This article was originally printed at gamasutra.com. Unfortunately, gamasutra could not include the game inside the article for technical reasons, so it appears here as it was originally intended. Gamasutra also edited several things I wasn't aware of, including the last sentence. For better or for worse, this is the article as I originally wrote it.

I've only said "Wow!" a few times in the last couple decades of playing games. One of those times was for the breakthrough Super Mario64, a game that took action/platforming into a 3D world and made it work. It's fitting that I said it again over its (true) sequel, Super Mario Galaxy, a game that took action/platforming even more into 3D and made that work, too.In the interest of full disclosure, I'll reveal that I might have more reason

Nicole Lazzaro doesn't know who I am, but I've met her, seen her presentations, and I think her research is as groovy as her 1970s-style pic.

than most to say "Wow" over this game. Years ago, I worked at a small company that went out of business where I was designing a 3D platform game that played with gravity. In some indoor areas, every surface could be a "ground" if you could find the right ramp to get to that surface. Spherical outdoor areas and water areas often had gravity pointing inward, making pretty much any outward direction count as "up." Now, years later, Mario Galaxy realizes these same ideas in the most clever, polished, beautiful ways possible. (Incidentally, World of Warcraft Trading Card Game also managed to create a more polished, fully-realized version of exactly the same thing I was working on, so that's twice now!)Why is Mario Galaxy so good and what can we learn from it? To borrow some terms from Nicole Lazzaro's four kinds of fun, Mario Galaxy has hard fun, easy fun, and social fun as well as the ability to evoke the emotions of surprise and wonder.

Look at the barrel of fun these guys are having.

Hard Fun

Gamers know this kind of fun all too well. This is the fun of overcoming obstacles and attaining goals. When you succeed at an especially difficult challenge, the Italian word fiero describes the emotion you feel as you raise your fist into the air triumphantly. Mario Galaxy has 120 stars to collect, offering plenty of this type of fun.

Mission 1: The Instructional Star

Find the first gold star after this sentence. It will say something like Mario Star (552) in gold text. Any green Mario Stars (121) are just a distraction.

Hard fun is so common in games that the only thing worth noting here is how well Mario Galaxy informs the player about exactly which goal he's going for, which goals are completed, and how many goals are left. I think this clarity magnifies the fiero aspect of the game. Putting the tally of hard fun at center stage (the number of Mario Stars (120) you've collected) makes it all the more satisfying to achieve the goals.

Easy Fun

Everyone can enjoy this cat. It's easy.

Ironically, this fun is much more rare in games. This fun that's not bound up with winning or goals. The entire Nintendo Wii system has an advantage here because the motion-sensing Wiimote lends itself to easy fun. Collecting the star bits (the colorful, glowing ammunition that bounces around everywhere) with the Wiimote's pointer is easy fun. Shooting the star bits at enemies is easy fun, though hardly ever required to achieve goals. Using the left-right-left-right gesture to do the spin attack is easy fun.

Another part of easy fun is exploration and variety. Some of the gameplay variety in Mario Galaxy includes:

• Flying with the bee suit
• Shooting fireballs with the fire suit
• Creating frozen platforms and ice skating with the ice suit
• Becoming a ghost who can turn invisible and float with the ghost suit
• Jumping very high with the spring suit
• Riding a manta ray on the water in a race
• Riding a turtle shell underwater in many situations, including races
• Balancing on a ball as you navigate through a level
• Flying with the red star suit
• Numerous tricks of gravity that vary across several levels

Just the moment-to-moment interactions involved with these things are fun, without even considering how they are used in the context of hard-fun-goals.

Social Fun

There's a joy you get from hanging out with other people, especially when you are a rich old man and the other people are hot chicks.

Mario Galaxy is primary a 1-player gamer's game (lots of hard fun), but it includes a brilliant 2-player feature that will surely become a standard. Some dismiss this feature as "tacked on," but something that strikes such an exactly correct note was surely a carefully considered feature. The 2-player co-pilot feature is intended for a non-gamer to enjoy the game alongside a gamer. I call it "girlfriend mode," and it adds a lot of social fun to a game that would otherwise have nearly none of that kind of fun.

The second player uses their own Wiimote, but does not use the nunchuck add-on (what non-gamer would want to anyway?). The second player gets their own cursor on-screen that can collect the many star bits littered throughout most levels. The second player (as well as the main player) can shoot these star bits at enemies. The star bits are basically like a shared pool of ammunition, and the second player can add to that pool and deplete it by shooting.

The greatness of this feature is in the details. First, the main player never actually needs the help of a second player, so this isn't like forced grouping in an MMO. Also, the second player can enter and leave the game at any time without any annoyance or stop in the action. When the co-pilot is helping, they feel like they are contributing because collecting star bits and shooting enemies is at least somewhat helpful. Also, there are several times in the game where a special NPC appears who asks you to contribute a bunch of star bits in order to unlock a new level. This means you can't completely ignore collecting star bits, and again, the co-pilot is contributing by collecting them. There are certain times when the main player is too engaged in hard fun platforming to be able to collect star bits at the same time, and this is yet another situation where the co-pilot can contribute.

Mission 2: The Chameleon Star

This star isn't gold. Find it and its associated three-digit number.

The role of the co-pilot is kept from having too much impact because shooting enemies does not actually kill them (it momentarily stuns them). Also, even without a co-pilot, any hardcore gamer worth his salt would be able to get enough star bits that no co-pilot is needed. But the non-gamer co-pilot doesn't know that!

Finally, the co-pilot's role consists entirely of easy fun. There is no way to actually fail at anything as a co-pilot. You just collect star bits whenever you feel like it, and shoot enemies if it seems like it would help. If at any point your co-pilot would prefer to sit there and do nothing or put down the controller and check on the stove, that doesn't cause any problems. Because the co-pilot has no pressure, it's easy to suck in a non-gamer. You get their in-game help, you get their observations about where a secret might be hidden, and most importantly, you'll actually communicate back and forth about things (aka social fun).

Surprise and Wonder

In addition to these types of fun, Nicole Lazarro also mentions several types of emotions that come up in games. I already mentioned fiero, the emotion you feel when you achieve something difficult. Mario Galaxy also creates the very rare game-emotions of surprise and wonder. That's quite an accomplishment considering the game's genre is well-worn territory, but the twists on gravity are interesting enough that sometimes you just sit back and say "wow, that's cool!" The surprise part is that you feel the wonder part several different times as the gravity tricks change. Just when you thought it was cool to run around the surface of spherical planets, you get to a room where "down" can potentially be any surface. Then a level where you can flip switches to change the direction of gravity. Then a level where moving spotlights determine exactly where a different direction of gravity is "shining" on an otherwise normal level. There are enough surprises to go around, and I've already ruined most of them for you.

Craftmanship

There's a few pet issues I'd like to point out that Mario Galaxy does right.

Opening Sequence

If you have 20 minutes to spare, maybe you can reach the first level of Paper Mario.

The opening sequence is only a few seconds long before you get to actually move around. Compare this to over 15 minutes in the excruciating opening of Paper Mario. God of War 1 has an opening sequence of less than 60 seconds, showing that there are better ways of conveying story than forcing the player to watch a long cut-scene before a game starts. Mario Galaxy conveys some of its story simply by showing speech bubbles over NPCs as you run by. You also unlock chapters of an in-game storybook as you progress through the game and you can read them whenever you want or not at all.

Inertial Frames

When you jump straight up while riding a train in real life, you do not slam into the back of the train; you land on the same spot as you jumped from. Physicists say that you are in the same inertial frame as the train, meaning that you're moving with it and your walking or jumping is relative to it. You all know this instinctively and yet almost no platform games know this. I remember actually being shocked in the game Spiderman 2 when my Spiderman was on top of a car and I jumped straight up and landed on the car. "Wow, they know about inertial frames!" I said. At long last, Mario Galaxy knows about them too. You can finally jump straight up while riding a moving platform and land on the platform without worrying about it moving out from under your feet.

Wall Jumping

This is a small thing, but points to an important idea. In Mario64, the wall jump move required good timing. You had to press jump just as Mario touched the wall, no sooner and no later. In Mario Sunshine, The New Super Mario Brothers, and Mario Galaxy, it no longer requires timing. When Mario touches the wall, he starts to slide down and you can press jump at any point during the slide to activate a wall jump.

Someone might say that the original harder wall jump was better because it "required skill." No one actually says that though. Being able to do your moves is fun, and Nintendo realizes that making a move hard to do is a bad way to add challenge. Even when its easy to execute a wall jump, there can be plenty of difficulty coming from the level or the situation you're in. Maybe you have a time limit, or maybe there are some flame jets you have to wall jump past, or a hundred other things. Incidentally, this is the same logic I'm using in making the moves easier to perform in Super Street Fighter 2: HD Remix. The moves themselves aren't meant to be the source of challenge, it's how and when you use those moves in the context of the game that's challenging.

Camera

I used to think that moving the camera around while you are in the middle of platforming was part of the game in Mario64. I was good at this, and I considered it one of the skills the game was all about. Mario Galaxy removes this "skill" almost entirely because it has an amazingly good camera system. Almost all the time, the camera is pretty much where you want it to be. This is a similar concept to the wall jump mentioned above in that the game is much better off creating difficulty in other places than wall jump execution or camera fiddling.

Mario Galaxy's camera is actually an amazing accomplishment. I saw a GDC lecture one year about camera systems in games from the guy who did the camera for Metroid Prime. That game also has excellent camera handling (and the best mini-map ever). You might say, "But it's a first-person shooter! There is nothing to the camera." What you don't realize is that Metroid Prime has over 20 camera modes. When you're in an open area, it's a regular first-person camera. When Samus rolls into a ball, it's third person. Some ball-rolling areas have a side-view camera and basically turn the game into 2D gameplay. Going through a tunnel has a special camera, and some boss fights have another camera.

A Mario-style third person platform game has even more demanding camera needs than Metroid Prime. In 1996, I would have not even been able to imagine a camera for a 3D Mario game that was basically in the right place almost all the time. When you consider that Mario Galaxy presents far more challenges to camera design than any other 3D platform game ever, it's that much more impressive that it succeeds. No matter which way gravity is going or which kind of crazy thing you're jumping around on, the camera seems to know where it should be. This is undoubtedly the result of endless hours of hand-tweaking of camera paths and some very smart logic to boot.

Mission 3: The Mouse and the Star

Find the last Mario Star below and note its corresponding three-digit number.

Sometimes it's nice when something you don't expect shows up. Just ask Mr. Incredibly Happy Bag Of Popcorn Man.

It's a real jerky thing to take an excellent game and say, "I'm knocking it because it wasn't excellent in some other area that it didn't even attempt." I already cringe at that being done to me someday, so I apologize in advance for this, but I do wish Mario Galaxy were even more excellent. Before I say what that is, I'll tell you what I think is one of the best surprises in a video game. I already said this in my previous article, The Power of Pacing (Game Developer Magazine, August 2006), and I'm about to say the same spoiler now for Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. When you beat that game (which only takes about 10 hours), you are lead to believe that you really reached the end. The game has been showing you what percentage of the map you've uncovered and it gets closer and closer to 100% as you work your way toward the final boss. After you defeat him, the big reveal is that the entire castle where the game takes place turns upside down, and you have as much more gameplay ahead of you as lay behind. This isn't some cheapy "play the entire game again and get the pink weapon" trick like Ghosts 'n Goblins uses, though. All the stairs and chandeliers and everything else are now upside down, creating all-new puzzles even though the territory is familiar. The enemies are also all replaced by harder enemies. It's surprising and amazing that it works.

Back to Mario Galaxy. It has plenty of surprises of its own, but those take place within each of the many levels. If you take a zoomed out view of the game and just look at the structure of it, it's incredibly predictable. You very quickly realize that each world has 5 galaxies (levels). You realize how many worlds there are from the way the blank spots are arranged on the map. Even though particular levels are surprising, the overall exercise of on the most zoomed out level becomes monotonous. I played probably the last third of the game on low volume while I watched reruns of Fraiser and The Golden Girls on a second tv. (A less honest writer would not have admitted that!)

That wacky Frasier is always having some kind of misunderstanding!

Mario Galaxy's purple coin missions were especially boring and tedious, even though some of them were very difficult. These missions have you return to familiar levels, but this time the levels have 100 purple coins in them that you must collect. It's like a 25 cent version of the Castlevania's upside-down castle gold standard. I really wanted Mario Galaxy to break out of its own formula and surprise me on the macro level as much as it surprised me on the micro level. If a big, paradigm-shifting surprised belonged in any game, I think it's this one.

Finally, note that even this very article took a completely different direction than it started on. You expected it to be sheer glowing praise all the way through, then I started giving you may strange fantasies about what the game might have been. At least I'm not making you read this entire article over again in order to find the 100 purple letters—or am I?

—Sirlin

Final Mission: Sirlin's Purple Coins

To unlock another version of this article, complete the three missions above, enter the star numbers, and visit the url that appears below:

[This article was originally printed in Game Developer Magazine, 8/2006 issue.]

Is it better to save your best content until the end of a game so you have a strong finish, or is it better to make the first few minutes of gameplay as good as they can possibly be? If your best stuff only shows up after the player has invested 20 hours, reviewers and some players might not even know it’s there. But if you "give away the farm" on the first level, the game has nowhere to go but down.

The general trend I see in successful games is that they tend to show a great deal of their coolness (but not all of it) in the first few minutes to half hour of gameplay. Let’s look at some case studies.

Metroid Prime
As of this writing, Metroid Prime is the 4th highest rated game of all time on gamerankings.com, receiving a 9.7 from Gamespot, a 9.8 from IGN, and a perfect 10 from EGM. It’s sold 1.3 million units on GameCube, according to TRSTS data.

  

Even 9.7 rated games have a fire and ice level.	Metroid Prime Pinball DS is ridiculously good, and I'm not even kidding.

The first few minutes of Metroid Prime show off an amazing amount of the game. We learn basic movement (R button shifts to freelook, L button shifts to strafe/lock-on). A button shoots and B button jumps. If you hold the A button, you get a fancy charge-up shot, while the Y button fires missiles. The X button turns you into a ball (with 3rd person camera) equipped with bombs (that make you bounce), and everyone loves rolling around as that ball. Your visor lets you scan the world to get info and tips and even open some doors. Most doors you just shoot to open, and your charged shot can be used to clear rubble. You also learn how to operate elevators and use the save stations. After only a few minutes, you fight a boss where you learn how to circle strafe while locked on and dash sideways during a lock-on. A few seconds after that, you get to use your grapple gun. (It was probably a mistake that they had you use the grapple gun for the first time during a timed sequence, but oh well.) You also get a taste of Metroid Prime’s map and mini-map, which are probably the best in-game maps of 3D levels the industry has seen yet.

That’s an incredible number of cool features revealed in the first few minutes of the game. It makes you realize right away that Metroid Prime is a class act that deserves your time. Incidentally, after the intro sequence, your character gets damaged and loses access to the morph ball, charged shot, missiles, and grapple gun. The game designers need to give you these items slowly over time to reward you, but they wanted to make sure your first few minutes were packed with coolness, so they gave you a great taste of what’s to come.

 

Grand Theft Auto 3
This infamous breakthrough title conveys its core ideas in the first few minutes. The game starts with a very short series of three missions: First, get in the car and drive your buddy to Point A, then drive to Point B, and finally pick up a certain passenger at the hospital and take her to Point C. This sequence teaches you how to get in and out of cars, basic driving (gas, break, turning), how to change the radio station in the car, how to pick up passengers, how to get a new car if your current car gets too damaged, and how to use the mini-map to find mission objectives.

      

Boys will be boys, and it's better that they explore fantasies like this and take out aggression on pixels rather than in the real world. The police track you down when you do bad stuff, which is not such a bad lesson.

After those first three missions, the game turns you loose into the world to do whatever you want. Doing whatever you want is the core concept of Grand Theft Auto 3, and the player realizes it right away. You can drive anywhere. You can fight people on the street and take their money. You can crash cars, wreck stuff, and steal cars. You can totally ignore the story and mission structure and make up your own story and missions. In doing so, you quickly learn about the police "star" system where committing worse and worse crimes increases force of police who are sent after you. You have to hide out or find secret police stars hidden in the world to reduce your infamy rating and get the cops off your back.

I’ve watched several people play GTA3 for the first time, and all of them abandoned the game’s mission structure within 5 minutes to explore the world and create their own goals. No wonder it sold over 5.6 million units on PlayStation 2 alone (and many times more than that once you factor in other platforms and expansions).

 

Castlevania and God of War
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (PlayStation 1) and God of War (PlayStation 2) are both examples of a near ideal distribution of “good stuff.” Both games start by showing you a large portion of the game mechanics. Castlevania uses the same trick as Metroid Prime where the player gets to start with a bunch of cool moves and weapons that he won’t get to use again until much later. God of War introduces basic fighting, ground throws, air throws, opening hatches, walking tightropes, a boss fight, special finishing moves, and use of magic all within the first few minutes. Note that best boss is the first one (the Hydra) and the most fun and effective magic power is the first one you get, (Poseidon's Rage, the 360 degree lightning attack). Each of these games is putting its best foot forward to get your attention from the start.

This screenshot doesn't really tell you anything about Castlevania: SOTN	Even the Russians love Kratos.

The interesting thing is that these games feel great right off the bat, but they don’t feel like the 9/10 or 10/10 games that they are. In each case, something later in the game takes the quality from 7 or 8 up to 9 or 10. In God of War’s case, it’s the emotional content of the excellent story that builds to a very satisfying conclusion. Even though the game is a “fight a bunch of guys game,” the story and presentation elevate it to the status of “memorable experience,” rather than just “brawler game.”

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night has one of the biggest surprises in games, and if you haven't played it, I’m about to ruin it. The game leads you to believe you've reached the end when you find Dracula and kill him. There’s a map that keeps track of what percentage of the game you’ve visited, and it approaches 100% by the time you reach the big boss. The surprise is that this is only the halfway point! The boss causes the castle (the entire game world) to flip upside down, and you must now play through it all over again, this time walking on what used to be the roof. Chandeliers stick up from the ground, you walk on the undersides of stair cases, and you begin to realize that the entire game was planned from the start to support an entirely different upside down game! Wow! All the enemies are replaced with harder enemies, and the various keys are hidden in new places. The awesome design of the upside down world elevates Casltevania to a very memorable experience.

So if starting out strong, but ending stronger is the key to victory, then what are some examples of games that break this trend? Games that start out weak and end up weak aren’t very informative here, but games that start weak and end strong would be great examples. We’d expect those games not to sell very well.

 

Psychonauts
I hate to pick on Psychonauts because Tim Schaefer’s great writing in previous games is one of the reasons I joined the game industry in the first place. That said, the first 12 minutes of Psychonauts are, from a gameplay perspective, a very poor experience. The only interactive things I did in those 12 minutes were enter my name, move the camera to the right and then up one time each in a tutorial, and walk two steps to an NPC that triggered even more movies. The rest of the 12 minutes was all movies. I just wanted to play the game. What’s just as bad is that after two hours, I didn’t get even a single Psi-power. Only after about three hours did I get to see anything that set this platformer apart from any other platformer, and the real interesting stuff isn’t until much later in the game. Even though many people told me that the game has wonderful ideas and cool gameplay as you get into it more, the first time I played it, I never made it past the first 12 minutes.

The premise: a small group of people have uncommonly amazing powers, but they are shunned by society. They come together at an academy to hone their super powers and hopefully do good for the world. X-men? Psychonauts? Both.

 

Traditional RPGs
RPGs in general also suffer from this phenomenon. Most (Final Fantasy-like) RPGs start you out with a wooden sword, no spells, and have you fight a few rats or something. Over time, your arsenal of spells and attacks increase and you usually get the ability to do combos of spells (or use your party members together in combos) that are pretty interesting and fun. This fun tends to come later in the game though, at hour five rather than minute five. This is perhaps why the single-player RPG genre isn’t selling as well anymore, except for games called Final Fantasy or games that have the Star Wars license. [Post publication note: Oblivion is an RPG that did well, but note that it basically used the GTA3 sandbox gameplay model.]

      

This is Aeris from Final Fantasy 7.	This is Adella from adellacosplay.com

 

Pace for Impact
It should be no surprise that you need to start out strong, or at least strong enough to grab the player’s attention. Burying the best content at the end is generally not a good idea, but it’s a question of degree. If your final boss is a 9/10 experience, but your first level is a 2/10, you have a major problem because no one is going to see that final boss. On the other hand, if you can get that first level up to a respectable 8/10 experience, then ending on a 9/10 boss is great, and perhaps nearly the ideal scenario. In any case, don’t be tempted to save all the fun until after the 20 hour mark because your first level is going to be your most played and most judged level. Go the extra mile to make it stand out, even if it means giving the player a preview of a few fun mechanics you planned on saving for the end.

One last note: if you really want to start in a way that no one ever does, then get rid of all that junk that players are tired of waiting through when they turn on a game. Get rid of the intro movie with the publisher’s logo, the intro movie with the developer’s logo, the legal screens (put them as an option on the main menu), and any other non-content cruft you can find. It’s getting totally out of hand how many screens of garbage games start out with before getting to the main menu. You’re much better off building brand awareness by actually making a good game than forcing everyone to see your logo every time the game boots. Put your logo in the main menu itself if it matters so much. When I pay $50 for a game, I expect to be exempt from even 5 seconds of this stuff.

 

I predict that zero games will follow this advice in the years 2006 or 2007. You could be the first. Oops, I saved my most interesting idea for the end of the article where no one will really see it.

--Sirlin

Someone once wrote this:

Balancing a competitive multiplayer game is orders of magnitude harder than balancing a single player game. When we try to balance a single player game, we are basically striving to match the "skill" of the computer to the skill of the player. There are many techniques for doing this, and there is a large margin of acceptable error.

For example, consider what happens if Joe Hardcore figures out a super sneaky way of beating almost every enemy in a single player game for free. Further suppose that this method is very obscure and discovered by less than 1% of all players. Factoring in strategy guides and the internet, sure, others will figure out this method, but the overall impact will be small. Joe Hardcore feels full of himself, the computer doesn't mind being beaten, and most players will never know about this method at all. It's bad, but it's not that bad. If the same trick/bug existed in a competitive multiplayer game, the game would be totally ruined.

--Sirlin

Though balancing a competitive multiplayer game is extremely difficult, balancing a single-player game is no cake walk. Before we can even talk about how to do it, we've got to decide what exactly we're trying to do. Is the goal to challenge the player? Is the goal to empower the player? Is the goal to give the player a particular experience? Is the goal to give him busy work and use operant conditioning to tap into any latent OCD tendencies he might have? (If the goal is that last one, then please stand up World of Warcraft. You're doing an excellent job!)

The game industry is still trying to figure out whether games should be really hard or not. Really hard games challenge the player, and potentially create a lot of gameplay time because the player has to play a lot to master the techniques, the patterns, etc. They also give the player a sense of accomplishment for beating the game. The games of old were great at this, and there are too many ridiculously hard games to even mention. For starters, try Ghosts'n Goblins, Spelunker on NES, or just about any top-down flying shooter.

The gaming market is a lot different now than in the old days though. We used to have a much smaller market of relatively hardcore players. Now the market is much, much bigger and it's possible to sell many millions of copies of a single game. Do many millions of people actually want to play a ridiculously hard game? To the dismay of many old-time gamers, I think the answer to that question is "no."

Let's compare the difficulty of these four games: Ninja Gaiden (Xbox), Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (PlayStation 2), Devil May Cry 3 (PlayStation 2), and God of War (PlayStation 2). These games immediately fall into two camps: 1) The designers sat around all day wondering "What can we do to make this game more friendly to the player?" and 2) "How can we infuriate, frustrate, and repeatedly kill the player?"

Prince of Persia is the nicest of the 4 games. The prince himself is very acrobatic and the controls feel very fluid and great. There's a lot of context sensitive moves, and they always seem to do exactly what you wanted them to do. The enemies aren't very hard, but you get to flip around and do cool stuff when you fight them. If you are ever low on life, you can just drink some water anywhere you can find it. Water is incredibly plentiful, so no problem there. Most games give you life back when you pick up some kind of health item, but then the item disappears. In Prince of Persia, the little pond or fountain or whatever is still there, so you can drink repeatedly (before a fight, after a fight, even during a fight) and get your entire life meter back.

In Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, like in all games, you push a box at some point.	This game sure has a lot of water.

It also includes the ultimate player-friendly feature: the ability to rewind time! If you miss a jump or get hit by an enemy, just rewind time to before that happened and try again. You need sand to power this time-rewind, but you can get it easily from almost any enemy. The Prince of Persia design team wants you to succeed. They are rooting for you every step of the way. While some gamers thought this was "too much hand holding," I think the majority of the audience found it "accessible and inviting."

Now consider the stark contrast with Ninja Gaiden. This game wants you to die repeatedly. One friend said, "It's basically a single-player fighting game where you are forced to fight intermediate-level opponents, even though you are a beginner." Even that is pretty kind, since I have still never beaten this game. Fans of this game seem to enjoy the concept of "I died at the boss, now I have to do a huge portion of the level over again." That gameplay model, to me, seems like it's from the 1980s. Itagaki, creator of the game, loves to talk down to players who can't handle his game. He released online expansions to Ninja Gaiden called "hurricane packs" where he made his ludicrously hard game even harder and harder and harder. He was pushing the limits of "impossible." He then collected these hurricane packs together into a title called Ninja Gaiden Black. When asked if he would put in an option to make the game easier, he said something like "I do not think we should, but some people think that everything in life should be handed to them. They are like dogs. That is why I have put in a new mode called 'Ninja Gaiden Dog mode' just for them." Itagaki has lost all connection to reality and has now directly insulted his players.

This is the hardest first-boss in any game I know of. Thanks Ninja Gaiden.	Get used to this screen.

God of War and Devil May Cry 3 repeat this same pattern. God of War is relatively easy because it concerns itself mostly with giving the player an experience. You feel like you are on an adventure and that you get to do many things (fight lots of enemies, swim, climb walls, cast magic spells, open treasure chests, etc). God of War views itself kind of like a movie; it wants everyone to experience the journey from beginning to end and be entertained.

Here's an epic moment in God of War that everyone got to enjoy, even without a raid group of 40 people. Blizzard can't figure out how this is possible.

Devil May Cry 3 is a very similar style of game, and yet it wants to ruin your day at every turn. The Japanese release defaults to a difficulty called "Normal" that is in fact incredibly hard. If you beat the game, you unlock another difficulty called "Hard." In the US release, the game defaults to Japanese "Hard" difficulty(!!), but it calls it "Normal" just to mess with you. After you die a bunch of times (and you will), the game tells you that you have unlocked "Easy," which is incidentally the same as the Japanese "Normal." Many people have asked me if they should buy DMC3 and I have to tell them, "I loved it, but you should not buy it. It's too hard and you'll hate it."

This Cerberus boss will own you before you even know how to play Devil May Cry 3.	At least Dante is pretty cool.

God of War outsold Devil May Cry 3 by 2:1 as of this writing. Capcom, creator of Devil May Cry 3, is actually publishing Sony's God of War in Japan. We can debate easy games versus hard games all day, but the mighty dollar is hard to ignore. That Capcom is now publishing its rival's game is telling.

Speaking of Capcom, they won Gamespot's award for best game of 2005 with Resident Evil 4, and probably rightfully so. Overall RE4 is difficult and you will die a lot of times, but it's far more forgiving than Devil May Cry 3. Yes, Resident Evil 4 has great graphics, great design, and a much better control scheme than the series ever had before, but without its auto-adjusting difficulty levels, I wonder if it would have touched so many gamers in just the right way. It's challenging, but forgiving. Secretly, there are 5 levels of difficulty. Every time you die, there is a 66% chance that you will switch to the next easiest difficulty setting. You probably go up a difficulty level if you play well for a while, but I don't know how exactly it works. I do know that the easier difficulty levels have fewer enemies who are each less threatening. Sometimes, even mini-boss enemies such as that blind enemy with "wolverine claws" are replaced with regular bad guys if you die too many times.

Resident Evil 4's chainsaw guy kills you in one hit. By the way, if you're against violence in video games, you're against the First Amendment.	These are level 60 World of Warcraft players who found out that the end-game is totally raid-centric.

Though it might be frustrating to try to get past a certain situation only to find it different (and easier) after dying a few times, I think it's much more frustrating to encounter a situation that's just flat-out too difficult and never lets you by. Auto-adjusting difficulty schemes are a lot of work, and I've seen them done poorly, but Resident Evil 4 shows what a huge success they can be.

Another clever feature of Resident Evil 4 is the rocket launcher. It's one-time use weapon you can buy from any vendor, and it's powerful enough to kill a boss in one hit! It costs just enough to make you want to save your money and not buy it, but if you are really fed up with a boss, you have a get-out-of-jail free card. I used it two thirds of the way through the game on the typical "boss with a vulnerable eye that you have to shoot so he opens up his real weak spot for a few moments, then goes back to slashing at you various ways with tentacles." I've fought enough bosses of that exact type in my day that I didn't think twice about taking a "pass" on this one. Skipping something I found annoying really made my day, as most games don't give me that option, ever.

Finally, there is one special game that bears mentioning in this tale: Sega's Rez. Rez is a critically acclaimed game that got completely lost in the shuffle whenever it came it out. It's one of the best games you've never played. I know a few people who don't like the game, but I think they just "don't get it." On the one hand, Rez is a rail shooter; your character flies along a pre-determined track and you shoot stuff along the way. But to describe it that way is a horrible injustice. Rez is an experience.

Well, here's Rez. So...um...these pictures won't help you much either. Go buy it yourself, which you can't, because it's almost impossible to find. What a shame.

As your progress through each of the 10 layers of each stage, another layer of music is added. The sound of your shots and of the enemies being destroyed work together to create music as well. The levels are psychedelic and basically indescribable. They are hypnotizing and not like anything you could ever dream up. Just watching someone play through Rez is mesmerizing. Try watching someone play EverQuest and see how long that lasts you. Try watching someone play Tetris or Counter-strike or Mario Sunshine. Even though those games all have virtues, they are not "amazing" to watch like Rez.

And yet, Rez is a very easy game. Most enemies cannot even hit you. Some can, and some shoot projectiles that can hit you. There are also some engaging bosses, but relative to other games, it's all very easy. Rez doesn't want to kill you; it wants you to experience its beauty, a beauty of sight and sound. In fact, it even has a mode called "traveling" where you cannot die! In this mode, you are free experience Rez in a totally non-threatening way. Can you imagine this mode in Super Mario Brothers? Or Street Fighter? Very few games are genuinely entertaining enough that you would actually want to play just for the fun of playing them without any threats. (Exceptions I can think of are Grand Theft Auto, The Sims, Sim City, and Katamari Damacy. And maybe Burnout.)

The flipside is that Rez is actually a very difficult game if you want it to be. For example, to unlock the "Boss Rush" mode you have to get a shot-down rate of over 95% on all 5 of the main levels. That's pretty difficult. To unlock some other options in the "Beyond" mode, you have to get 100% shot-down rate on the those levels. That's incredibly difficult. Other unlockables require you to get 1^st place in various "Score Attack" stages. If you are a fiend for Rez, there is plenty of challenge if you're looking for it, and very little challenge if you aren't. An interesting note is that the unlockable items that require 100% shot-down rate because automatically available after 10 hours of play-time. Rez figures that if you are willing to put in that much time, then you deserve to have some of the extras, even if you can't complete the difficult objectives. If Itagaki were dead, he'd roll over in his grave at that thought, and so would the creators of any massively-multiplayer game.

I submit to you that perhaps Rez is the ultimate example of difficulty tuning. First and most strking, it is fun to play for its own sake, apart from any objectives. That is a rare and wonderful property that very few games can live up to. Next, it allows a very wide range of players to experience that beauty and fun. It also gives a high challenge level to those who seek out challenge, and even then it throws you a bone if you're struggling. Perhaps this is the winning formula we should all be striving for.

--Sirlin

I'd like to explore the relationship between a game's focus on explicit goals and the degree of world-interactivity it offers the player. As examples of different points on the spectrum, I'll take 3 console games: Metroid Prime (GameCube), Mario Sunshine (GameCube), and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 (I played the PS2 version). Along the way I'll also point out the seeming trend towards extreme tedium in games.

Of these 3, Tony Hawk offers the most interactivity with world, by far. In this game, you control a character on a skateboard. You can move quickly through the environment, and you can interact with practically every object in the entire world. The levels are littered with vertical ramps that let you catch huge air, wires and rails to grind across, and a myriad of objects to trick off of.

Tony Hawk 4 gives the player a rich world and a rich combo system to explore. It offers more world-interactivity than perhaps any other game. (But damn those tedious missions!)

The game has a fairly complicated (and extremely well-implemented) combo system allowing you to string a huge number of tricks together as long as you never let all four of your skateboard's wheels touch the ground during a combo. The huge number of tricks and maneuvers combined with the huge number of interactable objects in the world make for nearly endless exploration of the combo system. Remember that you don't crawl through this world; you skate quickly, meaning there's an unusually high number of interactions per second in Tony Hawk.

So far, I've covered only the world-interaction offered by the game Tony Hawk. What about the explicit goals of the game? These come in the form of missions, most of which pervert or ignore the brilliant underlying mechanics of the game. I believe the main crime of the missions as a whole is that they are too "creative." When a game has such a rich interactivity as a base, many players will simply want to explore the combo system and the levels. Other players need explicit goals, but they'd be much happier with goals that play to the strengths of the game system rather than circumvent it.

The irony is that best missions in Tony Hawk 4 are the "boring" ones such as "Get 1 million points" or "Do a 300,000 point combo". (Shame on ign.com for knocking the boring missions.) Instead, the game is jam packed with such "creative" missions as "perform a manual [balancing trick] for a ridiculously long distance" or "find the 33(!!!) items scattered across this huge level in under 2 minutes." There are even "mini game" missions such as "ride a police car around London, reducing the entire game to a balance meter and a Dragon's Lair-like flashing light that requires you to occasionally move left and right." I mean, there's not even any skating in that mission! And don't get me started on the bug-ridden "tennis mini-game", which easily wins the award for "worst implementation of a tennis game ever."

There is certainly something to be said for missions that focus the player's attention on a particular aspect of the game (balance meter, air tricks, manual tricks, whatever), but it's quite a different thing to create dozens of missions which don't actually let the player PLAY the game.

Another notable feature of Tony Hawk 4, in fact the main innovation that version brought to the series, is the feature called "start, down, x." I have even joked that the entire game is the result of someone's bet: "I bet I can get 1 million people to press start, down, x on their PS2 controllers 30 times in the course of one minute." That "code" (which is merely pausing the game, going down once in the pause menu, then confirming) instantly takes you back to either the start of your last mission, or to a point in the level you configure. Since this feature is so fast and so good, it allows the design to get away with more difficult missions. The player can cancel out of a mission the *moment* it goes wrong. This is sometimes as little as 1 second into the mission...over and over. I'm not sure what this has to do with world-interaction, but it's a damn fine feature, and I wish more games let me instantly restart missions with no loading time.

And then there's Mario Sunshine. It certainly has less world-interactivity than Tony Hawk, but it still has some. Mario can run, jump, swim, hover, and more. Hovering with a strange water/jetpack is the game's main feature, and it's a pretty clever addition to the platform game genre. It's reasonably entertaining to just run around the main town and wall jump off the buildings to get onto the roofs, then hover around from rooftop to rooftop. It's not something you'd spend hours on end doing or make videos of to amaze your friends (like you might for Tony Hawk), but there is some fun to be had.

The hover pack is Mario Sunshine's main contribution to the platform genre. After playing it, it's hard to imagine not having a jetpack.

Mario Sunshine, like Tony Hawk, has a huge number of missions to keep the player busy with goals. The goals in platform games usually involve finding hidden and hard-to-reach objects (they're called "Shines" in this game), and fighting the occasional boss. For some strange reason, I tend to enjoy these types of games even though they are based entirely on collecting and picking things up, whereas in the real world I collect nothing, and anyone who's seen my apartment knows I don't pick up many things either.

Anyway, Mario Sunshine certainly has a good formula: at least a moderate amount of world-interactivity with goal-oriented missions thrown in to keep you busy. The main problem (well, other than the atrocious 3D camera) is that the mission design eventually becomes a pure exercise in tedium. I believe it's fun to find, say, one really well-hidden object on a level, and maybe 3-5 semi-hidden or guarded objects. That's a reasonable number. Mario Sunshine has 15 Shines to collect on each level. Let me put this in perspective, though: 1 of these 15 always requires you to find 100 yellow coins (they aren't really hidden), and 3 of the 15 always require you to find a total of 30(!) blue coins (these are hidden). The blue coins are so arbitrarily hidden that I defy anyone to find them all without a hint guide. I am quite averse to hint guides, but even I had to give in at some point due to the sheer arbitrary placement of blue coins.

Nintendo wanted to make absolutely sure you realize how great their jetpack concept is. They locked one designer—the one who kills ants with a magnifying glass—in a dungeon for one year where he devised these bonus levels, sprinkled throughout the game. They deprive Mario of his familiar jetpack, and place him in an absolutely sadistically difficult world of floating, rotating, disintegrating blocks.

Now let's turn to Metroid Prime. Of these 3, this one offers the least amount of interactivity with the world. Don't get me wrong: I'm don't mean that statement as anything negative against Metroid. Samus (the main character) can run, jump, shoot 4 different guns, use 4 different "visors" to view the world, roll into a ball, and drop bombs. Samus has a good number of actions, but in the absence of actual game goals, there's less fun things to do with Samus than with Mario, and there's way less to do than with Tony Hawk. This is no indication that Metroid is a bad game though. It just means that game elements must be introduced to keep the player interested. Metroid's premise is that you are in a large, fairly continuous world without "levels" or "missions." You explore this world and find upgrades that give you more moves and allow you to access more parts of the world. The world is peppered with fairly easy monsters and the occasional boss to spice things up. There are also a whole lot of hidden objects (upgrades to your missile capacity and health capacity) that are purely optional to find.

Metroid Prime, like all games, has a snow level.

Metroid works as a game because its fairly simple interaction model is complimented by just enough goal-oriented elements to keep the player going. Even then it's admittedly sparse, but I enjoyed it.

But Metroid Prime didn't escape the trend of tedium that's going around games these days. The game requires the player to trek across already explored areas of its huge game world time after time after time on the way to new areas. Interestingly, Metroid uses the exact same formula as another game: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, which avoided this problem. That game featured a large number of teleporter rooms throughout the world, allowing the player to skip past areas he's already explored. (Actually, Castlevania borrowed the formula from the original Metroid and Super Metroid.) Metroid Prime would have done better to replace all its save rooms with teleport rooms. By the way, why does it even have save rooms? I thought this was the 21st century, a time where game makers realize that the user should be able to save his progress at any point, not force the player to play another 20 minutes to find a save room.

So where does all this leave us? Three games that all have some level of world-interactivity combined with explicit game-like goals. Tony Hawk, the game with the most interactivity with the world (the best "toy") was somewhat ruined by missions that obscured the underlying game system. Mario Sunshine and Metroid, each with less world-interactivity, complimented their base systems with game-like goals, but again, Mario's ran somewhat wild, forcing the player to find literally hundreds of arbitrarily hidden objects. Meanwhile Metroid forced the player trek endlessly across its fairly barren world.

I think the lessons are these: 1) the more world-interactivity your game offers, the fewer game-like objectives it requires (the inverse is also true), and 2) for heaven's sake stop making games so damn tedious.

Postscript

I just finished playing Zelda: The Wind Waker (GameCube), which fits nicely into the interaction framework described above. Your character has a medium amount of interactivity with the world, but he's given such an insanely large list of things to do that that's ok.

I can't help but point out the continued emphasis on tedium in games though. My least favorite entity in the history of video games is Hyrule Field in Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Nintendo64). It's an incredibly large, empty field that the player must cross many times, with basically nothing to do. The GameCube game Zelda: The Wind Waker takes this to a whole new level. Rather than just a field, we have an entire huge ocean that the player must constantly sail across, which is--you guessed it--mostly empty. On the one hand, it gives the game an immersive feel, like you're really sailing on the seas across this huge world. On the other hand, I played much of the game using my picture-in-picture feature on my TV while watching old episodes of Friends and Seinfeld. I enjoyed the game, but I don't recommend it to adults who have a job.

Here's a screenshot of Zelda: The Wind Waker. I hope you enjoy sailing, as you'll be doing a LOT of it.

"Adventure game with no puzzles like train with no wheels...very soon get nowhere fast."---Ancient Chinese Proverb

The "adventure game" has died. Don't kid yourself into thinking otherwise. Sure LucasArts, the company that owned the genre, can get away with releasing the occasional adventure game, but that's the exception, not the rule. This fact makes a great many people sad, myself included, because much more than any other genre, the adventure game was about story. The digital, interactive medium offers amazing potential to tell stories in ways never before possible, so when the genre explicitly about storytelling died...authors either mourned the passing or denied it completely.

The message the market is telling us is certainly not that they don't want story games, it's just that they don't want "adventure games" and all the rules that go along with them. So, what is an adventure game? It's a story through which the player navigates, taking on the role of one character (or occasionally multiple characters). The story is a gated one, and the puzzles are the gates. In order to progress to new sections of the story, the player must complete tasks and solve puzzles. Since solving puzzles (by their very nature) require the player to think and explore possibilities, adventure games also allow (or force?) the player to wander around the world, talking to characters, picking up objects, amusing themselves until the moment of "aha!" that allows them to progress. In the vast majority of these games, time does not actually pass in any meaningful way. That concept is at odds with solving puzzles, unless events repeat or the player is allowed to travel through time. The result is often a rather empty experience. A large percentage of the game is spent wandering around in a static world, often paused in time, while the player figures out what to do. His reward is the advancement of the story.

The Secret of Monkey Island, though formulaic, inspired me to join the game industry. Excellent comedy writing, and great characters.

Now, I used to love this type of game. I love puzzles. To me, the process of solving puzzles was where much of the fun was. But the genre soon became rather puzzle-stale. Ingenious puzzles are difficult to craft, and the concept of walking around, talking to people, collecting inventory, and using items on each other only goes so far. These games were often forced, in search of variety, to present "puzzles" which went way beyond the realm of lateral thinking and into the realm of the arbitrary. In short, the basic construct of this type of game needs to change for puzzle writing's sake, if nothing else.

That's not the worst of it, though. Even with well crafted puzzles, adventure games have an awful lot of emptiness to them. Exploring a static world frozen in time is just not up to snuff these days. There are only so many lines of dialogue characters can have. Heck, Myst didn't have any dialogue or even any characters to entertain the wandering, stuck player That was fun back when 3D rendered images on a CD were innovative. Games like the Curse of Monkey Island try to minimize this emptiness writing damn funny dialogue to entertain you while you're stuck. But again, that only goes so far. I was willing to put up with the excruciatingly slow pace of adventure games as a kid, when then genre was fresh, but nowadays, it just doesn't seem like something I should have deal with. After all, stories are not, by nature, always slow paced.

Myst was fun back then. These days, it takes more than an empty world of still images and zero characters.

And remember, the story advancement is the reward in the adventure game formula. But if the genre is really about stories, then shouldn't the story be the meat of the game, not the reward for solving puzzles? Why do we need puzzles at all? The answer is that no one has really been able to figure how to make a game out of a story. (Yes, the role-playing game (RPG) is a different take on this, but it too is trapped in formula. And yes, Metal Gear Solid manages to have a story gated by action rather than actual puzzles...but work with me here, people.)

Let's look at how long it takes to play an adventure game. Well, it depends greatly on how able you are to succeed at the game elements along the way. It could take only 2 hours if you know exactly how to do everything (meaning you have a detailed walkthru from the net), or it could take 60 hours. In fact, it could take an expert gamer 60 hours, even though the actual length of real story might be as short as an hour or two. Would my mom want to play this type of game? Absolutely not. She might enjoy the story, but she'd never survive the huge time commitment. If it takes me 60 hours, how long would it take her? She also wouldn't appreciate the duration being directly tied to her skill at the game. She, as a non-gamer, is familiar with the concept of a tv show being a half hour long, a movie being two hours, a book being 300 pages, and so on. It's easy to understand where these types of entertainment fit in your real life schedule since they have predetermined, relatively short lengths.

What's the point of all this? The point is to figure out a way to create a story game that is much more about story than we've been able to pull of so far. I think the point is to also think a great deal about the mass market. The concept of storytelling is so fundamental to all cultures that it just seems a shame that our most story based genre of games are not accessible to non-gamers.

A "Forced Advance" Game

Here's my idea: the game plays itself. If the player does nothing---touches no game controls---then the characters will go about their business, time will progress, and a predefined story with a beginning, middle, and end will be told. This will take some predictable amount of time. (Perhaps 10 minutes, or 30, or 2 hours, or whatever the designer chooses.) Sounds like a movie, doesn't it? Well, the player doesn't have to sit and watch. He can intervene at any time and change the course of events. I certainly don't mean there's x minutes of full motion video, then a canned decision point, then more fmv. I'm talking about something much more fluid. More of a simulation.

While the player will see a story without intervening, he won't necessarily see the most interesting one. If the player's character had stuck around and talked to crazy Aunt Hilda a little longer, he might have realized why she had that magical locket in her attic that her daughter stumbled across. That Hilda actually put the locket there on purpose. That Hilda isn't that crazy after all. Puts a new light on the story, doesn't it? So one facet of this type of game is being able to explore different threads of the story as you desire.

There's also the concept of changing the course of the story. I can imagine one type of "game" in which the player is completely unable to change the storyline. The "game" is the (disembodied?) navigation through the physical game world, through time, and through the entangled web of the plot. Every object and character in every scene might have it's own story to explore, all related, all hyperlinked together in a sense. This is, I believe, what "interactive fiction" in games would be like. There really is no game element, but interaction with the story is so extreme that it at least has something in common with games.

Another route is to allow the player to affect the course of events, or at least to try. This might mean trying to convince characters to behave in a certain way through conversation. It might mean taking specific action in the world to try to change things, such as firing a weapon or moving objects around. Perhaps it's even possible to create traps (Spy vs. Spy comes to mind). The player might be in a position of power (police chief, ship captain, etc.) and easily influence events. Such a game world would probably have to be very resistant to change, though. It's probably not technically feasible to allow different outcomes to branch into a huge tree of totally different stories, nor is it even desirable. The opponents of interactive fiction state that any story is really 1,000 possible stories where the author intelligently chose the one, single best story to tell. It would still be possible, though, to create a game world whose major story arc was resistant to change, while allowing change on the smaller scale. It might even be fun.

Let's look at two specific types of stories that work well with this concept: the mystery story and the horror story.

The great thing about a mystery is that it's kind of like a game to begin with. It's a story that's one big puzzle. It's also not a zero-sum game. It's not author vs. reader. The author wants the reader to "win" in the end by figuring out the puzzle just before the answer is revealed. He does this by hiding clues through out the story, which is the other great feature of a mystery. Trying to find the clues in a mystery is a game-like activity, and a rather forgiving one. The reader doesn't have to find all the clues. He's able to progress through the story and follow it at every step whether he finds every clue, or no clues at all.

A mystery is really two stories in one. One is the story right in the forefront. The story we travel through as we would any other. But characters of this story are trying to uncover the second story---the secret story---of what actually happened. Who was the real killer? How was the diamond stolen? In the timeline, this second story usually finishes before the first story begins. The key feature here, though, is that progressing through the first story is not dependant on uncovering the clues which clarify the secret story. The secret story will be explained in the end, and hopefully the reader can look back and see where the clues were at that time.

So back to our game. The game plays itself and the events of the mystery (the investigation) unfold. Witnesses are questioned, the main character's safety is threatened, the zany next door neighbor is exposed to be an adulterer, but not a murder, and so on and so on. It's a story. Through the story are hidden clues, cleverly hidden off the beaten path. Maybe the player should talk to the pharmacist a little bit longer before giving up so easily. Maybe he should make young Miss Weatherby stay the night at the police station rather than risk her being kidnapped. Maybe allowing the main character's default action of going to investigate the crime scene isn't the best thing to do. If he chases after that suspicious character on the street he might end up learning something.

These clues are basically just like the DK coins in the action platform game Donkey Kong Country 2 (see my article on that game). They don't have to be found, but they are there to challenge the player. No matter how good or bad a player you are, you'll get to the end of the story (in a fairly known amount of time) and the mystery will be solved, though perhaps not by your character. But if you're able to find enough clues (DK coins), then you have the satisfying ending of solving the mystery yourself. Notice that this is an example of a larger story arc that is unchangeable by the player. No matter what the player does, Jimmy the Locksmith will still be the murderer. Minor events along the way (do you lose the game of 3-card monte to the street thugs?) and the ending (do you unmask the killer or did your sidekick) are flexible.

One problem with this type of game is the pacing. Being forced to advance through the story, never having a break might not be the most fun experience. As I talked about in my article on pacing, having a rising and falling sine wave of action is nice thing. Juxtaposing the highs with the lows give each a little more punch. So what if...parts of a game are in this "forced advance" mode we've been talking about, and parts are more like the traditional type of adventure game? The regular parts would have a feeling of safety, really, since the time pressure would be gone, allowing you to explore at your leisure, and perhaps even give you enough time to solve some actual thought puzzles.

And here we have the classic formula for the horror story. Parts of the story (the non-forced advance parts) are safe zones, and slow-paced. Interspersed are the tense parts---the parts where you are forced to act---forced to go forward---forced into the unknown. Furthermore, during these parts, you have a feeling of lack of control, just as you should in horror. If done well, the universe might even seem to be an entity, bending you to its will. In fact, I even created a design for such a game where the villain is a demon who has the power to beckon to the main character, forcing her to act, to progress. She has enough control to choose how she progresses (does she jump or crawl or draw her weapon?) but not enough control to resist. And boy, does that demon show up at inopportune times!

This horror game I've described, though based on the same forced-advance mechanic as the mystery game, is really of very different character. In the horror game I worked on, a great deal of the gameplay comes from the action elements caused by the forced advance. The character is forced across dangerous and scary territory. She must jump and shoot and swim and so forth to survive. During the regular parts of the game, she can carefully explore territory or story threads, find secrets at he leisure, stock up on weaponry, etc. These are the calm parts, and the forced-advance sections are the tense parts. Really, it's more of a "game" in the sense gamers are used to than the mystery I described.

The mystery allowed the player to be swept through a story while simultaneously exploring the story itself, trying to find the hidden parts of it, rather than concentrating at all on jumping or shooting or any other traditional "gamer" activities. The horror game spices up the pacing of more traditional game forms with an interesting mechanic.

Through these examples I hope I have scratched the surface of new ways to tell stories in video games. I truly look forward someday to turning such theory into practice, and to others advancing this still-infant art form.

This screenshot of The Curse of Monkey Island is purely gratuitous. Ever notice how Guybrush goes to a beach with a rowboat in every game?

Suspense is, perhaps, the most powerful device in all of storytelling, or at least the most efficient. Once an author has done the work to create suspense---a state of heightened anticipation in the audience---he can continue to reap the rewards long after the set-up. The true power of suspense is that it lives in mind of the audience member, not on the screen or the page. This has the twofold benefit that 1) fear and anticipation of the unknown (or even of the known) are far more powerful in one's imagination than any direct depiction could capture, and 2) the author can continue to elicit emotion from the audience without having to incur the many costs associated with actually depicting that which the audience fears.

The principles of suspense are surprisingly similar across media (literature, film, television, games) and across genre (comedy, drama, horror, pornography). In this article I will focus on the kind of suspense surrounding impending scary and nasty events, which relates well to my article on horror. Interestingly, it also relates well to my article on hiding secrets in 1-player platform games.

After laying out the basics, I'll go over four examples from film (Psycho, Reservoir Dogs, Scream, and the Blair Witch Project), and compare two examples in games (Resident Evil 2 and Silent Hill).

The first step in creating suspense is to create the ‘credible threat' that something might happen. This can be done through a myriad of circumstantial clues, or by actual example. To establish the threat that characters can die, for example, kill off a character early. Once the credible threat has been established, the real fun begins. Every subtlety becomes further beautiful torture for the audience. The glint of a knife under an overcoat conjures up images more frightening than an actual stabbing would. The squint of an eye, the tinge of maniacal laughter, and every other detail hint at whatever terrible event is to come. Suddenly every shadowy corner---normally boring and non-descript---becomes a possible harbinger of doom.

I know I said I'd stick to the kind of suspense related to the anticipation of bad things, but the connection to sex is just too strong. The anticipation is the thing. The actual pay-off lasts only a matter of seconds, but the anticipation---given that the credible threat has been established---can go on for hours. A dark corner is not scary, and a caress of the nose isn't sexy, but both can be once the proper anticipation has been established. The actual pay-offs of sex or violence can occur only a very limited number of times before they become more boring than exciting or shocking. The are virtually no limits, though, to the sweet agony of anticipation. This means that the most suspenseful and engaging of works can be filled with vast stretches of what would otherwise be called ‘emptiness,' filled only with anticipation.

Now let's turn to four examples from film, starting with the most subtle and ending with the most extreme.

Psycho Who better to teach us about suspense than the master of the form himself: Alfred Hitchcock. Psycho at first appears to be about the troubles with money and love of one Miss Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), but then suddenly becomes the story of something else entirely once Marion arrives at the Bates Motel. The suspense created in the scenes where Marion talks with Norman Bates and then retires to her room is created almost entirely within those scenes, rather than before. The preceding scenes do demonstrate that no one knows where Marion is and that the Bates Motel is a remote and isolated location, but the credible threat is established during Marion's ostensibly pleasant chit-chat with Norman Bates.

The audience realizes much more than Marion---that Norman is a little off in the head, and that his mother is at least as troubled. Marion sits in a room filled with stuffed birds, due to Norman's rather odd hobby of taxidermy. In essence, she is surrounded by death...in the form of birds, and even with a last name like Crane, she doesn't realize at all the danger she's in. This is called Dramatic Irony, since the audience knows something the character doesn't. The audience is able to put the various clues together to form the credible threat of danger, even though Marion is oblivious.

Norman Bates and his eerily foreshadowing stuffed birds.

It's the dramatic irony, I believe, that gives these scenes their power. The audience wants to yell out to Marion that she should leave immediately, that every door she opens could be dangerous, that every shower she takes....

Reservoir Dogs Reservoir Dogs employs a truly painful amount of suspense in the torture scene between Mr. Blond and the cop. Unlike Psycho, the set-up for this came long before the actual torture scene; the credible threat of what Mr. Blond might do is established bit by bit from the beginning of the film all the way to that scene. We hear Mr. White and Mr. Pink discuss Blond's psychotic killing spree in the heist gone wrong. We hear the gangsters' attitude that "cops aren't real people." By the time Mr. Blond is alone with the Cop, the credible threat of violence has been amply established. Writer/Director Tarantino, fully aware of this, draws out the scene, allowing the audience's imaginations to run wild.

Even though 95% of the torture scene consists of Mr. Blond dancing around telling jokes, the scene is remembered as excruciatingly violent. Almost all of this violence is in the mind of the viewer. Even during the actual act of violence that does occur, all we are shown is about 14 seconds of an empty doorway. But Tarantino doesn't stop there. He's established beyond any doubt that Mr. Blond is capable of anything, both through foreshadowing hearsay and through actual example. At this point, all Mr. Blond need do is threaten an even more horrible and unthinkable act, and the anticipation and mental horror the audience must endure becomes far more terrible than depiction of this act would ever be. Tarantino draws out the threat of this act as long as possible...and actual completion of the act isn't needed, since it's been happening for over two minutes in everyone's minds. He uses this climactic moment to deliver a totally unexpected turn of the plot...but that's another story.

Scream In Scream, writer/director Kevin Williamson simultaneously employs the principles of suspense and makes fun of them. Scream is also a notable example of the power an opening sequence can have.

Scream's opening sequence is a self-contained vignette with a beginning, middle, and end. Suspense is built during the sequence as Casey Becker (Drew Barrymore) realizes the very credible threat that the man on the phone might kill her. (Interesting Note: Hitchcock, with Psycho, was the first director to kill off the huge star (Janet Leigh) for the sheer shock value of it. At that time no audience expected the biggest name in the film to be killed so early. Williamson's homage to this was killing off the biggest star of Scream, Drew Barrymore, in the very first scene!)

When a big star such as Drew Barrymore in Scream (left) or Janet Leigh in Psycho (right) dies early, the threat of death looms over all the remaining characters.

Although the opening sequence is self-contained, the interesting note is that the opening sequence itself is the credible threat of violence for the entire rest of the movie. The nebulous danger of a killer out there somewhere would simply not have the power to fill every corridor and closet with suspenseful danger had we not been shown the brutal murder at the beginning. The opening sequence establishes ample credible threat, and it also establishes the film's genre, which is another topic entirely.

Williamson pokes quite a bit of fun at the device of suspense by creating numerous moments of anticipation out of completely unscary things. In Scream 2, he trains the audience to be so afraid of a phone call from the killer that the very sound of ring, and later the sound of computer instant message(!)---makes the audience jump. Williamson's crowning moment is the 10 minute scene in Scream 2 where Sydney (Nev Campbell) and her friend Hallie (Elise Neal) are trapped in a car and must climb over the unconscious body of the killer to escape. This scene is excruciatingly long and incredibly suspenseful...but the joke is on us. Absolutely nothing happens, and the two escape the car without incident. Ha! Based on the earlier credible threats of violence, Williamson essentially got 10 minutes of engaging screentime "for free."

The Blair Witch Project This film is the jewel and total embodiment of suspense. It is a film consisting almost entirely of nothing at all, yet somehow, the endless hiking and bickering are made into a disturbing and engaging experience for the audience. The credible threat of danger is established through the curious device of beginning the film by telling us the main characters have died. This allows the ENTIRE film to be come alive with suspense---with the anticipation---of the death they will inevitably face.

The Blair Witch Project also joins the long tradition of creating emotion (in this case fear) entirely within the mind of the viewer, rather than through direct images on screen. Perhaps the most frightening moment of the entire film is when the hikers discover three piles of sticks near their tent, representing their three impending deaths. This is the first moment they realize that their fears are not just imaginary---someone or something is really out there. I have never been so completely terrified of a small pile of twigs in my life.

Resident Evil 2 vs. Silent Hill

I suppose it's finally time for this article on suspense in games to mention an actual game. I'm sure you've been waiting---even anticipating---this moment the entire time. Suspenseful wasn't it?

Resident Evil 2 (PlayStation) and Silent Hill (PlayStation) are both very similar games. They're both horror games that rely heavily on obnoxious and poor puzzle design, and they both have settings full of shadows and the undead. Silent Hill's game engine is more advanced, and its fog effect is a great example of a technological limitation turned into a design strength, conveying a feeling of isolation and fear of the unknown. For this reason, Silent Hill is probably "scarier" for the first 10 minutes.

But Resident Evil 2 really mops the floor with Silent Hill. There's no comparison. Resident Evil 2 uses many of the concepts I've covered so far to establish the credible threat of danger. Its opening sequence starts the player about 2 inches away from a pack of zombies he has no hope of killing or running away from, since the player doesn't even know the controls to shoot or run yet. This would ordinarily be considered poor design, but it's perfect in a horror game. It establishes that enemies are hard to kill, and that you can die in this game. And die you will.

The player starts just inches away from a horde of zombies at the beginning of Resident Evil 2.

Resident Evil 2 also has a few moments here and there of a planned and scripted scary event, such as hands reaching out of the wall at you, crows shattering a window and swarming you, and the unforgettable "licker" jumping through the one-way interrogation window at you. These moments establish the credible threat that some scary might happen at any moment. This means the one thousand other moments when nothing scary actually happens, the player is still on his toes because something just might. Every corner becomes scary (thanks to the cleverly useless camera angles that are designed to limit the player's view). Every hallway looks menacing. Resident Evil knows the difference between creating a scary looking environment, and an environment that actually is scary.

Meanwhile, Silent Hill with all its advanced graphics creates zero moments of scariness. It never establishes any credible threat of danger or surprise. The player soon learns he can run around in the dark in a graveyard all he pleases, and that at worst he'll encounter a standard, helpless, familiar monster. The game is totally lacking in suspense, and as a result it feels boring, hollow, and empty.

I'll leave you with this sobering thought. Consider the work that went into both of these games. Both games created an entire world for the player to navigate. Both had music, sound effects, 3D models, textures, and animation. And after all that work, Silent Hill delivered a flat experience, while Resident Evil 2 delivered a memorable one---all because of a few scripted scary moments that made up about 2% of the game. That 2% of the game was all that was needed to establish the credible threat that is the seed of suspense. This incredible "bang for the buck" just goes to show the true efficiency and power of suspenseful writing and design.

Anyone interested in the design of so-called platform games would do well to study the "required reading":

• Super Mario Brothers 1 though 3 (NES)

• Super Mario World (SNES)

• Donkey Kong Country 1 through 3 (SNES)

• Mario64 (N64)

• Banjo-Kazooie (N64)

• Donkey Kong Country 64 (N64)

Nintendo and Rare deserve quite a round of applause here. Interesting that Shigeru Miyamoto basically invented the genre with Super Mario Brothers and re-invented it Mario64. These two titles were far and away the most innovative of the bunch, but I'm going to have to give the award of "best design" to Donkey Kong Country 2. Before I explain why, let's consider the progression of these games over time.

In the early days, platform games were about trying not to die. Dying occurred frequently and the main goal of the game was to get through all the levels. As time went on, we see less and less emphasis on the dexterity of passing levels and more and more emphasis on finding secrets. Perhaps the most extreme examples are WarioLand 2 and 3 for GameBoy where Wario cannot die. The entire emphasis on those games is puzzle-solving and secret-finding.

WarioLand aside, the notion of finding secrets in platform games led to the "dual goal" platform games of today. A casual or younger player's goal might be to simply get to the end of a game (which may or may not require completing every level). A more demanding gamer's goal, though, is to uncover every secret the game has to offer. In Mario64, this means finding all 120 stars (only about 60 are needed to "win" the game.) In Donkey Kong Country 2, this means finding all 40 DK coins as well as finding all 102% of the bonus rooms. These dual goals allow a single game to appeal to a wide range of players.

If platform games are becoming more and more about finding secrets, we should define what a "secret" actually is. To a really old-school player, a secret might be a near-impossible-to-find item that's virtually randomly placed. That's not the type of secrets I'm talking about. In fact, a "secret" in the sense of modern platform games is a hidden something-or-other that is actually meant to be found.