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360-HQ.COM :: Can you recognise who made the game - just from playing?
Can you recognise who made the game - just from playing?
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TheSalt
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Post Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2008 12:57 pm   
Post subject: Can you recognise who made the game - just from playing?
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Can you recognise who designed the game?

By Clive Thompson
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here's a thought experiment: Imagine someone gave you a totally new game to play -- but it was anonymous. It displayed no credits from the creators, no packaging and no corporate logos.
Merely by playing it, would you be able to figure out who had designed the game?

Most art forms work this way, of course. The instant we hear a song by U2 or the Wu-Tang Clan, we know who the performer is. When we see a movie by Francis Ford Coppola or even Michael Bay, we know who's behind it. This is true even with good architecture: A Frank Gehry building looks like a Frank Gehry building.

In each case, there's a sense of vision, a definable artistic aesthetic that pulls the whole unit together. When you begin to watch the movie, listen to the song or enter the building, you sense a unified artistic purpose, the psychic fingerprint of the creator.

But do games work this way? Do they need to work this way?

The question sprang to mind because I recently played No More Heroes, the superb new game by Grasshopper Manufacture. You may not have heard of the company, but over the last three years, Grasshopper has been quietly releasing a bunch of games -- including killer7 and Contact -- in a style that is striking, quirky, playable and instantly recognizable. Much of this is probably due to the commanding control of Suda Goichi, the company's Kafka-loving creative head.

Within one minute of popping No More Heroes into the Wii, I was steeped in Goichi's aesthetic. All the familiar Grasshopper tropes are present. There's the anime-esque cel shading -- bled and intercut with odd shocks of realism -- and the bizarre, slightly Freudian characters. There's a blending of modern 3-D realism with low-fi '80s game graphics and sound. And there's voice acting that is often just simply weird: like the way your character keeps up a psychological monologue with himself during a boss battle.

Playing No More Heroes is like experiencing a gentle psychotic break. It was precisely the feeling I got from killer7 on the GameCube and Contact on the DS. From the opening scene of No More Heroes, you know exactly who made this game; you would never confuse it with any other game creator.

It might be an obvious point to make, but I think this sort of vision is becoming more and more important to the design of good games.

The No More Heroes trailer shows off the eye-catching, ear-pleasing style that's become the hallmark of Suda Goichi, aka Suda51.


That's because games are developing bigger and bigger budgets, and the complexity of development is increasing. In that environment, if a game company doesn't have a powerfully magnetic, aesthetic North Pole to gather 'round, its games go off the rails in dozens of tiny, dreary ways.

Maybe the creator licenses an engine that's hard to work with: Engines have their own built-in aesthetics and need to be wrestled with harshly to make them "do" what you want, and not merely render everything as if it were from Half-Life or Quake. Or maybe the complexity of developing a game -- the sheer size of the teams, the outsourcing of key work to developers -- slowly leaches the quality out of the design.

When 50 people all make slightly different decisions about what a game is going to be like, it shows. Entropy takes over. The marbles scatter randomly across the living-room floor. You wind up with those drab, anonymous dungeon-crawlers and first-person-shooters and puzzlers. Turn the game off, and you can't remember anything about it. It's much like the drabness of big-budget movies and pop albums that have been surgically drained by corporate committees.

Yet the truly standout games fight entropy. They have a coherence that's fractal: Every tiny detail reflects the shape of the whole. Nintendo has long possessed this magic quality, thanks in part to its auteur, Shigeru Miyamoto. The aesthetics of Mario games are instantly recognizable and unique, and no matter how hard people try to copy Nintendo, they never get it quite right. Will Wright's games have always had that quality, too, as have Bungie Studios' -- or, on the "casual" level, the games of PopCap and Gamelab.

In music, we talk of timbre, the distinctive acoustic qualities that make each (good) band sound different from the others. Gameplay and game aesthetics have a similar sort of cognitive timbre: Your brain feels the uniqueness of the game as you look and move around the world, navigating its obstacles. And you only get that with a single, commanding vision.

So try the experiment yourself. The next time you play a game, pretend you don't know anything about who made it. Could you figure it out?






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