Infinite Lag

Fair Play

2012-01-05T21:40:00.000-05:00

Every time Jenn Frank publishes a new piece, she proves why she continues to be my favorite games writer. Aside from being the most skilled personal essayist in this space, she also has an uncanny knack for teasing broader themes out of details. She's done it again, dammit, in her latest blog post, "On games of chance and 'cheating.'" Please go read it now, if you haven't already, since this post is in response to Jenn's. Incidentally, so is this image:

Context(?)

[Quick aside: I almost didn't write this post because Jenn is one of those writers I affectionately call "hamstringers"—writers whose stuff is so good, you feel hamstrung even thinking about writing anything yourself. In retrospect, that vaguely porcine nickname is probably not very flattering to anyone. Sorry, Jenn. Here's another Gosling.]

Anyway, I won't bother recapping Jenn's article here because you really should've read it already. But I do want to respond to one idea that clicked with me. I apologize if this is a little rambling, but here goes.

The theme of "fairness" in gaming is endlessly interesting to me. That's probably because, as Jenn implies, how we judge the "justness" of players' various approaches to the rules of games—which are microcosms, after all—can say a lot about our beliefs about much larger issues in life.

Jenn relates the story of Jeopardy! contestant (not Super Bowl-winning running back) Roger Craig, whose intense preparation, including statistical analysis of most likely question topics, helped him become earn the highest total single-day winnings in the show's long history. Jenn wonders if Craig's obsessive study of the game crossed the boundaries of "fair play." She decides it didn't, but does arrive at this thought: "we socially dictate such a fine line between ‘knowing the real rules’ and ‘cheating.'"

That story reminded me of this fascinating piece from Esquire on Terry Kniess, the first contestant on The Price Is Right to win both Showcases with a perfect bid. A former weatherman, Kniess took a job as a security employee for a casino. Studying patrons, he became an expert in reading the ways they would exploit the games to their advantage—not by "cheating," necessarily, but by identifying and capitalizing on opportunities and weaknesses (e.g., counting cards). He became an expert at pattern recognition. Kniess eventually moved to the other side of the blackjack table, teaching himself to count cards—the quintessential example of an exploit that's as close to cheating as you can get without actually cheating.

In 2008, Kniess and his wife turned their attention to The Price Is Right, obsessively studying past shows to memorize the retail prices of common items. When he finally appeared as a contestant, he pulled off an incredible victory:

That winning bid was incredible in the truest sense of the word: it defied credibility. Especially given the preponderance of winning contestants on this particular episode, host Drew Carey and the crew were convinced the fix was in. From the Esquire article, here's Carey's reaction:

"Everybody thought someone had cheated. We'd just fired Roger Dobkowitz, and all the fan groups were upset about it. I thought, Fuck, they just fucking fucked us over. Somebody fucked us over. I remember asking, 'Are we ever going to air this?' And nobody could see how we could. So I thought the show was never going to air. I thought somebody had cheated us, and I thought the whole show was over. I thought they were going to shut us down, and I thought I was going to be out of a job."

And just over there, just on the other side of that curtain, was twice-perfect Terry Kniess, still dancing to the music. "I was like, Fuck this guy," Carey says. "When it came time to announce the winner, I thought, It's not airing anyway. So fuck him."

But the episode did air, and Carey's lackluster reaction to the perfect bid made more headlines than the bid itself. Carey suspected Kniess was colluding with another obsessive The Price Is Right fan, former contestant Ted Slauson, who happened to have been seated with Kniess in the audience. But former host Bob Barker would have crowned Kniess king of the game, the article says, for this "studio magic." In this view Kniess wasn't a charlatan, but "only...a disciplined man, a weatherman who had spent a lifetime being accurate, and who had also been a little bit lucky, and who had won a game that was made to be broken."

That's my emphasis there. A game that was made to be broken: is that what most games are, really? The Price Is Right, like all game shows (and most videogames), is a power fantasy. We root for the contestants to win because on some level we place ourselves in their shoes. We want them to break the game, if "breaking" means exploiting the rules to their advantage. We like to believe that the game can be beaten, that with determination, effort, and intelligence, we can overcome. It's Man against the System. With guts and smarts, you can make something of yourself, no matter who you are or where you come from. You make your own luck. That's the American Dream.

Terry Kniess and Roger Craig, are men who made their own luck. Through their intense preparation, these players exploited patterns in the game's system to reduce its advantage over them. Yet while we admire their hard work, we also tend to be suspicious of this kind of player. They've ruined the real fantasy, which is that we can win without obsessive preparation or superior talent. We can simply get lucky. If people didn't believe that, they'd never watch game shows. No wonder Drew Carey was pissed.

Jenn discusses players like Kniess and Craig who seek out and master the "secret rules" the rest of us don't consider, those patterns that are invisible to most of us, but once recognized, can be exploited to great advantage. Is it ethical to do so? Back to Jenn's point: there's a fine line between "mastery" and "cheating." It's hard to argue either Kniess or Craig was "cheating": their regimens were self-directed, required persistence and intelligence, and were intensely focused on the games' victory conditions. No outside manipulation of the rules or content of the games was necessary. It's easy to see them as heroes in their narratives.

That's why the case of self-proclaimed Survivor "villain" Jon Dalton, a.k.a. Jonny Fairplay, is so interesting here. I haven't seen much Survivor myself, but from what I gather contestants are encouraged, even expected, to make deceit a major tactic. Although he never won the game, Dalton became notorious for his psychological manipulation of the other contestants. Most egregiously, he lied about his grandmother dying to gain sympathy votes. Is this morally ugly? Probably. But it's certainly much closer to mastery than to cheating. Through study of previous seasons of the show, Dalton perceived an opportunity to exploit a weakness, and he capitalized on it. That weakness just happened to be a quality we value, empathy.

The irony of Dalton's self-appointed nickname was not lost on the audience and pop culture at large. He was a compelling player precisely because he appeared to straddle that fine line between mastery and cheating. To him, certainly, his tactics exemplified "fair play": he stayed within the rules of the game, but manipulated the odds in his favor, as any good player should. From what I know of him, which is blessedly little, Dalton seems to be a pretty repellent person on a personal level, and it's not surprising he's played up his "villain" image to extend his brief moment in the spotlight. Some of the vilification is no doubt attributable to him actually being a douchebag. But what's relevant to Jenn's discussion is how problematic his exploitation of the game was compared to Kniess's or Craig's. Dalton manipulated people, and even though that was well within the rules of the game, he was vilified for it. Kniess and Craig merely mastered the rules of an inanimate system. A system, in both cases, that features prominent sponsorships from faceless corporations hawking retail goods, entities no one feels guilty about cheating.

So back to Jenn's thought: "we socially dictate such a fine line between ‘knowing the real rules’ and ‘cheating.'" It's the social part of it that gums up the works, right? As children we're taught that cheating is wrong, that playing fair is the moral choice. So naturally, we immediately turn our energy to figuring out how to work the system to our advantage within the confines of "fair play." We seek out ways to bend the unspoken understandings that inform games. You'll get thrown out of a casino for counting cards not because it violates a rule of Blackjack, but because it violates a convention of play. It dispels the illusion of luck, of randomness, that makes the game enticing. It also pisses off the house, which is the only entity that is allowed to fleece anyone in this setting, dammit.

The perception of "fairness" is the key here. A child who loses a game will often cry "No fair!", as if the act of losing itself were an injustice. His notion of fairness is tied to his desired outcome. It is a transparently and often hilariously subjective thing.

Yet as we mature, we learn how to temper our, um, tempers. We gain a broader understanding of both the letter and the spirit of the rules games set forth. We realize the necessity of a level playing field in which rules are clearly defined and not subject to change based on our mood or recent sugar intake. We accept that playing games isn't always about winning, but about sharing a fun experience. In order for a game to be fun, we believe, it must strive for balance. And players have an obligation to approach that in good faith. When we perceive that they don't—even if they in fact have—we get upset. A contract has been broken.

Consider "spawn camping" in FPSes. It's dickish to camp out near a spawn point and waste other players as soon as they appear, but for years this behavior was perfectly within the confines of games' rules. Modern FPSes often have code in place to prevent it, and rightly so—it's more fun for everyone that way. But if the game allows you to do something, even something as dickish as spawn camping or lying about your grandma's death to get sympathy votes, is it really cheating? After all, the game is made to be broken.

That's why good QA testers are some of the most valuable employees a videogame studio has. They stretch the limits of the game not only on a technical level, but also in terms of which behaviors it should and should not allow. They break the game and break it again until the opportunities for exploitation, or at least exploitation that's not fun, are minimized. Players still find ways to manipulate the systems, of course. But how much of that is "breaking the game," and how much of it is strategy and skill? I wouldn't accuse StarCraft of being broken just because Boxer could trounce me.

Instead, I think when we call a game "broken" we mean that some facet of its ruleset is unbalanced. The level of challenge is out of whack. Something feels biased one way or the other, so much so that exploiting the imbalance feels closer to cheating than to mastery. In games, as in life, we crave that ideal level playing field. Even if we know it's often a myth.

GOTY 2011: Bastion

2011-12-30T17:15:00.000-05:00

I've contributed to a few year-end best-of lists this year, including two for Paste (one for traditional releases, one for mobile games), one for Kill Screen (it'll be up on the site in January), and even the community vote at Gamers With Jobs. Had Bastion been released in a mobile format, it would've topped all four.

No other game released in 2011 felt as coherent to me as Bastion did, as well-executed in all phases of its design. This game demonstrated a singularity of purpose I didn't encounter elsewhere, with the possible exceptions of Portal 2 and Dark Souls. But unlike those (terrific) titles, Bastion appealed to both my head and heart. That's not surprising given the thoughtfulness and talent of the team at Supergiant Games, some of whom I was fortunate to meet at PAX East last year.

Below I discuss some of the reasons Bastion was my favorite game this year. But since they get into serious story spoiler territory, I've hidden them behind the break. If you haven't yet played the game, please do yourself a massive favor and hold off reading until you've finished it (preferably twice!). In Bastion, far more than in other narrative-heavy games, the element of discovery and reflection is incredibly important.

Ready, Kid? Let's go.

In no particular order, here are the reasons I found Bastion so remarkable.

1. It's a pretty post-apocalypse. Jen Zee's art creates lush, vibrant landscapes and stylized characters reminiscent of Jim Henson productions. As in Labyrinth or The Dark Crystal, you get the feeling that although this world is strange and magical, it is internally consistent: everything belongs where it is. Environments are varied, but in ways that serve the story, not simply for the sake of having a "snow level" or a "train level." Ryan Kuo's review describes the art in splendid detail, so check that out for a more thorough discussion. But I also think it's notable that Bastion's art creates a fairy tale atmosphere without sacrificing uniqueness or emotional weight.

2. Tension between (re)creation and destruction. Caelondia has quite literally fallen apart after the Calamity. The conceit of the world reconstituting itself under The Kid's feet is a brilliant approach to guiding player navigation and exploration, but more importantly, it's a constant visual reinforcement of your goal of rebuilding his world. Yet Bastion is an action-RPG, so naturally you spend most of your time smashing stuff. You kill many enemies that either once were human or are still human; when you discover the cause of the Calamity and your people's own culpability in it, fighting the Ura feels just like smashing pieces of the world you're trying to rebuild. There's thus a constant tension between creation and destruction that is remarkably reflective of the story's main conflict. Not many games integrate story and mechanics in such a powerful and focused way. Supergiant clearly understands how to exploit genre conventions to meaningful ends.

3. That voice! Logan Cunningham's virtuosic performance as narrator Rucks goes a long way toward selling the story and world without interrupting the gameplay. This is another example of Supergiant just getting it: despite the central role of story, the player is in control at all times. Turns out you can tell a great story while also delivering a great play experience. In Bastion, Rucks is telling the story, but not driving it. The constant narration could very easily have become irritating, but the dialogue is so convincingly written and delivered that it becomes its own reward; every time I played I cranked my TV's volume and shushed anyone else in the room so as not to miss a word. Yet like the conflict with the Ura, the narration cannot be taken at face value. On my first playthrough, I didn't pick up on all the subtle hints Rucks was dropping about his own role in causing the Calamity. In my New Game+, I was amazed how much more resonance the narration acquired with my knowledge of what was going to happen. It's a testament to the strength and nuance of the writing that a game as "authored" as this becomes even fresher on a second playthrough.

4. Powerful moments. The story is well-paced throughout Bastion, but what really stuck out to me were a few genuinely poignant moments—story beats where there's a bit of a pause to highlight emotional impact. Two resonated in particular. First, there was the moment you discover the Singer, Zia, the first other survivor aside from Rucks. That alone is interesting, because until that moment it wasn't clear if there were indeed going to be more characters; suddenly The Kid's journey became a little less solitary, and thus his motivations become a little more complicated. But it was Zia's song, the simple, gorgeous blues riff "Build That Wall," that was the turning point when I started to connect emotionally with the game. I started thinking about my play experience differently, focusing more on what things meant than what I was doing. Then there was the rescue/abandonment of Zulf, after he's been wounded by the Ura. I can't express how effective this scene was. You either pick up Zulf's dying body and carry him through a gauntlet of Ura firing projectiles at you, or walk that same gauntlet alone. But in both cases, I adored the moment the Ura stopped firing at me: you could see them recognize the futility of their revenge, their realization that more death would not bring their world or people back. The player's lack of control in this sequence (you can't counter-attack) is an elegant reinforcement of that motif; it's as if The Kid is choosing to suffer this abuse as penance for the Caelondians causing the Calamity. As in any good fairy tale, the themes are universal despite the fantasy setting. This allows Supergiant to experiment with storytelling without sacrificing accessibility. And that ending! I can't believe they pulled off a conclusion that both wraps things up in a satisfying way and encourages you to immediately fire up a New Game+.

5. Evocative music. Darren Korb's score is not only one of my favorite records of the year on its own merit, but also one of the most musically evocative game soundtracks I've ever heard, serving just as crucial a role as the art in world-building. It's built on bluesy, drop-tuned acoustic guitar riffs, with occasional flourishes of banjo and sitar over fuzzy, driving drumbeats. A few memorable melodies in Phrygian mode add a vaguely Eastern flavor. All in all, the effect is at once familiar and exotic, as a fairy tale world should be. And it's so well-suited to the rhythm of gameplay that I have a hard time listening to the music without picturing moving through the game world, or wanting to pick up the game again.

6. Tight controls. One of the nicest surprises about Bastion is that it supports its many narrative, artistic, and musical ambitions with finely-tuned controls. I can't speak to the PC version, but on XBLA the game handled as smoothly as a luxury car. Although the aiming can get a little wonky for a few ranged weapons, especially the Calamity Cannon, the game is very responsive otherwise. Frankly, this was a huge relief for me, since given what I knew about Bastion prior to release, I wasn't sure how well it would handle as, you know, a videogame. But to my great delight, it's one of the few games I own that controls so well that I actually want to pursue combat challenge rewards. When your main point of comparison in terms of control fluidity is the Batman games, you've done well.

7. Accessibility/difficulty balance. Bastion is easy to pick up and play, with an intuitive, attractive UI. Yet one way it avoids becoming another clickfest action-RPG is with its novel approach to difficulty. Applying buffs to enemies to increase experience gain is interesting enough, but it's in combining these modifiers in different ways that this system shines. Doing so compels you to try out new weapon combinations and strategies, an important feature for a game with a generous selection of weapons. Weapons and abilities are expertly balanced, keeping the player feeling powerful but not overly so. The upgrade system feels natural as well, allowing you to use found items and currency to improve your equipment, but not overwhelming you with a million crafting options. And like everything else in Bastion, both the difficulty and upgrade systems are incorporated diegetically. The conceit of the idols to adjust difficulty is particularly elegant, since it allows for more world-building without hammering the player over the head.

8. Restraint. Other RPG developers, please take note: sometimes less is so, so, so much more. Bastion does not waste the player's time (or, just as importantly, attention) with reams of arcane lore. Item descriptions are a few sentences long at most, with oblique (at best) references to past events. Because of the narration, a full picture of Caelondia emerges without the need for obnoxious audio logs or in-game text. This works primarily because Rucks' lines are written and delivered in a naturalistic style that provides exposition without trespassing into cataloging. Keeping the backstory oblique also enhances the fairy tale atmosphere, letting the mystery and ambiguity of the world shine.

So there you are: my pick for Game of the Year, 2011. It's not, erm, stretched out over multiple posts this time around. (You're welcome.) But for the many ways Bastion demonstrates a thoughtful, emotionally affecting integration of storytelling and gameplay, it's my top choice.

40 Days of 40K Haiku

2011-11-29T13:00:00.005-05:00

Let's get this shit over with.

At the risk of turning this into an all-Warhammer 40K, all-the-time blog, I'm going against my better judgment and posting the collection of 40K-themed haiku I tweeted over the course of, well, 40 days. I'll do everyone a favor and hide it behind a break.

For those who haven't been following this nonsense, the idea was a lark inspired by having to come up with a bio for the latest issue of Kill Screen (out now!). "Let's say I tweet Warhammer 40K haiku," I wrote to my editor, when he asked for a few lines and my Twitter handle. I immediately logged on and threw together a few lines with the hashtag #40daysof40Khaiku. And only after I'd committed, as always happens with my projects, did I realize what I'd gotten myself into. To my great surprise and delight, along with a hint of self-loathing, people seemed to enjoy the result. They even asked me to collect the results and publish them.

So, by popular demand, Space Marine Teddy Roosevelt presents: 40 Days of 40K Haiku.

10/11 - Day 1
Drop pods streak through the
blackened sky. Underfoot, the
crunch of Eldar skulls.

10/12 - Day 2
Slay the foul xenos,
the heretic, the mutant:
purge them in His name.

10/13 - Day 3
Dawn on the Forge World.
This increased production will
please the Machine God.

10/14 - Day 4
From the depths of the
Eye of Terror, maddening
whispers of Chaos.

10/15 - Day 5
Colonel-Commissar
Gaunt surveys the wastes ahead.
A long march awaits.

10/16 - Day 6
The foolish man puts
his trust in luck; the wise man,
in the Emperor.

10/17 - Day 7
Astartes muster
at the Cadian Gate; pray
for their safe return.

10/18 - Day 8
She opes her mailed fist:
an Inquisition rosette!
Beware, heretic.

10/19 - Day 9
Emperor shield us
from the horrors of the Warp—
nightmares given flesh.

10/20 - Day 10
Eldritch warriors
emerging from the Webway:
dreaded Dark Eldar.

10/21 - Day 11
Orbiting a world
plagued by Chaos, we debate
Exterminatus.

10/22 - Day 12
The sole reward
for treachery and heresy
is retribution.

10/23 - Day 13
In void-swimming shoals
the Tyranid threat descends
upon our doomed world.

10/24 - Day 14
Oi, look, more ‘umies!
Come on, boyz, let’s join the Waaagh!
SPICE MARINES TO KILL!

10/25 - Day 15
Blood Angels, Dark Sons,
Imperial Fists—Brothers!
Prepare to deploy.

10/26 - Day 16
Return to your work!
Idleness breeds heresy.
That way lies ruin.

10/27 - Day 17
Servitor! Bring me
more amasec. — Another
lho-stick, my darling?

10/28 - Day 18
“Blood for the Blood God!”
they shout. “Skulls for the Skull Throne!”
These traitors must die.

10/29 - Day 19
In ancient tomb vaults
the Necrons sleep, awaiting
fools who would wake them.

10/30 - Day 20
Roboute Guilliman,
Ultramarine Primarch: we
bless thy holy name.

10/31 - Day 21
Execute cowards,
discipline fools, root out spies:
the Commissar’s charge.

11/1 - Day 22
I felt the Ork’s neck
snap beneath my Power Fist
and relished its fear.

11/2 - Day 23
The hydra emblem
of the Alpha Legion! Kill
these traitors, brothers.

11/3 - Day 24
Look to your Ciphers,
Prefectus. Your messengers
are not who they seem.

11/4 - Day 25
Defend the Craftworld!
The mon-keighs must not despoil
our sacred domain.

11/5 - Day 26
So you want to be
a Rogue Trader? Fine. Good luck
with that Warrant, ass.

11/6 - Day 27
Hail Lord Calgar, he
who took back the star fort from
M’Kar the Reborn.

11/7 - Day 28
Auspex shows nothing,
major. — Keep scanning, Sergeant.
The Tau are out there.

11/8 - Day 29
We curse the name of
Abaddon the Despoiler,
vilest of traitors.

11/9 - Day 30
After the Third War
for Armageddon, you’d think
we were done. But no.

11/10 - Day 31
The Hellstorm Cannon
of the Aquila Ignis
resides on Kronus.

11/11 - Day 32
A fate much worse than
death awaits those who betray
the Emperor’s trust.

11/12 - Day 33
The plasma pistol,
the heavy bolter: blessed
are the tools of death.

11/13 - Day 34
The snarling Ork horde
pouring through the blasted gate
will meet my chainsowrd.

11/14 - Day 35
Hear the Deathwatch cry,
“Suffer not the alien
to live!” — and fear them.

11/15 - Day 36
With thunder hammer
and jump pack, the Captain rains
death upon our foe.

11/16 - Day 37
See the tanks go by?
A Leman Russ column, I
think. Cheer them on, son!

11/17 - Day 38
Be cautious, brothers.
This Space Hulk is infested
with foul Genestealers.

11/18 - Day 39
Heroic Tanith
troopers, the First-and-Only,
saved us from Chaos.

11/19 - Day 40
Praise the Emperor.
The sign of the aquila
is your guide and shield.

Reaganomics

2011-10-24T11:32:00.000-04:00

Having received my review copy of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine several days before its release date, I expected to have a harder time connecting to full multiplayer matches. As it turns out, there were ample opponents online, mostly located, according to the in-game leaderboard, in France and Germany. At the time, I assumed Space Marine must have released early in Europe: nearly all of these players had reached double-digit levels in Space Marine's XP-unlock system. Not only did they zip through the maps to secure choke points with the speed and familiar ease of old pros, but they were also kitted out with powerful weapons and perks. It was clear they'd had time to practice.

I got slaughtered, of course.

(Turns out the game's official European release date was later than the North American date; I'm told some European retailers regularly break release date to sell extra copies. Knew those guys couldn't all be reviewers.)

Despite the relatively limited modes—team deathmatch and king of the hill varieties—I'd been looking forward to jumping into Space Marine's multiplayer. That's a rarity for me; I generally dislike competitive multiplayer shooting on the console, since I lack the appropriate twitchiness to properly acquit myself. But, as anyone who follows my lunatic Twitter stream knows, my 40K fandom knows few bounds. Besides, except for a few desultory forays into Call of Duty: Black Ops and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 matches, I hadn't had much experience with the now-standard persistent unlock model.

Of course, I was skeptical; intuitively, this kind of system, which awards players more powerful gear, stat increases, and/or customization bonuses the more XP is accrued, seemed unbalanced at best, obnoxious at worst. Still, I was curious to see if the RPG-lite hook of XP and weapon unlocks might engage me when applied to a fictional world I was already into.

The verdict? Sadly, no.

I can see why the persistent unlock model is so attractive to both designers and players. From a business perspective, it encourages a "long tail"—by lengthening the time players are likely to spend in multiplayer modes, you're keeping the product off used game store shelves at least for a little while longer. In the process you build word-of-mouth, since the player's online friends can see what you're playing and will want to join in the fun. The model also allows designers to mete out a steady drip-feed of "progress" to the player, creating the illusion of achievement, if not an actual sense of accomplishment. Leveling up means the player doesn't have to start fresh every time he boots up the game, promoting a sense of connection between the player and the multiplayer character. The playing field is not level every match; star players have paid their dues, and earned their perks. That sense of superiority is, I'd imagine, pretty important for people who invest a lot of time into competitive multiplayer. And the allure of new gear—well, that's been borne out by many a game.

But the persistent unlock model also comes with its share of downsides. The most convincing argument against this type of system is that bolting on a leveling up mechanic obscures the notion of skill. In a recent blog post, 100 Rogues designer Keith Burgun lays out a compelling case:

So, I hope that it's clear how in a skill-based game, having leveling-up is really out of place, and thus it makes your game much harder to balance. Assuming your leveling-up system is at all non-linear (which it really should be), it becomes impossible to track where your player will be in terms of his core-stats, and therefore impossible to balance the game appropriately. Combine with this the fact that most digital games are probably too inherently complex to begin with and we have a recipe for the current status of digital games: perpetual imbalance.

Our games should not be fighting against themselves like this. When designing a game, we must decide what it's about, and stick to it. Is it a game about timing, accuracy, and twitch skill? If so, how does a leveling up system compliment that? I am not saying, by the way, that an action game cannot introduce new mechanisms to the player as he goes, in the form of new enemies, new weapons, new environments. These are all great ways to increase the difficulty that force the player to increase his own skill.

There are a few interesting points here. The first is embedded in the first sentence and reinforced in the second paragraph: what kind of game is this, really? I'd argue that multiplayer shooters are primarily about skill. Success in a deathmatch-style game is mostly dependent on, as Keith says, timing, accuracy, and twitch skill. Knowing the maps helps a great deal, as does familiarity with weapon styles and use of bonuses or items. But without those qualities, upgrades will only take you so far. You need to have skill to win consistently.

With an unlock system in place, though, the game becomes more about addressing imbalances (i.e., exploiting your own upgrades or overcoming others' upgrades with your own skill) than about demonstrating mastery. The playing field is uneven. The player's objective thus becomes gaming the system to balance it in his favor—not about whatever he's actually supposed to do in the match.

For unskilled players, an unlock system creates the illusion of parity. By simply investing enough time into multiplayer—most unlock systems will award you at least a little XP for each round you play—you can advance up the unlock ladder, making up for your lack of skill with powerful weapons and perks. In theory, this will help you be more competitive.

In practice, it's more like our tax code: the rich get richer. In a graduated income tax system, people are taxed at a higher rate the more income they earn. This structure is intended to ensure that those who have benefited most from society contribute more back to it. As we're all aware, it doesn't work like that in reality. Decades of supply-side theory, and I'm sure more than a little bit of lobbying, have convinced decision-makers that 99% of us can rely on the largesse of the wealthy for our own financial security. Because they create jobs, see.

Multiplayer unlock systems don't operate on the same principle—there's no "trickling down" of skill—but they have a similar result. Skilled players will advance up the XP ladder at a much faster rate, compounding their advantage over others. Unbalanced matchmaking ensures you'll be placed in lobbies with players at wildly ranging levels, pitting your level 3 character against at least a few level 30s. (I've no idea how matchmaking works on the back end, but I assume grouping players of similar skill levels is a challenge.)

And this is the irony of the unlock model: it de-incentivizes its own incentives. Lower-level players are often killed within seconds of spawning. Even familiarizing themselves with the maps becomes difficult, since it's tough to explore with a bunch of elites hunting you. It becomes enormously tedious to advance up the ladder. After several rounds with a pathetic kill/death ratio, earning that level 10 Lascannon feels a lot less enticing. Space Marine combats this obstacle by allowing you to copy the loadout of the last opponent who killed you for one life; but even this creative fix is really just a Band-Aid. Being able to preview a high-level weapon or perk doesn't erase the tedium of grinding levels to earn it.

The last time I invested a genuine effort in multiplayer was probably in college, when my dorm floor played regular Quake II matches. The Quake games are notoriously fast-paced affairs, heavily reliant on twitch skill. But they also feature finely-tuned maps that allow for creative tactics. One thing I loved about Quake II was that I could practice with bots before taking on my friends. There was a way to refine my skill in a customizable environment, to familiarize myself with maps, items, and weapons without getting my head blown off every ten seconds. Everything was accessible from the start; the game felt like a shooter, not a JRPG. The playing field was even.

Here's the best part: Translating that experience with bots to matches against my friends was incredibly satisfying, even if I still got slaughtered. I had learned something by practicing and applied it in a live context. If I got destroyed, it was because my opponent was more skilled, not because he'd unlocked some perk or weapon. If "fun" in games is about learning, as Raph Koster says, we need more opportunities to learn, not to earn.

Tau Catalog

2011-09-20T12:27:00.000-04:00

The Ten Worst Dates I’ve Gone On In This, The Grim Dark Future Of The 41st Millennium

SEP. 20, 40,000 By J.P. GRANT

10. He shows up in fashionably ‘retro’ Mark 6 Corvus Armour, strutting toward the bar as if that Beakie helmet isn’t so unironically M.31, as if that studded left pauldron isn’t, like, a total space-goth cliche. He’s barely gotten out a “Greetings, fair one, in the name of the Emperor” before I fake an emergency vox summons from my Administratum sub-commander.

9. He doesn’t look like a Squat in his profile picter. But he is.

8. Crying? Seriously? He’s halfway through his third amasec when he just loses it, great gobs of snot dripping from his nose like drops of water from a leaky faucet. Except these drops are full of plague. He’s blubbering about his ‘existential despair,’ his ‘profound hopelessness and fear,’ begging me to join with him in ‘dark eternal service’ to ‘Papa Nurgle.’ Uh, no. But you can buy me another 19-credit Tranq-tini.

7. After dinner he asks me up to his con-apt to see the ‘etchings’ he’s done of the ‘Most Blessed Primarch Roboute Guilliman.’ Yeah, like I haven’t heard that one before.

6. He’s beautiful, he’s charming, he’s a medicae so you know he’s got credits. But then he gets me up to his hab. Throne, that vox-drone collection. Really? You’re still listening to Machine God? The Flash Gitz? Way to be totally M.37, bro.

5. He doesn’t know I fethed his best friend. Who was secretly a chaos daemon. Awkward!

4. So okay, he quotes the Codex even though you know he hasn’t read it. And he hangs out in dive bars on Edge Worlds to be like, ironic or whatever. But feth it, he’s hot. We’re making out in the alley behind his hab-block when he asks me if I ‘wanna get kinky.’ ‘What did you have in mind?’ I say. He gets this sick grin on his face, then whips out his data-slate. Thousands of picters of post-Atrocity Ravenor—OUTSIDE THE CHAIR. ‘Sizzled flesh turn you on, baby?’ No. No. NO.

3. Fine. I’ve had too many amasecs and now I’m letting him feth me because, whatever, it’s been a while. It’s going okay at first until he starts with the moaning. “Throoooooone,” he yells. “Oh, Throoo--ooo--ooone!” He sounds like a fething Squig with a bowel infection. Total stim-kill.

2. I drunk-vox him for a late-night hookup and he BRINGS HIS ROOMMATE. Who is an Eldar. The feth is he thinking?

1. Do I want to ‘polish’ his ‘nob.’ Um, not anymore!

You should follow Tau Catalog on Twitter here.

Excuses, Excuses

2011-09-19T20:12:00.000-04:00

Pictured: a smoking dog that is somehow not a French poodle

Two months? Two MONTHS since I last posted here?

I know, okay? I know. No excuse. Even for me.

Still. Haven't been idle this whole time, I promise. In fact, the main reason I haven't kept up with the blog is because I've been busy writing for other folks.

Voila, the obligatory rundown!

At Kill Screen, I interviewed Greg Kasavin, creative director at Supergiant Games, makers of my favorite game of this year, Bastion. It's not surprising that Bastion turned out so well, given the talent, smarts, and heart of the Supergiant team, most of whom I was fortunate to meet at PAX East. I have a lot more to say about Bastion, but I'll reserve that for a future post—one that will be positively riddled with spoilers, no doubt.

This sobering meditation on death and suicide in games, "Life After Death," was first drafted back in late April but kicked around in multiple incarnations until it finally went up at KS in late July. The finished product features an amazing illustration by Daniel Purvis and some invisible, but crucial, editing by Ryan Kuo. Karoshi is a curious game on a number of levels. It scared me probably way more than it should have.

I also reviewed an iOS game with the preposterous title Zombie Gunship for the site. I wrote this piece shortly after KS announced it was no longer assigning scores to reviews. It might be for this reason, or because I was particularly invested in my angle, or because I knew my editors support pieces that take risks—but writing this one was, I dunno, liberating. I fear I undersold the game itself, which is good fun. But if you grew up watching Gulf War I (my God. Gulf War One.) unfold on network TV like I did, it's hard to shake the odd feeling of deja vu.

Speaking of risk-taking, how about this in-character review of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine I co-wrote with Battle-Brother Rob Zacny for Paste. I don't have to tell you, faithful fellow servant of the Emperor, how much fun this one was.

Last month Paste also published my review of Toy Soldiers: Cold War, an XBLA title that builds on the strengths of its predecessor. Be sure to click on the comments to see an amazing defense of Weird Al in response to my offhand reference. (For the record, I love Weird Al too and agree that he's an outstanding musician, commenter dude—but it's hard to argue he's not seen as a novelty act.)

Whew. On to Gamers With Jobs? Told you I've been busy.

Back in May (May! Sheesh.), I contributed this piece on the new Mortal Kombat's final boss, Shao Kahn. Are fighting game bosses always broken? Maybe. But it's still interesting that for all the refinements Netherrealm made to the MK formula—the reboot is probably the best game in the series—they still fell back on the old "cheap-ass final boss" trope. I wonder if people would be disappointed if they hadn't.

In June, Mrs. JPG and I had a lovely holiday in London, kicked off by a surreal jetlagged visit to a (since-defunct!) Piccadilly Circus arcade called Funland. I wrote up the experience here.

July saw another long-dormant article published. "Right Here, Right Now" argues that now may be the best time ever to be a gamer. It also features probably the best header image I've ever found. I mean, just look how much fun Marv is having! Where would you rather be, indeed.

Last month, Rob and I attended our second GameLoop Boston. I wrote up some notes last year, but Rob and I decided to divide and conquer at this year's event, which was again a great time. Our roundup lives here.

Every Friday, GWJ features a column called Fringe Busters that highlights small independent games in 250-word blurbs. It's a terrific way to highlight games that tend to fly under the radar. Most are excellent conversation-starters. I've profiled two: the satirical "god game" Let There Be Smite!, made by my Kill Screen colleague Pippin Barr; and Symon, a beautiful, melancholy point-and-click game from my pals at GAMBIT.

Finally, I was a guest on last week's GWJ Conference Call, where I made some stupid Warhammer jokes and had a lot of laughs while Julian, Sean and Rob unleashed their fury on the abomination that is the JRPG.

And that's the list! I do have a few things in the works for this here humble blog, I swear. Stay tuned?

Taylor's Tower

2011-07-18T23:19:00.001-04:00

American industry's relentless focus on efficiency can largely be traced to Frederick W. Taylor, inventor of the theory of scientific management. In the late 19th century, Taylor, a mechanical engineer and former factory worker, conducted "time studies" of industrial workers, seeking to identify and codify what we might call "best practices" in today's business jargon—the most efficient processes for producing maximum output. Taylor timed workers' movements to the second, using his amassed data to construct an ideal system of motions for maximum productivity and minimum wastefulness. In a Taylorist system, in other words, all men are machines.

But Taylor wasn't simply interested in workers' physical movements. His theory, which could be said to represent the best and worst of the Progressive Era, also set out to bridge that pesky divide between labor and management. He claimed that his methods would not only increase output, but also improve worker satisfaction, reduce working hours, and minimize conflict. Of course, he also assumed laborers, like dogs, were either too genial or too stupid to mind being treated like objects.

It's no wonder Lenin was a fan. Despite its pretensions at fostering equality, Taylorism was a thoroughly autocratic system. "It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured," Taylor wrote in Principles of Scientific Management. "And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone" [italics in original]. So, lots of enforcing going on. And lots of room for interpretation about what "best" means. Charlie Chaplin's celebrated satire Modern Times brilliantly captures the dystopian work environment fostered by Taylorism. Nothing quite like the boss's furious face appearing on a giant viewscreen while you're taking a leak to scare you back to the assembly line.

No game has made me feel like a Taylorist factory foreman as much as Tiny Tower, the iOS tapfest currently inspiring love-hate reactions across the web. If you're not familiar with the game, it's an economic/real estate simulator in which, as the Tiny Trump in charge of your Tiny Tower, you build apartments and businesses, collect money, and exercise autocratic control of your pixelated "Bitizens." You choose not only if and where they work, but if they deserve to stay in your Tower at all, based on their work aptitude ratings. The mechanics themselves, like industrial labor, are repetitive to a mind-numbing degree: Build a floor, restock stores, wait (in real time!) for coins to accrue and restocking to complete, ferry Bitizens in elevators, restock stores, build another floor. Rinse and repeat.

Brendan Keogh's review in Paste explains the game's mechanics in more detail. But it also tries to articulate the game's bizarre allure, which many players are still trying to pin down. On the surface, there is nothing about Tiny Tower that should be fun. And yet we keep playing. Michael Abbott's recent Brainy Gamer post is an elegant piece of satire on that front.

The thing about Tiny Tower that interests me most, though, is not that it's a superficial game that is inexplicably addictive; I've played lots of games like that, Game Dev Story being only the most recent example. I do find it fascinating that the free-to-play (and apparently very profitable) Tiny Tower is so brazen about its micro-transaction opportunities—not by plastering you with pop-up ads and "social" hooks, but by slowing gameplay to an existential crawl, unless you want to pay to skip ahead—yet largely seems to have avoided the disdain inspired by FarmVille. I'm at something of a loss to explain that, other than to speculate that Moms haven't yet caught on. Mechanically, I'm not sure there's much difference. Presumably iDevices' enduring hipness shields Tiny Tower from some of the ire reserved for Facebook games.

What strikes me most about Tiny Tower is how transparently and, well, efficiently it compels the player to adopt a Taylorist philosophy. Taylor believed there was One Best Way to perform any kind of job, a sort of miracle cure for what ailed the worker, the manager, and industry as a whole. In Tiny Tower, it becomes clear after a few hours—once you are invested enough to start caring about your burgeoning building—that maximizing efficiency, not employing creative strategies, is the objective here. Just as in manufacturing, the work never ends in Tiny Tower; there is no defined end point at which the goal is achieved. There is only more building, more production. There is little incentive to do anything else than figure out the most cost-effective and time-saving way to keep doing what you're doing. Even the "strategy guides" for this game read like Taylorist propaganda. This one explicitly bills itself not as a guide, but as "tips and tricks for maximizing efficiency."

Of course, maximizing efficiency is sometimes just the way to win. In games like StarCraft or even chess, there are proven strategies that work to the player's advantage a very high percentage of the time. It's stupid to not employ them. Listening to StarCraft veterans debate build orders, it's easy to suspect they're just trying to find that One Best Way. But StarCraft and chess players understand that different situations require different strategies, and that strategies have to evolve on the fly as each match unfolds. The joy of these games is the artfulness with which skilled players adapt to changing conditions. Taylor, on the other hand, wasn't much for evolution or adaptation. Scientific management made no room for art. Enforced standardization was quite literally the order of the day.

Tiny Tower operates in much the same way, but on two levels. As Tiny Trump,* you exercise totalitarian control over your Bitizens, from where they live and where they work to what they wear. And these choices aren't merely cosmetic; dressing up Bitizens of similar aptitudes in similar "uniforms" can make them easier to find and reassign as needed. Should another Bitizen come along who happens to have a better aptitude rating, it's sayonara to the dead weight—if you're a Trump worth your hairpiece, anyway. (That element in particular, the shedding of inefficient workers, is eerily reminiscent of workers' loss of jobs to automation in the mid-20th century, a natural outgrowth of a manufacturing culture rooted in scientific management.) Inasmuch as it is possible to suck at Tiny Tower, you will suck if you don't learn to adopt a Taylorist approach. Or, more likely, you'll just put it away.

But then there's also the way the game itself becomes the Taylorist management to the player's laborer. Half of the "gameplay" is ferrying Bitizens on the elevator (which can be upgraded for speed, of course), perhaps the most menial task a videogame has asked of players in recent memory. If you allow Tiny Tower to send push notifications, it'll pop up dialogue boxes on your device every time a store is ready for restocking or a new floor has been built. It slaves the player to the (real time!) clock in a way that few other games do. Eventually you get the feeling you should punch a timeclock every time you boot up the damn thing.

But for all that, my Tiny Tower is no dystopia. For one thing, it's cute as hell. My Bitizens seem, on the whole, a happy and well-adjusted lot, with the possible exception of that blue-haired chick with the bunny ears who works in the Soda Brewery. There are enough bemusing Easter eggs in Tiny Tower's Facebook parody, "Bitbook," to convince me there's a fair amount of tongue-in-cheek intent here. I'm genuinely glad for developer NimbleBit—twin brothers Ian and David Marsh—that they've hit on what appears to be an enormously successful formula.

I'm also glad Tiny Tower has provoked me to consider how I "maximize efficiency" in other games. I may not have been able to articulate it properly before playing Tiny Tower, but it makes sense in retrospect: The point at which I give up and put a game away is often the point at which it begins to feel like work, when I become obsessed with finding the One Best Way to play it. If it turns out there is indeed a One Best Way to play, that's usually an indication that the game is not worth the effort I'm putting into it. Or maybe that it's ceased to become a "game" for me at all.

So why am I still playing Tiny Tower? For me, and I suspect for many others, there's a calming allure to the game's very mundanity and repetitiveness. It's satisfying and relieving in the same way, say, filling in a spreadsheet can be. There's a degree of comfort in the fact that little critical thought is required. The job hasn't been stimulating or challenging, but you have produced something. Something exists where it didn't before. And that's rewarding.

At least until it's time to build the next floor.

*No actual references to The Donald exist in this game. But they really should.

The Death Fetish

2011-07-05T14:30:00.014-04:00

In honor of AMURRICA, I marathoned my way through the single-player campaign of my latest library rental, Call of Duty: Black Ops, yesterday. My reaction was much the same as my response to Modern Warfare 2:

Hour 1: Wow, this looks and plays great.
Hour 6: My soul is crushed.

There's a reason I'll never buy a Call of Duty title, but it's not what you might think. It's not because I'm terrible at multiplayer-heavy shooters, although I am. It's not because their stories are barely-comprehensible Michael Bay power fantasies, although they are. It's not because Activision is creeping ever closer to Zynga levels of transparently formulaic cash-grabbing, although it is. And it's not even because I prefer not to have racist, sexist, homophobic horseshit screamed in my ear by mouth-breathing dudebro imbeciles, although that's a factor too.

No, I'll never buy a Call of Duty title for the same reason I'll never buy a Saw movie on DVD: it's death-porn.

It's not that I won't play a Call of Duty game, of course. I like to play a military shooter every once in a while, just like I like to check out a grisly horror flick every once in a while. It's fun to see where the genre is going. I just don't want to own those titles. I can't shake the feeling that would implicate me somehow.

The graphic violence, per se, doesn't bother me. I love Mortal Kombat, after all, and that franchise stakes its reputation on its glorification of human butchery. But unlike Mortal Kombat or any number of other ultraviolent titles—Borderlands, Grand Theft Auto, Left 4 Dead—the Call of Duty games seem to take themselves way too seriously. Even the Battlefield: Bad Company games lighten their tone with humor. (For the record, I don't count Black Ops' intentionally absurd Zombie mode, where JFK teams up with Nixon, Kissinger & Castro to fend off the undead; I'm talking about the campaign alone.)

Instead, I think it's the peculiar fetishizing of gruesome acts of violence that gets under my skin. Take the picture above. After battling across a rooftop level to save this guy, you watch him get shot through the head—in slow motion, naturally, with copious sprays of brain matter erupting from the wound in minute detail—just as you're about to save him from falling. You let the body (this is a body now, not a person like it was seconds ago, but the game makes no attempt to explore that terrifying concept) drop. It caroms off a neon sign, a lump of flesh and bone, literal dead weight. One cannot help but imagine ~90% of Black Ops players responding to this moment with a heartfelt "oh, sick, bro!"

In context, it makes sense that a hardened military operative like your avatar wouldn't pause in the middle of a firefight to ponder the existential meaning of life's precariousness. But Black Ops shows this event, and other similarly bloody acts, in such precise detail, in such high-definition scripted precision, that it's clear the game wants you to pay very close attention. The problem I have is that it doesn't ask you to do anything beyond that.

Consider the "rat tunnel" sequence in one of the Vietnam levels. Progressing through Viet Cong tunnels on your way to your next objective, you are limited to a flashlight and a .44 "hand cannon" revolver. Naturally, there are VC down here to kill. Except when you shoot them, they don't enact the typical death animations. Instead you get gratuitous displays of dismemberment like this:

Dismembered VC, unlike other enemies you shoot, moan and writhe for a few seconds after being shot, drawing attention to their suffering. As far as I could tell, every kill shot takes off a limb, regardless of where you're aiming. And yet, there's no narrative reason for the carnage (like in Dead Space or The Darkness). Not that I'd expect this, but there's no attempt to make you consider the ethical or psychological ramifications of your actions; at least that might have given a hint of depth to the grim proceedings. In my playthrough, I never encountered the limb-severing .44 pistol again, making it seems as if the weapon was specifically designed for this sequence. It's like a sex toy, meant for one purpose. The weapon, the amputation, the screaming: Altogether, it's as if the player is supposed to get off on the suffering and gruesomeness of this scene.

Movies like Saw and Hostel provoke the same reaction; the gore is fuel for the revenge fantasy. Perhaps in the Vietnam sequence the developers are trading on deep-seated American resentment about our dubious engagement in that country, allowing players to enact some measure of payback for our real-life perception of failure. By, you know, dismembering some virtual VC. If so, that's pretty fucking cynical and disrespectful (and aimed at the wrong generation). But I suspect that's reading a little too far into it.

It's the particular focus of these types of sequences that makes me think of them as fetishistic. There are several, and they all take place in close-up and/or slow motion. At one point, you have to swim underwater until you reach a VC patrol boat, yank a guard over the side, and stab him in the neck, keeping him from crying out by holding him under the surface. The careful attention that was clearly paid to ensuring the resultant cloud of blood disperses realistically underwater is far more unsettling than the blood itself. There's an intensity to the display that lacks any meaning other than titillation. This scene in particular has more in common with The Human Centipede than with Full Metal Jacket. Which is a shame, since the latter film used gruesome violence and bodily injury to say some very powerful and complex things. And the former was, well, The Human Centipede.

Verisimilitude, where videogame violence is concerned, is not necessarily a desirable goal. Create a photorealistic world and photorealistic animations, and your mandate then becomes to establish a degree of emotional verisimilitude as well; otherwise the experience is at risk of treading into Michael Bay or Eli Roth territory. The reality is that even for the most hardened veterans, witnessing and causing death are enormously traumatic events whose effects linger for decades, despite the protections of comprehensive training and psychological conditioning. Along with the troops who endure such horrific scenes themselves, I have deep respect for those who provide counseling services to soldiers. That shit will fuck you up. And if it doesn't, something ain't right.

To everyone but a psychopath the act of intentionally causing another person's death is, or should be, troubling at the bare minimum. Yet games like Black Ops continually ask us to behave like psychopaths without any consideration of how doing so implicates us in self-destructive, reductionist attitudes toward actual war. Their visual fidelity is precisely why they should be used not as arcade shooting galleries, which they are at bottom, but as simulators that allow players to experience the incredibly complex and disturbing aspects of combat.

In Black Ops' very last scene, SPOILERS, you finally catch up with the Big Bad Russian Guy after enduring a Fight Club twist you saw coming hours ago. You subdue him, pinning him to a catwalk submerged in water. The game then tells you to push in the analog sticks repeatedly to choke him to death. Here is the revenge fantasy come to fruition: Instead of concluding with a non-interactive cutscene in which you put a bullet in his head once and for all, you need to commit the deed yourself. You are given control of this oddly intimate act of violence. There are no blades, no guns, just your hands around his throat, pure human force. It's the most personal moment in the game, and it's as anticlimactic and emotionally empty as you'd expect. But I doubt that's because Treyarch is making a statement about the emptiness of revenge. Instead, I think it's emotionally empty in the way porn is emotionally empty: It's supposed to be.

Gimme the Loot

2011-06-21T15:00:00.008-04:00

Lock thine windows, close thine doors.

I think it's high time we retire the term "loot whore." The concept is innocent enough, I suppose: A player who can't get enough of the in-game acquisition of progressively more powerful and valuable equipment. The kind of player for whom every new dungeon-crawler becomes a compulsory purchase, for whom the thrill of leveling up is secondary only to the thrill of acquiring more and better gear. The kind of player, um, hooked by click-fests like Titan Quest, Torchlight, and their forerunner Diablo. The label "loot whore" is worn by some as a badge of pride, by some as a badge of shame, by some as both, but the meaning is clear: This is a player who loves killing monsters and grabbing the shit they drop.

Of course, any time you add the word "whore" to a phrase, you open up a host of weird implications. Does a being a loot whore involve "selling yourself" in some way? Does it imply having resigned yourself to habitual abuse, addiction, or degradation? Does the game become your pimp, your provider and abuser, your drip-feed of pleasure and punishment? Or is it, like most terms invented by and for gamers, just kinda stupid?

As it happens, Titan Quest was a favorite. I loved the setting and the art, the fast pace of combat, the relentless focus on finding new and improved gear. There was something almost shamefully compelling about progressing from one area to the next, holding out hope for a matching set of rare armor. It's the same feeling that more recent titles like Borderlands and Torchlight (and, presumably, the upcoming Diablo III) try to capture. If you could just find that Archmage's Mantle, you'd gain all the bonuses of the full set. You'd be unstoppable. You could stop searching for new stuff and focus on kicking ass.

Of course, there is no stopping the search in games like Titan Quest. The search is the game. Inevitably there is a more powerful weapon, a stronger shield, a more potent rune to discover. Inventory space is limited—slotting all your crap into the allotted space even becomes a sort of puzzle mini-game in Titan Quest—so you're forced to sell or discard items as you progress; there's little room for sentimentality. That's not much of an issue, though, since whatever loose plot or quest structure exists in the game is secondary to the allure of grabbing new stuff. Only those players with inhuman levels of patience and thoroughness, the obsessive collectors and explorers, will ever feel remotely close to satisfied. If they do their job well, designers will keep you right in that sweet spot between satisfaction with your current gear and lust for shiny new gear.

Titan Quest's inventory screen, a game in itself.

I've been thinking about acquisition lately, about the idea of collecting stuff. Maybe it's just because I'm getting ~~older~~ more experienced or have less time, but my patience for loot-grabs has worn thin. While I like Torchlight—it's cute, it's easy to learn, it hits all the right genre notes—I just can't bring myself to finish it. I'm not invested in boosting my stats with specialized gear or delving into sidequest dungeons in search of new trinkets. None of it seems to matter.

And that's in a game that's explicitly focused on collection, where new gear actually has a tangible, if often modest, impact on gameplay. The fact that collectibles are increasingly being shoehorned into games like Alan Wake and L.A. Noire, where they clearly make no narrative or environmental sense and offer no reward aside from the Pavlovian bloop of the Achievement, has soured me on the entire endeavor of acquisition. Funny that it took collectibles as transparently silly as coffee thermoses to illuminate just how wasteful the practice of obsessing over loot can be. Is the never-ending quest for better armor in Titan Quest substantially different from the Herculean challenge of smashing every EDF crate in Red Faction: Guerrilla? Do slightly improved stats justify the hours spent? What does it say about me as a player if I think they do—or if I just enjoy mindlessly collecting stuff?

The problem with an acquisition-obsessed culture like our own is that it obscures notions of value. The ability to amass a collection of stuff is in itself perceived as a virtue, without much thought as to the meaning(s) being conveyed—either by the stuff being collected or by the act of collection itself.

Increasingly, I'm finding that what I find valuable in games is not the massive amount of stuff to collect or tasks to complete or square mileage to explore, but the ability of the experience to make me think. Vague notions of "choice," "openness," and "variety" are often touted as indicators of value; in this sense many games become digital theme parks, playgrounds crammed full of Things To Do/See/Get. That can be fun, sure. But it's probably not a sustainable design ethic in the long run.

Torchlight's inventory screen. Now with more pets!

The ultimate irony here is that even as I tire of collecting things in games, I'm not tiring of collecting games themselves. I find myself tracking price drops and weekend sales on at least three different sites. I ask friends on forums for recommendations. I sign up for email alerts from publishers and retailers. I trawl the AppStore on my iPad for the latest free time-wasters, games I'm certain I will only play once, if at all. The hunt for cheap or free new games to add to my increasingly untenable collection is often more engaging than the games themselves. I'm running out of room on my shelves, both physical and digital, yet I still feel compelled to seek out new prey. The search is the game. And I'm not sure how comfortable I am with that.

The Theater Kids

2011-06-01T14:15:00.001-04:00

Yeah, that pretty much covers it.

There's a certain detached resentment that years of playing in pit orchestras breeds. No one's bringing you roses, and the only applause you can expect is the courtesy round when the cast deigns to wave at the conductor after taking their third or fourth bows. Without the backbone of your music, your rhythm, the people prancing about on stage would look pretty ridiculous indeed. But that doesn't matter. The Theater Kids, the ones who live for the show, the ones on stage, the ones who are on stage even when they're not on stage, this is their moment. You consign yourself to being an afterthought. But still you wait breathlessly for the invite to the cast party. If anyone remembers your name.

By the time I got to college I was done playing in orchestras, but because of the interdisciplinary humanities program I was enrolled in, I still had occasion to interact with plenty of Theater Kids. They were a different species than those I encountered in high school. Very few were proto-divas in the way they were back home, where the peculiar ennui of the small-city suburbs fertilized delusions of grandeur. They were not the obnoxiously ebullient children I'd encountered for years. No, these were a different lot. They wore scarves in the summer and hung out at the coffee shops across town, not the usual haunts closer to campus where the plebeians went. They smoked cloves. They had studied art history, knew about rhetoric and post-modernism, could rattle off the names of texts by German philosophers. They had been to Europe. They loved to talk. They touched your arm when making a point. And they were free, my God, they were so free, unencumbered by the strictures of conventional morality, canon, sexuality, social interaction. They were forever new, forever wild. They were bewitching.

Of course, they were illusions.

The more I interacted with the Theater Kids the more I grew to dread being compelled to spend time with them: in the dorms, at friends' parties, at humanities events, and especially in classes. Nearly every encounter was a one-sided trip into Too Much Information territory. The number of ways in which they were able to relate, say, Edmund Spencer's poetry or Native American creation myths to their own sexual or spiritual awakenings was astounding. Especially since these revelations were always conducted in cosmically inappropriate public forums, like 8:15 AM Intro to Renaissance Lit sessions. In their every behavioral tic there was an element of performance, a calculated attempt to concentrate attention on the performer. Everything was hyperbolically "meaningful." Conversations were full of words like "aesthetics" and "deconstruct"—words strategically deployed to encourage the appearance of intelligence—while utterly devoid of questions for the other participant. Unless, of course, that other participant was an authority figure who could somehow benefit them or a fellow Theater Kid, who would make a complementary show of genuine connection and understanding. In retrospect, I shouldn't be surprised I grew apprehensive about hanging out with 19-year-olds in berets who never shut up about their "craft."

The most heartbreaking thing about Theater Kids for me was that I really wanted to like them. I wanted to surround myself with people who could help me grow, who would help me understand new perspectives, who were different from the dopes I was used to back home. But too often, there just wasn't anything there besides compulsive self-promotion. Everything was indeed "meaningful," but only inasmuch as it related to them. They were, in short, the perfect target market for social media.

Nothing has taken me back to the feeling I used to get around Theater Kids as much as three games I've played recently: Braid, Limbo, and Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP. I really wanted to like all three, but I can't help feeling they're really just Theater Kids—long on style, short on substance.

Braid is the game I liked least, and consequently the one I've spent the least time with. Picked it up for a few bucks on a recent Steam sale, and put it away after maybe an hour. I get what it's doing, believe me. It was all the gushing essays about it that made me feel like it was a must-play to begin with. I get the point about reversing time, trying to fix your mistakes, the futility of trying to erase regret. The time-reversal mechanic is an elegant way to convey that theme. I can dig that. But perhaps it's the fact that I played it three years after it first set the world on fire, but as a game, it's just not grabbing me. I could have gotten that theme just by reading about it; in this case, the play experience has added little to my understanding or appreciation of the theme. The essays on Braid, in my view, are infinitely more interesting than the game itself, which from what I experienced is largely jumping backwards on meatballs' heads and collecting jigsaw pieces and reading cryptic poetry. The art style is pretty, no doubt, but damned if this game doesn't ooze with "look at me!" sentiment, from the purple prose of the on-screen text to the assumption that I give a crap about Young Angus Young or what assembling his jigsaw puzzle might reveal. It's as if the game is screaming "I AM MEANINGFUL!" at you. It's interesting to contrast Braid with ilomilo, since both are gorgeously-stylized brain-twisters, but evoke very different reactions.

My feelings about Limbo are a little more complex. While I wouldn't ascribe the same flamboyant egotism to Limbo as I do to Braid, I agree with Mitch Krpata that it is conspicuous in drawing attention to itself. Mitch describes the game as "smoke and mirrors," dissecting the ways its changing rules are more "artifice" than "truth." I tend to agree; while Limbo's utter lack of instruction to the player is unique in this era of hand-holding, the whole affair smacks a bit of Dragon's Lair to me. That game, you may recall, was also famous for causing frequent death. Failure is the only instructional tool at the developer's command. That gets old quickly, especially given that for a game that requires precision, Limbo's controls are awfully sluggish. But more damning to me are the game's pretensions at meaning. It wants us to ask all these heavy questions—Who is this boy and what is this nightmare world? Why are these creatures and other kids out to get him? What about all the dead children's bodies? Are we in Purgatory, as the title suggests? But in reverting to buzzsaws and electrified walkways and rising-water puzzles, Limbo steps on its own foot. The questions become secondary to just figuring out how the game is screwing with you in this next puzzle. As Mitch said, it doesn't give us more than a hint of what's really interesting, electing instead to throw a whole lot more familiar junk at us and trust that we'll confuse hints of meaning for actual meaning. If that's not a prime Theater Kid trait, I don't know what is.

But the biggest disappointment of this group for me is clearly Sworcery, which I refuse to call by its absurd full title any longer. I had read so many fascinating things from pals I respect that this was the first app I bought when I recently acquired an iPad. My Kill Screen colleague Rob Dubbin's review was so brilliantly written that I was immediately sold.

To be sure, Sworcery is pretty. The music and sound, in particular, live up to the hype. The ascending whole-step riff that plays when you lift a Sprite up to the sky? Simple, subtle, and gorgeous. The ambient sound (e.g. the rustling of bushes) is wonderfully atmospheric. Despite the pixel-art style, which I think is starting to get kinda played out, you can't fault Sworcery on presentation. It doesn't hurt that it features one of the most natural-feeling implementations of touch controls I've yet seen.

By my goodness, is there a game there?

Its creators describe Sworcery as "an unusual genre-bending effort with an emphasis on sound, music & audiovisual style that has been positioned as 'a brave experiment in Input Output Cinema.'" That, right there, is the perfect encapsulation of what makes Sworcery a Theater Kid. That description sounds really fascinating and deep at first glance, but upon closer examination reveals itself to be only somewhat comprehensible. Look, I get that they're being somewhat satirical here. I get the laid-back attitude conceit. I love the idea of experimentation, of playing with genre and expectations. The surrounding trappings are just irritating as hell.

A few elements in particular turn me off in this regard. The first is the incessant prompts to Tweet things, which I suppose is a cool guerrilla marketing technique for an indie developer and which was obviously very successful. But it also reflects the constant need for attention—the figurative "shouting into a room"—that is endemic to both the medium of Twitter and to Theater Kids. Things are being said, but that they are being said by the person who's saying them is more important than what is being said.

The other element I can't get past is the slacker-speak of the narration. Again, I get that it's a stylistic choice and through its contrast with the conventions of the fantasy adventure genre, calls attention to the experimental nature of the game. But I find it grating for that very reason. The presentation can speak for itself. You don't need to bludgeon us with hipness. Twitter gives us enough of that crap already. I close out of my play sessions feeling like an uptight nerd who's just left a gathering of cool kids who barely acknowledged him.

Sworcery feels to me like it is working really hard—and is obviously fairly successful in doing so—to concentrate attention on itself as a performance, if that makes any sense. Chapters close with a cigar-smoking narrator talking at you from a stage, with a curtain backdrop and everything. The spinning record is a constant motif, an image of musical performance. To me, Sworcery wants to be more performance art than game. That's fine; the game even explicitly warns us of that in its description of itself. But it's the peculiarly calculating nature of its execution that gives it that uncomfortable Theater Kid feeling.

Look, I don't mean to sound overly negative here. There are terrific, worthwhile elements to all three of these games, just as I'm sure many of those Theater Kids grew into terrific, worthwhile human beings (or, you know, were all along). But I've always found the things that were most meaningful in my life never made a show of being meaningful. They didn't need the applause. They just quietly earned it.

Keep on Trekkin'

2011-04-28T14:30:00.001-04:00

Okay, full disclosure: I'm writing this post mostly to have an excuse to share this image.

It doesn't take much to get me to extol the virtues of Star Trek, as certain people named after certain starship captains can attest. Buy me a couple Racer 5's and I'll happily expound upon the psychologically symbolic triumvirate of Kirk, Spock and Bones, or describe in minute detail my childhood epiphany at Sir Patrick Stewart's famous "There are four lights!"

I blame my father and syndication, in that order.

It's worth noting that the only branches of the franchise I followed were the original series, The Next Generation, and their associated movies. (I'm not sure if that makes me an elitist or a plebeian. Frankly, I don't want to even try to navigate the treacherous waters of Star Trek fandom's politics.)

The primary reason I never got into Deep Space Nine, Voyager, or Enterprise, I think, is that the Star Trek mythology was never remotely as interesting as the characters. And the performances of that original cast and the Next Generation actors, in their earnestness, humor, and occasional subtlety, realized the sense of romance, adventure, and promise Gene Roddenberry's "Western in Space" premise afforded. Due respect to the spin-off series, but their lack of compelling characters and emphasis on mythology left me cold. Star Trek just wasn't Star Trek without Kirk and Spock or Picard and Riker.

It's unfortunate that Star Trek has had such similarly mixed success in videogames. I still think my favorite entry to date is the NES version of Star Trek: 25th Anniversary. An adventure game with light (and kind of odd) space combat, it featured a linear story with some neat illusions of choice. For away missions, you could choose two companions from your crew to accompany Captain Kirk. Spock and Bones were my defaults most of the time, but you would also need to take along specialists (a geologist to study rock formations, a redshirt for extra firepower) to solve certain puzzles. Familiar faces like Harry Mudd and settings like the 1920s Chicago planet even made appearances. The experience was very much like playing through an episode of the show, albeit with some fetch-and-assemble quests shoehorned in.

Revealed a WHAT, Spock? Spit it out, you green-blooded Vulcan!

The other Star Trek game I have fond memories of is the Next Generation title for the SNES, Future's Past. The setup was similar to 25th Anniversary, but with more variety and some pseudo-open-endedness. Rotating through the bridge stations would allow you to warp to any location in the galaxy (although, to my knowledge, the only gameplay content was found on the story-related planets), browse dozens of entries in the library computer, or call a briefing in the conference room. You had many options for away team personnel and equipment, and the top-down space combat, viewed on Worf's tactical screen, was oddly satisfying—even if it was essentially flying in circles while spraying & praying. In retrospect, it probably wasn't that great of a game, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

The majority of the entries in the Star Trek videogame roster are, from what I can discern, a distinctly mediocre lot. The best of the rest, in my experience, was Elite Force, a solid FPS with a good amount of variety in environments and some surprisingly interesting character development. Of the several Star Trek RTS games released in the last two decades, the only one I tried was New Worlds, which was decidedly clunky and largely incongruous with my experience of the franchise. Shattered Universe on Xbox was abysmal, and the demo of Legacy I downloaded or the 360 was nigh-unplayable. The incomprehensibly titled shoot-em-up Star Trek: D-A-C, a tie-in to the 2009 J.J. Abrams movie, was only tangentially related to the franchise and barely worth the half hour I sunk into its demo. Finally, although I don't play MMOs, I can say with some confidence that Star Trek Online has not exactly lit the galaxy on fire.

And that makes perfect sense to me. Again: the characters, not the universe, are the draw. A Star Wars MMO might stand a better chance of success, given the wide variety of powers and abilities for the player to draw upon. But the Star Trek fiction doesn't really allow for much of that. And even if it did, there seems much less flexibility in the franchise canon for players to create their own stories. Star Trek has always felt more stiff-collared than the wanton playground of the Star Wars universe.

Computers? Worf got MAD computers in this bitch, son.

It's a shame we haven't gotten stronger efforts lately in the Star Trek game, um, space. In fact, I think now is an opportune time to reinvigorate the franchise in the adventure genre, for a number of reasons:

Episodic game storytelling works. Telltale has proven again and again that it can be not only a viable business model, but also an engaging format. Star Trek was at its best when it was episodic, letting the mythology serve as a backdrop for character development, not the other way around. Building a sprawling game world around its arcane lore seems backward to me.
Optimism is welcome. One of my favorite things about Roddenberry's vision of the future is that we didn't fuck it up. Intelligence, innovation, and compassion won out, all but eliminating hunger, poverty, and intra-species war. How many games do you know that present the exact opposite outlook? Aren't we all a bit apocalypsed-out by now?
The uncanny valley is narrowing. Advances in technology and designer skill have rewarded players with more photorealism than ever before. This is particularly useful in character-focused game narratives, which convey increasing levels of subtlety and nuance in performance. Imagine L.A. Noire's technology applied to a Star Trek game. It'd really be something to see that paired with voice performances by the actors we know and love. (And not to be too morbid, but, uh, Shatner, Nimoy & Co. ain't getting any younger—so sooner would be better than later.)
The adventure game is making a comeback. The buzz around L.A. Noire is due in part, I think, to the experimentation of titles like Heavy Rain and Deadly Premonition, and perhaps even the retro appeal of indie gems like Gemini Rue. There's a demand for this kind of game experience, which seems perfectly suited to Star Trek's strengths.
Marketing opportunities abound. Naturally, Abrams will have a sequel in theatres soon enough, and an attractive young cast can't hurt any potential tie-in. But in the 45 (!!) years since it first debuted, Star Trek has continually demonstrated its lasting appeal. There's a built-in fan base that will automatically snap up anything Star Trek-related, sure. But I think the makers of Star Trek Online may have counted a little too heavily on that. Again: characters. Telltale's Back to the Future game would not have sold nearly as well had they not gotten Christopher Lloyd and a remarkably good Michael J. Fox impersonator to do the voice acting. Nobody gives a crap about Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime not just because it's a dumb twin-stick shooter, but because it doesn't star the original Ghostbusters. Of course, getting some names attached is only the first step: Several of the mediocre Star Trek games featured recognizable talent. But pairing that talent with the appropriate game format and some of the series' experienced writers could be a huge draw.

Obviously, it would take a massive amount of investment, coordination, and skill to pull off a satisfying Star Trek adventure game. But as Spock might say, it's only logical.

Downgrading the Forecast

2011-04-23T14:13:00.001-04:00

Story of my life.

Apologies for the absence of new material here lately, friends. I'm afraid the outlook for the next few months is equally grim, as a number of professional and personal commitments will prevent me from writing here very much. We may want to downgrade the posting forecast from "intermittent" to somewhere between "very light" and "nonexistent" for a while.

In the meantime, I do hope you'll enjoy a few things I've been working on lately.

1. At Kill Screen, I participated in a group review of the new Mortal Kombat title. Well, kind of. We actually just reviewed some of the fatalities. But as the editor's note says, that's kind of the ideal way to get at the (violently extracted, still-beating) heart of a Mortal Kombat game: Just go straight to the main attraction. This assignment was a lot of fun, and I'm currently loving getting my various body parts lacerated/severed/crushed/excised in the game itself. Quick impressions: The B-movie schlock of the Story mode is a hoot, which makes the terrible sound mixing all the more tragic. I can't even hear the backing music well enough to determine if it is, in fact, Nelson.

2. The last of my PAX East coverage is finally up over at Gamer Melodico. Here's the full rundown:

A review of Jane McGonigal's keynote speech.
Part 1 and Part 2 of our event roundup.
A preview of upcoming XBLA title Bastion, including an interview with the game's creative director.
A look at Telltale Games' Jurassic Park: The Game.

Against my better judgment, I also have at least ~~two~~ one other article in the works for other outlets; I'll link here when I can. If I'm not too busy getting my face eaten.

UPDATE, 4/26: And the first is now live on Gamers With Jobs! Read "Paging Dr. Schadenfreude" here.

Ab Initio

2011-04-06T15:00:00.033-04:00

(Post contains mild spoilers for Chapter 1 of Dead Space 2. Abandon hope all ye, etc.)

When I taught high school English in a former life, I used to tell my students that if a book didn't grab them in the first 15 pages, it was probably the book's fault, not theirs. Unless it was one of the books I assigned in class, in which case it was definitely their fault.

A strong opening chapter is just as essential for a game with any pretense of narrative. Crafting a successful opening isn't an easy feat in any medium, but games have the added complication of needing to teach the player how to play in the first several minutes. I've learned to appreciate it when designers can insert tutorial elements into their opening moments with dexterity and thematic relevance, as opposed to the wanton extra-diegetic shoehorning most games make us endure.

Similarly, bogging us down in long cutscenes or copious text in the opening is an equally solid way to guarantee we won't give a crap about your game's story. We want to play right away. We want to inhabit the game world, not simply view it or read about it. This is especially important in horror games like the Dead Space franchise, where so much of the tension is dependent on the player's reaction to in-game sights and sounds. The backstory is relevant only inasmuch as it informs the conflict of the moment. (That's why I think the franchise masters have made the right call in shunting most of the series' lore to other media like novels and comics instead of burdening the games with it.)

So I was pleasantly surprised by the in medias res opening sequence of Dead Space 2. After a cutscene that establishes multiple conflicts in relatively short order—Isaac is still hallucinating his dead girlfriend, he's being interrogated in some kind of quasi-fascist insane asylum—we're thrust right into the action as an attempt to rescue Isaac is thwarted by a Necromorph outbreak. So we have an unreliable, possibly insane narrator, an implied shady government/corporate conspiracy, and an alien invasion. And who are these people trying to break Isaac out, and why? What's happened to land him in this facility? We're not yet five minutes in and already several conflicts have been established. So far, so good. But then things get interesting.

Once Isaac is released from the gurney he's been strapped to, he's forced to flee the ward as Necromorphs jump out from around corners and burst through ducts. Cue the frantic escape sequence. But here's the fun part: he's still tied up in a straight jacket. A prompt instructs us to hold down the left shoulder button to run. The straight jacket conceit makes this particular piece of scaffolding feel natural while also playing on that horror movie trope, the powerless protagonist.

I actually intentionally failed this sequence a few times so I could indulge my curiosity about the environmental storytelling in the surrounding area. Wheelchairs and debris litter the hallway. Other inmates in adjoining cells convulse in their straight jackets while the Necromorphs attack. (Mrs. JPG posited two good questions: "Can you save any of them?" and "Wait, why are they in straight jackets if they're already locked in cells?" The answers are, spoilers, "No," and "Beats the hell out of me.") Some inmates have scrawled cryptic messages on the walls (sigh); but instead of using blood, they've apparently used their own excrement (...yay?). Which, from what I understand from Lockup, is fairly realistic.

More remarkable than the fact that I could fail this opening sequence—I suspect few games in this genre allow you to die almost immediately after first taking control of your avatar—was that it was accomplishing so many objectives at once: Teaching the player a key ability; building a horror movie sense of powerlessness; setting up multiple conflicts; establishing setting; introducing enemies; and hinting at backstory. For a short sequence, it's quite elegant.

The rest of the first chapter contains additional flourishes, including some outstanding sound design and lighting effects, a couple predictable but effective "thing goes bump in the dark" scares, and a few nifty claustrophobic tunnel-crawling sequences. There's also some fun environmental storytelling to come across, like the interrogation video of another prisoner or the Marker made out of toothpicks in the arts & crafts room. The jury's still out for me on the newly-speech-capable Isaac—mostly because the things he's said so far are pretty generically action-movie dopey—but I am intrigued to see what happens with the "dementia" mechanic, if managing Isaac's growing insanity will become an Amnesia-like challenge.

What I'd really like to see, and what I'm sure Dead Space 2 won't give me because it's a big budget AAA title that needs to move lots of units, is a high-flying freak flag. I want the game to disorient me more, to be more Stanley Kubrick than Ridley Scott. The power of the in medias res device is that it forces the audience to play catch-up, to use their imagination to fill in gaps, make logical leaps, and interrogate details. With a well-designed world, that can make for a much more enjoyable experience. The horror genre allows for a lot of creativity in that sense. Here's hoping Dead Space 2 can deliver.

Turrets' Syndrome

2011-03-20T21:55:00.000-04:00

It wasn't the fact that I was firing a mounted machine gun from the back of a driverless wagon in the rural Italy of 1503 that swore me off turret sequences. But it didn't help.

I like Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. Ubisoft can keep cranking out Ezio chapters indefinitely, for all I care. I'd never say no to another beautifully-rendered Renaissance stab-fest. But I'm maybe halfway through this game, and it boggles the mind that I've already had to endure not one, but two turret sequences.

I understand the desire to spice up gameplay that can become formulaic—travel here, trail this guy, stab him in the back, jump into a hay pile—with something a little different. You know the old saying about variety and spice. But throwing a turret sequence into an Assassin's Creed game is like spiking your martini with mayonnaise.

To some extent it's an no-win proposition for developers: Make sure your game is chock-full of variety, but don't stray from your core mechanics. Don't bore us with the same thing over and over, but don't do anything too far afield from what we're used to. It's one of many Kobayashi Marus in the design world. You're inevitably going to piss off someone.

I'm all for developers taking risks and throwing curveballs at the player by way of jarring, even unexplained changes in the core mechanic. It's a mark of respect, in a way: It's telling the player you think she can handle a new challenge, a different mode of interaction. If a game is really smart, it'll use that shift to advance or reinforce a theme. (Ahem.)

But I think it's safe to say turret sequences haven't done that for a long-ass time, if ever. I'm talking about scripted sequences, of course, not games like Halo or Left 4 Dead where you can choose to man a turret at certain points if you want to. (L4D in particular has some pretty brilliant turret placement—particularly in the second level of the No Mercy campaign, where there's a hole in the floor behind the turret and you have to have a teammate watch your back while you fire.) No, I'm talking on-rails, shoot X number of cowboys/spaceships/Borgia guards to complete the mission, then back to your regularly-scheduled military shooter/open-world sandbox/survival horror game sequences.

Look, I like shooting galleries. In an arcade, at a giant cabinet? Sure. In a console game? Kinda played out.

Weird thing is, I actually used to dig turret sequences. There was something interesting about the tension between the enormous power of a minigun at your fingertips and the danger of having to stay immobile while you were being shot at. But after suffering through interminable gatling gun sequence after interminable gatling gun sequence in Red Dead Redemption, and very nearly rage-quitting Dead Space during that goddamn meteor-shooting minigame, I'm just done with them. The turret sequence has become a trope to be endured rather than an exciting change of pace. So you can imagine the intensity of the eye-rolling that occurred when Ezio jumped on the back of the Leo-Mobile.

Maybe because it's become such an expectation, it's become a lot more difficult to pull off an enjoyable turret sequence. This is probably blasphemy, but I found the helicopter turret sequence in 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand way more enjoyable than the few in Battlefield: Bad Company 2. In the latter game, wonky checkpointing and unclear damage indication hampered the experience. The former game makes it clear it wants you to treat it like an arcade game, which maybe accounts for the better implementation.

It's gotten to the point where turret sequences, no matter how well done, will leave a bad taste in my mouth. Mowing down dozens or hundreds of faceless enemies doesn't make me feel powerful anymore. It just makes me feel like a mass murderer. Even in games like Assassin's Creed, which are very pointedly about being a murderer.

So I wonder: is that the irony of the videogame trope? Or is it the irony of the weapon itself?

Pre-PAX Update

2011-03-07T22:59:00.000-05:00

This Friday, PAX East 2011 kicks into gear. I'm stoked to be covering the event for my pals at Gamer Melodico. I'll be sure to link to that coverage here once it's up. Hijinks: guaranteed to ensue.

Friends unfamiliar with the greater Boston area convention center scene, and who are you because we may have to not be friends anymore until you correct that, rest assured the new venue is much larger than the Hynes. Last year's event was pretty cramped, and now that the organizers have a better idea exactly how many folks will flock to our fair city for the weekend, I'm confident the environs will be more accommodating.

I mean, I'm still gonna bring my DS, though.

Regular Infinite Lag readers—all three of you—will notice I haven't kept up my typically torrid posting pace lately. I've obviously been putting all my energy into punchy alliteration and poor attempts at sarcasm.

I did manage to conserve at least a little energy, though, for a piece I'm quite proud of: "Data, Commander." It was my first contribution to Gamers With Jobs, the site that, single tear, really got me started writing seriously about games. Shawn, Sean, Julian, Rob, Lara, Cory, Allen, Erik and the rest of the motley crew over there have built an amazing community and consistently produce terrific writing and a top-quality podcast. I'm honored to be welcomed into the fold.

I'm also continuing to write for Kill Screen as long as they'll have me. In addition to the two reviews I've done recently—one on free browser game ...But That Was [Yesterday] and another on Xbox Live Indie Game Cthulhu Saves the World—I've got a piece in the upcoming print issue. Speaking of which, you really ought to do yourself a favor and subscribe. You won't regret it.

There are a number of games I do want to jabber about here on the blog, including recent acquisitions like Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and Dawn of War II: Retribution, but I'm afraid they'll have to wait until after PAX. Sorry, games, and sorry, visitors. I love you both, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and terribly cliché thieveries on which to end blog posts.

In Rotation, January/February 2011

2011-02-21T16:09:00.009-05:00

Although I've neglected to tally them here until now, I have managed to play a surprising number of games these past few months. Without further ado, here's the Winter 2010-2011 edition of In Rotation:

XBOX 360

Finished up Just Cause 2. Well, the story, anyway. After 50+ hours I'm still only at 55% complete. Wish I had picked it up when it first came out - it's become one of my go-to games. Wrote about it a few weeks back.
Also polished off the main story of Red Dead Redemption and maybe half of the main questline in the Undead Nightmare add-on. I'm a bit RDR'ed out, I think, although I do plan to finish the DLC, which I'm digging. The final act of the main game left such a weird (not bad - just uncanny) taste in my mouth that I'm not quite sure how to reconcile it all. Without getting into too much detail or trespassing into spoiler country, let's just say I remain baffled by why the final act wasn't the first act.
Singularity. Discussed that one already.
Dante's Inferno. Ditto.
Rock Band 3. A great selection of tracks, although I confess I haven't spent as much time as I'd like with it yet; still waiting on the twice-delayed MIDI adapter attachment so I can hook up my keyboard.
Splinter Cell: Conviction. Okay, so now I understand Fisher-Fest 2010. I don't really have much to say about this game other than that playing through it was like idly half-watching a rerun of Commando on TV while killing a bag of Jax on a lazy Sunday. It is what it is. And you feel vaguely guilty afterward.
Mass Effect 2: Lair of the Shadow Broker. Well, it's more Mass Effect 2. And, um, remember Mass Effect 2? That was awesome.
Two Worlds II. Honestly, I was rooting for this one. A few critics I admire spoke highly of this B-movie fantasy title, and knowing my predilection for somewhat broken yet charming games, I thought this'd be right up my alley. Nope. In the few hours I played before I gave up - and I hate giving up - the combat was just far too broken. At least my frustration prompted Mrs. JPG's suggested review title: "Two Worlds II: Drop This Deuce."
Cthulhu Saves the World. Check out my review of this old-school indie gem at Kill Screen.
Ilomilo. This brain-twisting puzzler is extraordinarily well-made and unrelentingly adorable. I'll have a lot more to say about this one once the wife and I finish our co-op playthrough, but for now, please enjoy this image of our friendly "thumb-creatures" enjoying a nice cup of tea.

NINTENDO DS

Puzzle Quest 2. Although there's no doubt the presentation, role-playing elements, and puzzle variety are much improved over the original, the battles are freakin' interminable. I wonder if the scaling system is broken; at level 37, I don't feel significantly more powerful than my adversaries. I like the addition of "action points" gems and the search, disarm, unlock, and loot minigames, but I feel like I'm treading water in the story.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent. A few hours in, I'm still wondering when this gets scary. There have been a few tense and cool setpiece moments - the monster's footprints in the water come to mind - but my primary reaction has not been fear but annoyance so far. It's difficult for me to parse which elements of the game world can be interacted with and which are static; for example, I wasted two oil canisters trying to escape a room by jumping through a hole in the ceiling when all I had to do was move some rocks. That'd be a "duh" moment except for the fact that the rocks I'd encountered earlier, in other rooms, were immovable. I do have to praise Amnesia for its audio design, though - one of the best examples of ambient sound in recent memory.
...But That Was [Yesterday]. I also reviewed this one for Kill Screen; very worth the 15 minutes it'll take you to complete.
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War. I LOVE IT. SHUT UP.

Liberate Me Ex Inferno

2011-02-11T16:02:00.005-05:00

Dante vs. a Rancor. IT'S IN THE POEM, LOOK IT UP.

Because it’s apparently Catch Up On Mediocre Games You Missed In 2010 Month at Infinite Lag, I went against the advice of Mitch Dyer and popped in my latest library rental, Visceral Games' Dante’s Inferno, last night.

Yowch.

Like everyone else with a moderately-developed sense of decorum, I was perplexed by the over-the-top marketing campaign for this game. Lost in the bewildering reports of "lust contests" and $200 checks sent to journalists was any idea of what the game actually was.

Turns out it's a brawler. And, at least a few chapters in, not a very good one.

Generally, there's nothing like intentionally idiotic PR to cool any interest I might have in a game. But I eventually became interested in Dante's Inferno for a few reasons.

The game had stayed off my radar until a few months ago, when one of my favorite critics, L.B. Jeffries, praised it in his year-end ranking for Kill Screen. "Dante's Inferno gets top marks," he wrote, "for having the audacity to focus on creating an artistic space instead of a spiffy plot or anything but familiar gameplay." Back in March, he'd written a PopMatters column called "The Literary Merits of Dante's Inferno," where he described a number of connections between the poem and the game and explained how certain game mechanics - like absolving or damning characters from the poem - reflect the themes of the Divine Comedy. As a game, he implies, Dante's Inferno is not that great; but with a copy of the poem nearby, there are a lot of cool flourishes to look for and find. (This is true: Mrs. JPG enjoyed trawling Wikipedia for info on each of the poor souls I encountered, and helping me determine how to judge them for their sins.) Jeffries concludes with this piece of irony: Despite its emphasis on mass appeal, "the only people who will really enjoy the game are fans of the poem."

Having been a lit major in college, I was appropriately scandalized when they turned Beowulf into a shitty CG action movie, and I didn't even like that text. The idea of a videogame adaptation of the Inferno, which I had loved, certainly rankled at first. (The PR nonsense didn't help.) But as I read Jeffries' piece and reflected on my own experience with Deadly Premonition, another game with a rich setting and lousy mechanics, I thought: what the Hell. Maybe they've done something creative. After all, Dante's language is incredibly visual; the Inferno could be fascinating territory for world-building.

Instead, in the first two hours of the game, I got the following:

An extravaganza of inexplicable button-mashing combat
A duel with Death Himself that somehow did not involve Battleship
Tedious platforming sequences remixed with insipid puzzles
Incongruously-styled motion comic backstory cutscenes
Tits
More tits
God of War Lite boss battles
More QTEs than you can shake a scythe at
Glitchy Virgil
Space Marine Mark Antony
Blade-armed Hellbabies spilling out of MegaCleopatra's nipples
Vagina demons/penis pillars
The Power of Christ Impales You

"Best three out of five!"

And in the latest edition of OMG What Have I Done To My Wife, this choice quote from Mrs. JPG:

"So...how is this game not Japanese?"

Facetiousness aside, the biggest issue with Dante's Inferno so far is that Visceral just picked the wrong genre. Nothing about the poem recommends itself to a hack-'n-slash more than to, say, an adventure game. The sacrilege here is not appropriating a literary masterpiece for a videogame, or even reformulating the plot and characters. It's appropriating this particular masterpiece for this particular kind of game.

Witness the following statements from creative director Jonathan Knight, who spoke to Gamasutra in this pillow-soft interview:

Again, it's an action game, and it's a game in which you do a lot of combat, and that combat is the heart of the game; that's what it is, first and foremost, and that's why it's entertaining, is that the combat feels so good.

And so, we absolutely had to craft a narrative around a very aggressive protagonist with supernatural weapons, and the ability to break into Hell and fight through the nine circles. So, knowing that that's what video games are, and that's what video games are going to be, we definitely had to craft a narrative around that.

Not sure that Dante's Inferno's combat actually does feel good, but regardless, I understand the idea. If you're making an action game, it's common practice to feature a badass power fantasy protagonist. And it's okay, then, to stretch the boundaries of the fiction in service of fun gameplay. Got it.

The fact remains that none of this preposterous stretching - the slaying of Death with his own magical scythe, the slaughtering of endless identical minions, the use of collected souls to upgrade combos, the health-restoring fountains found all over Hell - would be necessary if they had not chosen to make a damn action game. Visceral designed themselves into a corner. This, more than the marketing campaign, was the real bonehead move.

I agree with Jeffries that there are some interesting things going on in the environments, especially with how the designers chose to represent certain characters and locations visually. I actually liked their version of Cerberus as a bizarre H.R. Geiger sandworm alien, with its hundred chomping mouths, guarding the entry to the Gluttony level. That makes sense thematically, if not narratively.

But what makes the bulleted list above so silly is that so many of the elements in Dante's Inferno appear to have been inserted explicitly for action-game shock/coolness value. Killing babies! Giant wall-mounted genitalia! Blood! Boobs! Regardless of whether we'd seen them before in the God of War series, there's no consistent thematic or symbolic value there, as far as I can tell thus far. Dante's set of interactions is limited to looking at things, climbing over/around them, and killing them. The player's set of responses is limited to "Ugh!" or "Sweet!"

By their nature, action games are, with rare exceptions, intellectually lean. The Divine Comedy is not. Imagine how much richer the experience would have been had Dante's Inferno followed suit.

The Sincerest Form of Flattery

2011-02-04T11:00:00.019-05:00

Raven Software's Singularity is technically an original IP. But playing through the game, as I did this week, it's difficult to call it anything other than pastiche.

That doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it, of course. For a paint-by-numbers FPS, it was entertaining enough, with some nifty animations and satisfying, if unoriginal, action. It was quick and fun and utterly familiar, a Hershey's Kiss of a game.

What should be unique about Singularity is its core mechanic: manipulating time. The setup in brief: Your American soldier, abandoned in 2010 on a Russian island home to a secret experimental facility that went supernova back in the mid-50s, acquires a Time Manipulation Device (TMD), powered by ~~unobtanium~~ E99, a mysterious element found only on the island. With this Power Glove he can age or "revert" objects, people, and the requisite vestigial mutants inhabiting the facility. Fire at a soldier, for example, and he'll age to dust before your eyes.

Now you're playing with power, indeed.

The TMD is also handy for solving environmental puzzles, which are generally so simple and repetitive as to be laughable. Revert a collapsed crate to its unbroken state and use it to jump up to the ledge above you. Collapse the crate again, grab it using the TMD's gravity-manipulation power, and squeeze it through a small crevice so you can use it in the next room. Rinse and repeat.

The problem, as I'm sure every review has pointed out, is that the TMD only works on certain highlighted objects. That makes sense - you wouldn't want to fall through the floor every time you accidentally tapped the bumper - but it does lead to some incredibly constrained puzzle design. If I was stumped for more than a few seconds at any point during Singularity, I don't recall it. The level design is not so much bad as just remarkably uninspired. The ability to manipulate time should be a selling point, allowing the player a wealth of creative opportunities. Instead we get the same tired set of interactions over and over. So I suppose time is being manipulated, in the same way it was for Bill Murray in Groundhog Day.

Naturally, you'll do your share of time-traveling throughout the course of the B-movie story, and there are a few neat little setpieces along the way. Nothing that'll make your brain hurt, but some cool, if way too familiar, sci-fi flourishes.

That's the thing that defines Singularity: like Bill Murray's bedraggled weatherman, we can't help feeling like we've been here before. And with good reason: Singularity steals from other recent high-profile games with such brazenness and regularity that it's actually quite endearing. It's so obvious about its thievery that in a few instances, it even confused Mrs. JPG into thinking I was playing a different game.

There's the ghostly figures echoing through time, for example,

which are reminiscent of the "bleeding effect" between Desmond and Ezio in Assassin's Creed II. And even casual observers can see the similarities between "time rifts" in Singularity and the orange portals from a certain Valve blockbuster:

They even use light blue and orange as visual cues for reversion and aging on the targeting reticule. You know, like a certain Aperture Science Handheld Device?

Of course, there's the question of how much of the theft was intentional. I don't know a thing about Singularity's development cycle. It's possible none of these elements were purposefully nicked, but given the very obvious Borat reference found in a late level, I doubt the designers weren't aware of what they were doing. To quote my favorite composer, Igor Stravinsky, "Good composers borrow. Great composers steal."

I happen to like pastiche every so often. Maybe there's some part of me that craves the familiarity of the known quantity. There's something oddly comforting about Singularity in that way; you know it's retreading the trodden path, but it's nice to find yourself in familiar surroundings.

Below I've collected some of Singularity's more egregious and enjoyable thieveries. What else have I forgotten? Let me know in the comments.

Singularity BioShock
Giant tape recorder audio logs Giant tape recorder audio logs
E99 Tech ADAM
Bio-Formulas Tonics
Augmenter Gatherer's Garden
Encourages scavenging Encourages the crap out of scavenging

     Dead Space
Chrono-ping Holographic pathfinder line
Reverts Necromorphs
Giant monster boss fights Giant monster boss fights
TMD gravity manipulation Kinesis

   Halo
Phase Ticks Flood parasites

   Fallout 3
Seeker slo-mo animations VATS death animations
Hero Perks Perks
Alternate 1950s future tech dystopia Better alt. 1950s future tech dystopia

   Half-Life 2
"Interactive cutscenes" w/ NPCs Better "interactive cutscenes" w/ NPCs
TMD gravity manipulation Gravity Gun
TMD gets supercharged at end Gravity Gun gets supercharged at end

Cleared For Takeoff

2011-01-26T15:40:00.000-05:00

NOT York.

Deadly Premonition might have been fun to play and write about, but did York ever surf a plane? Thought not.

The game I spent the most time with while writing the GOTY series, mostly in an effort to maintain my sanity, was Just Cause 2. I'd borrowed it from the library over the summer and finally bought a cheap copy a month or two ago. What a fantastic piece of B-movie candy that game is.

In case you're not familiar with the premise, you star as Rico Rodriguez, secret agent of some indeterminate type, who's sent to the fictional South Pacific island of Panau to blow shit up in the name of freedom and democracy, or something. The story is unapologetically shallow. By sabotaging military equipment and government property, you earn "Chaos," which translates into new missions and money. The game's a completionist's nightmare, with a massive map featuring 368 locations to discover and destroy.

Yet it miraculously never stops being fun. Traversal, that bane of open-world games, is never monotonous, mostly because of the unique mechanic for getting around. By deploying Rico's arm-mounted grappling hook and infinite parachutes in rhythm, you're able to slingshot your way across hundreds of meters with ease. Appropriating a passing vehicle - even, say, a fighter jet - is a breeze, thanks to your trusty grappling hook and a few well-placed punches to the erstwhile driver's face. And of course, if you tire of your current vehicle, you can always grapple onto something else or bail out using one of your parachutes.

Naturally, just tooling around Panau is the big draw. It also doesn't hurt that the environments are gorgeous to look at.

There's something refreshingly endearing about Just Cause 2's approach. It's so cartoonish and over the top that pesky issues like adherence to the laws of physics or the limits of human anatomy can safely be ignored. Those, and the whole clandestine imperialist sabotage of a sovereign nation thing.

One of my favorite things to do in Just Cause 2 is hijack airplanes. Competent piloting skills aren't required when you can ditch your ride at any time. Most of the aircraft you typically encounter are military - various kinds of helicopters and fighter jets. It wasn't until probably 15 hours into the game that I realized there were commercial planes to steal as well. Presumably with full loads of passengers on board.

After a bad experience with engine trouble over the Pacific a few years back, air travel and I have not been great pals. The last thing I should be joking about is plane crashes. So it was pretty weird to hear myself addressing my terrified passengers over the imaginary PA as my onscreen avatar commandeered their aircraft. "Ladies and gentlemen, this is your hijacker speaking," I crooned to the screen. Watching me, Mrs. JPG was convinced I was having either a psychological breakthrough or a psychotic break.

Fortunately, it was the former. I even managed to work up some of that banter into a little riff for Kill Screen.

Writing that goofy piece was oddly therapeutic. The worst part of fear of flying, most sufferers will tell you, is feeling a lack of control. It doesn't matter that you are far more likely to die in a car crash on your way to the airport than you are in an accident on a commercial airline, or that you'd have to fly once a day for 22,000 years to die on a flight operated by a U.S. company. Statistics lose meaning when the heart starts racing. You're still putting your life in someone else's hands.

Just Cause 2 provided a strangely welcome inversion of that fear. I could literally swing in through the cockpit window if I felt like taking the yoke. Or I could surf on top of the plane, Teen Wolf-style, while the pilot guided it to its destination. Or I could hijack the aircraft, toss out the pilot, and then surf on top. Captain Rico was in command.

Thing is, I never bothered trying to land stolen F-14s. Panau's mountainsides and rivers are littered with their carcasses. I was content to send flaming helicopters plummeting into gas stations, chuckling as the resultant fireball sent bodies flying. I've probably killed 2,500 soldiers this playthrough, some by means as exotic as "crushing with a giant stone statue head winched to an SUV."

And yet the only time I mourned the loss of virtual life was when my Aeroliner 474 missed the runway at Panau International Airport. That's one fireball I'm not proud of.

Wrapping Up Deadly Premonition, and a Special Conversation

2011-01-24T18:50:00.036-05:00

A full month(!) of posts later, it's time to raise my glass and toast Deadly Premonition goodnight. Turns out there may actually be other games worth writing about. Who knew?

But before I bid York adieu, I want to share one of the many great conversations I've had about the game. Shortly after finishing Deadly Premonition, I enlisted fellow GWJer and indie game developer Bredon "Switchbreak" Clay - who did not like the game - to share his thoughts. His analysis of the game is quite sophisticated, and forms a great counterpoint to my own. Because it's all kinds of spoilery and pretty lengthy, our interview is hidden behind the jump. Again: If you haven't yet finished the game, please don't read this just yet. Spoilers aside, it may not make a lot of sense until you've seen how York's story plays out.

One more thing: I want to say a quick thanks to all the folks who have inspired and supported this series, which has been a blast to write. So, to Bredon, Matt Weise, Danny Weissenberger, Brad Gallaway, Darius Kazemi, Courtney Stanton, Jeffrey Matulef, Kirk Hamilton, Chris Pruett, John Kenneth Muir, Ian Miles Cheong, Simon Ferrari, and anyone else I've forgotten - may your coffees be ever full of FK.

Special thanks are also in order to the proprietors of two Deadly Premonition fansites, Whitney of Welcome to Greenvale and Animagess of Planet REDWOOD, for their terrific collections.

Now be careful, Zach. Spoilers ahoy.

JPG: You mentioned you finished the game even though you didn't like it. What was the primary factor that led you to do that?

Switchbreak: There is something about the game that is, for lack of a better term, adorably broken. Plus, I continually hoped against hope that somehow all the insane disparate parts would be brought together in an ending that acknowledges the insanity of what happened previously. Instead I get Goku Sheriff George and a rote ten-story tall boss monster. The ending was insane, but in a "you're watching a bad anime" sort of way, not a "holy shit" sort of way.

JPG: Yeah, I kinda felt the same way, at least about the "game" parts of the ending. Like with LOST's last season and especially the finale, it all of a sudden felt like I was watching a different kind of show. The X-Files conspiracy theory/future-science track was essentially abandoned for this immortal demigod/purgatory stuff that came out of nowhere. "No Olympics For You" George and Mega-Kaysen were a pretty clear reminder that, hey, JAPAN, you know? What disappointed me about those boss fights was that by nature of what they were - protracted, climactic battles against quintessentially Japanese mutant monster men - they took me out of that symbolic David Lynch mode of interpretation and shoved me back into the (as you said) rote boss-fight mode.

So from your perspective as a designer, what was the worst design flaw in Deadly Premonition, and why? What would you have done to fix that flaw?

Switchbreak: I think the biggest flaw was the disconnection between all of the parts of the gameplay. My one favorite anecdote to relate about the game to explain my feelings on it to people who haven't played is the scene in the hospital near the beginning. This is one of the scenes where the jolt in being yanked between the multiple different games that you are playing is strongest.

In the hospital, you start out in Game 1: the open world adventure game. This game-within-game is the one that, to me, yielded all of the actually interesting parts, though by itself it's somewhat shallow and ridiculous. You're first tasked with exploring the oddly labyrinthine hospital, and then given a chess-related puzzle by Ushah in order to gain access to the basement.

Once in the basement, you leave Game 1 and go into Game 2: the story. Then, after watching the murder mystery play out for a while, comes the hardest gearshift in the game. When you go to walk back to the lobby, you are without explanation or apology dropped into Game 3: the combat. This is a shitty game. Outside of the frustration of actually playing it or the mind-numbing lengths of time it forces you to slog through it, the way it functions in the game is merely as an utterly generic obstacle to unrelated goals. In the case of the hospital level, your goal is to walk to the lobby, meet up with your friends, and leave. The combat doesn't provide any twist to this goal - as soon as you are done shooting the hospital full of lead, you are brought to the lobby, where you and everyone else act as if nothing happened. The existence of Game 3, this insane reality-breaking segment where you stalk through the corridors of a civilian building in a small peaceful town firing round after round of submachine gun ammunition into undead horrors from beyond the grave, provides no twist to your goal of walking to the lobby besides making it take longer. You might as well have taken the elevator.

JPG: This is a brilliant analysis! Let me see if I understand you correctly:

Game 1: open-world tooling around, sidequesting, exploring Greenvale, racing, collecting trading cards, fishing, etc.
Game 2: the main murder investigation storyline, conveyed mostly through cutscenes and occasional controllable sections (canvassing people at the town hall, finding keys in the police station, locating clues in the paintings in the gallery, etc.)
Game 3: Other World combat

Where the line gets particularly blurry, for me, is between Games 2 and 3. The Other World sections bleed into the profiling sequences, which to me are really Game 2 territory. I completely agree that Game 3 feels poorly shoehorned in and would be far better implemented as a Silent Hill-style exploration mechanic. They could even keep the Raincoat Killer chase sequences.

Switchbreak: The thing is, Game 3 is a game mechanic and nothing else. It has nothing to do with the world you're in, nothing to do with the characters, and nothing to do with even the more insane aspects of the story. It takes up the majority of your time and keeps you from any of the interesting parts of the game. Every time you enter Game 3, you enter it in pursuit of some unrelated goal, and the only effect it has is to make that goal take longer to accomplish. The abrupt jumps into and out of it are both dissonant and, because it's no fun to play, dismaying. In a game full of design choices that are at least somewhat delightful for their idiosyncrasy, the combat doesn't seem intentionally or ironically out-of-place, it feels like a failed attempt at mundanity. It feels like the developers played Resident Evil and Silent Hill, copied those games into their own very poorly, and then didn't bother trying to integrate it into the rest of what's going on.

JPG: I don't know if I fully agree that you always enter Game 3 in pursuit of an unrelated goal - unless you count the "spirit maps" sold by Keith, which are totally tangential. The goal of the Other World sequences, by and large, is to collect clues (the key flags), which York then mentally assembles in the profiling cutscenes, which lead to story cutscenes. So in that sense Game 3 transitions right into Game 2. (You could even argue that Game 1 makes its presence felt in Game 3 via the conveniently-placed rooms where York can sleep, eat, shave, change, etc.)

Switchbreak: The profiling sequences themselves are done in quick flashes of still images and sound that you have to watch multiple times, which led to me always skipping until I hit the last key flag - and in general I very rarely felt worried that if I skipped that last one that I would be missing anything important.

JPG: I did that too. I was a neat idea at first, to present this cinematic that would gradually get clearer as you found more clues, but after a few times, you realized it was pointless to watch it until you'd found all the clues.

Switchbreak: The flashes of insight that York has after those sequences are silly, too ("I think this might have been ritualistic!"), as compared to the bigger insights of his, like the scene in the hospital or when he realizes that George is the Raincoat Killer, which don't require any profiling at all.

JPG: Yeah, that and George's license plate, "HESTHE1."

I also never got the huge insights York had after profiling, because they were pretty damn obvious 90% of the time. Although I have to wonder if that was intentional, too: If the game's meant to be uncanny in that David Lynch way, it makes a weird sort of sense that York is only able to suss out these blatantly obvious things when the player (Zach) figured them out ages ago. This obvious disconnect kept making me think that all this was taking place in York's mind; like, duh, it's ritualistic, did the bloody altar not tip you off? "FK in the coffee" is ridiculous not only because...well, it's ridiculous, but also because the second you meet Kaysen, you've figured out he's somehow behind all this. Again, uncanny.

Switchbreak: In many of the cases, though, even when you do have a profiling sequence adding a story-related goal to the combat, it is definitely not a time in which York should be searching for clues and profiling the crime scene - he should be getting to the victim before George shows up and makes a big show out of "accidentally" finishing her off in front of you. So even in those cases, 90% of the time the goal the combat is serving is orthogonal to the goal that the story has put in front of you.

JPG: Which brings us back to Game 3. You're right that there's a very weird lack of acknowledgment in Games 1 or 2 that Game 3 is happening, aside from the combat-related rewards for sidequests (e.g., the invaluable Infinite Wrench).

Switchbreak: At first, the fact that it goes unacknowledged seems interesting, and leads the mind in a lot of cool directions. [In the case of the hospital scene], was that crazy experience actually real or was it in York's mind? If it was in his mind, how did he actually get to the lobby? What is he doing with that MP5 military assault weapon, and what happened to all that ammunition that is suddenly missing from it? Why won't he tell the others? Is this an actual supernatural event, and if so, why does York seem so unfazed by it? Everything else about the case seems to astonish him, yet he marches into combat like he does this every day.

JPG: I agree that Game 3 largely sucks, and the zombies/wallcrawlers are at best only somewhat related to the main storyline. But in the game's defense, I do think it mostly tries to use the combat as a way to satisfy the publisher's demands (see below) while also ratcheting up the fear factor/surrealism of the story. And, I guess, revealing more of the "defense mechanism personality" about York, in that he can empty 500 clips into endless zombie ghosts and walk out calmly, cigarette in hand. But yeah, the logical loopholes in the story are large and plentiful, no doubt.

Switchbreak: Not until I neared the ending of the game did I realize that [the story's loose threads] were dead ends. York makes a big production of telling Emily his secret, but that secret is the existence of Zach, not his intermittent teleportation to a hell dimension in which he murders thousands of zombies. Surely this is a more important detail to disclose if you are willing to risk letting someone know that you might be insane, no? You meet the Raincoat Killer in there, so you expect the story of the town's history to offer some explanation... but no, the make-everyone-evil gas can't be it, because these guys can walk through walls and don't leave behind a lot of dead bodies for the police to investigate afterward. Plus the Raincoat Killer just turns out to be George, all cranked out on super-seeds that don't actually make him immortal as advertised. So wait - does that mean he knows about the zombie world the whole time? Also, half the time you go into combat you've just left George with Emily, so how did he show up in demon world too? You can't be both places at once, so why can he? Then Forrest Kaysen turns out to be some kind of god, so maybe he is in charge of zombie/demon dimension - but if he is, he never mentions it.

JPG: lol @ "intermittent teleportation to a hell dimension." Um, yeah, could definitely be a relationship deal-breaker.

As I mentioned above, I've read that the combat was a last-minute addition forced on the developers because Western audiences supposedly wouldn't accept a protagonist who didn't carry a gun. Does this change the way you think about Game 3?

Switchbreak: I read that about the combat as well, and it does explain a lot, I think. Still, I'm not sure how much game would be left without the combat. The adventure game is interesting, but it has a lot of the same problems as the combat does - every time it's time for a Game Mechanic, any context of reality is dropped and you are given a puzzle to solve that serves no purpose beyond making your goal take longer to reach. The interesting part of the game mechanically is the exploration aspect, I feel, because this is the one part that feels connected to the world in which the story of the game is taking place. But if everything but the exploration was stripped away, how much would be left?

JPG: How well do you think the story was told? Were there any design elements or moments that you think particularly helped or hindered the delivery of the story? For example, I really liked the flashback sequence where all of a sudden you are the original Raincoat Killer.

Switchbreak: There were aspects of the storytelling that I really liked. I liked a lot of the character building, at least on the three main characters - everyone else in town rode a little to far on the campy side of the campy/endearing line for me. I loved the one segment where you run through the town at night chasing after the ghost of Anna while every kind of demon attacks you and acoustic guitar music plays. It has a beautiful dreamlike quality that reminded me of the better parts of Silent Hill 2, and it is the closest the game gets to incorporating the game-parts with the story-parts. The part where you play as the Raincoat Killer was one of those things that was a great concept, and would have worked better for me if it had been better incorporated into the plot of the game. As it turned out, that bit of town history and in fact that specific Raincoat Killer were tangentially (at best) connected to the case at hand - much like everything else in the game.

JPG: Uncanny, isn't it?

GOTY Reason #7: Embracing Ambiguity

2011-01-22T17:31:00.000-05:00

"Hey, 'member when you were with The Beatles?...That was AWESOME."

Were I to interview Commander Shepard, it'd play out like an episode of the Chris Farley Show.

JPG: Hey, Commander Shepard. Remember...'member when you died saving your crew? And then they, like, cloned you back to life or whatever? And you got right up and started blasting robots and stuff?

SHEPARD: Yeah.

JPG: That was AWESOME. And, um, 'member, 'member when you went around the galaxy, like, getting all your team together? On those sweet missions? And The Illusive Man was all like, "I'm Creepy Martin Sheen" and you were all like, "You're not the boss of me!" You 'member?

SHEPARD: Uh, sure.

JPG: That was AWESOME. And 'member when you went to see Wrex on his planet, and he was all like "SHEPARD." in that deep voice? And then you got that other Wrex guy who also said "SHEPARD." when you talked to him? Do you...do you remember? You remember that?

SHEPARD: Yes, yeah. I remember.

JPG: Frickin' AWESOME!

"Douche chiiiiiilllll!"

As much as I enjoyed the game, I can't have a conversation with Mass Effect 2. I can't say much about it other than "...that was awesome." To use fancy academic terms, I can't interrogate it as a text.

My experience with Mass Effect 2 was very much like my experience with J.J. Abrams' reboot of Star Trek: It was a really fun, well-produced, entertaining piece of sci-fi action, and absolutely nothing about it was ambiguous.

The story, for all its branching narrative threads and customizable paths and expansive universe, was pretty damn straight-ahead. Sure, you can split hairs about whether Mordin's response to the genophage or Shepard's alliance with Cerberus were morally justifiable, but come on. If you understood the previous sentence, you have an idea of how hard it would be to convince anyone else that particular quandary was worth debating, especially without sounding like the Comic Book Store Guy.

And here's where, seven entries in, we finally get to the biggest reason I chose Deadly Premonition as my Game of the Year. I can talk about it.

In my last post I discussed what a risk Deadly Premonition is on a number of levels, especially because of its subversion of genre. But probably the riskiest thing about the game - and the factor that endears it to me most - is that it embraces ambiguity. It gives you problems that are unsolvable. It takes what should be a fatal flaw for any videogame and makes it a key selling point. Those unsolvable problems are precisely what makes the game so ripe for discussion, as players who experience the narrative differently develop their own theories and try to support them using evidence from the game. Let me try to list a few of these unsolved mysteries without trespassing too deep into spoiler territory:

Who - or what, exactly - is Forrest Kaysen? Why is Greenvale such an important location for him?
What is the precise relationship between Greenvale and the Other World? What is the mechanism for passing between them? Why do only certain characters appear to be able to do so?
What are the Red Room and White Room and Forest Room meant to represent? Why are the particular objects and people that exist within them there?
Does the trauma in York's past give him the ability to perceive things others can't (the "premonitions" of the title)? Is this related to his ability to enter the Other World?
What is the nature of the Ingram twins' seemingly extra-sensory abilities? Is this somehow related to Kaysen's interest in them?

Look, I realize there's a very high risk of Comic Book Store Guy nerdery involved in trying to answer any of these questions, too. I don't mean to unfairly dump on Mass Effect 2; as I wrote previously, Deadly Premonition's story is just as absurd. And yes, there are a few elements of Deadly Premonition - such as Michael only speaking in rhyme - that I'm fairly confident are not meant to be problematic issues for discussion as much as weird shit SWERY threw in to make Greenvale full of weird shit.

But unlike in Mass Effect 2, where any ambiguity in the story or characters is at best tangential to the player's enjoyment of the game, ambiguity is the centerpiece of Deadly Premonition. The game presents the player with ambiguity at every turn, actually forcing the player to enact ambiguity through their in-game actions - in particular, in the "Amazing Grace" sequence, but in plenty of other places as well. (Contrast this with the ambiguity in Mass Effect 2, which is largely reported after the fact in conversations with characters about their backstories. As for enacting it, a simple good/bad choice option does not make for a layered presentation of ambiguity.) Many, if not most, of Deadly Premonition's plot events, characters, and symbolic elements can be interpreted in multiple ways and from multiple viewpoints. This is clearly intentional and not, as some critics have suggested, weirdness for the sake of weirdness. Witness SWERY's symbolic mental map:

Even SWERY's diagram, which he presumably drew to illustrate the relationships between the various symbolic forces in the game, doesn't definitively answer any questions, although it suggests avenues of interpretation. It does, however, prove that there was clear authorial intent here: Whatever the game's failings, there is a complex and rich symbolic underpinning to it. The Mass Effect universe, like many RPGs, has a dense backstory, but the type of complexity presented by lore is very different (and, I think, less interesting) than the complexity presented by symbolism. The backstory of Deadly Premonition is only relevant inasmuch as it informs and makes ambiguous the current plight of the protagonist, whereas the backstory of most epic sci-fi universes is far more sprawling than necessary for the main narrative.

Whoa. Should have put a "verbosity" trigger warning on that paragraph.

Let's pull back a little. I want to come back to why I've spent so many words on Deadly Premonition, and why picking a Game of the Year was, for the first time, a truly meaningful exercise for me.

I played more videogames in 2010 than I'd ever played in a single year before, including some landmark AAA titles. For the first time, I had the budget, hardware, amazing public library system, motivation, and friendly enabling to make my hobby a priority. So I had a lot more material to choose from than usual. And it's maybe because of this increased access that I came to the realization that a game has to be more than "fun" for me to truly love it. It also has to make me think.

If this series of posts has been any indication, Deadly Premonition has given me plenty to think about. It's forced me to reevaluate what I want and expect from a main character. It's compelled me to examine design decisions more closely. It's shown me a new way of telling a story that prizes the storytelling over the actual content of the narrative. It's made me more curious about how business and project management constraints intersect and conflict with authorial ambition. It's given me a new perspective on player "agency." It's asked me to define how much gameplay frustration I'm willing to put up with in service of a greater purpose. It's challenged me to interpret a game - a game! - on a symbolic level in the same way I would a David Lynch film.

It's also given me the ridiculous and unforgettable Sinner's Sandwich, "Life is Beautiful" theme, and "FK in the coffee."

I'm particularly grateful to SWERY, though, for inspiring so many great conversations. Through talking and writing about Deadly Premonition, I've made a lot of valuable connections with terrific people. Ironically, this single-player game has been more "social" than any multiplayer experience I've had. And that's more fun than any game alone could ever be.

Talk about your douche chills...

I'll have one more post coming up wrapping up Deadly Premonition with one of these conversations. And then, I promise, we'll put York to bed.

GOTY Reason #6: Outsize Ambition

2011-01-17T13:02:00.000-05:00

For a game made by such a small team (an average of 25 people), with such a small budget (per SWERY, "not very much"), and with such an inordinate number of obstacles (unclear console specs, multiple near-cancellations, lack of technical expertise), Deadly Premonition has no business being as ambitious as it is.

Ambition is a difficult thing to assess in game development. Witness the above sentence: There's always a qualifier. It's difficult to find a review of an indie game, for example, that doesn't contain some variation on a sentiment like "for such a small team, this game is great." Conversely, there's an assumption that the BioWares and Rockstars of the world, with their infinite resources, should be able to crank out expansive 100-hour works of genius with zero bugs while innovating on every aspect of the medium.

Okay, maybe that's putting it a little strongly. But the fact remains that we typically judge a game's success relative to the resources that went into creating it. I don't think there's anything wrong with that approach per se - more resources do often translate to more opportunities for creativity and polish - but it can blur our understanding of what we mean by "ambition."

Ambition, to me, does not necessarily entail innovation. Just because a game doesn't do anything new with the medium doesn't mean it's not ambitious. Minecraft is an innovative project, combining the randomly-generated worlds of a roguelike with the freedom of a map editor or LEGO set. Super Meat Boy, on the other hand, is not especially innovative - it's pretty much a platformer - but it is ambitious in its approach. By ratcheting up the difficulty and tightening the precision of the controls, Team Meat established their unique vision of what the genre can be and challenged players to come along for the ride.

That almost antagonistic "let's see what you got!" attitude toward the player, I think, is what defines Super Meat Boy's ambition. It's a risk. Especially at a time when games seem to be getting progressively easier, it's ballsy to build a game around the idea of punishing difficulty. Yet Super Meat Boy ended up dominating the platformer conversation in a year in which Super Mario Galaxy 2 was released. Clearly, the ambition paid off.

But ambition - which I'll define as risk-taking with a purpose - does not always have to be fulfilled to be noteworthy. Failure can often be more instructive than success in this regard. (Listen to Three Moves Ahead's dissection of what went wrong with the spectacular bomb Elemental for proof.)

Aside from the York/Zach conceit, I'm not sure Deadly Premonition does anything especially innovative. In fact, there's a lot about the game that is pretty baldly derivative. The Other World conceit is cribbed from Silent Hill; the stand-and-shoot combat from Resident Evil; the labyrinthine sidequest structure from any number of JRPGs; the open-world exploration (and attendant ephemera) from any number of sandbox games; and the surreal atmosphere from David Lynch. And in every case, the source material is better implemented.

Where I think Deadly Premonition is especially ambitious - and successful in fulfilling its ambition - is in its world-building.

Given the challenges facing the development team, it's remarkable Greenvale is as engaging a setting as it is. In the post-mortem on the game in Game Developer, SWERY even admits his project - "replicating an entire rural American town from inside Japan" - was "rash." But it's not for the reason you might expect. As game designer Chris Pruett notes in his terrific analysis, "chalking Deadly Premonition's strangeness up to the cultural divide is a vast oversimplification." In other words, whatever discordant notes Deadly Premonition hits are not due to, as Chris says, "normal 'Japanese insanity.'" They are, by and large, intentional, meant to evoke a surreal feeling.

SWERY again: "For the story, I kept as much sense of reality as possible while embellishing it with a somewhat dreamlike milieu. As a result, I believe the sections depicted as reality have a dreamlike feeling, and likewise, the actual dreams are given a sense of realism - we were able to smear the boundary line. There are very few video games so particular about depicting such things, and I think Deadly Premonition may have become a unique example among them."

While the textures and animations in the game are often ugly, there is a different type of detail present in Deadly Premonition that's more important. As SWERY explains in the Game Developer post-mortem, each NPC has a 24-hour pattern of activities, specifically designed to reveal characterization. Peer into Thomas' apartment in the morning to observe him at his morning rituals. Follow Nick and Olivia around and you may uncover a possibly adulterous soap opera in progress. Head to Emily's house after hours and help her become a better cook.

What works particularly well here is that because Greenvale's cast is small and memorable enough for us to become interested in each character - and because this is a mystery, where our protagonist is expected to investigate - observing NPC behavior leads to meaningful conclusions. NPC activity patterns are constructed in service of not only a more realistic setting, but also of layering the story with additional complexity. (By contrast, it's debatable whether the same could be said about NPCs in Red Dead Redemption.) Examining this aspect of the game, Danny Weissenberger goes so far as to claim Greenvale is "the best-realized location in the history of video games."

Even ignoring the constraints of budget and technical expertise, it's quite a risk for a developer to spend so much energy and time fleshing out NPCs, especially when the bulk of the player's interactions with them are optional. Yet it's all in service of the game's vision of its world. SWERY: "I was insistent that the content of our side missions always draw upon aspects of the NPCs' personalities, thus adding further depth to the world of the game." And there's the key to an ambitious game: The risk-taking has to have a purpose that furthers the larger goals of the game. (To some extent you could argue that the loyalty missions in Mass Effect 2 operate on a similar principle, but not only did those have tangible rewards, they also never felt truly optional. They weren't all that risky.)

Of course, the entire Deadly Premonition project was a giant risk. Here was a detective game that was part talky adventure, part survival horror, part open-world, and all kinds of Lynchian crazy. How to sell this thing? The North American box cover is a misleading mess, billing the game as much more of a horror title than it truly is; one wonders if that was a marketing tactic meant to sell to the Silent Hill crowd. It's ironic that the other big measure the publisher took to mitigate risk - compelling the dev team to insert combat - ended up being one of the game's major turnoffs. And yet, even there, SWERY's ambition is evident: Although the "hold your breath to avoid zombies" mechanic is kind of broken and unnecessary, it was an interesting and risky attempt.

My other GOTY candidates, Mass Effect 2 and Red Dead Redemption, are both obviously bigger in scope and far more polished than Deadly Premonition. But with respect to the outstanding efforts of those development teams, neither game was as ambitious, as risky, as SWERY's. A sprawling space opera with intricate dialogue and moral choice systems? Kind of a BioWare specialty. A massive open-world shooter with incredible detail and freedom? Right up Rockstar's alley. Both games were based on existing, established IPs. Neither deviated too far afield from a proven formula. Both had millions of dollars of marketing capital to burn, and both were created by large studios with hundreds of experienced developers. By its nature, a videogame is a risky product, but these particular games were always going to be safer bets than most others.

So sure, there may be some element of rooting for the underdog at play here. But I think Deadly Premonition's ambition speaks to the thing SWERY has his team nailed: "we poured our love into the game." Due respect to other games, but the love that went into Deadly Premonition is more tangible than in most AAA titles.

GOTY Reason #5: "Lovely Useless Elements"

2011-01-09T17:20:00.004-05:00

In an interview with the Telegraph, SWERY said that given a bigger budget, he'd have included more of what he calls "lovely useless elements" in Deadly Premonition. As it happened, he managed to include quite a few regardless. And they're one of the reasons I love this game.

For the purposes of this discussion, I want to define "lovely useless elements" as two things: mini-games and (for lack of a better term) Easter eggs, little details in the environment or interface that serve to enhance the fiction. I'm not sure if that's exactly how SWERY defines them, but the idea is that these features are entirely optional and have no immediate practical application to core gameplay.

Generally, I'm of two minds about incidental features. On one hand, I appreciate the opportunity to jump into a mini-game every so often as a brief diversion from the core gameplay and/or story. Especially in open-world and RPG games, where it's easy to get overwhelmed with quest after quest, it's nice when the game encourages you to take a break and play some poker or compete in a race. Generally there's at least a tangential connection to the setting or plot, like Marston playing Liar's Dice in one of Red Dead Redemption's saloons or Chuck swatting golf balls in a sporting goods store in Dead Rising 2. Those mini-games make sense in the context of the setting, if not the story.

I've always been a fan of environmental storytelling, since I think videogames are uniquely positioned to do this effectively. BioShock is probably the easiest and best example: I spent just as much time examining propaganda posters and constructing the stories of tableaux I happened upon - like the corpse I found laying next to a pile of suitcases - as I did in combat. Often, I'm all for developers stuffing their games chock-full of flourishes in the environment or UI to build my connection to the fiction.

On the other hand, sometimes it's all a bit much. Just Cause 2, which I am still loving the crap out of, is decidedly not a racing game. Yet Panau is littered with vehicle challenges - which, again, are totally optional, but which also clutter the map as glaringly unfulfilled objectives.Yes, I understand that completing challenges nets me more cash and helps unlock more missions. It's the same with the hunting and outfit-collection challenges in RDR. It feels a little too obvious, like the game is saying, "right, here's the requisite driving mini-game, here's the obligatory on-rails gatling gun segment." The fact that there are tangible, practical rewards for participating in these mini-games doesn't dispel the odd tension that these games, which thrive on completionism of various sorts, create by including the mini-games in the first place. When completing a tangential challenge is as worthwhile or meaningful as completing a story mission, is there a point to investing the player in the story at all? [To Just Cause 2's credit, I think that game says, very clearly, "Nope! So go have fun just screwing around!"] Shoehorning in too many mini-games, as I think RDR does (although its implementation is superb), risks devaluing the narrative; ironically, this is especially true when practical rewards are attached to the mini-games.

The same risk applies to environmental flourishes. I don't know many people who claim BioShock is a terrific shooter, despite the nearly-universal praise it's gotten. In fact, that's the biggest knock on it, right? It's an amazing world and an okay game. One might make the same argument about RPGs like Dragon Age: Origins, which sometimes feel overloaded with lore. There's a delicate balance between game, environment, and story - so delicate, I think, that it's nearly impossible to seamlessly integrate all three.

Let's come back to Deadly Premonition. First, let's look at some of the mini-games (or, I guess, meta-games) it includes:

Racing. York can drive his car around the streets of Greenvale in a few timed checkpoint racing challenges. Completing races nets you Trading Cards (more on these in a bit).
Fishing. Once he obtains a fishing rod, York can head to watering holes marked on his map and cast his line, initiating a truly bizarre Press Your Luck-style game that results in a variety of prizes. Buying special kinds of bait can increase your chances of getting quality loot. In some cases you'll get Trading Cards.
Darts. After purchasing a Dart Gun (really?) from Richard, York can try to beat the high score on the machine in Richard's bar. The reward for getting high scores: more Trading Cards.
Peeping. Seriously. At most locations, York can peer into a building's windows and watch its inhabitants going about their business. These sequences occur in a first-person viewpoint and involve almost no player activity beyond moving the camera. The reward for peeping, and the game actually says "reward for observation," is Agent Honor (cash - again, more on this in a bit).
Shaving. Again, seriously. When he has access to a sink and mirror - sometimes in the middle of the Other World sequences! - York can earn Agent Honor by shaving. Shaving also prevents him from looking disheveled, much like...
Dressing. York can purchase a variety of suits throughout the game. Not changing his clothes every so often and not shaving will make flies buzz around him, and other people will like him less (though how the game articulates that I'm not sure).
Sleeping and Eating. Much has been made of the fact that York has a Sleep Meter and Hunger Meter, which can be replenished by sleeping and eating, respectively. York will collect various foodstuffs (jars of pickles, turkey sandwiches, lollipops) as he explores Greenvale (though I'm not sure how eating smoked salmon found in a disused locker in a nightmarish hell version of the police station could restore anyone). Sleeping restores health, and yes, you will get to sack out on some conveniently-placed cots in the Other World.

These last few aren't mini-games per se, but I've included them here because the player receives rewards for them. Notice a theme in the rewards? Generally, they're either Trading Cards or Agent Honor.

First, the Trading Cards. Aside from an Achievement for collecting all of them, these are demonstrably useless rewards. They contain maybe a sentence or two about the character or object pictured, with only a few revealing details the player/York hasn't already intuited or observed.

Agent Honor badges, found randomly around Greenvale and in the Other World, and especially when breaking crates or fences, grant York a small amount of cash. The economic system of Greenvale is erratic at best; a turkey sandwich costs $100, and calling the FBI on a nearby phone will set you back $1. York can purchase new suits, food, bait, upgrades and ammo for weapons, and gas for his car - but there's not a very robust economy in Greenvale, to say the least. Given that York receives cash every time he kills an Other World zombie (I don't even want to try to parse why, since that seems like a blatant extra-diegetic "game mechanic" thing), and that he will kill hundreds of zombies, the Agent Honor badges are essentially worthless.

There are also a few environmental/UI flourishes I want to highlight:

Turn Signals and Windshield Wipers. The latter is only useful when driving in first-person view, and the former is not useful at all.
License Plates. Each character's license plate reveals some hint about him or her, with a few being outright spoilers. If you want to, you can trail characters as they drive around Greenvale.
Smoking. York can light up a cigarette to pass the time while he waits for a sidequest window to open or for the next chapter in the case to begin.
Coffee Fortunes. "FK...in the coffee!" is a commonly-lampooned moment in the game, sure. But York can return to the hotel's dining room any time to read a new fortune in his coffee, fortunes which occasionally provide hints about sidequests.
The Pause Screen. Press the start button to enter a Lynchian nightmare room, complete with taxidermied deer head THAT TOTALLY BLINKS AT YOU.

In the August 2010 issue of Game Developer magazine, SWERY comments on some of the incidental features. Discussing the turn signals and GPS system in York's car, he says, "Features like these may seem extraneous, but I truly believe they accentuate the game's sense of reality."

In a way, I agree: I've never had a "turn signal button" in a game before. However, when maybe two other cars are on the road in a five-square-mile town at any given time - and controlling my car is like trying to ride a rhino with ulcerative colitis - to what degree can a turn signal possibly be "realistic"?

I don't want to put words in SWERY's mouth, but I think what he may be getting at - and what he discusses in the Telegraph interview - is not reality, but surrealism. He says: "it is my contention that without incidental elements, you can't create this dark, fearful side behind it." Going back to David Lynch films: the truly disturbing element, I find, is that before they veer too sharply into the surreal, they create a plausible simulacrum of reality. They put you in the real world before transporting you to the nightmare world. I think SWERY is trying to accomplish the same thing. [Whether he is successful is up to the player to judge, but I find it remarkable that he is even attempting this.]

There are two key things happening, I think, with SWERY's "lovely useless elements." The first is that Deadly Premonition, unlike RDR or any number of other games, is telling the player outright that these elements are indeed useless - and that's okay! As I said above, the rewards the mini-games offer are only marginally useful at best. The game is telling us that it's okay to do these things for their own sake, not in the guise of obtaining a new combat buff. That's kind of refreshing, actually; the idea is that simulating this weird reality is its own reward, instead of enforcing the common paradigm of handcuffing every mechanic to some kind of pseudo-tangible "progression." [BTW, this is why I find the sidequests that result in new weapons for the combat sections particularly grating.]

The second is that, like Lynch's work, Deadly Premonition depends on synergy. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. The story missions would not be nearly as meaningful had the player (as York/Zach) not had the opportunity to clandestinely observe potential suspects in Greenvale, or pursue them at whim around town in the car. The game mechanics, by virtue of their transparent worthlessness, become more meaningful than they ought to be. Unlike RDR, they throw into stark relief the fact that they are, in fact, useless.

I love the phrase "lovely useless elements." Why? It conveys what I think every fan of Deadly Premonition intuits: the love the creator has for the game. Whether the creation is successful in comparison with other games is, to some degree, irrelevant; there is a clear auteur at work here, and that curiosity alone is worth examining.

GOTY Reason #4: Absurd Story, Great Storytelling

2011-01-02T13:38:00.000-05:00

Story is commonly cited as one of Deadly Premonition's key (and, some say, few) strengths, but I have to disagree. The story is patently absurd. By the end, the absurdity is so thick even Shinji Mikami is ready to take his ball and go home.

And yet, Deadly Premonition is one of the best examples of storytelling I've ever seen in a videogame.

In Japan, Deadly Premonition was released under the name Red Seeds Profile (and on the PS3 in addition to Xbox360) - a title that, while not immediately gripping or grammatically elegant, is far more fitting. Like the single letter first found under Laura Palmer's fingernail in Twin Peaks, the red seeds found on, near, or in each victim in Deadly Premonition function as the recurring clue that engages the audience in the mystery along with York. The red seeds are the (David) lynchpin on which the plot is fastened. [Wow, I'm really, really sorry for that. (Not really.)]

But as with Twin Peaks, the narrative is so fragmented that you end up wondering if the red seeds are not just a MacGuffin. While linear overall, the plot of Deadly Premonition veers off into bizarre territory pretty regularly. For example, there's the scene where York has a, yes, premonition that the only way he will be able to retrieve missing documents detailing the history of the Raincoat Killer case is to literally fish them out of the river. So he...fishes them out of the river. With a fishing rod.

Because the game presents a pseudo-open world - while organized into Chapters, there is still plenty of room for York to hop off into sidequests and exploration between story missions - Deadly Premonition suffers from a similar narrative disconnect as Red Dead Redemption. I'm not the first to point out how badly, say, stopping to pick flowers or chase bounties breaks Marston's "have to get back to my wife and kid" conceit. But because York is so unswervingly weird, and the atmosphere so surreal - and because we've been conditioned to question reality via the Red Room/White Room and Other World sequences - we learn to expect, and eventually embrace, the absurdity and cognitive dissonance. Of course York would fish the case files out of the river. That makes sense in this world.

There's also the fact that much of the insight we get into the characters and world of Deadly Premonition is delivered in a seemingly incidental way. The sequence where York joins the local cops for an awkward dinner, or where George discusses his traumatic childhood with York at the bar: These are entirely optional scenes, initiated with a QTE, yet so much more revealing than most main story sequences. Similar arguments can be made for many of the sidequests; for example, completing Quint's engagement ring sidequest makes what happens in the main story even more tragic. Yet looking back on the story after completing it, it's hard to argue these sequences are not essential to a full appreciation of the logic and progression of the narrative. The main story missions, in which York searches for clues in Other World sequences and then mentally connects the dots to profile the killer, are ironically often the least interesting or emotionally significant. Instead, it's what happens after or between these missions that's resonant.

As a consequence, I'd argue, Deadly Premonition is basically telling the player the plot is secondary to the player's emotional connection to the characters and world. While I absolutely love just tooling around in Red Dead, and while I agree the game encourages you to do so, it's hard to make the same argument; in signature Rockstar style, the ancillary characters (save Bonnie and the Marston family) are largely satirical ciphers. While the player may develop genuine sympathy for the plight and passion of Luisa, for example, that connection is totally negated by the ironic pompousness and indifference of Reyes. While the story missions in RDR are generally less meaningful than the incidental ones, there's not as much emotional payoff as there is in Deadly Premonition.

That's not to say we're not interested in the mystery, though. We still want to discover the identity of the Raincoat Killer, understand the nature and purpose of the red seeds, unpack the York/Zach relationship, and figure WTF is up with any number of other oddities in the main plot. It's just that the structure of the storytelling itself prioritizes our emotional connection to the characters, not the main plot itself. It's a scenario oddly reminiscent of LOST.

It's interesting, and I think totally intentional, that the promo image above is a patchwork of characters' faces. There are more dramatic images that could have been used to advertise the series throughout its six-year run, but nearly all of the promo materials had the ensemble front and center. LOST may have had a supernatural mystery at its core - what is the Island, and why are these people here? - but the producers and writers never forgot that the characters are what kept viewers hooked. Their innovative storytelling structure - the flashbacks, flash-forwardses(?), and flash-sidewayses(??) - was perfectly suited to a series that was much more about asking questions than providing answers, and much more about people than about plot.

Like Deadly Premonition, the story of LOST was absurd, and became increasingly more so as the series went on. By the time the show entered its time travel phase and concluded with its spiritual gumbo of a finale, the plot had gone so far off the rails that having the characters meet in the afterlife - a writing cop-out if ever there was one, if you ask me, but that's another topic - felt like one of the only options left.

But for the majority of its run, the overwhelming success of LOST was never its story, but instead the way it parceled out information to the viewer. By focusing on a different character (or pair of characters) each episode in both the present/Island setting and the past/future/sideways/Mainland setting, the show encouraged the viewer to patch together its disassembled narrative, using character backstory as a hook to entice him to put in the effort. For the more devoted fans (yours truly included), there were any number of tantalizing in-show Easter Eggs and assorted multimedia ephemera to keep us invested in the characters and the mystery after the TV was off. [Author Amelia Beamer's article "LOST as Hypertext" analyzes the show's storytelling technique, and is a terrific read for fans of both LOST and Deadly Premonition.]

From the beginning, LOST was dedicated to engaging the viewer in the construction of its story. That its story was absurd was irrelevant. It was that it gave us all these avenues into its world that was meaningful, the way it exploited the tension between authorial control and audience participation. This, I think, is also what Deadly Premonition does so well, and what is unfortunately often overlooked about the game.

GOTY Reason #3: Shifting Perspective

2010-12-28T21:42:00.000-05:00

Good mysteries and good horror stories have at least one feature in common: they keep the audience off-balance.

Psycho is the easy example. When the main character can be killed off halfway through the film, the audience is being sent a clear signal - all bets are off. What you thought this film was about? Guess what: Not what it's really about. Or whom it's really about.

This act of shifting narrative focus, when done well, is remarkably effective in engaging the audience. It takes the viewer out of his comfort zone. It forces him to reevaluate his assumptions - about characters, plot events, themes, sometimes even genre. It makes him think critically about the messages he's being sent and asks him to consider how he's being conditioned to respond.

Deadly Premonition is heavily invested in making the player ask questions about what he's experiencing. These obviously start with the player's avatar, York. Namely, why is he so weird? How come he's so oddly nonchalant about these horrible, supernatural goings-on? And who the hell is "Zach," anyways? (At least, who does York think Zach is?) And the biggest question: what does it mean that I, the player, "am" Zach?

York encounters ethereal versions of the Ingram twins in the Red Room.

As I mentioned previously, the fact that York is an unreliable narrator calls into doubt whether any of what we're experiencing is real. Like David Lynch films, the game trades heavily in the symbolic. The combat sequences, which generally take place in the supernatural "Other World," may or may not be figments of York's imagination. Add to that the surreal Red Room and White Room sequences that precede each new chapter, and it's clear the game is demanding a different kind of approach than players are typically used to.

Alan Wake suffers, I think, from too closely approximating a conventional third-person action game; its most successful sequences, to me, were the weirder ones, like the bit near the end with the objects made out of words from Alan's typewriter. Deadly Premonition, on the other hand, only makes at best a half-assed attempt to approximate a conventional action or horror game; viewed as such, it is an abject failure, deserving of the bad reviews. But I don't think it's really interested in doing that. Instead, I think it's appropriating certain action game conventions (and intentionally subverting others) to unsettle the player so that his emotional and intellectual responses are continually off-balance. [And again, and I hope you can see this is not me being an "apologist" but merely acknowledging the obvious, it royally cocks up a lot of those conventions - which have become conventions not necessarily because they're "safe," but because they work.]

Speaking of unsettling: Deadly Premonition takes obvious cues from Twin Peaks, but I would argue the more resonant connection to Lynch is his 1997 film Lost Highway.

It's nearly impossible to describe what Lost Highway is "about," but, like other Lynch films Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire, it is a highly figurative and fragmented narrative in which a central character is quite literally a split personality. In each of these films, there occurs a point (or several points) at which the protagonist suddenly "becomes" a totally different person - played by the same actor - in a totally different situation. If there is a narrative logic to this splitting, it is fluid at best; the viewer is compelled to consider the film on a symbolic level, as logic either breaks down or is abandoned entirely.

But what makes Lost Highway, in particular, relevant to Deadly Premonition is the way the splitting of its main character can be read as a psychological defense mechanism. Film critic John Kenneth Muir's brilliant analysis of the film as Lynch's depiction of a "psychogenic fugue, a state of disassociation with oneself," could almost be applied to the game with equal precision. As in other Lynch films, certain events, characters, and details in Deadly Premonition that seem to make no sense at first acquire symbolic and sometimes narrative weight later on.

And, as in Lost Highway, internal conflict is rendered externally, in the physical world. In Lost Highway, the "Mystery Man," played with demented aplomb by Robert Blake, is a manifestation of the main character's growing mental instability. In Deadly Premonition, there are similar physical manifestations of abstract concepts and conflicts, represented by objects, people, and in some cases the environment.

Happy nightmares! Love, future accused murderer Robert Blake.

The fun part of Deadly Premonition, to me, was continually guessing not necessarily what was going to happen, but what the things that were happening represented.

Unlike the Iron Mans or Raiders of the Lost Arks of the gaming world - the Mass Effect 2s and Red Dead Redemptions, the well-produced, beautifully drawn, meticulously play-tested, deservingly-lauded blockbusters - Deadly Premonition is not as interested in telling you a story or having you experience it or having you create it as it is in getting you to think about what it all means. It wants you to shift perspective, to reassess what you thought you were playing and who you thought you were playing as. (In fact, the game literally forces you to shift perspective in a few key segments, though I can't discuss them without getting into spoilers.) Your sense of "agency," that big gaming buzzword, is toyed with throughout, and outright subverted on several occasions.

Just like I don't want every movie I see to be a David Lynch film - my head would asplode! - I don't want every game I play to be Deadly Premonition. But I do want to be challenged to think differently about stories and about games, and that's one of the big reasons Deadly Premonition is my pick for Game of the Year.

GOTY Reason #2: Emotional Investment

2010-12-26T16:35:00.000-05:00

It's hard for me to describe this scene without indulging in spoilers, but I want to tell you about my favorite moment in Deadly Premonition.

York has come to Greenvale to investigate the murder of Anna Graham, whose mutilated body was found suspended from a tree, clearly with some kind of sick ritualistic intent. As you might guess, Anna will not be the only victim in this story. Other characters York meets will be slain in similarly grotesque ways by the mysterious Raincoat Killer as well.

And now for the hopefully light spoiler: Toward the end of Chapter 2, there's a tense cutscene in which York saves another would-be victim from a grisly demise with some last-second heroics. Moments later, however, a terrifying accident - or is it, since the victim appears to be almost religiously rapturous about her rapidly impending death? - smashes the rescued individual to bits. It's a sudden and jarring twist, one that I'm sure some players might find darkly funny (or, worse, actually funny). By the time I'd gotten to that point, though, I was just horrified. After another seeming failure, the case was finally turning around. And then...this.

So we come to my favorite moment. York has just pushed budding love interest Emily, the sheriff's deputy, out of the way, saving her life as the victim is crushed under tons of stone. The camera pans from an image of the victim's arm sticking out from the rubble over to Emily's face. And Emily is in shock. Wordless, petrified, near-convulsive shock.

With York, in happier times.

Emily backs away, stumbling, mouth agape. In her expression the player can read any number of terrible realizations, as the young deputy comes to grips with - literally - the viscera of yet another mortifying crime she was unable to prevent.

And all I could think during this unnerving sequence was: Holy shit - shock. I've never seen a game so convincingly portray shock before.

Deadly Premonition is utterly committed to the player's emotional investment in the story and characters. So much so, in fact, that it makes the player role-play as York's alter ego Zach. And unlike most every other computer RPG, this one really does directly assume the player is inhabiting a role in the fiction. Hate to keep harping on this, but again, the "Zach" conceit is remarkably effective in encouraging the player to claim an emotional stake in the story. When a character talks to York, s/he is talking to Zach, too - to you. And after he's done talking to someone, York will ask Zach what he thought, engaging him/you in sometimes lengthy conversations reflecting on what they've just seen and experienced together. In this way the game demands that the player reflect on and emotionally engage with the story and characters in a way other games don't.

Finally, and this is something I'll discuss further in a future post, there are the Red Room and White Room sequences - dream-like intermissions between story chapters where the player explores weird symbolic spaces in York's mind. These scenes, which take obvious cues from David Lynch, build the player's investment in the characters by repurposing them in bizarre, surreal ways. You come out of these sequences saying, one, WTF, and two, why is York seeing [that person/those people] in that way? What could this represent? Are these the "premonitions" of the title, or something more abstract?

Like any piece of fiction, a colorful and interesting set of characters goes a long way toward engaging the audience. Greenvale is populated with an eclectic mix of inhabitants. Some of the more immediately recognizable, besides York and Emily, include amiable rockabilly convenience store owner Keith; his weirdly ethereal twin sons Isaach and Isaiah; traveling tree salesman Forrest Kaysen; kindly, deaf old hotel owner Polly; brusque, adversarial sheriff George; gas-masked, wheelchair-bound, weird-sandwich-loving millionaire Harry and his attendant Michael, who speaks only in rhyme; and SWERY's homage to Twin Peaks' Log Lady, "Roaming" Sigourney the Pot Lady (she carries an actual pot, not the drug).

Like York, the ancillary characters are instantly memorable. And unlike in Alan Wake, that other supernatural horror thriller of 2010, they're not merely props: when one of them turns out to be the next victim, we're genuinely sad, both for the victim and the characters who have to deal with the aftermath. (By contrast, what was Alan's wife's name again? Amy? Sarah? Gertrude? All I remember was the annoying sidekick Barry and the crazy lady with the paint and a bunch of demonic farm equipment.)

Throughout the main story York will gain plenty of revealing insights about his co-investigators, Emily and George, as they share intimate details of their backgrounds. These conversations were some of my favorite moments in the game, as York (and by extension, I, as Zach) begins to understand and empathize with the vulnerabilities of these people. Vulnerability is something most games portray inexpertly, if at all, and yet it's exactly this quality that audiences crave in their characters in order to relate to them.

[A brief aside: while I loved the "recruit your team" conceit of Mass Effect 2 - a phenomenal effort and the clear AAA GOTY pick for me - the vulnerabilities of characters like Jack, Thane, and Miranda rang a little more hollow for me. It's possible this is just because of the sci-fi trappings, but I think it's more likely that while the dialogue is undeniably polished and the production value is flawless, it's all a bit too Hollywood for my taste. One issue could be ME2's dialogue interface: When you can instantly (and, in my case, often inadvertently) replay the exact same lines of dialogue over and over, the emotional impact is necessarily deadened as immersion is broken. I'm not saying those characters' stories aren't rich and engaging; the emotional catharsis at the end of loyalty missions was the real reward for me, not the characters' newly-acquired loyalty. I just think it's more meaningful when there's no "game reward" (e.g. a boosted "loyalty stat") necessarily tied to characterization.]

As difficult as Deadly Premonition's side quest structure can be to parse - some only activate at particular points in the story progression, at certain times of day, and/or are dependent on the weather(!) - taking the time to meet Greenvale's characters and explore their lives can be immensely rewarding. As with any small town, there's a lot more going on than meets the eye. Although some of these tasks may be simple fetch-quest affairs, the player understands that as with a good deal of the "action" sequences in the game, they're means to an end. And that end is often not a tangible reward like a new gun or improved stats, but instead a more intimate view into the strange and fascinating lives of Greenvale's inhabitants.

Characterization as a reward for gameplay may seem an odd inversion of the norm. Usually we "endure" cutscenes, which function simply as context-building mechanisms to build investment in the action sequences that follow. But, like so many aspects of Deadly Premonition, it is precisely because of this subversion that I find the game refreshing.

GOTY Reason #1: Memorable Protagonist

2010-12-24T16:44:00.000-05:00

Commander Shepard and John Marston might star in two of the most (rightly) acclaimed games of this year. But both are positively boring compared to FBI Special Agent Francis York Morgan.

Call him York. Everyone does.

Clearly based on Twin Peaks' eccentric FBI agent Dale Cooper, York is the hero of Deadly Premonition, the investigator sent to the small northwestern town of Greenvale to solve a brutal murder case.

He's also one of the weirdest and most endearing protagonists I've ever encountered.

SWERY goes out of his way to distinguish his main character in the way a screenwriter might: by giving him instantly memorable quirks. Unlike the gruffly amiable (and inexplicably compliant) Marston or the impassive cipher Shepard, York has any number of recognizable traits and tics that imbue him with a multilayered personality:

Signature movements. As in the pic above, he flicks his cigarette lighter open with a confident swagger. He taps his collarbone when he's considering a problem.

And his most distinctive motion: he brings his hand up to his face, as if pressing a phone close to his ear, when he talks to Zach (more on that in a moment). Great actors understand that distinctive motions are often just as effective as words, if not more so, at revealing character. What does Shepard do? Cross his/her arms? Dance poorly?

Identifiable interests. Turns out York is a film buff - not surprising, since SWERY studied film in college and his co-writer, Kenji Goda, is in fact a filmmaker. His encyclopedic knowledge of movies, revealed mostly during driving sequences, ranges from Superman IV: The Quest for Peace to the John Hughes oeuvre. And as York discusses films, the player gets a sense of how his analytical mind works, his attention to detail, context, history. By contrast, I don't know what Commander Shepard is into. Fish?

An odd mix of the mundane and bizarre. Like many of us, York loves his coffee - but he also reads prophecies in the swirling of the milk. Over dinner with his new friends in the local police force, he casually describes horrific crimes (a man who uses victims' remains as kitchen utensils, a serial rapist with over 800 victims) while enjoying a steak and a beer, oblivious to his companions' shocked reactions. At one point early on, he seems more interested in the taste of a homemade biscuit than the details of the murder case he's investigating. York's odd way of processing information and making seemingly random connections - in a socially awkward way, of course - is reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes. His speech patterns are also similarly strange, with resonant ruminations on the case, the town, and life interspersed with incomprehensible and colorful figurative language ("I'm in shock, like a weasel in an electric chair!"). Like Holmes, York's worldview is a combination of the esoteric and the mundane, and like Holmes, he's endearing because of this.

A history. I can't get into too much detail here without verging into spoiler territory. But unlike other game protagonists, York's backstory - which is parceled out in tantalizing bits throughout the game - is rich, and, crucially, ambiguous. In one scene, York reveals he used to be a punk rocker in his youth, a lifestyle tellingly incongruous with his current professional, if eccentric, demeanor. It seems an offhand detail that, like so many of the offhand details in the game, simply feels like a whimsical way to flesh out the game world. Yet when you learn exactly what befell York in his childhood, the revelation that he embraced a punk lifestyle as an adolescent is incredibly fitting. (And while we're on the topic, I should mention that almost none of the offhand details in the game are truly "offhand"; most relate back to the story in distinct and interesting ways.) York's dedication to ritual - his morning coffee, his repetitive movements, even his signature greeting "Call me York. Everyone does" - not only makes him relatable, but also provokes questions. Mainly, how did he get this way? Who is he, really? I'm hard-pressed to name a game protagonist I've felt as invested in figuring out.

And then, of course, there's York's most definable characteristic:

Split personality. Early in the game you discover that York has an "imaginary friend" he calls Zach, a personality with whom he regularly converses - out loud and in front of others, no less. It becomes clear very quickly that you, as the player, are Zach; there is a sort of bending of the fourth wall as you realize that York is issuing you direct commands ("Just stop the car if there's something you want us to check out, Zach."). I can't stress how unique and interesting I found this conceit. It instantly renders York an unreliable narrator - when's the last time you played a game with one of those? - and gives you the nagging suspicion that some or all of this story may simply be a figment of York's imagination. Since Deadly Premonition is very much interested in playing with what's real and what isn't - and is heavily invested in bringing you into its strange world - employing the "Zach" conceit is a brilliantly tidy way of immersing the player. For a generation of games that prides itself on "immersion," only a few succeed in meaningful ways. The makers of Deadly Premonition understood that while games rich in environmental/incidental storytelling (e.g., BioShock, Red Dead Redemption) can go a long way toward inviting the player to inhabit the game world in an emotionally gripping way, only a protagonist as multifaceted as York.

***

I'll be taking a short break from the series for a couple of days for the holiday, but will do my best to have my next entry up in short order. Meantime, happy holidays!

7 Reasons Deadly Premonition is GOTY: Introduction

2010-12-23T17:58:00.017-05:00

Belieeedat, York.

And believe me: Deadly Premonition is my Game of the Year. Easily. And with all apologies to Danny Weissenberger, who made this call back in July, I'm going to add my voice to his excellent series of articles on the topic. I'll also do my best to keep spoilers to a minimum.

For anyone who hasn't read Danny's articles, here's the brief overview. Deadly Premonition is a third-person detective story by Japanese designer Hidetaka "SWERY 65" Suehiro, released in the US back in February. Sold at the budget price of $19.99, it was both panned and lauded by reviewers. It's gained cult status not only due to the polarizing responses it's provoked, but also because of its unrelentingly strange and oddly charming Twin Peaks-esque story and characters.

For a much better introduction to the game than I can give here, check out this video of Infinite Lag pal Matthew Weise's MIT presentation from a few months back.

Before I get into the 7 Reasons Why DP is my GOTY - which I'll cover in a series of posts, all of which will be linked right here on this page - let's look at the big reasons it shouldn't be.

1. Combat is poorly implemented and thoroughly unnecessary.

2. Driving can be interminable, especially with the anachronistic Resident Evil-style controls.

3. The map, which rotates depending on the direction you are facing and has no zoom levels, is useless.

4. The graphics and animations are sub-PS2 quality, and the sound mix in inconsistent at best, with many instances of cheesy soundtrack music popping up during tonally inappropriate times.

5. The side quests are largely impenetrable affairs, and the game is filled with seemingly tangential objectives and items.

In the series of posts that follow, I'm going to lay out 7 reasons I think these flaws - which are significant, no doubt - are completely worth overlooking. EDIT: All posts are now linked below.

Without further ado:

7 Reasons Deadly Premonition is Game of the Year

1. It features the most memorable and multifaceted protagonist in recent memory.

2. It is fully committed to the player's emotional connection to the characters and reaction to plot events.

3. It plays with the sense of player "agency," shifting perspectives in meaningful ways.

4. It is, like LOST, a patently absurd supernatural story that is nonetheless expertly told.

5. It contains, as SWERY has said, many "lovely useless elements."

6. It is remarkably ambitious in ways big-budget AAA titles can never be.

7. It embraces ambiguity and weirdness, respecting the player's ability and desire to discuss the story and atmosphere without needing a "right answer."

And once you've finished the game, check out this great conversation I had with indie developer Bredon "Switchbreak" Clay, who provides some excellent counterpoints in his own analysis.

Look for a post on each factor over the next few weeks. Until then, do yourself a holiday favor and go pick up a copy, will you?

Murder Simulators

2010-12-22T19:51:00.000-05:00

("Opium Den": Image by Cathy Lynch, courtesy Musee Mecanique)

The lights come up on a macabre scene straight out of a Poe story. Decaying castle walls surround the gallows where the blindfolded prisoner, hands bound behind his back, waits for the trapdoor beneath him to open and the noose around his neck to snap taut. To his right a priest in white robes rhythmically bends forward and backward, miming a crude simulacrum of the Last Rites. The executioner, face obscured by a black hood, stands impassive on the prisoner's left, awaiting the signal to throw the lever. The atmosphere is suffused with grim anticipation, a sense of guilty fascination, of morbid curiosity. Something terrible - and, maybe, secretly satisfying - is about to happen.

Eventually the priest stops swaying. There is an interminable pause.

And then, with a sharp crack, the floor opens. The prisoner drops. A thud as his body smacks against the scaffolding. The lights dim as the castle doors close. The scene, like the prisoner, is dead.

And it only cost a quarter.

This grisly scene was one of several contained in the antique coin-operated machines housed at the wonderful and weird Musee Mecanique in San Francisco. One of the highlights of my business trip there earlier this month - aside from hanging out with Gamer Melodico proprietor, musician, Kill Screen contributor, beer connoisseur, and International Cool Dude Kirk Hamilton - was touring this collection at Fisherman's Wharf.

Alongside vintage Pole Position and Star Wars cabinets, one can find an eclectic assortment of antique test-your-love-skill meters, crank-operated moving picture displays (many of the scandalous peep show variety!), pinball tables, photo booths, player pianos, nightmare-inducing laughing puppets, and mechanically-animated dioramas such as the morbid spectacle described above.

The animated scenes range in tone from pedestrian (a depiction of a farm at work) to exotic and salacious ("The Opium Den," pictured above) to surreal ("The Drunkard's Dream," in which mechanical monsters emerge from every dark corner of the wine cellar the drunk has collapsed in).

But most curious, and most genuinely disturbing, were the "execution" machines. Mrs. JPG and I saw at least one other: in this one, clearly inspired by the French Revolution, a criminal was guillotined after being read his Last Rites. Again there was a tense pause before the blade swished down and lopped off his wooden head, which fell neatly into a tiny basket.

It's strange to say, but somehow true: watching these crudely-painted, wire-controlled figurines enact these pantomime executions was far more shocking than nearly any digital murder I've been a party to in a videogame. And I've killed a lot of virtual people.

There is something undeniably grotesque about witnessing a death, real or virtual. Doubly so when that death is an execution. You can't help but feel, looking at this terrible thing, that you bear some small measure of responsibility for its occurrence.

One of the most disturbing images I've ever seen was a grainy .mpeg of the Nick Berg beheading my brother managed to download shortly after the event in 2004. I barely made it through the video before leaving the room. I remember being filled with a palpable disgust, not being able to shake the idea that by viewing this act, I was somehow complicit in it. Maybe that's just latent Catholic guilt, but it's still difficult to get past.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the execution scenes at the Musee Mecanique was the fact that I caused them to happen. I brought those scenes to life with my quarter. It's one thing to view a murder scene; it's another thing entirely to be the cause of it. And unlike most videogame deaths - which have become so fantastically gory, frequent, and inventive as to render them cartoonish parodies - the very crudeness of the Musee scenes, coupled with the awareness that they were explicitly built to showcase real-world "taboo" events, made them all the most resonant.

People who call games like Gears of War "murder simulators" have a poor understanding of the videogame landscape, or a distinct agenda, or (likely) both. The vast majority of videogames, I would argue, do not attempt to present emotionally affecting or even realistic depictions of death. Death is a mechanism by which obstacles to player progress are removed. Gory death animations such as the close-up chainsawing in Gears are, perhaps, intended as sensational rewards for players' displays of skill, and derive most of their impact from that sense of reward, not from the depiction of violence itself.

At a fundamental level, there is little difference between chomping a ghost in Pac-Man and stabbing a mark in Assassin's Creed II, despite the obvious gap in the degree of verisimilitude. I'm not saying the latter game is appropriate for young audiences. But I do find it hard to believe violent videogames make children more prone to violence. (Instead, I think, actual violence makes children more prone to violence. But that's a topic for another post.)

As in a given real world situation - the media's videogame-like depiction of the first Gulf War comes to mind - we find it difficult to empathize when death is presented on an abstracted level. Only humanizing victims, something most videogames fail to even attempt, can inspire that kind of emotional connection. The only videogame death in recent memory that not only intended to evoke genuine emotion in the player, but succeeded brilliantly at doing so, was in Deadly Premonition - a game that would never show up on the cable news radar.

Anyone who's endured a traffic jam caused by rubberneckers on a highway understands a basic fact about humans: we're fascinated by the morbid. This is nothing new: thousands of years of cultural artifacts, both mainstream and subversive, attest to this. The existence of decades-old coin-op execution scenes - with their embedded questions about audience, function, complicity, etc. - speaks volumes about the reactionary discourse around videogame violence in 2010.

A Seat at the Table

2010-12-01T23:58:00.001-05:00

(WARNING: heavily charged political content ahead. Videogame talk toward the end.)

In its November 29 issue, TIME magazine ran a profile of Senator Jim DeMint, R-SC, anointing this Tea Party champion leader of the "Rebel Brigade."

The article - a four-page feature by Michael Crowley and Jay Newton-Small, including the artfully dour full-page portrait of an austere-looking DeMint - is fairly representative of establishment media's fascination with the Tea Party upstarts, attempting to place its subject in the context of a broader social movement that's obviously having a large impact on the political climate. It's a longish feature for a news magazine, pondering the implications of DeMint's growing influence and his crusade against earmarks ("the gateway drug to socialism," as he calls them) for the Republican Party and even the White House.

The piece is solidly written. Except for the part where they take this guy at all seriously.

I'm not talking about the Senator's outright McCarthyish proclamations, like the one above. That's par for the course in today's GOP, and mostly simple anti-Obama posturing at bottom. No, it's this passage, which appears in parentheses in the fourth-to-last paragraph of this ~2,500 - 3,000-word article:

(And while he has recently downplayed social issues, DeMint is as conservative as they come in that regard. Witness his view that gay people or sexually attractive single women should be barred from teaching in public schools.)

Again: this man is a United States Senator.

If you can even begin to unpack the incredibly dense homophobia and misogyny in the Senator's belief, you ought to be awarded an honorary degree in abnormal psychology.

At the risk of breaking Godwin's Law, let's try a quick thought experiment. Replace the word "gay" in the above passage with the word "black." What year would you assume it was? As a corollary question, what color hood would you assume the speaker was wearing?

And as much as I'm sure the proprietors of Am I Hot or Not websites would love fat government contracts, I'm not sure All Sluts Left Behind would be a viably enforceable piece of education legislation.

Let me stress again: the above passage appeared parenthetically about 85-90% of the way through the article.

Reading this piece was like chatting politely with a mildly disagreeable, if civil, acquaintance at a party - only to have him tell you, an hour into your conversation, that stuffing live kittens into the garbage disposal is his favorite pastime. It's unlikely you would seriously consider his views on health care reform or deficit reduction after that little nugget of insight.

When you believe and say crazy fucking hateful things, you do not deserve a seat at the table. This is how adult societies operate.

In America, land of iconoclasts, we elect you to national office instead.

You could chalk up the problem here to Tea Party wackjobbery or irresponsible journalism or an immature political culture whose level of discourse is currently at sub-3rd grade standards. On some level you'd be right on all counts. But I think the issue is deeper.

There is an inexplicable, almost pathological need in American culture, and especially in politics, to resolve the inevitable and frequent cognitive dissonance with a minimum of critical thought. It is enough to believe. The details are trivial.

"Okay, maybe Senator X's views on gay marriage aren't, quote, 'politically correct'," one might say, speaking in the passive-aggressive code of the righteous. "That doesn't mean he doesn't have good ideas on tax policy." It does not enter this hypothetical voter's head that someone who proudly, publicly, and repeatedly spouts baldly illogical and hateful horseshit about one issue has thereby compromised his integrity on all others. (While we're at it, let's agree there is a marked difference between hateful horseshit and dumb crap politicians say all the time.)

The problem becomes trickier when, in the particular synecdoche of party affiliations, one individual's aberrations become representative of an entire group. Senator X is a bigot; therefore bigotry is a hallmark of Senator X's party.

If the preposterous Schwarzenegger vs. EMA Supreme Court case has shown us anything, it's that videogames still don't have a seat at the table. And despite the many indignant cries to the contrary, maybe it's our own damn fault.

I don't have personal experience with many games that present outwardly hateful messages in and of themselves, without the intervention of 12-year-old Future Klan Grand Wizards on Xbox Live. Games have definite issues with gender equality, diversity, jingoism, and maturity amid other concerns; but as far as outward bigotry goes, seems to me there's an awful lot more of that in the movies, on TV, and in political speeches than in videogames. I can think of many games I'd say have "problematic treatments of sexuality," for example, but few that overtly encourage or legitimize bigotry on the level of a Jim DeMint. As a whole, and despite the massive amount of growing they have yet to do, videogames are actually a fairly progressive medium, I suspect. The problem is that nobody outside our little circle realizes this.

The Grand Theft Auto games, for example, are often vilified as the worst examples of virtual degeneracy. Nevermind that such vilifications always entirely neglect to examine the messages behind the degeneracy, or even consider that there might be messages there. When Mom sees Junior blast away half of Liberty City as Niko Bellic, she doesn't stop to think about what Niko's narrative arc could be teaching her son about the futility of revenge or the need to move beyond one's past. She just says, no seat at the table for this filth.

I'm not arguing that Mom is necessarily wrong in this scenario; Junior may not be sophisticated enough to pick up on GTA's messages. GTA's messages may be poorly-conveyed or poorly-crafted. Any given game may, in fact, be crap. Many are. But the majority of games, I'd argue, do not promote hatefulness in and of themselves; like the dumb crap politicians say all the time, they may be stupid or vapid, but they're not usually explicitly hateful. Gears of War is macho and gory as hell, but I don't find anything particularly hateful about it. It's because Mom equates violence or gore with hatefulness - without understanding or examining the functions and motivations for the violence or gore, or the broader context of the genre conventions, developer tendencies, etc. - that games don't have a seat at the table.

Again, it's silly to argue all parents, or gamers for that matter, should become videogame critics. But those of us who do care deeply about games, creator and player alike, should have some responsibility for helping others understand why the games we love might be stupid, but are not hateful.

In Rotation, November 2010

2010-11-30T22:59:00.002-05:00

Work, holiday travel, and brief bouts with illness may have prevented me from writing much the past few weeks - but not, thank goodness, from playing videogames. Here's what's been in rotation this month:

XBOX 360

Deadly Premonition. Finally finished this endearingly bizarre thriller a few nights ago, and holy crap was the ending a revelation. Actually, the whole game was a revelation, on so many levels. There's lots more to come from me on the subject, including some analysis of the many risks this game takes that the AAA blockbusters won't even touch. But for now, let me just say, without the "so bad it's good" irony common to many reviewers' takes, that Deadly Premonition is without a doubt the most ambitious, challenging (not difficult, though - more like subversive), and ultimately rewarding game I've played all year. It features easily the most memorable protagonist of any game in recent memory, and a story that oscillates between absurd and poignant with more frequency and dexterity than everyone's favorite Sean Connery-in-a-Speedo postapocalyptic film, Zardoz. Approached with an open mind, this game can be an amazingly resonant, if unrelentingly odd, experience. If you are even the slightest bit interested in Deadly Premonition - and are willing to endure some obvious and frustrating design and technical issues to get to the brilliance underneath - do yourself a favor and pick it up. And for God's sake, DO NOT indulge in spoilers. You're better than that.
Dead Rising 2. Completed the last quarter of the story early this month, and I don't mind saying how touching it was to see Chuck save Fortune City wearing only Borat's banana hammock. The close-ups featuring our hero's bare ass as he shared a tender moment with his seven-year-old daughter were especially emotional.
Red Dead Redemption. Well, I got to Mexico. And now I get it. For a game that's so high on so many GOTY lists, it drags like a sumbitch in the second act.

NINTENDO DS

Harvest Moon DS. Just as impenetrably directionless and cheerfully addicting as the SNES classic, this portable version makes me wonder how, and no offense to the 70 million of you doing so, anyone could play Farmville. Not because Farmville is a "blatantly cash-grubbing spamming app made by an evil company for the PopularStalkingPlatformBook" or "only moms play it" or "it's more interactive advertisement than game," although all these things are true, but because nobody can fuck with the cuteness of Harvest Moon. Yo, you seen that sheep? With that fresh-sheared look? Straight ADORABLE up in this bitch. "This bitch" being, of course, the barn.

Dawn of War II and its expansion, Chaos Rising. It's been a mystifying but not entirely unwelcome journey into the Warhammer 40,000 universe this month, largely propelled by the very solidly-executed Dawn of War II. I'm not sure if this game qualifies as an "action RPG," "tactical RTS," or some other variety of "descriptor ACRONYM," but it's damn fun regardless. While I enjoy the resource-gathering and base-building of games like StarCraft and Age of Mythology, I'm generally lousy at adopting any other strategy than turtling. DoWII removes that temptation along with most of the intense micromanagement, freeing the player to aggressively pursue and destroy enemies the way any Space Marine worth his 41st millennium equivalent of stripes would. In many ways this game has more in common with Diablo or Torchlight than with StarCraft, but the distinction is academic: what I love most about these Warhammer games is the way their over-the-top weaponry and righteous pseudo-religious xenophobia give just enough context for me to jump in, guns blazing. Very much looking forward now to a game that would have never otherwise been on my radar, the upcoming 3rd-person shooter Space Marine.

Friday Links, and a VGBC Update

2010-11-19T07:30:00.006-05:00

November's been a rough month for blogging, as my scant output here attests. Not much to report on the games front; still plugging away at Dawn of War II, Deadly Premonition, and Red Dead Redemption. I picked up The World Ends With You from the library, but haven't had nearly enough time to play it; I want to give it a fair shake, but it's not grabbing me the way I thought it would so far. Combat feels haphazard, and the endless tapping to advance conversations, which veer precipitously into "..."-speech-bubble emo territory, gets old quickly. Still, I'll give it another go this weekend and see where I get with it.

Click the image to see Yahtzee Croshaw's very NSFW take on TWEWY.

Despite my busier-than-usual professional and social calendars lately, I do hope to continue to post regularly. The pieces I've got in mind, though, are a bit more long-form in nature and will probably be split up into multiple parts. Of course, I have to have time and energy to write them before I split them up. A notion that inspires only one reaction right now: ...

Apologies are in order, meantime, to all three of you who've been eagerly awaiting the next installment of the Video Game Book Club. I've actually got two reviews to catch up on - one for a StarCraft novel and the other for the latest Mass Effect book. Been dreading writing them, to be honest. The StarCraft book was so comically inept that making fun of it feels redundant and more than a little petty, which gives me pause about this whole endeavor. But fear not: I refuse to let this imposing tome, which rivals The Room in the audacity of its incompetence, dull my snark.

Also, re: the phrase "the audacity of incompetence" - PATENT PENDING, BITCH.

So. Friday links. Without further ado, here's what I rustled up from the great wide ether this week and last:

A very funny and insightful post by Margaret Robinson of UK studio Hide & Seek about the difference between - sigh - "gamification" and "pointsification."
At Edge, Randy Smith spends five hours with Alan Wake.
Wouldn't it be interesting if developers of big AAA games could study this weird proof of concept "game" about the subconscious of a man stood up for a dinner date, and insert that kind of intimate interaction into their grand narratives? What a fascinating way to inhabit a character.
Hate to keep plugging the GWJ Conference Call every week (well, actually, I don't), but this episode's time capsule to 1998 was a trip. Had no idea it was such a banner year for gaming.
On his blog Flash of Steel, Troy Goodfellow has begun an ambitious, and so far excellent, series of articles examining how the "character" of prominent nations/cultures have been portrayed in strategy games.
David Carlton's post about "practice" in games stems from his experience with Rock Band 3, where the idea of pure training modes is a natural fit - but then goes on to make some interesting suggestions about extending that valuable opportunity to refine skills to other game genres.

Primary Sources

2010-11-09T15:35:00.002-05:00

When I was a kid I was given some D&D sourcebooks as a gift one Christmas. I don't think I ever played a single game, but I remember obsessively trawling through the books, finding the world implied by the ruleset fascinating. It wasn't so much the setting, which seemed like generic fantasy fare, but more that there were rules governing how the fantastical stuff worked. I was especially riveted by the descriptions of spells and their effects, which seemed peculiarly plausible in the matter-of-fact tone in which they were written. It was like reading an instruction manual for a Honda, except the Honda was your character. Also, the Honda could shoot lightning bolts.

Around the same time (age 11 or 12, I think) I read through Lord of the Rings for the first time. I suppose I enjoyed the adventure story, though I'm sure I didn't fully grasp it. But what sticks out the most in memory is poring over those huge appendices detailing the history of this imaginary world. The fact that Tolkien had gone to such lengths to invent extensive cultural, political, and linguistic backdrops for his novels blew my mind. There was a real lived-in feeling to this fantasy world, although much of it was (and is) so esoteric I could never commit to it on the level others could.

When I read Dune for the first time a few years later, I had a similar experience. There was, again, an extensive appendix, featuring a glossary of the pseudo-Arabic future space language, a timeline of significant historical events, assorted fragments of religious documents, even a satirical poem. Whatever the reasons - probably my growing maturity and reading comprehension skills combined with the availability of a feature film, a protagonist about my age with godlike powers, and Frank Herbert's slightly less opaque writing style - I latched onto the Dune universe much more strongly than I had any other fictional setting.

By the time I'd gotten to college and delved into the Wild West of campus network file-sharing - this was the pre-Napster early days, mind you - I had probably re-read the book and seen the David Lynch movie five times apiece. So when that untamed landscape of free software opened before me, I immediately jumped on the old DOS adventure game simply titled Dune and its not-really-sequel, the famous pioneer RTS game Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty.

But the real treasure was a massive PDF of The Dune Encyclopedia some kind soul had painstakingly scanned.

This giant tome, first published in 1984 with the bemused, if not entirely wholehearted, approval of Frank Herbert himself, is the finest example of "fan fiction" ever published. Come to think of it, the fact that it was published, period, speaks to its quality.

The volume's editor, Dr. Willis E. McNelly, and dozens of collaborators penned hundreds of entries on the ephemera of the Dune universe, everything from arcane descriptions of future weaponry to centuries-long histories of the novels' various factions and races. Although not canon, it was a brilliant compendium of background material, lovingly assembled in a brilliant way: in the form of an in-universe encyclopedia, referencing fictional texts throughout its extensive study of the Atreides Imperium. Dr. McNelly's collection was so thorough and so compelling that Westwood Studios, developer of Dune II and later Dune games, stole from it. The idea that there could be "primary sources" in a fictional universe was especially notable to me, buried as I was in my literature and writing studies; it lent the universe an air of legitimacy, however slight.

(Of course, this was all in the days before Frank's son Brian and his hack ghostwriter accomplice took a giant dump all over the series with their procession of abysmal cash-grab "canonical" prequels and sequels. And used the power of copyright and estate to muscle everyone else out of the Dune business in the process.)

Had The Dune Encyclopedia been compiled today, it would have undoubtedly been in wiki format, much like my recent insomnia cure. But in some ways, I think that might have missed the point.

To my mind, nothing can replace the feeling of a tangible artifact when it comes to building on a fictional world's reach. As a kid, I adored the "feelies" that came with some PC and NES games. Michael Abbott's great post about these in-box extras - paper maps, decoder puzzles, 3D glasses - links them to the in-game codex in Mass Effect 2, which functions as a digital encyclopedia of sorts to flesh out that fictional universe. His point that the codex contains "pertinent, not disposable lore" is well-taken. There is a lot of fascinating stuff in there for those players who choose to explore it. It makes for a much richer Mass Effect experience, helping set this particular game's story within a larger fictional space. I'm sure I'm not alone in appreciating the creativity and dedication it takes to construct an engaging universe for your game to take place in.

That said, I have to disagree with Michael's comment that this codex, or any in-game codex, really, is "well implemented." In ME2, as well as in that other high-profile BioWare opus, Dragon Age: Origins, navigating through the codex is a chore. In Dragon Age, the codex/quest menus (on 360) were especially difficult to manage; entries were not numbered and navigating to a new codex entry often meant inadvertently marking other unread entries as read - thus dropping them off my list of "new" material. It was even worse in Oblivion: while it was cool to be able to pick up and read books, it felt like a disruption to the flow of gameplay, even when the content of the supplementary material was interesting.

Thing is, I'm not sure there's anything developers can do. It's just a pain in the ass to read text on a large screen. It might be more palatable on a PC, but that's how I played Oblivion and it still felt like a distraction. The act of playing a game and the act of reading about that game's world feel like two distinct activities that, to me, are best enjoyed separately. It would be interesting to see if BioWare keeps stats on how thoroughly players explore the codex in, say, ME2. After all, it does serve a similar function to the appendices found in Lord of the Rings and Dune.

Yet while I understand the desire for an in-game codex to help players understand the fiction and immerse themselves in it, I can't help but think there are more effective, meaningful, and potentially profitable ways to extend your game's universe. And I'm not talking about Collector's Editions; most seem stuffed with demonstrably useless physical artifacts that are more marketing collateral than supplemental content. A figurine might be nice for a desk display, but it doesn't connect to the game experience in a meaningful way like the feelies of old did.

Honestly, I don't think that's just nostalgia for outdated copy-protection mechanisms: as Michael points out in his post, feelies were often essential components of the package, a (sigh) meta-game experience that brought the player out of the computer game, but not out of the game world. There's something psychologically interesting that happens there, I think. You are compelled to reflect upon the game and its fiction in a different way because of the switch in modality. The very act of reflection should be an important goal in itself.

Game developers often have to (and should) think like teachers: their students have different learning styles. Communicating content in different modes is crucial if you want to reach everyone. If you want to meaningfully extend a game world's fiction, I would argue, you've got to look outside the game itself.

Friday Link

2010-11-05T07:47:00.001-04:00

That's right, there's only one selection this week. Because you really ought to take a listen to the latest Gamers With Jobs Conference Call.

In addition to regular hosts Shawn Andrich and Sean Sands, this week's podcast features Russ Pitts of The Escapist and Justin McElroy of Joystiq. The main topic stems from an open letter Russ recently wrote to game makers.

If there's one issue that should really dominate the conversation about videogames, it's the problem of half-baked "AAA" games being foisted on the oblivious consumer. When Fallout: New Vegas, which by all accounts is so buggy it's nigh-unplayable on any platform, costs the same $60 as more meticulously QA-tested games and somehow dominates them in sales, there's a bigger problem than what some film critic is saying. And yet, we bullshit about "art" and motion control and console wars and who wins trade shows.

So give the episode a listen, if for no other reason than to hear the phrase "We made who the king? The pattycake guy?"

Warhammered

2010-11-04T23:27:00.004-04:00

I'm rooting for this guy.

I have no idea how this happened.

Seduced by the Steam sale last week, and despite its ridiculous name, I bought Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II, the 2009 Relic hybrid RTS/RPG that, it turns out, is pretty great. It's like StarCraft with cover-based shooting and no building, or an isometric Gears of War with loot and leveling up. Both the game design and the fictional universe, or at least what little I've grasped of it, are curious blends of genre and style. And somehow, it all works. The single-player is damn fun, a well-balanced tactical RTS that's almost entirely combat-focused. I haven't jumped into multiplayer yet, but I've heard good things. Although my weak gaming setup - BootCamping into XP on a Mac Mini - necessitates turning down all the graphics settings, I'm assured the game looks great in higher resolutions.

But the game being good wasn't the revelation. It's that I've been inexplicably, and pretty embarrassingly, drawn into its fiction.

I knew nothing about the Warhammer 40K universe going into this game. I dabbled in some D&D-lite tabletop games like HeroQuest and DragonStrike as a kid, but that's about it. I've never been anywhere near hardcore enough to paint miniatures. So it was doubly surprising that this videogame got me curious about its Lord of the Rings In Space backstory.

Yep. Seriously.

Here's the premise of Dawn of War II: you command a squad of Space Marines (yes, they are actually called Space Marines) on a campaign to cleanse the galaxy of, no shit, Space Orcs, Space Elves, and the Xenomorphs from Alien. There's some kind of Fundamentalist Space Church that rules all of humanity, I guess, and your Space Marines - massive armored behemoths who look like the love child of Duke Nukem and The Hulk - have a sacred duty to whoop alien ass up and down the galaxy while dual-wielding flamthrowers and chainsaw swords. The voice acting brings a cheesetastic meatheadedness to the pitch-perfect melodramatic sci-fi dialogue. Your soldiers constantly refer to each other as "Brother," reinforcing the comforting thought that 38,000 years from now, just as today, society is dominated by bloodthirsty frat jocks.

I'd like to blame this week's particularly severe bout of insomnia for this, but it's true: I've been reading the Warhammer 40K Wiki. And it is endlessly entertaining.

Consider the following excerpt:
The torture cults eroded the future of the Eldar as a viable galactic empire. While this debauchery would have been destructive within any society, it was even more damaging for the Eldar because of their powerful psychic abilities. Within the parallel dimensional realm of the Warp, the psychic emanations of these perverse activities began to gather, strengthened by the souls of departed Eldar hedonists and cultists. As the Eldar's vices grew, this dark mass of negative psychic energy did as well, producing the terrible Warp storms that defined humanity's Age of Strife and made all interstellar travel and communication impossible for the human colonies of this period. Eventually, this growing mass of negative psychic energy came into a life of its own and came to consciousness over ten thousand years ago at the end of the Age of Strife as the newborn Chaos God Slaanesh, the Devourer of Souls and the doom of the Eldar. The psychic scream of Slaanesh's birth tore the souls from all the Eldar within a thousand light years of it, sparing only those sheltered in the wraithbone hulls of the Craftworlds. The Prince of Pleasure's awakening was so forceful that it tore a hole between the physical realm and the Immaterium, plunging the Eldar homeworlds into a nightmare existence, trapped within the realm of Chaos. This region is now known as the Eye of Terror, and is the home of the forces of Chaos in the 41st millennium.

Again: Yep. Seriously.

Look, I don't mean to shoot fish in a barrel here, honestly. There is something genuinely endearing about fantasy worlds that are detailed with such thoroughness, no matter how absurd. When sleep eludes me I find myself clicking through Wiki entires on the Imperium of Man, the Horus Heresy, Tech-Priests and Terminator Armor, the gene-seeds of the Primarchs. None of it makes much sense to me, nor do I expect it to, but it's fun feeling like a tourist in this intricate and throughly baffling place. And in turn, I'm going back to Dawn of War II with a renewed, if bemused, investment in my Force Commander.

I've always loved the idea that the silly sci-fi stories and games I was into had a history, an evolutionary path you could trace. The world didn't have to make sense or even be particularly internally consistent; someone just had to care enough to draw up the imaginary playground.

I miss that part of being a kid. I miss leaping headfirst into stories about Space Marines fighting the Orc Hordes across the galaxy in the 41st millennium, without the detachment of irony or the vague guilt of the responsible adult. I miss living in other worlds and not needing to think about why I wanted to in the first place.

Still, it's not all bad. At least I'm not playing WoW.

Friday Links

2010-10-29T09:59:00.000-04:00

The Oh God I Really Need A Weekend Edition:

Not sure I fully agree with everything being claimed in this Atlantic article, but it does raise an interesting question - and no, it's not the tired one about "art." It's more the implied question: when is a game (or artistic product, really) "finished"? Does the ability to patch/fix games so easily undermine their value? In other words, how is the idea of a "published product" changing?
An Australian columnist reads some serious political and moral subtext in Angry Birds.
At Gamasutra, designer Ernest Adams' column on "joy" in games is a terrific read for aspiring developers and established pros alike. As a player, there's a lot of fun to be had in just screwing around in a game world.
My favorite thing about Stallion83 - he of the quest for 1,000,000 Xbox achievement points - is the way even the most tongue-in-cheek fluff piece about him inspires crazy polarizing reactions.

In Rotation, October 2010

2010-10-26T21:07:00.000-04:00

Not a ton of new stuff to add to the list this month, but good stuff nonetheless:

XBOX 360

Dead Rising 2. Happy(?) to report the game's unabashed, directionless sexism continues apace. That aside, I'm having fun with it. I've still never not finished last in the multiplayer, but the whole premise - a kind of American Gladiators spectacle with zombies - is so ridiculous I hardly care. I won't pretend I'm not a little let down by this sequel; as Brad Gallaway points out, there's really not much new or different in this iteration. Still, it has its bizarre charms. There's nothing quite like repeatedly smacking a zombie in the face with a foot-long purple "massager" while wearing nothing but a cowboy hat and boxer shorts. Unlike MY WIFE, I appreciate that Dead Rising 2 gives me the opportunity to do that. Regularly.
Red Dead Redemption. I haven't progressed much since I wrote about RDR last week, mostly because I've been obsessed with:
Deadly Premonition. Nothing, not even the aforementioned face-dildoing, comes close to the sheer WTF-erry of this budget-ass Twin Peaks ripoff. I'll write more about Premonition this week, but for now, let me just say that it has rapidly, unexpectedly, and thoroughly unironically shot up my "games of the year" list. In the meantime, go read Daniel Wiessenberger's excellent series of articles on the topic.

NINTENDO DS

Trauma Center: Under the Knife. Picked up this one, along with Harvest Moon DS, as a gift for Mrs. JPG. While the gameplay itself is fairly mediocre - it's a glorified pixel-hunt embedded into an anime-style medical drama - the real value of the title has been its voice clips. "Doctor Stiles?" Yeeeeeeessssssss, sexy nurse? Never gets old.

ANDROID

Angry Birds. Mad love to Rovio for bringing their adorable, addictive puzzler to Android - and for free, at that! If Jon Hamm's proselytizing isn't enough, the game is so great it's even inspired its own line of plush dolls. Only a few triumphs can pull that off.

Friday Links

2010-10-22T07:45:00.011-04:00

Here's the roundup of pieces I've enjoyed this week:

This brief interview with the creator of Minecraft hints at an interesting, and I think worthwhile, take on videogame design - namely, that it should seek to emulate boardgames more.
Troy Goodfellow's post about how his deep immersion in the "grammar" of strategy games has conditioned him to respond to games in other genres is another topic that deserves further discussion, and I hope to see more from him, and others, on the subject.
As a nice companion piece to the above, check out Nels Anderson's recent post discussing the difference between "mastery" and "domination." A good read for game critics looking to build their lexicon.
Darby McDevitt's feature "A Practical Guide to Game Writing" at Gamasutra delivers exactly what it promises.
The reviews of Fallout: New Vegas are pouring in, and while I'm usually not big on reviews, Justin McElroy's and Russ Pitts' stand out. I've written before about how certain games seem impossible to quantify, and New Vegas seems like one of them. Where does that leave the reviewer, then? An experiential narrative style can go a long way in these cases.