Free Ride (Part II)

In Part I, researcher Ben Abraham discusses the importance of the land to Australia's cultural identity and wonders why there aren't more video games featuring Australia's unique environment. In Part II, he elaborates on how the game, Fuel, manages to captures this awesomeness.

That distinctiveness in Fuel begins with the color palette. Fuel is itself an oddly colorful game, given its post-apocalyptic setting. Drive through a densely wooded forest of almost-eucalypts and the sunlight turns the same yellow-white color that often shows up in anything filmed in Australia. Travel junkies will tell you that the sunlight is not the same around the world, and the Australian light has a distinctive piercing characteristic, reproduced in Fuel. Similarly, purple night skies stretch out over the land like a blanket as night descends and the grey tarmac is illuminated by the glow thrown out by yellow headlights. The largely deserted roads are not unlike the rural back ways that we travelled to get to my grandmother’s farm when I was younger, the only other travellers on both being the trucks rumbling through on the midnight express. Yellow-on-black warning signs and dun-colored railings at the side of the road flash past, making me forget I’m playing a game and not driving down the Great Western Highway. Signs warning that I’m entering a “restricted area” are reminiscent of some of the great tracts of outback that have been used as army test ranges—like a section of the Woomera Prohibited Area, itself roughly the size of England, that was used for nuclear testing by the British.

That hill where I stopped is covered with textures resembling the golden grasses in Arthur Streeton’s Golden Summer, Eaglemont — colors that may appear washed-out in comparison to verdant European landscapes. The visual arts in Australia followed a trajectory that appears to be playing out once again in games; the first colonial artists were faced with trees growing in strange new shapes and had to adopt a color palette that Robert Hughes says took decades to get right. But once representing the Australian landscape ceased being an issue of ability and instead one of taste, it still took years for Australian artists to acclimatize to representing the bush as-is, and for the public to acquire an appreciation for its distinctiveness. Clara Southern’s An Old Bee Farm may seem queerly infused with the bluish tinge of a decade-old VHS tape losing its magnetism, but it is not at all inaccurate; and vast tracts of the land in Fuel are similarly tinged with this distinctively Australian smoky-blue haze.

Tsunami Reef in the northwestern corner of the map resembles so much the outback areas of Western Australia and the top end of the continent, where the deserts meet the ocean. In the same area, dilapidated outback homesteads squat with low corrugated roofs and the occasional rusty windmill out back. My imagination works to fill in some of the blanks — a large freestanding propane cylinder becomes a fat corrugated-iron rainwater tank instead. Sunsets turn the sky a deep, abiding orange and bring out the red color of the sand—the same color exuded by the iron-rich soils of central Australia regardless of the time of day. Tumble-down farmyard buildings resemble long-abandoned remnants of early attempts at habitation. Elsewhere, large areas of smoldering bush imitate the aftermath of notoriously ferocious Australian bushfires, like the February 2009 fires that tragically claimed 200 lives.

Furthermore, with Fuel’s majestically sprawling map of 14,400 km², there is simply so much of the land — and so much that presents a monotony on such an unprecedented scale, (save perhaps for the legendary Desert Bus — that it adds to the sense of an Australian landscape aesthetic. (For an Australian corollary, there is a stretch of highway that crosses the Nullarbor desert and does not deviate from a straight line for 144 km.) It is also a great irony that, in the game’s flawless execution of such magnanimous scope, its very monotony and overweening size became one of its greatest criticisms. Matthew Burns wrote that, while fascinated with the size of the game’s map, his fascination gave way to horror at the realisation that it was “vast on a soul-deadening, terrible scale.”

Yet Immanuel Kant found beauty in that terrifying, overwhelmed-ness he called the sublime. Exposure to the sublime has clearly had an effect on the Australian psyche, or at least my own. I would be disingenuous if I didn’t confess to taking some pleasure in Fuel’s relative inaccessibility to others, like Burns. Taking pride in hardship and difficulty, while not a uniquely Australian trait, is perhaps a central one; and it feels connected to the unique affects of Australian bush aesthetics and the historic struggle to overcome such inhospitable terrain.

I consulted an article on GameFAQs about speeding up the tedious process of unlocking new zones, as the racing itself does not warrant more than a cursory engagement. I found a kindred spirit in the author, known only as ‘Xeigrich’, whose preface elegantly and comprehensively sums up the game’s unique attraction:

Fuel has one thing that other open-world games with vehicles don't have, and that's the peace of mind that you don't have anything to worry about while you're not racing. No health bar, no continues, no annoying NPC friends calling you to go bowling (Niko, cousin!!), and hardly even any AI traffic to get in your way! You can just sit back and drive, and drive, and drive. And I think that's awesome.

I think so too.

[This article originally appeared on Kill Screen, Issue 2.] 

Ben Abraham is a PhD researcher from Sydney Australia, studying the rise of online communities of videogame critics. He writes about games and technology at http://iam.benabraham.net/ and collects examples of excellent games criticism weekly at Critical Distance.

Free Ride (Part I)

In this article, researcher Ben Abraham discusses the importance of the land to Australia's cultural identity and wonders why there aren't more video games featuring Australia's unique environment.

There was a particular hill that I came across in Fuel, in an area that was covered with a tall field of crackling brown and straw-colored grasses. The battered remnants of a series of wind turbines crowned the rise. I stopped my quadbike and gazed around at the horizon, stretching away as far as 40 km. Trees bunched together in small ragged clumps that followed the contours of the mottled grey-green and brown landscape. The hill reminded me of hot summer holidays spent at my grandmother’s farm in rural New South Wales, of riding around on bikes and quads in grass that came up to the knee, grasshoppers spastically jumping into chests, hands, faces. The vista brought up memories of the property near the town of Wyangla (famous only for its dam, with a capacity three times that of Sydney harbour, which has been drought-stricken to a pathetic 3-percent capacity for the past five years).

The Australian environment is unique among the world. An island fortress in evolutionary terms, the entirety of the landscape—the dirt, grasses, rocks, trees, and shrubs—all bear the distinctive stamp of antipodean separateness. While the Australian bush has often been captured in film and moving image, painted, drawn, and even sculpted, until Fuel there was nothing close to a digital version in a videogame.

With the attention of the Australian development community locked firmly overseas for funding, investment, and (dare I say) inspiration—and only a handful of studios big enough to handle the sprawling nature of “AAA”-style productions—the result is a resource on the Aussie doorstep that remains entirely untapped. While tourism is a cornerstone of the Australian economy, people do not visit our shores to see Movie World. Instead, they spend thousands of dollars to see the remarkable beauty of the wild and untamed Australian bush. Yet aside from Fuel, no one has had the enterprising thought to make it virtual—and not even Fuel, an open-world racing game released in 2009, did it intentionally.

Somehow, through a magical osmosis of influences—from the movie Mad Max to fears about severe global warming—the French developer, Asobo Studio, ended up creating a topography that in places mimics the features and aesthetics of the Australian bush. That it’s taken a French studio to make an Australian landscape may seem an odd enough observation, but it speaks volumes.

The importance of this dearth of a virtual Australia must be understood in the context of the Australian identity. Australians have always possessed a close relationship with the bush, going all the way back to its first inhabitants. Before the continent even saw its first pair of English boots, indigenous Australians had inhabited it for a good 30,000 years and developed their own deep appreciation of the land—a land whose scrubby brushlands and forests without cultivation were the entire means of their subsistence. The centrality of the bush in Australian aboriginal culture is reflected in its art, spirituality, and regional languages, of which there were between some 350 and 700, developed as a result of long-established tribal territories, of which the inhabitants considered themselves merely custodians. The sense of a bond between people and land was passed down through the stories from “the Dreaming”—orally transmitted, colorful creation myths.

For the first British arrivals, it was a lonely, hostile, and often terrifying place. In his exceptional history of the formative years of Australia, The Fatal Shore, the historian Robert Hughes (whose own relationship with Australia is a story in itself) wrote that “until about 1830 the transportation ballads and broadsides present the bush as sterile and hostile, its fauna (except for the kangaroo, which no one could dislike) as eerie when not disgusting.”

That view would change dramatically as the colony grew and encroached on the formerly impenetrable bush. The interior would eventually take on the role of a place to flee from the tyranny of convictry, aided by the figure of the bushranger and the absconder who, as Hughes notes, “by making the bush his new home, renamed it with the sign of freedom. On its blankness, he could inscribe what could not be read in spaces already colonised and subject to the laws and penal imagery of England.” In fact, Hughes goes on to note that, with respect to the bushranger, “popular sentiment would praise him for this transvaluation of the landscape (though at a safe distance, of course) for another hundred and fifty years.”

In Australian literature and print in the 1930s and ’40s, a resurgent interest in nationalism in connection with the land arose as a result of the efforts of writers and journalists as well as public intellectuals, and established a link between the nature of the Australian identity and the Australian landscape. In a three-part essay from 1935 on “The Foundations of Culture in Australia,” P.R. Stevenson, considering the case for an Australian identity (as separate from that of a British subject), advocates one informed by the environment itself. He suggests that “as the culture of every nation is an intellectual and emotional expression of the genius loci, our Australian culture will diverge from the purely local color of the British Islands to the precise extent that our environment differs from that of Britain. A hemisphere separates us from ‘home’—we are Antipodeans; a gumtree is not a branch of an oak; our Australian culture will evolve distinctively.”

[This article originally appeared on Kill Screen, Issue 2.]
 
Ben Abraham is a PhD researcher from Sydney Australia, studying the rise of online communities of videogame critics. He writes about games and technology at http://iam.benabraham.net/ and collects examples of excellent games criticism weekly at Critical Distance.

June 2011: The International Scene

Game Design Aspect of the Month is seeking blog entries about games and game culture around the world.  If you have a game or scene to spotlight, please see the Submission Guidelines.

June 2011 Poll

Oops! Forgot to put up the poll.

Please vote for the June 2011 topic! As always, feel free to suggest more topics! Look at the submission guidelines for Topics and Blog Entries.

You'll see the poll to the right. The choices are:

* The American Scene (Spotlight on Games Dev in American Cities)
* The International Scene (Games and Game Culture Not in U.S.)
* Indie Design Revelations

Indie Design Revelations
What takeaways are there from the current crop of indie games?

Emergence in Game Audio

In this article, lead audio designer Gina Zdanowicz explains how audio designers can achieve epic soundscapes while still complementing emergent gameplay.

It’s no secret that over the years game audio has evolved from sound chip generated blips and beeps with simple musical melodies to three-dimensional SFX with epic sound tracks. In the past, game audio has been viewed as a backdrop to the game’s visuals. However, more recent advances in game audio demonstrates that sound is no longer a subtle component of the game experience. In fact, sound is one of the key factors for total player immersion into to 3D virtual environment. Interactive soundscapes are the vehicle that forms the interactive partnership between the player and the game. Game audio designers are tasked with immersing the player into these 3D worlds and keeping them there by creating a unified soundscape made up diegetic (actual) and non-diegetic (commentary) sounds for both linear and interactive segments of the game.

As emergent game play becomes the more desired technique in game design, the outcome is a globally designed game system comprised of rules and boundaries for player interactions, rather than scripted paths and events. Players can use basic elements of the game such as the story or strategic moves to play the game in a way that was not specifically designed or implemented by the game designer. What does this mean for game audio designers? Simply put, game audio designers need to create techniques to adapt to this emergent and highly user interactive medium.

Emergent game design encourages replayability as each time the player plays the game they make different decisions, which changes the game as a whole and results in different possibilities for action and endings. Additional sounds and music are needed for the action brought on by these different choices. For example in the game Scribblenauts, the player can choose from over 10,000 pre-programmed words to create objects that will be needed to complete tasks in the game by writing it out. For instance, if a player wants a saw, they simply type or write, “saw” and it will appear in the game. The player then has the freedom to use and move the saw around in any strategic manner possible. What’s interesting about this from an audio perspective is the fact that there are so many unique sound effects associated with the magnitude of objects that can be created by the player. The same magnitude of sounds can be found in larger more open-ended game worlds but the draw in Scribblenauts is both the ability to create objects and to see and hear them in action on screen.

As game play choices and games become more filmic and realistic by nature, game audio designers adapt film audio techniques to achieve an epic and adaptive sound for their game environments. In the past, one of the biggest problems facing game audio has been the endless repetition of SFX that are triggered constantly along with short pieces of music which loop endlessly through the game without changing.

With increased memory available on modern consoles, game audio designers are filling their games' soundscape with a variety of sounds that greatly improve the quality of this new generation of games:

• Crisp dialog that cuts through the mix: Drake’s Fortune Uncharted 2 Among Thieves recorded all dialog while capturing the physical performance for the game on the Mo-Cap stage. Having all of the actors read their lines together on a single stage added a more definitive spontaneity to the scenes that you just can’t capture when recording lines separately in a sound booth. 

•  Minimizing repetition using alternate SFX: Game animations such as footsteps, effort noises or armor movement can become very repetitive if there are only a couple of sounds, which are constantly triggered for each of those animations. Adding subtle variety to footsteps in a game can break up that repetition quickly and make walking around the game world more enjoyable for the player. Good Foley, ambient loops that change subtly with the environment as well as flow consistently between in-game and cut scenes and attention to the little details enhance the games audio and immerse the player fully into the world. It can also provide more information to the user about their environment that they may not have been aware of.

• Mixing the soundscape with enough dynamics: God of War 3 is a great example of a dynamic soundscape. The carefully mastered mix allows the sound elements to change subtly as Kratos moves through the world. Action in the distance sound closer as the action moves into what was the foreground. Ambient tracks mixed in a way that allows action in the foreground to supersede while allowing the music track to add emotional depth to the scene.

• Adaptive musical score: Adaptive Musical scores “adapt” as the game play changes and evolves based on the player’s choices. The use of branching music systems or stems allows the layering of musical or percussive tracks layers that can be flown in over the core layer to add enhanced tension or a positive vibe to the over all mood. Layers are used to build intensity as the player needs to be directed to move forward and additional layers with more tension and maybe more rhythm will be added as enemies approach and surround the players’ character. Layers of music can also build intensity, as the player’s character health is low. Real time DSP effects can be used in conjunction with these musical layers to filter the sound to give the effect of a dizzying loss of life. Layers can then be stripped away to lighten up the mood a bit by removing some of the rhythmic tracks and pulling back on the intensity as your player regains health or kills off the surrounding enemies and gets back to exploring the game and moving onto the next stage. L.A. Noire is a great example of using musical cues that adapt to changing game play or to lead the player to the next action in the game. During the first mission or tutorial phase the player is instructed to search for clues. On-screen text informs the player that the music will fade down when all clues in that location have been discovered and musical chimes will indicate objects that can be examined. A small chime indicates objects that need to be inspected further. Once the tutorial phase is over, it is up to the player to follow the musical cues through the game.

As game audio evolves, so does the technical aspect of sound design in games. Audio designers have the ability to handle implementation of audio by using middle ware such as Fmod or Wwise with little to no programmer involvement therefore generating more control over the soundscape. Creating audio for interactive game segments can be a challenge as the players’ actions are able to alter the course of the game constantly and the sound needs to evolve along with those changes. Audio middleware such as FMOD helps the audio designer overcome the issue of repetition in game audio by enabling the creation of a dynamic sound environment while optimizing resources of the game’s platform. It also allows the audio implementer to see what is happening to the layers of music as situations develop in the game. It unveils a sort of behind the scenes look at the process from the viewpoint of the middleware. This allows the audio implementer to be sure the music flows seamlessly from simple to percussive and complex and back to simple again with out any hiccups or a break in the sonic soundscape, which would quickly draw the deeply immersed player out of the game world.


Gina Zdanowicz is the Founder of Seriallab Studios, Lead Audio Designer at Mini Monster Media, LLC and a Game Audio Instructor at Berkleemusic. Seriallab Studios is a full service audio content provider supplying custom music and sound effects to the video game industry. Seriallab Studios has been involved in the audio development of 40+ titles in the last few years.

May 2010: Emergence

May 2010's topic was submitted by game designer Pascal Belanger.

I heard the most troubling thing from a narrative designer last year, which went like this: "If we are going to make art, we can't make emergence". I must say I was shocked about this. I could not believe that he would have that narrow a view about art and/or emergence. The first thought that came to mind was: What about Emergent Art?

I thought the statement was nonsense but some people around me seem to think otherwise, except that when asked about it they seem to take sophistic approaches to the question.

• What is emergence to you? 
• How do you deal with it? 
• What place do you let it take in your games/design? 
• And in your opinion, can we make emergent games that would still be art? 
• Or even better, are there any valid existing examples of such games?

Reference:
Jesper Juul on Emergence vs progression: http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/openandtheclosed.html

Game On! Can Playing Games Drive Adoption of Sales Force Automation

In this article, market analyst Lauren Carlson gives examples of how one might gamify sales force automation software.

There has been a lot of buzz lately around this term "gamification." But what is it? Gamification is the process of adding elements of games to non-gaming activities to encourage action or participation. Essentially, it is about making menial, repetitive or boring things a little more fun and engaging. Experts in the field of gamification have discussed introducing this concept into several different areas including education and e-commerce.

What about adding gamification to an area of enterprise software with traditionally low levels of engagement and adoption: sales force automation (SFA) software? The connection seems logical. Sales people and gamers share that same fiercely competitive nature. Perhaps the addition of gaming elements to SFA software would encourage sales people to learn, use and master the software.

Software Advice, a free online resource for software buyers, sketched out some pretty neat ideas for adding gamification to SFA software. They show how adding badges, leader boards and time v. completion charts can enhance the SFA software user experience.

I. Badges

II. Data Quality

III. Goal Tracking

Lauren Carlson writes about various topics related to CRM software, with particular interest in sales force automation, marketing automation, and customer service. She has a background in the music industry, and when she isn't writing about software, you can find her running at Town Lake and singing at local venues. She is a graduate of the University of Texas with a bachelor's degree in journalism.