What’s the best way to get rid of a bothersome fly? It’s one of the first questions asked by Scribblenauts, the DS game that grants its player access to a dictionary of more than 30,000 nouns with which to solve puzzles. Type the word “Swat” into the game’s dialogue box and a sketchpad representation of the object will ping onto the screen, ready and prepped to squish the insect.
If pushed for an alternative answer, you might try, ‘Insect Repellent’ to shoo the fly away, or perhaps ‘Turd’ to lure it elsewhere instead. And herein lies the genius of this extraordinary database: where the vast majority of games give us a handful of tools with which to solve their conundrums, Scribblenauts offers solutions as wide and deep as our own imaginations. It’s a subtle yet seismic shift: a game that, rather than focusing on what you do with your tools, simply asks which you want to use, chosen from a catalogue of everything.
And yet, the disappointment is that many of the game’s tasks lack invention, posing somewhat vanilla, mundane tasks for you to complete: eliminate the fly, fetch a bouquet of flowers, tidy up the rubbish, make a packed lunch.
This is just one of the reasons that Scribblenauts, which is in at least one-way revolutionary, has received a somewhat lukewarm response from critics and consumers alike. While the technology is a sort of irresistible witchcraft, the application is often dry routine. It’s like someone gave you the power to move mountains and then forced you to spend all day shunting shopping trolleys around Tesco’s car park.
But play the game with an imaginative child, and wide-angle concerns over mission structure melt away, as the true and dizzying wonder of the game’s conceit is unlocked. When I asked my daughter, who’s too young to read, how we should get rid of the fly, she thought for a moment before tentatively suggesting we create a frog. Frogs eat flies, ergo they are an excellent way to get rid of a fly, went her sound logic.
But there was a problem: the fly, hovering in the air, was out of the frog’s reach. Before I could even suggest we summon a chair or stepladder with which to raise the frog upwards, she jumped in with a suggestion: “A trampoline! Give the frog a trampoline”.
In a sense, a child, by definition, shrinks Scribblenauts’ scope. The game’s potential solutions are necessarily limited by vocabulary, so players with a smaller vocabulary have fewer options open to them. But, free of the dry, efficient logic of adulthood, a child’s imagination also opens the game up in ways beyond most adults’ reach.
Most games demand expertise for success, their richest rewards reserved for those who invest time into developing skills and technique. By contrast, Scribblenauts reserves its richest rewards for those who can devolve their expertise, unravelling the tightly wound habit of always seeking out the quickest, most efficient solution to a problem.
It asks that we all rediscover a sense of childlike inquisitiveness rewarding those who play with the game, rather than merely try to solve it. Through that lens, the normality of tasks heightens the thrill of discovering leftfield solutions, rather than diminishing it.
As the frog pogo’ed up and down, bouncing rigid and absurd on the trampoline, we laughed together as long and as hard as we ever have. The frog stared out at us, unblinking, springing up and down, uninterested in the meal that was now well within its tongue’s slimy grasp. Who could blame it? It had a trampoline.
I have no idea how something like this gets funded. Perhaps Nike has a pot of money set aside specifically for abstract, stylish but ultimately niche animations in the hope they are linked to and embedded on sites such as this one*.
Still, I have no qualms posting the video here as the light advertising does nothing to diminish to impact of the work it’s attached to. James Jarvis and Richard Kenworthy’s art and animation is superlative, the gait and rhythm of a runner so perfectly captured you wonder if the whole thing wasn’t motion-captured. Set to Caribou’s Crayon, it’s a joyful celebration of middle-distance running that sells the sport just as effectively as it sells the shoe.
*Update: Tom points outs that this Creative Review article answers a few of those questions.
The field is empty. It is night. There are no paper clips, tin soldiers, scraps of sushi, teddy bears, bicycles or classical guitars to roll up here. Instead, a lone man sits at a bench, straining through the gloom to read a book.
Hills roll off into the distance around him, their shape and form suggested by ten thousand pinpricks of light: lantern fireflies bobbing in a silence unbroken by the flitting of their tiny, spastic wings. Your Katamari rocks in the breeze as YMCK strike up a mournful chiptune ballad. The wind sighs and the reeds bow their heads in sympathy. Then, just as you begin to feel lost in an absurdist joke, the King of all Cosmos pops into frame and, in his stoner/child patois, begins to explain.
One week earlier, when showing off how high he could jump, the king bumped his head on an asteroid, in doing so clouding his memories. It’s in one of these half-rememberings (first seen in the second game, ‘We love Katamari’) that you find yourself now. “Look, someone studying having trouble reading…” the king says, pointing to the man on the bench.
“We can’t remember, so he can’t see,” he ponders before exclaiming, “Metaphor!” at his unintentional cleverness. “Zip the lit crit…” he rebukes himself, next delivering the mission briefing: “Make glowing Katamari with fireflies. Help him = help us. Ah! The power of metaphors.” The task established, you start rolling up the bright insects. Deliver the resulting ball of light to the reader within three minutes and he will be able to see and the King’s memory will be restored. Metaphor!
The Katamari series is ripe with metaphor. From the almost impossible to please father figure (or is he a god?) of King of All Cosmos to the very act of rolling up humanity’s detritus and firing it into space, the game’s messages are manifold. But, in this celebration of the series to date (in Japan the game’s known as ‘Katamari Tribute’), you wonder if the original, clearest message has been broken forever.
You see, for all the silliness, Katamari Damacy was at heart a didactic condemnation of the developed world’s rampant consumerism. Takahashi never wanted to make another Katamari game. Not only had his point been made elegantly by the first game, but also the core idea had been fully explored, its sequence of levels moving from rolling up the tiniest of objects in a Tokyo bedsit, to finally absorbing countries themselves in the bombastic endgame.
So Katamari Forever, by virtue of its existence, is a conflicted product. It’s a game that decries consumerism but which is itself riding a consumerist bandwagon alongside spin-off albums, hipster T-shirts and colourful merchandise, all of which clutter yet further the world it came, in its own kooky way, to save.
“Metaphor!” as the King of All Cosmos might shout before pointing out that the above paragraph is the same size as 46 antelopes and telling us to ‘zip it with the lit crit’. And fair enough because, for a great many players, the mixed message is as invisible as it is irrelevant.
For these players, answers to questions such as: ‘Does the game fix the camera issues of its Xbox 360 predecessor?’ and ‘How do the six-axis controls integrate with what was already a finely-balanced scheme?’ are far more pressing. Moreover, it may be a little unfair to burden Katamari Forever’s evidently conscientious creators with philosophical criticism. After all, taken as a raw product, their game is a fulsome celebration of what’s gone before, and while it may not surpass its inspiration, it certainly throws a good party in its name.
I once asked Final Fantasy producer Yoshinori Kitase why so many of his games revolve around adolescents. Surely, for those gamers in their late twenties and thirties who have grown up with the series, an older protagonist would have more resonance than Square-Enix’s typical angsty teenage hero? Moreover, aren’t stories that revolve around young people just a bit limited and tiresome for middle-aged game makers?
Not so, Kitase countered. The adolescent is the perfect game hero. The journey that a player undertakes in learning and mastering a game’s systems, advancing from novice to proficiency, exactly mirrors the transition from childhood to adulthood. What better candidate could there possibly be for the lead role in any videogame?
It’s a point of view that Policenauts, with a cast almost entirely over the age of 45, contests. But then, designer and producer Hideo Kojima has never been afraid to use maturity as a lens through which younger players can experience his games. Kojima’s most recent creation, Metal Gear Solid 4, starred a man in his forties with a premature-ageing disease that made appear like a man in his seventies.
Policenauts might be, first and foremost a thriller, a detective story – with all of the Miss Marple-style trappings you’d expect. But beneath the surface it’s a game about middle age. It features characters who have played most of the cards life has dealt them, who have been through a career and a marriage or two, and who, in most cases, have reconciled themselves to maturity’s colder bedfellow: cynicism. In filtering our view through this world-weary perspective, Kojima taps a stream of human experience largely untouched by the gaming medium. The result is mesmerising.
It starts with a girl, of course. Jonathan Ingram, a member of the L.A.P.D., married Lorraine, a student from UCLA, on 24th August, 2009 according to the date stamp on the framed Polaroid on his desk (the same day, it should be noted, as the release of the English fan-translation patch that has, 15 years on, facilitated this belated review). Their marriage was hot and happy until Ingram’s stationing on Beyond Coast, Earth’s first residential space colony, caused them to drift apart, figuratively and literally.
Ingram was a Policenaut, the name given to Beyond’s inaugural police force, consisting of the star players pooled from the NYPD, the LAPD, Scotland Yard, and the Tokyo Metropolitan police service. An accident on the space station saw Ingram disappear into space, cryogenically frozen by his protective suit, till his body was recovered and revived 25 years later.
In those intervening years the world moved on; Lorraine re-married and bore a daughter. Ingram returned to America, eking out a living as a private detective, taking on ad hoc jobs trailing adulterers, convicting petty fraudsters, whatever work he could take. Another three years pass, and then the game starts.
You learn all of this background information via the memorabilia that clutters Ingram’s desk in the opening stage of the game. This office, with its newspaper clippings, filing cabinets and cigarette stubs, houses his memories. Through it you acclimatise to the world and learn the game’s interface.
A sort of proto-point and click adventure, everything on Policenauts’ screen can be mined for information with a click of the cursor. Almost all of the game’s dialogue is voiced, so the level of detail built into the world is astonishing. Click on an object and Ingram will wax lyrical on its meaning and context. Click on it again and, rather than parroting the information again, he’ll elaborate, warming to his subject like an observant author. Kojima’s obsessive-compulsive attention to detail is writ large in these descriptions, which expand like ripples from an inquisitive stone dropped into water.
‘I’m beginning to resent Coppola’s subtly fascistic dictatorship over our travel experience.’ On visiting Tokyo post-Lost in Translation. She’s exactly right. I wonder when that effect will wear off?
Batman branches out into catching pirates. “It’s not a bug in the game’s code, it’s a bug in your moral code.”
“It’s worse than becoming one of them. He’s one of them pretending to be one of us” John Walker nails the dark side of Derren Brown’s reveal on Channel 4 last night.
Kurt Vonnegut explains our need for drama. Read this. (Btw, Vonnegut’s totally wrong. Everyday I go through the Cinderella story arc BEFORE I EAT MY CORNFLAKES)
A sort of melodic scribblepad, iNudge allow users to jot down their musical ideas on a proto-8-track sequencer. By limiting the available notes to a set scale, everything fits with everything else, so that even the least musical amongst us can feel tuneful and smart within minutes.
Of course, push a little and you’ll find its limitations to be tight and restrictive. With just 16 steps in the sequencer, the most you can create is a one bar phrase of music that loops forever. But as an introduction to multitrack sequencing, the interface is intuitive. There are knobs to adjust each instrument’s volume and stereo pan and you can set the .bpm, just enough breadth to ensure one person’s idea sounds distinct from another’s.
iNudge’s boasts a nerd fashionable choice of samples, which enable everyone to sound a little like CFCF without having to trawl through copious synth libraries. Finally, the chance to embed your creations and post direct share links with friends makes this a communal endeavour.
I asked my friends on Twitter to have a go and here’s what some of them came up with.
(NOTE: This article was first published in November 2008 and is republished here to coincide with the DC’s US release, ten years ago today)
This week marks the tenth anniversary of Sega Dreamcast’s Japanese launch, a console whose passing I mourn with a deep and enduring sense of loss.
What the platform lacked in profitable software it more than made up with bold innovation and pitch perfect ports of the latest arcade releases of the late 90’s and early 2000s.
This was the system on which Sega’s various development teams demonstrated unrestrained creativity and inventiveness. Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine any other system, past, preset or future, where an idea like Segagaga might blossom to market.
With that in mind the Dreamcast-branded canvas bag from GDC 2000 pictured above is pretty much the saddest thing. As an antidote to the half-truth tragedy of the bag’s slogan, here are ten of my favourite Dreamcast games. If you’ve never played them why not visit eBay this week and pick up a few. There’s no better time to investigate and celebrate one of gaming’s golden eras.
Jet Set Radio
Rollerskates, primary colour spraycans, and sugar-rush hip-hop, this is the game that birthed the cel-shading visual craze in gaming, one whose impact can be felt all the way up to tomorrow’s release of Prince of Persia.
It’s a crime game in that you terrorise the police with your street art, but this is a Children’s BBC and bubblegum brand of terrorism. And when you manage to chain together the architecture of Shibuya, jumping and sliding from rail to bus shelter to rooftop there’s a sense of flowing accomplishment that betters even the most slick and graceful moments in Mirror’s Edge.
You control a giant robot, ten pixels high who can deploy 1000 screen filling missiles at the touch of a button. Part puzzle game, part shoot ‘em up, part fruit machine, it boasts a vibrancy and strength of character rare to videogames.
Allegedly, Treasure’s Japanese team translated the game into English themselves. When the mangled Japlish script arrived at Western publisher Conspiracy Entertainment’s offices they thought it was so funny they decided to leave it unmodified.
Cosmic Smash
This is squash, as played in a Tron nano-universe. While Cosmic Smash bears many visual similarities to that other Dreamcast work of abstract wonder, Rez, it’s underlying mechanics are much closer to air hockey and Virtua Tennis than interactive Kandinsky.
The game is a marvel of graphical restraint, the uncluttered menus, metro system game structure and sense of purpose narrow and tight in a way few games can dare to be today.
Cool Cool Toon
Created by SNK, a developer best known for its grim and technical beat ‘em series, King of Fighters, Cool Cool Toon was an unexpected burst of saccharine J-pop kawaii-ness.
It shares a few similarities with the excellent rhythm action dance game, Bust a Groove, but the eccentric character designs and pink napalm colouring take it somewhere wholly distinct.
Crazy Taxi
Many of the Dreamcast’s games enjoyed follow-up sequels that developed and extended the core idea. But there’s a simplicity and purity in the first release of Crazy Taxi, a game in which you deliver passengers around a city against the clock, that was lost in subsequent iterations.
As the arcade scene chokes and dies in front of us, there’s a game design ideology of short, sharp bursts of intense fun being lost in favour of drawn out epics. Crazy Taxi is one of the very best examples of bright, short-form inventiveness.
Rez
A game that inspired me, for better or worse to write this. It’s an over-written, sometimes fawning appraisal of the experience, but I stand by it.
“Even if you do ignore all the peripheral highbrow talk of Russian abstract painters and neurological foibles or the lowbrow hand-muffled giggling about a third-party sex toy peripheral and its rhythmic pulsing, the strong, assured core of this extraordinary game is somehow more than its constituent parts.
Yes, you sit on an esoteric rollercoaster picking off line-art cubes as they streak by, but perform that kind of critical reduction and you’ll not only miss Rez’s destination but you’ll also ruin the journey. And in Rez, the journey is everything.”
Sega Bass Fishing
This is the kind of curio that foreshadowed much of the gimmicky appeal of the contemporary Wii library, but who can forget the first time they saw the clunky, white and orange fishing rod peripheral the game came bundled with.
Of course, execution is everything and while Sega’s bright and breezy interpretation of bass fishing bears little in common with its slow-paced inspiration, the game is all the better for it.
Samba de Amigo
Another good game made brilliant by its peripheral as evidenced by the recent lacklustre Wii remake. So much of the game’s appeal comes from the feel of the instrument in your hand, the way the beads sound in the room as their weight shifts forwards and back in time with your movements that removing that part of the experience would always irrevocably damage the experience.
That the maraca peripheral is so accurate is testament to Sega’s expertise with arcade hardware. That the rictus-grin monkey who shakes them on screen is so mesmerising is testament to Sega’s flamboyant, often iconic character designs of the time.
Ikaruga
There’s a possibility that I like the idea of Ikaruga more than the reality, but either way this is an important and impressive videogame made by an implausibly small team. At the time of its re-release onto XBLA earlier this year I wrote this of the game:
“While broadening the definition of the genre, Treasure has also then, in a sense, narrowed it. This is a game of relentless, near-clinical precision, built for repeat-repeat-repeat-till you-get-it play that it will stifle players who don’t fully commit to developing and perfecting a strategy. Seasoned shmup players are often lukewarm towards the game because you can’t simply fall back on sharp reflexes and instinct alone. Success takes planning and practice.
Whereas in Radiant Silvergun the colour-matching mechanics were totally optional, allowing the game to be played as a straight shoot-’em-up, here understanding and mastering the core idea is the key to success, a decision that splits the audience neatly in two: black, white, black, white.”
Shenmue
Earlier this week my friend David McCarthy referred to the “modest beauty of Shenmue’s routine”, a perfect summary of this Japanese life-sim/ murder mystery’s pace and ambiance. It is, of course, the first entry to a series that contributed to Sega’s bowing out of the console hardware race, it’s giant snowballing budget and ambition eventually outstripping all feasibility.
Nevertheless, this is a game that offers a extraordinary snapshot of a developer struggling to break free of gaming’s previous constraints and in doing so, helping to define the new ones.
This week marks the tenth anniversary of Sega Dreamcast’s Japanese launch, a console whose passing I mourn with a deep and enduring sense of loss. 
