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Games Without Frontiers: Victory in Vomit — The Sickening Secret of 'Mirror's Edge'
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Mirror's Edge
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<em>Screenshot courtesy Electronic Arts</em>
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By now you have probably heard the warning: Playing <cite>Mirror's Edge</cite> will make you vomit.
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<p>
The hot new videogame is a sort of "first-person runner": You're a courier who travels across the rooftops of a locked-down, police-state city, delivering black-market messages by using acrobatic feats of parkour. You're constantly leaping over gaps 40 stories in the air, tightrope-walking along suspended pipes and vaulting up walls like a ninja.
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<p>
It doesn't do justice to call the action in <cite>Mirror's Edge</cite> "intense": It <em>quivers</em>, like a hummingbird, and your first-person view is constantly whipsawing like a paranoid cameraman hunting for the best shot.
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<p>
Only 15 minutes into the game, my mouth began overproducing saliva, and I had to pause the action for a few seconds to avoid carsickness. I would feel like a total lamer, but apparently even the Penny Arcade guys <a href="http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/11/3/">wrestled with nausea</a>.
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<p>
Still, it made me wonder: What makes <cite>Mirror's Edge</cite> so different? Sure, the action is swoopy and vertiginous, just as it is in many other games. But I've played plenty of first-person shooters that required me to navigate ridiculous, zero-G boss lairs that were suspended over improbable heights, and none of those ever made me feel nauseated.
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<p>
Why does this game get its hooks into my brain so effectively? Why does it feel so much more visceral?
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<p>
I think it's because <cite>Mirror's Edge</cite> is the first game to hack your <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception">proprioception</a>.
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<p>
That's a fancy word for your body's sense of its own physicality ? its "map" of itself. Proprioception is how you know where your various body parts are ? and what they're doing ? even when you're not looking at them. It's why you can pass a baseball from one hand to another behind your back; it's how you can climb stairs without looking down at your feet.
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<p>
Most first-person shooters do not create any sense of proprioception. You may be looking out the eyes of your character, but you don't have a good sense of the dimensions of the rest of your virtual body ? the size and stride of your legs, the radius of your arms. At most, you can see your arms carrying your rifle out in front of you. But otherwise, the designers treat your body as if it were just a big, refrigerator-size box.
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<p>
Worse, in most games your virtual body cannot do even the most simple things that it <em>ought</em> to be able to do. Every time I'm playing a first-person shooter, I'll inevitably try to jump or walk up onto an object ? a ledge, a curb, a railing along a wall ? and discover that I can't. The designers decided they didn't need to worry about those subtle physics, and the resulting limitation completely breaks the illusion that I'm <em>in</em> that virtual body.
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<p>
<cite>Mirror's Edge</cite>, in contrast, does something very subtle, but very radical. It lets you see other parts of your body in motion.
</p>
<p>
When you run, you see your hands pumping up and down in front of you. When you jump, your feet briefly jut up into eyeshot ? precisely as they do when you're vaulting over a hurdle in real life. And when you tuck down into a somersault, you're looking at your thighs as the world spins around you.
</p>
<p>
What's more, the <cite>Mirror's Edge</cite> world feels tactile and graspable. Because the game is designed around the concept of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkour">parkour</a>, or moving through obstacles, most times when you see something that looks like you could jump on it, you can. The gameplay requires it.
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<p>
The upshot is that these small, subtle visual cues have one big and potent side effect: They trigger your sense of proprioception. It's why you feel so much more "inside" the avatar here than in any other first-person game. And it explains, I think, why <cite>Mirror's Edge</cite> is so curiously likely to produce motion sickness. The game is not merely graphically realistic; it's <em>neurologically</em> realistic.
</p>
<p>
Indeed, the sense of physicality is so vivid that, for me anyway, the most exhilarating part of the game wasn't the obvious stuff, like leaping from rooftop to rooftop. No, I mostly got a blast from the mere act of <em>running around.</em> I've never played a game that conveyed so beautifully the athletically kinetic joys of sprinting ? of jetting down alleyways, racing along rooftops and taking corners like an Olympian. It's an interesting lesson of game physics: When you feel like you're truly inside your character, speed suddenly <em>means</em> something.
</p>
<p>
The opposite is also true. Without a sense of physicality, speed feels lifeless. In <cite>Halo</cite>, you're playing as the cyborgically enhanced Master Chief, so your top speed at an open run is ? according to <cite>Halo</cite> nerd canon ? 30 mph or something. But it doesn't feel very fast at all, because your avatar doesn't appear to be actually exerting himself. When you run, your body bobs along not much differently from how it moves when you're walking, except the scenery goes by more quickly.
</p>
<p>
The combat in <cite>Mirror's Edge</cite> felt more believable than doing battle in <cite>Halo</cite>, too. When the cops were shooting bullets at me and I was frantically racing to escape, I kept thinking: "Damn, I'm going so fast I might just escape!" In most first-person games, I usually wonder the opposite: How are these guys <em>not</em> hitting me? So the brilliant physicality of <cite>Mirror's Edge</cite> isn't just a boon to the game's physics. It also makes the narrative and drama more plausible.
</p>
<p>
So yes, by all means, I'll keep on playing <cite>Mirror's Edge</cite>, even though it occasionally makes me want to vomit. In the past, I've often wanted to retch because a game is so bad ? but I've never felt sick because it was so <em>good.</em>
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<p>
<em>Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for </em>The New York Times Magazine<em> and a regular contributor to </em>Wired<em> and </em>New York<em> magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, <a href="http://www.collisiondetection.net/">collision detection</a>.</em>
</p><img src="http://feeds.wired.com/~r/columns/games/~4/455475503" height="1" width="1"/>
Gamer's Radical Realization: I Prefer Playing With Myself
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A fearsome warrior engages in battle in the classic, medieval-quest RPG world of <cite>Fable II</cite>.
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<em>Screenshot Courtesy Microsoft Game Studios</em>
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<p>
"Why do you want to play alone?"
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<p>
A friend of mine recently asked me this, during an argument about <cite><a href="http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/10/reviewfable-ii.html">Fable II</a></cite>. I'd recently begun playing the game — a classic, medieval-quest RPG world — and had devoted hours to leveling my character into a fearsome, beloved warrior. I'd amassed <cite>Ninja Gaiden</cite>-esque skillz, learned flesh-singeing lightning spells and won sacks full of bling. I'd explored the far ranges of the amazingly detailed land, and the townsmen were bowing and scraping for my favor. I had four different girlfriends.
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<p>
But to my friend, this made no sense. He's a hard-core online gamer — a member of a long-running <cite>World of Warcraft</cite> guild — so single-player RPG worlds seem completely baffling to him. Not to mention antisocial.
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<p>
In <cite>Fable II</cite>, you're the only "live" human around. Sure, it's crammed full of "non-player characters" — but they're all 'bots, spouting fairly crude dialogue lines, with none of the unpredictability and spontaneity of a multiplayer game. You have no friends with whom to share your feats, to brag to about your awesomeness, to marvel at the beautiful sights. There are no epic, wargasmic, 50-person raids that will be spoken of over mead, four generations hence, in a tavern.
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<p>
So it's a good question, really. Why do we want to immerse ourselves in a world that <em>emulates</em> all the tropes of a vibrant world like <cite>World of Warcraft</cite> — but where we are, essentially, alone?
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<p>
I told my friend he was looking at it all wrong. The reason we single-player fans love world-games like <cite>Fable II</cite> is precisely <em>because</em> there are no other "real" people around.
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<p>
Because really, who needs people? People <em>suck</em>. I'm joking, of course — but only a bit. The truth is that, in online multiplayer worlds, dealing with the delightfully unpredictable behavior of "real" people can be an absolute chore. Teammates fail to show up for a raid, or they leave everyone waiting for an hour, or they log out in the middle of battle and leave you gored by a howling mob. Have you ever actually tried to play <cite>Age of Conan</cite>? It's like the Stanford Prison Experiment in there, my friend.
</p>
<p>
Indeed, the dirty secret of online multiplayer worlds like <cite>World of Warcaft</cite> is that the vast majority of people play solo in them. As Nicholas Ducheneaut discovered, players who are piloting characters below level 40 <a href="http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2006/02/alone_together_.html">spend a stunning 70 percent of their time</a> questing alone. That means that the vast majority of <cite>World of Warcraft</cite> players treat their other fellow humans <em>like</em> non-player characters — 'bots they glimpse wandering through the forest, but never talk to.
</p>
<p>
But I'm being too negative here. There is an upbeat side, too. One benefit of being the only live person in a game is that the illusion of immersion is never broken. The designers of <cite>Fable II</cite> have complete control over what everyone in the game does and says, so they can make sure nobody drops any l33t-spe@k or references to Barack Obama. The world is all medieval, all the time.
</p>
<p>
More subtly yet, there's a sort of weird, existential delight in being the only truly sentient human inside a huge world. The fact that I know I'm the only person actually alive makes the game seem all the more dreamlike, as if everything — those mountain ranges, those creepy beetles — really is taking place inside my head. Sure, there's a co-op mode for <cite>Fable II</cite>, so you could play with another person if you wanted to. But I never bothered to try it out, because I preferred the solipsism of a world where I'm the center.
</p>
<p>
Indeed, sometimes I wish there were even <em>fewer</em> characters inside <cite>Fable II</cite> — and even more isolation. Some of my favorite moments were between battles, when I'd roam through a desolate stretch of forest at night, looking at the shadows and ancient ruins. Hell, I just enjoyed the peace and quiet! I don't get enough of that in my real life. That's why people loved <cite>Myst</cite> so much back in the day: The game was completely <em>deserted</em> — not a single other person alive — so you were literally alone for hours with nothing but your meditative thoughts.
</p>
<p>
Maybe this could eventually become an entire category of entertainment: You're dropped into a huge, lush, gorgeous, sprawling world, and all you do is just sort of ... wander around. We could even give it a name. Radical singleplayer: The game of solitude.
</p>
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<p>
<em>Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for </em>The New York Times Magazine<em> and a regular contributor to </em>Wired<em> and </em>New York<em> magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, <a href="http://www.collisiondetection.net/">collision detection</a>.</em>
</p><img src="http://feeds.wired.com/~r/columns/games/~4/440628143" height="1" width="1"/>
Games Without Frontiers: 'Pure' Shows Off Fun of 'Artistic' Physics
<p>
"The tricks in this game are pure fantasy. Do not attempt them in real life."
</p>
<p>
That's the warning that flashes when you first boot up <cite>Pure</cite>, the giddily awesome new ATV-racing game. And no wonder: <cite>Pure</cite> sends you driving around mudsplacked tracks with furious velocity, racing up steep hills and then -- <em>woo hoo!</em> -- launching yourself with escape-trajectory speed into the air. The goal is to pull off stunts -- 720s, forward rolls, one-armed handstands -- so you can earn "boost," which lets you go higher and, of course, pull off even crazier stunts.
</p>
<p>
After about 15 minutes, I was scraping the bottom edge of the ionosphere. Man, I had enough hang time to wander over to the fridge and grab a beer before I landed. So in one sense, yes, <cite>Pure</cite> is unadulterated fantasy: These sorts of tricks aren't remotely possible under the normal rules of gravity.
</p>
<p>
But the game isn't completely divorced from reality, either. The control scheme for the ATVs is forgiving, but only so much: You can survive a slightly sloppy landing, but not one that is one notch more careless. And when you first take off from a jump, you have only milliseconds to deduce whether you're going to go high enough to pull off a lengthy stunt. The upshot is that the physics in <cite>Pure</cite> encourages you to take crazy risks -- while still requiring you to think carefully about what you're doing.
</p>
<p>
In essence, the in-game physics cooked up by <cite>Pure</cite>'s designers isn't merely a matter of being realistic or unrealistic. The physics is <em>evocative</em>, creating your worldview within the game, and even <em>metaphoric</em>: When you play <cite>Pure</cite>, you realize that physics is one of the truly artistic elements of an action title.
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<p>
For example, think about a highly realistic game, like the first version of <cite>Gran Turismo</cite>. It became famous for offering what were, for its time, highly lifelike models of cars. They were hard to drive: It actually felt like you were steering a BMW across a muddy track in the hills of Tuscany -- which is, uh, hard to do. Friends of mine would coo over the ability to minutely tweak the performance of their favorite car's engine and feel it reflected in the handling. And they scorned the many lamers (like me) who had trouble controlling such realistic models.
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<p>
If you liked the game, it was because you liked the world its physics built: a rigorous, unforgiving place.
</p>
<p>
In contrast, the <cite>Tony Hawk</cite> skateboard games have always played fast and loose with physics. It's not just that the tricks are goofy -- like when I'd jump off the edge of a movie theater and grind along the edge of a moving bus. No, what I notice when I play <cite>Tony Hawk</cite> games is more subtle: It's the way that aerial stunts feel completely disconnected from Newtonian reality.
</p>
<p>
In <cite>American Wasteland</cite>, when I zoomed off a ramp and pulled a "Christ Air" combo, my body didn't feel propelled by any natural forces of inertia and kinesics. I just needed to get high enough off the ground, and presto, I could do the trick. It didn't really seem to matter whether the vectors of movement logically led to the stunt. This isn't a criticism; on the contrary, that was part of the pleasure of <cite>Tony Hawk</cite> -- the almost hallucinogenic, dreamland quality of the way you moved around.
</p>
<p>
So what fascinates me about <cite>Pure</cite> is how the designers strike a perfect middle ground between these two poles.
</p>
<p>
As I scream around the muddy tracks, it feels <em>kind of</em> like I'm on Earth -- with semi-normal gravity that affects me, and the objects around me, consistently. But it also feels like I'm simultaneously in some zone of half-realism where the rules bend at just the right moments -- allowing me to land safely from a stunt that by all rights should have broken my legs and wrists. So the upshot is that I'm neither as uptight as when I'm grappling for control of my testy car in <cite>Gran Turismo</cite> nor as wraithlike as I feel in <cite>Tony Hawk</cite>.
</p>
<p>
I sometimes wish a racing title would include DVD-style extras, in which the programmers could explain how they modeled the physics in their worlds. It's one of the more subtle and unsung elements of sheer artistry in gaming.
</p>
<p>
Or to put it another way: Painters use colors and texture to create moods; authors use words and imagery. But action games? They use physics.
</p>
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- - -
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<p>
<em>Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for </em>The New York Times Magazine<em> and a regular contributor to </em>Wired<em> and </em>New York<em> magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, <a href="http://www.collisiondetection.net/">collision detection</a>.</em>
</p><img src="http://feeds.wired.com/~r/columns/games/~4/412348888" height="1" width="1"/>
Games Without Frontiers: The Game of Politics Is Ready for Its Upgrade
<p>
I won the White House for Barack Obama last week. And for John McCain, too!
</p>
<p>
I was playing <cite><a href="http://www.politicalmachine.com/">The Political Machine 2008</a></cite>, this year's big sim-election title, and had a blast slinging mud and pandering. Playing as Obama, I stormed around the coasts, promising clean coal and running ads blasting McCain for supporting the war, and soon I was kicking back in the Oval Office. Playing as McCain, I played precisely the opposite cards in the red heartland, and won that race as well.
</p>
<p>
And as I turned off the computer, I thought -- wow, you could regard <cite>The Political Machine</cite> as the supreme indictment of American Democracy. Because for all its cartoony graphics, the electioneering feels quite realistic. Almost <em>too</em> realistic. And you wind up worrying: Is real-life politics just a game, too?
</p>
<p>
As we move ever closer to Nov. 4, pundits constantly complain that the presidential campaign has become a farce of scorekeeping -- with the candidates, media and consultants treating it merely as a horse race. <em>Why aren't we talking about issues?</em> they moan. <em>Isn't democracy supposed to be about more than just pandering to the crowd?</em>
</p>
<p>
In one sense, the pundits are completely right. There's something enormously depressing about watching the electioneering devolve into such nanoscale pettiness as the "<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/10/campaign.lipstick/">lipstick on a pig</a>" argument, or the choruses of "<a href="http://www.usnews.com/blogs/fresh-greens/2008/9/4/drill-baby-drill-breaking-down-sarah-palins-vp-speech.html">drill, baby, drill</a>." We're facing down some of the hugest social crises in a generation -- climate change, a worldwide economic meltdown -- yet we're faced with campaigns dominated by who's racking up more daily points: Who attacked? Who deflected? Modern political campaigns even borrow directly from the linguistics of game-playing: The candidates are engaged in a "horse race."
</p>
<p>
But let me suggest another way to look at it. Maybe American democracy really <em>is</em> a game -- and maybe that's the best thing about it.
</p>
<p>
What, after all, is a game? A game is a set of rules that gives players a set of goals but also constrains their behavior in striving for those goals; it architects their behavior in an interesting and hopefully enjoyable way. A really well-designed game is "balanced" and self-correcting. In a game of pool, for example, if you take an early lead by sinking a ton of balls, you quickly discover that -- whoops -- the game gets harder because your opponents' balls block all your shots. In MMOs like <cite>World of Warcraft</cite>, different classes of players do different things; as a result, no one class can run roughshod over all others.
</p>
<p>
In comparison, what's a democracy? Much like a game, it's just a bunch of rules -- written down on a piece of paper (er, a "constitution") -- that constrain everyone's behavior in an attempt to architect a productive, happy and peaceful polity. And, again like a game, if it's well-designed, it's self-correcting.
</p>
<p>
One reason to admire the U.S. democratic system is its neat balance of power. On paper, anyway, the branches of government -- executive, legislative and judicial -- are co-equal, so each can prevent the others from causing too much mischief. When it comes to elections, some sparsely populated states were weighted higher -- given extra senators and congressmen or Electoral College votes so that, again in theory, they wouldn't be run roughshod over. American democracy is strikingly gamelike in its design.
</p>
<p>
Yet the thing is, the game is clearly in need of a redesign. When you play <cite>Political Machine,</cite> you quickly realize -- much as real-world candidates do -- that you're mostly worried about the small handful of vote-rich "swing" states, like Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio. I won even though I almost completely ignored population-rich New York, California and Texas.
</p>
<p>
This is, of course, because of the superweird Electoral College system. It's a design choice that made a lot of sense 200 years ago, but makes increasingly less sense as time goes on and America becomes more of an urban, coastal country. The software of American democracy was designed to run on hardware -- a particular population distribution -- that no longer exists.
</p>
<p>
If American democracy actually <em>were</em> a game, like <cite>Halo,</cite> players would call it unbalanced -- and cry out for a solution. Or to put it another way: The software of U.S. democracy needs a <em>patch</em>. It needs some tweaks that force politicians to consider the whole map.
</p>
<p>
Plenty of electoral thinkers have suggested reweighting the Electoral College, or <a href="http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/ ">maybe even scrapping it</a>. Assuming this were politically possible, it would require some sober meditation on design. For example, to ensure that low-population states don't get completely overlooked politically in the new regime, you might want to include new safeguards for them -- such as a couple extra senators or representatives.
</p>
<p>
Even so, you'd want to be very, very careful as you proceeded. As any videogame designer knows, changing even one tiny part of a system -- making the rifles more lethal in <cite>Call of Duty,</cite> or gravity slightly more powerful in a racing game -- can send the entire thing spiraling into chaos. The same goes with democracy, in spades.
</p>
<p>
But the point is, thinking about American democracy as a game is not necessarily a bad thing. Quite the contrary: It might be the best way to fix it.
</p>
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</p>
<p>
<em>Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for </em>The New York Times Magazine<em> and a regular contributor to </em>Wired<em> and </em>New York<em> magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, <a href="http://www.collisiondetection.net/">collision detection</a>.</em>
</p><img src="http://feeds.wired.com/~r/columns/games/~4/399454445" height="1" width="1"/>
Games Without Frontiers: How Videogames Blind Us With Science
<p>
A few years ago, Constance Steinkuehler -- a game academic at the University of Wisconsin -- was spending 12 hours a day playing <cite>Lineage</cite>, the online world game. She was, as she puts it, a "siege princess," running 150-person raids on hellishly difficult bosses. Most of her guild members were teenage boys.
</p>
<p>
But they were pretty good at figuring out how to defeat the bosses. One day she found out why. A group of them were building Excel spreadsheets into which they'd dump all the information they'd gathered about how each boss behaved: What potions affected it, what attacks it would use, with what damage, and when. Then they'd develop a mathematical model to explain how the boss worked -- and to predict how to beat it.
</p>
<p>
Often, the first model wouldn't work very well, so the group would argue about how to strengthen it. Some would offer up new data they'd collected, and suggest tweaks to the model. "They'd be sitting around arguing about what model was the best, which was most predictive," Steinkuehler recalls.
</p>
<p>
That's when it hit her: The kids were practicing science.
</p>
<p>
They were using the scientific method. They'd think of a hypothesis -- <em>This boss is really susceptible to fire spells</em> -- and then collect evidence to see if the hypothesis was correct. If it wasn't, they'd improve it until it accounted for the observed data.
</p>
<p>
This led Steinkuehler to a fascinating and provocative conclusion: Videogames are becoming the new hotbed of scientific thinking for kids today.
</p>
<p>
This makes sense if you think about it for a second. After all, what is science? It's a technique for uncovering the hidden rules that govern the world. And videogames are simulated worlds that kids are constantly trying to master. <cite>Lineage</cite> and <cite>World of Warcraft</cite> aren't "real" world, of course, but they are consistent -- the behavior of the environment and the creatures in it are governed by hidden and generally unchanging rules, encoded by the game designers. In the process of learning a game, gamers try to deduce those rules.
</p>
<p>
This leads them, without them even realizing it, to the scientific method.
</p>
<p>
This is what Steinkuehler reports in a research paper -- "<a href="http://website.education.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/papers/SteinkuehlerDuncan2008.pdf">Scientific Habits of Mind in Virtual Worlds</a>" (.pdf) -- that she will publish in this spring's <cite>Journal of Science Education and Technology.</cite> She and her co-author, Sean Duncan, downloaded the content of 1,984 posts in 85 threads in a discussion board for players of <cite>World of Warcraft.</cite>
</p>
<p>
What did they find? Only a minority of the postings were "banter" or idle chat. In contrast, a majority -- 86 percent -- were aimed specifically at analyzing the hidden ruleset of games.
</p>
<p>
More than half the gamers used "systems-based reasoning" -- analyzing the game as a complex, dynamic system. And one-tenth actually constructed specific models to explain the behavior of a monster or situation; they would often use their model to generate predictions. Meanwhile, one-quarter of the commentors would build on someone else's previous argument, and another quarter would issue rebuttals of previous arguments and models.
</p>
<p>
These are all hallmarks of scientific thought. Indeed, the conversations often had the precise flow of a scientific salon, or even a journal series: Someone would pose a question -- like what sort of potions a high-class priest ought to carry around, or how to defeat a particular monster -- and another would post a reply, offering data and facts gathered from their own observations. Others would jump into the fray, disputing the theory, refining it, offering other facts. Eventually, once everyone was convinced the theory was supported by the data, the discussion would peter out.
</p>
<p>
"It blew my mind," Steinkuehler tells me.
</p>
<p>
And here's the thing: The (mostly) young people engaging in these sciencelike conversations are precisely the same ones who are, more and more, tuning out of science in the classroom. Every study shows science literacy in school is plummeting, with barely one-fifth of students graduating with any sort of sense of how the scientific method works. The situation is far worse for boys than girls.
</p>
<p>
Steinkuehler thinks videogames are the way to reverse this sorry trend. She argues that schools ought to be embracing games as places to show kids the value of scientific scrutiny -- the way it helps us make sense of the world.
</p>
<p>
One of the reasons kids get bored by science is that too many teachers present it as a fusty collection of facts for memorization. This is precisely wrong. Science isn't about facts. It's about the <em>quest</em> for facts -- the scientific method, the process by which we hash through confusing thickets of ignorance. It's dynamic, argumentative, collaborative, competitive, filled with flashes of crazy excitement and hours of drudgework, and driven by ego: Our desire to be the one who figures it out, at least for now. It's dramatic and nutty and fun.
</p>
<p>
And it's pretty much how kids <em>already</em> approach the games they love. They're already scientists; they already know the value of the scientific method. Teachers just need to talk to them in their language, so that the kids can begin to understand the joy of puzzling through the offline, "real" world too.
</p>
<p>
At one point, Steinkuehler met up with one of the kids who'd built the Excel model to crack the boss. "Do you realize that what you're doing is the essence of science?" she asked.
</p>
<p>
He smiled at her. "Dude, I'm not doing science," he replied. "I'm just cheating the game!"
</p>
<p>
- - -
</p>
<p>
<em>Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for </em>The New York Times Magazine<em> and a regular contributor to </em>Wired<em> and </em>New York<em> magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, <a href="http://www.collisiondetection.net/">collision detection</a>.</em>
</p><img src="http://feeds.wired.com/~r/columns/games/~4/386348628" height="1" width="1"/>
Games Without Frontiers: Games Give Free Rein to the Douchebag Within
<p>
I really want to nuke Athens.
</p>
<p>
I know it's possible. Hell, I've watched and rewatched the YouTube videos of the 14-year-olds who've <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEPzCPWn2NA">done it</a> in Sid Meier's new game, <cite>Civilization Revolution</cite>. The guttural roar of the ICBM taking off, the flare of the missile as it arcs slowly across the sky, the terrifying rumble in your Xbox 360 controller as the nuke pulverizes the target: It's <em>awesome</em>. I can't sleep until I've rained that sort of death on the world.
</p>
<p>
What the hell is wrong with me? There are a lot of ways to win at <cite>Civilization Revolution</cite> that do not involve taking a happy, peaceful city and reducing it to a smoldering gravesite filled with radioactive trinitite. I could, for example, train my country in brilliant artistry, building Wonders of the World -- a "<a href="http://www.civfanatics.com/civ4/strategy/cultural_victory_notes.php">cultural victory</a>," as it's called. Or I could win by becoming a great economic power, enriching my citizens and the global community.
</p>
<p>
But no. Every time I plunge into a game, I inevitably choose the most Cro-Magnon, "Hulk smash, Hulk destroy" strategy possible. Or maybe I geek out and try to discover spaceflight before anyone else, so I can outfit my hermetically sealed, glassed-in astronaut city with interstellar warp drives, blur the stars into hyperspace, arrive at Alpha Centauri, encounter alien worlds ... and then try to kill <em>them</em>. Ooooh, you guys back home wanna spend your time carefully building the Hanging Gardens, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Alexandrian Library? Fine. Go for it. <em>Hippies.</em> Me, I'm gonna reach for the goddamn stars, built some kickass mechs, <em>flatten</em> anybody in my way with a molten avalanche of plasma.
</p>
<p>
I repeat: What's wrong with me? One of the classic highbrow defenses of videogames is that they allow you to experience new personalities -- to, in the words of <a href="http://www.mit.edu/~sturkle/">Sherry Turkle</a>, create a "second self." This is considered supremely healthy, because self-exploration is generally a good thing.
</p>
<p>
But what happens if the second self you create inside videogames turns out to be a total <em>dick</em>?
</p>
<p>
Sometimes I think the best way to get a grip on my true inner self would be just to list all the people I choose to be inside games.
</p>
<p>
For example:
<ul class="list1">
<li>In racing games, I never want gearhead realism that replicates the precise feel of a Porsche 911. No, I want cartoon, Tex Avery physics and fishtailing insanity -- pedestrians screaming and diving out of the way and not quite making it.</li>
<li>In first-person shooters, I hate, hate, <em>hate</em> any complexity or nuance -- like protecting innocents, avoiding friendly fire or figuring out which stupid door to open. I don't even like games that don't give me <em>unlimited ammo.</em></li>
<li>In MMOs, I inevitably play as a class that can work solo -- like a Paladin, balanced between skull-crushing might and self-healing magic.</li></ul>
<p></p>
<p>
"OK, so, deep inside you're a frustrated geek with serious masculinity issues who doesn't like authority," said a gamer friend of mine when we talked about this over drinks. "And you're a loner who can't handle complexity."
</p>
<!--pagebreak-->
<p>
Except, except ... wait a minute, that's not even vaguely what I'm like in real life. In meatspace, I'm a total people-pleaser who avoids all conflict (to the point where I often get completely doormatted in my professional life). And I have a superhighly tuned, sensitive-boi EQ. Christ, I cry at <em>weddings.</em> What's going on?
</p>
<p>
Nothing weird, said <a href="http://www.bogost.com/">Ian Bogost</a>, a friend of mine who's one of the smartest game academics and game designers around. The whole reason my in-game choices are so divergent from my wussy-ass actual self is because I'm using games to see life from a different perspective; the Walter Mitty effect, as it were. Nothing wrong with that. And, he added, I'm imprisoned by a lack of options. Too many mainstream games are predicated on loony macho conflict because it's easy to model, and because the industry is focused on the power fantasies of 14-year-olds. I shouldn't blame myself for getting sucked into their poor choices.
</p>
<p>
Fair enough. Except ... there's been a huge growth in alternative forms of gaming in recent years, and the sad truth is that I rarely get as excited by them. All those "click management" games, like <cite>Diner Dash</cite> or <cite>Cooking Mama</cite> -- the ones that model the chaos of real life in a charming, witty way, and let you deal with it? That stuff puts me to sleep. Hell, I don't even have the patience for computer golf. When offered a choice inside games like <cite>Civilization</cite>, given the option of picking amongst different types of personalities, I choose to play as a complete douchebag. (In <cite>Halo 3,</cite> as you may recall, I wound up <a href="http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/commentary/games/2007/11/gamesfrontiers_1105">embracing suicide-bomber tactics</a>.)
</p>
<p>
Now, I'll issue my usual caveats here. I don't mean to suggest that I, or anyone else, should police their fantasy lives. Games are -- at least partly -- an exercise of the imagination, and it's always a perspective-broadening experiment to visit the dark or creepy places of the mind.
</p>
<p>
But interestingly, the rest of the world is beginning to realize that one's game preferences can be regarded as a <a href="http://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/">Myers-Briggs personality type</a> for the digital age. Plenty of college kids list their most-played games on their Facebook pages, under the presumption that this speaks as clearly about their inner lives as their religion or political stances.
</p>
<p>
And in the last few years, Silicon Valley companies have begun actively recruiting the leaders of major <cite>World of Warcraft</cite> guilds, under the assumption that people who choose those roles are good at being leaders, motivating teams and defusing interpersonal drama.
</p>
<p>
Just imagine what things will look like 10 years from now. "Hmmm, this job applicant has a kind of cool Alliance-Mage thing going on, so she'd be good in the legal support department, eh? Yeah, but her team-killing stats in <cite>Gears of War 4</cite> are really troubling."
</p>
<p>
Or in the world of dating: "I just don't know if I can go out with someone who never plays any of the side missions in <cite>Grand Theft Auto</cite>!"
</p>
<p>
Maybe, for the sake of my social reputation, I should start playing some <cite>Diner Dash.</cite> Who knows: If I play it enough, I might get really into it. Yeah, I think I'll head out to the GameStop and get a copy.
</p>
<p>
Right after I nuke Athens.
</p>
<p>
- - -
</p>
<p>
<em>Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for </em>The New York Times Magazine<em> and a regular contributor to </em>Wired<em> and </em>New York<em> magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, <a href="http://www.collisiondetection.net/">collision detection</a>.</em></p><img src="http://feeds.wired.com/~r/columns/games/~4/373945836" height="1" width="1"/>
Games Without Frontiers: Fun Way to Lose Weight: Turn Dieting Into an RPG
<p>
A friend of mine recently slimmed down on Weight Watchers. She joined two months ago, and in just a couple of weeks, she'd shed 10 pounds. She'd been trying for a year to lose weight, but nothing worked -- until now.
</p>
<p>
Why did Weight Watchers work so well? For a really fascinating reason: because it isn't a normal diet. It's something more. Something fun.
</p>
<p>
It's an RPG.
</p>
<p>
The Weight Watchers program is designed precisely like a role-playing dungeon crawler. That's why people love it, stick to it and have success with it. And it points to the way that we could use game design to make life's drudgery more bearable.
</p>
<p>
Let me unpack this a bit. When I asked my friend to see how Weight Watchers works, she showed me the ingenious system. "The best part is the web tool," she said, pulling it up on her laptop.
</p>
<p>
When you first log in to Weight Watchers, it determines how much food you'll be allowed to eat that day, expressed as a number of "points." My friend gets 23 points per day. Each time she eats a piece of food, she enters it into the online database, and it calculates how many points she's used. A small apple is one point; a piece of fried chicken is seven points.
</p>
<p>
When she first started the program, she was stunned at how quickly she burned through her daily points. A single bagel was six points -- more than 25 percent of her daily quota. "How the hell am I going to do this without starving?" she wondered.
</p>
<p>
But pretty soon she learned to hack her daily eating to suit the system. She snacked on vegetables that took zero points -- like bell peppers -- or only one or two points, like a tasty brand of microwave popcorn. Then she'd save up the big points for a really decent dinner. Better yet, Weight Watchers assigns her an extra 35 bonus points per week that she can use if she goes over her daily limit. Or she can bank them for a big blowout restaurant meal on the weekend.
</p>
<p>
What makes this point-counting possible is Weight Watchers' elegant online tool. Type in any food you can think of -- including brand-name snacks or boxed meals -- and Weight Watchers has already calculated the points for you. If she makes a special sandwich at home, she can calculate the ingredients, save it with a custom name, and then drag and drop it into her day every time she eats one.
</p>
<p>
As I watched her poke around on the screen, managing inventory, calculating points, staying within her range, it hit me:
</p>
<p>
Weight Watchers is an RPG.
</p>
<p>
Think about it. As with an RPG, you roll a virtual character, manage your inventory and resources, and try to achieve a goal. Weight Watchers' points function precisely like hit points; each bite of food does damage until you've used up your daily amount, so you sleep and start all over again. Play well and you level up -- by losing weight! And the more you play it, the more you discover interesting combinations of the rules that aren't apparent at first. Hey, if I eat a fruit-granola breakfast and an egg-and-romaine lunch, I'll have enough points to survive a greasy hamburger dinner for a treat!
</p>
<p>
Even the Weight Watchers web tool is amazingly gamelike. It has the poke-around-and-see-what-happens elegance you see in really good RPG game screens. Accidentally snack on a candy bar and ruin your meal plan for the day? No worries: Just go into the database and see what spells -- whoops, I mean foods -- you can still use with your remaining points.
</p>
<p>
And those 35 extra points you get every week? They're like a special buff or potion -- a last-ditch save when you're on the ropes.
</p>
<p>
Indeed, I'm in awe of the sheer brilliance of Weight Watchers in adopting the word <em>points</em> as its metric for measuring food. The word immediately shoves the user into the semantics -- and fun -- of gameplay. You regard losing weight as an intriguing challenge, as opposed to a mere grind.
</p>
<p>
This puts me in mind of the talk that <a href="http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/magazine/15-06/st_arg2">Jane McGonigal</a> -- a brilliant and pioneering alternative-reality game designer -- gave at this year's South by Southwest conference. She argued that game designers ought to put their skills to use in the real world by <a href="http://danhon.com/2008/03/11/sxsw-2008-jane-mcgonigal-keynote/">reshaping dull, everyday activities</a> into fun challenges. Why not a game that gives you points for walking your dog or jogging?
</p>
<p>
"Games are an incredible language and system. They should be everywhere," she said. "Why are we making games only for the bound pages for a computer screen or console? Why aren't we doing that to help people navigate and understand the world around us?"
</p>
<p>
She couldn't be more right. As McGonigal points out, there are already some witty attempts -- like <cite>Chore Wars, Wii Fit</cite> or <a href="http://www.seriosity.com/attent.html">Seriosity's system</a> that tries to limit corporate e-mail overload by forcing people to "spend" virtual totems to send a message. I can think of tons of things I'd love to see turned into a game: doing my taxes, dealing with my inbox backlog, being stuck in traffic.
</p>
<p>
And this stuff is clearly possible, because if Weight Watchers can turn something as unpleasant as dieting into a playful activity, the sky's the limit.
</p>
<p>
Just ask my friend.
</p>
<p>
- - -
</p>
<p>
<em>Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for </em>The New York Times Magazine<em> and a regular contributor to </em>Wired<em> and </em>New York<em> magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, <a href="http://www.collisiondetection.net/">collision detection</a>.</em>
</p><img src="http://feeds.wired.com/~r/columns/games/~4/361492775" height="1" width="1"/>
Back to the Grind in <cite>WoW</cite> — and Loving Every Tedious Minute
<div id="embed_wide">
<div id="pic">
<img src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/full/2008/07/wow_630px.jpg" alt="">
<div id="caption">
Getting into <cite>World of Warcraft</cite> for the first time means hours of grinding: performing the same tasks over and over to ?level up? a character. But far from being boring, grinding is one of the great unsung joys of gaming.
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>Last week, I finally decided to start playing <cite>World of Warcraft</cite> again.
And you know what that means: Exciting medieval adventures! Chess-like
strategizing with guildmates over raid techniques!</p>
<p>And, of course, grinding.</p>
<p> Hours upon hours of mind-numbing grinding.</p>
<p>
Even if you've never played <cite>World of Warcraft</cite> -- or any role-playing game, online or off -- you are probably familiar with the concept. To "level up" your character, you've got to gain experience, and that generally involves doing a few simple tasks -- mostly "killing stuff" and "collecting stuff" -- over and over again.
</p>
<p>
When I rolled my new Paladin, I had to spend the next eight hours planted at my desk, repetitively clicking through the same tasks as if I were an industrial robot making car parts on the Chrysler line. I slaughtered wolves, bears, a few more wolves, some creepy little Kobold humanoids, then -- hey -- some more wolves. I rooted around in their corpses for random junk. (Woo! A candlestick!) Then I did it again. And again. And again. Until 3 a.m., actually.
</p>
<p>
This is of the most-prodigious mysteries of the gamer soul. Theoretically, we love multiplayer games because they offer a dramatic alternative to our shades-of-beige meatspace lives. They let us cast off our mundane existence and become a colorful, empowered hero. And what do we do with this second life?
</p>
<p>
We behave like obedient workers in a Soviet collective outside Stalingrad, circa 1971. Comrade, your job is to collect potatoes. For seven years. We pay $20 a month for this privilege.
</p>
<!--pagebreak-->
<p>
What the hell is wrong with us?
</p>
<p>
There are several obvious explanations for why we grind. Partly, we know that the game gets interesting only once you're powerful enough to fight the bad-ass monsters. We'll endure whatever hazing necessary to get there. We'll grind until the sun explodes.
</p>
<p>
There's also the addictiveness of it all. And as I've argued before, <cite>WoW</cite> -- like many RPGs -- was designed to replicate the emotional logarithm of heroin. You reach level 2 quickly, level 3 a bit less quickly, and levels 4, 5 or 22 less quickly yet -- but it's such a blast each time you level up that you can't stop the party. You'll kill yourself to feel that hit one more time.
</p>
<p>
These explanations are all true, more or less. But I actually believe there's another reason we're willing to spend 20 hours a week grinding, and it's far weirder.
</p>
<p>
It's because we love it. We love grinding.
</p>
<p>
We cannot get enough of it.
</p>
<p>
Why? Because there's something enormously comforting about grinding. It offers a completely straightforward relationship between work and reward. When you log into <cite>WoW</cite>, you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that if you just plant your ass in that chair for long enough, you'll level up. It doesn't require skill. It just requires putting in the time. Play 10 hours, you'll do better; play 50, you'll do better yet; and yet more so with 500 hours.
</p>
<p>
The thing is, almost no arenas of human endeavor work like this. Many are precisely the opposite, in fact. When you go to your job at the office, there's little or no linkage between effort and achievement: You slave like a madman all year long, only to watch the glad-handing frat guy hired two months ago get promoted above you. And if you're a really serious nerd, the logic that governs interpersonal relationships -- marriage, kids, your parents -- is even more abstruse: Things can actually get worse the more time and effort you put into them.
</p>
<p>
But grinding? Grinding always works. Always. You get a gold star just for showing up. This is a quietly joyful experience. It feeds our souls, as well as our sense of justice and fair play. We grind because we can't believe what a totally awesome deal we're getting handed here, often the first time in our entire suck-ass put-upon lives.
</p>
<p>
Granted, a game based around grinding tends to privilege those with huge amounts of free time, which of course means younger people and robots and gold-farming guys in China (who, incidentally, are sometimes getting handed a much better deal than they'd get in a comparable meatspace job). And here's the inevitable caveat: I realize that <cite>WoW</cite> isn't only about grinding; it encourages teamwork and cooperation and strategy and woof-woof, meow-meow.
</p>
<p>
But let's not kid ourselves. There's a lot of grinding going on in that game. Like, right now. Seriously; go log on and check. I'll wait right here. It's cool.
</p>
<p>
Grinding is idiotic, but it will never go away, because it sustains us. When we're exhausted by things we can't understand, we take solace in things that are what they say they are. Our video games may be idiotic, but at least their idiocies are consistent.
</p>
- - -
<p><em>Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for </em>The New York Times Magazine<em> and a regular contributor to </em>Wired<em> and </em>New York<em> magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, <a href="http://www.collisiondetection.net/">collision detection</a>.</em></p><img src="http://feeds.wired.com/~r/columns/games/~4/347903879" height="1" width="1"/>
Games Without Frontiers: Go Ahead, Punk, Make Your Game
<p>
If you've ever played a really horrible game, you've probably thought: Wow, the people who made this are talentless. You fume at the derivative, seen-it-before gameplay; you complain that the levels are far too monotonous, or far too unmanageable. After a while, you throw down your controller and boast: Hell, <em>I</em> could make a game better than this.
</p>
<p>
Ah, but could you?
</p>
<p>
I recently found out when I spent some time with <cite>Blast Works</cite>, a brilliant new Wii title that allows you to create your own games. What I discovered is, as you might expect, it's pretty damn hard to make a fun game. You'll probably fail.
</p>
<p>
But in the process of doing so, you'll learn a ton about what makes a good game good. Or to put it another way: <em>Designing</em> games makes you a better <em>connoisseur</em> of them.
</p>
<p>
On the surface, <cite>Blast Works</cite> is a side-scrolling, spaceship-blasting game with a clever twist. Much like <cite><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradius">Gradius</a></cite>, you drift inexorably rightward, ever beset by blocky, polygonal enemies. But when you blast them into pieces, you can -- much as with <cite><a href="http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/news/2005/01/66225">Katamari Damacy</a></cite> -- swoop in and scoop up any loose parts, which then stick to your spaceship. Turrets from enemy guns remain functional, so you quickly can amass a huge, unruly mess of weapons that jut out from every direction. If you did nothing else but play the single-player component, you'd have fun.
</p>
<p>
But if you stopped there, you'd miss out on the philosophically rich treats to come.
</p>
<p>
Because also embedded inside <cite>Blast Works</cite> is an amazingly full-featured editor that lets you create customized spaceships, bullets and levels. Almost everything, from physics to camera zoom, is tweakable. Objects can be designed down to the last pixel if you're obsessed enough. Basically, it's everything you need to craft your own side-scrolling shooter.
</p>
<p>
Hot damn, I thought. I plunged into the editor and decided to try crafting a shooter with a nutty electric-guitar aesthetic. At first, it seemed really easy. In barely 10 minutes, I designed a crude <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibson_Flying_V">Flying V</a>-style ship. I crafted a couple of even more crude-looking enemies: Weak ones were shaped like guitar picks, and more-ferocious killers were shaped like ... well, big lumps of something or other. Hey, I'm <em>tolerable</em> at design, but only barely. And in any case, I was getting impatient to try out my creation. How would it play?
</p>
<p>
I loaded the game, hit Start, and when the Flying V ship drifted onscreen, I was hit with a giddy jolt of pride. Dude! I'm playing <em>my own game!</em>
</p>
<p>
But my pride quickly deflated, upon a sober realization: My game sucked.
</p>
<p>
I'd clustered the enemies far too closely together, making it impossible to avoid their attacks. Hell, I didn't even leave enough breathing space. The first notes of the ominous <em>they're-here</em> music had barely started when the armada arrived and sliced through me like I was soft cheese. I went back in and tinkered with the attack spacings, but found I quickly tipped into the opposite problem: Now the game was too easy. Hmmm.
</p>
<p>
Over the next few hours, two things happened. I got deep into the weeds of my game, tweaking and teasing the enemies and the landscape to try and balance things out. More important, I gained an amazingly rich sense of just how remarkable truly <em>good</em> game design is -- the talent that's necessary to reach that tightrope balance point where something's optimally challenging without being controller-chucking frustrating. I mean, if I was having this much trouble crafting a simple side-scroller -- one of the most rudimentary genres -- imagine trying to create a complex online world, an immersive shooter or a mystery game. How the hell do Blizzard, Bungie and Cyan do it?
</p>
<!--pagebreak-->
<p>
Creating a game, in other words, makes you a better consumer of games, because it forces you to think concretely about the linguistics of the craft: balance, collisions, human motivation, camera work, artwork, physics. It's like how being required to write speeches and short stories in elementary school trains you to appreciate a truly spectacular novel or bit of oratory -- or how knowing how to play an instrument, even poorly, gives you a deeper insight into true musical genius.
</p>
<p>
But the fascinating thing is that there are lots of people out there who are pretty good at game design. If you go over to the <a href="http://www.blastworksdepot.com/games/blastworks/"><cite>Blast Works</cite> website</a>, you can download ships, enemies, weapons and entire levels that gamers have created, and try them for yourself. The creativity is occasionally stunning.
</p>
<p>
There are re-creations of famous Nintendo characters like Mario and Link; there's even a precise rendition of the original <cite>Super Mario Bros.</cite> Someone assembled a hilariously spot-on homage to <cite>Star Wars</cite>. And one gamer, amazingly, re-created the look of <cite>Space Invaders</cite> by crafting a level so narrow it doesn't scroll -- and you thus remain on one screen.
</p>
<p>
I'm not suggesting that these are addictive, must-play games. No, they're more like fan fiction -- a way of thinking about what game design really is. They remind me of how new-media artists like <a href="http://artforum.com/video/id=20569&mode=large">Cory Arcangel</a> have plundered old-school game environments as a form of cultural commentary. (Indeed, I've even now been inspired with my own quasi-artistic idea: I'm designing a <cite>Blast Works</cite> level that has no enemies at all -- just a backdrop of buildings that will slowly spell out a message in enormous letters as you scroll by. It's <cite>Gradius</cite> as a form of text messaging!)
</p>
<p>
Of course, <cite>Blast Works</cite> isn't entirely new: Many previous games have offered modding and editing tools before. But I've never seen any game that mixed such flexibility with relative simplicity -- and offered such a quick way to share your design ideas with others.
</p>
<p>
And at the very least, it allows you to finally answer your own windy boast: Man, I could do <em>that.</em>
</p>
<p>
Well, sure. Just try.
</p>
<p>
- - -
</p>
<p>
<em>Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for </em>The New York Times Magazine<em> and a regular contributor to </em>Wired<em> and </em>New York<em> magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, <a href="http://www.collisiondetection.net/">collision detection</a>.</em>
</p><img src="http://feeds.wired.com/~r/columns/games/~4/334711355" height="1" width="1"/>
Games Without Frontiers: 'Space Invaders' Remake Takes Retro Gaming to the Limit
<p>
This is slightly embarrassing to admit, but I'm addicted to ... <cite>Space Invaders.</cite>
</p>
<p>
Not the 1978-issue game, mind you. No, I'm talking about <cite><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Invaders_Extreme">Space Invaders Extreme</a></cite> -- a re-visioning of the original game, released this week for the Nintendo DS and PSP by Square Enix (which now owns Taito, creator of the original <em>thud-thud-thud</em>ding arcade classic). The game is enormously fun, gorgeously rendered and -- other than the horrid use of <em>extreme</em> in the title -- a loving tribute to the Precambrian title that birthed the entire videogame industry.
</p>
<p>
But here's the really interesting thing. I think the new <cite>Space Invaders</cite> is the first "reissue" of a videogame that is completely successful.
</p>
<p>
This really has never been done before. This subgenre of gaming -- the classic remake -- is littered with failure. <cite><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defender_(arcade_game)">Defender</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroids_%28video_game%29">Asteroids</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaga">Galaga</a></cite>: You name the old-school game, and it's been ruined by some designer's misbegotten attempt to improve it. It's like a form of cultural taxidermy: They take a wonderful old game, surgically drain it of all joy, then leave the mounted corpse on your mantelpiece to glare at you with its creepy, glassy eyes.
</p>
<p>
But why? Why is it so hard to update a cool old game?
</p>
<p>
Usually because the designers get too fancy. They assume modern gamers will only play a game if it's 3-D, so they go to painful lengths to transform 2-D titles into full, "immersive" reality. Among other things, this inevitably screws up the control system. The playfully unmanageable chaos of the old-school <cite><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotron:_2084">Robotron 2084</a></cite>, for example, becomes the <em>grindingly</em> unmanageable chaos of the 1996 remake on the Nintendo 64.
</p>
<p>
Worse, by moving into 3-D, these games abandon the chunky, low-fi graphics that made those 1980s titles so vibrant and Jungian in their symbolic heft. In the original <cite><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlezone_%281980_video_game%29">Battlezone</a></cite>, the world was rendered in green, vectorized geometric shapes. It was a perfect evocation of the ghostly quality of "surgical" Cold War combat: We fight amongst Platonic solids!
</p>
<p>
Then Atari redesigned the game in 2006 for the PSP -- transforming it into the sort of brown/beige 3-D sludge so omnipresent in today's gaming, with sundry powerups that promise "complexity" but only serve to ruin the Zen-like simplicity of the original.
</p>
<p>
This is what's so refreshing about the new <cite>Space Invaders</cite>. It avoids all these pitfalls. First off, it remains resolutely 2-D. Indeed, the aliens look precisely as they did in 1978 -- chunky, pixelated blots of Otherness dread. They still crawl across the screen, slowly at first and then faster as you eliminate their ranks. And as before, you can only zip back and forth along the ground and fire upward.
</p>
<p>
Yet Square Enix has also managed to insert clever new bits of gameplay. Some of the aliens carry shields that deflect missiles back toward you; others, once wounded, stagger downward in kamikaze attacks. Every once in a while, one of those mystery ships at the top of the screen will pause, fizz and unleash a searing, laserlike blast for a few seconds. Meanwhile, you've got new powerups: multiple missiles, cluster shots and a penetrating laser.
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<p>
The upshot is that the game remains neatly balanced. The aliens have their new tricks, but so do you. In fact, as a whole, the game advances with the same sort of inverse logarithmic difficulty: Around 10 minutes in, you'll feel precisely the same <em>oh-shit-oh-shit</em> loss of control you experienced in the original arcade game. It's quite eerie.
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<p>
What I'm trying to argue, ultimately, is that Square Enix has captured the <em>spirit</em> of the original game. The funky weapons, the zigzaggy attacks -- sure, they're new. But they also seem like part of the <cite>Space Invaders</cite> canon. In essence, <cite>Space Invaders Extreme</cite> feels like a game that Taito's designers would have wanted to produce if they'd had just slightly more processing power.
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<p>
Square Enix's designers have deftly channeled the limitations that Taito's designers faced. And this, really, is the secret to their success -- because it's your choice of limitations, not freedoms, that makes for superb game design.
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<p>
So yeah: It's 1978 again. Except, somehow, slightly better. Welcome back!
</p>
<p>- - -</p>
<p>
<em>Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for </em>The New York Times Magazine<em> and a regular contributor to </em>Wired<em> and </em>New York<em> magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, <a href="http://www.collisiondetection.net/">collision detection</a>.</em>
</p><img src="http://feeds.wired.com/~r/columns/games/~4/322967105" height="1" width="1"/>
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