A Brief Disclaimer to Be Read Alongside "Intro to Game Design and Drama"

I specify on newer “art games” that offer too little resistance to effectively convey drama, but suffice to say, this is absolutely also a problem in commercial games, including the older, experimental commercial games that I adore. 

It is just as problematic that at no point in Dark Souls fiction am I sufficiently convinced that the player character would ever be able to overcome these challenges as it is that the late game of Final Fantasy VII can have it's drama utterly nullified by a powerful combination of overpowered spells that I can repeat over and over again to end dramatically important battles in single turns. 

As well, there are at least a few “art games” whose interfaces are bizarrely resistant, resulting in less meaningful interaction with their fiction or aesthetics, which is something Zolani will tell us about with his upcoming episode on Naissance.

- Austin C. Howe, Olympia, WA, 2015

Critical Switch: Intro to Game Design and Drama

Zolani told us last week, and him and I have both been hammering on for the past year or so, the interactivity-focused nature of ludology, that is, the formalized study of games and play in both digital and analogue spheres, is almost completely useless for studying games as works of art, especially given that we're finding, more and more, that interactivity is actually a massive element of all artwork, and that the interactivity we have with videogames in particular (as opposed to analogue games) don't really allow us the freedom of choice and action that is, supposedly, the definitive characteristic of the form.

Actually, now that I'm thinking about this, I realize that I should probably reiterate some stuff that we talked about around this time last year.

I return of course the devastating, razor sharp clarity of the words of Masayuki Hambalek, a Japanese game critic, who said about a year ago:

“When you can’t do something in a digital game, it simply doesn’t exist, so it doesn’t lower the degree of freedom.”

Digital spaces are different from real life. Whereas a fence that prevents us from getting too close to a particular place is an intentional restriction on our freedom, in a videogame, an invisible wall is more or less a rule of nature, an element like gravity or inertia that makes sure the whole universe functions properly.

As I stated in response to that thought on my own blog not long after:

We as critics and players more often than not highlight the fantastical things that games allow us to do over the mundane things that they do not. In reality, the amount of things you can't do in a videogame far outnumbers the things that you can, but the appeal of most digital games are those specific possibilities they do offer.

Or, as Zolani put it last week: “Interactivity is crap!”

As a result, interaction alone, we find, is likely not the element that makes for interesting and meaningful gaming experiences. I believe personally that what makes particular interactions interesting is their basis in contexts that we find compelling, be it a fictional universe or even just an aesthetic. It's not necessarily the what you do, because ultimately that “what” can be boiled down to polygons and numbers, but the who, when where, why, and how you're doing it.

I guess you could say that means I like videogames with good writing, and you wouldn't be lying, but I also enjoy plenty of silly bullshit games like Resident Evil 4 that build satisfying interactions through the most loosely-constructed contexts. In fact, poorly-written AAA action games give us a pretty strong argument for this kind of “context-based” understanding of engagement, because what most of them do is construct a context for the interactions that is just convincing enough to make for satisfying experiences. But that's a different episode.

As we move away from an interactivity-focused view of what makes games great or important, I think it's equally important that we not assume that interactions themselves are unimportant, if nothing else because the interface itself is what gamers most directly engage with. So basically, a game needs to have some kind of playability to it!

I feel like that's fairly self-explanatory so think of it this way: “gameplay” as it's thought of is not the notes and chords of the music, as I think someone like Keith Burgun would assert. It's more like the mixing of recorded music. When I listen to music, the mixing is the thing between me and the music, it's the thing that delivers the music to me, or the thing I have to work through to hear the music. Depending on the artistic aspirations of the piece, that mixing can be hyper-focused towards an aesthetic goal: this is your slick, mirror-shine pop record, or your raw, demo-quality black metal album. But still, in most cases, you're going to want a mix that healthily balances professionalism and cleanliness with excited performance and untamed energy. For videogames then, the gameplay, the interface, is not “what the game is” but rather the thing between me and the game, the thing that delivers the game to me, or the thing that I have to work through to get to the game.

The most obvious lesson this can show us with commercial videogames is that the design of these games should be relatively open to an audience who wants to pick up and play, and not be egregiously difficult or needlessly obfuscant. But my primary concern today is actually with games that, in an effort to streamline the relationship between the gamer and “who, where, why, and how” kinda skip out on the “what” because it's viewed as largely superfluous.

Among the early classics of what are broadly called “art games” a term that will hopefully die with scholarly study, and among what are often called “walking simulators” or “first-person narrative games”, the common design trend has been to build games that have almost no semblance of challenge or what the critic John Thyer calls “resistance,” whatsoever. And that works, for me, when the game you're making is meant to be a more exploratory experience. The Stanley Parable would be actively harmed by an attempt to add bizarre resistance to it, and I think Limbo was always harmed by it's attempts to mash up it's aesthetic and loose, heavy sense of embodiment with it's puzzles.

But I'm already also seeing a small trend of games wherein a sense of resistance is completely lost where I think it would strongly benefit the piece. Temporality by James Earl Cox III, for example, has a really bare interface. Temporality is a 2D game wherein you view multiple men's lives in a non-linear fashion as they move through phases: from childhood onto military service. These characters simply move forward through space and time until they is inevitably shot dead in an early-20^th century war while somber piano music plays. You can walk backwards and view events backwards but the events themselves aren't changed, only the way in which gamers view them.

The game is largely sentimental and I think what it wants to do through it's simple control scheme is convey a sense of inevitability to these characters' deaths. But the game also has you use the same control scheme to show lives that are full of vibrance and value and human experience. So when we inevitably get to the war torn field where these characters meet their ends, it feels bizarre to me that they inevitably die without me having some way to try and save them. I'm not saying that I should be able to save their lives, but rather that it would feel more appropriate if I, while their deaths were inevitable, was able to participate in some romantic struggle to take them as far as I can. As it stands, the quote-unquote “lack of challenge” inherent in Temporality's structure and controls feels nihilistic whereas the narrative information it's conveying is romantic, sentimental, humanist.

Huh, if only there were an ultra-specific term for naming a kinda conflict between how people interface with a game and the narrative content that game is trying to convey. Hmm . . .

Anyway.

So in essence there are, again, in my view, about two types of dysfunctional video games: those whose form of resistance against the gamer is so vicious and poorly-constructed that it makes me play designer and remove myself from the fictional or aesthetic context to try and understand the game as a series of hitboxes and numbers, whereas games that offer too little resistance fail to convey the weight and seriousness of their dramatic context.

The question then emerges is “what kind of interface would we add to this? What kind of resistance?” Now, the answers to that are endless, but I think how we go about doing that can easily be derived from a study of what we understand as “game design.”

If we were to add those kinds of interfaces to Temporality, we would attempt to do things like find cover, move between lines of fire, all of which can be built from understandings of deadly projectiles that we find have existed in commercially released games for decades.

There are tons and tons and tons of examples of this, and I want to go over a few of them in my next few episodes, so rejoin me in mid-July as we dive deeper into the study of Game Design and Drama.

Next week, Zolani Stewart will be back with an analysis of Naisance.

From Seattle, Washington, I'm Austin C. Howe.

Critical Switch: FFVII and Jazz Standards

On Jazz Standards

Joe Pass was a Sicillian-American Jazz guitarist who lived from 1929 to 1994, he is one of the greatest Jazz guitarists of all time, often cited along with Charlie Christian, Wes Montgomery, and George Benson. He was particularly a master of solo performance, capable of deftly moving between melody and supporting harmony, all with a massive improvisational flair. He could move between chords whose names I can barely say and in the next bar be blazing across a lick with deftly incorporated passing tones. This was on top of being an incredibly capable band leader, and an extraordinarily skilled accompanist.

Joe played jazz standards. Rock can have problems with cover tunes, at least from the 70's-80's and onward. For whatever reason, songs are usually seen as inseparable from the people who first wrote and performed them, from the contexts in which they were first created. Jazz doesn't do that. Jazz performers, generally speaking, tend to take a song and put their spin on it, and sometimes even put multiple different spins on it, like Joe Pass did with the song “Summertime,” first written by George Gershwin for the musical Porgy and Bess. Three different versions of “Summertime” that Joe Pass recorded are playing under this episode.

There's been a lot of argument over whether Final Fantasy VII should even be remade. If the original is as great as we say it is, shouldn't it stay the way it is? I'm bothered by this line of thinking for a number of reasons, some sentimental, others outright selfish, but one point became burningly clear as I realized it:

If Final Fantasy VII had already been remade, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.

Now that's a fairly tautological statement, but the evidence backs it up. I can think of no such dedicated originalists concerning, for example, Final Fantasy IV, which has been remade countless different times. Now, you could easily play the original version on the SNES and that's still a great game, but you also now have the choice of playing the PSP remake and the DS remake, the former a more traditional iteration with updated sprite graphics and more or less similar mechanics, (itself a port of a GBA remake) the latter a fairly major overhaul made in low poly 3D, adding voice acting, and redefining character combat functionality. Both of them are really great takes on the game. Both of them are really fun, both of them have the same great music and adventurous story. In my mind there is absolutely no reason not to play one of those versions over the original SNES version. And come to think of it, if you wanted to play the original game, would you play the US version with the butchered translation and altered mechanics, or would you play a fan translation patch of the Japanese version? That US version may be an inexcusably bad port by modern standards, but it was also the version that some people grew up playing, and probably the version some still play today.

Tales of Phantasia: now granted, nearly none of these versions are available legally in the US, but indulge me. The original version of the game on the SNES is by no means a bad game, but the Playstation version builds on it in every conceivable way, iterating on the combat system to more resemble the game's recent sequel on the Playstation, and adding the series legendary “skits” to the equation, adding lots of fun interactions between the game's lovable cast of characters. You could also consider Tales of Phantasia X for the PSP, which has all of the PS1 version additions and a fully voice acted cast.

Dragon Quest is a particularly blatant example: no one who likes people would recommend playing the original NES version of Dragon Quest when the Super Nintendo version exists that cut the grind in half, simplifies the environment interactions, and puts a fresh coat of paint on the graphics.

Chrono Trigger: the DS version adds stylus controls for the menu if that's your thing, a minimap, all the anime cutscenes from the PS1 version without any of the load times, and redoes the original translation. It is almost without question the definitive version of the game.

The primary difference, the only difference really, between any of those games and Final Fantasy VII is that those games were iterated upon consistently from their original release till present day. And while we can have reasonable discussions over which versions are we like better for what particular reasons, there's no real question as to whether the various iterations are legitimate interpretations. Final Fantasy IV, Tales of Phantasia, most of the Dragon Quest games are all jazz standards. Each version has it's own flavor, and thankfully, all those flavors are pretty solid!

Lemme let you in on a little secret, cuz a lot of people have forgotten this: Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and IX were all scheduled to be remade . . . for the PS2. Gamespot reported this in 2001. Quote:

Square has announced that it will release the remakes of Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and IX for the PlayStation 2 in individual packages. Each will be in DVD-ROM format, with graphical and audio enhancements. Additionally, special features will be included in the remake discs. No release information has been disclosed on the three Final Fantasy remakes at this time.

Then, a little movie called The Spirits Within happened, Squaresoft had a major corporate restructuring, they merged with Enix to become Square-Enix and the project never materialized.

A tech demo was even made that rendered Final Fantasy VIII's dance sequence in real time. With FFVIII being my personal favorite, I go back and watch that every once in a while and just go “Man, I wish I could play this version.” I mean yeah even it looks dated now, especially considering it's a real-time tech demo vs. the original games lovingly crafted FMVs, the character models are especially pale, but y'know what also looks dated? Every part of Final Fantasy VIII that isn't an FMV.

I guess the real question is, if all these games get remade and people are cool with it because those versions are awesome, why all the skepticism now about this game? Is it because this game is better? I mean sure, I like it better than pretty much any of the games I listed above and I'm also doing edits to my book about it, but Final Fantasy VII is also by no means perfect. The original translation has two ableist slurs and has Barrett talking like a Mr. T parody, and even the Japanese version has FFVII's infamously loosely structured endgame bit with the Huge Materia that we collect for . . . some reason or the other? Hell, FFVII is great, I'd still call it one of The Greatest but the game's Magic Defense stat doesn't even function properly, partially lending to the absurd cost:damage ratio for using magic all across the game. A remake would be a great chance to fix some of that stuff and maybe tweak the balance of high-level play as well.

And that's if Square takes the traditionalist route and remakes it as a traditional JRPG. I'd be perfectly fine with that, ecstatic even, but the more I think about it, the more I came to agree with my friend James Hearn that, like listening to Joe Pass' very different versions of “Summertime”, I'd love to play a version of Final Fantasy VII that, at least on an interfacial level, changed absolutely everything.

As noted by my friend Devon Carter in an episode a few weeks ago, Hiroyuki Ito, who designed the battle system for Final Fantasy VII, even said that when he first designed the Auto-Time Battle system for Final Fantasy IV, which Final Fantasy VII iterates upon, he saw it more as a means of abstractly presenting the fights in a way that was achievable with the technology at the time, and also said he thought that, as the series got older and tech got more advanced, how the battle work would change, and it has. The old 3-to-a-line battles had their own style and their own elegance, but Square shouldn't necessarily feel chained to them.

I understand preserving FFVII in it's original format, and I understand why for historical reasons that that is important, and I would never argue that the original game isn't worth remembering or caring about even with the remake on the way. What I will argue is that some of the stalwart dedication to preserving the original game instead of an effort to preserve Final Fantasy VII that also lets it evolve like a jazz standard comes from a dedication to the original game that is frankly silly given that the original game likely can, and arguably should be altered.

And if worst comes to worstand FFVII turns into some F2P MMO with all the music replaced by Sunn 0))), what a shame it would be, given that I can still play the original version or PC version, both of which now have excellent fan translations that address the major concern of preserving FFVII in the west.

I've rambled about but my primary point is this: FFVII should be remade. It should've already happened once, and ten or twenty years from now, it should happen again. Not necessarily because each version will always be better than the last, but, hopefully, because each of them will be interesting, and serve to give us multiple ways of looking at and thinking about one of gaming's grandest artistic achievement.

I will be returning next week, as promised, with an episode (or two given how these scripts are looking) about game design as a conduit to drama. From Seattle, Washington, I'm Austin C. Howe.

Critical Switch: Shovel Knight and Interrogation

So hey, new microphone! I've had episodes with good sound before thanks to my friends like James and Solon, letting me borrow their mics, but I now officially have my own Snowball mic! So audio quality should be lovely and consistent from now on. Thank y'all for helping make this happen.

Critical Switch is of course supported by patient listeners like you at http://Patreon.com/CriticalSwitch

Nostalgia means more than – hey, hey, sit down. I'm going somewhere with this. Nostalgia means more than people tend to think it means. In common usage it tends to mean a fondness for the past, but it can also mean “a fondness for a past that did not exist.”

In the recent wave of retro genre revivals, we see some of this concept in practice, in many particular ways. Pillars of Eternity and Divinity: Original Sin look and sound lot better than the isometric Baldur's Gate/Planescape: Torment CPRGs they are formatted on. Likewise for 2D platformer revivals like Castlevania: The Adventure Rebirth, which preserves the pure 2-directional whipping of it's side-scrolling predecessors but tampers down on the need to commit to one's jumps, as well as having the aforementioned technical upgrades.

A trend becomes noticeable wherein designers are choosing to buff out what were generally considered “flaws” in their original designs when updating them for the age of Kickstarter and reminiscence. And why shouldn't they? The history of commercial game design is mostly of slow-moving iteration wherein certain things that are disliked about a particular design are either removed or replaced, and in theory these games are merely picking up on where their predecessors left off.

But there's also something to be said for established traditions as well. I've run up and down the halls screaming at my listeners and followers about how if JRPGs so desperately needed change then why do none of the late-90's classics of the genres really play in any fundamentally different ways? And in many ways, the same sense of need for iteration is what arguably drove us away from these beloved genres in the first place, especially as we became focused on the progress of technology.

Now what I'm saying here is mostly some “the answer is in the middle”, “the mediator between the head and hands must be the heart” type shit. That's not useful. What is useful, is a work like Shovel Knight.

Shovel Knight is an immensely intelligent videogame released last year by Yacht Club Games whose ever design and narrative trope is, on a moment-to-moment basis, interrogating that space between nostalgia, progress, and the true past.

Aesthetically, Shovel Knight rides that particular “false past” idea of nostalgia quite hard. The game's color palette sticks almost religiously to the NES' own color palette, but they've admitted that in a few spots they had to use shades and hues not accessible on the NES. The music is neither puritanical NES chiptune or modern arrangement, but instead features music that was only capable of being played on a Japanese Famicom and certain games that made use of an expanded set of channels, most famously Castlevania III. Only a few games used that expanded set of channels, and none of them were ever released that way in the west. CVIII's western release uses only the regular 3 channels+noise for it's music. And of course, Shovel Knight is simply too large to have ever fit on a NES cartridge, being loaded with enough musical assets alone to fill an entire cartridge.

As well, Shovel Knight's particular design choices, while rooted in a genuine appreciation of 2D classicism, (multiple critics besides me have already analyzed the game's meticulous level design) also has a number of modern design choices, namely it's use of a Dark Souls-esque drop of money when the player dies. It chooses this system for punishment of death, which is barely punishment at all if the player can retrieve their money, rather than allowing the player only a limited number of attempts per level, thus opening up paths to repetitive mastery that, in older games, are mostly found through the abuse of savestates on an emulator.

So in some sense, Shovel Knight is already throwing on rose colored lenses about what the NES and what the games on it were like. In case it sounds like I'm stating this as critique on it's own, I'm really not. Each of these choices makes Shovel Knight more accessible than it's forebears, and choices made in favor of accessibility are nearly always justified.

Even then, in an intelligent and controlled way, Shovel Knight begins to subvert that modern accessibility. Specter Knight's stage's gimmick, for example, is that it will bathe the screen in darkness, but that the player can detect Shovel Knight and his movement objectives if they observe the blackness against the colored background. As well, sometimes lightning strikes and illuminates the path forward briefly. However, later in the stage there are a few sections that require seeming leaps of faith because Shovel Knight and his platform are bathed in darkness, and enemies are on his tail. One can only trust the designers here to have placed platforms in the way at exactly the right space to make these spaces practically navigable without putting Shovel Knight at risk. That trust is rewarded.

Slowly, as we move through the game, we see more and more design decisions in this vein. Instant death becomes more common, and the player is forced into awkward forms of movement and control like adjusting to the wind propellers in the Propeller Knight stage or the ice physics . . . the fucking ice physics in Polar Knight's stage. Some might see this as sloppy design as the game gets closer to the finish line, I'm more generous because in these decisions I see the boldest defiance of NES design this game has to offer: narrative and metaphor.

What is Shovel Knight about? It's about a Knight attempting to reclaim his former glory and save his girlfriend and his kingdom from the clutches of the evil Temptress. It's seemingly boilerplate videogames, but there's already a subtle and critical difference: Shovel Knight's quest is based on a loss in his fairly distant past, before his self-imposed exile. As he moves through and gets closer and closer to the enchantress, the Black Knight warns him that he is walking into great peril, and the various members of the Order of No Quarter, the Enchantress' servants, especially Treasure Knight, who tells us: “Even now, others are paying the price for your avarice.”

Still, Shovel Knight journeys on. After each level, Shovel Knight rests at a campfire, and sometimes he dreams of Shield Knight, desperately trying to catch her as she falls from the sky as he fends of hoards of fiends. It's a provocative pairing that I think almost suggests the unreality of the situation, not in an “everything that's happening is a dream” level, but more on the acknowledgment of the fantastical quality of games themselves, as well as living out this fantasy version of a NES game. We ultimately find that the Enchantress is in fact Shield Knight, under the control of evil magic. In defiance of the odds, Shield Knight is freed, and she joins Shield Knight and rests with him at a fireside. She limps to her place beside Shovel Knight, it is unclear whether she will awake from her rest.

This is, I think, a pretty strong metaphor for what it means to develop a 2D platformer in 2015. It is the struggle of searching for the past while accepting the present. And it's the constant question of whether the magic can survive in modern times. Overall I think the tone of the game, and of course the fact that the game exists, and is a beloved commercial success gives us a hopeful bend on that, and what were NES games if not optimistic, but what I appreciate most is that it's a topic that Yacht Club chose to struggle with not just in developing, but inside of the game itself. And after all, what is searching for answers, if not`` digging?

In this episode you've heard “Strike the Earth,” “The Requiem of Shield Knight” from the Shovel Knight original soundtrack by Jake Kauffman. Zolani Stewart will be back with our next episode.

From Seattle, Washington, I'm Austin C. Howe

Ronnie James Dio: 5 Years Later

Today marks 5 years since the shocking passing of Ronnie James Dio, and wallowing in melancholy I find myself writing an ode to him. The greatness of Ronnie James Dio is nearly impossible to describe in hyperbole, as much of his importance simply comes down to facts. The facts are these:

Born in 1942, Ronnie James Paladona (stories differ on how the name “Dio” came about, suffice to say it means “God” and the name is appropriate)  was first a trumpet player before being a singer. In a 1997 interview he claimed that he never once took a formal vocal lesson, employing merely the correct breathing techniques he’d learned playing the instrument. (Speaking as a friend of a number of formally trained singers, I doubt the story is facetious.) He fronted a number of unremarkable rock bands throughout his early career.

Often noted for his age after fame, Dio’s singles with early rock bands were met with only regional success, and he spent his 20’s in obscurity. He wasn’t even featured on a commercially released LP until Elf’s debut in 1972, when he was already 30. (According to wikipedia, his earlier band had made an album for Atlantic records, I can find no proof it actually exists.) Suffice to say, Dio peaked late, regardless of when one thinks Dio peaked.

That brings out the next astounding fact about Dio: not only did he record his most celebrated material at an age when some singers have already severely injured their voice, but in the process became one of the most celebrated frontmen in the history of metal.

In Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, we first see Dio’s fascination with fantasy imagery. Some bands had toyed with these motifs before, but Dio made them his own. In adopting such a style he also thoughtlessly adopted some of the casual racism of 20th-century fantasy, such as on “Voodoo” from The Mob Rules or a song from his Holy Diver album titled after the well-known slur for the Romani people. These are some of his weaker lyrics, such that their titles end up being more offensive than the content contained within, but the archaic and outdated must be noted along with the innovation.

That fantasy imagery (when used responsibly) combined with an early musical experiment in what would later be noted as speed metal, “Kill The King” represents arguably the first example of what would become power metal in the late-80’s and 90’s. The song has become something of a metal staple, being covered by the thrash band Heathen, and power metal bands Primal Fear, and Stratovarius.

The vocal styles employed by power metal bands can be credited almost singularly to Ronnie James Dio. Surely noted singers like Rob Halford, Ian Gillian, or even Robert Plant sang high, but there timbre was still obviously deep within the realm of rock’s down-south blues influences. Dio’s style was based in a classicism and melo-dramatism that he pioneered and mastered within metal. Power metal masters like Hansi Kursch, in their adoption of dramatic affectation, borrow much more greatly from Dio than from any other great metal vocalist aside from maybe Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson, who it should be noted wasn’t even recorded until 1980, and didn’t rise to prominence until almost a full decade after Dio. (As well, though Priest’s early material is now held in high regard, Halford wasn’t nearly the level of household name until around the same time.)

Presumably believing that fronting one of the most important metal bands of all time was simply insufficient, Dio left Rainbow when Ritchie Blackmore announced his intention to commercialize the band’s direction, and happened to run into Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi on the sunset strip in 1979 after the latter band had recently split with Ozzy Osbourne. The chemistry between the group and their new singer was so instantaneous that they released Heaven and Hell within the next year, reinventing their sound in the process. It and it’s follow-up, The Mob Rules are such immensely strong albums that it is to this day a serious question whether Sabbath fans prefer the Osbourne or Dio albums. (For most of my teenage years, Mob Rules was actually my favorite Sabbath album.) Dio first left Sabbath in 1982, after a rather silly argument over the mixing of their Live Evil album. Dio, a notorious egotist, had supposedly been tampering with the mix to make his voice louder, though despite his reputation that accusation is dubious at best.

Though Sabbath’s early days laid down the foundations of heavy metal and the downtrodden pace of what would become doom metal, I would say that tracks like “Heaven and Hell” or The Mob Rules’ “Sign of the Southern Cross” are probably the foundational basis for what would become classic doom metal in the late-80’s and early-90’s. Listen to Candlemass’ Epicus Doomicus Metallicus or Solitude Aeternus’ Beyond the Crimson Horizon and notice the combination of mid or low tempo riffs, but also notice the insistent melodicisim and the vocal approach of Johann Lanquist (or his successor, Messiah Marcolin) or Robert Lowe. I’d argue the approach bears a much stronger resemblance to Sabbath’s early-80’s material than their early-70’s, and those singers owe much more a debt to Dio than to Osbourne.

Presumably fed up with being a hired gun for established performers, Dio decided to make the show his and form a band under his own name following his departure from Sabbath. While not as musically important as either of his previous acts, Dio found his greatest commercial success with legendary singles like “Holy Diver” and “We Rock,” and gave some of his great all-time performances as a singer. “Rainbow in The Dark” in particular remains a favorite of mine, an immense display of Dio’s often-derided talents as a lyricist.

I cry out for magic

I feel it dancing in the light

It was cold,

Lost my hold

To the shadows of the night

Dio’s best lyrics are filled with evocative images like these, and though sometimes the intent of his metaphors are lost in confusing jumbles, the power of his stronger lyrics certainly makes one forgive his many attempts to capture a similar magic. It was on songs like this where the power of Dio’s voice was uplifting by pure strength alone, a source of genuine inspiration for my younger self, mired in suicidal depression. Connecting with his voice and his words showed me a side of metal that could empowering, not just defeatist. And while I identify with the pessimism of metal, it is songs, voices, and stories like Dio’s that help me carry on in spite of doubt. I may be left on my own like a rainbow in the dark, but that makes me the rainbow, doesn’t it?

Even when his words weren’t powerful, his voice always was. Even as he aged, Dio was still giving shocking, thunderous vocal performances, as we can hear on 2000’s Magica or my personal favorite, on Heaven and Hell’s The Devil You Know, which turned out to be his final album. Listen to his control of volume and his ability to choose when to unleash the grit and growl of his voice on “Bible Black.” Dio was sixty-six when he recorded this!

The modern age begets cynicism and skepticism in needless quantities, and I’ve seen more than a few wonder if Dio’s performance on this album was the result of studio magic. I had the privilege of seeing Dio on his last US tour to support the album. It is still the most impressive vocal performance I’ve ever seen, and he hit every single note of his youth. Perhaps not with ease, but surely with command.

Fame came late and death came early for Ronnie James Dio, who died from metastasized stomach cancer on May 16, 2010 at the much too young age of 68, who earlier in the year was still looking forward to playing summer tour dates with the reunited Heaven and Hell lineup, who didn’t even cancel their dates until it became apparent how serious his illness was. Dio was still determined to live, and to sing. It has been five years since and I still cannot describe the shock at learning that even gods can die.

Austin C. Howe, Seattle, WA, 2015

Critical Switch: Republican Dad Mechanics

I was gonna go on this long tirade about Dark Souls and abuse and nihilism but honestly, I think I want to focus on something in particular, it's a design trend that Dark Souls has largely fathered and I'm concerned about where I see it going.

Dark Souls and the semi-franchise it emerges from and has helped popularize has brought on the rise of mechanics whose design intention is to get gamers to be more careful, and build skill, but also have least the potential to cause brash, irrational decision making.

These types of system designs I will designate: “Republican Dad Mechanics.” You could also probably call them “school bully mechanics” but, an election year is coming up and dammit, this country is on the line! You know how it is.

In theory, the Republican dad is someone like this: they want to teach their child how to hit a baseball, but they find that the child is swinging limply, missing, or losing grip of the bat.

Now what a sensible human being would do is give expert advice: plant your feet firmly, grip the bottom of the bat strongly in the palms of your ha- nah fuck that, what the Republican Dad does is throw the ball so hard that they might actually hurt the kid, the logic being “you're gonna swing the bat or walk away with a bloody nose.”

That is the basic root of much of a lot of Dark Souls core design, but it's probably best indicated by the Blood Stain mechanic.

A primer for the unfamiliar: in Dark Souls, when you die, you leave behind a stain of your blood, and on that stain is the Souls that you picked up before you die. Souls are extremely valuable, as they are both the currency you use to buy things from merchants and blacksmiths, but also the experience points you use to level up. Even to gamers hell bent on the ultimate challenge of beating the game at Level 1 will use souls to upgrade their weaponry.

This creates this extremely common situation: I just died to a horde of ene mies while h olding a not-insignificant amount of Souls. Given that I am likely to die if I try and combat those enemies again, based on previous results, I would like to rush in, grab my souls, and escape the room as soon as possible. Thus, I begin my bum rush back behind enemy lines and within a moment I've died to the same horde. Thus, by the rules of Dark Souls I've lost my opportunity to ever get those Souls back. This logic applies to any other type of enemy, obviously, since enemies you've died to once are almost by definition enemies you are likely to lose to again.

Thus, the game has given me something that should encourage me playing better, that is, the loss of my souls, but it's also made those things the carrot on a stick that forces me into nonsensical loops of actions. I have played at least 200 hours of these games, I cannot shake the feeling that regardless of how good I get at them, the fundamental psychology of that mechanic will not change.

Bloodborne, From Software's new game in much the same style, has actually doubled down on this parental conservatism with it's new Regain mechanic. In Bloodborne, a certain percentage of damage taken within a certain time frame can now be regained if the player quickly strikes back at their opponent. The psychological punishment is actually even more severe here. As . . . I can't believe I'm citing this man, but the quote actually is pretty good, Tim Rogers writes:

 If an enemy hits you, doing damage, you can get your health back if you hit them soon enough after they hit you. This is idiotic. This is insulting! This is a huge, dumb punch in the face of a perfect combat system. It's filthy and it's gross. Wow, it's so great; I love it a lot.

With the Regain System, Bloodborne begs you to take tiny risks. I say the risks are "tiny" because that's how it feels: just one more button press. That button press is highly likely to get you killed, because for the length of that button press — the first few dozen time s, anyway — you're not thinking about position, timing, or stamina. You're thinking, "Hey, I can get that health back, so let's see if I can get that health back." Ten seconds later, the enemy is dead, and you have half the health you had during your initial engagement with the enemy. You feel like the biggest sucker in the world. You've seen the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. The Wizard of Oz was flipping you off.

The weird part is, in case you missed it, Tim Rogers likes this part of Bloodborne which you can list off as reason number 9001 about why I don't get that guy. Or maybe he's being ironic, I don't know y'all, New Games Journalism was weird.

So again, the game is shoving this obvious carrot in your face, but the only real answer is to just let it go, man. That could be a lot of things, but for a game as ludically focused as the FromSoft games tend to be, I'm just gonna call it misguided design.

Now of course other designers are preaching the Miyazaki gospel. Lords of the Fallen, one of the first major-studio Souls-likes adds an experience multiplier so that the longer you avoid resting at a checkpoint and spending your experience the more experience you build . . . which is bizarrely reflective of modern financial economics: “You've invested in some good stocks and made some smart decisions! Now make the decision whether you want to retire early and die rich or GO FOR MORE” even though there's no real reason to do that except maybe to buy that second Bugatti.

The idea of course is simple enough: let's put in mechanics that encourages gamers to more consciously engage with the interactions at hand. But in these cases, we have system upon system built to encourage wild and often unrewarding risk-taking. So how do you avoid being a Republican Dad designer?

This is the easy part: the solutions have always existed! But in particular I want to point out the tremendously smart decisions made by Platinum games, in particular how the parries work in Metal Gear Rising.

Parrying is exceptionally important to scoring high in Revengeance, or even just surviving on the high difficulty levels.

Parrying is attached to the same keys as both movement and attack, and that makes it inherently risky, because if you screw up the parry you're swinging at an enemy or running when you need to block.

Now granted, this can still happen, but unlike Dark Souls, Revengeance has got your back. What Revengeance does to mitigate possibly misguided player risk-taking is implements two types of parries.

The better kind, the kind you want, are often referred to as “Perfect Parries”. When a parry is executed within frames of an attack landing, Raiden will riposte, for enough damage to outright kill a low level enemy, and often to do 20% or more of a bosses health.

It would've been easy for them to look at player inputting those parries too early and say “git gud scrub” and walk away, but Platinum actually wants people to enjoy their videogames so they don't do that. Instead, they offer a version of the parry that can be activated much earlier, but also doesn't offer the riposte reward, often not resulting in any player reward other than not being hit. This is on top of having an invincible dodge move as well, for moves that cannot be parried, and that you can also use instead of a parry when you really need to get out of Dodge.

Bayonetta does something similar where when an invincible dodge is activated within the right time frame of an enemy attack, Bayo enters Witch Mode and gets to shell out massive damage, but you can still execute the regular dodge at a lower level of risk.

How would you implement those kinds of risk-mitigation mechanics in Dark Souls? Well . . . you don't. Because the fanbase would never shut the fuck up about it. Because remember, the most important thing you can derive from a hard videogame is being self-important about being able to beat it.

This week you'll've heard the Majula theme from the Dark Souls 2 original soundtrack and the Firelink Shrine theme from the Dark Souls original soundtrack composed by (I am definitely going to screw this up) Motoi Sakaruba, and “Stains of Time” from the Metal Gear Rising OST, music and lyrics by Jaimie Christopherson.

Zolani Stewart will rejoin you next week.

From Seattle, Washington, I'm Austin C. Howe.

On Commercial Altgames

A quick disclaimer: I want to defuse the idea, immediately, that this is any kind of angered “response” piece to Soha Kareem’s excellent, brief discussion of #AltGames and her creation of the Support AltGames Twitter bot. I want this to be viewed purely as supplemental article, one that covers a particular angle of the #AltGames idea that is particularly important to me, and that I feel I have some expertise in.

Kareem’s article focuses largely on the work of independent developers and critics whose work is definitive of modern #AltGames, an idea that is described as being largely new, as a response to and critique of establishment and status quo. While this is true, it should be noted (as Kareem does in her description of the interactions present in She Who Fights Monsters) that ideas and games that inspire #AltGames developers and critics have long existed in the niche corners of the commercial games industry. Thus a historical picture of #AltGames is, I think, obliged to note the work of developers whose work is, as Kareem describes, “experimental, autobiographical, or political” that has also been released for consoles and through large publishers.

Thus, some notable games developers who are often called “AAA” whose work easily fits the bill for #AltGames, in my humble opinion.

Yoko Taro

His works have been published by Square-Enix, but rarely sell well. He writes games that often deal with taboo narrative subject matter (including the ultimate taboo of videogame narratives: tragedy), as well as tease the player’s prior knowledge of videogame genres through experiments in ludic structure. Drakengard pulsed with tense, dissonant music and brutal, primitive combat, NIER was a graveyard of long-irrelevant genres, as well as  predated deconstructed 2013’s “Dadification” of videogames, and Drakengard 3 openly concerned the sexual interests of various women, a sexually submissive man, and multiple queer characters. He has been hired recently to make a new game, but a name or any details have not been announced. I await news with baited breath.

Amy Hennig

Hennig’s unapologetically talky Legacy of Kain games were some of the first games of such extreme narrative focus in the west to be developed not as systems-intensive CRPGs, but action-adventures for consoles. Her stories starred immortal, unhuman creatures and considered ideas as extreme as theicide, and lend themselves well to interpretative allegorical readings. As well, her team at Crystal Dynamics regularly prioritized space, architecture, and aesthetics instead of overthought combat or puzzle design.

Masato Kato

As far as I’m concerned, Squaresoft in the late-90’s developed games I would exclusively call “alternative.” Each of them fits at least one of those criteria Kareem notes in her article: “experimental, autobiographical, or political,” and not in ways that are shallow or easily written off. Final Fantasy VII was deeply anti-capitalist, Final Fantasy VIII an empathetic investigation of masculinity and masculine suffering,  and Final Fantasy IX concerned itself obsessively with death and existential purpose. (Even moreso than VII and VIII which were themselves obsessively existential.) They don’t tend to get remembered that way.

But no creative person at the company was as dedicated to tearing away at convention, experimenting with structure, and telling outright weird stories as writer Masato Kato. He got his start at the company writing the notably dark Zeal sequence in 1995’s Chrono Trigger and writing a few scenes for Final Fantasy VII. (I’ve never been able to find out which ones they were, but based on his style I’d hazard a guess that at least one of them was the Cloud’s Subconscious sequence.)

Then, he and the equally experimental duo Tetsuya Takahashi and Soraya Saga (birth name: Kaori Tanaka) launched into prominence with Xenogears, a (tragically unfinished) tale of reincarnation, history, Nietzsche, and evocative, charged imagery. The game is as intoxicating as it is confusing and frustrating, and it’s something everyone should play at least once.

After that, Kato was given complete control to write and direct Chrono Cross. Do not listen to anyone say otherwise, Chrono Cross is a messy masterpiece of sun-baked island scenery and deep self-doubt that deals in short vignettes, with no easy endings that leaves the player always marinating in a sense of defeat even as they push ever onward. And, to the misfortune of it’s legacy, it’s also a vicious deconstruction of Chrono Trigger. That works fine for me because frankly, I can’t stand Chrono Trigger.

Many of these figures are well-recognized, even financially successful on a massive scale, but I also find it incredibly important to celebrate their contributions to gaming outside of the nakedly commercial, and note that their games can be seen as alternative. I hope I’ve shed some light and opened some eyes, and in general I will continue to take note of historical examples of altgames released commercially.

In particular, I’m within a month and a half of finishing the drafting for my long-delayed book about Final Fantasy VII that does not yet have a title. Unlike most writing on the game that exists, I see this as a reading of the game from an alternative perspective.

• Austin C. Howe, Seattle, Washington, 2014