The Ontological Geek

Additional Pylons: Rise/Fall

2012-02-02T07:17:00.014-05:00

But now, O LORD, you are our Father;
   we are the clay, and you are our potter;
   we are all the work of your hand.
      ~Isaiah 64:8

One of the most evocative analogies for human change in the Hebrew scriptures is found in Isaiah, the oft-sung passage portraying the deity as craftsman and His people as clay. It must have been, and still is, an intimate image for Abraham's descendants - that a divinity might tug upon our very selves, shaping us into beautiful, lasting forms is flattering, and it inspires feelings of safety and hope that hearken back to the story of creation, when Adam was fashioned from the earth. But it also clearly relegates the human body to a subject role; the clay has no power to influence its own creation. Of course, since Darwin, we have known that evolution is a conservative, random process that operates (if it can be said to operate) toward the goal of replication, and is certainly not the purposeful artist that the author of Isaiah imagined. But this image still had weight, since we were subjects in the continual re-creation of the human race, not agents. But now, that too is changing. This image becomes less and less applicable as we consistently gain greater ability to become our own craftsmen. Now we can mold ourselves and mold others, and the promise of further influence over the body gleams on the horizon.

Of course, just because we can doesn't mean that we should. Deus Ex: Human Revolution is transfixed on the transhuman shift that begins even now, and examines many of the boons and pitfalls that command over the flesh might entail. The narrative begins in a time when augmentation of the body has become standard fare, if not commonplace, but society hasn't yet acclimated to the change yet, either. Augments are still very much attached to issues of class in Human Revolution’s imagined future, and so the player gains insight into how this technology might generate societal ills even as it simultaneously enhances individuals.

Human Revolution is smart in its approach; it puts the player in the role of an individual that was augmented out of necessity, not out of choice, and this frees the player to explore the issue through a character that, like any naturally evolved creature, didn't ask to be what he has become. As the narrative plays out, Human Revolution treats Adam Jensen as a microcosm within which the explore the ramifications of augmentation technology. One of the best, and most subtle, methods it uses is consciously drawing on two opposed myths - the Icarus myth and the Adam and Eve myth - to examine whether transhumanism will be remembered as a Fall, or as a Rise from old limitations.

The Fall

Deus Ex starts in the office of an unnamed businessman, who stands before a statue of a winged man (the first instance of the Icarus motif) in a tower overlooking a skyline and then turns to converse with a host of faceless, nameless individuals speaking via voice modulated pathways about a broad conspiracy apparently affecting a wide population and which will run through the rest of the game. What has this cabal worried is the new discovery that Megan Reed, a scientist of Sarif Industries, is poised to reveal the very next day in Washington. The scene then shifts to a news broadcast of Eliza Cassan, who is reporting on anti-augmentation protesters who are protesting (in advance) the news that Megan Reed intends to share with Congress, that she has found a way to make augmentations "available to all." The scene pans back to encompass Dr. Reed herself and the new head of security of Sarif Industries, Adam Jensen, who is the player's avatar. There are a few moments of context; the player can easily pick up that Jensen and Reed have an intimate history, but then the narrative plows along and Sarif calls Adam up to see him.

The game then places the player in Jensen’s shoes, and he, like the player, is new to the flurry of work at Sarif Industries. What's more, it's clear that he has doubts about the ends of the research being done at the company. Reed accuses him of over-thinking things; she insists that "The work we're doing is good. We're helping people overcome their physical limitations." Adam counters by pointing out all the Department of Defense contracts that Sarif Industries has running, and while Reed insists that they also work with teachers, doctors, and construction workers, the player is then treated to a demonstration of the Typhoon weapon system, a 360 degree radius attack system that levels everything around the individual deploying it. Reed contextualizes it as a sort of "deal with the devil," in that the defense contracts keep Sarif Industries afloat and helps fund technology that helps people, such as neural enhancements that helps one think faster and react quicker. There's then a definite confirmation that Megan and Adam have a romantic past, but then they separate so that Adam can continue on to speak with Sarif. As for Sarif, he's aglow with the new breakthrough that they're going to reveal tomorrow, and the player gets a glimpse of just how convincing Sarif can be. He specifically claims that they are in no way tampering with the natural order; instead, Megan simply unlocked what was already there inside human DNA, thus allowing for a safer method than what technology that's already prevalent on the market allows for.

This is the perfect way to introduce the game. It quickly establishes the setting, attributes voices to the sides of the debate that will be explored in the narrative, illuminates the themes of the work, and begins to characterize Jensen. The narrative kicks into action during the meeting with Sarif; an assault begins on Megan's lab, and Adam rushes down to investigate and do what he can. Jensen engages or avoids the armed men murdering their way through the labs, and in the process catches sight of a few heavily-augmented soldiers. One turns invisible; another is essentially a walking tank; and the last of them grabs Jensen and throws him through a wall, and doesn't stop his assault until he has pulverized Jensen's limbs and organs, and finally puts a bullet through Jensen's skull. And Jensen? Jensen is helpless during these proceedings; against this single augmented soldier, Jensen, a tough, trained, former SWAT member, is utterly ineffective. You can see this scene here, and also the scene I talk about in the next paragraph.

We are then treated to a wonderful cut-scene that intersperses slightly-stylized, elegant diagrams of the modifications being done to Adam's body and intimate, ultra-precise images of various augmentations being installed with scenes from Adam's memory, specifically of Adam making love to Megan. We hear her voice, saying, “I love you,” and whispering Adam's name. This is a brilliant scene for a couple of different reasons. First, the soft orange and yellow hues that are so prominent in the cut-scene imply warmth (and indeed, the tight focus of many of the shots are nearly womb-like; they are less clinical and more intimate), but also nostalgia; it is this mixture of life beginning and life past. Second, we are getting a glimpse at what makes Adam tick. In his near-death state, his memories are of loving Megan Reed, and this glimpse at his motivations and desires coincide with our intimate glimpse of Jensen's body. Finally, the images of this re-birth are mixed in with images of what Jensen is losing. The memories of making love to Megan are physical memories, so tightly wound in with the body that he is losing now and forever. And so the player receives this dissonant clash of ideas that simultaneously show us who Adam is and who Adam is becoming; what Adam is gaining and what Adam has lost; death and re-birth. It effectively establishes the tension at the core of the game: what does it mean to be human? What are the ramifications of what Adam has become? What does Adam represent?

New Man

The rest of the game takes place six months after this rebirth, as Adam attempts to contextualize and discover the truth behind both his own "death" and the murder of the woman he loved, let alone the many, many others that died in the attack. The player only ever knows him as an augmented individual from that point on. Most of his body is mechanical now; the game wastes no time in giving the player a glimpse of Jensen's sleek new body, which is designed to look as “human” as possible in musculature and form (in notable contrast to nearly all of the other augmented individuals he encounters). Even before we see the changes beneath Jensen's clothing, we experience the inside of Jensen's head; where before the player had a clean, vacant view of the world, now there is a HUD overlaid, keeping track of Jensen's vitals and offering assistance in observation and combat. Most of Human Revolution is set in first person, but occasionally the camera pans out onto Adam, usually when he is doing something intensely physical, when Jensen himself would be especially aware of his new body. Two notable examples occur when Jensen engages in physical combat with an opponent, or takes cover in a firefight. The changes to Jensen's body are incredibly beneficial for the actions the player is expected to perform, but it isn't long before Human Revolution asks the player to think about Jensen's new body.

In an early conversation with Jensen's pilot, Jensen is asked what he thinks about his new augments; it's a powerful moment for the player, who has just finished up his or her first mission and is probably a little giddy, having just received the first chance to upgrade Jensen's augments (my Jensen had just become capable of becoming invisible, and I was itching to try it out). But then Faridah asks Jensen how he's coping, and the player is given a couple of options, including a rather angry response that reminds the player that this new body was forced on Jensen, no matter how necessary or powerful the augments were. This sentiment is driven home to the player when they return to Jensen's home; no matter how the player had Jensen answer, a shattered mirror in the bathroom shows that Jensen has most definitely had trouble coping with the ramifications of his failure.

It was a fascinating discovery, one that I can't recall having with any other game. When Faridah asked how Jensen was, I answered that he was fine; his body had just come in handy. It had saved lives, in fact, and it seemed silly to begrudge it when it was so helpful and had accomplished so much good. But when I saw the mirror, I realized that Jensen (the Jensen that existed between my choices and the character that the game presented) was lying, perhaps even to himself. The artificial body must serve as an ever-present reminder of what Jensen has lost. In a later scene, Jensen might admit that "Every time I touch something I wonder - just for a second, every time - if what I'm feeling is real." Jensen's failure and loss is totally embodied; Human Revolution is nuanced in that as it provides the player with astounding, fun abilities, it reminds that the cost is Jensen's peace of mind.

Jensen serves as the prototype "New Human" for the player, and his own struggles with his identity is mirrored in the wider society. Jensen's stance on what he has been made into is ultimately up to the player, but he can be portrayed as angry and bitter, cold and detached, or as mostly recovered and warming to the benefits of his augments. Society contains those voices and more, and they are portrayed in the midst of anti-aug rioting in Detroit, in the brothels of Hengsha, in the literal towers of augmentated corporate executives and in gangs that harvest augmented limbs from the living and the dead. Humanity is on a brink; there are those who are optimistic and excited about the potential of augmentation, but there are many who express fear at the obsoleting effect of augmentation, since augmented individuals are better than non-augmented individuals in a physical, visible way, and at what some might say is a perversion of the sacred, natural body.

Law is still in the process of defining the role that augmentations will play out on a global scale, and the player receives the reasoned extremes of the argument about the implementation of augmentation technology via Jensen's discussions with David Sarif, who is both Jensen's employer and the man who foisted the suite of augmentations onto Jensen's dying body, and Bill Taggert, an anti-augmentation lobbyist whose wife was killed by a man suffering from augmentation-related illness. Sarif speaks convincingly of an unregulated future for augmentations; he portrays himself unflinchingly as a pioneer exploring and widening the boundaries of human capabilities. Sarif is a visionary figure, and fits the bill quite well. He totally believes in the correctness of his position, even as he acknowledges its occasional unfortunate downside, a "broken egg" here or there. He is no saint, asking Jensen to break the law on multiple occasions, but he is a true believer. Taggart stands opposite, and acts in a considerably more oppositional role throughout most of the game, but he is an explicitly political foe. One of the best scenes in the game has Jensen confronting Taggart in front of a live television audience over the involvement of one of his organization's important members in a massive kidnapping job. Taggart always aims at Jensen, claiming that the trauma of loss and then augmentation has made him unstable; it's a tense, wonderful scene, but mostly portrays Taggart as savvy politician. Taggart's more nuanced arguments are hinted at via e-books found in the game (and compiled for your benefit here).

Between the poles of these two men, the player and Jensen navigate whether the promise of augmentation technology is worth the cost in human lives and, potentially, the human spirit. Having established that, let's move into an investigation of the two chosen myths.

Icarus - Rise, then Fall

The core of the Icarus myth is Daedalus' and Icarus' attempted escape from Crete via wings that Daedalus fashions for himself and his son. Daedalus warns Icarus not to fly too low or too high, but Icarus, either out of ambition or the joy of freedom, doesn't listen; he flies far too high, and the sun melts the wax of his wings, and so he plummets into the sea and drowns. The myth interacts with the themes of ambition and power, and shares the same sort of structure that is common to the "Playing God" science fiction trope. Its main dramatic beats are a rise from imprisonment, but too far a rise, so that it ends in a sudden fall. If Human Revolution is "read" as an Icarus analogy, then transhumanism, especially augmentation, are the wings. All of humanity acts as Icarus, but again, Jensen serves as representative to humanity in Human Revolution. But what exactly does "soaring too high" translate into, and what fall is feared?

Well, the flight of Icarus is easily translated into the sheer capability of augmented individuals. Human Revolution expresses this most clearly through the gameplay. As Jensen unlocks more and more of the potential of his augmented body, he quickly becomes capable of sneaking through or assaulting heavily defended installations, or hacking any computer in less than a minute. With very little effort, Jensen can become exceptionally socially adept, observant, and able to emit mood-altering pheromones, making him a very persuasive individual. Jensen is simply better. This is true throughout the game, except in the instance of boss fights against the three members of Belltower's "Tyrants" unit, the heavily augmented individuals that Jensen sees in the last minutes of his healthy, unaugmented life. In fact, there's a real reversal of role every time Jensen enters close combat. Even trained soldiers don't stand a chance against him; with a single press of the button, the player can murder or subdue one (or even two) opponents in a recreation of Jensen's own "death." Jensen has become just as unstoppable because he was so brutally ruined.

The boss fights are universally considered one of Human Revolution's few failings. They are so different in form and content that it feels like you've started playing a different (and worse) game; they were even designed by an outside company. All the skills that you've been developing simply don't hold true in these boss fights, and the player suddenly finds themselves up against an opponent that will gladly eat their bullets and which they cannot avoid or talk their way through. If anything, this just underscores how "normal" the average soldier that Jensen leaves bleeding or unconscious in his wake is, and how much of an impact these hyper-augmented soldiers could have in a military environment. The three times that Jensen fights a foe that is as heavily augmented as he, all the rules change.

It's also worth noting that all two of the three boss fights are against opponents with significantly less elegant chassis than Jensen's; I bring it up because the matter of design is important to the Icarus myth, and because Jensen's advance through the ranks of the Tyrants is as much an aesthetic move as a military one.

The first boss, Lawrence Barrett, is clearly suffering from augmentation rejection (in the skin where the metal ends on his jaw), and his complexion has started to turn metallic. Moreover, the build is unnaturally heavy, with flanges and other defensive installations, and one of his arms actually houses a gun, making Barrett imposing, but certainly not beautiful:

The second boss, Yelena Fedorova, has less obvious deformity, but her chassis is vaguely non-human; the sharp edges of the torso are unappealing, and the scale of the body isn't quite anatomically right. It doesn't show here, but her legs bend the other way as well, creating a rather unsettling effect:

The bodies of these first two bosses are clearly unnatural. There is less fusion of form, so their limbs feel like additions rather than part of the body, and they cannot be mistaken for "natural" humans, even with clothing on.

The third boss, Jaron Namir, has a body that is clearly based on human musculature. Only two-toed feet and an especially thin torso break from the natural build:

While this bio-mimesis inspired body is very human in form, it still feels unfinished, since there is a startling lack of skin. Compare to the body of Jensen:

Jensen's augments are matte black and smooth like skin, but clearly have definition. What's more, they have not replaced all of his body so much as fused with it, and the end result is that it feels natural, and finished. With each new boss, it's as if we see the next design rung up the ladder of augmentation technology, and Jensen's triumph over his opponents champions his naturalistic augments over their unnatural bodies. Jensen is at the apex of augmented design - his aesthetic is clean, smooth and integrated, and in form he can pass as human.

In the Icarus narrative, the designer of the wings is not the ambitious character; in fact, Daedalus urges caution. It is Icarus that pursues greater heights, and Icarus that falls. In Human Revolution, David Sarif is the most ambitious character, and he acts as a representative for the parts of humanity that also pursue the full potential of augmentation. Nearly every encounter with Sarif sees him reiterate his vision of an improved humanity, a passion he no doubt received from the father-figure in his life. That role is filled by Sarif's mentor, Hugh Darrow, creator of augmentation technology, who fills the role of mourning father quite well.

Just as Jensen uncovers the Illuminati's plot to control all mechanically-augmented individuals, Darrow activates an alternative signal that drives most augmented individuals into a hallucination-fueled murderous frenzy. He does this not as an evil mastermind, but because he seeks to prove the dangers of augmentation to humanity. Like any philanthropist, Darrow hoped that his technology would grow to help people, including himself, but the inverse of his dreams were realized. Instead, his genetics made augmentation impossible for him, and the Illuminati and others had fashioned augmentation into a means of control over the poorer and weaker. Now disillusioned, Darrow wanted to break humanity's enchantment with the technology that he made, and fashioned an atrocity to that end. Darrow sees his "child" soaring higher much faster than he had hoped, and fears what will happen, so he does something that Daedalus could not: he engineers a less-fatal fall to cause humanity to cast off its wings. It's worth checking out the conversation that Jensen has with Darrow at the end-game; it's one of the best scenes in Human Revolution, and captures a lot of the themes of the game.

As an Icarus tale, Human Revolution steps in right before the fatal fall. Humanity's future relationship with augmentation is uncertain, and so it is unclear whether augmentation will keep humanity flying, or whether it will just enable humanity to plummet from even greater heights. Darrow would cut off the wings to keep us safe, while Sarif pushes us toward the heavens, and Taggart urges caution.

Adam and Eve - Fall, then Rise

The moniker of the avatar character, Adam, is a clear nod to the classical Christian creation myth, and it bears a few clear signs of fitting. Mythical Adam was the first man, and Human Revolution's Adam similarly acts as the source of a "New Human." What is interesting is that this new people will not spring from Adam's loins (at least, not primarily), and Adam does not offer a genesis of new life; instead, Adam offers a solution to a problem in the lives of those who have already become "New Humans." Specifically, augmented individuals face problems with rejection of artificial limbs and organs, a totally plausible biological response to what essentially amounts to an alien, non-self entity. White blood cells are sure to hate that new spring-laden steel leg, regardless of its utility. One of the central objects of worry in future Detroit is the limited availability of the drug Neuropozyne, which stops the eventual build-up of glial tissue around augmentations. Adam, however, doesn't seem to need the drug; he suffers no ill effects from his augmentations.

This is because the source of the discovery that resulted in the attack that starts off the narrative is Adam's DNA, which does all the things listed here (Subject X is Adam Jensen). Even the language in that entry (from in-game) begins to depict Subject X as a new being, totally matching the transhumanist ideal and expressed in the natural aesthetic of Adam's new body. The nervous system and the augments become indistinguishable, since Adam's biology strengthens rather than degrades the connection with augments. What was once two become one. Adam represents a new level of fusion between technology and humanity, a total incorporation of the machine into flesh. As such, he fits the role that his name opens. Adam is not only capable of experiencing this symbiosis himself, but also contains what is necessary to bring the rest of humanity into a similar symbiotic relationship with augmentations.

In part of a side-mission that is somewhat difficult to gain access to, the player might discover that the people that Adam thought were his parents were not his birth parents at all. In fact, the origins of Adam's life is shrouded in mystery. Dr. Reed admits to being curious about whether or not Adam's unique DNA is the result of random evolution, or is a product of human design; the game offers no clear answers, but due to his unique biology and the circumstances of his childhood, human design seems the most likely answer. At first glance, the age and overuse of the engineered man trope might blind the reader, but the way that Human Revolution employs it makes a great deal of sense. If Jensen is, in fact, the product of human hands, then even the inception of this new humanity is a self-produced genesis. He is an Adam fashioned not from the dirt, but from the labs of men, and this fits very much with the game's themes.

Also compelling is viewing Megan Reed as Jensen's Eve. They were lovers at one point, but again, it's not Adam's actual children that form this genesis. In an interesting turn, instead of taking Adam's rib, she merely takes his DNA in order to bring about new "life." From the perspective of the Illuminati, as presented at the beginning of the game, this discovery cannot occur; Megan has eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, and in order to keep her from sharing that knowledge, the Illuminati step in to "exile" her. The Illuminati does have a few traits that resemble a Hebraic notion of God. It has the apparent best interests of mankind at heart, and knows better than the individual human what traits to cultivate. Moreover, it's absolutely interested in this "new race," but it seeks to guide the direction of that growth. At the start of the game, the Illuminati is the human deity watching over the human birth of a new humanity, and is still fashioning the leash to hang around its neck.

As for Adam, he has already left the proverbial garden by the time the game hits full swing. He has already experienced his Fall, and the rest of his action throughout the game is his Rise. The game continually investigates what Adam has lost. In the creation myth, there is a trust broken between God and humanity; the Fall shatters the world, letting in death, but everything beyond that moment is a move toward reclamation of what the Garden contained, interpreted as a pursuit for life without death, paradise, or a healed relationship with the divinity. Jensen acts this role well; when he discovers that Megan is still alive, he does everything in his power to find her and heal the "sin" he committed in allowing her to be taken. But just as he is on the cusp of finding her again, Adam has an encounter with Jaron Namir. Upon defeating the mercenary, his final words for Jensen are: "Men like us... we never get back what we love." Namir is right; things are hardly the same, but the game doesn't give much time to explore what the future of Jensen's and Reed's relationship might be. Regardless, there is no question that Jensen can't go back to how things were. He has lost his body, and with it he loses the potential of returning to ignorance of his own origins and is rendered incapable of reclaiming his past.

Indeed, as much as Adam might recover in the narrative, there is no going back to the garden, especially by the time Human Revolution has concluded. Adam's DNA is enough for him to fill the "Adam" role, but that role is intensified when, as the game hits its denouement, a huge decision is placed in Adam's hands. The truth of Darrow's plan isn't widely known, and it is up to Adam to decide what message is broadcast to the world. He can champion Sarif's visions and inspire the world to explore augmentation to its full, listen to Taggart and encourage restrictions on the growth of augmentation technology, or fulfill Darrow's wishes and scar humanity's relationship with augmentation. In this action, Adam truly acts as the head of this "new humanity." He decides what limits are placed on it, and he decides whether it should exist at all. He is also given a fourth option: to shirk his role as the Adam of transhumanity and silence everybody who knows the truth (including himself), allowing humanity to choose its own path.

Ultimately, Jensen serves as an iconic man in Human Revolution, acting not only as the player's avatar, but as an avatar of the human race. He is in a position to decide whether the world should be made in his own image. If the Illuminati play the role of God at the beginning of Human Revolution, by the end of it Adam has attained that influence for himself.

Conclusion

Smart games are often a rarity, and so it is incredibly encouraging to see a game creatively reinterpret iconic stories and carry as much rich narrative content as Human Revolution does. It does an incredible job of making every part of its playtime, even side-missions, work toward investigating its core themes and creates an open field for the player to decide whether or not human enhancement is a future we should seek, and even then causes us to think about what we can do to avoid the sometimes-bleak future portrayed here.

Good on you, Eidos. And as always, I am eager to hear your thoughts, dear reader.

Matthew Schanuel is a grad student living in Boston, Mass. Whenever he isn't drowning in his thesis, he likes to drink beer, play games, run D&D and write fiction. Actually, he does all those things while he's drowning in his thesis, too. You can e-mail him at OatsMalone@gmail.com.

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Guest Article: Game Changers

2012-01-31T11:26:00.000-05:00

I’ve been reading Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, which is a novel about many things,. but largely about detachment and loss. It’s concerned with those things which were a part of our world, once, but are not now and cannot be again. In O’Neill’s novel we find Dutch-born Hans van den Broek in the strange and tense setting of New York immediately post-9/11. Like the New York skyline, Hans is experiencing the emptiness that follows loss, the sensation that something is wrong, something is missing. Estranged from the structure and support of family, friends, a home or a purpose, Hans is detached from anything meaningful, anything that might ground him in the day to day experience of actually being a human. Without overemphasizing it, the novel is pervaded by an essence of mourning, that sort of downbeat resignation in which life goes on but is seemingly more hollow.

We usually associate mourning with death and specifically the passing of a loved one, perhaps even a pet. But what we are really doing when we mourn is lamenting changes in our life, changes that cause the removal of something which has ingrained itself in our identity. Because we are a social species this is most acutely felt with other people, but the loss of anything which conjures an emotional attachment can cause that same lump in the throat. Homesickness is a type of mourning, as is that melancholy you feel at the end of a truly great game, book or film. They say that only one thing is certain in life and that is death, but by the time we even reach that point we have already experienced a series of endings which punctuate our lives like… well, like punctuation. From education to relationships, jobs to sports, novels to holidays, videogames to telephone calls, their completion both destroys us and recreates us anew. The location referenced by O’Neill’s title, Netherland, is a place where our past selves lurk, defined by its very distance and inaccessibility.

We can’t escape into the past, but we can revisit it. Hans’ situation is dire, and to combat it he invests himself into the incongruous sounding underworld of New York cricket. Cricket in New York is very different from the purer form of the game played by the Hans as a child, but not so different that he cannot pick up his old gear and slot back into his old place at the crease with the relief of one returning to his or her childhood home. We might call it therapeutic, or at least anaesthetizing. Certainly for a time Hans finds himself abdicating the complexities of his life in favour of his sport.

My own childhood was a fairly standard mixture of sports, gaming, books, outside play, and so on. Certainly videogames took up a fair chunk of my time. Somehow, though, I don’t feel that in similar circumstances I could fall back upon games the way Hans does upon cricket. Last year, Logan Westbrook wrote an emotive feature for The Escapist Magazine called Getting Back in the Game, relating his use of gaming as an escape after the breakdown of his marriage. That I can see: gaming as escapism. But there’s a subtle difference between the ways Hans and Logan escape in that Hans’ cricketing is very clearly related to a specific connection between the sport and his past. Hans is escaping into that netherland in an attempt to re-experience it; Logan is avoiding thoughts of his past, trying to disconnect. While Logan plays contemporary games to take his mind off his pain, Hans goes one step further to relocate his mind somewhere else completely.

There’s a consistency in sports which carries over the years. In spite of the differing styles of New York cricket and the more formal, normal cricket of Hans’ youth, it is the same game. The mechanics of actually playing, the physical act and emotional experience of the game, is the same. This is what draws Hans into his past. Like many sports, cricket has experienced cosmetic changes over the years, but moment to moment the performance of taking part in a match is little different from that of decades and even centuries ago. The same cannot be said of videogames, which are children of the accelerated digital age. Change in videogames is constant, with developers constantly pushing at the boundaries of what is possible, acceptable and desirable. A videogame is pretty much obsolete soon, if not immediately, after release. For established franchises, the next sequel is already in production; for original titles, any innovations which work are hybridized into the next generation, those which don’t work are discarded. New games come like waves breaking on the shore, some crashing momentously and some fading with barely a splash, but all forgotten when the next wave rolls in. And the next wave always rolls in.

My favourite game is Metal Gear Solid. Let’s not go into the reasons too deeply right now, suffice it to say it’s a great game that came at just the right time to etch itself onto my consciousness. I remember with fondness the adoring previews in various magazines before it came out; I remember my building desperation to play it; I remember playing the demo over and over and then after all the anticipation being not in the slightest bit disappointed by the final product. It’s my favourite game, and one that I associate along with the likes of God of War, ICO and Shadow of the Colossus in a decade-long heyday of my gaming education. Those three (incidentally, excellent) games have been at the forefront of the recent PS3 run of HD remakes of classic titles. There are whisperings that Metal Gear Solid, being from the same era, might well be for the same treatment.

Which would be great, sort of. I’ll play a remake and no doubt enjoy it for what it is, but in playing it I am always very aware that this is an ‘old game’. If there are failings I let them slide, because it’s an ‘old game’. HD remakes are draped in nostalgia, but lack the thrill of the original experience from when their innovations were still innovative. In the case of God of War, the spectacle of the original, the sense of sheer scale it made great use of, is diminished by its own sequels which each took things up a gear. Once outdone, something is no longer impressive. You can give them all the facelifts you like; time is unkind to aging games.

The Metal Gear Solid franchise plays on the theme of remake and replay with a recurrence of imagery and character throughout the series. This culminates in Metal Gear Solid 4 in a section in which protagonist Solid Snake finds himself back on Shadow Moses, the setting of the original game of which I am so enamoured. Along with Snake the player is thrown into a reminiscence of their first experience on the island, literally replaying part of the opening section of the first game. This is a smart piece of game-making which rounds Snake out as a character with a past, one which we have been privileged to be along on the ride for, but wait a second: This isn’t the game I remember! This game… Well, this game sucks! For me, the flashback scene is difficult to play. In my memory everything about the first MGS is much smoother, in graphics and gameplay. Where have these blocky pixels come from? Why is the AI so terrible? Once upon a time the fact that the enemy soldiers would see and take notice of my tracks in the snow was the coolest thing in the world. Now? Now I find myself wanting to make use of all the abilities Snake has picked up in the interim years: interrogations, camouflage, shooting out someone’s arm to keep them from firing or grabbing their radio, and so on. Rather than being taken back to my joyous first play of this game, the rose-tinted glasses of my memory have been removed. Re-experiencing it underlines the boundaries and limitations of the original, the advancements we have made become obvious, and my earlier experience is devalued.

You can return to gaming, but returning to a game is a more complex and often, for me, dissatisfying affair. Metal Gear Solid as an experience is as tied up with a particular point in my life as cricket is in Hans van den Broek’s, but it cannot return me to that point in the same way. Too much has changed, both for me and for gaming.

What I’ve written here might seem a little down on gaming, as though games are somehow not living up to something, but it isn’t. Or it isn’t meant to be. Games inhabit a specific time and place in my life; they tie themselves into my identity through experience. That identity changes, day in and day out, a process that is as inevitable as it is irreversible. Those changes might ultimately make me now incompatible with that which once spoke deeply to me, but that doesn’t mean it never did. I can look back on it with fondness, just as one who has been through the trauma and upset of bereavement might come out the other side with the warmth of knowing ‘At least we had the good times’. I lied, above, when I said that Metal Gear Solid is my favourite game. Rather, it is my favourite memory of a gaming experience.

Cricket doesn’t work out for Hans, of course. You cannot dodge real life forever, and you cannot ignore change. An unwillingness to accept loss simply places it on hold; it’s a temporary measure. Eventually Hans re-enters his life on new terms, a life which is both different and the familiar.

I used to have a poster on my wall, as a child. It was for the clothing brand No Fear, though that barely matters. The poster was a photograph of the surfer Taylor Knox riding an enormous, almost impossibly tall wave. That moment must have been the kind that Taylor lives for, catching the perfect swell and performing everything just right upon it, allowing the momentum of the situation to play out. But in the end the wave always crashes down, the moment always ends. Taylor will have found himself in shallow waters, knowing that that particular experience can never, ever come again. And then what? He swings back up onto his board and paddles out to find the next great wave.

Jim Ralph currently resides in sunny Winchester, in the UK. He spends his days pondering higher things, such as how you turn an MA in Contemporary Literature into a well paid job. Answers on a postcard to jimofthewords@hotmail.co.uk

Questions, comments, or hate mail? Comment below or e-mail us here at ontologicalgeek@gmail.com. Also, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for extra Ontological Geekitude!

The Philosopher-Geek: Catherine Chokes On Its Own Aspirations

2012-01-25T09:17:00.001-05:00

Thar Be Spoilers Ahoy, and pretty big ones, at that.

I remember first hearing about Catherine in a short Escapist article which mostly focused on how the game looked to be sexy and weird. Clips of bipedal sheep being eviscerated interspersed with shots of a not-overdressed blonde made up most of the trailer, and as the narration was in Japanese, I had absolutely no idea what was going on. I would probably have completely forgotten about it, but once the game came out, some months later, games critics I respect and admire began to wax rhapsodic about its many virtues. Catherine deals with sex, marriage, and relationships, they said, and does so in a mature and interesting way, all the while using the game's puzzle sections as metaphorical commentary on the protagonist’s predicament.

My interest was piqued, and while my general, lurking (and almost certainly unjustified) distrust of all things anime-related stopped my hopes from rising too high, I resolved to play this strange sheep-game myself. After all, if Tom Bissell and Leigh Alexander both think it's interesting, it has to be worth playing.

Circumstances and a general lack of funds conspired to push my own experiences with Catherine back until late December of 2011, six or seven months after the game arrived on American shores. By the time I placed the game in my disc tray, I had read dozens of articles about how fascinating it was. This may have created unrealistic expectations: nothing can ruin one's enjoyment of a mediocre experience quite like being repeatedly told how brilliant it is.

Even its staunchest defenders agree that Catherine is a strange game, if, indeed, it really ought to be called a "game" at all. (That's a pointless discussion, and not one I really wish to engage in at this time. Consider the conversation about the problematic definition of the word "game" invoked, and let's move on). It's two parts anime to one part puzzle game, and long cutscenes comprise at least half the game's playtime.

Catherine is divided between protagonist Vincent Brooks' waking hours, spent drinking at the pub with his poncey friends or in conversation with his long-term girlfriend, the no-nonsense Katherine, or the one-night stand he can't seem to shake, the voluptuous and titular (heh, "titular") Catherine. At night, Vincent descends into the nightmarish puzzle sections which make up most of the game part of the game, a sort of horrible bastard crossbreed between Q*Bert and Intelligent Qube, sprinkled with generous quantities of LSD. In between puzzle sections, Vincent is placed in a confessional booth, wherein the player is confronted with ostensibly yes/no questions. These vary from the merely strange ("Have you ever gotten a nosebleed from being too excited?") to the inherently absurd ("Do you prefer to date older or younger partners?").

When it's not about pushing blocks around or looking at dirty pictures, Catherine is, fundamentally, a game about a person's choice, so I found it a bit surprising that the game rarely gives you any agency in Vincent’s actions. The game’s ending is determined by the player’s confessions and the discordant morality meter those confessions affect, but most of the game is firmly scripted, save for a few more or less irrelevant lines of internal monologue which change depending on the position of the morality meter.

That said, games do not necessarily have to involve massive quantities of player agency in order to be interesting, and if the player was allowed to remove Vincent from the situation in the first few minutes of the game, there wouldn't be much of a game to play at all. But most games that do not allow a player much agency try instead to feature interesting and engaging characters and choices, such that if the player is spending time watching cutscenes instead of playing the game, the cutscenes are at least worth watching.

Catherine, however, focuses on the three least compelling and relatable human beings in the world, and fills its supporting roles with bland clichés or the spontaneously bizarre. Each character is painted only in the broadest strokes. After thirteen hours of play, the characters can still be summed up in two or three words each: Katherine is overbearing and disapprovingly maternal, Catherine is a squeaky sex kitten, and Vincent is the Least Interesting Man in the World, gullible, bland and thick, thick, so very thick. When examined further, these characters become actively worrisome: are all men just hapless, cheating-prone puppets being pulled around by their women? Must all women fall into the categories of skank or shrew? How much gender-essentialism can you pack into a game this size?

This lack of detail is the first of the real problems with Catherine. It purports to investigate relationships and adult life, but never gives us any reason to care about the relationships or people in question. Vincent and Katherine have ostensibly been dating for a very long time, yet we never see any indication that they know anything about each other. We only ever see them together at lunch in some pink bistro, having vapid conversation, showing no signs of chemistry or intimacy, whether emotional or physical. What do they do together? Why did they get together, and why do they stay? Where are the little in-jokes that all long-term couples have? Katherine’s pregnancy scare completely failed to move me because I couldn't believe these people had ever even kissed each other.

In short, the game does no more than sketch out the barest hints of character or relationship, leaving out any potentially interesting details until all that is left is a blandly archetypal scenario, without even the saving grace of interesting archetypes. Only teenagers and sitcom characters view relationships in such abstract ways. Real, mature relationships are messy and embodied and heavily rooted in contingency. Real-life relationships are all about specifics and details.

I’ve never been in Vincent’s exact situation, not just because I’ve never cheated on my girlfriend, but because I’ve never been an early thirties unmarried man trying to decide if he should commit. But when I was trying to decide if I should get married, the questions I asked myself were much more specific. I didn’t think about “marriage” or “commitment” or “children” in some sort of abstract sense – I wondered if my Christianity and my now-wife's agnosticness (not a word) would prove bigger barriers once we were married, worried about moving across the country without a secure job to support her getting an MFA. I worried about trying to balance whatever the heck I wanted to do with her academic career. Whatever “big questions” about marriage I asked myself were all rooted in contingent circumstance and real-life context. I didn't ask "Should I get married," as some sort of abstract, formal concept, because that's absurd. I asked "Do I, Bill Coberly, want to marry Erin McNeil, before I can legally drink, and then move across the country with her to somewhere I've never been?"

Maybe Catherine left its characters and situations bland so as to be able to say huge things about Relationships in general, Relationships as a formal construct, to ask questions about Marriage and Commitment and Freedom and Sex, to keep its situations so broad that they might be able to appeal to any person in any relationship. But sterilizing the situation with such enthusiasm has the opposite effect: it renders the characters completely unrelatable. These people don't seem to be real human beings whose tribulations and questions relate to my own experiences, they seem like automata engaged in a hollow facsimile of human life. As relationships are inherently unique and full of specifics, any discussion of Relationships or Marriage must be rooted in the specific and the convincing.

But, moving beyond my own existentialist/feminist distrust of all things uncontextualized, the game still fails because it cuts its own legs off. Three-quarters of the way through the game, it is revealed that Catherine is a succubus sent by Dumuzid, the Babylonian shepherd-god (I am not embarrassed to say I didn't know who Dumuzid was until I looked it up later. Perhaps Atlus overestimated their audience's familiarity with obscure Mesopotamian deities?) to tempt Vincent for... some arcane reason. I don't really know why, as at this point, my brain was refusing to pay too much attention to the plot, as I was too busy yelling at the screen. What little respect I had for the game vaporized with that reveal, because turning Catherine from an actual human being with agency into some sort of lust-demon completely invalidates the central questions of the game.

The question "Should I stay with this stable, boring relationship or pursue something wild and crazy and spontaneous" is, potentially, a valid one. The question "Should I stay with this human being or try to chase after this crazy demon-lady who has only shown interest in me so as to lure me to a bloody death" is not. Turning the temptress into a literal demon makes the game skirt its own central question. It's a coward's way out, both for the storytellers and Vincent. The storytellers don't have to really engage with the mess they've made, and Vincent doesn't have to deal with a real question.

If Catherine is a succubus, Vincent's dilemma isn't a dilemma at all. If he chooses the sex kitten, he never has to worry about whether she will quit being sexy and hot, or if she will bore him. The thrills of the purely sexual will always be his, because if she doesn't just pull out his heart and eat it, then she's a @#$%ing succubus, and can thus probably make his sex life interesting more or less indefinitely. If he chooses to stay with Katherine, however, then he has only rejected an idealized fantasy of freedom, and not a real person at all. He hasn't made a real, mature choice either way, and thus whatever real things the game might have to say are drowned out by the preposterousness of its premise.

Not every story needs to be an accurate portrayal of how relationships work, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with injecting fantastical elements into an everyday situation in order to examine it in more detail. That is, in fact, half the point of worthwhile science fiction and fantasy, but for a game which is supposed to be all about maturity and adult relationships, Catherine is shallow, cowardly, self-defeating, and unreflective.

In my post-Catherine grumbling haze, I reread the articles which first directed me into playing the damn thing, trying to glean some reason for why these game critics, who are far smarter and better-read than I, could speak so highly of what seemed such an obviously mediocre experience. All joking about whether or not we had played the same game aside, I worried I had missed something, wondered if I should play it again, if perhaps my answers to the game's few choices had blinded me its better parts. I further worried that my own life experiences had rendered me unable to "get it,” worried that maybe it contained some secret chord throughout which only those who have dated as post-college adults could hear.

But as I reread Bissell & Alexander, I realized something about the way they both speak about Catherine. Both tend to praise its courage, its novelty, and cite its maturity in comparison to other games. In other words, they call it mature because it is not simply puerile Soul Calibur softcore pornography, and, however bland and silly its relationships are, it does engage with them as something other than a series of clumsy conversations eventually resulting in a stilted sex scene. It's mature in comparison to other games, a breath of fresh (or at least different) air.

For Bissell, “Catherine became less a game than a much-needed foxhole in which to hide from that stuff for a little while. Above all, it serves as a bracing reminder of how much there remains to be done and said and explored in the video-game medium.” Alexander’s article is titled “Catherine Poses Questions About Mature Relationships Most Games are Afraid to Ask.” Catherine is mature in comparison to the rest of gaming, they say, and when I take a long, hard look at some of the nonsense that is thrown around this medium, I might be forced to agree.

It is infuriating to constantly talk about the potential for greatness in this medium and play game after game after game which retries the same broken formulae and wallows in the same muck. I can thus understand the desire to seize on anything that seems at all different, anything which tries even a little bit to engage with mature themes. I know I'm guilty of this sort of behavior. While I’m sure Bastion is good, I’m equally sure I like it more than it probably deserves, because I played it immediately after playing a series of disappointing and half-baked games which left me hungry for anything which felt finished.

Games are still an adolescent medium, and I understand and appreciate the need to nurture those artists who try to bring it into maturity. But we should not allow ourselves to be so caught up in a game's novelty that we turn a blind eye to its problems. It worries me to label Catherine mature because it sets the bar for maturity very, very low. Catherine isn't just "not mature," it doesn't just fail to live up to high standards, it's actively lousy. By the end of the game, the things it says about relationships and men and women are not just uninteresting, they are essentialist and crass.

If pressed, I suppose I will admit to being glad that Catherine exists, but only because of its instrumental value. I am glad that games about relationships are being made, and glad that they can apparently succeed. Catherine sold 200,000 units in its first week in North America alone, and if its success allows other, better games to come into existence and reach an audience, I'll call it a net gain. But Catherine is not worthwhile as an end-in-itself. Novelty is not enough to redeem shallow tripe, and ultimately, different crap is still crap.

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Bill Coberly is the Editor of The Ontological Geek, and writes the Philosopher-Geek column at least twice a month. Bill currently lives in Savannah, GA with his wonderful wife, working as a writer and legal assistant. You can, if you are so inclined, follow him on Twitter or e-mail him at william.coberly@googlemail.com.

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Guest Article: Skyrim is Gonzo Pornography

2012-01-16T14:03:00.002-05:00

After 70 hours or so of play, I finished the main quest line of Skyrim. By this point I had completed the Thieves' Guild quest line and a smattering of other quests from all over the map. I had discovered dozens of dungeons, slain many dragons, and finished more petty side-quests than I care to admit. When I decided to stop wandering the map and focus on finishing the central plot of the game, I was able to complete my remaining tasks in a couple hours, kept slow by my insistence on playing as a Bosmer archer instead of using any of the many methods of combat that render encounters trivially easy to complete. As the dragon-god Alduin evaporated in a shiny flash of elaborate death animations, I didn't feel like a hero. I wasn't even sure I had actually finished the main questline, there was so little fanfare. What I did feel like was that I had just finished a cheap porno, and that I should probably start playing something else before someone noticed me.

Why am I comparing a game that I enjoyed for 70 hours to grotesque sleazery? Essentially, I couldn't come up with a better comparison. The key features of an Elder Scrolls game, Skyrim in particular, seemed to match up quite closely to the most prominent qualities of gonzo pornography:

Highly visually glamorized characters and scenery (It's Sexy!)
Shallow details giving the illusion of coherence (It's Fantasy!)
Self-paced and finely categorized consumption (It's Yours!)
Exaggerated and unwavering mood (Hit Me Baby One More Time!)

I'll elaborate a bit on what I mean by each of these headings in their own heading.

Why Gonzo Pornography?

Pornography is a fascinating industry with an immense vocabulary of ludicrously specific jargon for things which most people would probably prefer never had names. In porn, the term 'gonzo' refers to a particular method of production that emphasizes first-person style camera work while eschewing such trappings as dialogue, costuming, plot, or other features common to virtually any genre of film. It's all about cutting right to the heart of what the consumer is looking for without any of the additional features one might search for to ameliorate one's guilt about consuming the thing. It doesn't pretend that you want to know that the man in question is a plumber or that there are quite believable reasons for him to be having a threesome with those sorority girl roommates; it's simply the rawest, most base form of a product that could otherwise be delivered with niceties to assuage the conscience of the viewer.

So. How is Skyrim like gonzo?

It's Sexy!

Twenty minutes of playing the game will leave you floored at the visual quality of the presentation. Every flower is beautifully placed. Every stone is elaborately crafted to be geologically convincing and topographically novel. All the bodies in Skyrim are crafted to represent idealized hard-bodied northmen, hardy and lovely women, and anatomically improbably lithe elven folk. While the idealization of bodies is hardly unique to Skyrim, it's just one example of a broader maximalist aesthetic. Every element is designed to be as exaggeratedly beautiful as possible.The sheer pervasiveness of the same level of detail across the whole setting is just stunning.

In fact, it's so stunning, you eventually lose the sense of wonder at how gorgeous the whole thing is. Your aesthetic standard is almost polluted with beauty. Your innate need to have something unbeautiful to contrast it against starts nitpicking details the same way the gonzo consumer begins deconstructing his or her experience. The Skyrim player gets irritated at two people sitting at a table using the same shuffling animation, and the gonzo watcher becomes dissatisfied that the actress isn't wearing heels in this one. In Skyrim, every book full of unique stories rapidly becomes a vacant prop that is to be ignored; in gonzo, the actress from the aforementioned threesome becomes background noise once she becomes familiar to the viewer if she isn't the direct focus of attention. Simply due to direct and constant exposure, what can be a compelling and enthralling display rapidly becomes banal and insignificant by being presented as the normal and commonplace.

It's Fantasy!

Skyrim lets you do exactly what you want in a game world. Do you want to cook? Create potions? Hunt bears? Lounge in the library of the mages' college reading story books? Climb a mountain? Pick pockets? Save the world from a risen dragon-god bent on bringing about the end of the world as is his sworn duty? No matter what sort of high-fantasy activity you've dreamed of doing, Skyrim helps you do it in fine detail.

Compare to pornography consumption. Do you want one actress or three? Blondes or brunettes? Leather or lace? First person or third person? What positions and props? The menu of options is staggeringly huge and specific to a degree that makes your average movie categories seem woefully inept in comparison. Once you've made your selections, the details will be trotted out in the same form as any other gonzo piece. Posing, teasing, stripping, sex acts to match your specific order, and, finally, the ever important finishing shot.

In either case, the whole parade displays an astonishing degree of care and attention paid to the specific demands of the current audience. They don't really need to fit into anything larger than their existent focus, they exist as self-contained motes of perfectly-packaged experience to satisfy a highly-specific appetite. The alchemy table is strewn with arcane goods, and your character diligently grinds mysterious things with a mortar and pestle while combining their magical ingredients. The gonzo camera moves to the perfect angle to expose exactly the view of human flesh performing exactly the motion you desire in the colors requested.

Do the props really enhance the whole? Do you really find Skyrim more compelling because you can actually read every god damn book in the game? Do you really find the gonzo cheerleader more compelling because the actress threw some pom-poms away before otherwise occupying her hands?

I finished the game having cooked exactly once, for the sake of getting an achievement (a statement which, in itself, probably deserves an article). Every activity in the game exists because someone might want it, not because it enhances something bigger than itself. The pieces don't necessarily come into conflict with each other, but the fact that everything is optional in the game leads all the pieces to feel unimportant. Compare this to Arkham City, where every gadget you find adds a new dimension to combat, opens up new areas of the game world to explore, has unique puzzles that can only be solved by using that gadget, and is likely an essential piece of a unique and thrilling boss fight. Everything is necessary and everything has a purpose, yet you still have choices about how, when, and whether you accomplish them.

Am I wrong to think the Arkham City approach is better?

It's Yours!

An essential part of the Elder Scrolls experience is that you be rewarded for seeking out the specific subcategory of the game's options you want to pursue at that moment. Skyrim lets you do anything you want to attempt at any time. There's no need to prioritize. You control exactly what you want to focus on at any time, and you get the appropriate reward for what you choose to pursue at no detriment to any other goal you could be striving toward.

Compare to a gonzo porn: all the pieces you might want from it at any time are there, and can be accessed with no detriment to the whole piece. While it would be fruitless and confusing to skip halfway through any Hollywood blockbuster, gonzo doesn't care what you're there for. If you want to skip the striptease, or put a particular scene on loop, there's no integrity there for you to damage.

If I started listening to random clips of narration from Bastion, I would have no bleeding clue what was going on. There'd be no coherent plot, no drama, no tension, no mystery, no satisfaction when a hidden truth came to light. If I started jumping to random scenes from The Prestige, everything would be meaningless and confusing, and the delightful surprise revelation of the movie would be lost in a nonsensical jambalaya of film.

Structure for these experiences enhances their quality. Bastion has a superb array of decisions built into it, such as what weapon loadout you want to use, what upgrade paths to choose, and what order to complete the map in, but it nests all of these in challenges and narrative points that lend them all a beautiful poignance. Skyrim simply unzips its fly and says "Go nuts!'

Hit Me Baby, One More Time!

This last point is more of the aggregation of the above points. When your senses are assaulted constantly by something with hyper-glamorized visuals, highly specific content segregation, and no penalty or reward for jumping immediately to the portion most appetizing to your basest appetite, what does this make of the whole? A solid block of raw, homogenous stimulus, carefully engineered to over-stimulate your most fundamental lizard-brain pleasure centers.

Nothing in Skyrim is special. No one in gonzo is loved. Either one satisfies your immediate and specific appetites, but are you enriched by either? Or do you walk away from both feeling like you've consumed something that has altogether diminished not only you as an intellectual and moral being, but also reduced a potentially edifying activity to a degrading parody of something good? They satisfy your crudest desires but also mock genuinely enriching media by mimicking their trappings while failing to use them in any meaningful sense.

When my dragonborn was in Sovngarde, letting loose the arrow that slew the god-dragon, the experience held so little drama that I wasn't sure that was all the battle and story had to offer. The combat had taken maybe 80 seconds of plinking on a bow-string while Alduin munched casually on one of the three Nord warriors assisting me in the battle. Some wooden characters stood perfectly still around me and played sound bites about how I'd be celebrated as a hero in the mortal realm. When I got bored staring at the pretty aurora in Sovngarde, I was sent back to Skyrim and told by Arngeir, spokesman of the Greybeards, that I was now free to choose my destiny.

It was roughly as thrilling as watching someone ejaculate, albeit not quite as creepy. Alduin's death is supposed to be a climactic moment of intense emotional and dramatic release, but instead it ran together as just another shiny moment in a game full of sparkly objects.

Everyone Loves Porn

Pornography destroys a great deal of the experienced value of what it seeks to portray by exaggerating a stable of finely-tuned details to the greatest extreme possible. By focusing on breast size, noisy cries of pleasure, and colorful latex costumes, it focuses on extreme elements of experience to depict something that is larger than and wholly alien from the subject matter it supposedly depicts.

I don't want this to sound like I'm moralizing, or even claiming that this is a bad thing. People have appetites, and we wouldn't be playing Skyrim or watching "Butt Battalion 37" if there weren't some sort of desire or need we had as human beings. I'm not going to tell people what to do with their joysticks.

What I do want to say is that Skyrim is not Citizen Kane or a Michaelangelo sculpture. It's a phenomenal technical achievement. It's actually really fun, and it's very good at providing a large variety of game experiences. It just isn't very good art.

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Jarrod Hammond doesn't always blog, but when he does, he does it for the Ontological Geek. He spends the rest of his time gaming on his PC, or apologizing to his wife for spending too much time on his PC. He lives in Kansas City, MO.

Additional Pylons: 2011 In Review

2012-01-08T21:38:00.009-05:00

Bill has already introduced the concept, so I won't tread over that ground again. Instead, here are my 2011 experiences, wrapped up in a pretty Christmas bow for you! Oh, and within this present are numerous spoilers. I spare no secrets.

Of the games that were released in 2011, I played, in roughly this order:

Dead Space 2
Dragon Age 2
Portal 2
Killzone 3
Bastion
L.A. Noire
From Dust
Catherine
Bulletstorm
Crysis 2
Gears of War 3
Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
F.E.A.R. 3
Infamous 2
Skyrim
Arkham City
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

Good lord.

Games I still intend to play:
Dark Souls
Assassin's Creed: Revelations
Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary Edition
Rage
Super Mario Galaxy 2

Awards Time

Best Game: Portal 2

Favorite Game: Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Best Male Voice Actor: Nolan North, Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception (Are you surprised?)

Second-Best Male Voice Actor: Brian Bloom, Dragon Age 2

Best Female Voice Actor: Ellen MacLain, Portal 2

Second-Best Female Voice Actor: Eve Myles, Dragon Age 2

Most Ludicrously Terrifying and Exhilarating Scene: Sinking Cruise-ship, Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception

Most Time Wasted Looking At Unmarked Bottles and Matchbooks: Me, L.A. Noire

Strangest Addition To An Old Franchise: Molemen with Punk Hair, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

Best New Weapon: Massive animatronic T-rex with lasers, Bulletstorm

Prettiest Game: I swore I wasn't going to spam it, but Uncharted 3 is gorgeous

Scariest New Enemy Type: Goddamn Chargers, Dead Space 2

Most Tragic Moment: Knight-Commander Meredith leaps a hundred feet into the air, Dragon Age 2

Second Most Tragic Moment: Dom dies, Gears of War 3

Least Realistic Character: Bertrand, Infamous 2

Dead Space 2: Kill Me Again, You Filthy Animal

That's pretty much exactly what I told this game, over and over. Dead Space 2 was one of those rare sequels that changed up the narrative formula of the first (by making Isaac a voiced character) and really pulled it off, forging a much better experience in the process. I thought the level design was quite solid, and the visual design of the game only improved on the original; the space station of the sequel was, if anything, even more personal and terrifying than the Ishimura of the first, and that's only sweetened by a return to the Ishimura in the late game. Dead Space 2 doesn't offer up much in the way of a compelling plot, but is pushed along by the player's burning need to get to the next intense set-piece that Isaac will have to endure. Or, actually, die from a few times, then scrape past. And you know what? That's incentive enough.

Should You Play It: If you like horror movies, games that feel “finished” and visually whole, dark games, or a lingering sense of dread in dark hallways, then absolutely.

Dragon Age 2: Victory in Scope, Failure in Endurance

Like any recent BioWare title, I've played through this game at least three times, aiming at distinct and unique characters with each run. I had several issues with Dragon Age 2, including the lack of variety in combat encounters, particularly in villains, and the way that the entire third act was such an incredible let-down and of such diminished quality to the other two that it stuck out, thumb-like and sore. And yet, on my first play-through, I encountered a number of incredible, difficult scenes in which I truly didn't know how to respond, or was surprised by the extra scenes included that served just to enhance the illusion that my character and Anders had a relationship. I always felt like my character existed in a real place, among a real community. The game's scope was excellent, and the aim and spirit of the game was right on. It's very possible that, as I've played, I best see the game they wanted to make and not the game they released, but there are some real gems in Dragon Age 2.

Should You Play It: Probably, but you should really steel yourself for disappointment in Act 3.

Portal 2: They Do All Their Science From Scratch

After every solved puzzle in Portal 2, I experienced a simultaneous pride in my own deductive abilities and respect for the brilliant folks behind this beautiful game. Those feelings then grew submerged by laughter at the next salvo of dialogue, and then, sometimes, to a very real empathy for the ridiculous, and yet very real, characters. Portal 2 does what only it does the very best. This is inarguable, and laudable.

Should You Play It: Very yes.

Killzone 3: Poor Zone 3

The plot and the characters are trash, and Killzone 3, especially, got me thinking about how virtually every first-person shooter I have played in recent memory had no trouble offering interesting settings and even cohesive and artful aesthetic polish to a game, but including decent writing or voice-acting is utterly beyond them. FPS is so often the realm of the visual and the spatial; the audio, and the imagination, are atrophied. All this to say that Killzone 3 looks beautiful, and plays like silk; it manages to feel like war more than any Modern Warfare or Call of Duty has. But the individual experiences of personal terror in a massive battlefield never aggregate, or if they do, it coalesces into a piece of narrative that is trite and boring.

Should You Play It: If you like pretty shooters that shoot good, you should play it. If you're a snob like me, but without the love for pretty shooters, then stay away from it.

Bastion: Narrate My Dreams, Mr. Cunningham

Bastion was an utter surprise. From the first moments, when The Kid awoke to a strange new world under the watchful narration of a gruff voice, to the final decision The Kid must make at the precipice of the unknown, choosing between a new world for the outcast or retroactively saving the lives of thousands, albeit to uncertain effect since there is no guarantee that the same tragedy won't happen again, Bastion is magical, thoughtful, and simultaneously mature and accessible. Bastion achieves something unique as it tackles very adult themes while maintaining the soft veneer of a children's book. Bill has written extensively about the interesting mish-mash in Bastion that ultimately accentuates the component parts, and I agree with his assessment. At the least, Bastion is a really interesting game, but chances are you'll find considerably more than just outstanding game play and visuals.

Should You Play It: Yeah, you really should. And it's so cheap!

L.A. Noire: Let The Plot Thicken For 2-3 Hours, Then Bake At 400

I played through all of L.A. Noire while visiting Bill, actually, over the course of about four days. I received the full pay-load of the game with little to no interruption (just Bill coming home from work, really), and didn't even spend time on the “side-quests” or other tasks that occasionally cropped up on my mini-map. Frankly, I was confident that they had no role in the narrative I was experiencing... they were never more important than solving the crime I was on, and the game never pressured me to pursue. The second I realized that I barely even had to drive, but could just let my partner take the wheel, chat a few lines at me, and then teleport the rest of the way to my destination, I cheered and never drove a car (when I wasn't pursuing a criminal) the rest of the game. I enjoyed the game immensely at first; I still think it's worth noting that they definitely included some amazing cases in the game. The porting of a police procedural show into a game is worth celebrating. Beyond that, the partner characters were interesting beyond their role in the plot (which was sometimes minimal), and the protagonist was fresh in that he was a complex, occasionally inconsistent character. But then it was like they pressed a fast-forward button on the story of Phelps, because there were sudden advancements that had no real lead-up. I became confused as to which story they were telling here... the cases? Phelps' story? Sheldon's? It failed to come together with strength, and I came away feeling like I had the broad outline of an interesting story, but many critical details and scenes were missing. L.A. Noire was almost great, but there were baffling amounts of what should have been the final product missing.

Should You Play It: Perhaps. It's worth playing through a case or two at the Homicide desk, at least; they're immensely enjoyable. Just don't finish it, and try not to fire a gun in the mean-time.

From Dust: Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Sound Of Screams

I'm still not sure how I feel about this game. It is, at the very least, a fascinating vision of a world where forces consistently collide and shape land-masses and natural disasters. The lore of the game seems a little thin, but that's okay because the style that it builds is ultimately enjoyable. However, while playing the game, I always felt a little bit like an interloper. The controls were a little hard to manage, and performing the tasks the game expects of you certainly isn't a quick or elegant experience. There's an odd secondary objective in all of the levels that exists mostly just to lengthen play-time. The game doesn't feel beautiful, and that might just be to its credit; like the materials you're working with, the interface and controls are rough and haphazard. Still, most of the time I just wanted to sit back and watch things happen. The best moments in my play-through was on the early levels, when I was creating new deltas where they shouldn't have been, and less on later stages when a whole mess of situations constantly threatened the tribal village under my care.

Should You Play It: If you're into simulation experiences, go for it. It's certainly a fascinating engine, and worth checking out for the price. There's also one level where you create a massive rock wall to keep out constant tidal waves that I can only describe as majestic.

Catherine: A Tale Of Two Biddies

This game had a lot of potential, probably before the makers of the game actually started to generate mechanics and the writers started writing dialogue. Frankly, the game's concept is much more interesting than its execution. I wish more games would tackle this subject matter, and I also wish that Catherine didn't. At the beginning of the game it appears that it will be mature about the subject and, more importantly, offer the player interesting choices in a very emotionally charged situation. Catherine fails utterly at this. The few times I was actually given an option in Catherine, I played a very bad man, and the game failed to take notice, instead portraying Vincent as a man who felt quite guilty (which was okay) and who kept making moves to cut things off with Catherine and reunite with his estranged girlfriend Katherine in spite of his apparent behavior (which was not okay; a game should not offer you significant choice and then ignore your decisions). What's more, the game quickly becomes off-kilter, ridiculous, and a waste of time, all wrapped around long puzzle sequences that were decent, but not actually that interesting. In the end, the game fails to make even a little bit of sense, and crosses the finish line with a long line of shattered dreams in its wake.

Should You Play It: If you're a glutton for punishment, or you'd like yet another example of how to make a less-than-unified game experience.

Bulletstorm: The Only Thing My Guns Can't Do Is Help Me Grow As A Person

I really wanted to hate Bulletstorm. Really, really hard. It's macho-man, bro culture exterior repulsed me, as did the popular story about how a certain designer demanded that the single female character's breasts be emphasized to a sickening degree, but luckily another (female) designer urged that her small chest was more than fine, increasing her role as tough gal as it decreased her role as sex symbol. I went in ready to be disgusted, but curious about the lauded skill-shot system and how it would play out in the campaign (since the “Echoes” mode held almost no interest to me; accruing points, even via creative murder, tends to be about as interesting as watching water bead on a window. Less interesting, perhaps). I was very, very surprised when I found myself delighted by the interesting locales and pace of the revenge/redemption tale, and even more surprised when I found it even slightly emotionally compelling. Though the dialogue is far from golden, and the characters far from fascinating, the main character's regret is understandable and interesting. It was better than I expected when the gruff dude I was playing expressed sorrow over his boorish, suicidal behavior at the beginning of the tale, and eventually learned to care again. Timeless tale it was not, but it was, at the least, much better than any of the advertising had led me to believe. Oh yeah, and the weapons are wild, hilarious, and fun.

Should You Play It: Only if you really like FPS games, you don't really care about what happens in a game so long as something is blowing up and one-liners are being thrown about, or you really want to be surprised by a game.

Crysis 2: Crysis-core

On the bright side, Crysis 2 is gorgeous, features a pretty cool nano-suit with a smart upgrade system and different modes (armor, stealth and mobility) that really changes the way a player approaches and thinks about fire-fights, which is admirable, fun, and makes you feel like a one-man predator (that preys on whole armies) in a way that's quite unique. However, the game is slightly repetitive, the balance of action and pace always feels a bit off, and the plot, which should have been interesting, utterly fails to amuse. It even has aliens that, in a feat I can't quite explain, are incredibly boring from their first introduction, and eventually become so commonplace and annoying that, mid-way through the game, you wish you could just fight human soldiers to the exclusion of everything else. I couldn't finish it; I just lost interest.

Should You Play It: Some of the ideas it has are worth investigating. The options built into the nano-suit do change the way you approach situations, so it's a unique experience in that, and until it gets boring it offers a simultaneous experience of immense power and fragility.

Gears of War 3: There Are Still Chainsaw Bayonets

It's more Gears of War, but the plot and dialogue isn't offensively bad. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and there are a few truly cool moments in the game that caught me off guard with their quality. Horde remains fun, if you can find friends to play it with.

Should You Play It: It's pretty much the best third-person shooter. If it appeals to you, then yes.

Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception: Charted The Path To My Heart

I love the Uncharted series. Each iteration has great writing, enjoyable characters, fun set-pieces and game play that alternates between solid shooting mechanics that fit the genre and puzzle solving in tombs that is occasionally truly clever. Like a good date, Uncharted 3 always takes you to the nicest places and doesn't linger too long at any of them, maintaining a fantastic pace. Uncharted 3 tells its story with flair and grace, and offers the closest thing you'll find to an Indiana Jones movie in game form. It doesn't do anything all that new or stretch the boundaries of how games can be art or offer new experiences, but it does everything with polish and charm. Uncharted 3 is refined, and every minute offers something to laugh, smile, or gasp at. Best of all, the terrible boss-fight at the end of Uncharted 2 is replaced by an awesome knife-fight with a well-dressed villain on a piece of rock collapsing into a huge sink-hole. It's exactly as awesome as it should be.

Should You Play It: Absolutely. I cannot recommend Uncharted 3 enough.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution: Viva La Revolucion

Human Revolution is incredible, with two exceptions: boss fights, and the ending. I'm in the middle of an article about how Human Revolution investigates trans-humanism through its protagonist, so I don't want to go too much into it, but suffice to say that the game offers a fantastic and complex vision of the world of the future, and is a joy to play both for the joy of tackling diverse problems with a multitude of solutions and for the joy of being Adam Jensen. Lucky, then, that only three boss fights plague the game (Pro-Tip: All three have a weakness to frag mines), and you can start a new game right after making it through the multiple-choice ending.

Should You Play It: Please do. It's worth your time. I finished it four times over a two-week period, and it never stopped being great fun.

F.E.A.R. 3: Spookily Terrible

I had a few fun experiences with F.E.A.R. and a dark room full of friends, so I thought that F.E.A.R. 3 would be a great deal of fun. It wasn't. Instead, it was a poor shooter with an incomprehensible plot, a single, uninteresting character, and long segments of zombie-style foes that were the opposite of fun. Every time the game toes toward becoming intriguing, it steps away as though intriguing were made out of fire. And it is never, every scary. Not once.

Should You Play It: Just don't.

Infamous 2: Change Of Heart Not Supported

Better than its predecessor, Infamous 2 still fails to offer a convincing character that manages to encircle both paths the player might take, an understandable difficulty since the poles are self-sacrificing hero and irredeemable, homicidal jerk. The game's narrative as expressed through the ubiquitous cut-scenes is strong between these two poles, and fails to be convincing in either case. Worse, it regularly fails to make your choices all that important except in one significant instance, where it limits the freedom of the player. Let me explain: Infamous 2 committed its worst sin in the end-game, when I was presented with a decision that was actually pretty complex and interesting. Should I activate a device that will kill me and every potential super-hero on the planet in the shaky hope of destroying a plague ravaging the “common” folk, or should I destroy it, essentially taking the safe route by saving the potentially special individuals of the world, even if it means that most of the population dies? I decided that my Cole would break form and save himself, since it was also the route that guaranteed human survival... but then the game wouldn't let me. I stared at my screen in confusion for about a minute before realizing that, to make that decision, I would need to lower my karma, probably by running around town and murdering large swaths of innocent civilians in what was apparently an attempt for Cole to develop the resolve to condemn most of humanity to a terrible plague. Then I actually yelled at my screen, informing the game that it just ruined itself for me. The ending (that I didn't want to choose, but did) continued in that vein, invoking the normal tropes and boss-fight moments, but it was not at all compelling. It's almost unfortunate, then, that Infamous 2 is so fun to play.

Should You Play It: It does a good job of making you feel like a super-hero or super-villain, but it fails to be emotionally convincing or interesting.

The Binding of Isaac: I'd Describe It As Delicious, But Ew

I had seen a number of my friends playing Binding of Isaac via Steam, and investigated because of the name. I bought it because of the price. Binding is a strange, strange game that I enjoy, but can't play for long. The player takes control of Isaac, the son of a very religious mother who receives a message from God that she must kill little Isaac, and Isaac escapes to the basement, a terrible and massive dungeon filled with children who descended and died before him. Isaac is naked, and his only weapon is his tears. It's a fascinating set-up, and the foes and décor are compelling, to say the least. The monsters populating the basement are all particularly fleshy, misshapen and wrong... there are heads without bodies, and bodies without heads, flies aplenty, and eventually walking vaginae that spew blood at Isaac, causing damage presumably both physical and mental, and the bosses are horribly mutated creatures until, in the tale's terminus, Isaac must fight his mother, who manifests as a huge, fat leg and other body parts pressed against doors so that only grotesque details appear to wreak havoc on poor little Isaac. Binding is unique, and is built around the sort of punishing ethos common to games of old. It's interesting, and, I'm sure, unpalatable to certain tastes, but I look forward to coming back to it for further short periods of play.

Should You Play It: It's worth a look, if just to see everything that I describe above. It's cheap, too.

Skyrim: Thar Be Dragons

I haven't gotten too far into Skyrim yet, but I'm pleasantly surprised by it. I played a fair bit of Oblivion, but mostly out of a curious sense of duty. For a multitude of reasons, Skyrim is much more palatable to me. The individuals who populate the world feel just a little more authentic, and have barely crossed the line into “vaguely real” territory for me thanks to better rendering of faces and improved voice-acting and writing. The skill progression system in Oblivion always seemed obtuse to me (to maximize one's level, one would actually avoid leveling until one had jumped enough, or brewed enough potions, to squeeze just enough ability progress into the experience without making the rest of the world tougher. This has the side effect of growing trepidation as the bar that symbolized your progress to the next level rose, culminating in, eventually, eschewing everything your character was talented at so that you didn't waste all that extra effort by accidentally figuring out how to whack heads with maces with a teensy bit more finesse), but Skyrim's leveling system is elegant and made me excited about every new level, as any decision I made on that level would cascade back onto a slew of powers or actions I had been using, suddenly filling them with new life. I look forward to stepping back into Skyrim when I have the time and money to pick it up for myself.

Should You Play It: Perhaps. It is a little addictive.

Arkham City: Silent Knight, Wholly Knight

I haven't had the time to finish Arkham City yet, but I have played most of it, and it improves on the already great formula tested in Arkham Asylum. The boss fights are quality experiences (especially a brilliant encounter with Mr. Freeze that essentially reinvigorated my belief in the boss fight; it still has life, if done properly!), and soaring about the city is just as fun as it should be. Arkham City is nothing less than a Batman simulator, and the player is always invested with a great many options regarding how to approach the challenges presented. Batman still sometimes runs out of interesting things to say, though.

Should You Play It: Do you want to be Batman?

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword: Some Things Don't Change

Unfortunately, I also haven't had time to finish Skyward Sword yet, either, but so far I am having a great deal of fun. The only thing I'm afraid of right now is that there will be too few dungeons to satisfy my need for more dungeons. This is exactly what I wanted when I first picked up a Wii controller; Skyward Sword delivers on the potential. I cannot stress how cool it is to swing Link's sword about. Upon raising my nunchuck to ready Link's shield, I would occasionally find myself taking a defensive posture, my eyes poking above its rounded white top. Seriously. All my issues with the odd, effeminate villain disappear the moment I swing that sword. Unsurprisingly, the dungeons in Skyward Sword remain true to form, offering new abilities and testing grounds for those new abilities and bosses who require your new ability to defeat. It's like coming home.

Should You Play It: Do you want to look like an idiot as you sword-fight with your Wii-mote?

As always, I welcome comments and conversation! I hope you had as good or better gaming experiences in 2011, and may your gaming in 2012 be surprising and full of kick-ass quick-time events!

The Philosopher-Geek: 2011 In Review

2012-01-08T21:03:00.002-05:00

2011 is gone, and games websites everywhere are just wrapping up their end-of-year lists and Game of the Year winners. The Ontological Geek is no different, but rather than choosing a Game of the Year or series of awards for the website as a whole, Matt and I are both going to offer our thoughts on the games of 2011, their highs and lows, disappointments and... appointments...? Anyway.

I didn't play anything like all the important games of 2011, but I played more new games this year than I have ever in the past, so I thought I'd single out a few for awards and then break down my thoughts on each of the games I played. Matt has also done so, and his list can be found here.

Of the games that were released in 2011, I played, in roughly this order:

Dragon Age II
L.A. Noire

Portal 2

Homefront
Dead Space 2

Bastion

Gears of War 3
Catherine

As such, any "bests" or "favorites" found below are obviously confined to this list. There are a lot of games this year I didn't get around to playing, and so I obviously do not have an opinion about whether or not they are any good. In case you're curious, here is a list of games I didn't play which I feel I probably ought to have, either because they interest me or to maintain a sense of cultural literacy:

Arkham City
Assassin's Creed: Revelations
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
From Dust
Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet
Call of Warfield: Modern Battleduty 3 (I kid, I kid)
The Binding of Isaac
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim
Sword & Sworcery EP

So, with that out of the way:

The Winners Are:

Best Game (Game of the Year): Portal 2

Favorite Game: Bastion

Favorite/Best Soundtrack: Darren Korb's for Bastion, though L.A. Noire's soundtrack was also stellar.

Best Male Voice Actor: Logan Cunningham, Bastion, and Stephen Merchant, Portal 2

Best Female Voice Actor: Ellen MacLain, Portal 2

Least Favorite Scene For All the Right Reasons: The Eye Poke Machine, Dead Space 2

The "I'm an Artist, Dammit" Award for: What The Hell is this Great Scene Doing in this Mediocre Campaign: Cole's Thrashball Flashback, Gears of War 3

Favorite New Character: Pretty much the entire NPC cast of Dragon Age II.

Most Annoying New Character: Catherine, from Catherine.

Best New Gun: The javelin gun from Dead Space 2 produced a lot of giggles.

Best Graphical Style: Bastion.

Best Facial Animation, Most of the Time, Except Sometimes When it's Really Horrifying, But Seriously, it's Amazing Technology: L.A. Noire.

Best Terrible Remixes of Great Classical Music: Catherine.

Best Polish: Dead Space 2

Worst Understanding of What Colorado Looks Like: Kaos Studios, for Homefront

Best Hats: L.A. Noire.

And now, for thoughts.

Dragon Age II

Of all the games that were to come out in 2011, this was the one I was most excited about. Consequently, it was the game which disappointed me the most. It's far from the worst game on this list, but it left me feeling unfulfilled and slightly sullied. I loved Origins, for all its weird quirks, graphical blandness, uneven design and anachronistic clunkiness, but I nevertheless appreciated and anticipated the sequel's promised refinements in graphics, combat system, and style. II promised a more tightly-focused story and a Mass Effect 2 level of polish and efficiency, and though I tried to avoid looking at the website pre-launch so as to avoid spoiling anything, any time I did stumble onto a trailer or preview, I found myself more and more excited. I pre-ordered the game in time to get the free upgrade to the Signature Edition, and my wife actually left the house for a conference about the time DAII came out, so when the game arrived, it was just me and Hawke for three straight days.

There is a lot to like about Dragon Age II, and some of my very favorite moments in 2011 happened in Kirkwall. The writing, both in terms of dialogue and overall narrative structure, is phenomenal. The characters are fascinating, beautiful, and very well-acted. I can't pick a favorite from among them, and the relationships they develop with Hawke and each other are complex and wonderful. The Arishok is possibly my favorite antagonist (I won't say villain) in all of gaming. The graphical overhaul gave the game a much-needed uniqueness, and elves should always be Welsh.

At the end of the second act, I was aware of problems, but was forgiving them without question because of the game's many strengths. By the end of the third act, however, I was beginning to be upset that I had purchased the game. It became increasingly clear that the game had been rushed out the door long before it was really finished, and some of what I had been willing to forgive as odd quirks in the first two acts became less and less forgivable as they happened more and more. Most of the quests happen in the same five or six copy-pasted dungeons, the streamlining and refinements made to the combat and inventory management systems left them shallow and neutered, but still fiddly. At the halfway mark, the game has mostly run out of unique enemies, and the third-act character-specific quests (which, to this point, have been the heart and soul of the game) are pale, impotent imitations of their predecessors.

I felt almost embarrassed as I played the game, as though I had snuck a peek at someone's rough draft. I don't know whose fault it was that the game was rushed out in a year, but that person should be ashamed of him or herself. It is clear that the team really loved this game, that a lot of heart and soul went into making it, and I imagine that with even six months' more time, DAII would have been impeccable.

As it is, I'm not sure what it averages out to. I can never stay too mad at it, because all of the good parts are really good. Regardless, it's disappointing to see something come so close to greatness and fail because of executive meddling.

Should You Play It: Maybe. The best parts of this game are some of the best stuff I've ever played in a game, so if you can stomach some disappointment, it's worth your time. But if you're looking for a complete, beautiful game, then you should look elsewhere.

L.A. Noire

Team Bondi's 1940s noir police procedural was one of 2011's most talked-about games, and there is a lot in it to like. I ultimately left the game feeling unsatisfied, but I'm glad to have played it. The biggest problem with Noire is the way its pieces absolutely do not fit together. First and foremost, it has absolutely no business pretending to be a sandbox. The side quests would be laughable if they weren't vaguely insulting, and the city lacks any semblance of life. The best description I've ever heard is that the city feels like a movie set: incredibly detailed, with a lot of actors everywhere doing their best to look authentic, but completely inauthentic and lifeless. Keep everything else and make it a linear game, and it would become infinitely better.

Sometimes the designers clearly didn't know what they wanted the player to be doing. Nearly every other suspect tries to run away from or punch Detective Phelps, and the chase sequences are not nearly engaging enough to warrant such repetition. While I suspect they were included to help keep the player interested and change up the pace, they end up monotonous, and draw attention away from the game's many strengths. Further, it must be said that the Homicide desk is terribly put together. While the individual cases are okay, the overarching plot they attempted to have tie them together is awful and obviously shoe-horned in, sometimes resulting in the player having to accuse obviously innocent people of murder simply because the game hasn't gotten around to revealing the (shockingly obvious) twist that all of the murders are committed by the same person. I would say "spoiler alert" before that, except that Cole and the player both figure this out within minutes of investigating the very first corpse.

All of that said, I'm actually really happy L.A. Noire exists. When it works, it really works. The soundtrack is superb, the city looks gorgeous, and although the real plot doesn't begin until the second half of the game, it's interesting and deserving of study (if more than a little rushed). The facial animation is stellar if occasionally unsettling, Earle, Phelps and Biggs are legitimately neat characters, and there are a few cases I recall quite fondly. There were moments when I really felt like a detective, pawing through a crime scene for evidence or interrogating a particularly evasive witness. Other times, its social commentary worked very well. There is a very mature story about how soldiers re-integrate into civilian life hidden away in L.A. Noire. I just wish they had spent more time on it.

Where Dragon Age II was disappointing because of its wasted potential, L.A. Noire is clumsy and awkward in the way a newborn is. It ends up actually being kind of endearing, and you want to encourage it because you know that at some point, some of these ideas could be used to make something truly great.

That said, every Rockstar-published game I've ever played has left me feeling a bit like this. There are supremely talented people working on these games, but I sometimes wonder if they ever actually talk to each other, and why the wholes never quite add up to the sum of their parts.

Should You Play It: Yes, if you're interested in trying something new and clumsy. But try to be charitable, and don't do any of the sidequests. They are completely not worth your time.

Portal 2

Most of what I want to say about Portal 2 has already been said by Oli Welsh in his review of Portal 2 for Eurogamer. There, he stated that while Portal had a number of great jokes, "Portal 2 is that rare beast, an actual video game comedy."

This is exactly correct. It's not just a game with jokes in it, it's all about humor and entertainment. The dialogue is nothing short of brilliant, but everything from the physics to the graphics to the character animation is impeccably designed to make the player smile or laugh.

Portal 2 is so good you almost don't realize how good it is. Like all Valve games, it's so subtle in its attention to detail that it's very easy to glide right through most of the game without noticing the various men behind the curtains making your every second much smoother and more engaging than it might have been. Further, you spend so much of your time laughing that you're not really paying attention to anything else. I haven't had so much sheer, unadulterated fun with a game in a very long time.

In this way, what Portal 2 reminds me of most is Young Frankenstein, which I will always argue is the greatest comedy every made. Like Young Frankenstein, every aspect of it is calibrated to be entertaining, and the humor flits wildly from blatant slapstick to subtly intelligent with such ease that it never hits the same note twice. Both are finely crafted works of art that stand unchallenged in their fields.

We spend a lot of time here at the Ontological Geek and in the broader gaming community trying to emphasize games that are Great Works of Art, games that try to do truly amazing things, teach us about the human condition and produce great emotional reactions. This is well and good, but sometimes I think we forget that games can also be fun. Portal 2 aims to be both fun and funny, and succeeds so well at both that it's my pick for the best game of the year.

Comedy is important. It's not a lesser art, it's just a different one, and a truly great comedy deserves just as much praise as any more "serious" endeavor. Portal 2 is not perfect, but it is something really special.

Should You Play It: Yes. Why haven't you already played it? Why are you still reading this if you haven't played it? STOP READING THIS AND PLAY IT.

Homefront

I wouldn't have bothered with Homefront except for two reasons. First, much of the action takes place in western Colorado, an area very dear to my heart, and second, throughout development, Kaos Studios released statements like this one, indicating that they were not interested in making a completely generic shoot 'em up FPS with realistic trappings, but rather intended to make a game which showed something of the seriousness of war, and dealt with the horrors of an enemy occupation.

As it is, they made a completely generic shoot 'em up FPS with realistic trappings. It's not awful, but it's not any good, either, and whatever aspirations it might have had toward emotional maturity were apparently forgotten by most of the dev team as soon as the cameras quit rolling.

Also, that's really not at all what Montrose looks like. Maybe before you set most of a game in a real town, you should do some research about what the town looks like?

Should You Play It: Nope. If you just really have to get your modern shooter fix, I suppose it's better than nothing, but it's really not worth your time.

Dead Space 2

I liked Dead Space well enough, but was not all that committed to playing the sequel. I only picked it up because Matt (who has always been the bigger horror fan) kept pestering me about it. When I finally did pick it up to get him to quit pestering me, I was very glad I did. DS2 is not the best game I've ever played, but it was an astonishing amount of fun. It's not subtle in its scares, but it was legitimately tense in places, and although the plot and characters weren't anything to write home about, they were engaging enough to keep me moving forward, which is more than can be said for many games.

The monsters were as squicky as ever, the new guns were viscerally satisfying, and the whole game was polished to a mirror sheen. Further, I appreciated the decision to voice the previously-silent protagonist. While Isaac was not a particularly deep character, it was quite enjoyable to play a game from the perspective of someone other than a particularly unlucky mime. I almost always find it easier to sympathize with a voiced character than a silent protagonist (Bastion and Portal 2 excepted).

Should You Play It: DS2 is unlikely to give you any nightmares, but if you enjoyed Resident Evil 4 or any similar third-person survival horror game, I think you'll quite enjoy this one.

Bastion

Bastion caught me completely by surprise. Gamers are a notoriously excitable lot, so when large quantities of people kept talking about how great it was, I thought I was in for another Braid: something kind of neat, but mostly pretentious and obtuse.

I played it out of a sense of cultural obligation, and immediately fell in love. It's beautiful, fun and stylish. It carries itself with an economy of form that I think most AAA games could stand to emulate, keeping all of the best parts of traditional RPG customization without the needless chaff that tends to come along with them.

I won't waste a lot of time here talking about how good it is. I did a lot of that a few months ago when it first came out. I probably wouldn't go as far as to call it a masterpiece, the way some folks have (if only so Supergiant Games doesn't get too full of themselves-- I want them to keep making good games, and nothing can stagnate an artist so much as being told he/she's a genius too soon), but it was unique in all the right ways and wonderful to play.

Should You Play It: I certainly think so. Because of the way it caught me so off-guard, I'm sure I have an inflated opinion of it, but I thought it was beautiful.

Gears of War 3

The multiplayer is a great deal of fun if you go for that sort of thing, which I do, obsessively, for about two weeks, and then I don't any more. I happened to like the improvements made to Horde mode, and will probably play it with friends off and on again for several years yet. But you don't come to the Ontological Geek to hear about whether or not multiplayer modes are fun, do you?

The single player campaign is a vast improvement on the first two in story and substance, in that it is not as actively offensive as the second nor as thematically barren as the first, but it's still nothing particularly stellar. Karen Traviss is clearly a pretty talented writer who was doing the best with what she had, but I found the melodrama a bit unearned. There are some very solid moments here and there, but the majority of it is so bombastic and overwrought that it all just becomes so much noise.

As usual, the environments are gorgeous, the voice actors are very good at what they do, and that ineffable Gears feel is stronger than ever. I enjoyed playing it with friends, but was still left feeling a bit tired by the end of the game.

Should You Play It: Sure, if you want. I'll be happy to play some Horde with you on Live (WombatofDoom42), but I will always wish the single-player campaign had more heart and less noise.

Catherine

Catherine just made me angry. I found it shallow, boring, and somehow both misandrist and misogynist at the same time. I am slightly torn, because I want more developers to make games that deal with topics like this. I want games to explore relationships, sex, and other aspects of adult life. I think games have the power, through procedural rhetoric and interactivity and lots of other neat tools, to tell us all kinds of interesting stories and posit all kinds of interesting thoughts about every subject. Games can be about much more than just shooting aliens or stabbing orcs (not that there's necessarily anything wrong with games that do those things). But I want them to do a better job than this.

I can respect games which honestly try new things and fumble, because fair enough, art is hard. I can't respect games that putz around for a while and waste my time under a pretentious cover. Catherine is two parts crappy anime to one part uninspired puzzle game with ham-handed metaphors, and for all its talk of being about mature, adult relationships, it's shallow and adolescent. It has a sitcom's view of relationships. I'll probably delve into it in more granularity and fewer pithy remarks in the next few weeks, but I didn't get it at all, and felt a little bit concerned by how many people apparently did. Either I missed something or they did.

Should You Play It: No, not even for cultural literacy.

So, that's that! Check out Matt's list, and let us know what you think!

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Guest Article: On Urgency

2011-12-15T11:58:00.000-05:00

During a recent Deus Treks podcast, I passingly mentioned that a game works much better as art when its gameplay reinforces its sense of narrative urgency. I didn't think much of it at the time, but on further reflection I think that it's an important piece of the Plot vs. Fun puzzle, and a useful lens for exploring games as art. I wanted to explore it in further detail in hopes of addressing some questions that I raised previously, and to add another term to the Ontological Geek's lexicon of analytical concepts. Since the state of Missouri requires me to warn people when I'm about to unload a wall of text, my discussion will take place after the jump.

When I talk about urgency, I mean a belief held by the player that they must undergo a particular course of action within a specific timeframe to achieve their goal. We see urgency most directly when we're dodging patterns in a bullet hell game or flooring the gas pedal in a racing title, but I want to use the term more broadly to include goals like making sure that I've swept every inch of a Zelda dungeon for heart containers before getting ready to confront the boss. In this sense, urgency is not necessarily about making the player feel panicked, but about internalizing the imperative of the game. Jane McGonigal addresses this when she talks about using games as a model for generating whole-hearted participation in activities.

A Little History

Early video games such as Missile Command, Asteroids, Space Invaders, and Galaga all created a sense of urgency by rapidly ramping up the difficulty of the game as you continued to play. More targets, faster enemies, and more complex tactics rewarded skilled play with greater challenges, which creates a sense of accomplishment while also averting boredom. While this is born partly out of a need to force people to feed more quarters into the arcade cabinet, it was also excellent game design that created a sense of urgency in the player to reach his or her goal.

In these early titles, there isn't much narrative to speak of. "Kill the aliens!" is enough story for quite a lot of video games, but for the first few generations of gaming the exclusive focus was the gameplay mechanics. Many of the archetypes of "mini-game" formats come from this era, and the gameplay is good for a reason: it presents a goal, and increases the complexity or difficulty of accomplishing that goal at a rate correlative with the player's increase in skill. Among other reasons, they succeed as games because the gameplay reinforces the sense of urgency to accomplish that goal.

As games have grown more complex and storylines have become more elaborate, we start facing the Plot vs. Fun problem: telling a good story requires seizing the player's sense of agency, but endless player freedom is going to harm the story because you can't control the pacing or ordering of events that lead up to them performing the right action to advance the story...

...unless they've internalized the narrative and have a sense of urgency to fulfill it.

Urgency Done Right
I'd like to elaborate an example of how a game can match narrative urgency to gameplay at multiple paces within a single title. The Ontological Geek's favorite dead horse to beat is Planescape: Torment, and since Congress has just lifted the ban on horse slaughter I'm going to merrily flog it further. While it's not the explicit structure of the game, I want to break it up into three acts to talk about how each one uses a different style of play to create an contextually appropriate sense of urgency.

In the first act, that level is zero. After waking up in the mortuary with no memories and discovering that you cannot die, you are left to wander around the city of Sigil to learn about where you are, and your choices determine your identity by changing your moral alignment, your class, and the attitudes and dialogue choices you have with NPCs. There is no clear force out to get you, and the only objective you have is the message carved on your back to seek out an object from a mysterious figure named Pharod. The time it takes you to get your bearings and learn about the setting is designed to let you luxuriate in the gorgeous design of the setting and swim around genuinely rich dialogue.

Combats are mostly optional, you can explore any part of the city, and none of the NPCs give you the typical "gather 5 modron sprockets and bring them back to me" quests, save for one character that lampshades it heavily and embeds it in a ridiculous chain of fetch quests that are designed to irritate your character. As you explore the city and meet more people, you eventually find several of your old journals, and find your way to confront Ravel Puzzlewell, the night hag who put you in this predicament.

The second act begins after Ravel tells you how your situation arose, and the mysterious shadows that have begun to appear around you kill her before she can tell you where to find the solution to your condition. At this point, the game shifts to a faster pace, as new areas are opened up for you to explore, and you suddenly have a much clearer goal: follow the trail the source of your condition, and put it to an end. This sends you traveling to prison worlds, extra-dimensional forges, and layers of Hell itself looking for the secret to ending your torturous cycle of rebirth. The scenery is just as rich, but the explicit goal is clearer and the forces standing in your way are much more menacing. Rather than exploring for the sake of learning your surroundings, you are working on locating the small clues that add up to your finding the secret location of the source of your torment.

The third part begins with the final stage of your hunt for the one who can tell you that location, and the final confrontation that decides your ultimate fate. This is an intense race through a collapsing demiplane on the edge of Hell, fighting endless waves of powerful demons, and racing to the fortress of the one who has been prolonging your eternal torture. The Fortress of Regret is not large, but the tremendous, desperate efforts of your tormenter kills your entire party, leaving you alone with your foe for a final conflict that is brilliantly written and which I have never seen topped. For the last hour of the game, you feel that the fate of something truly immense rests on your actions. It's gripping and heart-rending, and you absolutely cannot stop playing.

The urgency of each act is completely different. When the game is meant to be exploratory and self-paced, nothing presses you. When free-form exploration gets tiresome, you are given a focused goal with some flexibility around how you pursue it. Meaningful obstacles begin to push you toward your goal as the Shadows attack you when you spend too much time in areas you don't need to revisit. As the game draws to a climax, your path is short, direct, and astoundingly intense. There is no chance to pause and collect yourself, and giving you such a break would detract from the enormity of your pursuit.

Urgency Done Wrong

The converse situation occurs when a game completely fails to match the urgency of your imperative with the gameplay. I think the best example of this deficiency is in the Elder Scrolls titles, particularly Oblivion. The gates of hell itself are ripping tremendous holes in the wall of reality, and Cyrodil will be flush with demons if a brave adventurer doesn't step forth to seal the breach. You are that adventurer, and you can literally spend years in-game collecting wildflowers, without penalty, after the quest-relevant NPCs tell you that the world will surely end if someone doesn't immediately seal the Oblivion gates. There's absolutely nothing driving you to do anything. Ever.

The problem with Oblivion is that all of your objectives, no matter how trivial or dire, are of equal importance. Nothing motivates you to complete any of them aside from traditional adventurer's avarice. This is part of the appeal for many people, as you can simply do what you want to do and explore a tremendous and beautiful world at your own pace, seeking as much combat or commerce as tickles your fancy. As much as I enjoy this, the plot states directly that inaction will lead to horrifying consequences, and fails to deliver on that threat. If the game tells me the world will be flooded with demons unless I do something, then it should bloody well flood the world with demons if I spend my time trying to steal every fork in the world.

This is not to say that I dislike the Elder Scrolls games, as I adore playing Morrowind and Skyrim. I do, however, think it harms them as art to have such a jarring disparity between the threats in the narration and the threats in the game. Morrowind worked slightly better by having a lurking, looming dread in Dagoth-Ur rather than an unstoppable army constantly boiling forth from hell itself, and Skyrim at least drops a giant freaking dragon on my head if I spend too long mucking about in the middle of nowhere. Still, all of them have a rather absent sense of urgency, as there is no reward or penalty for completing objectives swiftly or over the course of months in the game. The narrative they are trying to build feels as important as the meaningless copies of the Biography of Barenziah on the bookshelves of every last citizen of Tamriel.

The Continuum

As with most of my ideas, urgency as a dimension of games-as-art is a continuum. Some games work at each end and everywhere in between. Deus Ex plays wonderfully along that continuum by alternating between wide open city streets that you can explore at leisure to tense scenes of escaping from giant collapsing buildings. Some games stick firmly to the full-blown panic end of the spectrum: bullet hell titles and fighting games are short, intense bouts of frantic struggles to stay alive and defeat your opponents. Titles like Civilization give you all the time in the world to plan and design what you want to see, never forcing you to end your turn prematurely or setting deadlines for your goals.

Urgency is a tool in the game designer's kit, and good execution depends on matching the urgency of the gameplay to the narrative goal you are trying to reinforce. Part of the reason that random combats in Final Fantasy titles irritate the living crap out of me is because they interrupt my desire to complete a goal; it feels like the game is needlessly obstructing my desire to accomplish the objectives it sets out for me. Planned encounters are fine, as I am perfectly willing to fight through a fiendish gauntlet of enemies if it makes sense for me to do so. Random encounters like fighting yet-another-goddamn-goblin while traveling from point A to point B, however, do very little to enhance my sense of progress and achievement, and sometimes hamper it by consuming precious minutes of game time impeding my progress. Combat events may be intense and require action and strategy, but if they don't build on my sense of progress, then they are failures. "Urgency" in the sense of "act now or die" doesn't always complement my use of the term.

What It All Means

Our mission here at the Ontological Geek is to take games seriously as art. Sometimes this means exploring single titles like book reviews, examining the details of a game as aesthetic experiences and offering commentary. More often, we try to articulate what aspects a game can possess that enhances its value as art, such as its sense of immersion and how its interface provides an experience that cannot be had through a different medium. A robust vocabulary for discussing games as art helps people understand why we love games so much, and why we think they can and should be taken seriously as enriching experiences.

My thoughts above are offering a term that may or may not wind up being useful in looking at other titles. The core themes that I've written about are immersion and interactivity, how they are not synonymous in games, and how they are essential components to understanding games qua games and games qua art. Urgency is another dimension of both, and a good game will probably lend itself to being discussed in such terms. It may not stick, but it might inspire insights into other titles you'd like to share on our humble blog.

The Philosopher-Geek: You're a Legend, Mr. Wayne

2011-12-14T21:23:00.000-05:00

First things first: go listen to the newest Deus Treks. It's the best one we've done so far.

With that out of the way:

It's Batman time. Again. (Always).

Last time, I mentioned that Arkham Asylum, (though really neat), mostly doesn't examine the Batman mythos with any real granularity. "You are Batman," it says, "Now go punch people." By and large, Arkham Asylum is a game about how cool it is to dress up in tights and a cape, but there are a few moments when it stops to ask the player a few questions about what it really is to be Batman, and those are the sections I want to talk about today.

The Scarecrow is an old Batman villain who plays a relatively small but memorable role in Arkham Asylum. If you're unfamiliar with the Scarecrow, all you really need to know is that he is an ex-psychologist who is obsessed with fear, and has invented a powerful hallucinatory fear gas which causes his victims to relive their worst fears and nightmares. The specifics of his place in the plot are not really important, as the sections which feature him stand entirely (and somewhat jarringly) on their own. In any Scarecrow story, Batman is inevitably affected by the fear gas, treating the reader/viewer/player to an examination of what Batman fears the most. In the best Scarecrow stories, these moments allow us to learn more about the human side of the Dark Knight. In the worst, the story simply gets trippy and weird for a while before returning to normalcy.

Arkham Asylum infects Batman with the gas on three separate occasions. These three moments allow the game to put on its arty hat and dig a little deeper into the psychology of everyone's favorite brooding vigilante.

The Form

The Scarecrow sequences follow a pretty strict form: first, Batman will get infected with fear gas, cough for a while, and then keep walking without any obvious dramatic shift. As time goes by, things get progressively stranger and stranger as the toxin works through his system and Batman begins to hallucinate. Eventually, these hallucinations culminate in a complete departure from reality wherein the player is required to play through a minigame with completely different rules from the main game.

In these minigame sections, Batman is placed in a nearly two-dimensional space composed of small pieces of the Asylum, floating in space. In the center of this space stands a fifty-foot tall Scarecrow, slowly rotating around and looking for Batman. His gaze is represented by a halo of orange light, and the player must avoid this light by hiding behind walls and only ducking through exposed spaces when the Scarecrow is looking elsewhere. If Batman stumbles into the Scarecrow's gaze, the player receives an instant game over as the giant looms over a cowering Batman.

After successfully dodging the Scarecrow's gaze and surmounting some straightforward obstacles, the player will come upon a Bat-Signal. Interacting with the Bat-Signal causes Batman to shine the light directly onto the Scarecrow, who will cry out and vanish. At this point, the hallucination ends, and Batman comes back to the real world, having completely shrugged off the fear gas without any apparent lingering side effects.

The Content

At first, these sections read as Batman conquering his fears and thereby surviving the temporary insanity produced by the gas. Batman endures the hallucinations and then comes out the other end by reminding all concerned that he's Batman, dammit, and is therefore immune to your stupid poisons.

The first time I played the game, I took these sections at face value, and therefore found them to be an enjoyable enough change of pace, but didn't feel like they lived up to their full potential. But as I thought about them later, I suddenly realized they deserved a closer look.

What is the player actually doing during the minigame sections, the real moments of gameplay? The large Scarecrow in the middle of the world is not the actual person, but a projection of Batman's fears. If the player runs out and tries to confront the Scarecrow (and thus, Batman's fears), directly, he or she is greeted with a game-over screen. The player must thus hide from Batman's fears, must avoid coming into direct conflict or contact with them. Practically every other obstacle in the game is defeated through the use of physical force. Batman does hide in the shadows when he is attacking a group of armed thugs, but he does so only until the player can isolate them and beat them into submission.

But the player never actually fights Batman's fears. Batman never punches the huge Scarecrow, never fights with him, never throws Batarangs at him. Instead, he runs away from him. He completely avoids the Scarecrow's gaze, and if he allows himself to be bathed in the light of the Scarecrow's eyes, to be caught and forced to reckon with his deepest fears, he goes completely insane.

Batman is not facing his fears and triumphing over them, he is running away from them. Each section forces Batman to interact with elements of self-doubt-- all of the hallucinations relate to Batman's perception of himself. Each time the Scarecrow poisons Batman, he forces him to take a long, hard look at himself.

And how does Batman shake off the toxin? Not by accepting the fears, or by confronting them, but by shining the Bat-Signal on the image of the Scarecrow, literally stamping the Batman emblem on his fears. This is an act of self-definition, of reasserting his identity in the face of the unpleasant introspection the fear gas is making him undergo. When Batman shines the bat-signal on the Scarecrow, he is redefining himself as Batman, "triumphing" over his fears not by confronting them, but by reminding himself who he is. Batman is an idea more than he is a person, and by shining the Bat-Signal on his fears, Bruce reasserts his identity as the legend. He is not Bruce Wayne, he is the @#$%# Batman.

The fact that he shrugs off the effects of the gas all at once immediately after this act of self-definition indicates that he is completely repressing his fears and self-doubt, shunting them out of his mind, conquering his fears not by facing them and letting them pass through him, but by putting his fingers in his ears and shouting "I'm Batman and Batman is not afraid of things," until they go away for a while.

So, what does the game think Batman is afraid of? The three sections boil down to two major fears.

1. Bruce Wayne

One of the most interesting parts about Batman is the interplay between his two personas-- the interaction and frequent disconnect between the way he views himself and behaves as he switches between Bruce Wayne and Batman. The real question is one of definition: is this person really Bruce Wayne, a billionaire playboy who moonlights by night as a costumed vigilante, or is he primarily Batman, who pretends by day to be a wealthy executive? Some superheroes are less confusing in this regard: Clark Kent isn't a real person, he's a mask for Superman. Spider-Man, conversely, is an excuse for Peter Parker to do all the things he really wants to do. But Batman is less clear-cut. Where does Batman stop and Bruce Wayne begin?

Arkham Asylum is mostly unconcerned with this dynamic. You play the game as Batman, and although Oracle calls you Bruce from time to time, the Bruce Wayne side of things is mostly irrelevant. But the one time you do play as Bruce Wayne rather than Batman is telling: you don't play Bruce Wayne the billionaire playboy, you play Bruce Wayne the terrified little child.

The second hallucination sequence causes the player's avatar to be replaced by a little boy in a tuxedo, walking down a raining alleyway, and listening, in the distance, to the sounds of his parents being murdered. The alleyway seems to go on forever, stretching on in permanent darkness, and the player can do absolutely nothing to stop the murder of Bruce's parents. Keeping the murder entirely auditory is actually a stroke of brilliance as it makes it all the more inexorable. You can't see what's happening, so you wouldn't even begin to know how to stop it, but you can hear it, so you know it's happening. The game does not take control of the avatar; it still allows the player to have control over the character, in that the player can physically move the little boy around, but the player has no control over the events that are unfolding in the game.

This is how Batman views Bruce Wayne: as a scared, powerless little boy, perpetually trapped in the dark alley where his parents were murdered. In Arkham Asylum, at least, Batman associates the name "Bruce Wayne" with powerlessness, with weakness, and with loss. He becomes Batman to escape from Bruce Wayne, to leave the little boy behind, and in this case, the reassertion of his identity through the Bat-Signal is a way of distancing himself from this part of himself. "I am not Bruce Wayne," he says, "I am not this powerless little child who could not save his parents from being murdered. I am Batman, and I can do anything."

2. Illegitimacy

How is Batman different from the costumed lunatics and murderers he opposes? Bruce Wayne, a grown man, spends his nights dressing up like a bat and beating up criminals and lunatics, and calls it his life's work, arguing that he's saving Gotham City. But Bruce could unquestionably accomplish far more good as the multi-billionaire CEO of a major corporation dedicated to rescuing Gotham, and he would probably get punched less. Rather than personally beating up robbers and rapists, Bruce could donate several million dollars to reforming the entire Gotham Police Department, and then donate several more millions of dollars to the educational systems and infrastructures of the city so as to help people avoid becoming robbers and rapists in the first place. In the real world, while Phoenix Jones may (or may not) do some good with his vigilantism, it's hard to argue that he does as much good for the world as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Jones, of course, isn't a billionaire, but Bruce Wayne is.

This is not to say that all future editions of Batman comics ought to center around the day-to-day affairs of a billionaire philanthropist, because, you know, yawn. And to be fair, many of the Batman stories do show him doing all manner of philanthropy in the daytime in addition to his night-time antics. But if Bill Gates ran around in a bat costume and punched people, even bad people, we would not cheer him on, we would call him crazy and lock him away. In the real world, that kind of vigilantism isn't really laudable, it's psychotic.

Batman, sadly, does not live in the real world, but any work of art which really wants to engage with the Batman mythos is going to have to explore this problem. Arkham Asylum does so in the third hallucination sequence, which takes the game's opening cinematic and inverts the roles. In the original cinematic, we watched as Batman drove a bound and gagged Joker to the Asylum and escorted him to his prison cell. In the hallucination, however, the Joker takes a bound and gagged Batman to the Asylum while all of the other villains watch and comment on how crazy Batman is. What's the difference, Batman's psyche asks, between these lunatics and yourself? It ends with the hallucinatory Joker killing Batman, and then cuts (after some fun fourth-wall breakage involving a faux game-over screen) to Batman's grave. Batman then claws his way out of the grave and walks through a series of cells which each contain images of Batman behaving just like the lunatics in the asylum before descending into the final minigame section. Maybe Batman isn't that different from the Joker. Maybe he should be caged. Maybe he is a lunatic. Maybe the Batman myth is dead.

Batman is almost completely silent during these hallucinations. He doesn't engage with these legitimate doubts and questions, he avoids them, and this time, when he shines the Bat-Signal and reasserts his identity, he is actually reasserting the value of the entire legend.

The Bat-Signal is really one of the sillier aspects of the Batman mythos. While it inevitably shows up in all of the darker Batman stories, it really seems most at home in lighter versions of the character. It belongs with a Batman who is anything but dark and edgy and brooding, a Batman who is pure-hearted and good and maybe even a little goofy, who inhabits a universe completely free of psychosis and real violence. Thus, using the Bat-Signal to reassert the validity of the Batman legend may serve as a way for him to forget all of the issues that undoubtedly underlie his behavior and remind himself of the legend. No, he's not a psychopath. He's different from the Joker because he's BATMAN. The Batman legend seems dead for a moment, but Batman crawls his way out of the grave, again, not by actually confronting the issue, but by reasserting his identity and his own self-made definitions, ignoring what is probably the truth of the matter in favor of the myth.

Conclusion

The most telling part about this is that this interpretation is not immediately apparent. Batman certainly doesn't think he's running away from anything. Batman thinks he's triumphing over Bruce Wayne's pitiful self-doubts and nightmares, and reminding himself who he really is.

Arkham Asylum is usually anything but subtle: it climaxes in a battle with a twelve-foot maniac clown. But hidden down beneath the broad strokes and nifty gadgets is real commentary about the sort of person Batman must be. You have to dig down to find it, past the trappings of the situation into the mechanics, the fundamental level at which the player interacts with the game.

When Batman finally breaks out of his last hallucination, he has the real Scarecrow by the throat. Scarecrow astoundedly yells that he has injected Batman with enough toxin to drive ten men insane. Batman has the willpower of ten men, the game seems to declare. But maybe it's not so much that Batman is stronger than the rest of us. Maybe he just has a much greater capacity for self-deception.

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Deus Treks Part Five

2011-12-09T08:50:00.001-05:00

This marks the fourth installment of our podcast wherein Bill Coberly, Matt Schanuel, and Jarrod Hammond play through the original Deus Ex and discuss their experiences. The first installment can be found here, the second, here, the third, here, and the fourth, here.

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Also, check out Jarrod's article on Plot Vs. Fun that we mention in the podcast.

Have you been playing through Deus Ex recently? Have any thoughts raised by this discussion you would like to share? Comment below or e-mail us at ontologicalgeek@gmail.com.

Thanks for listening!

Deus Treks Part Four

2011-11-29T20:05:00.001-05:00

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Have you been playing through Deus Ex recently? Have any thoughts raised by this discussion you would like to share? Comment below or e-mail us at ontologicalgeek@gmail.com.

Thanks for listening!

The Philosopher-Geek: I'm Batman

2011-11-14T22:46:00.001-05:00

As I mentioned in the most recent Deus Treks, I just finished playing Arkham Asylum for the first time, and, to my great surprise, I think it has helped me to fall back in love with video games.

Axiom VII of the Fundamental Axioms I came up with when I first started this blog (axioms which could probably do for some revision right about now) states that "If your writing is bad, I don't care how fun your mechanics are." This, I find, is one of the defining factors of how I look at video games. A game with bad writing tends to be bad art, and, perhaps because I am a writer, I tend to find poor writing and storytelling very distracting. I used to worry that I didn't like video games at all. After all, if what I really want are good stories and well-written dialogue, maybe I should just stick to films and novels? Nearly all of my favorite games prioritize story and dialogue over flashy graphics or gameplay mechanics, to the extent that some of the ones I value most are actually very clumsy to play. (I'm looking at you, Torment.)

I say all this because Arkham Asylum is not the best-written, best-acted, or best-plotted game I've ever played. It's probably not even in the top ten. The plot is really very silly, (why would the Joker need super-soldiers?) the dialogue is serviceable but largely unremarkable, the voice acting is competent but largely not particularly inspiring, (Hamill and Conroy excepted). It ends terribly.

Imagine my surprise when, upon finishing the game, I realized I absolutely did not care. Sure, the game would have been better if they had addressed some of these issues, but that absolutely doesn't matter. So, why do I enjoy this game so much?

Because you get to be Batman.

No, Seriously. Batman.

That's not a flippant answer. And I don't just mean that the game's avatar is shaped like Batman, or that he's voiced by Kevin Conroy. The simple fact that one is playing a character named Batman in the game is not what sells it to me. It works because the game's mechanics, combat system and physics engine allow you to actually be Batman. When you move the analog stick, the character moves like Batman. When you punch a criminal, the character punches like Batman. When you grapple onto a gargoyle and then swoop down onto an unsuspecting maniac, leaving him dangling from your perch, screaming and soiling himself in terror, you do it like Batman.

It's the game's rhythm, the way it allows you to calmly walk into a pack of fifteen felons with crowbars and know that you're going to come out victorious, that makes the game work. It's no surprise that it may originally have been planned as a rhythm game proper.

I had heard all of this before, but it's one thing to hear about how a game really makes you feel like Batman, and another to actually play that game. (Which may render this whole post moot, come to think of it.) It wasn't until I played the game and giggled like a first-grader for hours on end that I realized how truly unique it is.

See, about the fifth time I entered a room full of armed felons and quietly dispatched each of them without taking a bullet, the truth of the matter hit me: Arkham Asylum is exactly what a certain kind of video game does well. What Arkham Asylum does is something that video games may do better than any other medium: it allows you to step into someone else's shoes, and learn something about what it is like to be a different person.

Namely, Batman.

And Batman is kind of a big deal. Who do geeks revere more than Batman? If, in any argument, you can prove that Batman approves of a particular point of view, you win. "Appeal to Batman" is a respected rhetorical technique. If you walk up to a geek and say "think about something cool," he or she will think about Batman.

Comic is Zach Weiner's at SMBC.

Loss of Self

Matt wrote an Additional Pylon with the title "Better Storytelling Through Loss of Self," and while he was primarily interested in the way a good DM can reduce distance between player and PC in a tabletop RPG, the idea struck a chord with me. The best works of narrative art coerce you into perfect sympathy with the protagonist. They cause you to feel what the character feels, see what he or she sees, and, think how he or she thinks. A great work can make you inhabit, if only for the briefest of moments, another person's mind-- can make you leave yourself behind and temporarily become someone else.

This is the art that can change lives, the sort of art that alters worldviews, and video games might be uniquely suited to this kind of radical shift in perspective. It is one thing to read about a person's life, and quite another to actually live it. This is not to say that video games will necessarily eclipse all other art forms -- I am not one of those so fond of video games that he will refer to them as the apotheosis of all artistic endeavor. Even in the realm of "media about Batman," The Dark Knight and The Killing Joke are better art than Arkham Asylum. These other works, in addition to telling great stories, let me imagine what it might be like to be the Caped Crusader, give insight into Batman's psychology, the myth surrounding him, and the universe in which he operates. But in Arkham Asylum, I actually get to be Batman. The difference is crucial.

So, video games can allow you to experience what life is like through someone else's eyes. That's neat, but why talk about Arkham Asylum, when I could talk about Torment? Because Arkham Asylum lets you experience what it's like to be a very particular person.

Some people ask "Would it be as good if it wasn't about Batman?" Of course not. Would The Once and Future King be as good if it wasn't about King Arthur? Would The Last Temptation of Christ be interesting if it wasn't about Jesus? Like these other works, Arkham Asylum doesn't just "happen" to be about Batman. It is entirely about what it is like to be Batman. If it wasn't about Batman, it wouldn't exist.

The Dark Knight Rises

So why is this good or important? Does it just allow young men and women to act out the adolescent fantasy of dressing up like a bat and punching people in the face? Well, sure. It does that. Certainly part of the fun of the game is finally getting to appease the 10-year-old that ran around the backyard in a blanket-cape and jumped off of trees. And it's important to note that there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

In all seriousness, Batman is a lot more than an adolescent fantasy. Batman is a legend. Tom Bissell put it best when he said "Batman may have come to us through the comic book, but he belongs to American mythology now, and it is as hard to imagine him having been created by Bob Kane as it is to imagine Jesus having been created by Mark." Batman is a Hero, with a capital H-- a legend, a symbol of justice and protection and goodness in a way that even Superman isn't. Batman always has an answer for every situation, can always tough it out through whatever anyone throws at him. You can try to write him off as "a dude in a batsuit," but you would be wrong to do so, just as if you were to say Robin Hood is "a dude in tights," or King Arthur is "a dude with a sword."

Why do we all want to be Batman? Because he's brilliant, tough and strong. Because Batman always beats the badguy, and he always looks cool when he does it. Because although he doesn't play by the rules everyone else does, he is honorable to a fault. He will never kill the Joker, because he knows it would be wrong to do so. Batman is selfless when we are selfish. Batman is strong when we are weak. He can survive anything and beat anyone, but he is just human and broken enough to be believable. Superman is untouchable because he's from another world. No one of us could ever be Superman, and so the desire to be Superman is always thwarted, but Batman -- you almost think you could be Batman. He's just barely possible.

Why else do we keep coming back to him, almost eighty years after his initial debut? The Dark Knight is a powerful archetype, an inspiring legend, the sort of Hero that resonates with every person.

The Adam West Batman still exists, and so, sadly, does the Clooney one, but Batman as an idea transcends all of that silliness. Everyone who ever booted up a copy of Arkham Asylum brought an idea of Batman to the table. Every single person who plays the game knows who Batman is, and even where they might prefer Nolan to Miller, or disagree about the specifics, they agree about the fundamentals of the Batman mythos, and the fact is that Arkham Asylum satisfies all of those different preconceptions. When you play the game, you are stepping into the shoes of a legend, and there's something powerful and beautiful about that.

I don't wish to overstate this: Arkham Asylum, for all I've just said, is probably not Great Art. It's a fun video game, and I recommend it wholeheartedly, but it didn't give me any great epiphanies about human nature. But what it did is cause me to remember one of the reasons I love video games and find them as utterly fascinating as I do. The great ones allow you to briefly abandon your own experiences and take up another's, to re-enter the real world having lived for a while in a different one, and to be better for it. For a short time, I was Batman, and while I still eagerly await a game which really examines the psychology of the character in a more mature way, it was beautiful and fun, and completely worth my time.

So, play Arkham Asylum. It probably won't change your life. It's unlikely to make you rethink the nature of humanity. You'll probably spend most of the time giggling maniacally at the newest ridiculously cool thing you just did.

But you know what? It's beautiful, and special.

And it lets you be Batman.

--

Questions, comments, or hate mail? Comment below or e-mail us here at ontologicalgeek@gmail.com. And do remember that we are always accepting submissions to the Ontological Geek for publication on this here blogospace. Simply e-mail us at ontologicalgeek@gmail.com with any attached essays, and, after a quick review, we'll be quite happy to post them! Also, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for extra Ontological Geekitude!

Deus Treks Part Three

2011-11-03T00:13:00.009-04:00

Hello, all!

This marks the third installment of our podcast wherein Bill Coberly, Matt Schanuel, and Jarrod Hammond play through the original Deus Ex and discuss their experiences. The first installment can be found here, and the second, here.

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The article wherein Matt talks about "masking systems" can be found here.

Have you been playing through Deus Ex recently? Have any thoughts raised by this discussion you would like to share? Comment below or e-mail us at ontologicalgeek@gmail.com.

Thanks for listening!

Guest Article: Plot vs. Fun

2011-10-31T15:33:00.000-04:00

Matt's essay on the sandbox touches on many of the points I wanted to address when I originally talked about Plot vs. Fun. I don't want to contradict Matt, as I basically agree with the points he made, but I do want to explore my original distinction of Plot vs. Fun as it relates to sandbox games, meaningful games, and what analyzing games as art means. Phrasing it the way that I do implies that somehow plot is, at best, independent of fun, or, at worst, in direct opposition to it. I'm going to ask more questions than I answer, but I'd rather start a conversation than pontificate.

Stated succinctly, composing a coherent narrative with fixed events inherently requires seizing or suspending the player's control, disrupting our sense of agency. Every cutscene robs us of an opportunity to do something cool ourselves, but giving us total freedom to wander over every meaningless rock in a hundred-mile radius of Cyrodil means that long stretches of time pass without enhancing the narrative. This is the problem of Plot vs. Fun. The critical components of video games that make them games are moments of action and decision, while watching a story unfold and listening to dialogue is a passive activity. Giving us too much dialogue to listen to while trying to leap from platform to platform causes us to miss our jump, but having us stand around watching scripted events happen strips us of our sense of agency, the immersive aspect unique to games as art.

Many of the articles here discuss the importance of narrative and plot as it pertains to a game being good art. Bill makes a strong case that meaningful games need good cohesive narratives, and that "side quests" detract from that meaningfulness as a matter of definition; the fact that we distinguish in-game activities that reinforce the narrative from the optional ones that, to put it kindly, do not, is indicative that these things are antithetical to a high-quality experience. In Matt's sandbox article, he points out that striving to have huge amounts of options, as a practical matter, limits the depth of those options, leaving you with a world full of barely distinguishable mediocrities, none of which leave a lasting impression that you've done something meaningful to the game world.

Games can be fun and artistically interesting without narrative, as has already been explored in Bill's article on the Meaningful Game. Titles like Beat Trip Hazard create visually enthralling experiences with challenging gameplay that provide you with new ways to experience and explore your favorite music, but trying to force a plot on it would be futile and pointless. Minecraft is famously successful for being an enjoyable and artistically challenging game without the faintest pretense of narrative. Yet even games like this require either a one-line justification ("Avoid obstacles to raise your score, and you win!") or thrive because they enable the creation of narratives with the tools they provide.

Narratives are the strongest artistic component available for critique in games. Strong visual aesthetics can lend tremendous atmosphere to a game, as with titles like Limbo and Team Fortress 2, but the component that ultimately leaves us pondering the significance of our consumed experience is the narrative. As brilliantly executed as I find the colorful stylings of Torchlight, their style hasn't left me pondering the way that I understand the world. Similarly, good music is essential to an ideal gaming experience, but usually isn't enough to leave one re-evaluating their understanding of the world. If there isn't a narrative justifying what I'm doing, I won't be able to find the game fun.

The problem I wanted to consider when I introduced the Plot vs. Fun distinction is tied directly with the idea of interactivity. Video games thrive on the player's ability to make choices and to act at their own pace. Because of how computers work, however, all events and possibilities must be planned and programmed in explicit detail before they can even be experienced by players. This means that all possible experiences that a player can have must be explicitly planned, designed, and created.

Writing a good story is hard. Writing the same story 37 different times to cover the permutations of interest is harder. Narratives require continuity. A bit of narrative that is merely compatible with the greater whole without being necessary does not necessarily improve the whole. Similarly, a component which strongly enhances the narrative can scarcely be cut without detracting from the whole. After all, if a storyline reinforces the themes of the larger work and provides entertaining content, why would you make it possible to ignore it? Can the final product really be considered whole if high-quality components of it have been excised?

Contrariwise, video games contain many aspects that make gameplay fun but do not necessarily require any narrative significance. There are strong thrills to be gained from completely an especially difficult stage in a platformer, solving a complex block-movement puzzle that could never stand up to narrative justification, getting a strategically novel kill in Team Fortress, or executing a clever strategy in an RTS which has a pace of construction and action that would be positively nonsensical if narrated in real time. These sorts of events are distinctly fun, but must either be heavily abstracted to make narrative sense, as is true for games like Warcraft 3, or take place in a setting devoid of plot, as with Team Fortress.

In video games, these complex events form the bulk of a player's activity, and weaving narrative components into gameplay frequently requires seizing control from the player, leaving you staring at several inert sets of polygons playing sound files at each other, periodically pausing to let the player trigger the next few minutes of MP3 playback. Games that leave the player with control of nearly every event and which imbue every character action with player interaction contain many moments of awkwardly walking around a room waiting for the next quicktime event, reducing the overall impact of each of those choices. To use Heavy Rain as an example, I sincerely doubt that Norman Jayden could casually walk into a wall for 25 seconds while pleading desperately with Agent Blake to stop casually beating the hell out of Ethan's psychiatrist. These moments are great as narrative, but they are dreadfully boring as play and reduce the narrative quality by giving the player that form of control.

Finding a compromise between keeping us busy and providing us narrative is a challenge unique to game design. It is often possible to experience the pieces of a work in arbitrary order, something almost unique to the medium of games. This is chiefly addressed in one of two ways: either your decisions are of limited significance in most of the game world, as with Elder Scrolls games like Morrowind and Oblivion, or the dev team spends staggering amounts of time writing and programming complex chains of interwoven events and dialogue branches like BioWare does, which often leads to having fewer choices.

I've stated a problem: games face a unique challenge in plot development because directed narrative has the potential to disrupt our sense of agency, accomplishment, and immersion. The challenge is not insurmountable, as evidenced by the fact that we have games with plots. What I would like to do is describe the responses as a continuum of design possibilities, and explore them a bit to have a better hermeneutic for game analysis.

Option One: All Fun, No Plot

Games in this category are easy to come by. Team Fortress 2 is my favored example; as much media as there is outside the game, it may as well all be elaborate fanfic. There is no story in the game itself, and it doesn't need one. This is not to say that games in this category truly have zero narrative, but that they have the least amount of explanation to justify themselves. Puzzle games, for example, have no plot, but they are also not generally striving to be art that makes statements about the world.

These can be great games, but I question their ability to be art. I would expect them to contain good art, like beautiful imagery and good music, but I am uncertain that the game as such would be art. As much as I love the character design and dialogue in Team Fortress 2, calling it art as such seems to be shoehorning it into a category where it doesn't belong. But if a game with exquisite characterization, stylization, and nuance can't be called art, what can?

Option Two: All Plot, No Fun

A favorite title at this site is Planescape: Torment. As far as I care, no game has a more interesting conceit, better dialogue, or stronger characters. While quite a lot of characters are straightforward inversions of D&D tropes (e.g. the chaste succubus) they are all executed with such attention to nuance and carefully crafted dialogue that nothing feels forced. Torment is the Planescape setting taken seriously, and forces every D&D concept to its craziest extreme. I loved reading every dialogue branch, savored every character, and marveled at the beautiful design of every single spot in the game.

It's one of my absolute favorite titles, but as much as I love Torment, I'm not sure it's actually a lot of fun. Combat is unnecessary and boring, and most of the game consists of moving slowly between areas hunting for dialogue options. The joy of the game is in the reading, and it's certainly more immersive for the beautiful art and animations that accompany the events of the story, but the gameplay is rather tedious. Playing through the game again for the sake of reading my favorite parts is almost a chore.

I want to call Torment art, and good art. But is it fair to call a game art when its story is phenomenal and its gameplay is tedious? Heavy Rain has a pretty good story, but it's not actually very interesting to play. It would seem to be an iconic choice for a game to call art, but does that come at the expense of it being a game? A good narrative is art, but is the game art too?

Option Three: The Balancing Act

Most games strike their balance between player agency and pre-determined events. Video games are, at the most fundamental level, instruments whereby human motions trigger animations and sounds. I may press a button to cause a character to jump, or that same button press may trigger a three-minute cutscene. The amount of material I receive back may or may not be correlative to the frequency and complexity of the input I deliver. This, at the most naked level, is the problem. How much response should I expect for my actions? Is a long animation a better prize for a harder, more complex series of inputs? Is a game better for offering lots of good narrative, animation, voice acting, and music for comparatively little input? Or are these rewards only meaningful when careful thought and work is necessary from the player to achieve them?

What Have I Gotten Myself Into?

I’ve asked some hard questions. There are answers to most of them, and some of them can be written off as making bad assumptions. Some of them are extreme positions that no one holds, but still deserve to be addressed. I'd like to explore some of these later, but I don't have all the answers. This blog is about dialogue about how video games can be analyzed and appreciated as art, so I’d like to hear what you have to say about some of the topics I’ve brought up here.

Additional Pylons: Woe

2011-10-24T16:55:00.000-04:00

I haven't played a single video game for over two weeks, and I was going to decompress today with a bit of F.E.A.R. 3, which I just got in, before I threw myself into more homework.

Then I got the Red Ring.

I do not want your pity, only your understanding.

Deus Treks Part Two: On Beginnings

2011-10-11T23:25:00.001-04:00

Hello, all!

This marks the second installment of our podcast wherein Bill Coberly, Matt Schanuel, and Jarrod Hammond play through the original Deus Ex and discuss our experiences. The first installment can be found here.

The opening cinematic to Deus Ex is embedded below, and other than that, we hope you enjoy the podcast!

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It is perhaps worth mentioning that we have now more or less hit our upper limit on SoundCloud, so in all seriousness, if anyone here is aware of a better podcasting service which charges little to nothing, we'd appreciate being informed! We're all certainly capable of doing our own research, but if there's a service anyone has experience with, we'd certainly like to start there!

Have you been playing through Deus Ex recently? Have any thoughts raised by this discussion you would like to share? Comment below or e-mail us at ontologicalgeek@gmail.com.

Thanks for listening!

Deus Treks: Part One

2011-10-03T21:52:00.001-04:00

I'll let my voice do most of the talking, but I'm proud to announce a new feature here on The Ontological Geek, a feature which breaks from our usual approach.

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You're more than welcome to play through with us -- we aim to play around 5 hours a week, though it's hardly set in stone.

Please give us feedback-- would you like to see more of this sort of thing? Do you really dislike listening to us talk?

More importantly, we'd love to hear your thoughts about the game and/or the points we raise in the podcast. Comment below, comment early, and comment often!

Thanks,

--Bill Coberly

Additional Pylons: Buying In

2011-09-26T21:27:00.001-04:00

Over at Grantland.com, Tom Bissell recently put up an interesting review of L.A. Noire that is worth checking out; you can so so here. He also brings up some interesting ideas that I want to talk about regarding the experience of games, specifically the notion of "buying in" to a game's structure, narrative, and central conceits. I encourage you to read the article, but it's pretty lengthy, so I'm going to touch on the most important points that he brings up on the topic.

Read more, after the jump!

His introduction to the topic is here:

The story of L.A. Noire concerns a psychopathic cop named Cole Phelps, a man who inappropriately commandeers cars from civilians, steals outright any car that is left unattended, frequently destroys private property, and enjoys running over civilians. Despite his recklessness, Phelps becomes the most speedily promoted police officer in constabulary history.

At least, that is what L.A. Noire's story can be about, if the player allows it, which nicely nutshells the problem of open-world games that give players a large amount of behavioral freedom while simultaneously trying to tell a coherent, linear story.

Video games can do a lot of things other storytelling mediums cannot. Their penance, however, is to have to deal with things foreign to other storytelling mediums, one of which is a uniquely damaging form of audience disruption. Just about every storytelling game employs various masking systems that attempt to anticipate internally disruptive player behavior.

[...]

At first blush, L.A. Noire would have you believe that Phelps is not an antihero. He is a cop and a war hero — an all-around "good man." How good? Phelps cannot shoot his gun out in the open, which is probably the most significant safeguard the game's creators have placed on players determined to let Phelps go psycho. It is not much of a safeguard. But there is something admirable about how little L.A. Noire's makers appear to have worried about asshole players. A lot of games go to such lengths to anticipate asshole players that they sometimes feel like a pool that has been preemptively overchlorinated to frustrate the one kid determined to pee in it. Well-conceived masking systems can be things of real beauty, but they also squander precious development time that could be spent on other things, such as making more interesting games.

I eventually restarted the game once I had fooled around enough, but while playing through the rest of L.A. Noire the following question was never far from my mind: How big of a problem is it that players can effectively screw up video-game stories? It is a question that is never far from my mind when I am playing any game whose fiction works in tandem with my decisions to create something thematically unified and dramatically satisfying. So, how big of a problem is it? One answer to this question is: There is no answer to this question. Another answer is: Strong interactive fiction will compel players to behave in ways roughly analogous to how the interactive fiction's author intends them to behave. Another answer is: The whole purpose of interactive fiction is to encourage this type of crisis. Another answer is: This is precisely why the video-game medium is incompatible with authored forms of storytelling. In the past few years, I have thought about this question a lot — maybe more than any other question, in fact. None of the above answers satisfies me.

Bissell identifies the difficulties that come with trying to tell a coherent, linear story inside a video game with player freedom, pointing specifically to L.A. Noire, where the player's desires to run folks over with a vintage car might hijack the narrative. This is an interesting point. Cole, as the narrative presents him, would not go on a murderous vehicular rampage, but the player, when he or she has control of Cole's behavior, can choose to do things that Cole would not do, generating inconsistencies and, Bissell thinks, harming the experience.

Is this an actual problem? Bissell's ultimate conclusion is that player freedom makes a traditional narrative an impossible choice for good video game art; narrative consistency is too vital to the enterprise of traditional narratives, he seems to argue. But I wonder if Bissell is underselling the ability of players to smooth over such hiccups on their own.

Dungeon Masters have been dealing with this problem since the beginning of role-playing games. Most everybody who has run a game has encountered at least one trouble maker who follows his or her whims instead of contributing to the groups experience. Their Phelps might be a wanton murderer of pedestrians, just as their sorcerer is likely to burn orphanages and steal the magistrate's hat. And as any DM will tell you, if you're trying to run a compelling, meaningful D&D game, you kick that player out of your group or convince him or her to shape up. What you don't do is spend time worrying about their inane actions, and figuring out ways to mitigate or rationalize their behavior. I'm not convinced that video games should waste effort on those ends, either, and Bissell does refer to Noire's assumption that the player won't misbehave as "admirable." Masking, as Bissell points out, is used by designers to smooth over narrative discrepancies; you may be able to shoot your essential ally, but you cannot kill her. This is a somewhat flippant response, though. The fact is that, since there is a thinking organism in the narrator's seat, any and all of the player's behaviors can be adequately responded to, or stopped when the DM asks, "Are you sure you want to do that?", "Is that what your character would do?", or "No. Stop it or leave."

Still, I am not convinced that pouring time into masking systems makes much sense. Though Bissell seems to think that they are, to some extent, necessary (and I might agree with him to a short extent), I don't think that inability to mask a character's foolish behavior is a dire problem. And I think this for many reasons.

1. It's a private encounter with the work in question, and discounts the ability to partition an experience with a work of art.

In role-playing games, totally subverting the tone of the game is a problem because it harms the experience for everybody else at the table. In video games, the only experience you're harming is your own; and once the player realizes that an unsupported behavior is not a part of the experience that the game offers, he or she can get right back to exploring the experience that the game is meant to offer.

Moreover, I think that Bissell fails to account for the ability of a player to generate their own interludes within a piece of art. Just as somebody reading a novel might close the book to daydream about where the book is headed, or imagine how a character might deal with a hypothetical situation, or someone watching a film might pause it to tell her friend how excellent it would be if Captain America were ALSO in this film, and wouldn't that be hilarious, I'm not convinced that the experience of a video game is necessarily harmed by a player taking a break from the narrative by doing things that the game's narrative might not support. Perhaps the player is capable of partitioning the experience of wanton murder, separating it from the story he or she is otherwise quite involved with. In fact, the game's failure to respond to such behavior might even reinforce the notion that the player's choices are outside the intended boundaries of the experience the game intends.

2. Not all player approaches need be supported.

When a player comes to a game like L.A. Noire and immediately wants to run rampant through the streets, then they are doing something wrong. To a greater or lesser extent, L.A. Noire is designed to offer up a specific experience. (That L.A. Noire also tries to offer up a more traditional Rockstar Games experience is a bit of a problem, but that's outside the scope of this discussion). L.A. Noire should not be faulted for failing to adequately support experiences outside of what it intends. All possible player actions need not be anticipated; only viable options. This does cut down on player choice in the middle of a narrative (specifically by removing the choice to go insane and start murdering folks, become a thief or businessman, etc. etc.), but to some extent these choices might not belong to the player at all, but rather to the character, both to keep that character consistent and to keep the narrative focused on a particular sort of experience.

I also think that it's perfectly alright to declare that there is a "right" way to play a game, so long as the developers don't pretend like alternative methods of play are viable options. Some games are not good at this, and even L.A. Noire has issues in that it makes vague motions toward being an open-world game but offers relatively little of interest in that massive world. That the game indicates to the player that it is offering a different experience than it ought to and does is problematic, and for that L.A. Noire should be faulted, but I'm not convinced that a player's choice to deliberately sabotage the narrative should be held against a game.

3. Art can demand that a participant/viewer approach and experience it a certain way.

For a bit, I was wondering whether it was okay for a game to demand that it's audience approach it in a certain way (with a certain mindset, for instance) in order to experience it in the way that the designers intended. I initially thought that such an approach might demand too much, or at least might be seen as demanding too much; a quick comparison with visual art, or performance art, made it seem presumptuous on the part of the artist, to demand that a viewer engage with it in a specific way.

But truly, most art demands a specific sort of engagement, especially when art requires participants, as games do. Paintings in a gallery require that you encounter them from a distance, and predominantly through sight and not, say, touch. Plays offer a much better example; the script provides a base-line, but generally speaking the actor who is participant with the writer of the script does not have completely free reign to interpret those lines however he may like, or deliver them however he may like. And if he does exercise such gross freedom with the script, then people will begin to question his merits as an actor and wish that it had been performed differently.

Is there value in seeing the player's role in gaming as similar to that of an actor's in the performance of a play? Certainly, the work does not exist without the player giving it life (in both cases). Is there also value, then, in a game providing some sort of direction to players, indicating certain tried-and-true methods of interacting with an experience? Would it be useful for L.A. Noire to say, at the beginning, "We encourage you to play Cole as a sane, sympathetic war-hero, as this will give you the best possible experience"? That isn't the best example, but perhaps in games that get a bit more complicated, this might be a worthy cause. This need not be overt, of course; a game can quietly point the player toward playing a game a certain way, of coming to it with a particular mind-set. Especially in cases where a game just works better if the player approaches it a certain way, or as a certain sort of game, this approach could be valuable.

What do you think? Is there any value in delineating the "proper" way to approach a game? Do you think developers might benefit from thinking of games in such a light? I'm mostly just throwing this concept into the light; I'd love to hear your thoughts about it, readers.

The Philosopher-Geek: Questions, Anybody?

2011-09-15T20:10:00.000-04:00

Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

In the last month or so, I have gone from being all alone in Savannah and working from home to having various visitors, gaining a 40-hour a week job, and finally having my wife return to me after her summer interning out of state. In short, I have had very little time to do any video gaming since my discussion of Bastion, and not much for writing of any sort, either.

But I think I've finally started to acclimate to this working full-time gig, and am therefore returning to the Ontological Geek.

At any rate, I was working on a few ideas for articles in the next few weeks, but both of them seem to have fallen rather apart. There's plenty more where they came from, don't worry, but it occurred to me that I might ask all of you lot if there are any particular topics you would like me to address.

So, are there? Are there any games you particular want investigated, or broader topics you'd like to see discussed here? If so, comment below, or e-mail me at ontologicalgeek@gmail.com, or write on our Facebook wall, or write to us on Twitter at @ontologicalgeek.

If not, I'll just go right on my merry way doing my own thing, and that will be fine, but I figured I'd give you the opportunity to steer the discussion at least some. I can talk more or less all day about stuff I find interesting, but I'd like it better if you found the topics interesting, too.

So, thanks for reading, and let me know if there's anything you'd like me to address in next week's column!

Thanks,

--Bill Coberly

The Improper Response

2011-09-08T14:12:00.000-04:00

Your thoughts on the Tea Party aside, this should not exist.

It's tasteless. It doesn't present new ideas, or engage the ideas that clearly sit behind this product, at all; it incites for no real purpose, and accomplishes no true end other than further polarizing and enraging the political world. There is no possible way that this could have had a positive effect in anybody's life. And it continues to give a bad name to gamers and games.

The Philosopher-Geek: Tensions in Bastion

2011-08-18T14:04:00.008-04:00

As usual, Axiom VIII is in full effect. This post contains several relatively small spoilers.

About two weeks ago, I finally managed to sit down and play through Bastion, an excellent indie action RPG developed by seven-person studio Supergiant Games that was released in mid-July. It's an excellent game, and if you haven't already played it, you should. It's now available on both Xbox Live and Steam for about $15, and is definitely worth the price. It's certainly not perfect, but nothing ever is, and it is definitely good enough that it can be recommended wholly without disclaimers or qualification. Fundamentally, it's very good, and you should play it. It's almost certainly better than what you were going to be playing anyway.

Since I was struck by just how darn good Bastion was, both as an enjoyable game and as an excellent piece of interactive storytelling, I was seized by about a dozen different ideas for Ontological Geek articles.

What I have settled on to write about today is one of the ways that Bastion manages to be as completely unique as it is. Much of what makes the game interesting is the way in which it unifies various disparate elements which might, at first glance, seem to be irreconcilable, and then uses that tension to produce a better work of art than they would have made had they chosen more obviously-compatible elements. To help shed some light on how this works, I'm going to draw briefly some from the aesthetic theories of Alfred North Whitehead.

First, in case you're unfamiliar with Bastion, watch this trailer to get some idea what the game is about:

(A Small Part of ) Whitehead's Theory of Aesthetics

I've mentioned Whitehead before on this website, in a discussion of scope, but in case you don't remember that, in Whitehead's schema, aesthetic value is derived from taking disparate elements (concepts, characters, musical tones) and working them into harmony with one another. A given work of art has more value (i.e. is "better") the more harmony it produces, which stands in direct relation to either how many different pieces are harmonized, or how wildly different the pieces in question were.

There is a great deal more to Whitehead's theory than this, but I think it's an excellent starting point for a discussion of Bastion, as I think that much of the game's unique appeal stems from its excellence in doing just this. To help show this, I'm going to look at three separate sets of apparently-contradictory elements which Supergiant Games managed to weave into a harmony.

The Tone

The first and most obvious thing is the contradiction between the game's art style and the maturity of its tone. The art style conveys a sort of childlike, fairy-tale, storybook quality tone. The characters (even the one with the mustache) all manage to look sort of like children, with disproportionately-large heads and rounded features, and the game's color palette consists almost entirely of very bright, warm colors.

The art is certainly beautiful, but it stands in sharp contrast to the game's tone. It would not be reasonable to refer to Bastion's story as “dark” or “gritty,” but it is certainly very mature. It is, fundamentally, a story about what to do after a great catastrophe, whether one that is literally apocalyptic or, in a metaphorical sense, more personally so. Further, the game is full of parallels with such weighty real-world themes as colonialism, exploitation of natural resources, and even the use of nuclear weapons.

This is a pretty sharp contrast. If you had only seen screenshots for the game, you would probably assume the game's story to be fairly straightforward good versus evil, relatively black and white, to match its storybook art. Similarly, if I described to you a game which managed to touch on the treatment of indigenous peoples by imperialist powers as well as raise questions about the nature of regret, you would probably assume such a game would have a more traditionally “mature” art style.

It would be very possible to make a game which tried to be both of these things and failed miserably, but something in Bastion makes the contrast between the art style and the tone wonderful and not distracting. Some of it may, of course, be the exceptional quality of both sides. One might be a lot more willing to put up with cognitive dissonance if all the pieces are at least well-done.

Nevertheless, I would suggest that the real reason these disparate elements come together in harmony is not any individual quality of either element, but rather a third element which bridges the gap between them. I suggest that it is the game's narrator who provides a sense of continuity between the storybook art and the mature themes and plot.

The narrator, an old man named Rucks, is ubiquitous throughout the game. Hardly 30 seconds go by without Logan Cunningham's wonderfully raspy voice commenting on something the player has done or advancing the story, and it is both the writing behind the narration and Cunningham's excellent performance that bridges the gap between the art style and the themes.

The narrator tells the story, and never shies away from commenting on the serious implications of the city's past, but he does so in a way that fits right in with the art style. The narrator's friendly, colloquial manner of speech endears him to you and reminds you of listening to your grandfather tell you stories before tucking you in at night, even as he talks of serious things. His voice hardens and becomes somber at times, but it never loses that storytelling quality, thereby ensuring that the game's apparently contradictory styles are brought into perfect harmony, making the game far more interesting and unique than it would have been otherwise.

Bastion's Music

Bastion's soundtrack, written by composer Darren Korb, has received a great deal of acclaim, and rightly so. You can listen to and purchase the soundtrack here, and I strongly encourage you to do both of those things. Korb rather eccentrically described the soundtrack as "acoustic frontier trip-hop," and if that doesn't sound like fun to you, we probably shouldn't be friends.

It works because Korb knows when to use which elements: when to quietly strum at a banjo, when to raise the stakes with low bass beats and a driving rhythm, when to emphasize Eastern or Middle Eastern harmonies or instruments, and when to do all of the above at the same time.

The soundtrack is fantastic on its own, but it's particularly interesting to look at in the context of the game itself. A good soundtrack isn't just composed of a bunch of good songs, it actually serves to make the game better by creating the right feel and tone, and it is here that Korb's soundtrack really shines.

Korb creates a unique feel for the game by marrying all the different styles together. It creates a feeling of both familiarity and foreignness, and flows freely between them, ensuring that the player is never complacent, since he or she is never entirely sure what is going to happen next. Since this is also what the game itself wants, the soundtrack helps to reinforce the game's overarching themes.

The Kid

The game's protagonist is only ever referred to as "the Kid," a title of affection given him by the narrator, who, despite learning the Kid's name halfway through the game, prefers to keep it secret from the player.

Rucks' reluctance to tell the player the Kid's name indicates that the title is important, and I am sure it partly exists to lessen the distance between player and protagonist by removing the obstacle of a proper name. That said, I think the interplay between Rucks' insistence upon referring to him as “The Kid,”when coupled with the increasingly-weighty and difficult tasks he asks of him, points to another set of contrasting themes.

There are any number of places one could go with this topic. One could talk about the differences between Rucks and the Kid in terms of old age and youth, or of how the Kid can symbolize renewal for lands shattered by the Calamity, but all I want to talk about right now is how the title is, at first glance, fairly inappropriate, and how that apparent tension helps any and all of these possible themes work.

Rucks points out towards the end of the game how strange it is that everyone is waiting on the actions of a kid, and he's right. It is the Kid that pushes forward most of the game's narrative, that has to make the really hard choices towards the end of the game and suffers the most personal trauma throughout. So, why do Rucks and the rest of the characters allow the Kid to do all the heavy lifting?

Because he may be the Kid, but he's not really a child. If the game explicitly states the Kid's age, I missed it, but Rucks mentions at one point that the Kid served five years on the Rippling Walls as a guard, so it's unlikely he's really a child any more. Even if the Caelondian military accepted recruits as young as the British Navy once did, it's unlikely he's less than 18 or so. He may even be older than that -- Jen Zee, the artist, rendered all the characters with round, child-like features and large eyes, so it's difficult to tell simply by looking at him what his age is.

But even completely apart from his physical age, the Kid isn't a child because of the way he handles the Calamity. This is the true source of the tension in the protagonist -- he isn't a child, but he looks like a child, and the narrator calls him such.

So, why does this work? Is it simply sloppy writing or the traditional video game trope where the main character happens to be a little kid as a holdover from when games were primarily children's toys?

I don't think so, because that tension allows for a number of beautiful and interesting moments and opportunities for myth and/or symbolism in the game. It could, for instance, be interpreted as a general comment that old idea-makers (Rucks) can never be anything without the young go-getters at the front of their movements. It could be interpreted as primarily local and character-driven, and could thus be understood simply as Rucks patronizing (in a pleasant and gentle way, to be sure) the Kid and failing to realize that it is the Kid that is truly the most mature.

But I think the interpretation I like the best is this: If Bastion can be understood at least partly as being about how to pick oneself up and move along after a horrible personal Calamity, then perhaps each of the characters can serve a metaphorical role in that journey. Perhaps Bastion ends up showing that after some horrible catastrophe, even if you have an excellent ability to reason (Rucks), a good heart (Zia), and the best intentions in the world (Zulf), it is only if you can summon up enough dogged perseverance and sheer stubbornness, enough desperate, bullheaded will to survive, that you will make it.

That infuriating, desperate refusal to give up is the Kid. He may make mistakes, and certainly does a lot of damage to the world around in him in his push for survival, but he makes it. He restores the Bastion to safety despite being the Kid, and does more for the survival of those around him than any of the others.

I have no idea what, exactly, Supergiant Games was trying to say when they named the protagonist. What I do know is that in so doing, they created a good enough work of art to support all, some, or none of the above interpretations.

Conclusion

That's the sort of thing that the tension between Bastion's elements produces: it causes the player to dig down deeper into the game. It makes him or her want to spend more and more time with the game, thinking about how it works and why the developers might have chosen to construct a game out of so many diverse elements.

Each time the player is confronted by a collection of elements that would sound jumbled and confused out of context, he or she is drawn deeper into Bastion's narrative and atmosphere. Each element of tension serves to enhance Bastion's unique style and to provide a great deal of food for thought.

Whitehead would have been so very proud.

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Questions, comments, or hate mail? Comment below or e-mail us here at ontologicalgeek@gmail.com. And do remember that we are always accepting submissions to the Ontological Geek for publication on this here blogospace. Simply e-mail us at ontologicalgeek@gmail.com with any attached essays, and, after a quick review, we'll be quite happy to post them! Also, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for extra Ontological Geekitude!

The Death of Single-Player Games

2011-08-17T12:05:00.000-04:00

Matt here with a bit of commentary.

Game consultant Mark Cerny suggested that the single-player game is dying, and will actually be gone from mainstream video games within the next three years or so. I'm curious to know what you think.

I'm inclined to disagree; it seems to me that single player games have hardly been played out, and, by way of their strong traditional allure and the distinctive experiences that they can offer, they will still have some longevity. There is a definite trend, though. Playing through a game in community, even if it isn't through a multi-player format, is definitely growing. But games like Heavy Rain and Bastion shouldn't have multi-player components; it's hard to imagine them as anything but a solitary experience. I'm not convinced that Cerny's assessment is accurate. What are your thoughts?

Additional Pylons: Trenched Warfare

2011-08-16T23:53:00.002-04:00

Happy birthday, Ontological Geek! In honor of our first year (feels weird to say "our" in this context, since I started writing in January), I'm going to turn to that traditional celebratory activity: war.

War film has been hugely popular since the beginnings of the medium, and that style has definitely influenced the first-person shooter genre in video games. A great deal (half or more, I'd reckon) of first-person shooter games feature a war of some sort; only the rare shooter, such as the non-side-scrolling Metroid games, feature a story that has a sole protagonist up against an unorganized, non-military foe who isn't involved in some large campaign or plot. Instead, most modern shooters are war tales in some way or another, and the actions your protagonist takes throughout the game are situated as part of a larger effort. You're not aiming to kill 'em all or get a MacGuffin for its own sake; instead, you're hitting supply lines, halting offensives, watching your allies die horribly or heroically sacrifice themselves, shutting down (or launching) nuclear strikes, or seeking out a MacGuffin to turn the tide of the war. This is admittedly more realistic than the one-man-army style of story, but it also has its own set of tropes that FPS games (and 3rd-person shooters that focus on war, though they seem less likely to focus on the topic) have had little luck subverting or avoiding, resulting in stale and predictable narratives and characters.

I'll be piggy-backing off of my earlier article on the hero narrative in this discussion, because I think the outlines of the hero narrative are partially what makes the war stories portrayed in video games so stale and uninteresting. If you'd prefer not to re-read the article, the salient point is this: the hero narrative of most video games, featuring a protagonist who overcomes all failures and who is the most important man in the room, has nearly been exhausted. In fact, such a protagonist rarely suits a war story.

War... War Never Changes

Well, it's not exactly that simple, Mr. Perlman. War stories are fundamentally interesting to us and, outside of video games, they contain diverse themes and structures. Compare Schindler's List, Inglourious Basterds, Saving Private Ryan, Glory, Apocalypse Now, and All Quiet on the Western Front. Each film contains radically different themes, characters, and tone. They investigate disparate aspects of war with varied amounts of reverence and black humor, and show us a wide range of who the soldier is, and what he (or she) can become.

You would be hard-pressed to find such range in video game portrayals of war. The typical model ignores the complexities of war for a surprisingly black-and-white portrayal that does not lend itself to the exploration of mature themes; you are almost always a defender of justice and virtue against the heartless (or duped) foes of your nation, and "massacre fatigue" is a well-documented problem in many FPS games. When you kill a man in most war games, you're unlikely to feel anything other than a small sense of victory. While I don't think that this is at all responsible for any social ills or the actions of unstable individuals, that games inspire only such underwhelming responses is unfortunate.

Few war games actually engage with the difficulties of war; supporting characters are much, much more likely to cheer and quip when you blow another human's skull open than to express disgust, sorrow, or simply not comment. Admittedly, I've never been in a war, so that may be the way it happens, but I sort of doubt it. In most (quality) war films, such behavior would qualify the character as a Jerk Ass, if not a Complete Monster, and is generally there to illustrate either how war can change an individual or how war can let certain people be just as misanthropic as they always were. This does not apply to campy and/or gore-fest films, but I'd hesitate to call them war films since they're not actually investigating war as a concept but rather using it as a vehicle for simpler thrills. But in most video games, a squad will more often than not have at least one person who displays anti-social and/or psychopathic behavior, perhaps only when viewed outside the actual game narrative, since it is exceptionally unlikely that such a character will be called out for their blood-thirst. It's actually a little more than not being challenged in that attitude, actually; the game world doesn't respond to their behavior, thus implying that it is a fine response to war.

A powerful contributor to this problem is the black-and-white quality of the narrative; those on the other side are either evil or signed up on evil's side, so there's no sense in regarding them as human (or sentient things with feelings, if we've got aliens). Personally, I think the proliferation of that character archetype is amazing. War movies have presented that archetype to great effect before, either as a foil or as a way to show just how dark and terrifying the world can be, but video games have adopted it for different reasons entirely. I think that there is a fundamental difference of goals and content in most films about war versus most games about war.

In most games about war, the action is the point: most of the play experience will be made up of running, gunning, and taking cover as enemy fire zips overhead. Between eighty (at the very least) to ninety-five percent of the play-time will consist of heated firefights, or moving into a position to have a heated firefight, since that is the part of war that is adrenaline-fueled and is most obviously dramatic, since the stakes become life-and-death. But it's a mistake to assume that those stakes make a game dramatic, especially when your own character's repeated deaths and even the deaths of your allies passes by without a hint of emotional resonance. Intense battle scenes are so engaging in films and books partially because we don't know whether the characters that we care about will survive them; this is true in any story with serious stakes, but it is especially true of war stories, in which the threat of sudden death is a very important theme. That tension, and thus that theme, cannot exist in a war game. Even if an ally becomes cherished by the player, when that ally dies, it will be in a cut-scene, and will probably be slightly removed from the core experience. What's more, all personal responsibility on the part of the player will be negligible. The player will not think, "I got my friend killed," or "I wasn't good enough,"; the player will instead think, "Wouldn't have happened if I was playing in that moment."

Because control of the character is taken from the player at the most dramatic moment, when the supporting character's life is in the balance, the player is more likely to chalk it up to the ineptitude of the main character or supporting character instead of internalizing or rationalizing the death of the ally, which is essential to accessing the experience of the grieving soldier. For the most part, though, the "dramatic" fight scenes are devoid of actual drama, because named allies are almost always invincible, and every ally who might die is a nameless mook, and is utterly unimportant to the player. This means that, for all the excitement that firefights bring, they can actually get in the way of an engaging narrative and prevent a game from addressing the themes it otherwise might.

However, I think that an even bigger problem exists between the conceits of the typical hero narrative and those of most war narratives.

Spartans 'R' Us

The super-soldier is hardly a new idea, but it has never been as prolific as it is in war games. It's achieved a near-100% saturation rate. This is the notion that the protagonist is the most important soldier on the battlefield. He (or she, but given the form, "he" is really the safe bet) is wherever important things are going down; he turns the tides in every major battle; he cannot die; if he is not some sort of leadership who mixes it up on the front lines anyway, then his military decisions turn out to be better than his own inept sergeant's decisions; he often decides the fate of the war by his timely action and his unbelievable defense/capture of the MacGuffin despite overwhelming odds of failure. This should sound like just about every war game you've ever played. It should also sound very dissimilar to any quality war film or book you've ever read. There's a number of reasons why the hero narrative does not prepare a proper environment for investigating the themes of war.

1.There is a central protagonist, and he is a bad-ass.

The focus is not on soldiers, and how the common man deals with war. It's on the gruff dude with an attitude and one-liners to spare. It's on the veteran who is already awesome and battle-hardened. It is on the individual who is the minority in most actual wars, and who is not actively changing before our eyes in response to alarming war stimuli. Look to the Master Chief, Marcus Fenix, any Call of Duty protagonist, Tomas Sevchenko, or Nathan Hale. They are super-human, either in the way that the universe treats them or because they're actually super-human, in the case of the Chief and Hale. The player encounters the war through the eyes of this bad-ass killer. Fear has no place in the minds of these individuals, and death cannot touch them. They are immune to all of the things that make war interesting, on the psychological front. And if other characters behave like a normal person might (with fear, trembling, and panic), they seem weak or pathetic by comparison, and any emotional link that might transmit that "war is horrible" to the player fails instantly.

Quite simply, from a narrative standpoint, war is interesting because of what it does to people; if the character the player is inhabiting is already used to war, and receives no new revelations through the course of the game, then the player will have a difficult time receiving any sort of experience from the virtual war. Likewise, this means that the cast of the game isn't an ensemble, which could show us how war affects multiple characters. Thus, perhaps war games might be better off with multiple protagonists/main characters.

2. The hero must be incredibly vital to the war effort.

Which isn't exactly how real war works at all, and the best war films make this clear: war is an insanely communal effort. Occasionally large events will happen that change the course of a theater of war, but these are in the minority. Usually, however, in video game tales, the hero narrative demands that the hero be in exactly the most important place at a given moment, right in place to steal the nuclear codes or some other Item of Essential Value that will allow the allies to win the war for good. This makes the game obviously dramatic, and obviously interesting, but it also destroys more subtle possibilities, like a focus on character relationships and issues, while also ignoring the predominant experience of war. What's more, since nearly every war game has such a large scope, this means that a large-scope game only has so many interesting narrative devices it can employ without feeling tired and over-done.

3. The enemies are never right.

I mentioned this earlier, but it bears repeating. A heroic narrative cannot invoke sympathy for the villains, and honestly, if it humanizes them at all the narrative starts to break down. The player cannot be wondering whether the soldier he just killed had a wife and child, and so the designers of war games tend to keep things exceptionally black-and-white. This is a potential problem in every story, but it is a grievous error in war stories. Addressing this theme is one of the best things that war stories can accomplish, and it's unfortunate that the game will probably have no qualms about painting your foes in the broadest of strokes just to keep your enjoyment of the experience as guilt-free as possible. Making you think is not the goal of such games; addictive shooting game-play is. Obviously, there's nothing inherently wrong with that decision... it just tends to generate bad art.

It's A Game, Dude

So what if a game doesn't actually reflect any real war experience? That's not a problem, right?

Well, it is if we want games that seriously deal with the concept of war, and if we want games that address the themes of war artfully and with maturity. What's more, there's a great deal of experience in war that is intriguing, interesting, and ripe for gaming; it's just not getting any play because of the stubbornness of the hero narrative and the success of the high-stakes plot model. There are plenty of other stories worth telling.

Have you played any war games that actually reveal a more typical war experience, or that have made you think about the nature of war, or how war affects individuals? Let me know! I'd love to play them, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

The Ontological Geek is One Year Old: The Annual Report, 2010-2011

2011-08-16T23:02:00.003-04:00

See the title!

One year ago today, I posted the first post on the Ontological Geek, to an audience of my wife and a few of my friends. Today, I post this anniversarial (not a word) update with a few lessons under my belt and a year's worth of articles and comments posted on the Internet for all to see and, hopefully, enjoy.

First, I wanted to make sure to thank Matt Schanuel for writing the Additional Pylons column for the last eight months or so, as well as Jarrod Hammond, Tom Coberly, and Afh for writing guest articles.

I would also be remiss if I didn't thank my wife, Erin, who, in addition to generally making life livable, reads every one of my articles to ensure I make some semblance of sense and don't embarrass myself too much.

I can't help but feel a bit reflective, and so I thought I would share some of the thoughts I've been having. Hopefully they will entertain you.

19 Important Truths to Keep in Mind When Running a Semi-Serious, Not-For-Profit Blog
(Because Round Numbers Are Silly)

1. Writing once a week is probably a lie.

2. Any time you are excessively negative in a post, you will inevitably make a myriad of stupid errors and feel quite foolish.

3. Oftentimes your "great idea for a post" is only actually about a paragraph long.

4. Someone has always said what you are going to say better than you will. Say it anyway.

5. You will, periodically, go back through your archives and discover that there are entirely too many darn typos in things you supposedly proofread.

6. Don't sulk when Jarrod Hammond writes you a guest article which is probably the best thing on the site. He wrote it for your site, after all, not the other guy's.

7. Don't lie to your audience about when you're going to post late articles. And you always know when you're lying, don't pretend that you're "giving yourself more motivation."

8. You really don't write very well at 3:00 in the morning any more.

9. Resist the urge to back through your college essays and find out if you were better at writing at 3:00 in the morning a few years ago. You weren't. It will be a dramatically embarrassing experience.

10. Be nice. It stops some of the people who might hate you from burning you in effigy, and makes the trolls get bored and leave.

11. If Blogger's internal stat-tracker is to be believed, sometimes 50 people from Russia will all simultaneously choose to go to your website and not click on any posts.

12. Blogger will frequently report that people have gotten to your website from the strangest places. Don't click on the links out of curiosity. None of them will have any tangible connection to your website, and half of them will be pornography.

13. If in doubt, keep your stupid mouth shut. Especially if you haven't had a couple of days to think over what you're saying.

14. If not in doubt, consider keeping your stupid mouth shut anyway.

15. At some point, someone will post a link to your blog on a forum. Then, one of two things will happen: either very few people will click through, but a substantial percentage of them will read it, and some of them will become recurring readers, or tons of people will click through, and none of them will read it, and, if they bother mentioning your article at all, will only make fun of the fact that you apparently like philosophy. Try not to tear out your hair when this happens. You don't really have any to spare.

16. No one really cares that your blog has a Twitter account. Most of the people who follow it know you personally. Update it anyway. It's good for you, and maybe someday you'll figure out what to do with the darn thing.

17. If you are too drunk to drive, you are too drunk to write pseudo-philosophical discourse on much of anything other than beer.

18. Do not impulsively launch new weekly features in the middle of your busiest time at work. You will feel very silly when you miss the second iteration of a weekly feature because you were too busy. Your readers are too polite to call you on this, but they are all, every one of them, rolling their eyes when you do that.

Finally,

19. The stats haven't substantially changed in the last thirty seconds.

Goals

On a slightly more serious note, here are some things I would like to see on the Ontological Geek by this time next year:

1. More guest articles, from more guest authors. I would love to get to the point where I can post a new guest article every week, but for now, I would be quite pleased to see one a month.

2. Regular contributors updating at least twice a month. Once a week is foolishly optimistic for a fairly small, non-paying writing gig like this, but twice a month seems reasonable.

3. At least one more semi-regular contributor by the end of the year, to try to expand the number of voices regularly given the floor here.

4. Relationships with other blogs, websites, and Video Game People of similar levels of fame, so that we can start to expand our audience and develop lasting relationships.

5. Continued steady growth in views-per-month. We have (with a few random spikes) kept a pretty steady level of growth going since about December of 2010, and I would love for that rate to at least stay steady, and hopefully increase.

Call to Action

So, what does that mean for you?

Well, if you want to help us out, there are several ways you can do so:

First, tell friends that you think would be interested in this sort of thing about our website! At the end of the day, most young websites spread their dark, corrosive influence through word-of-mouth, so if you want to see us gain a larger audience (and therefore more and better content, which will attract a larger and better audience, lather rinse repeat), tell your friends!

After that, you can communicate our existence to any and all Internet People who might be interested. Tell them that you enjoy this website and think it might be worth checking out. Publicity is good!

If you feel particularly inspired, we welcome and encourage additional guest articles and, as mentioned above, would really like to have some more regular or semi-regular contributors, so if you feel like writing something about video games, art, other miscellaneous geeky things, or really anything interesting that you think our kind of audience would enjoy, e-mail us at ontologicalgeek@gmail.com, and we'll talk!

Finally, the most important thing you can do to help is to keep reading, and keep giving us feedback. Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter to make sure you know when we post things. This will be an added benefit, since we also use those channels to post particularly interesting things that we think our readership will enjoy from other websites. Let us know what you think of our articles, or if there are any subjects you would particularly like one of us to tackle. It's fun for us to just write about whatever we want, but it's more fun if we know that we're addressing some particular question one of our readers has raised.

Also, of course, keep being awesome. One of the things I most enjoy about running the Ontological Geek is the fact that our readership is almost unreasonably polite and intelligent. In all the comments we've gotten, even on our relatively inflammatory articles, we've only really received one or two comments that have showcased Typical Obnoxious Internet Behavior, and this fact starts to rekindle my faith in humanity.

Thanks very much, and keep being fantastic,

--Bill Coberly
Editor and Columnist
The Ontological Geek

--

P.S.:

Here are some random stats, for those of you who are curious:

As of this writing, and including this post, the Ontological Geek is currently home to 73 posts, or approximately 97,196 words.

Of these posts, 23 are Philosopher-Geek posts, 12 are Additional Pylons, and 5 are guest articles. The remainder are one-off news items or (since-discontinued) weekly features.

The average post is thus approximately 1350 words long. The average Philosopher-Geek post is approximately 2347 words long, the average Additional Pylon is approximately 1700 words long, and the average guest article is approximately 1515 words long.

Additional Pylons: The Sandbox

2011-08-02T17:41:00.000-04:00

The Philosopher-Geek has already written a very good post on the meaningful game, and that might be important to read before you step into this one, because I'm going to investigate two specific traits that he lists in that post. The specific traits I am interested in discussing are: 1. The Meaningful Game does not allow the player's choices or possible actions to derail the game or contradict its characters, and 2. The Meaningful Game does not contain side-quests. These two points are most commonly bungled in games that reflect the "sandbox," "free-roaming," or "open-world" style of design, and so I'd like to investigate the narrative challenges that appear when building such a game, and address the apparent sliding scale between depth and width, or freedom and consistency. But I'll start by defining what I mean by "sandbox" and "open-world," and addressing why such models are popular.

Absolute Freedom, Mostly

As has been previously noted in various posts, one of the distinctive qualities of games (both video and role-playing) is the interactivity of a game, or the control that the player has over a character, country, and/or narrative. Games express this freedom in a variety of ways, but it's hard to argue that the greatest expression of character freedom can be found in games that fit the sandbox model.

Now, open-world games are slightly different than sandbox games, but they reflect a similar desire and have similar aims. Open-world games are an answer to the "levels" of early gaming, which offered linear environments experienced in a pre-determined sequence. These games more closely resembled the style of art and entertainment that came before (mimicking novels or films), since the only real freedom that players could exert was often through the physical behavior of their avatar character, and potential ends were either "Success," if the player bested the challenges of the game, or "Failure," if the player did not perform adequately. Even games that did not have a defined order to levels, such as Mega Man, placed similar structure before the character. An open-world game seeks to break down the artificial barriers between discrete elements of a game's environment, instead including it all in one "world." However, it is important to note that there are always limits to a game world; all of it must be programmed, and there will always be walls enclosing the player, whether they are invisible, illusory, a level-wrap (think Pac-Man), or enforced by a character's refusal to leave the area of narrative importance. So open-world games are defined more explicitly by their refusal to draw boundaries between sections of the game and the ability to freely explore those sections.

Sandbox games are often synonymous with open-world games because they essentially do to narrative constraints what open-world games do to environments, and it's easier for that narrative freedom to be expressed in an open-world than a level-based game. Sandbox games will occasionally do away with the notion of a main plot, but for the most part the plot is available as one option among many, and sometimes the player can ignore the main plot (and thus the whole notion of "completing" the game) to instead pursue other tasks in the game-world. Thus, sandbox games often feature prolific and prodigious side-quests, if they are not composed entirely of small missions that avoid a main plot completely. Sandbox games encounter the same internal paradox as open-world games, namely that there is a limit to what the game can offer. Just as there must be artificial constraints regarding the size of the world, there remain artificial constraints in the narrative (or non-narrative) structure of sandbox games, such that eventually the player will simply run out of things to do or run into situations where the world cannot be interacted with in a specific way. So just as open-world games are defined by their refusal to draw boundaries between "levels," sandbox games are defined by their refusal to draw boundaries between "right task" or "plot task" and "other game actions." In other ways, it does not proscribe how the player should play the game beyond the natural constraints that programming only a certain number of ways that the player's avatar can interact with the world generates.

This style of game is so popular precisely because it gives a great deal of a certain type of freedom to the player. The player may tackle tasks that the player is most invested in, and in the order that the player wishes. It also allows the player to set his or her own pace in the game, which could be a good or a bad thing; I'll address this in a bit. Essentially, these games offer thousands of nuggets of experience, and the player is allowed to pick and choose which nuggets he or she will "consume", and in which order. The game is a gateway to a large buffet of potential experiences. However, I think that this proclaimed freedom can be a trap for the player as much as a boon, and I also think it's worth evaluating whether the pursuit of more freedom in-game is a worthy task, and especially whether this pursuit generates better art, or at least allows the player to either better access good experiences in a game, or access better experiences within a game. I'd also like to investigate whether this model of game better lends itself to certain sorts of narrative; after all, structure and mechanics may benefit one type of story, and render another less enjoyable or completely inaccessible. By the end of the article, I hope to identify what sorts of stories the sandbox style best serve, and what types of stories sandbox games should avoid.

The Cost of Freedom

In Polishing the Diamond, Enlightening the Mind, Jae Woong Kim writes "Absolute freedom is loneliness." I think that this describes my average experience with sandbox games. Take Oblivion as our first example. In order to give the player maximum freedom in the production of this character, the player starts the game by generating a character of any race and with any set of favored abilities (or ways to interact with the game), regardless of whether these choices are intelligent decisions or not. The choice of race does have some small influence on your abilities (sometimes a big influence), but it has very, very small narrative repercussions. Your abilities can determine what narratives you have access to in-game, but the choice itself has no impact on the narrative.

In almost all ways, your character is a blank slate; moreover, the tools that the game give you to flesh out that character's personality are not very diverse, nor does the game as a whole take much notice. In the pursuit of giving the player absolute freedom in his or her environment, the depth of distinct narratives (that contain specific main characters, a unified theme, and a cohesive "plot") tends to be shallow, short, and emotionally stunted. It is hard to lay this failure at the feet of the writers; after all, they're responsible for thousands of non-player characters. In an attempt to give as wide an experience as possible, and to provide such a diverse range of experiences (including radically divergent systems of mechanics within a single game, such as a stealth system, magic system, melee combat system, ranged combat system, leveled systems for everything from alchemy to armor, and the attempted unification of these systems) and narrative support for each experience means that the game is spread thin. If more focus is given to any one portion of the game, then whole systems might have gotten the axe... probably including the "Axe" skill.

The player never has a dearth of options in Oblivion, but unfortunately every option provides a narrative about as fulfilling as any other game's side-quest. Oblivion falls short of being a Meaningful Game simply because the player rarely, if ever, feels that anything meaningful is going on, and his player character is meaningful and interesting only because the player inhabits him or her. This would be less of a problem if interesting characters populated the world, but they don't.

If you're unfamiliar with Oblivion and games like it, here is an example of a single quest. The game is absolutely full of situations like these, and it displays the level of depth that all but a few characters in the game display. I am fairly certain that the designers of Oblivion were more interested in creating the broad experience of "There is a whole world out there waiting for me to interact with it in minor ways" than the experience of "I am a person doing meaningful things." This is generally true of most sandbox games; the veneer of freedom and option comes at the sacrifice of depth, emotionality and meaning.

Oblivion lends credence to the depth vs. width scale, that if a game grows wider in options and content, then that content will be less deep and reactive. While this scale isn't a given, it is useful in expressing why the events of the game are not often compelling or engaging, at least when assessed as a narrative. While player freedom is what makes video games a unique art form, if that freedom is viewed as an end (high freedom equals a good game) instead of a means (player choice is a vehicle through which we can tell a compelling story suited to the medium), then it will not produce a Meaningful Game.

The fact is that it is difficult to create a video game with a compelling narrative or, perhaps more accurately, few video games succeed at presenting a compelling narrative. I also believe that, for a game to be meaningful (and quality art), its elements must be quality. If such a game has a narrative, then it must be a quality narrative. It's my opinion, then, that if a sandbox game presents a single, "main" narrative, then the entire sandbox must exist within the narrative in order for the game to be meaningful, and probably in order for the game to be quality art. There are also alternatives to a single main narrative, which I'll get to in the next section.

Oblivion is indicative of most sandbox experiences in that, while it is the product of a great deal of work and effort, and is certainly admirable in many respects, it fails to be meaningful due to its shallowness and the derivative quality of its content. In other words, for all their scope, and arguably because of their scope, sandbox games tend to be bad art.

Paper Beats Rock, Sandbox Beats Story

The sandbox is popular for a reason: there are a lot of things to like about the sandbox. Player freedom IS interesting, and the ability to set your own pace and access the content that you find interesting sooner rather than later can be a good thing. Moreover, I don't think that the narrative failings of most sandboxes are a trait of the sandbox, but it does seem to indicate that simultaneously creating a central narrative and a sandbox is a self-defeating route. The typical narrative formula seen in most games clashes with the notion of absolute player freedom, either generating massive inconsistencies in character or plot, or simply forcing the character or plot to be so empty that they merely serve as a rough motivator for the events of the game (or the plot that's there because they said we needed a plot), which both generate bad art.

In some tales, the sandbox style simply does not make sense. In any narrative in which there is an important central narrative and the side-events detract from pursuing a larger, more pressing issue, a sandbox does not suit the narrative. The first article on the meaningful game spoke on side-quests, and the points that Bill made regarding them holds just as true for the way that sandboxes interact with central narratives, so I won't tread over that ground again. For the most part, then, I will argue that sandbox games should not attempt to follow any sort of linear narrative; they simply aren't suited to that type of story. Infamous, Fallout 3, Grand Theft Auto... these games are all fun, but they all have a central narrative that falls flat because of its location in a sandbox, and because the developers decided that having a sandbox was more important than making the story worthwhile and compelling.

Assassin's Creed (the first one; the second begins to lose this trait) is an example of a game that successfully builds a central narrative into a sandbox style game. This is because the narrative is in no way sacrificed to player freedom, because Altair's goals are always paramount and are the source of all his actions, because even "filler" activities often use the opportunity to further characterize Altair and the world he lives in, and because there is very little in the game that isn't designed to belong within the "central" experience and narrative. Hunting down flags and random templar begins to feel a little game-like, but the game predominantly rewards actions that drive the game along, thus maintaining a proper pace, and, more importantly, never interrupting the distance between the player and Altair. Most sandbox games do not feature so stellar an implementation; Assassin's Creed's focus on story and consistency is the exception.

Therefore, I argue that in order for the sandbox to be meaningful, the developers must avoid simply slapping a typical, straightforward, novel- or blockbuster-style narrative onto a sandbox and expecting it to be successful. Different forms often demand a change in convention and structure, and the sandbox rarely receives proper treatment in this regard; instead, if a narrative exists, it is a typical, straightforward affair strung like a thin thread through the middle of the sandbox, and its quality is usually poor or, at best, roughly equal to the quality of the narrative in the rest of the game.

But It Doesn't Have To Be This Way

Sandbox games could become much more meaningful if they followed Assassin's Creed's example, but the truth is that the traditional narrative model doesn't function as well in a sandbox (even AC has regular slip-ups, becoming derivative here and there). Luckily, there are many kinds of story, and many ways to incorporate story into a sandbox.

Right now, the most obvious model of heroic story-telling is what we see in novels and action/adventure films. These are long-form stories with high stakes, and they typically feature a consistent build in tension and conflict until the "final confrontation," in which the hero vanquishes the villain that has tormented him or her for so long. It is this model, the single, uninterrupted, building hero narrative, that is most commonly seen in games, and sandbox games often wind up with this sort of narrative simply because games today need narratives, and sticking to the mold is either the obvious choice, the only perceived option, or the choice that seems likely to sell best, since it has worked so well in nearly every other game.

But if we step outside of video games for a moment, we can see that there are many ways to tell a hero narrative; heroes don't just exist in novels and feature-length films. The models exhibited by television shows (i.e Buffy, Star Trek, Veronica Mars) and collections of short stories (i.e Elric and Conan) offer a powerful alternative to the feature-length narrative, and even contain methods of breaking up a central narrative or doing away with the central narrative altogether. Conan stories are strung together by the character, nothing more; Star Trek: The Next Generation is a continuous tale because it deals with the same characters, but for the most part each episode is a reset. There is some sense of "whole story," in that the individual tales are linked, but the tales can be accessed individually, and there is no design for a grand narrative that builds to a huge pay-off.

In my opinion, the tropes and models of these short-form stories provide a much better rubric for sandbox games than do central narratives. Instead of declaring one particular series of events the "main" story and making everything else filler, this model would realize that a sandbox game is really trying to tell a whole host of stories, but would remove the temptation to let the narrative's quality slide. I expect that, in order for the average sandbox game to be a meaningful game, the developers will have to take cues from television shows and short stories, and so seek to tell tales of limited scope and, hopefully, with a consistently high value of emotional content and meaning.

I'm curious to know what you think about this idea. I suspect that a paradigm shift is what's required for sandbox games to become meaningful and manageable; do you agree? Or do you think that the problem lies elsewhere?

The Philosopher-Geek: Questioning the Jimquisition

2011-08-02T15:18:00.003-04:00

I am hesitant to give him the traffic, but I suppose you should watch this video, since that's what this article is about. It is not really safe for work, though, so do bear that in mind:

I generally try not to pick fights here, but the ideas expressed in this video caused me to raise an eyebrow and strongly consider tearing out my hair, and I believe they might be deserving of some attention. Further, I do think that I have some things to say that are worth listening to.

Now, I'm not sure, exactly, just how serious Jim Sterling is with this video, but that's sort of the problem with Jim. You're never quite sure. So, for the sake of argument, I'm going to assume that he is at least partly serious, and so I'm going to address why Jim is wrong, and why we should stop listening to him until he cleans up his act.

Problem One: He's Not Correct

This is actually the least important of my criticisms, but frankly, I don't buy that acting like a petulant child is liable to get people to listen to you. His argument seems to be thus: Fox News and similar such places have massive followings, and they behave like screaming ninnies all the time. Thus, the best way to gain an audience is to yell and shriek and throw dung.

This is not true, and to say otherwise is to conflate correlation and causation.

Fox News did not attract its audience, it was constructed to meet the demands of an existing audience. Rupert Murdoch, after seeing the successes of folks like Rush Limbaugh, realized that there was a whole group of people in the United States who felt ostracized by existing news sources and perceived those sources as predominantly liberal and actively antagonistic. He thus realized there was demand for a product, and dollar signs lit up in his eyes while he realized it was about to be Christmas in Murdochville.

Fox already had an audience waiting for it, and it didn't begin its really ridiculous childish mud-slinging until that audience had really begun to trust it. By then, the audience had decided Fox was trustworthy, and loyally stood behind it as it got sillier and sillier. Further, few people in the audience needed to be convinced of Fox's core political beliefs (insofar as it has any beyond "make as much money as possible."). They were already conservative, already distrustful of American liberalism, and just needed someone to rally behind.

You can get peoples' attention by ranting and raving, but you will only win their support with said ranting if they have some reason to trust you beforehand. Lots of people will listen to the crazy street preacher on the corner, but no one is going to change his or her lifestyle to match the lunatic's commandments, because no one cares what he thinks.

Glenn Beck can draw cheers with his rants for two reasons. First, his audience already agrees, at least broadly, with what he says. I suspect that the number of liberals that Beck has convinced into changing their general opinions on a matter is substantially less than the number of liberals who might have been willing to listen to conservative concerns, but are instead repulsed by his rhetoric. That brand of childish punditry, which Jim Sterling seems to be advocating, does not change or win hearts and minds. It simply reinforces existing opinion and strengthens a group's morale.

Second, Beck's audience already trusts him. For whatever reason, the sort of people who are likely to have their opinions swayed at all by Mr. Beck already think of him as a credible source. Thus, even if they do disagree with him on a small matter, they are more willing to listen to his ravings and be impressed by his passion. This isn't crazy: you are far more likely to put up with someone getting carried away if you already think that person is worth listening to.

If Jim Sterling does go ahead and appoint himself "Video games' Jack Thompson," charged with the solemn duty of "shouting down the idiots," the only people he's going to be reaching are those who already agree with him or are already predisposed to agree with him. What he's not going to do is change anyone's opinion. All he is going to do is make a lot of noise and make gamers look bad.

Even if he does succeed in getting one of the opposing mud-slinging children to change his or her opinion (as he implies the Amazon-bombing of Cooper Lawrence's book did), that's not really the point.

There's an excellent scene in Thank You For Smoking that makes the point better than I can.

Even in the unlikely event that Jim or some other video game-friendly childish prank-puller/pundit/whatever-the-hell-Jim-wants-us-to-be might convince an opponent to change his or her mind, no one in the audience is going to care. The sort of crowd that is very interested in loud spectacle is equally uninterested in quiet, polite, declarations of past missteps.

See, you'll note that Cooper Lawrence put out her apology and acknowledgement of wrongdoing in the New York Times, not on Fox News. Do you know how many people unironically read the NYT and watch Fox News?

Probably pretty close to zero.

Problem Two: Even if He's Right, He's Wrong

But let's put all that to the side. Let's assume, for now, that Jim is absolutely right, and that behaving like children and allowing ourselves to be dragged to the level of the Fox Newses of the world will make people understand that video games are worthwhile or whatever it is that he hopes to accomplish.

The problem is that being childish and obnoxious isn't just bad because of what other people think, it is inherently bad. It is bad to lie, and to treat other human beings poorly. It is bad to intentionally distort other peoples' words to suit your own agendas, and bad to disparage someone else's work if you haven't even read/played/watched/otherwise experienced it.

Bad. Wrong. Unethical.

See, Cooper Lawrence did something wrong when she went on Fox News and pontificated about a game she had never played. But the Amazon review-bombers, well-intentioned though they may have been, did something just as bad when they spammed her Amazon reviews with one-star ratings without having read her book. It was the same thing.

I frequently find myself wincing at the tremendous displays of GIFT-enabled jackassery that can be found in the comments section of any major games website, and I'm not just wincing because other, non-gamers might see those comments and think poorly of gamers. Yes, that concerns me. But I also don't like it that the gaming community seems remarkably tolerant of asshattery. It makes me worry that the jerks might be the rule, not the exception. I find myself wanting to say self-defeating things like "I'm not like those other gamers" not just because I don't want to be seen as part of a community that is perceived as dysfunctional and obnoxious, but because I find myself worrying that the perception might be right.

See, if loud members of the gaming community all decide to act like jerks and no one calls them out on it, it doesn't just make the gaming community look bad. It actually makes the gaming community worse. When we consistently tolerate obnoxious and jerkassic behavior, we are actually lessening our own quality.

The stereotype of the gamer as the obnoxious, hate-filled loser is not simply a stereotype. The horrible messages sent into Fat, Ugly or Slutty, and the death threats that Courtney Stanton and Melissa McEwan received during the Dickwolves mess were not sent by robots. Real gamers sent those messages. If we allow that kind of behavior in the community, then it doesn't just "make the community look bad" on some kind of superficial level. It actually implies that the community is bad.

Now, I don't think that the gaming community is primarily composed of jerks. I know plenty of gamers that are wonderful human beings, and furthermore, everyone occasionally screws up and says something stupid on the Internet. If you think I have never said dumb things in forum posts, then while I am honored by your apparent perception of me as some kind of saint, you are wrong. Hell, I have even said very stupid or ill-timed things on this very website!

But the kind of behavior Jim seems to be advocating here is not just the occasional slip-up, but rather a concerted and willful desire to be obnoxious and stupid, and that's not a plan I can get behind. I'm not really worried that Jim's proclamations are somehow going to cause a revolution in the games community and turn all gamers into hate-filled pundits, but I am worried that continually talking about childish, pundit-like behavior as anything but awful will allow people to excuse themselves when they feel like being jerks. In other words, I'm not just worried that Jim and those who take his advice will make us look bad, I'm worried that we'll become bad as a result of putting up with their nonsense.

Which, naturally, brings me to the final problem.

Problem 3: Jimquisition is Part of the Problem.

Jim Sterling is a very smart guy, and I'm sure his public, "Jimquisition"-style persona is exaggerated. He frequently makes very interesting, thought-out points in his videos, and, presented in another, less obnoxious format, might be worth exploring. I want to hear what Jim Sterling has to say, and I used to be willing to put up with his obnoxiousness in order to listen to his criticism.

But I realized the other day that the difference between Glenn Beck and Jim Sterling is one of specific content and degree, not of form. They are both obnoxious louts who play up their points, valid or otherwise, to get cheers and laughs from an audience that likes to see things painted in broad strokes. Both of them probably began their careers less obnoxious than they are now, and both are probably less ludicrous in private than they appear in public. Both categorize those who disagree with them as stupid or ignorant and frequently say patently offensive things for no apparent reason other than because they want the attention. In short, both play to the worst parts of their respective communities, Beck to the hate-filled, xenophobic theocrat, and Sterling to the angsty, iconoclastic loser.

So for Sterling to say that the shouting and yelling match that is much of the American public scene is "sad" is fundamentally hypocritical, since he does the exact same thing.

He and his supporters state that his more preposterous statements and behaviors are satirical, or that it's tongue-in-cheek, or that his public persona isn't the same as his private persona. But that's frankly irrelevant. I don't care what Jim Sterling is like in the comfort of his own home or only among friends, because that's not the Jim Sterling that the world has to deal with. In public, he is obnoxious, loud, narcissistic and misogynist, and the fact that he ends most of these statements with an overdone wink and a declaration that he's been performing satire or trolling or whatever doesn't matter.

It's satire 'cause I said a bunch of stupid, horrible things, and then said "That was satire!"

I sent this article to my wife to edit, as I do with all my articles, and she was flatly appalled by the video up above. She told me she could not believe the Escapist pays him to produce that sort of thing, and that she could not stand the obscenity, the obnoxiousness, the smarm, or the lazy, crude MS Paint doodles.

My wife, you must understand, is not some sheltered princess. She really likes Zero Punctuation. She knows a fair amount about the gaming community, and though she is not herself a "gamer" in so many words, quite enjoys Civilization IV, Left 4 Dead, Lemmings, and Plants Vs. Zombies. She knows that gamers are not all jerks, and that there are wonderful things to be had in video games as an art form and the gaming community as a whole. Jim Sterling nevertheless gave her pause, and made her wonder about the quality of the community.

At some point, the narcissism, the lazy production values and the smarm stop being ironic or satirical, and start actually being what they're supposedly sending up. Jim passed that point some time ago. He's not funny, or satirical, or edgy. He's just an asshole.

So, What's the Point, Bill?

Why am I writing about this? Is it because I somehow expect Jim Sterling will come to my website, read this article, and change his practices? No, not really. I mean, that would be swell, but as Nick Naylor mentioned above, I'm not really talking to him. In the event that he were to read this and want to talk to me about it, that would be great. But I'm really talking to you, the reader, because I want you to do a few things.

First, and most obviously, following Jim's suggestions and giving into the natural temptation to fulfill the gamer stereotype when confronted with willful ignorance and misinformation is self-defeating, bad, and contributes to the very systems of rhetoric that have made you angry.

Yes, like-minded people will probably always be willing to listen to the right pundits, and if you're lucky, someone will cast your childish antics in a positive light, and maybe even give you a weekly feature on an otherwise high-quality gaming site. But becoming the enemy is not the answer.

A Call To (In)Action.

Jim Sterling is not a dumb guy, and beneath his vitriolic persona is a pretty sharp mind with some legitimately interesting things to say about video games, both as art and entertainment. But right now, I suspect he's doing more damage than good. By appealing to the self-righteous, crude, jerk demographic, Jim has already done what he asks us to do in this video. He has already lowered himself to the level of the mudslingers. At best, he is an incomptent satirist.

So, let's send a message to Jim Sterling and anyone else who wants to behave like this that we think the gaming community is better than Jim Sterling's public persona. We don't want to cater to those members of our community who think simply shouting louder than the other guy is appropriate behavior.

Let's not do this by ranting in comments, but by simply refusing to watch Jimquisition, refusing to follow his Twitter account, and even refusing to read his Destructoid reviews. If we send letters to him or his clients, let them be polite ones, but let us vote primarily with our traffic.

If Sterling's persona is primarily played-up and staged, then he can take it off. I do want to hear his thoughts on a multitude of issues, but I can wait until he learns to behave like an adult, and so can you. Let's make him shape up, or ship out. Let's show that the gaming community is better than the narcissistic, vitriolic, childish, misogynist asshole that is showcased in Jimquisition.

See, Jim is right that the world likes to listen to people who fling dung, and generally prefers spectacle over substance, but that doesn't mean we have to fulfill that desire. On this point, Gandhi, Christ, Kant and Wheaton all agree. Be the change you want to see in the world. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.

Or, fundamentally, don't be a dick.

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The Philosopher-Geek: A Rose By Any Other Name

2011-07-20T21:26:00.001-04:00

Yes, I'm back from my unplanned hiatus. But without dwelling on that, let's go ahead and get to work.

As usual, Axiom VIII is in effect. Thar Be Spoilers (albeit relatively minor ones) Ahoy!

What Are We On About Today

What I want to do today is to talk about genres and classification, and to do so primarily by evaluating two claims: the first, that Portal 2 is a puzzle game, and the second, that Dragon Age 2 is not an epic. I intend to look at what these two sentences really mean, why they have been said, and what sort of attitudes are revealed in their utterance. Hopefully, by the end of this article, we'll have a better understanding of what a genre or classification is, and how and when it should be used. Specifically, I hope to try to show why genres and classifications are immensely helpful for describing works to other people, and can frequently offer treasure troves of good ideas to draw from in the creation of new works. Genres and classifications became dangerous, however, when they became proscriptive, when a work is criticized for failing to adhere to established conventions.

On Portals and Puzzles

My opinion of Valve's Portal 2 is already a matter of public record. I think it's the best complete game I've played in years. Most of the Internet seems to agree with me, but shortly after I played the game, I found myself confronted by a recurring criticism. Namely, people would accuse Portal 2 of not being enough of a puzzle game, usually with a sentence something like "Portal 2 is a puzzle game, therefore it should/should not have done X."

In other words, people would become irritated at various things the game did or did not do, all because of its genre, the classification in which the game was placed. These various things (too many sprawling environments, too much of an emphasis on narrative, too easy, etc.) ostensibly contradict its class, and make it less of a puzzle game and more about other things.

On one level, this makes some sense. If I sign up to go see a cello recital, and halfway through the cellist puts down his cello, picks up an electric guitar and starts flailing away at a rendition of Purple Haze, I suppose I might have some right to be a bit put out (I mean, I wouldn't be, but that's more a function of my love for Jimi Hendrix than anything normative). Even if the Hendrix cover was truly fantastic, it probably didn't have any place in a cello recital, and if the recital was labeled "cello recital" and not "miscellaneous music recital," I might have some right to be irritated. If the musician in question wanted to play both the cello and the guitar, he should probably have said so to begin with.

Similarly, it might make sense that if Portal 2 is fundamentally a puzzle game, but frequently does non-puzzly things that take away from its effectiveness as a puzzle game, it might deserve criticism.

The problem is that I'm not really sure it makes that much sense to strictly refer to Portal 2 as a puzzle game, and, more to the point, I'm not certain that that label exists anywhere except in our own heads.

See, rather than sit down and try to hammer out what, exactly, defines the category of "puzzle game" and whether or not Portal 2 really fits those qualifications, I think it makes more sense to analyze where that category came from, and whether or not it actually makes any sense to criticize Portal 2 for failing to live up to its standards.

If you asked me to describe Portal 2 to you, I would probably begin by saying "It's a puzzle game," or something similar, because that category is helpful for communicating a series of things about the game, and there are few other commonly-used categories that fit it better. It's certainly more of a puzzle game than it is a role-playing game or a first person shooter (though it is played from the first person with a gun that shoots things). But if I stopped describing either Portal game at "puzzle game," I would not be communicating a very accurate picture of the game.

Bejeweled is pure "puzzle game," but both Portals, and the second in particular, are also strongly characterized by a wicked sense of humor and very, very strong (if subtle) narrative. Portal without GLaDOS, cake, and the Weighted Companion Cube is not Portal at all, whereas Bejeweled might still be identifiably itself with just a different art style or soundtrack. These other, non-puzzle elements make up a substantial portion of both Portal games' appeal and aesthetic value. Even though the first game has less of an emphasis on narrative and character than the second, it would not be nearly as interesting or worthwhile if the narrative was removed. The brilliant humor is a substantial portion of why the franchise caught on in the first place, and the creeping feeling of dreadful realization that the voice over the loudspeaker is not merely a quirky recording but is, in fact, an unfriendly and unpredictable consciousness that has it out for you is an important part of the game.

This is doubly true for the second game. If one simply removed Wheatley and GLaDOS and Cave Johnson, and, instead, had only a series of intriguing portal puzzles, one would be missing out on a great portion of Portal 2. The game is found in the merging of both the gameplay and the narrative.

I can think of no more appropriate part of Portal 2 to illustrate this point than in the oft-discussed moments in the game when it leads you to believe you are about to solve a puzzle and then quickly shunts you aside for a narrative sequence. Yahtzee's review makes note of this when he talks about these "two separate occasions within it when a puzzle is interrupted by a story section." Admittedly, he then does go on to state that Portal 2 is not really a puzzle game, but I think there's something curious about that sentiment.

It seems to suggest that there did, in fact, exist a puzzle which the story interrupted, as though the two things were separate elements, as though if the story would just go away for a few moments, there exist another two puzzles in the game that you could solve.

This is not true. The puzzle was not interrupted by the story, although that's certainly how Chell might feel. There never was a puzzle to interrupt. There was the illusion of a puzzle created entirely for the purpose of interruption, so that the story could continue. Further, the story and the puzzles are not really entirely separate elements. The story is frequently expressed through the puzzles, the puzzles advance the story, and the puzzles gain value and interest from their contextualization in the story. It does not really make sense to talk about the "story" interrupting the "puzzle," because they aren't really separate elements. There is just the game, which communicates with the player in a multitude of different ways, including story elements and puzzle elements.

In this way, I hope you see why simply describing Portal 2 as a "puzzle game" doesn't do it justice, and why it's really very silly to evaluate it against that category. A pure puzzle game is, indeed, something like Bejeweled, or Plants Vs. Zombies or Tetris. In this context, "puzzle game" is a useful descriptor, a useful shorthand way of describing several of the game's elements, but it far from tells the whole story. There is no problem with referring to Portal 2 as a puzzle game in casual conversation or at the beginning of a recommendation. The problem comes when one attempts to judge it against that category rather than on its own merits.

The Epic Jar

Dragon Age 2 was a weird thing for a number of reasons, many of which I have already discussed at length. But perhaps the biggest reason why it's interesting from a sociological standpoint is the way the backlash against it tended to focus on its fundamental design choices, rather than on its frequent lapses in execution. A discussion of these points formed the backbone of my article on the Problem of Expectation, but there is one specific subset of those criticisms that I only briefly mentioned before, and which is particularly relevant to this discussion.

The criticism is that Dragon Age 2 was not an epic, which is an accurate enough statement. It's not. I don't take issue with the factual accuracy of the point. The problem is that people will bandy that statement about as though it was a criticism instead of a simple statement of fact.

The word "epic," my friends, is a statement of genre. Some things are epics, and some things are not, and this has absolutely nothing to do with their respective quality. The Lord of the Rings is an epic, and it is fantastic. Lolita is not an epic, and it is also fantastic. Conversely, (and switching media), Avatar is an epic, and it is awful, and When in Rome is not an epic, and is also awful.

To describe something as an epic is to make a statement about its scope, not its quality. It is a classification, a way of pointing out the differences between a movie like Gone With The Wind and one like The Maltese Falcon.

If this is true, there is no shame in not being an epic. This hasn't stopped people from criticizing Dragon Age 2 for its reduced scope, however. I couldn't figure out why this was such a problem until I watched Yahtzee's review of the game, wherein he states that "The only point anything resembling a world-threatening fantasy adventure story occurs is right at the end, for the sequel hook."

That made me understand. Fantasy games are usually epics. Fantasy anythings are usually epics, because most authors want to show off the massive world they have created. They usually involve world or at least country-threatening events, massive adventures across colorful and exotic places. Thus, when people learned that DA2 was a fantasy game, they automatically assumed it was an epic, and were thus disappointed by a game which is fundamentally about one person's rise to power.

But this kind of massive scope is not necessary for a good fantasy story: try Neverwhere for an excellent small-scope fantasy novel, or Planescape: Torment for an excellent small-scope fantasy game. The fact that The Lord of the Rings was epic in scope does not carry as a corollary the fact that all other fantasy things must be similarly huge. DA2 contains a myriad of problems, large and small, but among them is not its scope.

So Why Is This A Problem?

At this point, you may be wondering why this all matters. Sure, maybe people were mad at Dragon Age 2 for the wrong reasons, or criticize Portal 2 for silly reasons. So what? Further, it's not exactly news that people like to compartmentalize things.

I'm bringing this up not just because I'm enough of a pedant to get mad at people for being wrong (though, admittedly, that's probably part of it.) There are two big reasons why this focus on genre convention is bad:

1. By holding an incorrect picture of what a game is in your head, you can miss its value. I've mentioned before that the first time I tried to play Assassin's Creed I insisted on trying to play it as though it was a straight stealth game. This wasn't wrong because of the category mistake alone, or simply because it might hurt some developer's feelings somewhere, but because I missed the fun and value of the game by doing so. Once I quit letting my preconceptions get in the way of what it was, I enjoyed myself immensely. Similarly, someone who insists Portal 2 ought to be a pure puzzle game might miss the value of the wonderful narrative and characters while he or she is grousing. It's thus important not to get too hung up on genre because doing so leads to the Problem of Expectation.

2. More importantly, using genres and classifications as proscriptive rather than descriptive stagnates the medium. One should not criticize a game for deviating from genre convention unless it is explicitly trying to be a pure example of a given genre. You undoubtedly remember reading about or hearing about the sorts of stuffy folks that were mad at Beethoven or Hemingway or Picasso or any of a billion other people for breaking the rules, right? This is no better. Whining at Portal 2 for not fitting neatly into the classifications we have in mind for "puzzle games" is the same sort of thing as whining at Beethoven's Fifth for not fitting neatly into the pre-existing structure of a symphony.

If developers are continually stymied by this kind of pointless criticism, they are likely to be more hesitant to try again. I bet you a ton of money that Dragon Age 3 will be much larger in scope than its predecessor, and it may be a while before EA considers publishing a fantasy game with smaller stakes than the whole world. Video games are preposterously expensive to make, and if we keep telling publishers that we don't want to play games that challenge us or push out of our established genres, they will listen.

So remember, folks: genres are useful as descriptors, as ways of telling your friends what kind of game you're playing. But as soon as they become proscriptive or normative, they lose their usefulness and instead become actively harmful.

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Questions or comments? Comment below or e-mail us here at ontologicalgeek@gmail.com. And do remember that we are always accepting submissions to the Ontological Geek for publication on this here blogospace. Simply e-mail us at ontologicalgeek@gmail.com with any attached essays, and, after a quick review, we'll be quite happy to post them! Also, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for extra Ontological Geekitude!

Additional Pylons: Wars of Worldcraft

2011-07-09T19:19:00.005-04:00

Usually my posts are entirely abstract, meant to entertain, inform, irritate or enlighten, but thus far I have avoided practical affairs. For the most part, video games are either enjoyed or they are not; an experience is gleaned, or it is not; but roleplaying games are something else entirely, for the player, certainly, but especially for the man or woman behind the metaphorical, and often literal, curtains. Today I am stepping into the role of the advice-giver, for I have discovered that perhaps I have some practical, serviceable wisdom to pass on in this arena. I became aware of this in a conversation with a friend last week; I sat down and decided to hammer out a setting for my new campaign in one sitting and thought it was going extremely well, and since he was currently in the throes of world-birth himself, he asked me for a few tips.

Below is my answer to him, and I'll also elaborate a bit on certain techniques that I have found useful in crafting a setting, and include some interesting idiosyncrasies that will probably be less helpful and more curious, as I run through how I generated the wiki content for my most recent setting. You can find that wiki here, and you may want to follow along, since I'll be referencing it often.

Oh, and sorry, Afh. I totally built a codex.

The Concept

My mind is a pretty useful organism, and one of the coolest things about it is that it works even when I'm not choosing to think. And one of the most important techniques I've discovered has to do with reigning the left brain in before it begins to organize things that don't exist yet, which can help one avoid certain urges that I'll get into in a bit. First I needed a starting point.

So I sat down and began by coming up with a name for my city, which I had already decided would be a city with significant links to the Shadowfell, which is basically a mirror-universe born from the shadows of the "natural" world. About that time, I also began looking for appropriate gloomy city art to inspire me and include on the wiki. That's when I stumbled over this picture in my library.

And that sparked a ton of ideas. It strongly reminded me of Venice, what with the canal in the middle of a city, and what I knew of Venice (pretty much from Assassin's Creed 2 and Casino Royale, right?) I liked, so I went with it for a framework. But what would I call this dark Venice-like city? I began throwing sounds together until I found something that I liked; I happened upon Threshing, which I liked because of its 'sh' sound, like in hush and flush, which evoked the proper feel, and because it involved the separating between worthy and unworthy, the valued and the chaff. I wanted this place to sound like the sort of place where the chaff of both Akana (the "normal" world) and the Shadowfell tended to accumulate, and, because I didn't want my city to just be a participle, I went with Threshingfall, which both sounds good and has some obvious similarities to the word "Shadowfell."

I then turned to do some research on Venice, specifically focused on its heyday in the mid-1400s to the mid-1500s, when it was one of the two great city-states of Italy, its art scene was beginning to flourish, and the Medici family was rising to prominance. I was mostly just looking for broad flavor, though; after all, I didn't want to be overly constrained by Venice, I wanted it to serve as inspiration. And I figured that Assassin's Creed 2 already represented a great deal of the flavor I wanted in my game, and they've usually got their history pretty good, anyway.

Next came a decision; I knew that I wanted the events of the last short game I ran to be important, in which daelkyr had invaded Sigil and forcibly removed the Lady of Pain's memories, thus taking control of Sigil for themselves, but I also knew that I wanted those events to be background information. Refugees from Sigil would have made their way to prominent "gate-towns." That meant using the Outlands, and the Planescape Outlands were something that always rang a little hollow to me. I loved the ideas of gate-towns, but the Outlands are consist almost solely of gate-towns and a lot of open space. The open space struck me as fake, boring, and pointless. Instead, I decided to adhere the gate-town idea in the "normal" world, cutting out the mostly empty Outlands altogether and giving the cosmology a solid anchor: Akana, a world I have worked with in the past. But I wanted to tell a new story, with a completely different flavor. The easiest option was a new continent, the south of which was still called the Outlands and was ruled by a series of city-states, much like parts of 1400s Italy. I then decided that Threshingfall, given its planar importance and links to the Shadowfell, would be the capital of the league of city-states, making it a slightly more charged political environment.

So these details gave me a solid basis to work from. Usually, I would have begun structuring the city, deciding what races lived in which districts and wielded influence, and balancing it all in my mind. I went with the opposite.

Using the Sub-conscious

Whenever you're working on big mental projects, it's not hard to get discouraged at the daunting amount of work you have to do, to get lost in specific themes and details, and to start missing the forest for the scree. While preparing for a D&D campaign is probably not the most strenuous activity you're going to be putting your mind through, you can easily be overwhelmed by its conceptual size and spend a lot of time spinning your wheels and brute-forcing your way through its creation.

I wanted to try a very different technique. Once I had Threshingfall, and had written a little poem expressing the mood I wanted the city to express, I sat down and started to write.

Instead of focusing on the needs of a city and approaching this creation from a standpoint of structure or realism, I elected to let my mind wander and just float past names and images. I recorded each idea that had some potential. I did focus on themes I wanted my city to express, but I wasn't yet caught up in actually fitting anything together; I didn't need to, all of that would happen on its own. In that way, the Crimson Academy, Bleak Alliance, Villain's Market and Den of Drakes was born. I had some rough images for what these organizations or places were like, but I wanted to hold everything loosely so that I could keep on coming up with diverse ideas.

I had never used this technique with setting generation before, but I found it exceptionally productive, primarily because when you're holding everything loosely you don't have to commit to anything right away. If one constructs a full "thing" in one's campaign setting, then it starts to limit other possibilities for the setting. For example, say if I sat down to work on Threshingfall and decided that there was definitely a group called the "Lurking Shadows," and proceeded to spell out how they were famous thieves led by a dwarf named Gary Oldman, but Gary was actually interested in eventually building a giant superweapon from the gems the Shadows were stealing. Where would I go from there? Well, I don't know if this is universal, but my left-brain would kick in; I'd be thinking of organizations that oppose it, and any other group or image I came up with that involved thievery, gems, a dwarven leader or a superweapon would be discarded pretty much immediately.

However, if I have loose images of what this organization is like (say, they are thieves, but what is more important is their elusive-yet-famous nature, and their goals extend beyond simple thievery), then those specific elements that might shut me off from other possibilities stay safely unformed until I have a whole mess of ideas that I am simultaneously working with.

Of course, with some of the names I come up with, I don't have any images at all. I just attach it to a theme (such as order or corruption, anything that I want to have a role in the many narratives I could string through the city), and let it sit. Those are actually my favorite, because my mind works better when its solving a puzzle than when it's just trying to "produce" something, and trying to figure out why a police force would ever be called something like the "Severed Legion" is pretty much just that. Approaching it like a puzzle makes a game out of world-building, too; if setting creation becomes tedious, then trying to figure out a "solution" to a self-imposed puzzle makes it refreshingly fun again.

Basically, the roots of my proposed method are this: sit back and allow the right-brain to play and tinker without getting too emotionally invested in anything but names, themes and images. It allowed me to come up with natural structure with no traces of artificial balancing and in which no power-group was obviously a response to another. I think that Threshingfall appears more organic because of that method of initial "play" and corresponding refusal to hold anything tightly.

As for actually filling in details, there's no reason to stop "playing." I strongly encourage you to avoid creating a hard-and-fast method of exploring the details of such organizations or countries (for instance, if you always started by determining the name of it's most prominent/powerful leader and recording its goals/population). That makes your creativity run through specific channels, and you'll be missing out on the possibility of startling insights and wasting time on details that, while significant for some of one's creations, might not be significant for each.

Storytelling Post-build

I've covered the techniques that I used to generate this campaign setting, and so now I'd simply like to touch on a few specific goals or themes that I explored after the majority of the setting was built and talk about how I've decided to implement them, partially because I think they're damn cool and want your opinions on how to pull them of as well as I want to.

First of all, I wanted a way to both encourage participation in the wiki (so that my players were actively contributing to the world, as well), and encourage them to take a hand in the altering the narrative. I did these through ESPs, which you can find on the wiki and are a blatant rip-off of the Serenity RPG's Plot Points. ESPs offer players the chance to actively change the story in minor ways (either to throw a little bit of chaos into the mix, benefit the character, or instigate a whole new sub-plot), as well as give themselves a little mechanical advantage, by producing material for the wiki or making interesting character-choices in play. I'm confident that these things can only make the game better.

My second idea, which I am quite excited about, occurred to me while I was pondering how to write the Adventure Log recording each session's activities. I like being a little creative in such records, simply because it allows me to continue fleshing out parts of the world that the players may never encounter in-game but can still add to their understanding of how the world works, or even where their characters fit into the world.

If you are going to play in the first session of Tenebrous Verses, you should really stop now and come back to read this after the session.

I decided that it would be fun to present the Adventure Log as the attempts of a scholar over thirty years distant from the "start" of the campaign to determine the truth of the stories surrounding the player characters, whom he refers to as the Emissary and the Emissary's companions. This means that the player characters have undoubtedly had a strong enough impact on the city that a slew of exaggerated stories will eventually be told about them. This also means that I get to play with a few ideas, such as examining just how distorted and muddy the work of history can be (especially in a 1500s where magic runs rampant), and examining how people become the heroes and villains of the future. It will also allow me to foreshadow in interesting ways and create doubt in the player's minds regarding the actions of their heroes.

It then occurred to me that I could extend this trope by actually incorporating it into the game. What if, at the beginning of the first session, I handed each character a name, race, and occupation, and we role-played through the first delivery of this accumulated historical/truth-parsing document? I thought this was an excellent idea for a couple of reasons: First, it allows me to re-cap the events of the last session at the beginning of each new session in an interesting way that involves player participation. Second, it allows players to comment on the actions and ideas of their own characters and others' characters outside of the game proper. Third, it allows me to create an interesting tale of intrigue that spans over thirty years. Oh yeah, did you really think that I would stop myself at just handing out names and occupations? I intend to slowly give them more information about their "modern" characters that starts to connect in odd ways with things that are happening in the "actual" campaign. Now admittedly, this is risky as hell, but if I can keep my wits about me it very well might be one of the coolest things I've ever done in a game.

It THEN occurred to me that I could validate the ESPs given the lens through which the campaign is being told; specifically, if the characters that the players are playing in the "modern" time-period are experts on the "heroes" of the tale, then they can occasionally interrupt the reading with their own insights into the story. Perhaps that's why our intrepid scholar is reading his account to these people first; so that they can offer corrections or challenge his conclusions. For instance, if an ESP is used to alter a character's attack roll, then I, the DM playing this "scholar," has gotten something wrong. One of these other noblemen or women (players) will step in and say, "No, that doesn't sound like something Cyril would do. In fact, I have heard about this battle; I know for a fact that he burnt out the man's brain with a single spell. I remember that detail quite clearly." And I, the humble scholar, will acquiesce. If it's a story modifying ESP, then it is an excited addition: "And of course, this is when the Queen of Adders could not find it in herself to kill Tolderoy's brother after all, because Tolderoy had awakened the last spark of love that her fetid heart could muster." At which point I, the scholar, would say, "That's a romanticized version, but close. The Queen had a moment of indecision, and finally acted to slay the brother, since he was, after all, stealing affections that were meant the Queen."

I think that these storytelling techniques will be fun on their own, but will also serve to illustrate just how tangled and complicated Threshingfall really is. I don't think that these methods would work with a setting that was larger and less contained, nor in a campaign that wasn't built to facilitate politically-charged stories.

In Conclusion

I've covered quite a bit in this article, and, as always, I'd love to hear your opinions on the techniques that I presented and the ideas I've got to make this campaign unlike any other! You're also totally welcome to steal any of these things, so long as you give me credit when you post them anywhere public, online or off. Well, until next week, ciao!

Guest Article: On the Plurality of Worlds

2011-07-09T15:34:00.004-04:00

Friend and longtime Ontological Geek reader/commenter Afh has written us a guest article on the subject of world-building, posted here for your enjoyment! I would remind anyone else who may have any particularly good ideas that we are always on the lookout for guest articles, and even potentially for more regular contributors!

--Bill

One of the great things about the human imagination is that, as well as coming up with ideas for use in the real world or conjuring up fictional elements (such as a child’s imaginary friend), imagination can create an entire universe or world, straight out of whole cloth.

This power is something I have always admired in others and cherished in myself. Imagination renders us into gods, with universes blossoming from empty firmament to spread and grow on paper, or film, to take root in the mind of others. This personal Genesis fascinates me, and provides endless enjoyment. Some like to tell stories, as do I, but I am not content with this alone. I like to build worlds. Worlds with all the detail of Tolkien’s, oft-imitated, never-equaled, landscape of swordplay and sorcery that has become the template for almost every other fantastic fiction since, the ‘standard fantasy setting’.

I also like to explore others’ worlds, such that the back-story of a game alone can interest me enough to purchase it. Examples of this include games like Genesis Rising and Demigod.
Video games have a unique capability in what I will hereafter refer to as “world building”. With this new medium, all the visuals, stories, and voices of your world are on screen. Now cinema, too, can produce these, but the interactivity of games allows the player to ‘live,’ however briefly, in these worlds, to step into the armored greaves or magnetic space boots of the characters onscreen.

One persistent trend in games continues to bother me. This trend is what I call the ‘codex’ method of background.

For example Dragon Age, while an excellent game, contains a ‘codex*’, literally referred to as such: An in-game encyclopedia of the world’s character and background.

Other examples include Mass Effect, small sections of Dead Space, Dungeon Siege 2, any instance of a “timeline” section, a la Halo Wars or Chrome Hounds, Alien vs. Predator: Extinction, and Metroid Prime. This last one is a particularly egregious example, as to acquire any information, the player must scan a living enemy, standing there like bait. This is poor immersion. Background should not be boring text. Background should be integrated into the gameplay both in the story/plot and the mechanics and art, not tacked on as a user manual (see Homeworld). Encyclopedic descriptions of setting should have ended with text-based adventure games. When the tech exists to render things like Cronos in God of War 3, the hair of a brute soldier in Halo, or, say, this scene from Drakengard 2. What excuse is there for relying on simple text to convey any detail of the scene or narrative of the story? This is related to long expositional rants in movies and huge explanatory blocks in novels.

If done incorrectly, such details remind me that, while interesting, this world I inhabit is mine. Mine to save, and mine to influence. Games, even the good ones, inadvertently solidify you or your character as the primary mover and shaker in the game. Fable 1 & 2 are offenders here, casting some random farm boy/street urchin as the world’s main agent of change. Sometimes this makes sense, such as in sequels, when your character has gained considerable status from saving the world or Fable 3, where you play as the crown prince of a large sovereign nation. Such a person should have definite weight on the world stage.

However, sometimes it is that much more engaging to realize that the world is filled with other names. Names that also affect the world, names that may be bigger than you are. BioShock does this well (yes, like the Philosopher-Geek, I too, have been bitten by the BioShock bug). Through the game’s grisly scenery and the scattered audio logs, the player’s discoveries begin to shed light on Rapture’s last days. There are also little asides, such as the machine that rewards you for selecting Big Daddy (if you have played the game through to the end, you will know what I am referring to). This is not so much backstory, however, as it is plot. It is action that involves you, and that you have a role in, however small. Plot is important, no doubt, but it is not the subject of this diatribe, rant, or what-have-you.

Integration of the world-building woven into story, as it should be, is realized in the Lord of the Rings. I discover Middle-Earth through the actions of the characters, the places they visit, and the people they meet. Where you first learn the history of Middle-Earth is where you should, integrated into the main events within the story and plot. Tolkien skillfully makes allusions to the fictional past, as well as present asides that only serve to enrich the setting with detail and a sense of consistency (I hesitate to use the word ‘realism’ in this case).

Although Dragon Age: Origins failed by using the “Codex” approach, as did Mass Effect, both of these stories also offered steps in the right direction. In Dragon Age: Origins, this step is taken by Leliana, a red-headed tale-weaving rogue and bard, whose tales taught you a lot about Ferelden, the setting of this game (although it should be noted, only one of multiple countries in the larger world of the Dragon Age series). “I love stories far too much to keep them to myself,” she says, and through lengthy conversations, you can discover a bit more about Ferelden’s history, as well as the historical motivations and explanations of continuing events. The past influencing the present, just like in our world. That is the correct way to inject such details.

While some games would not be helped or hindered by all this additional back-story or “fluff,” I think that sometimes a game needs not just characters, but a world for them to inhabit. This is opposed to what seems to be the standard fare, where a world is built around and specifically for a character.

Instead, world building requires settings and “fluff’ beyond the present story, a world that allows for multiple tales, and in the best cases, demands that more be told. The easiest example is to create a past, to detail a world’s history, to show how the past leads up to the present, but this is only a small part of the successful execution. As I mentioned above, good world building demands that stories go on without the characters, whether these other stories occur before, after, or possibly during the story that is being told now. Action should be occurring both on and off the screen, with multiple events happening simultaneously. Sometimes it is rewarding to see these elements shift and react in response to the player’s actions, other times it is awe-inspiring when you are reminded that you represent but one man/woman/alien in a much larger world.

Mass Effect 2 has a good example of this: on Illium, an alien city, you will often hear newsreels detailing political events, cultural exhibits, and economic trends. Occasionally, Commander Shepard’s (the character you control throughout the series) actions will be mentioned, and the choices he/she makes will be reflected in the greater narrative of the world. Other times, this feature is used to create foreshadowing, hinting at missions yet to come. These asides, while often humorous, remind you of the vastness of the galaxy, a galaxy, you, the player, must save.

Mass Effect 2 has another great example of behind-the-scenes exposure. On the planet Tuchanka, in a dark bunker, you find two native Krogan. They have a conversation that is a wonderful insight into their lives, lives that Shepard has no control over, but are a part of his/her world nonetheless. Originally, I was going to try to find a video of this, but it seems YouTube does not have videos of this specific conversation, so I will try to summarize it as best I can.

All right, these aliens, the Krogan, are infected with a disease that makes all but one out of every 1,000 babies stillborn. The Krogan are a warlike race that spends its days in intertribal feuds. The females have their own separate neutral clans that house children born to fathers from many groups. This way, rival clans will not seek them out and kill others’ heirs, as any one of the children could easily be theirs as well.

When you enter the area, two of these Krogan are talking, and one mentions that when visited by the females, he saw a child he believed to be his own. The second congratulates the other, but the first Krogan focuses on his feelings for the son he is not allowed to raise, that he will not get to watch the whelp grow.

This is a wondrous insight into ‘some random Krogan’s daily life’. It’s a rather heartfelt example that serves to drive home a large thread of the Mass Effect story, but the aside in of itself is a wonderful reminder of ‘the world beyond’ or ‘the action off-screen’.

Done correctly, such world building can instill a very organic and dynamic soul into a carefully crafted world, a world that can, and should, tell dozens of stories as time goes on. Done poorly, it can reduce a wonderfully detailed land to encyclopedic boredom. At worst, such minutiae can seem to be nothing more than smoke and mirrors, extraneous details that are waved before the player in the hope that poor story crafting will be ignored.

Go forth and forge worlds, fellow Ontological Geeks!

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*In case you were interested, codex is an Aztec word. The Aztecs kept long detailed books, often vibrantly illustrated, bound together with rope. The codices (the plural form) were meticulously detailed guides and manuals on particular subjects. These subjects ranged from a single religious ritual, long creation myths, texts on military strategy, lessons from a prominent politician’s career, and, a favorite it seems, “Why you should never mess with a powerful empire that practices human sacrifice”, where the power and might of the Aztecs was put on all gory display. Particular detail was given over to the many horrid ways that the priests would dismember you. Isn’t history fun?

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Questions or comments? Comment below or e-mail us here at ontologicalgeek@gmail.com. And do remember that we are always accepting submissions to the Ontological Geek for publication on this here blogospace. Simply e-mail us at ontologicalgeek@gmail.com with any attached essays, and, after a quick review, we'll almost certainly be quite happy to post them! Also, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for extra Ontological Geekitude!

Additional Pylons: Going the Distance

2011-07-05T11:54:00.002-04:00

In my original Additional Pylons, I introduced the idea of distance. I haven't stopped refining my understanding of the concept since then, and so today I'm going to share some of my thoughts regarding its ramifications and investigate some incredible artistic possibilities that gaming's naturally low level of distance opens up.

To that end, I am going to begin by identifying an important function of art that is often simultaneously a signifier of quality art: the critique of structures and styles of thought, and the offering of a fundamentally different perspective. I am going to stand on the back of Jarrod's post on art way back when, as well; read it if you haven't already, because it is quite good, and I see no reason to trek back over the path that he's already laid down.

Art That Burns Down Your House

Art is a slippery thing, and its traits are notoriously difficult to define, but what I have to say here shouldn't be too controversial. I suggest that most fantastic art causes us to revise our knowledge of the world, as opposed to just telling us what we already know. In other words, good art is revelatory, if not to us then recognizably revelatory to an other. Art tends to smudge contemporary boundaries, and art often plays a part in the re-drawing of boundary lines. Dickens challenged aspects of industrial London's social structure; Van Gogh painted a world of such vibrancy that changed the way we view starry nights; any poet worth anything offers startling insights about the nature of an experience, drawing connections so perfect and subtle that we can't help but see and feel differently about his or her subject.

An artist, and an artist's work, must often destroy something in order to offer a new view, or the experience, when it becomes art, must involve a revision of one's perspective. The "victim" can be as simple as genre convention, or as complex as a massive social and cultural assumption about the state of the world, but generally speaking good art will crack a viewer's understanding of the world, even if just a little and just to make space for some new, minor insight. Good art changes the way we view the world.

A piece of art need not engage with social issues or timeless human struggles in order to reveal. A great deal of poetry does just fine by examining a single, intense experience. In fact, the video game medium, like poetry, is uniquely capable of rendering intense individual experiences. Where video games most clearly diverge from poetry is in "reader agency," and in ideal length. Poetry shares insight; the author takes the reader by the hand and investigates a single (or small series) of thoughts and images, but it is ultimately one, pre-determined path. The reader does not have agency, even though the reader's experience of the poem will be unique. Video games (as they exist now, due to both industry and stylistic expectations) are more suited for lengthier investigations of broad experience, similar to what one would find in a novel, and yet the focus on a single avatar character resembles the merging of "author" and "reader" that occurs in poetry. This is partially because agency has a lot of importance in stories that feature character development, and giving that agency to the player can be an incredibly powerful experience.

However, as I noted before, not all games have such lofty aspirations, and they don't need to. For instance, the interactive experience found in Guitar Hero is enough to make the player feel a little bit like a rock god; its a huge portion of the game's appeal, discovering that you've got bits of Clapton or Hendrix in you, then capering about and showing off in front of friends. Guitar Hero offers little narrative trappings; any narrative is mostly provided by the player, or by the social context in which the game is being played. But what is there is enough to place the player in the shoes of a guitar player on stage. Is it enough to spur a revision of perspective? I suspect yes for some, no for others. Art isn't necessarily universal.

World-view and Art

To focus this discussion a little more closely on the subject of video games, it is worth addressing what makes video game art different from any other form of art. The current state of video games means that the target demographic are young American or Japanese individuals (mostly American males on our side of things; I don't know nearly enough about the Japanese market to make any statements on their demo), at least for the sort of high-profile, A-list games, which, incidentally, is where most of the development dollars for pushing the boundaries of the medium are likely to be found. This is not to say that startling games-as-art won't be found elsewhere; in fact, one could make an argument for certain Indie games as some of the most influential and startling examples of games-as-art in the last few years, but generally speaking those games have budgetary limits that form an insurmountable wall in certain areas of development.

What this means is that the most high-profile games that have the most potential of reaching the status of being good art are also intended to be appealing to the young American male demographic (so they can sell, so the game publisher gets a good return on their huge investment), and the priorities of those pursuits are sometimes mutually exclusive. This means that certain risks are down-right dangerous for publishers, and that certain perspectives and tropes within game genres become virtually universal.

This can be problematic for video games, since presenting the same perspective over and over again can get stale, and can thus hamper the quality of the overall experience a game can offer. Here's an example: When was the last time you encountered a first-person shooter that doesn't place you in the shoes of an American or an American ally? Now, most FPS games are made in America (I will just ride on the coat-tails of Extra Credits here), so there's good reason why game developers make their protagonists fit that mold. But presenting the prototypical everyman/hot-blooded-American tough guy with a heart of gold/granite without fail means that the experience has become a little stale.

I'd like you to play a quick game of pretend with me, so bear with me and withhold judgment. The American FPS protagonist is a tried-and-true model, so let's do our best to invert it; what if an FPS had you play as an insurrectionist fighting the American or pseudo-American forces? This could make for some interesting art. Imagine intense scenes of warfare, punctuated with the ills that a large occupying force naturally generates. Homefront made an attempt at working in similar themes, and I have no idea how successful they were, but I think we can all agree that it's a little strange that the insurrectionists in their story are Americans.

Let's take this one step further: what if an FPS featured an honest-to-god Muslim insurrectionist? What if the game tried its best to realistically portray the effect of an American occupation on Iraq? I'm going to ignore the fact that a political storm straight out of hell would consume this project and, in all probability, result in actual violence, and focus only on the "game" here; the reality of the market and the society isn't exactly what I'm focusing on here, though it is important to the discussion. Such a game need not take sides, nor actually support violence, but rather seek to humanize innocents and the "enemy" side of the conflict. The important part of such a game would be to recast certain archetypes and characters, causing us to consider the assumptions we have about such characters, and thus about such people, even if our conclusions are the same. That's what good narrative art does. Of course, this is an extreme example, and there's a great spectrum of other experiences the player can have between the Terrorist game and the FPS games of today.

A game need not even be a first-party title or have a high budget to encourage this reconsideration (though it can certainly help). The game Spent is a phenomenal example of a simple game that produces empathy and understanding of a life that is somewhat alien to most middle-class Americans. Regardless of sociological outcomes, such a game reveals a different sort of life to the player, and that alone can make it a worthy experience.

On a side note that is partially related, one issue that video games rarely (never?) tackle is religion, or if they do it is through a surrogate, non-existent faith. It's a strange decision, especially since a character's nationality is hardly ever up for debate and in some cases actually implies faith. For instance, it is a fact that every conflict in the Middle East right now, and every conflict portrayed in games, has religious over-tones, but games have failed to engage with it, probably because it is a risky endeavor. I understand, but would also note that some risks are worth taking.

In Conclusion

I have just scratched the surface of investigating how the revelatory power of art differs or is the same in video games. I'd love to hear your opinions on what I have written here (and I'm sure you've got some, some of it's a little volatile), and am especially interested in further suggestions along the same lines. What big themes do you think are absent in video games today, and what themes are well-represented? Why do you think that is?

The Philosopher-Geek: Novelty and Mastery

2011-06-02T09:59:00.002-04:00

So, a while back I said I was going to write a three-part series on Dragon Age II and things like entitlement, but as I've repeatedly tried to draft said articles, I've realized that they mostly amount to me whining a bunch. So, very briefly, here is a summary of the salient points I was going to make:

1. Gamers: if you want games to be art, don't complain when developers do things you don't expect them to do. It's only not very good art that only caters to what you want and never attempts to expand your horizons. If, however, you only want games to be entertainment, then, you know. Carry on.

2. Gamers: stop whining all the damn time. Seriously. You sound like children. Remember the stat that the average gamer is 33? No one familiar with the average forum post is likely to believe that statistic.

3. Companies (I'm looking at you, EA): while we understand you have to make money in order to make games, don't turn out half-finished games hoping to pull a fast one. You don't hurt us, mind, but you do hurt yourselves and your franchises. And you also look like jerks.

So, with those points said, let's move on to what I really want to talk about now: the concept of innovation, primarily inspired by Portal 2.

The Catalyst

Last week I finally got around to playing Portal 2, and for the sake of this article, I am going to take it as read that the game is very, very, very good, both as a puzzle game and as art. I'm pretty sure this is an uncontroversial statement, but if you happen to disagree, comment below and I'll be happy to discuss the point-- I'm not going to waste a lot of time preaching to the choir up here in the main article, though.

So, upon finishing Portal 2, as I began to think about what it was that made the game so great, I realized something: the game, for all its brilliance, seems to do relatively little to innovate in the form.

It is far from stagnant, but it generally sticks to the tried-and-true format Valve has used for several games now: strictly first-person, silent protagonist, a "less is more" approach to plot, no (or at least very few) real cutscenes, and a prodigious amount of detail. Further, while there are several novel mechanics not present in Portal 1, most of these come from an existing independent game whose developers were absorbed into the studio. (This was true of the base mechanics of the first game, too).

In short, the game doesn't really seem to do all that much that is new, yet it's nearly-universally regarded as brilliant. This seems at odds with the way we usually talk about innovation as being a necessary part of a good game. Games which do not bring anything new to the table are "stale," or "tired," we say. We desire "fresh," "new," and "novel" concepts.

This seems, then, to raise a few problems.

1. If games need to do new things in order to be artistically worthwhile, how can we understand games like Portal 2 to really be good?

2. If games must do new things in order to be artistically worthwhile, does this mean that a game's artistic value is entirely dependent on its position in time? Does the same game become better or worse entirely because of its context, or is there anything we can understand to be purely objective about a game's quality?

In other words, what is it to innovate?

This is obviously a pretty big question, and I'm hardly going to be able to deal with every piece and subtlety it deserves. Further, it has to do with a lot more than just video games, and as such, much of this post will be pretty applicable to any artistic medium. But I think that there is a quick distinction we can make which will help us begin to answer these questions.

This distinction is that between what I will call innovating forward versus innovating upward. Or, in slightly more palatable terms, it is the difference between novelty and mastery.

(As usual, it is important to note that this is not a hard dichotomy-- many games and other works of art are very good at innovating in both directions, though some definitely prefer to emphasize one over the other.)

Novelty, or Innovating Forward

Strictly speaking, this is probably what the word "innovation" really means. To aim for novelty in a work of art is to aim for new ideas, ideas which have not been done before, to "think out of the box." This, I think, is what is usually meant by "innovation." These new ideas can be technological advances, advances in form, or any other kind of push forward.

Novelty is about breaking the rules, and allowing the artist and observer to experience new things which were not previously considered options in art. Many of the artists, composers, and writers we revere most are known at least primarily for their contributions to novelty. Good works which aim at novelty aim to push boundaries, and great works of novelty shatter the existing rules and paradigms, all the while making us wonder why we ever imposed such stringent rules in the past. Novelty is important because it prevents art from becoming stale or stagnant, and it is generally exciting, and frequently iconoclastic.

The trouble with focusing on novelty, of course, is the risk. New ideas are untested, and while some are brilliant advances, others are dead-ends. Further, even if an artist does create a new idea which works very well, its first few incarnations are likely to be halting and awkward, as the artist struggles to come to grips with the ramifications of the idea. Thus, while most of the great works of novelty are valuable in and of themselves, (Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 and Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, though quite novel, hardly sacrifice quality to that end), others are primarily memorable for their effects on the outside world, rather than their own intrinsic quality. As an analogy, we revere the Wright Brothers not for making a particularly good airplane, but for the act of making an airplane at all. As airplanes go, the Wright Flyer is pretty lousy.

Novelty is frequently emphasized in game development, and with good reason. As we are still very much in the adolescence of gaming as an artistic medium, there are a lot of fundamental ideas we still need to sort out. We are barely learning how to communicate stories well in the medium of video games, and are only at the very outermost edge of the sorts of wonderful ways this medium can be utilized for artistic expression. As such, most of what we need are good, new ideas.

Also, let's not get too full of ourselves, it's a lot easier to sell a game with a slogan like "new and exciting combat mechanics like you've never seen," than "combat mechanics that are exactly the same as the last several incarnations of the series, but slightly polished."

The difficulty we face with constantly emphasizing novelty is that we frequently end up with games that are full of a lot of good ideas, but aren't terribly well-executed. I have played a lot of games of late (L.A. Noire, Metro 2033, Alan Wake) which, though full of great new ideas, fail to hold together when viewed as a coherent whole. The new ideas themselves often need much more attention, or are, in some cases, so novel and innovative that the artists who had the ideas have no idea how best to employ them. We end up with a lot of games that are interesting as milestones to mark the beginnings of ideas, but relatively few games that will stand the test of time as truly worthwhile experiences outside of their immediate context.

The dark side of novelty, of course, is that it's addictive. It's fun and exciting to break the rules, and this leads to the creation of novelty for its own sake in art. That's the sort of behavior that results in random, nonsensical "performance art" pieces that serve little purpose beyond simply being odd or novel. So far as I know, no one has sat, naked and cross-legged, in the middle of Times Square with a baked potato balanced on his head while a woman plays "Scotland the Brave" over and over again on an ill-tuned bagpipe for three straight hours. That would certainly be novel. But it would probably not be terribly worthwhile.

That, of course, is an extreme example, but the point holds in games, too. It is important to remember that novelty is not an end-in-itself. When one experiments with new ideas, the goal is to find better ways to communicate ideas or create experiences. The goal of thinking outside the box is to allow yourself to see things from a different perspective, thereby enabling you to notice details or concepts you might have missed. It's not that there is something inherently more valuable about the outside of the box.

In this way, novelty is forward-moving innovation-- it takes the medium into new and interesting places, and opens up new ways of experiencing games.

Mastery, or Innovating Upward

Johann Sebastian Bach is not a composer generally associated with innovation or novelty. Bach did not really introduce new forms of music into the baroque lexicon, nor did he substantially change the types of instruments usually used in baroque music. Towards the end of his life and after his death, he was regarded as being somewhat old-fashioned when compared to the new and exciting "classical" style. Bach, in short, is not particularly famous for breaking the rules.

What Bach did do is take the existing rules and forms of baroque music and use them to produce most of the best examples of that style of music in history. No one before or since has shown such utter mastery of the forms of baroque music, and it is difficult to imagine that anyone ever will. Bach, then, did not break the rules or push music forward, as such. Instead, he explored and unlocked the true potential contained within the existing ideas - pushed them upward to greater heights than they had yet seen.

I believe this should be understood as a kind of innovation, because while you would not say that Bach generally did things that were novel, exactly, neither could you say that he was stagnating the form. He pushed music to great things, and stands pretty much undisputed as one of the greatest composers of all time.

We value this brand of innovation because it allows us, generally, to have deeper experiences than those concerned purely with novelty. Observing or interacting with a masterful work of art may not always be as initially exciting, but by choosing to worry less about how to break the rules or where to push the envelope forward, the artist can focus instead on creating the deepest, purest experience a given set of rules or conventions allows. In other words, while it is definitely good that not all poetry needs to be in sonnet form, the sonnet can be used to produce wonderful works of art.

Focusing too much on mastery is not without its drawbacks, however. It is a relatively short step to go from "obeying the rules of the sonnet is a great way to write poetry" to "all poetry must be written in sonnet form." If a medium or a culture focuses too much on mastery without any room for novelty, it will eventually stagnate. After Bach, there were really only so many more things that could be done with his conventions. It is rather unlikely anyone is going to write a better baroque chorale.

Gaming, as I mentioned before, does tend to focus on novelty over mastery, and I think that makes sense. Many of the rules and conventions of gaming are so new and untested that it makes sense to keep trying on new ideas. But it is nevertheless helpful to sometimes take a step back from the arms race and simply use the tools one has to produce something like a great work of art, and that's the sort of game Portal 2 is.

Portal 2 isn't perfect. For one, there are a few too many sweeping environments with little to do other than "look really hard for the one patch of concrete you can portal to." (Though I think "there are too many pretty things" is a pretty good problem to have.) I don't exactly mean to suggest that it is the apotheosis of the current first person puzzle genre, or that it ought to be understood as a Meaningful Game (though I think it maybe stands a better chance at that title than most). That said, it is very hard to imagine what Valve could have done to make Portal 2 substantially better. For while it does not seem to push the medium forward that much, it certainly shows mastery and innovates upward by using Valve's conventions about as well as we've ever seen them used.

Upward moving innovation, then, or mastery, seems to be the process of taking primarily existing rules and creating the best work of art one can out of that system.

Conclusion

As I said before, these are not hard, strictly-delineated categories. Most games that innovate do so in at least some of both ways, and many of the true greats in art simultaneously restructured the way people viewed the medium and showcased excellent execution of the new ideas they spawned.

So, I wish to conclude with a few bullet points.

First, that novelty is not an end-in-itself, that forward innovation must be done with purpose, and not just for kicks.

Second, that you should never be afraid to try out new ideas if you think there is any chance the new ideas will better serve your ends than the ones you're comfortable with. Gamers: remember that you are not entitled to games remaining exactly the same, and never changing the formulas you like. Developers should be free to try new ideas without fearing constant screeching of fanboys at every change.

Third, that even as we struggle to push the medium of video games forward through the introduction of novel ideas and constant forward innovation, occasionally it is good to take a step back, look at the tools we have created, and showcase the wonderful things we already know how to do. Games like Portal 2 may not reshape the medium the way Doom or Super Mario Brothers or World of Warcraft did, but they do showcase the great things that artists can do with games, even as they help pave the way for the next great works of art.

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Postscript:

I had intended to work in a link to this article, but the paragraph in which it was to reside has since been proven unworthy. So, though it's not immediately relevant to this topic, it's about Portal 2, and it's an interesting question. The blog on which it was posted is also very much worth checking out-- the author has some very interesting and intelligent things to say about games, and I find it particularly interesting because he frequently talks about racing games, a genre with which I have little experience.

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Questions or comments? Comment below or e-mail us here at ontologicalgeek@gmail.com. And do remember that we are always accepting submissions to the Ontological Geek for publication on this here blogospace. Simply e-mail us at ontologicalgeek@gmail.com with any attached essays, and, after a quick review, we'll almost certainly be quite happy to post them! Also, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for extra Ontological Geekitude!

This Week In Stuff: 5/13/11-5/20/11

2011-05-20T17:24:00.003-04:00

Welcome to This Week In Stuff!

The Ontological Geek has had a busy week. On Monday, we posted our most recent Question of the Week (which you should definitely go answer, if you haven't already). On Tuesday, we saw the return of Matt's Additional Pylons column with an excellent look at the nature of death in video games. On Thursday, I posted my newest Philosopher-Geek column, a discussion of games-as-art. If you haven't already read all of these things, you should definitely check them out!

This week on This Week In Stuff, we have an interesting question raised by BioWare's recently-released approach to sexuality and romance options in Mass Effect 3, as well as two oddities of which I have recently become aware.

On Sexuality and BioWare Games

This is less interesting to me in and of itself-- that fans are worried about something upon receiving news about a sequel is not exactly noteworthy. First, let me go ahead and say that the artists behind Mass Effect 3 can do whatever the hell they want with their characters, and though we may be able to criticize them (after playing the game) for making poor choices, the characters belong to the Mass Effect team, and no one else. Read: calm down, folks. Calm. Down.

But what this does raise is the interesting question of what to do with sexual orientation in a BioWare-style roleplaying game. Do you open up all characters to potential romance with all sexes of player characters? Is it really very plausible that all the people on your spaceship are bisexual or specifically swing towards whichever sex the player character is? Is it more important to maintain character continuity between playthroughs, or more important to ensure that all player characters can experience whatever romance options they want?

In DA2, the character of Anders changes his sexual orientation based on the sex of the main character, Hawke. If Hawke is female, Anders is straight, and if Hawke is male, Anders is gay, and Anders' relationship with another character is altered accordingly. Does it make sense to so thoroughly yank around a character's personality and backstory based only upon whether or not the main character is a man or a woman? Maybe it does, I'm not sure.

See, I'm not currently going to try to answer any of these questions-- maybe I'll write a Philosopher-Geek column about them when I'm feeling like I want to get myself in trouble. But for now, I simply want to remind everyone that there are two different, but equally-admirable ends to consider and balance in these decisions: the end of ensuring that players of various sexual tastes can enjoy themselves in the game, and the end of ensuring that the games' characters remain internally consistent.

On Silly Criticisms of Portal 2

So, the father of an adopted child is mad at Portal 2.

Now, in his defense, Stapel himself, though apparently annoyed at the game, does not appear to be calling for it to be banned, and still speaks highly of the game in other regards. Further, I suppose it might be kind of upsetting for someone to call you "adopted" as an insult if you actually are adopted.

One quick note, WBTV: Portal 2 is not "a kids' game." It is a game that kids can play, certainly, but it's not a "kids' game." Further, while playing a Portal game will certainly stretch your mind in new and initially uncomfortable ways, it's not "educational" in the sense that it's primarily designed to teach children mathematics or whatever. Please get your facts straight and/or don't try to make things seem worse than they are.

Finally, all I have to say about the actual "controversy," (though I think it's far from big enough to be a controversy) is that people should just generally calm down. I can understand Stapel and his family being a bit startled at first, mayhap, but this is hardly worth getting really upset about.

Duke Nukem Forever Stuff Continues to Be Classless

So... I don't think I could care less about Duke Nukem Forever without actually removing my brain (though maybe that would make it more appealing, come to think of it), but this thing causes me to seriously consider that option. I can never decide if the folks behind Duke Nukem are trying to be satirical in their preposterousness, or if they actually are that preposterous. At some point, once you start releasing things like a marketing game aimed at seeing topless women, the line is very thin. Very thin, indeed.

So, with that, all I really want to say to Gearbox is:

Really, guys? Really?

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That's all for This Week in Stuff! Have a good week, we'll see you Monday for next week's Question of the Week. Now I'm going to go back and play some more LA Noire.

The Philosopher-Geek: On Games-As-Art

2011-05-19T17:35:00.003-04:00

Hello, all.

Have no fear, we are certainly going to return to the series on Dragon Age 2 next time, without a doubt. But as I looked around the Internet these past few weeks (in between bouts of typing my fingers off for my job) I began to read several recurring themes which came again to my attention, and thought I had better discuss them.

So I want to ask a series of questions, and attempt to answer them here. These questions pertain to the mission of the Ontological Geek and the kind of games criticism it purports to be about, and relate to several common concerns surrounding discussion of games-as-art.

So, with that, let's roll.

What is Meant By Games-As-Art, and What is the Ontological Geek Really Trying To Do?

When I first started the Ontological Geek, I was looking for a quick way to summarize what this website was about. "It's a games-criticism blog," is pretty accurate, I suppose, but what I wanted to convey was that mostly, this website is less invested in whether or not a game is fun (though we like fun, don't get me wrong), and more invested in whether or not a game is good art, and "games-criticism" didn't quite convey that for me. I settled on "games-as-art," and I realized the other day that I'd done a bad thing by not properly defining my terms.

Games-as-art as a phrase is hardly unique to me, but when I first used it, I was thinking of the way philosophers use the Latin word qua. Qua literally translates to "as," but it's used in philosophical (and other academic) circles in a slightly more specific manner. Qua, in philosophy, means something more like "in the capacity of," such that to talk about a chair qua chair is to talk about how a particular chair functions in the capacity of chairness. Thus, to talk about games qua art is to talk about how games function as art-- to talk about a particular game qua art is to put aside how it functions as entertainment or escapism, and talk entirely about how it works as art. So when I talk about "games-as-art," that's effectively what I mean. I left out the Latin because I figured we were already approaching dangerously high levels of pretension as it was.

Thus, to talk about games-as-art is to talk about games through a filter-- a filter which emphasizes games' artistic qualities and downplays their other qualities. This is why when I talk about Gears of War 2 through the lens of games-as-art, I tend to speak very harshly of it even though it's one of my favorite games.

This is because there are plenty of other lenses one could use. One can talk about games-as-games, and focus entirely on the functionality of their mechanics and ease of use. One can talk about games-as-rhetorical-devices, and focus on games' unique abilities to communicate ideas through processes. One can talk about games-as-fun, and focus entirely on how much people tend to enjoy a game. One can talk about games-as-cultural-artifacts, or games-as-microcosms-of-reality or any number of other things.

While I said above that to talk about games-as-art is to talk entirely about how games work as art, the barriers between these lenses are a little vague. Art is frequently rhetorical, and is usually supposed to be at least a little bit of fun, etc. Further, no one of these lenses is the "right way" to look at games. Games are all of these things. But what primarily interests me (though I'm interested in all of the above) is games-as-art, so that's mostly what we talk about here.

So, what is it to talk about games-as-art? It is to look at games and look for experiences of beauty, for social commentary, or for ideas about the nature of the world. It is to come to games without preconceptions-- not "this is what I want to play," but "what do the artists want to show me?" It is to engage seriously with the ideas behind every facet of gameplay, and generally to evaluate them with criteria similar to those that define the Meaningful Game.

The idea behind the Ontological Geek is that it is a place for people to engage in serious, in-depth, intellectual discussion about video games, while still hopefully remaining legible to the layperson. The questions we want to address here are "How do games work as art?" and "How can we make them better art?"

But those questions, however valuable, raise another question that we have to address before we can deal with them.

Why Do We Care if Games Are Art?

One of the first things you'll see in any forum discussion about games-as-art is a post questioning why we even care. Why does this matter? Why are we so worked about it? Why does it matter what a bunch of non-gamers think about video games? Can't games just be fun and still worthwhile without also being some sort of pretentious, "art?"

There are a number of answers to this question, and like most questions, there are normative and descriptive answers. Why folks like me and Matt do, descriptively, care about games-as-art may not be the same as why we should, normatively, do so. So I'll attempt to give two descriptive answers for why a lot of people probably do care, and then move on to at least one good reason why we should care.

Answer One: We Seek Societal Legitimacy

One of the first reasons many gamers are so quick to leap to the defense of games-as-art is that we feel a psychological need to justify our behavior as somehow mature, worthwhile, and, perhaps most importantly, adult. As the phrase "video games" still, in many folks' minds, means "childrens' toys," those of us who are adult gamers want to distance ourselves away from the image of childishness.

Many of us gamers spend a great deal of time playing video games, and we are not just 15-year-old layabouts or basement-dwelling college dropouts, either. Plenty of happily married mid-30s folks with respectable jobs and 2.3 children play a lot of video games in their spare time, and no one wants to be seen as the weirdo who still plays with toys. We seek legitimacy, the ability to say "I'm a gamer" without being shunned, and so we argue that games aren't simply toys or entertainment, they are art.

If video games are art, then by playing 25 hours a week of World of Warcraft, I am not just screwing around or playing with imaginary friends. I am engaged in artistic activity. In fact, you should be impressed, just as if I spent 25 hours a week reading literature, or 25 hours a week going to art shows. If games are art, we feel that our behavior, our hobby and our lifestyle can be somehow legitimized.

This is silly and dishonest. Games don't have to be art to be worthwhile. Plenty of art isn't very worthwhile, and plenty of games that don't much seem to be art are still widely regarded as excellent uses of one's time. Furthermore, the same person who disapproves of your 25-hour part-time job playing World of Warcraft isn't likely to be impressed by the distinction. He or she would probably find you "weird" if you spent 25 hours a week reading high literature, too. An argument for games' legitimacy as valuable and worthwhile expenses of time and money does not require that games can be art, and the two discussions ought to be kept wholly separate.

Answer Two: We Want to be Different From Those People

The blood of a great many pixels has been spilled of late to power discussion surrounding the term "gamer." Some folks think the term should go away, arguing that it serves as an artificial line dividing "normal people," from "gamers," and these folks argue that the word perpetuates negative stereotypes about people who play games. The stereotype to which they refer is that of the socially-inept, violent, aggressive, younger guy who does naught but play video games all day, who will never amount to anything or contribute anything to society.

There are many of us who play a lot of video games who would really prefer not to be associated with that stereotype, the more so because there are a lot of very vocal people who seem to fit it to a T. Anyone who has ever spent much time on the Internet or in an actual online game, knows that there are a myriad of obnoxious, foul-mouthed, apparently violently racist and/or homophobic and/or sexist folks out there that call themselves gamers. These are the sorts of folks that threatened Courtney Stanton's life when she went after Penny Arcade, the sort of folks that have gamertags like xXl337FagKillerXx. These are the sorts of folks that try as hard as they can to alienate and harass every single other person in the chatroom or server.

And those of us who aren't that obnoxious really, really, really want nothing to do with them.

So, we try to use every tool at our disposal to draw a line between us and those people. We try to get rid of the word "gamer." We try to create places for intelligent discourse of games, where rampant trolling and hate speech isn't allowed. We try to openly and vocally behave like decent human beings. And we try to use games-as-art to act as a dividing line.

See, xX1337FagKillerXx up there isn't terribly likely to care about games-as-art. He plays games for any number of reasons, but they usually are more about dominance or aggression or escapism, and not so much about mature narrative or beauty. So, we try to talk about games-as-art to draw a line in the sand, and to hopefully identify ourselves as the sort of people who care about that sort of thing. We're mandarins, we say, as we sip Chardonnay, read sections of Dostoyevsky and then play BioShock. We play games as art, not as entertainment.

This is understandable. But there are two problems with this: in the first place, the way to deal with xXL337FagKillerXx is to ban him from your forums and ignore him when you can't do that. Actively trying to wall off an area for him and his ilk is bad because there is simply no place where behaving like a childish brat is acceptable. This leads me to the second problem: there is nothing wrong with playing games for reasons other than their artistic merit.

To suggest that the smart people play games-as-art is to suggest that only the imbeciles play games-as-entertainment or games-as-whatever, which is a problem, because there's nothing wrong with playing games for entertainment purposes. The same person who can truly understand and appreciate the complex narrative of Torment or the philosophical questions raised by BioShock can also really enjoy playing a round of Super Smash Brothers or Gears of War. And that's how it should be, for the same reason that a real cinephile can truly appreciate the great works of film while still enjoying a good old summer blockbuster. To draw random lines in the sand is pointless and more than a little elitist. The point about games-as-art is not that it gives mature gamers something to talk about, it's that games can be art.

Answer Three: We Want To Experience Better Art

We ought to care about games-as-art not so we can feel better about ourselves or disassociate ourselves from reprobates, but so we can foster the development and growth of a new artistic medium.

Stripped of all the criticism, all the fandom, all the sociological studies, art is beautiful, fascinating, and worth our time. We want to experience art, and to encourage its creation and development. We should care about societal recognition of games-as-art because it will allow game-developers the resources and respectability necessary to produce truly great works of art. The development of art does not happen in a vacuum, and the development of video games tends to be very, very expensive.

It is very hard to convince a company to sink an extra $5 million into a game to make it better art unless there is good reason to believe that the community cares about the quality of a game's art. This isn't selfishness or vice or greed, it's perfectly reasonable. The best way to show companies and artists that we want them to make more and better art is by talking about games-as-art.

Art needs criticism and discussion to flourish. Some have suggested that the whole purpose of art is the changes it makes in the observer, the discussions that it engenders between friends and colleagues. So, why should we keep caring about video games as art? Why should we talk about them so much?

Because we want to encourage the artists to make better works of art. Because we want to experience good art. Because we have seen in video games the opportunity for new and exciting ways to communicate beauty and enrich our knowledge of the human condition.

Conclusion

Games can be art, and discussion of games-as-art will help both the medium and ourselves. If we criticize, poke, prod, investigate, talk about and think about games, we will help the medium develop, help it flourish and grow into something truly wonderful and truly respectable. This, in turn, will allow us to experience better and better art, enriching our own lives and making us better people.

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Additional Pylons: You Are Dead

2011-05-17T13:35:00.007-04:00

You're a brilliant, roguish individual with plenty of experience evading and disarming traps, but this one is complicated. The timing of the blades is tricky, and you know that a false step means at the least a hefty injury, which, since you're deep in enemy territory and a great distance away from any proper medical care, is essentially a long-form, suffering version of a more grievous stumble onto one of those glistening spikes. Still, your beloved significant other is on the other side of this trap (and many, many others), so there's only one option: forward. You trail right behind the bristling wave of spikes, leaping around the spinning pole that some evil man tied a whole bunch of swords too, and come out of a daring roll beneath a swinging log covered in cruel hooks... right into the path of a lancing saw blade that tumbles down from the ceiling, ringing melodically off of the stone chamber's walls, and straight into you, cleanly separating your arm from your trunk. You scream and tumble forward out of the trap, and as your vision start to go black from the searing pain (because of course somebody had to POISON the saw), your last thoughts are of your beloved Henry. The angle of his smile and the way his eyelids bunched up when he was surprised. The shame you feel, knowing that he's dead or worse now that your rescue attempt has failed. Or at least, they would be your last thoughts if you weren't standing right before that same gauntlet of traps, reminding yourself to dive after you get past the log.

There is perhaps no game trope more pervasive than non-persistent character death. Even people that have never touched a controller are well aware of the trope. What are the most common causes of the “Game Over” screen? Health bar is empty. Breath has expired. Bomb went off. And your character is most likely bleeding, diced, drowned, atomized, eaten, insane, turned into a zombie, or maybe just falling off the bottom of the screen upside down and with a shocked look on his face. But Game Over is not the end of the line. You get options, assuming that the game doesn't just take you back to your most recent checkpoint automatically. But for the most part, you find yourself back in your hero's skin five minutes prior to the most recent grisly demise.

This week's Additional Pylons is focused on the traditional punishments games use to illustrate player failure, and we'll start by asking, “Did you really have to kill him?”

Did You Really Have To Kill Him?

Unlike other forms of art, games demand some level of challenge, as Bill has demonstrated in an earlier post. Challenge means that there must be some chance of failure. In fact, the chance of failure makes games all the more fun; if the first attempt at a level or boss results in failure, when you come back the second time and use what you've learned there's a much greater emotional pay-off for your success. You feel like you have: A) learned something and B) vanquished a foe that has troubled and beaten you in the past. Such an experience of failure, as many hero narratives demonstrate, can be a great motivator for improving one's mastery of the game and one's ability to trounce a particular foe.

Death is easily the most common way that developers punish player failure. There are of course a great many reasons why character death is so prolific. The first is that it is an easy narrative way to express total failure. There are, perhaps, fates worse than being eviscerated, but they take too much time to present believably and powerfully without subjecting the player to an extensive experience every time they fail, and that (unless it is the point of the game, in which case: How interesting, I'd love to see your game) is counterproductive to experiencing the meat of the game. And so the character gets eviscerated, or suffers a less gruesome, but equally final, fate.

Death is also an attractive option because it is decisive: character death represents a conclusive end to the narrative. The player won't ask, “Wait, if barbarian lord Grimsplit was just beaten unconscious and captured, couldn't he then escape and foil the evil wizard's plan anyway?” if Grimsplit's organs are laying on the ground. But the quick return to the last checkpoint communicates that this end was the “wrong” ending, because it did not end in the character's success. The failure that ends in death is discarded as dross, and the game resets to a spot where the player can pursue the “correct” ending. In other words, death enforces the narrative in games that contain a non-flexible story.

Death is also just the natural punishment in certain genres, even outside video games. Zombie games should typically feature character death as punishment, because it is thematically important. There are, perhaps, other ways to punish failure in a zombie game, but there's no real impetus to seek out alternative punishments when your audience expects character brains to get eaten.

But the trend I'm examining runs deeper than avatar death. What I'm really interested in tackling is the model of punishment that character death epitomizes. The model applies to a wide variety of game-play situations: say you had to take actions to protect an important non-player character, and then fail. Almost every time, the narrative won't continue while displaying the ramifications of that character's death or capture; instead, the narrative will end (even though the hero is obviously still capable of action). This is in most cases a good thing; if the game was going to be less entertaining and less effective as art without that character, then the narrative reset is preferable. But let's take a critical look at this model, which resets the narrative in instances of player failure.

Tabula Rasa

As mentioned above, the narrative reset functions to enforce games with a single story-line, and the trope is so enmeshed with video gaming as a whole that calling it a dominating theme isn't really doing the trope's proliferation justice. It's a trope that is totally unique to video games, since it only enters the experience as a result of player failure. But what are the ramifications of the narrative reset model?

First, the emotional and artistic impact of the failure is stripped away by a narrative reset, which is rather obvious, but it can also alter the impact of the scenes that follow the reset. A narrative reset can make the last ten or fifteen minutes of game not count, and any emotions evoked in those ten or fifteen minutes will be evoked again the second time around, but naturally with less intensity, like watching a movie scene twice in a row before moving on to the next. Repetition of a scene can kill dramatic tension and continuity, and the narrative reset model has the potential to screw with the impact of an immediately following scene that depends upon the themes and content of the repeated scene.

Second, it removes the narrative risk of the death of a main character except at the very end of a tale. The character will only really die if the game developers want him to, and everything else is reset. Other tragedies may occur as the developers wish, but there's a virtual guarantee that the main avatar of the player is going to survive until the end of the game, at least. It creates an even greater expectation that a main character will survive than even other forms of narrative art. This trend has some roots in logistics, since killing off a main character before the end of the game requires a large amount of extra programming, assuming that the developers actually introduce a new character and not just a palette-swap.

This trope is not necessarily a bad thing; artistic tropes become tropes because they work well and fit the genre. And a game need not subvert this trope in order to be entertaining or good art. However, subverting tropes is a great way to tell diverse stories that the trope itself can't support, and there are often stories that spring out of the subversion of a trope.

Don't Fear The Reaper

Some of the best games I've played have subverted the trope of character death to a greater or lesser degree. Prince of Persia, for instance, merely calls attention to the trope, and incorporates it into its own overarching narrative by rewinding time and, even when the character DOES actually die, explaining it away as a slip-up in the Prince's storytelling. The more recent Prince of Persia does away with character death completely; there are still minor penalties for failing, but the narrative is never interrupted. Braid pulls a similar trick; the character can die, but time can be rewound indefinitely. In Planescape: Torment, death would set you back, but it was part of the narrative since you couldn't really, truly die; you'd just wake up in the mortuary, feeling stupid for trying to take on a whole flock of vargouilles.

All of these have a rather straight-forward treatment or subversion of character death, but they do maintain a similar model of punishment; even if the reset is justified by the narrative, it is still a reset. Because of player failure, the narrative was interrupted, and so the player is returned to the same situation and given another chance to assert the proper narrative. Is there the possibility of a different model of player punishment?

I propose this out of my experience with role-playing games, in which player failure can be expressed in a multitude of ways and can serve to enrich the narrative instead of interrupting it. I realize that this would probably be intensely difficult to build, but what if a game doesn't threaten the character's life directly? What if a character becomes injured, with all the penalties that would imply, and a character's goals or affairs become victim instead? And if the narrative continues, the punishment for player failure continues to haunt the player as the story continues. This could allow for really rich narratives. Failure is occasionally something characters have to deal with, but it's almost always a part of an inflexible narrative, and so the player doesn't feel as invested in the failure as he or she otherwise might. If the player's failures are combined with the character's, that means a huge decrease in distance; when the hero accidentally lets the villain escape and that villain starts to kill people that the hero loves, the player will feel those deaths more acutely if their failure played a role in letting it happen.

Games have begun to reflect player choice in the narrative, to a greater or lesser degree. BioWare games are particularly good examples of making player choice matter. But I'm suggesting something else entirely. What if player skill became a deciding factor in the narrative? What if the punishment for player failure played out in the narrative? I suggest that such a game would realize narrative possibilities that no game has before.

Conclusion

Character death and the narrative reset model is found in the majority of video games, and as I've tried to explain here, the trope has some distinct narrative ramifications, and I doubt that I've exhausted the concept. So, what do you think? Do you think there's something to my suggestion of a game that explores the narrative results of player failure, even if it is a nightmare to program? What other possibilities do you think exist in subverting the narrative reset model?

Question of the Week: If Music Be the Food of Love

2011-05-02T21:38:00.000-04:00

Last week's Question of the Week was on romantic relationships in video games, and apparently none of our readers can think of any that are particularly interesting. This is probably more a commentary on the state of engaging relationships on gaming than the imagination of our readers. If, however, you think you have an answer, but just weren't aware of the Question, you are more than welcome to go back a week and let us know!

This week the question is simple:

Video game soundtracks have evolved, over the years, from simple 8-bit chiptunes to fully orchestrated symphonic scores. What is your favorite video game soundtrack, and what, if you had to pick, would you put forward as the best?

Matt is busy with finals this week, but Bill knows that he is quite fond of both Inon Zur's soundtrack to Dragon Age 2 and Jesper Kyd's work for Assassin's Creed II.

As for Bill, he thought long and hard about what to say for this, and regretfully informs you that his answer to both questions is the same: Nobuo Uematsu's excellent score to Final Fantasy VII.

This is probably an uncontroversial statement, but hearkening back to all of the various game scores Bill has ever paid attention to, he honestly cannot think of a better score. Using very limited resources, Uematsu crafted a beautiful and varied soundtrack, ranging from the bombastically symphonic (One-Winged Angel) to rock (Still More Fighting) to the really very silly (It's Difficult to Stand on Both Feet, Isn't It.)

Each major character is given his or her own excellent motif, and the various musical themes weave together in later scores to underscore the emotional impact, themes and symbolism of the game. In many ways, it functions like a silent film score-- as FFVII was before the advent of voice acting, much of the nuance and subtlety in the game is conveyed less by the hackneyed (or at least poorly-translated) dialogue or comparatively rudimentary graphics, and more by Uematsu's excellent score.