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April ’08 Round Table – UPDATED 05/01
By Corvus | May 1, 2008
Coming off the first quarter’s focus on audio, we’re going to turn our gazes inward a bit for the next few months and look at the internal workings of story and play. I encourage you to join in, regardless of your perspective on the topics we’ll be covering. The important thing is that we explore the relevance of the topics at hand and engage each other and our communities in the conversation.
April ’08
Variations on a Theme: What are your favorite videogames? Or if you rather, what are your least favorite videogames? Chances are each group holds something in common. It could be something as simple as a gameplay mechanic that you love or loathe. It could be a save system that is too forgiving or too punitive. It might also be a particular type of story–Mario’s never ending proletariat struggle to gain the recognition of the upper classes, the rags-to-riches-by-way-of-the-sword story that so many RPGs feature.
Regardless, it’s a good bet that there’s a common theme running through this group of games. Some assumption the developers made about you, the audience. Assumptions that either resonate strongly with you or don’t. It’s these underlying assumptions, these themes, that this month’s Round Table invites you to explore. What are your most, or least, favorite themes? Are your favorite themes explored enough in videogames? Are your most hated themes explored too often? Answer one of these questions, or find your own approach.
So there it is, April’s Round Table topic! I encourage you to really peel back the onion skin on this one and focus in on a narrow approach. Rest assured, I’ll be there with plenty of follow up questions for you–so be prepared for a cross examination! *kniw*
William starts us off with a look at a common theme running through the portrayal of a female archetype running throughout Japanese games in Final Fantasy and Hayao Miyazaki.
Ben takes a look at asynchronous gameplay and provides a detailed look at the math of a Zergling rush in Starcraft and the Power of 3′s.
Max at Worldmaker.net muses that Love is a Story I’ve Been Encouraged to Finish, or What We Need Is Little More Voodoo in a post that explores the theme of gameplay acting as a barrier to story.
Shamus of Twenty Sided has joined in with his thoughts on The Tough Guy.
Tormod joins in the discussion with An Order of Side Quests
Joe of the Cult of the Turtle talks about coming of age within videogames in He Woke Up Late on His Special Day
Chris went to address the topic of themes and got stuck trying to figure out what his favorite games are in Rose Tinted Games.
Wow. It’s a good day for the table round. I remembered to add Joe to the post this morning, then Chris posted and now two more posts are up as well!
The first is me talking about how I wish video games would consciously explore more themes, like all the recent movies that appear to be exploring Themes of Isolation.
Then Adam of And thus Spoke Pi joins us to explore games that because of their great restraint, or is that constraint, seem lost and lonely in Lonely Games.
Jules joins us from The Interactive Quill to express delight in games that allow you to Be Who You Want to Be.
Jason of Unfettered Blather gives us an up close and personal look at his lack of control issues in Not My Idea of a Good Time.
Chris at The Artful Gamer has served up a dish that has inspired quite a bit of cogitative chewing on my part. While it doesn’t initially appear to be about theme, it reveals itself to be critical to the idea of discussing theme. So be sure to go and read Revilatizing Dead Culture: Why Game History Matters
Andrew has joined in the discussion with a look at two sides of a single theme in The Theme of Construction and Destruction
A new contributor, Nathan at Ethics of Madness, joined the Round Table last Friday and it’s taken me until now to update the post. Bad host! Still, this is the perfect time to thank everyone who has contributed to this month’s table. It’s been a stellar bunch of posts and you have all, once again, managed to impress me. Today is the last day to get your post included in April’s Round Table as tomorrow morning I’ll be posting a new topic for May! Now that I have that out of the way, go check in on Nathan as he puzzles through the themes of Meta-thinking and Emergent Behavior.
UPDATE
Although the Round Table officially ended yesterday at 11:59pm, Greg posted something this morning at The Dust Forms Words that I thought capped off the month quite nicely. So go read The Second Level and consider this your after-dinner mint, if you will.
Thanks again for an amazing month at the Round Table!
Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about joining the Round Table that aren’t answered by the FAQ.
Tagged:Blogs of the Round Table, themes. | 11 Comments »
April 1st, 2008 at 7:40 pm
Oh MY. Thanks for the heads up, you can bet I’m on board for this one.
April 2nd, 2008 at 12:43 am
For the lack of an own blog I’ll just write something here:
I could mention quick time events, or random battles but I think they aren’t inherently bad on their own, they are just scape goats for bad game design. This, coupled with unskippable neverending cutscenes and fridge logic in puzzles are the “features” that make me hate a game.
When the fun comes not from the gameplay itself, but from winning things or advancing in the game, it gets really hard not to hate it when the frustration levels are high.
To give a particular example, I just recently played Patapon on a friends PSP, and I have to say I don’t like it. The game design is nowhere near the brilliance of Loco Roco. The tacked on elements of RPG just ruined the experience for me, which is really odd since I love the genre.
The difficulty is set to annoyingly hard, hampering the advance of the player at every turn.
For example, in some parts of the game it is required that the player calls rain to advance. To do this, not only do you have to be in fever mode (which it takes at least 45 seconds to get) but you have to input a command with a complete different rythm than any other normal command. Add this to the fact that when you reach fever mode the cute patapons shout FEEEVEER, destroying your sense of rythm if you are not concentrated.
And yet, I have not seen a single review that called out this piss poor game design.
April 2nd, 2008 at 3:14 am
Ok. I’ll definitely be in on this. Just need to do a bit of thinking… which includes digging on the top shelf of my closet to get at the box of old gaming media…
April 2nd, 2008 at 5:49 am
@Kimari So the underlying theme you don’t like would be… video games are intended to be a series of escalating challenges?
@William @Tormod I’m looking forward to your entries!
April 3rd, 2008 at 9:36 pm
Dammit, too many themes I like to mention. I should write about a theme or mechanic which I hate and can’t get to grips with.
April 4th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
@Corvus:
Sorry, just now I noticed your response. It appears that I didn’t express myself rather clearly, now that I re-read my previous comment.
I enjoy escalating challenges, because primarily they give a sense of progression in almost every game. What I don’t enjoy is the bad design of challenges, or in other words, when the difficulty curve is all over the place with peaks that hamper the advancement of the player.
Let’s analize again Patapon for the sake of finishing the kill on the almost dead horse.
At first it’s easy to move and everything without much difficulty. Then come the enemies that bring the difficulty curve a little higher which is to be expected.
From there it’s a smooth ride without too many bumps on the road until we hit a desert at the middle of the game (or earlier I don’t remember well) where we can’t walk without getting our feet burned. Now we are introduced to a new command that uses the X button, so far so good. The game teachs us how to use it once, and then leaves us to our fate…
From what I remember there is no way to do this tutorial again, so we are screwed if we did not become familiar with the command by using it once.
Well now, here we are at the middle of the desert, with no freaking idea how to make it rain, because, oh joy, the freaking tutorial forgot to mention that to make it rain we need to be in fever mode.
A friend of mine had a really rough time with the fever mode because of the already mentioned scream of FEEEEVEEER coming from the cute little patapons. The owner of the PSP had been playing patapon for the past 5 days, and guess what? Neither of us couldn make it rain with 8 tries… Just imagine this: three idiots sitting in a back yard for an hour failing constantly at a task in a PSP game.
Although, I have to say, watching other people getting angry and frustrated playing a handheld game is one really amusing experience. I’m sure the cursing could be heard at 2 blocks away.
April 6th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
Also, I think I went over it a little too quickly last time, but can I just express my appreciation for the phrase, “Mario’s never ending proletariat struggle to gain the recognition of the upper classes”. Solid gold.
April 10th, 2008 at 7:17 am
[...] want to write something for this month’s Round Table, hosted by Corvus at Man bytes blog. It is in production, though it tends to run overboard. [...]
April 18th, 2008 at 6:27 pm
One theme in RPGs that has always bugged me are useless skills or spells that are thrown in just for the sake of it. In the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series, there are all those spells like sleep, defense down, and my favorite stone that you would never use in a regular fight but would be great to use during a boss fight. Of course these enemies are magically immuned to these attacks. This kind of game design forces you to avoid trying new things, and is really a way to artifically increase the challenge of most RPGS.
Take Nocturne for example, spells that can reduce the defense of bosses, their attack strength, and even give them a huge chance to miss are not frowned on but encouraged to use. Another example would be the game Shadow Hearts, where one of my favorite tactics is to use one characters increase damage spell, to set up a huge multi person attack that can usually kill a boss in 2 rounds of it.
I recently discovered Rogue likes which seem to scratch that itch of mine on not forbiding certain tactics. Every enemy can be affected by your magic staves, and you can build plans around this to get out of a jam.
May 1st, 2008 at 7:25 am
Thanks for the late inclusion; it’s good to be back in the Round Table!
May 1st, 2008 at 7:32 am
It’s good to have you back!