Dave Critiques - Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc - Immersion in narrative games

Transcript 

Hey hey folks, Dave here. Welcome to my critique of Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc. Just a friendly reminder that I will be discussing the game for those who have played it. If you haven’t and are worried about spoilers, please pause the video and go play the game before returning. For everyone else, let’s continue.

While thinking about the type of game Danganronpa is, my mind easily went to similar visual novels like the Ace Attorney and Zero Escape series. All three are murder mysteries (although Zero Escape is about the threat of murder). I wonder if a murder mystery is the best kind of story for a visual novel. I have heard it said that murder mysteries are kind of like games themselves, the reader trying to work out who the murderer is, how they commited the murder, and why, before these answers are revealed by the story.Certainly all these games have the player wanting to know the “why” behind everything.

In game design, Danganronpa is closest to Ace Attorney with the most entertaining parts of both games being the trial segments. The students of Hope’s Peak Academy are working out who committed the murders each time one occurs and how they did it (the why is stated from the outset. It frees them from the horror of their high school prison). The trials are more action orientated than Ace Attorney. You’ll mostly be going through testimony as your fellow classmates are discussing the case, disrupting a lie or an inconsistency with a truth bullet. It’s thematically clever. You’re blowing away falsehoods. This action is tense and exciting, not only gameplay wise, but narratively too as you’re slowly unravelling the murder in question.

Rather than increase the challenge of the cases and the logic used to solve them, it seems to me that Danganronpa keeps ramping up the difficulty of the gameplay itself. Well perhaps difficulty is the wrong word. The feeling I have is that the gameplay segments keep becoming more obtuse. Some of it makes sense like the ability to choose from multiple bullets to fire off at a false statement. That’s having the player use their head a little more. Then however you have comments blocking the statements you shoot that you have to clear out of the way first. Then you can suck up keywords from statements themselves in order to shoot them at another statement. And this is just the truth bullet segment. In the dual section, obstacles keep getting thrown in your path in a similar fashion.

This brings up the question of why. It seems that in the interest of servicing gameplay, Danganronpa interrupts the excitement and flow of its digital novel roots in order to have an increasing number of things for the player to do, an increase of the number of plates that they need to keep spinning. It makes me think of the criticisms that narrative heavy games face. How can it be called a game when there’s little to no gameplay, or if the gameplay itself seems superficial? Now I hear that criticism more towards games like Dear Esther or To the Moon than games like Ace Attorney, but I think the answer applies to all story driven videogames.

A narrative game features a different type of immersion than your typical videogame. The immersion is not in the connection the player has with the character they are controlling. There is little to no connection between the controller and the action on screen. These games, the successful ones, achieve their immersion through their writing. Strong characters, pacing, and revelations create a different kind of player engagement, a different type of immersion.The desire to see what happens next. Of course the problem with this type of immersion is that if the narrative isn’t engaging a player, there’s no gameplay to fall back on. It’s a testament to Danganronpa that its desire to try and increase its immersion through this escalation of gameplay isn’t enough of an overstep to destroy the immersion it creates through its characters and the mysterious and dangerous circumstances they find themselves in.

Thanks for watching.

Dave Critiques - Night in the Woods: The meaning of replayability

Transcript

Hey hey folks, Dave here. Welcome to my critique of Night in the Woods. Just a friendly reminder that I will be discussing the game for those who have played it. If you haven’t and are worried about spoilers, please pause the video and go play the game before returning. For everyone else, let’s continue.

One notable aspect of Night in the Woods is that during the day to day repetition, you choose which of Mae’s friends to spend time with. This means that based on the decisions of the player, you will miss content that reveals character and may help understanding of what the game is actually about. This gives the game ‘replayability’. This has often been a sought after selling point of videogames. Due to the nature of choice, an abundance of content, or simple secrets, games are praised for having new things to show the player on subsequent playthroughs. In narrative games, this is often done by asking the player to make decisions that impact the story in some way. Choosing which friend to hang out with may not seem like it matters all that much in the grand scheme of things, but Night in the Woods shows that such decisions can affect an overall understanding of what the game is about.

Viewing games as an artform, this presents an issue that paintings, films, or books don’t have to contend with. Yes just like these artforms, games can contain deeper meanings and thematic depth, but the difference is that those other artforms are static. A book has exactly the same words each time you read it and a film is exactly the same each time you view it. The only thing that changes is yourself as the audience, as you might uncover or make some aspect of the work more resonant than it was the last time you read or watched it. In fact, if a game is different each time it is played, it may be that it’s more difficult to engage with any deeper meaning or thematic depth as it’s quite possible that these aspects of the work are not experienced by each player on each playthrough.

The reason this idea struck me while playing Night in the Woods is because of how layered the game seems to be when trying to discern what it’s actually about. And I think that’s mainly because it’s not exactly just one thing. It’s many things, and these things overlap. For instance, Night in the Woods is a tale about the dangers of nostalgia. A manifestation of that idea that you can’t go home again because home isn’t the same as you left it, and you certainly can’t force it back to the way it was. It’s a coming of age story about early twenty somethings learning responsibility and understanding who they are and what they want their relationship to the world to be. It’s about mental illness and learning to live with that part of yourself. These seems to be the more grounded readings.

Night in the Woods is also about lovecraftian horror, about a malevolent elder god who might have descended from the stars and currently resides under the town of Possum Springs thirsting for blood. Whether this horror is legitimate or a metaphor for the more grounded aspects mentioned before is up to your interpretation. Having said that, the game is also about faith. Faith in people, faith in community, and faith in something larger than yourself. It’s about what faith means to different people, and what faith means to those who believe in the religious, including the possibility of the elder goat god. Lastly, It’s about small town America and the economic struggles of Possum Springs in the modern era.

All these aspects of the game I did not work out just by playing the game. I felt like I recieved the cliff notes versions of some of this while playing. The main path of the game will have you come into contact with the majority of these ideas, but my deeper understanding of the majority of them was coloured by the research into what other people have written about the game after playing.

Now if I were to play through a second time, I should be able to expand my understanding of the game’s meaning by making different choices in Mae’s day to day life.But let’s think of what this means for Night in the Woods as a piece of art with a definitive meaning. By definitive I mean what the people who made Night in the Woods had in mind when they created the work. I am not saying that an artist’s meaning is the “proper meaning” of a work or more important or “right” than the interpretations made by anyone who plays the game. It’s just that this game more than others has me thinking about what ‘replayability’ means in terms of artistic expression and interpretation.

The interpretations of Night in the Woods are based on repeated playthroughs and discussions between people who experienced different playthroughs. If you look at a game’s meaning as say a giant jigsaw puzzle, these playthroughs and discussions are clusters of pieces working to create a whole image. What does it mean however that a single playthrough of the game might only reveal small clusters of the jigsaw puzzle, and different ones each time? Does this mean that the meaning of the work is different each time? If so that adds a wrinkle to the idea of gaining new perspective from art when you return to it as the art itself may have changed. Then again, all this information present is actually a part of the game itself. It’s still been coded and animated even if the player never experiences it. I wonder if the ideas presented here hold merit.What’s your take?

Thanks for watching.

Dave Critiques - Cave Story +: The positivity of games criticism

Transcript 

Hey hey folks, Dave here. Welcome to my critique of Cave Story. Just a friendly reminder that I will be discussing the game for those who have played it. If you haven’t and are worried about spoilers, please pause the video and go play the game before returning. For everyone else, let’s continue.

So this is not really going to be a critique about Cave Story specifically. Oh I will start off by talking about what I see as the pros and cons of the game, but in this video I will be using Cave Story as a springboard to discuss the benefits and importance of games criticism. In researching what people have written about this indie platformer from 2004, I was expecting to go through a large amount of critical writing, but surprisingly, there was very little (at least the way I normally search for critical writing on Critical Distance, Google, and Youtube). The pieces I found were of mostly a high quality, especially the Youtube videos, and that will come into play later on.

I think Cave Story biggest strength is as a cultural landmark in gaming. It’s the epitome of what has become the indie gaming scene, made over 5 years by one man, and then released for free online (before eventually being ported to every console in existence). Yes, a lot of the great games of the 70s and 80s were made by one person or a small team, but I think Cave Story brought that spirit back in a big way. Thanks to the internet, anyone with the time and passion can make something and have it resonate with a large audience. In that context, I think Cave Story excels.

I also love its interconnectedness. The story links to the level layout, to the weapon upgrades, and even to the secrets, including the secret ending. It’s all cohesive. That makes individual elements difficult to criticise because the whole of the game is like a finely tuned machine, and taking out one piece and describing the problems with it can have a knock on effect for every other aspect of the game. Maybe that’s why criticism of Cave Story is so scarce. Fans of any game seem to have difficulty with the idea that you can love something yet still describe the faults you find in it. Heck, in my experience doing so usually strengthens your love of it as you’ve admitted that it is not perfect, but in doing so, what it does right can shine even brighter.

On its surface, I love how unique the experience system is. Your character doesn’t level up, but your guns do. They reach a max level, but every level of every gun has its own benefit. As interesting as this system is though, it’s the other side of the coin that I loathe. When you get hit, you lose experience, so the game is punishing you for playing poorly. If you’re having trouble on a boss you’re taking lots of hits, and because of this, suddenly your weapon isn’t doing enough damage anymore, sliding victory further out of your reach. I get that such a system teaches the player to prioritise dodging over attacking, to learn boss patterns, and to experiment with weapons, but the message I got right to the end of the game was “You’re sucking, and we’re going to make you suck more because of it”.

I love the characters of Cave Story. They’re cute, and yet their motivations and what they go through can be quite tragic. I won’t say that I found myself caring about their plight past wanting to complete the game, but I could see how characters like Sue, Curly Brace, and Balrog have endeared themselves to fans. I would say I felt sorry for Misery at the end, but when she gets possessed for that final fight in the boss rush, the frustration involved over how many times it took me to finally complete it had me caring a lot less than I initially did.

And that boss rush brings me to my final issue with the game, the difficulty of so many of the game’s bosses, and the infrequent checkpointing. Now I realise I am saying this as a player in 2017 who no longer has the patience for games that require a prolonged test of skill between safe havens, so to complain about a lack of checkpointing in a 2004 game seems petty. I admit this is a personal bias. The difficulty of the bosses, especially that final gauntlet sapped all enthusiasm I had for the game. It’s one reason such a short game took me a few weeks to finish. I didn’t want to return to it. I actually considered ending my play session with the bad ending, fleeing the island with Kazuma, but the desire to finish the game properly so I could talk about it with greater understanding prevaled.

You might understand where I’m coming from now that we’re going to talk about games criticism. I saw the good in Cave Story, but I thought its weaknesses outweighed its strengths. Since I try to not just talk about my likes and dislikes in these critique videos, I needed to find another angle to write about, and that’s the main reason I read and watch all the criticism I can find on the games I critique.It tells me what angles other people have tackled and what resonated. With that knowledge I can usually come up with an original take on the game in question or at least an idea of what I want to write about.

Upon doing this with Cave Story (the many attempts required to beat the final boss rush still fresh in my mind), the overall impression I got was not only how beloved the game is, but deconstruction as to why. There was discussion about how the different endings and weapon upgrades play into the game’s central theme of not accepting power that is not yours (as that is the easy way out). There was analysis of the early level design and how it teaches the player through its layout instead of tutorials or cutscenes. And then there were videos just praising certain levels of the game in particular. I’ll link to a few of these videos in the comments.

What this did is make me see the game in a whole new light. I haven’t forgotten my frustrations, but I can see where the people that love this game are coming from. I have a more complete picture and appreciation of Cave Story, and if I ever was to play through the game again, I think I would be more forgiving of its faults as I would be focused on everything talked about in these videos. Seeing my reaction to Cave Story was more negative than positive, I have no idea if I ever will play the game again, but I will say the idea that I might is not completely ridiculous.

One reason anyone writes anything in response to a game, movie, book, or any other artform is to gain a clearer understanding of their reactions to the work in question, and perhaps uncover why the work made them feel this way. The more writing on any work you read, the more differing perspectives you come across, even if you start to see patterns emerge with opinions about certain aspects of the work. Cave Story helped me rediscover how positive an experience it can be to listen to those who feel differently about a work than you do, and why that is. I still don’t think fondly of my time with Cave Story, but I’m glad I played through it, if just to discover why it’s such a beloved classic.

Thanks for watching.

Why Day of the Tentacle is one of my favourite games

Transcript

Hey hey folks, and welcome to another installment of Dave’s Favourite Games. This time around, Day of the Tentacle. This video will be an exploration of my history with the game, and the reasons I love it to this day. Hopefully it will inspire those who have not played the game to try it, and for those who have to find new appreciation of it. Let’s continue.

One thing that I am appreciative of when it comes to nostalgia is that a lot of my favourite games are adventure games. The reason is that adventure games are primarily narrative focused, and that means dialogue. What ends up happening is that the lines from games such as Day of the Tentacle are planted in my brain right next to all those movie and cartoon quotes. I often say “Mmm, I’m thirsty” when I’m thisty, sometimes out loud, and sometimes in my head. I then follow it up with a “I don’t think you should drink that. It looks bad for you.” For a lot of this playthrough of Day of the Tentacle, I was quoting the lines along with the characters on screen, and yes, I was doing the voices.

Unlike the trouble I went through to play what’s considered to be the best version of Loom, all I had to do with Day of the Tentacle is to buy the remastered version by Double Fine. I’m able to have my cake and eat it too when it comes to the game’s options. The voice files are finally in an uncompressed format, there’s remastered music and sound effects, and yet I can choose for the visuals to use the original pixel art. It’s entirely subjective, but I feel the pixel art holds a lot more charm than the new smooth line art. It’s funny because I think the old sound effects have a certain charm to them as well, but after some deliberating, the choice I ended up going with was new sound, old art. I had a wonderful time playing through the game this way.

One reason I love Day of the Tentacle is how the developers managed to make such a complex and silly premise work. You control three characters over a 400 year time span, and yet with that mammoth scope, everything seems managable and self contained. And this is a story about a crazed purple tentacle trying to take over the world. I think it’s the sheer courage of the premise, the surity of its narrative that helps it along. Oh, the tentacle drank polluted water, that means I have to turn off the pipes yesterday. That means we have to use the time machine. Oh, the time machine broke and one character is 200 years in the past and the other is 200 years in the future. They have to get back, and we have to get a new diamond to make that happen.

Meanwhile Hoagie in the past and Laverne in the future have clearly defined goals in order to facilitate their return to the present. Hoagie has to build a super battery. Laverne’s goals are a little more complicated. She has to first escape from the tree she’s stuck in. Then she has to find a disguise. Then she has to win a human competition in order to take a guard out on a date, so she can free human prisoners, allowing her to access the basement. Bernard doesn’t have an easy time either as he has to trick Dr. Fred into falling asleep so he can record him opening his safe, so he can have a contract filled out, that can be sent back in time so the Edisons have enough money to buy a diamond to power the time machine. You also need to rescue Dr. Fred from the IRS.

The steps needed to complete these goals are not really puzzles, but short snippets of situational comedy. But like most adventure game puzzle solutions, it involves being a bit of a dick. Oh, this artist is sculpting his brother? What if I were to switch mallets on him. Ed really likes his stamp collection? What if I were to spill ink on it? Oh, an exploding cigar? Why don’t I give one to George Washington? While the goals are clearly defined, the steps required to complete them are wrapped up in these little moments of gleeful chaos. It means that often you’re approaching the game not as a series of puzzles to solve but a series of “I wonder what would happen if I did this?” questions to answer.

And while so many of the game’s funny lines were in my head after all these years, the same could not be said for all the puzzle solutions. Due to the nature of trying out funny things, and fragments of ideas lodged in my memory, I was making consistent progress right up until the end of the game. Then I got stuck. I had forgotten where I could get quarters for the dryer. I had forgotten how to get the chew toy away from the cat, and I had forgotten how to swap Dr. Fred with his replacement. To the game’s credit, at this point I knew why I wanted to do these things, I had just forgotten how. Although the Dr. Fred problem was caused by forgetting the utility of the ‘use’ verb.

All up, replaying Day of the Tentacle was an absolute delight. The game is as charming and funny as its always been, and the remastered version allows for  different ways to experience it. Even though I love the original pixel art, I’m also curious to play through it with the new art style. Perhaps next time. If you like adventure games, comedy, or stylised cartoon visuals and you haven’t played Day of the Tentacle yet, you owe it yourself to give it a shot. For those of you who love Day of the Tentacle, tell me some of your favourite lines or moments from the game in the comments.

Thanks for watching.

Dave Critiques - Grand Theft Auto V: The potential of multiple characters

Transcript

Hey hey folks, Dave here. Welcome to my critique of Grand Theft Auto V. Just a friendly reminder that I will be discussing the game for those who have played it. If you haven’t and are worried about spoilers, please pause the video and go play the game before returning. For everyone else, let’s continue.

Unlike a couple of my other critiques where I start off with a moment that exemplifies the game, I will be using this critique to discuss one moment in particular. No no, not that one. That moment has been discussed to death. I want to discuss this moment. The moment that Trevor finds out that Michael killed their friend Brad in order to fake his own death and has been lying about it. When this scene started to play out and Michael and Trevor pulled guns on each other, I held my breath. I was excited and scared. I was sure that this was the reason we were playing 3 characters in this game. I was going to have to make a choice to kill one of them right here and now. The way the story had been escalating called for this moment. Then it didn’t happen. Trever runs away, Michael is set on by Chinese goons and eventually captured, and Franklin has to bail him out before they kill him. After being rescued, we’re basically at the same place the scene started. True, Trevor now has had his suspicions confirmed so has no reason to trust or work with Michael. Hell, he has ample reason to kill him. It’s what you think would happen after every other violent action Trevor has taken in the game up to this point, but no. Later on Trevor actually saves Michael and the two begrudgingly work on their final heist. It’s all quite anti-climactic.

And it’s a shame because of the opportunities that multiple characters presents. So let’s compare this to every other Grand Theft Auto game to begin with. In these games, you’re always playing an anti-hero of some variety. Sure your actions may have a good motivation behind them, but at the end of the day you’re commiting theft and murdering hundreds of people before the credits roll. There’s not even much ludonarrative dissonance between the story and what the player can do when they muck around in the open world. Sure you’re more of a psychopath if you steal cars, kill pedestrians and lead the police and army on a chase full of rampage and wanton destruction, but it’s only a more extreme version of the actions your character is taking if you follow the main plotline in any of these games. And that’s part of their appeal. The game plonks you down in a believable approximation of the real world at the time these games are set and allows you the freedom to act out playful dark impulses. I’ve heard it said that most people who buy the GTA games never complete them, or even unlock other parts of the world. I think that’s because most people enjoy playing with the systems and fulfilling these desires of destruction rather than play through a crime drama or a tale of gangster revenge.

So as the player, you are attached to the character you control. You see things from their point of view. There’s a saying in writing that we don’t have to agree with the main character of a story, but they have to be compelling enough that we will follow their actions out of at least a sense of curiousity. That’s why we can spend hours with Tommy, CJ, and Niko. We want to see what the game is asking of us as the main character, and how the character we are controlling will react. It’s almost like we’re playing a part of a play we don’t know the lines to, so we’re just as interested to see where it goes. The fact that games are an interactive medium allows such characters to get away with not being as well written or well motivated as we would expect from a similar character in a book, film, or on television because we are the motivation. We want to keep playing the game.

But ultimately games are a storytelling medium, even if that story is as simple as “I as the player overcame a challenge and feel great in having done so.” Things get a little more complicated when the game is actually trying to tell a story alongside the narrative of the player’s actions, but it seems easier to get the player to agree with a character they play as because they have an actual stake in what the character is going through. Once again that stake can be as simple as “I want to get to the end of this game, so of course I don’t want the character I am playing to die or feel bad”, but once you begin to meld gameplay with narrative motivation, the player starts to care a lot more about say Michael’s family thanks to the missions that have involved protecting them.

Now one of the easiest ways to create conflict in a story is to put together two characters who have completely different world views or motivations, and watch them butt heads. This is where the potential for multiple characters arises as we return back to that standoff in the snow. In any other GTA game, we would be controlling Michael in this scene. He has the family, he has more to lose, and Trevor is definitely a great antagonist for him, especially because Michael is more than a bit of an asshole, and this situation he finds himself in is primarily his own fault. Yes Trevor is a psychopath, but at least he’s honest about what he is and what he wants. Michael definitely has room to grow as a character so you can imagine playing Michael in this scene and being completely on his side.

Only we’re not just playing Michael. We’re playing Trevor, and Franklin too. Suddenly this showdown has a lot more weight to it. If we were just controlling Michael we might still agree he got himself into this situation, but we’d want him to get out of it because we’re invested in him as the player character. Having control over both Michael and Trevor, there’s now cause for concern as this scene is playing out. I was certain that the game was going to ask me to make a choice. I was certain that it was going to ask me which of these two characters I sided with in the moment, and I was afraid it was going to ask me which character would live, and which would die.. I was scared because at that moment, I had no idea which choice would be the right choice, and it was one of the most amazing narrative moments in the game because of what was playing out in my head.

Of course I’ve already stated that the game did not take this route. Trevor escapes and Michael gets captured. This perfect opportunity to showcase the potential for videogame storytelling was lost. Well that’s my feelings on the matter at least. The funny thing is the game tries to give the player such a choice later on, but as Franklin. Not only does it not have any resonance, I think it’s kind of a false choice. Let me explain.

You’ve completed the big heist that was supposed to be a suicide run. Michael and Trevor have escaped from a giant double cross, and one of the game’s douchey antagonists Devon Weston appears on Franklin’s front door. He wants Michael dead. Franklin tells him that the FiB has already told him to kill Trevor and he doesn’t want to kill either of them. Devon leaves and you’re given three choices: Kill Trevor, Kill Michael, or team up and take everybody down. I chose the third option. It leads to a giant shootout against the Merryweather mercenary group, and then a series of missions killing everyone in the game who has given our three main characters grief. It ends with Trevor capturing Devin Weston and all three shoving a car into the Pacific ocean with the billionaire tied up in the trunk before the credits roll. Michael and Trevor still don’t like each other, but their antagonism is played off lightly because of Franklin, and the fact they have a ton of cash now, no one after them, and they can all go their separate ways.

This is the only positive ending. I Youtubed the others and both killing Trevor and killing Michael have a sense of betrayal to them that leaves a bitter taste. I think it’s because while the game tries to play Franklin off as a character who has no loyalty and is only in it for himself, his willingness throughout the game to go along with all of the crazy schemes asked of him by Michael, Trever, and the FiB play counter to the subplot of Lamar guilt tripping him for forgetting where he’s come from. Both Michael and Trevor are mentors to Franklin, and not only is killing them off a dick move, but it leaves the FiB and Devon Weston unpunished, and one of the many things that GTAV is great at is making you hate Steve Haines and Devon Weston. To roll credits without either of those guys getting their commupance would have been even more anti-climactic than the lack of a choice at Brad’s grave.

And apparently if Trevor or Michael are killed, there are consequences in the post credits game. Their cut of the final heist goes to the other two players, and certain connections are cut off. So it seems the developers chose to change their open world based on this final choice. In my research it was claimed that the third option originally ended with Franklin dying, so at one point in development it would have been impossible to end the game without one of the three protagonists making it to the post credits world alive. That decision might have made the end of the game have more impact, but I dunno. I just feel like the way things ended up, they squandered a golden opportunity to showcase what a game with multiple protagonists can really accomplish. What are your thoughts? Would you have chosen to side with Michael or Trevor if the showdown ended with one of them dead? What choice did you make at the end of the game?

Let me know in the comments, and thanks for watching.