IC Forum Archive

aderack · Posts: 5018

A vague concept came to me a couple of hours ago:

Take a game that, ostensibly is... this one thing, it's a particular genre with certain goals, and it's entertaining enough if mired in its genre and a little buggy -- like you can poke away at the seams all over the place to get effects that probably aren't intended. The thing that first came to me was something like a...

Side note: Wi-Fi DS or Wii Pictionary could be interesting. Not for this, necessarily; just had the thought.

Anyway. Something like a video board game. An adaptation of some very famous Game of Life clone that you've never heard of, or Nintendogs, or a Mario Kart or Mario Party clone. Something vapid and small in imagination and ambition, though diverting. The kind of trash that builds up and you never think about, though maybe with a little more personality and irony about itself.

Then if the player happens to be bored enough -- happens to keep picking away at the discrepancies, at the bugs and exploits, happens to keep going out of bounds, he'll wind up... out-of-bounds. And then the real game will begin. If not, the dippy little game, with its goals and rules, is all you'll ever see.

As for what's out there, I don't know. It could start off just seeming like an error -- the Metroid Secret World sort of effect. Garbage that it's interesting to screw with. Then keep picking through the garbage, and there's something grander beneath that. Like you've just emerged from a dungeon into the blinding sunshine. And it just keeps getting more and more mysterious. There's no explanation for any of this; you have to piece it together on your own, through exploring and continually picking away at the edges of what's possible and observing and filing things away in your head.

What would be even better is if the initial part of the game had some kind of license. Like it would be a videogame version of Jeopardy! or some other known quantity, to further cover up what's really going on.

And then put the game out and say nothing. And see how long before someone finds the secret, and word begins to spread. Then see the noise grow and grow, and people getting paranoid about the glitches in every other game under the sun, wondering if they lead to anything special -- the way we used to, twenty years ago when we didn't know any better.

...

I don't know. I think it would be kind of neat. If impractical. It would require a Kenji Eno or some other funster, to take charge then sit in the background and not be credited.

Persona-sama · Posts: 1145

Sounds like the mysteriousness of the old NES games!

This reminds me of how in that recent Douglas Coupland book, jPod, the team basically spends all their effort to hide a secret bloody dungeon inside a stupid skateboard game, with the boss of the lair being an insane Ronald McDonald.

But really, a game like this would be pretty thoughtful. Post-modern, even?
It'd have to be made by a nameless third party who received the license for a crappy show and decided to muck with it. I imagine they wouldn't stay employed for very long after word gets out though.

It'd be neat if the game breaks down into a game that's not even of the same genre. It somehow turns into a text adventure or something really mysterious. When you finally reach the end, the game should find a way to format itself and only show a black screen upon booting afterwards!

Also, maybe it could learn your email and send you harassing messages asking you why you haven't played with him yet. Also, privacy curtains + hole.

oligophagy · Posts: 110

yeah, this lacks commercial viability. we should elaborate; i want to talk specific glitches!

i am thinking collision detection is pretty exploitable. it's very arbitrary, and people are used to it being wonky and half-broken, especially in a (faux) budget title. hence, the transition from "normal" mechanics to weird could slip under the radar for awhile. i'd certainly be freaked to suddenly find myself playing not at all the game i started.

but specifics! consider a genre FPS. game starts, you're shooting faces, no surprises. but you notice the collision detection is a little off. like, you shoot past the ear and it registers a hit but dead between the eyes and nothing. or you shoot an arm and the headshot animation goes. nothing to get upset about, i mean, we've all played turok! but as the game goes on, new faces, new guns, it seems to get worse. but gamers adapt. soon, you stop trying to aim exactly, and eventually, you're purposely shooting at empty space.

then you start bumping into empty space. this would ramp up subtly, like at first, you just can't get as close to walls or other objects. you're stopped sooner. then maybe a corner extends farther than it looks. or in a pattern of pillars, a row is missing, but the collision boxes are still there. a few small snags, later, not really connected to anything. or pits and rises in flat looking floors. soon straight corridors are like invisble mazes. and, yeah, you're not shooting enemies anymore either.

around this point, enemy animation starts to give out, gets choppy, sometimes even they'll move a few steps but not animate at all. then the static architecture starts change. not continuous shifting but maybe a sudden lurch and then the room is a little narrower. a row of pillars in your peripheral suddenly become misaligned. and this empty space you're shooting: hardly even connected to enemies anymore. and sometimes, looking through it, things seem slightly . . . magnified.

hmm. i'm losing the thread. the idea is to loosen the player-input game-response tie that's taken for granted (it is the foundation of the medium!). to what ends, i'm not sure. also, i'm realizing this is more upfront than aderack's conception. maybe for the surface game to really fall away, the player would have to stop shooting at enemies altogether (if they insist and keep shooting as dead on, the game clams up and eventually ends a mediocre shooter ending). this triggers greater mutations in the architecture, which in turn unveils invisible ramps and steps that, should you find and follow them, will take you above, and away: you walk out of the levels, you walk high above the city, you're over a forest. then: you're flying. you've become a bird and you're flying and there are these other birds and now the game is about flying sweeping rococo formations that leave watercolor paint trails above a planet that is its own atmosphere (it is inside out or something).

that's what i would do!

aderack, everyone else, what you would do?

duckzero · Posts: 244

That is a very interesting concept. I did something like that once with some old appleworks powerpoint like product. Either way, it was a very simple comic that you read by just clicking through the pages, BUT, if you did certain things, like press a certain random key, or click on a tiny off color area of screen, it would take you to a different set of events in the comic, waaaayy off from the story. Either way, i wanted to expand it into something like that, but alas the apple IIgs had a limit.

I want to talk more about your idea though. I could be done, pretty easily I think. It would have to have some polish, but it could be warioware like.

Imagine the first game you play is a space invaders clone, which seems to play fine, maybe the person plays for a while, dies a few times, restarts the game again, one of the invaders is a little off, shoots it, game begins to garble and such. Maybe the garbling could look something like a scrabble tile, after more "errors", and your spaceship becoming an avatar for the game, you play that for a bit. Rinse and repeat with some kind of "bug" in there, and who knows you'll have the last battle as the guy from Wolk5k or soemthing.

LegatoB · Posts: 1546

One thing that's been certain if I ever do any sort of platform/exploration game is that there will be a fairly lengthy area that can only be accessed by some sort of cheat - save file hacking, memory address shenanigans, etc. The area will act as though there's nothing unusal about any of this. It'll be filled with red herrings implying that it's somehow possible to take this route through the game by finding a secret path or performing some sort of sidequest in the main game to activate this route by alluding to the player character's supposed actions, but it will be completely impossible to do that. If I'm feeling really mean, this will also be the only way to get the "true" ending to the game, and the method of accessing it will change every time the game is patched to keep people on their toes.

Takashi · Posts: 820

Yes, let's make a game 99% of people can't solve without going to GameFAQs, because that's exactly what the world needs.

Persona-sama · Posts: 1145

This topic basically reminds me of something Tim wrote in his SMB3 article about how what if you were to turn around in Super Mario 1 and run to the left, and all of a sudden you're in the middle of a football field in the middle of nowhere.

Something kind of mysterious then paranoia and curiousity when you realize there's something beyond those invisible walls. Like the Minus World or the shortcuts in Castlevania and all that.

Mister Toups · Posts: 4943

My God Eric-Jon! My brother has been hounding me about how to recreate that crazy mysterious glitchy feeling from old NES games, and this whole time I've been telling him that I figure it's impossible. But uh, I guess not!

Persona-sama · Posts: 1145

Apparently the trick is to actually focus on making it seem mysterious and glitchy!

I think this should be the theme for our next set of King of Development Round Robin development game things.

aderack · Posts: 5018

Well, the focus here is on the glitchiness -- mostly because I think that would be a cool-n-subversive way of doing things. I think the real point is in the kind of thoughts and emotions and behavior that those glitches trigger in people who are prone to pick at them. I think all of those qualities are very close to the ideal purpose and potential of videogames in general.

It's that feeling of breaking through the boundaries of an established system -- of the suggestion of unknown yet possibly grand potential hidden somewhere beyond the mundane, that you -- as a free agent and very clever person -- are specially qualified to unlock.

The way a person might break through the boundaries could be mechanical or emotional or intellectual. Some of the best touches in some of the best games borrow from this principle. See the scanning in Metroid Prime, how it comes directly out of the themes at hand, then ties everything together, hinting at a sort of order and coherence and reality to the entire Metroid series and everything in it that you never really suspected before. Yet it never shoves the stuff down your throat; it's just there for you to put together on your own -- much like all of the abstract stuff in the original Zelda and Metroid and whatnot, except deliberate and intellectual rather than incidental and material.

And then there's Riven.

I think my point with the overt fake-bugginess was to exaggerate and glorify the whole pointless search process that we go through -- poking the edges of the scenery, seeing what's possible within the world, experimenting, and only rarely being rewarded with anything for our effort. And when we are rewarded it feels cloying and false, like those dumb treasure chests that have to be at the end of every single cul de sac in every single dungeon, to overtly reward you for going down and simultaneously make you feel obligated to go down every one.

It's working on the suggestion that maybe this behavior has a real purpose behind it after all, that sometimes -- just sometimes -- there's something magical and special and completely unprecedented to find. And the point to that is to bring into light that whole behavior, that whole mindset -- which, again, I think is implicitly what videogames are made to suggest, yet which I don't feel is often really addressed for all (or even much) of its potential.

I think this mode can be addressed in less gimmicky ways, even if the gimmick is maybe one of the clearest ways to illustrate it. The problem is that a videogame has to work on a couple of levels at once. It needs to have a completely workable status quo, that feels solid, that the player is convinced is meant to be solid, for the player's subversion of that status quo to mean anything. There's a lot of psychology here; the player shouldn't know immediately whether he's supposed to be able to do what he's doing, and that it has been accounted for; just that, for whatever reason, he's able to.

Beyond the psychology and the multiple layers to keep track of, the game of course has to be designed and programmed as well as possible, to avoid unintentional exploits. So there's a certain level of virtuosity required here.

...

Maybe I'm overstepping the line a bit, in defining the importance of these characteristics. The basic nature of a videogame lies in the causal relationship between the player and the gameworld; the basic potential lies in the narrative ability of that causal relationship (what it means for the player to act, given the established boundaries of the gameworld). The natural mode of player action is to explore those rules and challenge them. I suppose it doesn't follow that the player need subvert a status quo as-such; it's just, this is a good way to illustrate that mode of player interaction and its narrative and emotional potential.

The player should feel free; that he is at all times in control over his immedate decisionmaking, and that through his decisions he is just perhaps blazing into unknown territory, doing something nobody else has done, having a unique and visceral personal experience that's entirely generated by his own free will. Half-Life 2 is great at making the player feel clever and subversive for doing exactly what the game is expecting.

I think it's a misdiagnosis of this quality that has led to this sandbox nonsense (most recently reined in and made less inane by Dead Rising), and sense that players want "freedom" in their games.

...

I'll get back to this. Will post what I've got now.

Sawtooth · Posts: 2350

way back in the stammering babbling game topic I had a very similar idea about making a game about glitches (with a progression closer to oligapholy's approach, though)

aderack: I like your idea better! Mine was kind of babbling, and a bit too unsubtle. The idea of picking at the edges of a game to find the one beneath is solid. and tantalizing!

Douggie · Posts: 10

Kinda reminds me of the following hack some Japanese made for Super Mario Bros. (hope I'm not off-topic here) - I need to note there's unlimited jump (so you can double-, triple-, quadriple-, etc. jump - from what I read:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDSIuAg8F_U

Seems like this is a game which is hard to play even with an emulator + savegames! It appears only a hand-full of people can finish the game. If somebody has a guide to the glitches of SMB, let me know! I once saw a glitch demo video of SMB and always wondered how to wall-jump and walk through walls!

More on-topic, I always liked the jokes in Metal Gear Solid - the game over screen and such, where you went WTF for a few seconds, because you thought something was wrong with the game. Eternal Darkness also had some jokes I heard, messing with TV-properties and such (which wouldn't work on me, as I use a monitor).

zebadayus · Posts: 672

There's a super-difficult hack of Super Mario World called Super Demo World: The Legend Continues. It has entirely new worlds and sprites, as well as a few new mechanics.

Anyway, this game is extremely difficult. Furthermore, there's an entire secret world (Boo's World) that is only accessible through abusing a glitch in Bower's Castle. It's not insanely hard to miss, though. If you pay enough attention to the surroundings, and know enough about Mario history, the game sort of points you towards it.

Sawtooth · Posts: 2350

Douggie wrote:

Eternal Darkness also had some jokes I heard, messing with TV-properties and such (which wouldn't work on me, as I use a monitor).

A lot of them don't involve messing with the tv! But the whole insanity system was pretty broken and it usually broadcast its presence before the effect actually, so on the whole it was kind of disappointing.

With that game, I'd like to see that going insane started the game remixing entire levels on the fly. twist the architecture, shift some textures, break some animations, stop decoding audio properly, and we're set!

another god · Posts: 1629

Isn't this the concept that .hack is based around, except like, everyone knows .hack is based on this?

Sawtooth · Posts: 2350

i never played the games. I watched a couple episodes of the show, though, and was really disappointed that computer glitches manifested themselves in evil characters and stuff like that. I'd like to see a game come apart at the seams, twisting the game in a way that a computer glitch actually would. Like seeing the player's face mapped over the entire landscape, or falling through the world, npcs that just show as masses of jumbled polygons, and more.

oligophagy · Posts: 110

i think the nobody knows part is the whole point; you glimpse it, this light peeking through cracks in the firmament, no one's there to confirm it, hell, who would believe it?, but it is happening what's happening things like this really happen? a suggestion of unbounded potential, etc.

it seems to me the closer this comes to succeeding, the more it becomes a cruel trick on the player. i'm more partial to a future wherein a game interchange standard exists for collectibles and experience points and we start building game around game, like matryoshka dolls, and ever am i shooting zombies to save the lives of professional athletes for my soccer team that, should it win the world cup, will finally have enough money to finance the construction of a futuristic fighter craft for use against the Bydo Empire to save the earth and particularly the young boy tending grandfather's farm who, if he works hard enough, may . . . and so on, thus averting the question of purpose by pushing it off to infinity.