Once I bought into the necessity of hunting and gathering for cash within the game, most of the tasks came naturally. You play a cowboy; cowboys seek fame, fortune and money. Most things you do for fame and fortune in Red Dead gain you completion percentages. By the time I completed the story I had already reached 97% completion. That last 3% of game gave me just enough time to begin to tell my own story within the gameworld, creating the start of a new chapter in the lives of the Marstons. That experience provided me more narrative closure than did the game itself.

Red Dead Redemption is like that—I played the game on its own terms, but with my own personal style. A few weeks after the credits rolled, I had a conversation with my brother about the final storyline event. During that confrontation, my brother chose to use the Cattleman Revoler, the starting weapon of the game. He selected that weapon because he believed it was John Marston’s old gun, which he believed would mean more to your character than any of the weapons you purchase or find during the rest of the game. To him, the cattleman revolver was the symbol of Marston’s journey, and the only tool that could truly close the last chapter. By way of contrast, I chose a modern pistol—not for its stopping power, but because it had been given to Marston by the very forces he fought so hard against. I wanted to use my enemy’s own weapons to exact my revenge.

These were roleplaying decisions. They were driven by our interpretations of the characters, not any game mechanics. We had played all the same missions, but in the end, we didn’t choose our weapons based on power or flexibility. In most shooters the choice of weapon is clear—what has the most ammunition, or the most power? It is a rare game that can make you choose for emotional reasons. We chose based on our interpretations of the character we inhabited, and how we had reacted to the events we had been through together. I think that says more about how captivated we were by Red Dead Redemption than any broad generalizations ever could.

Now that the game is finally out, I am having a blast. After some initial issues with the horse controls the game quickly dragged me in, and hasn’t let me go. In fact, the only reason I’m  writing about it and not playing it right now is that I’m once again stuck on a bus. I haven’t progressed very far in the story due to work obligations, but the writing is solid, and after two years of Grand Theft Auto 4 the thing that most surprised me was how likable I found the characters. The world generally holds together, and the sheer variety of events and emergent situations I’ve encountered in the first few hours of play boggles my mind. Unfortunately, at this point in the game a few narrative elements are still bothering me, and the game’s Western setting prevents me from brushing these minor flaws away.

Hunting is my first big problem with the game—there isn’t any real in-world incentive. Beyond selling pelts for negligible cash, the only motivation I have found for hunting is to complete achievement-style challenges that break my immersion. Although I understand it would have irritated many players, I was disappointed that a game set in a world of scarce resources didn’t include some kind of hunger mechanic to justify your wanton slaughter of wildlife. Hunting doesn’t matter to Marston… it’s just something to do to pass the time. Doesn’t he have bigger fish to fry?

That inconsistency of pacing is the bigger problem. There isn’t enough urgency in Marston’s actions. His introductory confrontation with his old rival is almost lethargic, and once he recovers from his injury the game makes no effort to press you to complete your tasks quickly. In fact, the game’s design serves the opposite purpose, pulling you farther from the core storyline as you explore the open world. John Marston’s wife and child are being held captive by the government, but he seems perfectly at ease, doing odd-jobs for traveling salesmen and gathering herbs! The man should be agitated, driven. Deke Thornton in The Wild Bunch was also forced to turn on his old brothers in arms, and the stress of that order hangs over Thornton throughout the film. Marston looks bored in comparison.

This disconnect of characterization worries me, and I anticipate that when I beat this game I will be satisfied with the game, but disappointed by its narrative. Westerns live and die by their conclusion, and in a perfect world, I believe John Marston would die. His circumstances would slowly draw out the most heroic qualities in his character, and at the end of the game you would have the option to sacrifice yourself to achieve your goals, set your family ahead (in the manner of 3:10 to Yuma), and complete the arc of the narrative.

It’s a well-established progression in Westerns, and some of my favorite films in the genre end with the death of the protagonist. Unfortunately I doubt this will happen, although it would finally offer a narrative solution to the issue of player agency: If you play the game dishonorably, breaking Marston’s essentially noble characterization by indiscriminately murdering your way through the game, a narrative death could be cast as a personal redemption. Having an honor gauge that responds to your actions allows RDR to partially fit itself to your play style, but I haven’t yet seen any indication that honor is narratively tied to Western archetypes in this way.

I don’t normally put so much stress on the narrative of the games I play… Many do not need narrative at all, and others sidestep lackluster storylines with engaging gameplay. Unfortunately, by hewing so close to an established cinematic genre Rockstar has positioned the game within the legacy of Western films, and Westerns live and die not just by their wild settings but by their tough-as-nails protagonists. At the end of the day a game world that doesn’t force you to hunt rabbits to survive doesn’t bother me; a main character who drifts aimlessly and unhurriedly through a narrative does. It is a lost opportunity.

To be fair, the game is titled Red Dead Redemption, so maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this will end up just as I hope, with a stunning, redemptive narrative conclusion to match the exciting gunplay and beautiful game world.

My fingers are crossed.

However engaging a movie or a painting can be, it doesn’t depend on interaction. Though Sands defends himself from accusations of Chess snobbery, it is reasonably accepted that Chess is one of the most perfect games ever invented. A child can learn it, but a lifetime can be spent in search of mastery—no video game is so finely balanced. Chess is the standard to which games should be held, not a narrative, cinematic experience like “Citizen Kane.” I don’t mean to fall into the Narratology vs Ludology war, I just believe we should celebrate games for those elements that make them unique—and which make them last. Smith points out that cinematic experiences are technology-dependent:

Cinematic experiences in games last only as long as the makeup and technology hold. I may love Wing Commander IV for what it accomplished at the time, but do I really want to go back and play it still? Does the game itself actually hold up?

I began writing a post to this effect recently after I revisited some of my favorite games of the mid ’90s. I still enjoyed them, but the low-res textures and blocky models stand out more in comparison to modern titles. Some graphics hold up better than others (the Myst series comes to mind), but with my eyes jaded by current-gen titles it was much easier to see which games truly shined as games, with interesting mechanics and complex dynamics outlasting stunning cut-scenes. Thank you to Mr. Sands for deftly articulating what I was thinking when I returned to games like Jedi Knight or Half-Life:

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a broad spectrum of games that approach the medium from countless angles. That’s part of the flexibility of the platform, and a concept I champion, but I also think we lose too much time trying to be something [cinematic masterpieces] we are not….

In the long run, it has always been the games that unapologetically embraced the idea of truly being a game that seemed to last. Maybe that tells us something.

Well said.

*“Artistic Acceptance” here seems to be defined as “A pat on the back from Roger Ebert,” which is a whole different can of worms.

There are a couple of games I have been playing lately that I have particularly reacted to, and as I am currently stuck on a bus in deepest Connecticut I thought I might take a break from replaying Spider to reflect a little on a handful of iPhone ports that have most interested me: Tale of Tales’ The Graveyard, Popcap’s Plants vs Zombies, and Lazy 8 Studios’ Cogs.

I left some comments about Tale of Tales’ The Graveyard over at Creative Applications’ post about the recent iPhone port, and as it happened CreativeApps’ Filip judged my reactions interesting enough to reward me with a download code for the full game. I first played the free version of The Graveyard shortly after it was released, and for a game that takes under ten minutes to complete it really impressed me. (If you haven’t tried the game you should go form your own impressions—the core game is free on both computer and iPhone.) Cast in the role of an elderly woman, your only goal in the game is to walk into a graveyard, sit down on a bench, reminisce about lost loved ones, then stand and walk back out… hardly a complicated exercise, but the execution managed to really pull me in.

The first time I played I was extremely frustrated with the speed of my avatar, limited to a shuffling limp after having become so used to sprinting, flying and otherwise racing through other games. This is the first win for The Graveyard: I was frustrated because I felt old. Anything other than taxes that makes a fairly recent college graduate feel old is worth recognition, but the identification with the character actually strenghtened as I played. Looking back on my first play session, I started the game frustrated by how my avatar’s age limited my movements, but by the time I left the graveyard I was content to take things at the pace they came. In ten minutes Tale of Tales essentially walked me through the process of coming to terms with aging. While it will be quite a number of years before I can verify these reactions, that was my first takeaway.

Death is treated in a very matter-of-fact way in the game, and the song you listen to once you reach the bench recounts all the deaths your character has witnessed over her long life. Newborns, elderly relatives, sick children: everybody ends up the same in the end, with no more than a stone in the ground and an old woman’s memories to memorialize them. The song ends with the woman’s contemplation that she will soon join this row of stones. In a graveyard death is not frightening, it is all around… your character has come to terms with the coming end.

In the free version of the game, this is how it ends: you stand, you shuffle back to the main gate, and you close the game, returning to the triple-A shooter du jour or indie masterpiece of the moment. That is exactly what I did, but when I was browsing games several months later it had left a strong enough memory to spur me to head over and grab the full version. In an unfortunately typical situation my life exploded too much to take advantage of my new purchases, the game sat on my drive for several more months, and I didn’t end up playing the full version until I redeemed Creative Applications’ App Store download code earlier this week. The full version of the game adds only one feature: mortality. Unlike in the free version, once you put money down you can die.

In fact, every time I have played the full version, I have died. I cannot speak to the experience on a PC, but I can comment on the peculiarities of the mobile port. The first time I saw my avatar’s head slump forward I was on the train, playing with the sound off on my morning commute. The dischord around me on the T and the silence of the game (remmember that a large portion of the game’s content is a song about the dearly departed) made the whole experience rather surreal. It had been long enough since my initial playthrough that I couldn’t recall whether this was normal, so for a time I waited for her to stand, thinking perhaps the music hadn’t ended yet. When it became clear the old woman had passed away, I turned off my phone and got off the train, rather perplexed by how much less effecting the game was out of context. I made sure to wear headphones the next time. With the music and the atmospheric sound effects it was more definitive when she passed on… the music stopped, she seemed to consider getting up, then slumped forward instead. After having identified so tightly with the character in the free version, this time I found myself reacting much as one does to the news somebody you don’t know has finally passed away. Anticlimactic, expected, and peaceful, this was the antithesis of player death in almost any other game.

There are a few things about the implementation on the iPhone that I feel weaken the overall experience. First, the game does not override the currently playing music in iTunes. While I am normally greatful that games allow me to play my own tunes, in this instance I feel that random shuffle rather cheapens the experience. The Graveyard is such a concise statement that it would hardly be that much of an inconvenience to mute the sound for a couple minutes.

The other thing, and this may be true of the desktop version as well, is that if you die the game starts where the last one let off: You see yourself sitting on the bench, lifeless. In my opinion this diminished the feeling of finality the death had the first time I witnessed it much more than starting fresh would have done.

Is this a game that should have been ported to the iPhone? I feel that in some ways writing a game in Unity encourages the creation of ports, and this may be a case of “Well, we could, so why not?” After all, it’s nice to have a larger market, especially for indie studios with niche audiences. The chaos and unpredictability of your surroundings when you play an iPhone game stand opposed to the atmosphere of The Graveyard, and the game’s failure to override your own soundtrack, tends to weaken the impact of the game.

But then again, isn’t that the point?. Death is no more distant on the subway than it is in a graveyard. Whether you’re listening to Brahms, birds or the Black Eyed Peas does not have one iota of impact on your base mortality. So in the end, the juxtaposition of a carefully limited work of art with the sprawling chaos of the real world might go farther to emphasize the game’s message than the most carefully controlled environment ever could.

Whether it really belongs on the platform or not, I am glad Tale of Tales released The Graveyard for my phone. I don’t know how much this rerelease will earn the studio, but I hope that people will take a chance on these “artsy” games. Every game like The Graveyard and Rohrer’s Passage makes the App Store a better place.

Get The Graveyard in the App Store

This became far more verbose than I had anticipated, and having started in deepest Connecticut I now find myself rolling through Manhattan. With that in mind, I will defer commentary on the other games until a later time.

The project is built in a flash framework called Flixel, so you can try RAAJOCBDFOTLSOTS online: just click on the image. As somebody (possibly Darius) put it, Game Jams aren’t the place for win states, so just do as the title tells you and enjoy the game!**

*Our development process, while highly democratic, took a decidedly dictatorial turn when Michael came up with this name. I wasn’t about to argue!

**If there aren’t any cars on the screen, use the arrows to run and jump to the right until they respawn.

Update 2/23/09: Emily Daniels has posted a complete list of the projects created at the Dino jam. Everybody had something awesome to show by the end of the weekend, so check out the rest of the games!

http://globalgamejam.com/2010/quest-stick

Edit, February 1: Jeff has released the most up-to-date build as a .msi installer, which automatically pulls in the required dependencies. If you were having trouble running the game, try the alternative download link on our Game Jam homepage.

I got involved with the Game Jam through my participation in the Boston Postmortem IGDA meetings in general, and the Boston Indies independent game development meetup in particular. This past evening I attended a Boston Indies event in which Eitan Glinert of Fire Hose Games discussed the process of submitting their current project, Slam Bolt Scrappers, to the Independent Games Festival competition. Eitan’s presentation had some interesting points that I will be posting in the near future, but for now you should follow @FireHoseGames and check out the Slam Bolt Scrappers site for more information.

Additional shout-outs to Kristina Drzaic, formerly of 2K Australia and now at the once-again-Irrational Games, and Amanda Cosmos, a QA tester at Turbine and generally cool person.