Deconstructing the player

 And reconstructing the world

The 'Avatar' is the traditional means by which a player interacts with a game, but the types of avatar's that exist, alongside the absence of one all together, number in the dozens. Typically, when we really take a step back and look at the grand picture, it's the way that we players are able to interact through our Avatar's which determines the genre of the game. Create any sort of world you want, built on whatever themes, or historical significance, you can fathom; but stick the camera above the player at an angle and you'll be typically looking at an ARPG. Throw it in their head and you're looking at a First Person Adventure game, give them a gun and it's a first person shooter. Throw them into the sky and give them dozens of NPCs to play around and it's a 'God Game'. Any genre starts and is built around the player and the experience you want to inflict them with.

When I was more of a Horror Game lover, I remember being somewhat fascinated with the divide that genre has when it comes to the way it treats it's players. Most horror games are first person, obviously because they want to place the player in the shoes of the unnerving situation so they lose themselves to the fiction of it and are more likely to be scared; (and high quality 3D models are hard to make, that too.) but there is a fundamental distinct between styles of Horror game that, to this day, I don't think has a name. I'm talking the types of horror game where your main interaction with the world is how you hide away from monsters and the stalking horrors, and the other type of horror game where you fight back, usually whilst managing supplies and ammo, thus adding on tension not present in usual 'shoot 'em up' first person games.

Obviously the vulnerability of the player is several worlds apart between those two different styles of approaching the player in what is ostensibly the same genre. In the former example you play the victim, forever at the whim of the experience and the centre of an almost passive procession of emotional manipulation. For the latter style the player typically starts off as a victim, but has the chance to change that power dynamic slowly through the game by becoming more proficient, earning more tools, and becoming familiar with the way the world works. Think the difference between a game like 'Outlast', where you run around finding batteries so you can avoid the scary men in the dark, and 'Resident Evil' where you're always fighting back and getting to the point where you win out on top of whatever horror of the night dares threaten you.

But then there are games when there is no player avatar at all, and the player is more a suggestion of a role- the aforementioned 'god game'. In this style of game the player is not usually the subject of directed manipulation, but rather given the tools of the manipulator. (Or rather, the illusion of those tools. Actually asking players to code the game would be a little much.) Maybe you take charge of a faceless 'city council' who dictates the layout of city blocks, or the entirety of a race as they evolve throughout history, or even the elements themselves! These are games all about control and freedom, and breaking players out of the fleshy bodies of a singular avatar is the first step to realising that sensation of total, unfettered, control.

In some games the player acts as something of a possessor, inhabiting the shell of a character who already lives within the world they exist, with a personality and goals- for which the player merely acts as 'puppeteer'. Of course, this is the traditional way that action games operate, and adventure titles, giving the player a titular 'character' to play as rather than a blank slate for them to inhabit. Of course, there's always an inherit degree of immersion between the player and their avatar in any game, and even the most vocal and loud-personality character is going to be built to fit into that space somewhat. Some Avatar's are designed to take advantage of that immersion, providing a slate that isn't entirely blank, for the player to write in the blurb. I'm talking about heroes like Master Chief, who is very clear about his goals, but didn't really talk about his moment-to-moment thoughts and motivations until the later titles by 343. (You know, around about the time that 343 decided to make him an ultra special 'chosen one'. Sigh...)

Role playing games boast a very special relationship between the player and their avatar, where they become the person they control (perspective irrelevant) to such an extent where they help actually design that character to some extent. Maybe you'll pick their looks, decide how their skills blossom, choose what choices they make in the story. These are the relationships where the barrier between what the player wants and what the character wants is made so thin as to be imperceptible, so that 'ideally' the player never loses that suit of immersion connecting them with the heart of the player character. Role Playing games thrive best with the cooperation of the player to buy into their fiction, immersion with their world and believing themselves to be the avatar they control.

And there are also the games where the avatar is a cast of characters that we choose from. In fighting games, racing games, or competitive multiplayer games- the player has a slew of distinct defined and designed avatar's that they slip into the skin of and play as. Whether it's a Nintendo character in Super Smash Bros., a Warner Bros. alumni in 'Multiversus' or a member of 'Overwatch'- the character's themselves are icons, pre-existing and defined, with the player merely controlling them for their talents, usually for short bursts at a time. Like stepping into the skin of a celebrity who is famous for doing a certain thing and acts a certain way, you borrow their mannerisms and their talent, but you aren't taking their talents and fame for your own.

The very concept of an avatar is so essential to the fundamentals of game design that we don't even think about it anymore whenever we engage with a new game. Whereas once there was a cognitive connection that any person had to make when starting a game, figuring out which one of these squares was controllable in Pong, nowadays it's become the breathing heart of design to make that process so utterly intuitive that the player knows what they're getting before they load the game up on their system. Of course, it is the most simple and intrinsic parts of any craft that seem the most immutable, until someone comes along and reinvents the wheel before your very eyes, redefining what you thought a game even was.

I think the next stage of transcendent game design lies in meddling with these fundamentals and reconstructing them, but by pure merit of being fundamentals, the very conception of such a 'meddling' seems like a nearly impenetrable subject. There's a reason why I'm discussing this topic in abstract indirects, you can't really define coming up with a whole new way of looking at the already defined. But what I do think is that in the years to come, as systems become more powerful and some of these superstar 'auteur' developers become ever more unshackled by corporate bounds, we're going to start getting games that push the concept of gaming in directions we can conceive of today and those we never even thought of. And then maybe we too can, finally, be Strand-like.

Smash smashed: The results

Season unending. 

The heart of the community is a powerful and influential commodity whenever you are in the entertainment industry. When your starting out, the community around your products might be the only lifeblood still keeping you waking up to the gruelling tasks of the job at hand, when you're growing, the community will tell you with informed passion where their excitement wants to see you evolve next, and when you've made it, the community remains to humble you. A powerful community is steadfast and self-renewing, and the Super Smash Bros. community ontop of that has the tenacity of a cockroach. So whereas recent events make it look very much like the competitive Smash scene is on it's last legs, that couldn't be further from the truth. Smash has been squabbling in the dirt and having the time of it's life for decades now, recently it seemed that papa Nintendo had a reverse of opinion and was reaching down to help them out the gutter, but it was an illusionary truce from which they've dropped the community back where they started. But Smash will go on, no matter what Nintendo does.

When I last touched on everything that was happening with competitive Smash, it was all a veritable mess of information. The CEO of Panda was facing accusations of strong-arming tournament organisers to his own dubious ends, Smash World Tour had just been issued an ultimatum by Nintendo implying the obliteration of grass-routes tournament circuits, and just about every party involved was waggling it's finger saying that 'the widely shared narrative is incorrect, let us tell you the truth in a hot second!' Now with some time everyone has had the chance to share their truth and the largest take-away I currently have is thus: Ain't nobody was lying as definitively as some are saying. Dr Allen was throwing about meat with nothing to back it up, and The Smash World Tour might have fell on it's own sword a little bit to make a larger point. Which I think is hardly a surprise, to be honest. That's about what I figured.

Firstly, the cancellation of Smash World Tour; the very popular finale to a year of circuit events run by independent tournaments all over the place, pulled it's plug after Nintendo, having themselves signed a partnership deal with the Smash Panda cup, contacted the team directly on the eve of thankgiving. SWT weren't just callously tempting fate with this one, their Nintendo contact had informed the team that Nintendo would allow the Smash World Tour to be hosted alongside the Nintendo sponsored Panda cup, they were just waiting to receive their own official licence before the grim correspondence that led to the cancellation. Now, however, it's becoming clear that SWT were not told to close, at least not explicitly. They were denied a licence after months of deliberation based on some vague health and safety guidelines, which feel like a little bit a straw man excuse once you hear that Nintendo also pre-rejected their 2023 application before it was even issued; because, I guess, Nintendo looked into the future with their crystal ball and found next year's events to be equally as 'unsafe'. SWT also said they were told in a follow-up conversation that 'grass-routes' tournaments would be 'a thing of the the past'; which certainly gave off the impression of a crackdown, but not in explicit terms.

As it just so happens, Nintendo actually wanted the event to go forward because they knew what a terrible inconvenience this would cause to everyone; at least that's what they're claiming. Which sort of clashes with their other thoughts about the abolition of all non-licenced Nintendo tournament events, but what can you expect from a multimillion dollar international video game company? Consistency? Perish the thought! Still, this does paint the impression that SWT did play the fainting possum for publicities sake, perhaps to illustrate the attempted assassination of the Smash grass-routes competitive scene with an actual sacrifice, rather than allowing it to be quietly smothered over the next year. They threw themselves on the blade and died loudly, letting the community know of the dagger hovering over all of them. Whether that is noble or pretentious really falls to your own use of interpretation.

Former CEO of Panda, Dr Allen, certainly has very obvious views on the matter. Disclosed in a twitlonger, Dr Allen announced both his stepping down from the Panda Esports company, mid it's collapse that he sparked, and went off on a full blown slap back at all who he perceived as 'wronging' him. He targets were wide, mostly at Smash World Tour for which he constructed a wide conspiracy theory wherein SWT deftly finagled themselves a win-win situation for public relations. A position where they pushed Nintendo's strict limits with planning their unlicensed event despite being told to wait until Nintendo's go ahead and either got away with it and launched their show or suffered the ban-hammer and consequently received a rush community support, goodwill and, most importantly, clout for their next venture. My man might have been playing a few too many Yakuza games, however, because SWT had both their current and future events pulled. They have no backup to funnel the recent community outpouring of support towards. For a conspiracy, this seems to have been a pretty lazy and ill-thought out one. Or maybe SWT are instead playing the multi-year long-con... which would also be weak as these situations only really flare up for a couple of weeks at the most. If they were going to capitalize, they already would have.

Dr Allen also slightly contradicts his own perceived narrative of events by implying that SWT never intended to host the planned live event in the first place. Because his 'inside sources' relayed onto him that the apparent hosting venue had no slot booked for the supposed event! Oh, that is scandalous! Except Allen might want to check his sources, it took less than five minutes for people to track down the defunct landing page for the venue slot literally entitled 'Smash World Tour: contestants and family'. So... that's just plain incorrect. Allen also made the very inspired move to attack the one organiser who outright confirmed that the doctor had tried to strongarm him into exclusive broadcasting rights for the Panda Cup despite their pre-existing history with Smash World tour, by calling his contact an extremely unpleasant individual who shouted him off the phone. How could he know that his target just happened to be a beloved stable of the community, renowned for his calm manner, who was loved by everyone?

All in all; Doctor Allen tried to go out swinging with the sorts of 'mic drop' statement that Mick Gordon put out to clear his name not so long ago. Unfortunately Allen came out without any relevant receipts, (Proving he contacted and held conversations with some organisers actually proves none of his points) half-baked conspiracies and outright incorrect accusations that fizzled before his very eyes. For an apparent Doctor, he really didn't put in much of the diligence to dot his I's and cross his T's. But at the very least, in the height of his infamy, Alan let the mask drop and revealed the method behind his madness. Every competitive video game scene has outright support and involvement to some degree with the publishers and right's holders; except for Smash Bros. When Nintendo finally came to shut down the people playing their game without permission, Allen wanted to make sure someone who 'cared' about the Smash team was guiding their hand and preventing them from crushing everything the community was in their stupid zealotry. He wanted to be the saviour of the Smash scene. He was the Handsome Jack of this story. 

Of course, that assumes that Nintendo have the power to crush the Smash scene. In truth, Nintendo hates people taking their games competitively and actually always have, but somehow the N has never managed to stamp out grass route Smash competitions entirely, despite their best efforts. People have been playing Smash in tournaments for decades and they are determined to keep enjoying Nintendo's games no matter what the big N has to say on the topic. Regardless of draconian policy, the Smash scene is just that cockroach that will never be burned into nothing or wither and die. So yes, in Allen's fatalistic perception of the future of the community, he is the hero that the Smash scene needs right now; but in the reality that Smash resides, he is the deluded tyrant strangling the very life out of the thing he claimed to love. So next time you see a formulaic Anime with the 'I was the hero in my head' villain; you can tap your nose and say, "that ain't so contrived and unrealistic afterall!"

Sora in Smash

 Finally, indeed

And so it has finally come to pass, the clock has turned and the final Super Smash Bros. Character to be added in the largest crossover game of all time has come. I was actually late to the reveal (take a shot for me being late to a gaming event for the fiftyist time) so when I logged in all I saw was a couple of characters duking it out on a by-the-numbers stage and I remember thinking "Okay, so when does the cool stuff happen, who's the new character. All we've got here is Samus and Sora. Wait, wait a second... one of these guys isn't supposed to be here!" And that's how I learnt that our finale hero is going to be the bearer of the Keyblade himself; Sora of the Disney Square Enix divide. Aspirant of Kingdom Hearts, slayer of Heartless, friend to every single major Disney character ever, and remover of puberty during that one chase at the end of Kingdom Hearts 1 but the beginning of 'Chain of Memories'. And may I just say it's about time.

I mean the only reason I didn't recognise him straight away was because I assumed he was already part of the cast, that's how much of a no-brainer Sora was, but I guess the fact that we have him now is going to be an achievement to rest laurels on, huh. Does this make for that explosive finale we all were waiting for? I mean perhaps, for a few, but this isn't so much the mind-blowing "Oh my god, they got ____?" As it is the head scratching, "Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Doesn't it?" Then again, looking at Fortnite and the lackadaisical way they've handled crossovers throughout the years, I guess we really shouldn't just be down for anyone showing up anyway. Without Sakurai and his team of professionals leading the way, we'd be getting a procession of low effort skin jobs and not the all encompassing character creation which makes Smash Bros. creation so very special.

Whatsmore, when you really stop and think about it, putting Sora in any other video game is quite the huge deal when you consider that he is a creation of a property owned by Square Enix as well as the notoriously difficulty-to-work-with Disney. In fact, I think the only reason this deal was able to go through is because Disney relinquished it's reign of video games quite a while ago, and so Square have majority control over the direction of the series. The request for this crossover was likely just a document shoved on the desk of Chapek that he signed off on without reading a single word of it. Nintendo and Disney getting into negotiations together sounds like a recipe for abject litigational disaster as far as I'm concerned, and all the courts in the world have been spared a horrible death by paper cut.

That last livestream was a pretty emotionally charged moment for a lot of people out there, not least of all for Waluigi holdouts who don't seem to grasp the concept that the guy is already an assist trophy, thus he actually cannot become a fighter now. (I know most are just memeing, but some people get actually upset and it confuses me.) Seeing Sakurai build up to the moment was a big deal, seeing as how this game has been the ultimate culmination of all his work on Smash up until now. (And the fact that the final DLC character was supposed to drop at the end of the last DLC pack.) Though given the part of the industry he hails from it was obvious we weren't going to see any outward emotion,  I think the gravity of the finality surrounding the reveal touched us all. (Of course, for me that was in retrospect, because I turned up late.)

As for the reveal video itself, that was pretty much as sweet and emotional as it could have been; watching the fire of the Smash logo snuff itself out for one final invitation and then seeing that Invitation be the Keyblade unlocking Kingdom Hearts to release Sora. Or rather, I think that's what they were going for. The whole 'Door to Kingdom Hearts' thing has shifted over the years to the point where I legitimately have no idea what they were fighting over at the end of the first game anymore, so speculation abounds. But seeing Sora drift into the void and float above the dozens of his now contemporaries, was heart-warming to see. And I was even more excited to see that this was Kingdom Hearts 1 Sora. Or rather, Kingdom Hearts 2 Sora in 1 Sora's clothes, for whatever reason. A real call to the past from the team there, nicely done.

Sora's moveset was also touched upon with great detail, but anyone who has played the original games to their completion probably knows a great deal of these moves anyway. A lot of it just naturally flows from the combos in the old games just fine, because these franchises have been destined for each other for so long now. The only move I would personally call to question would be that Final Smash, which has Sora trapping his enemy inside of Kingdom Hearts (as it's identified in KH1, not the KH2 Moon) and then exploding it? Is that- is that a good thing? Isn't Kingdom Hearts integral to the fabric of the universe or something? And since when can the Keyblade blow up doors? I thought that keys opened things in much more traditional ways.

Yoko Shimomura's wonderful suites make for a much welcome edition to the Smash Bros. line up of tracks, and the fact that there won't be any original compositions is just fine when we're talking about tunes this iconic and great. (Except, of course, for the victory fanfare which was composed especially by Shimomura herself.) Swashbuckling adventure pieces really do highlight the similarities I find, and I mean this in the best of ways, between Sakurai and Tetsuya Nomura. Both are visionaries who dance to their own tune, for better or for worse. Both created fabulous and memorable series' that touched the hearts of millions. And now both have their DNA within Smash Bros. given that Nomura's baby, Sora, is fighting inside of Sakurai's baby colosseum game.

If you've been around here for any length of time you'll know that I'm a huge Kingdom Hearts fan (except for Chain of Memories) and thus I couldn't think of a more fitting end for the Smash Bros. lineup than what we've seen today. Except for, I dunno, a crossover with 'Heritage from the Future', but let's not go talking any more craziness up in here. Heck, I already got Pyra, I shouldn't start getting greedy with demands and such. Putting Smash Bros. to rest is a surreal thing to be doing, especially as I, for one, was sure that a third character pack was due to be announced anyday now, and who knows how many years it'll be until a follow-up. (if, indeed, there ever is one.) But all good things must have an ending, and I think we can all agree to some extent that Smash Bros has had this one a long time coming. Till the next one, Sakurai.

The quality of gaming AI and bots

Machine or man?

The gaming culture is one of ebb and flow, fads and trends, habits that come and go. Sometimes that is for the best, and sometimes it's for the worse, but either way, it makes gaming and game design a world in constant flux. To pull out that Bennett Foddy quote again, "It's like building on drying concrete." We all have those eras of gaming that we wish we could return to, times that we can point to and go "There! They had the right idea with that one." But time moves ever onward. That cannot prevent some wistful folk, like myself, for sparing a nostalgic thought about what was and what might be had certain trends played out differently, with that in mind, let's talk about AI.

No, I'm not talking about the traditionally accepted definition of AI (Which can be more accurately defined as 'super-intelligent AI') but rather the collection of algorithms and processes that make up the mind of a computer; it's 'Artifical Intelligence'. In gaming, we commonly use the term 'AI' to refer to the handling of bots and NPC's by the software, it's a catch-all term that encompasses their behaviour, reaction and believability. A game that would considered having 'good' AI, would be one wherein the NPC's make appropriate use of their tools, navigate their environment succinctly and pose an actual threat to the humans; whereas a 'bad' AI would be the type you see running into walls and standing around waiting to be shot.

In the early days of gaming, AI wasn't too much of concern for programmers as their games were a lot more simplistic in scope. Enemies didn't really need to be programmed with a wide range of possible actions and route planning algorithms, they just had to operate a simple patrol task with the player's one job to be to avoid them. It was in this vein that famous video game bosses such as Super Mario Bros' Bowser, resorted to little more than jumping up and down and shooting fireballs every now and then. The only real challenge on the player's part is jumping over the Koopa king and hitting the axe-switch to plunge him into lava. Difficulty ramped up as patterns became more unpredictable and/or erratic, which is why many a player still has nightmares about the Hammer Bros from Super Mario Bros 3 and the Gorgon heads from Castlevania.

Games gradually evolved throughout the years, however, and so too did people's perception about what made good enemies in video games. In my opinion, the real watershed moment was when 3D world's became a thing with the advent of the Nintendo 64. Suddenly, AI would need to navigate a whole 3D environment and it became difficult for Developers to get away with simple patterns for the enemy AI. Now they had to code in path-finding and write in extra rules to determine line-of-sight and determine when to use certain abilities. The old guard method of planning would be to have enemies attack the moment they rendered on the screen or whenever the player got too close, now games consoles had become so powerful that this was unfeasible, enemies could be rendered from far away and players could navigate in 3 dimensions, requiring the system to evolve.

This really started to take route in the early 2000's when Developers began to expand the sorts of games that they could make. On of the biggest games of the time that boasted about it's AI's capabilities would have to be, possibly the first game I ever played, Metal Gear Solid. That was a game which ushered in a whole new genre of play, stealth, and with it a whole new set of requirements when it came to coding enemy AI. Patrolling guards had to follow their routes, sure, but they had to be able to react to their situations in a way that felt dynamic and realistic. Should they become alert, they needed to comb the area in search; if someone held them up with a gun, they needed to freeze in fear of their life. This revolutionized the way that people viewed AI and laid the ground works for where it would evolve next.

From this point onwards it became something of a point of pride for developers to boast about the cool new AI that their games had to offer and boast about how clever it was. Battlefield 1942, for example, had one of it's key selling points rest on the strength of it's bots and their ability to mimic real life opponents. (Isn't that weird? A purely online game that teases the offline components.) This trend caught on too, with future online games like TimeSplitters putting considerable effort into ensuring that their offline play was just as exciting as their online play. During this time it was actually feasible for an offline gamer, like I once was, to buy the newest multiplayer centric game under the knowledge that I wouldn't be left out.

One might have thought that this influx of innovation would be never-ending considering the huge jump forwards in software tech in the years since, however that has not been the case. It seems as standard AI procedures (AI good enough to hold their own against a human) became less of a novelty and more of the norm, there grew less of an incentive to strive for improvement in this general area. Games stopped boasting about how smart their AI was and some multiplayer titles started forgetting about AI Bots altogether. (COD has never had AI bots in their multiplayer as far as I know.) I guess that creating the perfect online opponent was too close to literally cloning gamer brain patterns for Devs to continue down that road. (Although, some of the best advancements in the development of general AI have been made in Video game settings. Maybe these game companies are selling themselves short.)

In the modern age, the only time you'll hear a big fuss made about the quality of AI is when something truly spectacular has been achieved. Who remembers the reveal gameplay demo for 'The Last of Us' when we saw Ellie dynamically react to a situation when the player was in trouble? It was an incredibly impressive showcase and one that should have, in a perfect world, sparked interest in bot development for the future. But it didn't. The same was true for the impressive AI systems behind the Xenomorph from 'Alien: Isolation'. With a reputation for being the 'perfect organism', Creative Assembly knew that they had to do something more imaginative with their Alien beyond giving it a patrol schedule, and so they designed two AI 'storytellers' to manage it's behaviours. One storyteller would give the Alien's AI clues as to where the player was, simulating the 'it's always nearby' paranoia from horror movies, whilst the other would send false clues to distract the alien, ensuring it wasn't always on the player and making it's movements difficult to predict. Despite the creation of this ingenious system, 'Alien: Isolation' was not the spark to revive the AI trend.

So is the concept of great AI complexity dead in the world of gaming? Not quite. Some games have started to look into bringing bots back into multiplayer games, like Battlefront 2, and advanced AI scripting is slowly becoming more of a talking point thanks to pioneers like 'The Last of Us part II'. But perhaps what we really need is a huge leap forward in the technology to really fan the flames of creativity once again in the minds of creators and push the boundaries of what can be possible. I've seen AI demos in simulated environments that go so far as to start simulating the action/reaction motion of human emotions, effectively creating artificial wants and needs; the least we can do in gaming is create an AI that chooses to take cover once and a while.