QUAKE 3: Twitchy, but is it IF???
Wednesday, we spent most of class playing QUAKE 3 (on one computer because, for some reason, we couldn’t get it loaded onto any of the others.) Although for some people this might seem like a dream day in class, I was not quite as impressed with the game as I thought I might be.
First problem: The game is CRAZY hard! I’m an old hand at DOOM and DARK FORCES so I thought I’d do ok at QUAKE, but I was wrong. I had the difficulty level set to medium (I don’t remember what the game called it, but it was the middle setting) and my first six games lasted about ten seconds each. I had to reset the difficulty to the easiest level just to be able to SEE my opponent.
Second problem: The game was extremely limited in the “game play” area. There were no puzzles to solve, no keys to find, no tasks that needed to be performed accept kill, kill, kill. You run around and you shoot at the bad guys. I think each level might have had one or two doors that you could go through, but the only GOAL throughout the game was to shoot. To me, this became rather tedious rather quickly.
Third problem: I did not see any STORY to this game. There may have been some kind of “back-story” included in the instruction booklet or on the box that the game came in, but I don’t see how knowing the motivations of the various characters that you are trying to murder would affect how you play this game. Any “set-up” story explaining how the characters came to be in this seek and kill situation is irrelevant to how you play the game.
QUAKE 3 was not an example of interactive fiction, either by Montfort’s definition or my own. The POKEMON games that my daughter plays on Gameboy have way more story, and the story is integral to the completion of the game. In order to solve some of the puzzles in the POKEMON games you must interview a number of characters, most of whom only give clues as to how to solve certain challenges and move on to new areas. Even the TOMB RAIDER games have specific things that the player must do to move on to new levels like finding keys, picking up treasures, activating machines, and locating exits. QUAKE 3, on the other hand, was limited to finding the bad guys and shooting them, multiple times.
Hopefully our next few gaming experiences have more “story” to them. Perhaps if we try playing a role-playing game or one of the newer interactive fiction works from the IF Archive we will get a better feel for what interactive fiction actually is.
First problem: The game is CRAZY hard! I’m an old hand at DOOM and DARK FORCES so I thought I’d do ok at QUAKE, but I was wrong. I had the difficulty level set to medium (I don’t remember what the game called it, but it was the middle setting) and my first six games lasted about ten seconds each. I had to reset the difficulty to the easiest level just to be able to SEE my opponent.
Second problem: The game was extremely limited in the “game play” area. There were no puzzles to solve, no keys to find, no tasks that needed to be performed accept kill, kill, kill. You run around and you shoot at the bad guys. I think each level might have had one or two doors that you could go through, but the only GOAL throughout the game was to shoot. To me, this became rather tedious rather quickly.
Third problem: I did not see any STORY to this game. There may have been some kind of “back-story” included in the instruction booklet or on the box that the game came in, but I don’t see how knowing the motivations of the various characters that you are trying to murder would affect how you play this game. Any “set-up” story explaining how the characters came to be in this seek and kill situation is irrelevant to how you play the game.
QUAKE 3 was not an example of interactive fiction, either by Montfort’s definition or my own. The POKEMON games that my daughter plays on Gameboy have way more story, and the story is integral to the completion of the game. In order to solve some of the puzzles in the POKEMON games you must interview a number of characters, most of whom only give clues as to how to solve certain challenges and move on to new areas. Even the TOMB RAIDER games have specific things that the player must do to move on to new levels like finding keys, picking up treasures, activating machines, and locating exits. QUAKE 3, on the other hand, was limited to finding the bad guys and shooting them, multiple times.
Hopefully our next few gaming experiences have more “story” to them. Perhaps if we try playing a role-playing game or one of the newer interactive fiction works from the IF Archive we will get a better feel for what interactive fiction actually is.
posted by Brave Raideen at 6:40 PM
1 Comments:
I definitely agree with you about Quake's lack of story line. I assumed that since I was new to the game, I must have missed the premise of the game by not playing the first two installments from the series (is this true?).
Perhaps that idea of forming a narrative yourself (much like interactors do when "reading" hypertext novels) can be applied to Quake. It's a stretch and I honestly don't know if that's even the point of the game. We click on words and read corresponding passages in hypertextual writing to find a story; in Quake, we click on the mouse button to kill--but what does that tell us once our opponent is dead? Absolutely nothing.
But I will say, being trash talked by a one-eyed monster is somewhat amusing.
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