FunEffect.com

['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she looks at Echo Bazaar, a social game using Twitter, by Fail Better Games.]

Echo Bazaar, a web-based card game by UK firm Fail Better Games is a social grind game. Gameplay [here's a review with screenshots] consists of choosing trivial tasks to improve one's stats at four skills: Dangerous, Watchful, Persuasive, and Shadowy. Grinding also typically produces loot of some kind, which can be sold at the Bazaar for weapons and stat-improving hats and other similar trinkets; and players can also work on short-term and long-term goals (called Ambitions).

Success at these tasks depends on chance and your existing stats, which means that you can increase the likelihood of success on a particular challenge by devoting more effort to stat-building beforehand.

There are only a certain number of actions available in a given day, with a maximum of ten available at any given time; that number can be increased by tweeting an ad for Echo Bazaar (once per day at maximum), or by purchase. That structure means that gameplay is more or less a resource-management problem, with more resources available for real money. The player's agency is all about deciding which goals sound interesting enough to spend actions on.

That's not the description of a game I would expect to like. I have little patience for games that are mostly grinding, and I also like to be engaged with a game when I'm playing it, focused on the story and structure -- and then done when I'm done. Games that force you to string out the gameplay over many days tend to attenuate the pacing to the point of tedium. (I've yet to find a real-time game like Virtual Villagers that I get along with either.)

I had some of those issues with Echo Bazaar, too, but I'm still playing with it.

So far Echo Bazaar is a game almost entirely about setting. The premise is that London has at some stage -- perhaps during the Victorian Era -- Fallen. It is now an underground, infernal environment, where mushrooms instead of flowers decorate the hats, where bats and weasels are the most common sorts of pet, where the demonic and the undead can be found at afternoon tea. Con artists wear lace gloves to increase their plausibility. The vestiges of old London -- the street signs, the currency -- are forbidden and are rapidly being censored away.

The idea of an alternative, semi-demonic London is not exactly novel, but Echo Bazaar's version continues to appeal to me for two reasons.

First: the quality of the prose. Even very text-oriented games aren't always solid in this department. The writers of Echo Bazaar use concrete nouns and active verbs. They don't abuse adjectives. They have a sense of rhythm.

An example:

"Unfinished Men are Clay Men who lack something - sight, a voice, a hand, conscience, obedience. You can't really tell a crippled Clay Man from an Unfinished Man, except that ordinary Clay Men are never criminals. The distinction, unfortunately, often evades Constables and citizens alike."

Notice the way the number of syllables increases through the elements of the list, "sight, a voice, a hand, conscience, obedience". Notice that that list doesn't end with the obviously chilling "conscience", but with the more interesting "obedience". Notice how "Constables and citizens alike" sounds much better than "both Constables and citizens", because "alike" gives us a firm ending on an emphasized syllable.

This is not pyrotechnic prose, with lots of flashy words and obvious rhetorical figures. It's something better: it's disciplined.

The structure of Echo Bazaar really requires that the text be worth reading, because the short descriptions of missions and their outcomes (and of objects to buy at the Bazaar) are the chief reward for interaction; there are illustrations, but they are more limited in number and contribute more to style than to content.

Moreover, the text comes in small pieces, from a single sentence to a short paragraph. Not every one of these pieces is individually memorable, but most are fairly effective, hinting at a larger world and more depth than the player can immediately see.

The second point: despite my apprehensions, the world building feels reasonably consistent. I was afraid on first playing that it would be a grab-bag of images and concepts that had struck the authors as cool, with no connecting tissue. After playing for several weeks, I'm still not certain how much core world-building was done, but the new tidbits that I learn do seem to fit; the structure doesn't feel slapdash.

I think an engine like this could be used for something plottier. So far, though, such plot as there is is provided by the various long-term and short-term goals. These are pretty linear: the player has little control over how their pursuits turn out, only on whether they make progress.

Characters tend to be generic archetypes rather than specific individuals, too: you're generally casing "a jeweler's shop" or making up to "a rich widow", not robbing or seducing a specific person. This makes the story feel oddly lonely even though most game activities are about social interactions of one kind or another.

So it's the writing and the world that keep me tinkering around with Echo Bazaar weeks after I was initially invited to look at it. I am still having fun dipping into the environment it provides, and the daily time investment to do so is slight enough that I can forgive the slightness of the gameplay.

Disclosure: As a reviewer, I received free in-game currency (ordinarily available for pay), enabling me to see more of the game more quickly.

[Emily Short is an interactive fiction author and part of the team behind Inform 7, a language for IF creation. She also maintains a blog on interactive fiction and related topics. She can be reached at emshort AT mindspring DOT com.]

[In this spirited opinion piece, GameSetWatch guest editor Jenn Frank takes a look at the latest cavalcade in the discussion of independent and alternative video games, concentrating -- interestingly enough -- on the response as much as the statement.]

I really like Jim Sterling's recent Destructoid column -- not necessarily because of any of the points it makes, mind, but more because of the ensuing, often aggressive responses from other gamers, developers, and reviewers.

There's a writers' resource called the 39 steps that I also like. Actually, it's just a list of helpful hints for good fiction writing, but it's a really, really good list. And a lot of its little kernels of advice, I think, can be applied to game design philosophies, too.

For instance, I've always really liked #23:

"Obscurity is not subtlety; intentional obscurity is pinheaded and unkind."

I do feel that way about games sometimes. I think you can be subtle without being deliberately mean to your player, or willfully alienating him. I think assigning ponderous meanings to mundane in-game actions is kind of a lazy way to work Big Existential Truths into your story. I think some games are disingenuous facsimiles of other, better games. I like 'indie gaming' on the whole, because I like creative underdogs, and because the games themselves tend to be shorter and easier to pencil into my calendar. Still, I've played some pretty terrible ones. Similarly, I don't think all puzzle games are great, even though I really like puzzle games.

So I'm pretty noncommittal. I think these opinions -- which are by no means the opinions of GameSetWatch, thank you -- are pretty low-key and moderate and not especially meaningful or groundbreaking or much of anything.

Now that I've fully shown my hand, let's gossip. I sure love gossip.

Currently, my Twitter feed is full of games journalists and artists whose dietary habits and foursquare updates I like to track. And today a lot of them were very apparently furious about something. Since bluster and ire tend to make me giggle (as long as those things are not actually directed at me), I did some backtracking and eavesdropping.

That is how I found all these little 140-character feuds and sparring matches with Destructoid writer Jim Sterling. I had trouble making real sense of those conversations, so I scouted out Sterling's February 7 Destructoid column, "Indie games don't have to act like indie games," which, OK, the title actually kind of made me grin in spite of myself, maybe because it made me think of this gem. (Also, when I first wrote this paragraph, I had not yet seen this.)

But now that I've read his piece, I'm a little confused about the commotion.

Jim Sterling's arguments themselves are inoffensive and moderate, but they're presented in a deliberately bombastic, even confusingly inflammatory way. But with all the brimstone stripped away, he basically says games can be artful and still fun to play, if they'd only try to be more fun and, sometimes, more playable. He says some games are hipster indie imitations, filching elements from genuinely good games, passing superficial, intentional obscurity off as real depth. And finally, he seems to think that some games get away with being bad because no reviewer will just come out and say they're bad, or why.

In fact, the brunt of Sterling's put-on umbrage seems to be with last year's game The Path. And probably his umbrage is fair, because not every player adored it, exactly.

In his review of that game, indie game critic Michael Rose takes great pains to explain that The Path is absolutely not a game, even as he goes on to repeatedly refer to it as a game (and "as a game," he says, "it's pretty boring"). Still later, Rose decrees that the 2009 un-game is "this year's weirdest game."

So even for the skilled reviewer, the critique itself involves some problematic conflation, and by review's end, Rose ultimately sighs that he isn't sure whether to recommend The Path at all.

Rose also writes,

"Unlike other recent attempts at arty gaming (see Flower), [developers] Tale of Tales have not drawn that line between and art and gaming well enough."

Apparently, though, neither can players: do we want to game, or do we want to be art patrons? Are we distressed when we're asked to do and be both at once? How fun should a game be? How fun should art be? Should art be painful to play? How, exactly, should we criticize painfully unfun non-game art?

But I am getting away from my real point, which isn't actually Jim Sterling's column at all, or my defense of it, or what I think about game design, or whether The Path is good or bad or fun or artful or even a real game.

The main point of interest, here, is all the responses Sterling's editorial has elicited. In Destructoid's own comments sections, there's quite a lot of "Finally! Tell off those pretentious indies!" There are also some better conceived comments that try to negotiate the 'game' and 'art' thing without conflation (though you'll find more meticulously careful conversation in here instead). There's some mudslinging, too, at mainstream games -- which, to hear it told by some, are apparently now bereft of artistic merit -- and at Jim himself, for being a blowhard.

I'd go so far to say that Sterling isn't really saying anything in particular, albeit in his trademark brassy way. So, as is always the way with the Internet, people hear what they would like to hear. And how people respond to the column says more about their own philosophies than it says about the column's.

So now, fascinatingly, you have all these mainstream game reviewers talking suddenly about how maybe mainstream games are creatively bankrupt, and they're championing the indie game scene and shaking their fists. And I like the noble, vocal intent there, but it's a little awkward to witness. Because Jim Sterling's final point -- that some games get away with being bad because no reviewer can bring himself to speak an ill word against them -- is basically proven all over again by the responses.

That's... kind of uncomfortable. Jim Sterling's epic troll ("indie games get away with being bad") has hoodwinked perfectly reasonable people into saying, essentially, that every indie game is great, which is just something of a literal impossibility. Oops.

Then, in the other corner, you have Jim Sterling's seemingly lone defender -- reputable, big-time game developer David Jaffe! -- who has taken the column's most salient points and run screaming in the opposite direction with them.

Jaffe even goes so far as to take "pretentious, full of shit 'journalists'" to task (and I do like the scare quotes around 'journalists'!) for "lauding and hyping these types of games."

Reading that, I reflexively wondered if this weren't some veiled insecurity, some sort of fearfulness about how the video game landscape -- how games are made, how they are bought and sold, or how we choose to talk about gaming -- is changing. But I think that would require Jaffe to take independently-made games seriously enough to be frightened of them, and I'm not entirely sure that he does.

Of these pretentious 'journalists,' Jaffe writes,

"Often times I think these writers go on and on about a lot of this arty farty stuff so it makes them feel like their own work is important (i.e. they are letting their readers in on something special and important versus simply writing about how many new weapons exist in modern shooter/alien invasion/football sim game #42)."

There might be some truth to that -- although, probably, my need to feel special and important is not all that keeps me from gushing about framerates and football sims -- but the real truth might be even more damning.

While good indie games are well worth championing, particularly for the benefit of those people who otherwise might not find them, perhaps game reviewers are reluctant to criticize badly made indie games because it feels too much like, say, crushing a house made of popsicle sticks and pipe cleaners.

The fact of the matter might be -- and this is very uncomfortable for me to type out -- a lot of reviewers don't take the indie 'genre' seriously enough to challenge or even criticize the bad games. It feels too cruel, too mean, in the same way it is cruel to kick a puppy or steal candy from a baby.

Maybe a lot of game reviewers really don't give indie games the professional and helpful criticism they really deserve, then, because they or we secretly deny indie games the status, the credibility, that we reserve for big-budget titles. Maybe, too, reviewers are prone to gush because those games consistently exceed their secretly low expectations.

Maybe.

[This is a guest review by anosou. If you’re interested in writing an article for TIGSource, please go here.]

Square Off is an Xbox Live Indie Games title from Australian developer Gnomic Studios. An arcade-style shooter with a distinct cartoon art style, Square Off is one of the better games available from Microsoft’s indie platform. Why? Here’s why:

The concept of Square Off is rather simple really. You play as a little genetically-engineered square made from a mad professor’s brain cell and some alien DNA and your job is to wipe out the ongoing alien invasion. In practice this translates to a twin stick shooter with some twists. You control your little square (equipped with an adorable jetpack) with the right stick, aim with the left stick and shoot with the right trigger. During gameplay you can pick up an assortment of wondrous little powerups including a shotgun, a triple-barrel gun, bombs and a rocket launcher. The gameplay is very smooth and responsive, as it should be in a shooter, and the controls are simple yet functional.

In the main mode, the one where you fend off previously-mentioned aliens, the game is split into 6 stages. These generally take the form of a few rooms connected by smaller corridors and they’re all positively swarming with aliens. Again the gameplay is very basic but enjoyable – shoot the alien spawn and destroy the motherships and you move on to the next level. It’s actually quite unforgiving at times for the lonely player. If you can’t keep up with the alien spawn rate you can easily find yourself trapped in a narrow corridor unable to get through because your standard gun can’t keep up with the rate of alien spawns. A small design flaw but it’s uncommon during the game if you’re playing on a decent level.

What makes Square Off stand out are mainly two things. First and foremost it’s the focus on multiplayer. The main game (although a bit short) can and should be played with a friend or three. This makes the sometimes unforgiving levels both more fair and more enjoyable. Even the classic co-op “THAT POWERUP WAS MINE YOU IDIOT!” is there and I’m loving every second of it. This also takes care of the difficulty one might encounter when playing alone, it’s clearly designed around multiplayer play. There’s also a Death Match mode with three different gameplay options: To The Death, Frag Race and Time Limit. Going head to head with a few good friends in your couch makes for quite the killing fest.

The other thing that makes Square Off stand out is the delicious art style. Clearly inspired by The Behemoth’s games, the cartoon style with the thick lines and great attention to facial expressions works very well. There’s hardly anything to complain about here, this is definitely one of the better looking games on XBLIG. The sound and music almost reaches the same level too. The sound effects work perfectly with the game and the dramatic music gives the game a tongue-in-cheek serious tone.

Square Off does have some small issues though. The first and arguably biggest is the lack of online multiplayer. While this is uncommon for XBLIG titles in general, it would’ve taken this particular game to the next level. Other than that there could’ve been more variation when it comes to the enemies, most of them are of the same type (and look) and just keeps chasing you. To be completely fair these are minor things when you look at the whole package. Square Off is one of the better games on XBLIG and for 240MS (3 PUNY EARTH DOLLARS) you can’t go wrong with this. If you have friends to play with that is. Continue reading

[GameSetLinks is GameSetWatch's semi-regular link round-up post, culling from hundreds of weblogs and outlets to compile the most interesting longform writing, links, and criticism on the art and culture of video games.]

Continuing the regular round-up of GameSetLinks into the weekend, we start of with John Davison infecting GamePro with his particular brand of writing -- this one about why the future of games is not in traditional GamePro-preferred directions, most probably. And he's right.

Also in here - Hello Games on weird definitions of independent, Simon Parkin on the German anti-violent games brigade, a House MD casual game diary, why swifter feedback loops make for better games, and much more.

Woot woot woot:

The future of games is in your web browser, News from GamePro
This seems so wrong for me to see on GamePro, but John Davison is going to try hard to make articles like this seem 'right' for the site.

There’s No I In Indie | Edge Online
Absolutely excellent piece by Hello Games on the various definitions of indie, and why we could think differently about it.

Mike Darga's Game Design Blog: Players (And Designers) Learn Faster With Tight Feedback Loops
'Just as players learn much faster by seeing the immediate results of their decisions, so to do game developers.'

Marketable Skills: State of Game Programming Education - Jeff On Games
'What would I want out of programmers coming out of two year and four year programs, both those that are focused on game development, and those that aren't?'

Patrick Charnley writes to me again about Train2Game — Bruce On Games
The TIGA-backed UK game training scheme has now legally threatened both Bruce Everiss and UK Resistance in recent days in an attempt to get negative, allegedly defamatory comments removed. I've got no public opinion on who is right, but the potential for 'chilling effects' is obvious.

Killerspiele Article | Eurogamer
A great Simon Parkin piece on German anti-violent game rumblings.

The Future of Single-Player RPGs from 1UP.com
'We examine the state of the big-budget single-player RPG with a group of RPG developers. Each comes from a different facet of the market. Is it dying? Are the tastes of RPG gamers changing? What role do MMOs, consoles, and handhelds play? Is there hope in the indie scene?'

House M.D., Developer Diary | Gamezebo
Legacy Games have done quite well out of Hollywood-licensed casual games, and now they're trying House M.D.? Neat.

The end of another seven days, so it's time to go through the top full-length features of the past week on big sister site Gamasutra, plus some GameCareerGuide features du jour.

These would include some genuinely interesting interviews with Randy Pitchford (about Gearbox and Borderlands) and Rex Ishibashi (about his work heading up EA Japan), as well as pieces on Osiris and game design, the necessity to iterate in game creation, making games for Android, and several other neat GCG pieces.

Here we go:

EA Takes Japan: An Interview With Rex Ishibashi
"Publishing giant Electronic Arts is getting more aggressive in Japan once more, thanks to Eastern-targeted games such as Tsumuji, and Gamasutra speaks in-depth to EA Japan veteran and head Rex Ishibashi on the market and the company's plans there."

Making Better Games Through Iteration
"Though it may seem self-evident, rapid iteration is a great tool for creation small games, and Mobile Pie's Will Luton discusses how his team made iPhone title B-Boy Brawl iteratively, after initial failure through too much rigidity."

Sponsored Feature: Fluid Simulation for Video Games (Part 1)
"This sponsored feature, part of Intel's Visual Computing site and written by Dr. Michael J. Gourlay of the University of Central Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy, begins a multi-part series that explains fluid dynamics and its simulation techniques."

The Birth of Collecting: The Osiris Archetype In Games
"Jason Johnson looks to the mythological Egyptian god Osiris to draw an inconspicuous parallel between the story of the supernatural being and the practice of collecting objects in video games."

Developing Games for Android
"Amid the iPhone game development gold rush, developer Derek James checks out the hooky, Java-based Android OS from Google, discussing advantages and disadvantages."

The Illusions We Make: Gearbox's Randy Pitchford
"Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford knows what he likes and what he does not. Here, the outspoken designer describes the studio's latest game, Borderlands, as the game he's 'been wanting to make for 10 years.'"

GCG: Educational Fantasy
"Lindsay Grace discusses the challenges facing educational game design, and how the practical matters of education intersect the enveloping fantasy we expect from games."

GCG: Postmortem - Lies and Seductions
"In this postmortem, Petri Lankoski discusses the making of Lies and Seductions, an adventure game inspired by the novel Dangerous Liaisons."