Feminist Ambiguity

Last time out, in my brief discussion of modern feminism, I mentioned and provided an example of the ambiguity that feminists today face in their pursuit of… whatever version of equalist utopia their idea of feminism preaches. However, the battlegrounds across which this confusion & argument take place are many and varied and I thought I might explore a few more of them in this post. To make a point, essentially.

I begin with a joke: a feminist is standing near the front of a crowded bus next to a man, who is sitting down. At the next stop, a woman boards and the man stands up, offering her his seat. Muttering “You’re living in a bygone age” and clearly disgusted, the feminist grabs his shoulder and forces him back into his seat. At the next stop, another woman boards and again the man stands up. “We aren’t all damsels in distress” snarls the feminist, pushing him back down. At the third stop, a third female passenger boards; for the third time our man attempts to stand up, and for the first time the feminist standing next to him pushes him back down. This time, however, it’s the man who addresses her first; “Would you please stop doing that, you’ve made me miss three stops already””

Yeah, I’m not great at telling jokes.

Anyway, in spite of its dubious quality, the joke illustrates one such feminist battleground quite well; that of societal gender roles. The above situation, of whether one should offer a woman a seat when one is available in preference, is an extreme example- most people would consider it simple good manners, or a harmless quirk of society at best. In fact, many bemoan the ‘loss’ of such customs, claiming that chivalry is dead. However, there are some feminists, such as our example above, who consider chivalry as a concept an inherently patriarchal one; the chivalric (which might be better translated as ‘knightly’) originated during the medieval period and held that women should be protected and treated with respect. So far, so feminist; however, the essential reason that such parts of the chivalric code exist is because women of the time had next to zero power and thus no ability to fight back if they were treated dishonourably. As such, some feminists argue that the concept is outdated and patriarchal, subconsciously implying that modern women, like their medieval counterparts, are unable to fend for themselves in our modern age. So which is it; a harmless, even pro-feminist, societal institution, or a relic of an institutionally misogynist age?

Such arguments are not just levelled at seats on a bus; no less a figure than home secretary Theresa May weighed in on such an argument last year, saying that it was wrong to introduce quotas for the number of women on the boards of major companies as it devalued them, implying they weren’t good enough to be there on their own merit (the counter-argument being, of course, that women are criminally under-represented in such instutions and the forced introduction of women into their highest echelons might go some way to removing institutionalised misogyny in such companies). Hers isn’t the only argument one can make to back her point; others argue against such pro-female initiatives as being anti-male, preventing men from being elected to boards on their own merit.

You might recognise this argument as being, in this case, exceedingly stupid- it is comparatively very easy for a man to get onto such a board on their own merit. Although the idea of misandry (the oppression of and hateful behaviour towards men by women) is occasionally worth mentioning in certain circumstances, it has become a byword for what angry, anti-feminist men say to cover their frankly sexist attitudes. The issue is that whilst misandry is certainly a thing, it is very, very seldom a major issue when compared to the vast mountain of inequality built up by 5,000 years of institutional sexism and patriachal, misogynist attitudes. I mention this solely as a warning to any guys reading this- before accusing anyone of misandry, either deliberately or indirectly, think very, very carefully about it and make sure every other possible reason could be eliminate. The chance of misandry being the problem is very slim. Just something to bear in mind. Anyway…

Another set of issues and objections begin to enter the equation when we move beyond the traditional gender roles women aren’t meant to fill and move onto those that they are; those of cook, housewife, child-raiser and so on. It is generally agreed by most of a feminist inclination that women should not be forced into fulfilling these roles; that they should be free to be their own person and not forced to simply do the chores men don’t want to. However, this begs the question: is the structure of the ‘traditional’ family unit inherently wrong? Some would argue yes; that be being a stay-at-home mum & housewife, a woman is, intentionally or otherwise, contributing to the idea that this way of doing things is the only acceptable norm, reinforcing the patriarchy. Others, however, argue that there is nothing inherently wrong with the idea of a woman staying home, looking after her children, cooking meals and so on; if she wants to do things that way, that is absolutely her choice to make. Just as she should not be forced into the role, so she should not be forced out of it; maybe she wants to spend more time with her kids, maybe cooking has always been her thing. Some may suggest that cooking is only ‘a woman’s thing’ because of these institutionalised patriarchal norms, but then we realise that we can apply the exact same argument to this situation; something being a ‘woman’s activity’ doesn’t necessarily mean a woman can’t enjoy it with all the enthusiasm that a man (if so inclined) might. When we start considering the practicalities of a man fulfilling the ‘house-husband’ role, entering a genuinely female-dominated environment and capable of legitimately using misandry as an argument in some cases, the whole business finally spirals into a vortex of confusion and trying to keep track of the arguments flying all over the place becomes practically impossible.

There are countless other examples of this sort of thing, many of which are far less easy to determine the “right” answer to than the examples covered here. Does the far greater interest in male compared to female professional sport mean sports fans are straight up sexist? Is it the fault of any particular videogame featuring them that such a large proportion of gaming protagonists are straight white 30-something men? I could go on, but I feel my aim has been achieved; to reinforce my point about the ambiguity and politics inherent in modern feminism. Unfortunately, this doesn’t leave me with a natural conclusion, so… be nice to women, I guess? No wait, that might be considered over-chivalrous…

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Alternative Marketing

Extra Credits is one of my favourite online productions: what started out as a couple of animated lectures on videogames as art written by then student Daniel Floyd and posted on YouTube has now attracted attracted a huge fan base of gamers wishing to greater understand videogames as a form of artistic media.  Nowadays the show is hosted by Floyd, utilises the art services of LeeLee Scaldaferri and Scott deWitt and its content comes straight from the mind of James Portnow, one of the videogame industry’s leading lights when it comes to advancing them as a respected form of media and art. It provides intelligent yet easy-to-understand discussion on a topic too frequently ignored and trivialised by gamers and the general public alike, and its existence is a boon to the gaming world.

However, a while back they produced an episode that I found particularly interesting. Creative Assembly, the developers behind the hugely successful Total War franchise, apparently had some money left over in the marketing budget for their latest game, Total War: Rome II, and offered to subcontract the Extra Credits team (with their old art maestro Allison Theus) to make a few episodes about the Punic Wars, possibly the single most crucial event in the Roman Empire’s rise to power. They weren’t asked to mention the Total War franchise or Rome II at all, or even so much as mention videogames, just to make some short historical lectures in the engaging style that has made them so successful. The only reason I know of this origin story is because they deliberately chose to mention it in their intro.

As a marketing tactic, hiring somebody to not talk about the content of your game is a somewhat strange one, at least on the surface of it, but when one works backwards from the end-goal of marketing Creative Assembly’s tactic starts to seem more and more clever. The final aim of games marketing is, of course, to make more people buy your game, which generally takes one of two forms; the creation, expansion and maintenance of a core fanbase who will always buy your game and will do their own viral marketing for you, and the attraction of buyers (both new and returning) outside this core bracket. The former area is generally catered for by means of convention panels, forums, Facebook groups and such, whilst the latter is what we are interested in right now.

Generally, attempting to attract ‘non-core’ buyers in the gaming world takes the form of showing off big, flashy adverts and gameplay demonstrations, effectively saying ‘look at all the stuff our game can do!’ amidst various bits of marketing jargon. However, gameplay features alone aren’t everything, and there is a growing body of evidence to suggest that, for many gamers (compulsive Call of Duty players perhaps being an exception) story is just as important a consideration in their games as gameplay features. For a game such as the Total War series, where there is no predefined story and a distinct lack of character interaction*, one might think that this consideration becomes irrelevant, but it nonetheless demonstrates a key point; the core motivation behind videogame players is frequently not concerned with the gameplay features that form the bulk of most marketing material.

For a Total War game, the key motivating factor is based around a power fantasy; the dream of the player controlling the entire world at the head of one of the greatest Empires in history and of winning epic battles against great odds. From here we can dissect the motivation further- the thrill of victory in some great, decisive battle against your nemesis comes not just from the victory itself, but also from the idea of the players’ skill allowing them to outsmart the enemy and overcome the no doubt overwhelming odds. The dream of dominion over all Europe and beyond comes is partly satisfying for the sense of power it alone generates, but this sense of achievement is enhanced when one knows it is being played out against some great historical background, full of its own great stories, giving it some context and allowing it to carry even more weight. In Rome II for example, you have the options to emulate or even surpass the achievements of the mightiest Roman generals and Emperors, placing yourself on a par with Scipio and the various Caesars, or alternatively you can play as another faction and overcome what history tells us is one of the greatest empires and most unstoppable military forces ever to walk the earth. You can literally change the course of history.

One might ask, therefore, why marketeers don’t focus more on these aspects of the games, and to an extent they do; adverts for games such as the Total War franchise are frequently filled with inspiring messages along the lines of ‘Lead your nation to victory!’ or ‘Crush all who dare oppose you!’. But the very format of an advert makes really delivering on this historical power fantasy difficult; with screen time expensive and thus at a premium, there is little room to wax lyrical about any great history or to debate military tactics. A convention panel or gameplay demo can go a little further, but the usefulness of these is limited since most of the people who are going to be there will be fans of the series anyway; their main focus is community-building. And that’s where Extra Credits come in.

What Creative Assembly have realised is that Extra Credits have a large audience of gamers who are already well-indoctrinated with the concept of buying games (as some advert-viewers may not be) and think deeply enough about their games that flashy adverts are unlikely to impress them as much as they might some audience. Thus, to recruit members of the EC audience to buy the game, they need to sell them on the core appeal of the campaign, that of the epic history surrounding the game and your chance to manipulate it; and thus, they came up with the idea to simply educate the gaming world about this amazing piece of history, get them interested in it and make them want to explore it through games, their favourite sort of media. The Punic wars too are a masterful choice of subject matter; once commonly taught in schools (meaning there’s a pretty decent body of work analysing them to draw upon), they fell out of favour as Latin and other features of classical education began to drop out of the school system, meaning the majority of the population are unfamiliar with this epic tale of warfare on the grandest of scales. Given how relatively cheap and simple a technique it is, since it lets others do most of the legwork for you, it’s a truly masterful piece of marketing. And I’m not just saying that because it’s resulted in a video I like.

*I didn’t mention it in the main post because it disrupts the flow, but even without a preset story grand strategy games most certainly have a narrative. Indeed, the self-made stories of beating down a simultaneous rebellion and foreign invasion, and in the process gaining the moniker of ‘the Great’, are one of the main things that makes me enjoy playing Crusader Kings II. There’s an entire post’s-worth of discussion on the subject of videogames’ potential for fluid, non-linear storytelling, but that’s for another time

Why Stealth Features Make Not A Stealth Game

After a lukewarm reception to Assassin’s Creed III following its release that some fear may have disillusioned some fans, Ubisoft went all-out in their marketing campaign for Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, the latest in the series. As a fan of the series (and, incidentally, one who didn’t buy AC3 following the less than perfect feedback it got), I have no problem with this, and was intrigued and excited to see some of the features being implemented get put to use. However, one particular bit of promo material that caught my eye was the stealth gameplay walkthrough, which talks up the various stealth features employed in the game.

[Yes I am perfectly aware that this post is hideously out of date- I’m working through a backlog here]

Y’see, watching that video got me thinking about the role of stealth in the Assassin’s Creed games, and eventually led me to the conclusion that, at its heart, the Assassin’s Creed series is not a stealth franchise. I could justify that statement by pointing out the huge variety of stuff the game offers beyond stealth (free-running, the admittedly awkward ‘wait around for counter chances’ combat, and traversing the high seas spring instantly to mind), or by pointing out the extent Ubisoft is prepared to go to to ensure you don’t ever actually have to use stealth if you don’t want to- I mean for heaven’s sake, they’ve just announced a new mobile game based on Black Flag called Assassin’s Creed Pirates, which allows you to do all the sailing around and piratey things without any of the exciting running around on rooftops that made the game so popular in the first place. But this wouldn’t actually address the core reason behind the AC franchise’s non-stealthness- for that we must consider exactly where the stealth genre comes from.

To explain: every game genre is basically defined by a single, core game concept, a sort of combination of mechanics and the emotional hooks that get us to enjoy (or not, as the case may be) games of that genre. In an RPG it’s about the characters and your advancing skills, in a strategy game it’s about the concept of ‘playing god’ and dictating how a whole system works rather than an individual, and in a stealth game the core concept involves hiding. This central concept naturally extrapolates itself into a series of other features after a while. In many (but not necessarily all) cases, waiting becomes a core mechanic too, as once our protagonist has hidden from whichever bad guy is appropriate it would be strange for him to be able to move out of cover immediately- as Extra Credits said during their episode on the subject of stealth, the trick to making a good stealth game is to make waiting fun. Not only that, but a key part of making the experience of hiding compelling and fun is for the player to be able to use it aggressively to their advantage. Thus, protagonists in stealth games are also generally able to make highly effective sneak attacks on an unaware enemy, frequently one hit kills such as slitting the throat or the Dishonored choke hold.

Thus far, Assassin’s Creed is sounding very like a stealth game, and it’s true the games have always featured stealth gameplay heavily. The game’s most characteristic feature is, of course, the hidden blade, intended specifically for insta-killing an unaware enemy (with the option for a suitably dramatic dive throwing them to the ground for good measure), and in later games this can be adapted to allow an enemy to be poisoned, meaning he won’t die until you’re well out of reach of any blame. AC2’s introduction of attacks from ledges, hide spots and rooftops also expanded on this, introducing a new range of ways for a player to get into a killing position whilst remaining undetected. Not only does the series’ ever expanding array of hide spots help this, but they also give the option of helping a player to run away from a fight if they so choose, meaning fighting need not be the only option. But then again these features alone aren’t enough to make a stealth game: by way of example, Skyrim had a sneaking system that allowed for high-powered sneak attacks on unaware enemies, but is quite clearly an RPG with a few stealth elements rather than a true stealth game.

Thus, mere adoption of stealth gameplay features does not make Assassin’s Creed a stealth game, and it fundamentally is not one for the following reason: for hiding and waiting to become a game’s central features the player must have a reason for doing so; hiding must benefit the player in some way. Not only that, but the usually slower-paced stealth approach must some how become the more attractive option compared to a full-frontal assault, which from the start has the advantage of being faster, more direct and more exciting. One can attempt to railroad the player down this route by making the player instantly fail if they are detected (as the AC series has done on multiple occasions), but this is a clumsy way of doing things that fails to make the stealth experience more fun and only serves to frustrate the player as to why they can’t just rush in all guns blazing. In most true stealth games, the player is forced into hiding by making it the most favourable defensive tactic (ie the best way to stay alive), which is achieved by making sure they have relatively little health/armour/defensive ability so can’t really stand up in proper combat.

And this, really, is what distinguishes Assassin’s Creed as not fundamentally being a stealth game. The combat in AC games is frequently (and rightly) criticised for being formulaic and repetitive, and part of the reason behind this is that all AC characters are really good at defending. To block just about all incoming attacks merely requires the ‘high profile’ button to be held down, and if the counter button is pressed at the appropriate moment then almost every incoming enemy can be killed the moment they attack. If countering isn’t your style, then many a foe can be taken down by simply bashing the attack button, and as later games allow you to upgrade your weapons by the end this can result in a very quick death for any NPC foolish enough to get in your way. And all that’s presuming the player wants to stand and fight; even in AC1 enemies could be taken out from afar with throwing knives (which I suppose could be tenuously considered stealth weapons), and by later games our protagonist has grenades and a ****ing gun* at his disposal, which aren’t stealthy by any stretch of the imagination.

By making it so easy to fight, to cut through swathes of enemies with hardly a thought, the developers of Assassin’s Creed have ensured the focus of their game is not about stealth, and although this is by no means a bad thing (not every game need be stealthy) this fact does, I feel, somewhat undermine many of the stealth features they have chosen to include in their various games. Just so I can consider my point proven, some months ago the Assassin’s Creed Facebook page asked its readers which series was their favourite: Assassin’s Creed or Thief, the series that almost single-handedly invented the stealth genre and had recently announced a new game (the fact that this game has subsequently turned out to be terrible is, of course, an entire other point). How did these people, who I shall remind you were writing on the official Assassin’s Creed Facebook page, respond? Why, overwhelmingly in favour of Thief, of course.

This was, however, before AC4 was released.

*That list doesn’t even mention stuff like the hookblade and parachutes which, cool though they are, do nothing for the games’ stealth elements other than distract from them.

Leave Reality at Home

One of the most contentious issues surrounding criticisms of many forms of media, particularly in films and videogames, is the issue of realism. How realistic a videogame is, how accurately it replicates the world around us both visually and thematically, is the most frequently cited factor in determining how immersive a game is, how much you ‘get into it’, and films that keep their feet very much in the real world delight both nerds and film critics alike by responding favourably to their nit-picking. But the place of realism in these media is not a simple question of ‘as much realism as possible is better’; finding the ideally realistic situation (which is a phrase I totally didn’t just make up) is a delicate balance that can vary enormously from one product to another, and getting that balance right is frequently the key to success.

That too much realism can be a bad thing can be demonstrated quite easily on both a thematic and visual front. To deal with the visual sphere of things first, I believe I have talked before about ‘the uncanny valley’, which is originated as a robotics term first hypothesised by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori. The theory, now supported by research from the likes of Hiroshi Ishiguro (who specialises in making hyper-realistic robots), states that as a robot gets steadily more and more human in appearance, humans tend to react more favourably to it, until we reach a high point of a stylised, human-like appearance that is nonetheless clearly non-human. Beyond this point, however, our reactions to such a robot get dramatically worse, as the design starts to look less like a human-like robot and more like a very weird looking human, until we get to the point at which the two are indistinguishable from one another and we reach another peak. This dip in positive reacton, the point where faces start to look ‘creepy’, is known as the uncanny valley, and the principle can be applied just as easily to computer graphics as it can to robots. The main way of overcoming the issue involves a careful design process intended to stylise certain features; in other words, the only way to make something quite realistic not look creepy is to make it selectively less realistic. Thus, hyper-realism is not always the way forward in drawn/animated forms of media, and won’t be until the magical end-goal of photorealistic graphics are achieved. If that ever happens.

However, the uncanny valley is far less interesting than the questions that arise when considering the idea of thematic realism (which I again totally didn’t just make up). These are the extent to which stories are realistic, or aspects of a story, or events in a film and somesuch, and here we arrive at an apparent double standard. Here, our evidence comes from nerds; as we all know, film nerds (and I suspect everyone else if they can find them) delight in pointing out continuity errors in everything they watch (a personal favourite is the ‘Hollywood’ sign in the remake of The Italian Job that quite clearly says OHLLYWOOD at one camera angle), and are prepared to go into a veritable tizz of enjoyment when something apparently implausible is somehow able to adhere fastidiously to the laws of physics. Being realistic is clearly something that can add a great deal to a film, indicating that the director has really thought about this; not only is this frequently an indicator of a properly good film, but it also helps satisfy a nerd’s natural desire to know all the details and background (which is the reason, by the way, that comic books spend so much of their time referencing to overcomplicated bits of canon).

However, evidence that reality is not at the core of our enjoyment when it comes to film and gaming can be quite easily revealed by considering the enormous popularity of the sci-fi and fantasy genres. We all of course know that these worlds are not real and, despite a lot of the jargon spouted in sci-fi to satisfy the already mentioned nerd curiosity, we also know that they fundamentally cannot be real. There is no such thing as magic, no dilithium crystals, no hyperspace and no elves, but that doesn’t prevent the idea of them from enjoying massive popularity from all sides. I mean, just about the biggest film of last summer was The Avengers, in which a group of superheroes fight a group of giant monsters sent through a magical portal by an ancient Norse god; about as realistic as a tap-dancing elephant, and yet most agreed as to the general awesomeness of that film. These fantastical, otherworldly and/or downright ridiculous worlds and stories have barely any bearing on the real world, and yet somehow this somehow makes it better.

The key detail here is, I think, the concept of escapism. Possibly the single biggest reason why we watch films, spend hours in front of Netflix, dedicate days of our life to videogames, is in pursuit of escapism; to get away from the mundaneness of our world and escape into our own little fantasy. We can follow a super-soldier blasting through waves of bad guys such as we all dream to be able to do, we can play as a hero with otherworldly magic at our fingertips , we can lead our sports teams to glory like we could never do in real life. Some of these stories take place in a realistic setting, others in a world of fantasy, yet in all the real pull factor is the same; we are getting to play or see a world that we fantasise about being able to live ourselves, and yet cannot.

The trick of successfully incorporating reality into these worlds is, therefore, one of supporting our escapism. In certain situations, such as in an ultra-realistic modern military shooter, an increasingly realistic situation makes this situation more like our fantasy, and as such adds to the immersion and the joy of the escapism; when we are facing challenges similar to those experienced by real soldiers (or at least the over-romanticised view of soldiering that we in fact fantasise about, rather than the day-to-day drudgery that is so often ignored), it makes our fantasy seem more tangible, fuelling the idea that we are, in fact, living the dream. On the other hand, applying the wrong sort of realism to a situation (like, say, not being able to make the impossible jumps or failing to have perfect balance) can kill the fantasy, reminding us just as easily as the unreality of a continuity error that this fantasy we are entertaining cannot actually happen, reminding us of the real world and ruining all the fun. There is, therefore, a kind of thematic uncanny valley as well; a state at which the reality of a film or videogame is just… wrong, and is thus able to take us out of the act of escapism. The location of this valley, however, is a lot harder to plot on a graph.

Rugby Videogaming for Dummies

In my last post, I highlighted some of the problems facing the developers of rugby videogames, and the flaws in the current best efforts the industry has to offer. However, I personally reckon that the problems presented in attempting to replicate one of the most complex games on earth can be overcome; but that it may require a quite drastic change in the way these games are designed.

(For the purposes of this, I will stick simply to gameplay features; stuff like team licensing, graphics and the number of game modes available are all important quality factors in a rugby game, but can hardly be accounted for by any development team)

Probably the most similar sport to rugby currently in existence (excluding league… or union depending on your perspective) is American Football, which has the good fortune of having its own massive gaming franchise built around it. As such, I reckon that, despite the sizeable differences between the two sports, a quick look at the Madden game series would be a good place to start.

American Football is a highly structured game, and Madden (from my albeit very limited experience of playing it) reflects this well: before each play, the attacking player selects which move he wants to perform (from a very long list) and is then tasked with executing it properly (timing the pass and so on). This principle was also adopted to an extent in the 2005 game Pro Rugby Manager 2 (not a bad game, but graphics are appalling and large sections of gameplay horribly designed), which allowed you to preselect which move you wanted to perform before scrumss and lineouts. The fact that only about three of these presets ever worked is, of course, just a cursory detail.

Modern rugby, and many of its greatest tries, are dependent on such preset moves, and the tactic of allowing them to be selected from scrums and lineouts is, I think, a good one. Crucially, to retain the element of skill and to allow players to mix things up a bit in response to defensive frailties, only running lines should be pre-programmed, with the player choosing when and where to pass (or, indeed, kick). I personally think that the situation could be even further improved by allowing players to design their own moves, but this would be difficult to do on a console so probably wouldn’t be worth programming.

However, not all moves come from scrums and lineouts, and Rugby 08‘s idea of having a smaller subset of simpler moves to deploy in general play is worth reviving, I feel. Like that system, I feel four is the optimum number to be available in general play would be four, allowing console players to easily select them with the left analogue stick or D-pad. Two differences must, however, be stressed compared to Rugby 08‘s system; firstly, the players whilst running presets should not be constrained to jogging at two miles an hour in order to ensure speed differences don’t cause the move to break down (a frankly unsubtle solution to the problem that could be largely mitigated by allowing players to choose when they pass), and secondly, I think that a few even more basic moves should also be usable in loose play, rather than just after rucks. Simple stuff, like loops or scissors moves, the kind of stuff players could legitimately drop into play given enough space, just to give them the extra edge.

Next up, onto a few niggly details. The kicking system from Rugby 08 (which basically boils down to releasing the ‘kick bar’ at just the right time to ensure it bisects the upright) is just about perfect for place kicks and drop goals, although it could do with some method by which kicks are made more difficult to aim the harder they are hit. For kicks in general play, I like Rugby Challenge‘s system of slowing down time to allow proper aiming of kicks, not to mention most of their system of running rugby; a straight adaptation of that when playing ‘manually’ would be perfect. At the rucks, however, their heavy bind/quick bind system is, frankly, a bit stupid, not to mention the way that RC’s system prevents a team from playing the ball until it has definitively been ‘won’, preventing them from getting quick ball. Rugby 08‘s system is preferable; here, the team with the ball is presumed to have won it and are free to play it unless the opposing team get men there quickly enough. The only changes I would make to this system would be the introduction of a ‘grey area’ where the ball has been ‘half won’ from the opposition and neither side are prepared to play it, and for players to be able to cheat (and be penalised) of their own accord rather than requiring player input.

Trying to accurately replicate set pieces in rugby is, if anything, even more tricky than with general play. Lineouts would, I feel, be best replicated using much the same system as described for general play; preselecting how pods and players should move before letting the player manually perform the jump and throw. Again, flaws in both aspects should, I feel, be automated and mistakes dependent on a player’s lineout skill rather than getting the player to manually aim as in Rugby Challenge‘s frustrating throwing-in system. At scrums, things get more complicated, and although the simplest solution would be to just have teams simply push or dig in at the player’s discretion (as in Rugby 08), I reckon a better, more skill-centric approach would be to have two rhythm mini-games running simultaneously. To explain in more simple jargon, this would involve, on a keyboard by way of example, one hand pressing the up, down, left and right arrow keys in time with a series of symbols appearing on the screen, whilst the other hand does the same thing with the WASD keys, each set of keys representing the forward battle on each side of the scrum. A separate button press would tell the scrum half/no. 8 to take control of the ball; again, slowing down time here would allow for a suitably fast decision-making process. The more symbols are hit correctly in the rhythm sequence, the more control the prop is able to exert over his opponent; the amount the opposing scrum is pushed back as a result of this should not be arbitrary, but instead dependent on the relative strength and scrummaging skill of the second and back row players. And should also not be utterly ridiculous; on Rugby Challenge, a dominant scrum is often able to send opposing players flying back twenty metres or so, which simply never happens. Ever

Advocating the introduction of spurious rhythm mini-games is rarely something that will make you popular in gaming circles, and a lot of the ‘borrowed’ features I have advocated including in my hypothetical game could probably not be brought in verbatim for licensing reasons. But hey, I’m just some guy being hopeful; it may never happen, but if it ever did…

The Rugby Challenge

I frequently feel like apologising on this blog for my all too frequent excursions into the worlds of my two main leisure activities; rugby and videogames. Today, however, inspired by the recent release of Rugby Challenge 2, I’m going to combine the two, highlighting the problems oh-so-frequently encountered when designing a rugby game.

Rugby is not a sport that can be said to have made a grand splash in the gaming world; unlike the likes of football and basketball which get big-budget EA Sports releases every year, EA’s only attempt at a rugby game in the last 5 years was a half-hearted and lazily designed attempt to cash in on the 2011 World Cup. It’s even worse for rugby league fans, who I believe have only had two games ever made concerning their sport. The reason for this is depressingly simple; money. FIFA sells because football is massively popular across pretty much the entire globe, resulting in a massive market and the popularity of American Football sells copies of Madden by the bucketload in the wealthy USA. Rugby, however, has no such market ready and waiting for it; worldwide, around 4.5 million people are registered rugby players, and a rather optimistic guess could put the number of fans of the sport at perhaps 15 million. Of those, there is a fairly broad spread of ages between 7 and 70; yet the majority of gamers fit into the 14-25ish age bracket. And not all of those are going to end up buying a rugby game anyway.

Put simply, a rugby game has nowhere near the potential market of many other sports, so whilst FIFA 2013 was able to sell more than 3.3 million units in its first week, Sidhe’s 2011 game Jonah Lomu Rugby Challenge sold just 430,000 units lifetime across PS3 and Xbox 360 combined. Admittedly it was competing against the RWC 2011 game (which sold roughly the same, and probably to the same people), but even in a year when rugby’s profile was at its highest, such comparatively meagre sales represent a big problem when game development and the acquisition of team licenses are so massively expensive.

However, there’s very little that can be done about this until more people get interested in rugby/videogames respectively, so I’m now going to focus on the content games themselves, which presents a whole host of other issues. The two major figures in terms of representing rugby in the virtual world are EA Sports’ Rugby 08 (which, despite being 5 years old and barely different from the two previous EA incarnations, still has its adherents) and the previously mentioned Rugby Challenge. Having owned and played both (although not yet Rugby Challenge 2, hence why it doesn’t feature here), I feel confident in saying that, whilst both are pretty good in their own way, both have sizeable flaws; Rugby 08 is full of little cheats (such as a way of automatically winning every kickoff) that make the game far too easy once you are sufficiently experienced, the players have no personality or realism about their movements, its knowledge of the laws is dodgy in places, the difficulty settings are blunt as hell, the preset attacking moves are rubbish, lineouts are oversimplified, manually attacking produces highly unrealistic gameplay, the defensive moves it bangs on about in the promo material make no difference whatsoever, players frequently run through one another’s falling bodies and for some reason the player has to manually select when he or she wants to cheat (which, given how unrealistically good the ref is, is a totally dumb idea). Rugby Challenge is, to my mind, a superior game, but it is no less flawed; in their efforts to make the game more free-flowing, the developers have almost completely done away with any semblance of structure as every move degenerates into one long spree of offloads, with no preset moves to help offset this issue. To frustratingly contrast with this, the rucking system guarantees a constant stream of annoyingly slow ball, lineouts and scrums are dysfunctional and just plain unrealistic respectively, the goal kicking is dumb, the player ratings unrealistic (particularly for northern hemisphere players), you can’t take quick throw-ins and the commentary is nowhere near as good as in Rugby 08. And, just to compound the annoyance, neither has a realistic career mode, which severely damages replay value (an issue thankfully dealt with in this year’s Rugby Challenge 2)

Phew. Right, rant over, now to actually address the causes.

Aside from most studios being unwilling or unable to invest large amounts of money in developing a rugby game due to the limited market size, the main issue facing any rugby game concerns the nature of the game itself. Rugby is a game of a myriad of different battlegrounds and ways of playing the game, with players having to function both as a team player and as an individual both on and off the ball. This makes controlling it from the perspective of the guy with the ball, as all previous games have done, inherently difficult and unrealistic; in rugby, it is just as important if not more so who runs the dummy lines and provides a threat to the defence as the person who ends up with the try. This practice of each player’s individual work adding up to a concerted team effort is incredibly difficult to program, and to simulate it properly would require an incredibly sophisticated AI system beyond anything seen in any other sporting game. And that’s just considering the work done by the backs; accurately simulating forward play would be a nigh-on impossible task, so complex is the technique and decision-making that, in a real game, is responsible for the rucking and scrummaging victories that can turn a match. The other issue is the level of control that should be allowed to the player; a more complex, detailed game would be more realistic, but would seriously risk either swamping the player with decisions and information as they tried to control fifteen players at once, killing the immersion, or automating everything and taking the player out of the equation too much, so that their individual skill level ceased to matter. Finding a suitable middle ground between the Scylla and Charybdis of these two extremes would be a difficult, dangerous task for any game developer.

Still, despite all these problems and more, I personally think that it is far from impossible to make a great game that (relatively) accurately portrays modern rugby. And to find out exactly how I’d go about designing such a game, you can read my next post, in which I will tell you all about it…*

*That sounded way creepier than intended. Sorry

One final note; due to developments in my personal life, posts are now only going to come twice a week, on Wednesday and Saturday. This may change again in the future.

‘Bored’ Games?

I actually like board games; and no, I am not five years old. Not talking about the tabletop RPG, that most nerdy of activities, not talking about chess, fantastic though it is, not talking about su doku and the whole ‘brain trainers’ kettle of fish. No, I’m talking about the stuff we first learned to play as kids, where a coloured board, some dice and a few cards combine to create possibly the most stereotypical family play environment imaginable.

I am not, however, part of a vast subculture here, for whilst board games do have a reasonably healthy ‘hardcore’ market among older gamers (a category I do not consider myself to belong to), and there is an awards ceremony (the Spiel des Jahres) is specifically to reward excellence in board game, but it is an undeniable truth that the majority of bored games are marketed for and sold to young children and families. Moreover, the very concept of grown adults playing board games is considered an inherently strange one, and god forbid that you ever try to lead a ‘normie’ over to the boardgaming cause if you don’t expect to be treated like some form of primitive. As with so many things, I don’t consider this an ‘issue’ so much as something relatively interesting, so I thought it might be interesting to delve into for a short post. Hey, gotta write ’em about something.

The story of why no self-respecting adult can get away with playing board games begins with the games themselves. Consider this; what two things do games like Monopoly, Risk, Snakes & Ladders and Battleships have in common? Firstly, that they are all highly popular and everybody knows about them; these are the board games we learnt to play as kids. Secondly, they are truly awful. Something like Snakes & Ladders is an entirely futile task based solely on throws of a dice, which anybody older than about four can work out, whilst something like Risk takes absolutely forever to get through a game of (as well as being far too fiddly for its own good). Monopoly combines the worst of both worlds, being simultaneously hugely reliant on luck and godawfully long, not to mention the fact that it’s a family game based, basically, about being mean to one another, whilst Battleships combines both of these features (albeit in a slightly less interminably long format) with incredibly formulaic gameplay and being amazingly easy to cheat on. And those are just the examples I can think of in my head; there enough other famous games (and quite a few more not-famous and equally awful ones) with similar issues, whilst stuff like Cluedo and Trivial Pursuit, whilst not as bad, are somewhat uninspired by nature. Compare that to something like Settlers of Catan or K2, which are simple enough to learn (once one of you knows the rules), incorporate enough skill and strategy to be fun and don’t take seventeen and a half hours to play through (these style of games usually fall into the category of ‘German style’, for the record… but I really don’t want to delve into that now)

This begs the obvious question… why do we end up playing all these terrible games? The answer is, of course, to do with when we start playing board games- as children. As previously mentioned, children are by far and away the biggest market for board games, and it is considered almost an integral part of ‘normal’ middle class family life to have a few board games in the house- something to prevent the kids from ruining Mrs. Jones’ petunias or watching too much rubbish TV. So, parents pick something that is easy for a child to get their head around and, just as importantly, won’t tax their mental faculties as they try to learn the rules. The simplest way of doing this, of course, is for them to just buy the games they played as children, the ones that absolutely everyone knows the rules of, the ‘old favourites’ such as those mentioned above. This is why classics like Monopoly are so enduring, and why everybody knows why they work, which encourages parents to buy them, which means people learn them as kids, which means everybody knows them, which means… and so on down the vicious spiral. This, combined with the uncomfortable fear factor of trying to play a game whilst not fully understanding it or (horror) potentially losing to one’s offspring, puts a lot of parents off branching out with their choice of boardgames, which is perhaps understandable.

The ‘child factor’, incidentally, adds another push factor to the idea of playing boardgames when older. As boardgames are only really played by parents as a diversionary tool whilst their children are young, they become very much associated with our childhood days. Given that every child and teenager always wants to forget those embarrassing days way back when, this means that in our slightly older years, we actively reject the idea of board games as being ‘for babies’, and are frequently reluctant to open our mind to them (again, understandably). And, if we get into the habit of not doing something during these pivotal developmental years, the chance of us ever doing it in later life becomes increasingly slim.

Board gaming is not for everyone; I, for instance, would not consider myself massively enamoured with it, as they are usually a lot harder to get into than most other game formats since they don’t have any form of tutorial, and are often not taught word-of-mouth by an experienced player as card games are. They also frequently don’t have quite the same scope or ability to be artistic with their storytelling as other forms of media; but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be fun, can’t be serious, can’t be dramatic, can’t be funny, can’t be entertaining, or can’t be compelling to play. Board games need not be ‘bored’ games, although they easily can be; every so often, it’s worth giving something new, a decent shot.

Call of Duty: Modern Moneymaking

The first person shooter (FPS, or shoot-em-up) genre is the biggest and most profitable in the gaming industry, which is itself now (globally) the biggest entertainment industry on earth. Every year Activision pay off their expenditure for the next decade by releasing another Call of Duty game, and every so often Battlefield, Medal of Honour and Halo like to join the party to similar financial response. Given that many critics have built their name on slagging off such games, and that even the most ardent fans will admit that perhaps only four of the nine CoD games have actually improved on the previous one, this fact seems a trifle odd to my eye (which may have something to do with me being awful at them), and since I cannot apply science to this problem I thought I might retreat to my other old friend; history.

The FPS genre took a while to get going; partly due to the graphical fidelity and processing power required to replicate a decent first-person perspective, it wasn’t until 1992 that Wolfenstein 3D, the game often credited with ‘inventing’ the genre, was released, long after the first four home console generations had passed. However, the genre had existed after a fashion before then; a simple game called Maze War, akin to Pac Man from a rudimentary 3D perspective and with guns, is considered an early example and was released as far back as 1974. Other, similar games, including the space simulator Spasim (the same thing but in space) and tank simulator Battlezone (very slightly different and with tanks) were released over the next decade. All, as well as most subsequent efforts pre-Wolfenstein, used a tile-based movement system, whereby one’s movement was restricted to moving from one square to the next, since this was pretty much all that was possible with contemporary technology.

Further advances dabbled in elements of multiplayer, and introduced such features as texture mapping to enhance graphical fidelity, but Wolfenstein’s great success lay in its gameplay format. Gone was any tile-based or otherwise restrictive movement, and in its place were maps that one was free to move around in all directions and orientations in two dimensions. It also incorporated a health meter (and healing pickups), depleting ammo and interchangeable weapons, all of which would become mainstays of the genre over the next few years. Despite its controversial use of Nazi iconography (because the bad guys were Nazis, rather than the developers fascists), the game was wildly successful; at least for the short time before the same company, id software, released Doom. Doom used a similar interface as Wolfenstein, had better graphics and a more detailed 3D environment, but its real success lay in its release format; the first third of the game was distributed for free, encouraging gamers to experience all that the game had to offer before gladly paying for the remainder. With it’s consolidation and enhancement of Wolfenstein’s format and its adoption of a now-ubiquitous multiplayer mode, Doom is often considered the most influential FPS of all time, and one of the most important games full stop; its fame is such that versions of the game have been available on almost every major console for the last 20 years.

Over the next few years, many other features that would later become staples of the FPS genre were developed. The Apple Mac, not usually a traditional stronghold for gaming, was the platform for Marathon, which introduced a number of new game modes (including cooperative multiplayer), more complex weapons and placed a heavy emphasis on story as well as gameplay. Star Wars: Dark Forces introduced the ability to crouch for the first time, thus setting the template for today’s FPS pattern of repeatedly hiding behind chest-high walls, and 1995’s Descent changed the graphical playing field by changing from using sprites to represent objects and NPC’s in the gameworld to a 3D system based around polygonal graphics. This technology was one of the many technologies used in Doom’s 1996 sequel, Quake, which also increased the series’ emphasis on online multiplayer. Unfortunately, this market would soon be totally conquered by 1997’s GoldenEye, a tie-in to the James Bond film of the same name; the game itself experimented with new, claustrophobic game environments and required you to manually reload your weapon, but it was the multiplayer that proved its success. It has now been revealed that the multiplayer was actually nothing more than a hasty add-on knocked up in matter of weeks, but the circituous maps and multiple weapons & characters on offer made it endlessly compelling, and right up until 2004 GoldenEye was the best selling game for the Nintendo 64.

But the defining FPS of this era was undoubtedly Half Life; released in 1998, the game combined Quake’s graphical technology with a bulletproof gameplay format and one of the strongest narratives and plots of any game ever made. The single player experience alone was enough to raise Valve, the game’s makers, to iconic status almost overnight (a label they retain to this day due to their penchant for innovation and not being dicks about their business tactics), and when a multiplayer mod for it was developed (Counterstrike), it and its successor (Counterstrike: Source) became the most popular multiplayer FPS experience ever.

After Half Life, some felt that the FPS genre had been taken about as far as it could in its current iteration, and that the genre’s immediate future was to be based around increasing graphical quality, fiddling with storylines and making money. However, in 2000 Microsoft acquired Bungie studios (who had made Marathon back in 1994) and released their real-time-strategy-turned-third-person-shooter-turned-first-person-shooter as a startup title for their newly released Xbox console. The game incorporated a heavy focus on characterisation (helped by it occasionally leaving first person perspective for cutscenes, which Half Life never did) with a new style of enemies (well-rendered and varied alien opponents), a wide variety of weapons and the perhaps unusual feature of having an auto-healing system rather than health pickups. The game was called Halo, and it revolutionised the FPS genre.

Since then, advancements have been less revolutionary and more gradual, as the FPS genre has diversified. Halo has now gone through several incarnations whilst keeping the basic format the same, but the gameplay principle has been applied in almost every conceivable way. Battlefield and Call of Duty applied the concept to military-style gameplay with a strong multiplayer emphasis, whilst the likes of Resident Evil and Left 4 Dead added a horror theme (or at least used zombies as bad guys). The games based on the Crytek engine (Crysis and Far Cry) turned the focus away from linear mission design and on to beautifully rendered open-world levels (some would argue in direct contrast to CoD’s increasingly linear single player mode), and recently Spec Ops: The Line has followed in Half Life’s plot-centric footsteps with a nonlinear storyline based around the mental impact of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Some argue that the current FPS genre is stagnating; indeed super-critical game reviewer Yahtzee Croshaw has recently created a new genre called ‘spunkgargleweewee’ to cover generic linear modern military shooters (ie Call of Duty and her extended family) and indicate his contempt at their current form of existence. But to many they are the pinnacle of current-generation gaming, or at least the most fun way yet devised to spend an afternoon. By way of an example as to how much people… enjoy these things, the most recent Call of Duty game was released with a feature for the PS3 to allow the map packs used for multiplayer to be downloaded to the console’s hard disk. This was a feature requested of Activision by their hardcore fan base, who were somewhat perplexed at the request; the feature was, they pointed out, not going to make the game run any faster. But the fan base said they realised this, and it wasn’t a performance issue; it was just that they were playing the game so much that the process of continually reading the map data from the game disc was beginning to wear out the laser used to read the disc information. Thank you, Call of Duty fans, for making me feel especially productive after spending an afternoon writing an article for nobody on the internet to read.

Pineapples (TM)

If the last few decades of consumerism have taught us anything, it is just how much faith people are able of setting store in a brand. In everything from motorbikes to washing powder, we do not simply test and judge effectiveness of competing products objectively (although, especially when considering expensive items such as cars, this is sometimes impractical); we must compare them to what we think of the brand and the label, what reputation this product has and what it is particularly good at, which we think most suits our social standing and how others will judge our use of it. And good thing too, from many companies’ perspective, otherwise the amount of business they do would be slashed. There are many companies whose success can be almost entirely put down to the effect of their branding and the impact their marketing has had on the psyche of western culture, but perhaps the most spectacular example concerns Apple.

In some ways, to typecast Apple as a brand-built company is a harsh one; their products are doubtless good ones, and they have shown a staggering gift for bringing existed ideas together into forms that, if not quite new, are always the first to be a practical, genuine market presence. It is also true that Apple products are often better than their competitors in very specific fields; in computing, for example, OS X is better at dealing with media than other operating systems, whilst Windows has traditionally been far stronger when it comes to word processing, gaming and absolutely everything else (although Windows 8 looks very likely to change all of that- I am not looking forward to it). However, it is almost universally agreed (among non-Apple whores anyway) that once the rest of the market gets hold of it Apple’s version of a product is almost never the definitive best, from a purely analytical perspective (the iPod is a possible exception, solely due to the existence of iTunes redefining the music industry before everyone else and remaining competitive to this day) and that every Apple product is ridiculously overpriced for what it is. Seriously, who genuinely thinks that top-end Macs are a good investment?

Still, Apple make high-end, high-quality products with a few things they do really, really well that are basically capable of doing everything else. They should have a small market share, perhaps among the creative or the indie, and a somewhat larger one in the MP3 player sector. They should be a status symbol for those who can afford them, a nice company with a good history but that nowadays has to face up to a lot of competitors. As it is, the Apple way of doing business has proven successful enough to make them the biggest private company in the world. Bigger than every other technology company, bigger than every hedge fund or finance company, bigger than any oil company, worth more than every single one (excluding state owned companies such as Saudi Aramco, which is estimated to be worth around 3 trillion dollars by dealing in Saudi oil exports). How has a technology company come to be worth $400 billion? How?

One undoubted feature is Apple’s uncanny knack of getting there first- the Apple II was the first real personal computer and provided the genes for Windows-powered PC’s to take the world, whilst the iPod was the first MP3 player that was genuinely enjoyable to use, the iPhone the first smartphone (after just four years, somewhere in the region of 30% of the world’s phones are now smartphones) and the iPad the first tablet computer. Being in the technology business has made this kind of innovation especially rewarding for them; every company is constantly terrified of being left behind, so whenever a new innovation comes along they will knock something together as soon as possible just to jump on the bandwagon. However, technology is a difficult business to get right, meaning that these products are usually rubbish and make the Apple version shine by comparison. This also means that if Apple comes up with the idea first, they have had a couple of years of working time to make sure they get it right, whilst everyone else’s first efforts have had only a few scance months; it takes a while for any serious competitors to develop, by which time Apple have already made a few hundred million off it and have moved on to something else; innovation matters in this business.

But the real reason for Apple’s success can be put down to the aura the company have built around themselves and their products. From their earliest infancy Apple fans have been self-dubbed as the independent, the free thinkers, the creative, those who love to be different and stand out from the crowd of grey, calculating Windows-users (which sounds disturbingly like a conspiracy theory or a dystopian vision of the future when it is articulated like that). Whilst Windows has its problems, Apple has decided on what is important and has made something perfect in this regard (their view, not mine), and being willing to pay for it is just part of the induction into the wonderful world of being an Apple customer (still their view). It’s a compelling world view, and one that thousands of people have subscribed to, simply because it is so comforting; it sells us the idea that we are special, individual, and not just one of the millions of customers responsible for Apple’s phenomenal size and success as a company. But the secret to the success of this vision is not just the view itself; it is the method and the longevity of its delivery. This is an image that has been present in their advertising campaign from its earliest infancy, and is now so ingrained that it doesn’t have to be articulated any more; it’s just present in the subtle hints, the colour scheme, the way the Apple store is structured and the very existence of Apple-dedicated shops generally. Apple have delivered the masterclass in successful branding; and that’s all the conclusion you’re going to get for today.

Hitting the hay

OK, so it was history last time, so I’m feeling like a bit of science today. So, here is your random question for today; are the ‘leaps of faith’ in the Assassin’s Creed games survivable?

Between them, the characters of Altair, Ezio and Connor* jump off a wide variety of famous buildings and monuments across the five current games, but the jump that springs most readily to mind is Ezio’s leap from the Campanile di San Marco, in St Mark’s Square, Venice, at the end of Assassin’s Creed II. It’s not the highest jump made, but it is one of the most interesting and it occurs as part of the main story campaign, meaning everyone who’s played the game through will have made the jump and it has some significance attached to it. It’s also a well-known building with plenty of information on it.

[*Interesting fact; apparently, both Altair and Ezio translate as ‘Eagle’ in some form in English, as does Connor’s Mohawk name (Ratonhnhaké;ton, according to Wikipedia) and the name of his ship, the Aquila. Connor itself translates as ‘lover of wolves’ from the original Gaelic]

The Campanile as it stands today is not the same one as in Ezio’s day; in 1902 the original building collapsed and took ten years to rebuild. However, the new Campanile was made to be cosmetically (if not quite structurally) identical to the original, so current data should still be accurate. Wikipedia again tells me the brick shaft making up the bulk of the structure accounts for (apparently only) 50m of the tower’s 98.6m total height, with Ezio’s leap (made from the belfry just above) coming in at around 55m. With this information we can calculate Ezio’s total gravitational potential energy lost during his fall; GPE lost = mgΔh, and presuming a 70kg bloke this comes to GPE lost= 33730J (Δ is, by the way, the mathematical way of expressing a change in something- in this case, Δh represents a change in height). If his fall were made with no air resistance, then all this GPE would be converted to kinetic energy, where KE = mv²/2. Solving to make v (his velocity upon hitting the ground) the subject gives v = sqrt(2*KE/m), and replacing KE with our value of the GPE lost, we get v = 31.04m/s. This tells us two things; firstly that the fall should take Ezio at least three seconds, and secondly that, without air resistance, he’d be in rather a lot of trouble.

But, we must of course factor air resistance into our calculations, but to do so to begin with we must make another assumption; that Ezio reaches terminal velocity before reaching the ground. Whether this statement is valid or not we will find out later. The terminal velocity is just a rearranged form of the drag equation: Vt=sqrt(2mg/pACd), where m= Ezio’s mass (70kg, as presumed earlier), g= gravitational field strength (on Earth, 9.8m/s²), p= air density (on a warm Venetian evening at around 15 degrees Celcius, this comes out as 1.225kg/m³), A= the cross-sectional area of Ezio’s falling body (call it 0.85m², presuming he’s around the same size as me) and Cd= his body’s drag coefficient (a number evaluating how well the air flows around his body and clothing, for which I shall pick 1 at complete random). Plugging these numbers into the equation gives a terminal velocity of 36.30m/s, which is an annoying number; because it’s larger than our previous velocity value, calculated without air resistance, of 31.04m/s, this means that Ezio definitely won’t have reached terminal velocity by the time he reaches the bottom of the Campanile, so we’re going to have to look elsewhere for our numbers. Interestingly, the terminal velocity for a falling skydiver, without parachute, is apparently around 54m/s, suggesting that I’ve got numbers that are in roughly the correct ballpark but that could do with some improvement (this is probably thanks to my chosen Cd value; 1 is a very high value, selected to give Ezio the best possible chance of survival, but ho hum)

Here, I could attempt to derive an equation for how velocity varies with distance travelled, but such things are complicated, time consuming and do not translate well into being typed out. Instead, I am going to take on blind faith a statement attached to my ‘falling skydiver’ number quoted above; that it takes about 3 seconds to achieve half the skydiver’s terminal velocity. We said that Ezio’s fall from the Campanile would take him at least three seconds (just trust me on that one), and in fact it would probably be closer to four, but no matter; let’s just presume he has jumped off some unidentified building such that it takes him precisely three seconds to hit the ground, at which point his velocity will be taken as 27m/s.

Except he won’t hit the ground; assuming he hits his target anyway. The Assassin’s Creed universe is literally littered with indiscriminate piles/carts of hay and flower petals that have been conveniently left around for no obvious reason, and when performing a leap of faith our protagonist’s always aim for them (the AC wiki tells me that these were in fact programmed into the memories that the games consist of in order to aid navigation, but this doesn’t matter). Let us presume that the hay is 1m deep where Ezio lands, and that the whole hay-and-cart structure is entirely successful in its task, in that it manages to reduce Ezio’s velocity from 27m/s to nought across this 1m distance, without any energy being lost through the hard floor (highly unlikely, but let’s be generous). At 27m/s, the 70kg Ezio has a momentum of 1890kgm/s, all of which must be dissipated through the hay across this 1m distance. This means an impulse of 1890Ns, and thus a force, will act upon him; Impulse=Force x ΔTime. This force will cause him to decelerate. If this deceleration is uniform (it wouldn’t be in real life, but modelling this is tricky business and it will do as an approximation), then his average velocity during his ‘slowing’ period will come to be 13.5m/s, and that this deceleration will take 0.074s. Given that we now know the impulse acting on Ezio and the time for which it acts, we can now work out the force upon him; 1890 / 0.074 = 1890 x 13.5 = 26460N. This corresponds to 364.5m/s² deceleration, or around 37g’s to put it in G-force terms. Given that 5g’s has been known to break bones in stunt aircraft, I think it’s safe to say that quite a lot more hay, Ezio’s not getting up any time soon. So remember; next time you’re thinking of jumping off a tall building, I would recommend a parachute over a haystack.

N.B.: The resulting deceleration calculated in the last bit seems a bit massive, suggesting I may have gone wrong somewhere, so if anyone has any better ideas of numbers/equations then feel free to leave them below. I feel here is also an appropriate place to mention a story I once heard concerning an air hostess whose plane blew up. She was thrown free, landed in a tree on the way down… and survived.

EDIT: Since writing this post, this has come into existence, more accurately calculating the drag and final velocity acting on the falling Assassin. They’re more advanced than me, but their conclusion is the same; I like being proved right :).