tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-73440683516539467402024-02-20T18:43:17.756-08:00Versus CluClu LandIroquois Pliskinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14324582950813408440noreply@blogger.comBlogger148125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7344068351653946740.post-91210890380711977262010-01-13T11:42:00.001-08:002010-01-13T13:12:07.598-08:00Bayonetta<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEju_aXWGbGIL-Ew5_pGpiu1b0xx4iHo3giPmTS7_09yua7ZwhWe2JcGdpjZ_HMwij8qJIebnmxsj5jZIGenY3PP_gAzzb8XsjiBMT5JcGQ7KWDgot4I2nl3K8q7lxiejxlBHdNDKESSqpl7/s1600-h/bayonetta-3.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 329px; height: 465px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEju_aXWGbGIL-Ew5_pGpiu1b0xx4iHo3giPmTS7_09yua7ZwhWe2JcGdpjZ_HMwij8qJIebnmxsj5jZIGenY3PP_gAzzb8XsjiBMT5JcGQ7KWDgot4I2nl3K8q7lxiejxlBHdNDKESSqpl7/s320/bayonetta-3.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5426312282049022850" border="0" /></a> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Let's make no mistake: <i>Bayonetta</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is an embarrassment waiting to happen. To play this game in front of any human being over the age of 12-- indeed, </span><i>just to play it in front of yourself</i><span style="font-style: normal;">-- is to develop a sense that something has gone horribly wrong with your recreation. This choice of leisure bespeaks some profound defect in your makeup. That niggling thought that shadows much of our play-- that in the time it takes you to complete this video entertainment and complete it again on hard, you could have taken a serious chunk out of William Makepeace Thackeray's </span><i>Vanity Fair</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, an act of actual aesthetic and moral worth-- is amplified to the point of palpable shame by </span><i>Bayonetta</i><span style="font-style: normal;">'s relentless barrage of steaming tawdry nonsense. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> Some commentators have seen fit to praise this game's aesthetics, and it is worthwhile to note what one would be praising here. </span><i>Bayonetta</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> does not present a </span><i>world</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> so much as a rich slurry of eroto-religious iconography: butterflies demons motorbikes poledancing archangels cans etc. It has a strictly agglomerative notion of cool. I had the pleasure of reading Hiroki Azuma's </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Otaku-Database-Animals-Hiroki-Azuma/dp/0816653526"><i>Otaku: Japan's Database Animals</i></a><span style="font-style: normal;"> last semester, and its thesis that Otaku consumers view their entertainments as loose aggregations of chara-</span><i>moe</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> elements goes a long way towards explaining (if not excusing) Bayonetta's style.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> This is especially palpable when we turn to the titular heroine: the game's creators have been <a href="http://platinumgames.com/blog/">refreshingly frank</a> about the creative process, and if I understand them right they concede that she is a loving concatenation of fetishes. (My favorite revelation: when designing the stone-horse torture device, “I didn’t know how she would really get tied up, so I had to check some of “those” sites during work hours to get the production down just right.”) If this game had been made in 1999, she probably would have had </span><i>cat ears</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> As a fourth-wave feminist, I have to admit that I find all the leather and crotch-zooming deeply inoffensive. Leigh Alexander has <a href="http://www.gamepro.com/article/features/213466/bayonetta-empowering-or-exploitative/">called</a> </span><i>Bayonetta </i><span style="font-style: normal;">“empowering”, and though I don't know if I would go </span><i>that</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> far, I have no moral qualms about implausibly sexy broads wrecking shop. Which is to say: I don't see any </span><i>necessary</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> contradiction between humid eroticism and power. Bayonetta is nothing if not capable.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> A further point: the real perniciousness of sexualized images of women, to me, resides in the way that they warp our images of womanhood. The evil begins when a girl sees that image and says, that is what I am </span><i>supposed</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> to look like. I cannot imagine how anyone, even someone in the grasp of the body selfhatred industrial complex, could take these representations seriously. The faux verisimilitude of your standard issue of </span><i>Cosmopolitan</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is far more harmful per capita than this ludicrous game.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> With these important ethical matters dispatched, I am warranted to advise you, loyal reader, that </span><i>Bayonetta</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is an awesome video game. </span><i>Bayonetta, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">though it is deeply uncool as an aesthetic object, has some great moments. American developers lack courage when it comes to camp, and </span><i>Bayonetta</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is refreshing in its insane commitment to its chosen array of signifiers. (Susan Sontag nails it as usual: “the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization.”) Finally, here is a game that </span><i>cries out</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> for an all-male stage adaptation. Amirite?</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> Furthermore, </span><i>Bayonetta</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is the best game of its kind to come out in many years. (that is to say, the best since the Xbox </span><i>Ninja Gaiden</i><span style="font-style: normal;">) The kicking and the punching, they are uncommonly fluid and satisfying. The “witch time” mechanic, which is the lynchpin of its combat, is brilliant in that it forces the player to focus on understanding and anticipating enemy behavior instead of mashing away; the loadtime combo training is fantastic addition as well. While the design is hampered at points by a collection of flaws that seem to cramp almost every Japanese-designed character action game (lengthy cutscenes, dodgy checkpointing, repetition of bosses and environments, unpresaged modifications to the ground-rules of combat), the underlying bed hacking and slashing is so indescribably luscious that it redeems these annoyances. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> So, Gus Mastrapa's <a href="http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2010/01/bayonetta-style/">opinion</a> with regard to </span><i>Bayonetta</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is wrong: you cannot pass up this game for its visual and thematic inanity. The libretto for your average <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fidelio">operatic masterpiece</a> is some genuinely nonsense, and this does nothing to obscure the beauty of the music that is its rationale. Immortal Jazz music has been performed to songs on the theme of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heebie_Jeebies_%28composition%29">horniness</a>. As Frank Lantz astutely <a href="http://gamedesignadvance.com/?p=1648">noted</a>, games are more music than cinema. Let the music take your mind. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span></p>Iroquois Pliskinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14324582950813408440noreply@blogger.com249tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7344068351653946740.post-75655150017842316922009-12-23T10:27:00.000-08:002009-12-23T10:38:49.504-08:00I Was on a Podcast!<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://gamedesignadvance.com/headers/images/anothercastleHeader.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 380px; height: 380px;" src="http://gamedesignadvance.com/headers/images/anothercastleHeader.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:100%;">About a month ago, loyal VCCL reader, eminent game scholar, and beard enthusiast </span>Charles Pratt agreed to have me onto his gaming podcast, Another Castle. If you don't already listen to this podcast, you really should: given the roster of game development luminaries and accomplished scholars that have already been the show the presence of this semidefunct games-blogger is, er, pretty incongruous. Me, I was just pretty psyched to get a free Kirin and appear in a forum whose previous two guests were Eric fucking Zimmerman and Heather fucking Chaplin. Holy Christ!<br /><br />I really enjoy arguing with Charles, and this podcast is pretty representative of the class of things we like to gab about, such as the <a href="http://gamedesignadvance.com/?p=1796">nature of reality</a>. <a href="http://gamedesignadvance.com/?p=1949"> Check it out!</a>Iroquois Pliskinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14324582950813408440noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7344068351653946740.post-54418319241995874812009-12-23T08:15:00.000-08:002009-12-23T10:24:06.844-08:00King of Aughts: The Shock of the New<span style="font-size:100%;">Never forget: Somebody </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >invented </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Tetris. In June of 1984, a new light dawned on the world. Tetris was not a simulation of some extant human activity; when those blocks descended from the top of the well, something theretofore unimagined came into being. </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >Especially</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> in 2009, a year defined by its parade of ocassionally-ingenious incremental refinements, we must celebrate the new. This is no time to cheer retrenchment.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;font-size:180%;" >Grand Theft Auto III</span><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><img src="file:///C:/Users/wessels/AppData/Local/Temp/moz-screenshot.png" alt="" /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUllCBcmH7_BeAgmlSaKklNaHWJd6MQZXUb2qD4nmyA99NghjS9earIJb4z6y8icXghXNqJOfFTS0CbTQKFAKC2PkgQ7-P5UgS_J9FlwwxjZneGlTBV8MTyxfnuYnpnY63erZjWvDCEKjV/s1600-h/070403_CB_grandTheftAutoEX.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUllCBcmH7_BeAgmlSaKklNaHWJd6MQZXUb2qD4nmyA99NghjS9earIJb4z6y8icXghXNqJOfFTS0CbTQKFAKC2PkgQ7-P5UgS_J9FlwwxjZneGlTBV8MTyxfnuYnpnY63erZjWvDCEKjV/s400/070403_CB_grandTheftAutoEX.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5418468482157597170" border="0" /></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Even now, it is not difficult for me to summon up the wave of awe that I felt on first playing this game. One representative detail is burned into my mind: </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >there were radio stations</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. Not only could you walk on a </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >street</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> and </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >get into a car</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, but that car was connected to a wholly fictional radio network. While the later games in the </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >GTA</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> series better achieve the perverse environmental sensibility that the first open-world GTA groped towards, there is no downplaying the fact that </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >that</span> wonder, the thrill of jumping in and out of cars and driving around a populated cityscape, was the maybe the most impressive thing that happened in a video game this decade. All I know is, I wasn't playing much during late nineties, and it was putting this game into a rented playstation 2 in winter of '01 that got me thinking: I should keep an eye on these video games. So, GTA 3 was my personal road to Damascus moment when it comes to computer generated entertainment. Feel free to allot blame accordingly.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:180%;"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Katamari Damacy</span><br /></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgo6vB5I2GtqJauNGodg0r89nqsQ_9716gFFxz0_36F-EnatkNP0F8xGcMrfq0CA1eqT3qL5_P7QrJHzpgEdnrvhyphenhyphenIYoddOhpJy6PK65P98CWyQhD0BStzbqRXg_Kmr1wnjWGqSH0g8BKQf/s1600-h/katamari_1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgo6vB5I2GtqJauNGodg0r89nqsQ_9716gFFxz0_36F-EnatkNP0F8xGcMrfq0CA1eqT3qL5_P7QrJHzpgEdnrvhyphenhyphenIYoddOhpJy6PK65P98CWyQhD0BStzbqRXg_Kmr1wnjWGqSH0g8BKQf/s400/katamari_1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5418474628362937010" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:100%;">God bless Keita Takahashi. </span>Seriously. Katamari Damacy is a game of <span style="font-style: italic;">only one idea</span>. But what an idea! This game would have been revelatory for its wholly unique mechanic and playful manipulation of scale, a work of genius even without the dadaesque sensibility that informed the gameplay: the panicked shrieks of innocent children and livestock, the batshit crazy king in the sky, the continuous splendid parade of visual nonsequitur.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size:180%;">Rock Band<br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><embed id="mymovie" flashvars="playerMode=embedded&movieAspect=4.3&flavor=EmbeddedPlayerVersion&skin=http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/cne_flash/production/media_player/proteus/one/skins/gamespot.png&paramsURI=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gamespot.com%2Fpages%2Fvideo_player%2Fxml.php%3Fid%3DIyZlnzr55b4FuDfe%26mode%3Duser_video%26width%3D432%26height%3D362" wmode="transparent" allowscriptaccess="always" quality="high" name="mymovie" style="" src="http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/cne_flash/production/media_player/proteus/one/proteus2.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="432" height="362"></embed><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span><span><span>To think: how happy we were in '07 to be onanistically plunking away at plastic guitars. Perfecting our run at Buckethead's <span style="font-style: italic;">Jordan</span>. Make no mistake, I loved that shit. We just didn't know any better. Rock Band wasn't the mere accretion of supplemental prosthetic enjoyments. It took the core pleasure of Guitar Hero, participating in the creation of music, and brought a wholly novel feeling of collective achievement. It unlocked in me a previously unknown, burning desire to croon in a semipublic forum. It added drums. It was the most fun I had with a video game this decade. Just watch the video. <span style="font-style: italic;">Look how happy these people are!</span> And the they are right. </span></span></span></span><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size:180%;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><br />WarioWare: Twisted!<br /></span></span></span></span></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixLTBdElrhyphenhyphen0Acd66pplx4KwMFtgBsQo8rHJ_k1Kj6lJraC4X9pJxqwa9z_0G2K4-Dr6HqkiOS8JrRQkQ5-vBPwNeZ5jl2nxUuLB-9JkJeahhDnTAFpkOK2MLEqWUUxWVBk_v7jFU9KSVi/s1600-h/Wario+Ware+Twisted+%282%29.gif"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 313px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixLTBdElrhyphenhyphen0Acd66pplx4KwMFtgBsQo8rHJ_k1Kj6lJraC4X9pJxqwa9z_0G2K4-Dr6HqkiOS8JrRQkQ5-vBPwNeZ5jl2nxUuLB-9JkJeahhDnTAFpkOK2MLEqWUUxWVBk_v7jFU9KSVi/s400/Wario+Ware+Twisted+%282%29.gif" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5418484536920664482" border="0" /></a>I am continually amazed by Nintendo's uncanny grasp of the basic elements of play. When it published its first collection of microgames for the GBA, we confronted a shuffled deck of primordial gameplay elements, sheathed in an absurdist casing and revealed under duress. WarioWare posed a novel challenge to its players: "figure out what this game is! You have three seconds!" <span style="font-style: italic;">Twisted!</span>, the second game in the series, gets the top nod for the way it expanded the number of verbs at hand. Furthermore, physically rotating a gameboy is the way that world 1-1 of Super Mario Brothers was <span style="font-style: italic;">meant to be played</span>.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-size:180%;">Boom Blox</span></span></span><span style="font-size:180%;"><br /></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsb8ZG9BSqUAHcbTEyR0NMm7Ha1rD6amj14SDCBHlpXxHWVtsLjmyIPPeFulsOP4YQjZfPDGpKraFc6rmw7w-lNctK_zxCOcGNxmHTT8QycmnyDuvvmPY4GPTnXGT_daU4dNEOuTVDkby2/s1600-h/boom-blox-490w.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 280px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsb8ZG9BSqUAHcbTEyR0NMm7Ha1rD6amj14SDCBHlpXxHWVtsLjmyIPPeFulsOP4YQjZfPDGpKraFc6rmw7w-lNctK_zxCOcGNxmHTT8QycmnyDuvvmPY4GPTnXGT_daU4dNEOuTVDkby2/s400/boom-blox-490w.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5418488204364282850" border="0" /></a>To me, <span style="font-style: italic;">Boom Blox</span> is the first and maybe the only Wii game that made optimal use of the gestural possibilities afforded by its hardware. An accelerometer bestows myriad potential actions, and it just so happens that hurling objects with physics at blocks and cubical beavers is the best among them. Layering puzzle elements and a marvelous version of <span style="font-style: italic;">Jenga</span> into this formula only heightens the impressiveness of this seemingly obvious discovery.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:180%;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">World of Goo<br /></span></span></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEfc2xdOC7kdwiXup-NL88Kj1grJF3jr01onZJjo5K3AqfosezsQRLsXzQOG1lPI2u-298-1baanWWa4XB1LhRl7bNGIgo0IlvsTnP5pgeNzgjLeV-bRfwDzaGT3aI2lLgC4BDRZQqs3gb/s1600-h/Goo.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEfc2xdOC7kdwiXup-NL88Kj1grJF3jr01onZJjo5K3AqfosezsQRLsXzQOG1lPI2u-298-1baanWWa4XB1LhRl7bNGIgo0IlvsTnP5pgeNzgjLeV-bRfwDzaGT3aI2lLgC4BDRZQqs3gb/s400/Goo.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5418492813151338354" border="0" /></a>I must admit that I had not given much thought to the gameplay potential of adhesion. The virtual representation of physics was a mainstay of this decade's games, but <span style="font-style: italic;">World of Goo </span>stands apart for the way it devised an innovative game around the pedestrian idea of structural engineering. If that were not enough, the game spins a delightfully indirect yarn throughout the course of the game and continually introduces novel gameplay wrinkles into its basic recipe. As the game develops, you are always doing something new with your brain, and that is a mark of great design.Iroquois Pliskinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14324582950813408440noreply@blogger.com71tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7344068351653946740.post-7953537874955783022009-11-27T13:34:00.001-08:002009-11-27T13:39:35.084-08:00King of Aughts: Preamble<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidsQtgiwZTzbLe6-Q2gxMTWLN6wZpxqqi904gT-SrvtHsqMfQEGOn9holv-Sm7H-a-_VTdBfFZIYj7VVzznKx6oyqOzl4-XsiPWd6w6CdexlKb3Iz9R-qITABTXUXs0QxX3XxaYpqEaejq/s1600/notorious_big1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 300px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidsQtgiwZTzbLe6-Q2gxMTWLN6wZpxqqi904gT-SrvtHsqMfQEGOn9holv-Sm7H-a-_VTdBfFZIYj7VVzznKx6oyqOzl4-XsiPWd6w6CdexlKb3Iz9R-qITABTXUXs0QxX3XxaYpqEaejq/s400/notorious_big1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5408900265656736210" border="0" /></a> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I am a believer in lists. And not just the exuberant catalogue-- no, I am a believer in rank. A lot of sane people will tell you that pleasure in general and the pleasure of videogames in particular is an irreducibly private phenomenon, and that <i>definitive judgment</i> has no place in our commerce with art. De gustibus non disputandum. I am not one of these people. I think that video games are things, and that there is a difference between good things and bad things. This is why we make lists about them. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">However, I also believe that it's madness to affix numbers to a decade's worth of creative effort. Why? Well, it's because I am a pluralist, and I have think there is more than one kind of excellence in this world. Just as there are diverse virtues that belong to human beings-- one can be a good soldier, or a good scholar, or a good politician, or a good husband, though rarely at once-- there is more than one way to be an excellent work of art. The heterogeneity of goodness is one reason we are inclined to think that artistic taste is only subjective.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">This heterogeneity is especially critical when it comes to games. The video games are a hybrid medium-- they're both systems of rules and systems of representation. It's entirely possible for either element of this alloy to be independently magnificent. While I think the happy marriage of these two members is the manifest destiny of the artform, as critics we should find it our duty to appreciate both artistry and design. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">So, in the name of these principles the good ship Clu is going to steam out of drydock and praise the shit out of some video games over the next few weeks. I've been thinking about doing an end-of-decade list for a while, and I've ginned up some categories designed to capture the manifold ways that games are good. At this point, I am also prepared to promise some blurbs. <i>Blurbs as far as the eye can see</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.</span></p><br />Bear in mind: I am <span style="font-style: normal;">a</span><i> total charlatan</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> when it comes to video game criticism. For about four out of ten years in this decade I didn't play many video games at all. I don't own all the console systems and I've probably played less than a dozen PC games to completion this decade. (</span><i>Baldur's Gate II</i><span style="font-style: normal;">? I barely knew 'er) My frame of reference is </span><i>not to be trusted</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. </span> <p></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Finally, dear readers, I entreat to you distrust anything anybody ever says about art. Stephen Deadalus advised us rightly: “Beauty is a blank wall with Post No Bills.” Play, in particular, is the most anarchic of human pleasures. What kind of fool goes about trying to yoke joy under laws? Iroquois Pliskin, that's who. </span> </p>Iroquois Pliskinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14324582950813408440noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7344068351653946740.post-26332079622171206862009-06-22T21:53:00.000-07:002009-06-23T01:30:30.480-07:00So Close!<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5eW_IVybecr4ODDkJeecyeKV5YmKAgEPUimhobUNxmaOiBImRwBf1D3QqR7r1HsUVfEq7rEZdWrufH1G24Ec2ML7ZBh33yH5iwVZRHRsJnMqKvixGjzKwBMTghSiBWCjSjmn0kSY_F378/s1600-h/586528-mirrors_edge_artwork4_super.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 345px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5eW_IVybecr4ODDkJeecyeKV5YmKAgEPUimhobUNxmaOiBImRwBf1D3QqR7r1HsUVfEq7rEZdWrufH1G24Ec2ML7ZBh33yH5iwVZRHRsJnMqKvixGjzKwBMTghSiBWCjSjmn0kSY_F378/s400/586528-mirrors_edge_artwork4_super.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5350382729219639666" border="0" /></a><br /><i>Mirror's Edge</i> is a curious case: the game that gets <i>exactly one thing right</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. I may have spent some time in the past prattling on about the idea of a </span><i>Gesamtkuntswerk</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, but the bald truth is that in most circumstances a video game can get by, critically speaking, through dogged adherence to </span><i>just</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span><i>one</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> successful gameplay concept. Take </span><i>Crackdown</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. That game has </span><i>almost nothing</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> going for it: no narrative to speak of, a charmless and weirdly depopulated open world, janky driving, mediocre graphics etc etc. But then, there is the jumping around on buildings and shooting. </span><i>That is all it takes, folks</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. </span> <p></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">The cardinal achievement of </span><i>Mirror's Edge</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is how effectively it creates the feeling of inhabiting a fleet human skull, rather than a steadicam. While so many first-person games give this dogged feeling that the smooth arc of a camera boom is being made to simulate animal locomotion, </span><i>Mirror's Edge</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> just nails the feeling of momentum, the sensation of weight in your movements, the subtle but increasingly palpable bob of the head as you gain speed. First-person platforming has been attempted before, and effectively at that (remember </span><i>Jumping Flash</i><span style="font-style: normal;">? 'course you do!), but it's never been done in a way that does justice to the particularities of embodied vision. </span><i>Mirror's Edge</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> shines in these small gestures towards perceptual realism: the way the world swirls around your head when you make a tumbling landing, the way it swims in front of your eyes as you plummet to your death. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">To me, it is astonishing that the designers of </span><i>Mirror's Edge </i><span style="font-style: normal;">apparently managed to </span><i>mistake</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> these core pleasures that their game offered. </span><i>Prince of Persia's </i><span style="font-style: normal;">no-death mechanic (actually an unusually dense checkpointing system) was maligned at release for being a sop to the noobs, which it was, but it also had a positive function: the impossibility of failure incentivized throwing yourself headlong through the environment as fast as you could. </span><i>Prince of Persia</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is most successful when you fell into a rhythm and were able to whip past the lush scenery in top gear. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">The heights of </span><i>Mirror's Edge</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> are even better: you're booking across the rooftops, looking around for the next legible piece of the environment, navigating the world at a such a terrific pace that you lose the habit of conscious reflection. While the path through its roofops are almost as linear as </span><i>Persia</i><span style="font-style: normal;">'s consistently funnelish pathways, your elevation and the breadth of your field of vision in </span><i>Mirror's Edge</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> lends a unique feeling of grandeur and freedom to the business of running and tumbling and losing the fuzz. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Which all makes it, again, so baffling that the game's mechanics seem to actively deter you from falling into this insanely pleasurable flow. The “runner's vision” environmental color-coding is an excellent technique for making the environment instantly readable, but the platforming is too finicky to engage in without the prospect of failure. Chris Dahlen <a href="http://savetherobot.wordpress.com/2008/11/29/games-are-software/">put it best</a>: “I’d say that its core problem is that it looks like </span><em>Rock Band 2</em><span style="font-style: normal;"> but plays like </span><em>Mega Man 9</em><span style="font-style: normal;">; you want to settle in and enjoy the thrill, but imagine if </span><em>Rock Band</em><span style="font-style: normal;"> stopped the song every single time you hit a bum note.” While </span><i>Prince of Persia</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> was too generous, rewarding you if you jumped in the general direction of the next platform (which gave rise to the otherwise-curious comparison of the game to an extended quick-time event), </span><i>Mirror's Edge </i><span style="font-style: normal;">is too exacting: lining up your jumps requires too much precision. (This is doubly the case when your destination is a vertical pipe or horizontal bar.) It's too hard to make the tricky jumps on your first try, which brings the game to a grinding halt; this turns the game into a frustrating trial-and-error affair and ruins the best aspects of its gameplay. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">As for the elements of the gameplay that do not directly involve running and jumping and shaking the fuzz, the less said the better. I think the game's Spartan visual aesthetic is praiseworthy, but the bleached fascism of the environments is so uniform that the individual spaces lose any feeling of specificity (the “shopping mall,” for example, looks like another deserted skyscraper atrium). The gameplay elements that are meant to modulate the basic platforming are atrocious: the combat is an abomination, an </span><i>active deterrent</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> to enjoyment. (I recommend the “easy” setting, which reduces, but does not eliminate, the frustrating interactions with law enforcement.) The narrative is forgettable and poorly delivered. Despite frequent stabs at variation (an absurdly simplistic battle with an enraged wrestler, a “sniper” mission, and a surprisingly uninteresting battle against a posse of fellow "runners."), </span><i>Mirror's Edge</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> never succeeds in creating any satisfying variety in its gameplay. The level design deserves a special dishonorable mention: the spatial arrangement of the environments often makes it difficult to distinguish makeable jumps from impossible ones, and the “jumping puzzles” in the interior levels were uniformly tedious and unintuitive. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">All this is a shame, because </span><i>Mirror's Edge</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is </span><i>very close</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> to being a fantastic video game. The failure of </span><i>Mirror's Edge</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> reminded me of an <a href="http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2008/10/29/shigeru-miyamoto-punchout-mario-zelda-portal/">interview</a> that Shigeru Miyamoto gave to Steven Totilo, in which he said the </span><i>only revealing thing</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> I've ever heard Miyamoto say about the craft of game design: “I liken it almost to cooking. There are certain elements of cooking where if you’re able to find a very delicious ingredient, all you have to do is put a little bit of salt on it. Then you cook it and it tastes amazing... chefs are more interested in finding the most delicious ingredients they can find and cooking those in a way that really highlights the inherent deliciousness of the ingredient. And that, I feel, is our job in game design.” To follow up on the analogy: the designers of </span><i>Mirror's Edge</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> drowned fresh sweet corn in the awful sauce. Maybe they'll get it right next time around. </span> </p>Iroquois Pliskinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14324582950813408440noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7344068351653946740.post-2127607447332154522009-04-22T02:16:00.000-07:002009-04-22T08:27:17.333-07:00Against my Better Judgement, I Discuss Citizen Kane and Maybe Art<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5JihwqQYi7-I3yxBVtWUatMkACxriKNONEbgQzM7cuQcyCXcc4NRjaeABzoD7l3zM2Q83J5XmWcPWd5j_x1iL79DdpqNbuRk9u83QLZek2JTejwYGs_9UfZb6Hf8BePxb51AL8JFICWPa/s1600-h/glass.png"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5JihwqQYi7-I3yxBVtWUatMkACxriKNONEbgQzM7cuQcyCXcc4NRjaeABzoD7l3zM2Q83J5XmWcPWd5j_x1iL79DdpqNbuRk9u83QLZek2JTejwYGs_9UfZb6Hf8BePxb51AL8JFICWPa/s400/glass.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5327442203502038434" border="0" /></a><style type="text/css"> <!-- @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } A:link { so-language: zxx } --> </style> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The video-games-writin' set has an odd set of preoccupations, and many of them hinge on the question of legitimacy. The is-games-art debate, the Citizen Kane o' games question, they're all about the stature of games in the cultural marketplace, where they stand in the artistic <a href="http://www.brunching.com/geekhierarchy.html">pecking order</a>. (Here's a hint: <i>pretty fucking low</i>. It's <i>lonely</i> at the bottom. Hence the contest between video game and comic book enthusiasts, the “<a href="http://sexyvideogameland.blogspot.com/2009/04/kicking-dog.html?showComment=1239195000000#c875696501508294129">Saddest Fight on the Internet</a>.”) </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">One of the major problems with this discourse is that the are-games-art conversation almost never goes anywhere. I'm not denying that some good work has been done in this line (N'Gai Croal's <a href="http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/levelup/archive/2007/07/30/croal-vs-ebert-vs-barker-on-whether-videogames-can-be-high-art-round-1.aspx">reply</a> to Roger Ebert is maybe his finest piece), but I've never felt the conversation produces much. As soon as you pose the question the whole issue becomes a definitional wrangle over what <i>art</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is; one party or another begins lobbing stipulations at the other and a substantive issue becomes a semantical one. Comment threads allover the internet are overstuffed with useless arguments of this very form.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">The pervasive error here, which Wittgenstein warned against, is the presumption that there is one or more properties-- authorial intent, emotional depth etc.-- the possession of which unerringly discriminates art from nonart. The </span><i>Philosophical Investigations</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (supposing you try to understand it, which I cannot in good conscience recommend), will disabuse you of this misguided idea that there's a </span><i>criterion</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> to be had when it comes to applying concepts like “art.” There's a wealth of interesting historical and anthropological observations to be made about how we </span><i>use</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> the concept of art-- what it means for us to treat some portion of our culture the way we treat </span><i>Pride and Prejudice</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, say-- but we're not going to unearth a </span><i>metaphysical</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> truth, an occult rule, that will magically decide the question for us. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Leigh Alexander, in partnership with games-crit mandarin Ian Bogsot, recently launched a <a href="http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2009/04/opinion_why_raising_kane_wont.php">salvo</a> in a neighboring dispute, the Citizen Kane o' Games question. Their point is that we should put the whole issue to bed, as the dynamics of cultural legitimacy presupposed by the question are outdated and irrelevant in the new-media landscape. “we think that having a Citizen Kane will prove our artistic legitimacy,” Bogost remarks, “but masterworks are not how artistic legitimacy is proven anymore.” There's a lot of truth to this; the critical discourse on games, like all other cultural discourse, has become more and more fragmented and specialized since the advent of the internet. The scattered condition of our critical polis is ill-suited to king-making. Artistic legitimacy is a social phenomenon, something that we create ourselves-- a fiction, as Bogost says. It's necessarily bound to the forms of media that sustain and disseminate it. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">The problem with all this is that we're asking the wrong question. The “are games art?” question is </span><i>boring</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. The “will there be a Citizen Kane of games question?” is equally so. While we can make some more-or-less intelligent prognostications about the the new economics of cultural capital in the internet era, even this is a purely speculative. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> <span style="font-style: normal;">The interesting question, to me, is </span><i>what kind of art games are</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. That is, we should be asking ourselves what kind of formal dynamics and pleasures are inherent in the medium, and be able to identify when these formal capacities are used well. (This is another way of posing the question: </span><a href="http://versusclucluland.blogspot.com/2009/02/clarification.html"><i>how are games fun</i></a><span style="font-style: normal;">?) </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">And this is one area where thinking about what </span><i>Citizen Kane </i><span style="font-style: normal;">achieved (rather than what it </span><i>represents</i><span style="font-style: normal;">) is genuinely</span><i> </i><span style="font-style: normal;">important. The reason that </span><i>Kane</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> has the kind of cachet it does is because it displayed such a consummate command of the formal capacities of cinema, as a medium. (I think Alexander and Bogost do </span><i>Kane</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> something of an injustice; the article reads as if its cultural status is an accident of history, and underplay the role of its superb artistry in its achievement of that status) It wrought a novel marriage of form and content by creating a visual language that complimented its thematic preoccupations. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">There's a brilliant bit in Michael Chabon's </span><i>Kavalier and Clay</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> that captures this. They've just come from the movie, and Joe is trying to explain to Sammy that Welles' masterpiece holds the key to their own nascent, illegitimate medium:</span></p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">It was that C</span><i>itizen Kane</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> represented, more than any other movie Joe had seen, the total blending of narration and image... Without the witty, potent dialogue and the puzzling shape of the story, the movie would have been merely an American version of the kind of brooding, shadow-filled Ufa-style expressionist stuff that Joe had grown up watching in Prague. Without the brooding shadows and bold adventuring of the camera, it would have been merely a clever movie about a rich bastard. It was much more, than any move really needed to be. In this one crucial regard-- its inextricable braiding of image and narrative-- </span><i>Citizen Kane </i><span style="font-style: normal;">was like a comic book</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Now, cinema is much more akin to comic books than games. Let's lay this aside. It's this </span><i>braiding</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> we should be thinking about. We should ask ourselves whether a game can achieve a relevantly similar kind of synthesis. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">To tip my hand a bit, I think this would involve exploiting the fact that games are both </span><i>rules</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> and </span><i>fiction</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, form and content. The game creates a certain space of possibilities for the player to inhabit and the fiction invests those choices with meaning. The genius of </span><i>Bioshock</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, for instance, was the way that the game's upgrade-mechanics (acquiring ADAM, a scarce and morally hazardous resource) played off against its thematic concerns with the costs of untrammeled self-interest. It <a href="http://clicknothing.typepad.com/click_nothing/2007/10/ludonarrative-d.html">lost its way</a> on this point, but <span style="font-style: italic;">Bioshock </span>offers (along with </span><i>Portal, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">and maybe </span><i>Braid</i><span style="font-style: normal;">) something of genuine use: not a cultural monolith, but an example of what videogame art might look like.</span></p>Iroquois Pliskinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14324582950813408440noreply@blogger.com39tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7344068351653946740.post-47222223440608268262009-04-19T22:52:00.001-07:002009-04-20T00:05:46.120-07:00A Review<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO3Dqimm433RQon-36kTySPcOw_wvPc5rar58ozqLHToH-Fkw1MOZQsrl_WrX6G0xAXDNO4GbJ7uufwkDyQ-iS7SWEr9UsHKRIhDH1CxtFVmC8d3p42o0xwWlDoJareof5dSWzQvJESGss/s1600-h/gw2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 275px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO3Dqimm433RQon-36kTySPcOw_wvPc5rar58ozqLHToH-Fkw1MOZQsrl_WrX6G0xAXDNO4GbJ7uufwkDyQ-iS7SWEr9UsHKRIhDH1CxtFVmC8d3p42o0xwWlDoJareof5dSWzQvJESGss/s400/gw2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5326649176676685394" border="0" /></a><br /><style type="text/css"> <!-- @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } A:link { so-language: zxx } --> </style> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size:180%;"><i><b>Gears of War II</b></i></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Platform</span><span style="font-weight: normal;">: Xbox 360 </span><b>Developer</b><span style="font-weight: normal;">: Epic Software </span><b>Publisher</b><span style="font-weight: normal;">:Microsoft</span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><b>Box Quote</b><span style="font-weight: normal;">: “This game will INVITE you over to its house and let you bang its sister!” – Iroquois Pliskin, <a href="http://www.twitter.com/igndotcom">igndotcom</a></span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><b>Full Disclosure</b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">: The reviewer played through the coop campaign, but didn't do much with the multiplayer component. The original </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Gears of War </span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">was my first experience “playing” competitive online shooters over xbox live. The scare quotes are there because there are vast stretches of nonconsentual sodomy between picking up the controller for the first time and </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">playing a game</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">, an activity one would do for recreation. My dominant memory of this experience was when some frenchman shrieked “Putain!” and lodged a torque bow bolt into my side. </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Then</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">, I exploded. Word on the street is that the Horde mode (like Resi 5's Mercenaries mode) is the best portion of the entire product, but I wouldn't know. </span></span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><b>Gameplay</b></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">: Maybe because of its doggedly generic trappings, it's easy to forget what an innovative game </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Gears of War </span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">was on its release in 2006. The cover-based gameplay exchanged twitchy run-and-gunning of the classic FPS for tactical firefighting. </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Gears'</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> novel integration of co-op into the campaign dovetailed perfectly with this shift in emphasis; success in the pitched battles often hinged on coordinating with your partner to execute flaking maneuvers on the enemy positions, flushing your enemies out of cover. The challenge for </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Gears II</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> is the following: the bloom is off the rose of cover-based combat. So many of its predecessor's gameplay tropes have become </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">de rigeur</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> in modern shooter design. Where does the series go? The marketing runup for the game basically </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">conceded</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> that the sequel was going for a quantitative</span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;"> </span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">leap rather than a qualitative one, and after playing </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Gears II </span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">you'll recognize that “more badass” means “more of the same.” Not that this is a </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">bad</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> thing. Epic is simply </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">better</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> at this thing than its competitors; they've done a great job, again, of using clever level design to concoct memorable, tactically interesting firefights. The most creative moments in the sequel come when you're forced to deal with living, moveable, and otherwise unreliable cover. They've devised some fun new weaponry for this outing as well (I </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">dig</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> mortaring fools), and the complement of weaponry at your disposal gives you the means to vary your tactics in the individual encounters, switching between long, medium, and close-range murder-tools. </span></span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Unfortunately, the game's other stabs at injecting variety and novelty into the gameplay fall flat. The game is never really </span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">enjoyable</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> when you're not hunkered behind cover. </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">A</span></span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> lengthy sequence inside of a colossal worm tries to integrate some platformer-style gameplay into the formula, but your character's movements are too lumbering for this segment to be much </span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">fun</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">. The primary function of the numerous re-skinned turret sequences the game throws at you is that they make you pine for conveniently placed sandbags.</span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><b>Story</b></span><span style="font-weight: normal;">: You</span> have to give them credit: their unironic devotion to the hoariest action-movie conventions is so total that the whole affair begins to verge on the intended iconicism. To sum up: you're a grim marine. You're toting a metric ton of arm and a blithe attitude towards carnage. The actions the game demands of you save the world, somehow. (The reviewer is a little hazy on the causal nexus) This unflinching adherence to caricature is certainly a discredit to the imagination of the game's creators, but in their defense, it's virtually impossible to recall the central events of <i>any </i><span style="font-style: normal;">shooter game; even in great shooters like </span><i>Half-Life 2</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, it's the texture</span><i> </i><span style="font-style: normal;">of the world and the atmosphere that sticks with you, rather than the plot beats. And this is what </span><i>Gears </i><span style="font-style: normal;">is really </span><i>about</i><span style="font-style: normal;">: when you charge an enemy with your upraised chainsaw, you unseam them from the nave to th' chops, spraying gouts of ichor allover the camera lens. Everything about this gesture is gratuitous, down to the camera lens, but </span><i>Gears of War II</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> achieves a kind of lunatic grandeur that's hard to dismiss. It's the gore that gives the game its </span><i>personality</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. When you walk away from the game you're likely to forget about the emulsion and the purpose of the research facility and the tearjerking zombificaiton of the protagonists' loved ones. You </span><i>will</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> remember all the the cheerful vivisection. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><b>The Takeaway</b><span style="font-weight: normal;">: Are you not entertained?</span></p>Iroquois Pliskinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14324582950813408440noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7344068351653946740.post-88300248668289105872009-04-07T21:45:00.000-07:002009-04-07T21:51:51.075-07:00GDC09: Wot I Asked Will Wright, and What he Said<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgI0c0ip-AKLoQNGH1KadfkUR4NAWNYrNWRdysdXb7ru7sDIhrIaMFYbqy5SxFxlgBOqhia3RTy0JBubWeWcysgikFmN6tyuTktS47n34d0IWl_Eqfy6I4Wahoqk3eaarq5ivjs0uQPSRfd/s1600-h/3390587262_951644c056.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 254px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgI0c0ip-AKLoQNGH1KadfkUR4NAWNYrNWRdysdXb7ru7sDIhrIaMFYbqy5SxFxlgBOqhia3RTy0JBubWeWcysgikFmN6tyuTktS47n34d0IWl_Eqfy6I4Wahoqk3eaarq5ivjs0uQPSRfd/s400/3390587262_951644c056.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5322177438698583106" border="0" /></a>One thing that's always struck me about games is the contrast between the messiness, confusion and plain fuckedupness of our actual life and the clean, unfailingly rule-guided, perfectly revocable nature of a game-world. A game is the one place where everything <i>really does</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> happen for a reason-- everything can be understood and everything can be put right. This is one reason, I think, why we become so attached to games during adolescence-- as our emotional and social lives becomes exponentially more bewildering, these games offer a preserve of clarity and control. (See also that fascinating athropological phenomenon that is the dating sim) And to me, this is also why it's so difficult to imbue games with narrative complexity-- what we </span><i>want </i><span style="font-style: normal;"> from gameplay is a respite from culpability and failure and tragedy, the very things that make stories important. </span> <p></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">And this is what struck me about Clint Hocking's remarks about the the relationship of intentional play (using our knowledge of a game's rules to achieve goals) and </span><i>domination</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. As gamers, we have this inherently agonistic relationship to the game: we don't just want to </span><i>understand</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> the underlying dynamics of a game, we want to leverage this understanding in order to </span><i>conquer </i><span style="font-style: normal;">it. Gamers tend to be maximizers of utility; we're always one the hunt for ways to </span><i>break</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> the game, find the loopholes in its underlying systems that allow us to surmount its challenges without real effort. And as Hocking <a href="http://versusclucluland.blogspot.com/2009/04/just-remember-all-caps-when-you-spell.html">argued</a>, the moment we </span><i>dominate</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> a game, we destroy it. Hocking suggested that </span><i>improvisational </i><span style="font-style: normal;">play-- the kind of gameplay that incorporates elements of structured unpredictability-- offered an alternative to this destructive struggle between designer and player for dominance over the game-world. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">I still had this idea in my head when I went to see the panel on “Beyond Entertainment: Games and Social Change” at the GDC. The poorly-moderated had an all-star cast of developers (Peter Molyneux, Lorne Lanning, Ed Fries, Will Wright, and Bing Gordon), who were generally enthusiatic slash hyperbolic about the positive social effect and educational power of the medium. (Bing Gordon straightfacedly suggested that kids learn more about storytelling from playing </span><i>World of Warcraft</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> or </span><i>The Sims </i><span style="font-style: normal;">than by attending school or reading Dostoyevsky in the original Russian. People actually </span><i>clapped</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> for this kind of bullshit.) I remain skeptical.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Look, I'm quite willing to say that games are an excellent teaching medium when it comes to certain subject matter: they're much more effective at representing the dynamics of complex systems (things like the ecology of forests, cities, and civilizations), than other media. With a game, students learn about these systems </span><i>actively</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, by interacting with those systems and interrogating them, and this is a great thing.<br /></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">But it bears asking: if games teach us things, if they inculcate certain habits of thought and action, what about Hocking's point that traditional gameplay is narrowly focused on domination? When we spend our free time subjecting these virtual worlds to a perfect administration, purging their systems of the unpredictable human element, what does this mean when we turn back to the world? </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">So, I came up to Will Wright after the panel and I asked him this question. Is this urge to dominate these fictional systems just human nature, or is it something we've learned? Have years of 8-bit humiliation at the hands of games designers turned us into this kind of gamer, or is this just how the third chimpanzee is wired to behave? </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">This is what he told me: firstly, the urge to master our environment through the use of systematic thought to map concepts onto our environment is as old and as instinctual as language. And this seems right-- indeed, I think it's one of the key insights when it comes to explaining why games appeal to us. We enjoy apprehending rules because apprehending rules is one of the things that allowed us to hunt better than the other animals and plant crops and get civilization off the ground. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">His other point was to question the vocabulary. Optimizing our behavior by learning the rules of an environment may be essentially empowering, but maybe the term “domination” is prejudicial. You could just as well say that gamers have this drive to </span><i>understand</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> their fictional worlds, and there's nothing ominous about that. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">I thought these were both pretty good points-- I'm just replicating the substance of his response here but it bears repeating that Wright's a palpably thoughtful and articulate man; his responses we more cogent than my questions were, if you catch my drift. Still, I walked away with a couple reservations. First, whenever I play these games where I'm in charge of a dynamic system-- a simulated city, a pinata garden, a bourgeois household, whatever-- I have to fight this urge to turn everything into a sterile utopia. Infinite resources, neatly tended yards, the whole bit. One of the reasons we all find games interesting is because they create of this terrific feeling of progression and empowerment, but I </span><i>still</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> have this feeling that this craving for technical mastery stands at odds with the kind of attitudes and habits that we need in order to live a full life with our fellow humans. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">The other is this: I've always been drawn to Dave Hickey's idea that Jazz and other improvisational artforms embody a kind of democratic sentiment. If Adorno et al are right, and our artforms are ways of dramatizing the relationship between individuals and the social order they find themselves in, then the idea of improvisational gameplay has added dimensions of relevance. In Jazz, structure exists in order to allow the player to exercise their individual artistic vision. I think this ethos has interesting parallels with the immersion-school-of-game-design represented by Hocking and Steve Gaynor, who have argued that the purpose of gameplay systems is to allow the individual player to assume authority over the shape of their own experience. </span> </p><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">Image Courtesy <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/3390587262/">Gruntzooki</a>'s flickr</span>Iroquois Pliskinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14324582950813408440noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7344068351653946740.post-69734210967014232822009-04-07T03:32:00.000-07:002009-04-07T03:37:05.223-07:00GDC09: Casting a Pod<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9D6074-zCTEYErNIati6c1CaST2iNVf3muksSOCVTLFBCc4ioNVeV3Qv6Y7qO14nxBgOYU0GJNoznGUtQjDAJT66YbFVHPqIeN0Fwwu3JKj_J4nC4WhigFOsOIkQEQJJI7EPFj0-k6u1-/s1600-h/resident-evil-5-wesker.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 226px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9D6074-zCTEYErNIati6c1CaST2iNVf3muksSOCVTLFBCc4ioNVeV3Qv6Y7qO14nxBgOYU0GJNoznGUtQjDAJT66YbFVHPqIeN0Fwwu3JKj_J4nC4WhigFOsOIkQEQJJI7EPFj0-k6u1-/s400/resident-evil-5-wesker.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5321895895803560882" border="0" /></a>***Coletta Factor: Spoilerish Discussion of Resident Evil 5 ensues***<br />So, the always-gracious Michael Abbot had me on his podcast last weekend to chat 'bout the GDC with some eminent bloggers-- Ben Fritz of Variety's the Cut Scene <a href="http://weblogs.variety.com/the_cut_scene/">blog</a> and Duncan Fyfe of <a href="http://www.hitselfdestruct.com/">Hit Self-Destruct</a>. I don't exactly <i>remember</i> what I nattered on about into my USB rock band microphone (it was 11 AM on a Saturday and I was, naturally, <i>quite drunk</i>), but if for some unexplainable reason you'd like to hear it you can pick it up <a href="http://www.brainygamer.com/the_brainy_gamer/2009/04/brainy-gamer-podcast-postgdc-edition.html">here</a>. <p></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">One thing that came out of the conversation is that we all took very different things from the conference, though we were all people who write about games on the Internet. Ben's one of the very few really good industry reporters, so a lot of his time was devoted to interviewing publishers and publicists and gamesmakers-- hunting down the newsworthy. And Duncan talked about how the main business of the conference-- the panels and the awards-- weren't really <i>useful</i> to him given the way that he writes about games. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">For me, the real benefit of an event like the GDC (aside from getting to meet all these great people from the Internet) was coming into contact with a new language. All of us games writers who hanker after a better critical discourse on games stand in need of more vocabulary-- if not a common set of concepts or a shared jargon, at least a common discourse that we can draw on when we talk about the kinds of irreducibly subjective things that games do to their players. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">And it turns out that game developers are fellow partisans in this struggle. For the betterment of games, they've faced down the formidable task of explaining their practices to their fellows. They've salvaged elements of their craft from inarticulacy, because they need to explain to each other what makes a good level and what makes for satisfying combat mechanics and how to encourage cooperative play. All this is pretty downstream from the user-end experience of the game in motion, but my fond hope is that I can poach some of these ideas and use them to explain how and why games are fun. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The value of this language for the ordinary games-player is that it would allow you to see things you didn't see before. We can spill a lot of ink asking the function of criticism, but one thing that this secondhand enterprise <i>can</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> do is offer insight into how artworks function. You can go back to the same thing you've experienced and appreciate it in a different way. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">This is one thing I mentioned on the podcast-- when I came home and played through </span><i>Resident Evil 5</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> with my ladyfriend, I felt like a had a more expansive grasp of what the game was doing. Randy Smith's talk at the GDC was about the design of environmental puzzles, but when we ran into some crazy frustrating boss encounters later in the game his talk was the first thing on my mind. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Just like puzzles, your classic Zelda-style boss encounters in </span><i>Resident Evil 5</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> require the player to exercise a new set of techniques. They require a different tack than the inexplicably-multiethnic African zombie mob. And this is why it's so important for the designer to provide the player with some tools to understand how that puzzle works-- what its moving parts are, how they operate, when the player is on the right track and when they're not. (My all-time shortcut for this idea is this character in </span><i>Prince of Persia: Sands of Time</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> who just screams admonishments at you as you navigate a complicated disc-sliding puzzle)</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">A late boss encounter really illustrated one of the main ideas from Smith's talk. To simplify, one of his central points is that the moving parts of a puzzle should have clear affordances-- that is, you should be able to understand how the elements of a puzzle can be </span><i>used</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> by looking at them. Like, if you need to sever a dragon's head by dropping a portcullis, that portcullis should be jagged and mean-looking as hell; the rope that's holding it up better look </span><i>very severable</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">It's a fundamental unclarity about affordance that had us stuck on some of the later boss battles. </span><i>RE5</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> leans heavily on its context-sensitive button prompts to inform you about the environment-- whenever you're in the vicinity of something that can be </span><i>used </i><span style="font-style: normal;">(pulled, pushed, operated, swung, cut, uppercutted), the X button appears at the bottom of the screen. That's how you find out something is usable. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">The problem is, when you're faced by some homicidal ex-partner who's flipping around and unloading clips into you, getting some proximity is the </span><i>last </i><span style="font-style: normal;">thing you want to do. Nothing signals to the player that this enemy can be </span><i>used</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> in a totally novel way when you're both at close range. We spent a lot of time hung up on the wrong solution-- shooting from a distance-- before we </span><i>accidentally</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> ended up at close range. And it was only </span><i>then</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> that the context-sensitive menus popped up and the game telegraphed the correct solution to us. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">This basic issue recurs in a suite of late-game boss encounters-- these enemies have unique affordances that you <i>need to know</i>, but the only way you discover them is by approaching <i>really close</i> under select conditions and seeing the X button pop up at the bottom of the screen. This is bad puzzle design. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">Anyways I could nerd out about Smith's talk at length-- it was strangely appropriate and fitting that a talk about how you teach things to players was a model of pedagogical clarity and insight-- but you can hear me nerd out on this very subject on the podcast.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">Oh, and I was about to tell you what I asked Will Wright...</p>Iroquois Pliskinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14324582950813408440noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7344068351653946740.post-29787697615631343932009-04-02T12:47:00.001-07:002009-04-02T12:54:27.696-07:00GDC 09: Just Remember All Caps When You Spell the Man Name<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMVXGCUtqmCLXBmn1YotAKzYUfstIGGq2U4fD5_oOgQsyiuZ0e6KRkZl07P9BRbctDDOvRPZMTBQnogFaWYMfBD6NDN0pH12xmJQttdWanzskxOdV_TC00kB9WumOlXxUrUEmAEGSuQsHS/s1600-h/6a00d8345259b169e200e54ff534548833-150wi.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 150px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMVXGCUtqmCLXBmn1YotAKzYUfstIGGq2U4fD5_oOgQsyiuZ0e6KRkZl07P9BRbctDDOvRPZMTBQnogFaWYMfBD6NDN0pH12xmJQttdWanzskxOdV_TC00kB9WumOlXxUrUEmAEGSuQsHS/s400/6a00d8345259b169e200e54ff534548833-150wi.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5320183646601107666" border="0" /></a>Time has conspired with the internet to make my efforts at reportage gratuitous. You see, my favorite talk at the GDC this year was given by CLINT HOCKING, the creative director of the intermittently brilliant <i>Far Cry 2</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> and the man responsible for the term Ludonarrative Dissonance. If you've read his <a href="http://clicknothing.typepad.com/">blog</a> you know he's a frighteningly clearheaded man when it comes to thinking about games, so much so that he's forged the (admittedly florid but nonetheless indispensable) critical vocabulary. I loved his talk, and I'm wholly dedicated to hashing it out here, but in the intervening time Chris Remo has posted a crisp and accurate <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/news/gdc/?story=22910">recap</a> on Gamasutra. Furthermore: Hocking, that articulate and witty sonuvabitch, has put the entire talk and slides up on his <a href="http://clicknothing.typepad.com/click_nothing/2009/03/gdc09-part-2-improvisation-presentation-materials.html">site</a>. Which means: not only can you read a </span><i>professional</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> synopsis, but you can also </span><i>recreate the talk itself</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, complete with powerpoint jokes (a GDC staple), in the comfort of your own home. Thereby cutting out needlessly loquacious middlemen like myself. Alls I can promise you: I have an angle towards the end. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Hocking began by revisiting the idea of </span><i>intentionality</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, a concept he introduced in a talk given to the GDC in 2006. “Intentional Play” is when the player uses their knowledge of a game's mechanics and systems in order to achieve set goals. Hocking cited an example from his previous game, </span><i>Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">to illustrate intentional play at work: in the clip, the player drew on a suite of interconnected gameplay systems, objects, and behaviors-- sticky cameras, traps, enemy AI -- in order to blow an enemy soldier down an elevator shaft. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Hocking went on to break down the idea of intentionality a little further. Intentional play has two elements: “composition” and “execution.” Composition is the </span><i>planning</i><span style="font-style: normal;">-element of an action and execution is the </span><i>active realization</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> of that plan. Hocking used the example of travel to illustrate the differences between different sorts of intentional behavior-- travelling by car requires little composition and a lot of execution, while travelling by plane requires a lot of composition and little execution. To take an example from games, a stealth game is composition-heavy and a linear shooter game is execution-heavy. The former requires meticulous planning and the latter requires rapid action and reaction. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">He explained that the development team initially conceived </span><i>Far Cry 2</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> in the vein of </span><i>Splinter Cell</i><span style="font-style: normal;">: the game would facilitate a high level of composition-centric intentionality on the part of the player. When faced with the task of eliminating an enemy encampment, they expected the player to utilize their understanding of a host of gameplay systems-- fire propagation, scouting, weather, the day/night cycle, enemy AI, weapon loadouts, and so on-- in order to orchestrate an assault. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">As development on </span><i>Far Cry 2</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> progressed, however, Hocking found that some of these systems really didn't work out the way he hoped. Originally there was a complex enemy morale system and a more fulsome reputation mechanic in place, but the developers eventually eliminated them. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">But the developers discovered a funny thing: as they eliminated these systems, and the balance between composition and execution tilted away from the composition-heavy game they had originally envisioned, the </span><i>game became more and more fun</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. That is, the developers found that the game was at its </span><i>best</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> when the players carefully-laid-out plans went haywire and they were forced to reformulate a strategy on the fly. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Hocking explained this change in the fundamental design as a shift from a game that facilitated “intentional” play to a game that inspired “improvisational” play. This game was </span><i>neither</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> a composition-heavy game ala </span><i>Splinter Cell</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> or an execution-heavy game ala </span><i>Call of Duty</i><span style="font-style: normal;">: what was happening, Hocking says, is that the player was being compelled to periodically bounce back and forth between the “composition” and “execution” phases. </span><i>This</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> experience-- being forced to recompose on the fly and under uncertain conditions-- was what made the gameplay fun and memorable.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Improvisational play, Hocking says, is intentional but also formless and dynamic. He described the Big Daddy fights in </span><i>Bioshock</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> as another model instance of improvisational play: because the helmeted behemoths aren't initially hostile, the player has the chance to formulate a plan and lay some traps before initiating combat. Once the battle begins, however, it usually isn't possible to defeat the big daddies in one go-- the whole place goes bitchcakes as the daddy stomps and roars, and you're compelled to retreat and regroup and find ammo and devise a new plan. This is improvisational play.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">On the design side, the key to creating this type of dynamic play in </span><i>Far Cry 2</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> was inflicting random, small losses on the player in order to divert them back into the composition phase. Inflicting randomized </span><i>major</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> losses would frustrate the player, but injecting small incremental setbacks-- like the wounds, malaria attacks, and weapon jams in </span><i>Far Cry 2</i><span style="font-style: normal;">-- into the gameplay provides just enough putshback to force the player to revise their strategy. The buddy system, which saved the player from death and allowed them a long period of time to regroup, was implemented as a way to raise the player's tolerance for failure when these incremental punishment systems kicked in at a particularly fateful moment. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">So that's what the man said, roughly. I have two things I want to say. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">First, this talk was a pretty brilliant explanation of what occurs when </span><i>Far Cry 2</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span><i>works</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. People who love Far Cry 2 love it because it provides all these emergent stories that happen when their plans go haywire: “I was up on a ridge opposite a village and I was sniping dudes, as is my wont, when someone in the town opposite began mortaring my position and so then I had to bounce right in order to miss the falling ordinance which worked fine except the mortar shells set the grass on fire and while I was evading the shrapnel and the fire a bunch of dudes had run out of the town and were on the open plain below and they're peppering me with gunfire and it was now </span><i>too late</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> to thin their ranks with the rifle so I scampered down the ridge with bullets whizzing past me, I'm throwing grenades every which way and I spot this jeep on the west side of town and I jump into it and I'm madly barreling away as enemies jumped into their own jeeps for pursuit.” (Okay, you kind of had to be there)</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">The problem with </span><i>Far Cry 2</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is that this kind of memorable scenario doesn't happen enough. I found that certain strategies-- basically, getting a good elevated viewpoint and using the sniper rifle-- worked really really well (distance really blunts the disruptive force of the malaria attacks and weapon jams), and once I had discovered a winning gameplan I was loath to abandon that strategy. Because the mission-structure was essentially uniform throughout the game (assault this enemyladen camp x times), developing a bankable approach tends to ruin the game; the moments of pleasurable uncertainty are fewer and far between. The game gave the player the tools they needed to circumvent the effects of random incremental failures, and it suffered as a result.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Which takes me to a second point. To me, the most interesting point of his entire speech was this point he made about improvisational play at the very end: he said that improvisational play was a way to break the structure of </span><i>dominance</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> inherent in intentional play. As soon as we, the players, understand the deeper systems behind the game we seek to </span><i>master them</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, subject them to our intentions. And when we seek to dominate and master a thing, we destroy it. We deprive it of its beauty. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">This lust for mastery is one of the things that sets video games off from the other arts: we'd never say we “beat” a novel or a movie, but we feel comfortable using this kind of terminology to describe the kind of experience we have with a game. We feel that games are a </span><i>contest</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> with the designer; the systems and dynamics of the gameplay aren't there to be </span><i>enjoyed</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> or </span><i>treasured</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> but to be </span><i>overcome</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Hocking suggested that improvisational play offers a different model for player-game interaction. When we're continually forced to improvise-- when we never quite dominate the system of rules that structures our experience-- we're having a different kind of experience, one that's </span><i>not</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> a contest for power: the game becomes a field for the player to exercise a kind of grace. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">I thought this last point about understanding, power, and dominance was so interesting that I worked up the courage to ask Will Wright about it after one of this panels. Tomorrow, I'll tell you what he told me. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p>Iroquois Pliskinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14324582950813408440noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7344068351653946740.post-6668165259640343372009-04-02T01:58:00.000-07:002009-04-02T02:01:34.214-07:00Under ConstructionHay all! I'm working on this one thing, and I meant to have it polished off tonight but it just didn't happen. You can blame <span style="font-style: italic;">Yakuza 2</span> for having like four fake endings. To tide you over, I offer you the following. How awesome are the Superbrothers?<span style="font-style: italic;"> So awesome</span> that they made a music video of a game design lecture. Enjoy!<br /><object width="417" height="313"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><param name="movie" value="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=3807518&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=ff87a9&fullscreen=1"><embed src="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=3807518&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=ff87a9&fullscreen=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="417" height="313"></embed></object>Iroquois Pliskinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14324582950813408440noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7344068351653946740.post-69311716336403289932009-03-30T20:18:00.000-07:002009-03-30T20:22:32.491-07:00I Went to the GDC and I Learned How to Make Broad Cultural Generalizations<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHVOYm5ML4XF8GmNTa4-lhqyUxoSLOmqo_3oTqNhZzfVr5LB7X9pOJDpP_uizPb50sBx7JWQ7BEaymNJ77pRflTCkF0DcGMkA5xc2BDW_w-Bkg4SyLOTgJZVncNDzBYb4_iPRJD7MiETwK/s1600-h/GDC-09-event-image.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 218px; height: 250px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHVOYm5ML4XF8GmNTa4-lhqyUxoSLOmqo_3oTqNhZzfVr5LB7X9pOJDpP_uizPb50sBx7JWQ7BEaymNJ77pRflTCkF0DcGMkA5xc2BDW_w-Bkg4SyLOTgJZVncNDzBYb4_iPRJD7MiETwK/s400/GDC-09-event-image.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5319186696615314978" border="0" /></a><br />Hello and welcome, loyal VCCL readers! I apologize for the unprecedented period of radio silence over here, I spent the last week attending the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco. I've got all manner of reportage I'm working on, and I can promise you that this reportage is simmering in an aromatic broth <i>even as we speak</i>. I'm gonna give that GDC coverage a nice braise until the connective tissue loosens and it slides <i>right off the bone</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. I have copious notes. Stay tuned.</span> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">The GDC was my first time encountering game developers in the wild. I've read some fantastic blogs written by developers-- Steve Gaynor's <a href="http://fullbright.blogspot.com/">Fullbright</a> and Clint Hocking's <a href="http://clicknothing.typepad.com/click_nothing/">Click Nothing</a>-- but otherwise I haven't heard many actual game creators discuss their practice. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">My impression was that while game designers are a generally whimsical bunch-- irreverent, enthusiastic, irregularly clad and ill-shaven-- they exhibited a clear-eyed sobriety when it came to the <i>craft</i> of game design. They could describe the process of design in clean, functional terms: in this game we wanted the player to feel this way towards this character; we wanted the player to cooperate with his team members; we wanted the game to have a certain pacing. With these aims in mind it came down to knowhow and trial-and-error: we tried this and it didn't work, we tried this other thing and it worked better. The game makers I heard speak often showed an impressive command of how to manipulate the various elements of the game's design-- lighting, game mechanics, level design, sound, controls, UI-- in order to achieve the desired effect. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Maybe this is a cultural thing, because the talks given by Japanese developers displayed none of this pellucid clarity. Mike Abbot <a href="http://www.brainygamer.com/the_brainy_gamer/2009/03/suda-ueda-pagliarulo.html">wrote</a> about a panel with marquee Japanese designers Fumito Ueda and Goichi Suda, and his overriding impression was that these men were fundamentally inarticulate about the magic of the creative process: “Watching Ueda today, I saw a designer who struggles to articulate his philosophy of design, as if he were being asked to elaborate on something that requires no elaboration. At various points in the discussion he appeared at a loss for words, often deliberating on a question before finally answering it with a few basic and seemingly obvious observations.” Keita Takahashi, the designer of <i>Katamari Damacy</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> and now </span><i>Noby Noby Boy</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, gave a <a href="http://weblogs.variety.com/the_cut_scene/2009/03/keita-takahashis-beautifully-nonsensical-guide-to-video-game-making-gdc.html">talk</a> that was a celebration of whimsy-- a catalogue of his creative frustrations, unusuable ideas, and miscellaneous opinions. (His description of his recent opus: “</span><i>Noby Noby Boy</i><span style="font-style: normal;">' is a ticket to go to a festival to change the solar system.”) </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Perhaps this is not a matter of geography so much as sensibility. Suda Ueda and Takahaski were artists-- sculptors, painters, conceptual artists-- before they were game designers. Like Shigeru Miyamoto, who seems incapable of describing his creative process except through an occasional gnomic utterance, they gestured towards the irreducible mystery of inspiration when asked to describe the task of game development. Suda's explanation that "I go the the bathroom to poop, and I get ideas." seemed like a </span><i>reductio ad absurdum</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> of the mysteries of artistic inspiration. The challenge is about translating this bathroom vision into code rather than engineering a player response. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Their North American counterparts seemed far more practically minded when it comes to heeding the Muses. Perhaps this is because they tend to enter game development through programming or software design; they seemed more inclined to think of a <a href="http://savetherobot.wordpress.com/2008/11/29/games-are-software/">game as a piece of software</a> that will be </span><i>used by human beings</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, human beings with certain known propensities, than their Japanese counterparts. They tended to view the game as a functional object-- so much so that Randy Smith drew on Donald Norman's “The Design of Everyday Things,” a book about door fixtures, stovetops, and teapots, to illuminate puzzle design in games. While they were palpably excited about the idea that games can rival other arts when it comes to delivering emotion and narrative and memorable experiences, these same designers were also conscious of the fact that these marvellous experiences hang on the creation of an uncluttered and intuitive user interface. In short, I got the impression that you couldn't be a good artist without also being a good technician-- for any given project there is a right and a wrong way to accomplish your goals and </span><i>technique</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is the matter of knowing the difference. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Obviously I'm speaking in generalities here, and I clearly have a limited sample. Maybe the Japanese nuts-and-bolts dudes can't afford the trip. But after spending this weekend fighting </span><i>Resident Evil 5</i><span style="font-style: normal;">'s grabasstical interface I am somewhat persuaded that there's a real divide when it comes to eastern and western design sensibilities, and this divide has everything to do with the design-centric and productivity-centric tendencies of North American tech culture. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">More to come! </span> </p>Iroquois Pliskinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14324582950813408440noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7344068351653946740.post-24187908400667661022009-03-19T03:23:00.001-07:002009-03-19T03:30:58.286-07:00I Caved<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkadbaFFj8kb7I1Ziv0l7ujCJFwAvf7Xf__XeXGbXxKSBtZWdNV2YR0i4MlIXtL66LczKm2iX4isI3fQpoNDivIa9nWCtM2y3r7saE4c1sGodTIqUwdlOCS7r4Bcj4FaRNRHYOLv_luiUm/s1600-h/mgs3comic1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 209px; height: 159px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkadbaFFj8kb7I1Ziv0l7ujCJFwAvf7Xf__XeXGbXxKSBtZWdNV2YR0i4MlIXtL66LczKm2iX4isI3fQpoNDivIa9nWCtM2y3r7saE4c1sGodTIqUwdlOCS7r4Bcj4FaRNRHYOLv_luiUm/s400/mgs3comic1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5314843314942556834" border="0" /></a><br />If, for some unfathomable reason, you would like to read more of my occurrent thoughts, you can now follow me on <a href="http://twitter.com/Iroqu0isP1iskin">twitter</a>. Here Comes Everything! Everything that I am thinking!Iroquois Pliskinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14324582950813408440noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7344068351653946740.post-87580348421150479582009-03-19T02:22:00.001-07:002009-03-19T08:00:01.778-07:00The Game About Nothing<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglN6hvXHjc-DtMwdQgJQv8OUP6uxcvT8Idyv1jl3GUrhSAfy2q_xy7k5Hu-KjSy7A_D1hre2G5GQw1NeYrAQ3fBV5s4d4rmB7NDTC7ws0yqTZ-c1kPy84mCZtZMmh9Sx5jB77TuAdiOV9q/s1600-h/Seinfeld_TV_Walpaper_3_800.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 234px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglN6hvXHjc-DtMwdQgJQv8OUP6uxcvT8Idyv1jl3GUrhSAfy2q_xy7k5Hu-KjSy7A_D1hre2G5GQw1NeYrAQ3fBV5s4d4rmB7NDTC7ws0yqTZ-c1kPy84mCZtZMmh9Sx5jB77TuAdiOV9q/s400/Seinfeld_TV_Walpaper_3_800.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5314842307802247330" border="0" /></a><br />I've been meaning to play <span style="font-style: italic;">Yakuza 2 </span><span>ever since I heard <a href="http://fullbright.blogspot.com/">Steve Gaynor </a>enthuse about it on the Gamer's Confab in late December. Steve has this running theory about the nature of games as a medium: what they're best at, he says, is presenting the player with an immersive world-- creating a convincing and responsive environment in which the player can cultivate a sense of agency. He's much better at articulating this view than I am-- make sure to <a href="http://fullbright.blogspot.com/2008/11/immersion-model-of-meaning.html">read </a>his <a href="http://fullbright.blogspot.com/2008/09/on-invisibility.html">articles </a>on the <a href="http://fullbright.blogspot.com/2008/07/being-there.html">subject</a>, as they're pellucid. What follows is clumsy abridgment slash application.<br /><br />As I see it, there's two sides to this design philosophy. On one hand you have this imperative to make the narrative structure responsive to the player's choices-- the player should shape the plot and their character. It should matter whether I kill that special someone or let him live, because it's being able to make that choice that makes him <span style="font-style: italic;">my </span>character. Having this choice is what separates an <span style="font-style: italic;">interactive </span>medium from a didactic medium like film or literature.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Yakuza 2</span> is not that kind of game. Its plot is a linear narrative-- a <span style="font-style: italic;">Sonatine</span>-cum-<span style="font-style: italic;">One Life to Live-</span>style gangester melodrama-- told through cutscenes. So far as I can discern, nothing you do in the game makes any difference to the love and death that transpires in those scenes.<br /><br />But there's another side to the immersion model of meaning. Immersion is also about conjuring up all the specificities of lived space. Gaynor sometimes says that a <span style="font-style: italic;">really </span>good game can feel like visiting a foreign city, and this is where <span style="font-style: italic;">Yakuza</span> really shines.<br /><br />When it's not compelling you to pummel legions of suited gangsters and starving tigers, lets you loose to explore simulated versions of Tokyo and Osaka at your leisure. And this is the paradox: the game is most compelling when <span style="font-style: italic;">nothing is happening</span>.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Yakuza 2</span> is all about the local color, the needless frittering-away of time, the pointless minigames. The random guy in front of the Club Sega who wants you to find his cat, and the random guy inside who asks you to fish a robot out of the crane machine. The guy at the bar has a spiel about <span style="font-style: italic;">every whisky you order</span>. I just sat there drinking one after the other, just to hear the guy wax poetical over Ballantine's 17 years. You can while away precious minutes of your life at the batting cages, or chatting up the dames at the hostess bars. Men on the street will stop to discuss the virtues of Osakan cuisine or decry the drinking habits of the modern woman.<br /><br />All this is just to say: the real story of <span style="font-style: italic;">Yakuza 2</span> lies in all these unnecessary sidepaths. The virtues of the game don't lie in its clumsy brawling, its clumsier camera or even its byzantine melodrama-- they lie in its offbeat brand of cultural immersion. It presents a field of inessential, supplementary, specific actions to the player. Games should do this more often.<br /></span>Iroquois Pliskinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14324582950813408440noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7344068351653946740.post-21341831522430372162009-03-16T21:16:00.000-07:002009-03-16T21:25:20.553-07:00The HotnessFrom the department of good ideas: they got MF DOOM and Ghostface back together to do a track for <span style="font-style: italic;">GTA: Chinatown Wars</span>:<br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Un1EUORbKSI&rel=0&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Un1EUORbKSI&rel=0&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br />As a bonus, I recently found this video for Quasimoto's Rappcats pt. 3, it's pretty fantastic:<br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/ECGcQ6_Fj0Y&hl=en&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/ECGcQ6_Fj0Y&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br />(courtesy of <a href=www.rappcats.com>rappcats.com</a>)Iroquois Pliskinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14324582950813408440noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7344068351653946740.post-87991964302233777892009-03-15T14:20:00.000-07:002009-03-15T14:24:25.066-07:00The Local DialectI had no idea <a href="http://icanhascheezburger.com/2009/03/12/funny-pictures-fancy-butt-warmer/#comments">this stuff </a>was going on: <br /><br /><blockquote><div class="content"> <p>Ohai, Annipuss, and conga-rats for teh tawp spot!</p> <p>Cin I hi-jack this spot for a liddl nouncemint?</p> <p>Munday is Princess Mu’s burthday. She and I has planned to meet in teh Mu Meadow to check on teh progress of teh bulbs we has planted there last fall. We is meeting there at noon Eastern U.S. time. (I has nawt dun teh maths to tell whut tyme that is awl arownd teh whurld.) I duz nawt noes if she wuld mynd owr mayking a fuss over her beeg day - but awl of yoo is welkum to joyn us ther to see teh posies.</p> <p>Oh, and as teh Mu Meadow is teh playce where we brings owr hart-kittehs and hart-goggies (those that has passed over teh brij) and lets them owt to play, and then puts them back in owr harts agin - I fings yoo wuld be welkum to bring yor hart-kitteh or hart-goggie along to meet us there. I has nawt thot abowt noms but mebbe I kiin tawk Maus into sorprising Mu with a liddel array uf sortmints frum teh NOM menu. Kthxbye!</p> </div></blockquote>Iroquois Pliskinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14324582950813408440noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7344068351653946740.post-60470005560228640652009-03-13T18:21:00.000-07:002009-03-14T19:24:40.328-07:00Wherever You Go, There You Are<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglz4Xmc1r9_Xt-qjgPlU2hvVsg2ic4alyuZisLfxKPeym94_iZ2xHR2WNTfLFoNIqTnV4Ip4eUxOyWKchQWqKP0epWO4DIF8y6s5a8vvWNfCgelLEsF8CGgzBgXuF-Sz8VmxAiyRM8u1BS/s1600-h/burnout_5_3.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 318px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglz4Xmc1r9_Xt-qjgPlU2hvVsg2ic4alyuZisLfxKPeym94_iZ2xHR2WNTfLFoNIqTnV4Ip4eUxOyWKchQWqKP0epWO4DIF8y6s5a8vvWNfCgelLEsF8CGgzBgXuF-Sz8VmxAiyRM8u1BS/s400/burnout_5_3.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5312847639045394498" border="0" /></a>Ah, the PS3. That sinusoid black box is damned expensive, but once you have it ensconced beneath your television, I have some good economic news: 60 bucks will get you very far with this thing. I still haven't played a single disc-based exclusive I'd kill my grandmother for, but that PSN runneth over with affordable ubiquity. The <i>Pixeljunks</i> were some of the of the finest games of 2007, and <i>Everyday Shooter</i> is one of my favorites of all-time. (Full disclosure: just as <i>Flower</i> got Chris Suellentrop to buy a PS3, it was hearing about <i>Everyday Shooter</i> on the 1up show that sold me on the PStriple. Je ne regrette rien.) And then, there is the fact that you can download <i>Burnout Paradise</i>. When you boot up the PS3 and start up your medialess copy of <i>Burnout Paradise</i> you are <span style="font-style: italic;">playing the future</span>.<p></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">This isn't the only way that <i>Burnout Paradise</i> is forward-thinking. Criterion's decision to periodically dole out content updates gratis, long after its initial release, has already earned it well-deserved praise. Its integration of simple and elegant multiplayer functionality into the open-world structure should be emulated by other titles. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">But what I really appreciate about <i>Burnout Paradise</i> is that its innovative take on open-world game design addresses some of major complaints with open-world gaming and the racing genre at once.. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">One of my major problems with the sandbox games is that they often don't give the player all the tools they need to set the pace of their own experience. There's two ingredients to open-world cookery: scripted missions you initiate by appearing at certain points on the map, and scattered incentives towards exploration. The idea is that the player can mix these two to suit their own tastes. But the mixing isn't always easy. I love to wander around and get lost in the scenery every once in a while, but when I'm tired of playing the flaneur and get the yen for more structure, the mission node I want to find is often a long slog across the map. This turns exploration into business travel, and that's a problem. (This was a huge problem in F<i>ar Cry 2</i>: often there were 10 minutes of thickly murderous transit between you and your next desired objective.) </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">It's surprising enough that the exploration side of the open-world recipe works at all using a car as your main character. Matt Gallant's friend said that <i>Paradise</i> is “a platformer whose dude just happens to be a car” and that's totally right; it's kind of incomprehensible that this conceit functions at all. But the genius part of <i>Burnout Paradise</i>, to me, is that the moment you get bored of wandering around-- getting new cars and looking for stunt jumps and smashing billboards-- there's always a variety of structured events to do <span style="font-style: italic;">right where you are</span>. More than any other open-world game I've played, it succeeds in offering the player everything they need in order to tailor the pace of their experience. I never feel like I'm more than a block away from whatever I want to do. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">On the other front, I love the way that this same mission-density in <i>Paradise</i> overcomes the fail-and repeat cycle you find in so many racing games. Even the previous games in the <span style="font-style: italic;">Burnout</span> series, despite falling on the more arcade-y end of the arcade/sim racing-game spectrum, often forced you to commit to trial-and-error memorization of each course in order to proceed. (This is a problem I have with videogames in general: the only way that the designers know how to teach you to play the game correctly is by forcing you to repeat the same identical task.) I happen to love <i>wipEout</i>, too, but in the end the gameplay often amounts to rote memorization-through-constant-repetition. In order to pass the higher ranks, it comes down to always hitting that one speed arrow on the left side after the third turn. If you miss that one speed arrow on the left side after the third turn, you might as well restart the race and save yourself the time. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I think a lot of racing game fans, and those on the fringes of the OCD spectrum, enjoy the experience of perfecting their lines (lord knows, I even did this in the original <i>Mario Kart</i> when I was 15 years old, so the idea is not alien to me), but I squander enough of my life already. After a while the grinds down the experience for me.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>Burnout Paradise</i> doesn't have this problem, because by the time you fail you're usually on the other side of the map and ready for something new. Scott Frazier recently wrote that “Failing in racing games has never been fun before Burnout,” and I feel the same way. The thicket of new challenges awaiting you just past the finish line takes the sting out of defeat. Criterion patched in a restart option in the last update, but it goes against the spirit of the whole experience, which incentivizes novelty and experimentation over memorization; like Flower, it's essentially non-punitive. Why impose punishment on yourself? </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Burnout is such a gorgeous, smartly-designed racing game that we are likely to lose sight of the fact that it's a gorgeous, smartly-designed video game. I hope that other developers will swipe its many good ideas. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p>Iroquois Pliskinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14324582950813408440noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7344068351653946740.post-51748392383804980182009-03-11T16:15:00.001-07:002009-03-11T16:23:26.900-07:00Don't you Wonder Sometimes 'bout Sound and Vision<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBOGsdKxynLUhk9OSX-36vlpA6TNrO1oJD1b8QhSl6-YQCdAJyjO49LnhL0RGGTiOsLHMEjT7ZJwycorf_mTY4IVy048lnLsJJWL9HSQA4I3O9SZjtPntdJBSwlRBfayfF0MS_7XHM5vyb/s1600-h/18330995-Full.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 225px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBOGsdKxynLUhk9OSX-36vlpA6TNrO1oJD1b8QhSl6-YQCdAJyjO49LnhL0RGGTiOsLHMEjT7ZJwycorf_mTY4IVy048lnLsJJWL9HSQA4I3O9SZjtPntdJBSwlRBfayfF0MS_7XHM5vyb/s400/18330995-Full.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5312072938361399314" border="0" /></a>One of the interesting things about first-person shooter games is their marriage of vision to power. If you're out to kill some dudes, your primary task is to <i>look at them directly</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. The protagonist of a first-person shooter game is essentially a murderous, swirling vision cone. Maybe this is why games in the genre occupy the front lines of the battle for visual supremacy. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">And this is why I think the sound design of </span><i>Halo 3</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is so ingenious: it uses sound, rather than vision, to expand your hegemony. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Let me explain. One of the big challenges when playing multiplayer first-person shooters is that it's essential to expand your spatial awareness beyond what's going on withinin the frame in front of you. Even when you get acclimated to the maps, and develop this ingrained lizard-brain consciousness that there is a wall behind you and to your left, you must understand where your </span><i>enemies</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> are in order to succeed. And this is possible when </span><span style="font-style: normal;">you learn to map the blips on your radar into your lizard-brain wall-consciousness. Once you have all this under you belt, there's still a last thing to consider, which is </span><i>what weapon your opponent has</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. You have a split-second to gauge how you're going to approach this encounter-- whether you're going to charge them, or let them come to you, or whatever. These tactics all turn on how your available weapons match up. Often you have to make these calculations before you even </span><i>see </i><span style="font-style: normal;">the person you're about to encounter. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">The brilliance of </span><i>Halo 3</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is that you can get some of this information by </span><i>listening</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. I play with headphones sometimes so as to avoid waking up the housemates, and one thing I notice all the time is that every significant aspect of </span><i>Halo</i><span style="font-style: normal;">'s gameplay has a distinct and differentiable sound. </span><i> </i><span style="font-style: normal;">Each weapon, each piece of equipment, each vehicle is instantly recognizable. They even have different dynamics; some are loud and some are relatively quiet. It's really remarkable once you notice it. I remember once, when I had been playing</span><i> Halo </i><span style="font-style: normal;">for about three months, I heard the tic-tic-tic of a minigun in the distance. And I thought “Holy crap, I don't just know that there's someone using a turret, I know </span><i>how far away</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> they are from me now. They're on the opposite side of the map but that one gun is louder than the rest.” You can use sound to get spatial information that your eye's can't give you.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">On an encounter-by-encounter basis this information is often tactically invaluable. (This is why the game also visually represents sounds using yellow arrows at the edge of your field of vision.) Like, you'll </span><i>hear</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> that the guy in the room below you has a shotgun, a deadly close-range weapon. Which means: for god's sake, don't just drop in there. Engage from a distance. Or you'll come out of a base and you'll <span style="font-style: italic;">hear</span> a Warthog joyriding around nearby and slaying your teammates well before it appears on your radar. Which means: do some cowering inside the base until you figure out how to take it down. <br /></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">I think a lot of people in the critical-blogging line don't particularly like what </span><i>Halo</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> represents. It's a totem for the kind of game (maybe even the type of gamer) us we'd like to see less of. At the very least we'd like to see fewer games attempting to be what </span><i>Halo</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is. Hell, even I hate </span><i>Halo </i><span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://versusclucluland.blogspot.com/2009/02/on-masochism.html">some of the time</a>. But the basic truth is that good design conquers all, and this is where the game shines. </span> </p>Iroquois Pliskinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14324582950813408440noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7344068351653946740.post-557157639770317252009-03-10T02:50:00.000-07:002009-03-10T02:53:49.344-07:00La Comedie Post-Humaine<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCC302LD6SLhMmXwybbfletTrQQy6N7cuM7cwO77xBe8hoLbIp4ZwFcDpzLwE6vzk_dcdpnqH73wj-iGKG6AI5goGm8AqyDYp1Z4fI4kVYP6YM_ES8tr1UGl6B5XV7oUtqk1lUmaQpydFl/s1600-h/balzac2.gif"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 326px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCC302LD6SLhMmXwybbfletTrQQy6N7cuM7cwO77xBe8hoLbIp4ZwFcDpzLwE6vzk_dcdpnqH73wj-iGKG6AI5goGm8AqyDYp1Z4fI4kVYP6YM_ES8tr1UGl6B5XV7oUtqk1lUmaQpydFl/s400/balzac2.gif" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5311494491180218146" border="0" /></a><span style="font-family:georgia;">I finally downloaded </span><i style="font-family: georgia;">The Lost and the Damned</i><span style="font-style: normal;font-family:georgia;" > a few days ago, and my first thought was </span><i style="font-family: georgia;">thank God they didn't let this thing go to waste</i><span style="font-style: normal;font-family:georgia;" >. </span> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Though it sounds like a cliché at this point, I'll say it again: the </span><i>city</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is the best character in </span><i>Grand Theft Auto IV</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. It's not the most eye-assaultingly sumptuous environment ever created (In fact, it has this distinctly abstract quality in comparison with, say, </span><i>Far Cry 2</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> or </span><i>Crysis</i><span style="font-style: normal;">), but </span><i>GTAIV</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> doesn't trade in </span><i>visual</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> density, it trades in </span><i>cultural </i><span style="font-style: normal;">density. Which is to say, it teems with the sort of details that make it feel like a place civilized people inhabit. There is TV, Radio and internet: all the things you </span><i>need</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> to fictionalize if you want to render the cultural life of a modern city. The brownstones might not be photorealistic, but they </span><i>do </i><span style="font-style: normal;">look different from the ones on the previous block. This is progress. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Which brings me to Balzac. As a novelist, he's known for a few novels: </span><i>Pere Goriot</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, </span><i>Lost Illusions, Cousin Bette</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. But all these individual novels are just episodes in a ninety-five-work strong über-novel, which Balzac called </span><i>La Comedie Humaine</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. (“The human comedy,” a callback to Dante's divine comedy-- which is now, implausibly, a video game) </span><i>La Comedie Humaine</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is a panoramic satire of French (usually, Parisian) life during the restoration period. One of the basic conceits is that all of the characters in the </span><i>comedie</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> inhabit a common fiction: for example, the young and idealistic parvenu Eugene Rastignac appears in over a dozen novels. He's not always the main character-- sometimes he just makes a quick appearance-- but his persistence across the work gives the imagined world a feeling of coherence. Balzac saw each work as an opportunity to bring another perspective to bear on the phenomena that drove French society: money, sex, and status. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Now, let's be clear: Rockstar games is no Honoré de Balzac. Their preferred register is </span><i>low</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> satire, which means that your trenchant portrait of consumer society comes with a dick joke in it. However, Rockstar are men with </span><i>credible</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> ambitions when it comes to narrative. To play </span><i>The Lost and the Damned </i><span style="font-style: normal;">is to be reminded that their dialogue and voice acting are </span><i>professional grade</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. (It is unusual, even striking, to hear video game characters say the sorts of things that human beings say to each other, in the way that human beings say them to each other. On this front Rockstar is peerless.) Here is an outfit that is </span><i>demonstrably</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span><i>capable</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> of representing human interaction. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-style: normal;">And this is why the episodic model exemplified by </span><i>Lost and Damned</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> has so much potential. While they stuck to the shooty-shooty bang-bang template here, </span><i>Bully </i><span style="font-style: normal;">demonstrated that Rockstar can vary their gameplay while sticking to the open-world genre. Making a game where mayhem is not the core value proposition would actually be a </span><i>better</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> fit for the types of stories they've been trying to tell with Liberty City-- it would allow them to create a protagonist who is potentially not a sociopath. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Sam Houser, Rockstar's president, <a href="http://www.developmag.com/interviews/248/Grand-Theft-Auteur-Part-2">says</a> that he </span><i>likes</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> the low cultural esteem of games because it gives developers license to do whatever they want. And since DLC have a <a href="http://weblogs.variety.com/the_cut_scene/2009/03/in-the-past-few-weeks-ive-been-doing-two-things-that-tie-together-quite-nicely-thinking-about-the-video-game-businesss-econo.html">higher profit margin and lower development cost</a> than full retail games, it is a place where some experimentation might be financially feasible. If you </span><i>keep the city</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> and concentrate on </span><i>putting more world into it</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, imaginativeness becomes the primary obstacle-- you can add things into this city without having to add much </span><i>physical </i><span style="font-style: normal;">space and new assets. There's legions of empty storefronts and empty buildings, waiting to be filled. And </span><i>media-- </i><span style="font-style: normal;">web sites, radio stations, tv shows-- don't take up space either. Think of this cheap empty space as a place to tell new stories, because as a developer, </span><i>you are good at this</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Now that they've done so well with </span><i>Lost and the Damned</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, why shouldn't Rockstar keep layering narratives into a consistent fiction? Tell a story in Liberty City from the perspective of a policeman, or a politician, or a dockworker, or a street kid. A city is a big place; there is no shortage of interesting people to simulate. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-style: normal;">And you could switch up the gameplay: GTAIV </span><i>already has</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> a murder mystery in it, so why don't you try something on those lines?</span><i> </i><span style="font-style: normal;">The short-form model would make it easier to accommodate the tentative experiments with player choice Rockstar tried in </span><i>GTAIV</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> proper. They could build on the player's familiarity with the world and its characters instead of making a headlong rush for the next graphical iteration. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-style: normal;">I think </span><i>GTAIV</i><span style="font-style: normal;">'s graphics will look </span><i>good enough</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> for quite some time, and Rockstar has the clout to innovate in the console space. I hope I'm still driving around Liberty City for years to come. I don't know what Rockstar's long-term plans are for Liberty City, but I </span><i>hope</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> that they'll see it as a chance to establish a new genre of video game: the serialized post-human comedy.</span></p>Iroquois Pliskinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14324582950813408440noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7344068351653946740.post-54593331364813159722009-03-04T18:53:00.000-08:002009-03-04T19:22:05.767-08:00Unmissed ConnectionsYou: I saw you out on that crowded news aggregator I frequent on wednesdays during my lunch hour. You were hauling down so many clicks that I couldn't work up the courage to ask you over to my blog. Me: the swart fellow in the cardboard box, with the lame rounders 3 default template and faux hip 8-bit references. Now I'm kicking myself for not working up the courage to ask you your html address. I was thinking that you might want to give me another chance to make a first impression, maybe I can take you out to meat bun? <div>-------------------------------------------------------------------<br /><div>Lord knows I listen to too many damn videogames podcasts as it is. But while there are plenty of good ones, all of them hew to the same basic format: they're sports talk for nerds. A bunch of dudes gather 'round and jaw for a while. It's fantastic when you get the right mix of personalities. But former GFW Radio contributor Robert Ashley is doing something <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">new </span>with his show <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.alifewellwasted.com/">A Life Well Wasted</a></span>. He's switched up the basic template by interweaving interview segments with original music and a mellifluous voiceover. </div><div><br /></div><div>Speaking of people doing something new and original related to the video games, Duncan Fyfe has been crafting an idiosyncratic approach to games writing on his blog <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Hit Self-Destruct</span>. It's less a blog than a collection of essays whose approach wavers between fiction and non-fiction. He's been posting a series of pieces called "Domestic City" on the blog over the last few weeks and they're my favorite thing he's written so far. They begin <a href="http://www.hitselfdestruct.com/2009/02/domestic-city-part-one.html">here</a>. Read them, for god's sake.</div><div><br /></div><div>Oh, and then there's <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">this</span>: </div><div><object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.dawnmetropolis.com/_swf/embed.swf"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.dawnmetropolis.com/_swf/embed.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="350"></embed></object><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Good night and good luck</div></div>Iroquois Pliskinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14324582950813408440noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7344068351653946740.post-49343109611606626092009-03-04T00:59:00.000-08:002009-03-04T02:44:46.649-08:00Game of the Fortnight<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkIPP5nrmXiT_w3zGo5-nz3iAYUVkAuK8jIU35VLQnaJV_50voekWd0gHUo5d6I25JI4pmtcGAyqfqRmFE71uMzuBsdoZ7p8KPySBI2YQ8X7lCpgEnLtbPZ5GPfpi7hTW_IuU1-ibaeBeN/s1600-h/StevieRayVaughanTexasFlood.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkIPP5nrmXiT_w3zGo5-nz3iAYUVkAuK8jIU35VLQnaJV_50voekWd0gHUo5d6I25JI4pmtcGAyqfqRmFE71uMzuBsdoZ7p8KPySBI2YQ8X7lCpgEnLtbPZ5GPfpi7hTW_IuU1-ibaeBeN/s400/StevieRayVaughanTexasFlood.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5309254715536647090" border="0" /></a>I say unto you: screw the other games that are being released this fortnight. <i>Halo Warz</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, </span><i>Tom Clancy's Hawkxz, Killzones 2</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, whatever, those games are </span><i>total</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span><i>garbage</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. (Disclaimer: the author has not actually played any of these games and he is neither qualified to comment on them nor spell them correctly. The author hasn't even gotten around to playing </span><i>Fabled Deux</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.) The new best game on the earth is the Stevie Ray Vaughn and Double Trouble album </span><i>Texas Flood</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. </span> <p></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">It's been a looong time since I've played the <i>Rock Band</i> solo. It's weird: because playing Rock Band with your friends is exponentially more awesome than playing solo, standing alone in front of your television plinking away at a prosthetic guitar, which I did on an almost-daily basis throughout 2006 and 2007, feels-- <i>less than</i><span style="font-style: normal;">;</span><i> </i>intercourse robs masturbation of its charm. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">And this is the great thing about <i>Texas Flood</i><span style="font-style: normal;">: it's a </span><i>guitar</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> album. It will hold no interest for your drummers or Bon-Jovi-lovin' social set. You'll never get a group of friends over on Saturday night to belt out </span><i>Lenny</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, it just isn't that type of experience. What it </span><i>will</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> do is transport you back to late 2005, when you were huddled in front of your Playstation 2 with your headphones on at 3AM, playing the title track on repeat and feeling your newfound guitar skills converge on the ludicrous fretwork. (Speaking of which: how did we ever play </span><i>Texas Flood</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> with the utterly broken hammeron/pullof system of the original </span><i>Guitar Hero</i><span style="font-style: normal;">?) And you will think to yourself: making great guitar music by tapping away fisherprice guitar is damn fun. <span style="font-style: italic;">Someone </span></span><i>should make more of this game</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. </span> </p>Iroquois Pliskinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14324582950813408440noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7344068351653946740.post-17591019885048096982009-03-03T17:33:00.000-08:002009-03-04T16:07:44.285-08:00Games Journalism Needs Games Journalists<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQlDMrDmrJE26Nvq08dYKuwF0oYVkXNh92FYpg7Ww3bUFelY0tff_tjGpFmopMH71hQfeNnobXRYEeiPjlwt_DXNPmdXgqHoS2maj4PTQbEJXAIZJMAkG32TiXXXBUAIhM17J2YOa_Zwka/s1600-h/PressHat3_2.png"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 299px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQlDMrDmrJE26Nvq08dYKuwF0oYVkXNh92FYpg7Ww3bUFelY0tff_tjGpFmopMH71hQfeNnobXRYEeiPjlwt_DXNPmdXgqHoS2maj4PTQbEJXAIZJMAkG32TiXXXBUAIhM17J2YOa_Zwka/s400/PressHat3_2.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5309140727874170818" border="0" /></a><br />There's a saying which goes, "everyone's a critic." By which we mean, everyone can find <span style="font-style: normal;">something</span> scabrous to say about another person's creative labors. This was true even before the Internet added anonymity to the mix and turned humorous savagery into a national pastime.<p></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">But the expression also indicates the plight of professional arts journalism in the Internet era. Everyone <i>can</i> be a critic; we all see the same object and we can, in principle, offer our thoughts on that object to the world. While few have the writing chops or judgment to be a <i>good </i>critic, the traditional barriers to broadcasting your opinions to the world have fallen. Because brick-and-mortar distribution is limited, print publication used to confer authority, testify that the professional critic was a cut above the layman w/r/t aesthetic judgment. No more. Moreso than institutions, it's personality and wit that makes for critical authority in the web era. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">However, there is a world of difference between being a critic and being a journalist. Games crit has never been better, but actual <i>games journalism</i> is in a pretty deplorable state. Creating professional-grade coverage of the games industry, unlike mere criticism, takes skills that the average Internet person is not in the position to have: making contacts with industry figures and asking the right questions, tracking down leads, developing stories. And this is one place where the democratization of games coverage has been a bad thing.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">What you gain by reading good industry reporting is an appreciation of the sheer <i>contingency</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> of the path from inspiration to retail sale . The truth is that corporate structures and executive personalities inevitably shape the content we receive. Many a game perishes for lack of creative vision, but many games also perish because they fail to catch the eye of the captains of industry. Games developers will tell you: "the difference between a mediocre game and a great one? Six months." The people deciding </span><span style=""><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">who </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;">gets those six months are the ones responsible for the quality of the games we play. </span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">That is to say: if you want to know why creative triumphs are hard to come by, follow the money. Every innovative, trailblazing game needs a good business model to succeed, and that's why it's interesting to know something about the vicissitudes of the various publishers, and to get an understanding of why they make the choices they do. This is what journalists can provide and critics cannot. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Which makes it all the worse that so much </span><i>sogenannte </i><span style="font-style: normal;">industry reporting consists of press-release transcription (I'm looking at you, preternaturally successful <a href="http://www.kotaku.com/">blog aggregator</a>). Many of the newsites see industry news as a way to oil the gears of the console wars industrial complex, not as a way to shed light on the workings of the companies involved. (Why would any sane human being huddle over his internet, crying “Let 'em all go to hell, except corporate megalith B!” My only explanation is vestigial tribalism. On the other hand, the console wars is a recession-proof industry: not being able to afford the other consoles is what breeds irrational hatred of them.) </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Fortunately, there are a few sites that offer enlightening peeks into the machinery of the games industry. There's <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/">Gamasutra</a>, for one (Leigh Alexander has been doing great things over there, including breaking this great <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=21131">story</a> about salary-fixing in Montreal), but my favorite as of late has been the <a href="http://weblogs.variety.com/the_cut_scene/">Cut Scene blog</a> over on Variety.com, superintended by the redoubtable Ben Fritz. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">What I love about the Cut Scene is that it doesn't leave out the analysis: any website can post a figure or two, but there's a world of difference between citing a statistic and </span><a href="http://weblogs.variety.com/the_cut_scene/2009/02/comparing-playstation-network-and-xbox-live-revenue-is-what-matters.html"><i>explaining</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> what it means</span></a><span style="font-style: normal;">. And beyond this, the Cut Scene abounds in interesting and unique angles: how </span><i>Rock Band</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is <a href="http://weblogs.variety.com/the_cut_scene/2009/02/rock-band-is-losing-money-for-mtv.html">losing money</a>, and why THQ is <a href="http://weblogs.variety.com/the_cut_scene/2009/02/the-difference-between-thq-and-electronic-arts.html">different from EA</a> despite their equally dismal earnings reports. There's also some <a href="http://weblogs.variety.com/the_cut_scene/2009/02/gamefly-shacknews-purchase-is-not-about-synergy.html">great</a> <a href="http://weblogs.variety.com/the_cut_scene/2009/02/resident-evil-5-producer-jun-takeuchi-on-race-standing-still-and-the-wii.html">interviews</a></span> and an amazingly thorough and often-hilarious <a href="http://weblogs.variety.com/the_cut_scene/brash_entertainment/index.html">expose</a> on the collapse of <span style="font-style: normal;">Brash Entertainment. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">I don't know how long the Cut Scene will remain at Variety (Fritz has been working on a temporary basis since the economic downturn claimed his editorial position), but make sure to check it out. The world is an unsafe place for journalists these days. </span> </p>Iroquois Pliskinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14324582950813408440noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7344068351653946740.post-13384384148698340622009-03-02T20:06:00.000-08:002009-03-02T22:37:52.789-08:00Flower is Pretty, and Also Pretty Rad<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiz7XyZWl-hizidldp7D8k7wgaE0p3ISquPKUl5MSD-6C9Gq4lKMWJYfo0ZEpfvlG_5CBkHN-rnWlMMRudbvJetxE8s1lYLW_0v7ID7U-Ls7VCG4xhIwtgJCtpfIQ8ivmvI3bkDOkme_gWZ/s1600-h/flower_qjgenth.png"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 225px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiz7XyZWl-hizidldp7D8k7wgaE0p3ISquPKUl5MSD-6C9Gq4lKMWJYfo0ZEpfvlG_5CBkHN-rnWlMMRudbvJetxE8s1lYLW_0v7ID7U-Ls7VCG4xhIwtgJCtpfIQ8ivmvI3bkDOkme_gWZ/s400/flower_qjgenth.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5308810330508166098" border="0" /></a><br />Leigh Alexander wrote a <a href="http://sexyvideogameland.blogspot.com/2009/02/flowers-lawful-logical-wind.html">three</a>-<a href="http://sexyvideogameland.blogspot.com/2009/02/flower-s-precious-play.html">part </a><a href="http://sexyvideogameland.blogspot.com/2009/02/id-rather-let-flower-s-keep-doing-what.html">series </a>detailing her misgivings with <i>Flower</i> slash with the critical reception of <i>Flower</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, and I have to give her </span><i>big ups</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> for having the courage of her convictions and articulating some criticisms of a game so beloved amongst the game-blog set. </span>I've already said my piece on the game, <a href="http://versusclucluland.blogspot.com/2009/02/game-as-total-artwork.html">albeit indirectly</a>, but there were aspects of her critique that bothered me, so I'll try to sort them out here rather than writing an absurdly long comment on the excellent <span style="font-style: italic;">Sexy Videogameland</span>. <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Let's hit her discontent with the critical reception first. Her central idea, in the last of the three posts, is that games critics have pressed <i>Flower</i> into playing a role for which it is unfit<span style="font-style: normal;">:</span></p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">We play </span><i>Flower</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> and find that it is beautiful -- "oh," we sigh, "here's the one, here is our latest ambassador to legitimacy."... We are waiting, always waiting, for a game that can send us running to the blogosphere to discuss -- "here, here's one," we gasp, prizing </span><i>Flower</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> closely, thumbing through the indices of academia to find quotes about art, cracking our thesauruses for synonyms of </span><i>narrative</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, homophones for wind. Poor </span><i>Flower</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, unpermitted to simply be a good, thoughtful video game. We did this to </span><i>Braid</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, too. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I think this is a fair cop. (“homophones for wind” is a good line too) Maybe us in the serious games network of pretension have a slight messianic complex when it comes to the self-consciously artsy console titles. I think there's little disputing that the average games blogger wants games like <i>Flower</i> to succeed, because we <i>do </i>want games to move out of their current thematic ghetto. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">What I don't like about this tack is the accusation of bad faith. It implies that we're <i>lying to ourselves</i>, being unconsciously dishonest about the object at hand, out of a desire to legitimize gaming (and perhaps, by extension, our obsession with writing about gaming) to the culture at large. And sure, we all spend some segment of our existence lying to ourselves, sometimes on the Internet. But I don't think you <span style="font-style: normal;">need</span> to appeal to our legitimacy-complex to explain the rapturous reception of <i>Flower</i><span style="font-style: normal;">; one needn't be desperate to authentically </span><i>love</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> this sort of thing. I think it's plausible to say that for a <a href="http://www.brainygamer.com/the_brainy_gamer/2009/02/flower-in-your-hands.html">certain consumer</a>, </span><i>Flower </i><span style="font-style: italic;">just </span><i>is</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> their cup of tea. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Which brings us to her substantive critique of </span><i>Flower</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> itself. In her second article, Alexander begins with the statement of an excellent critical principle: “</span>I suggest that one of my aims in discussing games is to try to evaluate them according to what the developer's intention might have been and how well the game achieved it.” As I've said <a href="http://versusclucluland.blogspot.com/2008/09/attempt-at-creed-for-game-reviews.html">before</a>, this strikes me as an eminently sane way to approach the translation of an inescapably private experience into something communicable. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The problem, sez Alexander, is the very fact that <i>Flower</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> sets out to cultivate an emotional response in the player. To her, the relentless serenity and simple narrative contours of the experience felt artificial: “the deliberate </span><i>intention </i><span style="font-style: normal;">of </span><i>creating emotion</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is manipulative.” </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I disagree. How does the intent to create a particular mood or though visuals, sound and play mechanics vitiate a game? All good games are consciously designed to evoke <i>something</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> in the player. </span><i>Silent Hill</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> sets out to create an excruciatingly sustained unease. </span><i>Mario </i><span style="font-style: normal;">aims for whimsy. And what could be more deliberate than that episode in </span><i>Metal Gear Solid 4</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> where the player desperately mashes the X button to haul Solid Snake's disintegrating frame through an irradiated corridor? </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">What Alexander means here, I think, is that we all dislike it when the devices a game uses to gain an emotional purchase on the player are excessively transparent. That is, we feel that the emotional resonance of a piece of art should emerge from the way it presents a compelling vision of the world and the people in it; we don't like the feeling that elements of the work-- cheap sentiment, melodrama, weeping-- are put in there for the purpose of tugging at our heartstrings. (This is a great paradox about beauty, which Kant made central to his aesthetics: great works of art please us, without </span><i>seeming</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> to be designed for our pleasure. This is what natural beauty and artistic beauty have in common) </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">And this is where games like </span><i>Flower</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> have to walk a certain tightrope: onesidedly pleasant artworks run the risk of being veering into kitsch. There's no denying that </span><i>Flower</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> trafficks in oversaturated colors, plinky strings, limpid harmonies. One's tolerance for audiovisual splendor tends to be a matter of taste: what appears charming to some will come off as cloying or precious to others. But if the overabundance of these patently emollient touches ruins the aesthetic effect, this is </span><i>precisely</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> where it has failed on its own terms. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">The root my disagreement with Alexander, I think, is that we have different assessments of what </span><i>Flower </i><span style="font-style: normal;">aims to be. To me, </span><i>Flower </i><span style="font-style: normal;">is a simple pop song, not a concept album. A few of the critics have found it to be a profound, emotionally transmogrifying experience, but I don't think it's fair to say that the game tries to be an existential asskicker, like a Mahler symphony. It doesn't strive after metaphysics, and it doesn't have a particularly </span><i>deep</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> philosophical point to make about the relationship between man and nature. Saying it aims to be merely </span><i>lyrical</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> does it any discredit. (N'Gai Croal said it has the emotional sophistication of a Pixar film, and this seems about right.) </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">What </span><i>is</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> impressive to me about </span><i>Flower</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is the way that its achieves this lyricism through the design of its core mechanics. While the audiovisual grandeur does a lot of the heavy lifting, I think the real genius is all in the implementation of the motion controls, which give the game its unique feeling of lightness and freedom. The contrast between the total impunity the player enjoys in the first few levels and the sudden emergence of punitive gameplay elements in the fifth level makes for a good contrast; when you regain your impunity and bring down the military-industrial complex in the sixth, it feels genuinely empowering. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Alexander says that these elements are “design principles, not transcendental philosophical threads, not transporting narrative elegance” -- but this seems really wrongheaded to me. It implies a gulf: game design on one side, profound art on the other. But it seems to me that genuine </span><i>artistry</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> in game design resides in how you use</span><i> </i><span style="font-style: normal;">these mechanics and design principles to create emotion. I don't think the artistry on display in</span><i> Flower</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is totally original (it leans heavily on the template carved out by </span><i>REZ</i><span style="font-style: normal;">), but it succeeds in what it sets out to do-- create a lovely, enjoyable synthesis of gameplay mechanics and verdant panoramas. </span> </p>Iroquois Pliskinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14324582950813408440noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7344068351653946740.post-67937329747453587422009-02-26T03:26:00.000-08:002009-02-26T03:44:13.472-08:00On Masochism<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/6ZD1vkzYmyI&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/6ZD1vkzYmyI&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>One of Theodor Adorno's central ideas is that our cultural activities dramatize our attitudes towards the existing social order. The crabby German critical theorist was fixated-cum-obsessed with the formal qualities of modern music for this very reason-- he thought that the interplay of material and form in a given composition constituted an <i>ethical</i> stance towards political and social reality. While music offered the most abstract representation of these attitudes, Adorno thought the governing logic of a given society was manifest in the most innocuous artifacts. He even wrote an ingenious and scathing little book, <i>The Stars Down to Earth</i><span style="font-style: normal;">,</span> analyzing the authoritarian tendencies of the astrology column of the Los Angeles Times. <p></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Adorno's analysis of capitalist culture-- the "culture industry"-- in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Dialectic of Enlightment</span>, twins this stance towards the social significance of culture with Freudian analysis. On his veiw, there is a distinct psychopathology manifest in modern cultural forms, a tendency to masochism.<br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Genuine aesthetic pleasure is a threat to technical society because it offers an alternative-- call it an escape, or as Proust put it, “a promise of happiness”-- to the routinized degredation of industrial capitalism. The job of the culture industry, is to manufacture entertainments that reinforce the underlying logic of capitalist society and blunt the potentially liberatory potential of art. And this is where Freud's theory of masochism comes in. A key to understanding the culture industry, on Adorno's view, is to see that its pleasure is a delight in our own impotence. Adorno has manifold examples to back up this thesis-- titillating-yet-prudish films made under the eye of the Hayes board, slapstick comedy, even Donald Duck. (An example which I used once in class is the classic TV series “I Love Lucy.” Every episode Lucy dreams of stepping outside the household and playing with Ricky's band, and in every episode these aspirations are humorously punished. The spectator is meant to <span style="font-style: italic;">enjoy </span>the pain visited on her due to her aspirations after transgression.) The goal of the culture industry is to dull the anarchic force of pleasure by encouraging the spectator to revel in their own impotence. (NB this is all gross oversimplification of Adorno's Byzantine views on these issues, but is not actively misleading to my knowledge)</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Though I've never put much stock in this thesis as a diagnosis of modern culture as a whole (it's freighted with more Freudian commitments than is wholly sensible), it does have a way of explaining some things. For example, it's got a lot of explanatory payoff when it comes to golf. It is difficult to explain the staggering injustice of golf to a layman. It is perhaps the most arbitrary and maddening form of leisure ever devised. You see, golf is a game in which you have a very very slight margin for error. The ball is so small that very minor faults in your swing the thing can cause things to go horribly wrong. I've been playing golf since I was 12 or so, and I can still <i>completely</i> miff shots<span style="font-style: normal;">-- knock them with the blade of the club and send the ball dribbling 2 feet to the left. Even when I'm doing hitting the ball squarely, I have some insidious, ingrained element of my swing mechanic that imparts a spin on the ball, curving it ever rightward. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">It makes you want to smash up the implements you use to play the game, because they're the closest you can get to </span><i>smashing golf itself</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.</span><i> </i><span style="font-style: normal;"> Back during my caddy days I witnessed grown men throw clubs into water hazards and trees, and though I was embarrassed on their behalf my heart was with them. On what else can you wreak revenge? </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I say: here is a game that neatly captures the masochism of late capitalist culture. For eighteen holes your life is prey to the whims and malicious and arbirary forces, forces made all the more hateful by your sense that you <i>should</i> be directing their course. Every once in a while, seemingly at random, your efforts towards competence seem to pay off (sometimes you'll string a few decent shots together), but this is just another turn of the screw. Golf is life under the thumb of an inscrutable corporate overlord. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Which brings us to <i>Halo</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.</span> I'm crap<span style="font-style: normal;"> at </span><i>Halo</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. And yet every few months I'm mysteriously driven back to it. Despite my stack of unplayed and unfinished games, games that do not require interfacing with horrible racists, I </span><i>keep</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span><i>playing Halo</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> every time I sit down with the controller in my hand. I'm not sure why. It causes me <span style="font-style: italic;">actual </span></span><i>dismay</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> to keep throwing myself against the limits of my own competence. </span> At least golf is outside. Golf courses are picturesque and varied, which is something I can't say of team slayer on Guardian. And yet I'm always coming back for more, lured by the illusory promise of that one decent game. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Aside from my basic puzzlement at my own motivations it occurred to me that frustration-- frustration of the controller-throwing sort-- is a disturbingly common emotion that when it comes to games. Especially the <i>beloved</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> games of your youth: those games were insane and difficult and arbitrary. There was always some ornate enemy behavior or finicky jump or boss battle that made you want to swing your NES controller above your head and launch it into the nearest water hazard. What does this say about us? </span> </p>Iroquois Pliskinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14324582950813408440noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7344068351653946740.post-38345002573000309452009-02-24T01:15:00.000-08:002009-02-24T01:21:38.890-08:00Talking about Trigger Happy<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVHBZ5496hLxT1ssTbu0PXrXkQbTsvZUWdZYZbGQ2czyAuXABn9blB1_Tfid3Re-FH6OEa254a5G4hH9GAB8C3fQMuAlruZjQ0ojGuDxWgk4wR1WLfmRa4LKwytiQxOJZO27z37kZW4LVe/s1600-h/triggerhappy.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 309px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVHBZ5496hLxT1ssTbu0PXrXkQbTsvZUWdZYZbGQ2czyAuXABn9blB1_Tfid3Re-FH6OEa254a5G4hH9GAB8C3fQMuAlruZjQ0ojGuDxWgk4wR1WLfmRa4LKwytiQxOJZO27z37kZW4LVe/s400/triggerhappy.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5306290235640906482" border="0" /></a> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Ever since I wrote that piece about game-labor a few posts back I've wanted to check out more Steven Poole. While I was cruising his website I found that he wrote an actual book about videogames called <i>Trigger Happy</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, which I swiftly procured from an Amazon seller. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The aims of Poole's book are evangelical. It's out to convince joe six-pint that in the year of our lord two thousand, this whole videogame phenomenon has really <i>arrived</i>. The narrative demands of this missionary effort are the kind of thing that'll vary your mileage. Poole cites the customary battery of statistics about the size and ethnographic makeup of the fin-de-siecle videogame scene, and he notes the collaborations between established cultural enterprises (pop stars! name brand trainers!) and the videogame business so as to confer legitimacy on the nascent artform. If you are already inclined to the view that the video games are a culturally significant and interesting pasttime, you will find the book less-than-revelatory in the early going. But remember that this was 2000: Poole was doing <span style="font-style: italic;">God's work</span>. As Kieron Gillen <a href="http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2007/09/08/trigger-happy-happy/">notes</a>, <i>Trigger Happy </i><span style="font-style: normal;">“was an serious, accessible book on videogames where no one else had published one.”</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">And he can certainly evangelize with wit and verve. Poole manages the difficult feat of striking a tone that is both fiercely literate and unpretentious-- even when he is is showing off, it reads as constructive whimsy rather than writerly self-aggrandizement: “Games such as Defender or Space Invaders offer 'extra lives' when a certain score is achieved... It resembles an ethically inverted form of Buddhism... whereas Buddhism's final aim is to jump off the exhausting carousel of constant reincarnation and to be no more, life in a videogame is always a good thing, and killing is the morally praiseworthy action required to resurrect it.” <i>Trigger Happy</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> abounds in learn</span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;">è</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;">d-yet-appropriate asides of this sort (the index contains entries for Theodor Adorno, Martin Heidegger, and “Nietzsche, Friedrich, pummeling the joysticks”), and its greatest charms reside in Poole's capacity to weave old and new media together: “Just as Timaeus argues further that the four numbers (or atoms) that make up the cosmos correspond to the four elements of ancient Greek cosmogony (earth, wind, fire and water), so modern polygons can be made to draw every kind of substance on the videogame screen: rocky outcrops, sure, but also lakes, blazing torches, grass, even snow.” Despite the erudition on display the tenor of the prose is inviting, and the knowledge of other artforms on display throughout </span><i>Trigger Happy</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> gives birth to may of its best insights. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">On his <a href="http://stevenpoole.net/trigger-happy/">website</a>, Poole says that <i>Trigger Happy </i><span style="font-style: normal;">is “</span>about the aesthetics of videogames: what they share with other artforms, and the ways in which they are unique;” The “about” is telling. <i>Trigger Happy</i> doesn't make an extended argument about the nature of ludic pleasure (the kind you'd find in Raph Koster or Steven Johnson); it's more an <i>inventory</i> of the various aesthetic elements of the videogame: graphics, perspective, character, narrative, and so on. Poole has a wealth of perspicuous insights about the way that games differ from other media in their handling of these elements, but you won't find a <i>narrative</i>.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Indeed, the reader already-familiar with video games will find the side-streets the most interesting elements of <i>Trigger Happy</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. There's a great bit on the the conflict between the aims of gameplay and realism; an Piercean-semeiotic riff on Pac-man, and a thought-provoking meditaton on the relationship between Japanese aesthetics and Japanese game design. My favorite parts of the book were these stray aper</span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;">ç</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;">us, his astute observations about the subtleties of reward scheduling and the narrative pitfalls of infinite repeatability. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">It's </span><i>churlish</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> to register complaints with a work with so many stylistic felicities and such a wealth of keen observations, but I have to say that </span><i>Trigger Happy</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> left me wanting in certain respects. Though it engages with a wide variety of popular entertainments and never lacks for witty things to say about them (in this respect it is vastly superior to the stuffier game-studies approach of </span><i>Persuasive Games</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, which rarely treats popular games and embarrasses itself when it does), it lacks a certain generality.</span><i> Trigger Happy</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> isn't</span><i> </i><span style="font-style: normal;">animated by a single idea-- Poole is a fox rather than a hedgehog, in Isiah Berlin's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox">terms</a>. The craving after generality may be a particularity of mine, but as I read the book the I felt the continual disappointment of my hunger for a </span><i>thesis</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">This disappointment was made the worse by my sympathy for Poole's fundamental attitude towards the medium. Much of the game-studies lit operates at a substantial remove from the experiences of the game-player, and unintentionally evince a kind of lofty disregard for the very elements that make games compelling to their audience. (Bogost's concept of “procedural rhetoric,” for example, explains why someone would </span><i>design</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> a game-- to persuade, of course--</span><i> </i><span style="font-style: normal;">but is strangely mute on the seemingly inessential question of why someone would want to </span><i>play</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> a game so designed.) Poole's book operates on the assumption that popular games are objects worthy of an </span><i>aesthetics</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, and though he doesn't give a cohesive picture of the native excellencies of the medium (what it means to be "trigger happy"), he is on the side of the angels as far as I'm concerned.</span></p>Iroquois Pliskinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14324582950813408440noreply@blogger.com8