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The Old Geeks' Bragging Thread

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ackblom12:
See, I think that the games are crap these days argument is incredibly silly. As much as I loved playing Civilization 1, Pools of Radiance and many of those lovely lovely games I will not deny that alot of my love for them is pure nostalgia. The only thing I really miss from back in the day (same as you, it's really not quite so long ago as many posting) is that writers and developers had a lot more wiggle room for some serious experimentation overall.

Lord though, I don't recall what kind of computer our first one was. My mother was an early adopter because she is/was an accountant and bookkeeper and then jumped on the e-filing of taxes immediately when it became available a few years later. I remember being amazed at the HD in the 30s of Megs! DOOM then refused to install at some point because we didn't have enough HD space and I managed to convince my parents that the HD was failing and we needed a newer bigger one. :P

McTaggart:
It's not that modern games are crap, it's just that the 'feel' of them isn't as good. Modern games have slower movement and it's harder to get a feel for exactly where you are. Quake 3 (well, CPMA) has the best movement and the best sense of pace and scale of any game I've ever played. I'll be honest in that my experience with 'modern' FPSes is TF2, Borderlands and MW2 but in the second two of those the movement is really treacly and in all of them the field of view is really claustrophobic (TF2 limits it to 90 degrees and Borderlands defaults to 75 with no easily accessible options to change it).

Games aren't nearly all crap these days, but they're slower and more constricted in general.

steveb:
First machine I used was the commodor pet.
First machine I owned was a Memotech MTX http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memotech_MTX essentially the same spec as the japanese MTX systems but came out slightly earlier and made near oxford. It had a great little Z80 emulator in the ROM that let you single-step through machine code.

Now my first supercomputer was the Cray-1s.  

KharBevNor:
A new games versus old games argument would be a thread in itself!

I have to say that, as someone who cut his FPS teeth on Unreal Tournament, Half Life mods and later Battlefield 1942 and mods thereof, I definitely do think there's something very different about modern FPS games I've played. Partly this may be to do with control schemes (I will eternally consider mouse+keyboard the best way to play games of this type), but there seems to me to be an overall sense that I am somehow not actually in control of my character completely, in some weird way. I think this is partly to do with attempts at realistic physics (something that concerned designers of late 90's FPS's about as highly as love for his fellow man concerned Stalin), but also to do with a distinct shift in emphasis on how games are patterned. It seems to me that the incredible graphics of modern games are increasingly leading designers down something that resembles a slightly more thoughtful version of the almost universally dreadful 'interactive movie' games of the mid nineties. You're not quite on rails, but there's a definite idea of flowing between setpieces, which some may think improves a game. Personally, I know that many people heavily praise the fact that FPS games these days are far more narratively engaging and highly plotted than more traditional fare. I take a slightly more equivocal view. Always, when I have played games, I have been constructing a narrative in my head that gives my character (or civilisation, or whatever) some sort of motivation or story. To a degree, too much plot can actually erode this, or rather, not enough of the right sort of plot. I'm sort of rambling now, but I guess the problem is not so much plot as linearity. If a game is to have a detailed plot, it should not be linear, because that makes for a boring game. It's kind of related to how I became disenchanted with WoW because I realised that at the highest levels the game was basically a set series of tasks; there was very little room for my character to be invidividualised. I'm not sure I see the appeal in games (this is particularly something I've noted in what I've played of the Modern Warfare series) which are essentially just movies that you have to jump through hoops to see the next part of.

Jimor:
I've given some thought on how to unrail a narrative. While I don't have the answer, I have been working on developing a method of being able to change details within a continuity that would be accounted for throughout the storyline. It still limited to a generally linear plot structure for now, but I think it may offer clues on how to tackle other ways of varying a narrative.

Of course, the "easiest" way is to offer branch points to the story. This is what the old "choose your own adventure" books did. But even they cheated. The math of branching gets messy really quickly, offering a reader 10 choices during the story for example, means that there would have to be over a thousand different endings written. So what they usually did was fold most of the threads back into another branch (or simply pruned a lot of branches with "rocks fall, everybody dies").

Video games have their own ways of creating the illusion of choice. Most of the FPSs may let you choose to fight your way through the railroad yard, or the warehouse, but in the end, you still end up at the checkpoint at the water tower. Another way is to let you go quest for 5 different clues before you can move on. You can go find them in any order, but again, until you get them all, you can't get past whatever chokepoint the game drives you to before letting you through to the next chapter.

An MMO like EVE is interesting in that each player essentially creates their own endgame goal. But I still find the lack of an underlying narrative drive unsatisfying. Before I had run into EVE, I had written up a short blue-sky proposal for a space-based MMO that created extra content for players as they reached the edge of known territories. It also featured player-created goals, but I was imagining something a little more structured than what I later found in EVE.

Ultimately what we need to do is give the computer the tools to build a story around the player's actions. Build the world, then let the player's character wander around and interact with NPCs until they trigger enough pieces of a puzzle for the computer to synthesize a quest. Use meta-structures like the 3-act story arc to hang details off of. Use my system to let player choices resonate and interact with story details up and down the line.

I don't really know how this can be done, but we've pretty much conquered the visual aspects of being able to deliver on the promise of putting the player into their own movie. We just have to figure out how to let a story truly evolve out of their actions.

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