Among seasoned MMO players, Eve is infamous as “the Icelandic space trading game where everyone is a total asshole to everyone else,” and while that may be an exaggeration, it’s not entirely inaccurate. Eve was created by a tiny outfit in Reykjavik called Crowd Control Productions, often known simply as ”CCP.” The company was founded in 1997 specifically to create Eve, and no one on the original 21-man team had ever worked on a game before.

While Eve does display many of the hallmarks of massively multiplayer gaming (lots of grinding and mouse-clicking, utterly psychotic learning curve), it has a handful of features that make its virtual landscape very different and very dangerous. There is only one server: an absolute monster of a supercomputer that CCP claims is among the most powerful in the world. The star cluster of New Eden comprises over 5,000 solar systems, each with its own planets, asteroid belts, and space stations. And, perhaps most importantly, it is possible for players to control territory.

While the systems at the center of the map belong to the four Empires, where player-vs-player aggression is mercilessly punished by invincible computer-controlled police (but, crucially, only after the damage is done), well over a third of the galaxy falls outside of NPC control, and has been fought over every day since Eve’s launch by alliances consisting of thousands of players. They deploy orbital structures, claim sovereignty over star systems, control local traffic and access to resources, and fight each other using every tactic at their disposal, from massive fleet battles to official propaganda to outside-of-game shenanigans. Eve is harsh, cold and brutal, thriving on nonconsensual PvP and actively encouraging piracy, corporate espionage and other such dirty tricks.

It is, in short, a darkly beautiful playground.

I began playing Eve in January of 2005 and since then have spent a considerable amount of time on hiatus, giving me an outsider’s perspective on New Eden coupled with a veteran’s understanding of the machinations at work in its perpetually twilit universe. For me, Eve’s territorial component has always been more interesting than the number-crunching tedium of direct combat, where statistics like tracking speed, accuracy falloff and signature radius can send your poorly prepared ass home in an escape pod (or worse). The subtle art of deploying and defending structures, harvesting materials, manufacturing equipment and protecting market share with a gang of competent players is like an RTS writ large, operating at a deliberate pace requiring careful planning without the caffeine-fueled, 400-clicks-per-minute reflexes of a Korean StarCraft champion.

But there is, unfortunately, an enormous barrier to entry. More than half of Eve’s players never become involved in the endgame, preferring to mine asteroids and grind missions in the relative safety of high-security space, while most others are content to prowl contested regions looking for a fight. It takes enormous amounts of time and effort to establish a home among the stars, and even my modest dream of deploying a small structure in a forgotten dead-end system (the New Eden equivalent of a cabin on the tundra) to support the occasional combat sortie would demand an extraordinary level of commitment. Eve is a game for the hardcore; that is its greatest strength, but it also closes the door on easygoing players.

Massively multiplayer games, in general, only appeal to me in theory. Eve often comes close to satisfying me in practice, but it’s still not quite there. For me, the biggest draw of an MMO is its persistence; the game world continues to thrive with or without my presence, and playing the game takes on the feeling of traveling to another universe. In many ways, visiting another place is the most compelling aspect of games for me, and many is the time that I’ve played a mediocre game simply to experience its world. But nearly all MMOs - including Eve - stifle this feeling by substituting bewildering complexity for actual depth, shoehorning an array of statistics, measurements and hidden dice rolls into combat mechanics based primarily on pointing and clicking.

MMOs operate on the assumption that, if you’re playing online, you must be playing with other people. Some of the most fascinating aspects of these games - like Eve’s territorial endgame - are open only to players who team up with hundreds of others and commit to a minimum contribution of playing time to support the group. For games like Eve, this is a deliberate aspect of the design, but I believe it’s possible to design a game that opens this type of gameplay to the individual player. Time of Defiance attempted this, but fell victim to other shortcomings and faded into obscurity.

Wired’s Clive Thompson made a compelling case for the solitary gamer, and concluded his article with the suggestion of a “radical singleplayer” game that gives the player an enormous world to explore without subjecting him to the conflicting obligations of his peers. This is much closer to what I have in mind, although I would be inclined to incorporate some small-scale multiplayer aspect as well. Some titles like Freelancer and Sins of a Solar Empire have brushed against the ideal, the former allowing the player to set up his computer as a dedicated server; a “mini-MMO” in which a hundred or so players can log in and play indefinitely as long as the machine is running.

Following Mitch Krpata’s Taxonomy of Gamers, the vast majority of MMOs cater to skill players, rather than tourists. I am toying with the idea of an “MMO for tourists,” where players would be primarily focused on building up a homestead for themselves, engaging in combat and other activities on their own time, without requiring them to commit to large groups in order to experience the full breadth of the game. It would most likely rely heavily on instancing, something like Phantasy Star Online with more than just an endless series of dungeons.

Encouragingly, CCP has announced its latest expansion for Eve, entitled Quantum Rise. While the primary purpose of this expansion is to improve the game’s performance and reduce lag, features are being introduced (and further additions are planned for next year) that aim to increase the density of New Eden’s massive world, hopefully making it easier for solitary players to forge a path for themselves without committing all of their free time to the fickle whims of an alliance. The mechanics that govern sovereignty are being rethought, and perhaps there is still hope that I can have my little homestead in deep space. If not, I will at least have a clearer understanding of the challenges when I embark on a world-building mission of my own.

My thoughts on this are still a bit disorganized, as the field of massively multiplayer games in general is surprisingly uncharted territory. I will post further as I home in on this goal and establish a set of concrete steps to take in order to achieve it. More to follow!

Make no mistake; I fancy myself a pretty intelligent dude. At the very least I have a vocabulary rivaling that of Jerry Holkins, if not Gene Wolfe. Yet somehow there’s a part of my brain (probably the one devoted to recalling, word for word, the screenplays to Disney movies that I haven’t seen in ten years) that perhaps I should have cultivated more diligently. Most of these writers, by way of their superlative insight, make me feel like a 19th-century frontiersman wandering into a room full of astronauts. Fundamentally, we may be in the same line of work, but damn if I don’t feel left behind.

The staff of Action Button effortlessly canonizes Half-Life 2 and Metroid Prime while deftly impaling Metal Gear Solid 4’s head on a rusty pike, employing a kind of verbosity that I would never have expected outside of a graduate dissertation. Michael Abbott shares my appreciation for well-written cutscenes, and defends our common viewpoint through a review of Yakuza 2 that makes my assessment of Beyond Good & Evil look like a ham-fisted fan letter. The one-man development army known only as Eskil Steenberg represents virtually everything I believe a game designer should be, with a confidence so absolute that I would be tempted to call him the Howard Roark of video games if Objectivism were not so universally misconstrued by those with no value for greatness. Indie developer Matthew Wasteland, in a piece for GameSetWatch, eloquently expresses everything worth saying about “games as art” with nary a trace of pedantic rambling…

And here I am, barely able to keep up, still believing that I can make great games even if I could never sufficiently untangle the ensuing philosophical ramifications to save my life. Am I missing something? Is there some dusty old book of secrets, long forgotten in the back corner of an import game shop in a bad neighborhood, that reveals all the knowledge and wisdom necessary to see things this clearly? A neotechnological Necronomicon for ludologists and Nu Skool game journos?

I submit that there is not.

Furthermore, I submit that I would not need such crap even if there were.

There are many kinds of intelligence, and mine is not designed for intellectual pursuits. I am too methodical, too detail-oriented, and too obsessed with practical function to expound on the finer points of postmodern artistic expression in the medium of twin-stick shooters. How could I, when there are still so many scripts to debug, meshes to optimize and countless animations crying out for cleanup?

I am going to make linear “thrill ride” games. They will be very short, and will probably have cutscenes in them. Some of them may even be first-person shooters. But if the zeitgeist among game industry pundits is to be believed, I will never be allowed into the Real Artists Club - where all the truly creative game designers are hanging out with Andy Warhol and James Joyce - unless I abandon my personal goals and make a game so deliberately abstract that all interpretations are equally correct. Then, presumably, everyone gets to nod appreciatively over their martinis and feign interest as they regurgitate hastily fabricated analyses at each other so they can figure out which one of them is smart enough to date the Brazilian supermodel in the next room. What horseshit.

Hey, at least I can be vitriolic, right? That’s gotta count for something.

Jesus, the game I’m working on right now has goddamn space marines in it. How many self-styled Hunter S. Thompson successors are going to bail out halfway through and browbeat me for sixteen pages before even getting to the reveal? Who in the “games as art” community is going to stick around long enough to find out, somewhere during the second-to-last chapter, that the whole thing is a premeditated slap in the face of every antihero trope we’ve unwittingly swallowed while indulging in blood-soaked juvenile power fantasies for the past decade? I really don’t know. I could be shooting myself in the foot or launching a successful career. There’s no way to tell.

And thus I declare: if I am forever barred from the pantheon of True Art because I endeavour to tell stories that have one correct interpretation, one narrative arc, and one proudly displayed theme, then that’s fine with me. Theodore Sturgeon says “hi.”

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Alan Wake, here’s the latest trailer:

Finnish developer Remedy is known for their 2001 breakout hit Max Payne, which put players in the role of a police detective with a murdered family and a hands-on approach to justice. Alan Wake, on the other hand, is the story of a horror novelist stymied by writer’s block following the disappearance of his wife. He travels to a small town in Alaska to clear his head, meets a woman who looks disturbingly similar to his wife, and begins suffering from intense nightmares. Unfortunately, when he tries to write a new novel using these nightmares as inspiration, the events of the story begin to creep into the real world.

Doesn’t really sound like game narrative, does it? Granted, there are quite a few games that deliver deep, well-rounded characters, but there are precious few games with the cojones to hinge the entire story on the emotional state of a single character. Few games beyond the Silent Hill series have attempted anything like this, and even then only Silent Hill 2 really managed to accomplish this daunting task.

Of course, Silent Hill 2 was also fantastically obtuse.

Which is why Alan Wake excites me as much as it does. Remedy announced some time ago that they intend to build the game’s story like a television show (superficially similar to Atari’s Alone In The Dark reboot), with the full arc being divided into “episodes” that can be played individually. If nothing else, this gives me hope that we may end up seeing a character-based game with the depth of a Silent Hill that doesn’t require several weeks of intense analysis and/or a psych degree to be sure of the correct interpretation.

I hear Stephen King makes a decent living off that kinda stuff.

Valve’s Portal, as overexposed as it may be, is a perfect example of a game with a solid design philosophy. Since the game was developed by Valve - whose studio resides at the epicenter of a great Awesome Vortex within which nothing can ever suck - it’s clear that Portal was produced with the utmost skill and dedication. But I submit that this is not what makes it a great game.

Portal is great because it represents a way of communicating with the player that few games have ever tried, let alone succeeded at. First of all, consider the overall structure: a series of discrete, clearly separated puzzles, all of which are mentally stimulating, yet none of which take more than 15-20 minutes to solve.  As short as the game is, it is still designed to be accessible in small, bite-size chunks. Jonathan Blow, in his marketing materials for Braid, claims that his magnum opus of time manipulation “treats the player’s time as precious,” but it seems to me that Portal may even be more polite in this regard.

In addition, here is a game without so much as a single cutscene that still offers a deep subtext for the observant player. Portal’s philosophy is to be playable on the player’s terms without insulting his intelligence. The result is a game that feels like hanging out with a good friend.

On the other side of the fence, we have Grand Theft Auto IV. Now, I adored GTA III, and in fact I still play it regularly. But over the course of Vice City and San Andreas, the series started suffering from feature creep and I lost interest. The clearest example of this is the cell phone in GTA IV.

Yes, you can turn it off when it gets annoying, but the fact that this was Rockstar’s chosen method for delivering mission objectives seems to indicate that they were willing to sacrifice the player’s feeling of control for  the sake of heightened realism. The cell phone may be more “correct,” but I prefer the old method of showing up at a guy’s house for instructions; I’m willing to suspend disbelief in that regard if it means I can have more control over my playing experience. The infamous walkie-talkie in Capcom’s otherwise phenomenal Dead Rising is a more extreme case, but they represent the same thing: games made with great skill and talent, but without a positive philosophy regarding the player.

As games become more popular as entertainment and slowly gain more ground as an art form, game designers will need to be more attentive to the philosophy behind their games in addition to the mechanics. Soon, as it is in film, it will no longer be enough for a game to be technically proficient. It will have to clearly communicate itself to the player, using the player’s understanding and enjoyment as its foundation rather than an empty imitation of reality. The player is smart. He’ll figure it out.

Ernest Adams, game design instructor and writer of the “Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie!” series of articles, recently posted an essay on Gamasutra entitled “The Tao of Game Design.” While the piece doesn’t contain any revelations that fall outside of common sense - or, indeed, any knowledge that can be practically applied - the fact that Adams chose to make a distinction between the skills of game design and the philosophy of game design is worthy of consideration nevertheless.

One sentence in particular stands out to me: “It’s not possible to make a completely solipsistic video game.” An astute commenter points out that, as demonstrated in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, all creative work requires an audience in order to come alive, but I’d argue that games are more dependent on audience participation than any other medium. A solipsistic film like Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (which, for the record, I loathe) can at least get by on the intuition of its audience; you may never fully understand what it’s saying, but you can usually glean some morsel of information from a deliberately obtuse attempt at communication. Games do not have this luxury. The player is primarily responsible for the progress of the story, so if he is unable to understand it, everything screeches to a halt.

Likewise, if the player feels no motivation to continue, the game will stagnate. I discovered this after finishing my first game, Late Again. The main “hook” of the design was presenting the player with a choice between tedium (a subway ride to work) and the unknown (a romp through the upper atmosphere in a flying saucer), with both paths ultimately leading our perpetually tardy hero to the office… five minutes late. The idea being, of course, that if you’re going to be late anyway you may as well have fun. But problems arose with the subway ride. I had wanted the trip to last three minutes, thinking this would be a suitable amount of time to simulate the frustration of being stuck on the train waiting for the right stop. Unfortunately, the frustration was a little too effective. While the first minute or so was funny to most players, the remainder of the trip was so boring that many of them just restarted the game.

Whoops.

In my desire to create a game that actually communicated my impatience with public transportation, I had forgotten that there was going to be an actual human being at the other end, and I made no effort to intuit what would’ve made the game enjoyable for that person. As luck would have it, the initial feeling of being trapped in a subway car while playing a platform game was funny for about a minute, so I went back and cut the ride down to 60-70 seconds. Similarly, I shortened the spaceflight sections to prevent them from getting too repetitive, as they are quite rudimentary.

Game design is a two-way street. More so than writing, painting or film, games cannot afford to be self-indulgent because the player’s understanding is so crucial to the experience. Perhaps it is my belief that art, above all, is a form of communication that leads me to pursue game design. This is why I’m interested in Adams’s distinction between the jutsu (skills) and the do (way or path) of designing games.

How many games have we encountered that have all of the jutsu and none of the do? I myself have found enjoyment in games that, while well-crafted, are utterly devoid of substance (I have a weakness for oddball racing games, from Wipeout to Re-Volt to Star Wars Episode I: Racer). Some games have plenty of do, but not necessarily the kind you would consider enriching. MMOs often do this, such as World of Warcraft (”You’re just a monkey that pushes buttons. Push the buttons, monkey!”) and Eve Online (”You’re just a cog in someone else’s machine. Don’t screw up or we’ll ruin your fun until you quit!”). Of course, I have to mitigate all of this by saying that I love “junk food” games as much as the next guy*, but they’re certainly not the reason I’m in this business.

In the second part of this piece, I’m going to discuss some of the games I feel are good examples of proper skills matched with the proper philosophy, and what these games have to teach us, both as designers and as players. Come back soon for Part Two!

* If anyone wants to throw down in, say, Ace Combat 6, my Gamertag is Regulus.

Anyway. Rant incoming, so get comfy.

At the age of 23, I believe that I still qualify as a “young whippersnapper” in the game industry at large. As such, I may appear unqualified to lecture more experienced developers on their professional conduct, but I’m pretty sure I know a huge mistake when I see one.

Let’s not be coy here. Getting into pissing matches with your audience is probably the most self-destructive thing a creative person can do. As much as we may try to differentiate ourselves from Hollywood and other forms of media, this is at least one thing we can stand to learn from the film industry. Most filmmakers know how the system works. You produce a work of art, which may turn out good or bad. If it’s good, you graciously accept the honor and move right on to the next project. If it’s bad, you keep your head down and move right on to the next project. You don’t write angry letters to film critics about how they gave you a bad rap. And you definitely don’t try to guilt your audience into buying a ticket anyway.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I thought we all learned this lesson from Derek Smart years ago. The logic is simple: if you are capable of producing a good product, then the product itself will stand as proof of your talent. The moment you begin to vocally defend your work from its detractors, you are demonstrating a total lack of faith in your own abilities. Why else would you feel compelled to explain why your game is good, rather than let people see it for themselves? You obviously must feel that your explanation will be more convincing than the game itself. At that point, don’t even bother making it. Just tell people how awesome your game would be if you did make it. We’ll all take you just as seriously and you’ll save a lot of money in the process.

The revelation that sportsmanship is dead among gamers has been a bitter blow for me. In my rose-tinted, 20-something view of the universe, we all live in a rational meritocracy where anyone strong enough to beat me is an opponent to be honored and learned from. But as I begin my epic journey to the other side of the player/developer fence, I am even more disheartened that professionalism appears to be dying a slow, agonizing death in the game industry. Are gamers really so immature that it’s begun to rub off on developers? I’m not going to lie; as someone with a history of minor anxiety issues, this unhealthy psychological climate terrifies me far more than any failed creative endeavor.

When did we stop taking responsibility for our own work? When did our failures become someone else’s fault? Developers have been blaming publishers for years, but surely heavy constraints can inspire creativity, no? And even if you do get shafted - say, your QA budget gets axed and your game ships with bugs - save it for the postmortem, would you please? No need to air your grievances where we can all smell them. It just makes us think you’re the one that stinks.

My theory is this: as the gamer community has broadened to include more sociopathic neanderthals, they’ve become a far more convenient group to blame for all our mistakes. Because hey, they’re all assholes anyway, right? Suddenly, every flamebait forum troll becomes an attack from the community at large: Oh my God, they all hate me because they think my game sucks. I must educate them!

NO. STOP IT. You’re suffering from a delusion and you need to abandon it before you irreparably damage your career. I am already convinced that if Too Human doesn’t turn out to be the Second Coming and the cure for at least four types of cancer, Denis Dyack may never be able to get another game released. Not because his games are bad, but because no publisher will want to get near such a flagrant PR disaster.

And don’t even get me started on drinking yourself blind, flameposting reviews of your own game, and telling everyone you’ll make them all shut up one day.

So, here’s the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. In the tradition of indie developers openly asking what the deal is with things that upset them, I’m going to ask this question to all you developers out there:

Why do we get so bent out of shape when the Internet pans our work? What’s preventing us from dealing with these situations in a mature, professional manner?

I eagerly anticipate your responses. And I promise I won’t attack a Coke machine if I don’t like what I hear.

DISCLAIMER: Astute readers may wish to point out that my usage of other developers as examples of unprofessional conduct amounts to unprofessional conduct. I like to believe that we may learn from their mistakes so history doesn’t have to repeat itself.

UPDATE: The reviews are in, and Too Human turned out mediocre-to-fair. Sega is publishing a new title from Silicon Knights, so evidently Dyack is still a viable commodity. I don’t know whether I should be happy that things seem to be working out for him (I’m sure he’s a decent guy) or disappointed that this kind of behavior in the public forum is actually considered acceptable.

In other news, this interview with Luc Bernard is enlightening and mortifying in equal measure. I really hope this dirty-laundry tabloid business isn’t going to become a trend.

UPDATE THE 2ND: Okay, how is this supposed to not make me furious? Is this for real? Have I been transported into an alternate universe where you can pull this sort of lunatic stunt without getting flat-out gagged by your publisher? What the hell is this madness? Whatever it is, it was apparently enough to get him kicked from NeoGAF. Jesus. At this rate, I should be able to get a publishing deal simply by not rationalizing all of reality in my favor whenever a project goes south. Who wants to give me $15 million?

Did I say he was a decent guy? I still want to think he is, but now I’m not so sure.

Rationally speaking, I should not be angry right now. Unfortunately, I am anyway. What an awful feeling.

What is the demoscene? Wikipedia calls it “a computer art subculture that specializes in producing demos, which are non-interactive audio-visual presentations that run in real-time on a computer.” The demoscene is an offshoot from the early days of software cracking. Hackers who successfully managed to crack a piece of software often created these little self-executing bits of eye candy called “intros” proclaiming their success to anyone who ran their program.

However, since an intro often had to fit into the 4-kilobyte boot sector of a floppy disk, they required superhuman programming skills to implement. At some point, hackers began creating these intros as standalone programs purely to flaunt their abilities, and thus the demoscene was born. Modern intros are typically restricted to 64 kilobytes - derived from the maximum size of an DOS executable - but the mentality remains the same.

Intros often use techniques like procedural generation and audio synthesis to cut down on filesizes, and represent some of the most rigidly efficient code in the world. Current intros like Conspiracy’s Chaos Theory manage to squeeze entire music videos into 64k (for comparison, the one-page PDF file containing my resume clocks in at 182k), and the first-person shooter .kkrieger made waves in 2004 by fitting a playable demo level into 96k without sacrificing image quality. Most recently, independent coder Peter “Archee” Soltesz released Sumotori Dreams, a freeware game incorporating physics technology comparable to expensive middleware solutions like Euphoria and Digital Molecular Matter. Even Will Wright’s team at EA turned to the demoscene for inspiration when creating the procedural technology behind Spore.

So why is the demoscene still so far underground?

In all fairness, I think a lot of it has to do with poor definition. It’s difficult to explain succinctly what makes these programs so astounding, since the concept of filesize is quite abstract and has little meaning to most non-programmers. Additionally, like many computer subcultures, the demoscene is notoriously insular. Few hackers bother to spread awareness of their group, and still others actively resist such attention.

A notable exception is the demogroup known as Triton, whose members went on to form Starbreeze Studios, creators of The Darkness and The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. Transitions like this are rare, however. One urban legend claims that a major middleware developer contacted Peter Soltesz to purchase the code he used to make Sumotori Dreams, and he responded by releasing a new version of the game that was only 29k, smugly ignoring the offer. While most likely a gross exaggeration, this kind of attitude is not uncommon in the demoscene.

Fortunately, there are some individuals on the fringes of the scene, or entirely removed from it, who have taken up the cause. Will Wright often mentions the demoscene in interviews, citing the inspiration his team found in the scene’s 64k and 4k demo competitions. Sites dedicated to independent games went ballistic over Sumotori Dreams, making it one of the few games to reach an audience outside the scene itself.

Widespread recognition is still some distance away, but I’m glad that progress is being made. Hopefully, Spore will demonstrate what this kind of technology is capable of doing for games. Until then, you can expect me to continue evangelizing the demoscene at every opportunity.

I first became interested in Homeworld as a fan of Yes - the English gods of progressive rock - whose 1999 album The Ladder featured a video preview of the game. The album’s title track was to be featured in the final release, and lead singer Jon Anderson’s enthusiasm for the project intrigued me. Despite my ambivalence toward real-time strategy, I downloaded the demo, and was blown away.

In a nutshell, Homeworld does a lot of things right. But the game’s greatest achievement, and the one that kept me playing despite my tactical ineptitude, was Relic’s ability to make me genuinely care for an entire race, without once showing me their faces. The story follows the inhabitants of a hellish desert planet who discover that they had in fact been exiled from their original homeworld millenia before, and therefore endeavor to return aboard an enormous colony ship. Your task as fleet commander is to bring your people home.

Told through pencil-sketch animations and a minimal, almost poetic voiceover, Homeworld’s story acquaints you with the dreams and ambitions of a civilization on the verge of rediscovering itself. There is no gruff military hero with a dark past, no starry-eyed recruit eager to prove his worth, and no moustache-twirling villain. There are only the disembodied voices of your ship and your intelligence officer, giving you the information you need to complete your mission and little else. They describe objectives matter-of-factly, with full confidence in your ability; at this level of command, barking orders and urgently demanding success would be redundant. Aside from incidental snippets of combat chatter, these offscreen characters are the sole voice of your people, and their trust in you is absolute. This knowledge gives Homeworld’s gameplay far more relevance than usually expected from real-time strategy, which at the time had not attempted to seize the reins of narrative as linear RPGs had.

More recently, Introversion Software applied a similar technique to their action-strategy hybrid Darwinia, which casts the player as the defender of a digital civilization in danger of being wiped out by a computer virus. Beyond mere survival, however, these Darwinians have joined hands in preparation for the launch of their own polygonal rocket, with which they intend to explore their virtual domain. In this universe, the player represents a protective deity, complete with pixelated altars and spiritual gatherings. Far from being disposable pawns, these are tiny people, who love you and ask only that you shield them from harm.

Unfortunately, for the most part this “groups-as-characters” approach to the RTS genre has been overlooked as narrative has focused solely on the player’s achievements. Most strategy titles regard the civilization as merely a manifestation of the player, and I think this is short-sighted. Let him instead be the champion of his people, guiding them as one of their own, and greeted with trust and admiration rather than mindless obedience. The game, and your player, will be better for it.

Working with Ubisoft, Ancel was responsible for the creation of the Rayman series, as well as the highly-rated-yet-criminally-unprofitable Beyond Good & Evil. Most casual observers will tell you that his games are colorful, exuberantly animated, and somehow distinctly “French.” I consider all of these qualities to be facets of Ancel’s core design philosophy: that a game must have a recognizable personality.

This can apply to characters as well as to the game as a whole. Rayman’s eponymous hero, for instance, is bizarrely devoid of limbs, sports a gigantic nose, and uses his hair as a makeshift propeller. He is the epitome of cartoony spunk, and quite unlike most of the other goofy mascot-types in the platformer world. But more than that, the world he inhabits has a personality as well. Colors are haphazardly brushed and swirled across the landscape, creatures of hilariously exaggerated proportions flit to and fro, and I guarantee it would take you quite some time to find a single pair of parallel lines anywhere.

Beyond Good & Evil is somewhat tamer in its approach, but the effect is similar. Characters address each other with familiarity, as though everyone in this quaint yet futuristic city knows everyone else by name - which many of them do. The game’s predominantly blue-green color palette and soft lighting create a lush atmosphere that stays with you for some time. Walk outside on an overcast day after a rainstorm and you might find yourself yearning to return to Hyllis.

But where BG&E shines is in the strength of its characters. A friend of mine once described the game’s heroine Jade as “the sort of hero you never knew you wanted to be,” and I think that’s pretty accurate. She is ethnically ambiguous, has a modestly attractive figure, and works as a photojournalist. But she has a life, a home (an old lighthouse), and a family (a small group of orphaned children and an anthropomorphic pig). She is, as far as the player is concerned, a real person with real ideals. Simply the fact that she loves and cares deeply about the other characters puts her in a unique place among video game protagonists.

Ask me about Super Mario 64 and you’ll probably get an overly excited analysis of all the little details that made it such an astounding achievement. Ask me about Beyond Good & Evil, though, and you’ll probably hear a wistful sigh. Because as great as other games may be, here is one world that truly feels alive.

Well, a minor mishap involving the email forwarder at my previous webhost prompted me to consider switching to a new provider, and once the entire process was finished I figured I had a legitimate excuse to choose a slightly more versatile set of web tools. As wonderful and user-friendly as RapidWeaver may be, it came with the dubious “feature” of only allowing me to update from my Mac - a monster of a laptop that no sane person would carry around without a burro.

So please pardon the dust. This transition will be much quicker than the last one, mainly because it came at a rather inconvenient time. The old posts will be back in a few days, as well as some new material that never made it to the previous version of the site.

I’m also increasing my web presence in general, so feel free to watch in rapt fascination as I magically integrate social networking with this bad mammajamma. Twitter sidebars to follow?

The mind reels at the possibilities…