I’ve been moving horribly slowly through the JIGComp games and will probably not finish all of them. I did play all of Dan Efran’s “Ka”, however, and liked it enough that I have put my review over on IFDB.
On my iphone, I’ve been — playing is the wrong word. Tinkering around with the experiential artwork “Vanitas”, produced by Tale of Tales. Again, it’s not really a game, and this time it’s also not really a story, even in the vaguest sense: the app provides a virtual wooden box you can open and close. Each time you open it, there’s something new inside: a collection of odd objects, from coins and feathers and needles to skulls and flowers. The idea is an evocation of those old master vanitas still-life paintings, the ones that are supposed to remind us of the mortality of flesh and the brevity of human existence. I always really liked those for their elegance and technique. The “Vanitas” app functions in much the same way. You can play around with the objects in the box, turn them over with a prod of your finger, prick the soap bubble. Rotate the phone and they slide over one another. Things like that. It’s appealing for more or less the same reason that the paintings are, if you like those sorts of thing.
My XBox crusade continues, and I’ve tried Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (really so very much not for me); more of Fallout 3 (we are nearly done now, I think); Assassin’s Creed 2; and Rise of the Argonauts. Rise of the Argonauts makes me see in funny colors: the ways they’ve rewritten the mythology are not in support of especially compelling gameplay or story. Assassin’s Creed 2 has a silly framing story, but gets much better after that; I’ve only played a couple of hours, but I’m much enjoying the characterization of the protagonist (who seems to have been lifted from one of the spare non-speaking Montagues, and is keen on punching other young Italian men, and wooing women at balconies). Even better, it’s all about scampering around and over a period-accurate version of Florence. I’ll probably have more to say about that, and about Fallout 3, later.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 
You’ve always written “Veritas” instead of “Vanitas”, as both game and paintings are called.
Argh, total brain blip. Thanks for catching it; I’ve fixed it. (Completely different meanings, of course, but I had sort of half-rationalized the “veritas” one as because the paintings reflect the hidden truth. Or something to that effect.)
Here’s my take on Fallout 3. There is a text game element to this, I think. What follows has a minor spoiler for the Republic of Dave.
In the Republic of Dave scene, you can vote for who you want running the republic. Because Dave is such a small-minded prat, you don’t want to vote for him, but it seems tough to overcome the grip he has on the other lemmings in that town. The first time I played, Dave won the election, but I was convinced that there was a way to get him booted from office, so I went to a Fallout 3 FAQ.
As it turns out, you can manipulate the vote by getting someone else to run and then clicking on the voting box as soon as Dave opens it up, taking the votes for Dave out of the box, and letting Dave find only the votes for the other person.
This is cool and everything, and while I didn’t discover the solution myself, it’s by far the neatest “puzzle” I’ve yet found in the game. The issue is that there is absolutely nothing to clue you in that you ought to be clicking on the voting box at the instant Dave opens it. Rather, you’ve been solving every problem you’ve encountered for the last 40 hours by shooting people literally in the face.
I guess the common solution to this is to encourage the player to perform the gameplay mechanic of stealing things out of a container within a short slice of time – but that’s tough because if you limit the mechanic to just inside the Republic of Dave, it’s too obvious and doesn’t provide that nice feeling of inspiration. You can’t otherwise really control where a player goes in a freeform RPG, so having it be something you tried in another area isn’t possible, as there are no guarantees. (Well, the very beginning of the vault is a known setting, but still.)
I don’t know how you have a player become “inspired” for a unique solution to a puzzle when there are 159 other hours of content in your game. I wonder if (I fear that) we’ve gone to a place where that sort of thing is no longer possible in video games.
Robb, I think it’s still possible. There’s two wrongs ways to do it: asking the player do something they had no reason to expect to be capable of, and asking them to do the exact same thing hundreds of times in a row… but there’s a chewy chocolate center in between those two hard cookie extremes.
For the Fallout example, maybe if the gameplay mechanic being practiced were something more general than “steal things from a box in a small time period”, like “rearrange stuff to solve various puzzles under various conditions”. One puzzle requires reassembling a bicycle’s wheels, the next requires connecting power cables to devices, the next is to disguise a pit trap for enemies to fall in, the next is to steal the sole valuable item from under a pile of worthless junk without the shopkeep noticing, and so on.
Get the player used to the idea that they can, in general, move things around to solve puzzles, but have them move things in many different ways. Half-Life 2 does a pretty good job on this with the gravity gun; it can be used for multiple purposes both in battle (firing heavy objects as projectiles, shielding yourself with wide objects, returning grenades back to enemies) and out of battle (pulling desired items in from a distance, breaking things that are in the way, stacking things to climb up, creating paths over pits, and also solving various fixed puzzles like the).
Anyways, that’s my two cents as a highly inexperienced game designer.
I hear Assassin’s Creed 2 ending is pretty crazy, although maybe that’s not a bad point if you’re not taking the story very seriously.
“Heavy Rain” has just been released for the PS3. I think it’s something of a milestone as far as interactive fiction goes. I’d love to hear your thoughts if you ever get around to playing it.
That does seem to be the word around the water cooler, yeah. I don’t have a PS3, but if I get a chance to check out the game on someone else’s machine, believe I will be all over it.
In regards to Assassin’s Creed II: I absolutely loved that game. The story delivered a lot more than the one from the first game, while also leaving a lot of room for the inevitable sequel. To say the ending was good would be the same as saying that the Atlantic is a pond. It doesn’t do it justice.