This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Kris Ligman on topics ranging from what games writers can learn from Mad Max: Fury Road to a bullet hell game which learns from its player.
This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Kris Ligman on topics ranging from what games writers can learn from the relentless momentum of Mad Max: Fury Road to Warning Forever, a modular bullet hell game which learns from its player.
Design Notes
There have been a few essays connecting the film Mad Max: Fury Road to games, but this piece by Matthew Codd is by far the most effective I've seen, identifying how the film's writing mirrors that of successful games.
At Terrible Minds, author Amanda Gardner discusses the writing of Perception, an upcoming independent game developed by Gardner, her husband Bill (formerly of Irrational), and a robust team of industry veterans. As a novelist, Gardner shares her impressions of working in a collaborative medium:
When you're writing a novel, it's yours. Sure, you may have great critique partners and a stellar agent [...] but at the end of the day it's your baby. You own it, regardless of how much input you've listened to or how many eyes have edited it.
Writing a videogame is quite different. [...] I was a piece in this very intricate puzzle of designers, artists, musicians, voice actors, and more. And each of these people have different, and often game-changing ideas that they contribute. You have to be flexible and not get too precious about your ideas, because in one day, an entire level can be struck from the game, or two characters could end up becoming one.
Past is Present
Don't Die continues to profile some of the lesser-known names in game development, this week offering up a laid-back interview with Microsoft alum and founding Xbox team member Ed Fries.
Shifting from real histories to the imaginary, in the latest Memory Insufficient Mark R. Johnson explores how the Command and Conquer: Red Alert series communicates its alternate history timeline through its art direction.
And on Not Your Mama's Gamer, Samantha Blackmon notes a few of the problems inherent in Cuphead's reference to 1930s-era cartoons, which are often rife with racial caricatures (such as blackface and black minstrelsy). As she points out, some of this may be entirely invisible to those who don't have to navigate racism in their daily lives:
My life, my experiences, and the body that I live in makes Cuphead and its artistic style problematic to me because of all that it has come to mean in the last 85 years or so and that’s something that I just can't let go of. [...] The game threatens to draw upon racist caricatures to inform the narrative and give players a series of racism infused bosses and obstructions to justice to properly hate. Perpetuating the stereotype and, in some cases, feeding the racism that is foundational to the art style itself.
Blackmon and NYMG co-editor Alisha Karabinus extrapolate further on this in an excellent video analysis, while also taking care to note Cuphead is still in development.
(Content Warning: both of the above links include examples of racist imagery.)
Players Playing Play
On his blog, Andrew Brown proffers an engrossing analysis of symmetrical competitive game design, and in particular the simple-yet-effective systems in place in Nintendo's Splatoon.
Meanwhile, at Psychology of Games, Jamie Madigan has a brand new, fantastic interview with Riot Player Behavior Team leader Dr. Jeffrey Lin (podcast). If you haven’t heard Lin speak on some of the strategies Riot Games has experimented with over the last few years to reduce toxic player interactions in League of Legends, this is a highly recommended listen.
Inversions
At First Person Scholar, Mark R. Johnson has this fantastic long-form article on danmaku (bullet hell shooters), the player culture surrounding them, and the particular ways in which the adaptive enemy generation system of Warning Forever turns the genre's tropes on their head. As he explains:
[W]hereas in most danmaku games the player learns the bosses' patterns, the reverse is true in Warning Forever. The bosses -- or rather the AI which generates them -- learns the player's pattern, and constructs each subsequent boss to be more and more effective at defeating that particular type of player. This means that the player is forced (if one wants to seriously compete at a world-class level in this game) to adjust their strategies as the game goes on; adhering too long to certain strategies will meet with increasingly challenging foes as the AI zeroes in on the player's strategy and adapts to challenge it.
Paired with the above interview with Jeffrey Lin, these two pieces have some excellent observations about machine learning intuiting player behavior.
And last but by no means least, on PopMatters Moving Pixels G. Christopher Williams praises the attention-based systems which differentiate Kitty Powers' Matchmaker from other games modeling human relationship dynamics. Nothing revolutionary, but certainly an uncommon approach!
That's All, Folks
Thanks for reading! I warned you it was a short one. Have a link to submit for consideration? We very much welcome your recommendations by email or in a mention on Twitter!
And as always, a reminder: Critical Distance is entirely funded by you, the reader. If you like what you see and want to help us continue doing what we do, please consider lending your support with a small monthly donation on Patreon! We really do depend on all of you.
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