Only a Game

Plagiarism in Videogames?

To what extent is it meaningful to talk about one game plagiarising another? All games draw upon structures and mechanics that exist prior to their creation, and indeed must do so in order to be comprehensible to their audience. So what are the boundaries for theft of ideas in a medium that is necessarily derivative? In order to explore this issue, let us consider one particular case study: the popular puzzle-slash-cRPG game Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, which uses as its central element the "match 3 jewels" mechanic from PopCap's hugely successful game Bejeweled. Is this a case of plagiarism?

Firstly, I don't think there is any doubt that Infinite Interactive had seen Bejeweled before creating their Puzzle Quest game, and any innovation that can be assigned to the latter game can only be construed to originate in stealing the mechanics of Bejeweled and wedding them to a typical computer role-playing game structure. This may not seem very original, yet in videogames this kind of cross-pollination of genre elements can and is a source of originality. Puzzle Quest's design may rest upon pre-existing mechanics and structures, but the developers still made the decision to cross breed these elements, and having done so had to adapt and expand the mechanics of Bejeweled in order for them to fit into the new context. Since they did a good job in the process, to accuse them of plagiarism seems churlish and unfair.

For some time, accusations were leveled at PopCap that Bejeweled owed a debt to Nintendo's Tetris Attack videogame, which pre-dated it and is one of the first instances of a "match 3" mechanic - perhaps the very first. Yet here, claims of plagiarism would be wildly off-base. Not only is it unclear that PopCap had seen Tetris Attack, even if they had the earlier game displays none of the traits that make the later game so successful. The genius of PopCap in making Bejeweled was to create a game that could be played by anyone without any implicit stress (although a timed mode was also included for players who needed the additional excitement). This was one of the major design innovations of the last decade - a game so far from the gamer hobbyist's ideal of excitement and challenge that truly anyone could play it. Tetris Attack had none of this aspect to it - it was a conventional puzzle game, hitting all the emotional triggers of a conventional videogame. It had not innovated in the manner that Bejeweled had.

That Bejeweled is often copied is the surest sign of its success, and most of the games that copy it are strict cases of plagiarism. Goober's Lab, Sutek's Tomb and Zoo Keeper are all essentially the same game as Bejeweled, a theft of ideas that is not the basis for a lawsuit since game mechanics are not a form of intellectual property that can be protected. This is just as well - imagine how stagnant the first person shooter genre would be had (say) id Software owned a patent on the mechanics. We should be grateful that the kind of IP battles that hamstring creativity in other media do not apply to game mechanics.

Returning to Puzzle Quest, another point is worth noting: its cRPG mechanics are far more derivative than the workings of its "match 3" game, yet these aspects do not raise an eyebrow. Why? Because as a well-established videogame genre, cRPGs have already hurdled the plagiarism barrier. Once early videogames such as Ultima and Wizardry had successfully copied the major elements of the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop role-playing game in the early 1980s (itself owing a vast debt to tabletop wargames of the 1970s), the genre was established in its form. Now, new cRPGs may refine the details of the mechanics of these games in various ways, but few if any can claim to innovate in any major sense.

The fact of the matter is, game genres by their very nature become established because games borrow mechanics, structural elements, and conventions from earlier games. To have a videogame genre is to recognise a recurrent pattern of plagiarism that draws upon the successes of earlier games as its bedrock. This is a good thing for players: few but the most grizzled gamer hobbyists can face learning entirely original game rules every time they play, most prefer to play something that (in broad strokes, at least) strongly resembles an earlier game they have enjoyed. It means they have less to learn, and it increases the chance that they will enjoy the later game.

I work hard to come up with original mechanics for my videogames, but in doing so I risk creating a barrier between the audience and the games. Ghost Master, for instance, was highly original - but many players, trying to play it as if it were a strategy game, failed to get into what was innovative and interesting about the gameplay. My attempts to innovate had hurt the game. Similarly, Play with Fire leaves many players utterly confused as to what the play is supposed to entail (in part because of the unfortunate absence of a tutorial) because setting fire to blocks is far from an established game mechanic. With Reluctant Hero, my current cRPG project, I am attempting to walk a fine line - to innovate in the game structure and mechanics, but to do so in a way familiar enough to players that they can at least understand how the game will work. (The original PC version of this project has, alas, been suspended, but I have high hopes of resurrecting the project later this year in a new form).

It is the natural order of the videogame medium that games draw on earlier games within their genre (and from further afield!) Some games innovate, and in doing so they can attract new fans and devotees - provided the game is sufficiently familiar to spread to a wider audience. Some games innovate, but are so alien that they cannot hope to reach a wide audience. What would be considered plagiarism in other media is the backbone and lifeblood of the videogame industry, a well established system of building games from the ever-expanding toolkit of structural and mechanical devices that are the collective product of many generations of game developers. No-one owns these disparate ideas - and for this, on the whole, I suspect we should be truly thankful.

Automatic

As you read this, I am traveling south - perhaps I am already as far as Atlanta. I'm away for the rest of May, but in order that the Moorcock serial has a chance to reach its conclusion, Only a Game runs this week on automatic. Posts will appear every day, but I won't be able to check comments until later.

Four Winds

First, the North wind will take us south to Florida, for a brief holiday with my wife's family.
Next, the East wind will take us west to Colorado, to visit my brother-in-law.
Then, the South wind will take us north to Montana, to meet with a work colleague.
Finally, the West wind will take us east, across the Atlantic to the Netherlands, where I am lecturing briefly.

This is my itinerary for May, and in the interim I won't be here to run the game. But even though I am travelling as of next week, that doesn't mean that the game stops today - for as of this week Only a Game is fully automated.

Enjoy your weekends! I'll get to the comments whenever I can.

Moorcock's Metaphysics (5): Jerry Cornelius

May contain spoilers

It may be the case that the overall popularity of the fantasy genre has contributed to the Jerry Cornelius stories being overlooked in recent years in favour of the Elric novels, but there was a time when these four books were considered essential reading, and they have influenced an entire generation of creative talent, including Alan Moore, Jonathan Littell, and Grant Morrison, not to mention inspiring other writers from Moorcock’s own generation including Brian Aldiss, Moebius and Norman Spinrad. But what are these books, and what is the appeal?

The first novel, The Final Programme, which was written in 1968, begins with an armed raid on a remote fortress which is an event-for-event retelling of the story of Elric sacking the city of his kinsmen from an earlier story (later collected into The Weird of the White Wolf, and other volumes). It is a reference that most of Mike’s readers would recognise, since he had earlier made quite an impact in the counterculture with his albino antihero. Jerry Cornelius, the central character, takes the role of Elric, and all the major characters are neatly substituted. Jerry is clearly an aspect of the Eternal Champion, but no longer in a sword and sorcery setting. Here he is an assassin for hire, a secret agent and a bisexual playboy – he is, in effect, the Eternal Champion for the late sixties, a spy thriller for the cultural underground.

But all sense of conventional heroics gradually devolves in the central quest of the novel, which involves attempts to thwart the mysterious Miss Brunner in her attempt to build a supercomputer for nefarious ends. The story takes upon an otherworldly feeling in its descent beneath the surface of the Earth and its eventual conclusion, leaving the reader not quite sure what has happened, but thoroughly swept up in the ride. The impression one gets is that here is an expression of the Eternal Champion mythos into what was then the modern day. But this is only part of the story.

In the subsequent novels, the narrative warps and changes in strange and paradoxical manners. In A Cure for Cancer, Jerry is still a hip secret agent, but there is no clarity as to what is going on. No-one in this novel seems to really know anything substantial, other than having an awareness of the gradual decay of civilisation or something close. Jerry doesn’t even seem that interested in stopping what’s happening, even if he could, and is more involved in an aesthetic, artistic quest than a political one. The disorienting passage of the narrative is heightened by an unconventional structure, such that the climax takes place in the middle, and not the end, and the resolution of the plot happens roughly three quarters through. It’s a wild ride that whets the appetite but confounds expectations.

Even this falls short of the disorientation of The English Assassin, during which Jerry spends almost the entire novel having a serious nervous breakdown while being carried around in a coffin. The story focuses entirely on other characters, who experience a series of eight different catastrophes within their collapsing society. Jerry appears only at the end, bursting out of his coffin onto the beach in a Pierrot costume – a rustic clown character from the Commedia dell’Arte. The reader can be justifiably bemused by this turn of events, and yet anyone who has made it this far into the sequence recognises that what is going on here is not conventional fiction.

The Pierrot reference makes explicit part of what is going on in these dizzying novels. The Commedia dell’Arte was a dramatic form which reached its maturity in Renaissance Italy. The essence of the form was improvising plays from a given theme (the way children make up games, and role-playing gamers create stories). Each of the characters is a stereotype of a certain kind of person in Italian society from that era. So there is Pierrot, the sad fool who with an unsophisticated wit still manages to foil his enemies at time, Columbine, who Pierrot is in love with but will never have, Captain Fracasse, a pompous blowhard with dubious military conventions, and a host of other stock characters.

The Commedia dell’Arte provides mythology on a human scale, and this is what Moorcock weaves via a similar technique – a stock set of characters, such as Jerry and his brother and enemy Frank, Jerry’s beloved sister Catherine, the occasionally evil Miss Brunner, the grotesque Bishop Beesley and so forth, face situations on a theme – that being, the catastrophic collapse of society. This becomes explicit in the title of the 1971 collection The Nature of the Catastrophe, which featured stories by ten authors, including Moorcock, Aldiss and Spinrad, all experimenting with the technique that Moorcock was developing.

Moorcock has said on the subject of the Jerry Cornelius stories, that they are an attempt to liberate the narrative – to leave it even more open to interpretation than conventional stories. The whimsical events and references within the novels are a complex set of allusions meaningful (and explicable) to Mike but thrown together in such a way that the reader is essentially required to bring their own meaning, in a manner not dissimilar to the acclaimed but inaccessible Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, which via a constructed language invites the reader to experience something beyond conventional narrative forms.

In fact, Mike actively encouraged other authors to experiment with the Jerry Cornelius mythos in what might be considered an early open source project, the aforementioned The Nature of the Catastrophe being one product of this. (It is perhaps because this freedom had been given that Mike has been less pleased with Grant Morrison’s tributes to Jerry Cornelius – creating new characters inspired by Cornelius rather than contributing to the mythology directly). Indeed, this wider collaboration is ongoing, and Jerry Cornelius has recently appeared as a child in Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and will shortly be appearing in the new comics in this series. Jerry, it seems, just won’t stay down.

The conclusion of the Cornelius Quartet, The Condition of Muzak, first published in 1977, is even more surprising than its predecessors. In this story, Jerry Cornelius is no longer a hip secret agent, but simply a confused teenager, his exploits revealed as adolescent fantasies. Society is still seen in a state of collapse – here, Europe is a surreal collection of splintered city states – but there is little doubt here that Jerry is an ineffectual nobody in this world. The climax concerns Jerry’s foul mouthed mother (a considerably more terrifying figure than the villains of the earlier stories!) revealing the twisted family history... The novel won the 1977 Guardian Fiction Prize, and was hugely lauded. A reviewer in the Times noted: “The realisation comes that Jerry is seeking sanctuary in different universes of Time in separate private mythologies. As indeed, is the implication, are we all.” It is Moorcock’s existentialism expertly rendered.

The four Cornelius novels form a sequence that begins by connecting the Eternal Champion themes into the political context of the 1960s, and then gradually plays with and deconstructs the theme of the decline and collapse of society. Eventually, the narrative has become so deconstructed that it is revealed as teenage fantasy – Moorcock has created a new superhero (or rather, antihero) for his times, then carefully and methodically exposed that hero as a fool, a harlequin and a dreamer, destroying and reinventing the very mythology he had built up.

This is not the only time Moorcock has reinvented and expanded upon the Eternal Champion mythos of his earlier work. From 1991, Mike began reimagining his existential mythology into a new form, one which complements yet expands upon its roots. It is this regeneration of themes that we shall look at in the final part of this serial.

The opening image is the cover from the 1987 Grafton Books edition of the short story collection The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius, by the artist Tim White. As ever, no copyright infringement is intended and I will take the image down if asked.

Next week, the final part: The Game of Time

Temporal Fault

Your scheduled post occurs one week in the future. Skip your comments phase.

No-one saw the cracks at first, lurking between the moments, until in an instant there was a cacophonous rip and the fabric of time was torn asunder.

Transatlantic Traversals

It is with a touch of disappointment that I report that my wife and I will shortly be crossing the Atlantic ocean yet another time in order to live on the European shores once more. There are good reasons for us to move back to Manchester, including the fact we have property there, and a slew of new and exciting projects with European clients, particularly our friends at 3D People. But still, I have enjoyed my year in Knoxville, amidst the greenery and sunshine, despite developing a certain sense of isolation.

Knoxville, a charming college town on the eastern edge of Tennessee, has been a part of my life since 1997, when a friend's wedding brought me here - and led me to my wife. I appreciate the popular conception that people have of Tennessee, and for the most part it is wildly unfair. It is true that this is a fairly conservative state, one in which a conventional patriarchal version of Christianity dominates, and thus a State which prefers to support Republican over Democrat. But beyond the stereotypes of the majority lies a wealth of diversity, and this truly is a remarkably friendly region, with people who would gladly lend a hand to someone in need.

East Tennessee is the liberal side of the State, with the conservative influence being much stronger in wealthy Nashville, or densely urban Memphis. The Christian Churches here are diverse, and there are two Unitarian Churches, one of which has amicable relations with the local Pagan groups. The Pagans, alas, have been having all sorts of problems resolving tensions in their community recently, which is a shame as at its best it is a wonderfully spiritual counterculture. Many refugees from stale-minded Churches have found a home among the Pagans, although it would be wrong to presume that there are not open-minded Christians here. A friend, who alas recently moved to Cincinnati, belonged to a splinter group of Christians within her own church that explored a less traditional interpretation of Christianity in their Sunday meetings.

A fringe benefit of the strong Christian presence here: my wife and I have been able to do our shopping on Sunday mornings, when the orthodox religious community is in Church. The largely empty aisles make for a refreshingly quiet supermarket trip!

My long relationship with Knoxville is not ending - we shall be back here again, no doubt - but my residency here must come to an end. It is with sorrow that I wave goodbye to our many friends here, but it will be with commensurate delight that I greet the many friends waiting for us on the other side of the Atlantic, where we will arrive at the start of June. Until then, we will be lost between worlds, travelling and visiting friends and family.

Farewell, Knoxville! We shall meet again!

New Poll: Volume of Content

I've fallen into a comfortable rhythm now, posting Tuesday to Friday, and I have managed to cut down on the over-long posts (somewhat!) by breaking them up into serials. Now that these changes are bedded in, what do you think about the volume of content here on Only a Game? Still too much? Just right? Or do you crave the flood of nonsense we used to have in the crazy days! The poll is up now.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Results of Poll 8: Save Games

Moorcock's Metaphysics (4): The Multiverse

May contain spoilers.

The Multiverse refers to a diverse collection of parallel worlds or universes – the many within one. Just as Law and Chaos have penetrated deep into the counterculture thanks to Moorcock’s writing, so the term “multiverse” (originally coined by 19^th century luminary William James) has achieved its popularity thanks to Moorcock’s work. Michael Moorcock’s Multiverse refers in some sense to the collected settings of all his novels – both fantasy and literary, and is also referred to in the fantasy novels by the poetic name “The Million Spheres”, representing myriad alternative worlds that may be visited by the Eternal Champion.

These days, we are more likely to encounter the term ‘multiverse’ in a science fiction setting – as branching timelines, alternative realities, and quantum universes – but Moorcock’s writing is seldom within this genre. In fact, Mike has expressed a certain dispassion for strict science fiction (the expression of scientific knowledge or musings in a literary form, as with say, Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke), noting “science fiction achieves concentration by exaggerating the actual… and so does horror fiction, and crime fiction… you can get away with wild exaggeration in science fiction, as long as your reader accepts the science fiction form you’re using.” Although two of his earlier novels – now published as The Winds of Limbo and The Blood Red Game – fall broadly into this space, his work draws more commonly from literary, psychological and mythological roots, and is perhaps better characterised as fantasy, irrespective of the specific trappings employed.

There is a sense that Moorcock’s Multiverse is not a physical space at all, but a literary one – indeed, this is not the parallel universes of, say, Star Trek, where most of the physical laws remain the same and only the events may change, the very nature of each ‘sphere’ of the Multiverse can be wildly different. There is a sense, therefore, that while the Million Spheres represent a genuine diversity of realities for Mike’s character’s to explore, it figuratively represents the whole of his stories – a literary superset, comprised of many different styles and settings, ancient and modern, fantastical and down-to-earth.

Because it is a literary space, there are few explicit rules to be followed, and it is possible for time and causality to vary wildly from one sphere to the next (from one story to the next…) As a result of this, the death of a character does not mean that this character will not be seen again – after all, in a multitudinous literary space, what are the limits save imagination? Colin Greenland has described this aspect of Moorcock’s work – the fact that characters may occur again and again, irrespective of their earlier fates – with the phrase “Death is no obstacle” (also the title of a book Greenland published containing a dialogue between him and Moorcock discussing Mike’s work).

Thus the Eternal Champion stories represent a recurring fantasy mythology involving constant repetition of events, with the hero being able to work subtle influence only at the expense of considerable effort. These kinds of stories represent many of the “Milllion Spheres”. Additionally, there are expressions of the same themes into a more familiar, “modern” context, such as the Jerry Cornelius stories (which we will look at next week), and also the more grounded literary pieces like Mother London and King of the City, which lack fantastic elements, but contain many of the same thematic elements (and often a crossover in the names of characters too).

A recurring symbol within the Multiverse is that which mankind craves, but can never quite reach. The earliest appearance of this kind of metaphor in Moorcock’s work is in The Golden Barge, in which the protagonist is forever chasing the barge of the book’s title down the river, but can never reach it. The same theme is explored many times, for instance, in the Dead God’s Book in the Elric stories, which promises the satisfaction of dreams but when Elric finally lays hands upon it, it crumbles to dust – the essence of the unattainable goal.

Perhaps the most famous expression of this theme is the Eternal City of Tanelorn (pictured above in an airbrush painting by Rodney Matthews, a print of which adorned my walls as a teenager). Tanelorn is said to exist in some form in all the Million Spheres, and cannot be destroyed. Heroes strive to reach it, mostly in vain, and the various facets of the Eternal Champion have a different relationship with the city according to their fates. Hawkmoon, perhaps the most moral of the incarnations, achieves his freedom from struggle in Tanelorn at the climactic original “ending” of the Eternal Champion mythos, The Quest for Talelorn, and Erekosë too finds an end to his struggles here – albeit a tragic conclusion, as befits his questionable history. Elric, alone among the incarnations, reaches Tanelorn easily – and because of this, finds no peace there. Since the city represents the utopian goal that cannot be achieved, only strived for, there can be no peace without the struggle to attain it.

In the Eternal Champion mythos, the space between the Million Spheres is referred to as the Seas of Fate, upon which the Dark Ship sails. This symbol can perhaps be compared to the “Ship of Fools” (a common allegory in Western thought, which possibly originates in Plato’s Republic): mankind is seen as a vessel crewed by people who are confused, deranged, or oblivious, a ship without a pilot and seemingly forever adrift. The Ship of Fate in Moorcock’s Multiverse is filled with lost souls seeking Tanelorn, but the Blind Captain and his twin brother, the Steersman, never seem to take them there. The Captain and his brother are later revealed to be metaphors for mankind, and the creation of Tanelorn is accredited to them – which is to say, that it is mankind’s imagination which creates unachievable utopian goals.

From 1981, Moorcock develops a new strand to this idea, one which highlights an essential aspect of the utopian quest – that it may be unattainable does not destroy its value. This begins with the introduction of new incarnations of the Eternal Champion, the members of the Von Bek family, who are intimately connected with the Holy Grail. The first of these novels, The Warhound and the World’s Pain, which was nominated for the World Fantasy Award, deals with the end of the era of the ancien régime – when Europe was organised under a strict chain-of-command claimed to begin with God, and proceeding down through the King, the clergy and the aristocracy to the peasants. It is thus a tale from the dawn of the Age of Reason, when mankind is becoming able to lead itself (and thus also the beginning of the transformation of the Christian Church from a source of authority to its younger and still-evolving role as a source of spirituality).

The Grail (which appears in this book as a simple clay pot, but has other forms in other stories) is an embodiment of Harmony, and in the Eternal Champion mythos appears also in other forms (such as the Runestaff in the Hawkmoon stories, and perhaps also in an early form in Phoenix in Obsidian as the Screaming Chalice). Ulrich Von Bek, the protagonist in The Warhound and the World’s Pain, is charged by Lucifer (who seeks to reconcile with God) to find a cure for the world’s ills in the form of the Grail. He is opposed by the sinister Klosterheim, an embodiment of the failed Eternal Champion (another recurring symbol, usually in the form of the villainous Prince Gaynor the Damned), who arguably represents nihilism against the Eternal Champion's existentialism.

Ulrich notes, with characteristic fatalism: “Man struggles in the belief that he can, by dint of perseverance, affect his own destiny. And all those efforts, I think, lead to nothing but ruin.” In seeking to recover the Grail on Lucifer's behalf, however, he learns that “one must seek to become human and to love the fact of one’s humanity”. In discovering this, he also discovers the Grail. Upon delivering the cup to Satan, Lucifer remarks: “Man, whether he be Christian or pagan, must learn to rule himself, to understand himself, to take responsibility for himself. There can be no Armageddon now. If Man is destroyed, he shall have destroyed himself.”

Similar themes are explored in a modern context in the stories of Moorcock’s most infamous and critically acclaimed creation, a lascivious secret agent and adventurer who brings the Eternal Champion mythology back down to earth with a cataclysmic bump.

The opening image is Tanelorn, by the artist Rodney Matthews, and can be ordered from his website as a print. As ever, no copyright infringement is intended and I will take the image down if asked.

Next week: Jerry Cornelius

Super Mario Galaxy

Super Mario Galaxy is a highly polished, professionally produced platform game, with much to recommend it. Unfortunately, it is also a product of the tensions in the videogames marketplace – stuck between continuing to court the support of the gamer hobbyist, and meeting the play needs of the wider mass market audience, and this creates certain problems which cannot easily be overcome. As of the end of March this year, this title has sold some 6.1 million units, making it the most successful standalone game on the Wii, and given that this sales figure has been achieved in less than six months, it still has a reasonable chance of outselling its seminal predecessor, Super Mario 64, which sold 11 million units.

This is not a review of the game – I am not trying to suggest who will enjoy this game or otherwise, although this information may be derivable from the following analysis. Rather, I want to examine the game design of this title and consider some of the implications that these design choices had on the game’s audience, largely with the goal of demonstrating how fiendishly difficult the process of creating AAA videogames for a mass market audience has become. Some familiarity with the game is assumed, to save describing all of the game’s details completely.

 

Emotions of Play

At their heart, the Mario games have always been rushgames – capitalising on vertigo to generate excitement, and offering challenges of sufficient difficulty to provide the emotional reward of fiero (triumph over adversity) such that the game also operates as something of a wargame as well.

Unfortunately, it has become quite difficult to create rushgames for an audience that will include both gamer hobbyists and mass market players, because of an ever-widening gap in game literacy and control skills. Gamer hobbyists can complete absurdly difficult platform challenges without batting an eylid, while certain mass market players can feel a sense of reward just at correctly working out how to get through a linear task sequence in a tutorial!

This basic problem haunts Galaxy throughout, with many reviews commenting that it is too easy to reach the main ending (which occurs at 60 stars – about half-way through the content), and overlooking the necessity of the end point being in-reach for a mass market audience who lack the skills of their game-obsessed counterparts. The later challenges are difficult enough to satisfy any gamer hobbyist, however, and to complain at the end point being placed too soon is to unreasonably assume a greater obligation on Nintendo’s part to satisfy the gamer hobbyist over the mass market player.

Relating to this is a problem which cannot be overcome: the success of the platform game genre in the 1990s came on the back of new kinds of platform game that while copying many of the elements of the successful Super Mario 64 formula recast the genre closer to the “virtual tourism” vibe which is well suited to a mass market audience. This shift gradually caused the gamer hobbyists to abandon the genre in droves for other genres that were better pushing their buttons (FPS games, for instance), and without the hobbyists to proselytise to the masses the platform boom of the nineties collapsed.

Galaxy does not evoke this “virtual tourism” vibe very well – although its environments are inventive and engaging. I believe the strange miniature worlds and odd gravity effects of Galaxy will be somewhat off-putting to the mass-market in general, being weird and unfamiliar (things the mass market seldom connects with). Because this game necessarily draws directly from the well of prior Mario games, and not from the wider canon of the platform game genre, there is a lost opportunity to appeal to a wider audience with a more explorable sandbox world, rather than the chain of challenges that is employed.

 

Verbs of Play

The previous title in the 3D Mario platform games, Super Mario Sunshine, attempted to revitalise the ailing genre by the addition of new player actions involving a special water-squirting backpack. This was not enormously successful, and many players felt this was a clunky addition. (This earlier title also suffered from imperfect level design, probably as a result of time pressure during development).

In Galaxy, Mario’s moves are not significantly different from their classic roots – a suite of different jumps, along with requisite supplemental moves such as dive attacks, plus a spin attack achieved by shaking the Wii remote. This kinaesthetic control element works nicely – it’s one of only two gesture controls that make use of the Wii’s motion sensitivity (the other being an odd ‘screwdriver’ gesture) and it’s used both to fight enemies (including Boss enemies) and to activate the “Sling Stars” that link the end of one platforming section to the next. This works nicely: it’s an easy control to activate, and adds a nicely visceral aspect to the play of the game, especially in Boss fights where the feel of thumping Bowser or his son becomes quite tangible.

Another unique feature is that the player collects “star bits” (an additional economy that has been added to the game beyond Stars and Lives) by pointing at them with the Wii Remote cursor, and can then fire these star bits at monsters to stun them. This doesn’t enormously contribute to the main gameplay (although it can be useful), but is significant when a second player is involved (see below).

It has been a feature of the Mario franchise for many years that extra abilities that he gains are temporary – either time limited, or lost when Mario takes damage. This element remains in Galaxy, although some of the new abilities such as the Bee Suit (essentially a jetpack) and the Boo Suit (a ghostly alternative jetpack) are restricted by avoiding water and light respectively. There is something fundamentally unsuccessful about the way this is dealt with in Galaxy – some of the new abilities provided to Mario can be fun, but they are often rather frustrating, and frequently underused.

For instance, the Ice Mario power-up is time limited. The ability it grants is good fun – skating across water that freezes as you go is satisfying, and wall jumping up frozen waterfalls is especially rewarding. But the time-limited aspect of these abilities contributes to the rushgame goal of excitement at the expense of the greater player agency that could have been afforded. It’s hard to appreciate that the time limitation is being used to add excitement, when what one is feeling is the frustration that one does not have the time to experiment with the new toy that has been given (a freedom that other platform games would have more willingly afforded).

Additionally, some of the toys on offer are not much fun – the manta ray is a pain to control, as is Spring Mario and to some extent Rolling Ball Mario, and there are other similar niggles lurking in the corners. These are used sparingly, which is a good thing, but perhaps the game would be better if they had been excised entirely: the time used in their implementation could perhaps have been better spent in other ways.

 

Camera

The big revolution that came with Super Mario 64 was the camera object – this allowed for the flourishing of 3D worlds in videogames, and is perhaps the single most important design innovation of recent decades. In Galaxy, the game provides little camera control, and instead uses a fixed-camera mentality to ensure there is a good view in every situation. Often, the viewpoint defaults to side-on, making the game into a “two and a half-D” platformer – these segments of the gameplay work nicely, as most players can interpret a 2D environment more easily than a 3D world.

There are places when the camera specification can be confusing – especially when flipping between one plane of gravity and another, since Galaxy is set on odd-shaped worlds which the player can stand on either side of (most of the time). Certain players will find their control stick doesn’t work in the manner they expected when experiencing the gravity flips, but for the most part this problem is manageable.

Some gamer-hobbyist players will lament the lack of camera control, and find it frustrating – however, these will be in the minority of the game’s overall audience. The mass market players will mostly be thankful for the assistance the game provides them in taking away the demand to control the camera object (although most will lack the game literacy to recognise this state of affairs). A considerable amount of time must have been invested in specifying the fixed camera views – this is increasingly becoming a necessary element of games targeting a mass market audience, because of the vast skills gap between the hobbyists and the more “casual” players.

 

Co-Star Mode

The game features a co-operative mode in which a second player can assist Mario. This probably should not be considered a “Two player mode” as the second player is not granted sufficient agency for this appellation to be justified. Rather, Co-Star Mode is more like a support mode – and indeed, the game is much easier with the second player assisting simply because the extra player has the ability to ‘hold’ monsters in a glowing white field, fixing them in place and rendering their attacks ineffective. This doesn’t work against everything, but there are sufficient places where it is helpful for it to be worth having a second player if one is struggling with the game.

The Co-Star Mode has received considerable criticism for not being a particular effective two-player mode – the second player is not nearly as engaged in events on screen as the player in control of Mario, and may in many cases feel that they are not being enormously helpful (since the opportunities to assist come intermittently). Nonetheless, I believe some praise is due to the team for the inclusion of this feature: a support mode allows for players to play together (which is a vital play need for many players, and especially in the mass market) and the fact that having a second player makes the game easier provides a unique difficulty balancing mechanism: hobbyists seeking challenge can play unaided, while mass market players who are struggling can get a friend or family member to help them through the tough parts.

In Co-Star Mode, the main player does not need to point their Wii Remote at the screen most of the time, and can focus on the platform elements while the support player can sweep up star bits with their cursor, and interact helpfully with the monsters. This split, which divides the game actions between players, further contributes to the game feeling much easier in Co-Star Mode. The mode is far from perfect, but as an attempt to incorporate a social play form in a genre normally toxic to this kind of co-operation it is laudable.

Additionally, the Co-Star Mode represents an excellent Tutor mode – an already experienced player can take the support role, and even has the opportunity to cause Mario to jump when necessary for added assistance. Allowing experienced and game literate players to use their skills to help the less experienced players get to grips with Mario’s world helps spread the appeal of the game, at least in principle.

 

Lives

The strangest aspect of the game design is the use of lives. I am not wholly of the opinion that “the time for lives has passed”, although there is a certain zeitgeist towards this viewpoint. In fact, when I have challenged developers I work with on their choice to include lives in certain games, the common response is “we needed some kind of economy” – that is, without lives for the player t