Short Story

The Wheel

It was a massive cog shaped wheel, and each participant was individually assigned to a spoke. And by assigned I mean handcuffed.  Then there was the jolt as an electric current was fed into the wheel through our bonds and sent searing into our bodies.  The command came slowly from some hidden speaker within the chamber “Push… push… push”. Reluctantly I placed my hands on my spoke and started to push.  The push command was unmistakably clear, but the speaker insisted on searing it into our brains and continued its chant in monotone and on cadence. After the first mind-dulling hour it was clear that this would be a game of endurance. My mind numbed to the constant whine of the turning wheel, the frequent screams of those who dared take their hands off their spoke, and the relentless chorus of the speaker, “push...push…push”. I had assumed my fellow sufferers were experiencing the same electrical shocks that had alerted us to our task.  There was only one way to be sure, I took my hands off of the spoke and braced for the pain, hoping it would serve as a welcome break from the monotony of pushing. The shock came as expected but the voltage had been increased, the pain intense. It was clear that participants were to keep their hands on the wheel at all times. By the third hour the wheel had slowed to a crawl, I had almost stopped pushing altogether and by the looks of it the clever boy in front of me had stopped pushing at all. He was slung over his spoke and being carried by our shared momentum. The notion of carrying this freeloader empowered me with a righteous indignation that often is the necessary catalyst to any type of protest.  I mustered the energy and as loudly as possible said,  “stop pushing”.  No effect the others were in a trance, too bored or tired to care.  I turned to the man pushing behind me. He seemed to have an unnatural amount of resolve and I had a strange suspicion that he was somehow enjoying himself.  

“Why are we still pushing “?

“I think its clear “ as he pointed to his handcuffs

I looked to the boy in front of me,  “he’s not pushing and looks comfortable, maybe we don’t have to push?”

“Do whatever you want then” was all he replied

I leaned back and pulled in the opposite direction of the pushing and the wheel came to an abrupt halt.

Everyone was now at rest, no one had been electrocuted, heavy breathing and the chanting speaker was all that could be heard. The motion to stop pushing had passed, most took to leaning on their spoke, careful not to remove both their hands at any one time. With nothing left to do I began admiring the construction of this monstrosity. The giant cog rested at the bottom of the spiral peg and was mounted on a large spinning platform, it looked like an industrial version of the playground apparatus that was obviously designed to spin and cause children to lose their lunch. Perhaps that was reason that it had been phased out of most modern playgrounds. The reverie ended as I realized how little these wheels had in common. One was designed for pleasure, but this ones only purpose seemed to be the application of pain and boredom. Sure it was just an object but it was making me miserable, we weren’t milling corn or somehow helping a useful device to function.

I tugged on my spoke and sent the wheel spinning backwards startling the others, they moaned in dismay as the whiny creak of the wheel resumed. On the same cadence of the hated speaker, I began my own chant.  “Pull…pull…pulll” using what energy I had left to issue my most intimidating voice. The enthusiasm was well received by the man behind me. He took to the order of pulling as fervently as he had clung to pushing. The wheel moved easier in this direction and after a few rotations the others began to pull in earnest as well. My excitement grew as I watched the cogwheel slowly begin to rise in elevation. This wheel had indeed been screwed on.  With each rotation it moved a few centimeters upward, not noticeable at first, but as the centimeters became inches the others began to take notice. The concept took shape in their heads and a tangible air of giddy excitement permeated the chamber. The prospect of a possible conclusion to this game fueled our adrenaline.  I looked around and for the first time saw participants smiling, there was no mistaking it as every spoke had now risen a full foot in height. “Its working” someone said and the chambers energy increased. “Pull…pull…pull…pull.”  The chant now had so many voices even the hated speakers “push, push, push,” only added to our energy.  The cog was nearing the top of the spiral peg now. “Pull…pull…pull…pull…pull.” My spoke was now almost above my head and admittedly our pulling had become less effective, but what we lacked in leverage was more then compensated for with the lure of imminent victory. The vents on the sides of the chamber unleashed a torrent of gas and with it a collective groan from all of us. The game was ours, but the ultimate victory and destruction of our enemy was to be denied.  The wheel of pain would not receive it’s due punishment today. I sucked in as much gas into my lungs as possible and embraced the euphoria of losing consciousness.

Do that...DO EXACTLY THAT!!

Apparently In a moment of inspiration I deleted all of my Powerpoint Documents from Google Docs which I was using to host my game design ideas. I was making room for some videos I wanted to upload and in the process I have ruined the Game Design aspect of my blog. Luckily I have back ups of all my Powerpoints and so I will soon perform the semi-arduous task of re-uploading them to Google Docs and getting them back up on this site. Till then you will just have to amuse yourself by reading my other posts and my newest poem.

Give it some Thought

What you long to feel
It's deep in your bones,
It repeats and repeats
It makes clones of a clone

It’s just one thought who stands all alone
And wants to hear nothing,
Cause nothing is something
That already it owns

Just more of the same
It will always maintain,
Until it's the only it
Which stands to remain

But all is not well and surely not good
It’s that lingering nag screaming
“Just look under the hood”

That for your thoughts to keep shape and hold their own weight,
They must be measured and tested without your constraint

The truth will be sought and the facts will be found,
But they care little for manners, and they often confound

Yet still it clings to this lonely thought
If only to hide and never receive
Anything that could enhance the chance to perceive,
That a fiction is fiction no matter how hard you believe

It firmly maintains
Till no doubter cares to remain,
That we exist in a world with nothing left to unveil
And we falsely believe with the mind to conceal
That the thing we fear most is not knowing the real

Why perform this same trick today,
Travel here and about, but continue to say
That life moves along like the script to your play

Never chancing to tear open the gifts you are sent
Fearing one will deliver the harpies cry of dissent,
Till you won’t trust your eyes without your egos' consent,

Take comfort in having all your ducks in a row,
But know that this myth though easily bought
Will never hold value like something you yourself have wrought,

Just know that even if your grift is not caught
It will rob you too, of what really you sought
An answer to questions of what’s here and what’s naught,
The answers freely given… It requires only your thought

Eliminate DOWNTIME

The biggest obstacle facing the online Fighting game genre is DOWNTIME and the problems which it creates.  When players sit down to play a game they demand some form of immediate entertainment. Every second spent not being entertained is a moment to think, “Hey, maybe I should be doing something else.”

The premiere games of this genre like; Street Fighter, Tekken, or Mortal Kombat, all emerged from a time where players would meet at Arcades and cheer loudly around a game cabinet pumping it with quarters and playing till their fingers blistered. With the emergence of online gaming, this scene is largely a relic of the past, and players now compete primarily from the comfort of their homes. Despite the significance of this change in venue, the format of these games remains largely unchanged. Now If you were to play any of these games online today, the majority of your time will probably be spent; navigating menus, watching loading screens, or waiting for the matchmaking system to find a suitable opponent. Unless you are already a dedicated fan, this experience can quickly grow stale, and it appears safe to say that the genre will need to embrace a new format in order to realize their true potential.

 To put it plainly, the online fighting game genre needs a way to alleviate the boredom experienced during the periods of time where the player is not engaged with an opponent, and furthermore the player must be convinced that he is not engaging in a solitary experience. I believe the most effective solution would be to add the presence of a game "Overworld", a place that encourages players to mingle and explore, while the matchmaking system runs hidden in the background. Even if this was done by allowing the player to navigate his character through an extremely simplistic 2-D world, it would succeed by giving players something to do in between matches, instead of presenting them with a screen that perpetually reads “Searching For Opponent." This would also help alleviate the feeling of disconnect exacerbated by a matchmaking system that pairs you with an opponent whom you have had no previous interaction with. There is no story being told when players are plucked from the confines of an ethereal pool and paired seemingly at random.  It is this profound lack of an engaging narrative combined with the drudgery of downtime, that dulls the game experience and continues to limit the genres appeal.

After playing the recently released Ultimate Marvel Versus Capcom 3, the game practically begs to be done in such a manner. Imagine walking through a snowy woodland as you play as the popular Marvel character Wolverine, out of the bushes comes another player who happens to play as your arch-rival Sabertooth. A challenge is issued and the game loads the “Snowy Woodland”, a stage that actually corresponds to your location within the 2-D Overworld. This format would really engage players and help to apply an overarching narrative to each game played. Instead of navigating menus only to stare at a loading screen while awaiting your next anonymous opponent, players could experience the joy of actually role playing their characters.

With the removal of players from the social atmosphere of a physical Arcade, some key factors of appeal have been lost and they remain missing. By giving online players the freedom to interact with each other both before and after their actual matches, you not only eliminate the problem of downtime but also help foster the communal and social atmosphere that contributed so much to the genres past success.

Life is a Work In Progress

And so is this Blog, I have recently begun some site maintenance and with the help of some Youtube tutorial videos, I have been attempting to provide a more polished look. Most notably I have added tabs so that it will be easier to navigate my posts by category. I have also decided to share more of the content I have created, including my newest video and some of my dear Game Concept design documents. Enjoy but please do not lift my ideas :)

Pumped Up Kicks Best Video

My Directorial debut

The subject matter is a little dark but... so are the lyrics

Innovate Fluid Controls and Conquer

Controls are an overlooked part of successful gameplay, and I would say that it is next to impossible to make a great game without a great control scheme. The first thing I do when playing any new game is to move around and see how it “feels”. Like driving a new car, one of the first things you notice is how a game handles, for me there is no greater turnoff than a game with sluggish or imprecise controls. If I cannot control the game properly why am I playing it? A few games come to mind when I think of great control schemes: Smash Bros Melee, Goldeneye 007, and Halo CE. In all of these games your character moves fast and actions are executed almost at the speed at which you can think of them. This makes for a truly gratifying experience, and at the best moments you feel completely immersed, with each feint and attack being performed instantly almost instinctually.

It is no surprise then that the top games, especially those in the FPS genre, tend to be the ones which utilize the most intuitive and elegant control schemes. When Halo CE was released, almost every subsequent FPS adopted a near identical control scheme. Now the dominant position is held by the COD franchise, and true to form its control scheme and notably the “Aim Down Sights” mechanic, is nearly universal amongst current shooters. This being said, the “Motion Controlled Shooter” genre has not taken off , even with the advent of advanced gaming apparatus like, Microsoft’s Kinect, or Sony’s Move. This is a genre that cannot gain steam because the dominant control scheme is by my description. Broken. Until a fluid and intuitive control scheme is introduced motion controlled shooters will retain their role as novelty games that lack in lasting appeal.

Motion controlled shooters suffer from what I would call “Deadzone Syndrome”. This means that the dominate control scheme utilized by almost every motion controlled shooter uses the mechanic of a “Deadzone Box”. Unfortunately, this scheme is neither intuitive nor elegant, it places too many demands on the player and penalizes him with unreliable results. Like early Nintendo 64 games, motion controlled shooters suffer from their inability to compromise between giving the player control of his directional movement (where the player is moving) and aiming orientation (where the player is facing). Early 64 games were unable to reconcile this issue, and suffered for it. The player only had one analog control stick, but there were two tasks, what were developers to do? They had to compromise, the first company to do it right was Rare with Goldeneye 007. What did they do? They divided the tasks equally into a manageable and inventive control scheme. The analog stick was used to control forward and backwards movement yet simultaneously govern horizontal aiming orientation, a novel idea indeed! Lateral movement was regulated to the left and right C buttons and vertical aiming orientation was mapped to the up and down C buttons. This intelligent division of labor coupled with fast movement speed and an extremely active “auto aim” system struck an almost perfect balance. Controls were fluid, aiming was simplistic, but maneuvering still required substantial skill. All was right In the world of FPS and every game hence forth utilized a strikingly similar control scheme.

But then a Revolution occurred. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo released their next generation consoles, and all of them had one thing in common. There were now TWO analog control sticks, no longer did movement and aiming orientation need to be carefully divided between multiple sets of buttons, No, now their was a control stick that solely governed movement while the other took care of aiming exclusively. It was a revelation and it allowed for a far more elegant and precise control scheme to emerge. Games like Halo and Call of Duty led the way and to this day hold a virtual monopoly on FPS controls. With this revelation came a double edged sword, while it allowed the FPS genre to grow by leaps and bounds, it also saw game developers forget the lessons learned from dealing with the limitations of a single analog stick. This lesson seemed unimportant, we would never have to deal with that problem again, we had two analog sticks now. Predictably, history repeated itself, and despite great advancements in technology the video game industry was faced with an old adversary with the advent of motion controlled gaming. The Nintendo Wii, Xbox Kinect, and Playstation Move hoped to revolutionize gaming with the ability to have players actual motion control the game. One hand would navigate an analog control stick while the other hand’s motion would control the aiming orientation. Unfortunately there was an unforeseen complication, the players motion hand now must control aiming orientation AND the actual location of the Aimer. This is a new task altogether, where previously the aimer would always remain static in the middle of the screen. If we have learned anything, we know that we must have either enough analog control sticks to govern each task, or we must be inventive and divide tasks appropriately. To the detriment of gamers everywhere, developers did neither. There is no logical way to add a third control analog as players only have two hands, and its introduction would no doubt add a layer of complexity that is both difficult and undesirable. No, instead their strategy was to regulate all movement to a single analog control stick, while the other hands movement controlled both aiming orientation and aimer location. To compensate for the difficulty encountered when one hand must simultaneously controll two tasks, developers introduced Deadzone mechanics, what I would dub the proverbial nail in the coffin for the motion controlled shooter genre. The Deadzone mechanic creates a box (the size of which is often customizable by the user). When the aimer is within the box, only aimer location is controllable, and when it is outside the box, only aiming orientation is controllable. While this simplifies the near impossible task of navigating both with one hand simultaneously, it is clunky in the extreme. The player thereby spends most of his concentration on switching between these tasks and often gets confused, especially when a target lies just on the periphery of the Deadzone. The player must then first reorient his aim and then move back to control aimer location, in the heat of the moment this is extremely frustrating and gives new meaning to the term Sluggish controls.

The wonder is that the lesson of the N64 was so soon forgotten and exchanged for such a poor alternative. But there is still hope, in order for a successful control scheme to be accomplished we must recognize that there is only one analog at our disposal, we must be inventive. THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE IS REDACTED (I can’t give away all of my ideas :)