Strictly Business

Numbers

I’ve now come across two little sisters - the girls possessed with Adam. When you come up to one after any threats are neutralized (more on that in a later paragraph), you have the option of saving (taking enough adam to normalize) or harvesting (sucking it all out) her. I know I would get more adam if I harvested the girls, but at this point, I don’t know what I’m missing, how much I give up to take the morally safer choice. Not only this, but I have my communication line with the man I’m trying to help free from… wherever he is. The guy told me I should save the sisters and I feel his fictional eyes watching my decisions.

Part two: the way you work with ‘lives’ in this game is odd. I’ve played games where you must restart entire levels if you die before you finish them. I’ve seen games where you lose your loot if you die, but you’re still around where you started. This game continues on through your multiple deaths, though no body can ever be seen when you end up in a vitachamber. It might be because I’m used to restarting levels when I die, but I find the fact that I can attack a Big Daddy multiple times, only to have it back where it was before it killed me, but with weapons.

Ambiance

Note: I was asked for images, but I can’t grab screenshots from my PS3 and my room is lit all wrong for pictures. Perhaps I should include interweb-fount images just to show the general look of the game I’m moving through…

In fact, that’s what I’ll do for this post.

First out is the setting: your first-person character is trying to get the heck out of this creepy place called Rapture. When you show up, someone who is, as far as I’ve seen so far, the only person left his sanity, notices your arrival and begs you for help. It’s implied that you will help him, and so he gives you tasks and guides you through your journey. He can tell you what things are, but he isn’t able to tell you “look out behind you!” or “if you get just one step further in to this area, you’re going to be ambushed”.

Rapture is slowly being waterlogged. There is water everywhere, and ice, too, at some entrances. It’s mostly dark, with lights having smashed out by frantic crazies or shorted out by the moisture.

As I mentioned before, there is no constant music in this game. It’s quiet, so that you can hear all the crazy mutterings of splicers, and their footsteps and clatterings as they roam the map, oblivious to you until you get too close… for the most part.

Splicers, as your mutant enemies are called, are crazy with a lust for Adam, a commodity of a sort, which allows you to modify your genetic makeup further and further, in order to gain more power. They are examples of what can happen if you throw integrity to the winds and do whatever you can for power. Their minds are broken, and you often come across a scene where a splicer is treating an inanimate object as if it were something alive or at least more precious. My first such encounter with this ended with me acquiring a pistol, after I offed the splicer who was crooning and murmering to it as it lay in a baby carriage.

Some splicers are more with it than others, though. One persistent character wearing a surgical mask and toting a wooden crate took great pleasure in flinging grenades at me while deftly evading fire. Once, after I had left the screens which took me through acquiring my first engineering tonic (which heightens your skill at hacking machines by giving you more time to do so), I turned to move on, only to see another splicer in a surgical mask standing directly behind me. He stared and muttered something for a split second before proceeding to whale on me before I could react.

As I wander the maps, keeping an eye out for shining objects (which is how you can find useful dropped items in the unlit areas) and movement, and an ear out for muttering, footsteps, and other movement, I realize that I am essentially adapting to my environment. Of course, it’s taken me several deaths to do so (thanks goodness for vita-chambers), but this game shows me that I can, in fact, become capable of stealth, strategy, and decision, some things which I never had to worry about when I played Katamari Damacy or Super Mario Bros.

(Sorry this post is a little later than 6 — I swear the majority of it was written on Thursday!)

(Edit 2: inserting images didn’t work, so get ready for an image post instead..)

Hacking it up

A post. I’ve had a busy week (believe me or not), so I’ll be getting this done around 9ish.

I finally finished replaying the three Ratchet and Clank PS2 games! I know this sounds like it has nothing to do with anything, but in fact, this means that, A, I can really get into/obsess about BioShock, and, B, that I won’t have to worry about re-adapting to the controls every time I sit down to play. Not that I could not have gotten used to this in time, but this fact removes a slight deterrent from playing the game, just enough so that I am about 60% more likely to play it on a whim. Add this to the fact that I’ve got an excuse to be a lump and play this instead of a social life, and the fact that it now has my full attention, and you can expect me to rip through this game by the end of next month.

I Got to do my first hacking this round! Ratchet and Clank has this, too; it’s an excuse to add a timed puzzle-type mini-game into the main game. In R & C, you have to do it to get through doors. In BioShock, you don’t have to, in fact, there’s a recording - recordings are the way you pick up much of what Rapture was like before shit hit the fan - from the city’s founder denouncing the hacking of vending machines and such. I think this is supposed to give the player a moral pang, but really, I’m way past viewing hacking as morally wrong. Unfair, perhaps, if it directly hurts someone, but that’s obviously not the case in Rapture. Not only has my task been killing murderous crazy people from the very beginning of the game, but in some cases - such as security bots and turrets - hacking keeps you from dying. If that’s not an incentive to go against something’s intended programming, I don’t know what is.

We went over this sort of thing (cheating/hacking) a bit in SI 410 (Ethics and Information). Whether or not the player believes hacking is wrong in the non-videogame world, there’s a good chance they’ll be hacking away in the game anyway. Makes me wonder how much I’ll have to worry about the bigger moral decisions people have assured me are coming up later in the game. But I’ll discuss that when I get there.

In other news, this game is cool! I like the way there’s no music, because that way you can hear people before you see them and prepare yourself. Sometimes it’s hard to hear things if multiple sound sources are going at once, but you generally get the gist, if not exactly what is being said.

Adjusting (under construction)

I’m still having trouble adjusting to BioShock’s first person controls and general feel.

At the beginning of the game, I was asked a few questions that set a few parameters that I don’t think I’m able to change now that my game is in motion. One question asked me what experience I’ve had with shooters, and I answered “some,” because I did not feel that I would enjoy a game configured for a beginner of any sort. I am considering, though, at this point, starting a new game on the easy mode. I’m curious to see if it would allow me to feel more comfortable in the gameplay earlier on.

But I asked a friend about this, and was told that the differences between “beginner” and “some shooter experience” involves, not a tutorial or a means of getting comfortable with the controls, but rather increased HP + MP (if you will) capacities, and a greater amount of consumables and goodies available for pick-up as one moves through the game.

I cannot help but think fondly of the original Ratchet and Clank’s simple-yet-effective beginner obstacle course, which taught Ratchet’s basic moves using enemies that weren’t likely to kill him in a few hits. Then again, BioShock’s method of ability-teaching reflects that of the second and third games. Perhaps in the end I am more unsettled by the horror-thriller vibe of the game than I care to admit. Maybe I just need to get more into this particular game’s groove.

Assuming it has one.

The Real Beginning

I’ve been at BioShock for about an hour, now. I have noticed plenty of points to write about, so I’m going to go ahead and write out my entry now so that I can go back to bed.

First: BioShock is a serious game. I’m used to playing Mario Bros. And Ratchet and Clank. And Katamari Damacy. Perhaps some tower defense-type games. But BioShock isn’t cartoonish. It’s not brightly colored, doesn’t have clean, smooth lines, doesn’t have light, happy music playing. I’m used to enemies that, when you defeat them, magically disappear, often leaving shiny rewards behind; in BioShock, your defeated enemies turn into corpses that stay where they were felled. And you have to go up and search them to get things from them.

The game is dark, both literally and figuratively. It makes for a much more unsettling atmosphere. There is no question that the tale we’ll be uncovering and continuing will be sordid and creepy.

More than anything, right now, I’m hung up on the control scheme; it’s not an illogical configuration, but I’ve been playing Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando for most of the week. The camera not being at liberty to pan around and switch angles in BioShock (what with it being first person and all), along with weapon selection, jumping, and crouching all being tied to completely different buttons in this game, I’ve had some trouble moving and defending myself.

Less of a problem, but a noticeable thing, is that, in this game, health restoring implements can be stored for later. I’m used to only regaining health when I find it lying around in mysterious boxes. It’s interesting to see how various items have an effect on your health and eve (in any traditional game, ‘eve’ would be called MP, I believe). Pep bars, as you might expect, increase both. Alcohol (you find wine and such lying around) improves health but decreases eve, and smoking cigarettes has the opposite effect. If you’re low on, say, health, and you find cigarettes, it’s wise not to smoke them, but if you need a power boost, perhaps it’s worth the health hit.

Kay. Back to bed.

The Epic Choosing of BioShock

Well, see, BioShock’s stats seemed strong against those of Game Selection Paper, so I pulled out its pokéball and…

No really.

I am going to be playing BioShock all semester and blogging about my progress. It’s an FPS set in an alternate history, where (when?) an underwater utopian society was built somewhere below the ocean. Your character crashes into the sea and finds his way down to the compound (the city of Rapture), to find that something went wrong. You spend the game figuring out what happened and how to get the heck out while fending off mutants and crazy scary mechanical defense systems.

I figured this would be a great game for this assignment because friends and reviews assured me that it has replay value (in case I finish it before the semester’s out), and these two sources also confirmed that I could expect to encounter such learning opportunities as decision making that would affect the game’s outcome, moral decisions, puzzle/problem solving, and detective work on the story of Rapture’s decline (downfall?).

I just got the game and the console I will be playing it on yesterday, and I’m excited to get started playing and comparing it to all the readings we’ll be doing. Woop woop.

Assignment 7: Analytics.

This assignment was a great idea that seemed to be foisted upon us at a point which was too late and too close to our other projects for us to give it the attention it deserved.

Right off the bat, I can say that analytics require time and planning on the end of the site designers. Since we didn’t have much time, and we sure didn’t have any opportunity to alter Drupal to record custom data, we had to make due with Google Analytics. It could have been worse.

We quickly learned that analytics are not as clear and formulaic as we’d like them to be. We ended up looking at a page where reading is not expected, since it’s a gateway page, so how do we measure how helpful it is? We can’t measure time spent on the page. We have to measure the amount of traffic that ends up on the pages to which the documentation page links, and, ideally, the amount of time spent on those pages. 

While analytics are important for measuring a page’s success, this quantitative evaluation method is costly to put into effect, requiring time and skill for implementing a means for data collection, as well as time for the actual data collection. Fortunately, once it IS in place, an analytics system can provide a constant stream of useful statistics and requires only a few people for the actual data analysis.

Assignment 6: heuristics.

This evaluation is a good supplement for other testing procedures. We did heuristics evaluations at the same time we were doing usability testing, but I can see it being used with personas or competitive analysis.

This method seems to me to be, essentially, self-administered usability testing. since we had spent so much time on the site already, we knew the various paths a user takes for typical site use, and we took some more time to play around and really scrutinize points of the site’s design which we have slowly been trained to notice over the course of this class. Of course, many of us also reported problems we observed while conducting our usability testing, emphasizing how important it is to have input from both the inside and the outside, from “experts” and unfamiliar and untrained sources.

This is a pretty great evaluation, though. It identifies problems, but because it’s done by the designers or professionals, solutions can be offered on the spot, too. I spent plenty of time elaborating on the ways I hoped or expected features to work, meaning them as suggestions for future design.

As I said, though, while “expert” input is valuable, it can’t cover all the bases and it’s hard-put to point out the problems non-experts and fresh eyes can encounter. Fortunately, it only requires at least one person to conduct, as long as they are familiar with heuristics and severity ratings. Not that it isn’t better to have more than one evaluator. In class, we ended up with a sort of long tail of issues, which were mostly pointed out by one or two members of a class of .. however large our class is. 

This evaluation takes a matter of hours per evaluator, depending on the depth of the assessment and the size of the product, but can be conducted at any point where there is a model or product to see. It may also cost money, if no “experts” can be found to work for free. It’s still generally cheaper, in terms of both time and money, than usability testing, though, since the number of people conducting heuristic evaluation will almost always be the smaller pool.