Boobies, with blue feetI want to talk about two games today that probably no one else will compare directly. The only things they have in common are that they are both XBox 360 games, that I rented both from GameFly, and I played one immediately after the other. This, and expectations of the quality games, has strongly impacted how I feel about the games. And here, if there’s one thing we really care about, it’s about how we feel about things. There can be little doubt that games engender emotions in us, just as story does, which is what makes them both powerful to the human psyche.

There is another thing that we here at CotT like, and that’s boobies. Not just the bird kind, as depicted above, but the other, more sexual kind. Yeah, it’s probably a bit course to use that term, but it is the one we use (man and woman alike) about 90% of the time. We like them, and we’re not particularly ashamed about it. I don’t know where that puts us on the exploitation-of-women-feminism scale, but we never really grokked the exploitation-of-women-feminism thing either. I want to say that I’m not saying we don’t think it exists, just that we don’t fully understand it. We don’t see anything inherently wrong in including boobs in an adult game, but we also recognize that it doesn’t lend itself to high art. (One of our goals is to have high art and boobs merged into a single game.)

The ultimate thing is, we like boobs. With that in mind, I rented from GameFly the XBox 360 game Conan. For, honestly, no other reason that it had that whole saving the very-thankful-topless women thing in it. I knew better than to buy the game, my money is going to that, I just wanted to see, for honest, prurient interest. I expected to play the game for an hour, drop it right back in it’s GameFly envelop, and send it right on back. Especially coming off the undoubtedly better game, Assassin’s Creed.

I’m currently on my second play through. Creed went back to GameFly as soon as my first essay about it went up (an action I only mildly regret, after some discussions with Corvus).

Expectations played a large role in this. I was expecting something a bit more phenomenal from Assassin’s Creed. The story was excellent, except for the denouement. The gameplay was satisfactory, but not good enough. With Conan, I was expecting an hour of play (to the first boobies, which, frankly, came much earlier than that), with a less-than exciting God of War clone, and that’s exactly what I got. So, I kept Conan, which I started to understand near the end of the game, and am playing through it again. The boobies are now just window dressing, and the actual combat system, which seems to have clicked in my head, is interesting. Perhaps not as interesting as God of War, but I wasn’t (and still aren’t) expecting much more than that.

At the same time, the IGDA’s writer list was having a discussion about narrative in games, and the argument was made that gameplay is supreme over story, because without gameplay there’s no game. It was also put forth that good gameplay can overcome a bad narrative, but a good narrative can’t overcome bad gameplay. I disagree (and there were others on the list who showed examples of this).

In fact, I think this is part of what is going on with Assassin’s Creed and Conan.

As I tried to do what Gabe of Penny Arcade suggested, to play every mission in Creed and do it all, to grasp the full scope of the game. I felt like I was just crossing ticks off a list, with a small bit of achievement whoring, while advancing the plot to see what happened.

It was kind of like a novel with two character threads: one you could care less about, and one which is vitally interesting, dragging you through the lame chapters until you got to the good parts. And like is often the case in novels like that — it’s the main character (ie, the gameplay) which isn’t so interesting, and this other, minor character (here, the narrative) which keeps me going.

In Conan, I am achievement whoring, I’m doing what I can to parry attacks to get achievements, throw rocks and light things on fire, all the sorts of things that get me more achievement points. In Conan, the majority of the achievements are for mastering the combat, with few marking the path through the story, especially in terms of total points.  But it doesn’t feel like the game has failed me — it never had pretensions of high art.  Today, it is a fun game, tomorrow it will be replaced by the next IP-laded God of War style game, and it, along with countless other games, will be forgotten.

And I’ll be playing the Assassin’s Creed sequel.

Still, it would be nice if the gameplay and narrative elements could come closer together, that I could feel like playing Creed again to challenge myself a bit more. But the gameplay wasn’t there, and the story left me cold.   Conan succees by being lowbrow, and while not being exceptional, it is never boring, and rarely annoying.  (Just to be fair, Assassin’s Creed was never annoying in that game glitchy, twitchy kind of way that Conan occasionally is when jumping or blocking doesn’t quite work.)

So, what about that narrative vs gameplay argument (or narratology vs ludology as the game academics would have us say)?  In this case, gameplay is winning out.  But the truth is, I’m not buying either of these games. Both have to be there to upgrade something from rental to ownership.  For us that’s Half Life’s Orange Box, or Mass Effect (which our roommate is on his third or fourth playthrough), or Oblivion.  In all these games the gameplay and narrative work together a bit better, giving a sense of fun and pleasure throughout.

So we own them.  And that seems like the ultimate “win” for the game companies involved.