No, actually, I’m not. I’ve been playing Demon’s Souls — a game even its developer admits isn’t “a fun game.” The action-adventure game casts you as a hero confronting where progress is hard-won, recovery supplies are limited and equipment can wear out. The twist is that when players die, they return as phantoms to navigate the same environments in a weakened state in the hopes of earning their bodies back — that’s right, the game actually gets more challenging the more you fail.

And yet I love it.

I can’t stop playing, and I can’t really figure out why. Aren’t games supposed to be accessible, and isn’t frustration supposed to be a killjoy? What’s the allure in this difficult game?

Expanded audiences and accessibility are major watchwords in the present era of gaming. Microsoft Game Studios’ Bruce Philips recently unveiled research at Gamasutra showing that even among Xbox 360 games where completion rates are highest, most users only get about half the potential Gamerscore. And 30 percent of users don’t finish some of the most popular and widely-played titles Philips studied. His theory – and that of numerous other designers crafting games designed to be appealing to wider audiences – is that frustration is what makes players give up.

But even though I’m definitely frustrated with Demon’s Souls at times, I’d say I’m even more driven to succeed and to conquer than I’ve been in a long time. What gives?

“I do not think that games must be accessible to be appealing,” Demon’s Souls producer Takeshi Kajii told me in an interview. “If you make a game accessible it will expand the audience. However, if we were to make all games accessible, wouldn’t you eventually get tired of the same thing?”

Kajii explained that in creating Demon’s Souls the team sought to return to the core of what’s fun about games, and relied on three tenets: challenge, discovery and accomplishment. “People commonly say Demon’s Souls is hard because of this, but we never made the difficulty needlessly high for the sake of being hard, nor did we intend for it to be a selling point,” he said.

Steep difficulty can be appealing. Take the case of indie action-adventure title Spelunky, where the sense of discovery and achievement is maximized by stiff odds. “I think that a tough challenge can make a game much more enjoyable,” said creator Derek Yu. “Don’t we feel the most fulfilled when we overcome something difficult? Without that feeling of getting better, a game turns into a chore – something that you do as a distraction rather than something you do for fulfillment.”

The key to effective difficulty, as opposed to frustration that’s just frustrating, is all in the implementation. “Doing something hard isn’t fun in and of itself,” said Yu. ” It’s not fun to sit in an empty room and try to balance a ball on your head for 10 hours straight. To make challenge effective, you have to provide an interesting game world and create deep mechanics that are entertaining to play with and very satisfying to master.”

Nels Anderson, gameplay programmer at Hothead Games, also feels it’s important to delineate between frustration and meaningful challenge. “Being frustrated usually means the player cannot determine a way to improve or progress,” he said. “Part of the reason Demon’s Souls works so well is because you understand why you failed.”

Demon’s Souls‘ Kajii says that failure needs to be an ever-present possibility if the player is to feel a sense of accomplishment. “We designed it so that players are likely to die if they aren’t paying attention,” he says. “By maintaining this intensity, players will be constantly nervous while playing, but [will feel] a tremendous sense of accomplishment is their reward for doing so.”

Achievements are more valuable, then, when there’s a lot at stake – and failure is less frustrating when it’s clear to the player where they messed up. “Demon’s Souls is a game where you ‘die a lot,’ but as I’ve already said, it is geared so that you will acknowledge that it was your own fault,” said Kajii. “Players will keep playing because they know they can get past a certain point by taking a different approach, using their imagination, and thinking about how to overcome obstacles.”

In a game like Demon’s Souls, then, a frustrating death is simply the game informing me that my strategy didn’t work. The mechanics are such that I can’t blame the game, and my failures never feel unfair. I can then tackle the exact same obstacle with a different approach, until I figure out a tactic that will help me succeed – and victory’s all the sweeter thanks to all of my struggles on the way.

“Dying in a video game is like losing a tennis match, or getting rejected when you ask a girl out, or looking at a painting and not understanding its meaning. You’ll always learn something and the next time will be better,” said Yu. He says that if dying’s fun, that makes it all the better – and Demon’s Souls also features an interesting twist on death.

Enriched by its multiplayer element, the game allows players to see the bloodstains of other fallen heroes, and touch them to view how they died. Players can leave notes and messages for one another warning of tough spots up ahead, and can also recruit the phantoms of players that have died to help them handle challenges. Kajii says this system of strangers helping strangers came from a real-life experience of his, a time when his car was stuck on a snowy mountainside.

Numerous stranded drivers all banded together to push each of the cars in turn, but Kajji couldn’t stay behind to thank his benefactors, lest he end up stranded again. “I wondered about things like whether the last person made it home, whether I’d ever meet the people who helped me again… Maybe if I’d met them somewhere else, I would’ve made friends with them… Many thoughts crossed my mind,” he said. “This occurrence of helping complete strangers was strangely very memorable, and I kept thinking about it for a very long time.

“Demon’s Souls is a game where you die many times, so I thought this idea of helping others would be a great fit. It’s as simple as, ‘We all die so easily, so let’s help each other out,’” he adds. “Unlike other RPGs, each player unfolds their own story, and each encounter with a phantom player expands and diversifies their experience.”

Designers are right to be concerned with players finishing fewer titles, and they’re right to offer low barriers to entry for expanded audiences – to a point. “I think in an attempt to avoid frustrating players, the baby often gets thrown out with the bathwater in terms of difficulty,” said Hothead’s Anderson. “It’s a pretty common misconception that players want easier games.”

He paraphrases some research from Jesper Juul of MIT’s Gambit Game Lab: “Players are more critical of a game that’s too easy than one that’s too hard. The player can improve and make a difficult game fun, but short of handicapping oneself, there’s no way to make a game that’s too easy harder,” Anderson continued. “However, as soon as players feel they don’t have any way to improve, their assessment of difficulty turns much more negative.”

Frequent death and frustration don’t need to be viewed as engagement-breakers in games – as long as the deaths are meaningful and educational, and as long as the player’s frustrated with themselves, not the game. The most important factor is clearly that players must be able to see what they can do differently to surmount a challenge.

The tactic that finally gets me over a bridge swarmed with archers, or through a narrow hallway packed with vicious wolves, might not be the same one that works for another player, but it’s one I’ve developed on my own, through trial and error, experimenting with the environment and with my own abilities.

“This act of trial and error in a tense atmosphere is the heart of challenge and discovery, leading to the strong satisfaction of accomplishment,” says Kajii. “I’d say Demon’s Souls is not a ‘fun game,’ but a ‘game to have fun with,’” says Kajii. “The goal is not to find a pre-defined answer — instead the answer is something created by the player on their own through their own play-styles.”

[Leigh Alexander is news director for Gamasutra, author of the Sexy Videogameland blog, and freelances reviews and criticism to a variety of outlets. Her monthly column at Kotaku deals with cultural issues surrounding games and gamers. She can be reached at leighalexander1 AT gmail DOT com.]

Though always an industry mainstay, Activision didn’t start to take its place front-and-center in the core audience’s shooting gallery until years recent. It was theGuitar Hero and Call of Duty, franchises that became Activision’s golden calves; early incarnations of those titles broke ground and dazzled audiences.

Then came the sequels, the sequels, and yet more sequels. As the publisher’s stock soared (ticker: ATVI) its triumphant executive became a vocal and often controversial mainstay in the business press – and by extension, the gaming consumer press.

“Hating EA is so last year,” CEO John Riccitiello told Kotaku at E3 in 2008, talking to us about what Electronic Arts had learned from its old ways of doing business – ways that look an awful lot like how Activision appears to conduct itself these days. All across the internet, it’s clear: Gamers have crowned a new Evil Empire.

Who Is Bobby Kotick?

I, as a games biz reporter, have been given interview time with most major publishing execs more than once — most of them believe it’s important to reach out to us from time to time as a way of reaching their consumers. I’ve never even been in the same room with Mr. Kotick. And while Activision is often responsive to media inquiries regarding its games, calls for comment on business articles or questions about the company itself—such as my request for info for this article—usually go unanswered.

But as an industry analyst, it’s the job of Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter to check in regularly with top execs and get the info shareholders need to make investment decisions, so he’s fairly familiar with the bombastic executive. “Bobby is friendly to a fault, funny, very smart, and quite engaging,” says Pachter. “He is a bit flip, in an entertaining way, and I think it translates in print as cocky. I like him a lot, and think that his public persona has been twisted by the gaming media, making him into a ruthless factory head.”

Kotick’s “public persona” continues to raise eyebrows all on its own. Asked recently by an analyst on a quarterly conference call about the rising cost of packaged game software — bolstered, in no small part, by Activision’s higher price points on peripheral-equipped games, Kotick said that “if it was left to me, I would raise [software] prices even further,” and chuckled along with his execs.

Just a joke it may have been, but hardly a tasteful one in a recession, where cash-strapped consumers were likely to catch wind of his cavalier attitude. It’s just one example why a wash of anti-ATVI sentiment pervades the comments sections and forums that impassioned gamers call home. Contrast that to Nintendo’s stated promise to “keep people smiling”, EA boss Riccitiello’s common refrain that quality must precede profitability as a goal, and Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick’s regular praise for his development talent on every quarterly investor call.

But Kotick’s most recent round of cold talk was the most eyebrow-raising: he recently said his goal’s always been to “take all the fun out making video games”. As for the working environment at Activision? “I think we’ve definitely been able to instill in the culture the scepticism and pessimism and fear that you should have in an economy like we’re in today.”

The widely-publicised quote, delivered at an investor conference, was easy flamebait. Gamers’ passionate nature and yen for controversy is part of what defines them as a community — and hating can be fun, as exemplified by this resulting parody song from IdleThumbs’ Chris Remo, who says it’s “based on the teachings of Kotick”.

But what do Kotick’s employees think, living in an environment of “pessimism, scepticism and fear”?

Nose To The Grindstone

“Kotick basically says that he was partially quoted out of context, and partially the humour of the situation at the time isn’t conveyed in the quotations,” says a level-headed employee of one of the publisher’s internal studios, speaking under condition of anonymity. Infinity Ward’s Robert Bowling also seemed to take it as a joke, if you recall his subtle riff on the snafu during a recent Modern Warfare 2 event.

Numerous Activision insiders who didn’t want to be quoted said that Activision, as a corporate entity, treats them well — individual developers are more likely to encounter conflicts of studio bureaucracy on the development side rather than on the publisher-side, something of an unusual scheme of events in game development.

The high-pressure, goal-driven environment also means tensions across rival internal studios flare up more often, as we saw with the public spat between Infinity Ward’s Robert Bowling and Activision producer Noah Heller, representing Treyarch’s Call of Duty: World at War. Of course, the culture of achievement also means that prominent designers on projects like these drive very, very nice cars, we’re told.

Our source has never himself met Kotick, but says he’s heard little ill of him — he compares what he hears to “people who know Bush, where despite what you think about his policies, they all seem to think he’s a cool guy to sit around and have a beer with.”

The Bad Behavior

Industry sources say, though, that other gaming companies don’t feel quite so positively toward Kotick — in particular, that such a cash-flush company is leaving it up to the others to shoulder the collective cost of piracy protection and first-amendment lobbying via their Entertainment Software Association dues. That is a point of contention.

Activision was the largest publisher to defect not only from last year’s E3, but from the ESA — the trade body that represents the interests of all game developers. And while this year, the publisher returned to E3, it still won’t rejoin the ESA: “We have our own issues that are not the industry’s issues,” Kotick has said.

But Activision is part of the industry — so as much smaller publishers manage their pricey ESA dues to support pro-industry lobbying and public awareness campaigns, Activision, one of the world’s wealthiest, is sitting out its share. And that decision is viewed in a poor light by other companies.

Also worrying is Kotick’s pattern of levying lawsuits against the defiant. Activision dropped gamer-darling Brütal Legend, from its publishing slate in the Vivendi merger because the eagerly-anticipated title, plus other Sierra games, “lacked the potential to be exploited every year on every platform,” as Kotick said at the time.

But when EA picked up the game, Activision sued — a move an EA spokesperson now-famously likened to “a husband abandoning his family and then suing after his wife meets a better looking guy.” (”Hey, if Activision liked it, then they should have put a ring on it,” chimed in creator Tim Schafer.)

Under Kotick’s stewardship, Activision seems to be developing a propensity for the sort of legal challenge that makes it look like a bully. There’s also the imbroglio over turntable games, when Activision bought embattled developer 7 Studios — who’d been working on Scratch: The Ultimate DJ for Genius Products. Genius now alleges Activision levied its legal muscle and some “unsavory business practices” to delay a possible rival to its own turntable-equipped DJ Hero. Activision mantains its involvement with 7 Studios provides the developer with much-needed financing, and that Scratch had fallen behind in production well before its acquisition.

A Culture Of Cash

Pragmatic gamers may not like Activision or Kotick’s ways, but will assert the man’s just doing his job and doing it well: The games industry is still a business, after all. He has, at least on the books, earned some compliments — and mad money to go with them. The 46 year-old Kotick has helmed Activision since 1991, and in 2007, the NPD group pegged the publisher as the industry’s biggest. Activision’s 2008 saw four consecutive quarters of revenue growth — and that same year, Forbes says Kotick earned $US15 million for his work. That’s twice what EA’s John Riccitiello made as head of Activision’s nearest rival.

And when he’s not running the game industry’s newest and biggest Death Star, evidence suggests he might not be such a bad guy. He participates in charitable organizations as a member of the Board of Trustees for The centre for Early Education, chairs the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Tony Hawk Foundation — making his game franchise figurehead happy, sure, but the Foundation also puts skate parks in disadvantaged communities.

Nonetheless, Bobby Kotick doesn’t seem to care what gamers think. Should he? Pachter points out that when “the old” EA was churning out content with less attention to quality, the resulting gamer backlash did, in his opinion, injure the company’s bottom line.

“The argument about consumer fatigue and lower product quality is sound,” Pachter concedes. “There is only so much innovation that can occur, and annual games are less likely to be innovative than bi-annual or tri-annual games.” It’s possible that Activision’s business strategy and public persona may one day come home to roost, as it did for EA.

Until then, what can gamers do? Not buy Modern Warfare 2, the holiday season’s most-desired title?

…Yeah, right.

[Leigh Alexander is news director for Gamasutra, author of the Sexy Videogameland blog, and freelances reviews and criticism to a variety of outlets. Her monthly column at Kotaku deals with cultural issues surrounding games and gamers. She can be reached at leighalexander1 AT gmail DOT com.]

Are video games creatively narrow, or rich? Epic Games’ Cliff Bleszinski calls this “the most loaded question I’ve been asked in five years.”

Amid much discussion on whether games will one day be perceived as relevant art, one thing’s clear –it’s on today’s leading creators to break the cycle of sameness. What do games need to truly diversify?

If many of us gamers had our way, we’d play games and little else. For others, as much as we prize our favourite pastime, we’ve often lamented the same-ness of the experiences on offer – often, the biggest blockbusters are derivative of one another, cycling us through near-indistinguishable experiences again and again.

Industry veteran and Zoonami CEO Martin Hollis, most recently creator of quirky Wii Ware title Bonsai Barber, agrees that the thematic range of games isn’t very broad. “Pauline Kael famously criticised films as being only about violence and romance: ‘Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang’,” he says of the great film critic. “Games are virtually all about violence, or at least conquest and dominance. So we can say games are all ‘Bang Bang, Bang Bang.’”

Raven Software’s Manveer Heir has firsthand experience with the “Bang Bang, Bang Bang” – and agrees with the general idea that a lack of creative range is constricting games.

“There are some outliers, but we continuously make the same games about the same things,” says Heir, who worked on this summer’s Wolfenstein sequel. “The only things that change are our mechanics. We regularly have white male generic space marine characters as protagonists. Our NPCs are often cookie cutter and stereotypical. We use the same backdrops of post-nuclear apocalypse or colonizing Mars, or crazy fantasy worlds.”

The Sameness Cycle

Among gamers, Double Fine president Tim Schafer has attained the sort of hero status reserved for the coolest kid in school thanks to his consistent originality. He has a theory on why this same-ness keeps happening.

“There is a cycle in game development,” he says. ” People making games usually make games that appeal to themselves, and choose from a narrow set of inspirations — Star Wars, Aliens, Blade Runner, Tolkien, World War II, super-hero comics, and a few more.

“Then, those games appeal to a certain set of fans, and some of those fans will eventually grow up to make games themselves, and those games end up looking like the previous generation, because they were made to please a similar bunch of people. That loop just repeats and stays the same size forever.”

“I think any medium that only looks to itself for inspiration is limiting its scope of possibility,” says writer Marianne Krawczyk, who counts the God of War franchise among her projects. “It’s been a mantra of mine for a while now that we need to look outside of games (and movies and TV, for that matter) and start letting other art forms and other kinds of experiences influence development.”

For example, Braid artist David Hellman drew from the art of French Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne for the painterly style used in that game by . Although that decision came primarily from Hellman’s own tastes, he finds a parallel between Cézanne’s creative goals and those of the game: “Braid is about worlds of subjective perception and also about ideas and laws,” muses the artist. “Cézanne married impressionism’s transient play of colour and light with a powerful geometric order.”

“Games are very inspiring to me, but only for gameplay, not subject matter,” says Schafer. I will experience something awesome in a game, and I will think, ‘That was awesome.’ But then, I’ll think, ‘Why was that awesome?’ And try to deconstruct the experience down to its essence to find out why it works.”

Schafer says he got the idea for cult hit Grim Fandango from reading Mexican folk tales; Psychonauts was inspired by a class he took on dream psychology; Brütal Legend came from heavy metal album covers, and Full Throttle took its cue from something as simple as the story of his friend’s summer vacation.

“You never know where inspiration is going to come from,” says Schafer. “I think the secret is just to make sure you are exposed to a variety of inspiring influences all the time… I trekked around Nepal once, but that didn’t give me as many game ideas as just reading one book on Mexican folklore did.”

Risky Business

“Creative people need to look at all avenues of creative expression,” agrees Krawczyk, who says she’s fascinated by the Bigfoot legend, of all things. And one doesn’t even need to be an expert in their external hobbies and interests to draw inspiration from them – Krawczyk has had little success learning guitar, attempting surfing or trying to draw, but she keeps at it anyway.

“I allow myself to fail miserably, which opens up a kind of creative freedom that translates into the work I do care about,” she says. “If you are open to failure, at least in the beginning, you’ll take risks and eventually get something that is better than if you had played it safe.”

Risk-taking is a key element – Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello called Brütal Legend a “significant creative risk” — just before the publisher announced it’d be the one to rescue the title from its post Acti-Blizzard limbo. Fervent gamers now look forward to its breath of fresh air.

“We need more games that are willing to go out on a limb and try something new,” says Raven’s Heir. “And we need them to be smaller-budget games that are very successful at first, so that large companies will take the risks down the road.”

The Emerging Market

Trying innovative, smaller-budget titles with a creative bent is the tack that Zoonami’s Hollis has chosen. He’s been focused primarily on Bonsai Barber of late, but he’s also so humble that perhaps few gamers know that during his career, he was one of Rare’s earliest programmers and directed and produced not only critically-acclaimed Perfect Dark, but widely-beloved Goldeneye 007, a dorm room mainstay for a generation of gamers.

He says he’s often inspired by his own “failed” prototypes, but as for friendly plant-hairstyling Bonsai Barber’s influences: “Henri Rousseau, thematic influence from Magritte, a structural influence from Friends, a game design influence from Animal Crossing, and there is also something ideological within the game,” he says. When it comes to the industry’s influences, “I hope no one looks only at games!” says Hollis. “That is going to lead to stagnant creations. You can’t breathe the same air forever.”

And yet the pattern of the video game industry tells us otherwise. Derivative games sell, sequels are the watchword for the holidays, and the audience’s appetite for war campaigns and space marines seems never to wane. What’s wrong with more of the same, if that’s what people seem to want?

Power Fantasies Sell

Keeping to the familiar can cap games’ commercial potential. While core audiences may not mind the same-old, the gaming audience is growing, andthose narrow tropes aren’t appealing to anyone new. “You can see from the best-selling titles on the Wii that those games aren’t generally the ones that make huge headway into the market,” Heir points out. “Our narrow focus on male power fantasies is going to hurt us in the long run.”

Epic’s Gears of War has become the poster title for that much-maligned “male power fantasy.”. The original game and its sequel have moved more than 11 million units to date, numbers that challenge the assertion that musclemen chainsawing aliens in a sci-fi warzone is a concept with limited appeal.

As progenitor , Gears-head Cliff Bleszinski has become a polarising figure over the years among those who’d like to name the franchise—and Bleszinksi, by association—as simple pap for meatheads. His influences? “A childhood filled with Transformers, GI Joe, Thundercats, Inhumanoids, MASK, and mountains upon mountains of sugar cereal,” he says.

But Bleszinksi, too, describes non-traditional influences as playing a primary role in his work. “I believe it’s crucial for developers to maintain a competitive edge by playing the games that their peers create,” he says. “However, over the years I’ve found that real life experience can not only inspire the creative process, but also be a wonderful way to decompress from the stress of development.”

He “decompresses” through hobbies like jungle ATV rides and trying out zero gravity on parabolic plane flights. Bleszinski enjoys activities as energetic as the style of gameplay he favours in design, demonstrating that life experience drives developers’ work. “Pursuing new experiences and enjoying the art of fun can translate into understanding how to have a better sense of speed, momentum, adrenaline rushes, or overall satisfaction,” he explains. “You’re channeling that experience back into the sofa when you build a game.”

But Is It All Talk?

People like Krawczyk, Hollis, Hellman and Heir aren’t the only intelligent, creative professionals working in game development. Not every other developer takes their cues solely from shallow, limiting archetypes. And yet the epic games to which so many developers and publishers devote the largest share of their budgets make only occasional progress toward breaking the tiresome loop Schafer describes. ICO, Shadow of the Colossus, BioShock and Portal make strong arguments against shallowness and sameness—but how long are gamers going to milk those?

“I think we can use games to reflect society, hold a mirror up and show people how we are as a culture in a way other mediums can’t do,” says Heir. What, then, does a Wolfenstein re-up say about us as a culture – that we’ll never get tired of shooting Nazis?

Multitudes of annual trade events convene developers for discussion on meaningful narratives and immersive art, and yet creative people still do uncreative work. Developers bemoan male power fantasies and yet more games with “war”, “dragon” and “star” in the title, and yet they keep signing up to make them. The commercial nature of the games biz may constrain the risk inherent in breaking new ground, but that’s not a sufficient excuse—all art is commercial.

Consumer demand has the largest influence over the games that hit the market. So, if games are limited, it also suggests that the legions of fervent gamers, bloggers and enthusiast writers who devote endless words to their desire for culturally significant games are simply paying lip service to an ideal they won’t back up with their wallets. Either that, or this most vocal vertex is a segment of the market too small to matter.

The same games keep getting made largely because that’s all the core audience is interested in. So maybe it’s gamers, not game developers, who need to get a life.

And even when games great and small take big risks on new ideas, many will still fail to rock the boat. But there’s a glimmer of hope: it only takes one to break the derivative loop, says Schafer. “If you throw a wild card into the cycle—like Grand Theft Auto did with urban crime—then that game reaches a new set of fans, previously unserved. Then some of them grow up to join the industry, and maybe expand it with their own wild card ideas.”

“So, if the games industry is going to keep growing, it has to pull in influences outside those currently explored in games,” he adds. “Life is very broad, and games so far have only sampled a narrow slice of it.”

[Leigh Alexander is news director for Gamasutra, author of the Sexy Videogameland blog, and freelances reviews and criticism to a variety of outlets. Her monthly column at Kotaku deals with cultural issues surrounding games and gamers. She can be reached at leighalexander1 AT gmail DOT com.]

Audiences constantly demand video games fight familiar boundaries. We’re sick of the same old, same old. We want creativity, artistic integrity, elegance and depth–or do we? Do players know what they’re asking for when they look for “more” from games? And if this is really what we want, then what’s with the mixed reception–both cultural and economic–when we get it?

We’ve seen it happen time and time again. A game can ring all the right bells in response to the clarion call for “art,” for “legitimacy,” for “more” – and yet fail to penetrate the market in a significant way. Examples? We asked for an adult game on Wii ever since the platform launched, and if you believe the internet, the lack of Wii games for grownup, hardcore gamers is a potentially lethal chink in Nintendo’s armour.

Yet March NPD revealed that Sin City-inspired, artfully violent MadWorld, which on paper is exactly what we asked for, performed only modestly at 66,000 units. Similarly, GTA: Chinatown Wars‘ underwhelming sales performance on DS has been made an avatar for the idea that mature content on popular platforms just doesn’t pull audience attention — even with high ratings. Then, of course, there’s Capcom’s classic Okami example, the last-gen avatar for the baffling case wherein creative success doesn’t match up to the commercial.

Here at Kotaku last month, we talked about all the ways in which M-rated content isn’t really yet mature. Now, we look at the viability of art games–and as sick of the “games as art” issue as most are, we wouldn’t be so tired of hearing it if there weren’t something missing, either in the conversation or in the games themselves. What’s holding them back?

Designer and academic Ian Bogost recently theorized that what players are really asking for when they kick around the issue is not simply art, but legitimacy– in other words, we know that games are capable of affecting players more deeply than the silly thrill of the headshot, so we want to see them try.

And yet the response to art games is usually mixed. Neither the critical press nor the consumer base seem to be universally decided yet on how to receive the work of developers like Jonathan Blow of time-bending Braid fame; Jason Rohrer, creator of thought-pieces like Passage and Gravitation, or Tale of Tales, who’s slowly advanced on the art game scene with both The Graveyard, a brief essay on entropy, and the darkly allegorical The Path.

Off The Beaten Path
Tale of Tales’ The Path is the latest game on the scene to confuse traditional “gamers.” It’s an exploration horror title that relies allegorically on the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood to provoke thoughts about innocence, curiosity, expectations, violation, growing up – or, at least, that’s what the response has been from some. Beyond that, it’s difficult to describe without spoiling– The Path might provoke you to think about something else entirely, and so the best way to understand it is just to play it.

Notably, it’s open-ended; it’s not task-driven, and whether or not there are “win” conditions is up for debate. It’s a game that asks audiences to reconsider what a game “is,” but let’s not wander off The Path to tackle that issue today. Steve Gaynor, designer and author of the Fullbright blog, has an excellent door-slammer: “‘Is it a game’ is almost as useless as ‘is it art,’” he says. “Did you play it? Congrats, it’s a game.”

Gamers act very fatigued of familiar conventions; there’s a jaded, blasé attitude toward re-skinnings of the same old thing. Yet we often see confusion and hostility toward games that experiment with new ways of reaching players–maybe part of that is because both audiences and designers are stuck in old ideas about what games “are.”

That’s what Tale of Tales believes, so perhaps it’s unsurprising that The Path is a non-traditional game–the developer’s two-person team, Michaël Samyn and Auriea Harvey, are not traditional developers. In fact, they never set out to make games, and spent most of their careers as storytellers in other media – sculpture, painting, performance, graphic design and music, to name a few. The pair’s fascination with fairy tales and old mythology came out of the desire to work with existing story language rather than fight the fact, as they say, “we weren’t the greatest fiction writers in the world.”

“In 2002, we threw ourselves into the reluctant arms of game development,” the pair tells Kotaku. “Because, unlike the web technology we had been working with before, games technology was still continuing to evolve towards ever greater ways of making interactive art. It seemed like game technology would allow us to finally really create what we had only been simulating before.”

Stuck In A Rut?
Samyn and Harvey chose to work with video games, then, because they believed in the idea that games are capable of delivering art and story in unprecedented ways. But they admit to being a little disappointed at how rigidly both game developers and players insist so strictly on established conventions.

“We quickly found out that many game developers don’t think of their technology as a medium for artistic expression or even for touching people or telling stories about the world,” say Tale of Tales. “To our surprise they were really fond of the very traditional game structures that they had inherited from board games and arcade games. And they enjoyed very much re-skinning the same game over and over.”

Regardless of how you feel about The Path, there’s no universe in which a desire to try new directions for video games is a negative. “We’re exploring the enormous potential of this medium for art-making. We’re not interested in purity,” Tale of Tales explains. “We’re not so interested in the history of videogames or the traditions of game design. We’re taking the medium at face value and poking at it to see what it can do.”

But the team admits they were shooting for “commercial potential” with The Path, moreso than with Tale of Tales’ Independent Games Festival award-nominated art game The Graveyard. But speaking on whether audiences are actually willing to pay $US10 for The Path– “we tend to be pessimistic,” say the pair. “It seems to be very difficult to find an audience large enough to support our production without extensive effort outside of the purely creative activity.”

Pushing The Borders
Another inhibitor to greater commercial and cultural viability for art games is the difficulty in reaching mainstream audiences. Tale of Tales actually hopes primarily to reach non-gamers through work like The Path, but explains why that’s a complicated proposition: “The main thing that seems to be blocking this progress–if we’re allowed to call it that–is the difficulty of approaching markets outside of the market for games,” they say.

“The games industry is very well organized and very successful within its own ecosystem. But it has optimised all of its systems and habits for internal use. As a result, only gamers like games. And everybody else doesn’t understand them or is even disgusted by them. Which is problematic for us. Essentially, we make games for non-gamers—and, in general, non-gamers hate games.”

Designer Jason Rohrer, known for poignant titles like Gravitation, Passage and IGF Innovation Award-winning Between, has bypassed the entire issue of the commercial viability for art games by making all of his titles free to download. “I’d say that Tale of Tales is not making games at
all, but something else entirely,” he says. “They call their works ‘games’ out of simple marketing convenience.”

From that perspective, it makes a little more sense that gamers hesitate to vote with their wallets in favour of games like Tale of Tales’ if they’re not meant to be “games” as we know them.

“Works like Braid and [Rod Humble's] The Marriage, on the other hand, are undeniably games. You can win both games, and in the case of The Marriage, you can also lose,” says Rohrer.

Still, there’s no saying that The Path would be a commercial juggernaut even if it adhered to more familiar definitions of “game.” Says Rohrer, “It’s not clear to me that ‘gaminess’ is correlated with commercial success. Braid was a commercial success and was generally embraced by mainstream players, while The Marriage was given away for free, and arguably couldn’t have been a commercial success if it was sold.”

Rohrer says that game length, replay value or other measures of the amount of time players can spend with a game is a common way by which people determine their financial valuation. “Braid is more valuable to [gamers] because it takes five hours to complete; it contains a few dozen puzzles. The Marriage is like a single puzzle, and if you figure out what the mechanics mean, you are done playing.”

It’s easy to blame the audience for not receiving progressive games the way they “should.” But Rohrer argues that the primary obstacle to growth for art games is actually an absence of depth: “We’re trying to push the medium forward into more meaningful territory, but we haven’t figured out how to do that while also preserving the features that make games an interesting medium in the first place,” he suggests.

And Rohrer says it’s worth pointing out that lack of depth isn’t just a problem in art games–it’s a problem for most games. “Mainstream, commercially-successful games aren’t deep–they’re just really long,” he says. ” Long and shallow. Art game makers have rejected the notion of making a game unnecessarily long by repeating the same gameplay filler over and over for 40 hours. But what art game makers are producing instead are short and shallow games, at least in terms of gameplay.”

So it’s not that gamers don’t want art, and it’s not necessarily that the audience is unprepared to embrace new definitions of games. The issue may just be that even though they push boundaries, art games suffer from the same problems as all video games do.

Looking Down The Road
It’s not all bleak news for art right now. “We do continue to be surprised by the amount of people within the games audience that do appreciate our work,” says Tale of Tales. “So some things can change on the inside as well… There are even hardcore gamers to whom The Path is a true revelation.”

“The Path seems to be selling to some people, which shows that there are some people who are willing to throw down money on it,” agrees UK journalist Kieron Gillen of the Rock Paper Shotgun blog–where staffer John Walker posted complex but ultimately mixed impressions of the game.

“In fact, I suspect at the end of all this, The Path will end up doing financially better than the average indie game which recapitulates what we’ve seen a thousand times before –because it’s exploring a relatively fresh niche,” says Gillen.

And Gillen suggests it may not be such a problem if people appreciate art games, but are unwilling to spend money on the experience–the Tate Modern in London, for example, charges ticket fees for special exhibits, but the majority of visitors to the gallery simply visit the free exhibits.

Tale of Tales says it’s “quite pleased” overall with The Path’s sales, even factoring in the “steep drop” within a week of the game’s release. That’s a normal sales pattern, but it means the pair has work yet to do in order to help the game reach more people.

“Two years from now, we will draw our conclusions,” say Tale of Tales. “So far, it doesn’t look like a project like The Path is commercially feasible without arts funding–at least not within the current games community.”

“But we don’t intend to stop at its borders. Perhaps The Path can find commercial success in a whole new audience. We’ll let you know.”

“Maybe when we do this a few more times, and when other artists and designers join us, the audience will get more used to these ‘divergent games’ and the landscape will change accordingly.”

Why “change the landscape”? Plenty of gamers just want to play Halo, and that’s fine. But pushing the boundaries of traditional design is the only way video games will gain a greater cultural presence. Without titles like The Path, games risk being relegated to permanent insularity. Audiences and designers who care about games must play– and buy – these kinds of games, and accept their role in the future legitimacy of the medium. Otherwise, “games as art” will remain nothing but a tired talking point.

You’re picking your way through the destitute skeleton of an abandoned building. All around you, decaying, discarded décor reminds you that people lived and worked here once, just as it prompts you to wonder what happened to them. Strange noises and crawling damp seep through the rotted walls.

Your backpack is stuffed with cryptic objects you inexplicably picked up in your exploration – unsettling to look at and obscure in their application, they somehow hold the solutions to the puzzles that impede your progress, if only you can figure them out.

It’s dark, you’ve got a weak flashlight, a short knife, maybe a length of steel pipe you picked up along your way. And you have a sinking feeling that at the end of the next corridor, death is lurking in the shape of a shambling, deformed monster. But you press on through the dispassionate madness, driven by unravelling mysteries and the unresolved ghosts of your own past.

This is survival horror – does it still exist?

The Origins
Though it’s widely held that 1992 PC title Alone in the Dark laid the groundwork for the way video games treat horror, it was the original Resident Evil that cemented the formula on consoles in particular. The saga of Raccoon City began in 1996, when an entire generation of gamers became invested in the adventures of the Redfield siblings, the sordid Umbrella Corporation, and the S.T.A.R.S special forces. Hallmarked by the moan of soulless zombies, mysterious puzzles in an abandoned mansion, and occasional leap-out-of-your-goddamn-skin moments, it wasn’t the kind of thing you’d want to play late at night by yourself.

The original Silent Hill arrived in 1999. Like Resident Evil, it sent the player wandering through eerily deserted locales dismantling black-blooded flesh sacks, but Silent Hill’s hallmark was true psychological horror – the eponymous town cloaked in white fog, through increasingly detailed iterations of the series, became a fairly clear allusion to the protagonist’s personal Hell, and players could draw metaphors through each phase of the game to the often sordid history of the game’s characters.

Resident Evil, Silent Hill and the Fatal Frame series, which takes a particularly Japanese cultural approach to the survival horror formula, could perhaps be called the “triple crown” of survival horror in video games, and along with Clock Tower, Haunting Ground and Siren, each of which put a distinctive spin on the core genre, set in stone the way we chase fear on a video game console.

Don’t Fight, Just Run!
Titles like these all have distinct differences, of course, but they all tend to have a few traits in common. First, they largely de-prioritize combat mechanics, favouring challenging the player through elements like on-location puzzles, mazelike game areas, using the environment itself against enemies, and even fleeing and hiding instead of direct combat. The Fatal Frame series eschews actual hand-to-hand fighting, characterized by its use of a camera to banish the game’s ghosts; Haunting Ground avoids the issue entirely, creating effective, vaguely perverted fear by casting the player as an exposed, vulnerable girl who must hide while training her dog to defend herself.
Though the inability to directly confront monsters in an effective way ended up enhancing the fear factor for these games, it wasn’t likely an entirely deliberate design decision – technology in the nineties didn’t allow for multiple kinds of mechanics in one game the way we see today. Back then, a game couldn’t easily have an enormous, interactive environment, an inventory-dependent puzzle system, and really good third-person character behaviour and still have a sophisticated combat engine on top of it.

In other words, the only games we had in which the fighting worked well were games in which fighting was the main event. But Silent Hill became a critical and commercial success in spite of decidedly unwieldy combat mechanics – fans didn’t play it for the creature-bashing, they played it for the creep factor, perhaps demonstrating to the industry that games didn’t need combat to be great, and paving the way for other clever, primarily psychological action titles.
Among its peers, though, Resident Evil was arguably the most successful in terms of combat mechanics, at least in contrast to Silent Hill. Though it wouldn’t have held up when compared to, say, Western first-person shooters or action titles as far as how fluidly the player could become a killing machine, it was always largely competent, and the arsenal of available weapons increased with each successive installment of the storied series.

If fighting mechanics remain the weak spot in survival horror, it makes sense that developers would want to evolve them, and again, it makes sense that Resident Evil‘d be the one to perfect its combat controls as the years went on. The widely-acclaimed Resident Evil 4 has been called one of the best all-around games of all time, hailed in large part for its good looks and brilliant controls. The action comes fast and messy, and it’s outright joyful to play as agile, powerful Leon bringing the wet, snap-popping hurt to a legion of eerily lifelike viral Ganados.
And by all early accounts, Resident Evil 5 will just refine that formula even more. Through all of its pre-release critical checkpoints RE5 has excelled. It looks awesome. It hasn’t messed much with RE4’s practically perfect controls. It brings the zombie-bashing into a new (if somewhat controversial) arena. It adds partner AI!
Wait, partner AI? Whatever happened to alone in the dark?

You Call This Survival Horror?
When you watch Chris Redfield (who over the years has apparently been lifting a lot of weights) charge through an open village with the camera over his brawny shoulder, toting heavy arms with his tough-sexy partner Sheva by his side, it ought to make you thrill with anticipation for what could be the next great action game.
But it also ought to make you wonder – is this really survival horror?
Electronic Arts’ upcoming space splatterhouse Dead Space says it’s “survival horror” too. Now, it looks like a good game, to be sure, and it also looks like it’ll be quite scary. But with a focus on real-time, non-stop action (literally – you can’t use a pause menu) and design that producer Chuck Beaver says is inspired by Half-Life 2, it has few touchstones to survival horror as we know it. “Person all alone in creepy area surrounded by swarms of bad guys” does not a survival horror game make – that’s just a basic tenet in nearly all video games. By that definition, hell, even Super Mario Bros. is survival horror.

So whatever happened to our imperfect, psychologically damaged heroes, our creepy little doll rooms, our feeble switchblades, our crawling dread? And why have they been replaced by gun-toting professionals and space marine types – as if gaming needed any more space marines?

How We Lost Our Way
Part of the answer lies in the fact that the video game industry has become big business in a way that perhaps it hadn’t yet approached in the early and mid-’90s. These days, whenever you’d like to know why too many games just “follow the leader” instead of innovating, whenever you’d like to know why your favourite kooky series got canned – and, in this case, when we’d like to know why a beloved niche went mainstream, there’s a simple, two-word answer that means a lot to game company investors but very little to us: Risk management.

Games with big budgets need to make a lot of money; that’s not greed, that’s fiscal responsibility. So when planning a project slate, publishers look around and see that the big sellers are Gears of War and Halo — they look at the high performance of RE4 and consider the heavy weapon apocalypse to be the direction that consumers want to go. And to some extent, it is – these titles are shining examples of excellent game design. But faced with these prevailing trends, most publishers will feel the need to see highly detailed gunplay and cover mechanics implemented into the games they greenlight, believing it’s a recipe for success – even for games that have historically thrived on other strengths.

The other reason is somewhat more complex. Those beloved survival horror franchises came into prominence at a time when Japanese design and aesthetic sensibilities largely dominated the console market. The very titles that have helped shift Western development to the forefront – the aforementioned Gears, Halo and Half-Life among a good many others – have also brought Western cultural values about action, fear and horror to the fore, where previously the Japanese approach defined the genre.

East Versus West
Resident Evil is said to be born from a Japanese horror movie, “Sweet Home” (which was actually based on an NES game of the same name). Although “Sweet Home” itself took its inspiration in turn from several Western movies, it nonetheless carries with it the strong hallmark of the way Japanese culture treats horror – and that distinctly Japanese fear factor is what made Konami’s Silent Hill, Tecmo’s Fatal Frame, and Sony Japan’s Siren what they are.

The West and the East have distinctly different approaches to creating fear in entertainment media, uniquely rooted in their respective cultural histories. Though it’s doubtless had numerous influences from Western films and games – we mentioned Alone in the Dark, for example – the Japanese aesthetic for survival horror video games relies heavily on ghosts, ritual, and the unseen. This results in a fear environment that is primarily psychological, contrasted with a Western approach that is more visceral and action-oriented. Think American slasher fics versus Japanese haunting films for a basic example.

So as Western game design shifts to become the dominant paradigm, it makes sense that action and gore has begun to supersede psychological dread as the primary catalyst in what we call survival horror. Resident Evil creator Capcom is, of course, a Japanese company, but Capcom in particular has been tenaciously successful in learning to balance the needs and interests of a Western audience with a Japanese one, arguably even targeting Western consumers primarily over Japanese audiences with its major releases in recent years.

Going Back To Our Roots
But longtime survival horror fans recognise that there’s a distinct loss happening for the genre as the complexities of Japanese fear aesthetics begin to take a back seat. While Resident Evil’s shift to a more Western-style action series has been a more gradual, comprehensible transition, by contrast the Silent Hill series has remained largely unadulterated. That’s why news that California-based Double Helix would be developing the fifth Silent Hill game, Silent Hill: Homecoming, raised alarm for many series stalwarts, who worried that American developers might not be able to retain the distinctly Japanese spirit of the series.

But perhaps a collaboration between Japanese IP and modern, Western design talent is a key way forward for survival horror. While the Japanese fear aesthetics I’ve lauded here have resulted in games that take a subtler, more thought-provoking approach to the genre, they can also feel a little surreal and disjointed. The strength of Silent Hill 2 was the fact that its gameplay and environmental elements subtly pointed the way to some dreadful truths about “hero” James Sunderland’s sundered mind and deeds — but aside from its problematic combat, its weakness was that it sprawled thematically, leaving many loose ends, unanswered questions, unclear conclusions and unrelated elements.
Japanese horror idealizes the unanswered questions; Western horror wants clearer explanations for motivations, behaviour and symbols. Perhaps the Silent Hill series might have attained still more widespread appeal if it had, to be blunt, made just a little more sense – and if the combat design had been just a little bit better, while still stopping short of becoming a pure-action title where the player felt powerful.

But what if collaborations such as the one between Double Helix and Konami can bring us the best of both worlds?

There’s Hope!
Such partnerships can merge the established conventions forged around popular franchises originating in the East with the forward-thinking, proven Western recipes for strong design that current trends seem to favour, thus helping historically niche franchises find broader global success – which could mean that survival horror as we once knew it might see a renaissance.

Silent Hill: Homecoming will be seen as the test of this merger between two worlds. And while I’ll leave the reviewing here to my Kotaku colleagues, I’ve spent hours upon hours over the last few days playing it for my Variety Magazine review, and I’ll just say that in my opinion, it passes the test with flying colours. Yes, Silent Hill fans, you will be happy.

Here’s hoping it forges the start of a return to familiar form for survival horror — real survival horror.
If you’re interested in reading more on this subject, I recommend the following links:
Chris’ Guide To Japanese Horror: Chris maintains an extensive database on the survival horror game genre and has done a great deal of writing and research on it, and in this article he gives a succinct explanation of some key hallmarks of Japanese horror, how it differs from Western horror and how it has influenced entertainment.

History of Resident Evil: Writers Justin Speer and Cliff O’Neill go in-depth on the genesis and evolution of Capcom’s baby.
Sweet Home at Wikipedia: Wikipedia article on the Sweet Home game and film with relevant links.

Leigh Alexander is news director for Gamasutra, freelances and reviews often for a variety of outlets including Variety and Paste, and maintains her gaming blog, Sexy Videogameland. Her monthly column at Kotaku deals with cultural issues surrounding games and gamers. She can be reached at leighalexander1 AT gmail DOT com.

We love, of course, when games have themes and messages, when they offer the player a choice – this equates to more complexity, we feel, this places a game on level with other media that aim to make us feel. There’s an entire segment of the audience that devotes itself to finding the emotional moments in games; we write essays, post blogs and have forum discussions about Little Sisters, about holding hands with Yorda or getting rid of GLaDOS.

And many of us have even accepted, to some extent, that games are currently a little bit self-referential and insular. They often tread dangerously in the direction of comic books, which by giving comic book fans only and exactly what they wanted, ended up being of interest only to comic book fans and no one else. We see that games, as an interactive medium, have much greater potential than this.

But what happens when a game doesn’t create the message from inside its fictional world, but uses a message that already exists?

What if “games as art” in the real world actually looks like something we really, really don’t like?

Let’s talk about Invaders!.

“I don’t believe that WoW is untouchable”, he said. “I completely believe that a game could come out and be more successful than WoW. I’m hoping that we’re working on it right now”.

Designing and developing any MMO, Kaplan said, simply distills down to a series of choices. “I think a lot of other companies have had great opportunities to do what WoW has done… usually for whatever reason, they miss the mark”.

“I actually feel really bad, a lot of times, when new MMOs come out and don’t do really well, because I’m not thinking of it from a business perspective. I know what it’s like to be a developer on a team that you believe in on a game that you just love, and for some reason, you don’t get enough time, or someone makes a bad decision… everybody’s making a lot of small choices, and when those go wrong, your game ends up not successful”.

Diablo III lead designer Jay Wilson believes that one can really focus on one MMO at a time, because of the time demand. He said he played Age of Conan for a couple of months, played Lord of the Rings Online a lot, and still goes back to City of Heroes every now and then. He thinks the key to MMO success is “not making choices based upon being different, but making choices based upon what’s good for your game”.

“If there was an MMO out there that had a tone different from WoW but was executed as well, I actually think there could be a huge audience for that. When I get disappointed, it’s because I don’t see that level of execution”.

Another key factor for global success, said Blizzard’s associate PR manager Bob Colayco, is that it takes a lot of time to develop the infrastructure to support a global audience. Players in any country around the world can receive service and support on WoW in their native language and the localizations are meticulous, he said, which contributes to the retention of a broad userbase.

But will Blizzard’s next project be the game that finally tops WoW’s global success?

“I believe it can be”, Kaplan said. “The same challenge is on us. Are we going to make the right decisions? I don’t believe that just because we made WoW, we’re guaranteed on the next MMO that we make to have the same success”. He also said that at launch, WoW was not what it is today — it’s taken the game a five to six-year development cycle, plus two years on Burning Crusade and a year and a half on Lich King. Similarly, StarCraft 2 is renowned, he said, for its “perfect game balance” — but it didn’t launch that way, the team recalled.

“I really believe you’re only as good as your last game. I really think you gave to prove it every time”, said Kaplan.

And is the bar especially high for Blizzard? “Yeah, for sure”.

Said Wilson, “The only thing we get for free is faith that we’ll follow up on any problems. Anything else, we have to earn”.

I didn’t need to say any more, of course, because Wilson already knew about the fan-fit I was referring to. “It’s a complex issue”, he said. “It’s been a big issue online, but for the most part, the response we’ve gotten has been very positive. We’ve got petitions, a few people on forums [who are] very loud, but it’s really more of the ’squeaky wheel’ syndrome”.

“Certainly, internally there’s no doubt. I would tell people who don’t like the art style that probably, getting the art style was the hardest thing”.

But there’s a careful method to all of it, Wilson explained:

Wilson said that what we see now is the third iteration on the Diablo III design. As with many of the decisions the developer makes, much of the art design issue was based in gameplay principles.

“Diablo is a game you play for, hopefully, hundreds of hours, and one of the rewards is a variety of different-looking environments”. People looking back on old Diablo, he said, may have a selective memory. “People remember the Act I dungeons… but they kind of conveniently forget the green fields of Act I, and all of Act II… and it’s palaces, its bright deserts”.

“We’ve wanted to add them for a long time”, WoW game director Jeffrey Kaplan, who is as enthusiastic in person as he appears in this picture, told Kotaku. “I’m a huge fan of achievement systems in other games; I love Xbox’s system, and I also think Steam did a really good job in introducing achievements. We always talked about it for WoW… [since] players are always measuring themselves against other players”.

Why the decision to include achievements, then, with such a heavily status-based leveling system at the core of WoWs mechanics? Big difference, said Kaplan: “With levels, you’re gaining tremendous character power… skills, abilities, access to more items and areas… with the achievement system, we really wanted it to be a history of your accomplishments. Not gaining character power through it… we wanted it to be a reflection of your character’s power”.

So how does it work? Squirrels ensue: