Borderlands – The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned

Much downloadable content seems to me to be somewhat conceptually broken. No no, I’m just overthinking it right? People like a game, they want more of it, and so the developers make some more and sell it out. Simple right? Hmm, I’m not convinced.

I don’t have a problem with developers offering more content to those who want it, after all they’re just a different scale of expansion pack really (my other misgivings aside). My problem largely stems from the type of game DLC is often being made for and the way it is integrated. Take the Zombie Island DLC for Borderlands: I enjoyed it, liked the areas and the new environments and had fun playing it, but the way it was integrated just seemed utterly incongruous and entirely at odds with the rest of the game.

First off is the geography. The DLC area is not actually relative to anywhere on the map, it’s a magical, far away land that can only be reached by means of fast transport. It could be anywhere and so might as well be an alternate plane of reality. This leads to a second problem which is as there is no real route to it the island only appears in the fast-transport list and right at the beginning of the game too. I presume these were intentional, designed to allow the gamer play their new DLC straight-away rather than locking it away in the latter stages of the game. Fair enough, I can understand that. Of course this leads on to another problem though: where as every other part of the game has fixed levels of difficulty requiring your character to be of roughly of a certain level, zombie island has to scale to allow almost any level of character to play through. A useful mechanic certainly, but your suspension of disbelief gets a little tested by the way zombie island missions simply scale along with you while the regular, mainland ones inexorably become trivial. The DLC missions are always at a fixed difficulty with relation to your current level and will scale even as you work through them (though playthrough one caps at lvl35). With the difficulty being immutable in this way you cannot simply grind up some more levels elsewhere and come back stronger nor can you skip side-missions in order to make things tougher, meaning that the difficulty must be set just right. Naturally in this fine balance the developers erred on the side of caution and as a result zombie island was rather easy, even with multiple players, and there was nothing you could do about it. Well, actually you could go there before level 10 to make it harder as that seems to be the minimum they’ll go, but this of course raises another issue, that of breaking the story. Being set after the end of the game it’s a touch incongruous to experience the DLC story before you’ve even left the Arid Badlands starting area. The solution to this is to make the story itself rather unrelated and ineffectual to the main plot, after all how critical can a piece of plot be if you can play it any point in the game without ruining the rest of it? Great. That’s exactly what I wanted.

It’s perfectly feasible to add more content to the game in a way that fits in with original title – alter the map slightly and put an exit by the coast for example. You have to reach that spot for your first visit, then obviously you can fast travel in from then on. This would solve many of the conceptual issues of difficulty and story placement and also just the arbitrary nature of warping to a new playground for an unrelated jaunt. Perhaps the story might need changing, but you would at least know what kind of time scale you had to play with. However, this of course comes at the sacrifice of not letting someone who has just paid for their DLC have access to it right away unless they have a character in roughly the right spot. This wouldn’t make for happy consumers.

So you’re faced with the choice between something that amounts to a short interlude which, due to its brevity, fails to re-create the magic of the original, or having to grind through hours and hours of the game again simply to access the small segment you’ve just paid for (which is again hamstrung by brevity), something you might have to repeat for each new pack. Neither is really an inviting prospect and it’s for this reason that I think this particular model is broken or at least needs a little thought.

Torchlight – Runic Games

Addiction is not a pretty thing – it’s life-consuming, it’s a burden and a distraction when you’re away from it. It keeps you awake at night either doing it or thinking about it. What’s even worse is when I have trouble explaining why I’m even addicted to it in the first place. Torchlight is one such addiction where I became hooked on what essentially seems to consist of clicking on stuff to see if anything good comes out. Sounds great huh? I’ve managed to kick the habit now, but I was main-lining that dirty stuff for quite some time. What was it that I was addicted to? Simple: loot. Why was I addicted to it? …not so simple.

The plot is almost non-existent and intentionally so as the designers didn’t want it to distract from the gameplay. I had little to no idea why I was in the dungeons and what quest I was actually doing, I was only aware that there was loot at the end of the quest. The game itself has extremely simple controls (though they gradually ramp up) that are basically just left-clicking on things. You don’t even control your movement directly, you just click where you want to go, click what you want to attack, click what you want to pick up and click what you want to sell. These almost childishly simple controls, a placeholder plot and a statistical barrage from the loot transpire to send you into a powerful loot-trance which can last for hours at a time.

To say the addiction is only about loot is probably inaccurate I suppose. There’s much to be said for incrementally levelling up your character, acquiring new skills or bumping up old ones, and mapping out where you’ll be spending the next points, but it’s important for there to be more skills than you can reasonably master without having so many as to be bewildering. Mix these thoroughly with graduated loot that’s only marginally better than what you currently have, being careful that it never quite satisfies all your needs, lightly sprinkle in some armour sets that are nigh-on impossible to finish, and round it off nicely with increasingly tough enemies to make your old loot redundant and you’ve got a time-honoured recipe for Gamer’s Crack.

Rarity is crucial of course – sorting through huge piles of items is made worthwhile by the rare-but-good shit. However, is sifting through mountains of worthless junk actually necessary though? What would happen if you were to simply remove the so-so generic loot leaving items to spawn infrequently but be consistently good? Certainly this would ease that tedious feeling of perpetually panning for gold, but I think really that the enjoyment of quality loot would suffer without mundane items to compare them to. It’s not only that the item is powerful that makes it highly prized, but that it’s superior and this bestows infrequent but beautiful moments: the widening of the eyes and the sharp intake of breath as you find a diamond in the rough. So unfortunately it would seem that using the loot-hoover and wearing your loot-goggles is an essential part of it all.

Overlapping mini-goals are what’s really at the core of this addiction though, in much the same way as a game like Civilisation I think. There’s always one piece of armour that you’re not satisfied with, one weapon that you really like but doesn’t quite cut it (or vice versa), one skill that you’d like to put just one more point in…These goals never align and resolve at the same time, as soon as you’ve managed to tick one off another rises to the surface, just when you think you can put it down you realise you can’t because you’ve very nearly achieved the next goal already, and as a result there’s a crucial absence of closure for the player. A careful balance of the toughness of enemies against the potency of weapons is a nice bonus to actually give the goals some urgency (for which you need to turn Torchlight up to Very Hard), and the net result of all these factors? Just… one… more… dungeon…

The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

I recently undertook the onerous task of reading this mammoth tome that weighs in at a whopping 1460 pages, probably the longest book that I’ve ever read. Among my peers, the length of time taken to read novels is often cited as their reason for not reading much, and the immediacy of cinema, television and the internet tends to dominate people’s leisure time. In a culture obsessed with previews and spoilers, all we’re concerned about it seems is what happens and how it ends. It seems to me that the length of books is one of the great things about them – rather than a brief stroll you go on a journey with the world and the characters over the course of days, weeks and even months. Indeed, it seems a strange criticism to make given the current length of TV series that the same peers will devote themselves to. Regardless, I travelled with the Count for a long time, and I finally arrived too.

A common letdown with lengthy storylines is a failure to capitalize on the built up expectation and deliver that killer ending, that final knockout blow that leaves you stunned. Lord of the Rings didn’t do it for me, neither did Bone, Harry Potter was solid but not stellar, and Neon Genesis: Evangelion was a quagmire of existentialist navel gazing only partially rescued by the alternative ending. Still, Lone Wolf and Cub brought me to tears and Akira left me breathless so some do manage it.

Personally I can’t help thinking that Monte Cristo fell at this hurdle too. The whole book appears to be about not just revenge but revenge well-deserved, yet it wriggles out of this at the last minute and decides that in fact it’s about mystical providence dealing out people’s just desserts. In retrospect some signs were there, but it ultimately renders the book a touch hollow. Sure, providence is involved in giving him the chance and opportunity to avenge himself, but that’s simply the initial premise of the fiction. The glory of the book is the man wilfully and meticulously executing the downfall of his enemies and seeing the net slowly tighten towards the inevitable, sticky end. It’s the brilliance and daring of the man’s struggle and the sheer guilty pleasure of seeing someone utterly destroy their unjust persecutors that keeps you pushing on through the massive tome. The joy of his victory is what you expect at the end, but instead you are presented with an empty message of enfeeblement and modesty.

Was the journey enjoyable? Yes, very much so apart from a pretty dull 300 pages or so in Rome (I realise that 300 pages is basically a whole book, but strangely it doesn’t seem like that). Watching the plots, plans and positioning unfold slowly and inexorably was a smouldering (though not blazing) pleasure. However, the expectation of the pay-off at the end is what makes all these worthwhile and were you to lop off the beginning section that tells you it’s revenge then it would probably all be a bit boring. On reaching the compromised ending it immediately coloured my opinion of the preceding pages, yet I cannot deny that I was enjoying them greatly at the time which leaves me in a strange position.

Is the ending so important as to render the majority of the book redundant? Surely given the length of a book such as this, it’s the journey that’s more important and if I had to pick one it’s certainly the journey over the ending. We’ve all been told about a story “oh but make sure you get to the end, it’s great!” That’s nice, but you can’t just write a good ending and hope your reader makes it there because there’s a good chance they won’t – the journey has to be worth travelling as well. You don’t go on a long walk simply to get to the destination otherwise you’d just skip to the end, it’s just a shame that the last taste in your mouth is the most lingering and that a sour ending can spoil what was a great journey.

Portal & such like

What with games being so expensive we really need to get our money’s worth out of the pesky things! However, it’s becoming apparent to me that gamers seem distractedly preoccupied with quantity over quality, and that this fixation is somewhat divorced from considerations of price. Even if the ticket price is small, games are still not free from accusations of inadequate content. Much of the commentary surrounding 2007’s Portal was about how short it was, a finger that was also pointed at the recently released Braid (Portal came as part of the astonishingly cheap five-game Orange Box and Braid sold for £10). The low price of these games was apparently not justification enough for their brevity, and though many did recognise and appreciate the quality enough to feel that it made up the shortfall, some clearly still remained unsatisfied. Personally, I wondered whether the length of these cheaper games was even worth mentioning at all let alone justifying with reasons other than price – it seemed obvious to me they’d be short because they didn’t cost much, but clearly some people expected more. So is there some arbitrary quantity of game, regardless of cost, that must be provided? And is price only relevant to the quality alone?

At the other end of the spectrum from Portal and Braid, huge games like Fallout 3 get much praise for their sheer volume of content at normal retail price, so we are at least consistent if nothing else. Maybe it’s me that’s got it backwards, thinking of the price first then equating a length to it, rather than primarily thinking about how long I want a game to be then judging if it’s worth the price. However, an arbitrary expectation of length can have negative effects, and the story or gameplay can be dragged out to meet it. Some games simply don’t have the creative depth to fill that content requirement, and I’d much rather they just remove the filler and make is shorter. It might sound like a bit much to ask, but I’d like to see games being consistently good all the way through, even if that means being shorter than expected. It’s better to be left wanting more than it is to not make it all the way through.

So I guess it sounds like I’m advocating a system where things are priced according to the amount of content. If we’re so concerned about value for money then surely this would make sense as things could be priced accordingly? Perhaps, but I wonder if that wouldn’t be opening Pandora’s Box to find the next installment of Fallout costing twice as much as before – hey that’s because it’s huge kids! Neither would I be happy about paying full price for a two-minute game even if it was staggeringly amazing. I suppose games, like movies and books, will never escape the fact that they are consumed largely in order to pass the time in an agreeable manner – the more time they pass enjoyably the better. Books, however, vary a little in price depending on size, whereas films generally don’t even though they can vary in length relatively freely, though I’m not sure I ever hear film critics comment on it. Still, a few more pricing options for games wouldn’t hurt I don’t think, and it looks like this is happening too with the growth of downloadable games.

Really my point is that, regardless of the real-world practicalities and preferences, I feel the overbearing hunt for value is one of the long list of things that retards the progress of games to full maturity. The length should be cut for the game and not the other way around. Sure, a full price micro game would suck (and is an absurdly extreme example), but busting a gut churning out content to meet some arbitrary content-value proposition set by nerd-raging gamers will usually just make the game suffer in the long run. We shouldn’t ignore quantity at all, but it’d be nice if the focus shifted slightly over to quality a little more noticeably, and it would be extremely nice if we, the audience, could appreciate that quality without the need for caveats about brevity.

Personal Favourites: Akira & Dune

"After three days, fish and guests begin to stink" goes the curiously astute proverb. Being visited recently by some old friends evoked an unusual blend of emotions in me, one of which was that of otherworldly visitation. The world had turned since I last saw them and things had moved on. That earlier memory-existence superimposed itself onto the present while they’re there and vice versa, familiar faces appeared in unfamiliar settings, things have changed yet nothing has changed. The visitation shifts things for a few days and the collision of worlds and times is both exciting and unsettling. On the other hand, maybe it’s nothing more than a piss-up with good buddies.

I’ve been seeing old worlds a fair bit recently, re-reading some old books and comics, old favourites that is. There’s something safe and cozy in the prior knowledge that the book is going to be good, that in fact it’s going to be very good, which feels like slowly relaxing into a nice, hot bath. Comic books lend themselves to re-reading more than literature I suppose due to ease of reading. Bound-up graphics novels and trade paperbacks are inviting rather than intimidating, but a six-hundred page novel you’ve already read can seem like a slightly pointless mountain to climb. However, this highlights one of the things that we might forget from time-to-time: are we reading to find out what happens? To reach a destination? Or are we reading because the act of reading itself is pleasurable?

I recently read my battered copy of Frank Herbert’s Dune for the fourth or fifth time (I lose count) and each time I wander out onto the Funeral Plain I am reminded of just how much I enjoy reading this book and wonder why it has been so long since I last felt the Arrakis sand in-between my toes. The internal intrigues, strange technologies and stilted language create a world which I enjoy visiting and each time I flesh out their characters with increasing detail and familiarity. Another world I paid a repeat visit to was that of Katsuhiro Otomo’s post-apocalyptic Tokyo from his manga epic Akira, soaking up the cinematic spectacle and grandeur inked into every panel – the volumes of which are markedly less veteran-looking than my copy of Dune, because comics need taking care of after all. On the second read of a comic there’s a comfortable freedom of pace: I can whizz through it at breakneck pace, taking it in as an intravenous hit to a major artery, or I can take my time poring over it and savouring it. With books I can’t speed read like some can, I have to take a steady pace slow enough not to miss anything but fast enough not to lose momentum.

But do all stories warrant a second go? And if they don’t what does this say about them? With both of those examples I find it hard to pick a preference between the world-setting and the characters themselves. I wouldn’t go so far as to say those are both necessary to warrant a return, and while having both certainly helps I would suggest that the characters are the more important facet. I’m pretty sure great plot on its own with shallow characters just won’t warrant it for me, and that without good characters to sink my teeth into – be it in film, comics, or books – I probably just won’t care and invest enough to come back. So perhaps it’s the same for our stories as it is in life: it’s not about the where and the when and the how, but it’s the people and the characters that keep you coming back, the old friends. Perhaps.

Understand Comics – Scott McCloud

Recently on Robert Ashley’s thoroughly marvelous A Life Well Wasted podcast, he mentioned Roger Ebert’s notion that games could not be considered a (high) art form as they don’t have sufficient authorial control. Varying levels of choice are inherent in games, one could theoretically go so far as to play Super Mario Bros. just by jumping up and down over and over again in one place, totally within the bounds of game’s rule-set. Of course they would not be playing ‘properly’ and as intended, but who’s to say they can’t do that? While gaming probably does have less control than other mediums, I found the discussion (and in fact most discussions about this subject) omitted the glaringly obvious fact that books, film and art also need to be consumed ‘properly’.

Take a book. Some people will scan the last page of a book before beginning reading, almost like a superstition, and in fact there’s nothing stopping them reading any page they like and in any order. Though it might sound absurd, this type of behavior is becoming more and more common; when surfing the internet we jump from hyperlink to hyperlink, mid-text and mid-video, consuming only bite-sized, non-sequential chunks of each. A film is in a similar quandary in terms of linear continuity, but also the viewing environment is way outside its control, yet still very important. Why should we create a proper environment on the creator’s behalf for ourselves to consume films in? So we can consume it properly and fully, to allow ourselves enjoy it. What if you only saw a painting out of the corner of your eye, what would you do? You’d go over to get a ‘proper’ look at it of course. My point is that we acknowledge expected ways to consume all these media in which the receiver has to play their part too, so why are games any different? Reading random pages or only watching half the film with the sound off might seem ridiculous or facetious, but no more so than just jumping up and down in the corner in Mario.

Comics have also struggled to be accepted as art, a plight which Scott McCloud’s awesome book Understanding Comics spends a while fighting. These days comics are much more readily permitted, after all they’re passive like books right? Wrong. McCloud devotes a whole chapter to the issue of ‘closure’ – the things that happen between the panels that we subconsciously fill in – revealing audience participation that we did not even realise happened. A comic author only presents to us static images with text and can merely imply what happens in the gaps; it’s the reader’s willing participation that gives the characters life between the panels. Film is somewhat more explicit than comics, but books I think are less explicit and require lots of audience participation. Jumping up and down on the spot will soon get boring, as does looking at just one corner of a painting. It’s easy to deliberately spoil your experience, so the author and audience must meet each other in the middle for real communication to occur.

So authorial control is not complete in any medium. Maybe that’s obvious. But what about the big intentional choices? Well, it then becomes the question of who is setting the level of this arbitrary threshold that games are failing to cross? It sounds to me very much like disqualifying noise metal from being music because it doesn’t have enough melody, something it’s not trying to have. Authorial control is indeed important in the arts, but it is not necessarily integral and defining, which reminds me of McCloud’s point about the frequent mistake of failing to separate the form from the content. Gaming is young and still has a long way to go before it matures and finds its own unique voice, but to renounce player choice is to discard one its greatest strengths. New art forms are not just different presentation methods of the same content; direct audience control is a real option gaming has over other mediums and it should embrace this difference in its continuing search for authenticity, rather than trying to perform other art forms – most commonly film – through a gaming lens.

It’s inevitable: it’s all going digital. How soon I’m not so sure, but that’s just a detail. However, legal and financial wrangling aside (a little hobby horse of mine), there is something I’m going to miss about having an object to hold and cherish. This really struck home the other night when I was playing Jonathan Blow’s Braid which recently came out on PC (long after its Xbox release). I fell for it in no time and felt it was so seamlessly created, such a complete package, that it just cried out to be lavishly wrapped up in a bespoke, tactile package. The reality is that it came in cold hard bits that for one reason or another I find much harder to cherish. There’s definitely a risk of sounding exactly like vinyl lovers do when talking about CDs and banging on about the artwork and that’s something I’m keen to avoid, so I’m not going to wax nostalgic about the way PC games used to be packaged because let’s face it they were packaged like crap. Needlessly huge and cumbersome boxes gave way to impersonal plastic DVD boxes with ever diminishing manuals; the closest we get to object fetish now is brushed aluminium ‘Steelbooks’ – which I suppose is nice but it seems like too little too late. When Braid whispered in my ear about reification, images came to mind of folded card embossed with patterns, a rainbow of matte colours, a notable absence of child-like, techno-hip, jumbo fonts yelling the title out and a distinct lack of bullet-pointed product feature list on the back.

I’m not a fanatic collector or rabid object fetishist, but I do wonder about my tastes. Am I outdated? Is this something I’ll grow out of? Or is holding things, touching things, something that humans won’t escape? Maybe it’s to do with ownership I suppose, in that we might sub-consciously equate being able to hold something as having the power and control over it and confirming our ownership of it – having the object there permanently is irrevocable proof. But I wonder if that attitude is the same for the next generation that has grown up with digital ‘possessions’ (for lack of a better word)? Do they still equate physical possession with ownership? Do they even think of ownership in the same way? The shift from vinyl to compact disc was a minor step, updating and modernising without really changing the premise, but the shift from hard-copy to digital is a whole new paradigm as you can’t hold it and it doesn’t even have a package! Thinking about it, I have become attached to certain box-less programs I use and that feels similarly warm and fuzzy. Maybe it’s even purer as I’m not swayed by fancy packaging. In any case, it will be interesting to look back in ten, twenty, thirty years and see how far we’ve come (or not as the case may be). Will the digital revolution be utter and complete or will we still continue to lovingly weigh ourselves down with objects?

Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China & Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea – Guy Delisle

In contrast to fly-on-the-wall documentaries, Delisle is ever-present in these books as in many ways they are as much as about him as they are the places he is staying. He’s working in the Far East for animation studios outsourcing their work, and the frustrations of dealing with language barriers, intepreters and foreign customs heavily pepper the narrative, as does the loneliness and boredom of being away from home in hotel rooms for long periods.

The two books differ in that Shenzhen is a more personal affair, focusing on his dealings with everyday people, his experiences as a foreigner in a strange land and the general insanity that the loneliness of such a position brings. Hardly anyone speaks English and he will sometimes go whole days without saying a word. Pyongyang on the other hand rarely sees him without an interpreter-chaperone and as a book has much more commentary on the bizarreness of the political landscape and the all-pervasive propaganda that shrouds the society. While Delisle clearly has preconceptions about North Korea – he brings Orwell’s 1984 with him in a fit of rebellion – he still manages to avoid a heavy-handed agenda, holding back from the scything critique about the realities of life for average citizens that I was expecting. Rather than painting things in a bad and uncompromising light, he paints them in a strange, quaint, bizarre and weirdly charming light, and each story still contains those beautiful, special, quiet moments that you get when travelling. Delisle himself has commented that these are by no means journalistic in nature as he feels there is too much of his own opinion in them.

One of the subtleties of the artwork in these is that Delisle caricatures himself in a simpler way than the rest of the cast, often drawing only his eyes as dots, omitting his mouth and also bestowing himself a uniquely angular nose. If we were to believe Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, this draws us in to his persona and helps us easily identify with it while his more detailed Korean and Chinese counterparts heighten the already existing culture divide, making them appear more foreign, alien and harder to relate to. The overall feel of the artwork in the book is one of informality, it’s all shaded by hand and there’s not a ruled line in sight as far as I can tell, not even among the panel edges, and this is very fitting with the non-journalistic, personal approach. The unintimidating nature – of both the art and the comic form itself – is very approachable and accessible, the uncluttered panels, simple layouts and comic timing all serve to draw you in without effort, with the end effect being more powerful than you expect.

Would I have preferred a more direct, incisive, balanced, investigative and journalistic approach to the subject matter? Not really as I don’t think I could have stomached it in this instance, Delisle’s sense of humour and eye for the personal brings a lot of much needed humanity to the table. Would it have worked if it wasn’t a comic? Undoubtedly, but I’m not sure I would’ve read it, something about Delisle simple and clear artwork brings these worlds to life in such a charming way. It’s hard to know what to say about them really as they’re so understated and disarmingly honest, all I can think of is that I will not hesitate to pick up his next book, Burma Chronicles, when it comes out.

The Wider Implications of Humble Spell-checking

We all know auto-correct from word processors: “should i?” becomes “Should I?” without me doing a thing. So should I bother writing a capital I at all when a lower-case one will do fine?

Now at this point in time there’s plenty of programs that still don’t auto-correct you, so you do still need to know your grammar, but less and less is handwritten. Calculators – in one form or another – are pretty much ubiquitous these days too, and people rely on these more and more to do even their basic maths for them. Adobe Dreamweaver is another example in which the software will do all the coding for you, so why bother learning it?

Even if we do know how to do something initially, continual use of machine automation makes us lazy and our knowledge becomes dusty and rusty. I’m not sure we would actually lose the knowledge entirely, but I can see issues like that arising in the near future as we become increasingly computerised. However, this poses the question of why bother to properly learn something in the first place if you not actually going to use it?

This has been going on for a long time though, we use things every day, even though we don’t understand how they work. Take the oven for example: a replacement for the simple cooking fire that many people would not know how to light (other than those with misspent youths), let alone explain how an actual oven works, because they don’t need to. Knowing how everything you use works is frankly a ludicrous idea and really defeats many benefits of living in a cooperative society full of specialised people. However, take the Dreamweaver scenario: what if you left the HTML and CSS entirely to the software makers and just designed using the tool in hand without any understanding of how it worked? Not too ridiculous, though possibly problematic. What about the same for maths? Leave it up to the people who make calculator software to get that right, just like we might leave the maintenance of our car up to a mechanic.

That probably sounds like a nasty diatribe on the perils of machines, as if I’m about to proclaim a Butlerian Jihad of sorts, so here’s the other side: why waste time labouring over something that a machine can do for you? Machines are designed to increase efficiency, to save us time and effort that could be better spent doing the bits machine/tools can’t do. Web designers can spend more time designing and less time coding, and if we ignore the obvious benefits that has then why bother with any tools at all? We wouldn’t be where we are now without these tools as they have become specialised beyond a humanly reproducible level.

Modern life has embraced physical labour-saving devices so whole-heartedly that we are constantly told that we need must regularly exercise and many of us now have to go out of our way to do basic exercise (gyms etc.) in order to stay healthy. It seems that maybe many of us are saving ourselves so much physical labour that in fact we’re not doing enough! In the realm of knowledge the internet raises an issue of similar scale: when the Internet eventually becomes ever-present on-demand (e.g. smart-phones are getting there), why would you learn something that you can Google in five seconds? I’m not being facetious here either, if you really can look it up in five seconds, then really, what IS the point of learning it? The rapid increase in technology is accelerating our abstraction from previously everyday tasks. While this has been indeed been going on forever, are we about to reach breaking point? Or is this just cultural evolution?

So: should i? Or should I not?

Seven Minutes is a little gem of a game brought to my attention by the Gamers With Jobs. This article will spoil the game completely so seriously download and play it first. (Go on, it’s only seven minutes long!)

The premise is simple though bizarre: a giant, ethereal, disembodied, three-eyed head yells at you not to touch the blue fire. Naturally you touch it. The head then tells you that your world will end in the titular seven minutes and that you shouldn’t leave the room. Naturally you leave the room. What follows is a tricky but delightful 2D platform-game in which the Head continues to taunt you, reminding you that your journey is pointless as you’re going to die soon, and my, isn’t the time going fast?

After ignoring the head’s commands we find out it has been telling us the truth the whole time: at the end the head re-appears to tell us "There is nothing. NOTHING." And that’s it. Game over. We still know nothing about the seemingly omnipotent being and its quasi-nihilistic ravings, but strangely that’s ok. The charm is in how much is left to the imagination, the stylish design, tidy execution, how little time you have to get bored, and the quiet chuckle of the anti-climax.

But apparently that’s not the end. The creator tells us we’ve not beaten the game until we’ve seen the credits, which is achieved quite simply: don’t leave the room. After seven minutes the credits roll and that’s the real ending.

So, progressing through the game in the traditional manner presents you with no reward at the end; remaining inactive and doing nothing means you "win". But then why do we play games? To beat the game or to play the game? Before I stumbled across the real ending, I couldn’t help but think the Nothing ending isn’t really nothing. Really you get to hear the punch-line of the joke and you get to a little something from the disembodied head that’s analogous to a cut-scene. Or maybe that’s what they’re saying, that cut-scenes are really nothing and there never is any real reward at the end of games. Perhaps a defeat-ending more fitting with what seems to be the point of the game would simply be a dead end room – no visit from the head and no actual defeat-ending at all. But the real ending makes me think that’s not the creator’s intent.

The head spent the whole time telling me there was nothing at the end, yet I still ploughed on through. Did I not need a reward in order to enjoy the game, or was it because I assumed the head was lying? Certainly the aim is on a return play-through of a game, the ‘reward-ending’ is pretty much immaterial to me and it’s the play experience there for. Much the same is true of films I watch for a second time: I’m not watching to find out what happens again, I’m watching to enjoy the characters. A similar thought occurs when I reach a final boss that is too hard to be worth bothering with, the best bit of the game is already over  and I just quit after a couple of tries, why put myself through it? So I don’t really play games for cut-scenes or to beat them; I play games because the act of playing them is enjoyable in itself. In this case the real ending is ultimately hollow, and if I were to play Seven Minutes again I think I would surely be defeated, for obvious reasons.