Real Sand-Box Style Games

The problem with having a new born is that light sleepers sleep even lighter. And for me, half the reason I sleep light is that I can't turn my brain off when I want/need to (the other half of the reason is that I can't turn my ears off, so I hear everything). So tonight, I started thinking about "open ended" sand-box style games that really aren't and how they could be fixed and probably not nearly be as fun.

The Grand Theft Auto series is supposed to be the leader in open world gaming. You can do anything you want, whenever you want. But in reality, the game has confines that funel you toward an end. Sure, you can stop interacting with the other characters in the game and just drive around and do stunts and collect things, but that's hardly fun. Grand Theft Auto is like a really awesome movie game. You get back story, you work through the multiple storyline arcs and then come to the final conclusion/resolution. But what if the game had endings that might not ever happen or be so insurmountable that we realize that we need to keep playing to find an ending that suits us.

I feel like the main problem with games like this is voice acting. Trying to add production quality to video games like this ultimately holds them back. If you didn't have to write dialog for every situation, you could have even more situations and then not feel pressured to actually manifest them. GTA IV had hundreds of pages of script (closer to a thousand?). Why not proceedurally create the game using a system more built for the purpose: classic role playing games.

In an RPG like Dungons and Dragons, heros build characters based off of categories of statistics and a pool of experience points. By rolling dice, they give each attribute a value and base instances in the game off of them to determine the outcome. But what if every primary and secondary character in a video game had that.

Let's take GTA IV as an example. The game would give you the same backstory of imigrating illegally to America to meet your cousin and start a new life. Your back story as gangster determines your character statistics (i.e. you have a high percentage of shooting accuracy, high speed and strength and agility, etc). Everyone else in the game has statiscs that are created when you initiate a new game save. The problem here is figuring out every type of statistic you need to make the game have it's own story arcs (or not!). For instance, one of your cousin's new buddies could have a high probability to let you have a car from his dealership, but also have a high gambling probabilty. He could also suck at it. At the close of the local casino, anyone with unpaid debt has a problem and if one of them knew you, they might call you for help where you could, as a player in the game, decide whether or not to help and if "helping" includes using a gun.

By running the game off of percentages and character attributes and tying that with activities that already exist in the games (racing, gambling, flying planes, shooting pool, strip clubs), you would basically have a program that is acting as a the "dungeon master" and crafting an experience specifically for you, making sure that not too many instances happen at the same time, that as time moves along maybe things happen to more primary characters, and, with a high probability, one of a few huge event trees happens that lead you to a satisfying game end, not necessarily a story end. If we decided that our friend in the casino who's knee caps are about to be shot off, we could come to the rescue, kill the gangster owner and take over the place for ourselves. We win. But if we want more, we stay in the game, sell the casino and that tells the game we want to keep rolling the dice and see what comes up next.

How does that differ from GTA IV now? There are lots of small story arcs that we could leave the game anytime after succeeding, but we bought the game because we know there is a big finally ending that triggers the credits. If we keep playing, we eventually have to come to that ending. We could just try dating women in the game and play as a dating sim, but there is no final event there. In Fable, a game where you can get married and have kids, you get an experience and resolution, but it's based off of meeting requirements. Anyone who tries it and learns the rules will succeed. There's no chance or probability, leaving the "mission" on a single track. GTA, nor Fable, have stopping points where your telling the game that you want to continue and to keep generating instances of events of varying difficulty or probability of success.

Games like Dungons and Dragons have a players working in an enviornment where the dungon master has crafted an experience and feeds players a main story arc and choices. It's a relationship that requires the will to continue to meet goals predetermined by the dungeon master. Keep the character building of Dungeons and Dragons and use the abililty of a computer to generate days worth of content and you have yourself a truly open ended game where the content only stops if everyone the player can interact with dies off or moves out of town.

That all being said, I never said that a game like this would sell or be any good. It's 2:45 in the a.m. and "sand-box style" was the phrase that entered my head back around 1:30am.

Truth in Advertising Bill Passed in Utah

Jack Thompson, the craziest ex-lawyer this side of the globe, helped push House Bill 353 into amendment status ratifying content targeting video game retailers and movie theaters and selling M or R rated material to underage kids.

83 (u) (i) advertises that the person will not sell a good or service labeled with an age
84 restriction or recommendation to a person under the age restriction or recommendation; and
85 (ii) sells that good or service to a person under the age restriction or recommendation.

With a new child of my own, I completely understand having some sort of measurement in place to help stop retailers from pushing pornography and murder onto kids who don't know better. But scaring politicians with lies is just wrong.

Jack, again, pushed that the game Grand Theft Auto IV is a murder/sex simulator, "rewarding" players for killing cops and shooting hookers. He references Devin Moore, a murderer who killed three police workers in 2005, stating to the police that "life is like a video game, everyone dies sometime" and that he shot the police because he didn't want to go to jail. At the time of the shooting, Moore was 20 years old.

My issue is that no where in the bill does it say anything about parental punishment for parents who let their kids play violent games or see violent movies. And I don't see how selling games to underage kids has anything to do with truth in advertising.

Personally, I've played through all of GTA4 and never once had relations with a prostitute. I did however run a car 80mph down a street in the middle of the city and whipe out score of pedestrians. When the cops chased me, I ran outside of their red circle of awareness, at which point they completely forgot about me and I went along my merry way.

Ahh, the realism of video games.

Finished: Grand Theft Auto 4

Tonight will be the end of Grand Theft Auto: IV. I checked the in game stats and saw that I had clocked in just under 37 hours in the game, which isn't surprising considering how often I got sidetracked flying helicopters, shooting tires off of speeding cars, or driving SUVs and sportbikes in skateboard parks.

But as I realized the game was coming to an end (I just have one mission left) I realized that with everything that is so right with the game; all the great voice acting, variations in missions, new physics, better controls, that the story of the game was stretched out too far and too few. It felt like 80% of the missions in the game were spent doing dirty work for someone else so they would give you a tip about finding the people that your looking for in the game. It was very little reward for the work.

And what made it worse is that I knew going into each set of character's missions that I didn't care what their motivation was. One mob boss is having beef with a couple others so you fix things and do one or two ancillary things in between to break them up. But there's no emotional tie-in to their missions. Niko had no real motivation other than a slight greed and the hopes that once he finished working for someone they would tell him what he needed to hear to move his story along.

That's it. My one complaint about the game. I didn't have problems with mission difficulty or repetition. I didn't have problems with the online side of things. Just the story. Now, unless this final mission blows the cap off the mob bosses and all the people you met, which I doubt it will, I'll assume that it's content was foretold by the previous mission and that there are no Shyamalan-style twists.

I wouldn't mind going back into the game once it's finished though and replaying some of the pivotal moments when you choose to save or kill people, at least when you finally do find the guy that you've spent "years" searching for. I let everyone live on my play through. I guess that's supposed to say something about who I am as a person right?

EDIT: Saturday morning I finished the game outright. I chased down the man that killed my girlfriend in a park on the game's version of Staten Island, killing him underneath the giant statue's shadow. Niko's cousin proclaimed that we had won, but Niko wasn't really sure at all. The screen went blank and slow fly-over of Liberty City's different areas with no music and rolling credits ended the game. Very somber. Very emotional. The credits ended with a black screen and Niko's voice saying, "So this is what the dream feels like. This is the victory we longed for", and a consoling phone call from cousin Roman. Then the game opens back up to free play.

GTA 4: What I Did - Finale

No, not being played by the government. But your character is. It's too bad people focus so much on the actions of GTA games instead of the stories.

In GTA: Vice City, you were a run away gangster who's sole goal in life was to take over your ex-bosses territory. In San Andreas, it was your duty to clean the streets of drugs and get the "thug" out of San Andreas. Now, in GTA 4, just trying to make ends meet and "start fresh", the story gets even more interesting (I tried not to read the page actually, but I saw two possible endings as well as where I'm at in the game right now).

As a story-telling medium, GTA is one of the tops. It's the most immersive game series I've ever played. It may not be particularly deep with lure like Final Fantasy or a book like Lord of the Rings, but if there was ever a series to be compared to watching a movie (albeit plus or minus 30 hours), this would be the one.

I'm 26% into the game (maybe 40% of the core storyline). I've passed 36 missions. I've killed 120 people over the span of 29 game days. I've stolen 71 cars, 2 motorcycles, and 3 boats. My longest police chase lasted 5:20. I've spent $82 on food, $180 on dates and only gotten drunk once. I played pool for 7:20 and beaten the high score on Cub3d. I've gotten 34 text messages and surfed the internet for 33:28.

And that's only about a 1/20th of the stats tracked in the game.

I'm going to go ahead and call this game the best GTA so far. They've fixed so many control issues, updated the graphics nicely, gotten top-notch (and non-famous) actors for the voice work, and nailed the cinematography. The map is now nice and tight so your not driving an hour just to get somewhere. The physics on cars and people are perfect. The musical score for the game is inspiring and enveloping (even the pause menu music).

Honestly, if it weren't for the cussing and the violence, this game could probably get some kind of Emmy / Oscar Award. It will clean up in the video game awards, as numerous and flaky as they are. San Andreas won awards. So did Vice City. So who knows?

I do know that I'm looking forward to finishing up the story and generally screwing around in the game online and off.

GTA 4: What I Did - Part 2

At this point, I'm pretty focused on completing the core missions of the game and I've come across a really interesting pattern in the game: your character never drinks, smokes week (or cigarettes) or does any drugs, even when asked multiple times by the same person. Also, Niko (your character) always points out the flaws of everyone's plans. He's not disillusioned by schemes or tempted by anything really. He knows he needs money to survive and that's his only weakness. I made that sound sadder than it really is. I have to admit, he didn't really fight staging a gay date in order to make a little cash.

But I've managed to play the game as straight as I could and would have liked. The first opportunity I was given to let a guy go instead of killing him, I did. The game has forced me to kill off everyone else in order to get paid for the jobs I was given by my "friends". And besides the one time I was showing a friend GTA 4, I haven't purposefully gone out and shot civilians or police officers. I run when I can and drive hard. I've been in the hospital quite a few times in order to not kill police. It's the least I can do.

I've played pool and gone bowling with a couple of characters. I also got the high score on the arcade game Cub3d, a really neat falling-block style puzzle game.

I haven't surfed the internet or watched too much television though. Not that the idea of watching hours of tv on a game on my tv or surfing a canned internet eludes me. I'm just really interested to see where story lines branch out to. I feel more emotionally attached to Niko for some reason. An ex-military immigrant who had done some bad things is now trying to make a life in America. He's knows there's not thing as a "fresh start", but he's trying to do what he can. Apparently he's just done worse things than shoot a few guys in the face, because there are no internal issues there!

And I'd probably be a few more hours into the game if friends wouldn't keep inviting me into online Blackhawk helicopter/high speed boat shenanigans and a round or two of jump-the-moped-into-the-helicopter-blades. Seriously. I'm pretty sure that the latter wasn't my idea. Pretty sure.

GTA 4: What I Did

• First opening credits: This game has higher production values that most movies. So clean. Well shot. Good voice acting. This is digital acting at it's best. I'm driving in the first few minutes. That's good. I immediately want to play it like a movie, but I know that won't last long.
  
• There's a t.v. in my room that plays a few channels. All of them parodies of real shows. This is a nice addition to the radios in the cars. I can see myself wasting a few hours here (there's really a lot on). I hear there is a whole movie to watch too. Hey, wait, I think that's a Halo parody cartoon.
  
• I'm on my first date with an American girl. Awkward! Seriously though, somethings weird. She's a clean freak and isn't saying much about herself. Cute as hell though. We're going bowling. Seriously. You can bowl five frames in the game. I prefer Wii bowling. Niko needs a damn Wii. Once our date was finished, I get to keep her car to continue on.
  
• I decided it was time to jack a car. So I picked the sportiest one around. I drove off a few blocks and started looking at the paper map included with the game, when all of the sudden I get rear ended at high speed. My g.t.a. victim found me and started chasing me around. I got out, ran around the block and got back in my car confident that I lost him and took off to find a paint shop for the car. Damn guy found me again!
  
• Time to make dinner. I took Niko back to the apartment and turned on the tv and let it play while I cooked. I hope they release these shows on YouTube or something. They're pretty funny and are so on key with what's wrong with American t.v. This stuff is really well written. "Bitches love initials!"
  

That's all for now.