Best system for a scholar who wants to learn about gaming?
March 8, 2010 1:02 PM   Subscribe

I need a hands-on education in gaming, esp. developments in interface and narrative. I have to figure out where to start; please advise, hivemind.

I teach and write about new media stuff. Concepts and models from gaming are having a huge influence on the domains I study -- they're a lingua franca for some of my students -- and are an extraordinary form, obviously. And I've never played (with) them, aside from the occasional Flash game, and childhood NES. I read books about gaming but don't play games. I want to dive into this world firsthand.

But I need to know where to start, because I don't have a whole lot of money or time: I can't go out and buy multiple systems immediately. What do you recommend? Best console, and the best games to break ground with? Things that push the limits of the form -- play, structure, interface -- a plus. Thanks so much.
posted by finnb to Media & Arts (29 answers total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
I've only played the demo, but there's a consensus that Heavy Rain is one of the most recent novel games in terms of narrative and user interface. It's only on PS3. Maybe you could play the demo on a friend's machine.
posted by demiurge at 1:07 PM on March 8, 2010


I recommend a PS3 with Uncharted 2, Assassin's Creed 2, and Dragon Age: Origins. You'll find some great examples of modern interfaces and narratives, plus they're a lot of fun to play through.
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis at 1:12 PM on March 8, 2010


You MUST play Portal. There are at least five reasons why: 1) it's a perfect example of how gaming mechanics allow a fundamentally different form of narrative entertainment; 2) it is rapidly becoming a cultural touchstone the size of Yellow Submarine; 3) it's short, you can finish it in a couple of hours; 4) it's crazy fun; 5) did I mention it's crazy fun?
posted by BitterOldPunk at 1:22 PM on March 8, 2010


Shadow of the Colossus on the Playstation 2 changed my ideas about what a game could be.
posted by edbles at 1:26 PM on March 8, 2010


Best answer: If it were still backwards compatible, I'd suggest getting a PS3 with Heavy Rain and picking yourself up some PS2 games on the cheap (Shadow of the Colossus/ICO especially). Heavy Rain is probably one of the most interesting games I've played recently and I could definitely see the "advancing the medium as an art form" statement applying to it. I'd also maybe look at LittleBigPlanet to see one of the areas gaming is very quickly moving towards: user-generated content.

If you're looking into getting into gaming in general, I'd suggest perhaps picking up a Wii and purchasing some old school games on the virtual console, and maybe picking up a game here or there. There are some gems amidst the crap (and trust me, there's a lot of crap), but not too many games that really stand to advance narrative. Advancement of interface with the Wii is pretty obvious, and it's good as a study of when an advancement becomes a gimmick (see "waggle controls"). Alternatively, the DS has a lot of titles that are great for both people just getting into gaming and hardcore gamers alike; there's a lot of movement in the game development scene towards marketing to casual gamers and hardcore gamers simultaneously (see World of Warcraft as an example).

You could also try to find yourself a gaming community that discusses the indie games scene. A good chunk of innovation in gaming comes from promising indie developers (Portal coming immediately to mind). For a zero dollar investment, look at the Flash indie game scenes (check out some of the communities for development libraries like Flixel/Flashpunk/Box2D to see people's random experiments).

These are some of my favourite recommendations for someone getting into gaming and wanting to explore the medium as a whole:
Heavy Rain (PS3)
Portal (PS3, X360, PC)
Half-Life 2/Episode 1/Episode 2 (PS3, X360, PC) (Note: you can get Portal and HL2/EP1/EP2 as part of The Orange Box)
Bioshock (PS3, X360, PC)
Uncharted 2: Drake's Fortune (PS3)
ICO (PS2)
Shadow of the Colossus (PS2)

I'm always happy to provide more recommendations upon request with more details.
posted by DiamondGFX at 1:33 PM on March 8, 2010 [1 favorite]


Nthing Portal in part because the developer's commentaries might be super useful to you - they talk about technical stuff to some degree, but also the narrative and the interface and that sort of thing. Also, it's hella fun.
posted by restless_nomad at 1:34 PM on March 8, 2010


You might also just try looking up game videos on anything that is posted in here, it might be a faster, cheaper way to learn about how a game moves and functions. Half the reason I watch and read reviews is to be able to talk intelligently about games I have no intention of playing, but may have cultural significance within the medium.
posted by edbles at 1:34 PM on March 8, 2010


First, books:

Remediation by Bolter and Grusin
The Language of New Media by Lev Manovich
A Thousand Plateaus for the Map stuff... the intersection of maps and games = fascinating.
Lucky Wander Boy by D B Weiss, for fiction's take on it...

Then, for the games - the now-canonical list of border-pushers =
SimCity
Doom/Quake (or any representative FPS)
GTA3 - the Sandbox Style
Myst, for narrative adventures in hypercard.

There's something of a consensus that the PC, since it's read-write, is the site of a lot of the limit-pushing at the level of gameplay, as opposed to console gaming, which is much more of a producer->consumer dynamic. But YMMV...
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 1:38 PM on March 8, 2010 [1 favorite]


Get Steam and browse the $20-and-under games. There is a tremendous bounty right now for the frugal gamer.

It's true that the current-gen console games have a bit more cultural centrality and nowness, but you don't have to spend that money to learn a huge amount about games since the days of NES.

(Also: if you really haven't played video games since the NES, there are some real classics that might fill you with delight. Have you sat down with Super Mario World, ever? Any modern computer can play that game with a SNES emulator.)
posted by grobstein at 2:07 PM on March 8, 2010


You can watch other people play videogames. If you have a capable PC, you go look into getting a last-generation 3D card (around $100-125) and downloading games from Steam or Good Old Games, where old games are often offered at a steep discount.
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 2:11 PM on March 8, 2010 [1 favorite]


With regard to interface, I can't believe no one has mentioned the Wiimote, the Wii Balance Board, Natal and the iPhone touchscreen. That's four pieces of hardware right there that are the vanguard of how interfaces will be designed and redesigned for decades to come.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 2:17 PM on March 8, 2010


Response by poster: Thanks so much for your advice so far, all. A lot to chew on: it's so easy to forget how diverse it is, how many different kinds of platforms, games, models. (Like cinema, where it's *The Godfather* and industrial education and safety films, grindhouse biker movies and Stan Brakhage taping moth wings onto a strip of celluloid, Super-8 home movies and MST3K, and and and ...) Points definitely taken about checking out videos and "let's play", commentary, the indie scene, and PC as distinct from console gaming.

For anyone following me down this path in the future, this question posed to friends has also turned up a lot of recommendations for Braid and the work of Jason Rohrer. And it is universally agreed that emulators are an amazing boon.

(I'm on a recent-gen Mac, but apparently Steam is planning to make their games available on the Mac in April.)
posted by finnb at 2:18 PM on March 8, 2010


A recent-gen Mac can boot into Windows and run many Windows games passably well, too.
posted by grobstein at 2:20 PM on March 8, 2010


Best answer: If you get a PS3 you'll miss out on one of the best narratives in gaming yet: Mass Effect 2 (although to appreciate you'll also need to complete ME1). I haven't played Heavy Rain yet but from what I hear it's better described as a Interactive Narrative Experience (which is supposedly incredible) than a real "game". It will be interesting to see how if it effects the industry beyond itself. I hope to get my hands on it soon.

Subscribe to Gamers With Jobs podcast. Each week they talk about what games they have been playing but they always have a more in-depth segment in the middle where they discuss a topic. They also have articles about this topic such as this one.

"Things that push the limits of the form."

One problem you might have is that you have no foundation to understand why X game is so groundbreaking . Why does one game achieve excellence over another? You should play Modern Warfare 2 if only to see what sort of sense they try to string the stages/vignettes on to: absolutely none. Yet where is fails narratively on the large scale, it succeeds in short segments.

Similarly, with Mass Effect 1 you can see the needlessly cumbersome item management system & the awful controls of driving the Mako (which all gets forgiven by the explosive finale). Then go see how they fixed all of that in ME2 (no items management & no Mako). This is also witnessed in the evolution of Assassin's Creed II over Assassin's Creed. These are good examples to see how even the same I.P. & basic gameplay improve to make the interface not interfere with the narrative.
posted by yeti at 2:27 PM on March 8, 2010 [3 favorites]


Interface and evolution: you might want to check out the move to mouselook in PC first-person shooters in the mid-90s. You could play some Doom (1993), which used a keyboard interface, and then some Marathon (1994) or Quake (1996), which implemented a system where you use the mouse to control your viewing/firing direction.
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 2:34 PM on March 8, 2010


Oh, and one more thing. A current trend in gaming is "emergent game design". GWJ talk about it here. if I understand it correctly, it's basically creating a ruleset whereby the players are able develop their own narrative outside the actual game. An obvious example is the co-operative experience in Left 4 Dead in which everyone re-plays the same 5 levels over and over, but in each play-through a narrative emerges not only of what is happening to your characters, but also what is happening to the relationship between the players themselves.
posted by yeti at 2:38 PM on March 8, 2010


Response by poster: (That's a really good point, Yeti. How to get the context of the conversation, as it were.)
posted by finnb at 2:39 PM on March 8, 2010


Response by poster: (I have a meeting, but I'll be back soon. This is fantastic stuff. Thanks again, everybody.)
posted by finnb at 2:40 PM on March 8, 2010


Gamasutra is another gaming-industry website that sometimes does in-depth features on games and genres.
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 2:41 PM on March 8, 2010


You might want to look into Echo Bazaar for discussion of narrative-based gaming. It's a different thing from the other games mentioned here, but it is all about the story.
posted by jeather at 2:58 PM on March 8, 2010


IMO your best bet is to start with PC games. A PC with Windows XP can run a great range of games, especially with emulation. PS2 had a vast library of games and plenty of ground-breakers (PS1 compatibility too) and is pretty cheap nowadays.

Check out the wikipedia article on genres and try to see what would interest you. I may post some musings on these later on.
posted by ersatz at 3:04 PM on March 8, 2010


By the way, one tool that Heavy Rain uses is a gameplay device called a Quick Time Event or QTE. They generally interfere rather than abet the game, although with Heavy Rain it's not an after-thought for once and I am most interested in how they constructively use the technique. QTE's are away of allowing the game designer to show a cut scene (ie: choreographed narrative) but also force the player to interact to some degree. In some games, the best moves and actions aren't done by the player themselves, but instead we are shown by game designer. The only interaction we are given in the Big Moment is an anticlimactic button press. To go further, by their nature they can catch you unguarded. For example in Bayonetta, often after you play an action sequence if you relax during a cut scene you can automatically die if you don't hit "Y" at the precise moment. It's frustrating.

Speaking of cut scenes - there are a staple of modern game story-telling although there are excellent examples of games with a strong narrative that don't use them. This is why people up-thread mention Portal. IIRC, Bioshock has moments where they advance the narrative (as a cut scene would), but you actually stay in character and move around freely. The effect goes not unnoticed. Here's C-Net article on that exact topic. On the opposite spectrum, Metal Gear Solid 4 (Another PS3-exclusive) is mostly cut scene.

That should give you some further thought as you go forward. Enjoy & have fun blasting Zombies/Aliens/Nazi's!
posted by yeti at 3:26 PM on March 8, 2010


Grand Text Auto (and it's blogroll) does a decent job of tracking more "academic" writing about games.
posted by juv3nal at 3:31 PM on March 8, 2010


Don't stress too much over which console to buy! A Wii, Xbox 360, or PS3 will offer a variety of newer games as well as smaller, indie, or older titles. Look at the other functionality the console will offer you (I like the 360 because its Netflix InstantWatch interface is my favorite).

I'm seconding Braid, and if you end up with a PS3, do definitely check out Little Big Planet (as well as Flower, a cheap downloadable game).

The suggestion to watch lots of game trailers & reviews is a good one!

But if it's a question of cultural knowledge, try to determine what type of games your students are interested in. Different genres attract very different people. And you're right, there is a wide variety of them. There are divisions between people who play MMO (massively multiplayer online) games, RPGs, sports, first and third person shooters, puzzle games, and adventure or platformers!

(There are some games, esp. the new and exciting ones, that do defy categorization, or create their own, new category!)

One last suggestion: check out your local library. The young adult section may offer one or two gaming magazines, which are a lot of fun to read.
posted by Isingthebodyelectric at 4:49 PM on March 8, 2010


Silent Hill 2 is a must for narrative. Continuing the recommendation for Shadow of the Colossus. Bioshock as well would likely interest you.
posted by cmgonzalez at 5:48 PM on March 8, 2010


Response by poster: Thanks so much to all respondents. I'm going to mark this question as answered: I've got a lot to go on now! Time to look at prices, find deals and get gaming --

Press "play" to begin ...
posted by finnb at 8:03 PM on March 8, 2010


Definitely pick up some of the popular games to get "a sense of the conversation". Or sit down with friends who have them and play together / watch them play. You can watch play videos on youtube and in reviews as well, but it feels much more interactive when you're watching "live".

For playing, there's probably a pretty big hurdle ahead of you just mechanically - six buttons and two triggers and two shoulder buttons and two thumbsticks and a D-pad on the xbox 360, for example. It takes a while to remember which finger movement corresponds to what command, for most people. This'll especially mess you up with quick time events if they're very demanding.

A suggestion I don't think I've seen here - try to play demos of a lot of games, just to get a sense of what the play feels like. An 'action game' like Devil May Cry or Bayonetta feels very different from an FPS like Halo or Modern Warfare, even though they can be superficially similar. Playing a bunch of different games in little bits can give you some of that broad background.
posted by Lady Li at 9:36 PM on March 8, 2010


Really make sure the PS3 is backwards compatible, the most recent versions aren't which is part of the reason there's been a price drop. You may need to internet around to find an older model.
posted by edbles at 7:24 AM on March 9, 2010


On the PS2 front, it might be easiest to just buy an old PS2. They're all over pawn shops in Minneapolis for $30 or so. Guaranteed compatible.

Then get Katamari Damacy.
posted by chazlarson at 12:00 PM on March 9, 2010


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