Creating a Universe

Weighty-sounding, isn't it? "Creating a universe". Can you imagine what all goes into literally creating an entire universe?

Authors, developers, directors, and artists alike do this kind of thing all the time; they birth an entire universe with their minds, and then create a series of rules and guidelines by which their universe abides. This can include everything from creating the history behind an object, or the laws and guidelines that govern a fictitious people. Any way you slice it, that kind of rampant creativity requires an awful lot of work.

What got me thinking about this idea of universe-creation was after finally being able to play and beat Mass Effect 2, for the PlayStation 3 (Lucky 360 guys got it a year earlier!). What fascinates me is the amount of unnecessary detail the men and women at Bioware went into while creating the story universe for the Mass Effect games. In an interview with IGN, Ray Muzyka, CEO of Bioware, mentioned that a team of designers and artists spent 6 months to a year doing nothing but fleshing out the "IP (Intellectual Property) Bible" for Mass Effect. According to him, the IP Bible is "consulted for all Mass Effect games", and he compared the whole thing to an "iceberg that's down there, giving it weight and gravity, credibility and depth". The result of this explosion of creativity is a video game in which every character has palpable motivations and history; every race of aliens has a culture, a homeworld complete with politics and law, religion and family customs. The fruit of all of this creative labor has even been given a special place within the Mass Effect games, in the in-game Codex.

The Codex in a Mass Effect game is a teriffic read in itself, a kind of encyclopedia of various peoples, races, worlds, technologies, and other kinds of terms and historical bits and bobs that the game itself makes liberal use of; I couldn't get enough of it, and wish there were more. Another of the truly cool parts of the game's Codex is that it draws upon actual science as a means to explain its own fiction; things that I recall reading about or hearing about in the various science and space-related documentaries and blogs I take in here and there.

This may sound like a side topic, but it still proves interesting just how deeply the developers consider a game's universe when designing it. Take a look at this article, taken from the Mass Effect wikia page; it's an article about FTL (Faster Than Light) travel, within the Mass Effect universe. This article has text that was lifted directly from Mass Effect's Codex, and so you can see how much thought was put into just the explanation of faster than light travel. Now, this is something that according to Einstein's law of relativity, should be impossible because of the amount of energy it takes to move something so fast; when you're talking about going the speed of light, you're talking about requiring an infinite amount of energy to move even something as small as a single person, let alone a complete starship. Mass Effect's creative writers seem to have been especially proud of their workaround to this law of physics, considering that the very effect that allows anything to go faster than light in Mass Effect is called the "mass effect field", or rather a fictional phenomena in which an object's mass is reduced so that it can travel faster than the speed of light. That way, all of the game's alien species, spread out over the entire Milky Way galaxy, can communicate with one another.

It reminds me of the amount of work put into the collective "bibles" put together for other worlds created within literature, such as the Star Trek (Seen to the side here), Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings universes; the sheer amount of canonical information these things are created from is staggering. The thing that's cool, however, is that until more recently, movies, TV shows, and books were the only places you could really find these gigantic databases of information coming from.

Nowadays, almost any kind of gaming series you can think of would require some kind of "bible", so as to keep continuity through the different iterations of a franchise. Dead Space, for instance, has to keep track of 500 years' worth of human history, so that all of the facts spread amongst a novel, two major console releases, an iPhone game, a Wii on-rails shooter game, and two animated movies is consistent with each other. Call it a consequence of transmedia, in which a single franchise that may have started as a movie, or a game, or a book, can spread and become popular in other mediums.

Now, with any kind of transmedia venture, things can go wrong...and for some reason, that seems to happen most often with video games in their transition to movie theaters. Probably the biggest example I can think of in which a video game has been rendered nearly unrecognizable is the Resident Evil films. Don't get me wrong; I actually find something to enjoy in them. They're campy and fun, and they're just generally enjoyable popcorn flicks.

Problem is, the video games have an entirely different story than the films do, to the point where I can't understand how both of these things can coexist like they do.

Resident Evil fans know what I'm talking about; the films have taken liberties with the story content that is baffling, to say the least. The games themselves are about the battles of a small group of people (Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine, Leon Kennedy, and a few others) as they try and prevent an evil corporation, Umbrella, from controlling the world by creating all kinds of nasty viruses that turn people into zombies and other various abominations of science. That's the games in a nutshell. The movies? They're about a woman named Alice, who is apparently doing the exact same thing, but all of the characters who were in the games were reduced into small, bit roles; they aren't the main characters, and they haven't even all been in the films yet. On top of that, in the films' continuity, the Earth is now a desert wasteland that's been completely destroyed by Umbrella. In the games' continuity, Umbrella as a corporation doesn't even EXIST anymore; it was dissolved by the US Government after their illegal experimenting into the human genome was made public.


How could two properties, based on the same franchise, wind up so differently? I'm sure there's a host of different factors involving rights and lack of involvement and communication between an American director and a Japanese developer, but what it all boils down to is a lack of control over the IP's Bible. With Resident Evil, the IP Bible has to be a complete mess, because the games themselves have a convoluted, borderline nonsensical continuity that makes little to no sense most of the time. Honestly, I couldn't even tell you what all has happened in all the games because it's become such a giant mess.

But that doesn't make the games any less enjoyable! I love Resident Evil, for and despite all of its campiness.

Now, don't think that just because a video game doesn't have a fully fleshed-out tome of information dedicated to its world and its universe that I don't like it; there's plenty of games that have nothing of the sort whatsoever, and yet they're absolutely wonderful. I really doubt the Mario series has a continuity to it, and yet Mario games to this very day are some of the finest things you can find out there.

Ever try looking into the continuity in the Legend of Zelda series? It's amazingly disjointed and nonsensical, and yet I wouldn't change it for the world; I love that series just the way it is, and just how I hope it always will be.

The great thing though, is just how wonderfully diverse the world of gaming has become, that such things can coexist in the same space. Sharing shelf space with my Assassin's Creed series (A transmedia franchise with an absolutely wonderful backstory) is 3D Dot Game Heroes, a lovingly-made clone of The Legend of Zelda, with the simplest of stories; rescue the princess, save the kingdom. I don't need some story bible for something like that; it's beautiful and perfect just the way it is.

So let me just extend my personal "Thank you!!" to these developers who slave away, making these games as wonderful as they have been the past few years. Sure, not all of them have had the loving attention to detail that the Mass Effect franchise has, but they're all wonderful just the same. Thanks guys, you do some damn fine work.


Here's a list of some other franchises you might want to look into if you haven't yet, ones with storied histories that probably kept their developers up for months on end. (It's by no means a complete list of course!)

- Dragon Age
- Grand Theft Auto
- The Elder Scrolls
- Resistance
- Halo
- Uncharted
- Silent Hill
- Final Fantasy
- Metal Gear Solid
- God of War
- Xenogears (And Xenosaga)
- Metroid

Annnnd We Have A Winner!

Score one for the boys back home!

Last night's Grammy Awards, while predictably full of faces like Bieber and Gaga, managed to finally do something interesting and a tad unpredictable. Happily, this means Christopher Tin's beautiful "Baba Yetu", nominated for a Grammy and theme song to 2005's Civilization IV, actually ended up winning!

The song, which you can hear below, won in the "Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalists", although I would say that this recognition came about 5 (or 6!) years too late. Why the delay? Well, the men and women of the Academy do not pay attention to video game music, but they do pay attention when a composer places a song like this at the beginning of a new album. Christopher Tin did so with his debut album, Calling all Dreams, which also ended up winning a Grammy for "Best Classical Crossover Album".

What I don't get is that the Grammy Awards consist of 109 categories...and cover music across an incredibly broad spectrum, and yet these awards do not incorporate video game music. If a theme song for a video game is good enough to win a Grammy, then why couldn't video game music be the 110th category? Someone needs to make it happen!

Anyway, this is still a moment that we gamers have to be proud of. Mainstream recognition could be a good or bad thing, though that is a topic for another day. For now, let's just be happy that our entertainment medium of choice is capable of producing such award-winning quality.

EDIT: I just got through listening to Tin's Calling all Dawns album over at his website, and all I have to say is "Wow". It's no wonder this album itself also won a Grammy; this guy is incredibly talented, and the songs presented here are absolute gems, all presented in a variety of languages fine-tuned to sound their most beautiful. Everything from Swahili (With Baba Yetu of course) to Japanese, Latin, and Celtic Irish. I think I'm going to be buying this album!

The Silent Tutorial

Isn't that a great quote right there? That quote encapsulates exactly why many people, myself included, think of the Super Mario Bros games on the 8-bit NES as examples of the best game design you can find in the industry. Good, intuitive level design is able to teach its players how to play a game, without actually telling them to do so. The levels demand little baby steps in our understanding of how a game works, and the level design embraces this fact.

A game developer by the name of Radek Koncewicz, creative lead of Incubator Games, posted this article about how the video game Super Mario Bros. 3 teaches its players everything there is to know about playing, without ever dipping into using a tutorial. This is just a wonderful article that sheds light on the invisible parts of game design that are just so subtle and intangible that we don't even realize what's going on.

If you think about it though, a player does subconsciously need to figure out how to interface with a game; how the physics of speed and momentum work, the things that will and will not hurt you, the way you overcome obstacles, etc. Many games use a tutorial, where the developers will put up messages onto the screen, telling you how to do specific things in the game world. A textbook example would be in a first person shooter where your character is forced to go through a training exercise in a safe location first before going out on his first mission. It's a convenient way for a developer to keep you rooted into the game's fictional world, and let you know how to play the game while they're at it. I did always find it strange to hear characters inside a game world comment on which buttons you should press though; it feels awkward.

"Go on and press the SQUARE button, and you'll reload your weapon!". Imagine if someone told you that in real life; goofy is one way to put it. The experience of having an in-game character tell you what buttons to press is clunky, and takes you out of the experience.

In Super Mario Bros. 3, there is no such goofy tutorial; there is only Mario, and his small set of skills. The way Mario interacts with his world is a playground set up before you, with small hints littered throughout that hint at what you can try to do, just to see if it works. What happens when you jump a second time on that turtle shell? What happens when you run really fast with the raccoon tail powerup, and then jump? Go and try it out! The game even shows you where you can do it, and provides you a safe place to teach yourself simple skills, but without ever saying a single word.

Prior to sitting down to write this article, I tried to think of a few other games that approached this level of intuitive design, and the truth is that very few games are able to tap into the subconscious desire to explore, but make certain to keep out the pain associated with learning what NOT to do.

LittleBigPlanet is one of those titles that just begs to be touched and toyed with; it invites you into its paper mache and cardboard cutout world with a string of fluffy, fuzzy yarn, and it pokes you just enough that you want to go and figure out ways to tinker on your own terms. Virtually everything about LittleBigPlanet (Along with its recently-released sequel) makes the player feel comfortable and in control. It helps that the charming, soothingly British voice of Stephen Fry accompanies most things that your little Sackboy does, cheerily commenting on how to get from point A to point B. In the end though, even the wonderful narration by Mr. Fry is still just another (albeit very good!) way to deliver a tutorial. The game is still going out of its way to tell you how to play it, and that's just something that gamers these days have become accustomed to seeing and hearing when they first dive into that hot new release.

Maybe the biggest reason we can't seem to escape the tutorial is because video games these days have just become so much more complex. If you think about what the landscape of the industry was like when Super Mario Bros. 3 released, it was an entirely different animal at the time. Controllers consisted of a D-pad and two buttons (Not including Start and Select), and were extremely simple to grasp. One button always seemed to let the player jump, and the second button was used for pretty much everything else. The D-pad let you move your avatar around the game's world, and the rest was up to you, armed with the instruction manual that came bundled with the game. Simple, right? Up, down, left, right, B, A, Start, Select. That was it.

Today, just the sight of a PlayStation 3 controller is enough to intimidate newcomers; it just looks so complicated! You have Up, Down, Left, Right, Triangle, X, Square, O, Start, Select, the Home button, L1, L2, L3, R1, R2, R3, and two analog sticks. For the longest time, I didn't even realize that the L3 and R3 buttons existed, because they're hidden; you have to click in the analog sticks to actually press them. How is ANY game supposed to convey which buttons you press and which ones you don't, without explicitly telling you so?

Let's hope this freaky controller isn't an image of the future, although to many people looking at the controllers of today, this image isn't far off the mark of how things are today!

Bearing this in mind, I thought long and hard, and can only think of a single game that has managed the feat of being able to wordlessly convey how it is played...well...almost. That game...is Flower, a downloadable game for the PlayStation 3.

The game itself never tells you how to play it; you just interact with it. The only hint of how to play the game comes from the splash screen on the PS3's Xross Media Bar, where you go to actually boot up the game. It says "Tilt the controller to move, press any button to blow the wind.". That's it; short and simple. It doesn't lie either, as literally all you do to play this game is just move the controller around as if you were driving a car made of air, and every button on the controller does the exact same thing; make you move faster.

The goal of the game is beautiful and relaxing, as all you need to do is blow the breeze over a series of budding flowers to make them grow, and to collect one of the new flower's pedals into your ever-expanding collection of multicolored pedals, all held aloft by the breeze that you control. The game never tells you what to do with all these pedals, or why you collect them, or how you complete a level. You just keep doing what feels right; what the game makes you feel is right without ever telling you so. Each flower you collect is accompanied by a pleasant chime, and the happy sight of a flower blooming. You want to collect more, and more, and more...and you soon learn that in order to bring the game's world back to life, you have to keep blossoming more and more flowers. Before long, without the game so much as telling you a single word of how you finish the first level, you've done it. The game never exactly taught you anything, and only ever relied on subtle visual cues for what is the correct way to go about finishing a level. It helps too that there is no penalty whatsoever for simply experimenting, and letting the game soothe and relax you.

To better convey how this works exactly, just watch this video. Note that at no point is there *anything* on the screen that tells you what to do; you simply feel things out and DO it. Beautiful and relaxing, isn't it?



Now don't get me wrong here; I have nothing against tutorials in video games. They can be helpful, especially with the complexity of most of today's console games, and they can really add color and variety to an experience. They can be a great introduction to a game world, they can be smart and well-integrated even. There's not really anything inherently wrong with a tutorial, and to be perfectly frank, it's a very good thing that tutorials actually exist.

There are few things more frustrating than a game that NEEDS a tutorial...and yet doesn't have one.

I'm looking right at you, A Boy and His Blob. Oh yeah.

Take a look at that screenshot. That is from A Boy and His Blob, on the NES. It's a great game, a classic that many people have learned to love, and it was even able to spawn a new version just recently on Wii...and yet it is one of the most frustrating things I've ever played!

This game gives you NO information whatsoever. Why are you this kid, and why is there a gelatinous snowman following you around? Oh yeah, that's the blob! Of course! ...But why does it say that you have so many licorice jellybeans? I have no idea.

Look at this from the point of view of a little kid in the 1980's, who has very little experience with video games outside of Super Mario Bros, who is not used to the concept of resource management in a video game. Would this little kid inherently know that there are a bunch of different kinds of jellybeans, and that each jellybean does something different when you feed it to your blob? Would he know that one kind of jellybean turns the blob into a ladder, while another turns the blob into a hole in the ground that your boy can safely fall through to a platform below? No, no, no, and no.

I know this, because I was that little boy in the 1980's. I rented this game from our local video store, and it didn't come with the instruction manual; it was just the cartridge and me, and a weekend wide open to having fun with a boy and a blob. I turned on the game, I moved to the right like I would do in any other game I've ever played, and then come up to a brick wall. I spent two days trying to get beyond that wall, but it never happened. There were no clues, there were no hints or subtle nudges in one direction or another; it was a solid brick wall of bad game design that made no sense to a little kid.

I hear that A Boy and His Blob is actually a pretty good game...but I can never get the bad taste of that experience out of my mouth, even when I tried to go back and give it a go myself just recently. I still cannot fully get the grasp of how to do what needs to be done to advance in the game, because of the nature of the gameplay. There is only one correct way to get through many situations in that game, and yet there are 12 different kinds of beans, each with a different effect. Doesn't sound much for today's gamer, sure, but it was a huge number of things to juggle for a 4 year old in the 80's.

I have no problem with trial and error gameplay; it's a way to teach us what works and what doesn't. What I do have a problem with is when a game flat out prevents progress simply because it can't be bothered to explain its own goofy rule system to the people who bother playing it!

A good example of trial and error gameplay that really has stood the test of time, is Metroid on the NES. It's one tough game, an intense and unforgiving experience that tosses you right into things and forces the player to make sense of how to survive in its strange, alien landscapes...and yet it works. One button jumps, one button shoots, the D-pad moves your character, Samus, around the game world. Outside of that, good luck using those simple tools to explore!

The only brick wall dead end kind of experience in Metroid is related to the game's difficulty, but that isn't an obtuse concept to understand. All the player needs to do is adapt their own play style to figure out how to get beyond a tough enemy, or a really hard boss. No matter what you do in Metroid, you use the same small skillset to do whatever needs to be done. The game doesn't demand that you all of a sudden develop a completely new way of playing a game without even somehow letting you know that you need to do so, and it doesn't expect unfair things of its players. And no, reading the manual doesn't count.

Seems to be a real running trait in Nintendo-developed games that gameplay flows naturally, and that the player is only encouraged to do what seems and feels right. That feeling is nurtured through level design, and the player is unwittingly coaxed into delving further and further into the experience.

Take Zelda, for instance. This screen right here is the very first thing you see as the game begins. Knowing nothing else about this game, what can you gather from this single image?

1.) You can see that there is a character in the middle of the screen, and that this is you. Noticing your character, you can also tell that your character is equipped with a shield. Maybe it could block projectiles?

2.) You can see all that green stuff all over the screen, and just the texture and look of it suggests that all that stuff is impassable; you can't walk through it.

3.) Now you see that there are three different paths available to you to take; they're clearings that will let you go to other areas. Suddenly, you think "Oooh, what could be out there?? What's on the next screen??"

4.) The only thing stopping you from exploring those areas is that black square in the upper left portion of the screen; you are drawn to it, and want to find out what it is! When you touch the black square, the screen changes, and you realize you just went inside a new room.

5.) Holy crap! A sword! Cool! But the man is saying that it's dangerous to go alone...so there are enemies? And you hit them with the sword when you get it? But how do you use the sword?

6.) Walking over to the sword, you automatically grab it, and in the top portion of the screen where it has two blank spaces labeled B and A, the sword will appear where it says A. So that's how you use the sword! Press A!

7.) The only way out of the room is the way you came in, and it leads you right back out to where you started. Noticing those three paths you can take, you're ready to take one of them, and see where it leads you, armed with a sword and ready to explore!

See how intuitive level design can tutor you, without even telling you what to do? The developers at Nintendo created a series of things to draw your eye, and like a trail of visual bread crumbs, they encourage you to learn the basics of the game just by following the trail, even if you don't realize you're doing exactly what they wanted you to do.

So maybe video games have gotten so complex in recent years that self-explanatory tutorials like this are a rarity, but couldn't that be a good excuse for new players to start with the golden oldies that we started out with when we were children, ourselves? We learned how to game with these cherished old gems. They've held their value and their fun factor through the years, and they can bring new gamers into the fold, so that they can join in on the fun with the rest of us!

There's something special and pure about these older gems, something that no amount of flashy modern graphics and action could ever hope to reproduce, and the new found complexity of these new-generation games is partially to blame for this.

So go on out there and play an old-school NES game today! Have fun without all the fluff, and appreciate the fact that there are games out there you don't need to spend an hour and a half learning to control before you can have fun with them. And if you know someone who can't get into the whole thing because of the controls, then suggest they start where we all did; with the good ol' basics that will never die.

Electronic Maestros - A Brief History of Music in Games

Music is a wonderful thing, isn't it? As a psych major, it has fascinated me how the human mind can be molded like putty at the sound of it. It amazes me how music can add color, emotion, and feeling to just about anything. Think of how many cultures are defined by their music, such as the way latin culture is flavored with tango and salsa, or how Jamaican culture is defined through reggae. Music says so much about the people who created it, and even then, there is much more that music can do. Music can transform an experience, add levity or tension, promote good feelings or make you feel depressed.

It's no surprise then, that music has been a supremely important component of video game design. Companies hire orchestras to score their games, and some sound designers have become celebrities within the gaming community...and yet all of it started in such a humble way.

Let me take you on a little guided tour around some of the high water marks of music in the gaming industry...



You should recognize that song; almost everyone does! That song was designed by Nintendo's Koji Kondo, the man who designed music for the entire Mario franchise, from this game all the way up to the stellar Super Mario Galaxy 2, released just this year. His music is based off of simple melodies that loop endlessly, and yet can be listened to without tiring of them during gameplay. In fact, if you're interested in one of the other things that gives Kondo-san's music that "secret spice", take a look at this link. It talks about the "Golden Ratio" that is present in much of Kondo's Mario music, one of the things that makes the music so appealing to our minds in the first place.

One of the things I can't get over with this game, however, is that the entirety of the original Super Mario Bros. is around 41 kb, if you can believe that. Granted, the music within Super Mario Bros. was simply a series of instructions to be fed to a sound processor within the NES console itself, but even so it's amazing to think that all of that music fit within such a small space, to say nothing of the other 8 unique worlds that made up the rest of the game.

Can you imagine Super Mario Bros. without that song? I sure can't. The music is inextricably tied into what made Super Mario Bros. the great game that it is; take it away, and you've robbed the game of its soul.



The Legend of Zelda, another classic by Nintendo, was also scored by Kondo-san. This is another great display of Kondo-san's music being the driving force behind what kept players in the game; the main theme of the original Zelda title was a permeating force that drove you towards adventure! It gave the player all the reason in the world to keep pushing forward, through all the puzzles and perils, to rescue the princess and save the day. Epic little song, isn't it? Epic, but pure classic.

Like all things with video games, technological advances allowed for greater innovation. The limits of what sound designers could do was expanded upon with the release of each successive console generation, and for a time, sound enhancements were reason enough to get excited over the newest gaming console, since the hardware was improved right alongside the graphics hardware. Better graphics, better sound, better games!

The SNES, released in 1991, heralded with it what some consider the very best game soundtracks to have ever been made. It was as if the sound designers, constrained for years and years having to work with 8-bit hardware, were finally free to let their imaginations run wild; they ended up prodicing some truly fantastic, iconic melodies to accompany their games.



Take the music for Donkey Kong Country, composed by David Wise, formerly of the (then) superstar SNES second party developer Rare. The song above was written for the underwater sections of Donkey Kong Country, and surprised gamers with its serene and subtle beauty that, until that point, had been nigh unheard of from within a video game soundtrack. Consider that just scant years before this game was released, the best we had heard were the harsh and bare chiptunes that were generated by the NES sound board. Although the music from some NES games is truly great, the complexity and quality jump from NES to SNES is truly something for the ears to behold.

While David Wise did not gather the rabid following of some of the SNES's other great composers, his music is still considered by many gamers today to be some of the best that has ever been written for the console. While the SNES was certainly not the only machine to be putting out quality music around the time, the Sega Genesis is not looked on quite as fondly due to the machine's rough, jagged sound quality. The SNES, to be blunt, had a far superior sound processor, and so is home to the most memorable music of the era.

The SNES continued to generate a collection of stellar tunes, and no discussion on SNES-era music would be complete without mentioning the musical tour de force that was SquareSoft's Chrono Trigger, released in 1995.



Chrono Trigger is a role playing game about a group of friends who, by a series of strange accidents and coincidences, wind up traveling through time. Through their travels, they discover that in the distant past, a creature from another world burrowed deep into their planet, and in the far future, this creature would rise from below, and bring about the end of the world. Through their travels, they come across the world of 12,000 BC, a time in which magic existed. Those who could practice it lived on floating continents in the clouds, high above the non-magic users, who lived on the ground in the middle of a full-scale ice age. This song, Corridors of Time, is the theme of those cloud-dwelling magic users. It was written for Chrono Trigger as a part of the "Dream Team" of developers, that included Nobuo Uematsu (Famous for his work as composer for the Final Fantasy series) and Yasunori Mitsuda, who had gotten his start in the world of video game composing with this game. The entire soundtrack, top to bottom, is packed to the rafters with memorable tunes that encapsulate every emotion from panic to sorrow, and lend a real feeling to each character in the story, since each character had their own theme song.

By no means did video game music stop at that point, however; a further evolution in the complexity and sophistication of video game music would come chiefly from the new contender in the video game console war; the Sony PlayStation. While Nintendo went on to create plenty of industry-defining video game experiences with the N64 (Super Mario 64 and Zelda: Ocarina of Time chief among those), game companies like SquareSoft felt their creativity was stifled by Nintendo's decision to stick with the lower-capacity (And more expensive!) cartridge format for their 64-bit system. The PlayStation may have been a less-powerful 32-bit console, but its CD-based storage medium offered game designers, and by extension sound designers, a hugely expanded capability to deliver higher-quality experiences to their customers.

The result...is this.



This is "One Winged Angel", the final boss theme song for the game that turned the tide of the console war, and put Sony in a position of market dominance that lasted until the release of the PS3 in 2006. The music for Final Fantasy VII, like all Final Fantasy games before it and many of them since, was composed by Nobuo Uematsu. Uematsu-san is perhaps one of the most famous of video game composers, his music being featured in concert halls around the globe and featured in countless fan remix and cover albums. I myself had the honor to meet the man, albeit briefly, during his visit to Chicago in May 2006. I still have the signed copy of Final Fantasy VII's disc 3 hanging, framed, on my wall as proof!



As iconic as the soundtracks for the Final Fantasy games are, Uematsu-san's work on the PlayStation was eclipsed almost completely by the stunning quality of by his other, lesser-known contemporary, Yasunori Mitsuda. Mitsuda-san had worked first on Chrono Trigger, but the work to have come from him on the 1999 SquareSoft hit and Chrono Trigger sequel, Chrono Cross, is utterly phenomenal. The whole soundtrack feels like a lucid celtic tropical dream, a perfect compliment to the game's tale of two alternate universes, one in which the main character Serge had died, and one in which he had lived. Which is the real universe, and why is Serge able to traverse these two parallel universes? Many gamers never found out, too busy listening to this soundtrack to keep playing. If you are looking for what truly is one of the most breathtakingly beautiful soundtracks to have ever accompanied a video game, look no further than Chrono Cross.

That was 1999, though. Time continued, and the hardware continued to grow, and by this point the quality and beauty of a video game's audio was no longer constrained by hardware; the hardware was powerful enough to generate any kind of sound imaginable. Music in video games became less about pushing out the most from a game's hardware, and more about being creative with how the music is used while playing the game. You may have noticed the strange change in quality from the "One Winged Angel" song in FFVII to the beautiful "Time's Scar" from Chrono Cross. This is because the PlayStation was sat in that awkward middle space between the consoles that used a sound chip inside the console to generate music, and the consoles that contained all of the sound data purely on the disc, composed elsewhere by more powerful hardware and merely played by the console like an MP3 would be on a computer. Final Fantasy VII's music was generated, for the most part, by the PlayStation via MIDI files synthesized by the PlayStation's sound chip, but Chrono Cross's music was composed separately, using more powerful hardware to create the music.

From that point forward, it became difficult to tell if music was synthesized by the console's sound processor, or if it was recorded elsewhere. The highest-quality music was recorded specially, and so became part of the signature of a well-designed game. But with the increase in power of the consoles came an increase in the consoles' ability to use sound to create a finely-tuned experience.



This is where some of my favorite sound design comes into play, with the creative sound use of games like Silent Hill 2, released for the PlayStation 2 in 2002. I have gone in detail with the way this game uses sound before, but the significance to the game industry's usage of sound is an extremely important one; it personifies the usage of ambient sound, of white noise, and of silence in video games as a tool to be used in creating a mood. The game can literally scare you by draining the sound completely out of a scene, leaving nothing but the subtle hissing of a TV, or the empty sounds of hollow footsteps creaking over strained wood...

For this, we have Konami's Team Silent sound developer, Akira Yamaoka. Yamaoka-san has become synonymous with the Silent Hill series, to the point that many fans will not accept a game as a Silent Hill game unless he is behind the music. Sadly, however, he left Konami in early 2010, only to team up with Grasshopper Manufacture (Headed up by the eccentrically-named Suda 51, and responsible for games like No More Heroes and Killer 7).

Video game music has undergone further evolutions, as the industry has generated more and more money. Popular games these days include actual licensed music (Such as the Rock Band or Guitar Hero series), and the ones that don't include licensed music have even gone to the trouble of commissioning entire orchestras to provide the music for their games.

Developers of current-generation games have pulled out all the stops to bring to our video games the quality and production values of a Hollywood blockbuster. Men like Harry-Gregson Williams (Responsible for scoring the Shrek series, Enemy of the State, Armageddon, The Rock, and 2010's Unstoppable) currently compose the score for video games like Metal Gear Solid 4.

The Metal Gear Solid series has always had a stable of utterly incredible music, and may be among the very first examples of this truly cinematic quality brought to live on the screens of video game players around the world. Just listen to this jaw-dropping example of celtic beauty first heard during the end credits for Metal Gear Solid for the PlayStation 1 in 1998, and brought back for a gut-wrenching moment of frosty nostalgia ten years later in 2008's Metal Gear Solid 4..."The Best Is Yet To Come".



I can only smile at the song's self-aware title, as the best truly was yet to come. It always is, when you're discussing the video game industry.

Video game music only continues to improve, to become more cinematic, more relevant and beautiful....and I'm proud to say that a song from a video game has finally be recognized by a crowd that is potentially much bigger than the gaming industry.

A song from the video game Civilization IV has been nominated for a Grammy, just recently. If you listen to any song from this post, I urge you to listen the most to this one. This is the opening cinematic of Civilization IV with the song "Baba Yetu". Watch as a single video game song attempts, along with the imagery, to showcase the entire path of human civilization.

Beautiful.



Man, I love being a gamer.

Nier - Underappreciated Beauty

I have a friend out in Ohio by the name of Kevin. He's one of those kinds of guys who has a burning curiosity for those lesser-known games destined to be passed up by those with interest only in the big-budget titles like Call of Duty and Halo. Perhaps if video games these days cost a little less, more people might take a risk on games they know less about, such as this little gem released on PS3 and 360 this past May, Nier. Even though I do love me some games, I have to admit that $60 is a pretty big investment for a lot of us nowadays, especially with the economy being the way it's been. That money is an even bigger risk when the game comes out, and ends up scoring mixed reviews, most of which tend to lean toward the negative. I like to read the reviews of gaming critics from Game Informer, 1up.com, or even IGN, but there are some cases where the critics are just...wrong.

Luckily for us both, Kevin thought the same way about the naysayers. He decided to take the risk I couldn't afford to at the time, and snatched up the PS3 version of Nier. Neither of us were expecting great things, but the game's trailers and screenshots still held an awful lot of promise.

Nier was developed by a lesser-known developer known as Cavia, and published by Square-Enix in May of 2010. It followed the story of a man (Presumably named Nier, although the game allows you to decide what his name will be) and his tireless search for a cure to the Black Scrawl virus that has afflicted his daughter Yonah, 1300 years after the same virus had killed off most of humanity around the world.

The world has been reduced to a near-feudal collection of tribes and hamlets scattered about the ruined, green wreckage of our once-proud civilization, and although life is tough, the father holds himself together with the help of Yonah; she is his very reason for existing, and the sole excuse for him to continue living. Everything he does, and by extension everything you do, is for her. The fact that humanity is dying out is...irrelevant.

The Black Scrawl virus is not the sole concern of those living in the world beyond the apocalypse though, as a plague of ghostly, otherworldly creatures known as Shades stalk what humans remain. What the Shades are, and why they have hunted humans to the brink of extinction, are just a few of the mysteries that the storyline of Nier attempts to answer, and it does so in a way that I can only call unique and beautiful.

This world, although it is a future vision of Earth, is dissimilar from our own through the existence of magic. Magic is a key ingredient in the fight against Shades, although the only two entities capable of using magic are two special, talking and floating books named Grimoire Noir, and Grimoire Weiss. They embody the duality between light and dark, good and evil...although it isn't quite clear at first which one symbolizes which.

Grimoire Weiss, as he demands to be called, is your companion. He is found early in the game, held prisoner by the game's first boss fight, a pair of hulking armored statues stood in silent patrol in the ruins of what once was an apartment building. By the time the game takes place, such a simple thing as an apartment building has come to be altered into what looks to be a cathedral, empty aside from the unintelligible shrieks from the Shades that inhabit it. Your daughter Yonah had run to that building, away from your watchful eye, all because she had hoped to find a flower called the Lunar Tear, in hopes that it might grant her wish to be cured...but instead, it brings you to Grimoire Weiss, who in turn may truly have the key to a cure for Yonah.

The story continues from there, growing from a personal tale about saving your daughter, to an incredibly bizarre tale of how it was that humanity managed to kill itself...

To say more would spoil it, though it's difficult to make heads or tails of the story until the credits are rolling...but even then, it isn't enough! A part of Nier's innovation lies in the fact that the storyline you see the first time through the game is literally half the story; after the credits, the game asks if you would like to play again from the middle. It isn't long before you discover that the game has hidden the truth from you...and that the missing piece changes the entire meaning of the story. Throughout Nier, you feel as if you are heroic...you feel as if you were doing the right thing...

...until you are finally able to hear and understand what the Shades are saying.

That single change to the game changes everything...and it makes you almost feel disgusted at yourself.

This incredible twist in Nier's storyline during the second playthrough doesn't even touch on the myriad of reasons to fall in love with Nier's charms, however. The game is unique not just in story, but in all areas.

Many games adhere to a strict genre, but Nier attempts to buck this trend in a very different way from other multi-genre games (Such as Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption), by gluing together genres that make almost no sense together. One part of the game has you shooting from a top-down perspective at obstacles, just like the old arcade game Asteroids. Another beautiful section of the game is a full-on text adventure, similar to early PC games like Zork (These parts of the game feature some of the most beautifully-written passages I have ever seen from within a video game). Some parts of the game feel like an RPG, with a system of leveling up and improving skills, but even then the gameplay simultaneously feels like a hack n' slash action game.

The real showstopper though has to be Nier's incredible soundtrack. With 43 songs on the official OST, over half of them feature vocals of one kind or another...all of which are in a language made to sound like futuristic versions of Gaelic, Portugese, Spanish, Italian, French, English and Japanese all swirled together into a lyrical stew. None of the songs have any true translation, but it is all because they are sung in a language that isn't supposed to exist yet. One of the most incredible songs in the soundtrack is a forlorn, beautiful track sung by one of the game's many colorful characters, Popola; it is called "Song of the Ancients", and it never ceases to send a chill down my spine knowing that the 'ancients' in the song's title are none other than us. Not one of us will ever be able to understand the music...but we know just by listening that it is the sad tale of our civilization, and how we were lost to the winds of time so many years ago. Have a listen!



Isn't it ethereal, and yet so strangely forlorn? It's...like passing on a prayer to those long gone, those who will never hear what you wished for them, and yet it is all that can be done. The last remnant of their memory embodied in a song, and echoed for all those who live on...

Gives me shivers every time I hear it! And that's just one song among MANY that are just...stunning. Try listening to "The Wretched Automations", or "Emil - Sacrifice", or even "Temple of Drifting Sands"; they're all flat-out excellent, in my opinion.

The music is beautiful, some of my favorite of the entire year in fact, but that doesn't mean Nier doesn't still have some problems; which contributed heavily towards the negative critical reception that Nier gathered, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post. Many critics couldn't stand the gameplay structure, such as this quote from Gamespot's Nier review: "This dreary action role-playing game has its worthwhile moments, but they're separated by countless hours of fetch-quest tedium.". A few other critics, such as this one from the New York Times, had something positive to say: "Incredibly, Nier even forces the player to read. Some of the game’s most powerful moments are presented simply as white text on a black screen. In the context of a medium in which almost everything is displayed visually, these prose segments in the form of memories and dreams ignite the imagination and lend the overall experience a rare depth. No game I have played since 1999’s Planescape: Torment has made such effective use of textual storytelling.". I would tend to agree with this, really; the text sections truly are beautiful and effective, showcasing some of the best writing I've seen in a long, long time. Still, it shows just how mixed the feelings were on Nier. It should be fairly obvious which side of the debate I stand on.

Nier is a flawed, but beautiful game; I'm proud to say I own it and have beaten it twice. I have my friend Kevin to thank for the willingness to dig for a hidden jewel, and find that rare, unappreciated gem hidden away out of sight, destined to get almost none of the respect it deserves. It's a true shame then, that after Nier was released, Cavia was disbanded and absorbed by its parent company, AQ Interactive. Nier was their last hurrah, and to leave on such a beautiful and thought-provoking final note is perhaps the best way to go...but even so, those who played Nier and loved it for what it was will be saddened they had to go.

Oh, and as a final note, if you took a look at the "Song of the Ancients" video above, you might be wondering why there are two versions of the game; Nier Replicant and Nier Gestalt. Nier Replicant is the original version, released only in Japan, in which Nier (the father) and Yonah were brother and sister, not father and daughter. Nier was a much younger character, with a completely different design in the Replicant version, and the developers at Cavia thought American audiences would not be as receptive to such a young character. Because of this, they decided to make a version of the game called Nier Gestalt, which featured a tougher, older protagonist who was looking to cure his daughter. Nier Replicant was only released on the Japanese PS3, while Nier Gestalt was released on the Japanese XBox 360, and was also ported to the American and European PS3 and 360. Take a look at the picture below to see just how radical the character changes were for the two versions!

Save Your Progress?

Video games these days are HUGE. They really can take an amazingly large amount of your time to complete, and some of them I'll just turn up my nose and laugh at the mere concept of completing them. But that's not a bad thing; I love to play a game I can't finish, simply because it feels like I got my money's worth from them. Case in point? Fallout: New Vegas. New game, but it would probably take anybody over a hundred, maybe two hundred hours to see everything. I intend on stretching that out as long as I possibly can, to enjoy the sights of a post-apocalyptic Nevada and really feel like I'm living in the world.

The very reason we can have games this big, however, is in the design of the save game system. It's an old concept by now, but in the earliest days of the video game industry, saving your game was unheard of; it was seen as unnecessary, or even a strange privilege that you don't really deserve to have by some game developers.

The earliest video games were single-screen affairs, designed where each screen was a different level; level 1 was blue, level 2 was green, and had a different layout. Donkey Kong was like this, for instance; each level was just a different challenge for "Jump Man" (Who would later become known as Mario) to overcome, in order to save the princess at the top. Did this game need a save system? Nope! Why would it? Most of the challenge in the game is simply surviving the early levels so that you can climb to the upper levels, and being able to save the game in this instance was not only impractical from a gameplay perspective, but it was something that game developers hadn't even figured how to tap into yet. Why should they have? Arcade games weren't designed to keep you there for hours; they were designed for you to be able to feed some quarters into the machine, and keep you challenged for a few minutes at a time until either your pockets were empty, or you got the highest score.

When the Nintendo Entertainment System was released in America in 1985, video games began to take on a new meaning and dimension. The design philosophy shifted (albeit very slowly) from the arcade mindset, and began to realize that a gamer sitting on the couch at home wanted to be entertained for a longer period of time. That was one major reason why games like Super Mario Bros. were so popular; they not only were longer, but they encouraged discovery and exploration. You could spend minutes or hours beating Super Mario Bros., just finding all the warp zones and hidden 1-up mushrooms, or racing as fast as you could to the finish. It was all up to you, really. Even then, Super Mario Bros. was set up as the kind of game that did not require saving. Half the fun was derived from getting as far as you could, and yet the game was not actually long enough for it to truly be a nuisance when you died, and the Game Over screen heralded your return to the very beginning.

As games became longer, their challenge never quite waning, developers began to picture your average gamer getting frustrated at the concept of playing a long, difficult game, and being unable to finish it because of the combination of length and difficulty. Thus came the advent of the password.

It was simple, really; put in the right combination of letters and numbers, and the game would allow you to jump to a higher level from the beginning of the game. It was a crude, rudimentary system of "saving" the game, but it at least made it possible to begin from level 50 in Bubble Bobble, for instance.

One of the earliest games on the NES to use a password system was Kid Icarus, and this password system was not used as a cheat to jump ahead, but rather as a genuine attempt to let the player save progress. After dying, the game would present the player with a 24-digit password that, when written down and entered into the game's Password screen upon bootup, would allow the gamer to start right from the point that they died. It was seen as revolutionary at the time, and yet by today's standards, we can't help but wonder what they were thinking with how this sytem was implemented.

Passwords are meant to continue the game after the game has been turned off, and yet Kid Icarus, like almost any other early game that used a password, actually forced the player to input the password in order to continue, even if the game hadn't been turned off. You die, the game gives you a 24-digit password that will take FOREVER to put back in, and the game will then go back to the title screen, where you can choose to start over fresh, or put in the password you were just given. If the passwords were intended as a way to continue the game after the game was turned off, then why do they force you to put it in anyway, even if you intend to keep playing? These passwords took an eternity to enter, and some of them, like the oft-maligned NES title Deadly Towers, actually enforced a TIME LIMIT on entering them. That sure sounds like fun! Typing in a 30-character password with a 40 second time limit?

This is just bad design, really. A good idea...but implemented poorly. I mean look at this screenshot from the NES version of Rambo, and imagine yourself typing this in every time you died. You have to ask yourself, "Is it really necessary to have a full set of upper and lower case letters, along with numbers AND punctuation marks??" That is a 32-character password system, and if you accidentally type even one letter wrong, the entire thing is erased, forcing you to start over again. I have to wonder; what in the hell were they thinking?

The first game to get it right, however, used a then-new technology to get things done, and in the process it helped to define what a save game system would be from then up until the present day. Enter The Legend of Zelda, a golden behemoth of beautifully-designed gameplay magnificance from the minds of the men who brought you Super Mario, Donkey Kong, Metroid, and a host of other favorites.

In 1986, The Legend of Zelda was released, and it was a gigantic adventure for the time. Nine sprawling, animal-shaped dungeons contained fragments of the legendary Triforce, and when combined they have the power to defeat the tyrant Ganon, rescue the princess of Hyrule, Zelda, and restore peace to the land.

The developers must have wondered how any sane person would be able to tackle such a huge, puzzle-filled adventure and actually be able to finish it in one sitting, and wisely concluded that it just wasn't going to happen. At the time, there was no internet for people to be able to look up solutions to the game's puzzles, or the locations of all the game's items and dungeons, and such information was passed almost exclusively via word of mouth. All of that had to be found manually, and that took a considerable amount of time to do! The game needed a real, genuine save system, and there were just too many variables (Amount of money, what items you did and did not find, what dungeons were and weren't completed, etc) to include a password system. Their solution was to use a "battery backup" system, which at the time just blew our minds.

How did it work? In other games, bits and pieces of information the game would use (Such as how many arrows you are holding, or how many enemies you killed in the last room you were inside of, for instance) were stored on the game's RAM. When you turned the console off, the power supply to the RAM would also shut off, and all information stored on the RAM would then be lost. To counter for this, other game makers would store the game's passwords permanently onto the game's ROM, which is where all of the permanent data for the game was stored. When powered off, the ROM would not lose its data. The solution the designers of Zelda came up with was to include a small, flat watch battery on the inside of the game's cartridge (Which you can see in the image above), that would provide a small amount of power to the game's RAM, where the game would store data used in loading a saved game, even after the game had been shut off. Thus, the saved game had been born...and it was revolutionary.

After the saved game had come, games gradually began to get longer, and longer...and helped to drive a bigger and bigger wedge between console-type games and arcade-type games. Games became lengthy adventures that could be stopped and started at will, and the games therefore became more complex and intricade. The ability to save the game enabled developers to create more engrossing titles, from RPG's like Final Fantasy where saving your game was a critical necessity, to adventure titles that could take weeks to explore completely.

Of course as time went on, the technology changed and the saving of games had to evolve along with the times. With the advent of CD-based games came memory cards (Like the PS2 memory card to the left), small pieces of memory that were inserted into a system and used to keep game save records. By now, even those have been rendered obsolete by technology that crosses over to other formats, the compatability for different machines differentiated only by filetype, rather than by hardware. I can, for instance, put a USB drive into my PS3, transfer all of my save data onto it, and place it onto my computer. From there, I can copy the data, share the data with my friends, burn the data to a CD to store for when I need it, etc. With game save data like Zelda, however...well, batteries don't live forever; it is very rare to find a copy of The Legend of Zelda for NES with the battery still able to hold a charge. The result is that most copies of Zelda can no longer actually save your game, unless you were to crack the cartridge open and solder in a new battery. Even if you do, there is no way that I know of to be able to remove the save data directly from an NES cartridge and save it somewhere that it won't get lost.

With how ubiquitous the saved game has gotten in recent times, the ability to save has overcome technological hurdles to actually become a part of the way you play the game. A case in point where the save system can become a part of the gameplay is in the Dead Rising series, with Dead Rising 2 having just recently been released on the PS3 and 360. In Dead Rising, both 1 and 2, the character you play as has just three days in a locked-in environment (A shopping mall in the first game, and a casino city in the second) to figure out a conspiracy theory, and rescue as many people as possible from thousands upon thousands of zombies during a zombie outbreak. The thing is, it is impossible to actually do all of this in one run; you must make very careful use of the game's save system in order to do this. In Dead Rising 1, you only have a single save slot to take advantage of, and in Dead Rising 2 you have three. You have to save the game by visiting a bathroom and relieving yourself, which in itself is a creative approach...but the real interesting thing is that at any point in time, you can restart the game from the very beginning, but with all of your current experience points, skill points, items, and abilities carried over into the new game. The result is that each time you play the game from the beginning, you are more capable to actually survive the three days, and get more things done in the short time you are given.

Dead Rising, interestingly enough, is one part of a curious dichotomy that has arisen between Japanese-developed and Western-developed games; their save game systems are different. The way it was during the Super Nintendo era, when all of the greatest games were coming out of Japan, is that save games were handled with the usage of a save game spot. You had to guide your character to one of a number of specific spots in the game, that were considered "safe". There were all kinds of different kinds of save points, such as a colorful box with the letter S on it like in Super Mario RPG (pictured above), telephones in offices or in utility closets in Parasite Eve, or even the lone and singular save point in the apartment "hub" area in Silent Hill 4. Japanese games have even integrated strategic saving, such as in the Resident Evil series, where saving the game was handled through the use of "ink ribbons". You had to find ink ribbons, and there were only so many of these ribbons in the game. These ink ribbons would then be used on typewriters in safe rooms, and one ink ribbon would let you save your game one time. Saving your game in Resident Evil was something you could only do a finite amount of times, and those ink ribbons would end up becoming a valuable commodity.

The part where that dichotomy I mentioned comes in, is that Western-developed games emphasize more freedom in their save game design. The game Fallout: New Vegas (pictured) that I had mentioned at the beginning of this article will let you simply open the pause menu at ANY POINT in the game, and save the game. That exact moment in time will be frozen, and can be recalled whenever you like. Worried about what might be around the corner, or worried that you might do something you didn't intend on doing in the game? Save the game beforehand, and if you find out you made a mistake, just load up the game and fix your mistakes. There are no save points, because literally any point in the game can be saved at. The other common way the game is saved is based on a checkpoint auto-save system, used primarily in story-driven games (Like Halo, Call of Duty, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, etc) where the game will automatically keep your game saved as you progress further along. If you manage to get to a checkpoint, your game will be saved, and if you die, then you are brought back to the nearest checkpoint. You can, of course, also restart at the nearest checkpoint in the pause menu if you feel you've messed something up.

The really fascinating thing with this difference in save game systems is that it reveals the differences in Western individualistic and Eastern collectivistic thought processes. In Japan, you are told where and how you can save. It is controlled for you, and the developers worry about giving the player too much freedom as to where and how you are able to save your progress. In Western games, the save systems allow for freedom and room to breathe; you are able to dictate when is a good time to save your progress, because you are ultimately the one who wants to have fun in the way you choose to. If you want to make things hard on yourself by only saving while in a town, then you can do that. If you want to make things easier by saving whenever you think there may be trouble up ahead, you can.

In the end, there are advantages and disadvantages to both styles of saving, but the end result is that we all have a great time playing lengthy games, and are able to live our lives without worrying about how much we're driving up the electric bill by keeping the system on while we go to school or work. And thankfully, we don't have to keep reams of note pads and waste gallons of ink writing down inane and ridiculously long passwords every time we make a mistake.

I can only hope that more games make innovative use of save game systems, like the Japanese-developed Metal Gear Solid. Did you know that there is a point in Metal Gear Solid 3 where, if you save the game and then boot the game back up, you are treated to a "deleted scene" in a video game that never finished production, shoehorned into Metal Gear Solid 3 as an easter egg called "Snake's Nightmare"? I love things like that!

The real point here is that the way you save the game can provide some seriously interesting wrinkles in the fabric of what makes a game fun or frustrating; it's all in how you interact with the game, and how it adapts to your life in the real world. Sometimes, the thing that makes all the difference is how we are allowed decide when we don't want to play anymore, even for just a little while.

Design in Fear

It's almost Halloween, meaning almost everywhere you look, you can see discussions and reminiscing of the things that scare us most. Being a psych major, the subject of fear has a special place in my heart. Why do we enjoy it so much? The subject has been covered at length before, and the short version of it is that we love it because we get a high off the fight or flight response. That's great, but not exactly what this blog is about. How fear is CREATED, though? Now that's the question.

Fear is a product of design, short and simple; it is the result of careful planning on the part of the developer, and the strings of emotion can be plucked in an amazingly varied number of ways by sound designers, level creators, writers, and the other parts of the development crew. It is a concerted, focused effort that can either work to a terrifyingly effective degree, or flop like a fish on a pier.

Fear is an intensely personal thing; what makes us afraid is dictated by what we ourselves are afraid of. Fears can manifest themselves in anything that carries a negative memory or experience, but those aren't the kinds of fears that video games tend to try tapping into. Instead, video games tap into what human beings as a whole are scared of. Darkness, loneliness, helplessness, lack of experience or preparation, and what horrible things lurk just beyond our realm of understanding. What is through that door? I have no idea; it could be anything! The imagination runs wild as it tries to fill in the blanks, and the mind is always preparing itself subconsciously for the worst of outcomes...and that is exactly how a video game can generate fear.

When I think of games that scare me, I tend to look towards one of my favorite game franchises, Konami's "Silent Hill" series.

Perhaps one of the most fascinating things about the Silent Hill games is how different the fear evoked by them actually is from, say, a movie. Movies can evoke dread, they can raise the hairs on your neck and give you a JOLT as that unexpected thing pops into the screen, and you feel scared for the people you're watching. There's the suspense of wondering what will happen next, and having no way to know but to keep watching, and to feel helpless at whatever outcome plays out before your eyes. But through it all....it is entirely passive. You watch the movie, things happen in the movie, and you are powerless to change it. On top of that, as I had noted before, you feel scared only for the people you are watching, and after the credits roll, are thankful that the same thing didn't happen to YOU.

In a video game, none of this is the case. Let's take Silent Hill, for example.

Silent Hill 1, for the PlayStation 1, follows the story of Harry Mason as he searches for his daughter, Cheryl, in the resort town of Silent Hill after having gotten into a car accident. Something is obviously wrong with the town; it is covered by a fog that obscures anything more than 10 feet away, there is no electricity, and there are no people. The entire town is completely dead, and the only sound that can be heard is the echo of your own footsteps. As you try in vain to search for Harry's daughter, you find a huge bloodstain leading into an alley, as if someone were dragged. Gathering your wits, you follow it...following along into the darkening alley as a piercing air raid siren cuts through the silence, extinguishing the daylight and seeming to summon an unearthly rain. You pull out your lighter...the tiny flame barely able to light an area more than three feet around you, and you can only proceed further and further into the alley...not quite sure why the blood is getting thicker on the ground, to the point where all you hear is the pounding of the rain and the squelching beneath your feet as the ground is littered with chunks of bloodied meat of some kind. You notice there are hospital stretchers and overturned wheelchairs lining the walls, humanoid shapes obscured by bloodied sheets that cover the stretchers...and then you can see the walls give way to a tangled maze of bloodied barbed wire...and then before you, the ensnared and nigh-mummified corpse of a man held up above the alley, in the same position as Jesus on the cross. The music, having been either nonexistant or low and groaning before that point, spikes in a demented crescendo of dissonance and metallic clangs that are suddenly punctuated with the sounds of something sneaking up behind you. And that's when you are grabbed from behind by what look like mummified children wielding scalpels. You have no weapons, you have no way out...you can only watch as they overwhelm you, and kill you.

That is the first ten minutes of Silent Hill 1.

That exact scene is the culmination of a number of different elements strung together by the developers, all designed to unsettle and frighten the player. Even the smallest of elements (The silence, the loneliness, the oddness of the situation) is enough to get beneath the skin and stay put, refusing to go away. The sensation of tumbling down some kind of hellish rabbit hole while feeling your way through the alley is so incredibly palpable, because it is not Harry Mason that is doing the tumbling; it is YOU. You control Harry, you tell him where to go and what to look at...and if he dies, it is because you put him in that situation. It is because if you were Harry, you would also have died.

The interactive nature of a video game means that instead of passively watching a series of events unfold, you instead are forced to experience them. Have you ever seen a scary movie in which you thought to yourself "Don't go in there! He's gonna get you!!", or something to that effect? There is no helping it; the movie will go on no matter how much you wish it wouldn't, and bad things will happen with you having no say or input whatsoever. In a game, the tables are turned and you are instead forced into the situation of having no choice but to push onward, no matter how awful the situation continues to get. How do you survive, when there literally is no way back? Keep pressing forward...and endure it.

There are many other ways a game like Silent Hill can present fear by manipulating the variables in a situation, and that brings me to another one that I had mentioned; the oddness of the situation.

Have you ever seen something that just...didn't make sense? It felt so odd, so out of place, that it unsettles you...and makes you feel like what is happening cannot possibly be an accident or coincidence. Something like this freakish two-headed baby demon, pointing a deformed finger at you, staring at you even though its eyes are closed. (This is a monster that you encounter MANY times in Silent Hill 4: The Room, and before attacking, it stands exactly in this posture.)

Silent Hill 2 for the PlayStation 2 is what truly exemplifies this method of scaring the player though, in a particular section of the game that, to this day, I absolutely HATE to play.

Silent Hill 2 follows James Sunderland, an unassuming man who received a letter from his wife, asking him to come to Silent Hill, to find her at their "special place". The problem is that James' wife had been dead for three years. That right there is enough to feel that oddness of the situation, but Silent Hill 2 is not content to leave it there.

At one point in the game, James is forced to enter the "Silent Hill Historical Society" building, a glimpse into the history of the town itself where the player can see how Silent Hill had formerly been the site of an American Civil War POW camp, as well as a center of occult activity in the years before then. That's when you see it; an impossibly long staircase that looks ripped into the wall, that leads right into another of those rabbit hole from hell scenarios...only this one is longer. Much longer. The staircase feels like it leads into hell itself, the end nowhere in sight, as a sound that can only be described as a hollow, solemn death horn sounds again, and again, and again...and faster and faster, as you descend the never-ending staircase. And then, finally, there is a rickety wooden door, that leads you into a full three to four hours of falling ever deeper into the maw of madness that is Silent Hill's dark underbelly.

You come across a long-abandoned prison buried hundreds of feet underground...but then you have to go beneath that. You then find yourself in the corpse disposal chute used by the prison in the days of the Civil War, still stocked to the brim with ancient and silent corpses. You jump down the corpse chute, and end up in a sewer labyrinth. You go through the labyrinth, finding a hallway that looks as if it were ripped from the prison you had just traversed, only that it had been turned on its side. Your only way forward is to jump into the sideways hallway, falling and falling, winding up in another hole in the ground that leads to a floorless prison cell. Jump in, feeling like you have to be thousands of feet beneath the surface by now....only somehow, the next area appears to be outside, in a small enclosed area. It is raining, and you can see that it looks like the small, near-forgotten area is a strange makeshift cemetary. One of the grave markers is sat in front of an open grave, only the grave itself looks like a bottomless pit. On the marker is written "Here Lies James Sunderland". You have to jump into your own grave (As seen in the picture above). Down, down you go...further down, taking an industrial elevator further down...then winding your way through an empty, newspaper-plastered labyrinth that makes no physical sense, hunted down by a physical manifestation of guilt and punishment the whole way (Who happens to be Pyramid Head, the subject of the picture just below!), forced to watch a doppelganger of James' wife die for the second time in the game, and then....it goes ON AND ON.

The game *DOES NOT* let up! There's even more after that, and each and every little moment of it forces you to feel like the situation cannot possibly get any worse, and yet it does. The entire time, every area you visit is pitch black. There is barely any music; just silence and white noise. The smallest sound makes your heart pound. At one point in the sewer labyrinth, the game even traps you in a small room with a key you need to progress further, kills your flashlight (The one and only source of light and safety you have), and forces you to change the battery. Once the flashlight comes back on, you find that the entire room is flooded with insects that are slowly killing you, unless you can guess the 3-digit code to unlock the way out.

This entire scene, from the moment James enters the Historical Society until the time he finds himself back outside on the shores of Lake Toluca, is a descent into a psychological hell. It doesn't even exist, as confirmed by the game's developers, but it is intended to be a gigantic storytelling device, all giving no subtle hint that the man you play as has done something terrible...something he has repressed, that he feels guilty for, and that the town of Silent Hill itself is punishing him for his crime.

To this day, I am stunned and even humbled at the symphony of fear that Silent Hill 2 in particular is able to conjure. The game knows what scares you, and not in a corny way that sends "chills down your spine", or "keeps you on the edge of your seat", or any of those other tired phrases used in the film industry to show how frightening something is. Silent Hill 2 is genuinely terrifying, because it pulls no punches. It portrays a horrible, depraved scene obscured by darkness and fog, forcing your mind to expand on what could be just out of sight, and then it pulls the rug out from your feet when you least expect it, to show you something true about yourself.

The antithesis of Silent Hill, and of fear in gaming as a whole, can actually be personified by horror gaming's other, more prominent poster child, Resident Evil....although it didn't start that way. Let me explain, in brief.

Resident Evil is the brainchild of developer Capcom, released in Japan under the name "Biohazard". The series plumbs the depths of more physical horror, complete with cheesy (But enjoyable!) storyline and oodles of zombies and other mutant abominations that want nothing more than to kill you.

Resident Evil gave the horror video game genre its mainstream kick start, although it was by no means the first scary video game ever created (Horror games go back much further, with games like 7th Guest, I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, and Alone in the Dark on PC). The games originally held up their fear factor by depriving the player of resources, a great tactic to keep a guy like me from actually finishing any of the earliest games; it was truly terrifying to be surrounded by enemies, to only have five puny pistol bullets in your clip, and no healing items. It brought that feeling of helplessness and powerlessness front and center, and ensured that the game was truly a terrifying ordeal, even if the games never did attempt to get inside your head and scare you in the darkest and deepest of places like Silent Hill did.

As the series went on, even though the games remained of a very high quality, the actual fear generated from Resident Evil games began to take a back seat to action.

I have no problem whatsoever with a good action game, and the fact is that the Resident Evil games make GREAT action games...but the cost of all that action is the fact that while playing them, you no longer feel helpless. You could be up against a hundred zombies, or mutants, or whatever else the games throw at you, and not feel a single iota of fear, because you're the heavily-muscled man with the enormous machine gun and sniper rifle. You want a zombie gone? All you do is point your gun and squeeze the trigger; you feel like you have something to rely on, even when things go from bad to worse.

Resident Evil 5 is the most recent game, and the one in which the fear has essentially been removed from the experience. You have a partner with you throughout the entire game (The lovely Sheva Alomar, no less), you have an arsenal of high-powered, customizable and upgradeable weaponry, and you have a LOT of ammo. As long as you persevere, nothing can stand in your way. Add to this that most of the game takes place in broad daylight, in the bright sun of an Africa besieged by parasite-infected humans known as "manjini". Fun? Absolutely. Scary? Not one bit.

Compare this to Silent Hill 3, for instance. Silent Hill 3, you play as an ordinary teenaged girl named Heather who is simply trying to get home to her father. She has no experience whatsoever with a gun, she isn't very strong, and she can't move very well. Silent Hill 2 has the exact same thing going on; James Sunderland is only an ordinary man, with no combat experience at all. His first weapon is a plank of wood with some rusty nails lodged in one end. Resident Evil 5, on the other hand, places you in the shoes of a man with biceps bigger than my head, who at one point wields a minigun. Who would YOU feel safer playing as? Easy choice.

The point of all of this is that fear is a nuanced and fragile thing that relies entirely on a game being able to provide a sense of insecurity to the player, and all of this is done through design.

Using the same kinds of principles, a game designer can evoke ANY kind of emotion, from elation and joy to depression and worry. I haven't even really gotten into all of the ways a developer can inject all of these emotions into the software, from level design to music, to use of white noise and silence, and even to small things like puzzle design. There's so much ground to cover!

So for this Halloween, if you REALLY want to scare yourself, go and pick up a game! I guarantee you, the experience will be one you aren't likely to forget, and while you play, take a moment to appreciate the work that goes into making these things as frightening as they can often be. It's tough work, but they have pulled it off in a beautiful way that never ceases to amaze me.

For a little help, here's a list of games I recommend for this Halloween if you'd like to scare your pants off!

-Silent Hill 1 (PS1), 2, 3, or 4 (PS2)

-Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly (PS2)

-Condemned: Criminal Origins (360) or Condemned 2: Bloodshot (PS3, 360)

-F.E.A.R. 2 (PS3, 360)

-Dead Space (PS3, 360)

-Demon's Souls (PS3)

-SIREN: Blood Curse (PlayStation Network)

Happy Halloween!!


And as a bonus, I have here a short documentary on Silent Hill 2, called "Alchemists of Emotion". Enjoy! It's an intriguing look into the people who make these games possible, the ones whose jobs it is to scare you, and to make you think...