Adventure games, as a category, have done reasonably well for us--partly, of course, because there are few high-budget, major release adventure games any more (although Dreamfall, which we sell as an affiliate, is one such). So adventure game fans pretty much need to look around online to find good titles.

From an independent developer's standpoint, adventure games are a good place to go, since there aren't a lot of huge-budget titles to compete against--and because there are tools, like Adventure Game Studio that make it feasible to develop something pretty decent without a huge amount of effort. Of course, AGS games run the gamut from ones with graphics that approach major studio quality (like Al Emmo and the Lost Dutchman's Mine) to ones with far more retro graphics (like The Shivah).

One a unit basis, The Shivah is our best-seller to date, in fact; it helps to have a subject as unique as a murder-solving Rabbi, of course, as that's the kind of thing that it's far easier to get press for than something more mundane (and indeed, The Shivah has been mentioned by Reuters, CNN online, Wired, PC Gamer--and The Jerusalem Post). The price helps too (it's only $5)--and even though the graphics are quite retro, they feel appropriate to the game.

Dave Gilbert, Shivah's designer, recently released The Blackwell Legacy, which is a personal favorite; it's got better graphics and takes a little longer to complete than The Shivah, but has the same excellent voice acting, and a stronger dollop of humor. We don't expect it to sell as well, since the subject--a medium with a ghost sidekick out of a Damon Runyon story who helps ghosts come to peace with their deaths and "move on" to the next world--doesn't have the same easy promotional hook. Which is too bad, as this is an excellent game, the kind of thing that any fan of the Monkey Island series or Grim Fandango will enjoy (though it's much shorter than those games).

If you'd like a longer game that's also reminiscent of the best of the LucasArts adventures, Al Emmo and the Lost Dutchman's Mine is the place to turn; indeed, the eponymous protagonist, a dweeby 40-something guy, is strongly reminiscent of Leisure Suit Larry, and a bit of Guybrush Threepwood. Good writing and voice acting, clever puzzles, from a development team that first came to the adventure gaming community's notice with excellent remakes (with updated graphics) of Kings Quest I and II--people who love adventure games beyond reason, in other words. What more could you ask?

A little older, but still games we like are the Delaware St. John series--The Curse of Midnight Manor and The Town With No Name. If Al Emmo and Dave Gilbert's games are remniscent of LucasArts adventures, the DSJ games are perhaps reminiscent of Myst--the game played on a series of nicely executed still images in a first-person view. At least, if Myst featured a paranormal investigator looking into eerie goings-on. Both games are from Big Time Games, the vehicle for Bryan Wiegele's designs--as is Inherent Evil, an older title for which a sequel is in progress.

The Witch's Yarn is an oddball title that takes an unusual tack; it's not so much about puzzle-solving, but about telling a story--and depending on your choices, the story can vary quite a lot from playing to playing. It was a 2006 IGF finalist, but it's also hard for us to figure out quite how to reach the right audience for this game--given its nature and subject (the story of a witch running a wool store), that's probably not old-school adventure gamers, but a broader audience interested in interactive stories with female protagonists. (There's a Mac version, too--we'd like to have more Mac adventures, and we understand that doing Mac [and Linux] versions with AGS isn't that hard.... Hint, hint...)

Kishi Kawaii/Cute Knight is equally oddball--and with strong appeal to women, too--and has done surprising well for us, perhaps because of a cult following in the anime community. As much an RPG as an adventure game, you play an 18-year old girl in a fantasy world who must find a life path before she turns 21. There are 50 potential endings, in fact. Graphics are anime-cute, but quite limited; it's mostly played in text, and it's surprisingly engaging for a game that hardcore gamers would probably think is primitive in its approach.

Altogether, we're quite proud of our adventure game catalog, and it's an area we plan to focus on in future. And indeed, if you know of good-quality independent adventures we may have overlooked--do let us know.
posted by Greg at 8:53 PM 35 comments

An interview with Danny Ledonne, the creator of Super Columbine Massacre is up at Arthouse Games; it actually addresses some of the criticisms in the "prosecution" case below.

And Jason Roher, creator of Slamdance finalist game Cultivation, on the same site, has an open letter to the finalists asking them to stay in the competition and use it as a platform to criticize the decision on Super Columbine Massacre, rather than to withdraw.
posted by Greg at 12:24 PM 22 comments

A friend writes with a lengthy rebuttal to my previous defense of Super Columbine Massacre that I feel is well argued enough to post:

Greg:

I read your post on Super Columbine Massacre RPG! with interest and unease (to give it its orthographically correct title btw--you delete the "RPG" and the exclamation point, but they're part of the actual title and, I think, reinforce its unnecessarily sensational nature).

I think you're so off base on this one that you need to be rebutted, in detail. As you know, I agree with you that games can be art, and that it's reasonable for them to address complex issue. This game, however, and the circumstances of its creation, are so flawed that they do not deserve defense. I don't really have a position on whether or not the Slamdance people were right in kicking it out of the competition--but I do think it's so bad a game that it should never have been included in the first place.

I'm not going to argue that it's bad because the Columbine massacre was horrible, and any game based on it is inherently in bad taste; you're right that this is a straw horse, and in fact, I'd agree with you that any game that was about the massacre but also "insightful, somber, and respectful of its material" would have merit. But to claim that Super Columbine Massacre RPG! is "insightful, somber, and respectful" is either ingenuous or stupid.

In fact, Super Columbine Massacre RPG! seems to have been created specificially to glamorize the murderers, sensationalize and trivialize the tragedy, and create a controversy to promote the designer. In versions of his website that are now available only through web.archive.org, he earlier said:

"CONTENTS: A FREE Role Playing Game (RPG) for your PC devoid of malware, spyware or other junk not related to 'killing as many fuckheads as possible!'"

Somber and respectful, yes? And later:

"FINALLY, remember Reb's ['Reb' was Harris's online handle] words: 'Don't follow your dreams or goals or any of that shit, follow your fucking animal instincts: if it moves kill it, if it doesn't, burn it. Kein Mitleid!'

In other words, it's pretty obvious that the designer is among the sick crew who do indeed view Harris and Klebold as martyrs, in some twisted sense, rather than the psychopathic slaughterers of innnocents that they obviously were.

Later on, he seems to have adopted the defense that the game is intended to raise questions and focus attention on both the proximate tragedy and the ultimate failings of American culture, and is thereby some kind of serious work of art--but my guess is he went this route only after he got some traction in that area from dupes like Ian Bogost and you.

Let's look at the very title: "Super Columbine Massacre RPG!" Yes, I'm sure you'd defend this as a satirical attack on videogames "qua" videogames, but it's also well designed to spur controversy among people who aren't gamers; yes, for us gamers, "Super" conjures "Super Mario Brothers", and the use in connection with "Columbine Massacre" may strike us as satirical, but for the general public, the title as a whole immediately says "offensive disgusting game." Again, there's a clear attempt to court controversy and to sensationalize the material; "somber and respectful" is no where in the picture.

But let's leave aside the developer's own words, and turn, as you do, to specific analysis of the game itself--which I think is the right approach, although my analysis of the "text" (if you can call it such) is very much at variance with yours.

You apparently felt a feeling of nausea at having to kill so many defenseless children while playing the game, and felt that this was one of the points the designer wished to make; I would suggest that this says something about your sensibilities, and not the designer's. "Killing as many fuckheads as possible," remember? Reading posts on the game's forums, I was struck by one that asked why the game didn't record the number of kills you made--typical game-think (more is better), but perhaps a better representation of the game's aesthetic. One of the lessons to be learned from the actual history, by the way, is that Harris and Klebold were not only murderous assholes, but they were incompetent murderous assholes--if the cafeteria bombs had gone off as they'd planned, they would have killed hundreds, and if they'd been more relentless in their actions, they could have killed far more, even without that. We should be grateful, of course, that they were morons, even if murderous morons. Still, it's not at all clear to me that the designer thinks it bad to rack up the highest possible death count; indeed, his statements suggests otherwise.

You also suggest that the RPG conventions to which the game adhere are themselves some kind of purposeful, artistic criticism of the basic conventions of the RPG (killing monsters to gain EP and items). I think otherwise; this is the default for RPG Maker, the application in which the game was built. I would guess the designer didn't bother to make any modifications from the default, because he was more interested in posters of Marilyn Manson (about more which later). In other words, there's no clever artistic criticism of game conventions here; it's simply a use of the existing features of the environment in which the game was designed, with no particular thought given to their implications or impact.

I also wonder how you reconcile the textual description of Harris and Kebold as "brave boys", after each murder, with the notion that this game is "somber and respectful."

The images of the dead and grieving after Harris and Klebold's death, of which you make a great deal, strike me as calculated precisely as a means of deterring criticism--not, as you apparently do, as a partial justification for the gleeful enactment of the massacre that precedes it.

And, as Rampant Coyote says, the very existence of the Hell levels pretty much kicks out the legs under any defense of Super Columbine Massacre RPG!. Maybe if the game had ended with their suicide, you could make the case that this was some kind of tortuous re-enactment with artistic intent; but the Hell levels pretty much make clear that Harris and Klebold are indeed viewed as heroes, in some sense--and their ultimate embrace by Satan as some kind of apotheosis. By the way--what is Jon Benet doing in Hell? The circumstances of her death may have been damnable, but presumably she was an innocent.

Finally, let us turn to what you term "considerable research." Harris and Klebold are, in victory text after combat, repeatedly congratulated for "Another victory for the Trench Coat Mafia." Actually, Harris never wore a trenchcoat until the date of the massacre, when he wore it to hide his weapons; and while there was apparently a clique called the "the trench coat mafia" at the school, the members thereof had graduated years previously. Harris, depicted in an early scene in the game as having a Marilyn Manson poster in his room, claimed to hate rock in preference to techno, Ramstein and Prodigy being favorites; in his room, selecting the stereo starts Nirvana playing, which presumably was also not among his preferred music. In general, the designer seems to like grunge, but Harris and Klebold in fact did not. Then there's the "bullying" cut-scene with Harris; this is another myth. Bullying may or may not have happened at Littleton, but the proponderance of evidence is that Harris was a psychopath and not motivated by any specific grudge.

In other words: Considerable research? Not really.

And as for actual gameplay itself: This game sucks. You yourself allude to the "boring and repetitive" nature of "Final Fantasy-esque combat"; this is understating the case. In the massacre sequence, unarmed children pose no real opposition, and in the Hell levels, the swarms of demons are mere obstacles between you and reaching the end sequence. It's all basically plain-vanilla RPG Maker, with nothing you could characterize as remotely like clever level design--as you might expect from a game designed with shock value, rather than actual gameplay, primarily in mind. Let's not even talk about the repetitiveness of the combat interface, which requires you to select a weapon for each of your characters, every combat round, before resolution.

In short, it's clear to me that your defense of this game is entirely wrong-headed. It's not an "insightful, somber, and respectful" look at the Columbine massacre; it's a sensationalized attempt by a mediocre creator attempting to garner attention. It's not a "game that approaches the status of art;" in fact, as a game qua, it pretty damn bad. And while someday there might be a game of Columbine that does not "trivialize a tragedy," this ain't it.
posted by Greg at 2:41 AM 33 comments

Wow. First up was Jonathan Blow, who withdrew his game Braid from the contest. Now the creators of flOw, Jonathan Mark of Everyday Shooter, and the Toblo dev team have done so.

The festival has an unsatisfying statement on their site. Ian Bogost's tombstone image on his post about the controversy starts to look prescient.

Update: Waking Games also withdraws Once Upon a Time.

Update: One of the contest's judges, Joe Bourrie makes a statement on the affair.

Update: Nick Montforth withdraws Book and Volume. Also, USC withdraws sponsorship of the event.
posted by Greg at 3:52 PM 22 comments

Cross-posting from my blog at Manifesto Games.

All right.

As you know, we include in our inventory some free games--ones we think are particularly notable. Months ago, we decided not to include the Super Columbine Massacre RPG, because there's some controversy we don't need to court. However, this pisses me off: Columbine game pulled from competition.

The competition in question is the Slamdance Guerilla Gamemaker Competition, which runs simultaneously with the Slamdance Film Festival, and along with the IGF, is one of the few events which helps to focus attention on independently-created games--which, of course, is what we also focus on. And we therefore support the festival.

I'm not going to focus on their reasons for pulling the game, nor to assign blame; if you want to explore that further, Ian Bogost has an excellent post on the subject. Instead, I'm simply going to make Super Columbine Massacre available here--and tell you why it is a work of art, an exemplary and important game, and worthy of your serious attention.

Update: Andrew Stern, co-creator of Facade, last year's Slamdance game winner, has an open letter to the festival asking for Super Columbine Massacre's reinstatement as a finalist.

Why Is Super Columbine Massacre Controversial?

Super Columbine Massacre is controversial for one reason only: Because our culture continues to assume that games are "mere entertainment," that a game based on so horrific an event must ipso facto be in bad taste. Games are fun, Columbine was a tragedy and never the twain shall meet; a game on Columbine must by nature trivialize or cynically exploit the event. Q.E.D.

Yet we do not make the same assumption about any other medium: a documentary on the Columbine massacre, or a novel, or a New Yorker essay would, a priori, be treated with respect, at least until the viewer or reader had experienced it, after which a judgment might be made as to its merits. And if the work proved insightful, somber,and respectful of its material, the world would consider it unexceptional.

I will suggest, therefore, that no one is entitled to criticize this game until they have played it--and am morally certain that those who do have not. Because those who do will find it insightful, somber, and respectful of its material.

Within the industry, Super Columbine Massacre has come in for a share of criticism as well--primarily because our industry is sensitive (and with good reason) to criticism that it is too reliant on violence and shock value for its success. The instinctive reaction of anyone within the industry when hearing about this game for the first time is inevitably "Oh god, we don't need this." But what we don't need is games even more tasteless than, say Postal; we don't need more ammunition for the know-nothings who attack games already.

What we do need is games that challenge the stereotype of games as mindless, violent thumb-candy for boys--and games that show the potential of our medium to enlighten, to illuminate, to teach, and to move. What we need is games that approach the status of art.

Like Super Columbine Massacre.

Nuts and Bolts

Super Columbine Massacre is built using RPG Maker (as was Aveyond). Color is 8-bit, and the screen is built using 16 pixel by 16 pixel tiles. Movement is in the four cardinal directions, using the arrow keys; all actions are accomplished by facing an item onscreen and pressing SPACE or ENTER. ESC brings up a menu that allows saves (in limited places), access to inventory, or quitting. Inventory can include a wide variety of weapons, as well as other items, some of which you need to give to other characters to trigger in-game actions. The whole looks like a mid-80s PC RPG, or an RPG for a NES.

Combat is Final Fantasy-esque, in that combat transitions to a separate screen and is character-skill rather than player-skill based. (Yes, Harris and Klebold 'level up' as they kill people.) It's turn-based, although most opponents pose little threat to the protagonists (a jock may get in a hit or two), at least until the Hell levels.

Cut scenes are created in-engine, although real-world images and occasional sound-clips are used at times. The game is highly linear, and completing it pretty much requires replicating the actions of the real mass-murderers. Dialog is primarily drawn from the words of Harris and Klebold themselves, and in dialog panels, they are represented by somewhat pixelated images of themselves.

Player skill is important during gameplay mainly for purposes of avoiding NPCs (particularly during the early bomb-planting sequence, but later on for purposes of avoiding combat, particularly in Hell, less because it is dangerous than because it becomes tedious and repetitive over time--a common characteristic of Final Fantasy-esque games). There is some degree of puzzle solving, but it is fairly minor; as with most such games players need to grab every loose item they can, but at least there isn't too high a degree of "hunt the pixel."

A typical gamer will find about five hours of play, though it can be completed in roughly an hour (a video of a complete run-through here).

Enough of that.

Design Choices

Perhaps the riskiest artistic decision in Super Columbine Massacre is in casting the player as the murderers themselves--risky because we expect to identify with game protagonists, take pleasure in their actions, and share in their triumph. The emotion most games strive to evoke is 'fiero,' the joy of triumph over adversity--inappropriate, in the context of a story where there ought to be no joy, there is tragedy rather than triumph, and where there is scant adversity: unarmed children pose little challenge to the heavily-armed PCs. In another designers' hands, this choice would have been crippling.

But the insight Super Columbine Massacre provides about its subject matter derives precisely from the fact that the player is forced to take the roles of the pepetrators. The player is exposed to their world: the music, the games, the heedless cruelty of high school life, the thoughts and words of Harris and Klebold themselves. Few people of intelligence and sensitivity emerge unscarred from the relentless anti-intellectualism and the cruel cliques of the American high school, and while most of us are not driven to murder (rather more to suicide), this game does a good job of evoking the thoughts and emotions of Harris and Klebold--without glamorizing or exculpating them.

Once the massacre begins, the game becomes, for an experienced player, almost routine; encounter opponent, enter combat, select weapon, collect experience and items. Yet rather than being a trivialization of the event, this in itself is a critique of the conventions of the game qua game--the way in which slaughter becomes an end in itself and a means to advancement. No Conan, nor yet any real-world adventurer (save perhaps Tamburlane) ever personally slaughtered so many foes as a typical RPG requires, and yet we do so without thinking. In Super Columbine Massacre, you can't do so without thinking, precisely because of its connection to a real-world event. Though these are still pixels you are killing, you know they are stand-ins for the real-world victims--and it's hard to avoid a feeling of nausea after a time. Indeed, it is only the low-res, retro nature of the graphics that make it possible to continue playing: the game-ness of it helps to cloak the horror.

It's an interesting tension, in fact--between evocation of the brutality of the event, and enough distance to continue playing, between the banality of the conventions of the RPG and the anything but banal nature of the material under study.

Nor will the designer let you escape into the banality of gameplay; once the massacre is complete, he exposes you to a series of images, real world photographs of the corpses of the boys--and of the grief of the survivors and their families. The sharp-edged nature of these, in stark contrast to the pixelated images of the game itself, remind the player that this is more than "just a game"; it is a harrowing replication of a modern horror.

Perhaps this is where the game should end, but in fact there is a sort of giant easter egg to follow: the Hell levels. Hell is surely where Harris and Klebold should be, but in perhaps another risky choice on the designer's part, they seem to like it there, as it's a lot like Doom. Indeed, the monsters they encounter and fight are drawn directly from that title. In the course of their journey through hell, they encounter the outer circle (per Dante, the place where those damned but not evil, such as pagans who never received the word of God, spend eternity), where people including Jon Benet and Confucius are encountered--along with John Lennon (damned for being an atheist, presumably), who sings "Imagine" to Harris. This elicits the response "If you weren't already dead, I'd have to kill you," which does sound in character. They also encounter Nietzsche, who proves to be a Nine Inch Nails fan, which also sounds in character.

There's an element of humor here, in other words--and indeed, if an accusation of tastelessness has any merit, here, and not in the massacre sequence, is where it lies.

After solving puzzles and encountering Satan comes the final cut-scene of the game: a ceremony outside the high-school, with the game putting in the mouths of the speakers a variety of the conventional sentiments the tragedy evoked. One speaker demands gun control, another a ban on violent media, a third the need to re-Christianize society. The sentiments are enough almost to make you wish you could take Harris and Klebold back to the school, at least in their game-character guise, and murder these idiots...

...because Super Columbine Massacre does a far better job of getting inside, and trying to understand, the events of that terrible day than these speakers do.


A Work of Art?

Those who deny that games can be art generally argue that games are mere entertainment, and therefore cannot aspire to that status. This is a form of category confusion; Harlan Ellison, for example, argues that being entertaining is the mininum criterion for a story, that any good story must entertain--but if it does no more, it is not much of a story. Naked Lunch, Burrough's novel of social pathology, is entertaining in its fashion--but it's also a brutal and harrowing emotional experience.

Others claim that games are not (yet) art, because of the limited palette of emotions they can evoke: tactile pleasure, fiero, and frustration, certainly, but not (or rarely) tears or nostalgia or righteous anger, the vast panoply of emotions that film and fiction evoke. To my mind, this is category confusion again; architecture also has a limited emotional palette, but we consider it art. By this standard, however, one can certainly posit Super Columbine Massacre as a work of art: it evokes emotions rare in games--pity, horror, and repulsion.

The great strength of games as a medium, the one thing games are able to do that other media cannot, is to illuminate their subject by engaging the player directly in the action. Other media can depict, but they can't bring you inside. Reading a novel or watching a film, you may identify in some sense with the characters, but you are never unconscious that you are outside, watching; in a game, by nature, you are inside, doing. Thus a game such as Zucker's Napoleon's Last Battles can help you gain better insight into the nature of Napoleonic warfare than reading Clausewitz; a game such as Sim City can lend insight into the nature of cities that's hard to obtain in any other fashion.

And a game such as Super Columbine Massacre can lend insight into the events of that terrible day that newspaper reports, or somber and thouthful essays, cannot. Not necessarily better insights--but different ones--precisely because it makes you complicit in recreating the events.

As gamers, and those who love games, our reponse to this game, and to the criticism of it, should not be to hide, or run away, or hope that it goes away. Instead it should be to say: You do not understand, nor are you attempting to understand. This is not a glamorization of the murderers, nor yet a trivialization of the tragedy; it is a work of serious artistic intent and accomplishment, based on considerable research, that in fact illuminates and reflects the horror of that day. Just as there are novels of the Holocaust, there can be a game of Columbine, and neither need trivialize a tragedy.

Further Reading

• Designer's Statement
  
• Ian Bogost's Analysis
  
• Patrick Dugan on the Game
  
• Super Columbine Massacre: Better Than You'd Think (via Kotaku)
  
• Retro Super Columbine Massacre RPG a Mostly Thoughtful Take on the Tragedy (via Gameology)
  
• Rampant Coyote has a very different view of the game
  

Or you could play it.
posted by Greg at 5:54 PM 94 comments

We recently got word from the Copenhagen ITU (ITU = "information technology university") that TL Taylor, a professor there and author of Play Between Worlds, wanted to install a number of games from the Manifesto site on the machines in their computing lab for the use of her students. The Copenhagen ITU is one of the main world centers for game studies--Espen Aarseth, Jesper Juul and Gonzalo Frasca also teach there--and I thought their list was interesting, and worth posting here, as an indication of what, in essence, an external authority thinks are among our most interesting titles.

Here's what they wanted:

• Cloud
  
• DROD: Journey to the Rooted Hold
  
• Gish
  
• Oasis
  
• Strange Adventures in Infinite Space
  
• The Shivah
  
• Toribash
  

posted by Greg at 8:44 AM 12 comments

This is kind of cool...

Several small science fiction/fantasy boardgames were published by the "Dwarfstar" imprint of Heritage (a miniatures manufacturer) in the 80s, some of which I still have in my collection. Some of them are excellent, and the current owners, Reaper Miniatures, have put them up online for free download here.

I can recommend Barbarian Prince, which was designed by Arnold Hendrick, who later went on to a career in digital games for Microprose and then for Interactive Magic; it's a first-rate soloplay fantasy RPG. (He was also a designer for SPI back in the day.) In the Dwarfstar line, he also designed Grav Armor, which is interesting, but not as original as Barbarian Prince. Arnold today runs an excellent email business newsletter about MMOs; if you have a professional interest in the field and would like to contact him to get on the list, feel free to let me know.

Goblin was designed by Howie Barasch, who I knew as SPI's marketing manager; he later went to run South Games, a major hobby game distributor in the 80s, but I've since lost touch with him. Cute and fun, if not what I'd call an important design.

And Star Smuggler was designed by Dennis Sustare, who is probably best known for his goofy tabletop RPG Bunnies & Burrows--less well known (because video games didn't then contain credits) is that he was one of the chief designers at Coleco back during the first digital game boom, and contributed to probably a majority of the Coleco-published Colecovision games. Star Smuggler took the basic paradigm of Hendrick's Barbarian Prince to SF; the original game was marred by some serious copy-editing problems (a potentially crippling issue in a paragraph-system boardgame); I don't know if these have been fixed in the downloadable version.

Silly nostalgia for me, but potentially some interesting free games for you. And thanks to Rich Carlson for the heads-up.
posted by Greg at 11:37 PM 57 comments