Well Played 2.0: Video Games, Value and Meaning - OpenLibra

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afflicting Boletaria is that of demons attacking people for their souls, because taking one’s soul grants the user power, making them stronger, faster, or allowing them to use incredible magic. The only way to fight this process is to copy it, to attack these demons and steal the souls back in order to make yourself as powerful. Harvesting souls in order to give one’s self god-like powers is known in Boletaria as practicing the “soul arts”, and is forbidden for obvious reasons. Demon’s Souls makes clear that greed is the ultimate sin in this world, and that the player is no less subject to its consequences than story-characters are. Practicing soul arts tends makes people behave like The Old One, the ultimate demon that started the whole mess. When people are consumed by greed to the point that they lose all morality they become what are known as “black phantoms”, mass-murdering soul-harvesters who attack anyone they see. NPC black phantoms attack the player during “black world tendency”, a special gameworld state in which the player’s wanton murder has resulted in a location being tainting by–and therefore “tending” toward–evil. As the story informs us, these NPCs are champions from all over the world who came to Boletaria seeking, like you, to gain power and slay The Old One. In a state of white world tendency these NPCs appear as friends and allies, more interested in the welfare of others than in gaining souls. But in black world tendency you often find the exact same people turned into black phantoms. Consumed by greed, they will try to kill you on sight. To them you are just a soul piggy-bank waiting to be broken. The rationale for this change in NPC behavior can be found in the difference between white and black world tendency, in how their different rules encourage different sorts of player behavior. White tendency actually cripples one’s ability to farm souls and build power. Enemies yield far less souls in white tendency, and enemies drop less material for soulweapon forging. In other words, greed is punished for doing good and rewarded for doing evil. The more innocent people die, the more the world tendency goes towards black, and the easier it is to gain souls and become a badass. As a player it is simple to follow this path, to game the system in this way. The result, of course, is that you become a creature of bottomless greed, and because your behavior infects the world around you, nearby NPCs also get caught up in the same cycle and spiral down the same moral path. It’s a giant domino effect, the ultimate expression of which is invading other players’ games and murdering them for their souls. When you do this you always appear on their screens as a dark shimmering ghost, a black phantom. 58
The genius of this system is that the multiplayer community inevitably acts out the moral dichotomy Demon’s Souls bases its entire single-player narrative around, giving it an uncanny resonance in the real world. Demon’s Souls hands us a hideous world consumed by greed, in which everyone is killing everyone for the ultimate spiritual commodity, and this is what’s going on with online player behavior as well. Unlike many games, Demon’s Souls has no “online multiplayer mode”. Its singleplayer mode is always online, with the possibility that another player will brutally invade your world at any given moment. The game’s escalating ruminations on greed as the story reaches its conclusion are therefore far more striking than they would have been otherwise. In the final moment, when the Black Maiden—the greatest practitioner of soul arts, who’s been your ally through the entire game, converting all your souls into power and granting you life after life—thanks you for subduing The Old One and turns away from you, you have the opportunity to kill her, to stab her in the back and take her soul, the most powerful soul of all. I didn’t do this, of course. I turned around and walked out. But it was impossible not to wonder, in the moment, what I would gain by doing so. I walked out and watched The Old One float back into the sky. I was standing there in my best armor, which I’d brought with me expecting The Old One to be the fight of my life. But, like many of the “big” boss fights in Demon’s Souls, it wasn’t. I had walked into this weird tree, that was seemingly under the ground but appeared to be in a vast desert under an open sky, and found a sorry, pathetic, diseased looking creature flopping around in the muck. It was King Allant, the man who’d unleashed The Old One on his country to begin with by dabbling in soul arts. He (like us all) wanted power, and he had in the end become this sickening shell. I still expected the worst, so I pulled an arrow and aimed, and suddenly heard the king’s voice in my head. He said something about God creating The Old One to save us from ourselves, that The Old One was doing God’s Will. I began riddling the misshapen form with arrows, and it did nothing. As it died I heard the king’s voice damning me for defying God, and that was it. The game was over. The easiness of this “last boss” is partially, I think, what puts the player in the frame of mind to actually kill the Black Maiden when she thanks you. It is anti-climactic in any conventional videogame sense, and the gamer in you wonders what the pay-off is. But this sort of anti-climax appears to be a deliberate, reoccurring aspect of Demon’s Souls. The game is so difficult, with normal enemies and bosses being so absurdly hard, that the bizarre ease of all the so-called “arch-demon” fights is 59
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Well Played 2.0: Video Games, Value
Page 3 and 4:
Table of Contents Thank You. Well P
Page 5 and 6:
Introduction Well Played 2.0 More P
Page 7 and 8: Cloudmaker Days: A Memoir of the A.
Page 9 and 10: abbreviations from the Periodic Tab
Page 11 and 12: that curtain was. This decision was
Page 13 and 14: experience. The ambivalence I felt
Page 15 and 16: special treat: in very faint text w
Page 17 and 18: storytelling where the topic is act
Page 19 and 20: 16 It’s striking that an experien
Page 21 and 22: 57 http://www.argn.com 58 http://ww
Page 23 and 24: the level of interactive engagement
Page 25 and 26: he wants the honor and glory for hi
Page 27 and 28: cinematics are units that go beyond
Page 29 and 30: differs from the first checkpoint).
Page 31 and 32: oom that you just saw in the vision
Page 33 and 34: Figure 10. Screenshot of the Castle
Page 35 and 36: fight, the space is large enough th
Page 37 and 38: scenes have more of a pounding elem
Page 39 and 40: going to have a successful ending (
Page 41 and 42: Interestingly, it doesn’t rewind
Page 43 and 44: note, I actually let myself get kil
Page 45 and 46: an attempt to inject it into gamepl
Page 47 and 48: Team XBox. Prince of Persia: Sands
Page 49 and 50: Gray discs require two adjacent bre
Page 51 and 52: my own music,[72] or more often, I
Page 53 and 54: allows five discs before a new row
Page 55 and 56: Chain Factor functioned as the “t
Page 57: I think, what well-designed virtual
Page 61 and 62: haunting (and haunted) games I’ve
Page 63 and 64: Compared to “Sabre Wulf” and
Page 65 and 66: altitude) depending on the moment o
Page 67 and 68: Aside from that thread that explora
Page 69 and 70: would make anyone feel eager to pla
Page 71 and 72: learn on how to jump and take the o
Page 73 and 74: DREW DAVIDSON et al. (2008). Beyond
Page 75 and 76: her picture. When opening the locke
Page 77 and 78: The story advances with the explora
Page 79 and 80: Favorite moments Nothing would stop
Page 81 and 82: than yourself. Your character is re
Page 83 and 84: on presence, flow, and learning. Ho
Page 85 and 86: oach did not serve as a distraction
Page 87 and 88: game. However, some players felt pr
Page 89 and 90: sugary sweets from the picnic blank
Page 91 and 92: Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1997). Findin
Page 93 and 94: 30 square kilometers around the Che
Page 95 and 96: Deus Ex and System Shock to set the
Page 97 and 98: the dreams,” muses this nameless
Page 99 and 100: fails to realize that the Zone is n
Page 101 and 102: leak, empty land-scape highlights t
Page 103 and 104: The storyline, characters, and even
Page 105 and 106: enough. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warf
Page 107 and 108: developers utilize environmental es
Page 109 and 110:
The title of the novel is a referen
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And yet the same sun, the same moon
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(www.perimeterpartners.com), Bill H
Page 115 and 116:
Actraiser Andy Jih While many other
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simple to dive into: run left and r
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the only task left is to go to the
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have ended the game simply with an
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For an adventure game to succeed, i
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cinematic, Manny despairs of his lo
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normal day-to-day life to reach new
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weren’t completed due to budget a
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mechanic Elementals that look like
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gameplay mechanics in Fallout 3. Th
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with moral dilemmas is done with th
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contained vignette will also make m
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One of the most discussed Quests in
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the grove to help the Wasteland whi
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weapons lost will change playing st
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nonexistent, and few gamers I talk
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Cyan is notorious for baffling play
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Figure 2: The Cleft in the desert,
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“writing” Ages, housed in “li
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ook, that book appears in your Relt
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visits to solve, each player needs
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them prideful and greedy. The impli
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midst and walking down the path. If
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Figure 17: Decoding the door in Ede
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As mentioned earlier, central to Ur
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Immersive Game Design: Indigo Proph
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compartmentalizes all of the conten
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immediate connection between player
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initiating a similar game-ending ev
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interactions have even greater sign
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was trying to concentrate on inputt
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Lions & Jackals: The Politics of Fa
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Banga, meaning “the all-powerful
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ealization of what he turned into.
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Maybe 80% of our players are just l
Page 185 and 186:
Jeffries, L.B. “Far Cry 2: The He
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Looking beyond the moments, it is i
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prowess. There is some level of apt
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solid short-term goal, much like fi
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time or exploring the same game lev
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and seamless; the player is whisked
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Rasmus: I have an absolute love for
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feeling that there is something int
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sessions make it easy to get into t
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the game sometimes. Isn’t this a
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Jesper: I would argue that the disc
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incredibly exciting and rewarding,
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playing games — ironic, I suppose
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Sutton-Smith, Brian. 2008. Play The
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dilemma itself. Should I, the playe
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Pool of Radiance Sam Roberts Pool o
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play experience of Pool of Radiance
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probably at what might be called th
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containing a moment of choice, is a
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interpreted, without remaining hide
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Making and Unmaking Place in The Da
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technical accomplishments, the play
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understanding.”[160] Time of day
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ears).[167] Videogames take advanta
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the orphanage, church, warehouses,
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Golden Arm and His Girl Friday, tel
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directions except toward the goal.
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This dynamic is played out in a sho
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169 Celia Pearce, “Narrative Envi
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ilovebees: Playing and Designing in
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Curious parties falling through the
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Columns of paired numbers appear, l
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may be, they may still need to be n
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strength of its developers and its
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Resident Evil 4: The Mercenaries Mi
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skills at RE4 have earned you the p
Page 257 and 258:
Another important factor that adds
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The strongest pressure on the playe
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• Do I have enough health left to
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New Section Francisco Souki It was
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the game stayed true throughout the
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a reflective Mamma mia! You only ne
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point it all took shape in my head.
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neutral planet, the attacking ships
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want to attempt to play at an exper
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abusive language. Most importantly,
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Stephen Jacobs is an Associate Prof
Page 279 and 280:
granted by the EPSON Ibérica’s
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and Second Person. He is cited in m
Page 283 and 284:
of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Sim
Page 285 and 286:
designing and developing cross-medi
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