Versus CluClu Land

Bayonetta

2010-01-13T11:42:00.001-08:00

Let's make no mistake: Bayonetta is an embarrassment waiting to happen. To play this game in front of any human being over the age of 12-- indeed, just to play it in front of yourself-- 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 Vanity Fair, an act of actual aesthetic and moral worth-- is amplified to the point of palpable shame by Bayonetta's relentless barrage of steaming tawdry nonsense.

Some commentators have seen fit to praise this game's aesthetics, and it is worthwhile to note what one would be praising here. Bayonetta does not present a world 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 Otaku: Japan's Database Animals last semester, and its thesis that Otaku consumers view their entertainments as loose aggregations of chara-moe elements goes a long way towards explaining (if not excusing) Bayonetta's style.

This is especially palpable when we turn to the titular heroine: the game's creators have been refreshingly frank 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 cat ears.

As a fourth-wave feminist, I have to admit that I find all the leather and crotch-zooming deeply inoffensive. Leigh Alexander has called Bayonetta “empowering”, and though I don't know if I would go that far, I have no moral qualms about implausibly sexy broads wrecking shop. Which is to say: I don't see any necessary contradiction between humid eroticism and power. Bayonetta is nothing if not capable.

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 supposed 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 Cosmopolitan is far more harmful per capita than this ludicrous game.

With these important ethical matters dispatched, I am warranted to advise you, loyal reader, that Bayonetta is an awesome video game. Bayonetta, though it is deeply uncool as an aesthetic object, has some great moments. American developers lack courage when it comes to camp, and Bayonetta 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 cries out for an all-male stage adaptation. Amirite?

Furthermore, Bayonetta is the best game of its kind to come out in many years. (that is to say, the best since the Xbox Ninja Gaiden) 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.

So, Gus Mastrapa's opinion with regard to Bayonetta is wrong: you cannot pass up this game for its visual and thematic inanity. The libretto for your average operatic masterpiece 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 horniness. As Frank Lantz astutely noted, games are more music than cinema. Let the music take your mind.

I Was on a Podcast!

2009-12-23T10:27:00.000-08:00

About a month ago, loyal VCCL reader, eminent game scholar, and beard enthusiast 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!

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 nature of reality. Check it out!

King of Aughts: The Shock of the New

2009-12-23T08:15:00.000-08:00

Never forget: Somebody invented 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. Especially 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.

Grand Theft Auto III
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: there were radio stations. Not only could you walk on a street and get into a car, but that car was connected to a wholly fictional radio network. While the later games in the GTA series better achieve the perverse environmental sensibility that the first open-world GTA groped towards, there is no downplaying the fact that that 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.

Katamari Damacy
God bless Keita Takahashi. Seriously. Katamari Damacy is a game of only one idea. 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.

Rock Band

To think: how happy we were in '07 to be onanistically plunking away at plastic guitars. Perfecting our run at Buckethead's Jordan. 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. Look how happy these people are! And the they are right.

WarioWare: Twisted!
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!" Twisted!, 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 meant to be played.

Boom Blox
To me, Boom Blox 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 Jenga into this formula only heightens the impressiveness of this seemingly obvious discovery.

World of Goo
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 World of Goo 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.

King of Aughts: Preamble

2009-11-27T13:34:00.001-08:00

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 definitive judgment 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.

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.

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.

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. Blurbs as far as the eye can see.

Bear in mind: I am a total charlatan 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. (Baldur's Gate II? I barely knew 'er) My frame of reference is not to be trusted.

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.

So Close!

2009-06-22T21:53:00.000-07:00

Mirror's Edge is a curious case: the game that gets exactly one thing right. I may have spent some time in the past prattling on about the idea of a Gesamtkuntswerk, but the bald truth is that in most circumstances a video game can get by, critically speaking, through dogged adherence to just one successful gameplay concept. Take Crackdown. That game has almost nothing 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. That is all it takes, folks.

The cardinal achievement of Mirror's Edge 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, Mirror's Edge 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 Jumping Flash? 'course you do!), but it's never been done in a way that does justice to the particularities of embodied vision. Mirror's Edge 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.

To me, it is astonishing that the designers of Mirror's Edge apparently managed to mistake these core pleasures that their game offered. Prince of Persia's 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. Prince of Persia is most successful when you fell into a rhythm and were able to whip past the lush scenery in top gear.

The heights of Mirror's Edge 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 Persia's consistently funnelish pathways, your elevation and the breadth of your field of vision in Mirror's Edge lends a unique feeling of grandeur and freedom to the business of running and tumbling and losing the fuzz.

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 put it best: “I’d say that its core problem is that it looks like Rock Band 2 but plays like Mega Man 9; you want to settle in and enjoy the thrill, but imagine if Rock Band stopped the song every single time you hit a bum note.” While Prince of Persia 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), Mirror's Edge 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.

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 active deterrent 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."), Mirror's Edge 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.

All this is a shame, because Mirror's Edge is very close to being a fantastic video game. The failure of Mirror's Edge reminded me of an interview that Shigeru Miyamoto gave to Steven Totilo, in which he said the only revealing thing 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 Mirror's Edge drowned fresh sweet corn in the awful sauce. Maybe they'll get it right next time around.

Against my Better Judgement, I Discuss Citizen Kane and Maybe Art

2009-04-22T02:16:00.000-07:00

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 pecking order. (Here's a hint: pretty fucking low. It's lonely at the bottom. Hence the contest between video game and comic book enthusiasts, the “Saddest Fight on the Internet.”)

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 reply 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 art 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.

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 Philosophical Investigations (supposing you try to understand it, which I cannot in good conscience recommend), will disabuse you of this misguided idea that there's a criterion 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 use the concept of art-- what it means for us to treat some portion of our culture the way we treat Pride and Prejudice, say-- but we're not going to unearth a metaphysical truth, an occult rule, that will magically decide the question for us.

Leigh Alexander, in partnership with games-crit mandarin Ian Bogsot, recently launched a salvo 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.

The problem with all this is that we're asking the wrong question. The “are games art?” question is boring. 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.

The interesting question, to me, is what kind of art games are. 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: how are games fun?)

And this is one area where thinking about what Citizen Kane achieved (rather than what it represents) is genuinely important. The reason that Kane 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 Kane 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.

There's a brilliant bit in Michael Chabon's Kavalier and Clay 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:

It was that Citizen Kane 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-- Citizen Kane was like a comic book

Now, cinema is much more akin to comic books than games. Let's lay this aside. It's this braiding we should be thinking about. We should ask ourselves whether a game can achieve a relevantly similar kind of synthesis.

To tip my hand a bit, I think this would involve exploiting the fact that games are both rules and fiction, 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 Bioshock, 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 lost its way on this point, but Bioshock offers (along with Portal, and maybe Braid) something of genuine use: not a cultural monolith, but an example of what videogame art might look like.

A Review

2009-04-19T22:52:00.001-07:00

Gears of War II

Platform: Xbox 360 Developer: Epic Software Publisher:Microsoft

Box Quote: “This game will INVITE you over to its house and let you bang its sister!” – Iroquois Pliskin, igndotcom

Full Disclosure: The reviewer played through the coop campaign, but didn't do much with the multiplayer component. The original Gears of War 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 playing a game, 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. Then, 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.

Gameplay: Maybe because of its doggedly generic trappings, it's easy to forget what an innovative game Gears of War was on its release in 2006. The cover-based gameplay exchanged twitchy run-and-gunning of the classic FPS for tactical firefighting. Gears' 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 Gears II is the following: the bloom is off the rose of cover-based combat. So many of its predecessor's gameplay tropes have become de rigeur in modern shooter design. Where does the series go? The marketing runup for the game basically conceded that the sequel was going for a quantitative leap rather than a qualitative one, and after playing Gears II you'll recognize that “more badass” means “more of the same.” Not that this is a bad thing. Epic is simply better 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 dig 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. Unfortunately, the game's other stabs at injecting variety and novelty into the gameplay fall flat. The game is never really enjoyable when you're not hunkered behind cover. A 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 fun. 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.

Story: You 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 any shooter game; even in great shooters like Half-Life 2, it's the texture of the world and the atmosphere that sticks with you, rather than the plot beats. And this is what Gears is really about: 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 Gears of War II achieves a kind of lunatic grandeur that's hard to dismiss. It's the gore that gives the game its personality. 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 will remember all the the cheerful vivisection.

The Takeaway: Are you not entertained?

GDC09: Wot I Asked Will Wright, and What he Said

2009-04-07T21:45:00.000-07:00

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 really does 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 want from gameplay is a respite from culpability and failure and tragedy, the very things that make stories important.

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 domination. As gamers, we have this inherently agonistic relationship to the game: we don't just want to understand the underlying dynamics of a game, we want to leverage this understanding in order to conquer it. Gamers tend to be maximizers of utility; we're always one the hunt for ways to break the game, find the loopholes in its underlying systems that allow us to surmount its challenges without real effort. And as Hocking argued, the moment we dominate a game, we destroy it. Hocking suggested that improvisational 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.

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 World of Warcraft or The Sims than by attending school or reading Dostoyevsky in the original Russian. People actually clapped for this kind of bullshit.) I remain skeptical.

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 actively, by interacting with those systems and interrogating them, and this is a great thing.

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?

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?

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.

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 understand their fictional worlds, and there's nothing ominous about that.

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 still 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.

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.

Image Courtesy Gruntzooki's flickr

GDC09: Casting a Pod

2009-04-07T03:32:00.000-07:00

***Coletta Factor: Spoilerish Discussion of Resident Evil 5 ensues***
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 blog and Duncan Fyfe of Hit Self-Destruct. I don't exactly remember what I nattered on about into my USB rock band microphone (it was 11 AM on a Saturday and I was, naturally, quite drunk), but if for some unexplainable reason you'd like to hear it you can pick it up here.

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 useful to him given the way that he writes about games.

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.

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.

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 can 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.

This is one thing I mentioned on the podcast-- when I came home and played through Resident Evil 5 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.

Just like puzzles, your classic Zelda-style boss encounters in Resident Evil 5 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 Prince of Persia: Sands of Time who just screams admonishments at you as you navigate a complicated disc-sliding puzzle)

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 used 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 very severable.

It's a fundamental unclarity about affordance that had us stuck on some of the later boss battles. RE5 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 used (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.

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 last thing you want to do. Nothing signals to the player that this enemy can be used 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 accidentally ended up at close range. And it was only then that the context-sensitive menus popped up and the game telegraphed the correct solution to us.

This basic issue recurs in a suite of late-game boss encounters-- these enemies have unique affordances that you need to know, but the only way you discover them is by approaching really close under select conditions and seeing the X button pop up at the bottom of the screen. This is bad puzzle design.

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.

Oh, and I was about to tell you what I asked Will Wright...

GDC 09: Just Remember All Caps When You Spell the Man Name

2009-04-02T12:47:00.001-07:00

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 Far Cry 2 and the man responsible for the term Ludonarrative Dissonance. If you've read his blog 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 recap on Gamasutra. Furthermore: Hocking, that articulate and witty sonuvabitch, has put the entire talk and slides up on his site. Which means: not only can you read a professional synopsis, but you can also recreate the talk itself, 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.

Hocking began by revisiting the idea of intentionality, 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, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, 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.

Hocking went on to break down the idea of intentionality a little further. Intentional play has two elements: “composition” and “execution.” Composition is the planning-element of an action and execution is the active realization 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.

He explained that the development team initially conceived Far Cry 2 in the vein of Splinter Cell: 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.

As development on Far Cry 2 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.

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 game became more and more fun. That is, the developers found that the game was at its best when the players carefully-laid-out plans went haywire and they were forced to reformulate a strategy on the fly.

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 neither a composition-heavy game ala Splinter Cell or an execution-heavy game ala Call of Duty: what was happening, Hocking says, is that the player was being compelled to periodically bounce back and forth between the “composition” and “execution” phases. This experience-- being forced to recompose on the fly and under uncertain conditions-- was what made the gameplay fun and memorable.

Improvisational play, Hocking says, is intentional but also formless and dynamic. He described the Big Daddy fights in Bioshock 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.

On the design side, the key to creating this type of dynamic play in Far Cry 2 was inflicting random, small losses on the player in order to divert them back into the composition phase. Inflicting randomized major losses would frustrate the player, but injecting small incremental setbacks-- like the wounds, malaria attacks, and weapon jams in Far Cry 2-- 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.

So that's what the man said, roughly. I have two things I want to say.

First, this talk was a pretty brilliant explanation of what occurs when Far Cry 2 works. 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 too late 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)

The problem with Far Cry 2 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.

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 dominance inherent in intentional play. As soon as we, the players, understand the deeper systems behind the game we seek to master them, subject them to our intentions. And when we seek to dominate and master a thing, we destroy it. We deprive it of its beauty.

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 contest with the designer; the systems and dynamics of the gameplay aren't there to be enjoyed or treasured but to be overcome.

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 not a contest for power: the game becomes a field for the player to exercise a kind of grace.

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.

Under Construction

2009-04-02T01:58:00.000-07:00

Hay 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 Yakuza 2 for having like four fake endings. To tide you over, I offer you the following. How awesome are the Superbrothers? So awesome that they made a music video of a game design lecture. Enjoy!

I Went to the GDC and I Learned How to Make Broad Cultural Generalizations

2009-03-30T20:18:00.000-07:00

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 even as we speak. I'm gonna give that GDC coverage a nice braise until the connective tissue loosens and it slides right off the bone. I have copious notes. Stay tuned.

The GDC was my first time encountering game developers in the wild. I've read some fantastic blogs written by developers-- Steve Gaynor's Fullbright and Clint Hocking's Click Nothing-- but otherwise I haven't heard many actual game creators discuss their practice.

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 craft 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.

Maybe this is a cultural thing, because the talks given by Japanese developers displayed none of this pellucid clarity. Mike Abbot wrote 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 Katamari Damacy and now Noby Noby Boy, gave a talk that was a celebration of whimsy-- a catalogue of his creative frustrations, unusuable ideas, and miscellaneous opinions. (His description of his recent opus: “Noby Noby Boy' is a ticket to go to a festival to change the solar system.”)

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 reductio ad absurdum of the mysteries of artistic inspiration. The challenge is about translating this bathroom vision into code rather than engineering a player response.

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 game as a piece of software that will be used by human beings, 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 technique is the matter of knowing the difference.

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 Resident Evil 5'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.

More to come!

I Caved

2009-03-19T03:23:00.001-07:00

If, for some unfathomable reason, you would like to read more of my occurrent thoughts, you can now follow me on twitter. Here Comes Everything! Everything that I am thinking!

The Game About Nothing

2009-03-19T02:22:00.001-07:00

I've been meaning to play Yakuza 2 ever since I heard Steve Gaynor 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 read his articles on the subject, as they're pellucid. What follows is clumsy abridgment slash application.

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 my character. Having this choice is what separates an interactive medium from a didactic medium like film or literature.

Yakuza 2 is not that kind of game. Its plot is a linear narrative-- a Sonatine-cum-One Life to Live-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.

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 really good game can feel like visiting a foreign city, and this is where Yakuza really shines.

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 nothing is happening.

Yakuza 2 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 every whisky you order. 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.

All this is just to say: the real story of Yakuza 2 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.

The Hotness

2009-03-16T21:16:00.000-07:00

From the department of good ideas: they got MF DOOM and Ghostface back together to do a track for GTA: Chinatown Wars:

As a bonus, I recently found this video for Quasimoto's Rappcats pt. 3, it's pretty fantastic:

(courtesy of rappcats.com)

The Local Dialect

2009-03-15T14:20:00.000-07:00

I had no idea this stuff was going on:

Ohai, Annipuss, and conga-rats for teh tawp spot!

Cin I hi-jack this spot for a liddl nouncemint?

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.

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!

Wherever You Go, There You Are

2009-03-13T18:21:00.000-07:00

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 Pixeljunks were some of the of the finest games of 2007, and Everyday Shooter is one of my favorites of all-time. (Full disclosure: just as Flower got Chris Suellentrop to buy a PS3, it was hearing about Everyday Shooter on the 1up show that sold me on the PStriple. Je ne regrette rien.) And then, there is the fact that you can download Burnout Paradise. When you boot up the PS3 and start up your medialess copy of Burnout Paradise you are playing the future.

This isn't the only way that Burnout Paradise 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.

But what I really appreciate about Burnout Paradise 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..

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 Far Cry 2: often there were 10 minutes of thickly murderous transit between you and your next desired objective.)

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 Paradise 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 Burnout Paradise, 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 right where you are. 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.

On the other front, I love the way that this same mission-density in Paradise overcomes the fail-and repeat cycle you find in so many racing games. Even the previous games in the Burnout 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 wipEout, 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.

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 Mario Kart 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.

Burnout Paradise 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?

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.

Don't you Wonder Sometimes 'bout Sound and Vision

2009-03-11T16:15:00.001-07:00

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 look at them directly. 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.

And this is why I think the sound design of Halo 3 is so ingenious: it uses sound, rather than vision, to expand your hegemony.

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 enemies are in order to succeed. And this is possible when 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 what weapon your opponent has. 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 see the person you're about to encounter.

The brilliance of Halo 3 is that you can get some of this information by listening. 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 Halo's gameplay has a distinct and differentiable sound. 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 Halo 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 how far away 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.

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 hear 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 hear 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.

I think a lot of people in the critical-blogging line don't particularly like what Halo 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 Halo is. Hell, even I hate Halo some of the time. But the basic truth is that good design conquers all, and this is where the game shines.

La Comedie Post-Humaine

2009-03-10T02:50:00.000-07:00

I finally downloaded The Lost and the Damned a few days ago, and my first thought was thank God they didn't let this thing go to waste.

Though it sounds like a cliché at this point, I'll say it again: the city is the best character in Grand Theft Auto IV. It's not the most eye-assaultingly sumptuous environment ever created (In fact, it has this distinctly abstract quality in comparison with, say, Far Cry 2 or Crysis), but GTAIV doesn't trade in visual density, it trades in cultural 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 need to fictionalize if you want to render the cultural life of a modern city. The brownstones might not be photorealistic, but they do look different from the ones on the previous block. This is progress.

Which brings me to Balzac. As a novelist, he's known for a few novels: Pere Goriot, Lost Illusions, Cousin Bette. But all these individual novels are just episodes in a ninety-five-work strong über-novel, which Balzac called La Comedie Humaine. (“The human comedy,” a callback to Dante's divine comedy-- which is now, implausibly, a video game) La Comedie Humaine 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 comedie 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.

Now, let's be clear: Rockstar games is no Honoré de Balzac. Their preferred register is low satire, which means that your trenchant portrait of consumer society comes with a dick joke in it. However, Rockstar are men with credible ambitions when it comes to narrative. To play The Lost and the Damned is to be reminded that their dialogue and voice acting are professional grade. (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 demonstrably capable of representing human interaction.

And this is why the episodic model exemplified by Lost and Damned has so much potential. While they stuck to the shooty-shooty bang-bang template here, Bully 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 better 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.

Sam Houser, Rockstar's president, says that he likes the low cultural esteem of games because it gives developers license to do whatever they want. And since DLC have a higher profit margin and lower development cost than full retail games, it is a place where some experimentation might be financially feasible. If you keep the city and concentrate on putting more world into it, imaginativeness becomes the primary obstacle-- you can add things into this city without having to add much physical space and new assets. There's legions of empty storefronts and empty buildings, waiting to be filled. And media-- 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, you are good at this.

Now that they've done so well with Lost and the Damned, 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.

And you could switch up the gameplay: GTAIV already has a murder mystery in it, so why don't you try something on those lines? The short-form model would make it easier to accommodate the tentative experiments with player choice Rockstar tried in GTAIV 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.

I think GTAIV's graphics will look good enough 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 hope that they'll see it as a chance to establish a new genre of video game: the serialized post-human comedy.

Unmissed Connections

2009-03-04T18:53:00.000-08:00

You: 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?

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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 new with his show A Life Well Wasted. He's switched up the basic template by interweaving interview segments with original music and a mellifluous voiceover.

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 Hit Self-Destruct. 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 here. Read them, for god's sake.

Oh, and then there's this:

Good night and good luck

Game of the Fortnight

2009-03-04T00:59:00.000-08:00

I say unto you: screw the other games that are being released this fortnight. Halo Warz, Tom Clancy's Hawkxz, Killzones 2, whatever, those games are total garbage. (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 Fabled Deux.) The new best game on the earth is the Stevie Ray Vaughn and Double Trouble album Texas Flood.

It's been a looong time since I've played the Rock Band 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-- less than; intercourse robs masturbation of its charm.

And this is the great thing about Texas Flood: it's a guitar 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 Lenny, it just isn't that type of experience. What it will 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 Texas Flood with the utterly broken hammeron/pullof system of the original Guitar Hero?) And you will think to yourself: making great guitar music by tapping away fisherprice guitar is damn fun. Someone should make more of this game.

Games Journalism Needs Games Journalists

2009-03-03T17:33:00.000-08:00

There's a saying which goes, "everyone's a critic." By which we mean, everyone can find something 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.

But the expression also indicates the plight of professional arts journalism in the Internet era. Everyone can 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 good 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.

However, there is a world of difference between being a critic and being a journalist. Games crit has never been better, but actual games journalism 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.

What you gain by reading good industry reporting is an appreciation of the sheer contingency 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 who gets those six months are the ones responsible for the quality of the games we play.

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.

Which makes it all the worse that so much sogenannte industry reporting consists of press-release transcription (I'm looking at you, preternaturally successful blog aggregator). 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.)

Fortunately, there are a few sites that offer enlightening peeks into the machinery of the games industry. There's Gamasutra, for one (Leigh Alexander has been doing great things over there, including breaking this great story about salary-fixing in Montreal), but my favorite as of late has been the Cut Scene blog over on Variety.com, superintended by the redoubtable Ben Fritz.

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 explaining what it means. And beyond this, the Cut Scene abounds in interesting and unique angles: how Rock Band is losing money, and why THQ is different from EA despite their equally dismal earnings reports. There's also some great interviews and an amazingly thorough and often-hilarious expose on the collapse of Brash Entertainment.

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.

Flower is Pretty, and Also Pretty Rad

2009-03-02T20:06:00.000-08:00

Leigh Alexander wrote a three-part series detailing her misgivings with Flower slash with the critical reception of Flower, and I have to give her big ups for having the courage of her convictions and articulating some criticisms of a game so beloved amongst the game-blog set. I've already said my piece on the game, albeit indirectly, 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 Sexy Videogameland.

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 Flower into playing a role for which it is unfit:

We play Flower 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 Flower closely, thumbing through the indices of academia to find quotes about art, cracking our thesauruses for synonyms of narrative, homophones for wind. Poor Flower, unpermitted to simply be a good, thoughtful video game. We did this to Braid, too.

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 Flower to succeed, because we do want games to move out of their current thematic ghetto.

What I don't like about this tack is the accusation of bad faith. It implies that we're lying to ourselves, 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 need to appeal to our legitimacy-complex to explain the rapturous reception of Flower; one needn't be desperate to authentically love this sort of thing. I think it's plausible to say that for a certain consumer, Flower just is their cup of tea.

Which brings us to her substantive critique of Flower itself. In her second article, Alexander begins with the statement of an excellent critical principle: “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 before, this strikes me as an eminently sane way to approach the translation of an inescapably private experience into something communicable.

The problem, sez Alexander, is the very fact that Flower 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 intention of creating emotion is manipulative.”

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 something in the player. Silent Hill sets out to create an excruciatingly sustained unease. Mario aims for whimsy. And what could be more deliberate than that episode in Metal Gear Solid 4 where the player desperately mashes the X button to haul Solid Snake's disintegrating frame through an irradiated corridor?

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 seeming to be designed for our pleasure. This is what natural beauty and artistic beauty have in common)

And this is where games like Flower have to walk a certain tightrope: onesidedly pleasant artworks run the risk of being veering into kitsch. There's no denying that Flower 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 precisely where it has failed on its own terms.

The root my disagreement with Alexander, I think, is that we have different assessments of what Flower aims to be. To me, Flower 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 deep philosophical point to make about the relationship between man and nature. Saying it aims to be merely lyrical does it any discredit. (N'Gai Croal said it has the emotional sophistication of a Pixar film, and this seems about right.)

What is impressive to me about Flower 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.

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 artistry in game design resides in how you use these mechanics and design principles to create emotion. I don't think the artistry on display in Flower is totally original (it leans heavily on the template carved out by REZ), but it succeeds in what it sets out to do-- create a lovely, enjoyable synthesis of gameplay mechanics and verdant panoramas.

On Masochism

2009-02-26T03:26:00.000-08:00

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 ethical 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, The Stars Down to Earth, analyzing the authoritarian tendencies of the astrology column of the Los Angeles Times.

Adorno's analysis of capitalist culture-- the "culture industry"-- in The Dialectic of Enlightment, 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.

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 enjoy 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)

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 completely miff shots-- 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.

It makes you want to smash up the implements you use to play the game, because they're the closest you can get to smashing golf itself. 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?

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 should 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.

Which brings us to Halo. I'm crap at Halo. 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 keep playing Halo every time I sit down with the controller in my hand. I'm not sure why. It causes me actual dismay to keep throwing myself against the limits of my own competence. 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.

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 beloved 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?

Talking about Trigger Happy

2009-02-24T01:15:00.000-08:00

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 Trigger Happy, which I swiftly procured from an Amazon seller.

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 arrived. 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 God's work. As Kieron Gillen notes, Trigger Happy “was an serious, accessible book on videogames where no one else had published one.”

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.” Trigger Happy abounds in learnèd-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 Trigger Happy gives birth to may of its best insights.

On his website, Poole says that Trigger Happy is “about the aesthetics of videogames: what they share with other artforms, and the ways in which they are unique;” The “about” is telling. Trigger Happy 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 inventory 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 narrative.

Indeed, the reader already-familiar with video games will find the side-streets the most interesting elements of Trigger Happy. 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 aperçus, his astute observations about the subtleties of reward scheduling and the narrative pitfalls of infinite repeatability.

It's churlish to register complaints with a work with so many stylistic felicities and such a wealth of keen observations, but I have to say that Trigger Happy 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 Persuasive Games, which rarely treats popular games and embarrasses itself when it does), it lacks a certain generality. Trigger Happy isn't animated by a single idea-- Poole is a fox rather than a hedgehog, in Isiah Berlin's terms. 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 thesis.

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 design a game-- to persuade, of course-- but is strangely mute on the seemingly inessential question of why someone would want to play a game so designed.) Poole's book operates on the assumption that popular games are objects worthy of an aesthetics, 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.

A Clarification

2009-02-21T17:40:00.001-08:00

Here is my theory. Game criticism isn't about telling the player whether a game is fun or not. If that's the critic's job we are all in a lot of trouble, because in the near future everyone will be able to pick up a demo and tell themselves whether a game is fun or not. “Is it fun?” is a question destined for obsolescence. We should be telling people how a game is fun.

I think this task is a something like what Aristotle does in the Poetics. Aristotle thinks that there is a certain experience that is constitutive of tragedy as an artform: katharsis, or the cleansing release of pent-up emotion and pity. With this end in view, Aristotle asks how the various elements of the dramatic work (the plot, the characters, and so on) need to be structured in order to create this emotion for the audience. And it's the same for games; what a critic can do is explain how the various elements of the game-- the visual design, the narrative, the gameplay-- conspire to create pleasure.

The second question, then, is what kind of pleasure do games aim at? What is the gaming equivalent of katharsis? My answer is that games aim to inspire a characteristic sort of pleasure, the delight in the discovery and mastery of rules. Play is an expression of the human mind's native lust to master the lawlike natural world through experiment and planning. As Kant says: “The understanding is hungry after rules, and it is satisfied when it finds them.” And video games are most fitting artform to satisfy this desire, because unlike other games and sports the rules of a video game are not disclosed in advance. Each game reveals a novel rulebound world to the player, and asks her to uncover its underlying logic through inquiry and imagination. And that is why the games are fun to play.

Virtual Reality

2009-02-20T23:05:00.000-08:00

"James' big night included his remarkable run in the first 2:50 of the third quarter, almost single-handedly turning a six-point halftime deficit into an eight-point Cavaliers lead. And he could have scored two more in that stretch if he hadn't missed a pair of free throws.

'It was almost like watching a video game,' Zydrunas Ilgauskas said."

For Fun!

2009-02-18T17:43:00.000-08:00

I have no interesting or substantive ideas to write about today, so I'm thinking I'm going to turn the comment thread of this post into a twitter feed. Feel free to reply, and then when you get responses it will be in your email. This is how real twitter works, apparently.

Why Y'all Should Read Dave Hickey

2009-02-17T23:28:00.000-08:00

First off, a note: some guy on twitter, who is a real writer, called me a minor-league Pauline Kael of games crit, and that was about the best thing that happened to me on Friday. I didn't say "all weekend," 'cause on Saturday I prepared an elaborate meal for the lady friend, and this was followed by us curling up on the couch and watching Battlestar Galactica. Ahh, romance. And then, on Sunday, everything I ate had barbecue sauce on it.

Speaking of whichawho, I'm fairly certain I'm the only videogame blog type on earth who is still not on the Twitter. Which leads me to ask: am I that one guy who's like, "I don't have a cell phone," as if he should be proud about not availing himself of a technological advance that is both fun and useful? I don't have anything against the microblog phenomenon but I think the pressure of thinking up interesting things to say about myself would slowly drive me insane. Also, as a side note: video game bloggers, I am lurking your twitter feeds. It is because they are they are there, on the internet.

Last week I asked Insult Swordfighting's Mitch Krpata about video game writing he wishes he could write and he responded. In the question I mentioned Dave Hickey, who does not write about video games. Most folk are unfamiliar with Hickey's work-- I wouldn't have come across his stuff if I hadn't found his book Air Guitar in the meticulously curated remainder section of the Harvard Book Store.

It is not enough for a critic to have keen insights into the object at hand. It's a start, but it's not enough-- you need to have wit and style. People knock critics for being parasites on others' creativity, but the truth is that good criticism is art, because it requires good writing. And if you care even a little bit about writing well, writing is about the most agonizing task on the planet. It's why I stand in awe of my favorite critics: Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin, Lionel Trilling, George Steiner, Adorno, Nathan Rabin. They're all brilliant prose stylists in their own right who turn their minds to the work of others.

Hickey has a really distinctive sensibility; he writes about so many topics-- basketball, Sigfried and Roy, Punk Rock, visual art, Perry Mason-- and he brings to each this mix of erudition and complete sociability. The style is conversational, unassuming, even hip, and yet absurdly well-informed. He can tell a good story and he can drop in an illuminating quote from Ruskin. Despite the coherent sense of what makes art important that emerges along the length of the book he's not out to sell you a system. He's just out to explain why certain things are worth your admiration. Since an example, unlike the previous paragraphs, is really the only thing that'll do him some justice, I'll close with a passage:

"In the process of writing about works of art, then, we make the same sort of Draconian decisions that we do when writing about nonart experience. We write about what can be written about. We decipher that which lends itself to cipher and discard the rest as surplus. Unlike the lost surplus of nonart experience, however, the surplus we ignore in works of art survives, remains available to be invested with meaning by subsequent viewers under different circumstances. But a problem remains, which is that the aspects of visible artifacts that are most effectively translated into writing usually have little or nothing to do with the occasion for writing about them, which, in my experience, invariably resides in the pleasurable, confusing, or horrific nature of the experience itself-- an experience which is neither surplus nor cipher. 'In the landscape of spring,' the koan reminds us, 'the branches are neither long nor short.' They are simply present, precedent to the standards and expectations we impose upon them as we name their attributes, pronouncing them long or short, strong or weak, young or old.

In the act of writing about art, then, you press language to the point of fracture and try to do what writing cannot do: account for the experience. Otherwise, you elide the essential mystery, which is the reason for writing anything at all. The easy alternative is just to circumnavigate the occasion of seeing something-- to 'professionalize' art criticism into a branch of academic art history-- to presume that works of art are already utterances in art-language that need only be translated into a better language to achieve perfect transparency. In this way, the practice of criticism is transformed into a kind of Protestant civil service dedicated to translating art-language into word-language that neutralizes its power in the interest of public order. The writer's pathological need to control and reconstitute the fluid universe of not-writing is fortuitously disguised by this stratagem-- since in the truly 'professional' discourse, no more intimate engagement with the 'needy' object is requires than that of a doctor with a patient, and no more stress need be placed upon the language than that required by the clinical assignment of symptoms."

The Game as Total Artwork

2009-02-17T00:49:00.001-08:00

In 1949, Richard Wagner wrote an essay entitled The Art-Work of the Future which articulated his theory of modern art. At the heart of this vision is the idea that an authentically modern artwork should be a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total-art-work. The highest form of art, dramatic opera, is a synthesis of the various classical arts. Operatic performance brings the three performance arts (dance, music, and poetry) and the three plastic arts (painting, sculpture, and architecture) together into a unified work whose aesthetic power outstrips the isolated capacities of each individual artform.

On Wagner's conception, the union of the arts is a kind of civic republicanism. Each of the individual art forms attains its highest power by being incorporated into a common order, which subjects each of them to a higher principle and thus unifies them into a single aim. Dance, song and poetry only find their individual fulfillment when they are each bound into a single will: “It is in [the stage artist], the immediate executant, that the three sister-arts unite their forces in one collective operation, in which the highest faculty of each comes to its highest unfolding. By working in common, each one of them attains the power to be and do the very thing which, of her own and inmost essence, she longs to do and be.” Wagner's aesthetic rhetoric consciously evokes the political struggles that broke all across Europe the previous year, with the gesamtkunstwerk stepping onto the revolutionary stage as a model for political liberation: “This purpose of the Drama, is withal the only true artistic purpose that ever can be fully realised; whatsoever lies aloof from that, must necessarily lose itself in the sea of things indefinite, obscure, unfree. This purpose, however, the separate art-branch will never reach alone, but only all together; and therefore the most universal is at like time the only real, free, the only universally intelligible Art-work.”

Orchestral tonality plays a central role in this unification. Music's unparalleled capacity for emotional expressiveness enriches all the other performative elements, and makes it fit to serve as a lingua franca for the other arts: “the manifold developments of Tone, so peculiar to our instrumental music, unfold their utmost wealth within this Artwork; nay, Tone will incite the mimetic art of Dance to entirely new discoveries, and no less swell the breath of Poetry to unimagined fill... in the Orchestra, that pulsing body of many-coloured harmony, the personating individual Man is given, for his support, a stanchless elemental spring, at once artistic, natural, and human. The Orchestra is, so to speak, the loam of endless, universal Feeling.” In this sense, tonality is what unites the various arts because its emotional texture straddles the different senses. We say that different sounds are rough, cool, warm, elegiac, or foreboding, and when we talk this way we mean that these aural textures correspond to the feelings effected by other art forms like prose or painting. The effect verges on synaesthesia, in that the qualities of different senses bleed into each other. And so tonality provides the bridge between different visual and auditory media.

Naturally, Wagnerian opera is not the only art-form that can aim at the unification of the various plastic and performative arts. Music and graphics usually play an ornamental role in game design-- they're so many skins thrown over an indifferent frame of game-mechanics. And this is fine: not every game must to strive for concinnity, because the play's the thing. But I often think that the sought-after “art” in the is-games-art debate is the aesthetic unity we find in the total artwork.

The key point, it seems to me, is to recognize that gameplay has tonality. Just as music, a non-representational medium, can evoke certain moods and emotions, game mechanics can elicit emotional states.

One side of this tonality is tactile. We often say that controls feel crisp or mushy, and this is a way of describing the feel of the connection between your inputs and the ingame happenings. This is important too, but I mean to point to something more fundamental: the feeling of interacting with a world through a piece of molded plastic. Every game establishes a particular rhythm for what you're doing with your hands: mashing on buttons as fast as you can, steering your jumps with the sticks-- maybe waggling (if you're into that sort of thing).

Pixeljunk Eden doesn't require a flurry of buttonpresses to play well; the pace of your physical interaction with the game can be downright leisurely. The platforming in Prince of Persia has a unhurried but constant rhythm and flow. Controlling Mario in three-dimensional space is kinaesthetic perfection; the controls are perfectly pitched so as to communicate this distinctive feeling of lightness and momentum. In each of these games the gameplay exploits the kinetics of control and movement in order to impart a certain aesthetic feeling to the player.

The other side of this tonality is more psychological. The texture of your engagement with the game-world differs radically from one game to another. Different genres have different ratios of reflex action to problem solving to discovery to strategy. Most long-form action games modulate between periods of calm and periods of high tension, but other genres can be entirely tensionless. Some games require you to solve many small problems quickly (Tetris) and others one large problem slowly (Portal). The thoughtfulness, vigilance, or wonder that gameplay mechanics can inspire are key ingredients of gameplay tonality.

To my mind, games are at their best-- maybe, their most artful-- when they construct a synthesis of sound and vision around the texture created by the play. Of course, Mario provides a template for how this is done. Every part of a Super Mario Brothers title-- the gameplay, the music, the visual artistry-- conspires together and complements the others. And the net effect is that unmistakable sense of total fucking delightfulness.

But to me, the best contemporary example of this striving after holistic unity is Jonathan Mak's Everyday Shooter. It's not just that the music and graphics are brilliant, judged on their own terms. It's that these elements harmonize so perfectly with the gameplay. The levels of Everyday Shooter are structured such that the player's actions harmonize with the music and visuals. Each “track” presents a different set of enemy behaviors and a different chaining system, and these changes work in concert with the other elements to establish a distinct tone for every level. Some levels are frenzied and some are relatively serene; some require a lot of planning and others only demand quick reflexes. But in each case the art follows the mood established by the gameplay, and this is what makes it such an expressive and wonderful game.

The artistic program first glimpsed in games like Tetsuya Miziguchi's REZ is still young. But games like the recent PSN release Flower show the expressive possibilities that skilled designers can create through the aestheticization of gameplay. By uniting visual and musical art under the banner of gameplay, games can end their protracted tutelage to cinema and stand on their own. This is a worthy task for the art form of the future.

In Praise of the Mundane

2009-02-12T03:06:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was talking about game labor, or the increasing onerousness of electronic entertainment. Game labor-- or what Steven Poole calls the “employment paradigm”-- is a big problem in modern game design. If you ask me, the prevalence of game labor is the main reason why that Nintendo Wii is outselling every damn system on the market right now. Normal human beings aren't willing to work for their fun, and they shouldn't have to. I don't mean to demean delayed gratification, but what passes for delayed gratification in most modern games is just drudgery.

Today I wanted to talk about another aspect of the employment paradigm: the simulation of labor. That is, not hacking fourty-six boars to death so you can get your next sword, but driving a simulated forklift. There are whole video game subcultures oriented around the performance of virtual jobs: men and women who are safely and efficiently piloting 747s from Sanfrancisco to Denver in Microsoft Flight Simulator, where they are guided in by other men and women who are staffing Denver's air traffic control. There are people running functional investment banks in the popular MMO EVE online, and embezzling money from them. I'm talking about bus driving simulations, which are currently on the market.

One could see in this the death of pleasure. Surely Adorno would say that simulated employment represents the total surrender of the imagination to capital, a degredation so total that we've come to take pleasure in our enslavement to the capitalist system. But surely this goes to far. (This is, remember, a man who though that Jazz was enslavement to the capitalist system.) I can't help but find this wholehearted commitment to normality endearing. Maybe this just betrays my midwestern roots, but it's utterly heartwarming to see people out there whose free time revolves around preventing simulated air disaster. And I'm hopeless as a critical theorist, 'cause I have a hard time with the false consciousness concept-- can't bring myself to declare others' quaint diversions a form of pathology. Apparently, some folks like a routine, and I can understand that.

I think there's deeper point here that goes beyond labor: to me, there's something enchanting about simulating the mundane. Games usually turn on shooting the next guy in the head and watching the world burn. I'm so inured to being thrust into violent, death-defying scenarios that the quotidian has a paradoxical charm.

In the very beginning of Indigo Prophecy there's a brief episode that goes like this: you've just come back from a disturbing scene in the restaurant. You get back to your apartment in the next scene, and spend about 20 minutes engaging in these unremarkable activities: you watch TV for a little while, have a drink, practice your guitar, have an awkward conversation with your ex. From that point on the game gets goes down the rabbit hole, but for that one scene it succeeds in communicating this idea that your protagonist is a regular human being who's trying to cope with the bizarre events that just transpired. It's the most successful sequence in the entire game.

Injecting these moments of normalcy into the unremitting stream ludicrous heroism has this way of transfiguring the everyday. I've been playing Yakuza 2 this week, and the really interesting moments don't come when you're fending off hallwayfulls of well-tailored thugs. They're when the game sets you free to roam the packed streets of Osaka and you to get lost in the commonplace events that unfold in every corner of the world-- the man trying to win a robot out of the crane machine in the arcade, or the restaurant owner who asks your help tracking down a dine-and-dash customer. Aside from the fact that these scenarios are essential to creating a believable world, they also serve to mitigate the alienation that comes with making your hero an all-crushing god-king every time he fights some dudes. Fumbling with the crane machine makes your protagonist a person, and that's essential to the fiction.

While the mundane may have a special charm to me, I'm not calling for every game to be Animal Crossing or The Sims. You can capture the texture and rhythm of real life without disposing of the heroism. It's the juxtaposition of the mundane and extraordinary that fascinates me. Few games take advantage of the possibilities when it comes to using quotidian detail and, yes, quotidian labor to create an authentic sense of world and character. (Well, No More Heroes apparently does something along these lines but I'm led to believe it's some kind of cruel joke.) Games are meant to pull us out of our lives and transport us into different worlds, but the funny thing is that they're often best at this transport when they take our world with them. And this is just what good art does: it reveals our everyday world under a new aspect.

They Call it the Grind for a Reason

2009-02-11T03:24:00.000-08:00

Work is where you spend your time conforming to other peoples' whims. And then leisure is where you do what thou wilt. Except when you don't. The strangest thing about modern games is how they make play into work.

Take Rock Band 2, a game I adore. From the moment I pulled the shrink wrap off the case, all I wanted to do is croon Lindsay Buckingham's torrid farewell to Stevie Nicks at top volume. I had done my research and I knew it was on that very disc in my hand. But Rock Band says: not so fast, Pliskin; you have to earn the privilege of pouring out your heart to Stevie Nicks. Emotional closure with Stevie Nicks is something you have to work for. Why don't you spend a few hours playing through a bunch of other songs, possibly multiple times, and then once you've put your time in you'll get a shot at Go Your Own Way.

When games demand this kind of behavior from their players all I can think is that something has gone seriously wrong with our leisure. It's gotten so bad that Stephen Totilo compared gaming to gymgoing, an activity that most people view with a tinge of dread: “Playing lots of games can be pretty unpleasant, not unlike going to the gym a lot. You like what you get out of it, but you've got to put in a lot of work, much of it tedious.” And just earlier this week Mitch Krpata made the same point: “Ultimately, playing games is work. They ask a lot of you. It's a matter of how much effort you're willing to put in to get out what's there.”

And they're both right. It's not just that games require a high level of engagement relative to other forms of entertainment. Games have always demanded that the player surrender their will to a set of arbitrary rules (a set of controls and a system of game mechanics), and this is precisely what makes them fun. (Or so I argue) It's the kind of conformity that modern games ask of the player: repetition of menial tasks; accumulation; joyless travel. When the fundamental gameplay becomes routine, a superstucture of systematized rewards-- orbs, achievements, cutscenes, and XP-- is there to keep the player's eye on that next promotion and her nose to the grindstone.

Totilo has a fascinating explanation for this in his piece: he says this phenomenon is a symptom of video games' growing pains as they've developed from the three-minute quarter devourers of the arcade era to the twenty-hour-plus epics of the modern era. Even great gameplay mechanics like shooting and jumping are difficult to keep fresh and engaging over such a long span; and the narrative payoff of lengthy engagement still isn't enough to fend off the distinct sensation that we're laboring in our free time-- spending our time doing things we'd prefer not to for the sake of the game, rather than for the sake of our own pleasure: “That's what you get when you, the gamer, indulge in a creative form that was created to convey satisfying-but-repeatable, controllable bits of action for a quarter per minute. This is the creative form that has somehow evolved into a medium of 25-hour, $60 collections of satisfying-but-repeatable, controllable bits of action without inventing many successful strategies for telling stories, figuring out how to develop characters, or turning into a more interesting way to spend an hour than listening to Beethoven or watching The Wire.”

This is an intriguing proposal, but I could not let it pass without mentioning RPGs. Unlike the games that flourished in the arcade era, role-playing games don't rely on having the player do fun things with their hands. They offer a different species of pleasure, the sense of satisfaction that comes along with the feeling of progression. Progress is a way of forging the player's connection to their characters, because the time and effort dedicated towards earning levels and items invests the player in their avatars. Though I've praised the use of light RPG elements in other genres in the past, these mechanics can be a crutch when they're transposed into boring and stale forms of gameplay. Given our documented willingness to wander around a world map and mindlessly press A at regular intervals for hours on end, us gamers have a shown a marked disposition to pursue progress for its own sake. Progress is an easy hook, and getting caught in its clutches is what transforms our play into labor.

There's a brilliant piece of social analysis to be written about this phenomenon. Luckily Stephen Poole has written that piece, replete with the (to my mind, necessary) nods to Adorno, Horkheimer and Twain. But I think Poole draws the wrong lesson from his trenchant analysis. The solution to game labor isn't open-world game mechanics and user-created content. If we wanted our leisure to offer unfettered choice even the openest of open-world games are a poor option; games always drastically constrain the range of options available to us.

No, the solution to game labor is the same as the solution to real labor: even work is joy when you're doing something that truly exercises your faculties. We wouldn't hate work if we got to do something new and challenging every day, or if we were offered a truly great complex and difficult task to perform. It's the mindless repetition of menial tasks that makes work intolerable. And so the cure for game labor is good game design. When a game continually challenges you to think and react and adapt as you move through it, it never feels like work. But it's incredibly difficult to create gameplay that meets this standard, and that is why Valve only releases one game a year.

A Review

2009-02-09T03:22:00.000-08:00

Devil May Cry 4

Platform: Xbox 360, PS3, PC Developer: Capcom Publisher: Capcom

Box Quote: “As if Baz Luhrmann adapted the Necronomicon into a video game” -- Iroquois Pliskin, versusclucluland.blogspot.com

Full Disclosure: I played Devil May Cry 3 for the Playstation 2 back in the day, and I have two memories. First, that game was an ass-kicker. It didn't have check points, so if you died you had to play the whole level over again; because the first boss was in-fucking-sane, it took me almost four hours just trying to get through the first level. The game made you spend your precious orbs in order to buy mid-level continues. Who does that? Second, I remember that the main character had this move where he would chant “Blastoff!” and knock these demons into the air. “Why is that dude saying 'blastoff!' all the time?” my roommates would ask. “That's what you say when you're fighting demons, and you're unconcerned about your safety.” I replied. The main guy was totally intent on looking cool as he fought these hellbeasts, apparently unaware that I was sending him to certain death yet again.

Gameplay: Ninja Gaiden designer Tomonobu Itagaki once derided Devil May Cry by saying that it's not an action game, it's a combo game. This is true, but it shouldn't count as a knock. The combat system in Devil May Cry isn't as complex as Gaiden's, and it's not as spectacular as God of War's, but it has a unique fluidity. The enemies aren't really there to kill you; they're a canvas for you to weave interlocking sequences of stylish attacks, dodges and juggles. Making it look good is an end in itself, and the mechanics reward your commitment to style over substance. This approach to character action is exceptionally smooth-feeling and satisfying, which is fortunate given that the game has some serious deficiencies in the level and enemy design department: after you've battled through the first twelve or so levels of enemies and bosses, be prepared to hang a uey and play the exact same levels and fight the same bosses in reverse. The final level also contains a japanese-action-game convention that has become my personal bete noire: the final-level tour de bosses. This means that you will have fought every boss three goddamn times by the time you finish. However, these boss fights should challenge your reflexes and pattern-recognition skills to their limit; even after my third tango with the demon frog I found myself pumping my fist in exultation. Good times.

Story: The problem with video game stories isn't even that most games don't aim at realistic drama. It's that so many try for genuine pathos with such a blithe disregard for their own cliche-ridden scripting and boldly mannerist voiceacting. Devil May Cry, on the other hand, makes lemons out of lemonade by basking in its own ludicrousness There's more than one dude in a trenchcoat to control this time around, and you'll run around killing demons with guns and demonic hands and implausibly large swords. No-one seems too intent on portraying real human beings, and this frees all the characters up to spit corny dialogue at each other and display a careless attitude towards death. It's the Ocean's Thirteen of video game narratives: everybody just seems happy to be there. They show up, chew some scenery and take home their paycheck. There's a plot in there too, and if the faux macho posturing doesn't hook you, the rampant anticlericalism might do the trick. Coletta Factor! At the end of the game you kill the pope. Good times.

The Takeaway: Devil May Cry 4 protagonist Nero sez: “Now I know what this hand is for: it's for sending guys like you back to hell!” No, seriously. He's not just jerking you around. That is what it's for.

Pleasure (Pleasure)

2009-02-05T16:06:00.000-08:00

Sigh. I am probably not cut out for this kind of piece. I'm more of the analytical type.

We partisans of the games-is-art cause talk a big game. We're all for this idea that games ought to embrace some long-term goals in the realm of narrative artistry. Above all we demand maturity, by which we mean: something that is true to reality as it's experienced by adults. In fact I was praising Far Cry 2 for these very qualities in my last post; the attentive reader might notice that I might have cast some mild aspersions on pleasure for getting in the way of mature narrative.

Aaaaand then last night I decided to throw Devil May Cry 4 into my Xbox. Honestly, the whole enterprise mocks the search for le mot juste:

I should try anyways, since words are my business: The Devil May Cry series is a character-action demonicidal opera. You pilot a white-haired wiseass in an implausible red trenchcoat from one implausible scenario to the next, and kill a heap of demons. For some reason, your sword revs like a motorcycle. I have principles and all, but I'm not made of stone, people.

Devil May Cry, as a series, wields a simple and nonsensical palette: Motorcycles. Demon popes. Rocket Launchers. Boobs. It acts as if it doesn't owe you an explanation why these things belong together. There's such a gleeful devotion to artificiality and exaggeration that it ultimately comes off as charming naivete. It knows that the demon-slaying is the main attraction, and so it feels free to cram every cutscene full of absurd demon-centric melodrama. There isn't an authentic human emotion to be found in the series. Everything is subordinated to style. (This is where a comparison to opera might work. Even great operas are often crammed with of stock characters, exaggerated melodrama and convoluted plotting; and all that is immaterial, because the libretto is in service of the music.) The Devil May Cry series, like all great trash, has the courage of its convictions. It commits to its frivolousness with admirable devotion.

Were I a helpless genius, I'm sure I could transform this experience into some brilliant “Notes on Camp”-like cultural analysis. That woman could spin gold out of straw.

But here's the lesson I take. It's like hip-hop: regardless of how great your MC is, no matter how mesmerizing his wordplay and no matter how slick his storytelling, it doesn't matter if the track doesn't move you. A ridiculous beat will redeem a hapless vocal, but the opposite isn't true. (Exhibit A: Gang Starr. Exhibit B: Canibus) Same goes for games. Doing pleasurable things with your hands comes first.

That might serve as the credo of what N'Gai Croal called the “shake-your-ass” school of game criticism, in his discussion of God of War 2 with Stephen Totilo. : “[GOW2] is unquestionably a game that will make you shake your ass. And that's my point of departure when assessing the quality of my gameplay experiences.” Alas, this is the case.

Addendum: I realized, having written this post, that over the course of this blog I'm just going to end up comparing games to every musical genre in existence. (In my defense, it was N'Gai Croal wot started it) When I compare Killzone 2 to bluegrass you have my permission to drag me behind the shed and put me down.

I Must to Learn to Invect Like This

2009-02-04T23:52:00.000-08:00

From Slate.com:

"This din of brasses, tin pans and kettles, this Chinese or Caribbean clatter with wood sticks and ear-cutting scalping knives … [t]his reveling in the destruction of all tonal essence, raging satanic fury in the orchestra, this demoniacal lewd caterwauling, scandal-mongering, gun-toting music … the darling of feeble-minded royalty, …of the court flunkeys covered with reptilian slime, and of the blasé hysterical female court parasites … inflated, in an insanely destructive self-aggrandizement, by Mephistopheles' mephitic and most venomous hellish miasma, into Beelzebub's Court Composer and General Director of Hell's Music—Wagner!"

The Game Made Me Do It

2009-02-02T18:01:00.000-08:00

*** Coletta Factor: Spoileresque discussion of Far Cry 2, Bioshock, Prince of Persia below***

No, I'm not talking about the moral hysteria periodically visited on the medium whenever some malfeasant decides that simulation mitigates their wrongdoing. Listen, old people: I don't think that 12-year-olds should be playing GTA either, but I don't think that their doing so is going to lead to a life of bank heists or jetpack abuse. I consider myself beyond outrage when it comes to Victorian panic, but it turns out I'm still capable of shock: last week, I heard a video-games expert on the BBC suggest a correlation between the rise of video-game enthusiasm and suicide in middle-age women.

I'm talking about the things you do in the games themselves. We often operate under the assumption that games realize their storytelling potential as a interactive medium when they give the player full control with regard to the important decisions in the story. But one thing that struck me as I've been thinking over my favorite narratives of the last year is that these stories are most compelling when they force you into actions you'd rather not commit.

In Far Cry 2 the game tells you: go to this town, and hold a machete to the throat of some low-level functionary so he gives up some information. And then kill him. Or it says: go to this town, murder a bunch of guards, and destroy this shipment of malaria medicine. Things of this nature. The rationale for all this destruction gets progressively fuzzy as you move through the game. But the moral queasiness you feel as you walk down the path that the mission-structure sets out in front of you is one of the most compelling aspects of the game.

Quite a few games have traded on this productive friction between the demands of the game-structure and the player's sense of choice. The most compelling narrative moment in Bioshock doesn't emerge from the vaunted moral decision; it comes when you face Andrew Ryan and learn that the player's obedience to the rules of the game-world is slavery. The only memorable aspect of Prince of Persia's narrative is its conclusion, where the game compels you to undo everything you've accomplished and betray your consort in order to finish the story. GTAIV progressively humiliates the player's desire to shape their protagonist's character and destiny by sending the player on a program of senseless murder that leads to his ruin.

Some might think that this friction between the player and the game is a sign that the design has gone horribly wrong. One can feel especially betrayed when the game-mechanics suggest a level of control over the shape of the whole experience that is lacking in the narrative elements. (its open-world, coerced-narrative) But it appeals to me. I think the deliberate friction evident in these scenarios is an audacious response to a central problem with narrative in games.

The problem is this: on one hand, games traffick in empowerment. From the perspective of gameplay, the fundamental goal of game-design is to give the player a feeling of agency, a sense of power that grows as the player masters the rules of the game-world. It's agency that makes games fun. This is the core value proposition that games offer w/r/t non-interactive media-- games have this unique capacity to make the player feel like an active participant in the creation of something grand: a picaresque fantasy adventure, a rock concert, a war epic.

But the omnipotence of empowerment presents difficulties when it comes to making meaningful narratives. If the mechanics always tell the story of the player's glorious triumph over the world, how is it possible to craft a story that embraces the full range of dynamics available to mature narrative: failure, regret, chance, tragedy? Narrative thrives on conflict, ambiguity, and irresolution, values that are difficult to realize within the triumphalist script laid out by the gameplay.

And this is why I admire games like Far Cry 2 so much: their narrative elements make the player feel uneasy about their thirst for power. Realizing that fun is at any rate indispensable, they decide to make power itself problematic. Far Cry 2 knows that it feels like a colonialist power trip, and it doesn't shy away from the unflattering aspects of murder; if you're paying attention it subtly leads you to some unsettling conclusions about the behavior it forces on you in the name of fun.

And the thing is, I think it's more interesting to be unsettled by your behavior than spend all your time heeding your better angels. For me, moral choice is usually boring. I can't help it: given the choice, I attempt to be a good person, and the comfort of making the virtuous decisions makes for an uninteresting narrative. Fallout 3 is an excellent game, but there's nary an interesting decision to be made in it, because the choice for unstinting heroism is always on the table.

So perverse as it might sound, I'm going to plead for less choice in video games. It's a paradox: by limiting the player's discretion, you can expand the narrative possibilities of the medium. Coercion can create a kind of emotional heft that you can't achieve within the confines of the empowerment-myth. When I play games like Far Cry 2, Braid, and Shadow of the Colossus, I'm convinced turning the myth against itself may be the way to go.

Getting to the Bottom of Candyland

2009-01-28T11:32:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about children's board games ever since I read Chris Dahlen favorably compare Chutes n' Ladders to Fracture last fall. And then this week, I read a piece over on Boingboing in which Stephen Johnson (writer of the essential Everything Bad is Good for You) tore Candyland a new one. (A sampling: “what sort of message does Candy Land send to our kids? ... It says you are powerless, that your destiny is entirely determined by the luck of the draw, that the only chance you have of winning the game lies in following the rules, and accepting the cards as they come. Who wants to grow up in that kind of universe?”) The fascinating thing is that there's this whole battery of games-- Battleship, War, 7 up, Puppy Pals Bingo-- which defy all my basic assumptions about what makes games compelling. And since Charles Pratt encourages us game-critic-types to understand all different kinds of games, it seems worthwhile to figure out the mystery of Candyland.

The thing is, none of these games require any meaningful decisions on the part of the player. In Candyland, all you do is pick colored cards off the top of a deck and move to the corresponding color. Even if you're a total cretin, you can kick ass at Candyland. Same goes for Battleship: you actually have to decide where to put your ships and where to attack and whatever, but there's no skill involved. Battleship is just an agonizingly extended version of the game, “how many fingers am I holding behind my back?”

This all seems wrong to me. Sid Meier purportedly described a video game as a series of interesting decisions, and while this isn't perfect it certainly squares with my sense of things: games are interesting because they provide this tightly governed space where your decisions and skills and apprehension of the rules determine whether things go right or not. It's this making-things-go-right-through-skills that make your triumph over your little brother at NHL '94 worthwhile. This conquest would ring hollow if it all hung on chance. And we hate the video games when they punish you with arbitrary obstacles – ninjas hitting us with exploding arrows from offscreen, and the like. It offends our sense of propriety. Our sense is that for once in our lives, we should be spared outrageous fortune for a few hours.

Gambling may help to further clarify things. Casinos have all sorts of games that are as senselessly random as kids' games-- Keno, Slots, Roulette, and the like. It's the riding-of-money-on-things that makes these games interesting. Nobody would play Roulette unless there was some action to be had Since your success or failure is a matter of pure luck you need to get some cash involved in order to gin up some interest in the proceedings. We can all agree that Candyland would be sweet if there was some cash at stake, but that's regrettably not the case.

So what's the appeal? My ladyfriend told me I'm overthinking this: “you don't need any complicated concept at the center of Candyland, because you're in a magical land made out of candy.” This point is well-taken: there are pictures of candy involved. Maybe Battleship scratches your itch when it comes to your fantasies of nautical warfare; I had Electronic Talking Battleship growing up, and it added a lot in the atmospherics department.

Also, there's a way that these games create drama out of uncertainly. While you can't control your destiny in Chutes n' Ladders, its rules create all these late-minute reversals and dramatic tension. There's an appeal to the mere sense of tension, this am I gonna make it to the end feeling. It's exciting, especially if you are four and the status of victor is new to you. A lot of great games like Monopoly or Catan have this element of fortune in them because they hang on dice rolls. Maybe these games are a more faithful representation of real life, because success is a liberal mixture of planning and luck.

But in the end what I'm led to think is that Candyland is fun because it's a game about mere rule-following. As Johnson says, “winning the game lies in following the rules;” and though he means this as a knock I think it's the reason we like these games. Moreso than winning, the big accomplishment in Canyland is just correctly playing the game. Following the rules is the only skill the game requires. It has to be that following rules is fun. In itself.

Why is it that we would follow rules for recreation? It sounds all wrong, horrifically un-fun, to say that we like rules. Well, my hunch is that it's because human beings are rule-mongering creatures. Other animals know how to do all their essential life-tasks on instinct; a spider doesn't need to learn to spin it's web. But in order to accomplish our higher-order tasks-- assemble our Ikea furniture, sow crops, apply for a car loan-- us sapiens need to learn how to follow procedures, grasp abstract rules, understand patterns. These native talents are our meager dispensation from nature. As Kant says, the natural world acts according to rules but humans act according to the conception of rules. Candyland is a kind of dry run.

In Everything Bad is Good for You, Johnson proposed that this basic human lust for rules was built into our psychology by evolutionary pressures. This is why we like video games-- we're hardwired to take enjoyment in discovering the rules latent in the systems we confront. And though evolutionary neuroscience is a tenuous enterprise at this point, I've always thought he's onto something. The whole edifice of human civilization rests on our malleability, our capacity to mold our conduct in accord with rules. Sometimes this conformity is voluntary; sometimes not. The redeeming thing about games, these little artificial sets of rules we construct for ourselves, is that they present this one space where this conformity is a matter of choice, rather than necessity.

How it is that Games Teach you Things

2009-01-27T00:01:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned before, I spent about a month off the video-game-playing grid after Xmas, first through travel and later through the perspiration-centric malady I described in my last post. But since I had my nintendo DS and my laptop along for the ride I did sneak in some gaming here and there.

What games I did play served to impress the centrality of learning to video games on me. Games aren't terribly good at delivering narratively structured content, compared to other forms of media, but they have some unique competencies when it comes to schooling players in the dynamics of a system. Many of us bring a set of accumulated generic abilities to particular games (we know how it is we're supposed to jump in two-dimensional space, or how it is we're to shoot in three dimensions), but almost every game we play has some new set of rules it seeks to communicate-- controls, mechanics, enemy behaviors and the like. Often it's something as simple as “doors that look like this can be opened by using this item,” or “this enemy can't be beat with your usual attacks, you'll have to do something different,” but most games faces the task of making their underlying logics apparent to the player.

Every game needs strategies to communicate the lineaments of its underlying ruleset, and this goes double for games whose basic controls and mechanics are innovative, or deviate from the player's generic expectations.

This was the case with World of Goo, one of the two games I played over the break. World of Goo is a physics-based-puzzle game produced by the pop-and-pop game developer 2-D Boy. The ungainliness of the “physics-based-puzzle” moniker should point up the novelty of the game; we lack a ready vocabulary to describe what kind of game it is in the first place. (Roughly, it's a game where you make bridges) And so you think that it would be difficult to communicate the rules of the game to the player-- but the really remarkable thing about World of Goo is the game's tremendous ease of play given the novelty of its mechanics.

I chalk this ease of access up to meticulous craft. It's all in the way the game introduces its basic concepts. From the very beginning it eases you into the idea of goo-based construction. It doesn't ever throw a bunch of new rules at the player at once; the new mechanics and gameplay ideas you need to solve the puzzles are layered in gradually from level to level. If there's some new trick you need to master in order to surmount the next few levels (say, setting a portion of the bridge ablaze, or suspending it from baloons, or whatever), you'll be required to do something simple with it before you'll be asked to do something hard. The puzzles always run a few steps in front of your core competencies, and this is how it should be: you feel neither frustrated nor coddled.

This careful layering of game-mechanics reminded me of Portal, the game Goo most resembles in both its design and sensibility. If you've ever listened to the developer commentary to Portal (which you should, as its the cheapest course in game design you'll ever come by) you'll be struck by the deliberate way that the designers introduced the potentially bewildering portal-mechanic. The player has to learn to use static portals before they are asked to move them, and they have to learn to manipulate one side of the portals before they are asked to manipulate both ends. The game forces you to master a battery of basic concepts about the portal-physics before it guides them towards the complex later stages.

And this is just how it works in World of Goo, as well: the gradually-more-complex puzzles call for the player to synthesize and re-deploy the rules and concepts you've amassed in simpler contexts. It leads to these satisfying moments where you feel that solving the game is a genuine piece of human ingenuity.

My other diversion over the break was Shiren the Wanderer, which is actually a DS port of a 1995 SNES game. (I owe my knowledge of this game to Zach Reese's zealous evangelism.) “Diversion” is probably to mild a word; my girlfriend quipped that Shiren qualified as my common-law husband by the end of the vacation. Let's just say that the playtime I sunk into that infernal amusement approached Fallout 3 levels.

What's remarkable about Shiren is how much unlearning it foists the player inured to the conventions of traditional-RPGs. All the trappings of the game bespeak RPG standbys: there's an inventory full of swords and spell scrolls, recovery herbs, and the like. There's experience points and levels and so on. But Shiren the Wanderer swiftly undercuts this expectation; all the elements of the RPG language are there, but the basic syntax of the game is radically different.

It all turns on the game's attitude towards progression. In the classic Role-Playing Game, core appeal of the genre is the progressive empowerment of your player-characters over the course of the game. Whatever the setting, you expect to continually gain levels acquire better weapons.

When you die in Shiren, there is no progress-saving resurrection item on offer. Every time you fall, you irretrievably lose all of your levels and items. You start again from level one in the starting town. There are persistent elements of the game, which progress and improve between playthroughs, but your character isn't one of them.

If World of Goo belongs to the Berlitz language school of game-pedagogy, Shiren is an example of learning-through-immersion: it dumps a dictionary in your lap, dumps your ass in the town center and speeds away. There's a kind of “tutorial dungeon” in the first town, and the early run of the game is filled with villagers has a handy tip to pass along. It's not that this information isn't valuable; mastering all the wrinkles of the game passed along in the early-going often mean the difference between death and survival in the later stages. But it's only over the long course of prolific misfortune that you pick up on their importance. For example, a man in the first town tells you he stores food in jars. And on the twentieth-or-so level you start running into these traps that rot all your food unless it's in a jar. It took a round of soul-crushing starvation on that twentieth level to impress the importance of that minor tidbit.

By and large Shiren's pedagogical tool is death. You die in countless frustrating ways until you get the hang of the subtleties of the mechanics and learn of the few contributions you can make to your future success. And over time you find that you get a little bit better at the game each run-through. And it's immensely satisfying, because the first 20 times you die think that there's no way you're ever getting better at this game. Your (relative) mastery of the game's myriad wrinkles and challenges is a hard-won accomplishment secured against overwhelming odds, and because of this you feel a sense of pride at your ability to stave off death.

And so my holiday was spent with games on the opposite ends of the spectrum: World of Goo's patient instruction versus Shiren's school of hard knocks. And despite their different approaches I felt that each, in their own way, did credit to the core competence of games as a medium: inspiring the pleasure of finding things out.

Sweaty Delerium is the Worst Videogame Ever

2009-01-22T15:49:00.000-08:00

So, as I returned from the post-Xmas trip to Guatemala and Belize last week (there was a wedding, along with some R&R) I had the full intention of hitting the ground running, taking care of business in a flash, being well-rested and rejuvenated. Despite the fact that I had spent almost a month playing very little save a DS port of an eleven-year old SNES game (more on this later), I had all these aspirations to get the games-criticizing back on track.

And then, about two days after reentry, I came down with the death flu. You all know what I'm talking about. One morning I had a runny nose, and then gradually my eyeballs began to ache. This is always a bad sign, this soreness of the eyeballs. Over the following days I'm treated to a whirlgig tour of the varieties of somatic distress. Not only the industry-standard chills, nausea, sweats, etc., but also these absurdly detailed headaches: a San Andres fault of pain, a fully localiziable fissure spidering its way through your cranium.

You know the situation, where the full-body weakness forces you to subject the smallest expenditure of effort to this brutal calculus. I would like to take some juice, but can I afford to walk all the way to the kitchen? When that juice is on the bedside table: can you afford to move all the way across the bed and move from underneath the covers? While I made it out of the house on Saturday, I didn't make it past the refrigerator on Sunday. It was that kind of sick.

Listen, I realize that all this is pretty uninteresting. Publicizing the minute particulars of your unwellness is on par with telling people anecdotes about your pets' eccentricities, or showing them your vacation slides. And telling people about your dreams is almost as bad. However, I think the fever- delirium over the last few days had some interesting angles. When you run this kind of fever, the frontier between wakeful consciousness and the dream-logic gets a bit porous. You can't really fall asleep, but when you close your eyes your thoughts run away from you.

So here's the thing: My hallucinatory feverishness had this distinct ludic quality. Right as I was coming down with the sickness, I had been playing Shiren the Wanderer. I even played it some while I was sick, during those times when I was capable of keeping my head and hands outside of the bedsheets This was a very bad idea. I've been this kind of sick before, and the fever dreams have always had this nasty edge to them, these really abstract elements of persecution-mania: I'm being pursued, or kept against your will, I'm being followed, I can't find my way to escape. Not by anything in particular, mind you, and this makes it worse. There's no beginning and no end to it.

Usually I would say there's something metaphysically comforting about playing video games. It's a space that functions according to a predictable and surmountable set of rules. I think this is true regardless of challenge: even where you're unable to get through the obstacles the game puts in your ways you never lose the sense that there is such a way. I sometimes think that the essential predictability and intelligibility of games (and sports, for that matter) explains why they appeal to us so much during our adolescence: while we're spending the rest of our lives coming to grips with an emotional and social reality that is new and complex and unpredictable, games offer us a place where we can safely cope with a recognizable and familiar order.

This is why the ludic delirium was so godawful. Whenever I closed my eyes, my brain kept on playing Shiren the Wanderer unabated. But it was as if the familiar logic had come unmoored, was stripped of all its comforting sense of stability and order. My mind kept traveling along in this insanely familiar space, but the experience was twisted into this Kafkaesque odyssey. I retained this feeling that I was wandering along these paths between towns (these dreams even had this overlying map-grid from the game), but any sense of progression or rule-guidedness was gone. I had this incoate feeling that the goal of my quest was to overcome this terrible illness (like, when my fever broke and the aches receded and my stomach settled down, it played out in-game like I had discovered some new town or accomplished something) but I had this horrible sense that my most intelligent efforts would avail me of nothing in this effort.

I think most people who play games as much as I do see this phenomenon to some extent, where the game-logic invades their everyday activities. There were some hilarious examples of this in the most recent Idle Thumbs podcast. This was some bad mojo, though. The moral: stay far far away from videogames if you have the death flu.

Now that I'm on the mend I have some some plans to talk about actual games that you can play, rather than the hallucinatory versions of them that are available exclusively on the in my fevered brain entertainment system. Stay tuned!

Hasta Luego!

2008-12-26T22:21:00.000-08:00

Hi Ev'ry body!

I'm heading of on a two-week trip to Central America next week, which means that Versus CluClu Land will be taking a temporary break. Depending on the Internet situation in Guatemala, there may be some sporadic updates in which I give a blow-by-blow accounts of my Peggle deathmatches with the Ladyfriend.

Happy New Years to everyone!

The First-Annual Versus Clu Clu Land Awards for Excellence in Game Design

2008-12-24T01:28:00.000-08:00

The close of 2008 is upon us, and it's appropriate if not obligatory to bestow laurels on the exemplary products of the year past, preferably according to some schema. Though I can't hope to rival the Spike Video Game Awards when it comes to cheerful misogyny (I'm fresh out of both diapers and metallic body paint), I thought it only natural to fabricate some categories and bestow some distinctions. Astute readers of VCCL (I'm led to believe they exist, God help them) will notice that several categories are cribbed from my piece on “three methods of game design.” And so, without further ado, I present Versus Clu Clu Land's first annual awards for excellence in game design:

The Min Riker Award for Excellence in Immersion, ultraboosted by strategychocolate.biz

Goes to Far Cry 2. Beyond the generally awe-inspiring attention to graphical detail manifest in the flora and fauna and climate of Leboa-Sako, CLINT HOCKING's Africa-set magnum opus abounds in the small touches that communicate an authentic sense of place: patches of leaf-filtered sun on the floor of your safehouse, bugs on your windshield, the golden luster of the savanna grass at sunset. And having to look down at your map while driving so uncannily replicated the hazards of real-life vehicular navigation that you forgave the frequent mishaps it caused.

Most Honorable Mention goes to Fallout 3, whose ammunition-and-wonderglue-laden Capital Wasteland was among the most impressive landscapes of this or any other year. Gamers are unlikely to forget the gorgeously barren vista that greeted their first steps out of the Vault 101, or their first glimpses of those blasted monuments to an extinct nation. The seamless integration of RPG menu-shuffling into the world via the Pip-boy wrist computer removed another barrier between the character and the environment, and the unparalleled explorability of the game-world was remarkable: it was a world that continually outstripped the player's thirst for discovery.

The Wassily Kandinsky Synaesthesia Award, fueled by Mr. Pibb

Goes to Castle Crashers, a game that looks like Frank Zappa sounds. Dan Paladin's gleefully depraved character art stole the show (nobody's likely to forget the catfishsubmarine anytime soon), but the electric-guitar-drenched soundtrack is almost as good. Every nook and cranny of the art was awash with memorable details, and the sheer visual awesomeness of the game demonstrates what four years of adoring labor will get you.

Very Honorable Mention goes to Pixeljunk Eden: more than any game this year, Eden created a cohesive and beautiful union of sound and vision. Bayion created a visual and musical aesthetic for the game that echoed the breezy organicism of the gameplay perfectly.

The Hideo Kojima Award for Innovation in the Field of Gameplay

Goes to World of Goo. Sure, it didn't invent physics. (Physics was invented by our risen Lord, Jesus Christ.) But goo-based bridge construction was such a novel mechanic that the progressive introduction of imaginative variations on the basic formula was gravy.

Honorable Mention goes to The World Ends With You, whose dual-screen-scribble-and-blow skirmishing breathed new life into one the area of video game design most in need of renovation: JRPG combat. Square-Enix, the company least likely to innovate, introduced countless fresh ideas into a genre notorious for creative stagnation, and their risks paid off at every turn.

The Shigeru Miyamoto Award for the Doing of Fun Things with your Hands

Goes to Boom Blox. The genius of Nintendo's console resides in its unique access to the joys of movement, and the developers at the beleaguered EALA were one of the few third-party developers who grasped the potential of the interface. Boom Blox founded its world on play, and its physics-puzzle-based gameplay turned vigorous wiimote-chucking (plenty fun on its own) into an intellectually compelling exercise. Like Wii Sports, its only credible rival on the hardware, it succeeds by capitalizing on the endless fun inherent in its core mechanics.

Honorable Mention goes to Pixeljunk Eden: the raw, kinetic fun of its grapple-and-swing mechanic, the appealing sense of momentum and grace it created, was such that it drew my non-gamer housemates into the feverish pursuit of trophies.

The Fumito Ueda Award for Achievement in the Integration of Gameplay and Narrative

Goes to Braid. Competing interpretations of the elliptical text-fragments proliferated on the Internet post-release, and though creator Jonathan Blow never anointed a “correct” decryption of the narrative, it was clear that the thematic resonances of the time-warping gameplay were the fundamental to the game's meaning. (Let us not a forget: we had an extended argument over what a video game meant! This is progress.) Braid subversively interrogates the cerebral attitude its complex and inventive puzzles demanded, investing the player's conquest of time and space with layers of emotional depth.

The Edwin Q. Goaty Prize, funded by the Edwin Q and Frances T Goaty Foundation

Goes to Grand Theft Auto 4. Yes, really.

It's the Little Things

2008-12-21T23:34:00.000-08:00

First, some housekeeping. I made my first-ever podcast appearance on Michael Abbot's Brainy Gamer Podcast under a pseudonym. (My last radio appearance was on the WBRU Jazz overnight back in '01.) Good times all around; you can hear me sully what scant indie cred I possess by declaring GTAIV my game of the year. Also, my piece on “the year of being there” recieved a nod from N'Gai Croal's Level Up blog. So, with this being-alluded-to-by-N'Gai-Croal out of the way, now I can die in peace.

I greedily devoured James Wood's new book of criticism, How Fiction Works, over the two days I've spent here at the Pliskin family seat in Cleveland. Like his other books, it's compulsively readable and inexhaustibly perceptive. How Fiction Works is many things: a treatise on the representation of subjectivity, a short history of the novelistic form, a meditation on the elusiveness of realism. But above all it is a primer on literary technique, with examples.

Wood gives a good deal of attention in this slim book to the importance of detail in literary representation. For Wood, the modern novel comes into existence with Flaubert and his obsession with the selection of detail. Flaubert's prose is not just a lucid camera passively turned on reality. He knew how to focus the lens of his prose on just the right elements of the manifold of experience: “Flaubert seems to scan the streets indifferently, like a camera. Just as when we watch a film we no longer notice what has been excluded, what is just outside the edges of the camera frame, so we no longer notice what Flaubert chooses not to notice. And we no longer notice that what he has selected is not of course casually scanned but quite savagely chosen, that each detail is almost frozen in its gel of chosenness.” (40) It's this devotion to the variegation of detail, the spatial and temporal dynamism of the selection, that creates the impression of reality in all the savage artifice: “The effect is lifelike-- in a beautifully artificial way. Flaubert manages to suggest that these details are at once important and unimportant: important because they have been noticed by him and put down on paper, and unimportant because they are all jumbled together, seen as if out of the corner of the eye; they seem to come at us 'like life.'”(42)

These conventions can't be transposed from literature to video games, as they are different mediums. Unlike the novelist, the game designer doesn't have license to manipulate the focus and the tempo of the represented experience, because the player ought to have control over these elements. They should control how the world appears to them-- what they see and how long they notice it-- and this is a devilish problem in game design. But the use of detail is no less essential to reality-effect of a simulated world.

Niko Belic doesn't scramble headlong down the stairs of the Hove Beach rail station; he descends with a stiff-legged sidle. You can tell from his carriage that he doesn't have a young man's spring in the knees. It's not just that the animation captures one of the subtle particularities of human movement; Niko's gait incarnates his durability, the steady world-weariness that defines him.

There's a hole in the roof of my safehouse, in Leboa-Sako. There's a tree interposed between the sun and the roof; and when the wind catches its leaves their tangled shadows flit across the smear of sunlight on the dirt floor. I've half a mind to sleep for a couple hours and see if the little yellow tache of sun moves its way across the floor. When I visit other safehouses I keep an eye out for this same patch, and am cheered by its absence. This is what it's like in real life: each roof is different in its irregularity.

The most credible element of the courtship between the Prince and Elrika is the gracefulness of their bodies moving in tandem. When they have to switch places on one of the innumberable wooden beams, they link arms and pirouette around each other. It looks like they've been practicing this move all their lives, it's done with such quickness and ease.

All of these moments were are impossible without the great leaps in technology we've seen over the last two decades. There's no denying that the lexicon has expanded greatly. But my feeling is that the barriers to verismilitude in video games aren't technological-- lighting effects, texture work, mocapping-- but technical. They're matters of technique, mastering the extant toolset in order to produce the novelistic details that make for the feeling of authentic transport. Game design doesn't need a better camera, or a holodeck. What it requires is old-fashioned artistry and imaginativeness, an obsessive and nerdish Flaubert who will come along and show us how games work.

A Review

2008-12-20T02:24:00.001-08:00

Prince of Persia

Platform: Xbox 360, PS3, PC Developer: Ubisoft Montreal Publisher: Ubisoft

Box Quote: “Like one of those rides at Epcot Center, but in a good way.” -- Iroquois Pliskin, versusclucluland.blogspot.com

Full Disclosure: Even though I'm awfully good at video games, I'm what Mitch Krpata would call a tourist. If I wanted a gaming experience founded on the systematic humiliation I would just go out and play golf. Though death is a fine tool for teaching the player the rules of a video game, I think that the course of civilization has brought forth effective pedagogical alternatives to routinized cruelty. People forget that if you remove the soulcrushing frustration from golf (the putting-the-ball-in-the-hole part), you still have walking around outdoors drinking with your friends for a couple of hours. Nobody complains that strolling around manicured hillsides and sipping on malted hops is too easy.

Gameplay: Despite appearances to the contrary, Prince of Persia is not a character action game. Think of it as “Parappa the Rapper meets Aquanaut's Holiday” and you're getting in the right frame of mind to appreciate what it's trying to accomplish. The series' trademark acrobatic platforming has been reimagined as an exercise in rhythm-based gameplay: you hit various buttons with correct timing to transition from wallruns to bar swings to longjumps. By eliminating death from the scenario (your magical companion swoops in every time you fall into an abyss and cheerfully deposits you on the last bit of stable ground you touched), the game encourages you to traverse the game-world without stopping to think about your next move. And this is how Prince of Persia goads the player into pursuing its core experience: falling into a rhythm, sight-reading your path on the fly and losing yourself in the simple joys of motion. The legibility of the environments (there's always clear visual cues-- scratched-out patches on the wall, woodlined crevices, blocky hooks-- that indicate the right course through the world) removes the “puzzle” from “puzzle-platforming,” but your compensation is the fact that the world itself is a shimmering, colorful treasure. It's the closest approximation of an inhabitable painting yet seen in video games, and over the eight hours it took me to complete the game its relentless beauty never wore on me. It's a world that exists to be seen, not beaten. Bits of rhythm-based combat and simple lever-pulling puzzles interrupt the platforming at points, and while both are diverting, these elements seem to exist in order to punctuate the platforming segments rather than compel in their own right.

Story: Much like Sands of Time, the newest entry focuses on the flirtatious relationship between the reluctant hero and his fetching consort. The female lead this time around is Elika, the princess of a corrupted kingdom whose moving plight slash diaphanous clothing attracts the attention of the roguish protagonist; you spend the game healing her cursed realm and letting the dalliance marinate. Prince of Persia's designers took an unusual tack on the delivery of the narrative: instead of mandatory cutscenes, they allow the player to initiate a brief conversation between the prince and Elrika by hitting a shoulder button. While I thought this technique was a step back from Sands of Time's seamless integration of voiceover narration and conversation into the action itself, the quality of the voice acting and scripting are both noteworthy for their competence. The prince has a chuckle-worthy wisecrack or two in him, and this was incentive enough to take a moment for reflection between wallruns. But really, all the romance is in the charming physicality of the platforming itself: the way the Elrika clings to the Prince's back as you scramble across vines, the way they swing around each other in order to exchange places on a beam, the way that Elika's jump-extending fling becomes a natural part of your own movements. These kids dance so well together that their falling for each other seems inevitable, and this is as it should be. The unexpectedly poignant finale was a fitting counterpoint to the breezy, swashbuckling tone of the narrative and presented the player with the one of the few real ethical dilemmas of the holiday season: turn the console off, or finish the game?

The Takeaway: If you're like me, you've spent a lot of time the last few months wandering from one bombed-out warzone to another. Why not let a game transport you somewhere you want to be?

Seeing Africa, Down the Barrel of a Gun

2008-12-18T23:50:00.000-08:00

For all my talk of ludonarrative dissonance, I think that us gamers have a native tendency to let the gameplay, rather than the narrative, assess the moral aspects of our conduct for us. When we're rewarded with currency and powerups, this validates whatever we're doing in the world, regardless of the narrative scaffolding the designers decide throw up around our gradual empowerment. If you want to save the world, then you have to push a few old ladies down the stairs: so be it. We're not likely to raise a fuss about it if achievement points are in the offing. It's how the countless heroic exploits of our youth have trained us to approach these things.

I can think of no other explanation for the political and moral tone-deafness in the reviews of Far Cry 2. I've trawled metacritic for assessments of the game, and while these trained professionals have an excellent eye for lighting effects and improbable AI, the fact that the narrative revolves around setting Africa ablaze for fun and profit seems to have passed without notice. Maybe I have some unusual sensitivities when it comes to doing violence on African soil, because I spent a bunch of time in college reading Franz Fanon. But I had to turn to Mitch Krpata's review in the Phoenix to get a take that did justice to the game's comprehensive moral unease. Maybe the the adjective “gritty” is supposed to capture the edge of moral horror that tinges many of your actions in the game.

I think this tendency to associate gameplay-progress with moral rectitude is what blinds us to the ethical messiness of Far Cry 2. The game's buddy system is a good example: your fellow mercenaries will come and save you from dying, help you upgrade your safehouses, and give you missions. So they must be pretty good, right?

The thing is, your buddies are not good people. After spending a small amount of time with my best buddy Paul Ferenc, I came to the conclusion that the man was in line for a severe beating . He may have pulled me out of a scrape once or twice, but those facts doesn't paper over the fact that Paul is a callow douchebag, the feckless backpacker type satirized in The Beach. I'm supposed to help this man achieve his lifelong dream of kicking back in Thailand for six months and getting high every day.

My contempt for Paul led me to the next logical question the game poses: how is it that you're any different? Every game makes you feel like you're the moral center of its cosmos, and this is misleading. Seeing yourself in the other mercenaries (you can actually choose them as player-characters) just reveals what you would know if you weren't locked into seeing the world from the first-person: you're part of the problem. The player is just another well-heeled Western interloper looking to capitalize on the political chaos for his own ends. Nobody's welfare seems to factor into the equation.

To its credit, Far Cry 2 doesn't beat you over the head with this stuff. Everything is done with a subtle hand: a doctor in town almost calls you a “foreign mercenary”, before stopping himself and calling you an “altruist.” But early on, I held a knife to an aid worker's throat to get the location of some medical supplies, which I then destroyed in an effort to get some leverage. After threatening to slit another man's throat I heard him mutter “This life!” as I walked away. The moral tenor of the game doesn't come through elaborate speeches and grand gestures: it's all in his tone of voice as he utters the line. It's all there if you're paying attention.

Maybe you're a well-meaning imperialist: you're be looking to take down the man who's fueling the conflict by dealing arms to both sides. But in the meantime you're just another asshole with a gun playing the political mayhem to your advantage. And if, at the beginning of act 2, this involves some arms-proliferation to break a cease-fire between the factions, so be it. The game told me I had to do it, anyway.

And while we're talking about the game making you do things, it's important in closing not to overlook the most important point: it's incredibly fun to kill people. The gunplay is expertly tuned, and the armory offers you an absurdly diverse array of tools with which to discharge your animal strength; because the combat scenarios are so open-ended, the game encourages you to try a wide variety of those weapons and strategies. I have no idea what kind of alchemy is going on under the hood that creates this urge to murder downed enemies with a machete (I have this feeling it's a combination of the way the perspective mimics your head-movements and the prominence your hands in the visual frame.), but I find myself doing it at every opportunity. I shot a man in Pala, just to watch him die. And the fire, the fire is awful pretty when it ravages the plains. And so, I guess the real message is that killing people is its own reward. Does it matter why?

The Year of Being There

2008-12-15T04:29:00.001-08:00

Slowly but surely, the conventional wisdom is coalescing around the view that '08 was an off-year for video games. In Slate's year-end gaming roundtable, Chris Suellentrop cited the lack of critical consensus on the game-of-the-year as evidence that this was “a year of just-misses.” Despite plentiful capital, recession-defying sales, and a raft of rapturously received titles, critical opinion has begun to converge on the view that something is missing from this year's releases.

I have a diagnosis. Back in July, I wrote a piece on the similarities between Jazz and video game design which might shed some light on the indefinable manque in question. Its comparison of improvisational music to video games was a felicitous stalking-horse for my effort to posit a defining conflict between structure and freedom in modern game design. In retrospect this conflict seems more and more important, and fortunately for me the comparison of 2008 to 2007 yields an elegant illustration of this contrast.

A look at the defining games of 2007-- Bioshock, Portal, Call of Duty 4, and Half-Life 2: Episode Two-- betrays a common theme. Each of these products delivered a expertly paced, varied and linear experience. They empowered the player by giving them the opportunity to make the correct choices, to discover their role in the epic that unfolded in concert with their actions. They compensated the player's acquiesce to a preordained path by supplying them with a well-crafted narrative arc and many-sided gameplay.

The best games of 2008-- Fallout 3, Far Cry 2, and Grand Theft Auto IV-- are the fruit of an opposing design aesthetic, a philosophy which prizes experiential immersion in an open gameworld over closely authored design. Steve Gaynor, one of the best advocates of this philosophy of game design, argues that video games best exploit their native potential when they provide a seamlessly simulated world in which the player can exercise their own agency and autonomy: games should “[provide] a believable, populated, internally consistent, freely-navigable gameworld for the player's avatar to inhabit, and robust tools of interactivity that allow the player to build a personal identity within that gameworld through his own actions.” The intrinsically interactive nature of video games, as a medium, ought to be brought to the fore through the creation of game-worlds which allow the player a sense of “being there”-- being transported into a dredible world in which their choices matter.

To me, the above-cited games represent some of the most powerful examples of this conception at work. From the standpoint of sheer density, we've never before seen worlds like Liberty City, The Capital Wasteland, or Far Cry 2's Africa before: chewier, more granular, lavished with yet-unseen devotion to specificity. The astonishing detail and dizzying scale of these games (especially the first impact of the environments: stepping out of vault 101, driving into Algonquin for the first time, the first African sunrise) marked a qualitative leap over the worlds of games past.

So what went wrong? Why are these games flawed masterpieces or “near-misses” rather than monuments? On one hand, I think it's a matter of diminishing returns: given the length of modern videogames, the spell cast by those environments can't help but dwindle over the course of tens of hours of play. Maybe the first dozen times you pass some jaw-dropping panorama or meticulously detailed cityscape and you are arrested by its sheer gorgeousity. But games demand a long investment of time, and by the tenth hour that lush gameword becomes another place you drive by on your way to killing some dude. It's almost like Gaynor's video-games-as-travel metaphor went over-literal: Liberty City is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

The progressive waning of the player's astonishment would be less of a problem if open-world games managed to engineer a well-paced experience with variegated gameplay. But non-linear games also have difficulty establishing taut pacing over a twentyplus hour narrative. Because they give the player discretion over the unfolding of the core narrative events (the more-scripted “missions” that make up the main quest or storyline), the situation that they find themselves in-- the world itself-- has to be “seeded” with points of interest in such a way that the player will be sufficiently engaged if they take off on their own. Because the prime mode of interaction in these games is combat (even Fallout 3 has little non-combat interaction outside of towns), the core gameplay tends to become repetitious even if the basic combat mechanics themselves are satisfying and patient of a variety of approaches. As Suellentrop wrote, “Don't I have the right to expect something more from this marvelous new medium? Something more wondrous than beautifully and impeccably crafted worlds filled with enemies for me to kill?”

The storyline that the player can create for themselves by traversing the world at their leisure has to be at least comparable in its pacing and variety to that of a more tightly-scripted game, and this is supremely difficult to achieve. This is partially a matter of execution-- GTA has an overlong third act and repetitive mission structure, Far Cry 2 has a few too many guardposts, Fallout 3's environments have this feel of procedurally-generated uniformity to them-- but these corrigible flaws point to the unresolved challenges inherent in open-world game design.

Setting all these difficulties aside, there is an element missing in all of these games that is perhaps even more important. One of the benefits of linear game design-- steering the player towards a particular set of actions and scenarios-- is that it allows the designer to freight these specific gameplay elements with a narrative signficiance. That is, the more you can shape the gameplay the more you can work towards a synthesis of gameplay and narrative.

In the Slate exchange, Newsweek's N'Gai Croal contrasted Gears of War 2 with God of War, noting that the latter better exemplified the marriage of gameplay to narrative:

Compare [a sequence in Gears] with the sequence in the first God of War, in which our hero Kratos, trapped in Hell with the wife and child he inadvertently slaughtered, must now protect them by alternately holding them to him (using the game's grab mechanic to share his health bar with them) and fighting off an army of Kratos doppelgängers. It's gameplay, not a cutscene, and nearly four years after God of War's release, it still stands as one of the best examples of how narrative and interactivity can be synthesized to create, well, art.

Gears' deficiencies in this respect are (from what I gather) a failure of creative nerve rather than a structural problem, but the felt disconnect between gameplay and narrative that Croal highlights is common problematic in the year's best games. It's nowhere more dissonant than in GTA4, where the gleeful sociopathy of the gameplay clashes with the putative moral decency of the protagonist. Fallout 3 lacks any such jarring clash, but at the same time it also fails to forge any memorable connection between the game-mechanics and the story itself. My sense is that most of the mechanics (the reward scheduling, the level progression, the quest structure, and the morality system) are well-tuned RPG conventions that could be transposed into any any other story and into any other world. They're mercilessly compelling and well-crafted in their own right but they don't reflect the kind of artistic impact that is possible through the mating of those mechanics to story.

What is missing, then, is the meaningful fusion of story and gameplay, form and content, that made games like Half-Life 2, Bioshock, and Shadow of the Colossus so memorable. The exception is Braid, a game in which deprived the player of choice in order to invest its time-scrambling gameplay with thematic and emotional resonance. It was a shining example of the potential of narrative synthesis in this year of immersion.

Essential Jargon: Procedural Rhetoric

2008-12-10T11:24:00.000-08:00

Leigh Alexander recently lamented the lack of a common critical vocabulary among the games journo set, in her review of 2008's biggest disappointments. (More disappointing than the fact that the owners of the most important console in world are being treated to a gruesome parade of z-grade software? Really?) Of course, she doesn't mean “vocabulary” literally; Alexander explains that the problem is that the games-writing landscape has surplus of consumer advocacy and a surfeit of criticism. (What's the difference? I say: a review tells you if a game is fun, criticism tell you how it's fun.) But this is a convenient pretext for more jargon-mongering under the welcome cover of topicality. To whit:

“Procedural Rhetoric” is an analytical framework for video game criticism developed by Ian Bogost, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a prime mover in the nascent academic field of videogame theory. Bogost's 2007 book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames is a long-form implementation of this analytical framework to video games concerned with matters political, commercial, and educational. It aims to show how video games, as a means of persuasive expression, might transform our understanding of these various domains.

So, what is Procedural Rhetoric? A wise man once told me: “Pliskin, whenever you face a complex problem, chunk it out.” And so I will.

The “procedural” piece tags how games express ideas. Games are procedural because they use rules to represent things. When you interact with a game, there are a set of procedures, or rule-based systems, that define what your tappings and wagglings mean in the context of the game's world. So, there's a rule that says your character will jump if you press A, and another rule that says you die if you run into an enemy, and a rule that says you advance to the next level if you reach a certain point without dying. As Bogost writes, “Procedural systems generate behaviors based on rule-based models; they are machines capable of producing many outcomes, each conforming to the same overall guidelines” (4); every computer game is a complex, nested system of rules whose structure designates certain outcomes in view of the player's inputs.

One of Bogost's main points is that procedurality as a phenomenon isn't native to games. Human beings inhabit a variety of worlds-- natural, social, economic, and political worlds-- whose basic contours are rulish in nature. There's the law of gravity, the law of supply and demand, laws against regicide, and so forth. What video games do is represent the logics of these rule-bound systems through processes and procedures. This is what makes them different from other media; unlike visuals or text, games represent systems of rules by using systems of rules, and this makes them particularly adept at representing how complex systems work: “only procedural systems like computer software actually represent process with process.” (14). So where a textbook might represent gravity by using equations and pictures, a game can represent gravity with a physics engine: a system of rules which manipulates objects in accordance with certain physical laws. Guns, Germs and Steel and Civilization both express visions of the developmental logic of human civilization: one with words, one with rules.

The “rhetoric” piece tags why games express ideas. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. Bogost's interested in how games persuade their users through rules, since he thinks that they have unique persuasive capacities relative to other media.

There are many rhetorical techniques, not all of them kosher, but Bogost is especially concerned with a rhetorical figure he traces to Aristotle, the enthymeme. An enthymeme is a rheorical technique where you present a piece of inferential reasoning but omit one of the premises of that piece of reasoning. For example, I could say “Of course this guy dude loves first-person shooter games. He's a fourteen-year-old racist!” The suppressed premise of this figure is: all fourteen-year-old racists love first-person shooter games. I think the reason Bogost hones in on the enthymeme idea is that it contains a kind of proto-interactivity-- in order to understand the point, the audience has to piece together the logic of the statement and discover the missing premise.

So, to re-chunk the matter at hand, Bogost proposes that video games are particularly adept at creating procedural enthymemes. As the player interacts with the system of rules by learning to play the game, they also gain a grasp of the deeper logics that shape its surface-logic-- what deeper rule-governed forces account for the way the game behaves. For example, let's say that when I start playing SimCity, all I know is that I'm out to build a city on a hill. And so I might start out by just zoning willy-nilly in a bid to attract a tax base. But when I've played the game for a while, I come to realize that the layout of the residential zones relative to the transport systems, power grid, police stations, fire houses, and industrial zones is the key condition for economic and population growth.

Bogost says that discovering this deeper layout-logic is like discovering the suppressed premise of an enthymeme. And this is one important way that games can be used as arguments; they can make an argument about the way things work (the way economic, commercial, and political systems work, for example), by having the player discover the underlying logics of its systems. Maybe you play another game-- a simulation of being a freshman house member in the US congress-- and as you play it, you discover that the key factor in “winning” the game (getting elected) is voting for legislation that favors big-pocketed donors to your reelection campaign. Making that game would be a way of persuading the player that the campaign-finance system is in need of repair.

So that's procedural rhetoric. I have a bunch of inchoate thoughts on the merits and demerits of this approach and Bogost's execution of this paradigm, which I'll save for later or possibly just spare the public. But I will say this: at first blush, I'm entirely on board with the procedure and wary of the rhetoric. What I like about the rhetoric idea is that it places the accent on how the work operates on the player, and this is essential for an interactive medium. What I don't like is that it's a resolutely utilitarian framework for critical analysis: it focuses in on the way that games might change our opinions for good or ill at the expense of the way games might transport, entertain, humiliate, and ravish their users.

I'm not saying that there is a hard-and-fast distinction between art and propaganda. Surely, a great work of art says to its audience: du muss dein leben andern. But we value beauty because reveals a transfigured world to us, and persuasion has a way of trivializing this transfiguration. This isn't a knock on Bogost's approach. At least in the context of Persuasive Games, he's not in the pursuit of beauty. But for those of us who entertain the idea that games might be art-- art which might (in time) become important to humans in the way that Homer and Battlestar Galactica are important to us-- stand in need of an aesthetics rather than a rhetoric.

It Came From the Trackbacks

2008-12-09T20:18:00.000-08:00

Here at Versus Clu Clu Land, our motto is “Come for the Guitar Hero flamewars, say for the Brechtian analysis of Metal Gear Solid 2.” But I also want to do justice for the people who didn't mean to be here at all. I spend a lot of time checking the trackbacks to my blog, which shows referrals from other sites-- it's always heartening to see this modest venture make it on a blogroll or find someone who has an opinion about something I wrote. But the most colorful discoveries are the google searches, which reveal a legion of wayward souls who mistakenly clicked this site in the honest pursuit of deathclaw pornography. Deathclaws pornography searcher, your quest was not in vain; you will achieve posterity, as a trackback. A sampling:

"pictures in iroquois of there land" #3

"Foucault hermeneutics of the subject" #5

"ROLAND KEY .GAMES" #3

“if you were an iroquoi learning in an iroquois town” #6

“sexy mystery woman picture “ #1

“rock band guitar controller doesn't play fast notes” #1

“i have not told my garden yet thesis” #2

“why use pronoun she instead of he” #13

“mark frumkin dreadlocks” #6

“brechtian the expectation of the rule” #1

“intrinsic desire versus self discipline are both compelling” #1

“boys games from seeing their stuff” #1

“deathclaws porn” #2

“player piano video for children” #5

“how to get fizzle bear on viva pinata” #6

“i have money world oyster” #4

“why i cant use my head while playing games” #4

“what does vault means” #1

“im really bad at this whole goodbye thing” #2

A special shout out to the author of twitter.com/powermobydick, who apparently spends his time compliling every mention of Moby Dick on the interwebs. Yours is a brave and noble calling.

Merely For the Sake of Argument

2008-12-09T18:45:00.000-08:00

There's two worst-of lists in my google reader today: Leigh Alexander over at Gamasutra and L.B. Jeffries both posted their year-end roundup of the worst in gaming, which are nearly as enjoyable as the best in gaming. Their mutual bête noire? The holiday game-release funpocalypse, which has made holistic analysis of the current gaming scene impossible to all save heavily medicated twelve-year olds. Seriously guys, when you're releasing these games, think of the critics. There is only so much fun that we can take.

...Which is why I can't weigh in on the question raised by Chris Suellentrop in my favorite year-end tradition, Slate.com's year-end critical roundtable with N'Gai Croal, Stephen Totilo, and Seth Schiesel. Chris asks if 2008 was the best year ever for games; since I've yet to play Far Cry 2, Fable II, Gears of War 2, or Imagine Babiez Pony Party 2 (possibly an actual game), I have no right to weigh in on this question.

So instead I'm going to make an end run on the whole discussion, evade the calendar year, and declare a Tiger Slam. The following games were released between August 14, 2007 and August 14, 2008 in the United States.

Bioshock
Rock Band
Portal
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Persona 3
Halo 3
Pixeljunk Eden
The World Ends With You
Super Mario Galaxy
Grand Theft Auto 4
Braid
Everyday Shooter
No More Heroes

There are others that could go on this list: Burnout Paradise, Wii Fit, Mass Effect, Boom Blox, Assassin's Creed, and Metal Gear Solid 4. All I'm saying is, I left deserving stuff off the list, merely for dramatic effect. Discuss.

Protip

2008-12-06T02:56:00.000-08:00

In Google Reader, input:

up,up,down,down,left,right,left,right,b,a.

Essential Jargon: Ludonarrative Dissonance

2008-12-05T20:54:00.000-08:00

I hate the term “ludonarrative dissonance.” It sounds needlessly florid, and it's the sort of thing that gives aid and comfort to the people who think that games writin' has gotten too fancy. Though it exactly describes the phenomenon in seeks to explain, it's the kind of phrase that stands in the path of common human understanding, and this is never a good thing. I wish I had a good substitute neologism at hand, but the plainer “story-game conflict” lacks zazz. Maybe the readers have a pithy and non-latinate alternative.

In a recent speech at the Montreal International Games Summit, Blow described ludonarrative dissonance as one of the three ways modern games are “conflicted.” (He calls it a conflict between story and “dynamic meaning”, but it's basically the same idea.) Here's the conflict: the game's mechanics lead you to have certain attitudes towards a character or situation, and the game's story tells you (or your character) to feel a different way. Because these two elements of the design pull in different directions, the game fails to achieve what it wants to communicate in either case. Hence the dissonance.

We might say: mechanics don't tell you anything. Mechanics are just sets of rules that define what you can do in the game: jump, run, shoot, whale on ninjas. This is right; textbook cases of dissonance revolve around a smaller subset of rules that define “progress” in the game: how it rewards you for doing certain actions by giving you new abilities and allowing you to progress through new terrain, and how it punishes you by forcing you to replay certain segments and preventing you from getting further. Blow advances the idea that these elements of the game's mechanics have a quasi-moral significance that is ultimately significant w/r/t the narrative. By giving and taking progress from the player, a game communicates a message about what is right and wrong to the player. Blow critiques World of Warcraft, for example, because he thinks that it showers unstinting rewards on the player's unpraiseworthy drudgery.

In the original case of ludonarrative dissonance, Clint Hocking's critique of Bioshock, the point of conflict was the player's decision to save or harvest the “little sisters”, a well-defended posse of bioluminescent poppets with a monopoly on a crucial resource which the player needs to upgrade their abilities. From the standpoint of the story, this decision is crucial; it's cast as a harrowing moral choice between virtue and self-interest, a decision that resonates with the story's larger thematic concern with the costs of untrammeled self-interest. But from the standpoint of the mechanics, either decision is more-or-less equal over the long term when it comes to progressing through the game. And this tells the player that the decision isn't as important as story says it is.

Almost all of Blow's examples focus on conflicts between narrative elements and the reward-structure of the gamplay. But there's a different kind of dissonance in games as well, which is as important to thematic coherence but is but harder to articulate. It's the way that game mechanics, the controls and movement and gameplay alltogether, invest your actions with a specific texture. Game mechanics (the controls, but also the structure of the levels and the enemy design) can create a certain tactile impresions to them that's hard to put into words. The way a game controls, the way it feels in you hands, can speak volumes.

An example might help: Mitch Krpata recently wrote a post on Gears of War 2, and said that he felt that there was a disconnect between the gameplay and the story. As a cover-based shooter, the gameplay centers around holding down a defensive position and keeping distance between yourself and the hordes of locust. But “The storyline... puts the COGs on the offensive for the duration. It's all rah-rah, take-it-to-'em stuff. You get all geared up to fight, pardon the pun, and then spend all your time with your head down. That doesn't make sense.” Krpata found the defense-based gameplay was satisfying in the context of the first Gears, where humanity was up against the ropes. But now that the story licenses the player to go out and get some, it seemed unsatisfying to spend your time cowering behind sandbags.

It's also worth noting where this marriage of narrative and gameplay goes right. I've been playing the most recent Prince of Persia game this week, and one of the things I like about it is distinctive feel of the platforming. Both the platforming and the combat have been likened to a rhythm game, and this is a strange-but-appropriate comparison. Because you don't control your momentum in midair, traversing the world is mostly a matter of timing your button presses correctly. The jumping and climbing has this nice tactile rhythm, and because the game is so forgiving, it allows you to focus on charting a fluid path through environment without worrying overmuch about death frustrated. With practice, you get the point where you can read the terrain like a row of glowing gems in Guitar Hero. The feeling of lightness you get from conforming to the tempo of the terrain complements the narrative, since the hero is depicted as a of carefree gadabout in a consequence-free magical kingdon. The banter, the visuals, the pace of the platforming, the supernatural aura, all these things work together to create this feeling of freedom and careless heroism. These gameplay systems wouldn't work in every game, but they function wonderfully in the context of the world and narrative that Prince of Persia attempts to create. Call it ludonarrative harmony.

I don't agree with all of Blow's arguments (and I take some issues with his examples, which I'll spare you out of an unusual dispassion for pedantry) but I do think he does an unusually good job of articulating the the problems and tensions in so many modern games. The challenge is finding ways to meld form and content, gameplay to story. These elements in modern game design have had one shotgun wedding too many, they deserve some happy nuptials.

Is Death the Mother of Beauty?

2008-12-03T22:19:00.001-08:00

At the Montreal International Game Summit last month, Braid designer Jonathan Blow delivered a talk on three “conflicts” in game design. One of these conflicts is a conflict between challenge and story. While the organic structure of a narrative dictates that you flow from one narrative point to the next in a particular rhythm, creating challenging gameplay imposes the a different tempo on the experience. Every time you kill a player, in order to test their skills, the narrative grinds to a halt. Trying to make a coherent, smooth-flowing narrative pace in the game leads you to make the game easy for the player, and this conflicts with the need for challenge.

Sometimes, my response to this conflict is to doubt that challenge is necessary to game design, anyway. Penny Arcade's Gabe once said that as he's grown older, he's become less interested in beating games and more interested in seeing them, and I feel the same way. Though I'm pretty adept at jumping and shooting, I don't feel the urgent need to demonstrate my expertise in these areas outside of multiplayer games. In certain moods I'm tempted to make the same complaint about all games that I make about Rock Band 2: Why should I have to sweat in order to see all the content? I bought all that game from you, fair and square, and I shouldn't have to demonstrate my entitlement to it by pressing some buttons with proper timing.

But Blow makes a persuasive argument for the importance of challenge to game design. Challenge, he says, is a way for a game designer to invest the player's actions with significance. Punishing a player is a way of showing that their choices matter. It's failure that gives a player a unique feeling of agency and empowerment, because the possibility of death creates a context in which your conquest of the game's world is meaningful.

I think Blow is right. The problem isn't challenge itself. It's the nature of the punishment that matters, the way games compel you to repeat the same sections of the game over and over again. Repetition of this sort is worthwhile when it tests your abilities (I once wrote that death is the stick the designer beats you with in order to teach you the game's rules, and this seems right), but almost every game tests those abilities by forcing the player to rehearse an already-learned set of actions. This was why the AI Director in Left 4 Dead is so important: it frees the game from the shooting-gallery syndrome that plagues many shooters. Even when you are forced to repeat a scenario over again you can't fall back on memorizing previous run-troughs to get you through.

Merely executing a game plan you've already plotted out doesn't count as a good exercise of your faculties. It's coming up with a solution to a challenging problem that's enjoyable, which gives you an authentic sense of mastery. This is why Braid was rewarding despite its elimination of player death-- Braid challenges you to imagine the world in a particular way, rather than challenging you you memorize the width of a platform.

Tilting the challenge on the conception side of the conception/execution dichotomy also explains the core appeal of the Prince of Persia games. Sands of Time allowed you to erase your mistakes by rewinding time, and this freed you to relish the gracefulness of your movements, experiment with different solutions to the jump puzzles, and avoid the frustrations that come with the occasional execution misfire. The puzzle-like construction of the rooms transformed the gameplay into aesthetically elegant problem-solving, and the game succeeded in spinning a well-paced and clever narrative around this core experience.

They've followed this approach to its logical conclusion in the most recent Prince title by completely eliminating death. If you miss a jump or muss up a battle your partner Elrika saves you, every time. It is literally impossible to fail and get sent to a menu. This decision to eliminate frustrating repetition shows an attempt to shift the burden of challenge away from execution. As Tycho of Penny Arcade wrote today: “I think they wanted to make a lyrical, organic world that the character flowed through. They had an aesthetic goal, and the extent to which Prince of Persia succeeds as a game depends on how well they draw you into that.” This is exactly right. And it's not just the world that is lyrical: your movements themselves are effortless and elegant. Both the combat and the traversal have a careless fludity and unhurried tempo, which that fits with your character's casual approach to gallantry. The challenge comes from discovering a navigable path through the gorgeous environments, not from repetitive death.

This just all right with me. Almost every review of the new Prince game has complained about the difficulty, and this seems to be one of those cases where the game is guilty of nothing save violating the reviewer's expectations. As Mitch Krpata said today, the critic's job is to illuminate what the game is trying to achieve and how the game's various elements contribute to that goal. Prince of Persia isn't Ninja Gaiden, and this is OK, because it's not aiming for the same tension-filled experience. It's a game that wants to be lyrical. It wants to be an musical instrument rather than a crucible, and it succeeds in this goal.

Art, Games, and Money

2008-12-02T01:40:00.000-08:00

We all know why video games suck in '08. It's the money.

When critics ask why games aren't realizing their potential as a medium, we are all are pretty comfortable saying that the basic problem is that somebody has to write the checks. In a capitalist society that somebody is suited men helming publicly traded publishing companies. These men answer to shareholders, and shareholders prize stability. More than anything else, the one thing stockholders want to know is how much money a company will be making three years from now, and the way for the suited men to put their minds at ease on this score is by assuring them that their franchises are ripe for continual exploitation. The critic's ideal is as a genre-defining feat of ingenuity, and the shareholder's ideal is a revenue stream. Sometimes these two ideals coincide, but this is somewhat accidental.

So it's easy to get down on the market for making everything more terrible. But I was rereading Dave Hickey over the weekend (this is a good idea), and reminded me that art is a field of value governed by the market too.

Karl Marx based the value for goods on labor. Understandably, he thought that forging a foundational connection between economic value and labor at the basis of his economic theory was the way to make human misery a factor in the workings of the post-industrial economic order.

While classical free-market economists like Ricardo and Smith also openly advocated a labor theory of value, Marx argued that holding this position within the framework of post-industrial production rested on some dubious propositions. He thought that classical free-market economics amounted to an exchange theory of value. Because exchange value is determined by the interaction of supply and demand, and demand is a psychological phenomenon, the perception of value plays a crucial role in an economy where the value of goods is regulated by market forces; on this view the study of economics is the study of incentives. (This is why wallstreet panic is literally panic-- the value of some assets in market economies are conditioned “by the imagination of man (or sometimes, so it seems, madmen)”, as Warren buffet said of the now-infamous Credit Default Swaps. And let's not forget that, in his off-hours, Adam Smith was an acute moral psychologist). And at the base of everything, Marx aid, is the commodity fiction, the more-or-less reliable faith that fellowmen will continue to give us certain goods in exchange for intrinsically worthless slips of paper.

It is a good thing that Marxist economic principles don't rule art. If we adhered to a labor theory of value, then each copy of Chinese Democracy would cost 8 million dollars. But it's not. Art is a field of value that is utterly in the hands of the perceivers. (Even those morgage-backed securities are going to get valued eventually, and it's going to come down to what people are able to pay.) The value of art is all exchange-value, pure commodity fetish. And it's a good thing.

As Hickey notes, the value of art comes down to the risks that critics are willing to take on behalf of the things they care about: “Art and money are cultural fictions with no intrinsic value. They acquire exchange-value through fiduciary investments of complex constituencies-- through overt demonstrations of trust (or acts of faith, if you will)... The Whitney Museum may say that Wanda Whatzit is the next big thing, but only the sustained investment of money, journalism, exhibition space, scholarly prose, foundation awards, loose talk, and casual body language can maintain Wanda's work in the public esteem.” Scholarly prose doesn't set the price-- at least not initially-- but over the long term the value of a work of art comes down to its cultural capital. It's us-- and by us I mean both consumers, and people writing on the Internet-- who determine what these experiences are really worth.

There's been a lot of talk about the troubled relationship of the industry to the critical apparatus. Mammon raises his head again. The financial equation for the online mainstream games journal site is well-established: previews=page clicks=profit. This isn't quite payola but it's a situation where the sites stand to benefit from giving positive reviews of a company's releases. (And here, I'm not even going into the whole matter of ad buys.)

But all this anxiety covers up the fact that what critics think of games actually matters. The fact that a critic's is something that someone would want to buy is a testament to the sovereign power of partiality over the realm of culture. The deregulation of opinion come the advent of the internet has loosened rules of the market: there is a flood of ordinary citizens avid to squander hours of their life in advocacy of their “particular marriage of desire and esteem.” is a testament to the democratic possibilities that are at the center of Hickey's vision.

Chuck Klosterman Describes the Guitar Solo to "Shackler's Revenge"

2008-12-01T01:43:00.001-08:00

"The sonic equivalent of a Russian robot wrestling a reticulating python."

A Game of the Year

2008-12-01T01:35:00.000-08:00

The holiday release schedule is winding to a close, and the stock-taking has begun. As previously noted, I am am wont to uninformedly opine on the quality of these releases, but Chris Dahlen opines on them, uh, informedly. He's professionally obligated to be on top of his shit.

Lord knows I've been looking forward to writing a list of this sort since I started up this doubtful venture. I love to shower hierarchically organized favor and disfavor on cultural objects. We all know the business of affixing a rank to the calendar-year's achievements is the antithesis of criticism, but I revel in the stuff. In addition to entertainment and heuristic values of list-making (for a period of time, whenever I was searching for a new book to read, I would just flip to the Modern Library's list of the best 100 novels of the 20^th century on the inside cover of my copy of The Secret Agent and pick something out. I never would've gotten to read A High Wind in Jamaica without this policy), there is a shred of critical function in the whole enterprise. Games are a young medium, a number of things are being attempted, and a year-end list is a way to bestow praise the things we think praiseworthy.

I've had this question in mind-- the question about what I'd like to see more of-- ever since I read Sean Sands' short but pointed assessment of this year's crop of games over on Gamers with Jobs: “I appreciate a fun game as much as the next guy, and this year has been positively choked with safe bets and easy playtime. I walk away from 2008 with some nice memories of time spent happily indulging my pastime, but few moments of gaming that challenged me on anything but a functional and mechanical level.” Now, this is a judgment that could apply to any year in the history of games. There is also a certain date before which such an evaluation wouldn't even make sense. But he's right. We desperately want to see game creators break new ground, make games we could both enjoy and care about. We deserve more than we're getting.

There are exceptions, and chief among them is Grand Theft Auto 4. GTA4 isn't the most fun game this year, and it's not the most compelling game. But it's the most problematic game, the game with the highest highs, and the game I think about the most. Sands concurs: “the most challenging gaming phenomenon of the year was the moral dissonance that is Grand Theft Auto IV... This is about the ways that games can challenge expectations, norms and mores. When I say GTA IV’s moral complexity was challenging, I’m talking about the compelling simulation of a character that both regrets and revels in the violence he dispatches... Though the execution was imperfect credit, has to go to Rockstar for trying to create a morally complex character in a world that simulated a spiral of inescapable violence despite illusions of freedom.”

Make no mistake; as a game, Grand Theft Auto 4 has some significant problems. Far Cry 2's narrative designer Patrick Redding untentionally gave the perfect description of Grand Theft Auto 4 in an interview with Gamasutra's Chris Remo and Brandon Sheffield this fall: “ Clint [Hocking] and I always said, 'Let's fail as big as we can on this." Let's take such a radical swing at this... let's put it all in and bet on red 12. And honestly, if we mess this up, it will be one of the most useful epic failures of all time, because the shrapnel will be useful.” Grand Theft Auto 4 is sublime shrapnel, a monument to creative failure. Rockstar attempted to wed open-world banditry, social simulation, and emotionally subtle storytelling together, but the more the player moved through the game the more they blew apart into fragments. The individual elements (especially, sweet jezus, the city, a city so beautiful that it was enjoyable to just look at it.) were superlative--each of them is well-conceived in its own right-- but they didn't harmonize well. (Miyamoto compares game design to cookery, and this seems a case were the ingredients didn't play off each other in the right way.) GTAIV is less than the sum of its parts. It contradicts itself; it contains multitudes.

But for all of this, GTA4 is a classic, and stands head and shoulders above its previous iterations and nearly every other game released this year. It was compared to The Godfather on release, but a better point of comparison is another internally riven American classic: Moby Dick. Melville was torn between writing a ripping nautical yarn and a metaphysical odyssey, and it shows. Rockstar was torn between constructing a sandbox and a stage, and it shows. The result was a tenuously fused work of genuine Americana: a disorderly paean to the American city, a bit of ultraviolence, a stonkingly beautiful soundtrack, a fable, a simulation, a gonzo critique of capitalism. It's a game we deserve.

Something to be Thankful For

2008-11-27T23:41:00.000-08:00

A while back, my video producer friend Matt made a 3-part series of Heinz commercials on youtube for a competition. They include a meticulously recreated miniature '80s sitcom set, and are pretty amazing. I'm posting them here in an attempt to turn "dis a bunch of gaaahbage" into a meme. check it:

Why the folks over at Heinz didn't pounce on these, I'll never know. Just thinking of the injustice causes a burning falcon of rage to burn in my breast.

If you liked these (and you will), check out his series on the employees of Madison Square Garden: http://msg.com/gardeners/

The All-Hearsay Holiday Buyers' Guide

2008-11-26T22:59:00.000-08:00

The Gang of Four neatly summarize my experience of the winter release schedule:

Most of it's passed me by, since I've spent all this time playing Fallout 3. Forty-Nine unstintingly virtuous hours later I polished off the main quest. I am duty-bound to tell you, as a consumer advocate, that it is a fine game. It has very high playtime-to-dollar and brainworm-to-soundtrack song ratios.

Aside from this Fallout binge (it is less a game than a subtle form of hypnosis) I've played some of that LittleBigPlanet game (verdict: I am just not this game's intended audience) and some Left 4 Dead (verdict: brilliant.) Since I have never allowed my ignorance to get in the way of having an opinion, however, I've decided to conduct a whirlgig tour of the conventional wisdom on this season's notable releases. Call it all-hearsay game reviewing (A near cousin of Mitch Krpata's “User-Submitted Previews”). As a games enthusiast writing on the internet, I'm going to hew to the policy of having my consumer choices decide my critical evaluations: Fallout 3 is the game of the year.

Fable II: Apparently, you can surmount most of the lifestyle-simulator elements by farting repeatedly in the town square, or playing Links for a few hours in the smithy, and this is rather disappointing. But in the end, whimsy carries the day.

Dead Space: David Ellis sez: “Now That's What I Call Survival Horror!” Not so much a game as a compilation, excepting the stuff with the HUD. All the merits and demerits that go along with this description.

Mirror's Edge: An inspired set of core gameplay mechanics in search of a game. Call it Assassin's Creed '08. The mixed critical response to Mirror's Edge led N'Gai Croal to come out of his hiatus and write a great piece on the place of innovation in game design. (Good to see you back, N'Gai!)

Here's my take: First, the fact that most professional reviewers have to assign numbered scores to their reviews (not that they like doing this) feeds into the idea that elements like innovation, graphical design, controls, and the narrative are things that can be assigned specific weights and that the merits and demerits in each area are being weighed against each other to produce an evaluation. And sure, sometimes it's like this, but in most case a critical take is a matter of how these elements work together in an organic whole. Second, there's a reason Portal and Resident Evil 4 are both landmarks of innovation, rather than false starts. It's because their designers built a tightly constructed game around their novel mechanics. Often, but not always, doing this comes down to level design.

Far Cry 2: Apparently, it's what we call a “grower.” Like when I listened to Sea Change the first ten times I wasn't impressed, but then the 11^th time rolled around I was like “Whoa, this album is off the hinges, permanently.” You spend all this time wandering around the savannah and trying to repair your jeep and dying of malaria, and you think you hate Far Cry 2, but then at some point it all clicks and you decide it's total genius.

Valkyria Chronicles: This is cheating, because I've actually played the demo, but I have to say that this game is a total sleeper hit. Had I not spent the last 49 hours of my gaming life playing Fallout I would probably be frittering away my latenight hours conducting manoeuvres. Why couldn't this game have come out in March? Sheesh.

Gears of War 2: Over the last few years, the folks at Epic Software have been hard at work building a better meatgrinder. Like Super Mario Galaxy, it shines in the areas that expertly constructed Nintendesque entertainments shine: level design, control, funness.

Ah, making all these uninformed asessments makes me want to buy certain of these games. Alors. I'm off to finish making creamed corn gratin with bacon and onion rings (aka “dishfull o' cononary”) for the Pliskin family Thanksgiving festivities, here in the Cleve. I wish you all a hearty meat coma!

My Adventures with The Turk

2008-11-25T23:04:00.000-08:00

I owe my discovery of “The Turk” to Walter Benjamin, who uses him to weave a dizzying thesis about the interrelation of Theology and Marxism: "The story is told of an automation constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet's hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called "historical materialism" is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight." Despite my reservations about the metaphor itself-- it trades on attributing a degree of whimsy to the supreme being that is difficult to square with the tradition. But it turns out that the story of the automaton is the real deal-- it was an ersatz chess-playing Turk made in the late 1700s and pawned off as an authentic robot until it was revealed as a hoax in 1857.

We imagine that there are hunchbacks inhabiting our machines all the time-- many people will swear that their iPod shuffles designedly, calculating its mix in order to pump them up during their workouts. Valve Software's recent zombocalypse shooter, Left 4 Dead, has a feature called the “AI Director,” an algorithm of some kind that dynamically alters the quantity and distribution of zombie attacks in the level based on your performance. When I was playing through L4D last week, my fellow survivors and I quickly fell to speculating about whether the AI director was capable of pity, whether our collective suffering would be sufficient to propitiate his reptile heart. The answer was no, though he can be swayed by turning the difficulty to “easy.”

Evolutionary psychologists have this theory about human consciousness, which holds that the human mind has a “hyperactive agency detection device” (Pithily, HADD) At some point in our emergence from the grasslands we acquired a propensity to perceive the world in terms of agency-- we see the world as if it were guided by an intelligence, as if every change in our environment was caused by an agent of some kind. By keeping us minutely keyed to the environment, the HADD may have helped the first homo sapiens avoid predators. Some philosophers of religion speculate that this evolutionary spandrel may be responsible for the belief in ghosts and spirits. Follow the misfires of our HADD long enough and you can explain why humans came to offering up goats to the big AI director in the sky.

I'm even more dubious of this theory than I am about the marriage of historical materialism to lurianic Kabbalah. However, to bring it back to games, we don't need any barely-empirical brain science to explain our dogged feeling that games put us in contact with a human mind. As Michael Abbott recently noted, the pleasure we get from gaming-- interacting with systems of rules-- is that playing a game is a kind of communication between the designers and the player. Games are an expressive medium because their rules are structured towards an end, because they have certain designs on the player. The reason the AI director seems like a merciless sonovabitch is because some brilliant people at Valve wanted to scare the bejeezus out of us, and keep us playing the same levels over again, and they created a set of rules fit to that end. It's their minds that are hunched inside the base of the robot.

Art-Games, Twitterlurking, and Poetry

2008-11-22T15:11:00.001-08:00

A confession. I am an inveterate twitterlurker. My personal life is banal too document, (“There's loose weed on top of the hand dryer in the Peet's bathroom. Ah, Berkeley!”), but I enjoy eavesdropping on other peoples' twitter feeds, largely because I am hungry for more internet when my google reader runs dry, and I like feeling privy to the happenings of certain games-writing paragons. It's sad, I know. But every so often you run across something great, like the Esquire feature on games designer Jason Rohrer I found on Shawn Elliott's twitter feed.

The article is an exemplary piece of games writing. It is economically written. It talks about rules. It explains the artistic dimensions of game design in a clear and straightforward manner. And it talks about games-as-art without any of the exoticism that plagues most treatments of the idea in the mainstream press. (“Game are art? Well, whodathunkit! Here I wuz, thinkin' it was all about shootin' aliens!”) The article also links to Rorher's new game Between, which was commissioned by Esquire for its feature on the Best + Brightest 2008.

Rohrer himself turns out to be an interesting case. He's off living a Thoreauvian existence in a scarcely electrified shack in upstate New York, eating nonstandard cereals and designing art games. (Favorite detail: Rohrer has a renaissance-style patron, a silicon valley captain of industry who's helping keep him in quinoa between paid speaking engagements.) There is a certain earnestness and ungainly romanticism in his portrayal which bespeaks genuine artistic purpose-- like he is making games as part of a larger attempt to come to terms with the world. It's a marked contrast with the recent New Yorker profile of Cliff Blezinski, which implied that his inner life consists of driving cars very fast on the freeway.

Rohrer's games are repeatedly likened to poetry-- “a superb and tightly crafted sonnet,” for example. The choice of poetry trades on the idea that video games will constitute art when they evoke deep emotional reactions. (viz. Wordsworth's definition of poetry: “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings... recollected in tranquility”) I've never bought this “games will be art when they make you cry” argument. (It's taken to an extreme: Rohrer is the first to cry over his game Passage because he sobs while programming it.) Maybe this is one of my idiosyncrasies, but I don't cry during movies that often. The last movie I wept over, I think, was Princess Mononoke on DVD. (I cry during the same scene every time I see that movie, it's just one of those things.) Part of me just distrusts sentiment as a criterion of artistic value. After all, people have been weeping over shabby melodramatic novels and Final Fantasy VII for some time now.

However, the poetry metaphor is sound. The reason is that poetry, for all its emotional directness, is also a relatively abstract form of representation in comparison to prose. Because the use of meter overlays an added degree of form on the syntactical relations of the grammatical phrase, poetry possesses a heightened compression in virtue of its formal complexity. In order to understand a poem you have to take it a part and get a grasp on how it's constructed, how the arrangement of words in metrical form works to evoke a particular feeling or idea.

The same goes for Rohrer's games: their meaning only becomes legible when you reflect on how the various elements of the game relate to each other. (Like, when I played Gravitation, I said to myself, “Why is it that sometimes I could jump really high, and other times I couldn't? And why is it that i could jump higher after playing ball with that other person-shaped block of pixels? Furthermore, what does that mean?” These are the sort of questions you need to ask if you want to get the message.) The visuals are intentionally sparse, just barely representational, and their underlying meaning only begins to take shape when you grasp the deep grammar of the game and think about how the pixelated figures work in concert with the underlying rules of the game.

One theme of the piece is that we lack any models of real artistic success in interactive art. This is only mostly true, but it raises a good question: Is the artistic potential of games best exemplified by abstract tone-poems like Rohrer's work, or by long-form narrative games like LMNO, the EA-backed Spielberg project he's working on? And what if it's neither? What if the pinnacle of game design doesn't consist of using interaction to grapple with life, death, love, hate, poverty, and racism? What if it's all about creating a perfectly tuned death machine?

Despite my resistence to the latter scenario, I've never been as compelled by the five-minute art game as I have been by Shadow of the Colossus, or Bioshock. It's not that Rohrer's work isn't fascinating and thought-provoking; it's just that as an exercise, it stays far from the core pleasures of mastering rules. By the time you learn the rules there's nothing left to do with them. (Games are about doing things with rules.) This is why Braid was such a success, to my mind-- it spun a satisfyingly ambiguous narrative around the core experience of rule-mastery.

So check out the article and patronize your art-game developer of choice. As always, the main obstacle to art is the profit motive, and these men will only make games if we support them.

Stickin' Together is What Good Waffles Do

2008-11-19T12:30:00.000-08:00

Competitive gaming was a staple of my gaming youth. I had a little brother, and we lived through the heyday of the 2-D fighting game together. He quickly outpaced me in any real-life athletic contest, despite the fact that he was two years younger. (I'm fairly certain he was beating me in one-on-one before he hit pubescence) Video games were one of the few fields left where we were equal competitors, and though we were both pretty fierce (The “Detlef Schrempf” incident remains the last recorded instance of physical violence between us), competition was always a source of bonding.

But when I look back at the last few years, many of my best gaming experiences have been cooperative: playing Rock Band with my old roommates and a broad assortment of intoxicated guests (including my esteemed associate Dr. Toaster), beating Gears of War and Halo 3 with my roommate Galen, playing Pixeljunks with my girlfriend.

What all these experiences have in common is a couch. I'm frankly astonished that the golden age of cooperative gaming (including the reign of the greatest cooperative game of all time, World of Warcraft) has come during the era of the online gaming. Say what you want about the inelegance of the split-screen solution, but it's hard for me to imagine great multiplayer gaming (let alone great cooperative gaming) without the ability to gesture at, cajole, interject, and strike your fellow-players.

I've played a lot of Halo on Xbox live in my days, and I will tell you that it is very difficult to get these people to collude. It's not just a matter of the notorious dogged venality+immaturity+anonymity equation that describes most online gaming. Even where the spirit is willing, it's just difficult to collaborate with your fellows when you're locked into first-person: explain where you think “we” should go on the map, orient yourself w/r/t the rest of your team, and reach a consensus on what to do. Even if my combat skills qualified me for a leadership position (which, as the above-referenced service record testifies, they do not), there is this matter of discussing coordination problems with strangers.

It is a testament to the immense ingenuity of the recently-released Left 4 Dead that almost all of these problems inherent in online cooperative gaming have been addressed. Valve, the game's developer, has approached these difficulties as design problems, and addressed them as such. It's tempting to think that the low quality of common-grade online gaming is the player's fault, and this certainly is true. We're inconsiderate sons of bitches, to a man. But Valve adheres to the “it's not the players, it's you” philosophy of game design, and this shows.

For me, one of the biggest hurdles to collaboration in the first-person perspective is orientation. Sometimes I feel like the first-person perspective itself has an ethical valence; it prevents you from seeing the world from others' perspective in such a way that the challenges of working together can be prohibitive. But Left 4 Dead has elegant solution: you can see the other players' silhouettes, outlined in a glowing aura, through walls. This isn't realistic, but it is a perfect solution to the mutual-orientation problem. The color of the aura itself conveys important information on the other characters' status when they're in a situation that requires your intervention: when they're low on health, when they're trapped by a hunter, when they're trapped by the horde.

And the game is conspicuously rife with situations that force you to look out for each other. Aside from the obvious hunter-and-smoker traps which require others' intervention, there are also setpieces that allow you access to a mounted minigun. The problem with this immensely powerful weapon is that you can't cover the whole range of the scene; in order to use it effectively one or more of your teammates needs to cover your flank. In the short time I played we quickly found ourselves covering the entry points.

The game's vaunted AI director system isn't just there to provide replayability, either; it's an integral tool of the cooperative concept. Each time you run through the level, some covert dwarf chessmaster hiding in the game's code rearranges the frequency and placement of the zombie attacks. Because you can't anticipate where the next attack is coming, from you are reliant on your teammates to cover all the angles. Your weapons are fairly powerful on their own-- the assault rifle is capable of stacking zombie corpses like cordwood if you can anticipate bottlenecks. But the unpredictability of the zombie mob mitigates against the power of the weapons, and this in turn cements your reliance on the other survivors. Much as in real life, the arbitrary hazardousness of the outside world nurtures the connections between individual actors.

What I learned from Left 4 Dead is that a harsh enough world can throw anyone together. When an unforgiving cosmos contrives to unite you all together an admirable esprit de corps can flourish, even on the Internet. (The ten-year olds I was playing with last night suggested that we come up with a “gang name,” and I'm taking this as a testament to the quality of the game's design.) If the Barack Obama presidency fails to unite us as a country, I'm going to hold out for a fast-zombie apocalypse.

Illbleed

2008-11-17T23:50:00.000-08:00

So, I heard about this trailer on the Idle Thumbs podcast, which features both original music and the dulcet tones of Chris Remo. Apparently it's from an early-oughts Dreamcast title, which explains the references to "Who Wants to be a Millionaire," but not the inclusion of the word "shit" in promotional material. My ladyfriend and I were having a quarrel about whether this video's humor is intentional or unintentional. You be the judge:

Da Art of Storytellin' (pt. 1)

2008-11-13T18:55:00.000-08:00

***Coletta Factor: Tangential plot spoilers for Fallout 3 below***

Modern role-playing games face storytelling challenges different from those of other genres. It's hard enough to craft a one story well in a video game; we have precious few examples of games which make effective use of the narrative tools unique to the medium, telling a story in such a way that the player's actions play a central role in its unfolding. The most successful game narratives have focused on a single relationship established through collaborative gameplay mechanics. This template won't hack it when it comes to creating a role-playing game, because we expect that every town will have its own story, its own cast of characters.

Virtually every traditional RPG has conveyed its narrative through either cutscenes, dialogue trees, or both. When you enter a new town, the player knows that her job is to wander about querying every dude in sight, wading through their menu of responses until they hit upon the significant bit of information they are supposed to discover. This approach can pay off: Planescape Torment, for example, had a dialogue-tree system wordy and dense that your interactions gradually coalesced into a thick description of the world, one that pleasingly verged in interactive fiction. Nearly every character had a different narrative register and a different perspective on your character and the events around you. But this strategy hasn't been successfully replicated, because the limits on graphical power and voice acting favored Planescape's brand of text-centric storytelling. And beyond this, there's no getting past the fact that your interaction in the dialogue-tree model still inevitably boils down to clicking boxes, and the artificiality of this mode of interaction is fundamental to the dialogue-tree model.

Fallout 3 has staked out the rudiments of a new solution for storytelling in role-playing games. While the game still uses the old dialogue-tree model for conversations (replete with the wooden animation, fixed camera angles, and pre-scripted dialogue choices, conventions that Mass Effect should have rendered archaic), its innovations lie in the potential of its to environmental storytelling.

I wouldn't have anticipated the seeming inspirations for this technique: two first-person shooters. Valve's Half-Life series pioneered the participant-observer model of video game storytelling. All the events of the plot unfold in front of the player's eyes; all you know of Gordon Freeman is what you see mirrored in other characters' reactions. Without any player-initiated dialogue and without any cutscenes, you learned about the world and other people through active observation. The animation and voice acting were so well-executed that you would pick up on elements of the story by paying attention at the nuances of body language and delivery. (Because the game was in first person, you would even follow a conversation by turning your head from person to person, the way you would real life.)

Bioshock took this idea further by making greater use of the environment to suggest a story. While the game's audio logs are its most powerful storytelling device (Fallout smartly borrowed this idea as well), Bioshock also managed to convey a with its spaces. You would walk into a room, and just by looking at the tableau you could tell what had happened: a mass suicide, an aborted new-year's-eve bash, a lethal domestic dispute. The mere placement of objects in a room would lead you to draw the desired inference. This style of storytelling puts the onus the player-- you have to actively look around, observe and interpret in order to apprehend the narrrative. Observation has a dynamism and feeling of discovery to it that mere text, for all its expressive capacities, can't produce.

The most memorable moments in Fallout 3 come from these episodes of environmental storytelling. While I mentioned some examples in a recent post, (christ almighty, this is turning into the all-Fallout blog. Apologies all around.) I'll give another here: while I was wandering the wasteland I stumbled onto Vault 108. In the Fallout series, every vault has a story, and the story of Vault 108 was told without any dialogue. There was bloodstained walls, the corpses of some unlucky wasteland interlopers, a cloning lab, and a pack of identical, jumpsuited men named Gary. You could hear Gary 43 call to Gary 32 in the halls before they both set upon me with knives: “Gary. Gary? GARY!” I missed the holotape with a recording of the backstory until my final round of the premises, but even without this explanation I knew the deal: I had stumbled upon the revolt of the Garys.

We complain a lot about the dominance of shooters on the consoles, but I think the narrative design lessons from the first-person-shooter golden age are beginning to cross-pollinate. The first-person perspective has its own unique storytelling capacities, its own way of involving the player in the unfolding of a narrative, and Fallout 3 is a step towards its fruition in the RPG genre.

Gaming and Money

2008-11-12T10:37:00.001-08:00

Gaming is an expensive hobby. If you're like me, and you have a innate thirst for variety, it's difficult to keep up a gaming habit without beggaring yourself. Leaving aside that console hardware is muy caro (does anyone remember that the PS3 was five hundred dollars at launch?), every other item involved in gaming is ten dollars more expensive now than it was the previous colsole generation. And if you've been paying attention, real wages haven't been keeping up with inflation for some time now.

Ah yes, and there's also the matter of that global economic meltdown we've been hearing so much about on the news. (Okay, okay, the one I would be hearing about on the news, were it not for the fact that all my knowledge of national affairs comes from what I can glean by watching Oprah.) But even if your employment prospects aren't getting snookered by the liquidity crisis (the term hiring freeze is destined to be part of the spooky campfire tales that graduate students tell their children), odds are you would benefit from some belt-tightening. So, I have some words of wisdom on this front.

1) Make a Spreadsheet: I don't mean to get all Suze Orman on y'all, but financial planning is only path to spiritual wholeness and reconciliation with your estranged father. But seriously, make a spreadsheet, stick to it. I've budgeted myself $45 bucks a month for games and I've stuck to it, I don't think I've missed out on anything.

2) Play Old Games: I loves me some new games. Fresh, topical games. But buying every new release on launch day is a one-way ticket to penuryville (population: you). If this season's ridongculous release schedule has taught us anything, it's that noone has the financial or temporal resources to navigate the release calendar. I've made some tactical forays into the new releases (Fallout 3, LittleBigPlanet, and Rock Band 2 made the cut), but beyond that I've seen that holding off can net big discounts. The big outlets like Gamefly always have too many copies of the AAA titles, and if you hold off for a six months or so you can get these games at 1/3 their cover price .

And those old games aren't getting any less good. They're only getting cheaper. I've been playing Killer 7 the last few weeks; it set me back 8 dollars on ebay. Ditto with Fallout 1&2. If you're at all like me, there's scads of top-shelf titles you've missed out on during their four-month bell curve; odds are that many of them are laying in that pile next to your gaming system already. Summon this pile of shame to mind next time you are within purchasing distance of new games. Imagine that your mind is a deep, still pool of water.

3) eBay, not Gamestop:I can't think of a suitable metaphor for Gamestop's conduct w/r/t the consumer that does not involve sexual assault. Never sell them your games. Gamestop's used-game trade-in business is a racket that would make Jimmy Hoffa blush like a Lousiana débutante. Selling your old games and systems on eBay, on the other hand, is a good deal.

Fellow video game collector, your fetishism is understandable. To this day I remain compulsively attached to nearly every book I own, even the ones I actively despise. (I'm looking in your direction, Tropic of Cancer.) I tell myself I will want to reread them in the future, to but this is patent mauvaise foi. The benefits of self-overcoming in the case of your video game collection fetishism are substantial. Selling off games after you've completed them on eBay goes a long way towards defraying the cost of new stuff. I was intimidated by selling stuff online but the people at eBay have conspired to make it extremely easy. Hit up Staples for some padded envelopes and you're in business.

4) Don't Frequent Places Where you Might Purchase Games: My girlfriend is really into the food industry, and she reads all these books about how food industry conducts psychological warfare on the consumer by subtly manipulating the disposition of products in the supermarket-- the size and shape of the packaging, the placement of the products on the shelves. I am 100% certain that these same scoundrels who embarked on this program of hypnotism-through-product-arrangement have unleashed their reams of empirical research on the arrangement of game stores. Basically don't enter the places unless you have something specific in mind. Idly perusing the shelves gives the mind-control gas time to take effect.

5) Credit Card Debt is Deadly Poison: That is all.

The World's Your Oyster

2008-11-10T23:21:00.000-08:00

Whatever your opinion of Bethesda's hit fantasy role-playing game Oblvion (and it is an immensely divisive title), there is a moment in the game that is indelibly etched in the memory of everyone who has played it. After being confined to a narrow, and rat-strewn prison in the game's first hour (fulfilling the industry-mandated quota on first-hour rat-slaying in RPGs), you step out of the dungeon and into the the most impressive vista created in a video game. A glimmering expanse of grassland and forest stretched in all directions, as far as the eye could see. Even though the game would never live up to the immense feeling of promise that greeted your first steps out of the prison, to this day I have an unshakable conviction that Oblivion had achieved a wholly new experience of space in a video game, one that justified the technical leaps necessary to its achievement.

As much as I enjoyed the mind-boggling expansiveness of Oblivion, my enthusiasm for exploring its world eventually foundered on the game's patent schematism. Oblivion had an respectable variety of locales-- cities, caves, ruins, forts, castles and the like-- but once you had spent a good amount of time in the world you came to recognize that the world had been created by continually recycling a set palette; once you had seen one goblin-infested fortification you had seen them all. Even though you could walk for forty-five minutes in any direction, you eventually ran out of novel scenery. The designers' decision to scale the enemies to the player's level was a necessary hedge against the player's eventual exhaustion of the game's assets.

For me, Fallout 3 finally fulfills the promise of those first steps out of Oblivion's prison. Even though Fallout makes the same liberal (re)use of generic items (it's impossible to shake the feeling of deja vu when you unearth abraxo-cleaner-and-wonderglue-strewn room # 438), I have been continually impressed by how the game nurtures a sense of boundless possibility, a feeling that belies the palpable limits of the game's suite of in-game objects. For every cookie-cutter factory or sewer (and there are more than a few), there is something genuinely new and interesting-- a mercenary camp, an abandoned school, a decrepit power station, a high-rise full of prostitutes. Even the generic Metro stations (whose uniformity is excused by the fact that they are well-wrought simulacra of the actual D.C. Subway system) are strewn with small of unique content-- faux vampires, deranged clowns, and inexplicably well-defended wall safes full of scanty nightwear.

And due to my aversion to the main quest, I haven't even run across the truly ubiquitous features of Fallout 3's postapocalyptic D.C., like the crumbling, debris-strewn National Mall. For all its expansiveness and sheer density (I'm still impressed by the fact that you could read every book), the world of Oblivion was fundamentally uninteresting to me on its own terms: the races, creatures, and environments were such regulation Tolkienesque-fantasy fare. The wedding of the Fallout series' distinctive design aesthetic to the open-world design ethos of Bethesda is a happy one-- the signs, the style of the ruined automobiles, the radio stations, the whole faux-retro cultural imprint taken as a whole is just more compelling to me, and the sense of place is reinforced by innumerable apt details. Unlike a goblin fortress, it offers me something I haven't seen before.

The designers, seemingly inspired by Bioshock, have done a good job of telling a story through the player's mere experience of space. I went down into a shelter in the downtown area yesterday, and though it was barren of life, the disposition of the objects in the bunker spoke volumes: the head of a statue, a garishly illuminated flag, a set of female mannequins covered with plungers, a dessicated corpse on an operating table.

It's true that the character animations and voice acting are not the game's strong suit, but harping on this point too much obscures the fundamental fact that the game's most memorable character is the world itself. If the interactions with other people fall flat at times, my desire to interact with the irradiated landscape has yet to run dry; indeed, I'm beginning to wonder if there is any real upper limit to my desire to aimlessly wander the wastelands with my trusty pup Dogmeat, aiding the weak, scavenging ammunition, and gorily shattering the crania of the odd raider. For now, there's no end in sight.

Consulting the Oracle: Miyamoto on the Flavor of Fun

2008-11-07T02:17:00.000-08:00

The New Yorker ran a profile of Cliff Blezinski, designer of the game Gears of War, in a recent issue. I wasn't fond of the piece; in its zeal to show the artistic merit of the medium, it ends up casting Gears of War as a wistful meditation on the ambiguities of homecoming. Gears is a fine game, but it's no Rachel Getting Married. We're not doing anyone any favors by pretending that our smartly constructed mass entertainments are think-pieces. A sample of its routine overpraise: “The world in which the action takes place is a kind of destroyed utopia; its architecture, weapons, and characters are chunky and oversized but, somehow, never cartoonish. Most video-game worlds, however well conceived, are essenceless. Gears felt dirty and inhabited, and everything from the mechanics of its gameplay to its elliptical backstory was forcefully conceived, giving it an experiential depth rare in the genre.” Gears is pretty, to be sure, but “elliptical” is an incontestably generous descriptor for its narrative, especially when "cartooish" and "essenceless" lie a mere sentence away, readily at hand.

The article takes its title from one of its more effective passages: “Growing up playing games, [games designers] absorbed the governing logic of the medium, but no institutions existed for them to transform what they learned into a methodology. Gradually, though, they turned a hobby into a creative profession that is now as complex as any other. They have established the principles of a grammar of fun.” I like the idea of “grammar” as a metaphor for the practice of game design, if only because it accords so closely with my own sense of what makes games fun.

Sometimes I think that the grammatical form of games is essentially interrogative: games pose problems to us, and the fun comes from figuring out how we're going to solve it. It's a testament to the richness of modern game design that the question “how am I going to kill this dude?” has lost little of its original luster. I think this is because this query always points to a deeper question, which is (unexpectedly) more compelling than the first: “what are the rules of this world?” To me there is something elemental about the feeling of discovery that goes along with learning rules, because in disclosing its rules, a game also discloses a world to the player.

But this whole fun-as-the-discovery-of-grammar idea runs aground on an inescapable counterexample. Aside from creating the two greatest series in the history of games, Mario and Zelda, the designer Shigeru Miyamoto has also overseen the development of the Nintendo Wii platform and was the lead designer on Wii Fit. Simply put Miyamoto can lay claim to knowing more about video-game-fun than any other human being on the planet.

Stephen Totilo ran a great three-part interview with Miyamoto last week, and what I learned from Miyamoto is this: fun is not a form; fun is a flavor. When he was describing his design philosophy he made an analogy with cookery: “There are certain elements of cooking where if you’re able to find a very delicious ingredient... often times the 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.” As Robert Ashley once said, Miyamoto creates a world out of fun. they build an entire world out of jumping, like they did in Mario 64. This is also, I think, why so many Wii games have managed to create short, fun activities (your WarioWare model) but utterly failed at what the other consoles excel at: creating cohesive, compelling worlds.

That “how does it move you?” tagline from the ads isn't all marketing cant. It's a guide to Miyamoto's philosophy of game design. I wrote a while back about how the joys of Nintendo's games are irreducibly kinaesthetic, and I think that the company's recent path shows their fundamental commitment to thinking of fun as a bodily event, something that happens to you when you pick up the controller. Nietzsche wrote that “we listen to music with our muscles,” and it's a description that works just as well for the kind of art that Nintendo creates: closer to music, or poetry, than to literature. (N'Gai Croal hit upon much the same idea when he wrote that we understand games with our hands.) (This is why Sony went to wrong with the Sixaxis motion control on the Playstation 3: they took the input device without understanding the design philosophy that goes along with it; as a result their games fundamentally lack the immediacy of their rivals'. In their defense, Boom Blox is to my mind virtually its only successful third-party implementation on the Wii itself.)

The near-absence of Nintendo's imprint from the holiday game season has been a curious phenomenon to me. Wii Music looks to be a misstep; it seems that the fun of Rock Band is equal parts music and movement, and Wii Music only realizes the latter. But when I look back on the games I've enjoyed the most this fall I keep coming back to Pixeljunk Eden, a game that is the quintessence of Miyamoto's ideal. You can't play Eden without participating in the momentum; it's the fundamental contagiousness of its motions that make it so compelling. This isn't grammar, but Miyamoto reminds us that fun is more than syntax.