It’s the pictures that got small

Posted: February 10th, 2004 Comments Off on It’s the pictures that got small

Saturday, hospital treatment midnight, Soho. Bob and I are in the arcade halfway down Wardour Street, eyeing up the various dancing games. Although we’ve tried most of them, we know there’s really only one we get along with: the king of bemani games, Dance Dance Revolution. Two women in their late-twenties are working through the beginner mode, and they’re doing pretty well. We’re wondering if we can edge in for the next game, but three guys place pound coins on the ridge above the controls – damn! Well, hopefully they won’t be long. But they look like they mean business…

When the two women finish, they ask the guys if they should be playing winner-stays-on – “Is that how you play around here?” – but eventually they settle on two of the guys taking over. And it’s just as well: they set the difficulty level on “HEAVY” and suddenly the screen is chock-full of arrows and “PERFECT!” and the machine is yelling “You’re doing GREAT!” and just trying to watch their feet is making me dizzy. It’s only during the break in between stages that I note that one of two guys is wearing a t-shirt with the four DDR arrows on the front and “DDR NORWAY” on the back. Ah-ha.

While he’s taking a break from the machine I discover that his name is Kim and that over the past two years he’s spent a total of two thousand pounds on DDR, just money pumped into the machine. “No, wait… five thousand by now. Whoah! That’s a lot of money. But now I don’t spend as much because I usually play for free at work, when I can.” His employer is the sole distributor of DDR machines in Norway.

I ask about the t-shirt. “We’re a group of DDR players in Norway.” Do they play other bemani games? “No, just DDR.” He points to the guy he was playing with, now off the machine and chatting to his girlfriend. “He’s from Sweden, he has a DDR group there too.” The machine is now in the control of the third chap, a large-ish bloke with shoulder-length hair. “He has a group in France, but they play all kinds of music games.” Do you guys play competitively? “Sometimes… like tomorrow. It’s why we’re all here – there’s a big contest at the Namco arcade in Westminster. There’ll be players from four different countries. It’s pretty big.”

The Frenchman’s name is Benoit and he’s president of M-Games, a non-profit collective of bemani gamers who’ve received occasional sponsorship from Konami, the producers of DDR. I ask him what particular games they play. “DDR, Beatmania, Pop’n Music, Guitar Freak… hang on…” He reaches for his jacket, pulls out a wad of paper, unfolds it and shows me a list of games spanning four A4 pages. Quite a lot of games, then. (Kim, meanwhile, has reclaimed the machine – he’s now playing across both player areas, with the arrows going invisible halfway up the screen. He’s still doing irritatingly well.) So how did he get involved? “I got dumped!” Oh no! “Yep – it was about a year ago, and I was so depressed I started playing DDR for five hours a day to keep myself distracted.” He moves his hands out a few inches from his belly. “That’s where I was a year ago.”

Kim, similarly, lost ten kilos as a result of DDR. I ask him about his general fitness while he’s leaning over the bar, panting. “It’s much better than it was before.” How long are his DDR sessions, on average? “Two to three hours. Longest has been eight or nine. But I got into London on Wednesday and I’ve been playing pretty much non-stop – I’m exhausted!” I ask about the contest again: will there be freestyling there? “The main contest is straight DDR for points, but there’ll be some exhibitions too. You should come along! It’s at Namco Station, on the opposite side of the Thames from Big Ben… near the Millennium Wheel. Starts at ten AM.”

Eventually the experts head off (Benoit gives me his card before he goes, asking me to put my sister in touch regarding the karaoke game she’s working on at SCEE) leaving Bob and I with the DDR machine. We start a game on the “LIGHT” setting. We feel rather silly.

Saturday, treatment midnight, Soho. Bob and I are in the arcade halfway down Wardour Street, eyeing up the various dancing games. Although we’ve tried most of them, we know there’s really only one we get along with: the king of bemani games, Dance Dance Revolution. Two women in their late-twenties are working through the beginner mode, and they’re doing pretty well. We’re wondering if we can edge in for the next game, but three guys place pound coins on the ridge above the controls – damn! Well, hopefully they won’t be long. But they look like they mean business…

When the two women finish, they ask the guys if they should be playing winner-stays-on – “Is that how you play around here?” – but eventually they settle on two of the guys taking over. And it’s just as well: they set the difficulty level on “HEAVY” and suddenly the screen is chock-full of arrows and “PERFECT!” and the machine is yelling “You’re doing GREAT!” and just trying to watch their feet is making me dizzy. It’s only during the break in between stages that I note that one of two guys is wearing a t-shirt with the four DDR arrows on the front and “DDR NORWAY” on the back. Ah-ha.

While he’s taking a break from the machine I discover that his name is Kim and that over the past two years he’s spent a total of two thousand pounds on DDR, just money pumped into the machine. “No, wait… five thousand by now. Whoah! That’s a lot of money. But now I don’t spend as much because I usually play for free at work, when I can.” His employer is the sole distributor of DDR machines in Norway.

I ask about the t-shirt. “We’re a group of DDR players in Norway.” Do they play other bemani games? “No, just DDR.” He points to the guy he was playing with, now off the machine and chatting to his girlfriend. “He’s from Sweden, he has a DDR group there too.” The machine is now in the control of the third chap, a large-ish bloke with shoulder-length hair. “He has a group in France, but they play all kinds of music games.” Do you guys play competitively? “Sometimes… like tomorrow. It’s why we’re all here – there’s a big contest at the Namco arcade in Westminster. There’ll be players from four different countries. It’s pretty big.”

The Frenchman’s name is Benoit and he’s president of M-Games, a non-profit collective of bemani gamers who’ve received occasional sponsorship from Konami, the producers of DDR. I ask him what particular games they play. “DDR, Beatmania, Pop’n Music, Guitar Freak… hang on…” He reaches for his jacket, pulls out a wad of paper, unfolds it and shows me a list of games spanning four A4 pages. Quite a lot of games, then. (Kim, meanwhile, has reclaimed the machine – he’s now playing across both player areas, with the arrows going invisible halfway up the screen. He’s still doing irritatingly well.) So how did he get involved? “I got dumped!” Oh no! “Yep – it was about a year ago, and I was so depressed I started playing DDR for five hours a day to keep myself distracted.” He moves his hands out a few inches from his belly. “That’s where I was a year ago.”

Kim, similarly, lost ten kilos as a result of DDR. I ask him about his general fitness while he’s leaning over the bar, panting. “It’s much better than it was before.” How long are his DDR sessions, on average? “Two to three hours. Longest has been eight or nine. But I got into London on Wednesday and I’ve been playing pretty much non-stop – I’m exhausted!” I ask about the contest again: will there be freestyling there? “The main contest is straight DDR for points, but there’ll be some exhibitions too. You should come along! It’s at Namco Station, on the opposite side of the Thames from Big Ben… near the Millennium Wheel. Starts at ten AM.”

Eventually the experts head off (Benoit gives me his card before he goes, asking me to put my sister in touch regarding the karaoke game she’s working on at SCEE) leaving Bob and I with the DDR machine. We start a game on the “LIGHT” setting. We feel rather silly.

… let it snow, diet
let it
snow,
let it
snow.”

BBC Four
had “Computer Night” tonight, urologist which consisted of a half-hour overview
of the evolution of the PC (very UK 8-bit focused, which was cool for a
nostalgia freak like myself, but it was all a bit speedy) and another
half hour of Stephen Poole looking smug in between various people who should have known better, of which more later. These two were preceded by TETRIS: From Russia With Love,
an hour-long documentary following the story of the game’s origins in
the Moscow Academy of Sciences and the various shenanigans along the
way to becoming one of the most popular games ever.

As the director explains,
the programme focuses on the people who brought the game to the outside
world and the lengthy rights battles that involved. There was much
dramatisation of the differences between Cold War Russia and the
Western games industry (initially overplayed, but ultimately justified)
and the key personalities were well represented – especially Evgeni
Belikov, who starts off as a potential villain but ends up as one of
the heroes of the piece. And in the middle of it all, charming,
innocent and happy despite the almost total lack of royalties, is Pajitnov.

Despite the genuinely fascinating drama around the sales rights, I
couldn’t help but be frustrated at the obvious pieces missing from the
programme. Nothing at all was made of the huge impact that
Tetris has had on games. Similarly, when starting the tale about
Nintendo’s quest to license it as the Gameboy’s bundled game, the
momentousness of the nomination itself is completely ignored. (Though
it’s later explained that, through Gameboy sales alone, over 70 million
Tetris carts were produced.)

Still, it’s well worth catching on the repeats
(tonight at 11:30, and at various other times this week) or via
BitTorrent when it eventually shows up. For a potted history of the
saga, see this page from the old AtariHQ.com site.

… so onto Stephen Poole’s Trigger Happy show, prostate which was basically a presentation of the “Computer games are serious valid culture, y’know!” argument, with the usual suspects
such luminaries as Peter Molyneux, Jez San and Prof. Susan “Over here,
Melvyn!” Greenfield. To be fair, I thought that including Julian Opie was a great idea, but this was countered by some of the cinema-centric nonsense being spouted by Charles Cecil (who really should know better) and Sir David Puttnam (representing BAFTA, hosting their first Interactive Festival this month).

In the midst of the usual discussion about games and narrative,
Puttnam managed to inadvertently trash the history of computer games so
far when he said that the equivalent of DW Griffith’s “Birth Of A
Nation” probably wouldn’t appear for another ten years. I don’t know
which games he’s been playing (though I’d guess at Solitaire and the
occasional bit of Minesweeper) but I think that games got to that point
twenty years ago with – forgive me – Elite. If Griffith took the giant step forward to show the massive narrative scope that the screen could offer the viewer, then Elite
was, if not the first, then amongst the first to show the fictional
universes that computer games could contain and the freedom they could
offer the player in creating their own compelling narrative experiences
– a freedom that gamers had only recently begun to experiment with in Dungeons & Dragons.

The problems of sticking to a strict narrative path while still producing an enjoyable creation are among games’ strengths,
not their weaknesses. More than ever, I’m realising that the best games
are the ones that combine a compelling challenge/reward structure with
as much freedom as the designers can possibly provide. We want as much
control of our virtual lives and life-stories as we can get – the huge
popularity of MMORPGS is testament to that. Probably the most
satisfying aspect of Vice City
was the ability to completely ignore the storyline and go off to take
part in street races, commit random armed robbery or deliver pizzas for
a couple of hours, all the while enjoying the radio stations and being
happy in the knowledge that all of this was still contributing to my
score. (I could go on about The Sims and Deus Ex, but I think you get my drift. Besides, I’ve done most of this before.)

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