Mass Effect Contingency and Canon

Original Post: May 30 2011

In another in a series of pieces discussing largely unanswerable questions, this piece will examine the relevance of the ‘canon’ to an interactive form such as Mass Effect. The background to this discussion is the overall controversy regarding sex in videogames, and why it is such a difficult subject to handle well, that began in particular regarding Mass Effect a few years ago. More recently, speculation surfaced and inspired a heated debate regarding the possibility of expanding same-sex relationships with previously-established characters in Mass Effect 3. The debate, while very likely motivated by personal aversions to non-heterosexuality in general, revolved around canonical and continuity objections. My question here is, can an interactive medium have a non-interactive canon? Who is to say what the truth is, in a medium where nothing is true, and everything is permitted?

I’m getting a lot of mental mileage out of this topic, and I’m spreading the thoughts out in various outlets. This blog post is one version of the thinking. I will be developing it further in a paper I’m presenting in July at an academic conference, and I had a chat to Mark Serrels over at Kotaku AU for a slightly more approachable take (albeit with slightly different concentration). There is a lot more to be said about Mass Effect, romance, fiction and simulation and I hope to be involved in saying. For now, let’s begin with this discussion of canon. 

Videogames can be described as ‘state machines’ meaning they are constructed out of many sets of options which can be set to a range of different positions. A light switch is a very simple state machine, with both an on and off position while a windmill is a poor example, as there is no switch from on to off, and the speed the mill turns at is highly variable. Games usually contain many, many sets of possibilities, or individual option-cases, that can be set to one of range of possibilities. The class of your RPG character, whether a Little Sister is still in the level or not, and further whether she was rescued or harvested. Some states will either imply or preclude other options in a different set. Think of Morrowind or any other faction-heavy game, where being a high-ranking member of one faction forbids you becoming a high-ranking member of some opposing faction.

Taken all together, these state cases are ‘what is possible’ in a game. Generally the state of any of these cases is entirely dependent on the choices and actions of the player. The possibility space is the player’s domain, as we work through the long set of options, we flick switches to the position that pleases us. The size of the possibility space is usually biggest in strategy games and RPGs where the ‘how’ you play is a major feature of the genre. These games typically present the world as open to the player’s input, malleable to the player’s will. If I want to become exalted with the Cenarion Circle, I know exactly what I need in order to do so, and really, nothing and no one can stop me. If I want to have the maximum proficiency with daggers, I know how to achieve that too. There is really never any question about the potential of the player’s character. Whatever he/she sets out to do will be achievable, provided that it exists within the possibility space in the first place. The ability to manipulate and eventually dominate the possibility space is the prerogative of the player in videogames. This is generally viewed as unproblematic. Yet, as in life, the case of romance and sexuality becomes problematic, and requires greater nuance.

In traditional media the possibility space is defined, or rather described by, the canon. The canon of a particular work is ‘the way things are’ in that universe. Canon, for our purposes here, is something of a history book, and in the case of sci-fi or fantasy, a physics lesson. The canon defines who people are, what they have done, and more generally what is and isn’t possible in the world, based on narrated events in ‘canonical’ texts. That is, the canon is extrapolated from the published novels or films etc. from the original or authorized sources. So, no, your Harry Potter slasher fan-fic is not considered canonically true.

What does this mean in a medium where, for different players, the things that happen and who people are can be wildly different? In the Mass Effect canon, are the Rachni extinct and the Geth reprogrammed, or not? Is Shepard male or female? Is Ashley Williams alive or dead? Mass Effect’s canon is as contingent as the narrative. The way my Mass Effect universe ‘is’ as defined by what actually happened will be (or can be) quite different to yours. What is possible doesn’t change; we both have the same opportunities to begin with. Therein lies the rub: is the canon formed of narrative events, or by the possibility space?

Continuing to use Mass Effect as an example, the array of options regarding the so-called ‘love interest’ characters present us with an interesting case. For the moment, let us ignore the relative believability of any particular character’s sexual orientation, I will return to that later. The question for now is this: on any one playthrough, Shepard can only fully pursue one character, with the clash between two potential romance partners resulting in a decision being made between them. So, two of the available characters are demonstrably attracted to Shepard. Does the fact that an experienced player knows that if the game were played differently, another character would also be available, or would change their sexual orientation, matter? Is the possibility part of the canon when it doesn’t actually happen?

For example: Liara can romance either a male or female Shepard. Does this make her a ‘bisexual’ (in human terms, she’s attracted to both sexes and this has nothing to do with her own lack of definite gender)? Or is she simply (human) straight and attracted to a male Shepard in that case, or a (human) lesbian being attracted to a femShep? Given that it requires two fundamentally different playthroughs of the game to demonstrate her bisexual availability, is it fair to assume the same from one playthrough? Take another example: upgrading the Normandy. In different playthroughs, the ship can be anywhere between stock-standard and fully upgraded. Given that both are possible, does this indicate that in the ‘canon’ the Normandy is somehow both? A “bi-engineered” ship both with and without upgrades? And does the possibility for the player to choose a male or female Shepard mean that canonically, Shepard is actually a simultaneous hermaphrodite?

My suspicion is that we want to attribute something more like personality to Liara, Jack, Miranda or any other character, and less like state machine coding that actually defines them. Especially when it comes to sex, but generally because these characters are more fun when thought of as people, we want to construct for them an interpretation of their possible states as behaviours rather than programming. We want them to be more real, with their own agency, rather than simply accepting input from a player, and activating the appropriate animation and dialog according to the selection criteria. Further, it is unprecedented for each ‘reading’ of a text to present a materially different story, so despite this possibility in videogames, we tend to treat/imagine Liara as the same person when romanced by either male or female Shepards—even though this is a different story.

When we combine the player-centric possibility space with a more traditional understanding of character and canon, these problems arise. The term ‘Shepsexual’ is used in the BioWare forums to describe the peculiar, unlikely experience of everyone on the ship being attracted to Shepard. We can avoid this sensation if we compartmentalize our plathroughs into separate versions of the story, though. This places some expectations on the shoulders of players, to change their perception of character, and less on those of developers. The reason I suggest this first is that from a story-writer’s perspective, having a love-interest in a story such as Mass Effect in a linear medium may indeed be inevitable, possibly vital to the experience. In an interactive narrative, the decision must be made between allowing/providing for a romance with one particular NPC (let’s say Ashley) meaning that the only playthroughs to feature a romance arc are those by a male Shepard, by a player interested in Ashley (and not Liara or Kaiden). The alternative must then be alternatives. It is not part of the story/narrative that all characters desire Shepard, but part of the deeper structure that a romance arc (of some sort) should be possible for any given Shepard. Therefore, the designers must plan for romance for each different Shepard by creating different versions of each NPC: romanced and non-romanced. Within that, we should probably find romanced-by-male and romanced-by-female, and possibly even the non-romanced version of each as well.

The question becomes whether any particular character being bisexual is actually part of his/her story or if it is simply a mechanical reaction to the player/character’s gender. This is a deep problem between traditional game design and realistic world building. If we are to create worlds, and especially characters, features such as their sexuality must seem to belong to them, as a person, rather than being part of the possibility space that the player controls, or it feels disingenuous, even pandering (especially to certain hetero-male fantasies). Design fundamentals tell us that games should be fair; life tells us that the world is not fair. This demands a very awkward balance between enabling a wide array of player experiences, particularly those personal ones such as romance, and creating an unrealistic world where everyone wants to sleep with you.

A Series of Interesting Choices

 Original Post: May 18 2011 (Kotaku AU)

Kaiden or Ashley? Rescue or Harvest? How do you make decisions in video games? Video games were described by Sid Meier as ‘a series of interesting choices.’ Indeed, many good video games today involve choices that go beyond which gun to use or how fast to run through a room. Many involve decisions between two general strategies, or like the above examples between two characters or responses that affect the rest of the game. The question here is, how do those choices matter?

I want to suggest that there are two different types of choices available in video games, and wish that there was a third. The first I will call a ‘mechanical choice.’ These are the kind that may not even seem like choices to experienced gamers, as they are built into the mechanics of the game. These are the ‘choice’ to grab a Mushroom in Mario, or to pick up a sniper rifle in Call of Duty while standing on a rooftop. Do you upgrade your sword and armour or not? Of course you do these things, because they help you to beat the game. Mechanical choices are economic: they make the player-character (or his allies) more powerful.

The second kind of choice is a ‘narrative choice.’ These are the kinds of decisions that affect the fiction/story of the game, but not the relative power of the player-character. By rescuing either Kaiden Alenko or Ashley Williams in Mass Effect, the strength of the overall party isn’t affected, since the two characters are more or less interchangeable given the right balance of the other party members. We do not have the option to rescue both, so a loss is inevitable. The only difference is which personality you lose. Playing as a good or evil Cole in inFamous is a general strategy (like any other good/bad split we see so often these days), but doesn’t affect the strength of the hero either way. Each power is balanced against its opposite, so in the end, a Cole of either alignment has equivalent firepower.

In Bioshock, we can either harvest or rescue Little Sisters. Does it matter, in the end, which we choose? Jack gains more ADAM initially by harvesting them, but then ends up with more than he needs anyway. A saviour gains the extra plasmid ability that balances out the lack of ADAM in the critical battles against Big Daddies later on. FarCry 2 designer Clint Hocking explores in detail the reasons he feels the game is a betrayal to the player, and the mechanical weakness of the Little Sister choice is part of it.

The problem though, is this: if you were made genuinely, significantly weaker by choosing to save the Little Sisters, would you do it? Videogames are almost entirely about seeking to increase one’s power, in order to overcome dangerous obstacles. What kind of videogame player would seek to make himself weaker, and thus in danger of not being able to finish the game? Yet this is exactly the kind of problem any altruist finds himself in. The choice to save Little Sisters (in a real world) would be meaningful because of the self-sacrifice on Jack’s part. He sacrifices power in order to preserve the life of a little girl, the ethically noble option. By then rewarding the player with a new power, the videogame essentially takes away the meaning of that initial choice.

In a world where we create videogames with different difficulty settings, can we not incorporate that into the fiction? Why shouldn’t Bioshock be harder to finish playing as a good guy? (Or inFamous, Mass Effect, Fable or Fallout 3 for that matter.) Our ethical frameworks in the real world often will tell us that the ‘right’ thing to do is often not the ‘easy’ option. Why don’t our games reflect this?

Take the Mass Effect example again, and combine it with the romance arc. Let’s re-imagine the mechanics a little, and for example use a male Shepard who has pursued Ashley in the romance. Having gotten to the end stage of the romance arc, Kaiden (not Ashley) will be granted some extra mechanical combat strength, whether a new weapon or armour or ability, making him clearly more powerful than Ashley. Then, when the vital decision must be made, the player asks himself: Do I save Ashley whom my Shepard loves, or Kaiden, whom my player-brain tells me is the more valuable game piece? This asks the player to think about the party members as characters, rather than only pieces of gear to be wielded in a fight. It asks the same of the designers, of course. (Reverse all this for a femShep, for a similar effect, and just do the math if you want to include Liara—she’d have to be put in a similar life-threatening situation for it to work though.)

It’s simply too easy to ignore the fiction, in our medium, and hide behind economics. There are too many ways to fail, and not enough ways to bring the story to an end. Mass Effect 2 goes some way to explore this by providing many different ending scenarios, not all of which are victorious at all. Heavy Rain does the same by providing several different endings, and not forcing the player to go back and play the last level over again if someone dies. So you might have ‘beaten’ the game, but you certainly haven’t won. But it’s not just the end of the game that matters, it’s how we get there, and why we make the decisions along the way.

So the third type of choice I imagine is the kind that actually breaks some game design rules, and unbalances the game—if it should. Life isn’t a game, and it certainly isn’t always fair. If we want to explore more realistic human experiences, game designers will have to confront this fact eventually. Naturally, we can’t guarantee all players will respond to and think about the context of these choices. Many will continue to ignore them in favour of whatever the most economical decision is. But how many interesting, compromising, uncomfortable and increasingly horrifying choices can a designer compel a player to make, with the promise of greater power? I’m not arguing here for games to be impossible to ‘beat’ if you make the good choices instead of the bad ones (not all games anyway…) but that you’ll have to be more careful, work out a better strategy, or do more preparation work like Mass Effect 2 makes you do in the lead up to the Omega Relay jump. All that time you can savour the knowledge that you’ve done the right thing. Or not, and enjoy playing a psychopath for a bit.

A Riposte to Blunt Criticism

Original Post: May 10 2011

A few days ago I was cited in a piece by Danc on his Lost Garden blog as being an example of “shallow game criticism.” While I don’t take personal offence to the citation, nor even the tone of Danc’s article, I feel compelled to respond (as many have before me) to its argument. In a way I welcome the opportunity to clearly enunciate my own position, even if it is from a defensive posture. And like any good narcissist, I’m pleased anyone is reading my work–even when they disagree! So, herein lies something of a personal (please note, personal) manifesto.

The two points that Danc seems to take issue with are the nature of criticism in general, and the purpose of videogame criticism in particular. He has not engaged deeply with the concept of criticism of other art forms, so I can only speculate about what he feels the nature and purpose of literary criticism is, and I may well do so throughout this discussion.

Firstly, about videogames themselves:

Yet though games do possess evocative elements, they also are driven by a functional heart that resists being reduced to only the softest of sciences. Bridges, though undeniably aesthetic and cultural objects, can also be understood as functional or economic creations.  Playthroughs, aesthetics, rhetoric, literary theory, film theory, art history may be one set of valuable perspectives, but if you only rely on these, you will fail to paint a complete picture the babbling, whirring human-mechanical reality of a games.

Games have much in common with functional works involving mathematics, psychology, governments, economics or other complex systems.

As for games criticism, he is quite particular. Games criticism must be:

Grounded: Are you basing your theories off empirical evidence?  Do not write something merely because you had a feeling to express.

Aware: Do you know what other people have written in the past?  Do the research and be an informed commenter.

Insightful:  Does your writing add a substantial new perspective or tool that moves the conversation forward?  Do not rehash the same old thing simply because you have an opinion on the currently popular meme.

Actionable:  Does your writing identify a course of action that previously was obscured? Do not let an exploration of an idea wander off into vague hand-waving.  Ask the reader to perform an experiment that increases the knowledge of the community as a whole.

Of my piece, he says:

Yet the essay is little more than a series of personal descriptions of how he feels when he plays certain games.  There is little insight that couldn’t be gained by sitting down with a beer and a controller. There is no attempt at gathering empirical evidence. Adam could have saved everyone a vast amount of time with the TL;DR summary: “In 3rd person you can see (and thus empathize) with a visualized character and in 1st person, you can’t.” Once you strip away the laborious language, you have yet another bit of fluffy gamer opinion written by a young student.

And follows with:

He is a student acting as an academic, writing what is essentially a playthrough that in turn masquerades as game analysis.  The fact that he is a student writing a playthrough is fine.  The multiple levels of deception are what initially raised my hackles.

Given this, if you fail to disclose your perspective, you are very likely wasting the precious time of your reader.  If you deliberately obscure this information (as I’ve seen many student or indies tempted to do) you are being a dishonest member of our community.  Hey! Stop doing that…there is no shame in writing openly and honestly about your perspective.

So working through some of these points, perhaps to quibble a little before I launch into what I really want to say here:

Regarding the “disclaimers” that Danc seems bent on, whereby each writer will post a bio or resume at the top of each of their pieces, I did that. I was introduced as an academic. My title (with the help of Kotaku’s editor Mark Serrels) is a riff on the content and purpose of the article. “What’s Your Perspective?” The title was a question, my essay was an answer. The purpose of the article was to give my perspective, follow my thought process, and provoke others to do the same of their own thoughts and reactions to games. In that, I feel eminently successful. The article sparked the most successful debate and discussion anything I’ve written has so far accomplished. It’s even been linked by someone who disagrees with me vehemently! It was a perspective piece, informed by my own reasoning.

A “playthrough” is a new term for me, maybe like a walkthrough, which is an unbiased description of events as they unfold, explaining the how-to’s of a game. Nowhere in my piece does it instruct anyone on how to play any of the games I mention. It would be a woeful playthrough, in fact, in its lack of detail. Perhaps the problem here is the word Danc chose to apply: “analysis.” If he has a specialist understanding of “analysis” which requires empirical datasets, graphs and metrics, then my piece is not analysis. Yet he is the one who used that word in the first place. Personally I have a broader definition of the word which includes the careful study of an object by one person reporting his findings, supported by a logical argument. Further, if Danc had ever read any of my genuinely academic writing, he would find that I engage quite specifically with the mechanics of videogames as a matter of course. In fact, I almost never only talk about the story, or a character, or other elements of fiction without engaging with how they function as part of the system. Instead he reads one of my pieces, on a public enthusiast blog site, and fails to appreciate that even that one is actually a question of the most basic mechanical nature: player perspective, and writes me off as a ‘shallow game-illiterate’ when in fact I have Crawford, Zimmerman and Koster on my shelf right now. I’m also not sure what he believes the difference is between a student and an academic.

Regarding his four-point checklist for a critical article: I frankly and unreservedly disagree with his first point. If I have no right to express what feelings a piece of art instilled in me as an individual human, then all is lost and we should all just go home now. The primary occupation of humankind is coming to terms with being a human, and understanding the feelings and experiences we have in life. Criticism is a parallel to artistic practice in helping us to do so (more on this later). Secondly, it will become evident throughout this piece that I believe Danc has himself failed on his next point, that of being informed about the research into what has already been said on this subject. He can drop names like Koster, Zimmerman and Crawford, but this is cherry-picking in the extreme and demonstrates no awareness of the ebb and flow of theoretical perspectives in recent game study and criticism (more on this later too). With his third point, Danc seems to be stating that not everyone has a right to express their own personal interpretation (as indicated in the first point) of a game experience. He seems to value his time quite highly, so we writers should think of him and question whether he has read something similar at some other time. Also, if the article in question does not answer the (Danc’s) questions satisfactorily, then we should also not bother…which brings me to the fourth point: action. Rather than introduce my objection to this here, it will appear in more detail below.

Finally he implies some level of dishonesty, even out-right deception using me as an example for argument, suggesting that people like me (students or indies) wilfully obscure their identities. I have never done this. I don’t even use an alias (Danc is your real name?) in my work, my university email address is my public contact information, I am introduced in my article as a PhD student, and have the same posted on my blog. I am also easily accessible on Academia.edu. In any event, the identity of the author should be secondary to the quality of the writing. If Danc judges the work by the author, he commits a grievous act of prejudice that I simply do not have time for.

 

The Purpose and Nature of Videogames Criticism (for me).

Are videogames art? Are they machine? Are they emotional, evocative? Are they calculating, engineered? Are they narratives? Are they games? Yes. Of course.

These are questions theorists such as myself have been battling with for over a decade now, and have more or less moved on from. The hybrid nature of the videogame has become evident, almost taken for granted. We have gradually specialising videogame theorists such as Aarseth, Juul and Frasca who have moved from a hardline ludological position towards a middling perspective, and back again—more at peace with those of a different perspective than in 2003. On the other side there are people like myself, Ben Abraham, Monica Evans, Ewan Kirkland, Miguel Sicart, Julian Dibbell, T.L. Taylor, Hilde G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg, Jack M. Balkin and Beth Simone Noveck, and Nate Garrelts who perform (or edit collections of) analyses from a wide range perspectives.

Game critics, whether their testamur reads BSc or BA, must and do acknowledge the varied character of their object of study. That is, in fact, the entire focus of my PhD thesis: an analysis of the structure of a swathe of videogames in an attempt to articulate how and why their active systems engage with the fictional content they present, and how that fiction works to contextualize otherwise meaningless code. In his piece Danc is echoing rather loudly the hardline ludological position perhaps best personified in Markku Eskelinen or Jesper Juul ten years ago. Eskelinen’s most famous quote reads: “If I throw a ball at you I don’t expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories.” Like early ludology, there is no room in Danc’s position for a literary or aesthetic criticism of videogames because games are, essentially, mechanics.

Yet in a similarly blunt fashion, I could ask whether Danc (or Markku, should I ever encounter him!) sees code or characters when they look at Red Dead Redemption. What is on the screen, flowcharts and algorithms, or people and places? Why do we spend millions of dollars on the scripts, voice actors, motion capture, environment modelling, musical score and sound effects if what games are, really, is code and mechanic? If at the end of the day, all that fiction stuff is mere fluff why is it there at all?

The truthful answer is always “both.” The horse I ride in Red Dead is both animal and subroutine. Videogames are a medium, evocative and emotional, but they are a systematic medium. Videogames are unique among games in that they are media, and unique among media in that they are games. So, indeed, a critic who fails to address the systemic nature of the videogame is ignoring something fundamental to the object itself. But a critic who fails to appreciate the human experience of playing is missing the point of videogames in the first place.

The point, if videogames can be said to have one, is to affect the player. Designing a working system is trivial, at this point. If a computer programmer cannot create a working system of zeros and ones, then he is not a programmer. Yet this meaningless accomplishment is not the goal of the game designer. His is an artful craft, with the same humanist goals as other art: expression, communication, even communion with humanity, explorations of what it is to be human. Videogames are the medium that expresses our new(ish) understanding of life, the world and the whole stinking thing as a network of related agents moving in patterns, affecting each other in different ways, with consequences and potential both realised and unrealised. See Ben’s favorite Latour, Foucault or Deleuze and Guttari for various network theories about reality.

Danc repeats a familiar ontological assessment: the rules of games are “real” and “true,” therefore residing on the “real” side of an ontological divide between “real life” and “fiction.” They are objective, like geology or physics. This is simply, patently untrue. The rules that define Super Mario are entirely contrived, man-made and ultimately, arbitrary. They are not found, discovered, in nature the way rocks and gravity are. They lie on the same side of the ontological divide between truth and fiction beside Robinson Caruso and the Force. The rules of a videogame are ontologically identical to the rules that define the speed of Warp 9 or the difference between a Jedi Knight and a Sith Lord. The difference is their presentation, manifestation, not their ontological nature. In a film or novel, we imagine the rules that bind the fictional world by modelling them internally based on the examples we are shown through description and action in the narrative. In videogames we have an almost direct access to the rules, with which we can experiment to observe their cause and effect ourselves. They remain fictional rules, only “true” inside the fictional world bound within our PlayStation, instead of between book covers or title sequences and credits. This concept of mine is influenced by a ‘transmedial’ understanding of fiction/narrative described by Marie-Laure Ryan mostly in Avatars of Story.

Given that videogames are in fact entirely fictional, though systematic, they are just as open for personal reflection and deep, individualised criticism as any other artform. Danc’s preference for empirical data to somehow find the “truth” of what a game… is? means? …is laughable. I do not require a survey to explain why Romeo and Juliet is tragic. I do not require a set of metric data to understand my experience of the Shawshank Redemption. To suggest that only through qualitative data will we ‘understand’ a film, novel or painting is ridiculous. Following from this, how will the quantitative analyst even know what questions to ask, without a treatise from an individual player thinking about his own experience? How did we come up with words like ‘fun’ or ‘immersion’ or ‘agency’ in the first place if not by attempting to describe personal experience in words rather than numbers?

Criticism in the artistic tradition is a method by which a person reflects deeply on the work of an artist to elucidate and/or disseminate its meaning more widely than is likely to occur without such work, whether that meaning is obscured through difficult or complex text, genre convention, specific social or historical context, or some esoteric symbology or allegory. For further reference on a traditional critic, see The Intent of the Critic by Wilson, Foerster and Ransom. For an example, read something by Pauline Kael. Artists in other traditions are assumed to be masters of their craft, or at least assume themselves to be such that they do not look for validation or “tips for improvement” from a (mere) critic (though the working relationship between Modernist writers such as Eliot, Pound, Woolf and Joyce is worth thinking about). The critic is not writing so much for the artists as for the audience, the same audience he shares with the artist. The responsibility of the critic is indeed, as Danc suggests, to “know more” than the average reader/viewer/player as to make his observations appear insightful, or the connections made seem meaningful rather than obvious. A critic making obvious observations can indeed be said to not be doing the job. But it is simply not the critic’s primary job to tell the artist what to do next—any artist standing around idly waiting for such instruction is a sad fellow! Coupled with this exploration and explanation of meaning is a judgement, an assessment of either why this artwork is indeed so meaningful, or where it falls short of the mark. Perhaps a film is confusing, but isn’t meant to be—this is the job of the critic to point out. No, dear viewer, you are not missing something, this is just poorly edited film. Or, instead, this film is about confusion and is not meant to be easy to understand (Memento? Fight Club?)

I wonder what Danc would think of the essays regarding Ayn Rand and Objectivism that Bioshock inspired. Is this all useless babble because it didn’t give a bulleted list for improvements to be made in Bioshock 2? Is he so caught up in the commercial-industrial nature of videogame production that what exists no longer matters, and only what is yet to be made has any relevance? What of criticism in other artforms? Should a critic of Shakespeare limit himself to analysing the grammatical style or other ‘functional’ aspects of a play, with the goal of writing a better play, at the expense of enjoying Hamlet? The fact is, these Bioshock essays were adding meaning to the game for players not immediately familiar with Rand or Objectivism. The critiques (which can be positive, by the way) were allowing the less informed players (like myself, initially) to understand more of what Bioshock had to offer, effectively making it a better game for those players. The only call to action there would have been to read Atlas Shrugged and then play Bioshock again.

Yet even that last sentence isn’t true. I have written criticism of videogames like Bioshock and Assassin’s Creed, both of which I really liked, specifically addressing shortcomings in the mechanics of both games. The question I put to Danc, is why would I do that? What makes a game “better” in his own terms? He never really articulates what he thinks a “better” game would be, he seems to take the end goal for granted. To me, a “better” game is one that marries the systemic mechanics (ie. What you can and can’t do, and what happens as a result) with increasing tightness to the narrative. See Clint Hocking, Ian Bogost and Jonathan Blow for these kind of ideas. So, a game called Thief should be about hiding and sneaking, not running and gunning or farming. How do we know what makes one mechanic better than another? If we can only refer to hard science, the answer is: as long as the bridge doesn’t collapse its fine. Nevermind that it’s ugly! So as long as the game doesn’t crash, its fine? No… that’s just wrong and I’m not even sorry to say it.

In summary, Danc does not want to read game criticism. He wants a report written by a systems analyst for purposes of systems design. I actually have a qualification in that field, from my undergraduate degree. I have both a major in English Literature and Information Technology, with a third major in “Informatics” (now called Digital Cultures) which is essentially the deliberate marriage of the two. I have a further major (serendipitously) in Art History and Theory. I have written systems analyses, designed algorithms and databases, and I realise that many of the same skills apply in the development of a videogame. The same can be said for cinematography: an electrician is required to set up the lighting, a sound engineer to record and edit sound and maintain equipment, a camera operator to maintain and use the correct cameras. To suggest that only technical knowledge and insight is required to produce a film  is preposterous (or any other artwork: novels have grammatical syntax, painting has linear perspective and chemistry of paint, thinner and colour theory, sculpture and architecture rely on geometry and physics). Of course, many of these technical skills are found within the artist himself: an author will likely know the grammar of the language he is using; the director will probably have experience in most aspects of film technology. But art is not the sum total of its techne. I choose to view videogames as art, and not as pure technology. Danc may choose to view videogames differently, but has no ground upon which to stand in condemning my work and the work of others for not satisfying his purposes.