Endless Ocean (Wii)

I've recently had a look at Endless Ocean on the Wii, and it's proved to be an interesting change. First off, it manages to put you into some sort of trance like state by making you feel like you could actually be underwater (whilst somehow managing to keep dry). The graphics are obviously key to this experience (and perhaps playing it on a 32inch TV) but I think the music is quite important too. Tycho from Penny Arcade puts it well when he writes: "The rhythm of the scuba gear itself is sufficiently hypnotic, but they offer up musical selections in parallel: there is a warbling sea witch in this game whose voice can drown men. When we dive, I believe we dive in search of her." As you progress in the game, you can unlock further similar tracks but you can also play music of your own from an SD card you can plug into the Wii. It is probably best to find something more chilled out to swim around too though as the game is so relaxed it might be a bit disconcerting to have Arctic Monkeys or something in the background.

It's also different because I'm not sure what the goal is. You seem to get to dive and swim around and poke fish, a lot. I've also managed to become a freelance photographer, get hold of an underwater pen, and make a dolphin my diving partner, who I have (very originally) called Ecco. This might sound busy, but it's not really. It's all the less stressful because there is no competition, no an enemy to fight, no point system as such or and there's not even a time limit. Of course there is a story line - I've been hired as some sort of researcher/diving guide to work on a boat with this lady called Catherine who can't swim and seems to have some sort of issue with her father (I caught her making apologies to him while staring out to sea), but it doesn't seem very important. At the end of the day I can choose whether to take people on tours or not and I seem to be able to decide where I want to go, with a few hints from Catherine about where might be interesting. There are also hints of legends about caves and the like but at the end of the day I can just sit on the deck and watch the sea.

Admittedly all this relaxing gets a little boring so it is quite nice to go on dives. You can catalog all the sea creatures you find by following them aroun and you seem to be able to find stuff out quicker if you feed, poke or stroke them. That's one of the ways you seem to progress in the game, by discovering new species. The other indicators are: adding more information to existing species, exploring new areas on the map, and feedback concerning you guided dives. For my last diving tour I got an A, I think because I actually managed to find the fish the client wanted to see. But it's still all very relaxed. There is the occasional moment of frustration though when waving the Wiimote doesn't quite get your avatar to do what you were expecting it to do. Plus, I'm not sure whether I've forgotten the controls for looking more closely at something and picking up objects, or if there are just some things I have to wait to be unlocked before I can do so.

You'd think I might have learnt a bit more about different kinds of life underwater but I'm not sure I have. I don't really read the information I gather, and very little of it seems to stick. That said, I never knew there was such a thing as a False Killer Whale but apparently there is. In fact, the information you get is rather like skimming through an article in wikipedia and then forgetting all about it. I'm not sure about this poking and stroking fish thing either. I mean, is that really the best strategy to use when faced with a species you've never encountered before? Especially when it looks like something that might want to bite or poison you. It seems impossible to die in this game as you don't even seem to be able to run out of oxygen. Not that I want to die, but it seems odd there is no element of risk at all. Maybe it's just a result of playing other games, but I can't help expecting something bad to happen at some point.

I find it interesting that I care about things like the feedback I got from a dive, and how many creatures I've found, but that I don't really care about what I've actually found out about them. I also don't care about Catherine's relationship with her father (for all I know she blames him for never teaching her to swim). I do think the game engages me emotionally, but only when I'm actually diving. So when I'm swimming underwater, the music is playing and there are pretty fish and coral to look, it feels good. It's a nice change from trying to kill all the baddies and trying to improve your performance all the time. Though you can get a bit of a shock bumping into a particularly ugly fish, or something large like a manatee. I don't think that feeling of being immersed under water is the same as experiencing of flow though, mainly because the game seems to lack any real sense of challenge. So, I doubt I'm going to be playing much more of it as I'm just not sure what I'm getting out of it, and trying to discover every single species doesn't seem enough to keep me playing on the off chance that something else will happen.

An awful lot of gameplay and a few thoughts

I've been playing quite of different games lately and have been struck by a couple of things. The first concerns the fact that I haven't actually gotten round to finishing any of them. Which links in quite nicely with Leigh Alexander's article on "Completion Anxiety Disoder" where she considers the reasons why people don't seem to end up completing many of the games they actually have. She covers lots of practical reasons like not having enough time, and games being too difficult/easy or not interesting enough and then ends up suggesting a further reason; that players sometimes just don't want the game to end. Now it's a pretty interesting article in itself, but when you think about it in terms of how this relates to the educational potential of games it raises a couple of interesting issues. I mean lets assume we're talking about good games here, the ones that do get the challenges right and manage to maintain our interest, she's still basically saying that even when the motivation to play is there, people don't actually want to finish what they started. This would mean an end to the game-play experience and so instead it appears better to just avoid playing. So, if we're thinking about games as learning environments, then doesn't that mean that those playing won't get the 'complete' learning experience? Maybe this is only an issue if you think about learning in terms of delivering content and achieving outcomes? Or maybe it's just an odd claim to make, especially when you think about comparing it to not finishing a book or a film. In those cases, the only times I don't are when I'm not enjoying the experience - if I really enjoy it then I usually end up reading/watching it again, rather than trying to avoid the ending all together.

The other thing I've been thinking about has to do with playing Guitar Hero III and how frustrated I got with it when trying to beat Slash in a guitar battle and I couldn't. It really pissed me off. Which didn't exaclty help me when trying to concentrate on getting the notes right, so after suppressing the somewhat rock star urge to smash the tv with the Les Paul controller, I turned if off. Don't get me wrong, I really did enjoy playing and still do - I think it's been a while since I've really felt that sort pure sensation of 'flow' - but only when I'm good at it. It made me think though about all the things I've been reading about learning and fun. I kind of realised that I'd forgotten that just because you enjoy learning something doesn't mean that it's easy. I suppose the point of the story is that I did go back and beat Slash, which felt good, and so I'm still playing it. But if I want to be really good at Guitar Hero, it looks like I might actually need to take the practice mode seriously (where you can practice the songs you unlock outside of career mode). I just can't help feeling that if I'm going to do that, then maybe I'd be better off picking up the rather dusty bass guitar I got a couple of years ago and practice on that instead so I can learn to actually play along to the all songs I've been enjoying in the game.

Trauma Centre: Second Opinion (Wii)

I borrowed Trauma Centre from the department, and was looking forward to trying it since it looked like it was really going to let you make the most of the Wii Remote. Plus, cutting up people and trying to stitch them up seemed like it should be fun. The game took a little while to get going since it was introducing the characters which seemed fair enough at the time. You play this sort of inept new doctor, who essentially depends on a more experienced (young, pretty, female – big surprise) nurse to guide you through your first couple of operations. This seemed to be a pretty good way to introduce you to the controls and sequences you have to go through, especially in my case as for some reason the dept has the German version of the game (its in English but the manual isn’t) so I had no idea what I was doing at first. I managed to kill my first patient straight away, by not realising I had to put the glass shards I tweezed out on a plate on the side of the screen and lowering my patients vitals pretty quick. The music definitely adds to the tension, as does the time limit and the fact the nurse keeps calling out “doctor!” – making think I’ve done something wrong when she is just telling me what I should do next.

So anyway, after my initial failure, I started to get the hang of it. The operations were fun, and I seemed to pick up what I needed to do without really realising it. This was something I noticed when I got a new nurse (also female, younger and possibly prettier but definitely less helpful) and had to figure out what I needed to do when on my own. Some of the tools were easier to use than others, for instance I quite liked the scalpel since you just had to wave the remote in a relatively straight line but had trouble with suturing as it took me a while to figure all I needed was a zig zag motion across the wound. There were some tasks though I had real problems with like using the defibrillators, and learning how to draw a star so I could activate my healing touch (more later on this). The game threw some medical terms at me, some of which may have been real and as you go on, some which were definitely not. But you didn’t seem to need much of this information to do the actual operations so I didn’t care too much.

I also didn’t really care too much about the narrative – in part at least because it was all scripted and I had no control over my character, who I didn’t really identify with, and because it all seemed a little silly. You have to play this inept doctor (even if you do get given an A at the end of all your operations), who goes on to discover he has the “healing touch” (an ability passed down from the ancient Greeks which allows you to slow down time during operations when you play Derek or helps increase a patients vitals when you play the Nozomi sequences) and is actually the only one who can defeat the GUILT virus. I laughed out loud when I first came across the GUILT virus, I thought for a minute it might be some horrible disease you get when your conscience has had enough but no apparently it stands for the Gangliated Utrophin Immuno Latency Toxin virus. And it looks like terrorists are to blame for it. Uh huh.

Trauma Centre is a fun game, and does utilise the Wii Remote and nun-chuck in pretty cool ways. It also manages to teach you how to use them without you having to think about it too much. The operations themselves are addictive; you did want to keep trying until you got the hang of a new tool/sequence (or until your patient didn’t die). You do want to get an A as opposed to C rating at the end of each one. Oh, and it helps you can change the difficulty rating at each operation. But the storyline didn’t really work for me. I started to lose interest and grew bored of having to click through seemingly endless storyboards (Which Will did mention when I borrowed it). I didn’t care about the characters, or the GUILT virus, I didn’t want to find out what was going to happen next. It all came across as a little ridiculous – surely we have enough diseases in the world without having to resort to made up terrorist ones – while it also treated issues such as suicide and euthanasia simplistically be resolving them in really cheesy ways. Any experiences of flow were definitely limited to the operation mode. Ultimately, it wasn’t emotionally engaging enough and I felt the story was getting in the way of me doing what I actually wanted to be doing.