Note: This email exchange with MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo originally ran on N'Gai Croal's Level Up and MTV's Multiplayer blog, in four separate installments, from January 28th-February 1st 2008. We now present it here in its entirety, under a single permalink, for easier printing, emailing and archival purposes.

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 Burnout Paradise, developed by Criterion Games and published by Electronic Arts

Another year, another set of games to incite email warfare between MTV and Newsweek. Yes, Vs. Mode is back once again, after a brief hiatus which saw the principals take their battle to the pages of Slate. The subject of our newest Vs. Mode discussion with MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo (also featured on his blog Multiplayer) is Criterion Games' and Electronic Arts' racing game Burnout Paradise. In Round 1 of our exchange, Totilo explains why "It's complicated" is the best way to describe his relationship with the latest Burnout, while we describe how we fell hard, fast and almost completely without reservations in love with Criterion's refreshing new take on its aging franchise. Enjoy.

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To: N'Gai Croal
From: Stephen Totilo
Date: January 19, 2007
Re: And On My Fourth Try…

N'Gai

Happy new year. We meet again for a Vs. Mode and this time we are like two prizefighters embodying two conflicted ideologies--Burnout Paradise love vs. Burnout Paradise hate. We have already been publicly identified as bitter rivals regarding this game before the first punch has even been thrown.

For those not familiar with Burnout Paradise, we're talking about the new open-world PS3 and Xbox 360 racing game that ships this week from EA. It is designed to buck a bunch of conventions by eliminating menu screens and instead making each of the game's racing events accessible selectable only when the player drives to specific, event-specific intersections. The game is designed for online competition, but largely constructed for friends to drive through the same city and create events on the fly; you can't go to a Halo-style online lobby, find a match and then load right into it.

Over the last month, you have been identified as N'Gai Croal, champion of Paradise. You have been declared as someone who gets it by none other than head Burnout developer Alex Ward in a worldwide pre-Christmas address to Paradise demo fans and skeptics: "OMG The Crash Mode suXXors," Ward parroted his demo's critics as saying, before countering, "Hmm, again, none of you have played it yet. N'Gai Croal at Level Up seems to like it."

I am Stephen Totilo, enemy of Paradise, repeatedly referenced in episodes of the grand 1UpYours podcast because of the instant message I sent show host Garnett Lee in December:

I loved it at press events. got a review build yesterday and either they were hiding the flaws well or this game doesn't really come together in the first couple of hours. the races, so far, are all rally races (those compass points you love listing on 1upyours), and so they keep taking me away from the neighborhoods I like. I hope there are circuit races but I haven't found any yet. and the crash mode. it was great fun when Alex Ward showed it to me. but it seems way too easy to just keep it going and going. where's the strategy? what's the challenge?

So we are foes. Opposing forces, like Hillary and Barack. And I am ready to crush you.

Except…I'd like to tell you something first before we start swinging: Burnout Paradise makes a really good fourth impression. It makes a good first and second one, too. Just a bad third one. You need to factor this in.

My First Impression of Paradise: It's E3 2007, July, and Alex Ward is demonstrating the game in an airport hangar that has been converted into a showcase room for upcoming games. He hands me a PS3 controller and lets me race in the open world of Burnout Paraside. The game's graphics are great; the sense of speed is blistering. We argue--it's Alex, remember--about whether Burnout is essentially about crashing (so I say) or about speed (so he says). He impresses me with a description of the game's USB camera feature which will takes snapshots of anyone you're playing the game with at the moment you bump them into a wreck. And he lets me activate Showtime, the new crash mode that loosens the gravity under my car's chassis and lets me flip through traffic to rack up damage. Some say it's like a car-based Katamari Damacy. The more apt metaphor may be SSX meets Mercenaries. It's a tumble of destruction. I love it. Paradise gets my vote as best racing game of E3.

My Second Impression of "Paradise: EA interrupts my busy November with a New York City hotel demo session for early 2008 titles. Company product manager Derek Anderson sits me down in front of a PS3 running Burnout and lets me drive through more of the game's city. The photo feature is now enabled, and we put it to good humiliating use against the people playing the game on another set-up three feet away from us. The game is fun, though trouble does brew. Derek shows me the Marked Man events, which we trigger by screeching tires at an intersection. He explains that enemy cars will now be in hot pursuit, trying to thrash my car into scrap before I reach an indicated end point. I make a few sharp turns in Paradise City and immediately lose the cars. Part of the open-world Paradise philosophy is that you can take any route you can imagine to reach a prescribed goal. But this seems too easy. I've outfoxed the artificial intelligence in seconds. Derek says this doesn’t usually happen. I'm willing to consider it a fluke. I leave feeling pretty good about the game.

My Third Impression of Paradise: EA sends me a review build in December. I play it in my PlayStation 3. My wife and I love Burnout 3: Takedown, me for the racing, she for the crashes. I drive through a few intersection-triggered events in my first sitting, winning enough of them to unlock the crash mode so that I can let me wife give it a try. But I give crash--Showtime--a go before her and it all falls apart. It seems too easy. I tumble my car farther and farther down a road, causing massive property damage and waiting for the mode to get hard. Surely there must a time limit I'm going to have trouble with or a score threshold I can't easily meet. Not really. It's easy. It reminds me of how Lumines got on the PSP, too easy for too long before any challenge emerged. This is happening in my first un-supervised session. I want out of Showtime mode and put the controller down so that my car goes still and, at last, the mode does time out. This seems wrong, even broken.

I try a few more races, but grow weary, as I later note in IM to Garnett, that the races keep sending me away from the places I want to be, from the exciting, bustling downtown in the east to the hilly winding roads of Paradise City's west side that I don't enjoy as much. The game feels too open. And it's got me worried. Is this what happens when text menus are turned into virtual-world navigation, when you have to move a car or a character to get to the next thing, instead of just highlighting a line of text? Does this mean PlayStation 3's Home virtual world social space is going to feel just as wrong when compared to the text menu interfaces of Facebook and Xbox Live? I'm getting into a panic. At some point I call and tell you this and you remind me that I'm the guy who calls for radical innovation in sequels instead of more of the same. I don't appreciate the rhetorical checkmate, but you get me thinking. I am bummed out.

My Fourth Impression of Paradise: It's early January and EA has sent me a boxed copy of the finished game and I pop that into my PS3 to start all over again. This time I ignore the intersection-triggered racing events. I don't get in a rush to unlock Showtime mode. I just drive around and smash into things. I do that thing that is supposed to be the most important thing in any video game: I just play. I drive off cliffs and boost through billboards. I careen up the ironwork of an arched bridge. I smash other cars off the road and burn black circles into pavement with my tires. OK, then I race. Just enough to unlock Showtime and to get reminded about the online features. No one in the world is playing the game online at the same time I am, so I don't get to invite anyone in or join anyone in their version of the city. But I do turn on the score indicators which denote the fastest driving time and most damage caused on whatever street I'm on at the moment. A lot of the streets don't have records yet. So, to steal a line I used last week, I make like Neil Armstrong setting the long jump record on the moon. I make a lot of giant leaps for mankind in Paradise City. I realize I'm enjoying my favorite type of multiplayer gaming--asynchronous competition. While everyone else is sleeping, I'm trouncing their records. At least that's what I tell myself. I keep ignoring the races. I'm having too much fun. And then I listen to 1UpYours and hear myself being touted as the poster child of Paradise hate. Oh, what they don't know…

So, before we start swinging, N'Gai, I just want you to know that I think I'm on your side now. I still think Showtime mode should have been more hemmed in--damage should only be calculated for a given street while you're still on or above that street, not when you've tumbled three boulevards away. But, if anything, Burnout Paradise has challenged some of the traditionalism I had and turned me to the other side. I'm a convert.

N'Gai, how about you? Have you ever had this kind of trouble appreciating a game before? Have you done any flip-flopping of your own? I know you've already said the game is "open world racing done right"; you still think that? Surely you've spotted some flaws….

-Stephen

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To: Stephen Totilo
Fr: N'Gai Croal
Date: January 27, 2007
Re: Open World, Closed Minds

Stephen,

You've written 1600 words that basically amount to, "N'Gai was right." If you had just started with that premise, you could have saved yourself a lot of time. Try to keep that in mind for future Vs. Modes.

When I'm previewing a game--whether it's hands-off or hands-on--there are two questions I generally ask myself: Is this going to be interesting to write about, and am I personally going to have fun playing this game? For some journalists, those might be one and the same, but I've often found that not true. Will Wright's games, for instance, like The Sims and Spore, are always fascinating to write about, but I have little to no interest in playing them. On the other hand, I haven't been terribly interested in writing about Bizarre Creations and Sega's The Club, the just-released, way-too-limited demo got my pulse quickening in a way that I didn't expect, and I can't wait to get my hands on a review build. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: we "see" games with our hands, and my hands tend to prefer action to reflection.

There are some franchises that are sufficiently known quantities that I don't feel the need to spend much time previewing them; I'd rather wait until a final or near-final game is available so that I can truly get a sense of whether or not I like the newest installment. Burnout Paradise fell into that category. I chatted with Alex about the game last February during the D.I.C.E. conference in Las Vegas; I played it at EA's pre-E3 event last June; I discussed it with Alex some more over dinner during E3; and I played it one more time at that EA media preview event in November. And since I saw nothing at those events that worried me--it looked great and drove fast--I didn't feel the need to focus on it heavily, from a quality assessment point of view. Instead, I could wait for EA to send me the review code and enjoy it (or not) at my own leisure.

I very much enjoyed the review disc that EA sent us in December, but I also knew that it would piss off some longtime fans of the franchise. That's why I wrote in my preview:

As excited as we are about the game, we suspect that the Burnout Paradise will nevertheless be somewhat polarizing. Traditionalists may find it difficult to accept the go-anywhere, do-anything freedom which has replaced the event-by-event structure that typifies the majority of racing games; it certainly took us a good half-hour or so before we could finally let go of what had been and open ourselves up to what could be.

So said, so done: many a Burnout aficionado was freaking out after playing the demo that Criterion and EA posted on Xbox Live Marketplace and Playstation Network. That's why it's sort of funny seeing the majority of the GAF-ers who were outraged by Alex's impassioned defense of his game singing an entirely different tune now that they've been able to get their hands on it. I guess you can identify with them, eh?

I dropped Alex a line immediately after my first play session with the review code to tell him how much I'd liked it; his reply was my first inkling that he and the team were extremely anxious about what kind of reception it would get. Then again, I'd already drunk the Kool-Aid, at least when it comes to Criterion's publicly stated development philosophy, which is that they deliberately introduce significant changes when they're making sequels. As Alex has said to me more than once, if someone wants to play Burnout, Burnout 2: Point of Impact, Burnout: Takedown or Burnout Revenge, they should take them out of their collections and play them. It's an admirable philosophy--and an extremely risky one, which no doubt gave a nice case of heartburn to the bean counters at EA.

It would have been so tempting for Criterion to have made the open world optional and layered a structured event system on top of the game as it exists today. Everyone wins, right? Especially since I'm a fan of developers providing players with as many options as possible so that we can customize the experience to be exactly what we want it to be. At the same time, I can't help feeling that we've all benefited from Alex and his team fully committing to making Burnout Paradise an open world racing title. They've embraced it in ways large, small and highly instructive for anyone who follows in their footsteps. Driving through gas stations to replenish your boost; through auto repair shops to fix your car; and through junkyards to switch vehicles. Taking out cars to add them to your collection. Anywhere, anytime Showtime mode for your destructive delight. Having three different burnout systems--Stunt, Speed and Aggression--which both harkens back to Burnouts past and lets players drive the way they want to drive.

I don't like everything about the game, though. Specifically, the absence of closed-off circuit races is a bummer. I'm terrible at navigating the point-to-point races on open roads, so both Race and Marked Man events are more of a pain than I'd like. So when I'm not casually tearing through Paradise City, near missing, crashing and Showtiming my way through its streets, I break up the Sunday driving with Road Rage and Stunt Run events. In other words, I've been playing Burnout Paradise as more of a laid back, drop in-and-drop out kind of game rather than dedicating myself to completing as many of the events as possible. For someone who's always been more casual than hardcore in his approach to racing games, this has proven to be the perfect structure for a not-quite-perfect game; an Xbox Live Arcade or Playstation Network title on steroids. If only I could store it on my PS3's hard drive….

So in the final analysis, when a studio is as good as Criterion has proven itself to be, I wholeheartedly support a radical approach to sequel development. I suppose you would have preferred that Criterion stopped making these games after Burnout: Takedown, since you subscribe to the theory that once a title has been perfected, once you have achieved gaming "satisfaction," a sequel isn't necessary. Not me. I subscribe to the theory that it is a developer's job to make all of its games essential, whether it's a new IP or the umpteenth sequel, and I don't presume that just because a developer manages to hit one out of the park, they've wrung everything out of their game mechanics, or even scratched the surface. I don't know whether Criterion will be able to top Burnout Paradise, but I do know that Alex and company aren't going to rest on their laurels or play it safe. It's an attitude that we all benefit from, and one that more developers should take to heart.

Cheers,

N.

Next: In which we dig a little deeper into Paradise City.

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 The Burnout Paradise city map

In Round 1 of our Vs. Mode exchange with MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo (also featured on his blog Multiplayer) on Burnout Paradise, he graciously admitted, after much to-ing and fro-ing about his assorted experiences with the game, that in the end we were right and he was wrong about the quality of the title. We thanked him for recognizing the wisdom of his elders, but in truth, we had long suspected that Burnout's radical reinvention would be the source of much consternation among gamers. In today's Round 2, Totilo risks the wrath of Nintendo fanboys the world over by daring to suggest that Burnout Paradise is a better Animal Crossing than, well, Animal Crossing itself. (We've never played it, so we'll just offer up a quick "no comment" and leave Totilo to stand alone in the line of fire.) For our part, we ran with his suggestion that the next big trend in games might lie in ditching the medium's historically goal-oriented focus, coining such sure-to-be-industry-standard terms as SOS, MMSS and SSAOWG in the process of exploring the power of online-connected open worlds. What does it all mean? Read on to find out.

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To: N'Gai Croal
Fr: Stephen Totilo
Date: January 29, 2008
Re: Burnout Meets Animal Crossing

N'Gai,

First I was the Anti-Burnout-Paradise guy. Now you've pegged me as the Anti-Sequel guy. Did you not sense my anguish I felt while writing my "Does Portal Need A Sequel" blog post? I am conflicted about some games' need to be sequel-ized. Burnout 3: Takedown was such a good game that I probably would have said the series didn't need a sequel. I did not like the subsequent Revenge and Dominator games as much. I was ready for Criterion Games to stop wasting their time and move on. Too much talent spent nudging a series forward. Time for a bold new something.

Then they finally did "deliberately introduce significant changes" for Burnout Paradise and, like the guy who told me the DS wouldn't be a hit, I had to eat crow. I guess they needed to nudge the series a few time before jolting it forward.

I'm only realizing now, though, that they've nudged it into a really interesting spot: the spot I long ago hopes would be taken up by Animal Crossing.

Ah, Animal Crossing. How has Nintendo been able to get away with that series? The promise of the premise is wonderful. It's a game you don't really play. You just hang out in it and has enough programmed into the world to keep you interested for at least a full year. It's designed to be enjoyed in group play, but unlike a massively multiplayer online game like World of Warcraft, you don't really have to play with other people. You can, but you don't have to. In fact, it's designed to be fun for its asynchronous multiplayer. You know, I go into the virtual town and do stuff. Then you go in later and see what I did. But have you ever tried playing an Animal Crossing game? Millions of people buy them, but don't they know? The controls are clunky; the interface, even in the DS one, is not intuitive. Everything I ever learned about from Miyamoto games regarding smooth controls that you don't even have to think about appear to be absent from the Animal Crossing series. How is that? Why is that? I don't know.

Maybe I don't need to worry about that anymore, though, because I think Burnout: Paradise could be my own Animal Crossing. Paradise City is huge. There are lots of things to do, mostly involving smashing thing--cars, gates, signs, etc. There's also just interesting terrain, good lines to race through--across bridges, through railroad tunnels, up and down big staircases, down the beach, in the hidden circuit race track (I found it!) in the southwest part of the city. And like Animal Crossing, I can welcome other people into my city or hop into there's and play together, mostly an improvised fashion. Better for my tastes, though, I can play against them without them, knocking off their high scores while they're asleep. As I said in my Round 1, I don't even care that much about the races in the game anymore. I just like driving around, wandering digitally. I guess it's the difference between going to a specific website or just surfing the web to alleviate boredom. We all know which of those activities is actually more fun.

Burnout: Paradise is, therefore, a fun quasi-private, quasi-public place I like hanging out in. I like loitering in it, passing the time. I think I like it for the same reason I'm also really enjoying the Wii's scuba simulator Endless Ocean. In that "game," I enjoy just going for a dive, checking out a school of fish or swimming through ancient ruins. Grabbing the tail of a whale shark and slowly getting pulled through the sea is thrill enough. I don't need a high score in that game. I don't need a goal. Apologies, to Mr. Ward, but I don't feel like I need to ever beat it.

Have I discovered the dream of virtual reality made true? Have I abandoned the virtues of goal-oriented games for a world of virtual wandering? I do like goal-oriented games, but as I get a taste of some of the games that just give me a fun digital place to be in, I'm finding myself quite satisfied. I remember feeling some of this back when I played Pilotwings 64 and just enjoyed jumping across the game's miniature United States in some spring-filled boots. I think this might be why lots of people like Grand Theft Auto, except I think what people who don't follow the story actually do in that game is make a goal for themselves--cat and mouse with the cops--and that's not the same as just wandering around.

Over the last week, none of the Paradise times and rankings scored by people on my PS3 friends list have appeared in my copy of the game. I'm not sure why that is, but it means that even the one goal I had for the game--to beat people's numbers while they were sleeping--has at least temporarily been excluded from the way I play the game. I haven't minded. I turn on my PS3, drive around, smash into a few things, race really fast, jump into an online game to crash into a few people, then log off. In 15 minutes I've been to another place and been quite satisfied.

N'Gai, have I discovered the next big thing? Is virtual reality here? Were we all snookered into thinking our games need goals and are we finally going to ignore those false carrots and just enjoy the trot? I need to know.

-Stephen

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To: Stephen Totilo
Fr: N'Gai Croal
Date: January 30, 2008
Re: Join The Club

Stephen,

You wrote of your newfound love of aimless driving over event completion, "I guess it's the difference between going to a specific website or just surfing the web to alleviate boredom. We all know which of those activities is actually more fun." To that, sir, I say TMI. Let's nip this talk of boredom alleviation through Web surfing in the bud before it gets out of, uh, hand.

Seriously, though, I think you are onto something here. Your description of Paradise City as a place where it's cool to loiter and hang out is spot on. There's also a subtle insight in your assessment of the game world as "quasi-private, quasi-public" place, as if it were a social network of some kind. But none of this would be possible, or at least as fully realized, if Burnout Paradise wasn't a connected open world. (Perhaps now the pitchfork-wielding peasants who had been massing at Criterion's gate can start to see why Alex Ward and his team built the game the way they did, prioritizing openness and seamlessness and doing away with the load times brought on by the discrete race-by-race structure that typifies most driving games.)

You mentioned the asynchronous multiplayer gameplay in Animal Crossing; the power of Paradise is that it can be synchronous and asynchronous, just like a social network, if I'm connected to Xbox Live or Playstation Network. I can set and break records even if none of my friends are online, but when they do log on, we can also compete head-to-head in Burnout's unified environment without sitting in a lobby or waiting for a race to load. I've been talking about the Facebook-ing of videogames for a few months now, and the idea of a unified gaming environment where you and your friends' records mark the world like a wall-to-wall conversation thanks to the power of connected consoles--this is yet another step in that direction.

This new-ish development may need its own acronym, like SOS (Shared Open Spaces), MMSS (Minimally Multiplayer Sandbox Simulators) or SSAOWG (Simultaneously Synchronous and Asynchronous Open World Games). Regardless of what it's called, developers must start explicitly thinking about this when they're designing their games. It's particularly important for teams working on open worlds. When you're building a large, unified play space, you're going to want to get the most gameplay per square inch that you possibly can out of it. That's part of the thinking behind collecting packages and going on taxi missions and vigilante missions in Grand Theft Auto.

And this is where I would disagree with you that these games are freeing us from goal-oriented gameplay, because what we're actually witnessing here is a proliferation of goals. In Burnout Paradise I can "collect" broken billboards, shattered barriers and hidden jumps. I can score newer, better cars. I can beat my friends' records. I can beat them head-to-head. I can accumulate Achievements. True, I can also opt out of every single goal and simply drive around the city. But the breadth of goals means that players can now have explicitly different experiences with the same game and tailor those experiences to the kind of entertainment they're looking for. They can grind out every last goal to beat the game, reject the notion of accomplishment entirely, or find the path that best suits them.

In our Phantom Hourglass edition of Vs. Mode, I suggested that density of gameplay could replace scope of gameplay as a developer's primary objective. Look at what Bungie did with Halo 3: campaign, co-op, multiplayer, Forge, skulls, photo mode and Saved Films. Little Big Planet is doing the same thing, with everything from level editing to puppeteering. I've been spending a lot of time over the past week playing Bizarre Creations and Sega's The Club--an unholy marriage of the thrill of a third-person shooter with the urgency of a racing game--first via the recently released Xbox Live Marketplace/Playstation Network demo and then with the actual review code. The meat of the game could be said to be its Tournament mode--it's the equivalent of the story mode in a fighting game--where you compete in six to seven events per location to become the titular Club's best killer. But based on my initial experience with the highly limited demo, which only lets players try a couple of event modes rather than an actual tournament, I now know that I'll be spending the bulk of my time going over individual maps, memorizing the patterns of the enemies and the placement of pickups in order to keep improving my scores. The tournament, for me, is just a means to an end: unlocking events and locations so that I can play them at my leisure. Because where The Club really shines is not in the overall progression through it's barely-there story and beating the game, but rather the painstaking mastery of its fast-paced levels.

I wonder though, if die hard, old school, goal-oriented players will wag their fingers at gaming delinquents like ourselves who reject the idea that winning isn't everything, but the only thing, for whom beating the game--or other people--is their entire raison de jeu. As I become increasingly hardcasual in my gaming tastes, I need games to stop boxing me into one way to have fun, one way to progress, one way to entertain myself. I don't want the proclivities of 12-24-year-old males, who have unlimited amounts of time to grind through a developer's set path, to prevent me from having a good time. As Brad Pitt said of Project Mayhem in "Fight Club," "You decide your level of involvement." (Would this be Vs. Mode without a "Fight Club" or Metal Gear Solid reference? I think not.) The more developers that follow in Criterion's footsteps, the more teams that choose to achieve their hours of gameplay by expanding their games along the twin axes of density and variety to accommodate a wider range of gaming desires rather than along the narrow path that satisfies the same old hardcore joypad-twiddler, the more fun I'll be having.

In fact, doesn't this tie into one of your other pet theories: that the secret to games that have truly succeeded with mainstream audiences--Tetris, Grand Theft Auto III, Halo, Guitar Hero--is that they can be played casually? I've disagreed with you pretty vehemently on this in the past, because it's always felt like something's missing from your axiom, as though hardcore videogame mechanics are somehow a barrier to success. Perhaps the correct Grand Unified Theory is that the breakthrough games of the future will no longer reward only a narrow range of play styles. Instead, they'll explicitly support a variety of play patterns, each of which could be measured by an individual player's skill; the intensity, frequency and duration of their play sessions; and the nature of the experience that the player is looking for, be it challenge, stimulation, competition, relaxation, exploration, entertainment. Forget the One Console Future--I'm talking about the One Game Future, the Everlasting Gobstopper of interactive entertainment.

Are you with me?

Cheers,

N.

Next: In which the concept of the hardcasual gamer gets a thorough examination.

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In Round 2 of our Vs. Mode exchange with MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo (also featured on his blog Multiplayer) on Burnout Paradise, Totilo bravely challenged Nintendo fan orthodoxy to assert that Burnout Paradise had--apologies to Alex Ward for our terminology--beaten Animal Crossing at its own asynchronous multiplayer game. We took that ball and ran with it, inventing on the fly such acronyms as SOS (Shared Open Spaces), MMSS (Minimally Multiplayer Sandbox Simulators) or SSAOWG (Simultaneously Synchronous and Asynchronous Open World Games) to describe the genius of Paradise. In today's Final Round, Totilo challenges our distortion of one of his pet theories, then partially smacks down our idea that Burnout Paradise could or should lead to a One Game Future; we concede the point on satirical grounds, but issue a full-throated defense of our belief that Criterion's racer represents a design approach best described as the Everlasting Gobstopper of Interactive Entertainment. And if you have no idea what the heck any of this means, just read this post and let us enlighten you.

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To: N'Gai Croal
Fr: Stephen Totilo
Date: January 31, 2008
Re: It All Comes Together…

N'Gai,

A "One Game Future," huh? The "Everlasting Gobstopper of Interactive Entertainment." You think that Burnout Paradise puts us on track for that? Because if people enjoy a playground kind of game in which players make the rules of how they want to play… then suddenly one game can be many games in one?

I see where you're going. Who needs Mario Tennis, Mario Golf, and Mario Kart, as separate games when you could just have them in one grand Super Mario World? (Nuts, that name is taken...how about Super Mario Playground? No? Super Mario Kingdom? Like that?). We've all been playing as Mario in so many different games already. Why not just unify his experiences into one persistent experience, sold piecemeal, if need be, but all connected to a grand quilt of a game. Or maybe theme park is a better metaphor. Nintendo's Mii characters, which can appear in multiple games, seem to support this concept. There's also a whiff of it emanating from Sony's Home.

But when I put it like I just did above, I kind of hate it.

You did acknowledge that you were contorting my original theory. I'd like to re-iterate it, so that we can build off it or contort it again. My big idea, which you've never agreed with before, is that the only games to cross over to a mainstream audience and become cultural phenomenon are the ones that were made to be played--or could be played--in satisfying short periods of time. You could knock through a game of Pac-Man or get a thrill causing mayhem in GTA 3 in five minutes flat. You can feel like you've actually experienced the essence of Tetris, Wii Sports and Guitar Hero in just as short a span--which isn't to say you won't get hooked for much longer. But that's why I don't think Final Fantasy, as popular as it is, has ever crossed over to the point where it gets mentioned on CNN when a new one comes out. It's why I think, while Zelda games are beloved, they do not matter to the world the way Mario games do. Almost all of Mario's adventures can be fun and satisfying in short bursts, which gives them a crossover appeal that can attract the attention of people who only play games in that casual way.

What you've praised about the game-like aspects of Facebook and that we've both enjoyed in Burnout: Paradise is that they are two types of virtual worlds in which bursts of interesting things can and often do happen. They are not, in and of themselves, casual games. In fact, they are quite expansive things. But little bursts of fun pop up in them frequently. Some of them bubble up from the system, placed in my path for me to stumble on. Some are triggered by other people using the platform. And some are instigated by ourselves. The bursts of enjoyment are there, occurring in discrete, definable moments (a new Burnout Showtime run I decide to take down 9th Street in order to break someone else's record; a super-poke I get on Facebook that needs retribution; etc). But the overall experience for me in Facebook and in Burnout, is, like I said in my last letter, one of just hanging out, for the most part enjoying the serendipity of fun happening rather than either chasing it down or being funneled down a particular defined path of fun. I imagine this is how some people experience World of Warcraft.

So what if more games were stitched together like this? What if all things driving could exist in Paradise City, so that realistic driving sims and arcade racers and Twisted Metal variations and Pursuit Force sequels and all sorts of other road-bound gameplay could all be played on those streets, depending on what a player going into Paradise City felt like doing?

I'm torn. On the one hand it seems fun. On the other, it seems like it's antithetical to artful game creation. It could be cool for a game console to be a single holodeck of fun, one that blurred distinctions between starting one game and then going to the other. But I can't see Geometry Wars and Portal sharing that same theme park in any way that improves their current status as two separate games. Would we really want all driving games to be mods of a single driving engine? All first-person shooters to be a transformation of the same tool set to suit the experience you want to have at the flick of a game-changing, scenery-transforming button? (Is this where Unreal Engine 4 would bring us?)

You propose an intriguing future I'd like to sample but I'm not sure I want to be the new status quo. All games together as one....Interesting. For now, I'm voting "no."

But ask me again when Little Big Planet comes out.

-Stephen

P.S. Was I supposed to be writing about Burnout: Paradise more? Sorry. I'm still reeling from the scores the Criterion guys are now posting on the leaderboard. I can't keep up! I'm definitely going to enjoy just being a Sunday driver in this one. Leave the fierce competition to the pros.

***

To: Stephen Totilo
Fr: N'Gai Croal
Date: February 1, 2008
Re: Little Big Burnout? Or World of Burnout?

Stephen,

With the Super Bowl just around the corner, it's somewhat fitting that you fell for my Statue of Liberty play. There were actually two separate ideas that I threw into the teeth of your defense as time was expiring--the One Game Future and the Everlasting Gobstopper of Interactive Entertainment. You chose to tackle the frivolous one rather than the one that was more profound, giving me a clear path to the goal line and another Vs. Mode victory. Consider this post the literary equivalent of me high-stepping my way to the end zone.

The One Console Future is a deceptively logical but wildly improbably idea that, like a siren's song, seduces otherwise savvy people--Silicon Knights' Denis Dyack, Electronic Arts' Gerhard Florin and Eat Sleep Play's David Jaffe among them--into throwing themselves against the jagged rocks of reality. This, even though they know, or ought to, that the two best examples of what a One Console Future would look like are the 3DO (which flopped) and Windows PCs (which is seeing several of its biggest franchises sell orders of magnitude more units on consoles).

As for Jaffe's assertion that publishers might lead the charge for this, I'll set aside the cat-herding nightmarishness of that theoretical consortium and point out the following. First, the folks I've spoken with at EA have always said that their biggest fear is that there would be only one console, because the last manufacturer standing would be free to jack up the royalties. Second, as long as the successful of a console is predicated on charging publishers' royalties to offset the cost of R&D hardware subsidies, someone is going to have to put their skin in the game and take on that risk, and I guarantee you that third party publishers have no interest in doing so. So consider my One Game Future suggestion a modest proposal satirizing this One Console Future that simply refuses to die.

The Everlasting Gobstopper of Interactive Entertainment, however, is the logical outgrowth of the dialogue we've been having in this Vs. Mode exchange. The idea isn't that Burnout Paradise morphs into Gran Turismo or MotorStorm, but rather that it maintains and expands its support for multiple styles of play without ever losing the essence of what makes it Burnout. A number of gamers, including myself, are sad that Criterion didn't include circuit races and Aftertouch. Some might also miss the police cars from previous editions. All of this is stuff that Criterion could bring back as downloadable content, overlaid on the existing world of Paradise City.

You wrote a post earlier today about Halo 3 and its content expanding features like Forge and Arcade scoring. What if Criterion and EA not only released a downloadable file establishing circuit races, but also let you create your own circuit races simply by driving through the city, automatically blocking off the surrounding streets, as if two "Tron" lightcycles were tearing side-by-side through Paradise City? What if Aftertouch and Pursuit were one of many modes that you could turn or off, like the game-modifying skulls in Halo 3? What if Criterion added a car customization mode, letting you swap out not only Boost Types, but also paint jobs and decals--or design them yourself, as in Rock Band? What if they--gasp--brought back classic Crash Mode? That's what I mean by the Everlasting Gobstopper approach to game design.

What's interesting about this is that even as it's the logical extension of the open world approach Alex Ward and Criterion have created, it directly contravenes their precise, deliberate reinvention of the game, which I praised earlier and still love. They chose to leave some things out and replace certain beloved elements with others in the on-disc game, and that was the right decision. But just as Alex has asked us to open our minds about what Burnout can be, we have the right to ask him to open his mind about going back to the future and enabling Paradise City to evolve, via downloadable content, into everything that Burnout has previously been. Because today's high-end consoles make this possible. The bean counters I mentioned in Round 1 will be happy as well, because they can a) make more money via incremental sales, and b) dissuade people from selling the game back to GameStop because there's nearly infinite pleasure that can be derived from the core game and its add-ons.

Taken one step further, perhaps my One Game Future idea isn't simply satirical. It's not that Burnout becomes Gran Turismo or Need For Speed, but instead that it evolves into Little Big Burnout, or World of Burnout. Each disc following Paradise would contain a single, brand-new city, several new cars and Criterion's trademark reinventiveness (yeah, I made that word up) to provide several new race types and modes. But the new city would also support all of the different elements from previous Burnouts. So if you love Burnout 1, you would effectively be able to play Burnout 1 race types on Burnout 6's streets.

In my vision, the disc serves as a vehicle for content that can be played the way Criterion wants us to play it, but we can subsequently transform it into the Burnout we want it to be. Eventually, we fans would have multiple Burnout cities--ideally, we'd be able to store them on our console of choice's hard drive--multiple race types, event types, vehicles and more to choose from for an evening's entertainment. Talk about gameplay per square inch; if this were to get any denser, we'd be talking about the Black Hole of Interactivity, swallowing up every spare second of our time.

There is a risk here that in supporting all of this customization, the Burnout community will devolve into a collection of hyper-niches, like people who only like to drag race along Angus Wharf in Hunter Mesquite vehicles at dusk. But I think that a lot of the biggest AAA franchises will be headed in this direction, and Burnout Paradise is an important step along the way.

Thanks for the conversation; apologies for the end zone celebration, and I'm looking forward to next month's debate, which should be pata-pata-particularly interesting.

Cheers,

N'Gai