Undergrad Gaming

It’s an idyllic winter’s night in a gaming household. I’m sitting at my grandfather’s desk with a mug of hot tea and a jar of peanuts, killing time – that is to say, doing research – with a series of minimalist Japanese point-and-click browser adventures (“The plane broke down. Escape from uninhabited island”) while from the next room comes that sweetest of holiday sounds: the crunchy shatter of virtual targets, the BLING of points being racked up, the occasional exultations of victory, the more frequent curses of defeat.

I’d underestimated Link’s Crossbow Training, and the futuristic Wii Zapper gun-conversion doohickey it’s bundled with, in the first assessment. To even a medium/soft-core gamer, it’s a pretty slight experience: ten three-stage levels’ worth of shooting galleries, each stage clocking out at sixty seconds, with the Zapper as cute but inessential novelty. I played it with my nongamer fiancée, burning through the whole thing in less than two hours, and when we sort of shrugged and put the Wii away I figured that was that.

The next afternoon she pokes her head into my office, a strange glint in her eye. “You know what I think would really reduce some stress?” she asks, rhetorically. “Shooting some goblins.” She mimes cradling the Zapper, and I recognize the glint: she’s got The Fever. Link’s Crossbow Training may be slight and light, but that’s what you look for in a gateway drug.

The meh reviews the package received illustrate a problem with absolute numerical game ratings; comparing the LCT/Zapper combo to a fully realized game is like comparing “Essential Japanese for Travelers” to The Tale of Genji. More than just a trivially diverting virtual popgun experience, Link’s Crossbow Training is nothing less than a grammar of videogames.

Gamers seldom consider the mass of convention and idiom that supports modern gameplay – we don’t have to consider it, because it’s second nature. We don’t have to puzzle out how an onscreen radar works, for example; we don’t have to relearn each time the fundamentals of moving through virtual space, let alone relearn the trick of perceiving the onscreen image as space. But for complete newcomers – they’re rare, but they’re out there – these fundamentals of the medium are baffling as hell, rapid-fire babble in an unfamiliar language. LCT offers a way for these poor souls to at least get up to the level of “Hello, my name is…” and “Where is the train station?”

Gaming 101 is simple target shooting, the first stage of each level. Point the aimer, pull the trigger. Concepts introduced: what an aimer is; what a trigger is; basic menu navigation; scoring and score multipliers; target evaluation and selection. Importantly, the shooting-gallery stages introduce that most basic of videogame drug-rushes: beating your own high score, knowing you can do even better, and being offered the chance to try.

Gaming 140, comprising the “Defender” levels, builds on that. These stages are basically rail shooters; Link’s position is fixed but the player can and must look around the game space to find targets. Here, benign bullseyes are replaced with fearsome enemies. They’re all one and the same to us stone-cold virtual killaz, but for an absolute newbie that first experience of a skeleton coming right at you while a warning klaxon blares can be terrifying. Concepts introduced: looking around; awareness of offscreen game elements; basic radar use; sangfroid in the face of marauding undead.

At the 200 level, the “Ranger” stages take the student through their first full-on FPS experience, giving them control over Link’s movement through the space. Here are introduced the final concepts needed for basic interaction with the modern games medium: perception of three dimensions in virtual space; use of a control stick in moving a character through that space; basic gunfight tactics; advanced radar use; exploration of the environment. Upon completion of the course, advanced students may attempt their first-ever Boss fight for extra credit.

Thanks to Link’s Crossbow Training and the Zapper doohickey – technically unnecessary, the physicality of clutching a gun can’t be overestimated as a teaching aid – I’ve watched my girl go, in a few short hours, from “What? What the fuck? I don’t get it!” to happily striving for Gold and Platinum rankings and trading high-scoring tips over morning coffee, from flailing miserably to navigating the game’s combat courses with a confidence and precision that’d get her though Halo multiplayer without embarrassment. I’m really quite proud.

Of course, like any good school, LCT offers students plenty of opportunity to experience – and learn to cope with -- those intangible challenges of the gaming experience that can’t be taught in a classroom: the remorse over blowing hours of time chasing meaningless medals, the clammy feeling of gamesweat, the first twinges of carpal tunnel syndrome, the perceptual vertigo of returning to the real world.

I just pray she doesn’t get The Dreams.

Pass the wiimote on the left-hand side

Sitting around a cozy kitchen table in the late-afternoon cool of the year’s first real summery Saturday, the requisite Coronas – sunshine beer! -- washing down a loaves-and-fishes joint of scavenged cheeba, the conversation somehow (my fault?) turns from whatever it had been – gardening, travel, Arrested Development, poutine – to the topic of videogames and their mind-bending near future.

I think it was the upcoming release of the Opera web browser for the Nintendo DS that got us started; at least, that’s what I gather from my notes scribbled on the back of the Wild Rose Brewery & Taproom flyer promising me of 15% off any drinkable, eatable or wearable next time I’m in Calgary. Stoners who care seem to agree: the combination of dual screens, touch interface, full wi-fi web browser, massive installed base and commodity pricing – and also, you know, games – means… something. Something big. Much of my noted discussion is obscured by a later sketch diagramming my plans to camperize my minivan, but from what I can make out we were excited about the possibility of some kind of internet phone application – no more quarters to The Man!

Easier to make out, in big block letters laid down with a firm hand, is a phrase I wish I could seal in a Quantum Envelope and mail back in time to the Beat poets:

“MOTION SENSING IS THE NEW RUMBLE”

No surprise the party partisans are down with the Wii, when they can get it. All that arm-waving and carrying-on not only provides a fun vector of entry for non- or casual gamers (that’s code for “girls”) but also acts to counteract the screen stereotype of the slack-jawed stoner, swaddled in a stinky alpaca poncho someone left at his place, twitch-clutching the control pad as Super Nintendo bleeps and explosions emanate from the perfectly good TV somebody just totally left in the alley, dude. Images of fun-buzzed young hipsters prancing around like giddy fauns with wiimotes are going to be key in our upcoming “Today’s 420!” image-rehabilitation marketing campaign, alongside chic lady CEOs with posing with their Vuitton vaporizers and smiling astronauts hotboxing the ISS. Coming soon to a bus shelter near you.

Anyway, the New Rumble. In a recent entry on games blog Destructoid, poster Reverend Anthony ran down his list of the “top five gameplay innovations to look forward to this year,” and right there in the middle – between the “procedural generation” of Will Wright’s Spore and the real-time conversation system in BioWare’s Mass Effect -- was the first thing my Friends Indeed and I thought of when the Wii concept was unveiled: swordfighting! Specifically, true motion-tracking, one-to-one swordfighting, unlike the, sub-Morrowind slash-triggering of Red Steel, which was as disappointing as getting a “Lettuce Garden Kid” for Christmas in 1983. Realistic blade battling of the type wishfully mimed by every nerd who picks up a wiimote would be the killer app for motion sensing; how you gonna keep ‘em down on the button-pressing farm, once they’ve seen sword-swinging Paree?

Deep technical and design problems lie in the way of realizing our D&D dreams. One that worries me is a sort of feedback deficiency: onscreen, your flashing blade will now and then be blocked by solid objects – other swords, trees, people’s skulls, etc. – while your actual arm goes wwhiffff through the air. How do we get that delicious curtain rod-on-curtain rod feeling of contact that makes fake swordfighting so fun? The wiimote’s anemic rumbler is inadequate to the arm-rattling task; what we need is a special swordfighting wiimote with beefed-up feedback, a heavy-ass hilt packing one of those old-school pinball kickers that’ll splinter your damn ulna. OK, one problem solved.

More fundamental: you ever watch people playing Wii Sports tennis – or, dear Lord, Wii Sports boxing? It’s random, frantic, desperate and not a little dangerous to bystanders. Any swordfighting game is going to be Dark Honor: Legends of the Blademaster on the box but Random Beating: Flailings of the Spastic in play – especially in a multiplayer game; might as well simulate seal clubbing, or a LARP session. But we – our ancestors, actually -- may have solved this problem, according to another bit of scrawl from the flap of a pack of du Mauriers. See, at the dawn of the modern age, dudes had a similar difficulty. It was necessary to turn the barbarity of sword-butchery into a gentlemanly pursuit: fencing. Over time, a complex framework of rules governing the flow of combat were developed. Basically, the first fencer to “establish a threat” has priority, or “right-of-way”, meaning his hits will take precedence over those of his opponent, even if said opponent has… he…zzzzzzzzzzzz…

Huh? OK, maybe not such an exciting idea. I’m sure Nintendo or one of their third-party developers will figure out how to make swordfighting work on the Wii. Or… well… hey! It doesn’t even have to be on the Wii! Sony’s launching a new camera peripheral for the PS3 that could support decent motion-tracking capabilities, and their controller infrastructure already supports Sixaxis tilt-sensing… shit, it all adds up! Motion sensing is the new rumble; Sony’s going to sneak out from under the cover of their dark cloud of early marketing mistakes and eat Nintendo’s lunch with a wiimote knockoff!

I ought to be snobby, dismissive, indignant or otherwise fanboyish about Sony’s biting the Wii thing, but somehow I can’t muster it; the daydreaming legions of gamer-stoners are getting impatient, on side with whoever manages to deliver the rattle and clash of real-time swordfighting to their flag-curtained squats.

I mean, to their airy urban-minimalist lofts. Today’s 420!

Wii work hard...

So much about the Wii is a waiting game. Those of us who already have Nintendo’s shiny ivory keystone are, quite literally, a-waiting games. Those of you who don’t, well, at least our collective Golden Dawn will come simultaneously – we’ll dance in the street together, like this one really creepy Mario ad I saw in Japan the same weekend Edmonton was tornado-grated. We’ll revel the point when, for example, a perfectly responsive knockout boxing game or subtle sword simulator make us swear off the opposite sex forever. Until, of course, the wave of interactive Japanese sex games hits us – HARD, the all-confusing “third sex”: robots! In the meantime, there may yet be hope for the human race.

For the retail price of just more than its included controller, the pun in the newly-released WiiPlay is possibly unintentional, but speaks volumes. We’ve seen it all before, though not that that’s such a bad thing. Not quite as athletically heart-squeezing as WiiSports, WiiPlay leads us back to a number of long-forgotten arcades and dens - sans bullies - offering up a replay of Pong in Table Tennis, for starters. There’s also a motion-sensitive cover of the old NES Duck Hunt not quite as good as WarioWare’s Can Shooter, plus that Red’s Rumpus Room classic, Laser Hockey, which nods appropriately to neon vector graphics. Unlike a real air hockey game, it’s pretty tough to physically hurt your opponent by shooting a disc into his teeth, sadly.

Yes, it’s true. Wiis don’t actually hurt smart people, no matter what Sony hopes. So seriously, for the love of God, will you people stop droning on about Wii-motes going through TV screens? Anyone who manages to forget to hang on to their controller when swinging their arms around, strap or no, is – let me just calculate some numbers here – yes, a complete fucking idiot. Would you let go of a golf club? A hammer? The neck of a poopy puppy over your Persian rug? Of course you wouldn’t. So shut it, crap mongers. It’s not a funny joke any more.

Back to our pleasant walkthrough, amid the hundred brilliant mini-games in the spring-leggy Wario Ware, including cleaning a cow ass and zipping up the back of a panda, was a proto pool game. I was going to slag WiiPlay’s pool – a simple game of nine-ball with background music only Jimmy Buffet could love – until I realized I’d been playing it for an hour without blinking, even though I really had to go to the bathroom the whole time. Like WiiSports’ bowling, it’s a brilliant way to spend an afternoon, especially if you just got laid off from a major newspaper freaking out about all the free commuter dailies in a non-commuter town that just showed up, owned by and in direct competition with your own paper. What are these idiots thinking?

Ah, but we keep getting distracted. Besides its pool, and certainly not its Where’s Wii-ldo game, battle tanks is the cherry. The closest ancestor is Intellivision’s Triple Action, of all things, just a bunch of tanks trapped amid four Bezerk walls, trying to kill each other. A metaphor for life, really. Hm. Instead of fighting wars in the Middle East, maybe we should all sit down and play the vs. mode of this, then send the vanquished into the most convenient disintegration booth. Of course, some Cpt. Kirk figure would come and disrupt our utopian society and force us to kill for real again. Effin’ space philosophers.

Anyway, for the extra controller alone, WiiPlay is worth it. Now, without passing anything or touching at all, you and the Mrs. can sit side-by-each and answer such questions as “Is there life on Mars?” on the Everybody Votes Wii channel, or just take turns spinning the NASA weather globe, which currently remains the coolest thing about Wii anyway. SPIN, TINY LITTLE PLANET –WHO’S YOUR DADDY? SAY IT! BWA HA HA HA!

BACKBEEP – Air hockey at Red’s – the ‘90s

Despite barely being able to skate, I’m killer at air hockey. The trick to winning it is staring your human opponent in the eye so he looks back at you, kicking off the psychological battle. While he’s looking at you, slip all four of your fingers down over the side, thus extending the width of your nipple-shaped paddle a variable extra inch or so. Like most things in life, your “serve” is the best time to score, usually a rebound off the side wall. But once he starts guarding for that, shoot straight into the net as much as possible, destroying his ego with backwall cracks. Unfortunately, once the enemy realizes you’re cheating (though even show me a rulebook), you’ll probably end up with blood-bruised fingernails. But after the first couple hits you don’t even feel it any more. You don’t even feel anything.