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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34939469974893266612014-11-23T02:06:16.010-05:00Exploring BelievabilityJ. Sheahttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3493946997489326661.post-65937264417617392392014-10-16T05:22:00.001-04:002014-10-16T05:29:54.353-04:00Analysis: Wing Commander

First released in September of 1990, Chris Robert's Wing Commander series was both traditional and novel, combining a classic "space ace" concept with innovations in storytelling and worldbuilding. Drawing influence from the Pacific Theater of World War 2 as well as more contemporary works like Top Gun, this memorable and influential series certainly has a lot of concepts to explore.

Setting
Set in the distant future, Wing Commander takes place during a war between the Terran Confederation and the Kilrathi, a race of imperialistic, militant cat-people. The player takes the role of Christopher "Maverick" Blair; in the first game, he is fresh out of the academy, assigned to the carrier Tiger's Claw. The series follows Maverick's actions through the war and beyond. The earlier games generally follow a more militarized pattern, focusing on missions and patrols assigned by your commanding officer. In later games, as the war changes, your objectives are more based on pursuing individual goals, uncovering plots, and so on.

Representation
The Terran Confederation as depicted in most of the games is a relatively progressive society; pilots from all over the world are represented on the Tiger's Claw, and female pilots are common as well. While the statistics still skew towards white men (6 of 9 pilots in WC1 are white, and 7 of 9 are male), there's at least a clear attempt at inclusion (which makes sense for the setting). The uniforms worn by pilots are the same for men and women - a sensible WW2-inspired look for dress uniforms, and a relatively goofier-looking flight suit. Combat is taken seriously and combatants are treated with respect; the occasional exception, like Todd "Maniac" Marshall, is done intentionally, to contrast with the more serious standard of the rest of the cast. In terms of design, Wing Commander is basically what I want out of games: I want combat to be taken seriously, and "the way characters are designed" should be part of that seriousness.

Mechanics
Wing Commander is not a realistic simulation of spaceflight, but it is a relatively consistent one. Space combat happens in a certain way, at certain ranges, and everything about the game's setting is designed around that. As such, it is believable, but not realistic. Of course, it was designed this way for a reason, and that reason is "you can't have exciting dogfights in a realistic space game". Wing Commander was designed to be WW2 in space, just like Star Wars was, and that manifests itself in the fact that dogfighting in WC is heavily reliant on guns as opposed to long-range missile exchanges. The depths of space serve as a stand-in for the Pacific Ocean, with planets serving as its "islands".

Imbalances
By its nature, Wing Commander is a "space ace" narrative. You are playing a single pilot. You are going to get the most kills. You are going to be the biggest contributor to the war effort. You are going to make or break every mission. In that sense, Wing Commander is a classic PvE setup: your enemies are numerous and incompetent. The player's ability to "beat the odds" is artificially inflated because the odds in question are meaningless; it doesn't matter if they outnumber you ten to one if they can barely fly in a straight line. And of course that incompetence isn't limited to your enemies; your allies are also pretty bad at flying, so that you can feel awesome for flying a thousand times better than them. In the land of blind men, the one-eyed player-character is king. This sort of forced imbalance compromises the setting itself, and it also makes the player's victories feel weird if they stop and think about it. A smaller number of more-skilled pilots would have been just as challenging without making the player feel like they're picking on pilots far inferior to themselves.

However, there are certain levels of "consistency" that still exist in the series. For example, you're "legitimately" flying the same fighters as everyone else; you don't have advantages in terms of your statistics, number of missiles, or anything like that. You've got shields and armor on your ship, and it's the same level as everyone else who flies that ship. The only difference between you and everyone else is your flying ability. This is a marked difference to something like Call of Duty, where your superhuman ability to absorb bullets is (a) never mentioned and (b) completely vital to your ability to complete missions.

WC1 even included "failure" as a gameplay concept, with a webbed sequence of missions that would change based on your success or failure in a given area. This was abandoned in WC2, when it was discovered that players were generally more likely to reload and try again than to accept a bad result. Another important failure-related gameplay feature was the ability to eject from your craft, thus living to fight another day (unless something bad happened to you post-ejection). These mechanics helped "defeat" to feel like a more natural part of the setting, instead of a thing that should be ignored and erased ("not canon", as it were).

Morality
In the first game, morality is simple; the Kilrathi are the enemy. They are not just an enemy, they are the enemy: an implacable, non-negotiating race of super-warriors who have the darkest possible plans for Earth. There is zero reason to feel remorse for killing a Kilrathi, and many reasons to feel good about it. Like orcs in most fantasy, the Kilrathi is a remorseless aggressor who can only be stopped with violence, thus justifying a gameplay scheme based entirely around killing.

In WC2 the idea is introduced that not all Kilrathi are like that; a defector Kilrathi, nicknamed "Hobbes", joins your crew and flies alongside you. In addition, there is a revolt in one of the Kilrathi colonies, suggesting that not all the Kilrathi support their totalitarian government. These simple additions transformed the Kilrathi from "100% merciless killers" to "99% merciless killers", a change that warranted some introspection. The game certainly addresses the issue, as Blair begins to question his own attitude towards the Kilrathi and the potential that peace could be reached.

[SPOILER ALERT]

One of the more troubling twists in the game is the fact that Hobbes turns out to be a traitor. While this is not by itself a bad plot twist, in context Hobbes is the only friendly Kilrathi that exists. Obviously a few other ones exist, but Hobbes is the only one that the player ever sees or talks to. As such, the ratio shifts from the Kilrathi being "99% merciless killers" back to "100% merciless killers, and also 1% duplicitous backstabbers".

Conclusion
Wing Commander is a game where you never actually command any wings and that legitimately bothers me. It bothers me because if you strip away the "space ace" stuff you have a pretty solid premise: a roster of well-characterized pilots fighting a serious war against an aggressor. The setting is compromised by the need to make the player feel better than everyone else, and if you took that element away and turned it into something more like X-COM, you'd have a better product overall.

Okay, done? Great. I just explained everything I feel about video games in one accessibly-written article.J. Sheahttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3493946997489326661.post-50679160475263256782014-10-11T17:51:00.001-04:002014-10-11T17:51:10.517-04:00KISS: "Gamer Culture"
Keep It Simple, Stupid:

A concise analysis of Gamer Culture

SCENARIO

Gamer Identity is a concept built in opposition; which is to say, without societal distaste for gaming, "gamers" would not exist. People enjoy movies casually, and while there are people who are dedicated to the art of filmography, "film buff" and "gamer" do not have the same connotations. Gamer Identity exists because gamers were treated like outcasts and weirdos, and as a result were forced to socialize primarily with other outcasts and weirdos.

However, it is the year 2014, and for the most part things are different now. If a gamer is treated like an outcast and a weirdo now, it's probably because the are an outcast and a weirdo, not because they're a gamer. Yet you can still see a great deal of bitterness at the old wounds; one of the most notable ways this manifests itself is in hatred for "fake geeks". "Who do they think they are", the argument goes, "to try to get in on gaming as an identity without having to endure that outcast status?"

Well, I grew up in the 90s, and I was part of that "original caste" of gamers. I was a person who played games and was treated like an outsider, although not necessarily in that order. And the thing about it is, I got past it. I came out the other side. I watch people who are what I used to be, and all I can wait for them to do is either wake up or destroy themselves.

The thing is, ultimately, there is only one concept that "gamerdom" stands for: the right to not be made fun of for fucking around in an electronic toy.

Take everything you know about GamerGate and run it through that filter.

Gamers think SJWs are "too sensitive". In reality, the gamer wants to preserve their right to not be made fun of for fucking around in an electronic toy. This issue is, to them, a core concept of who they are, and yet somehow they believe that other people are too sensitive. Not them. Other people.

You know, I'd love to go on about this, but there's really nothing else to it. It doesn't matter if gamers invoke "journalistic freedom" or "artistic integrity", ultimately every discussion is going to turn back to the right to not be made fun of for fucking around in an electronic toy. And hey, "gamergaters" aren't the only ones who really care about that right! Lots of people do. Lots of people get upset if you make fun of them for fucking around in an electronic toy. It's basically a prerequisite for being the kind of person who spends their life fucking around with an electronic toy.

ALTERNATIVES

Well, personally, I'd argue that maybe you should grow the fuck up, you huge stupid baby, but a more constructive alternative is to try to understand what you have in common with your SJW opponents so you can see that you're actually not that different. Both of you care about "artistic freedom", to an extent. Both of you participate in a hobby where you do immoral, stupid things and justify it because it's "just a game". Both of you are basically idiots trying to pretend like you know what big people are talking about.

CONCLUSION

but no seriously grow the fuck up
J. Sheahttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3493946997489326661.post-314818673424787172014-08-28T23:38:00.003-04:002014-08-28T23:41:45.587-04:00Semper GamesI. WHERE DOES "WHY" COME FROM?

Imagine an empty universe. Imagine nothingness. This is a universe without God, without a creator, without a guiding hand. It was not *made*. It simply *is*.

Populate this universe with the celestial objects - stars and planets and all cosmic entities in between.

Now add to one planet the element of water - and from water, emerge life.

Now we wait.

Life mutates. The drive to live is mutation - a beneficial one, at least for purposes of survival. The beings that do not have these instincts die. The ones that do live. This does not mean that those biological instincts are the way life should be. Rather, they are self-justifying: they exist because they helped life survive. This, and only this, is their purpose. Such is the way of "biological truths".

Many animals exist that failed to breed. They died. But in truth, so does every other animal. Death is the common curse. Why, then, is breeding important? It isn't. It's simply a trait that is passed on. The reason it is passed on is because it is a trait that supports being passed on. Breeding does not save you from death. Failing to breed does not damn you. You are, and then you aren't. You are not graded. You are not scored. It is not objectively possible to waste your life.

At any moment, you could be killed. This would not be an event with purpose or greater cause. It would simply be what happened.

There is no purpose but that which we give ourselves, or which we allow others to give us.

II. WHY DO ANYTHING?

A problem I have with a lot of philosophers is that they're essentially working under the assumption that "something important" exists. For many, this is the existence of the divine - that they firmly believe God exists, and their philosophies are founded in working around or with God's plan for them. René Descartes famously examined every possible assumption he had, down to his own existence - but concluded ultimately that he must not be deceived, because a Just God would not allow it. He could not bring himself to truly doubt the existence of God, even when he was intent on questioning everything else.

For others, the concern is more material. Ayn Rand labored under the idea that it was objectively valuable to pursue prosperity. Now I could certainly trot out quotes about her views on the rich (they're great and deserve everything they have and they got it all themselves) or the poor (they're parasitic idiots who couldn't sustain themselves for a week). But I think this one sums it up a lot better:

"They (Native Americans) didn't have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using. What was it that they were fighting for, when they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their 'right' to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or a few caves above it. Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this continent."

Ayn Rand's belief is that it is an Important Truth that progress is good and anti-progress is bad. Progress is more important than the autonomy, and lives, of the native peoples, and she holds then in contempt for failing to recognize that. She can't prove that value, of course, because it is a subjective belief. It is an opinion. But it is an opinion that she regards as unassailable and objective. She does not consider an alternative, because the criteria she uses to make decisions is founded in the intrinsic idea that progress is good.

If you were interested in defending civilization by its merits, you could mention things like medicine and plumbing and industry. Theoretically, you could make the argument that "civilization" as a concept includes many things that improve the life of the citizens within it. However, to do so, you would have to weigh that against the human beings killed in its name. This is not something Ayn Rand does because she does not care about those things - she cares about Progress itself. And if "progress" includes her living in luxury as the rightful inheritor of profit, then all the better for it. Naturally, Rand's philosophy was a big hit with people who want to be rich, selfish, elitist, and morally justified.

Most of the "great philosophers" operate in this way. They have an idea of the way the world should work, and they try to come up with reasons why it's the way the world has to work. Reading classical philosophy is a lot like reading the works of Freud - it's useful in a historical sense, but in an objective sense it's people without training trying to stumble across the truth. Freud is the "father of psychology", but he was also biased and arrogant, leading into his preferred conclusions without real concern for methodology or the well-being of his patients. In much the same way most of the great classical philosophers are essentially setting out "the way they think the world works" and then trying to justify it after the fact with their own theoretical anecdotes.

A philosopher believes that their beliefs are correct because they believe they must.

The counter-question is always "and what if we don't?"

III. WHY DO REALISM?

Now, me, I'm a bit of a philosopher myself. I believe in the sanctity and primacy of reality. I believe that stories should aspire to something beyond pure entertainment - to truly connect with the real world, with real people and real stories. Reality comes first, real people and real stories, and fiction should - at best - try to skim off of the beauty of reality. It disgusts me - disgusts me - when people cry over fictional characters more than they cry over real people. It sickens me when people give more attention to a fictional story about war atrocities and "game narrative theory" than they do to real wars. It shows me, over and over, that people are more concerned about stroking their own egos (in one way or another) than actually learning about the world around them.

Recently, some of that kind of stuff has been in the limelight. Battlefield: Hardline brought out the idea that dehumanizing a group of people in order to justify violence being "fun" is distasteful and disrespectful. Hey, guess what, that's exactly how I feel about most video game violence. The idea of using something like that as entertainment is abhorrent to me. But most gamers are still basically okay with it, because that's the reality they grew up in.

Once, I wrote an article about the depiction of "easy violence". In this article I didn't even bring up the idea that it's wrong to pantomime murder - instead, I challenged the way we view escapism. "Killing" is generally a self-indulgent act in gaming, but it's also usually a pointlessly easy one. Is there a reason to get a thrill from pretending to kill an enemy who was barely capable of fighting back? Is there a reason to think it's cool and exciting to put a reticle over a guy and launch a yellow blob at him that bursts into jelly? Is this why we game?

Another time, I wrote an article about the way people use "realism". In that article I pointed out that many people (on all sides of the political spectrum) will use "realism" as a good thing and "non-realism" as a bad thing, but they will do so in very select instances. Some people will say that women shouldn't be allowed to fight or be stronger than a man, because that's "unrealistic". Other people will say that it's wrong for armor to have breast-shaped indentations, because that's "unrealistic". However, these kinds of complaints tend to float in a sea of abstract, disjointed design decisions. There is no true adherence to realism - it is simply invoked as a self-justified concept, with its own intrinsic moral value. And, of course, it's difficult to be so certain about what is "realistic" when we ourselves don't know all the facts about reality.

Almost all of my early articles had the same basic concept even when they were talking about wildly different topics: they were trying to teach people that realism itself is good, not just the concepts behind it. Inevitably fiction must differ from reality (that's why this is Exploring Believability and not Exploring Realism), but the more coherent realism you can put into a work, the better it'll be. And by "better" I mean in terms of things like visceral reactions, logical coherence, and real-world engagement. In fact, I told everyone this in the very first article I wrote on this site.

But now here comes the question: "and what if we don't?"

IV. WHY DO GAME?

The answer is "nothing". Nothing happens if you don't adhere to realism. There is no objective purpose to life. It is impossible to "waste" life objectively. Life may be spent however the living being wishes (physical constraints aside).

FACT: A walking simulator is objectively not a waste of time.

FACT: A dating simulator is not objectively a waste of time.

FACT: A depression simulator is objectively not a waste of time.

FACT: A murder simulator is not objectively a waste of time.

The worst thing I can promise you, objectively, is that you will be hated by someone, somewhere. This is inevitable. But still, you don't want it.

How many of you are familiar with Christian Weston Chandler? Yeah, he's kind of a weird guy. Got a lot of problems. Easy to make fun of. Except, the problem is, a lot of the people making fun of him were basically just as weird and degenerate and societally-outcast as he was. What grounds did they have to mock him, apart from the safety of not being on display? What right did these shitbag nerds have to point and laugh at another shitbag nerd?

There's a really wonderful and enlightening event from Chris' life called Father Call. It's a complete dressing-down of Chris' inflated ego and sense of self-worth, where a societally revered individual (a veteran, a father, a provider) tears apart a societally hated individual (a failure, a blowhard, a guy who makes jokes about 9/11). Lots of people laughed at it. How many of them, I wonder, were nervous on the inside? How many of them compared their lives to Chris' and realized, oh, right, maybe I'm not as different as I'd like to think? Maybe, just maybe, I'm also a person that society despises?

"You are all bronies to me." - @ExpBelieve, twitter dot com

Of course the objective answer to this is that being hated is only bad if you care about the opinion of the people who hate you. Christian Weston Chandler could bundle himself up in his delusions and live totally happy on the taxpayer's dollar for the rest of his life. He can't get a girlfriend, sure, because that would require someone else thinking well of him - but he can at least get an anime bodypillow.

Why do we game? Because gaming is that blanket. Gaming is that bodypillow. Gaming is an institution founded on two things: self-indulgence and self-delusion. Games are about escapism - about pretending you're cool and important and likeable even when you're not. Games are about being better than everyone else. Games are about being stronger than everyone else. Games are about "romances" that are easy and reliable because there's no human being on the other end with opinions and values of their own.

And if you tell nerds how pathetic they are, they get so upset, my droogs. If you could harvest outrage, you would have no greater source than telling nerds they're pathetic. As much as they mock SJWs for daring to care about issues (and also "not doing real activism"), they themselves are the most sensitive demographic in the world. Because despite their "detached exteriors", they know what they are. Despite their "thick skins", they know how people feel about them. Despite the masks they wear, they know what's coming.

Hey, everyone, who wants to laugh at the nerd?

Despite everything they do - because of everything they do - gamers are losing right now. You know why? They're attacking the only people who could give their vapid medium an image improvement - the only people who could polish that turd up enough to make it respectable. They're organizing as one entity to do the kind of stupid shit that Jack Thompson could only dream of. For years, anti-game people had to make do with loosely connecting games to shootings. But now, here it is: an entire subculture organizing to do overt, repulsive activities. People who lived their lives not giving a shit about what other people thought of their body pillows and their murder simulators are now forced into answering the ringing phone. They hope, vainly, that an anime character will somehow turn it all around for them and make society ignore them again. Ring. Ring. Ring.

It's the Father Call.

Pick up the phone.J. Sheahttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3493946997489326661.post-20461922884227760072014-08-17T22:03:00.003-04:002014-08-17T22:04:46.966-04:00Quick Primer / UpdateHey guys I know I said I was done writing about games, and really, believe me, I'd like to be. But, you know, there's been a lot of stuff going on recently and I think people could use a quick primer on the way games work and why things are wrong with them. Ready? Here we go:

1) Battlefield Hardline Is The End Result Of A Logical Chain Of Events

People are generally pretty surprised and shocked at the timing of a game wherein you kill lots of people who are forcibly dehumanized in order to justify a binary moral narrative.

But this is what games have done forever. Every game where you kill living human beings does this.

The thing is that, in order to justify a format where the protagonist is better than everyone, someone has to be the "everyone". In B:H's case, the "everyone" is people you might know, people who are your friends, people you would sympathize with. They have names and faces and value and worth. They're human beings, goddammit.

Every game about killing human beings is about killing human beings. Repetitive, I know, but games love to take that thought away from you. The people you fight look and sound like human beings, but they don't behave like them. They don't cry or beg or run. They just fight and die. In such circumstances you're completely obligated to kill them - if you don't, they'll just try to kill you later.

And of course it's only fair that you should have advantages - there's so many of them, and just one of you! It makes sense that you can regenerate health. It makes sense that you can slow down time. You have to kill everyone. It wouldn't be fair for the act of murder to be scary or consequential. You have to make it fun.

At this point you might be thinking about games like Call of Duty. Fine. Do what you have to do. But when you're done thinking about that, don't forget to think about the snarky nerd-bait games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect. Don't forget to think about literally every game where the act of killing is cheered and praised. Because they're all part of the same problem. Don't make excuses. Don't go "well it's okay in this situation". Wake up. Confront the real world like a goddamned adult.

Is it necessary to kill people? Inevitably, yes. Sometimes people have to die. Should we celebrate it? Should we cheer it? Should we draw pleasure from it? That depends. Look around you. Look at the people cheering on the murderers. Ask yourself if you want to stand with them.

2) Gamers Harassing People Is The End Result Of A Logical Chain Of Events

Gamers have been told all their lives that they're better than everyone, and if they're not better than everyone they're garbage. That's power fantasy.

If a gamer tried to shoot someone, the police would stop them. They know this. Their fear of death is more important than any possible desire to harm others.

If a gamer got in a fight, they could be overpowered physically. Failing that, they could be sued. Their fear of consequence is is more important than any possible desire to harm others.

But there are no police on the internet. There's no "being overpowered" on the internet. There's not even really any "being sued" on the internet.

Now they have a format where they can do as they please without being stopped.

This is what power fantasy does. This is what dehumanization does. This is the monster it bred.

Some of those monsters are reading this and they're nodding their heads. He's right. I can do whatever I want.

3) Polygon Headlines Are The End Result Of A Logical Chain Of Events

Gamers being ignorant and uneducated is nothing new.

"When I see MGS transcending the medium, pushing the envelope... When I hear [people complain that there are] 'too many cutscenes,' I think, 'you're a peasant.' MGS 4 made me think about PMCs -- which, in a way, I hadn't before. The fact that [Kojima] brings up these real issues and brings them to light for people who don't really think about them...." - Shane Bettenhausen

Do you understand now why I hate Spec Ops: The Line? Not for what it is, but for the reception it had. The idea that something so shallow and weak could be so enlightening to so many was a revelation about how ignorant and terrible the average gamer is.

But it's not surprising.

Gaming is an exercise in "not thinking". Gaming is an exercise in finding reasons to not think about things. Gaming is an exercise in being shocked when a game provokes the slightest thought.

Gaming is about a population who will only accept new information in an exciting or thrilling form, like a child who must be tricked into taking vitamins.

Maybe pick up a book. I recommended a few the other day.J. Sheahttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3493946997489326661.post-15695474311669482572014-08-10T00:27:00.002-04:002014-08-10T00:36:26.824-04:00Reading ListThe one thing I miss about Twitter is the ability to signal-boost for a book or movie that I liked.

Luckily, I still have a blog.

The Forgotten Soldier, Guy Sajer
- Autobiography of a German (French-German, really) soldier on the Eastern Front.

Ivan's War, Catherine Merridale
- Collected accounts and historical overview of the common Soviet soldier in WW2.

A Rumor of War, Philip Caputo
- Autobiography of an American officer in Vietnam.

A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah
- Autobiography of a former child soldier in Sierra Leone.

Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
- Illustrated autobiography of a girl during the Iranian Revolution.

Ayn Rand, Darryl Cunningham
- Illustrated biography of a girl during the Russian Revolution.

An Image of Africa, Chinua Achebe
- A critical essay regarding Heart of Darkness, available here. Criticisms are also applicable to stories that followed the HoD model, such as Apocalypse Now and that one other thing.

Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
- The Stoic Emperor's observations on life and existence, which are surprisingly secular in nature.

The Cartoon Histories, Larry Gonick
- Some people don't like reading books with just words in them. Gonick's an alright alternative.

Women In The Military Speak Out About Their Portrayals (Or Lack Thereof) In Video Games, Jacqueline Cottrell
- This is a great article primarily because the two servicewomen bulldoze the interviewer's attempts to make excuses about "well, FEMSHEP,". The last paragraph lines up almost perfectly with the things I believe about games.

Unmanned, MolleIndustria
- This is a weird book.

Jet Set Radio Future
- I have two joys in life: I love to go fast, and I love to build cities.J. Sheahttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3493946997489326661.post-68295000612400678572014-07-10T00:59:00.001-04:002014-07-10T01:36:20.206-04:00Semper InvictusBefore I start this, I'd like to dedicate this article to S.R. Holliwell, the author of a well-researched and well-written set of analyses on the works of Hideo Kojima with regards to depictions of misogyny and transphobia. These articles have been stricken from the internet, I assume because she got tired of being harassed about them. If there is one person in games who should have been writing, whose works should have been getting recognition, it's her, and not people who are writing about how games need to be More Fun And Less Serious, or about how games journalism is Totally Corrupt (for the ten thousandth time).

Anyways, on to the article.

The second most-read article I've written was "How To Write Empowering Female Characters". In that article, there was an examination of the concept of "agency", as well as the greater concept of portraying characters as though they are people and not just cardboard cutouts. Pretty simple stuff. At the end I mentioned WWE wrestler "Kharma", who differed from other women in the WWE because she was presented first and foremost as an aggressive, powerful figure instead of eye candy. I mentioned that the WWE should consider hiring some female MMA fighters to add that sort of credibility and power to their women's competitions.

But I never wrote an article about female MMA fighters, and that's basically a huge oversight on my part, because essentially Women's MMA is 90% of the things that I wanted out of videogames before I gave up on them as a medium. Here's the checklist for depicting combat well:

1) Combat is realistic and meaningful.
2) Combatants dress and behave in ways that indicate they are taking things seriously.
3) Combat, and its participants, are treated with respect.

These are pretty simple rules, I think. I'm not going crazy here (at least, not with this specific set of rules). And there's games that fulfill those standards - well, a few at least. Tom Clancy's stuff was pretty consistently good about that sort of thing. Rainbow Six 3 was a respectful, realistic, intelligent shooter that easily included female characters with no major overhauls necessary. GRAW2 has the best "tough lady" faces in video games. But most of the time, games are pretty dumb about this, because games make combat to be "fun", and by being "fun" they also end up being "stupid".

Whereas, conversely, MMA in real life is a sport where people are getting punched in the head. As a result, competitors and spectators tend to take it pretty seriously. They wear practical clothing. They do their hair up so it can't get yanked around - and if they don't, they at least know there'll be repercussions. They're not there to "look good", they're there to fight. It's simple stuff. And it's basically all I wanted out of games, at least in terms of depicting characters.

So here's the funny thing about women's MMA, right: I don't have a lot to talk about. It's basically fine. Women are competing seriously. The commentators are treating them respectfully as athletes and fighters. You get cool natural moments because this is an actual fight instead of a staged event. Everything is right where it should be. I mean, the thing is, everything that happens around it is more balanced because there's that strong core of serious respect. There's women in MMA who flaunt their sex appeal, and the difference between that happening in MMA and that happening in a video game is pretty obvious too: it's a real woman doing it, under her own agency. She's not being disrespected for it. It's simple stuff. That's the thing about MMA, though - it's real. It treats fights like they're real because they are. It treats women like they're real combatants because they are.

It'd be silly to say that there are no problems in the MMA world, but compared to gaming it feels like there's a more real chance of actually undoing those problems. Yeah, Dana White is a misogynist asshole, and the entire Invicta company was founded as a way to get away from him, but hey. Martial arts is founded on principles of respect. You know what isn't? Gaming. There is no underlying expectation of respect in gaming. The only principles in gaming are "if people will buy it, make it". Anyone can throw out a "market research" explanation for depicting women in a certain way, or, failing that, they can go for the equally eye-rolling "artistic license". You don't get that shit with MMA. Fights are fights.

Of course there's still assholes who follow MMA - it's a bloodsport, after all. Of course there's still people making derogatory comments about WEAKER WOMEN. Of course there are MMA fighters who are pieces of shit. It's an inevitability. It's still an event that takes place on Planet Earth, after all. On the other hand, you have companies run by and for women - the kind of thing that would get overwhelmingly swarmed and harassed in the gaming world. You have a backbone of "this is real combat" that adds a level of objectivity to the proceedings. There's a strong core foundation of "hey, this is a serious sport" that helps solidify the community in the face of shitty human beings. Gaming would be fucking blessed if it had a single woman - fictional or non - as intense as AnnMaria De Mars. Fighting is serious fucking shit.

When people ask why Assassin's Creed won't treat women with respect, ask yourself: when did AC ever treat anything with respect? When did games ever treat anything with respect? Why are we surprised that a medium based on shallow, petty self-indulgence keeps fucking up when it comes to actual serious topics? How can they stay when they're sixty million miles away? How can they fly when they're free?

Sometimes I wish I'd started taking heroin instead of getting into videogames. It'd probably have been healthier overall.

Support Invicta FC.J. Sheahttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3493946997489326661.post-87598329556225861932014-06-19T01:34:00.001-04:002014-06-19T01:34:25.402-04:00doneit finally happened

it's pretty funny that, like mrbtongue*, wong ultimately has a soft spot for mass effect despite it being all the things he's listing off as shitty

also i probably would have added an entry for "things looking stupid as shit" but you can't have everything

*for the record mrbtongue is undoubtedly the most respectable games theorist on youtube; the fact that he has only two attributes that i dislike should make it pretty clear that he's heads and shoulders above the rest of the video game world

as for me,

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J. Sheahttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3493946997489326661.post-77583622792395422352014-03-29T23:04:00.003-04:002014-03-30T01:08:45.219-04:00Ludonarrative Dissonance: A PrimerIn conventional terms, there are two parts of a "game", or "interactive experience". There is the mechanical aspect ("the game") and the narrative aspect ("the story"). Some people are confused about the relation between these two things and I have a lot of time on my hands after writing literally every possible thing about believability that I could, so here we are again, doing this old song and dance one last time before I do it again next week. To start with, let's identify the two major parts of an "interactive experience", or "game". The first part, the mechanical game aspect, is what we'll call "the sport". The second part, the narrative story aspect, is what we'll call "the story".

Sport is a term I am using not only because of its structural connotations (sports have rules and regulations that exist on their own terms) but also because of the implications of its etymology. While today we associate "sports" with a highly structured team experience connected to physical exertion and capabilities, the origins of the word are actually much simpler. The word comes from the French desporter, meaning diversion or amusement. No seriously, look it up. This definition dates back to the 1400s, and as "play" became more structured it took on the modern meaning. The point here is that "sport" is a term I am using because sports are done for fun or for enjoyment. This relates in turn to the role of "sport" in a game. Sport is the rules for playing a game. Sometimes these rules intersect with the greater rules of the game slash joke that we call "reality". Sometimes they don't.

Story is the simulation of actions in a usually-consistent universe. Characters, events and settings make up the foundation of a "story", which is reinforced with dialogue, graphics, sound, etc. Story serves as the horrific, misshapen skinsuit crudely fashioned to cover the Sport Experience. It is a tattered and baggy object that nonetheless adds appeal to the Sport Experience despite clearly not fitting on it and ultimately being a terrifying funhouse mirror of real life. An example of Story is a reflexive point-and-click experience being converted into a murder simulator where players pretend to kill other human beings while gun companies make actual real-life profits from their guns being represented in the game as largely unrelated numbers and objects. If the story was not there, the players would simply be launching projectiles at each other, and players hit by the projectiles would be briefly removed from play for several seconds. Without the facade of shooting human beings until they die it's impossible to see this sport as being appealing.

Hey, do you remember that time that a fictional movie was made and it was so convincing that it drove up membership for the Ku Klux Klan to the degree that it was more influential and dangerous than it had been at the height of Reconstruction? No, forget about it, I'm just thinking out loud.

Some games that are all sport and no story include all sports that have no story, such as rugby, hockey, jai alai, and badminton. These experiences do not offer justifications for their mechanics, or even context - the rules are the rules and that's all that they are. A Ping-Pong player is simply a player of Ping-Pong; they are not representative of, for example, a mighty hero vanquishing an ancient evil. They are not recreating the battle of Stalingrad via paddle and ball. They are not pretending to explode civilians with every swing. They are not learning valuable lessons about the cruel nature of war when the ball hits the tiny net. They may have existential crises about why they are playing Ping-Pong, re: the pointlessness of learning to become extremely skilled at hitting a small ball back and forth, but this is within the realm of real life not the simulated reality of a Ping-Pong Narrative.

Some interactive experiences (or "games") that are all story and no sport include Bell Park, Youth Detective, Oren Moverman's Rampart, John Gardner's Grendel, and Eduardo Galeano's Days and Nights of Love and War. In these events there is no "skill" or "rules" that determine forward progress apart from the act of pressing play or turning pages or clicking one of several choice options. However, despite this simple setup, these stories are comparable in choice-levels to more advanced Sportgames such as Uncharted or Bioshock. Despite the more intensive sport setup, the narrative advancement is basically the same for these games as it is for the sport-free games. Also, the writing is worse. Like, Jesus, seriously, have you actually played an Uncharted game? Are they kidding us with that dialogue?

You might ask yourself at this point: what makes a game a game, objectively speaking? The answer is nothing. Classifications like that are entirely a human invention and the universe really doesn't give a shit about whether something is a game or is art or whatever. Their definitions come from the notoriously shoddy English language, which some people think is a near-infallible source of categorization when in reality it was cobbled together from like five different languages over the course of a millenium or so, and that's not including all the loanwords. Fuck Art. Fuck Games. Who gives a shit. Uncharted is a movie where you have to pretend to shoot people with shitty guns to unlock new sections of the movie. Who gives a shit. Fuck it. Another important part of games is level design.

What is the "endgame" of a game? What is the innate purpose that games should strive towards? Once again we must look towards the gaping abyss of existential purposelessness to give us our answer. A great eye opens in the swirling, incomprehensible vortex, and as you stare into it you realize that in 100 years you will be dead, and your role in this universe will be negligible. The only beings who will mourn you are just as fragile as you are. You were born into this universe to die and the insubstantial things that you do during your cosmically brief time here are of no concern to anyone other than beings as flawed and pointless as you are. As you take pleasure from breaking society's taboos, as you drive on the sidewalk in Grand Theft Auto or molest a 14 year old in SNATCHER or improperly stack crates in Shenmue, remember that the fleeting pleasure you derive from these experiences are in essence acknowledging the worthlessness not only of the simulation but also of the real thing. Without the firm hand of the law most of you wouldn't have enough empathy to even consider not doing it in real life because people like you aren't motivated by things like human kindness, are you? Bonus Question: What would Jean Calvin think of video games?

REVIEW QUESTIONS
1) Why?
2) Why bother?
3) Objectively explain why murder is wrong. Do not use the human definition of "wrong".
4) If it feels good, should you do it?
5)

6) Explain ludonarrative dissonance.
7) Do you think racists and sexists are allowed to post on the internet? Do you think that if someone commits a rape or abuses their spouse, their internet rights are revoked? Do you think that when you laugh at off-color humor, that every single person who laughs along with you is doing so ironically? Do you think that violence is real? Do you think that all this is just a game? Do you think you're winning? Explain why, objectively.
8) The Office was only funny in the first season. Explain why I'm right.J. Sheahttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3493946997489326661.post-31469465692155564872014-02-25T19:59:00.001-05:002014-02-25T20:13:03.987-05:00Hideo Kojima Wishes He Had Thought Of Breaking BadI can't even laugh about this anymore.

"The kind of topics they're handling in Breaking Bad, the way they express them and put them on screen, let's say I tried to create a game with similar topics and similar expressions, it would be hard to get approval in the company. The way these guys are putting the planning for this project and making it a commercial success - that's somewhere I feel very jealous as a creator."

I'll make one admission: it is possible - possible, but not likely - that I overestimate Kojima's creative control over his product. It is certainly feasible that he didn't want to include a sexy sniper babe to boost figure sales - that without the interference of the rest of Konami, he would have made a completely straightfaced story about child soldiers and CIA torture and sewing bombs into peoples' abdomens. It is possible that the goofy things throughout the rest of Metal Gear Solid were foisted upon him by the company.

But we still have to judge MGS; we still have to see it as the result of ideas, some of which are problematic, that leads to a completed video game product. This gives me the unenviable task of separating Kojima's "real thoughts" from the company lines he is contractually obligated to support. Was it Kojima's idea, or the company's idea, to have the bosses of MGS4 be played by supermodels? Was it his idea to sexualize women with horrific backstories of abuse and murder, or was that the company? Was it Kojima's idea to make the poopy guy fall in love with Meryl and then turn into an action movie badass? I know for a fact that he wanted Metal Gear Rising to be about Grey Fox and not about Raiden, so I can't blame him for anything in that. Was anything related to Peace Walker Kojima's idea? Is Kojima even a real human being, or is he a marionette assembled by the Konami corporation to have a relatable goofball behind their coldly calculated corporate products? In short, is Kojima a piece of shit, or does he just make games for pieces of shit? This might seem like a simple issue, but it kind of calls to question the whole "art" angle of video games. If you literally cannot tell if a game is designed for the artist's preferences or "just to sell", is it really worth anything? Also, why is it that the people who want games to be considered art will also go out of their way to defend pandering, stupid decisions even when they're explicitly stated as such?

Anyways, if you want the Breaking Bad of videogames, play Liberal Crime Squad or Swat 4 or, hell, maybe even try out Floor 13 if you're okay with going a bit afield. All of those are games that exist, made by small, dedicated studios without grandiose ideas of billion-dollar profit margins, more concerned with delivering a small-but-tight experience with meaningful decision-making. So maybe Hideo Kojima should just fucking quit and start his own studio, is what I'm saying. It worked for Peter Molyne-oh wait no

During development of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Hideo Kojima wanted the Beauty and the Beast Unit to be naked during cutscenes, though this would have severely affected the game's censorship rating.

i forgot that hideo kojima is just a piece of shit and there's no question about it
J. Sheahttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3493946997489326661.post-30409269505330295682014-02-02T14:08:00.001-05:002014-02-02T14:19:11.907-05:00Men climb the mountain to reach the top.

There's a paradigm in our culture. It's called "I can tell fiction from reality". It's a statement used in reference to escapism that contains elements and actions that are considered immoral or wrong "in real life" but are okay in scenarios where no real people are hurt. For example, material that involves the protagonist committing murder, torture, rape or acts of pedophilia are all defended under this argument. The core of the argument is that while it's acknowledged that a character's behavior is disgusting, it's okay to draw pleasure from it because it's happening in a caged, unreal environment. As long as nobody is really hurt, you can do whatever you want.

I won't say that there aren't truisms found in this argument. I'm certainly not going to argue that people who play violent video games should be locked up, as much as I'd probably enjoy a world free of them. But it's an oversimplification of one major element, which is this: the things we draw pleasure from have reasons behind them. You're not gardening, you're not driving a bus, you're not mowing the lawn, you're not painting your house. Your escapism - your alternate world, constructed purely to give you pleasure - involves murder. Specifically, it involves power. Escapism, 95% of the time, is about having power, and often about having power in such a way that you don't feel bad about using (or abusing) it.

That image at the top shows why there's a gaping weakness in this argument - a massive, uncovered, festering wound that people like me can jam their fingers into and then start pulling apart. The fact of the matter is that words like "badass" and "awesome" don't exist in a vacuum - they're appealing to concepts that people have been trained to value and enjoy and consider important. For men, appealing traits generally exist with a few core concepts.

"Badass" men are powerful. They are strong, rich, fast, etc because these characteristics allow them to influence others without being influenced themselves, which is the basic goal of the pursuit of strength. "Badass" men are composed, detached and stoic. They are not affected emotionally unless it is appealing for them to be, which is to say they do not show fear or weakness, but will exhibit grief when it can be turned into righteous anger. This ties into power; a real man does not allow himself to be affected by others even in an emotional sense. It is okay to show anger, because anger is a prelude to violence, and violence is the man asserting power and dominance over others. Fear, on the other hand, is a prelude to having power asserted over one's self, and as such is unappealing for a male character.

In short, characters like James Bond - who represents "the top of the mountain" in the opening post - exist in such a way that they are able to influence others without themselves being hindered or weakened or trod upon. Even when they are tortured and beaten and stabbed and shot, they grit their teeth and bear it, knowing that their chance will come to exact revenge, and that revenge will be all the sweeter for the grievances inflicted. Similarly, it's okay for such characters to have character flaws like alcoholism or drug addiction, as long as the manner in which they deal with such things is stoic and detached and not pleading or pathetic. They needn't be a braggart, either - think of characters like Solid Snake who are constantly asserting that "they're no hero", and how every insistent repetition of this fact just makes them seem humble and, ergo, more awesome. Every trait comes down to power, a perpetual need to be on top of situations even when those situations are specifically centered around being weak or downtrodden.

I'd like to talk to you about James Blake Miller briefly. You may remember him better from this picture:

When this picture was taken during the Battle of Fallujah in 2004, it was held up as one of the best pictures taken from the war. The New York Post splattered it across their front page as an icon of success, of tough American soldiers kicking ass in the face of fierce (yet cowardly and conniving) resistance. The thousand-yard stare of a man who had just emerged from a hellish warzone and was taking a brief reprieve before re-entering it was interpreted as the cool glare of a detached and stoic warrior who was able to kill his enemies without emotion or regret or remorse.

On his return home, James Miller suffered from severe Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Of course he did. He was involved in the most intense urban theater of the Iraq War, during which time he was constantly in fear of death coming from any direction. He watched friends die, and knew that at any time he could be next. It didn't matter if it felt like he was safe - RPGs and mortars don't care about walls. He knew these things. Even when he returned to the United States, his body and mind were trained to live in fear, to be paranoid about every whistle and sound and sudden motion and loud noise.

In 2005, while preparing for disaster recovery efforts for Hurricane Rita, Miller was involved in an incident where he attacked a Navy seaman. This came after the seaman had whistled in a way that mimicked an RPG's signature trail, which Miller believed was done intentionally to upset the marines present. In 2006 he got married, which was made possible thanks to the donations of people affected by his story and his trauma. Less than a month later he was divorced, unable to live in normal conditions due to his PTSD.

James Miller is a warrior, a stone-cold killer whose icy glare and drooping cigarette are iconic images that will endure for centuries to come. He is a model for children to follow, like Clint Eastwood or John Wayne or Max Payne or Adam "Kane" Marcus or who the fuck ever else you want to name. James Miller is a human being who has difficulty functioning in our society. He is a man who lives in fear because he somehow survived an event that could have killed him at any moment it damn well pleased and his body and mind are so tensed up that resuming normal life is almost impossible. He is a traumatized individual whose sacrifices seem hollow and meaningless in retrospect, who has survived while watching friends die, who endures and can't really explain why he does.

"I mean, He must think I deserve to fuckin' be punished baaad. And the only reason why I can figure that I'm still alive is that this is God's way of letting me feel the guilt for all the bad shit I did. Because there's not a morning when I don't fuckin' wake up and the first thing I think is, 'Another day I'm here.' What did I do to make me deserve another day? What have I done in my life that my buddies didn't do to make me deserve so many days?"

You want to know how I can tell people can't tell fiction from reality? Because if they understood reality, they wouldn't idolize the image of a badass murderer in the first place. It wouldn't give them pleasure to pretend to be those people, and it wouldn't make sense for them to think of such people as being worthy of emulation. There wouldn't be people who look at Rorschach and think "yeah, that guy makes a lot of sense".

But they do. They think of people like that as "the top of the mountain". They think of war and killing as baptismal waters that transforms untested boys into hardened men. They think that it's the goal of the male animal to become sharpened, focused, stoic, detached. They think that men are killers, even if they have to obey laws. They wait, primed and ready, for a moment when some thug tries to mug them, some shithead breaks into their house, some little old lady gets attacked on the street. They wait for a chance to commit murder in such a way that it's societally condoned and justified and even heroic, like a firefighter hoping for an arsonist or a doctor hoping for a plague.

The mountain isn't real. And if you think you're at the top of it, you're fucking deluding yourself.

I just need someone to talk to.
J. Sheahttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3493946997489326661.post-66252619329924288212013-11-30T00:54:00.001-05:002013-11-30T01:12:49.059-05:00Male ObjectificationIt's difficult to talk about the objectification of men in media, especially in gaming. This is not because of denial of its existence by presumed feminazis. Rather, it is because of the overeagerness of certain groups in attempting to suggest that all instances of attractive men are objectification - an argument clearly intended to suggest that the objectification of women is not itself a problem. The goal of such groups is to reinforce the status quo, rather than to actually challenge the way men and women are presented in media. This presents a dilemma for anyone who intends to talk about the actual nature of objectified men, as the spark of discussion becomes the roaring flame of "men are the real victims", overshadowing any attempts at real analysis.

what will make my cause seem legitimate, i know, slurs used against homosexual men

Firstly, though, we need to understand what the concept of objectification actually entails. Objectification is an authorial process that presents a character as essentially lacking any agency or believability, usually for the sake of personal or audience gratification. Zooming out, a character's physique and personality can be entirely tailored such that it comes off as wholesale personal gratification on the author's part. It is not traits or features that are objectifying, but rather the reasons for their selection or inclusion. A character being large-breasted is not objectifying; a character being reduced to "large breasts" as their primary character trait is. A woman being attractive is not objectifying; a refusal to include or depict non-attractive woman is. It is entirely about the relationship between the author and the character.

Since many authors, especially in the world of game development, are straight and male, it's obvious that most instances of objectification are done by male designers with female characters. With that said, it's not impossible for men to be objectified - it's just done far more rarely. People who don't quite understand what objectification means tend to look at attractive men in games and go "yes, that's what objectification is". People compare Conan the Barbarian with Red Sonja - after all, they're both scantily clad. But of course the difference comes down to context and intent, not just "what they're wearing", which makes it a partially subjective and therefore strenuous issue.

But what about the men, though? Surely in all of gaming it's impossible to think that there are no examples of men being victimized, dehumanized, or sexualized. This is true. Male objectification does exist. But it's a little more complicated than certain groups would like it to be. So let's get started.

PART I
Men Dying En Masse, Screaming And Gurgling, With Blood Issuing From Their Mouths;
or, Who Will Weep For The Veterans Of Simulated Wars

Games love murder. Damn, do they love murder. Murder is fuckin' fun as shit. Games love fucking killing the shit out of human beings. God damn. And who gets murdered? Most of the time, it's men. Oh, sure, sometimes it's women, but women generally get murdered "specifically" - that is, as characters with actual backstories, for specific reasons. Men get murdered en masse. Men get shot and stabbed and pureed and sliced and diced and burned and frozen without so much as a whiff of regret or a last dying quote. We accept this because, shit, we have to kill somebody, might as well kill the sex we think is capable of fighting back.

And that's it. That's the reason. From a gender standpoint, men are strong aggressors, women are weak and incapable. The same logic that prevents many gamers from accepting female protagonists in action games also affects their view of men in a negative way. The expectation that men are stronger and less emotional is great - that is, if you're coming from a culture that values stoic strength. On the other hand, if you have moral qualms with the expectation that men need to bleed and die for their country, that a real man needs to be a killer, that death is the business of men and they have no right to complain about it...well, it gets fucked, doesn't it?

Masculinity hurts men. More than anything women will ever do, masculinity is what hurts men. Masculinity creates damaging stereotypes and enforces harmful expectations of what men should do. Men can't cry. Men can't run. Cowardice is wrong. Weakness is wrong. Men fight. Fighting is cool. Killing is cool. Killing men is cool, because the men you beat are either weak or cowards, and those things are wrong. Don't be a pussy. Don't be a faggot. Get strong. Get powerful. Kill or be killed; if you're killed, you're wrong. Be the best. Every moment you're not the best, you're losing. EVERY MOMENT. BE THE BEST.

DULCE ET DECORUM EST PRO PATRIA MORI YOU FUCKING LOSER

We love killing in games, don't we. We love winning. We love the thrill of superiority, and thanks to protagonist-centric action games, we don't really have to worry much about the agony of losing. We don't have male characters worrying about being brutally killed or torn apart. We have stoic badasses - even survival horror gets characters like Leon Kennedy and Isaac Clarke, not poor whimpering manbabies who would basically deserve to horribly die, am I right? Yeah. Fuckin' badass. Oorah.

Three things fix this. First, we accept women in action roles, both as protagonists and antagonists. Allowing women to join men on the front lines of video game murder eases the burden of war-murder by making it so that the horrendous acts of death are not limited to the male sphere. Second, we accept men in non-action roles; games can be about all sorts of things, not just things where aggressive and assertive characters need to be the protagonists. Third, we stop accepting games where we casually kill people by the truckload. I mean, if you care about not objectifying people, it's pretty obvious that "turning people into gratification-corpses" is one of the most severe types of objectification there is. So let's stop doing that, right? It's fucking creepy.

PART II
The Automaton Cannot Love You Back, No Matter What It Is Programmed To Say;
or, Press X To Elicit The Feels

This is going to be a short section because I don't think the concepts are particularly advanced. Dating sims are traditionally designed for both men and women - for every Tokimeki Memorial there is an Angelique Trois, for every Ashley there is a Kaidan, for every Morrigan an Alistair. Dating sims are bad at depicting relationships, and it's for relatively simple reasons: they don't exactly go out of their way to try to depict realistic human behavior or simulate any sort of agency. In games like Mass Effect you can basically say whatever you want to a person and still end up sleeping with them, because otherwise the game's not fun. Both sexes in dating sims end up as automatons, existing solely to dispense sex once enough coins are put into the machine. They're shallow representations of humanity given only enough character to provide emotional gratification when fake-sex is achieved.

Of course, a notable contextual aspect is that men and women are treated differently with regards to promiscuity. A man casually picking up a woman for sex is accepted, whereas the inverse is less so. A man is expected to take the lead in a relationship, while a woman is expected to be the lesser part of the relationship. Terms like "who wears the pants", which are still used in the Year of our Lord 2013, suggest that the gender concepts of superiority/inferiority still hold traction. Male characters are not shamed for having sex, while female characters implicitly - if not overtly - are. While the situation is "equal", that doesn't magically make the results equal.

The solution to this is to stop having dating sims or romantic relationships shoved into games that don't do them well. Stop including characters like Alyx Vance, who fall in love with mute murder-machines. Stop including simplistic dialogue trees that serve to offer no real choice or options of failure. We make characters emulations of human beings to elicit emotional reaction, but part of that has to include the illusion of agency or else you might as well just be having sex with robots.

PART III
The Beautiful Boys, Whose Tunnels Are Already Opened;
or, Would You Trust The Greeks To Make Your Games

I'm going to start this section off with a short bit from Grimoire Nier, a guide released alongside the "dual game" Nier. In one version of the game, the titular character was a gruff adult; in the other, the titular character was an effeminate, beautiful teenager. The relationship with the character Yonah is changed; old Nier is her father, young Nier is her brother. Despite these being the only changes, some radically different moments of characterization ensued; things that affected Dad Nier weakly affected Brother Nier far more strongly. They also had different pasts. Dad Nier did jobs around town to make ends meet, since he was a competent adult. Brother Nier, on the other hand, was forced to resort to prostitution to pay the bills; only later, when he was more capable, was he able to take the Dad Nier role of odd jobs and hunting.

I said that extremely casually, but I want you all to understand it clearly. Brother Nier, the effeminate bishonen, was forced into prostitution (with both men and women) as a young teenager. This is a heavy plot point, and it adds an extremely sinister undercurrent to the way he's treated in the game and as a result of his design. Specifically, it affects a line that comes from this interview.

-Which scene does (Novelist Jun) Eishima like?

(Director) Yokoo: Eishima is definitely satisfied with just watching young Nier's back while he roams the fields, since it's zettai ryouiki and whatnot.

Eishima: I did get satisfaction from making him run like crazy.(laughs) But you see…when I get really happy watching that, my high school son would just pass by and say "But, haven't this kid's tunnels been opened up already?", popping my bubble.

This is objectification of a male character in a video game. The novelist Eishima knows about and acknowledges the traumatic past of Brother Nier; in fact, she was partially responsible for writing it, although the idea wasn't hers. She even expressed some disgust at it and the tonal dissonance of a "shonen adventure" that also features such dark material. And yet she sees Nier as a piece of meat, a beautiful young man to view sexually, and her reverie is only interrupted by her son - HER SON, mind you - reminding her of his "lost purity". This is it. This is the equivalent to Quiet from MGS5 or the B&Bs from MGS4. This is male objectification. This is a man becoming meat, his agency and feelings and experiences thrown aside for the sake of empty, uncaring lust.

In my last article I talked a bit about the nature of cultural standards - how we expect murder to be treated as a normal part of a story rather than a serious event in the same way that Romans and Greeks would casually depict rape and pedophilia. If our video games were written by the Ancient Greeks, things like this would be incredibly common. Look up Ganymede, whose visage - often engaged as a bottom in acts of homosexual intercourse - is plastered across many a Grecian vase or urn. The idea of not depicting sex acts involving young, beautiful boys would strike the Greeks as being as prudish and "out of it"; not dissimilar from the way many gamers view complaints about sexualized female characters.

Objectification is not found in objective design concepts. It is not found in "bared skin" or "weakness". It is found in design reason and justification. It is found in purpose and intent. When you played Zelda ALTTP, did you notice Link's bare thighs and short tunic? Did it worry you, to think that the designers might be appealing to a pedophilic sort of crowd? What if the designer was a gay man or a straight woman? What if the designers admitted that they designed the character to appeal to gay men and straight women, as Kojima did for Quiet?* What if the author was revealed to have a Vore fetish - would you think differently of scenes where Link is swallowed whole by monsters? The important factor here is vulnerability. An attractive character is one thing, an attractive character designed to be viewed as a "victim" for purposes of sexual appeal is another. This is why Nathan Drake and Marcus Fenix are not "objectified" - because society doesn't view strong men like them in the same way that it views attractive, feminine women. It's not about beauty; it's about the implications, and how those implications affect how people are treated. A character that exists to be emotionally mistreated and belittled for the gratification of the player is objectified; a character who is "good looking" is not.

*I acknowledge that Kojima also designed Raiden to appeal to women, but this decision was far less explicitly about "sex appeal" and additionally less related to sexual vulnerability. If it was, then there would be reason to have concern over Raiden's nude torture scene in MGS2 - but as it is, it came off as a goofy joke, where Raiden is reasonably competent and in-charge even as he's forced to cover his genitalia with his hands. It's reminiscent of the way that, even as a child, Nathan Drake is still a hyper-competent individual at no risk of dying; even at his most vulnerable, Raiden is still a badass ninja who can cartwheel the fuck out of armor-suited guys.

One last note about Quiet: I've noticed people saying that it's ridiculous to complain about Quiet in MGS5 when the game contains child soldiers and torture, both of which should provoke more outrage than "a girl is sexy". Let me teach you something about Tone, readers. Tone is what gives Hideo Kojima the credibility necessary to say that he's going to make a serious game about child soldiers and not be laughed out of the industry. Tone is what suggests that a game presented in a serious and realistic way should be able to handle child soldiers as a reasonable topic of discussion, in a way that will enlighten and inform players. Tone is trust. Quiet being a sexy, unrealistic sniper for the explicit purpose of appealing to the teenage male crowd breaks tone. It means that the game now exists to be fun and enjoyable and lighthearted. Don't worry about the details - this is a goofy game with sexy babes! Everyone knows MGS games are goofy and fun. Now kill those child soldiers we talked about. Kill them. Put a gun in their mouth and blow their fucking brains out. Fucking murder them. This is a serious game. This is a real game. This is art. Okay, now back to the titty babe. You can blow her brains out too if you want. It's all in good fun.J. Sheahttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3493946997489326661.post-68120107051919557112013-11-05T23:14:00.002-05:002013-11-05T23:16:24.367-05:00Analysis: 300What Is The Purpose Of "300" As A Concept

Broadly speaking, there's a huge number of battles in history. There's a smaller, but still sizable, number of famous battles. There's a smaller-than-that number of famous last stands. So why Thermopylae, in particular? Why Spartans (and only Spartans, excluding/marginalizing their allies) versus Persians? And why, specifically, do we root for the Spartans, other than the fact that they're underdogs? Why did all of these things happen in the movie "300", based on the comic by Frank Miller? Why did this happen? Why did this story need to be told?

The answer is threefold. Firstly, because the Spartans are white, despite being olive-skinned, dark-haired Greeks. Secondly, because they're politically similar to us, despite being slave-owning (and frequently slave-murdering) semi-pedophilic pagans. Thirdly, because they're ideal masculine figures of strength and courage, despite that strength and courage coming from a horrifyingly brutal lifelong training regimen.

Let's take it from the top.

Part 1: The Whiteness

The Battle of Thermopylae took place in 480 BC - which is to say, almost 2500 years ago, 500 years before Christ, 1000 years before Muhammad, and 2000 years before the concept of "whiteness" existed. It's strange, then, that we feel naturally compelled to ally ourselves with one group of Aegean pagans against another. Maybe there's a little bit more going on than that. Let's take a look.

Firstly, let's note that in the traditional schema of Western History, Greece is considered an essential forebear, along with Rome. While the Angles and the Saxons and the Normans and the Franks and the Germanic Tribes might all get attention, Western Culture generally thinks of itself as being descended from the Greco-Roman world. The reasons for this are kind of complex, but to sum up a lot of things in a pretty quick way, the Romans admired the Greeks, and Christian Europe admired the Romans. Though Europe was descended from the tribes and peoples who had torn Rome apart, there was still a great deal of admiration and respect for Roman culture. Rome itself was the capital of the Catholic faith, and was considered an absolutely holy city. The Church declared many Romans to be "virtuous pagans", worthy of emulation despite not being part of a Judeo-Christian faith system. Catholic priests did most of their writings and sermons in Latin, and worked to preserve writing and art from the Roman era. The rule of most European rulers was fashioned after Rome, the most notable being the Holy Roman Emperor, but also worth noting are the Czars (Caesars) of Russia.

So that's a lot about Rome. Catholics admired Rome, and Rome itself had admired Greece, fashioning many aspects of their art, architecture and culture around Greek concepts. So through this two-step process we get the modern idea that the Greeks and Romans are our "true" forbears. This reached its peak with Neoclassicism, wherein the prestigious peoples of Europe saw themselves as Greece Reborn, emulating their fashions, artwork and sculpture. As late as the Napoleonic Wars, soldiers would ride into battle with helmets designed in Greek styles. Despite being two thousand years away, and not even being really "white", the idea that Greece = Europe became ingrained in Western culture. Conversely, the descendants of the Persians were the Turks (although that's also much more complex), who were hostile infidels (also more complex) who threatened the unity and stability of the Christian world (see previous).

So with all that said, do you really think it's a coincidence that there are no actual Greeks in 300? Let's go down the list. Leonidas is played by Gerard Butler, not even pretending to hide his Scottish accent. British actress Lena Headey plays his wife, Queen Gorgo. Australian David Wenham plays the film's narrator, Dilios. English actor Dominic West plays that one smug guy who turns out to be a traitor and a rapist.

Huh! How about that. Nobody Greek. Nobody with olive skin and dark, curly hair to distract us from this story about the foundation of European culture. Oh, and they got a Brazilian to play Xerxes, because, you know, whatever, brown skin. And nobody on the Persian side is developed as anything but a lacky to an insane, gibbering emperor, there to be killed by brave, white Spartan warriors. Well, let's move on.

Part 2: The Values

Okay, so maybe it's kind of weird that the Spartans are being used to represent White People in a battle against Brown People. But surely we must empathize with the Spartans - after all, the Greeks are the fathers of democracy! Of republics! Of representation by the people, for the people!

"A new age has begun. An age...of freedom! And all will know that three hundred Spartans gave their LAST! BREATH! to defend it." - Leonidas

But see, then we run into trouble again. The Spartans had a society based on all men becoming warriors, without exception (which makes it hard to explain the totally-fictional skeevy senator dude, as an aside). But naturally they still needed people around to make weapons and harvest crops and stuff - they weren't going to have their women do all that. So they needed slaves. Lots of slaves. Lots and lots and lots of slaves. As in "seven times as many slaves as Free Spartans", according to Herodotus. Yes. Seven times as many slaves as Spartans. Seriously.

Maybe you're thinking, well, slavery back then wasn't like slavery now. It wasn't as bad, and it wasn't drawn along racial lines. And in some regards that's true, but on the other hand you got stuff like the Crypteia. Let's explain the Crypteia a bit: it was both a method of control and a way to train their young boy-warriors and make them into man-warriors. Every Autumn, the Helots became free game, and the boy-warriors were sent among them to kill and steal at their pleasure. In this method, children were introduced to the concept of killing human beings, and the slaves themselves got the pleasure of being constantly spied upon by their murderous masters.

So yeah. Not doing too great on the whole "freedom" front. Oh well, a little slavery and ritual abuse never stopped the American founding fathers. Let's keep going.

"If those philosophers and, uh, BOY-lovers have found that kind of nerve..." - Leonidas

Now this one is kind of nuanced. Most Greek societies practiced pederasty openly, and wouldn't have really seen "boy-lovers" as an insult. The Spartans actually formalized the man-boy relationship into a one-on-one mentorship; where this gets murky is whether or not this, too, was pedophilic in nature. Some writers of the period suggest that while an adult Spartan was definitely meant to have a relationship with a boy, the idea of it being carnal was outright frowned-upon. Worth noting is that Aristotle in particular thought it was part of the reason why Spartan women had an inordinate (in his view) amount of power. So this one actually gets a pass, although for obvious reasons the PLATONIC man-boy relationship is never established in 300 either. Even that would be too close to "oh right the Greeks are pedophiles", a fact that many scholars actively refused to engage until the 1970s, because it was so harmful to their idea of the Greeks being a superior and enlightened culture.

"Immortals... they fail our king's test. And a man who fancies himself a god feels a very human chill crawl up his spine." - Dilios

So, on to the Persians. The Persian Empire at the time of Thermopylae was pretty well-established, coming off the reign of Darius The Great, who expanded the Empire, organized its linguistics and monetary system, codified systems of law, and developed a bureaucracy to manage its many peoples. A bit before Darius was Cyrus the Great, praised by historians for his respect for religious tolerance and his views on human rights, as well as his contributions to the infrastructure of the Empire as a whole. Of course this is not to say that the Persian Empire was perfect or anything - they were still an empire, after all - but they were at least comparable to Rome in terms of morality, and Cyrus especially was studied by the American founding fathers. They were a bureaucratically organized state with a goodly amount of freedoms for their citizens, based around the dualist Zoroastrian faith but with tolerance for other religions and traditions.

So in 300 they make Xerxes a megalomaniac with delusions of godhood standing at the head of a slave-army forced to revere his own divine personage above all, who cannot even conceive of the idea of failure because he is so invested in his persona as a superhuman being. He brings with him an army not just of elephants and alchemists and exotic tactics but also of horrifying monster-people. His Immortal bodyguard, far from being treated as respected, loyal counterparts to the martial Spartans, are instead turned into monstrous orc-men who dual-wield swords and dress like Hollywood ninjas.

uh

"This day we rescue a world from mysticism and tyranny and usher in a future brighter than anything we can imagine." - Dilios

In general, 300 seems to have a major problem with religion overall - or at least the acceptable target of pagan religions. In addition to Xerxes and his whole schtick of religious domination over the free, enlightened Spartans, you also have the Ephors. The Ephors are creepy people who creep all over shit and accept bribes and do other terrible things. It is the Ephors who prevent the entire army from moving to meet Xerxes, not based on legitimate religious reasons but because they took money from the Persians and also so did that senator guy they totally made up.

The only good Spartans are warriors. Everyone else is a limp-dicked communist attempting to undermine our way of life because they're unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary to ensure Spartan freedom and liberty and justice and apple pie and baseball and Do You See Where This Is Going

It's really kind of difficult to not see the movie's contempt for "people who would rather talk than fight", and its inference that these people are actively attempting to support our enemies and destroy our culture. Considering that it was made by and for Americans, aka "the people whose government spends half of the world's military budget by itself", who had been waging a War On Terror aimed exclusively at brown people, it's really really kind of difficult to miss the political implications of this movie.

Where this gets interesting is that the idea that 300 isn't political or racially-charged or whatever. If 300 had been about feminism or anti-war sentiment or something, everyone would realize that it was a political movie. Everyone! Every single person who watched that movie would know it was a Political Movie. On the other hand, most people who saw 300 just thought of it as an action flick. They never questioned the idea that we should root for the Spartans against the Persians. Spartans are badass, and Persians are crazy. I'm sure most of them realized something was amiss historically when the monster-men rolled up, but how many of them do you think went home and learned about the history of the Spartans and the Persians and looked at the whole "white people versus brown people" thing and so on and so forth. How many.

Well, I'm sure a few did.

Part 3: The Manliness

The real reason we root for the Spartans is that despite all the awful shit they did, they are manly as fuck. They are badass. They kick ass. The idea of rooting for a violent person is considered "politically neutral" because "action" is such a common, yet low-key, genre. There's no political implications to Commando or Predator, right? We just want to watch a strong guy kill a bunch of other guys. That's what all guys want. It's universal. Look back on Beowulf or Achilles or Hercules - they were unambiguously heroic, right?

But we're not crazy, either. We don't just murder anyone for the hell of it. We, like the American Government, only want to kill people who threaten us. We want to be violent, but we want it to be morally justified, because murder is wrong and bad. We want to kill, but we want to do it in self-defense. So we dream of that moment when someone steps up to the plate so we can totally ruin them. At least 1464 people on the internet share this dream, according to the top comment on this post. The Spartans, in particular, are fighting for Our Freedoms. They're Our Troops, as it were. Their bloodshed is implicitly connected to your continued freedom-having status, despite any analysis that says otherwise. You can't stop the killing because if that happens then we're not free anymore. You monster.

It is made explicitly clear that the majority of Persians are slave-soldiers, fighting only because of the crack of whips on their back and fear of the retribution of their God-Emperor. Yet all this really means is that they're incompetent, a flailing army of cowards and conscripts driven towards the meat-grinder of the Spartan phalanx (and then later the Spartan freestyle murder competition) to die horrific and undignified deaths. No sympathy is garnered for them despite them being forced into this by a power far beyond their control. The Spartans never make offers to accept defection. The Persians are never humanized despite being the victims of the story. They exist to serve as a group of people that it is okay for the Spartans to kill, under the reasoning that the Spartans are outnumbered, and thus are allowed to resort to any measures.

I'd like to pause briefly and compare this to Metal Gear Rising. In MGR, the "non-lethal" options of previous MGS games have essentially been removed. Sure, you can cut off a person's arm or leg and eventually they'll leave rather than fight you to the death, but there's no "shock sword" or anything like that until you've already beaten the game once. Enemies will constantly taunt you and attack you; later, during a guilt-trip sequence, this is attributed to nanomachines. Inside they are human, afraid and vulnerable, and Raiden is made to feel bad for killing them. Rather than leading him to develop a method to take down enemies without killing them, Raiden simply activates his latent "super-asshole" mode, which gives him a hilarious growly voice.

In the hands of a capable player, it would be simple for Raiden to take down enemies without killing them. Attacking their weapons, for example. Using a weapon that isn't lethal, but makes it harder to take enemies down. Avoiding enemies altogether. So on and so forth. Raiden's power is great, and that's why it's supposed to be fun to play as him - but great power comes with great responsibility. Raiden is so overpowered compared to the enemies he fights that it would be child's play for him to take down enemies in a non-lethal fashion, but the game does not provide any apart from de-limbing them. Thus we are reassured that Raiden has to kill these guys, and because they're assholes, he's morally obligated to do so.

Okay.

Now think about how many people thought that Rorschach from Watchmen was a good and reasonable character.

Action movies and games and so on don't turn people into murderers. But on the other hand there is a latent culture of violence that really wants to be unleashed. It expresses itself through wars, air strikes, and "anti-terror" operations. It expresses itself through police brutality and the death penalty. It expresses itself through a huge military budget combined with constant complaints about far smaller programs like health care or food stamps. It expresses itself through an ongoing cultural fascination with vigilantes, even when they're entitled rich kids like Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark. It expresses itself through the basic idea of "I want to do violence because violence is cool, but I need to find someone to do it against that's okay to hurt".

People don't think these things are political. They think the idea of challenging them is political. The status quo is normal, not political.

Politics, my friends, is everything. Everything you do is politics. The act of living your life is politics. Politics may mean the difference between whether or not you are capable of living your life. Racism is politics, even when it's academic for one group of people and unavoidable for another. Sexism is politics. LGBT affairs are politics. Violence is political. Jail is political. Budgets are political. Values are political.

Games aren't inherently political, of course. Neither are sports. But as soon as you throw a narrative over it, and establish a Good Guy and a Bad Guy, it becomes political. The Greeks would make dating sims where you find a young boy to fondle, and they wouldn't think of that as political - they'd think of it as normal. The Romans would make bawdy games about slave-rape and call each other Bottoms over their headsets (Romans accepted male homosexuality, but it was considered shameful to "take it" - Julius Caesar himself was dogged by accusations of the act). Culture is defined by normalcy; cultural relativity is defined by re-examining what "normal" means. The things that you think are Fine and Okay and Not Political are things that future generations may revile you for. Or they might think you're not hardcore enough. Who can tell with future generations.

The purpose of 300 is to tell a story that appeals to Americans. It does so by making its protagonists unrealistically white and freedom-driven, and it does so by making its antagonists weak, simpering, pagan, and Brown. It tells a story of violence that we are meant to agree with, because it is violence in defense of our Liberties and our Rights. And it kills a shitload of people, because that's fun, and cool, and we love it.J. Sheahttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3493946997489326661.post-45557658824870906482013-10-10T00:29:00.003-04:002013-10-10T00:29:46.547-04:00Walter White SyndromeThere's a curious thing about games and movies.

The two mediums have almost a parent-child relationship; games aspire to be movies, whereas movies are often compared to games in a derogatory manner (usually "this would be more fun if it was playable"). Movies are respected and well-regarded despite their Bays and Shymalans, whereas games are despised and ostracized despite their Crusader Kings and their Planescape: Torments. Accordingly, the responses and expectations they garner are different as well. Stupidity in a movie is seen as worthy of criticism the majority of the time, while stupidity in a game is seen as "just part of the medium" in similar amounts. Movies have higher expectations placed upon them, whereas games basically accept whatever they can get. Movies are princely, fair and tall, while games are homely, stunted, and undervalued.

But this is not intrinsic. Intrinsically, there is no reason that "uninteractive audiovisual" should be a more respected medium than "interactive audiovisual". Intrinsically, there is no reason that interactive narrative experiences (electronic or traditional) should be loathed while "talkies" and "flicks" should be loved. It's worth remembering that for a while, movies were just sort of a cartoonish gimmick, accepted but not respected. They were a novelty, not a proper medium for conveying stories like books were. However, while games have struggled with this reputation for forty-odd years, movies actually got over it pretty quickly.

The difference, when you got down to it, was subject matter. It's easier, in a lot of ways, to make a serious movie than to make a serious game. A serious movie is telling a pre-made story, where actors and actresses can display emotion in response to an event in a relatively normal way. A movie, or a book, or a TV show is about one story. There's no need to worry about alternate outcomes and there's certainly no intrinsic need to make the process of reaching those events "fun". Engaging, yes. Compelling, yes. Not fun. They CAN be fun, of course, but again, it isn't a necessity.

What does this mean for subject matter? It's simple to make a movie about...anything, honestly. If there is a series of events connected by even remotely logical segues, you can get a movie. You can get a movie about people in a concentration camp. You can get a movie about people in an earthquake. You can get a movie about people falling in love and falling out of love. You can get a movie about someone dealing with moral dilemmas of every imaginable kind. You can take any set of events and turn it into a movie, as long as you find a way to keep the audience interested - not necessarily "entertained", again, but connected in some way to what's going on.

Games have a harder time with this, and part of the reason is that games generally require a minimum of ten hours of gameplay to be CONSIDERED a game. You have to INVEST in a game, and more than that if you want to see what happens in a story you damn well better learn how the gameplay system works (even if it's totally unrelated in every way). Games are high investment for, in most cases, an equivalent or lower payoff. This is especially true of games that embrace ludonarrative dissonance, making no attempt to connect their stories to the things the player is spending hours actually doing.

So What's This Walter White Shit

Part of what storytelling in fiction accomplishes, apart from the whole entertaining/compelling aspect, is that it creates hypotheticals. What if? What would you do? How would you feel? Books like 1984 attempt to immerse you in a scenario, right down to the grimy details, and ask you: what would you do? And in many cases, whatever answer you give, they have a response. Many movies and books and TV shows function as moral exercises by attempting to connect your own real life to the things these fake people are doing, because (and this is key!) you're supposed to forget they're not real. This is why you care about things happening to fictional characters: if your thought is "well that actor still gets paid" then it is pretty much provable that they have done their job poorly.

Which brings us to Walter White. Walter White, the main character of AMC's Breaking Bad series, is a piece of shit. He is human garbage. He is an absolute terrible human being in every way. And this is a thing a lot of people recognize: the creators, the actors, a lot of the fans, etc. And yet there's some people who ignore his murder, his drug-dealing, and his ego-driven family endangerment and attempt to argue that Walter is a cool, reasonable guy constantly beset by a bitchy, underappreciative wife. They argue that on certain moral grounds Walter is actually great and not awful.

See what happened here, though? Everyone involved addressed this hypothetical scenario based on real moral logic. When someone argues that Walter White is good or bad, it's not just about "the show", it's about their standards and their values. Breaking Bad is a modern show with a "family man" main character and thus despite the murder and the drug-dealing it's incredibly relatable, at least early on. The audience is meant to connect to these characters based in large part on the fact that they're very human and the consequences for their actions reflect this. When Walter spends an entire episode questioning and rationalizing his decision to murder or not murder a drug dealer he has locked up in the basement, that's a struggle we can connect to. We may not have had to ever make that choice ourselves, but it's so visceral and so low-key that we can imagine being there and to imagine the way we would think about that situation. In some ways it's no different from any other thought exercise or social experiment.

This also means that if the show got unrealistic, it would break a lot of the tension and distance us from realism that the show spent so much time building. There's violence in the show, but it's very quick and decisive, with serious consequences every time it happens. The most "cartoonish" violence in the show is two guys being very suddenly run over by a car, and yet even that had an entire episode to set it up and then an entire ARC dealing with the consequences. There is a logic to everything that is going on that requires things to maintain a realistic level of believability.

So What's This Video Game Shit

Let's compare Breaking Bad to another video game that is also about crime: Sleeping Dogs. Sleeping Dogs is a game about undercover policework, sometimes. Sometimes it is a game about shooting a lot of people. Lots of people. With guns. Lots of guns. And you get shot a lot of times and you shrug it off by hiding behind cover. And also you run people over with cars. Bad guys, civilians, whoever. But then BAM you're working for the police again to bring down this bad guy and nobody ever questions the fact that you did more damage "dicking around" than the bad guy ever did in any other circumstance. This is because the GAME part of Sleeping Dogs isn't real but the MOVIE part of Sleeping Dogs totally is.

Breaking Bad would never do this. There will never be a segment of Breaking Bad where the rules just collapse, where the main character's actions suddenly lack all consequence or relation to the reality of the world. This would never happen in Game of Thrones, either. The idea that, for the sake of player enjoyment, the rules of reality and logic need to be thrown away so the player can dick around in their own self-indulgent sandbox is a disease that only games seem to catch. And more importantly, gamers expect it, too. Gamers accept games like The Last Of Us or Bioshock Infinite, where characters casually shift from "fake reality" to "real reality" like it's controlled by a fucking light switch. "It'd be really bad if Daisy killed that kid" thinks the player after having previously murdered ten thousand permanently-hostile human beings without a single drop of remorse or regret. The reality turned back on, so now killing is Not The Answer, even though it was answering every single question up to that point.

It's expected that a video game's gameplay will be Fun. Not immersive, not compelling, not intriguing or interesting or eye-opening or horizon-broadening, just FUN. Fallout: New Vegas is a game about exploring the post-apocalyptic Mojave desert, interacting with the remnants of the Old World and the reforging of the New World. It is also a game about blowing people's heads off in slow motion, because FUN. Assassin's Creed is a game about a secret conspiracy throughout history involving major political figures. It is also a game about stabbing a shitload of people in the face and then gleefully running away like a cheeky boy, because FUN. LA Noire is a game about investigation and police procedure, about solving crimes and figuring out puzzles. It's also a game about shooting ten billion dudes in the face and regenerating your health, because FUN.

There's nothing wrong with fun, on its own. There IS something wrong with it essentially being treated as the only way in which a game can interact with its subject matter. A lot of games shouldn't be fun! They can be compelling, or educational, or immersive, or whatever else, but "being fun" is a concept that stretches games unnecessarily and ultimately separates the things you do in the game from the things you're TOLD you're doing in the story.

And here's the Walter White point.

So What's This Morality Shit

In Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones or whatever, it's possible to look at the hypothetical scenario as though it's real, and examine the emotions and values you feel in relation to them. It's not only possible, but expected. The cast and crew of Breaking Bad expect people to see Walter as a reprehensible human being, based on the characteristics he's been given. Contrary to their expectations, many audience members had their own standards they judged him by; standards like "provides for his family" and "takes a stand" and "is strong" and "is confident" and "says badass shit". Regardless of how horrific or short-sighted or harmful his actions are, those people are not judging him on his morality, they are judging him on how cool he is, and the general reaction to those people is one of disgust and contempt. It says something about the way they'd feel about a real-life Walter White. There is no "wall of fiction" that defends their viewpoint, because it's a hypothetical scenario, not just a lie.

Games don't get that. We expect game protagonists to be murderers. Not just that, but we expect them to murder for fun, not just for necessity. Some games try to curtail this - all its other problems aside, Metal Gear at least acknowledges the act of killing and gives players alternatives rather than making it the default. But that's one series compared to the hundreds that surround it, which are essentially shooting galleries full of red jelly and ethnic stereotypes (also, Kojima ruins the effect of MGS by constantly trivializing and misrepresenting PTSD, in some cases for purposes of sexualizing female characters).

We need games where we can treat the character - PLAY the character - like a real person. Not an avatar for our indulgence, not a medium for dicking around and improving our numbers, but an actual human being who happens to be under our guidance and care. This isn't impossible! This isn't even unreasonable! There's games that give the player enough choice to actually roleplay a character, so that decisions are weighted morally as well as mechanically.

I bring up roleplaying because "playing a role" is where gaming, especially gaming as an interactive narrative, really started. It was the transition from Wargaming to D&D - the idea was that you'd take a single person's role instead of an army's, and you'd make decisions based on that character's ability and personality and so on. Games have largely moved away from this, in large part due to the transition from the open, malleable world of tabletop games to the rigid, restricted shooting galleries of video games. Video games, for example, would rarely produce this as a natural moment:

You see this shit? Do you see what happened here? A player JUDGED another player/character's actions based on a moral code, a code established in large part by movies. It establishes "what it means to be a hero", and what kind of actions can stain that idea. Conversely, rather than rebutting with the in-character logic of "I do what I have to do to survive", the gamer responds with "that's just the rules of the game". They don't treat it as another reality, they treat it as a set of rules to follow in order to gain points and win rewards.

For video games, this isn't entirely the player's fault. A lot of it comes from the system. In a tabletop game, the DM/referee can punish players for doing things that are out of line, with logical consequences that match the behavior. A situation that absolutely couldn't be solved by negotiation or trickery or bluffing would be seen as unusual even in games where combat is the norm - after all, sometimes you've got reasons not to fight. But in games, it's totally expected that you won't be given that choice, and that killing your enemies will be the absolute only way forwards. How many games, now, have based their "twists" on the fact that they do exactly that, and then afterwards blame the player for doing the only thing the game allowed them to do? The answer is "like seven, at least, three of which are highly regarded in gaming spheres for doing so".

But there's one other thing too.

So What's This Puppeteer Shit

The biggest difference between games and movies is that movies consist of a cast of characters who all exist "in universe" and have feelings and relationships and emotions and senses that all exist within that universe. Their decision during the course of their stories are prompted not just by immediate desires but also by their emotions and their sensibilities. A character wants to avoid getting shot not because it's an inconvenience but because getting shot hurts and the prospect of death is terrifying. Characters have emotions and feelings and therefore characters also have stakes.

Players don't have stakes. Not really. Players have desires and whims, sure. Players want this, or they want that. They get annoyed if they die because they have to go back fifteen minutes (worst case scenario) and try again. It's comparatively hard to get players to make decisions based on "character logic", or at least logic that's similar to the emotions and feelings a character would be feeling. Players are puppeteers, alien entities controlling a character without feeling any of its sensory input or emotional variables.

It's possible to work around this. Some games do a great job of making players forget that they're sitting safely behind a computer screen and force them to feel fear and tension. Some games make characters believable enough that players feel empathy and compassion for them, even if they're not really allowed to do anything about it. But most games are inept about actually doing anything with these sorts of emotions. This is compounded by the concept of "saving", where emotional attachment is undermined by the ability to reverse consequences and ultimately reveal how "not real" everything is.

What it needs to come down to is choice and consequence. Realistic, logical choices and consequences based on realistic, logical scenarios. If you want a Breaking Bad of games, you need to deal with the morality and ethics and nuances of murdering a human being. If you want a Game of Thrones of games, you need to deal with the morality and ethics and nuances of declaring war and maintaining honor and marrying for love or duty or power. If you want a game with depth, you need to make a GAME with depth, not just a "movie with depth" stapled onto a game without it.

I don't want this to end on a negative note. I want this to serve as a lesson, a lesson about why movies are well-regarded and games are treated like toys for children. The answer is that games, and gamers, treat themselves as part of a medium that is for entertainment and indulgence first and foremost. The rare games that defy this are largely ignored because they aren't working with the expectations that have been set. If games want to be treated like something beyond "Michael Bay's Transformers", they need to start actually working towards a level of ludonarrative interaction instead of just pasting on more "serious" cutscenes to their goofy, murderous games.

Games like Bioshock Infinite and The Last Of Us and Spec Ops make it totally clear that some game devs want to be seen as adult and mature. But they (or, in many cases, their publishers) lack the resolve to push through it, to deliver an experience that can be taken seriously during 100% of the game's length. Instead, they're forced to deliver "breathers" of goofy content so they can dive into the serious stuff, with the added expectation that many people will skip the serious stuff to go back to dicking around.

Games will be taken seriously when they grow the fuck up.J. Sheahttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3493946997489326661.post-19496372300129501772013-09-28T01:44:00.002-04:002013-09-28T01:49:53.563-04:00Recommended GamesSo there's been a lot of talk about GTA V lately.

Let's not do that.

Here are a list of games that I feel encompass some qualities of believability and immersion and that serve as a noteworthy alternative to the "action standard" common in games.

Crusader Kings 2 ($40 on Steam)
CK2 is noteworthy because it's first and foremost a game about interpersonal interactions, conflicting personalities, and political marriages. Oh, yes, there's a big map and there's wars and so on, but it's not really a "strategy" game. CK2 is a game about being a medieval ruler. Invariably, with so much power centered on a monarch and a small group of high nobles, that means it's a game about people. Wars will start in CK2 not just for economic reasons, or reasons of expansion, but also because of relationships - a principled duke who can no longer stomach his cruel, craven king, or a ruler who refuses to help an ally-through-marriage out of sheer hatred for them. A good, kind king can give way to a spoiled, incompetent one. Wars will be fought over favored successors, and soldiers will be used as playing pieces for a game beyond their understanding. And yet despite all this, CK2 contains many good and pure things, too - a parent's love for their child, or a political marriage becoming true love. CK2 is not good because it is cruel or grim, but because it is real.

Dwarf Fortress (cheap as free)
DF is a pretty cool game and you can build forts and stuff in the ground, and there's like monsters sometimes, it's cool. Sometimes it's nice to just build a fort and stuff you know, like you build forges and shit and a brewery so your dwarfs can drink beer. I dunno, it's nice. Oh, also there's an implicit anarcho-socialist message to the game where every dwarf essentially takes what they need from the common supply (a derivative of their expedition-borne beginnings). The nobility are not only useless but highly disruptive, forcing their views and laws on an otherwise orderly and equal society based on the threat of force provided to them by a designated executioner. This metaphor grows even larger when coinage is introduced - it's not even usable in its current state, since the transition from an equal commune to a capitalist system essentially drives dwarfs insane, creating widespread unhappiness that leads to revolt. The only protection that the haves can expect against the have-nots comes from the military, since the upper class will always be vastly outnumbered and thus subject to the inevitable forced will of the people unless the trained warriors remain loyal enough to maintain this unfair social system. Oh, and the monster descriptions are kind of neat.

Most of the details in that paragraph came from a Storify post that I can no longer find so if you know which one I'm talking send me it and I'll put it here instead of all this text.

Hitman: Blood Money ($9 on Steam)
It's kind of hard to include H:BM on this list since I'm trying to go for games that aren't callous murder simulators, and in many ways that's exactly what H:BM is. But unlike most violent games, H:BM is a smart game and gives you options for handling situations in believable ways. It's possible (and essentially condoned) to go on a killing spree without remorse or regret. But, more rarely, it's also possible to play the game like an adult and treat the situations like they're real and consequential and possessed of moral depth. It's possible to get through the entire game without killing anyone besides your target, but it's also possible to fuck up and have to kill someone because you made a mistake and you don't want the guards to see you. There's a sense of consequence that arises when "killing" is an exception rather than a rule, and it adds moral tension and stakes to the gameplay. It's a nice sign of what games are capable of accomplishing emotionally when they treat death as a serious part of the gameplay AND the narrative instead of a goofy thing that happens for player amusement.

King Of Dragon Pass ($6 on gog.com, $10 for iOS)
KODP is a game where you control a clan of Orlanthi, a Gallic-inspired culture from the fantasy setting of Glorantha. This world has its own rules and realities - Gods definitely exist and frequently interact with the living world, and they expect a great many things from mortals. KODP is in many ways a role-playing game, except you are "playing" an entire clan. It is your job to optimize your harvest, maintain your traditions, keep the Gods happy, and raid your foes - whether human or not. KODP is a management game driven largely by story events; these events tie in well with the management, since they draw upon resources and items that are gathered and collected as part of the management game. While there is certainly a bit of simplification for the sake of gameplay, there's actually almost no ludonarrative dissonance despite the scale of the game. Even the constant warfare and killing in the game is actually totally justified by the setting - it's how the Orlanthi live. The manual advises you to put aside your own morals and play like an Orlanthi, and that alone should tell you how deep this game is capable of getting.

Liberal Crime Squad (cheap as free)
A lot of games make claims on satire through their overindulgent content. Liberal Crime Squad may be satire. It also might not. It depends pretty much entirely on how Tarn Adams feels about politics. LCS is intentionally designed as a "SLA simulator", which is to say, a world where the radical terrorist tactics of the 60s actually accomplish goals and social change. LCS is a game about handing out pamphlets and making your own newspaper. LCS is a game about kidnapping conservatives and murdering cops. LCS is a game about protests and LCS is a game about brainwashing. LCS is a game where you can win everything without ever killing a single person. LCS is a game where you can kill a thousand people and still convince the public to enact social change. LCS is like GTA if you actually had a meaningful reason to feel bad for murdering people. LCS is like GTA if you actually had a meaningful reason for murdering people. LCS is choice. LCS is consequence. LCS is means. LCS is ends.

Papers, Please ($10 on Steam)
Papers, Please is a bureaucracy sim where you take the role of a border official responsible for managing immigrants and making sure their documents are in order. While a great deal of this game is mechanical work, the game also manages to have an impressive narrative that connects to the gameplay rather than being separated from it. The first aspect of this is that you occasionally get applicants with some story element to them - they're visiting family, or they need a cure for some disease, or they're secretly part of a rebel movement. The second aspect is that your success affects your pay, and your pay affects your ability to provide with your family. Mess up too often and your family will starve, catch sickness, and eventually die. The second aspect connects to the first because intentionally allowing a bad applicant in for personal reasons counts as a failure, and can thus have an effect on your score. It's also reinforced by the gameplay that terrorism, plague etc are legitimate threats, thus making the entrance requirements more logical and sympathetic than just being an empty bureaucracy. Also worth looking at is the author's earlier work, "The Republia Times".

Red Orchestra 2 ($10 on Steam)
Red Orchestra 2 is a Stalingrad Simulator that takes the form of a realistic first-person shooter. The use of atmosphere and mechanics creates a highly immersive experience that really drives home how terrifyingly deadly and oppressive the war really was. From long-range fighting on the plains to house-by-house fighting in the urban center, Red Orchestra 2 helps players understand the battle that claimed at least two million lives over the course of six months. Players, especially new players, will often be killed by people that they can't see. They will fumble on reloads as an enemy rounds the corner and stabs them with a bayonet. They will take cover behind a wall only for the bullets to penetrate anyways. They will get shot in the gut and die, screaming and moaning, in total agony. Red Orchestra 2 is a game that lets you know that war fucking sucks and it makes this statement as often as it can just by the virtue of the way the game is played. There's no grand narrative necessary, no condescending story. Just you, your vulnerable body, and the thousands of believable ways that you are probably going to die without really being able to do anything about it.

SWAT 4 ($10 on Amazon)
SWAT 4 is the flipside of Red Orchestra 2; it's a realistic shooter, but in many ways it's anchored to our own mundane world rather than the hellish landscape of Stalingrad. SWAT 4 is a police simulator of sorts, where you lead a team of officers methodically through buildings, taking down perps and rescuing civilians. What separates this game from light-gun cop games or even from something like Rainbow Six is the nature of the game's bureaucracy. You have to issue warnings before you shoot someone unless they are in the process of shooting at you. You have to handcuff every living person you meet, whether civilian or surrendered criminal. You have to secure every weapon. Killing criminals, even for justified reasons, loses you points - a perfect run is done using non-lethal weaponry such as tazers and pepper spray. SWAT 4 is a game that takes death as seriously as it can, and it's a nice change of pace from the bloodthirsty TERRORIST KILLER genre of games.

Total War (Series)
The Total War series is similar to Hitman in that it's possible to play it sociopathically or morally. It's entirely possible to play Total War as a game first and foremost, throwing soldiers into danger without regard for their safety or well-being. But it's also possible, due to the game's relative realism, to try to take things seriously and actually have some level of concern for your soldiers' safety. In addition, like Red Orchestra, Total War illustrates "what war is like", albeit on a more zoomed-out level. The press of shield-walls, the rain of arrows, the terrifying thunder of cannons, all these things are represented in the game. Thousands of men die in battle, and even the most skilled warrior can do little against a direct hit from a siege weapon. This effect is compounded by Medieval 2's character development system, where generals and family members will gain attributes either through their actions or purely randomly. These generals can all die in combat, which adds a greater, more personal stake to the action in addition to concern for the lives of one's men.

Tropico 3 ($10-$15 on Steam)
When I talk about Tropico 3 I have to do it by talking about another game first, namely Bioshock Infinite. Bioshock Infinite is a story about racial tension and governmental control and economic inequality that is expressed via shooting people. Tropico 3 is a game about all those things that is expressed by actually running a government and dealing with rebellions. Tropico 3 is a game that puts you in a position of power, where you are capable of suppressing elections, spying on your citizens, and imprisoning or assassinating dissidents at your leisure. If you are relatively open, your bad policies are countered by citizens protesting and voting against you. If you are clamping down on free speech and free choice, your citizens take up arms against you, because their means of peaceful resistance have been removed. This teaches you more about violence than Bioshock Infinite's South Park-esque "both rebels and oppressors are equally bad" lesson ever will.

Victoria 2 ($20 on Steam)
Vicky 2 is sort of a combination of CK2 and Tropico, not as "zoomed in" as either but with a lot of the same choices. Victoria 2 takes place in the period between 1820 and 1930, a period of societal and technological transition and upheaval. Choosing any country in the world, it is your job to manage that country & keep it from being subjugated by its neighbors. Like CK2, there is no real "win condition"; the default gameplay assumed that conquering territory is a positive, but it's also possible to measure success by the happiness and well-being of your citizens. It's possible to enact social reforms through supporting policies, to transition from a slave-holding nation to a free nation, to create and improve welfare programs, to give the vote to every citizen of age, male or female. It's also possible to over-tax the poor, indulge the rich, and support a course of action that ensures that the upper class stays on top. Each action will generate anger from its detractors, and managing political ideologies and rebellions is a major part of the game.

Way of the Samurai (Series)
The primary virtue of WOTS is the way it handles its plot/gameplay relationship. Rather than being one long, meandering story, WOTS games depict short scenarios with lots of points for change and consequence. WOTS3, for example, has 21 different endings. There's still plenty of "gameplay", but compared to something like Fallout New Vegas, the results are more immediate. It also means that death & failure are included in the game mechanics, since "death" means the end of the immediate game (a few hours of gameplay at most) and not the end of the total game (up to 100 hours). WOTS3 also does some interesting things with combat and characterization; as a member of a faction, you can talk to your fellow faction-members and humanize them a bit, which changes things up when you play the next run as their enemies and have to potentially cut them down. The game offers non-lethal options and even the ability to beg for mercy as ways to mitigate this guilt.

HERE ARE SOME GAMES I THINK ARE WORTH TALKING ABOUT BUT NOT AS MUCH

Company of Heroes is good for its immersion and pathos despite being an RTS, traditionally one of the goofier genres in terms of summoning new units into the world via a barracks. Its reliance on "gamist" bonuses drowns out its realism but at the same time its depiction of units breaking under mortar fire, screaming and crying for mercy, is almost as intense as Red Orchestra's. The voice acting really helps carry the whole experience, which is actually one of RO2's weaknesses (at least, in the sense that there's not ENOUGH voice actors).

D.Souls is a game that I don't really feel even needs explanation. It's a solid action-RPG. Its harsh gameplay creates (totally atmospheric) feelings of fear and panic and keeps players on a razor's edge at all times. It's funny, too, because if the game was gentler - more health, kinder checkpoints - it would have been totally forgettable. Nice graphics and handling, maybe, but certainly not the experience it came to be. Everything about it hinges on how seriously you have to take the game to play it well.

Deus Ex is on this list, but not Human Revolution.

Dragon's Dogma is a cool open-world RPG and it has some good action and I like the way you have to prepare for a big expedition every time you leave the safety of the game's main city. I like the way that you can turn off almost every part of the HUD, which should be mandatory. I like how you can navigate your way around the game world by using the capital city as a reference point. I like that there's lanterns and when it gets dark out it's actually really dark and not just "game" dark. I also like that it uses Shadow of the Colossus-style climbing mechanics in a full-sized action-adventure instead of it being limited to a single limited-focus game.

Gone Home is not actually on this list I'm sorry. I feel like it could have been but there's this whole feeling where you're expecting a mystery and there really isn't one and honestly I'd get a better LGBT-discovery experience by opening Twitter and asking my followers how they feel today. I mean I dunno, Jesus, at least you don't fucking murder anyone.

Metal Gear Solid 3 would have been really great if someone had made it who wasn't Hideo Kojima. Like seriously "sneak through the jungle, managing your supplies and tools" is a great idea, and then it's ruined by being a Metal Gear game. Come on, dude. Let me have the C4 and the CQC and the ability to use environments to my advantage and then get out of here with the fucking conspiracy plot and the boss battles. Go home.

Mount and Blade is really good for a game made by a single Turkish couple. It's got good fundamentals, but a kind of weak overall focus. It's a good approach to game design though, because it fills a mechanical niche with competent gameplay - in this case, an open-world medieval game with action-based melee combat. The relatively stagnant point is a bit of a problem, though; castles can change hands, but it's difficult to enact lasting change.

Sleeping Dogs was pretty cool when I thought it was going to be a martial arts action-adventure where your loyalties to the police would be tested by the realities of your infiltration of a dangerous and ruthless criminal underworld but then it just turned out to be regular GTA but in Hong Kong, and then poop fart butt video games

STALKER is immersive and cool and does a lot of good things. Its approach to open-world adventuring is a really good standard to set, since it combines relatively realistic shooting with a survival-horror-esque approach to combat. Throw in the peculiar nature of the zone and its other human inhabitants and you've got a solid all-around experience.

Okay that's it that's all the interesting games goodbye

J. Sheahttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3493946997489326661.post-31610026265455942492013-09-05T18:49:00.001-04:002013-09-05T18:49:20.020-04:00Design Document: "The Game of Throne of Games".

Earlier today, Ian Miles Cheong pointed out something to me that explained a lot of how I feel about fantasy, especially fantasy in games. He asked this: Where is the A Song Of Ice And Fire of video games? Where is the game that transforms "fantasy" from an escapist farce into an actual, respected genre for games and storytelling?

And that's a simple question, but it's a question with a lot of background to it that needs to be addressed. There ARE games that use the base components of GoT: successions, kingdoms, bloodlines, battles, and so on and so forth. But the problem is that none of them have ever really created a coherent ludonarrative reality where every part of the game is working to support this one real thing. Every example I can list has its problems, or at least differences with the successful GoT model.

Crusader Kings 2 is a game I love to death. It's amazing in a lot of ways. But it's a story creator, in the most zoomed-out, uncharacterized way possible. It is a game about hundreds of years of history being condensed into a few hours, it's not a game about one war or one conflict. It's a game for imagination and filling-in-gaps, it is not a game that tells a single person's story well. The Total War series has the same problem - its characters are computer-generated, with traits and personalities, but it's not a game about "telling their story". It's not personal or emotional enough to really get in there.

Final Fantasy Tactics is certainly about a single war - a war for succession, no less - but the problem with FFT is that FFT is about battles between ten warriors that ignores the battles between thousands. Things like politics and allegiance are never a huge concern in FFT; Ramza hires warriors, then goes off and does his own thing while his ever-loyal army remains by his side. Relatedly, the game's childish art (certainly a necessity of technology, yet still) does not help immerse the player into a world of medieval politics and intrigue - which, by all accounts, it is supposed to be.

An earlier work by Yasumi Matsuno was Ogre Battle: Let Us Cling Together. In many ways, LUCT addressed the previous concern without really doing so enough. While FFT's story has a succession crisis in the background and Ramza's own concerns in the foreground, LUCT's protagonist is more directly part of the game's main war. The director based LUCT on the Yugoslav wars, and correspondingly the conflict in LUCT is one divided on ethnic lines. As such, your party members have ethnic loyalties and their affiliation with you will be affected by the paths you choose. Yet at the same time this is still a game about six-on-six combat, and "morale" means very different things when you're managing a small band and when you're managing a united army.

Finally, the Suikoden series of games generally manages to do a good job regarding scale - the player generally starts in a position of power, but is deposed or betrayed and has to work their way back up. Suikoden involves large-scale battles as well as the usual "adventuring party" segments which helps to create the sense that there is an actual war going on. The reason it's not usually included in discussion of serious fantasy games is that the game relies heavily on JRPG tropes and a lighthearted, sometimes-broken tone. The art, music and writing all suggest a world where the battles aren't as serious or grim as they could be - after all, it's a game series ultimately for children.

So, thinking logically, if I wanted to make a fantasy game that would be taken seriously and would use the interactive medium to its fullest extent, here are some things that I would do.

A Single, Direct Origin

Interactivity as a game concept is about giving the player ways to interact with the environment based on justified cause-and-effect. In games like CK2, this is created by making the entire game an emergent, unbreaking chain of events and AI behaviors. For this theoretical game, founded in something more zoomed-in, it's important to start somewhere coherent so that the player has a "world" established to mess around with. Going off the themes established, there could be any number of potential situations to start with: an ethnic war, a deposed royal family, a ducal coup, a peasant rebellion, resistance against an invading force, etc etc etc. Despite the diversity of choice, this is still an important decision to make because it affects why everything is happening. Why the protagonist wants to fight whoever it is they're fighting. Why people would want to join them. What the end goal is. How the character is expected to behave. How much responsibility they bear. The situation affects the character, and the character (if they're well-established) affects the player.

Large-Scale Real-Time Tactics

The reason it's important to have things be "large scale" is because large scale, by its nature, involves death. In a small scale game it's very easy to shift things mechanically so that nobody dies. The focus on RPG systems makes it so that random character death is far less acceptable and represents a larger investment of time and energy. Compare Valkyria Chronicles with Company of Heroes. Compare Final Fantasy Tactics with Medieval Total War. Death needs to be able to happen because death is part of a story, not just an annoying mechanic where you have to restart.

Scale is important. Scale gives the sense that there's an actual war going on, and if scale can be well established the player should be reminded that thousands of soldiers are fighting and bleeding and dying for their cause. It's morally simple to have six loyal friends follow you around beating up goblins and orcs. It's a lot more complex to be leading an army, especially when that army is made up of people with their own ideas and values and families and livelihoods. Now it's about responsibility, not personal sacrifice - about what you're asking your soldiers to do, not just what you yourself are willing to do.

Politics, Agency and Consequence

One of the games I neglected to add to the list was Victoria 2, primarily because it's not fantasy. But Victoria 2 does have an aspect that's relevant to this: the idea of population politics. Individuals in a nation have ideologies, separated by class and region. Setting policies will appease or anger ideologies, and choices made during the game will shift people's ideology from one side to another. Making a powerful group angry can result in a rebellion that has to be put down, oftentimes during a crucial moment in a different war.

Now let's frame this in the concept of a single rebellion or war. Where do your troops come from? Who are your allies? Who's supplying you? Can you make every potential ally happy or would they have contradictory goals? Say you raised most of your troops as volunteers in the name of freedom. Would they be happy if you had to make concessions to an authoritarian faction in order to avoid war? Would they understand? The idea of actually having to manage morale as the end result of people's desires and values and wishes helps to create a sense of agency for all the troops you command. They're not mindless slaves. They're not chattel. They're not going to stay with you for no reason. These are people who have entrusted their LIVES to you for the sake of one cause or another. Similarly, there are many powerful figures in a kingdom - dukes, barons, counts. Are these nobles going to help you or your enemy? It will depend on your personality and your goals. The common people might flock to your banner if you promise to improve their rights, but can you afford to anger the noble class? Choices have systematic, long-term consequences because they reflect how the world perceives you and how they respond to you.

This system also solves a problem that games often encounter, where "romance" is an arbitrary choice for player indulgence. Dragon Age and Mass Efffect are the two biggest offenders here; their romance subplots don't affect gameplay, it's just a side game so the player can live vicariously through their protagonist. In a noble system, however, marriage is about far more than love alone. Crusader Kings does an admirable job with the concept, but it doesn't take it quite far enough. What we're looking for is, quite naturally, a level akin to Game of Thrones - where "love or duty" is a serious choice with consequences. Even if you choose "duty", which duty is the most important? What happens when you marry someone and your allies betray you? Would you marry someone you despised if they offered you more power? In its own way these sorts of option give a sense of agency to the spouse as well, since now they're part of the political system in a way beyond "immobile love interest". They, like everyone else in the world, have their own desires and values.

Failure Is A Gameplay Mechanic

The problem I have with a lot of games is that they're structured in such a way that people simply don't accept failures. The idea that a fudged battle or event is worth "loading state" over affects the way a story is perceived. Games can force hard choices on players, but "convenience" is rarely the reason an option is taken. There are few games where you accept an unpleasant alliance purely because you need the help - generally, games are so trivially easy and give you so many retries that even if you get boxed into a bad situation you can power your way out of it given enough effort.

Hard choices, as a rule, need to actually have consequence to be effective. If you make a bad choice, you should be able to fight out of it or deal with it in some way, but it should be DIFFICULT, and that difficulty should have meaning throughout the rest of the game. In X-COM if you mess up on a mission you might lose soldiers permanently. In Total War or Crusader Kings, a bad war (or even a bad battle) can mess up your entire kingdom. Things like this help keep players on their toes and conscious of the decisions they're making instead of treating gameplay like a throwaway, skippable part of the game.

Ludonarrative Cohesion
The biggest thing about the three prior points is that the goal here is to create a reality where gameplay and story do not diverge. It is perfectly plausible and justifiable to have a tactics-based video game that mirrors the reality of a medieval-style war pretty closely. There's nothing impossible about it, it's just a question of detail. Every decision that the player makes, whether in "management" or in combat gameplay, can exist in-universe. There's none of that weirdness where the main characters are like a thousand times more powerful than every other human for no reason, because it's a game about command, not about supermen. There's none of that bizarre choice-making in games like Dragon Age or Mass Effect where it's a direct branch into another story point because now those choices translate into gameplay with lasting effects. It all has to work together to create a cohesive reality. Every soldier that dies is real to the universe, and at the end of your road you're going to have to answer to every single one.

The Importance Of Realism
This is the last part and I think it's going to be the hardest for gamers to give up. Design and visuals are seen as a subjective thing by a lot of people, and in most respects they are. But realism, as I've covered numerous times, offers a variety of advantages in terms of how the player responds to stimuli. It helps things feel visceral and provides sensory reactions. It helps the player take things seriously. Yes, ultimately whether or not realistic designs are "good" is subjective, but that's also true of writing and you can still tell when something's being seriously written, can't you? It's the same thing. Realism, of whatever sort, is the aesthetic of the serious story.

That's not to say this is a BROWN AND BORING sort of realism, by its nature. Reality has plenty of colors (another thing that I've covered hundreds of times before). Simple, modest things like sashes and tabards take the place of oversized shoulderpads and golden armor. The real issue here is about making a story that seems like it's by, for, and ABOUT adults. It's about the fate of nations and people, not about escapism and fun. It's a story that bears responsiblity and weight to it. The visuals need to reinforce that by actually depicting adults, not circus clowns and teenagers.

The end goal here is to get, as we said, the Game of Thrones of games - a cohesive, logical story with a consistent tone and setting where characters' actions and motivations play out to create a tapestry of events. If the visuals can't keep up with the tone, then you might as well not even bother. Because this isn't just about "gameplay" anymore. This isn't about making an entertaining experience. It's about making an interactive story that people can take seriously. It's about making something that offers depth and emotion through its gameplay as well as through its human interactions. It's about making something that says "this is a thing that I could not do with a movie or a visual novel or whatever". It's about making something real.
J. Sheahttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3493946997489326661.post-57066707161839439052013-08-21T01:03:00.000-04:002013-08-21T01:16:52.552-04:00Liberal Crime Squad

The medium of games - of "electronic interactive entertainment" - is preoccupied with the concept of games being art. Games being CREATED as art, games being PERCEIVED as art, games being CRITICIZED and LAUDED like art. And among the aristocratic class of ludologists, a monarch has been chosen - "Gone Home", a kind and caring queen from a distinguished and proper bloodline. Untained by the blood of the the triple-A commoners, Gone Home has established its credentials with the elite through a combination of eschewed "low tropes" (violence, puzzles, content) and a storyline appealing to the intellectual nobility.

But there is a secret monarch, cloaked in rags, who lurks among them. Unacknowledged, uncrowned, yet true royal blood runs through its veins. Its near-divine bearing is hidden by its common garb, yet one has to simply look upon its face to see its regal status.

That game, the uncrowned emperor of ludonarrativity, is Liberal Crime Squad.

Liberal Crime Squad is a game with a mission and a purpose. LCS seeks to create a world according to the logic of groups like the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Manson Family - a group where individuals who seek change need only to pick up a gun, kick in a door, and shout a proper slogan. It is a world where Violence Works, where charismatic terrorists can turn the tide of public opinion with a well-placed attack and where the lines between "good" and "bad" can easily be drawn based entirely on party lines. Liberal Crime Squad is a game for revolutionaries.

The Character

Liberal Crime Squad begins with a series of character-making questions, where you walk through your life leading up to the point where you begin the struggle against Conservatism. This series includes:
1) Your sex-at-birth (this includes androgynous, and your gender can be changed later).
2) Your childhood, including incidents of punishment and family strife.
3) Your methods of expression - artistic, aggressive, introspective, etc.
4) Your teenage years, including problematic behavior, social judgments and expressions of sexuality.
5) Your plan to take back the country.

I want to tie this back to the Reigning Monarch of Video Games, Gone Home. In Gone Home you go through one teenage girl's journey, discovering political causes and her own sexuality. In Liberal Crime Squad, you go through this every time you play the game. Liberal Crime Squad allows for a huge amount of freedom in your actions and thus in addition to affecting your skills and stats based on prior experience, these questions can also influence how you play the game, or more appropriately how you create the story.

You can play Liberal Crime Squad as a psychopath (as per every other video game), but you can also play it as an idealistic protester, a charismatic visionary, an introverted hacker, an artist, a scholar, a thug, a kidnapper, an assassin, a liar, a thief...Liberal Crime Squad is one of those games that gives you a world and an objective and says "get to it". Your objective is "make the world safe for left-wing politics". How you get there is entirely up to you.

The thing about "games" is that as a medium they offer an unparalleled opportunity to be story CREATORS, not just story EXPERIENCES. Liberal Crime Squad is about crafting your own narrative, starting at birth and working your way towards the struggle for liberation. Your actions and choices are part of that. You might have to kill. You might watch friends die. You might fall in love. You might go to jail. You might be crushed by a wave of public apathy, or you might inspire sweeping legislative changes. Nothing is guaranteed, but everything has a consequence - there's only one save file, and you don't get to decide when it saves.

The Violence

Liberal Crime Squad is an intentionally violent game - not just in the sense that people will die but in the way they die. The game is mostly text, so combat is represented entirely by descriptions of actions and responses. Characters will be maimed, pulverized, stabbed and shot. And they will not die easily - they will bleed out, they will beg, they will cry, they will depart with their mother's names on their lips. What's also different about the violence in LCS is that it is almost never necessary . In addition to intimidation during combat situations (scaring potential enemies off), it's very easy and feasible to get through the entire game without killing anyone by using non-confrontational tactics such as media presence. In fact, in many ways it's EASIER, since it involves committing less crimes.

LCS does not have complicated morals in a direct sense. If you encounter a Conservative, they are an enemy. It doesn't matter if you were mowing down cops with assault rifles, if you encounter a conservative and you don't take the time to scare them off, they're going to throw themselves at you. This is, of course, unrealistic - no matter their party affiliations, people don't behave like that. But there are two relevant places where they do: the first is in the mind of people like the Symbionese Liberation Army. The second is video games. Liberal Crime Squad is like Bioshock Infinite if Bioshock Infinite had any options besides "murder".

If the player has thought even briefly of the world as being "real" in any sense - if they feel any sense of immersion at all - this should really fuck them up. It's one thing to imagine violence being applied to the people you really hate - what if it ended up requiring you to kill every "conservatively-minded" person you met? Would you really feel like you held the moral high ground when that was enough to justify slaughter? Are you okay with the idea of shooting people in the streets for their beliefs, or to support your own?

Did it bother you in The Matrix, when Morpheus justified shooting innocents because it was more important that they potentially be brought out of the computer world than to keep being alive inside it?

Do you like hurting other people?

The World

LCS holds the proud distinction of being one of the few games where gameplay truly changes the world. You see, the "liberalness" of the country is measured on roughly 20 different political points - women's rights, gun control, freedom of speech, and so on. These points are affected by legislation as well as popular referendums. The election of the president and the constituency of congress and the senate are major gameplay features affected by your success at spreading the word of liberalism. As the laws change from conservative to liberal and vice versa, the world changes as well.

For example, Freedom of Speech is essentially abolished at arch-conservative levels; publishing your own newspaper is illegal and leads to raids by the Fahrenheit 451-inspired "firemen". Women's Rights affects how many women you will encounter in roles such as police officer and corporate manager. Civil rights and labor laws affect the status of sweatshop workers you can liberate. Gun Control affects whether or not citizens are armed (although considering your intended actions, they're fully justified in BEING armed for self-defense). Even outside of these things, the likelihood of encountering conservative or liberal characters changes as you spread your philosophy. The world shifts as you play, so that you get a real sense of something happening that many games miss.

The reason this is important is not just "hey, that's neat", but also the sense that you're actually doing this for a goal. You're doing it to reduce military spending and corporate graft, and to improve the lives of the downtrodden and oppressed. You're doing it to create a better world. You might be doing it in horrific ways, but at least there's an overt justification. There's a real, visible goal to systematically work towards. Games like Spec Ops and Bioshock attempt to force moral moments when your goal is basically "you're stuck in a place, try to survive". Liberal Crime Squad doesn't "force" the moment, and it also sets up real stakes for your success and failure.

I think one of the most important parts of the game, from an artistic standpoint, is "nightmare mode". Nightmare Mode is a game mode where the world sets out completely arch-conservative; there is no freedom of speech, all crimes are punished severely, and death squads stalk the streets. It is a world where your struggle is not against mere "right-wing politics" but against an overt Fascist Dictatorship. The methods that in the regular game seemed "distasteful" or "exaggerated" now become necessary - there is no "nice way" to change the world when the state crushes free speech and demonstration. And in many ways, Nightmare Mode isn't as much of an exaggeration as one might think; I mean, we have had actual fascist dictatorships in the world, lest we forget.

One of the problems I had with Bioshock Infinite was the painting of the Vox Populi as being as bad as the Founders. The Vox Populi are an oppressed, enslaved underclass fighting for their freedom, the Founders are slavers with technological superiority who control a flying sky city. The game somehow equates these two groups as being equal. The Vox Populi do not exist in "normal" LCS. The Vox Populi are in Nightmare Mode. They inhabit a state that crushes freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and freedom of vote. They inhabit a state that is overtly in love with the idea of slavery. They inhabit a state that they can't even FLEE from, because it's fucking FLYING. And we're supposed to look at these people - trapped, beaten down, cornered - and we're supposed to CONDEMN them?

Liberal Crime Squad doesn't condemn them. Liberal Crime Squad knows what they're dealing with.

Final Note: The Problem

That's not to say LCS is perfect. There is one major problem I have with it, and that is the relative lack of agency on the part of your subordinates. Obviously it would be very annoying to manage a game where every individual member of your group has their own desires and goals separate from yours, but there's a reason why I'm picking this.In LCS, you have a skill called "seduction". Seduction can be used on anyone, regardless of sex or preference ("preference" doesn't really exist in LCS). If you date someone long enough without them getting tired of you and breaking it off, they become your "love-slave" (game's words).

Now, once again this goes back to the game's origins, with people like Patty Hearst or the Manson Family's female components. There is a precedent for people like that developing inexplicably devoted lovers willing to do anything for the cause. But it's also troubling because it's the only method by which "love" is expressed. There is no way for someone to fall in love and become an "accomplice" or a "co-conspirator" or an "ally". If someone falls in love with you, they are your love-slave, and nothing short of your death will cause them to leave the movement. In a game about liberation and freedom (esp. women's liberation) this is basically inexcusable. I don't think it ruins the rest of the game but I refuse to allow it to pass without notice.
J. Sheahttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3493946997489326661.post-69290588102813726752013-08-17T01:54:00.002-04:002013-08-17T02:02:52.973-04:00Failure States: Understanding Ludonarrative DissonanceAs games stumble through their gawky, misguided adolescence in their journey to maturity, they are forced to deal with many of the same lessons that regular human adolescents are forced to learn.

The most important lesson is failure. It is a lesson that many games have yet to learn.

There is a feeling for people who have been through trauma. Car accidents are probably the most common source of this feeling; the most likely for someone such as an unaware adolescent to experience. It is the experience of a mistake that has been made and cannot be undone. Repaired, perhaps. Forgiven, perhaps. But never erased. Never removed. And people who have experienced that state, whether they were the cause of tragedy or the victim of it, do not easily forget it.

It is the state of failure. It is the state wherein one realizes one's vulnerability, the fragility of one's shell. Rather, it is the state where the childhood feeling of invulnerability is abolished. It is the state where one realizes that things can happen that cannot un-happen. It is the lifted shield of juvenile delusion and the exposure to responsibility and consequence.

And games have yet to experience it, to embrace it. Games fear it because games see themselves as the shield. How can it be their job to create this sensation of weakness when the purpose of games is to escape from responsiblity, to avoid consequence? Games save your data so that when you stumble you can get back up. Games give you safety harnesses and airbags and insurance policies so no matter what tumble you take you can get back up without learning anything from it.

This is fine for games that don't aspire to be anything but a fun, distracting experience.

But now we're making games that try to be grown-up, aren't we? We're making games that aspire to something greater. Games like The Last Of Us, which supposedly tell the story of survivors fighting the odds, with death and loss happening on their journey. These are deaths that are meant to evoke emotion, not simply to be the loss of an AI character. These are deaths we are meant to care about.

But that death happens in a safe place, doesn't it? It happens where the player can't touch it. "It's not my fault" says the player. And if by some miracle a death happens that IS the player's fault, the game shrugs. "Well, we'll just give you another go at that one. That one doesn't count". The threat of death is reduced to an inconvenience for the majority of the game and then they attempt to draw emotion from it when it happens outside of the player's control.

Games like this are the equivalent of an adult giving a child a bike with training wheels, then later shoving them to the ground. "Why didn't you LEARN from that?" they cry, ignoring the fact that there was no logic or reason to it, nothing that could be avoided or improved upon. Games like that control everything and berate the player for doing nothing.

This is not to say that there are not games with consequence and hair-trigger decisions; Hitman: Blood Money is a perfect example. A person playing Hitman morally is forced to make difficult decisions. Every move and mistake could result in needless death of innocents; the Hitman's ultimate goal is to kill his targets with as little collateral as possible. A person trying to be invested in the process is under heavy pressure, then, as a single mistake could lead to a compromised identity, a witness that needs to be eliminated, a team of innocent police officers that must be gunned down. Failure in Hitman carries moral weight to it because it complicates the situation and it has consequences.

It's also not entirely fair to blame games alone for this. Movies have suckled viewers on the concept of consequence-free stories for decades, so much so that films like Chinatown and shows like Game of Thrones stand out simply for not doing that. But what's different between movies and games is that games are interactive, and thus failure can be completely natural rather than forced. And if we care about evoking emotions - that is, emotions other than vicarious triumph and saccharine attachment - then we must look to that interactivity for ways to accomplish it. Consequence is easy, if you shape the game right from the start.

Sometimes we must simply accept that we are fragile, that we can be broken, and that others share this. Sometimes we must learn that the world isn't as safe as we'd like to think. This does not have to be taught through complex symbolism or strained metaphors. Just the realization that every action we do, or do not do, affects the world.

And if gamers don't truly believe in the worlds they inhabit, why on earth would we consider games art?
J. Sheahttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3493946997489326661.post-80907943134824748512013-07-28T01:50:00.004-04:002013-07-28T01:50:57.669-04:00Analysis: No More HeroesThis post is dedicated to everyone who responded negatively to this video.

Question.

What is the artistic statement of No More Heroes?

What is the authorial intent? What is it hoped that the player will take away? What is it attempting to comment on?

Before I hypothesize about that, let's set up three major things set forth by the game.

A) Travis Is A Poor, Friendless, Sexless Otaku Loser
B) The UAA Is A Scam That Travis Fell For (Because He Is An Otaku Loser)
C) Travis Represents "You, The Player" In Some Way Because He Is A Loser Otaku

Those are pretty inarguable parts of the game's narrative, which is to say, it is clear that those are things that the game wants us to believe based on the things that characters tell us. These are the things from which the game draws its "art" value because other than that it's just a bunch of murder and sex jokes.

Now let's start asking questions.

look at this ugly neckbeard sack of shit

Question 1: Why Doesn't Travis Have Any Other Friends?
It is established early on that Travis is a loner with only one real friend in the entire world - Bishop, the owner of a nearby video store. This is important to characterize Travis as a loser, and it's important because in the second game Bishop is murdered, which spurs Travis' revenge plot.

But why is Bishop the only friend Travis has? Surely in a town as large as Santa Destroy there must be some anime clubs or fight clubs or motorcycle enthusiast clubs. Travis has a wide range of hobbies. What is stopping him from hanging out with people who share those hobbies? He's not terribly ugly or even particularly shy, so it's not like his social awkwardness is an issue. He has no problem talking to people in any other context. Nothing about him suggests that he's even an introvert. The only thing preventing him from having other friends is that he's unable to talk to other people within the game, unless they are selling something or training him. It's almost like it's a forced contrivance to attempt to artificially reinforce Travis' status as a loser otaku.

Question 2: Why Can't Travis Get A Girlfriend, Or At Least Get Laid?
Travis' journey to the top of the rankings is spurred onwards by Sylvia's promise to have sex with him when he's #1. But, like Bishop, I am forced to ask: are there not any other people that Travis could have sex with? I understand that he finds Sylvia attractive, but the setup is that Travis is a terrible otaku virgin and that's why he's so desperate to have sex with Sylvia.

Again, the only constraints visible on Travis' socialization is the invisible, un-addressed barrier known as "the game won't let you". Why can't Travis hit the club and find some willing ladies? He's got style. He's good-looking. He's confident. He has about as much chance of having sex as any other man - probably more, when you get down to it. Sure, the anime covering his motel room might creep most women out, but it's not like there's not other places they could go, and it's not like it's established that he's tried and failed. He's just an unexplained virgin and this is a source of great shame for him.

Question 3: If Travis Is So Poor, Why Does He Have A Lasersword And A Rad-Ass Bike?
It's set up that Travis bought a sword on an online auction and has his giant bike because [mumbles, trailing off]. But it's ALSO set up that Travis is laughably poor, since he lives in a motel instead of a big fancy house and his internal dialogue during the Rank 10 fight is all about how he wants more wealth and power out of the whole "assassin" thing. This poverty is why Travis has to take humiliating jobs in between assassinations, such as coconut collection and scorpion wrangling.

The economy of Santa Destroy is unfortunately inconsistent to attempt to make a cohesive statement about "wealth" or "poverty"; some shirts cost tens of thousands of dollars, but so do enhancements for legitimately lethal laser swords. There's basically no other kind of store, and Travis never has to make payments on his bike. He doesn't even seem to have to pay rent. There's no way to tell what being "poor" means, or WHY Travis has to take demeaning jobs when it also turns out that-

Question 4: If The UAA Isn't Real, Why Was Travis Being Paid To Murder People?
In one of the first game's later cutscenes, Travis talks to Sylvia's mother, who explains that the entire "ranked fight" thing was a scam. This would work if the entire game was about building up money via menial tasks so you could pay off Sylvia and she would arrange for you to fight another assassin, at no real benefit to Travis. However, that's not the case. Travis IS given jobs to murder people for money, and as it turns out he's really good at it since the world is infested with people who are barely one-hundredth as strong as he is. This is not a hallucination or a setup since one of those assassinations is the canonical reason for the entire chain of events in No More Heroes 2. So Travis is in fact being paid to murder people, including the CEO of a major corporation, and yet he has to take menial jobs to make basically the same amount of money. Also, the organization paying him for murdering people doesn't exist, even though it is paying him and there are legitimate reasons given for the contracts assigned to him.

Question 5: If Travis Is Such An Otaku, Why Is He A Buff-As-Fuck Ubermensch?
Travis is superhuman. This is undeniable. There are a huge number of humans around Travis, and he is stronger than almost all of them by an insane margin. Travis Touchdown found a lightsaber on the internet and took some wrestling tips down at the gym and now he is stronger than every trained thug and professional goon thrown against him. Not "just as strong", not "a little bit stronger", but so strong that he can wade through them and murder them all. Why is this. Why is he so much more powerful than them. Is it because this is a video game and not an intelligent, cohesive plot. What part of this is commentary on him being an otaku.

Question 6: Who Gives A Shit About Jeane?
Jeane comes in at the end and is like, hey, Travis, you totally forgot that your parents are dead and you swore revenge against me. And Travis is like, oh, you're right, I did! And the audience smiles. Now we know why Travis is a loser: because he forgot about his revenge quest. Because he let petty desires cloud what he truly needed to do with his life. Now it all makes sense.

It doesn't actually make sense. The fact that Travis was seeking revenge for his dead parents is already a childish escapist plot, so you can't shoehorn it into a narrative as a representation of serious adult behavior that's being deviated from. Revenge isn't "the real thing Travis should have been focusing on", it's a thing that's just as ridiculous as trying to have sex with Sylvia. It's a goofy terrible goal and not a grounded or mature objective in any way. So who cares. What did Jeane showing up matter, artistically. It's just a plot twist, it doesn't actually influence Travis' character at all.

Question 7: Is It Because He Jacks Off To Anime Porn
I think that's why Travis is supposed to be a loser otaku. I think that's the reason. I think the fact that he's a buff, confident, handsome, stylish man with a giant bike and a lucrative job is meant to be pushed to the side and the fact that he jerks off to anime porn in a motel room is meant to convince us that Travis is a loser. Okay. Fine. I can work with this. Jerking off to anime porn is pretty bad I guess. Except that the entire fanbase for NMH also jerks off to anime porn, because only those kinds of people would buy into a game where you murder hundreds of people with a laser sword.

Conclusion: There Is Literally No Real Commentary In No More Heroes
Sorry, guys! I know you thought there was but there isn't. It's just a series of basically unrelated events with no actual cohesion, because fiction is a lie and lies don't have to be plausible. There's no artistic lesson to No More Heroes, no moral, no concepts. It's just a random bunch of shit that Suda thought was cool but he wanted to maintain some of his credibility from Killer7 and also wanted to explain why No More Heroes was so boring and unfun.

Oh, wait, no, I almost forgot.

Question 8: Punk's Not Dead
There's nothing "punk" about No More Heroes. Suda51's appropriating a culture and he doesn't even care.J. Sheahttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3493946997489326661.post-75933341599952194452013-07-14T16:12:00.000-04:002013-07-14T16:41:00.595-04:00Symbolism: A Guide
"Dude, this guy is augmented. That's transhumanism. He has too much fun with transhumanism, and then he burns and falls to his death--this is my metaphor; this is perfect."

Jonathan Jacques-Belletete, Art Director, Deus Ex: Human Revolution

We are alive, and then after a variable period of time, we die. What happens after that is a matter of debate.

As an atheist, I believe that when we die, that is it - we just stop being alive. There's no scoring, no reward or penalty, no post-game analysis. We are, and then we aren't.

So let me talk about symbolism for a bit, with the time that I have on this Earth.

Symbolism frustrates me because it tends to get used as a cheap, easy way to achieve credibility. It is part of a systemic approach to "story value", wherein linking enough concepts together gets you a rolling combo and lets you rake in that sweet, sweet Social Justification. It's part of a cohesive desire to escape the outcast nature of video games and anime by proving that, just like books and movies, they are capable of doing "the art things" and thus time spent on them is not time wasted.

Symbolism is easy. If you lower your standards to Evangelion levels, symbolism is absolutely trivial. A character martyrs themselves - just like Jesus did! A character shares a name with a person from the bible. A cross appears, in some format. In ANY format. Someone quotes Shakespeare. Someone else quotes Buddha. He talks about his bibles, talks about John 3:16...AUSTIN 3:16 says I just whipped his ass! It's basic.

wow its almost like this magic evil town is magic and evil and not regular and normal

Games are often compared to "Skinner Boxes", which is to say "operant conditioning chambers". You press a button, you get a reward, and the reward makes you feel good. It's the primary mechanic in MMOs - the long-awaited "ding" doesn't mean anything outside of the game, but it still feels good to get it. There's no meaning to it, no purpose, but it triggered a positive response in your brain despite the fact that it's fundamentally "not a thing" at all.

Symbolism is operant conditioning. Metaphors are operant conditioning. "Value", as a concept, is operant conditioning. They don't mean anything. They don't make you a "better" person, or a more-informed person, or a more empathetic person. They just trigger feelings of "I'm better now". They rely on the existing structures of literary analysis to provide feelings of worth associated with these very basic and easy-to-construct concepts.

People play games like Bioshock or Spec Ops The Line, and maybe they enjoy the ride - that's fine. Maybe they enjoyed the emotional ups-and-downs, that's fine. I wouldn't say I enjoyed it, but "emotional evocation" is both subjective and, itself, pretty easily accomplished, so it's not a thing I'd comment on. But then people play games like Bioshock or Spec Ops and they say, yeah, that game was really Meaningful. That game really Made Me Think.

Did it? Did it really? Please, tell me what it made you think about. Tell me if you actually breached your comfort zone and thought about uncomfortable topics. Tell me if your viewpoint was actually altered by the presentation of these fantastic, unrealistic scenarios and the way people behaved in them. If you say "no", then you were really just spinning your wheels - it didn't change anything, it just made you feel like you were learning something. But if you say "yes", well, you're not off the hook there, either, because now we have to go back and EXAMINE the things you think you've learned.

who would've thought the killer was a mere 13 year old

I'm going to link to a much longer, much better article than this concerning Ender's Game. Specifically, the article talks about how Orson Scott Card orchestrated events in his fictional universe in order to justify his own real-world viewpoint: the viewpoint that morality is based entirely on intentions and not on actions. Card's world, as depicted in Ender's Game, consists of problems that the protagonist must be forced into, and then those problems must be solved with violence. The former aspect exists so that the character can be "good" and "justified" when they do violent things.

People read Ender's Game, and many enjoyed it. Some thought it was a nice tale in its own right - an enjoyable journey, perhaps, but not a philosophically viable one. What about the people who didn't think that? What about the people who thought that yes, you could learn something about how to live your life from Ender's Game? What about the people who did think that genocide was justified and sympathized with Ender for it? What about the people who truly believed, after reading Ender's Game, that you did have to "beat people until they weren't capable of beating back"?

I'm not going to pretend that people wouldn't come to these conclusions on their own. Moral absolutists have always existed, and one book isn't going to make or break that reality. But fiction can be persuasive because it presents a highly emotional case - a case that exists in a courtroom where the author is representing every single part of the trial. The author is free to malign their opposition, to make the jury sympathetic to their side, to make the judge rule in their favor. How can you learn from that? How can you take lessons about how to behave from an individual who is no more "qualified" in this matter than you are, and who has orchestrated an entire scenario to make you think they ARE?

So to sum up, symbolism serves two roles.

The first role is empty emotional evocation - useless, but harmless. It makes people think they've learned something when they haven't, but at least it's not actively making them worse.

The second role is to convince an individual of real-world lessons - a process that is inherently biased. A process that can be used to convince people of things that they will then carry into the real world, because they have faith that the real world resembles the fictional scenario they just witnessed.

Fiction is fake. Fiction is made up. You can put anything you want in fiction because it's not real. You're not required to have any rules for fiction because it's not real. You're not required to have consistency or applicability for fiction because it's not real. You can "blow people's minds" easily because it's not real. You can "totally fuck with someone's perception of reality" because it's not real.

The void breathed hard on my heart, turning its illusions to ice, shattering them. Was reborn then, free to scrawl own design on this morally blank world. Was Rorschach.

ICARUS HAS FOUND YOU!!! RUN WHILE YOU CAN!

J. Sheahttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3493946997489326661.post-45011452711887429822013-06-20T01:00:00.003-04:002013-06-20T01:06:41.037-04:00Hitman: The Assassin RPGHitman: Blood Money is one of the best games ever made.

Agent 47 is one of the worst game characters ever made.

H:BM warms the cockles of my robotic, unfeeling heart because it is primarily a simulation game. To wit: you are given a set of tools, an area, and an objective. There are no "go here" arrows. There are no forced "do this" sections except as direct mission objectives. You are free to go about completing your objectives in whatever manner you choose, to make use of whatever resources and ideas you see fit.

Let me talk for a second about "choice" in games. As someone else pointed out more extensively than I will, there is a difference between "choice" and "consequence" (or "cause and effect"). Choice in, say, Mass Effect is very limited in terms of its effects. The choices you make in Blood Money, on the other hand, exist as part of a living setting - people respond fairly naturally to the things you do, which results in complications and failures. You also generally have to make these choices in real time, under pressure, rather than at your leisure.

More than simply being part of gameplay, though, the choices in Hitman allow for something fairly rare in computer games: actual "roleplaying". Hitman is a game where you can have a "character", and play the game in the way you think fits that character. For example: what are your character's motives? Are they kind-hearted and compassionate, cold and professional, or psychotic and hateful? When "choices" arise in Blood Money, it's usually things like "I've been spotted. Do I kill this innocent or let them go and risk jeopardizing the mission and revealing my identity" - decisions that must be made on the fly, and under duress.

For the most part, Blood Money does an admirable job of keeping its "story" out of the way and letting the natural story of player agency do its own talking. However, there is that issue: why is Agent 47 one of the worst game characters ever made? Because he has a personality already. In one of the rare cases where a game lets the player exhibit their own view, make choices, make decision, and have potential motivations, 47 already has ideas about all those things. 47 is a cold, professional killer. 47 kills witnesses. 47 doesn't care about money so much as he just does what he's told. 47 is not "your character". 47 is 47. Now obviously this isn't the Blood Money team's fault - 47 was established in the earlier, less well-developed games, after all. But it's representative of the problem of a "single protagonist" work.

There are many important things that a character's motivation adds, but the most direct one is a sort of "moral calculus". Which is to say: if a character believes it is right to murder a character because [x], how far are they "allowed" to go to kill that character while still being justified? Again, 47 doesn't care about casualties and bystanders, canonically. But imagine a character motivated by justice or revenge. Imagine a character who believes that a murderer should die, but becomes worse than the murderer in the attempt to carry out their punishment. Imagine a character whose stated motivations were questioned and challenged during the course of the game by situations where they were forced to choose, naturally, between one ideal and another.

Imagine, in short, a Hitman-style game where you made your own protagonist - where your actions and your own thoughts as a player reflected on the character you were shaping. Imagine a Hitman-style game where you weren't an assassin, but instead some sort of secret agent operating in similarly-sized mission environments. Imagine if your objective was zoomed out even more than "kill x" - imagine if all the objectives were about accomplishing something, and you simply had to find the way to reach that goal. All of this is not to say that I don't enjoy Blood Money, of course, but this is simply finding ways to improve on a well-polished base model. It's also important to understand that "roleplaying game" doesn't just mean numbers and level-ups, but referred initially to the idea of actually taking the role of a character and behaving like you thought they'd behave.

J. Sheahttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3493946997489326661.post-57740639070360028192013-04-30T14:54:00.002-04:002013-04-30T15:15:19.896-04:00The Lie Of Fiction, And Morality In GamesI've written a lot about "believability" in the last two years, and for a lot of different reasons: equal representation, immersion, mechanical variability, even the possibility of using interactive mediums for educational purposes. While I've written about a lot of different aspects of "believability" and what it means, there's one major thing that I feel is still important to address: the base concept. I'll put this as directly as possible.

1) Fiction Is A Lie

2) Immersion Requires Truth

3) Your Brain Cares About Fiction Because It Subconsciously Thinks It's True

These three statements are the foundation of why "believability" as a concept is important. It's why we care about "canon" or why we get invested in characters or why we get upset when things are "spoiled" or "ruined". Fiction is a lie, but it's a lie we care about. People can make up any story they want about Star Wars, inventing their own arcs and characters as they go along, but they still got upset when Lucas "ruined everything". Sure, Lucas' stuff had the special effects budget and all, but it's not more "real" than your version - it just has a bigger budget. Individual "fanons" or "headcanons" are just as real as Lucas' canon, in the sense that they're all lies that have been made up. And yet people get angry, because that's how the lie works: your brain sees it as a form of reality.

All the reasons we care about stories - all the pathos and drama and emotion - are related to the fact that at some level our brains treat these stories as being "not stories". In many cases this manifests in subconscious reactions, which is something I've emphasized in the past with regards to design. Things like realistic armor and weapons can make the impact of combat feel more "real" and therefore more dangerous, whereas cartoony designs make it feel less so. Tricking people's brains into accepting a false reality has many different facets - the way people behave, the way things develop, the way objects feel and look. Heck, it was about 90% of RedLetterMedia's review of Star Wars. People don't care about accuracy and consistency for no reason, they care about it because it's part of the emotional evocation process.

STAB WOUND DETECTED, INITIALIZE SCREAM.MP3

Let's take this in a different direction: "why do we care about villainy". People often defend doing bad things in games (or drawing pleasure from bad things in movies) because it doesn't hurt anyone. That's true. The ones and zeroes that have been assembled into "characters" are programmed to say things like "ow" and "stop it" when you attack them, but there's no consciousness there. Or, in a movie, the actor/actress is told to scream and cry, but they're not really being hurt. It's the simulation of pain and suffering, yes, but really there's nothing going on.

But then why do people enjoy it?

The simplest answer is that even though we know it's false, the simulacra of life are there to convince our brains that on some level it isn't. This is why we put so much effort into creating "humans" in games who scream and bleed even though the same job could be done by silent, untextured models like these guys. The reason we bother making the lie of fiction convincing is because that's how it hooks up to our brain and produces all those feelings and emotions. We know we can't be hurt by a work of fiction, yet there's an entire genre of games and movies designed to provoke horror and fear. We know fictional characters aren't real, yet works of fiction constantly attempt (and often succeed) to make us care about the characters and what happens to them.

"You're all the real bad guys" says Booker, gunning down another thousand citizens.

The duality of cruelty is that even though "it's not real" is invoked as a defense, if it was OVERTLY "not real" people wouldn't care about it as much. The simulation of cruelty and dominance and power is what gets people excited because it's plugging into a primal part of masculine identity. Masculinity wants to be stronger, it wants to be better, it wants more influence. The defining trait of masculinity is competitiveness and a desire for superiority; this is the core of "power fantasy" as a concept, and why works that play into that concept are so commonplace. People want to be Indiana Jones or James Bond or Batman not because they think it would be interesting and nuanced to be an archaeologist or a spy or a vigilante, they want to be those people because they KICK ASS and everyone thinks they're awesome. That's why they're "escapist": because in a competitive masculine-structured society, the greatest escape is being better than everyone else and not having to put up with their shit.

In Reservoir Dogs, one of the most memorable characters (in an admittedly small lineup) is Mr. Blonde. Mr. Blonde is in some ways the epitome of "power fantasy" and in other ways he's not. Most people were disgusted by Mr. Blonde's horrendous behavior, as was ostensibly intended. This includes Michael Madsen, the actor who played him, who almost couldn't complete this scene after the cop ad-libbed the line about having a family. It was so upsetting to him that even though he knew it was fake and nobody was getting hurt, he was still emotionally moved to the point that he almost couldn't continue the scene:

I dunno, you play somebody who's psychopathic or who's violent, you try to draw the line somewhere. I mean, I don't really believe in killing children or women! You have to be…playing a bad guy's one thing, but turning it too far in the wrong direction doesn't make me happy. [src]

And yet there's plenty of people who see Mr. Blonde as the apex of masculinity, with good reason: he's calm, he's in control, he holds power over others. While everyone else is freaking out, Mr. Blonde is as cool as a cucumber, and isn't disgusted by things that normal people would be. By the standards of power fantasy, Mr. Blonde is the coolest dude ever. The fact that he's immoral might turn away some, but for others it makes him all the more enticing - he doesn't even give a shit what anyone thinks of him. He is a badass. And yet all the things that make him "badass" are supposed to be part of his depiction as a morally repugnant piece of shit.

A simple game of cops and robbers.

Would Michael Madsen play Mr. Blonde for fun? If there was a Mr. Blonde simulator, would Michael Madsen enjoy playing it just to enjoy himself (as opposed to "for purposes of telling a story")? Most likely he wouldn't. He states that "playing a bad guy's one thing", which suggests that the reason he's normally okay with it is BECAUSE he's certain that the character is being represented as a repugnant villain and not a good guy. Yet even despite this, despite knowing that this character would be hated and despised, he still almost couldn't stand it. Madsen played the role because it was part of the story, but he found the character to be repugnant - he didn't consider playing the role "escapist".

What's interesting to me is that his logic is almost the opposite of the earlier statement of cruelty in games being okay. Madsen justifies playing a bad guy BECAUSE it is a "bad guy"; not because it's fun or cool, but because he thinks it's important that characters like this are shown to be awful, villainous people. By contrast, the "cruelty is okay" logic suggests that you can do whatever you want to do in fiction without being criticized for it, no matter what sort of acts you're emulating or carrying out or how it's depicted. As long as you don't do it in real life, nobody's allowed to criticize you. Yet Madsen is disgusted by these actions even when he knows it's not real, because instead of being kept separate from reality, it acts as a mirror for it.

Games and movies are allowed to depict awful things because they're not real and nobody's getting hurt, but at the same time there's still a level of "expected response". James Bond in the 1960s was an overt misogynist who would kiss women against their will; that wouldn't fly today, and it'd seem creepy and weird to most audiences. A game that allowed the player to do the same without consequence would seem pretty suspect, too. Yet there's plenty of games and movies where murdering hundreds of people - justifiably or otherwise - is treated as being normal and expected, and doesn't compromise the moral integrity of the murderer. Wei Shen still gets to be a cool undercover cop in Sleeping Dogs even when he's driving at 75mph down the sidewalk. Nobody calls him out on being a sociopath. Nathan Drake gets to quip and snark after every kill (and enemies eagerly continue to charge directly at him rather than running away), and he's still clearly meant to be likable. Two of the only protagonists that are actually treated like awful people for doing these sorts of things are Kane and Lynch, and their game received an overall negative response largely because of that characterization.

Do violent video games cause people to murder in real life? I don't think so. I don't think they CAUSE it. Are they RELATED? Sure. The same desires fuel both fake-murder and real-murder; desire for power, for supremacy, for apex masculinity. Obviously it's better to have fake-murder than real-murder, but that misses out on an important issue, which is that there are ways for people to be absolute pieces of shit without actually killing people. Maybe video games don't cause real-life violence. Do they factor into harassment, or misogyny, or rape threats? Does the culture that thrives on the victory of the strong over the weak - of the badass motherfucker over the pussy faggot - REALLY have nothing to do with these things? When people are saying things like "sexism is integral to the fighting game community", or physically threatening people who criticize their culture, or taking films like Red Dawn and Olympus Has Fallen to heart...is this completely unrelated to the violent media that these cultures are centering around?

Ask yourself this: what separates a game or a movie from propaganda? Does anything? Would you care so much about "being badass" if it hadn't been rigorously established as an ideal by the culture you've been immersed in since your birth? As much as people are willing to give leeway to people's morality in the past, they sure don't apply much thought to it in the present. Nothing's changed. You're still a product of your culture, if you allow yourself to be. Question why you think these things are acceptable.

Honestly I should've just posted this picture and that's it, that's the entire article.

J. Sheahttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3493946997489326661.post-49915428130780534312013-04-28T00:49:00.004-04:002013-04-28T00:49:57.389-04:00Character Design, Revisisted

"Sejuani's lightly-armored, skin-flaunting, fleshy apparel didn't mesh with the idea of a dominating, ice warrior. Now heavily armored atop Bristle, this visual rework clearly conveys the core of our concept for the champion. She's powerful, capable of conquering the Freljord and leading the Winter's Claw to victory." (src)

Yeah, I feel pretty good about this.

Two additional reminders of how to do good character design:

It's that easy.J. Sheahttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3493946997489326661.post-78464435215904215452013-04-13T14:27:00.001-04:002013-04-13T21:36:26.444-04:00KISS: 50 Cent: Blood on the SandKeep It Simple, Stupid:
A concise analysis of 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand

There is a simple question that games do not ask often enough. That question is "what does this have to do with reality?" When violence is part of a world of fiction first and foremost, it becomes alienated from the audience's experience. Yet it is inaccurate to say that "violence" is not part of ALL audience's lives, or that it is impossible to connect the audience to the violence they are seeing. Many who live in the so-called "first world" still experience random and brutal violence as part and parcel of their daily lives.

With that said, who better to make a game commenting on violence than one who was a victim of it? Curtis James Jackson, stage name "50 Cent", is such an individual. On May 24, 2000, Jackson was shot nine times at close range with a 9mm pistol. The bullets hit Jackson's hand, arm, hip, legs, chest, and passed through his left cheek. Miraculously - and I can think of no other word to describe such an event - Jackson survived largely unharmed. The most visible lasting damage is a slur in his voice caused by the cheek injury, something the average viewer probably thinks of as just being part of his "rap persona". After the incident, Jackson wrote in his autobiography: "After I got shot nine times at close range and didn't die, I started to think that I must have a purpose in life... How much more damage could that shell have done? Give me an inch in this direction or that one, and I'm gone".

Jackson in many ways is the real-life stand-in for the video game protagonist - a man who was shot repeatedly and, in an event bordering on self-parody, essentially "walked it off". Who better to make a game that attempts to comment on real violence and real death than someone who has actually been through it? The reason I don't believe this game was really "understood" by its target audience was that unlike games like Spec Ops or Bioshock, the game never grabs you by the lapels and shouts in your face about its message, splattering spittle across your cheek. Instead, the game is itself; the world it presents and the actions it depicts are meant to shock you by what they are, and what they represent, rather than the game coming out and telling you that "you should be disgusted" or "you should be horrified". This endeavor is aided by a protagonist who many gamers instinctively hated - a black, masculine, materialistic rapper, a person that some assumed couldn't tell the difference between fantasy and reality. The number of people who criticize rap for being about "guns and bitches and bling" and ignore rock songs about the same material stands as a testament to the societal effectiveness of this setup.

50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is a game about the title protagonist and his 3 comrades pursuing a diamond-encrusted skull through a war-torn Middle Eastern city as payment for a concert carried out in that same city. Already we are faced with multiple themes: materialism is the primary one, but it's also worth noting that there is a contrast between "the Middle Eastern city that has a huge stadium packed with Fifty Cent's fans" and "the Middle Eastern city that is desolate and destroyed" - in fact, they are one and the same. When we, as First Worlders, imagine a city in the Middle East, do we even ALLOW for the first part to coexist with the second? One is put in mind not of Iraqi battlefields like Fallujah, but instead of American cities, with high-development urban areas as well as battered ghettoes. Fifty Cent is not fighting through a foreign warzone, but instead he is fighting through a lower-class urban area - in America, this would be his home turf (as seen in "50 Cent: Bulletproof").

At several points the theme of "destroyed beauty" comes up in Fifty Cent, whether it's addressing the architectural influences of a palace or statue, or commenting that a bombed-out theatre "must have looked grand in its day". This is not a "war" concept, though - rather, we must keep in mind that this is an extension of Fifty's home, the ghetto. Like his own home, this city's lower-class areas are run-down, desolate, abandoned. Things that were once grand were allowed to fester and rot because they were no longer convenient for society at large to support. After all, the country itself isn't collapsing - the parts of the city where Fifty's concert was seemed intact and thriving. Instead, like a sandy Detroit, this is about a world that's been allowed to collapse because it was undesirable. The hotels, shopping malls, and theatres of this world fell into ruin, crime and poverty for the same reasons that they do in the First World: economic abandonment.

Fifty's enemies, too, are representative of his own familiar world. They are described not as terrorists or freedom fighters or insurgents, but "gangsters" - gangsters clad in different garb and with more control, but gangsters nonetheless. It is not known what spurs these people onwards to try to kill 50 Cent, but then, it's also not known what spurred Darryl Baum to put nine bullets in Curtis James Jackson either. Unlike games about "war", the gangster-on-gangster conflict in Blood on the Sand can be motivated by something as simple-yet-powerful as masculinity and machismo. These gangsters are trying to kill Fifty Cent because they come from a world where life and death are cheap - and if that seems unrealistic, one has but to look at real crime, real gang wars, real murders.

Not that the game is limited to killing gangsters, of course - at one point Fifty encounters an American PMC unit looking to "Get Rich Or Die Tryin'" (to quote one of Fifty's albums). The fact that these fellow Westerners - materialistic, unconcerned with morality - end up as Fifty's enemies stands as a testament to the self-consuming nature of greed. And what is "greed" on the battlefield? What does it mean when people are willing to kill other human beings for money alone? The concepts that games like MGS4 don't even begin to address are brought out in force by Fifty Cent Blood on the Sand.

And thus we come back to the first theme brought up: materialism. Fifty Cent Blood On The Sand is a game about materialism first and foremost. Fifty's only goal is to retrieve his payment - a diamond-encrusted skull. There is no other greater motive or concept here, no ostensible righteousness to be subverted or undermined. Fifty Cent Blood on the Sand is a game about killing people for money. Do you think this is accidental? Do you think it's unintentional? If so, perhaps you ought to read this:

"A sneak peek of the game shows 50 Cent accepting a diamond-encrusted skull as payment, then the crew is ambushed. "I had seen Blood Diamond and I had some ideas that I wanted to put in (the game)." And in an overseas trip, he read about "an artifact, it was actually a human skull that they placed diamonds in. It actually exists. It's a touch of reality.""

Fifty Cent: BOTS was inspired by Blood Diamond, a movie about conflict diamonds in warzones. And if you think Fifty merely skimmed off the "diamond" concept, perhaps you should consider one of his other works: "Home of the Brave", a movie where he depicts an Iraq War veteran traumatized by killing a civilian. The exploration of PTSD and the consequences of war in that movie extend far beyond the actual "end of violence", a conceit that even "serious" games rarely deign to approach. To assume that Fifty Cent - a victim of actual violence, in real life - doesn't "understand" violence is the conceit of racist, assumptive faux-intellectualism.

Fifty Cent: Blood on the Sand isn't a game about war. Fifty Cent: Blood on the Sand is a game about the ghetto, moved to a location that gamers are more familiar with, one that might actually provoke outrage and disgust. But the theme's the same: it's a game about people with nothing to lose scrabbling, bleeding, and dying for a chance to escape poverty. It's a game about the haves and the have-nots. And it's a game ignored because the entitled gamer media wasn't willing to give its creator the credit he deserves.

ADDENDUM:
Does music affect the perception of a game's tone or concept? Let's find out:
http://youtubedoubler.com/7MP4
http://youtubedoubler.com/7MPj
http://youtubedoubler.com/7MPp
http://youtubedoubler.com/7MPAJ. Sheahttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3493946997489326661.post-12131640914064021942013-04-09T13:34:00.004-04:002013-04-09T13:34:49.843-04:00KISS: Crusader Kings 2Keep It Simple, Stupid:
A Concise Analysis of Crusader Kings 2

INTRODUCTION
Crusader Kings 2 is a Grand Strategy game, also known as a "mapgame". In it, you take the role of a medieval noble - anywhere from a count to an emperor - and attempt to lead your dynasty to greatness. In truth, even that descriptor is a bit direct, as the actual game itself plays like a medieval Sims game. But there's a reason why I want to talk about Crusader Kings 2, and that reason is "emergent gameplay". I have talked about this at length in another article, but this is meant to be an easy, simple introduction to both the concept and the game itself.

MECHANICS
The mechanics of Crusader Kings 2 are the mechanics of medieval law and economy - or, failing that, a general approximation of the concept. As a ruler, the player (like all other rulers in the game) must manage finances, relationships, and alliances through a system that exists to support "in-universe" decision-making. This is to say that in most cases the kind of decisions the player will make are likely to mirror the decisions the character would be make, and are founded in the same sort of logic. For example, marriages can provide claims to thrones or beneficial inheritances, and these provide the same incentives for arranged marriages that existed in real medieval Europe. This is a scenario lacking in ludonarrative dissonance - there is a very clear relationship between the game's mechanics and the reality it depicts.

Every character in the game has traits. These traits have their origins in the experiences and events that the character has gone through in their life - how they were raised (and by who), what random things befell them, what decisions they've made. Every character, from the lowliest courtier to the highest emperor, has a "story" to them that is generated as you play. They have desires, hopes, flaws and virtues. Every single character in the game is operating with their own agency based on the traits they have. As such, the entire world shapes itself bit by bit as the game progresses - even if you, the player, are on the other side of the world, the wheels are still turning.

Does a kingdom unite or fragment? Does an empire rise or fall? Does a dynasty flourish or crumble? While the player may be focused on answering those questions with regards to their own lands, the fact is that they're being answered in every kingdom, duchy and county. The world is not "created", but shaped by every interaction and event. Every character is potentially important because there is no such thing as a "protagonist" in Crusader Kings 2. There are people. Some of those people have titles. They all have effects on the world.

This is the heart of "emergent gameplay", or in some definitions "emergent narrative". In some games, the things you do in gameplay do not matter at all - it's just a distraction before the next cutscene. In CK2, every decision you make affects the overall scenario; even if it's something as simple as "banishing a vassal to another land" or "executing an enemy", the ongoing gameplay causes these events to spiderweb into a thousand fragmented possibilities. This is at the heart of what makes alternate history so interesting to a lot of people; the idea that any little change or twist could make the world an entirely different place. Grand Strategy games are, more than anything, about constructing a world out of those kinds of twists.

RELATIONSHIPS
While these concepts cover the larger aspects of CK2 - arranging marriages, declaring war, conquering territory - a huge part of CK2's value, to me, comes from the way it handles interpersonal relationships. Like those other events, CK2 has relatively emergent "interaction"; characters like or dislike each other based on their personalities, and random occurrences may change the way they feel about each other. While the actual interaction is relatively abstracted, the game gives you enough clues to imagine how two given people would interact even if it can't show it in detail. But even beyond that there's something greater, and it has to do with the "world shaping" aspect of the game.

I'd like to share with you a screenshot I took during one of my games. This screenshot, by itself, provokes more emotion in me than any other game I've ever played. I smile every single time I see it. And that seems strange, being so affected by a single paragraph wedged between two portraits, and yet it does, more than a thousand impassioned cutscenes. And here's why: That's my son. That's not [child x]. That's not [vassal y]. That's my son. Rather, it's my character's son, but CK2 is a game that allows for roleplaying more than almost any other game I can name. It gives you justifications for "game actions" that match up with what a character would actually be doing in a situation. It gives you a set of traits that you can use to guide your general behavior and outlook. And, in this case, that's my son. If I've been playing this game and I've been getting into this character and doing what I think this character would do, it means so much more to me to have that sort of paternal moment where a father and son can truly bond.

And in game terms, it's just some numbers shuffled around. But what covers those numbers gives us context, and with context we can imagine. No, the game does not show us a montage of this father and son running around and getting ice cream and so on, but it gives us enough information about each of them and the relationship they share that it's just as easy to imagine it and more importantly to take this information in and have it affect the way you play the game. Do you think I'd callously marry this son off after this, or do you think I'd look for a wife he's happy with? Because of the lack of ludonarrative dissonance, I can roleplay with relatively few constraints, doing things that make sense for the character to do.

Most games are "story presentations" or "story delivery systems". Crusader Kings 2 is a "story creator". It is a string of narrative events with semi-defined characters who interact with each other in ways based on their personalities. Characters like "the princess who loved her father despite him trying to kill her" or "the strong, capable lesbian queen" stick out more because they are generated naturally as part of a system and fit into the ongoing story-construction. In this case, the fact that the interactions are so "simplified" is actually a benefit - because it's far easier to imagine a scenario where you have basic facts but not detailed reactions. In a game like Mass Effect, for example, everything would be represented directly - tone of voice, response, attitude - but in Crusader Kings you're given some basics about a character and an event for them to respond to. This allows the imagination to actually go to work, rather than shackling it down with "the way things actually are".

CONCLUSION
Obviously it wouldn't make sense for all games to be like CK2. In many genres it's simply not feasible - this kind of interaction is basically reserved for strategy & management games. But I also want people to know about it as an example of what games are capable of beyond "violence". Is it harder for games to do interaction as a major gameplay mechanic? Yes. Is it impossible? No. It just requires a different approach than the games-as-movies concept that many games seem to favor.J. Sheahttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3493946997489326661.post-47904731391623853152013-04-02T15:11:00.001-04:002013-04-02T15:11:26.960-04:00It's Over.Comments from Hideo Kojima regarding "Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes".

On Emergent Gaming & Player Choice (from this interview)

Kojima: First of all if you give somebody a mission, and say your mission is to go and rescue this person, already you create some drama there. However if you take that a step further and say give the person the power to decide how they get there, what time they arrive, what kind of path they use to sneak into the base then it creates even more drama and gives them more freedom. So it's not so much that I've been aiming to create an open world game so much as I just want to give players the freedom to do things in a way that feels natural to them...what I want to do is give people the freedom to create their own stories and create something that's very personal to them. That's what I want to accomplish.

On Storytelling In Games (from this source)

Metal Gear Solid 4 had long cutscenes because it needed to close the story and explain everything. For Ground Zeroes, a new method of story telling will be used, and Kojima thinks players will really like it...Kojima said he believes story telling through cinematics has become a bit outdated, and therefore he used a new method of story telling for Ground Zeroes.

On Tone & Seriousness (from this source)

Kojima: Video games as a medium haven't matured very much at all in the last 25 years. It's always about killing aliens and zombies. Not that I don't like those kinds of games... they are fun, but I think games have a long way to go before they can mature. Over the past 25 year I have tried to work with the Metal Gear series to introduce more mature themes, but really it hasn't gotten there yet. Compared to movies and books it still has a long way to go.

On Gameplay Design (from this source)

Kojima: "Up until now Metal Gear has more or less been set on one path. Like you're set on one rail to get from point A to point B, with a certain amount of freedom between. What I want to do is create a true open world experience. Where the player has all these options available to them and really limitless gameplay. That's what I'm trying to accomplish with my next project, Ground Zeroes."

J. Sheahttp://firstname.lastname@example.com