I've spent the last few weeks playing through Marvel's Spider-Man on the PlayStation 4. As far as open-world action games go, it's up there as one of the very best I've played this generation. It may not boast the sweeping grandeur and epic scale of something like Horizon Zero Dawn; nor is it a sandbox of interwoven emergent gameplay systems akin to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Instead, what makes Marvel's Spider-Man so successful in my opinion is a quality that open-world video games have been lacking for the best part of a decade; a razor-sharp sense of focus. It's that quality that has inspired me to devote three weeks of game time to pursuing 100% completion across the base game and all three of its DLC packs, even shooting for the Platinum Trophy. To anyone who's arrived here in the hope that I might dissect Marvel's Spider-Man from a story perspective, I'm sorry to disappoint you but that won't be the focus of this blog post. I simply don't have the necessary investment in Spider-Man's extensive mythos to judge the plot points of this game in the context of an average Spidey story, and I feel any attempt to analyse it on its own merits, isolated from the rest of Marvel's Spider-verse, would be a missed opportunity. For what it's worth, I enjoyed Spider-Man's story in the same way I might enjoy a big-budget popcorn flick. I was completely engrossed in the midst of the experience, but found it easy to detach from the story and its events when not playing. Instead of focusing on narrative, I want to dive deep on two very specific pieces of Spider-Man's game design, and how I believe they transform it into something far greater than just another bloated open-world action game full of towers to climb and map icons to investigate. Friendly NeighbourhoodIt goes without saying that an open-world game is usually only as good as its open world, with the best examples of the genre taking place in some truly memorable game-spaces. Games like Grand Theft Auto III and The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind feature some of the most iconic open worlds the medium has to offer. Hours of gameplay spent in places like Liberty City and Vvardenfell has given me a knowledge of their geography comparable to that of my own hometown. Even now, almost two full decades since the release of those games, I feel confident that I could comfortably navigate my way around their respective game-worlds without needing to refer to a map. Over the last decade or so, the number of open-world games being released has increased exponentially. That market saturation comes at a price, though, and that price is usually individuality. In a phenomenon that other critics have dubbed 'Ubification', after the publishers most associated with the template, almost every open-world game released in the last ten years is built on an identical foundation; enormous maps populated with nondescript cookie-cutter locations, separated by countless square miles of wilderness, connected by a network of roads and pathways, and punctuated by towers to climb, enemy outposts to clear, and almost infinite collectibles to pick up. This game design philosophy has reduced much of the open-world genre to homogeneous checklists of busywork, to the point where even distinct franchises start to feel identical to one another. So what exactly makes GTA III's Liberty City and Morrowind's Vvardenfell so memorable compared to current-generation open worlds like Far Cry 4's Kyrat and Just Cause 3's Medici? My personal opinion is that their strength lies in their relatively small size. Smaller open worlds lend themselves better to memorisation in large part because there is less for the player to memorise, but I don't believe that's the only reason. It logically follows that in a smaller environment, with a limited number of routes between a smaller number of locations, the journeys the player makes in these games are going to repeat, and that repetition in turn breeds familiarity within the player's mind. Smaller open worlds also tend to be constructed in a much more bespoke manner, with unique landmarks and idiosyncratic road layouts that stick in the player's memory far more readily than the copy-paste towns and identical connecting highways of their larger counterparts. Marvel's Spider-Man bucks the Ubification trend, instead opting for an open world much more akin to those from the turn of the millennium in terms of its size and construction. It confines the action to a scaled-down approximation of the island of Manhattan, providing the player with a relatively small game-world by open-world standards. It's also an environment packed with recognisable landmarks in the form of uniquely-shaped skyscrapers and other famous buildings, that serve to orientate the player within the game world. It's not perfect; given that almost all the gameplay happens above street-level, there's never really an opportunity to get to know the road layout of Spidey's Manhattan intimately. But after a few dozen hours in this digital recreation of the Big Apple, I feel like I have a good understanding of the city's geography and could comfortably navigate to any of the map's nine districts using only the skyline for reference. Another advantage of smaller open worlds that I neglected to mention earlier is that their more compact size better lends them to objective-based scavenger hunts and scattered collectibles, usually because those objectives and collectibles are either fewer in number or their distribution is more concentrated (or, indeed, a combination of both). Spider-Man subscribes to this school of thought as well, keeping its backpack and landmark photo collectibles to respectable quantities of fifty-five and fifty respectively and packing them pretty densely into the map. It also keeps the quantity of side quests at a very modest level by contemporary open-world standards, introducing new objectives gradually and rarely exceeding a dozen unique instances of any given extra-curricular activity. Keeping the numbers low stops these distractions from feeling like boxes on an endless checklist, and in turn helps prevent the player from burning out. Can He Swing From A Thread?But having a smaller, more concentrated open world is only half the battle. Developers have to give the player incentives to explore, and they have to make the act of traversing their world enjoyable in itself. This is something that I feel open-world developers really lost sight of for a while, with the problem being compounded by the trend of open-world games becoming increasingly vast. The larger a game-world is, the longer it's going to take to traverse, and the more time players are going to spend travelling between objectives. A lot of games try to mitigate this problem by introducing fast-travel options, allowing the player to bypass the down-time between missions by teleporting to their next objective, but personally I feel this amounts to developers cutting off their nose to spite their face. What is the point in building these huge open game-worlds and then actively encouraging players to avoid engaging with them in the most fundamental way? Marvel's Spider-Man navigates these potential pitfalls with aplomb, primarily because it features some of the most enjoyable moment-to-moment traversal ever seen in an open-world game. Spider-Man's web-swinging mechanic is consistently satisfying thanks to the pitch-perfect control scheme and the ease and speed with which it enables the player to move unimpeded through the game-world. Every minute I spent navigating Spider-Man's open world was an enjoyable experience simply by virtue of the fun I found in the basic act of swinging from a thread. By traversing the map in this way, I was able to deal with side missions and other distractions organically as and when I found them, rather than referring to lists of objectives and ticking them off one by one. While the game does feature a fast-travel mechanic in the form of New York's famous subway, it's telling that I never once felt compelled to use it outside of one mandatory instance during a story mission and the four further times required to unlock one of the game's Trophies. Incidentally, I think it's worth recognising when a game is able to justify the existence of fast-travel within the context of its world as Spider-Man does, since it helps preserve a sense of immersion that would otherwise be shattered by teleporting halfway across the game-world for no good reason besides player convenience. The way that Insomniac have incorporated "spider-sense" into exploration also deserves mention here. While mainly featured in the game's stealth sections to highlight enemy positions and other objectives, spider-sense can also be triggered at any time during traversal. Doing so will cause a sonar-like wave to emit from Spider-Man's current location, revealing the whereabouts of any nearby points of interest as icons on an overlay over the gameplay. This feature allows for seamless exploratory gameplay, eliminating the need for the player to check either the mini-map or the map menu to identify collectibles or side missions within their vicinity. This also plays into preserving the player's sense of immersion and encouraging them to encounter objectives organically rather than viewing them as a checklist in a pause menu. There Goes the Spider-ManHere ends another instalment of Text Boxes. I had hoped to be posting a little more frequently than I have so far, but since open-world games take a little longer to get through, I guess delays were to be expected. It also took me a while to hone in on a particular aspect of Marvel's Spider-Man to write about, but I'm glad I didn't rush things as I'm really pleased with the end result. I would have liked to go into more detail on what precisely makes the game's web-swinging mechanics so satisfying, but I couldn't find a way of doing so without either getting bogged down in minutiae or resorting to the lazy "it really makes you feel like Spider-Man" clichés that have practically become a meme at this point. As it stands, I think it gets my main points across pretty well.
If you have any thoughts on this long-form essay on Marvel's Spider-Man, then I'd appreciate some feedback. Please leave your thoughts below in the comments, and I'll be sure to reply to them as soon as I can. I'm keen to engage in discourse beyond the write-ups themselves, and eager to hear other people's thoughts on the games I've been playing. If you have any friends who like Marvel's Spider-Man, or who are interested in video games and their stories in particular, I'd be grateful if you would point them in the direction of this blog by sharing it with them. Word of mouth is going to be crucial in getting this project off the ground, so anything that puts me in touch with a wider, interested audience is a massive help. I'll be back with another Text Boxes entry very soon. Until then, thanks very much for reading. Take care, and I'll see you around.
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Hey there folks. Dan here, with the inaugural instalment of Text Boxes for 2020. When trying to work out what to write about in this first entry for the site, I spent a lot of time thinking about which game to open with. I wanted something familiar, so I was comfortable with the source material; something short, so it wouldn't take me too long to revisit for a refresher; and something deep, that might offer a lot of mileage when it came to unpacking it from an analytical standpoint. The game I kept coming back to, which ticked every single box, was Valve's revolutionary first-person puzzler Portal. It feels even more fitting in the context of Portal also being one of the first games I wrote about when I launched my Giant Bomb blog all the way back in the summer of 2008. That original post can be found here, if you'd care to read it. I wouldn't say I'm proud of it; I'm proud of what it represents in terms of the genesis of that blog, but it's very formulaic and doesn't really go into any detail, particularly on the things that make Portal so interesting from a narrative and mechanical angle. Thankfully that means this blog won't be re-treading old ground. Instead, it will be a chance to finally do justice to an all-time favourite in written form. The Portal Will Open in Three... Two... One...I'm not sure there's another video game whose first ninety seconds are as perfect as Portal's. Fading from black, the player is placed into the body of protagonist Chell and encounters the disembodied voice of GLaDOS for the first time. As the psychopathic AI delivers her opening monologue, the player has the opportunity to explore the confines of their cell, their ability to roam limited by glass walls fencing them in. Then, something incredible happens. GLaDOS's speech tails off with a countdown, and at the end of that countdown, a mysterious opening appears in one of the walls of Chell's cell. Approaching it, the player sees something seldom witnessed in a first-person game; their avatar. Not face-on, as one might see themselves in a mirror, but from the side and at a distance, like some sort of out-of-body experience. Curiosity gets the better of the player, so they step further forward, and pass through the opening. As they do so, they witness themselves stepping through the void in real time, and as they emerge on the other side, they find themselves on the outside of the cell looking in. This is the genius of Portal; in a little over a minute, it introduces the core conceit of its gameplay and reinforces the player's understanding by making their first interaction with it as memorable and meaningful as possible. This is no happy accident, but the product of intelligent game design. The developer commentary track, unlocked after beating the game for the first time, explains as much. The player's cell is rendered memorable by the inclusion of recognisable objects that act as visual anchors. The radio is playing an instrumental version of Still Alive to provide a constant audio anchor as well. The portals are positioned in such a way that the player will always see Chell's character model when looking through them. All of these design choices amount to a short segment of gameplay that teaches players how Portal operates on the most rudimentary level without the need for a conventional tutorial or any on-screen prompts. This is especially important in Portal's case because its core mechanic is not a conventional one. In a first-person shooter, where the core mechanic is point-and-shoot, it's not unreasonable to assume that players will be familiar with that mechanic, because it's in a lot of games out there. There aren't many games out there that allow the player to defy the laws of physics by passing through wormholes connecting different points in space. By extension, it's therefore not unreasonable to assume that players might need familiarising with what is a pretty complex concept. By framing the player's first interaction with a portal in this very deliberate way, the developers are able to give players the basic understanding needed to engage with the game's other mechanics and solve the puzzles it presents to them. It is information conveyance at its very best, and that is why I hold the opening moments of Portal in such high regard. Environmental information conveyance is a big part of Portal's design philosophy. The game communicates with the player through a language comprised of audio-visual cues that the player subconsciously learns to read as they play the game, even if they may not realise they're doing it. This is not an uncommon practice in game development; one of the best examples of this is red barrels, whose striking colour denotes explosive properties in almost every game in which they feature. Because Portal's core mechanic is so unique, it goes to follow that the language it uses is pretty unique as well. In another example taken from its developer commentary, Portal communicates points of interest to the player through shapes; objects which can be interacted with, or are important for solving puzzles, typically have rounder edges (not unlike the game's eponymous portals) to make them "pop" against its angular environments. The contrast between light-grey, concrete walls and darker, reflective metal ones teaches the player to recognise which surfaces can and cannot host portals. When it comes to "flinging", a late-game mechanic which involves using gravity to build up momentum and launch out of a portal across a gap, Portal educates players by placing a checker-board pattern on the ground in places where it needs to be employed. These constants help the player to associate mechanics with certain aspects of the environment, giving them at least some indication of what the solution will involve without ever explicitly spelling it out. Aperture Science: We Do What We Must, Because We CanPortal's environments don't just relay information about the game's mechanics. They're also one of its most important tools when it comes to storytelling. Environmental storytelling is a technique largely unique to video games, where interactivity permits players to explore maps and extrapolate narrative threads from things like object placements. Valve have long been proficient in this kind of storytelling, and Portal is no exception. Although Chell's personal story is never really addressed in Portal, morsels of the wider story of Aperture Science are littered throughout the test chambers and backstage corridors that make up the Enrichment Center. Perhaps the most well-known examples of this are the "Rat Man dens", a handful of hideouts tucked away in corners of the game's last few test chambers, with scribbled drawings and text adorning their walls. These dens represent a crack in the gleaming facade of the Enrichment Center, often being the player's first opportunity to get behind the scenes and see what the facility actually looks like beyond its clinical test chambers. While nothing in these locations advances the core story of Portal, their existence fleshes out the wider scope of the narrative by painting a picture of events transpiring outside of the player's perspective. In these instances, the scrawled warnings on the walls of the Rat Man dens also serve to foreshadow upcoming events in the story by alluding to GLaDOS's murderous and mendacious nature before it ever becomes apparent to the player through Chell's eyes. The Rat Man dens are the most obvious example of environmental storytelling in Portal, but there are several more, and most of them much more subtle in their execution. One of my personal favourites is the projector screen that appears in the game's final stages, when the player is traversing several office environments on their way to confront GLaDOS. This simple prop, which cycles through about four slides on a loop, depicts Aperture Science as being in fierce competition with another scientific organisation, namely Half-Life's Black Mesa, for several government contracts. Not only that, but it shows that Black Mesa clearly has the upper hand in this regard, with their awarded contracts and funding far exceeding those of Aperture. It's the kind of thing that could easily be missed, but which adds so much flavour to the situation around the core story, as well as giving a glimpse of the connective tissue that ties Portal to the Half-Life universe. One final example I'd like to highlight, and which I only really noticed through this most recent playthrough, is just how empty and abandoned the Enrichment Center feels. It's a fact that manifests itself through several facets of Portal; for instance, how the player never meets another human character for the duration of the game. It's also evident in the environmental design, though. On this playthrough, I fully appreciated the textures attached to the walls of the test chambers; clinically pristine at first glance, but under closer scrutiny, revealed to be crumbling at the edges. The water hazards that cover the floors of some chambers are not clean and clear, but murky and green, also suggestive of an environment gone to seed and not properly maintained. When the player makes it beyond the test chambers and into the bowels of the facility, the metal panels on the walls and floors are rusting. The environment artists went to incredible lengths to create this air of abandonment about every single aspect of Portal's visual style, and I feel they deserve nothing but the highest praise for doing such a fantastic job that I felt it without ever really noticing why until now. Didn't We Have Some Fun, Though?But what of the story itself? The moment-to-moment events that unfold as the player makes their way through GLaDOS's fiendish labyrinth of challenges? In all honesty, I think it's okay. It justifies the gameplay well, and provides just enough of a motive for the player to tackle the antagonist that the final confrontation feels rewarding, but it is at its core a very simple story without too many unexpected twists or turns. Portal's story is elevated not by its content, but by its delivery. Environmental storytelling, information conveyance and gameplay are important parts of that delivery, but what ties it all together is its inimitable personality. Almost all of that personality belongs to GLaDOS, the sardonic AI communicating with Chell (and by extension, the player) from that aforementioned incredible opening to the game's equally memorable denouement. For a significant portion of Portal, GLaDOS serves the role of narrator by being the player's guide through the Enrichment Center. The player may or may not trust her, but given she is the only character present besides themselves, and therefore the only perspective the player has on the unfolding action, they have no choice but to follow her instructions. As the player progresses through the test chambers, seeds of doubt begin to be sown, primarily through the environmental storytelling in the Rat Man dens I discussed previously, which start to call GLaDOS's reliability into question; if "the cake is a lie", can this AI really be trusted? This comes to a head at the end of the final test chamber, when GLaDOS attempts to incinerate Chell as a "reward" for completing her little game. In this moment, GLaDOS's role changes from mentor and narrator to primary antagonist, and the remainder of the game becomes about getting to her and putting her out of action. In a fantastic example of ludo-narrative concordance, this is also the point in the game at which the training wheels really come off and some of the established rules around portal placement and puzzle solving get re-written, mirroring Chell casting off the shackles of GLaDOS's control. Let's be honest, though. GLaDOS isn't just memorable because she's a mentor figure who transforms into an antagonist. She's mainly memorable because she's very funny. There's a clever juxtaposition between her cool, robotic delivery and the darkly humorous content of her dialogue, which often results in jokes only truly landing when the player stops to think back on the meaning of what they've just heard. Credit is due to both the writers at Valve for imbuing a supercomputer with so much personality, and voice actress Ellen McLain for delivering her lines so brilliantly. In the age of "meme humour", it's easy to think back on Portal as just "the 'cake is a lie' game", but I think that to do so is to do a disservice to how legitimately funny Portal was, and indeed still is. Congratulations, the Test Is Now OverIt was a pleasure revisiting Portal to put together this inaugural write-up for Text Boxes. There was a lot more I could have said, most of which would have pertained only to very specific parts of the game, so I decided to keep those back and make this a more general write-up. These are early days though, and the format is very much still subject to change. Future entries might look at just one particular aspect of a game that captures my attention, resulting in shorter, more focused blogs going forward. If you have any thoughts on this long-form essay on Portal, then I'd appreciate some feedback. Please leave your thoughts below in the comments, and I'll be sure to reply to them as soon as I can. I'm keen to engage in discourse beyond the write-ups themselves, and eager to hear other people's thoughts on the games I've been playing. If you have any friends who like Portal, or who are interested in video games and their stories in particular, I'd be grateful if you would point them in the direction of this blog by sharing it with them. Word of mouth is going to be crucial in getting this project off the ground, so anything that puts me in touch with a wider, interested audience is a massive help. I'll be back with another Text Boxes entry very soon. Until then, thanks very much for reading. Take care, and I'll see you around. Daniel KempsterHey there folks, and welcome to Text Boxes - a brand new blog dedicated to exploring storytelling in video games. Before we properly get underway, I'd like to take some time to establish what Text Boxes is, who I am, and what I hope to achieve through this endeavour. What is Text Boxes?As I said above, Text Boxes is a blog founded upon the analysis and critique of storytelling and information conveyance within the medium of video games. In layman's terms, it's a space where I plan to explore the techniques that games employ to tell their stories and teach their mechanics to players. Each new entry will dive deep into one aspect of a specific game, series or genre, putting it under the microscope to try and establish what makes it successful (or, in some cases, unsuccessful). While most of the content on Text Boxes will gravitate towards analysing stories and storytelling techniques, I'll also be looking at things like game mechanics and visual presentation when I find them particularly interesting or noteworthy. As time progresses, I hope to cover a wide range of topics including voice acting, animation, dialogue trees/wheels, environmental storytelling, ludo-narrative dissonance, everything in between and plenty more besides. What's your schedule?Right now I don't have a strict schedule outlined for Text Boxes. In terms of how often I'll be updating this blog, the honest (if vague) answer is, "as often as I can". In practice, the frequency of posts will be dictated by how quickly I'm able to make it through the games I intend to talk about, but I'm tentatively going to say that new entries should arrive about once every two weeks on average. I don't currently have an agenda regarding which games I intend to cover in this space, either, although I do have some entries already in the bank and ideas for others starting to take shape. In these early stages, Text Boxes will simply be informed by the games I choose to play in my spare time, and the things I notice while playing them. That's not to say I don't have ideas in terms of continuity or long-form serial content, but for now I'm happy to let circumstance dictate my direction and see where it takes me. Who are you?My name is Dan Kempster. I'm a writer and video game enthusiast based in the United Kingdom. Consequently I have a great deal of interest in both video games and storytelling, and for some time have been looking for an opportunity to explore the place where the circles of that particular Venn diagram overlap. As a student I studied English Language and Literature at the University of Essex, graduating with a BA (Hons) First Class in 2011, giving me an established (albeit slightly rusty!) background in literary analysis. Prior to Text Boxes I maintained a user's blog at popular video game website Giant Bomb. I'll be archiving the most meaningful content from that blog by copying to Text Boxes over the coming months, but for now you can access my old posts by clicking this link. Why write a blog?This is perhaps the hardest of these questions for me to answer. In the modern age, when almost all video game criticism has moved into the audio-visual space by way of podcasts and YouTube videos, it's incredibly difficult to measure the long-term viability of the written word. Personally, I believe that long-form essays and written criticism justify their existence by providing a carefully curated alternative to the often lackadaisical spontaneity of unscripted, stream-of-consciousness audio-visual content such as podcasts and Let's Plays. While I attempted to carve out a space for written content through my Giant Bomb blog, I came to realise that the site's userbase wasn't interested in the kind of content I sought to provide. That realisation led me to establish Text Boxes as a blog dedicated to written articles, in the hope that it might reach out to like-minded individuals and forge its own identity within the landscape of video game criticism and analysis. I hope I've shed a little light on what I hope to achieve with Text Boxes, and I'd be really excited to know if you're planning to come along for the ride - please leave me a shout in the comments if there's anything in particular you think I should be focusing on at this early stage. I'm currently hard at work preparing the inaugural entries for a January 2020 launch, but until then, please feel free to explore and familiarise yourself with the site. Be sure to pin Text Boxes to your browser's list of Bookmarks, or subscribe to new posts via the RSS feed if that's more your sort of thing. Thanks very much for reading folks. Take care, and I'll see you around. Dan Kempster |
AuthorHey there folks, and welcome to Text Boxes. I'm Dan, a writer and video game enthusiast with a passion for storytelling. Text Boxes is a blog dedicated to games, their stories, and the techniques they use to convey them to the player. Archives
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