Virtua Fighter 5 announced!

The Virtua Fighter series has always been awesome, and this Japanese trailer for Virtua Fighter 5 looks spectacular. Check it out:



Hopefully this will make its way to America pretty soon.

Dostoyevsky said it best.

The estimable ants begin with the anthill, and they will probably end with the anthill, which does great honor to their consistency and trustworthiness. But man is a flighty deplorable creature, and, like a chess player, he may be fond only of the process of achieving the goal, rather than of the goal itself. And who knows (no one can vouch for that), perhaps the only goal toward which mankind is striving on earth consists of nothing but the continuity of the process of achieving....He is fond of striving toward achievement, but not so very fond of the achievement itself, and this is, naturally, terribly funny.

—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, from Notes From Underground

My name is Brian and I am a recovering Achievement addict

For some people, simply beating a game isn't enough. They need something more. They need to feel as though they've "achieved" something, even if that achievement is entirely symbolic. Microsoft was all too happy to cater to these sad souls, and they created the Gamerscore system. Accomplishing certain in-game tasks ("Achievements") would grant you a given number of points ("Gamerscore"). The more games you play, the higher your Gamerscore. This, of course, has led to some people feverishly hunting as many Achievements as they can in order to boost their score as much as possible. Sadly, I used to be among these people.


Ultimately, Gamerscore is just a number. It signifies nothing except the amount of time and effort you've put into playing Xbox 360 (or PlayStation 3, as their "trophy" system is very similar). Getting a huge number of points doesn't grant you anything except a larger e-peen than your friends. It's easy to get sucked in, though. Before you know it, Achievements are altering the way you play games.

For example, some games offer Achievements for beating the game on a higher difficulty, others for finding every gold coin or hidden box or other assorted tchotchke the designers may have put in there. Many Achievements you can get by just playing the game normally. "Achievement Unlocked: You beat level 1!" SoulCalibur IV grants you 5 points just for watching the opening movie. But it's the ones that you have to go out of your way for that are trouble.

Achievements are strictly voluntary, and I know lots of people that are totally indifferent to them. I used to be that way. "I could get more Achievements on that game, but why bother? I already beat it." But somewhere down the line, and I can't remember exactly when, things changed. I found myself going out of my way to earn extra Achievements. I went back and played old games just to increase my Gamerscore. In a way, this was a good thing. I was able to put off buying new games because I was trying to earn new Achievements in my old games. Some Achievements led me to parts of the game that would have otherwise gone unexplored. Mass Effect, for example, has Achievements for playing as a Biotic, Soldier, or Tech character. So in order to get every Achievement in the game, you'd have to play through it a minimum of 3 times.

There's a dark side, though. My lowest point was probably when I bought the game Avatar: The Last Airbender - The Burning Earth. See, all Xbox 360 games have a minimum 1000 Gamerscore, which usually get divided up into around 50 Achievements. Avatar, on the other hand, has just 5, and they are ludicrously easy to earn. I did it in about five minutes:

Yep. 1000 Gamerscore just for standing in place and mashing the B button. After I saw that YouTube video, I knew I had to do that myself. And once I did, I immediately returned the game. I didn't bother playing past the first five minutes. I didn't care. I got what I was after. It was soon after that, though, that I began to take a look in the mirror and think maybe I should just try to enjoy games for their own sake.

What really shook me out of my Achievement whoring was Assassin's Creed. Among the game's Achievements are these: Find all of King Richard's flags; find all flags in Masyaf; find all flags in Jerusalem; find all flags in Damascus; find all Teutonic flags in Acre; find all Templar flags in Acre; find all Hospitalier flags in Acre. Now, that is a lot of flags. And I actually tried to collect every last damn one. Never made it, though. Gave up in Acre and never looked back. Three words: Fuck. That. Shit.

So clearly, Achievements have the potential to alter one's playing habits, both positively and negatively. Game Developers Conference wraps up today in San Francisco, and although I couldn't attend this year, I caught coverage of several panels that explore the very issue of how Achievements affect the way people play games.

In one, Geoffrey Zatkin of Electronic Entertainment Design and Research said, "Achievements are a reward. People use reward mechanisms in game to get players to do what you want them to do. If there were no rewards for collecting coins in Super Mario, you wouldn't do it. Achievements can be a very powerful tool that have a very low impact on a development budget."

He suggests that designers place certain Achievements in games with the intent of aiming a gamer's behavior. Based on my own experience, I can certainly see some truth in this. Would I have ever attempted to collect all the flags in Assassin's Creed if there weren't Achievements for it? Hell no. And yet, if you put a carrot on a stick, even if the carrot is a meaningless collection of points, I'll chase after it.

In another talk, Chris Hecker of the independent game studio definition six argues that Achievements can spoil the fun. GameSpot reports,

Hecker's "nightmare self-fulfilling scenario" was that extrinsic motivators [i.e. Achievements -Ed] would ruin the intrinsic motivation to play their games. And with the industry's current "fetish" for metrics, Hecker said developers will wind up being pushed toward designs where extrinsic motivators work well.

Again returning to my Assassin's Creed example, this is exactly what happened. It wasn't until I realized that collecting flags had turned into a chore, devoid of any fun or game-oriented purpose, that I stopped caring. However, I think Hecker is off the mark if he thinks his conclusions apply to all gamers. As I mentioned before, I know many people who are totally indifferent towards Achievements. And Geoffrey Zatkin's research showed that "On average, only 27 percent of players managed to get half of the available achievements in each game."

All in all, I think Achievements are a good thing and I'm glad they're there. Their best function, as far as I've found, is to let you get more life out of your old games. Do you have an old game that's been collecting dust on your shelf? Try beating it on Hard. But if you find yourself crawling through every nook and cranny looking for all 500 Secret Orbs of E-Peen, you might want to think twice.

(Further reading here, here, and here.)

So close, yet so far.

In my last screed, I wondered when we'd see a positive videogame story in the mainstream media. It appears I may have spoken too soon, as the Los Angeles Times just did a piece hyping a videogame tournament this weekend in their Entertainment section. It's easy to see this is a good sign, but before I go overboard heaping praise upon the article, take a closer look:

On Saturday, UGTL will hold its fifth official Streetfighter IV tournament at a warehouse just south of downtown L.A. Streetfighter IV is a popular video game, available on PlayStation II or Xbox, in which players battle each other in simulated hand-to-hand combat.

If you didn't find anything wrong in that passage, then you've probably never worked as a copy editor or proofreader. To put it plainly, the correct terms are Street Fighter IV, PlayStation 3 (not PlayStation 2), and Xbox 360. To give credit where it's due, kudos to the Times reporter for at least including the Roman numerals in the title of Street Fighter IV, as I've seen "Street Fighter 4" much more often. You'd think it would be easy to get such a small detail right. I mean, come on, it's right in the logo on the front of the friggin' box:


Perhaps you think I'm nitpicking. Well, you know what? So should the Los Angeles Times. As I mentioned almost a year ago in my entry about the Videogame Style Guide, one would be completely in the right to criticize the Times if they, for example, wrote about The God Father 2 instead of The Godfather Part II. It should go without saying that writing about videogames should be held to the same standard as writing about film.

But I want to be clear that I only criticize, not to nitpick, but because I want videogames to be a more regular part of the LA Times' coverage. But if a major publication like the Times keeps making simple mistakes like these, then I'm much more likely to continue to get my videogame news from fan-made and amateur Web sites. (By the way, go to Get Your Tournament for the most up-to-the-minute videogame coverage!)

I've been a Satanist since the age of 5, apparently.

That is, if you agree with self-described "frumpy, middle-aged mom" Marla Jo Fisher of the Orange County Register.

I truly believe that video games were created by Satan to turn otherwise normal children into his drooling, glassy-eyed stooges. After my son plays them at his friends’ houses, he comes home irritable and testy for the rest of the day.

Even though his skin is normally mocha-colored, after a day spent in a darkened room with a controller in his hand, he comes home with a sickly pallor.

Nice hat.

I'm tempted to call bullshit, as Marla Jo Fisher seems to fit the stereotype of the panicked, uninformed parent to a T. But no, Ms. Fisher really is a staff writer for the Orange County Register, and some of her previous missives deal with such hard-hitting topics as children wanting cell phones and the sudden popularity of Blackberries.

I breathed a slight sigh of relief when she revealed in her next article that the whole "Satan" bit was a joke. But of course she's still convinced that games will turn your child into fat, lazy zombies.

I'm not going to refute Fisher's comments point by point, as many others on the Internet have beat me to it, and most people with common sense can see right through the bullshit anyway. Instead, I'd just like to point out how every counter-point comes from a gaming blog or Web site, and I've seen pretty much nothing from traditional, mainstream media. This says to me that ignorant opinions like Marla Jo Fisher's are still the most prevalent, and it's up to us in the interim to set the record straight.

I'm still waiting for the day when this balance shifts. Just as comedian Bill Hicks wondered why you never heard a positive drug story in the news, I'm wondering when the major news media is going run a positive video game story.

Just a thought.

In the first episode of South Park's eighth season Stan, Kyle, Kenny and Cartman buy ninja weapons at the South Park County Fair. The boys imagine themselves as real ninjas, and what ensues is a madcap adventure drawn in a parody of Japanese and American action-oriented cartoons.


The comedy comes by way of the fact that we in the audience get to see both sides of the fantasy. We see peeks of the boys both in their own fantasy world, and we get to contrast that against the real world, which usually intrudes at the most inopportune times. (E.g. Butters gets a ninja star stuck in his eye and the kids have to deal with taking him to the hospital without their parents finding out.) Even when we're in the fantasy world, though, it's obvious that we're really watching a bunch of 9-year-olds because the fantasy is just so ridiculous. "I have the power to have all the powers I want," Cartman says at one point. Not to mention the hilarious theme song.

Now, imagine the South Park boys successfully avoided all real-world intrustions for as long as they liked, and instead of buying ninja weapons, they went to a gun show and bought assault rifles and chainsaws. I wonder what that equally ridiculous fantasy would look like.

Yeah, looks about right.

Playing the denouement

Designer Denouements

How can the denouement be incorporated into gameplay? In literary forms, it is most often the events that take place after the plot’s climax that form your lasting opinion of the story. A well constructed denouement acts almost as a payoff, where protagonists and antagonists alike realize and adjust to the consequences of their actions. Serial media often ignored the denouement in favor of the cliffhanger, in order to entice viewers to return. Television has further diluted the denouement by turning it into a quick resolution that tidily fits into the time after the final commercial break.

But the denouement is most neglected in video games where it is often relegated to a short congratulatory cut scene, or at most–a slide show of consequences. This month’s topic challenges you to explore how the denouement can be expressed as gameplay.

As far as I can tell, a major reason gameplay is not often used for the denouement of a game's story is that the designers of the game haven't equipped the player with the necessary gameplay elements. Take, for example, any shooter game. They are built from the ground up to let you explore levels, shoot enemies, and nothing more. Once the final boss is defeated, what more can you do? Shoot his corpse? Wander through his empty chambers? These games never come with a "Breathe a heavy sigh of relief" button. No wonder so many games end with a cutscene: Having your character wander around still in full combat mode while everyone congratulates him on his success wouldn't make any sense.

I feel obligated at this point to mention a game that comes close to being an exception: the Half-Life series. While it's true that the Half-Life games keep the player's experiences tied completely with the main character Gordon Freeman, I still feel like the denouements of each game are not expressed with gameplay. Each and every Half-Life game ends with Gordon Freeman being physically restrained in some way, usually being put into stasis by the G-Man until the beginning of the next game. Although you are still technically "playing" while this is going on, you can't move, and you can't shoot. You've pretty much been reduced to a silent observer, so what's the difference between that and a cutscene?

For fully action-oriented games such as these, I'm in agreement with Cory Stahl's assessment that cutscenes are appropriate and maybe even necessary.

For the denouement to be incorporated organically into the gameplay, I think that playing the denouement would have to feel as natural as playing the first level of the game. Sadly, most games are designed to let you fight your way to the climax, and that's it.

A game that actually bucks this trend, and is a great example of actually getting to play the denouement, is the original Katamari Damacy for PlayStation 2. Throughout the whole game, you roll up Katamaris in order to restore stars to the night sky. After you complete the final level, what do you do? Roll an enormous katamari around the entire earth, as the newly created stars shine down on you from above. It lets you feel satisfied with a job well done, while also letting you play in the same exact way you did when you started.

My main point is that gameplay must develop as a function of the story, not the other way around. But it's only with the last couple generations of consoles that we've even been able to do this. When Super Mario Bros. was released in the US in 1985, the details of the story were contained in the instruction booklet because Nintendo lacked the technology to put it entirely into the game. These days, we no longer have to do that. If the game's story involves a hero conquering obstacles, rescuing a princess and bringing her back to her castle, make sure you get to play every part of that story, not just the first part.

Here's an example of what I mean: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney is a game on the Nintendo DS that puts the player into the shoes of Phoenix Wright, a defense attorney who must always find his clients declared not guilty. When the third game of the series, Trials and Tribulations, was released, the promotional materials made a big deal out of the fact that there was a second playable character. "Play as TWO different attorneys!" the ads promised, as if this was going to change the gameplay in some significant way. As I played the game, however, I discovered that it didn't change the gameplay at all. Rather, the only reason you play as a different attorney is to develop the story from another character's point of view. The game's denouement, also, would not have been possible without this second playable character.

So, to wrap up, I would like to restate my point that the reason gameplay stops at the denouement is because, oftentimes, the gameplay was not designed with the denouement in mind. Develop the story from beginning to end, then design the gameplay from the ground up to fit the entire story. Do that, and playing the denouement should become much more common.