Craig Ostrin

With my heart slowing and my health bar dropping, I sprinted through Rapture’s Mercury Suites for the cure to my gradual death-by-mind-control. I found it at the top of the three-story apartment complex.

On the way back down, I took my sweet time, checking every nook for extra ammunition, secret tonics, and weapon-upgrade stations. I examined the map every ten steps, making sure I hadn’t missed a single room.

One thing gave me pause. Rushing through the doorway of the late Sander Cohen’s residence, I heard classical music coming from the next room. This far into BioShock, I knew that paying attention to audio signals was the best way to prepare for whatever threat lay ahead, but I wasn’t ready for what came next.

As I crept closer to Cohen’s ballroom, I brought out my crossbow. Two splicers stood before me, but I didn’t pull the trigger yet. To my surprise, they were dancing. Waltzing, actually. This was unlike anything I’d seen in Rapture. Splicers’ psychotic antics had faded into the background for me. Deranged muttering, violent screams and cheerful singing—they were just cues. Yellow traffic lights. But this was something else. This was beautiful. The couple danced and danced, seemingly oblivious to their ragged, blood-stained formal attire just as they were to the decomposing world around them. They were more human to me than any of the supposedly sane individuals I had encountered. While I was racing to find a way out of this miserable hellhole, they had already found their escape hatch.

I stood in the shadows and stared as the dancers repeated their steps, afraid to move closer. I checked my map. I would have to go through this room to continue my obsessive treasure hunt. Who knows what fortunes lay upstairs? But I didn’t want to startle them, and I certainly didn’t want to have to kill them. I aimed my crossbow again, zooming in on the twirling couple. But I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t worth it. After one last look, I turned around and walked away.

I know I haven’t written in a while. Finals dominated April, and I’ve been preoccupied with a slew of activities this summer (more on this later). I just wanted to put this up before I forget.

This is a comment I wrote (with slight edits) on Chris Remo’s response to the question of Dante’s Inferno: essentially, whether it’s a “good thing,” “bad thing,” or neither.

It doesn’t have much to do with Remo’s take on Dante but, instead, was sparked by a small section of his post.

I know it’s not the duty of any individual game designer to ‘justify’ games to anyone who doesn’t play them, and it shouldn’t be, and obviously as a gamer I know full well that games are capable of more than this. But the reality is that most games DON’T have anything to say; most games DON’T communicate any meaningful thought; and most games DON’T deal with their subject matter in anything other than the basest, most ridiculous way. You could say the same for most fiction of any medium, but it’s certainly even more true for games.

My reply:

I’ve been listening to the Creative Screenwriting Magazine podcast¹ lately, in which the host, Senior Editor Jeff Goldsmith, interviews a different writer on each episode. You’d be surprised at how much thought goes into even the most explosion-riddled action flick.

Have you seen The Island? It’s standard Michael Bay fare, with a dystopian clone world as the backdrop for slow-mo action and over-the-top special effects. The movie was written by the same guys who did the new Star Trek’s screenplay, and during the Trek interview, they mentioned that they’d had loftier ideas for The Island, which weren’t quite realized once Bay and the studio got a hold of the script.

Even The Dark Knight—on the surface, a fairly standard adaptation of a classic superhero series, albeit with exceptional acting on the part of some of the players—had a ton of thought and care put into the themes and characters.²

I think the biggest problem with storytelling in games right now is that most developers don’t know how to craft a protagonist. Either they’re non-existent, as in most first-person games, or they’re absolutely flawless, with no room to grow and develop.

At their core, stories are about characters. If we can’t create compelling characters, we can’t tell compelling stories.

George Kokoris wrote an excellent post about the necessity of “personal inspiration” in game design, inspiration that needs to come from outside our own industry, he argues. He highlighted Dead Space: Extraction in this IGN interview with executive producer Steve Papoutsis as an example of what happens when a game is completely devoid of personal inspiration. Watch the interview.

George’s response:

“We have a variety of different mechanics that other games don’t have. We’ve got our zero-g, we’ve got branching paths, we’ve got camera control… And each weapon has an alternate fire mode, which a lot of other games don’t have.”

This is where the wheels started coming off for me. There is nothing in that sentence that helps me differentiate this product from any other 3D shooter. Plenty of games have those features, sometimes in exactly the same combination. But the unfortunate truth is that this really is what constitutes originality for a lot of developers. Extraction isn’t necessarily aiming all that high, so it may be an unfair judgment on my part, but I still feel it perfectly illustrates the limited scope of creativity in the game industry.

In a way, it’s unfair to judge the game and its dev team based on what the producer said in an IGN interview, since he’s basically been given a PR script to memorize.

On the other hand, as a PR person (whether he likes it or not, that is his role here), he hasn’t been given a very good script. One of the first things you learn in an intro marketing class is that you communicate benefits, not features. People don’t care that the car you’re trying to sell has built-in GPS with all this functionality, they care about the benefits of that feature: that they’ll never get lost. Or, in games, people don’t care that you’ve got 20 weapons and 10 maps in your multiplayer game, they care that they can play in diverse environments where no match will be the same as the last one.

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“I think my first reaction when I heard some news about [BioShock's] end was like, ‘People got to the end?’” said 2K Boston’s Ken Levine at a New York Comic-Con panel last month. Now, in what other storytelling medium would you ever hear that come out of a creator’s mouth?

An incomplete film or novel is an active decision. You walk out of a theater, turn off a DVD, or put down a book. On the other hand, videogames tend to just fade out of your top-level consciousness after a while. You’ve seen my list of shamefully underplayed games. It’s not an uncommon phenomenon. If you’re into videogames, chances are you’ve got more than a few lying around that you never finished yet always meant to revisit. But why does this happen? Why don’t we finish games?

Well, as you may have guessed, I have a theory.

It starts with a basic generalization: Game stories suck.

I just deleted a couple paragraphs full of examples, because I know you don’t need proof. It’s just a given. For every story delivered as elegantly as Portal‘s, there are a thousand games full of derivative garbage with incoherent narratives and forgettable characters. There are a number of reasons why game stories suck, and we can go into them all another time, but what does it have to do with finishing games?

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More on what I’ve been playing.

Halo Wars

It’s probably best that this has some separation from the bit on Killzone 2. Sure, they’re not in the same genre, but we all know how crazy the Internet can be.

It’s hard to tell how much my enjoyment of the Halo Wars demo stems from my fondness for Halo, and how much from the actual gameplay. Ensemble really nailed the feel of the franchise, from the way the Warthog bounces and swerves to the use of the original assault rifle’s crosshairs for the selection reticule.

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My parents instilled in me a deep love of reading at a young age. So, naturally, I thought I wanted to be an author when I was a kid. That is, until I learned how few novelists actually “make it.” But I was still passionate about books and knew I had a knack for telling good writing from bad, so I adjusted my goals: Editor at a book publisher—different job, same skill set, right?

More recently, as my gaming hobby grew into a passion, I went through a similar cycle. First, the same thought that strikes every devoted gamer: “If I like playing games, wouldn’t it be great to make them?” I didn’t have much interest in art or programming, but I could write. Right? And considering the quality of most videogame stories, games writing looked like a pretty viable field for me. (Design and production seemed like appealing alternatives too.) That wasn’t the issue though.

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I’m still planning to write up my thoughts on why people don’t finish games, and why it matters, but this week is incredibly hectic for me. So, instead of leaving this page barren for almost two weeks, I’m going to bang out a quick article on what I’ve been playing (answer: mostly demos). I hope this gives you a sense of my perspective and taste in games.

Killzone 2

The first of two big demos dropped last week, and while the gushing reviews are rolling in, I can’t say I’m so impressed with the snippet we’ve received. Although, part of it could be that I can’t stand the DualShock 3 for first-person shooters. (The sticks are too loose and too close together.)

Aside from general complaints about the PS3 controller, it was the little things that disappointed me in Killzone 2. I’ve always liked it when your character reaches out a hand and turns a door knob or pushes a button rather than the object magically operating itself when you press X. It grounds you in the world. So, how can Guerrila nail that one aspect of immersion, but then completely neglect to give your character feet?

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As far as I know, the term “Pile of Shame” originated on an old 1UP Yours episode, spawning a brilliant, albeit short-lived, experiment. The concept was that the Yours crew would revisit an underrated title as the community played along and participated in the discussion via the message boards.

While 1UP Yours’ brief endeavor flared out before it even got started, the Squadron of Shame took up the torch (then, just a small group of like-minded gamers in one corner of 1UP’s forums), and they still carry it proudly today.

This spark of an idea stuck with the Squad, and was eventually revived by 1UP FM, because it fills a need. Not only do we find joy in digging up the gems that slipped through the cracks, but we all have games that we never played but meant to, games we bought but left in plastic, games we put aside for one reason or another, to which we always meant to return but never did. We’ve all got a Pile of Shame.

Here’s mine.

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I’m going to skip the formal, front-page introductions and jump into some real content. If you want to know who I am and what I’m doing here, check the next page over.