Questionable Content

Thanks to Murray Thomson for the link to the Questionable Content strip!

The Sith Lords: First Impressions

Immediately after finishing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, I picked up the sequel, The Sith Lords (TSL). I say “picked up” rather than played: while I didn’t have to lose two days to downloading and patching, as I did with Fallen Earth, I lost a day to digital rights management. TSL won’t run on Vista. And by “won’t run,” I mean, won’t leave the launching screen.

I’ve got an ancient laptop I use for school, that’s too old and slow to run *anything,* but it’s got XP on it. So I loaded the game, and got about 5fps out of it – but at least I was able to get a taste for the story and gameplay. After a lot of forum hunting, and a couple fan-created patches that didn’t solve my problem, I discovered that the solution is to email the DRM manufacturer and ask for a new .exe file. To their credit, they responded overnight, and the new file solved my problem.

I was able to load a mod to give me the same player-character head I had in KOTOR, and I was good to go (and yes, the non-regulation underwear’s a mod too ).

Game Mechanics

Despite being the product of an entirely different company, TSL has substantially the same look and feel of KOTOR, all around. The UI is a murky green instead of a sharp blue and tan (there’s a huge fan patch to restore the KOTOR color scheme, which I may install).

TSL fixed one of the most annoying features of the KOTOR interface, though. In KOTOR, there’s no way to differentiate between a crate that you’ve emptied and one you haven’t. So, if you’re the generally forgetful type, the only solution is to look in every box, every time you pass it. I probably spent a good two hours of my total gameplay double-checking empty crates. TSL adds the dead-obvious (and greatly appreciated) feature of [EMPTY] on crates or bodies you’ve already checked. Woot!

Additionally, blasters actually work well in TSL, whereas in KOTOR lightsabers or blades were always more effective. I was shocked when my backup actually managed to clear a room with blasters ahead of me!  And the upgrading/crafting system, which simply never worked in KOTOR, is much more substantial and effective. In part, that’s because there are fewer opportunities for merchant NPCs: workbenches where you can break down junk and build things you want take the place. It’s an elegant solution.

On leaving the first planet, there’s a KOTOR-style shooting minigame – but unlike KOTOR’s, it seems the TSL team actually tested the PC version. It’s highly playable, even mouseless. And it’s not a stop, break, play, then resume without consequnces – the roadblock that the minigames were in KOTOR. The first one here, you’re on the ship, shooting at a platoon of attacking Sith. If you get them all, good. If not, the ones you miss manage to board, and you then have to fight them in regular gameplay. Integrated and meaningful, unlike the KOTOR minigames.

Story + Game

While TSL keeps the broccoli-and-chocolate formula of story game + gear&grind RPG of KOTOR, the balance seems to be much more heavily towards story. The formula is the same: you wake up with amnesia in a place you need to escape. But instead of the squeaky-clean Carth, your ally this time is a mysterious old woman who’s clearly running some op of her own, and may or may not have your best interests at heart.

Story and gameplay seem better integrated: early conversational choices fix the backstory carried over from KOTOR, whether Sith or Jedi triumphed in that time, or whether you don’t know what happened. The persuasion skill affects your influence over your party members, and your alignment shapes theirs to a greater or lesser degree depending on your persuasiveness and choice of conversational responses when your party members have differences of opinion.

About the best of all, the droids from KOTOR are playing a bigger role. The adorable T3, who had far to little to do in KOTOR, saves the day in the prologue to TSL (which acts as a very nicely done sandbox tutorial). It’s three or so hours in before you’re reunited, and it’s a shame “Squee and hug the droid” wasn’t an outcome choice – it was great to see the little guy

I like the ambiguity of the story so far: it’s really unclear how much you as the player character are supposed to remember from your past, and with different people telling you different things, you’ve got choices as to who to believe or disbelieve, trust or keep at arm’s length.

While I know to expect frustration and disappointment at the end (the game was rushed out to meet a corporate deadline and never finished), so far I’m finding TSL a compelling, delightful, well-designed improvement over the original.

KOTOR Wrapup

I was up till 3:30 last night finishing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, playing through till I’d gotten both the Jedi and Sith endings. My final impression? KOTOR is, as I said early on, two games in different genres that go together about as well as chocolate and broccoli.

One game, the  “series of interesting choices” as Sid Meier defines games, is the branching narrative of the Republic officer who awakens on a warship under attack, and is faced at every turn with a series of character-defining decisions, steadily escalating until the fate of the galaxy truly hangs in the balance.

The other is a “kill stuff, level up, get better gear, kill more stuff” RPG.

RPG as roadblock to the story game

You can play the RPG and pay minimal attention to the moral-choices game, just clicking through dialog choices to get on with the action. The character game isn’t an obstacle to RPG play at any time, and can be seen by game-mechanics literalists as just a particularly slow and verbose way of selecting talent trees for your player character. That’s certainly not the way I played it, but I get the sense that a lot of hardcore gamers, and academic game analysts, particularly in the ludology tradition, did.

You can’t, however, play the character game and just click through the RPG: the killing-stuff gameplay sets up roadblock after roadblock to the progress of the character game. It’s just bizarre from a design standpoint.

For example, take the final sequence of the game. Your party’s invaded the Sith Lord’s lair, and you have to fight your way through several levels of really tough lackeys to get to him. Great RPG play: the combat is challenging, well done, and forces some real tactical thinking (the walkthrough I’ve been resorting two has three different approaches to clearing one level).

But it has no effect at all on the character game, except to act as a roadblock.

The character game, stripped of spoilers, goes:  You infiltrate the lair, and fight your way through to someone you know. Do you kill them or persuade them to join you? If you kill them, overall victory against the Sith will be a lot harder, but you may fail to persuade – or you may just want the satisfaction of killing them. You then fight your way through to the Sith Lord. No matter what choices you’ve made along the way, you have to defeat him to end the game.

So, none of the RPG fighting changes anything in there. And the only change it has on the boss fight is, you might have used up too many resources on the henchmen to survive the final battle (as I did my first play through).

Your only choices are fail, re-fight, or proceed as if the trash-mob and mini-boss fights hadn’t been there at all.

I would have loved “KOTOR the character game” immensely. I’d even have enjoyed “KOTOR the RPG.” Together, the games were a constantly frustrating series of pointless obstacles:  “I can’t proceed with the game till I plug in a mouse and shoot down space fighters.” “I can’t proceed with the character game till I clear a level of droids with flamethrowers.”

The consequence was that I ended up bypassing almost all the optional questlines and activities, most of which I would have enjoyed, because I felt I’d wasted so much time on the random roadblocks.

The story game: choice constrained?

I’ve written about choice constraints in the story game, and did a pretty good presentation for Alice Robison’s class on it. There definitely were points where I felt the designer’s concept of options was so limiting as to be immersion-breaking and immensely annoying. However, overall, I feel that I got to express myself pretty well as my “projective identity,” to use Jim Gee’s term.

The choices I had were a pretty good reflection of morality and faction politics in the Star Wars universe, though the extremes of pocket-emptying charity and mustache-twirling villainy often provided gross over-simplifications.

I did want one option that wasn’t open to me, and my Sith play-through in the middle of the night was an attempt to approximate it. I found myself wanting to be the Sith Gorbachev, to be a Light ruler over the Dark forces the way a couple members of the Jedi Council were pretty Dark rulers over the Light side. The branching structure didn’t permit it, but came close enough to let me roleplay it out in my head in a series of endgame choices

An unethical game?

Overall, I find Manuel Sicart’s conclusion that KOTOR is unethical per se as overstated as his similar conclusion about World of Warcraft based on an analysis of a badly-implemented early PvP patch. The character game could have been more nuanced, losing the cartooony moral extremes. The RPG game could have not penalized playing gray: there are powerful Light and Dark Force powers, but in the middle you can’t use the best of either.

I found the character game deeply engaging: I spent tens of hours thinking out my choices in particular situations (the Bendak’s Bounty quest would make a terrific law school final exam), dreamed several nights of my player character embedded in the story, and find the story I crafted through play as one of the very best Star Wars fictions.

The interaction between the two “games” in the game, and the fact that the RPG repeatedly threw up roadblocks to gameplay in the character game, was major, major fail, and would have led me to abandon the game early on had I not been playing it for a class. I’m glad I stuck with it, but that’s no credit to the designers, who served up a near-fatal problem for story-focused gamers.

Next up? Reading some KOTOR fanfic, now that I don’t have to avoid spoilers. And KOTOR II should arrive today: I want to see how a different studio handled the property (I know how badly it was bungled, but still), and I’m hooked enough into the story to want more.

Oh, and the volume of the KOTOR graphic novel compilations that I’d been missing came yesterday. Transmedia ftw!

Dreaming in KOTOR

After a class presentation on Monday where I argued that Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is unethical in the way it creates ethical dilemmas for our player character/projective identity, then limits the player’s responses in ways sometimes deeply frustrating, the game and I clicked at such a deep level that I’ve been dreaming in character extensively every night since.

What changed? I think I’ve achieved some measure of literacy with the adventure-game format, and the game progressed to a phase where it was getting everything right. The basic structure has your adventuring party traveling between planets. The first two have to be taken in fixed order, then you’re free to take the next four in any sequence, leading into a fixed endgame. Since the middle worlds can be taken in any order, they have to be at roughly the same level – so the first one the player encounters will be very hard, the last fairly easy.

The first world I went to completely stymied me on the boss fight, so I re-rolled. By the time I got back there (at the 10 hour rather than 17 hour mark), it was tough but straightforward. The next two worlds I went to were absolutely delightful: story and gameplay integrated smoothly, the visuals were terrific, the challenges just in that “flow” zone of pleasantly frustrating.

One of KOTOR’s interesting mechanics has been the conversation/quest interplay with the NPCs in your party. Each has a backstory (including the hilariously bloodthirsty droid, HK-47). The more you converse with them, the more, obviously, they reveal about themselves – but the conversations also unlock side quests involving their pasts. It’s an interesting solution to the problem of creating strong characters in games.

Some of the character-development quest/conversation arcs work better than others, and in general they’re pretty heavy-handed. Carth’s quest for his son, lost in a war zone as a baby and rumored to be in the Sith Academy, was standard melodramatic fare, but Bastila’s search for her father’s journal and choice whether to keep it or offer it to her hated mother, and the Mandalorian mercenary Canderous’s slow reveal of why he’s come along both felt rich and engaging.

The game’s built around a powerful plot arc involving a quest for the source of the Sith lords’ power and a means to bring them down – and I’m hugely glad I was unspoiled for the plot developments. Last night had me screaming “OMFG!” at a major plot turn, much as I’d seen something being foreshadowed all along.

I think re-rolling was the key element in the depth of my engagement with the game: the choices I made at the game-mechanics level for customizing my player character and party members paid off in much better gameplay, and playing as my constant digital-worlds alter ego, Kaseido Quandry, rather than a generic character, made the ethical choices and plot developments much more personally resonant than if I were playing with a character who wasn’t so strongly my projective identity.

I’m on our last world before the finale now. I’m a little concerned that I’m low-level: I passed up a few side quests, and a lot of the money-making side opportunities, so I’m not in uber-leet gear.

I was just too greedy for the story….

KOTOR: Re-roll, Hour 7

In Alice Robison’s ENG553 Videogame Studies yesterday, we did updates on our gameplay. Just about everyone doing single-player adventure games was frustrated enough that they’d have quit, were they not covering the game for class. Me too: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic definitely would’ve been in the sell-back bag were it not for class.

I’ve been stuck on a boss fight (the Kashyykk encounter with Calo Nord), and utterly unmotivated to play.  It seems like my criticism that narrative and gameplay aren’t well-integrated in the adventure genre wasn’t an idiosyncratic observation. We’ve also all encountered problems with walkthroughs, which tend to be written by game experts, and not terribly helpful for those of us struggling with our gaming basic-literacy skills.

But, I’m on tap to do a 30 minute academic-conference quality presentation on some aspect of KOTOR next week: and that’s plenty motivation to get back to the game. I knew I wanted to use the “Elise and Her Lover” quest to discuss the interplay between game mechanics and ethics, and that meant re-rolling in order to go through it again for screencaps and textual analysis.

I spent some time last night with the game forums, and found all sorts of goodies. I modified the .ini file to allow direct-save screencaps, which will make pulling shots for my presentation vastly easier than trying to alt-tab and paste while the game’s running. I also enabled windowed running, another huge aid to the documentation process.

My character this time is a mod: I’d been thinking of using a mod to play a non-human, probably a Twi’lek, but somebody’d done a mod to create a face pretty close to my cross-platform “Kaseido Quandry” look. So, this time out I’m a Scout again, but with my standard name and look. It’s a nice treat, happy as I was with the “Catience Winoda” avatar.

And, best of all, there’s a cheat code that disables the constant repeat of that fighter-combat minigame every time you fly between planets! I haven’t enabled any cheats that affect the character’s experience, but I’ll probably play around with some more visual mods.

My re-roll’s been shockingly easier: at 7 hours 40 minutes I’m less than three hours from being caught up with Catience, who’s stuck at the 17 1/2 hour mark. Looks like I have massively increased my literacy, with the specific conventions of the game and with the genre. Now that I have some vague idea how the Wizards of the Coast d20 character design system works, I’m manually leveling my main and the characters in my party, rather than letting the software auto-level party members. I think I’m getting stronger specialization without making anyone too weak to hold their own in the group. We’ll see how the Calo Nord fight goes with this new, improved team.

I’m positioned at the start of the “Elise and Her Lover” quest, all Jedi’d up and ready to go. Not bad for an evening and an afternoon, and it leaves me in good shape for getting the presentation done by Monday, along with a long review paper on Celia Pearce’s Communities of Play by Tuesday.

Tomorrow will probably be a power-read, unless I decide I’m actually having fun with KOTOR this time out, and do my screencapping so I can go on with the gameplay.

KOTOR Hour 17: Disempowerment & Reflection

I’ve completed the quests that unlock the major plot device of the game, and I’m completely frustrated in several respects.

Gameplay that Unlocks Narrative

First, I think I’ve learned why I gave up on adventure games on the Playstation 1, and haven’t played the genre in ten years. I’d like to draw a distinction between games in which the gameplay creates narrative (Civilization, Sim City, and, I think, World of Warcraft) and those in which the gameplay unlocks or reveals narrative (KOTOR, Bioshock). I like stories. I read a lot of them, and I tend to gobble rather than savor them. So, when I play a story-based game, I find the gameplay is an obstacle to the narrative: I want to know what happens, not kill mobs and pick up loot!

When I used to play adventure games, back when I was a lot more addictive/compulsive than I am now, I used walkthroughs constantly: I must have spent a fortune on phone calls to the helpline for King’s Quest and Leisure Suit Larry (well, I would have, except I made them from work at a law firm when I was being paid to wait out a recession), pushing past the game elements to get to the resolution of the narrative.

(Note: I did subsequently play, and really enjoy, the Monkey Island games. How are they different?)

In my previous KOTOR post, I wondered if my frustration was the meta-game consequence of KOTOR’s theme, that impatience leads to the Dark Side. Now I think it’s just a problem with the genre, that playing a fighting game to unlock bite-size chunks of a narrative is like chocolate and broccoli, not chocolate and peanut butter.

Constraints

Miguel Sicart, in the difficult but essential The Ethics of Computer Games, flat-out calls KOTOR an “unethical game.” One of his grounds, the reduction of ethics to a game mechanic, I don’t buy as unethical, and I think directly contradicts his own praise for Grand Theft Auto: Vice City on what I read as similar grounds. But I do agree that KOTOR is a “closed system,” one in which the player doesn’t get to enact their own ethical choices, but has to choose from a limited and sometimes arbitrary-seeming system. As Sicart says

This creates an ethical experience of both disempowerment, since the player cannot exert direct moral action on the game world, and reflection, since players have to reflect on the values they are playing by.

About KOTOR specifically, he says that it and Bioshock

intends to be open ethical games, since they aim to create a game experience in which ethics play a role in the relation to a responsive game world. They do not succeed because the developers overemphasized the closedness of the game experience, not allowing players to reflect on and experience the game as a moral agent.

That was my response to Bioshock, too, which I played for about an hour. I thought the setting was gorgeous and intriguing, and I wanted to explore the city and its history. I had no interest in shooting everything around me, though, and considered playing a shooter too high a price for the visual and narrative payoff.

Here’s an example of the closedness of KOTOR. I’d mentioned earlier that I’d picked up a quest from a woman to recover her “kidnapped” sex droid, and suspected from the get-go that he was a runaway. When I find the droid, he says that he ran away because his owner had developed an unhealthy attachment to him, and he felt that if here were gone, she might find a “real person” for a lover. He then begs me to kill him. My choices from the menu then are to kill him, to tell him that I’m going to tell his owner why, or lie and tell her he’s still out there, or to say that she’s *really* upset that he’s gone. I take the latter, and he says he’s been selfish in putting his own desire for freedom ahead of her needs, and returns to her, where she very creepily says she’s going to take him home and ensure he never gets out again.

I can’t begin to count the ways in which this is fucked up, but let’s stick with the gameplay basics. My choices are to kill a runaway slave or return him to his abusive mistress. I was trying to find an option *I* considered moral – enabling him to confront her directly about her treatment of him, and/or to help him escape. But I wasn’t given those options. My choices were to kill a sympathetic sentient being, or deliver him back to slavery. The constraints did give me grounds for reflection: which is worse, death or slavery? But I was disempowered from my ability to enact my own moral alternatives by the limitations of the gameplay. As Sicart put it

the player is bereft of her creative capacities, leaving a system that evaluates and labels her actions according to moral standards that are external to those the player has created.

Exactly.

Appeal of the Narrative and Frustration With the Gameplay

One of the major attractions of the Star Wars universe for me is the complex politics underlying the simplistic Light/Dark approach of the Jedi. Their self-righteous Manicheanism has the potential for immense corruption, a theme at the heart of much of the Star Wars narrative, movies as well as Expanded Universe. Their relations with the Republic are fascinating, and full of 20th Century and contemporary analogs: are they the Communist Party running a subservient state apparatus? Are they the moral equivalent of the World Bank, dictating policy to the state? Are they the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms? The Iranian Basij?

KOTOR presents the moral complexity of the Jedi: a master fakes her death in order to drive her apprentice to the Dark Side as a test of her strength and a cautionary tale; young Jedi leaders become convinced that their strategic ability is greater than that of the Republic, and turn to the Sith for a superweapon to fight their enemies; an inadequately trained neophyte (the player character) is sent down a path that led well-trained and respected Jedi to become Sith, out of political expediency… it’s good stuff.

So, I’m interested in the storylines that intertwine this narrative, not just the main “find the mystery whoosit and defeat the Dark Lord” plot but the stories of the supporting characters that intertwine it. But, to proceed along those storylines to the conclusion, I’ve got to do a bunch of side quests (dealing with runaway slaves, gangsters, wild animals), kill a whole bunch of stuff, and do more of those progress-blocking minigames to get there.

I’m pretty sure if I weren’t playing this game for class, at this point I’d call the broccoli/chocolate ratio unfavorable and bag it. As it is, I’m on the Wookiee homeworld, about to fight my way through forest monsters to find a star map.

Oh, excitement. Or, as my Wookiee teammate would say, “AAAAAAAGHHHHHH!”

Harshing Your Squee

We had a rare treat yesterday in Alice Robison’s ENG 553: Videogame Studies: Jim Gee dropped in for an hour and a half chat.

Jim ranged from the politics of healthcare in the US, to the lack of innovation in distance education, to the wild success of the American school system in turning out docile, uncritical service workers. A couple student questions, including one of mine, turned on his concept of “affinity spaces,” as distinct from another popular term in the literature, “communities of practice.”

He stressed that affinity spaces are purposeful communities, where, paraphrasing, other issues are left at the door. He gave the example of a pickup group in World of Warcraft, where you don’t care if the other player is a good person, or shares your opinions and values, but only on how well they play their class. He also said that internet-based affinity spaces give you the opportunity to set aside your physical-world signifiers like race, gender and class, but implied that it’s more than an opportunity, rather more of a mandate, since those things are seen as extraneous to the purpose of the space.

I didn’t, and don’t, buy it, but I didn’t have a ready and compelling critique. Reading Miguel Sicart’s The Ethics of Computer Games today, I came across a useful tool to hang a critique on.

Sicart (the book is adapted from his PhD dissertation in philosophy, so the language is difficult – though he’s amazingly clear for a philosopher) presents a model called the “ludic hermenuetic circle” (warned you!). Unfortunately, the diagram isn’t online, and my scanner’s not working, so bear with me here…

One of Sicart’s main points is that the player of a game isn’t some being that popped into existence at the login screen: they bring a lifetime of experience, both in games and in the world, and they bring their culture(s). What the diagram conveys is that the gameplay is an interaction of the affordances and constraints of the game, the player’s experiences, the game community and the player’s involvement with it, and the player’s culture and values. It’s all a whole.

So, for example, when I’m playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, my play experience is directly informed not just by what’s on the software disc, but by my knowledge of the Star Wars saga, my experience as someone who sucks at console shooters, my mouseless laptop, and my own history of thinking about, and experiencing, matters of race, gender and sexuality. Your play experience will have some commonalities and some differences.

Now, say I enter into an active community of KOTOR players. Gee’s formulation would have me check my personal history, values and culture at the door.

Really?

No, not really.

What this view means in practice (though I’m sure it’s not Gee’s intentional formuluation – I’ll come back to issues of intentionality either below or in a later post) is, “check your *minority* attitudes at the door.”

Sicart makes an outstanding point about game culture:

If the community is comprised exclusively of those who can afford to log onto the Internet regularly and/or spend vast amounts of time participating in the common creation of the game culture, then there may be silent web-less majorities that do not follow the values of the community, thus distorting the values of the game as they can be perceivedd. That is, the values of the game as deduced from its communtiy may only be the values of an elite group with time and technical knowledge and capacities.

There’s a concept of “reflexive” and “projective” users, that’s useful here (from Christina Lindsay’s “From The Shadows” in How Users Matter, Oudshoorn and Pinch, eds.): designers often design for other people just like them – that’s the reflexive user. They also have views, maybe broader and more nuanced, of who their users are – that’s the projective user. These categories are often narrower, and sometimes have very little relation to, the actual users.

So, in the KOTOR case, the projective users of the game were experienced Xbox players. Then the game was ported to PC, and actual users came in who weren’t familiar with or skilled at console games – and those mingames that formed gates for console players became barriers for people without console skills. Actual users varied from projective users, and they found problems the designers never intended.

Now, the same thing happens with race, gender, sexuality and class.  One of the things happening on the Blue Mars forums was actual users confronting the designers’ decisions to make avatars look like the developers’ reflexive users: young white and Asian guys, with limited and really fake opportunities to present oneself as female, conservative, older, of African ancestry.

Now, there are three responses. One, “STFU and play,” was taken by a developer in a recent post (with a terrific critique by Cuppycake here). This view says that your identity is irrelevant to the play experience. But if it was irrelevant, then the designers would happily play gay, shapeless African women. That doesn’t happen. So what they actually mean is, your *minority* identity is irrelevant to our *majority* creation – *your* identity doesn’t matter, but *mine* does.

The second is I think what Gee is getting at, though I may be wrong. “Look, here’s your chance to pass as a buff, high status straight white guy! Lucky you!” Despite my sarcasm, there’s some real value here. People *can* set aside their low-status signifiers and be judged on the merits of their play, commentary or creations, and that’s of enormous value. However, there’s a price, and that price is being seen as a projective user, rather than as an actual user.

I think this is where a lot of racewank comes from, though it’s a subject I’m very weak on. In a space where nobody has signfiers, most everybody assumes most everyone belongs to the projective users, to the majority. And then somebody says something about a minority that they’d never say if they thought there actually were minorities present, and a flame war starts.

So “no signifiers” *never* means “race, gender, sexuality, age, don’t matter.” It means “each of us assumes all the others are members of the majority.” Which is equalizing, but equalizing at the price of people losing their particularity, their history, their culture.

But we *don’t.*

As Sicart says, we’re all embodied players, and we carry our past, our values and our culture with us. We *can’t* check them at the door.

I’m reminded of one of the early Death Knight quests in WoW, where we, as a servant of the Lich King, steal and don the Scarlet courier’s gear – and suddenly all the Scarlets, whom we’re at war with, appear as friendly to us. Sure, I can stand and talk to High General Abbendis in the middle of the Scarlet army and chat with her, safe in my Scarlet disguise. But let me tell you, if I said “HAI GUYS IZ SCOURGE”  I’d get killed on the spot.

That’s the experience of being any sort of minority, cultural or player, in a lot of “affinity spaces.” As long as we’re all Scarlets here, it’s all happy fansquee. But just go and say “I’m really enjoying my undead lifestyle,” and just watch the flame war start!

The third response is that of the actual user who says, “deal with me, respect me, give me the affordances as a minority that you give to the majority.” *You* get an avatar that looks and moves like you – give me one. You get to flirt with the NPCs you find cute, give me the same ability.

Somehow that’s immensely controversial in the community of developers and players who fit the reflexive-user model.

So, when we speak out in affinity spaces, most of us really aren’t there to harsh your squee by bringing nasty real-world politics into your game space. We’re just bringing *ourselves,* just as you do, but want *our* selves to be acknowledged, represented and respected in the space just as *your* selves are.

I want to squee too – but it’s hard to do with a lame-ass avatar!

KOTOR Hour 14: Game, Meta-Game and Projective Identity

I’m back to Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and finding that the game and meta-game are merging into one examination of motive. One of the lessons of the narrative of KOTOR is that impatience and an urge to rush off to glory lead to the Dark Side. It’s also one of the lessons of its gameplay. Catience Winoda may be on her way to becoming an exemplary Jedi, but I fear I’m opening to the temptations of becoming a Sith … critic! [shudder]

Minigame Lessons

If I weren’t playing KOTOR for class, I’d have abandoned it at the fighter-combat minigame on leaving the planet Taris. At a classmate’s suggestion, I tried the minigame again with a mouse, after failing six times with the laptop touchpad and arrow keys. The game was a *lot* easier with the mouse, and I destroyed all but one of the pursuing fighters in short order… four times. The first three times, a last fighter I could never find destroyed us. I’d committed to ten tries, and I really wasn’t expecting to succeed, but on the tenth try, I got the last fighter, and the game could progress.

On thinking about putting minigames in plot-critical positions, I’ve come to think that it’s worthwhile. Actually playing out major turning points in the game gives a greater feeling of involvement and accomplishment than a boss fight or cutscenes. The first plot-critical one, the swoop race, made me feel like I/Catience really was a hero – and left me finding the rescued Jedi, Bastila, much more annoying than if I hadn’t just risked my neck to free her!

*However,* each one of those games is an opportunity to lose players. Each game makes progress in the game and genre the customer bought dependent on their success in a game genre they never asked for – and may suck at.

A simple solution would be to allow the player to choose a separate difficulty level for the minigame. I might have raised the level on the swoop race, since the posted time of 31 seconds was pretty easy for me to beat. Someone who hates racing games might choose an option that would set the time at, say three minutes

Likewise, I’d have chosen an option for the fighter combat with, say, three instead of 10 fighters, moving like my dead granny on a bad day. Someone else might choose more fighters with a better avoidance pattern and heavier weapons.

At the lowest setting, the minigame would be pretty much a walkthrough – which would allow an uncomfortable player to have the first person experience – and still get on with playing the game they bought.

Jedi Trials

On delivering Bastila to the Jedi, they invited me to train, given the freaky Force visions I’ve had since the beginning. The offer highlighted a problem with the multiple-choice conversation mechanics: while some options remain available despite the order you take them in, some are permanently foreclosed, and there’s no way to know which is which. For example, one of the Jedi masters told me that Bastila had mentioned we’d shared a Force vision the night before. I had four or five response options, one of which was “How did she know I had the vision too?” I chose another response, fully intending to come back to that question – but it never appeared as an option again.

Likewise, later on I was called on to conduct a murder investigation as part of my training, and one of the suspects started with “Do you know who I am?” I answered “No,” to bring him down a peg, but never had the opportunity again for him to tell me who he was.

The training consisted of three trials: the first a call-and-response test that required careful note-taking, the second a Facebook-quiz to help me select which of three Jedi classes I’d choose (Consular, a mix of the fighting type and mind-powers type, focused on mental discipline and balance rather than combat or another class I’m not entirely clear on. The third was to purge a grove of the Dark Side  – which I did by being nice to an emo girl

So now I’m a Jedi, tasked with resolving a feud before it blows up into a gang war, and doing some assorted good deeds I got talked into, including finding some middle aged lady’s missing sex droid (for realz!).

Thoughts on the Nature of Games

I’m finding KOTOR a strange game. I’d been wondering if it even was a game, or an interactive story: I’m definitely constrained in some narrative choices. I’d like to play out my Dark Side alt to see how different the story is, but I get the sense that, like a Disneyland ride, the train pretty much goes down one set of tracks, but I get the chance to manifest different values along the ride.

I think KOTOR is a game, as it presents a series of consequential choices. The consequences seem as much at the meta level as at the game level: I get to witness my choices, and decide whether I am (or am choosing to present as) a kind person, or greedy, or cruel, or gratuitously violent. Catience Winoda as a “projective identity,” to use Jim Gee’s term, is just that – a projection of the moral choices I make as the game continues to offer them to me.

I find, though, that “KOTOR as moral game” leaves me frustrated sometimes with the combat-game elements. I have to fight through packs of horndogs to get to the rescues, the negotiations, the mysteries, and I wish I could just handwave them away. Though I get XP for the puppy fights, it doesn’t feel like enough to be worthwhile, and it doesn’t feel integrated into my goals, like the gang fights on Taris or the battles against Mandalorian hoods on Dantooine. It’s grinding without enough reward to compensate.

I’m also finding Dantooine, unlike Taris, too slow. Faced with a choice of grinding out puppy fights and finishing a stack of side quests before I can get on with the Sith War storyline… I’ve turned to blogging, and may well go into WoW to get things done.

Lesson? If your game is built around a strong and compelling storyline – and KOTOR very much is – everything else, the side quests, the minigames, the trash mobs, can provide frustration, boredom, and an opportunity to quit and not return. I’m not saying game and plot elements have to be relentlessly linear, just relentlessly relevant.

Frustration and the Meta-Game

Projective identity? Much like the presumed-dead Dark Lord Revan, Catience is/I am too eager to get into the fight to faff around with local policing and varmint control. Are we on our way to the Dark Side, or providing a justifiable critique of game structure? Where is the line between the game’s ethical choices and those of the meta-game? When does Revan’s and Catience’s concern for the good of the many over the few blur into Sith/Soviet social engineering at gunpoint? Does my concern with gameplay in the service of narrative indicate an intemperance and impatience that could lead me to the Dark Side?

I have to conclude that the game is playing me, and that “game criticism” is in fact a moral justification for my undue focus on linearity and glory, and indicative of a lack of patience and balance – and is in fact the meta-version of the same phenomenon that opened Revan to the Dark Side. Catience got chided for wanting to prioritize her training over the task of defusing the growing feud, but the warning was aimed more at me. Catience doesn’t like the puppy fights, but is happy with the good-deed-doing: I’m the one booking fittings for my long black cloak.

Darth Kas grows impatient…

KOTOR, Hour 11: Stuck!

Woo, design fail!

Earlier this week I finally completed the first world in KOTOR, successfully raiding the mafia boss’s headquarters. It went pretty smoothly, aside from another bit of gender hilarity:

The first stop on breaking out of the mobster’s “guest room” is the slave quarters. So, I went up to the Twi’lek girl by the door to talk, and was told something like “With all respect, ma’am, one of the men could better serve your needs.” Which I thought was pretty shirty for a slave, and almost wished I was playing dark side, to cause a little trouble there. :p

So, on talking to the male Twi’lek, I got offered a “massage”! I didn’t go through the whole chain, but if you get a couple (off-camera) “massages,” and are sufficiently appreciative, the slave tells you about one of the other guests. As with the previous “seduce somebody for information” quest, I ended up just lockpicking the door and going straight in.

The Game Banshee walkthrough noted:

“If you’re male, you can indulge in earthly pleasures with the slaves. They’ll also give you some info about the Estate. If you’re female playing the Xbox version, tough luck. However, in the PC version, there’s also a male slave who will divulge info about the prisoner here if you’re persuasive enough. This is not a required step, but simply an alternative way to find out what’s going on here.”

Um, genderlulz ftw.

Anyway, I got through the base, stole the ship, and got offlplanet -

- and into a complete bottleneck.

After takeoff, there’s a minigame you have to complete to move on. At the previous one, the swoop race, there was a save point, a screen with directions for the minigame, and a pause till you’re ready to try it. And you get several tries, aside from being able to reload if you hose it.

This time?

You walk into the ship, get five minutes of cutscenes, and then find yourself fighting for your life in a space shooter. No directions, no savepoint. Now, for the Xbox version, this would be sloppy and thoughtless, but not a game stopper. On a PC? Tilting the cannons up and down isn’t easy or clear, and supposedly there’s two triggers, related, I suppose, to the Xbox controls. With no directions, I have no idea what the second trigger is. All the online walkthroughs only give Xbox directions, to boot.

So, I got the ship blown up. And got tossed back to the last save point, takeoff from the planet. And had to sit through *five minutes* of cutscenes again.

And again.

And again.

And I’m still stuck at the damn shooter game.

If I weren’t playing for class, the game would be in the bag to get sold off to the used bookstore now. As it is… sometime I’ll have half an hour or an hour to burn, and an unusual reservoir of serenity, and I’ll keep trying till I can clear the Sith fighters before our shields fail.

There’s a move to build minigames into MMOs these days. This should serve as a cautionary tale for designers – *please* don’t make progress dependent on succeeding at a game genre some players may not be good at – you’ll *lose them.* As a sideline, an option, a treat, terrific. But as a barrier, a dealbreaker?  Please, just *why*?

KOTOR Hour 9 (Take 2)

I’m definitely climbing the learning curve of genre mechanics, and having a mixed reaction to KOTOR’s minigames.

Booboos and Borkage

At 9.5 hours into the game (saved games all have a “time played’ timestamp on them) I discovered that while I’d definitely given the plague serum to the good doctor *once,* I hadn’t done it in the version I’d ended up saving. I thought I had a third dose, so I sold that to the ganglord for some needed cash – then got bitched out by the doc for letting the poor die while the ganglord auctioned off the antidote to the highest bidders. Oops. So, I went back two hours and replayed. One nice benefit to replaying was, I came out with enough cash to pay a vendor full price for a critical item, instead of having to blackmail her into giving it to me. Yay more Light Side points!

I’m also having a serious problem with another game mechanic: armor and weapons are upgradeable, but I can’t make the upgrade process work. You can get- through drops or vendors – a range of upgrades, which you can add to certain gear, using a workbench. Complete fail, across two installations of the game and three characters. This could prove a fatal liability shortly.

At first I thought I was missing a reagent, like the blacksmith’s hammer or jeweler’s kit in WoW, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. I’m hoping I’m just misunderstanding something, and this isn’t a software flaw.

Minigames

KOTOR includes several minigames. One is Pazzak, a card game, with opportunities to play for cash and to customize your card deck as you go. It seems to be something like blackjack, but with cards with negative point values as well. Cash-strapped as I am, I’m not interested: it’s too thinky.

The swoop race, a major plot turn, however, rocked – and I hope there’ll be more chances ahead to race. Thanks to my serum screwup, I got to do the race segment twice, and the second time a challenger posted a much tougher time to beat, making a real race out of it. I don’t really understand when I’m supposed to shift gears, and how I’m supposed to know, but I loved the speed and strategy of it.

Ethical Challenges

I’m enjoying the dueling arena, too, though I’ve spent entirely too much time thinking through the ethics of the final challenge. There’s a bounty out on a retired dethmatch dueler. It’s a legitimate government contract, and I’ve already collected several other bounties, to help local law enforcement and line my own pockets. This last one, though, is ethically dubious, and I know that collecting it yields Dark Side points. However, I’m not entirely convinced that it’s worse than the others.

The situation is, this guy is accused of killing people in illegal deathmatch duels. However, ostensibly he retired when deathmatches became illegal. I know I can tempt him into a deathmatch. If he takes my challenge, he’s clearly proving the charges against him, and killing him to collect the bounty would be perfectly legal. OTOH, it’s also clearly entrapment, as if I *don’t* tempt him, he won’t enter the ring.

Oh, and did I mention I’m cash poor?

I’ll *probably* pass on the challenge, but this is only the second Dark Side opportunity to tempt me, the other being one of necessity, in shaking down the vendor my first time playing through. Though, if the Jedi I rescued, Bastila, continues to be such a condescending snot, I may just sell her to the Sith anyway :p

In other news, KOTOR became available for digital download through Steam on Friday, for $10. I could’ve saved myself $25 over buying the “Best of PC” package. Oh well.