Welcome to another Vs. Mode confrontation. In previous installments, Newsweek’s N’Gai Croal and I have debated “God of War II,” the “Halo 3” beta and the adults-only “Manhunt 2.”

Yes, yes, that last exchange was a bit lengthy.

So N’Gai and I thought we’d do something that’s really hard for us this time: be succinct.

Our topic, fittingly, is short-session gaming. Sound nebulous? We’re talking about all those downloadable games and quick handheld games that are occupying more and more of both of our gameplay time. We like the short stuff. He and I have battled it out on the “Super Stardust HD” leaderboards. (My top score dwarfs his, naturally). And we’ve both been hooked on short handheld games: he on the PSP version of “Gunpey,” me on the DS version of nirvana (AKA “Picross“).

So we decided to do a Vs. Mode on this stuff, as an attempt to figure out what’s great about the short games and what big games could learn from them. This one started tame — a little too tame for my taste. But before I could get too upset about that, I had N’Gai trashing my so-called Grand Unified Theory of Best-Selling Games and I accused him of using the old-man defense one time too many.

Where else will you read a verbal brawl of this intensity? Nowhere else.

(Unless you count N’Gai’s blog Level Up, where he co-publishes these exchanges, and the court filings of the Epic v Silicon Knights lawsuits)

Read on at the jump for Round 1, consisting of our first four 500-words-max e-mails. Round 2, in which I just about lose my patience with this guy, arrives Tuesday.

To: Stephen Totilo
Fr: N’Gai Croal
Date: July 22, 2007
Re: My Name is N’Gai, and I’m a “Gunpey”-holic

Stephen,

I began this entry the week before E3, and I was well on my way to what would have been the perfect kickoff post on short session games. I was going to lead with the sentence “My thumb hurts;” rhapsodize briefly about the PS3 game “Super Stardust HD;” explain how despite my increased coverage of games, I’ve found myself spending less time actually playing games, causing the more robust console and handheld franchises that used to make up the largest part of my videogame diet–”Metal Gear Solid,” “Halo,” “Metroid,” “Devil May Cry“–to steadily give way to the likes of “Virtua Tennis,” “Lumines,” “Meteos,” “Every Extend Extra” and “Geometry Wars;” name-drop Electronic Arts chairman Larry Probst and a conversation the two of us had last fall about my changing gaming habits; cite Geometry Wars’ revival of the “Robotron“-esque twin-stick shooter; and conclude by asking you which other genres that once served as full-meal games are ripe for revival as short session snacks. And I was going to accomplish all of this in the 500 word, small-entries-for-small-games limit that we’d agreed to for this installment.

That plan went out the window on the Saturday after E3, when I picked up the PSP game Gunpey for $9.99 in an L.A. Best Buy discount bin. It’s a remake of a puzzle game created years ago by the father of the Game Boy, Gunpei Yokoi–think “Tetris” meets Connect Four–updated by Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s Q Entertainment. I rarely spend my own money on games–it’s one of the perks of this gig–but Namco Bandai neglected to send it to me, and being a Mizuguchi fan, I couldn’t resist. And now I can’t put it down.

Heading to work last Friday, I missed my subway stop because I was in the middle of a personal best run. Normally, I’d switch from an express train to a local train at 42nd Street. But I was so engrossed in “Gunpey” that I’d lost track of everything somewhere around Atlantic Avenue in my adopted hometown of Brooklyn. When I finally looked up, I was at 72nd street, as if time had somehow been compressed. At work, I didn’t think about the game, and I had no real intention to play it again that day. I left the office to meet up with a friend in the East Village to see “Sunshine,” and I’d planned to listen to Ziff-Davis’ 1UP Yours podcast on the way. But the moment I sat down, I felt an overwhelming Pavlovian urge to play “Gunpey.” Goodbye podcast, hello nirvana. My friend was late to meet me; excellent. The line at the concession stand was inordinately long; hallelujah. Waiting for Sunday brunch to arrive; no problem. Procrastinating Doing additional research on this post; why not? Every delay was an opportunity to wake up my PSP and play more “Gunpey.” I’ve got full-fledged games like “The Darkness” sitting in their shrink wrap because I can’t shake the fiendish pick-up-and-zone-out simplicity of “Gunpey.”

Is something wrong with me?

Cheers,
N’Gai

***
To: N’Gai Croal
Fr: Stephen Totilo
Date: July 24, 2007
Re: Was “Zelda” A Mistake?

N’Gai,

I don’t need the easy bait.

Your “Gunpey” love isn’t sign that there is something wrong with you. In fact, it is a sign that you are quite normal. You are, I dare say it, typical. You are Joe Gamer. I say this not to disparage you, but to celebrate your one-man proof of my biggest new idea about video games, my 2007 Gaming Epiphany:

The only games that achieve mainstream success are those that can be played casually–narrative is unnecessary and maybe even a detriment.

Have you ever seen those lists of the best-selling games of all time? They are topped by games that can be played in 10 or 30-minute bursts: “Tetris,” “Madden,” “Gran Turismo” and “Myst” to name four. These are games with no story or with a story that can be ignored. See those “Grand Theft Auto” games on lists like that? Most “GTA” gamers play the series like it’s “Pac-Man” with pedestrians and cops. Show me a multi-million selling “Zelda” game and I will show you an adventure-free Mario Kart that outsold it. “Halo,” “GoldenEye,” and “Doom” didn’t get famous for lengthy solo campaigns. The DS didn’t fly off shelves because of a 30-hour RPG. Casual is king.

So maybe I should have wondered if you were un-well when you favored the “Metroid”s and “Metal Gear”s of the world. It baffles me today that anyone looks for games that are linear and long, games that ask you to care what happens next. After 20 years of it not happening, people who make or love those games think they can be a dominant form. Don’t those games always disappoint? The fluke is that anyone buys “Final Fantasy.” The aberration is that anyone invests three hours–let alone 30–into an adventure game.

This has been a tough idea for me to accept. I always wanted my games to be adventures, an interesting interactive series of events. I crave “Zelda”s and “Metroid”s and games that can be as rich and lasting as novels. But recently I realized that almost any such game I play lets me down. “Final Fantasy” feels too long. The “Zelda” games repeat themselves. The “Metal Gear” games tell a story I don’t care about. I wait–in vain?–for one that is sublime from end to end (maybe my beloved “Majora’s Mask“?)

But then I think about what kinds of games have really excited society. And I am reminded that the masses, including you, have always been most engaged by games that can be at their best 15 minutes in. They are the short-session games of the type I’ve recently become re-enchanted with myself. “Super Stardust HD” feels right. “Geometry Wars” doesn’t disappoint. “Lumines” feels less flawed than any adventure game I’ve played.

So were those long-form games a mistake? Is casual king? Is adventure really better off the domain of movies and books? (And how does “WoW” fit into this?) My world is flipped.

-Stephen

***

To: Stephen Totilo
Fr: N’Gai Croal
Date: July 25, 2007
Re: “Super Stardust HD” 1, “The Darkness” 0

Stephen,

Your Grand Unified Theory of Best-Selling Games needs some work. But with just 500 words per post, I’m not going to tackle that in this particular entry. I will say, however, that there are aspects of modern games–particularly those with stories–that can feel like work. With each new game, we have to learn its controls, mechanics, rules, visual style, geography, architecture and narrative. So depending on the game, it can be up to an hour before we hit the point at which we’re truly having fun, where continuous confrontation, challenge and discovery are tempered by mastery of the game’s basic elements in an equilibrium between the new and the familiar. In dealing with this medium that’s still for the most part not very far evolved from its just-a-way-to-kill-time roots, I find that as I get older, I’m increasingly less tolerant of that initial learning phase.

After my last post, I popped in a long session game–”The Darkness,” finally–and played it for about an hour or so. It begins interestingly enough, with an on-rails, semi-interactive opening credits sequence of three mobsters casually driving through a tunnel, which turns into a car chase, a shootout, and finally a car crash, leaving you alone for the game’s proper beginning. While that opening was both cinematic and atmospheric, its immersiveness stemmed primarily from its visuals instead of its rather limited interactivity, so I found myself getting bored and antsy. To paraphrase Cyndi Lauper, I just wanted to have fun, and I didn’t want to invest much time or active thought in getting it.

Even though I got my Darkness powers in the next mission, and the third mission provided some opportunities to play around with my Darkness abilities in various scenarios, I still felt like I was too close to the beginning of the learning-mastery-performance axis, and as a result, I wasn’t feeling the instant gratification that I wanted out of the limited amount of time I had to play. In other words, my ass wasn’t shaking.

As we’ve discussed before, games are a generally ineffective medium for the plotting and character development aspects of storytelling. They’re much better at action and exploration, the latter involving moving through landscapes and/or architecture in order to accomplish one’s goals. But during my play session with “The Darkness,” my boredom stemmed from my increased aversion to exploration. I didn’t want to navigate a 3-D world. I wanted a limited, clearly defined play space. I wanted simple rules. I wanted waves of obstacles to dodge and enemies to blast. I wanted to twitch and shoot and have the pleasure centers of my brain tapped over and over again, perpetually poised on the razor’s edge between conscious thought and reflexive reaction.
What I really wanted to play was more “Super Stardust HD.” So I did.

Cheers,
N’Gai

***
To: N’Gai Croal
Fr: Stephen Totilo
Date: August 5, 2007
Re: A Tetris That Fully Taps Cell?

N’Gai,

I think I bailed out of “The Darkness” at the same time as you. And there’s a chance that after I bailed out I played more “Super Stardust HD.” But I can’t remember. I might have played “Picross DS.” I might have played more “Pac-Man Championship Edition.” Any of those three games may prove to be the finest titles of early summer and I am happy to shower all three of these small, short-session games with praise.

But…I am not going to be so kind to the games you’re turning away from. You let them off the hook. You implied that it’s you–not them–that has turned you away from long games and toward the modern day equivalent of “Asteroids” and “Pong.” Don’t give them the old-man defense: that the closer your dreads get to turning gray the less appropriate long games are for people like you. Do people outgrow novels and long movies? No, there’s something else short games must be doing right. After all, the Wii and “Guitar Hero” are huge successes thanks to offering short-session fun.

So let’s praise the short stuff! But let’s also wonder: why is it so arresting even for serious gamers like you and me again? A major factor is that games are getting a little more in step with the rest of popular culture. Short games are to long ones what downloadable songs are to albums, what e-mail was to letter writing (and then IM was to E-mail and then texting was to IM). These days the cultural oddity is the 60-hour “Final Fantasy.” Oh, and “Harry Potter” novels and Vs. Mode exchanges (But which one is truly worthy of a movie adaptation?)

So short-session is in fashion. But here’s what I find really intriguing: the existence of high-end short games like “Super Stardust HD.” Many short-session games have been, to modern eyes, graphically basic. That is because they a) came from lower-tech eras (”Pac-Man”), b) were designed for relatively limited portable devices (”Nintendogs“), c) were made to be quick-loading time-wasters (”Minesweeper“) or d) weren’t predicated on complex visuals (”Guitar Hero“). You might easily put cracks in my theory, countering with graphically rich games like “Gran Turismo,” “Madden” and “Halo,” that are popularly enjoyed in short sessions. But save that for later. But you know and I know, that “SSHD” draws an extraordinary amount of console horsepower to render a simple short-session game mechanic. This, I think, is unprecedented and an accident.

I don’t think the PS3 and 360 were engineered to run small games. They were packed with pricey chips to run epics and big, involved games full of modes and seasons–not to run a thousands-of-objects-on-a-screen shmup . But that’s what we’ve now gotten. And it makes me wonder. Is this a future that these game publishers should consider pursuing with vigor? How about using that Cell processor to make really fancy puzzle games and photo-realistic rhythm games?

What could technology made for epics provide short-session games?

-Stephen

(To be continued on Tuesday)