I have not told my garden yet/ Lest that should conquer me;

When I returned from a brief and console-free trip home this Sunday, the first thing I did was download the full version of Pixeljunk Eden. (I had to run yet another firmware update just to get into the store. The PS3 has too much computer in it and not enough console) I am glad for the brave new world of online distribution, where it is possible to obtain games like this for 10 bucks without leaving the house. I haven't invested a lot of time in it yet (there are some non-videogame related duties to be discharged here at the house of Clu), I've had the game on my mind ever since I started playing the demo last week.

A while back Michael Abbot discussed how modern video games have begun to widen their expressive range; when they were tethered to the arcade there was an imperative for a video game to challenge the player as much as possible for the shortest amount of time. A life at the arcade was likely nasty, brutish, and short unless you were very good at the game. With the transition to home consoles and the PC long ago, games broke with the design imperatives of the arcade; this led to the creation longer and less death-intensive experiences in the long-form narrative genres like adventure and RPG games.

But what we are seeing recently, it seems to me, is the flowering of a new design aesthetic within the short-form arcade game. Pixeljunk Eden retains the simple and easy-to-master mechanics of an arcade game, along with the short-form play length-- you can learn the game's mechanics and play a level in five minutes. But in lieu of mercilessly barraging the player with difficult obstacles in that time, Eden allows the player some air to breathe. It brings some leisureliness to leisure. Traversing the platform-style gardens is a matter of making a series of long, swooping leaps from plant to plant as you swing from the end of a line of silk. Rarely had a video game felt graceful to play. Rarely have I felt that excelling at the game is a matter of making just a few, carefully plotted actions rather than many quickly plotted actions, but Eden's gameplay has this very feel to it. Because pollen-collection is the basic goal in the game, sometimes your best course of action is just to hang on the end of a branch and wait for the wind to blow the pollen your way. The gameplay itself conveys a sense of tranquility; although you always feel like you know how to progress you seldom feel a sense of pressure.

The game's visual and audio aesthetics represent a skillful fusion of form to this content. Through the art style and music, the game reinforces the sense of calm created through the play mechanics. It is as if the game's art staff thought: “what does it feel like to play this game?”, and then sought to reproduce this feeling in visual and aural terms. The monochromatic color scheme, which favors bright blues and greens, gives the screen an uncluttered look, and the music has a loose, unstructured quality which suits repetition.

While the individual gameplay and artistic elements of the game are clearly borrowed from other games-- Rez, Everyday Shooter, Bionic Commando-- the sum of these elements and their implementation is really novel. They reflect an attempt on the part of the designers to do something different to the player. Games have been very good at creating certain experiences-- fear, empowerment, amusement-- but they have rarely sought to inspire the sort of peacefulness that Eden does, and I think this in itself is an achievement.

The emergence of the downloadable space in this console generation has been a real blessing for the console gamer who wants to see new and innovative efforts of this kind. (I know there are things on the PC that would blow my fragile mind, but I just can't seem to get into playing games on the object I use to check email recently.) Sometimes you saw a real standout like Katamari Damacy, but the economics of retail distribution just don't seem to favor unusual short-form games like Eden. I'm hoping that this space might become a safe-haven for games of this kind with offbeat and artsy ambitions for the medium. I would never have thought that the game I have been anticipating the most for a long time is coming to Xbox live arcade this Wednesday.

A Modest Proposal

Dear Nintendo,

There is still a chance to preserve the image of the storied Pokemon brand. You've had a good run, nobody disputes that. But there is no getting around the fact that Pokemon is based on the enslavement of wild animals for the purpose of bloodsport.

God knows we all love it. Who doesn't love having an army of trained animals bloody the sands of the arena for your prestige and profit? But it is only a matter of time before the other shoe drops and the public at large realizes that the beloved Nintendo brand is associated with a game that is turning our pliant youth into Ron Mexicoes. You can stave off the inevitable by slapping some electric mice onto puzzle blocks from time to time, but we all know that the coal that fires the engine of the Pokemon brand is the human thirst for cruelty. I offer you a final chance to salvage your carefully-crafted reputation for the avoidance of corruption.

Surely you remember Rare, they used to be in your employ. A few years ago they released the commercially unsuccessful animal husbandry simulation Viva Piñata. Nobody played this game, because it was far to complicated for children and far too adorable for the Halo crowd. The people who got the most out of it were old people immune to shame, like myself, who got sucked into the game's wonderfully deep gameplay and spent the next few weeks coming up with obscure naming conventions for our herds of squazzils and bunnycombs. (Characters in 18^th century french novels, British Moralists, members of Led Zeppelin.) While the game had some gorgeous art design and many of the animals had some real zazz to them (you had to ignore their connection to a horrible kids' TV show) it failed to find an audience.

Here are the facts on the ground. Viva is already half-Pokemon. (The other half is The Sims.) It combines the fun collecting adorable animals with the thrills of housekeeping. It is a fantastic game, and if the general public were aware of its existence it would be a smash. You already have an actual product called My Pokemon Ranch available on WiiWare, which has successfully tapped the Pokemon consumer's desire to merely wander around a fenced area populated by their squad of Pokemans. This is a game that would benefit from some actual ranching. Why don't you give the consumer a break from pitting Pokemon against each other in a contest to the death and have them facilitate some Pokeman romance through careful ranch maintenance?

You work out the details, and it will sell millions. I hereby waive my usual finder's fee.

Yours,
Iroquois Pliskin

Lasering Dudes is a Sport

(The photo above is an illustration of the author's vaunted lasering skills)

Last fall I bought Halo 3. Before I picked up the game I had never played an online shooter. I was certain that I was not one of those people. I was in it for the single-player game, which was fine but not earth-shaking. But one day I decided to give the whole multiplayer thing a shot. After several straight days of getting my ass handed to me by twelve-year-olds on Snowbound, I got the hang of it. The multiplayer game unfolded its splendors. Then, Halo got its hooks into me in the worst way. It proceeded to devour whatever time I dedicated to playing video games and much of the time that was traditionally allocated to my other important life activities: playing in the snow, kissing girls, and the like. While this was unfortunate for all other aspects of my life, I developed an appreciation for a new type of play.

I think the genius of Halo 3 really lies in the wellneigh absurd refinement of its basic combat mechanics, but that is a story for another post. I want, instead, to talk a little bit about some other reasons why I think the game is so compulsively enjoyable.

If you've been reading the blog for a while you know that I've been arguing games are fun because it's pleasurable to learn and master the rules of a game-world. I think this is basically true, but I think I should also make a distinction. So here's some crude taxonomy: All video games lie on a continuum between two extremes: on one hand you have games where you are discovering new rules and play mechanics almost constantly as you progress through the game, and on the other hand you have games where you discover most of the rules at the very outset, and the challenge comes mastering those rules and perfecting your use of them. Games that fall in to the latter category, like Halo's multiplayer, are sports. You have to evaluate these two categories of games differently. While the fun of the first category originates in our innate desire to master the world through experimentation and planning, the fun of the latter comes from our equally innate love of competition and storytelling.

The human thirst for identity is such that we are willing to submit ourselves to any set of rules that offers us a chance to distinguish us from our fellow man. I can attest to this, because while growing up my brother and I could take any activity-- eating dinner, peeing, jumping on the couch, anything whatsoever-- and turn it into a contest by slapping a few extra rules onto it. This not only enriches our regular day-to-day habits (If you ever watch the timbersports on the ESPN2 it will dawn on you that they are just lumberjacking with some extra constraints. ), but also gives us a way to match ourselves against others, because the artificial standards created by a sport offer a public and objective measure of our prowess. This is half the fun of Halo.

Here's the other: One of the reasons that sports have a such a reign over our imagination is that they feed into our love of storytelling. Sports are made to create situations with narrative significance: last-minute reversals, falls from grace, chances for redemption. It's why you can't talk about our national love of sport without talking about The Natural or Hoosiers or When We Were Kings, and it's also why sports talk is such a big part of sports culture; half of the fun of following sports is cooking up stories with the other fans about the games and the players, spinning a common narrative about what it all means.

In multiplayer games like Halo, the fun of the game comes from the stories that you tell to yourself using the tools you have acquired by mastering the rules of the game. The stories you get out of playing Halo usually lose something in the telling (“This was 'ought-seven... the red team had me pinned down outside of Zanzibar. I was down to my last plasma grenade, so I had to make it count.”), and this is why Halo 3's saved films feature is, to my mind, such an important step forward for the multiplayer genre as a whole.

Halo 3's theater allowed you to go back into any recent game and rewatch the action you had just played. The feature gave you the ability to replay and make saved film clips of your personal highlight reel, in order to narrate them for your Halo-playing friends. This enabled a more rich type of storytelling; you weren't limited to just telling people how it went, you could show them and add you own myth-making on top of it.

The theater also created another type fun native to sports. After you played with your roommate, (or clan, or whatever. I never personally knew more than two other people who played Halo), you could go to the theater and break down the film together. I know this sounds absurd, it was just wierldly fun for my roommate and I to sit down with a mess of breakfast cereal after a match and walk through the games we just played. Since the game records the action from every player's perspective, you could observe someone who had just schooled you and piece together the tactics that had laid you low. Or you could just walk through the last game from your own perspective and discuss how you tackled certain situations. This was not only fun in its own right, but it also made you better at the game, which was a bonus; it gave you a chance to do some second-order reflection on how you had made use of the game's rules and maps, and think about how to use those rules and maps to your advantage.

This is why we don't need a Halo movie. Let the idea languish and die. The real Halo films are being made every night, by the kids.

The Compact

We might say that all works of art trade on an implicit bargain struck between the audience and the artist. It goes like this: we agree to take some time out of our days, paying attention to whatever it is the artist has to say, maybe suspend our sense of disbelief, and in exchange the artist promises to take us somewhere. Different forms of art have different tools at hand to accomplish the artist's side of the bargain.

In an interesting and well-thought out piece on his blog Fullbright, Steve Gaynor of 2K Marin (the developer of Bioshock 2) makes a persuasive case that the tools of games as a medium are uniquely suited to accomplish a particular kind of transport. He says “video games excel at fostering the experience of being in a particular place via direct inhabitation of an autonomous agent.” One of the things I took away from his post is that the bargain struck between the player and designer in a game is quite different from the sort of bargains stuck by other media. Game design is, to a greater degree more than other media, a form of collaboration between the designer and the player, since the transport-- the sense of “being there”-- provided by games is crucially linked to the player's sense that their choices are a meaningful part of the experience. I'm going to summarize Gaynor's argument by rephrasing it as an agreement of this sort, with the aim of comparing it to another type of agreement that is central to the history of moral philosophy.

The setup is like this: the designer and the player have a certain common goal--transport-- but they each must play a different role in the realization of that goal. The designers have to make the rules for the world that the player is going to inhabit, and the player must accept the limitations on their choices that come along with being in a world governed by certain artificial conventions. While the designer's ideal aim is “verisimilitude,” the player will have to accept some restrictions on their arbitrary liberty-- the player just won't be able to accomplish all the interactions with the world that he is capable of in real life. (We have to suspend our disbelief and accept the bizarre conventions of games all the time-- bodies that disappear after 30 seconds, the narrow range of manipulable objects, exploding barrels, and so on.)

The aim of these rules, Gaynor says, is to enable the player to make their own story with the rules given to them: “the core experience of playing a video game is itself unique to each player-- an act of realtime media interpretation-- and the most powerful stories told are the ones the player is responsible for.” The function of these rules is the transfer of power from the one who makes the rules-- the author of the game-- to the player. “Video games at their best, “ Gaynor says, “abdicate authorial control to the player, and with it shift the locus of the experience from the raw potential onscreen to the hands and mind of the individual.” By participating in the game and learning the rules laid out by the designer, the player realizes the common goal that governs their relationship: giving the player a sense of “agency and autonomy.”

When I was reading Gaynor's piece I was struck by the fact that the agreement between the designer and player he depicts there shares some interesting structural features with the social contract described by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. According to Rousseau, a “social contract”-- an agreement made among citizens, which creates a political community-- was the basis for the legitimacy of the laws created by a King or other political leader. What the “social contact” and the agreement I described above have in common is that they are structured around a mutually held end-- the freedom and autonomy of the people to be ruled by the laws established by the contract. The sovereign has the authority to make the laws that govern those subjects, but on Rousseau's account this authority itself only comes from the fact that these laws are appropriate given the common goods, particularly agency and autonomy, realized by social life.

Now, I don't think we can make too much of this similarity; I don't mean to suggest that the collaboration between player and designer that occurs has the same sort of moral and political significance of the social contract. I just think that these two “agreements” share a certain texture deriving from the fact that they are both guided by the value of agency and autonomy.

But what also intrigued about both of these contracts is a certain paradox: they both work off the fact that submitting to rules can feel liberating. Even though these rules place artificial constraints on how we act in the world, we can feel that we are more free when we work within them. This is certainly the sense that we get when I figure out how to get around in the world created by a game or overcome the challenges it throws at us. Games can abuse us or humiliate us by imposing limitations that feel unfair and arbitrary, but when these rules are well-crafted they can create the terrific feeling of agency. (This is even true of games, like Half-Life 2, that are a great deal more structured and linear than Gaynor's ideal.) Rousseau offers some interesting perspective on this idea, because he also believes that the regulation of our conduct by laws makes us more genuinely autonomous agents; it is only when we consent to being governed by just laws “that the voice of duty succeeds physical compulsion and law succeeds appetite; man, who up that that point had only regarded himself, sees himself forced to act according to other principles... Though he loses, in this state, many advantages that he had in nature, he wins much greater ones back. He exercises and develops his faculties, his ideas flourish, his sentiments are ennobled.”

Trash, Art, and the Games

“Art is the greatest game, the supreme entertainment, because you discover the game as you play it.... We want to see, to feel, to understand, to respond in a new way. Why should pedants be allowed to spoil the game?” -- Pauline Kael, Is There a Cure for Movie Criticism?

When pressed to justify our leisure we run the risk of disavowing pleasure. Because games are almost universally associated with puerile amusement, because they are seen as frivolous where they are not seen as corrupting, the ludologists and the games-as-art crowd are quick to run to the defense of games with the standards of respectable art in hand. Surely a good many games are about nothing more than engineering some empowering bit of badassery, we say, but their potential lies in their expressive capacity for making us reflect on agency, identity, and control. Look past the genre exercises-- your headhopping cartoons and your space-marine operas-- and you will find a medium groping towards works of moral imagination. Games aren't just trashy fun, or at least they won't be forever.

As Andrew Doull argues in a provocative recent article on GameSetWatch, our rush to defend games in these terms betrays a certain “fear of fun.” As a card-carrying member of the games-is-art crowd I am doubtless as guilty of this as anyone. I want games to aspire to the narrative complexity and technical self-consciousness I associate with high art, art for adults. When driven to defend gaming I will cite the pleasures of discovering and mastering the rules of a game-world, an activity which shares a great deal with the sort of learning we do in other contexts. And I believe that games can use the tools of their medium-- control, interaction, and narrative-- in order to interrogate these very pleasures. Games like Bioshock and Shadow of the Colossus have suggested, each in a different way, that our desire to master the world and turn it to our uses is shadowed-- as The Dialectic of Enlightenment warned us-- by a covert desire to conform and yield to the rules imposed on us by others. We're not in Citizen Kane territory yet, to be sure, but clearly these games are waypoints on the medium's journey towards maturity.

Doull's piece reminded me of the essay Trash, Art, and the Movies, written by legendary New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael. What Kael says can be read as a counterpoint to the aspirations I mention above, so I am going to use this post to present her view. She has some interesting points to make about justifying pleasure, and though they are meant to describe the state of film in 1969 they are just as applicable to gaming in the present day. Her response to the demand for justification is to question our very desire to justify ourselves: “Does trash corrupt? A nutty Puritanism still flourishes in the arts, not just in the schoolteachers’ approach of wanting art to be 'worthwhile,' but in the higher reaches of the academic life with those ideologues who denounce us for enjoying trash as if this enjoyment took us away from the really disturbing, angry new art of our time and somehow destroyed us. If we had to justify our trivial silly pleasures, we’d have a hard time.”

In short, Kael counsels that we are best off to overcome our misguided scruples-- divest ourselves of the idea that there is something ignoble about the pursuit of pleasure. Pleasure she memorably remarked, is “something a man can call good without self-disgust.” Even a cheap and mindless genre exercise can be redeemed (as trashy movies are) by the presence of some glimmer of real vitality: “The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line.” The plot of Ninja Gaiden is insipid, the character design tawdry, and the level design pedestrian. But the combat-- the combat is genius. It shouldn't matter that virtually everything else in the game is trash.

The upshot of her view, then, is that the price of acquitting ourselves of the charge of infantilism is the disavowal of what is vital and compelling about the games themselves. What Kael says of film one can also say of gaming: “Movie art is not the opposite of what we have always enjoyed in movies, it is not to be found in a return to that official high culture, it is what we have always found good in movies only more so. It’s the subversive gesture carried further, the moments of excitement sustained longer and extended into new meanings.” If Kael is right, we do violence to the excellences of games when, in search of respectability, we try to turn Resident Evil 4 into Middlemarch. We are better off celebrating the subversive gesture-- the vengeful and methodical beheading of the undead-- with unabashed relish. As Kael wrote, “we shouldn’t convert what we enjoy it for into false terms derived from our study of the other arts. That’s being false to what we enjoy.” The challenge of games criticism is one of becoming articulate about what we enjoy. Fun is what we have always enjoyed in games; but saying interesting things about having fun cannot mean leaving it behind.

But I do wish that games tried to be the “really disturbing, angry new art of our time.” As Louis Menand notes in an excellent review of Kael's work, she forged her critical consciousness in reacting to the cineastes and the directors (Bergman, Kubrick) who were contemptuous of the audience's desire to be entertained. In games we face the opposite problem: game creators are too complacent about their ability to entertain us. They know what we like and they know there is money to be made by giving us more of it. And while I don't think there is anything unethical in this, this attitude reeks of cynicism and laziness. I'm not worried about games falling into the hands of pedants, I'm worried it falling into the hands of people who would be willing to exchange creative stagnation for profit. The more this happens the less fun we'll have on our hands.

I Talk with my Roommate about Glider Et Al.

The new breed of console owner created by the success of the Nintendo Wii remains shrouded in mystery. In the past year Nintendo has pulled off the astonishing feat of marketing a game console to consumers who have not played games since youth. They've won this generation's console war by delivering uncomplicated fun to masses. To their chagrin, Nintendo has largely abandoned the hardcore consumer to the Xbox and Playstation 3; instead they have created a new consumer whose tastes are different from those of lifetime gamers. But the tastes of this consumer are still pretty much unknown, aside from the fact that they love Wii Sports. How do they go about buying new games? What sort of things are they looking for from their games, and are long-form narrative games among them?

In search of some answers I interviewed my roommate Christine, who got a Wii this spring as a graduation present. She's the model for the new Wii owner: she's never owned a console, she doesn't follow games in general. Most of her exposure comes from me. So I got her to take a break from studying for the New York bar exam today and sat her down for some questions.

Q: So, did you have any game consoles in your home when you were growing up?
A: Um, we had a Mac classic. Does that count? A Macintosh. We had this one game I used play obsessively, it was called glider. I tried to find it few years ago.

Q: What was glider about?
A: You take the place of a paper airplane and you glide around this house--- it's not haunted but there are appliances on. You had to stay away from open flame, and you were propelled by all these vents and fanss. The object was to get through the house without crashing into furniture or being overtaken by a propeller or balloon. Not only did I get through the entire house every time (it takes about and hour and half), but then when I got to last room I would intentionally not finish the game and go through backwards.

Q: How long did it take you to work up to this level of skill?
A: I played it for years. If we found glider right now I could do it today. I still know the location of all the mystery vents. There were these dark rooms and you would have to fly over the light switch. Sometimes you had to knock a can of grease over and slide over a table. I didn't have a lot of friends growing up. Just my friends from viola camp.

Q: Were you exposed to any violent games on your Macintosh SE 30?
A: Ummm, no. But glider was fucking awesome. What about Mac Ski? Does that count?

Q: Does your knowledge of the fact that I spent most of my childhood ripping the still-beating hearts from my enemies change your opinion of videogame violence?
A: [laughing] I think it makes a lot of sense. I can picture little Iroquois sitting too close to the TV comparing himself to Beowulf. What was the sword's name? Frumkin?

Q: I'm going to leave in that total non-sequitur. Over the last three years you've seen me playing a lot of crazy stuff on the TV while you're surfing kitten blogs in the living room. Have any favorites?
A: I hate Halo. I don't like the noises it makes. My favorite is Grand Theft Auto. It reminds me of Sim City, which I also played growing up. I love the New York aspect, the world they created, all the hidden treasures for people who play it. Or people who watch people play it.

Q: You bring some considerable legal expertise to the viewing of Grand Theft Auto. Describe some of the intentional torts you've seen me commit.
A: I think the best-case scenario for me on Tuesday is I open up the Bar exam and there's a question with this fact pattern: an Eastern European gentleman who has good taste in clothes commits grand larceny, assault, battery, second-degree burglary (entering a building with the intent to commit a crime), solicitation and conspiracy (those two crimes don't merge in New York). And we're forgetting homicide! You've killed people right? [She shoots the interviewer a pointed look] Felony murder, regular murder, involuntary manslaughter, voluntary manslaughter, arson. Basically GTA is a checklist for me if I get a criminal law question on the bar exam.

Q: In general, if you see a game console in the house of an adult, how does this change your perception of them?
A: What game console? Wii? Playstation? Are we talking a couple guys in a frat house with Rock Band, or our apartment?

Q: Let's say it's an Xbox.
A: Umm, do they play Halo with 14-year-old boys on the internet who insult their gamertag?

Q: Let's change the subject. When was the moment when you said to yourself: “The Nintendo Wii... I have to buy that shit.”
A: You and I were talking and you telling me how it was like a remote control. It seemed very doable to me. You guys used the playstaion 2 controller as a de facto remote control for watching DVDs, but the controller makes no sense to me. It has too many buttons. But the Wiimote feels like a remote, it makes a lot of sense to me. And that was really appealing. I wouldn't have to spend an hour. Also, I really really really like Miis

Q: After you depart to become a high-powered attorney, who will you turn to if you want to buy Wii games?
A: You know the answer. Do you think I'm not going to you and asking, “What are the nerds on the blogosphere into these days? Also, you recommend good games, like Boom Blox. You're not going to go recommending something with a lot of dragons or something. I try to avoid slaying.

Q: Wii Fit told me that I was a fatty. Discuss.
A: Wii fit does not know what it's talking about. That said, I don't want to make you feel bad, but it told me that I was doing very well when I stepped on it for the first time in like two months.

Q: I don't know how to put this. How would you feel about me surreptitiously filming you playing Wii Fit in bikini-style underdrawers?
A: You'll be hearing from my lawyer.

PS-- Good Luck on the bar exam, Christine! You're gonna do great. If any readers want to wish her well you can send your regards to bigupstoxtine@gmail.com. I can confirm that she is really excellent at glider. If anyone wants to try unwind after the exam with some glider, it can be found here.

A Positive Notice from Poland

My blog got mentioned in Poland! I'm excited to see the word get out beyond our shores:

"New, merely several week's blog, but it is foreshadowed (is presaged) very curiously among others, hitherto existing registration about similarities of games of types with jazz sandbox and about rules of games from the point of view of philosophy of edge ( ) sic. It sounds high-flown, but it is written without complication zbytnich."

My thanks go out to Marzena Falkowska. Check out her blog!

(Somewhat-garbled translation courtesy poltran.com)