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silveradept[This is part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. If you have suggestions about where to take the series, please do say so in the comments. We have a lot of spaces to fill for this month.]
Once games had the ability to be more than "Here's a loop, if you complete it, reset the loop and increase the speed / start the loop one line lower," the concept of discrete levels and rooms expands the possibilities of games significantly. Space Invaders gains significantly more complexity when Galaxian and Galaga arrive, not just because the invaders take unique patterns to get into their swarm formations, but because each wave is a different formation composed of different members, which require different techniques and are of differing threat levels to the player character. (It also introduces a mechanic where a player can temporarily let a ship get captured by the opposition and then, if they are skilled enough, they can free the ship with a well-placed shot and proceed from that point forward with two ships next to each other, firing side-by-side at the invading opponents.) Admittedly, an entire generation of game-playing people think of Super Mario Brothers' Worlds, with discrete levels as their first thought on this structure, they have Donkey Kong's success to thank for this "level-with-stages" structure working out as well as it did, since Donkey Kong was one of the first to make the game loop have progression between stages, instead of having the complete gameplay experience available on one screen, as Pac-Man and many of the Space warfare games did.
For me, while I will get to Donkey Kong in due time, because it has an Atari 2600 part where only two of the original four stages are produced in the level loop (and without many of the fancy graphics present in the arcade or NES originals), the first encounter that I have with a Donkey Kong-type game is Ladder, written for a Kaypro computer that was at least briefly part of the family (which means I have seen, although I don't remember how to work, CP/M as an operating system), that I didn't particularly felt like I was all that good at, being, again, six or seven, and that also had an implementation of Hunt the Wumpus, which I seem to recall I didn't play much. There was a reason for it, and it probably was that it was a difficult game for my six year-old self to avoid either falling down the pit or stumbling into the chamber of the wumpus and getting killed by it instead. Might also have been a very text-heacy game, and while I was good at reading texts, I might have been interested in reading other texts than that particular one.
In any case, The concept of levels and stages also allows for the introduction of the puzzle game, where instead of repeating the same set of stages in order, and where one could develop, essentially, a perfect play algorithm with enough time spent analyzing the patterns of the game, in puzzle games, each stage / level may have the same objective, but the components of how to achieve that objective and the hazards in the way of accomplishing that task have been changed. (If you wish to be pedantic, to a certain degree, all games are puzzle games because they set a task before the player and give them tools to accomplish those tasks. However, outside of the puzzle game genre, the emphasis is usually on some aspect of the game other than solving the puzzles, like dodging invaders, barrels, or wiping the screen of attackers before progressing to the next point. A lot of puzzles, at this stage, are based around platforming ideas of running, climbing, and jumping, and the characters involved may or may not have abilities to defend themselves with.
Two of the iconicentries to the puzzle genre that tae full advantage of requiring both brains to plan moves and the timing abilities to execute them are Lode Runner and Lemmings. I have only ever played the latter, both both of them are broadly similar - guide the character(s) across a stage full of hazards to accomplish their goals. Lode Runner is a single character with a set of abilities that have to be used in the correct ways so as to gather all the gold bard on any given level, Lemmings is a stream of creatures that can be assigned particular abilities to inluence the path they are walking upon to avoid hazards that will crush, mutilate, slice, or drown them, with a specific percentage of the whole required to make it home in the time alloted. (Often, this means that before the pathway is fully clear, the player has to increase the drop speed of the lemmings to give them enough time to make it all the way to their destination.)
Lode Runner is also important in the history of gaming in that it was one of the first games to ship with a method for players of the game to create their own levels. Such that if a player had friends or wanted to continue playing games past the official levels, there was a significant amount of replayability that came with the game. (And while it would be a while before BBS, newsreaders, and other forms of Internet access to stored fles were stood up and people could post their level creations, moving levels across on disks and discs was usually possible, or drawing the level design out on paper and then using that blueprint sketch to recreate the level on another person's computer.) I suspect this is also the point where we started seeing levels whose sole design was to be as frustratingly hard as possible, if not outright impossible to complete. Presumably, the level editor checked to make sure there was a player, at least one object to collect, and a goal zone designated, but I'm not sure how much it would check to make sure the level was actually playable or traversable. (This idea of beastly hard but theoretically winnable games spawns its own entire genre, starting with the Kaizo Mario World edits to Super Mario World SNES ROMs and waltzing all the way through games suc as I Wanna Be The Guy. Because apparently, there are people whose masochistic streaks take the form of Jason Fox's attempts at passing the otherwise unpassable.)
Not all games bundle a level editor with them, which is a bit of a shame for some of them, like brick-breakers or other such things where being able to make and play your own level creations would be a way of showing off your creativity (or sadism. Sometimes both.) Level editors are often a good way of introducing smalls to the concepts involved in programming and game design, as they give someone a limited amount of resources to work with and a specific goal to make a level that works and is enjoyable to play for the target audience. A small who gets interested in this idea at a young age and builds some skills with it might be able to resist the influences of others around that suggest a person of their gender presentation should not engage in things like level or game design. (THBBBBBBBBPTH and fie on you if you suggest such a thing to anyone. A significant amount of problems with many subcultures can be directly traced to their attempts to gatekeep interested others out because the people already in wanted to make their experience exclusive, instead of inclusive. Don't do this.)
For other games, often the first-person shooters developed and released by id tools were developed and released separately to not only construct new levels, but to allow for manipulation of game assets (so that one could not just create a door, but specifically a door that required a blue key to open, or a door that opened and closed itself without human input at set intervals. These attributes were often associated with the objects themselves, so you would put the door in first, then edit the door's attributes to say "needs a blue key", "starts open", "starts closed", or "can't be opened with the action command at all." Additionally, the ability to set triggers that would happen when the player, or a monster, or a projectile, or anything else, touched the part of the level associated with the trigger made it possible for people to design their own levels that played even more like the actual game itself, because they were using things that had been built into the game itself and were possible through the engine that drove the game. So you still had a fair amount of levels that were playing Kaizo games, sure, and some that were essentially completely new campaigns that could be loaded, one level at a time, and at least one memorable Doom level that was, essentially, a domino palace, except that the dominoes were explosive barrels that would end up killing the player character if they were too close to the action. (The judicious use of a cheat code to engage God Mode was suggested in the file documents so as to avoid this pesky problem and see the explosions in their full glory.) I think that there was also a major boss character in the stage who would very easily be felled by the collective explosive power on display, just for the fun of it. And who might also set off the situation themselves with their own weapons and result in their destruction (and the player's, too.) There may be more than a few levels developed for these kinds of games that rely on the player knowing the appropriate cheat codes and deploying them, because once they're known to work and exist, sometimes people will design levels that are unplayable in the sense that a player that isn't cheating won't be able to win or succeed at. Possibly because someone thought they were making a Kaizo World and instead just stuffed it full of traps and enemies without a thought about how it would play.
Some scripting applications were meant to abstract a certain amount of the code away and provide some visual representation of the level beig built. Others went specifically in the direction of showing as much of the code as possible, with the idea that by learning how to build levels, triggers, and interactions, a person might learn the underlying coding language more generally and be able to put that to use in other situations and with other games or applications. (Quake, for example, had QuakeC, a custom scripting language that handled specific parts of building Quake that other tools did not. It wasn't quite actual C, but things learned using it gave someone an idea of how the C language works that they could put to use in other places. Combined with level and asset editor tools, a person could change as much about Quake as they wanted to. Thus came the era of mods, which came in a few different flavors. Some mods did relatively simple things, like changing weapon to something that had different projectiles or making items behave differently. More involved mods would have more things changed, and if the changes were sufficiently different from the base game, they might be classified as "partial conversions" that may have kept some amount of the original game, setting, or otherwise, but also had a significant enough difference that someone might, instead, be playing a different game. At the far end of the modding spectrum are "total conversions" that completely overhauls game assets, levels, and basically provides a completely new experience running on the same engine. Several total conversions for other games would end up becoming games in their own right, like the very popular Counter-Strike total conversion for the original Half-Life. (Counter-Strike may have been more popular than Half-Life itself, and I remember at least one package of Half-Life things that offered the original game, its two expansions, Opposing Force (where you play as one of the Special Forces sent into Black Mesa), Blue Shift (where you play as a security guard at Black Mesa), and Counter-Strike, the most popular total conversion for Half-Life, reworked into a stand-alone game of its own.
Both partial and total conversions took advantage of the newly networked world to distribute themselves. Buying a game that had scripting and level editing and asset editing tools available for it meant potentially a lot more game for your money just through playing the mods, levels, and scenarios developed by the community and released for free. (There were some that might have been available for a fee, but those kinds of things were always in flux, much like all other fanworks, as to whether that was a good idea to do or was just asking for the lawyers to descend with a Cease and Desist and remove the thing entirely from the community.) It also meant that more people got to experience Sturgeon's Law firsthand, but what's trash for one might be treasure for others, depending on how they want to play the game and what they think of as a fun time.
And then there's Minecraft, which takes all of these things that have been popular in the past and puts them deliberately into the game itself. Rather than something like RPG Maker, or other tools that allow someone to create games of a certain type, Minecraft's Creative mode is a giant sandbox where anyone can create just about anything, whether through assets available in the game or through coding in new extensions and games through the use of the Java programming language. There's also Survival mode for the original game, which teaches recipes and is an adventure story about gathering resources, staying alive, and eventually defeating a powerful creature in the Nether. But Minecraft (and its somewhat free-to-play cousin, Roblox) spawned an extremely robust modification community as soon as it became clear exactly how much freedom a person has in the game to do things, which can range from recreating architecture from our world (in block form) to constructing fairly advanced calculation engines by building logic gates through the use of redstone. And what can't be done in-game might be able to be done out of game with the appropriate Java knowledge, and indeed, I suspect there are more than a few people, smallings included, who have cut their teeth and learned how to program significantly in Java because they wanted to make a Minecraft mod and the redstone wasn't completely able to do it at that point. (Which is to say that you can emulate an Atari 2600 using redstone, so if you're going to Java, there's a good chance it's not just a 2600 you're looking for.) Minecraft is one of the most interesting distillations and extensions of the modding community, and was built from the ground up as a game that was intended to be modded and put to whatever uses the community could think to use with those blocks (and the programming behind it). There's a reason that it's outsold Tetris to take the number one spot for games, even though it's much more of a toolkit to develop your own things rather than a game to play.
But much like the physical block kits of yesteryear, there's a certain amount of satisfaction that comes from putting together a creation of your very own and being able to display it to the world, so I doubt that we'll be seeing the last of games of this nature for a very long time. And, unless companies get short-sighted about how their products are used, we won't see the end of the community that makes modifications to the game. Including the ones that make mods to restore cut content or to allow the player to cheat and experience they game in the way they want to.
Once games had the ability to be more than "Here's a loop, if you complete it, reset the loop and increase the speed / start the loop one line lower," the concept of discrete levels and rooms expands the possibilities of games significantly. Space Invaders gains significantly more complexity when Galaxian and Galaga arrive, not just because the invaders take unique patterns to get into their swarm formations, but because each wave is a different formation composed of different members, which require different techniques and are of differing threat levels to the player character. (It also introduces a mechanic where a player can temporarily let a ship get captured by the opposition and then, if they are skilled enough, they can free the ship with a well-placed shot and proceed from that point forward with two ships next to each other, firing side-by-side at the invading opponents.) Admittedly, an entire generation of game-playing people think of Super Mario Brothers' Worlds, with discrete levels as their first thought on this structure, they have Donkey Kong's success to thank for this "level-with-stages" structure working out as well as it did, since Donkey Kong was one of the first to make the game loop have progression between stages, instead of having the complete gameplay experience available on one screen, as Pac-Man and many of the Space warfare games did.
For me, while I will get to Donkey Kong in due time, because it has an Atari 2600 part where only two of the original four stages are produced in the level loop (and without many of the fancy graphics present in the arcade or NES originals), the first encounter that I have with a Donkey Kong-type game is Ladder, written for a Kaypro computer that was at least briefly part of the family (which means I have seen, although I don't remember how to work, CP/M as an operating system), that I didn't particularly felt like I was all that good at, being, again, six or seven, and that also had an implementation of Hunt the Wumpus, which I seem to recall I didn't play much. There was a reason for it, and it probably was that it was a difficult game for my six year-old self to avoid either falling down the pit or stumbling into the chamber of the wumpus and getting killed by it instead. Might also have been a very text-heacy game, and while I was good at reading texts, I might have been interested in reading other texts than that particular one.
In any case, The concept of levels and stages also allows for the introduction of the puzzle game, where instead of repeating the same set of stages in order, and where one could develop, essentially, a perfect play algorithm with enough time spent analyzing the patterns of the game, in puzzle games, each stage / level may have the same objective, but the components of how to achieve that objective and the hazards in the way of accomplishing that task have been changed. (If you wish to be pedantic, to a certain degree, all games are puzzle games because they set a task before the player and give them tools to accomplish those tasks. However, outside of the puzzle game genre, the emphasis is usually on some aspect of the game other than solving the puzzles, like dodging invaders, barrels, or wiping the screen of attackers before progressing to the next point. A lot of puzzles, at this stage, are based around platforming ideas of running, climbing, and jumping, and the characters involved may or may not have abilities to defend themselves with.
Two of the iconicentries to the puzzle genre that tae full advantage of requiring both brains to plan moves and the timing abilities to execute them are Lode Runner and Lemmings. I have only ever played the latter, both both of them are broadly similar - guide the character(s) across a stage full of hazards to accomplish their goals. Lode Runner is a single character with a set of abilities that have to be used in the correct ways so as to gather all the gold bard on any given level, Lemmings is a stream of creatures that can be assigned particular abilities to inluence the path they are walking upon to avoid hazards that will crush, mutilate, slice, or drown them, with a specific percentage of the whole required to make it home in the time alloted. (Often, this means that before the pathway is fully clear, the player has to increase the drop speed of the lemmings to give them enough time to make it all the way to their destination.)
Lode Runner is also important in the history of gaming in that it was one of the first games to ship with a method for players of the game to create their own levels. Such that if a player had friends or wanted to continue playing games past the official levels, there was a significant amount of replayability that came with the game. (And while it would be a while before BBS, newsreaders, and other forms of Internet access to stored fles were stood up and people could post their level creations, moving levels across on disks and discs was usually possible, or drawing the level design out on paper and then using that blueprint sketch to recreate the level on another person's computer.) I suspect this is also the point where we started seeing levels whose sole design was to be as frustratingly hard as possible, if not outright impossible to complete. Presumably, the level editor checked to make sure there was a player, at least one object to collect, and a goal zone designated, but I'm not sure how much it would check to make sure the level was actually playable or traversable. (This idea of beastly hard but theoretically winnable games spawns its own entire genre, starting with the Kaizo Mario World edits to Super Mario World SNES ROMs and waltzing all the way through games suc as I Wanna Be The Guy. Because apparently, there are people whose masochistic streaks take the form of Jason Fox's attempts at passing the otherwise unpassable.)
Not all games bundle a level editor with them, which is a bit of a shame for some of them, like brick-breakers or other such things where being able to make and play your own level creations would be a way of showing off your creativity (or sadism. Sometimes both.) Level editors are often a good way of introducing smalls to the concepts involved in programming and game design, as they give someone a limited amount of resources to work with and a specific goal to make a level that works and is enjoyable to play for the target audience. A small who gets interested in this idea at a young age and builds some skills with it might be able to resist the influences of others around that suggest a person of their gender presentation should not engage in things like level or game design. (THBBBBBBBBPTH and fie on you if you suggest such a thing to anyone. A significant amount of problems with many subcultures can be directly traced to their attempts to gatekeep interested others out because the people already in wanted to make their experience exclusive, instead of inclusive. Don't do this.)
For other games, often the first-person shooters developed and released by id tools were developed and released separately to not only construct new levels, but to allow for manipulation of game assets (so that one could not just create a door, but specifically a door that required a blue key to open, or a door that opened and closed itself without human input at set intervals. These attributes were often associated with the objects themselves, so you would put the door in first, then edit the door's attributes to say "needs a blue key", "starts open", "starts closed", or "can't be opened with the action command at all." Additionally, the ability to set triggers that would happen when the player, or a monster, or a projectile, or anything else, touched the part of the level associated with the trigger made it possible for people to design their own levels that played even more like the actual game itself, because they were using things that had been built into the game itself and were possible through the engine that drove the game. So you still had a fair amount of levels that were playing Kaizo games, sure, and some that were essentially completely new campaigns that could be loaded, one level at a time, and at least one memorable Doom level that was, essentially, a domino palace, except that the dominoes were explosive barrels that would end up killing the player character if they were too close to the action. (The judicious use of a cheat code to engage God Mode was suggested in the file documents so as to avoid this pesky problem and see the explosions in their full glory.) I think that there was also a major boss character in the stage who would very easily be felled by the collective explosive power on display, just for the fun of it. And who might also set off the situation themselves with their own weapons and result in their destruction (and the player's, too.) There may be more than a few levels developed for these kinds of games that rely on the player knowing the appropriate cheat codes and deploying them, because once they're known to work and exist, sometimes people will design levels that are unplayable in the sense that a player that isn't cheating won't be able to win or succeed at. Possibly because someone thought they were making a Kaizo World and instead just stuffed it full of traps and enemies without a thought about how it would play.
Some scripting applications were meant to abstract a certain amount of the code away and provide some visual representation of the level beig built. Others went specifically in the direction of showing as much of the code as possible, with the idea that by learning how to build levels, triggers, and interactions, a person might learn the underlying coding language more generally and be able to put that to use in other situations and with other games or applications. (Quake, for example, had QuakeC, a custom scripting language that handled specific parts of building Quake that other tools did not. It wasn't quite actual C, but things learned using it gave someone an idea of how the C language works that they could put to use in other places. Combined with level and asset editor tools, a person could change as much about Quake as they wanted to. Thus came the era of mods, which came in a few different flavors. Some mods did relatively simple things, like changing weapon to something that had different projectiles or making items behave differently. More involved mods would have more things changed, and if the changes were sufficiently different from the base game, they might be classified as "partial conversions" that may have kept some amount of the original game, setting, or otherwise, but also had a significant enough difference that someone might, instead, be playing a different game. At the far end of the modding spectrum are "total conversions" that completely overhauls game assets, levels, and basically provides a completely new experience running on the same engine. Several total conversions for other games would end up becoming games in their own right, like the very popular Counter-Strike total conversion for the original Half-Life. (Counter-Strike may have been more popular than Half-Life itself, and I remember at least one package of Half-Life things that offered the original game, its two expansions, Opposing Force (where you play as one of the Special Forces sent into Black Mesa), Blue Shift (where you play as a security guard at Black Mesa), and Counter-Strike, the most popular total conversion for Half-Life, reworked into a stand-alone game of its own.
Both partial and total conversions took advantage of the newly networked world to distribute themselves. Buying a game that had scripting and level editing and asset editing tools available for it meant potentially a lot more game for your money just through playing the mods, levels, and scenarios developed by the community and released for free. (There were some that might have been available for a fee, but those kinds of things were always in flux, much like all other fanworks, as to whether that was a good idea to do or was just asking for the lawyers to descend with a Cease and Desist and remove the thing entirely from the community.) It also meant that more people got to experience Sturgeon's Law firsthand, but what's trash for one might be treasure for others, depending on how they want to play the game and what they think of as a fun time.
And then there's Minecraft, which takes all of these things that have been popular in the past and puts them deliberately into the game itself. Rather than something like RPG Maker, or other tools that allow someone to create games of a certain type, Minecraft's Creative mode is a giant sandbox where anyone can create just about anything, whether through assets available in the game or through coding in new extensions and games through the use of the Java programming language. There's also Survival mode for the original game, which teaches recipes and is an adventure story about gathering resources, staying alive, and eventually defeating a powerful creature in the Nether. But Minecraft (and its somewhat free-to-play cousin, Roblox) spawned an extremely robust modification community as soon as it became clear exactly how much freedom a person has in the game to do things, which can range from recreating architecture from our world (in block form) to constructing fairly advanced calculation engines by building logic gates through the use of redstone. And what can't be done in-game might be able to be done out of game with the appropriate Java knowledge, and indeed, I suspect there are more than a few people, smallings included, who have cut their teeth and learned how to program significantly in Java because they wanted to make a Minecraft mod and the redstone wasn't completely able to do it at that point. (Which is to say that you can emulate an Atari 2600 using redstone, so if you're going to Java, there's a good chance it's not just a 2600 you're looking for.) Minecraft is one of the most interesting distillations and extensions of the modding community, and was built from the ground up as a game that was intended to be modded and put to whatever uses the community could think to use with those blocks (and the programming behind it). There's a reason that it's outsold Tetris to take the number one spot for games, even though it's much more of a toolkit to develop your own things rather than a game to play.
But much like the physical block kits of yesteryear, there's a certain amount of satisfaction that comes from putting together a creation of your very own and being able to display it to the world, so I doubt that we'll be seeing the last of games of this nature for a very long time. And, unless companies get short-sighted about how their products are used, we won't see the end of the community that makes modifications to the game. Including the ones that make mods to restore cut content or to allow the player to cheat and experience they game in the way they want to.
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Date: 2019-12-27 07:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-27 04:04 pm (UTC)