Sun 26 Oct 2008
The Videogame Bends
By
Recently a friend mentioned that, when a novel grips him to the point that its world is the last thing he visits at night and the first thing he looks for in the morning, there needs to cooling off period when it’s finished.
This break acts as a kind of unwinding; a time to let the pressure and intensity of living in two different places at once dissipate, a time during which the thought of starting a new book is nauseating.
Climb into a story and the first thing you must do is acclimatise to its setting, tone, characters and rules. As such it’s only natural that when you eventually leave its boundaries there needs to be decompression.
This need for space between stories is something common to videogames. In games not only does a player (usually) have to get acclimatised to setting, tone, plot and ideas but also to a slew of invisible systems, those rules that govern the player’s engagement with the world.
Sink any amount of time into a videogame and you’re learning skills not only in the abstract space of your mind but also motor skills to link muscle inputs to on-screen outputs. You build an interactive vocabulary. Move too quickly from one game to the next and you’ll trip up, like a multilinguist moving too fast from one country to another, mixing-up their vocabularies in transit.
It’s something I’ve felt this weekend when moving from Fable 2 to Fallout 3. I completed the former at the start of the weekend and moved from Albion straight into Fallout’s post-apocalyptic America. The switch of setting from pastoral, fantasy land to barren, rubble strewn nuclear wasteland was jarring but that was nothing to the jolt of having to settle into to different ways of interacting with the world.
Two hours later I was back in Albion, a place where I was literally a king, mopping up post-completion bonus missions happy in comfortable, familiar interactive surroundings where the Y-button draws a rifle, not a jump, and the B-button summons a spell, not a Pip-boy.
As Raph Koster has long argued, what makes videogames so engaging is the human mind’s love of learning and mastering new systems. So the problem wasn’t that I’m averse to moving into new worlds and learning their rules, just that I hadn’t properly decompressed from one before moving into the next.
I’m forbidden from saying anything about Fallout 3 (I’ve been reviewing games for a few years now and I’ve never had such a stringent NDA in place this close to a game’s release) but it wouldn’t be crossing a line to say that the game’s a million miles away from a stinker. Still, if you’re knee deep in Fable 2 and planning to pick up Fallout this coming Friday then my advice is to play something palate-cleansing in between, something far, far away from role-playing in all its various contemporary forms, something a bit like /Karoshi Suicide Salaryman perhaps.
Most convoluted Flash game link ever.
October 26th, 2008 at 6:52 pm
I know exactly what you mean. I’m going to have to decompress a bit between current indulgences (Far Cry 2, Fable 2) and Fallout 3, not only because of the tone and scale, but also simply because Fallout as a universe means so much to me that I need to enter it clear and leave it clear. I might wait a while for it.
I wasn’t planning to get Fable 2, but so many of my friends are playing it, and the critics were so pleased, I couldn’t not. It’s a nice change of tone from FC2, but at the same time reminds me how much I liked the first Fable – most things making me grin were in the first game as well. It’s the first game, but more so.
(Far Cry 2 is a strange one, though – I nearly gave up in frustration after two hours, but a few more hours and it all has clicked).
Also: I think, after all this choice and openness and giant-worlds, I could do with something pacy and abstract, or linear and OTT, before I delve into another “big” game. The threat of a new DS Castlevania isn’t helping me on that scale though, either.
Better to decompress than to declare gaming bankruptcy, though…
October 27th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
I find the decompression back into real life more challenging than that between games. I spent all saturday managing my business empire in Albion (apparently, you can go adventuring too, but that’s a little too adventurous) then had to cope with the extended social interaction functions of having variously alienated familial elements down in London for a lunch. I did find that putting on better clothes made them like me more though; who says games don’t you teach you anything, etc?
October 27th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
Just so long as you didn’t attempt The Swinger achievement with the wrong group, Dan.
October 28th, 2008 at 12:32 am
I’m having precisely the equal-but-opposite reaction having spent some 40-some hours in the Wasteland now, compared to a small handful in Albion, and that muscle-memory disconnect’s never been as pronounced as switching between the two.
I almost feel like I’ve ruined Fable for myself, not to mention the good faith of a number of villagers having accidentally cast area affect spells in the middle of a previously adoring crowd trying to pull up my non-existent Albi-boy.
The second-long wait for Fable’s d-pad to show the correct contextualized options feels excruciating (dammit, I want to tell my dog he’s a good boy, and I want to tell him NOW), compared to the immediate Pip/VATS button gratification in FO3, and I’m not sure I might have even given it a second thought if I’d come to Fable fresh.