Contested Vocabulary in Game Studies

Original Post: February 23 2011

I want to take a moment to pour over the semantics of a few important terms/concepts often used in the context of videogame studies. These terms are fundamental to our study, but are in my opinion, abused. That is to say they are either given new or limited definitions, or claimed by game studies when up to now, they’ve been deployed with different meanings and in different contexts. So without further ado: Play, Rules, Learning and Goals.

Play: Play is a tough nut to crack. Huizinga and Callois wrestle with this word for two different books’ worth of exposition. These two seem to remember that play is not the exclusive property of “game theorists” as they nominate many other meanings of the word play, which I’d like to remind any game critics (or maybe just myself) of. A play is a dramatic, theatrical production. A play is acted out by players who occupy a role, which they also play. Musicians also play the music and their instrument with two slightly different meanings. Finally the meaning as in the play of the steering wheel, which I think is fundamental to our understanding: the space for free movement within a rigid mechanical structure.

If we take a step back, and use the’ free play within structure’ as a fundamental definition, I think it actually works for all the previous meanings. A musician can play his instrument, but only in so many ways according to the rigid physical reality of how the instrument works. He can find novel ways to do it, like knocking on an electric guitar to make percussive noises, but that’s still within the physical limitations. The same musician is playing the musical score, which like the character in a theatrical performance, is defined by the original author. Each player is free to interpret that role or score, to embellish or emphasize certain aspects, but there is a structure within which, or with reference to, they perform their free movements. Take the reinvention to far, however, and whether the character/song are in fact the ‘same’ as is described by the score or script. Play is a creative process, but located and contextualised by some kind of structure which can be game rules, a script, a musical score or the amorphous rules of child’s play.

Rules: Rules are not endemic to games. Rules do not, for example, define games as different or exceptional to ‘real life’ in that all our lives are governed by different rule structures. These are cultural rules of etiquette, governmental law, rules of physics, rules of corporate bureaucracy, etc. Rules are also present in supposedly non-rule based media such as novels and film. Early ludology claimed that it was a videogame’s rules that set it apart from other media, yet one can investigate two sets of rules that govern the details of any given narrative, especially obviously in science fiction or fantasy genre. Firstly, structuralism explored the rules by which all stories are crafted. Propp and Levi-Strauss in particular dissected myth to discover how each one did the work of meaning-making. Rules that govern the hero’s journey, for example, explaining the stages of narrative, and of narrative construction itself by Genette and Chatman.

The second kind of rule is internal, fictional so to speak. These are the rules such as Star Trek’s Prime Directive. The characters within the fiction must obey that rule. The speculative scientific rules of warp drive are consistent within that universe, meaning that Warp 9 should (if the narrative is well-formed) always be the same speed. Picard cannot suddenly read minds as to conveniently advance the plot, because that contradicts a rule that says he is not an empath. Like us in the real world,  characters in typical fictional works are subject to the rules of their world. Whether that world’s rules deviate far from ours or not is irrelevant, though the deviant, fantastical worlds make the rules more obvious to the audience. Returning to Callois, “Rules create fictions.” We may simply change the tense of a sentence such as ‘Some special humans have been mutated to possess strange new powers,’becomes ’some special human beings can mutate to posses strange new powers,’ to create worlds within which narratives occur–the world of the X-Men, for example. This applies equally in the mundane fictional world of Emma Woodhouse, who explores social rules and patterns.

Learning: Learning as abused in relation to rules. In A Theory of Fun Raph Koster uses the notion of learning as if it does not happen in any other way than in rule-based games. Though I agree with his premise that we are pattern-recognising animals, and that we seek patterns in most everything, the distinction between games and narrative as being based on the ability to ‘learn the rules’ is erroneous. As described above, narratives have rules too. Mostly we are interested in learning the fictional rules, as opposed to the structural ones. Learning the structural patterns is expressed in a negative way by labelling a novel or film ‘formulaic.’ What is a formula but a rule, and algorithm and structure for crafting a narrative?

Discovery is a term more likely to be associated with narrative experiences. We discover what happens as we read through a book, because we didn’t know to start with. By discovering events we extrapolate rules, the ‘why’ not just the ‘what’ of a drama. The reasons why Romeo and Juliet ‘happened’ are the rules of their society, of human nature, as well as the rules of tragic narrative form. Games are better equipped to teach us rules in that they can check our understanding in ways that novels and films cannot, not formally anyway. But games are, thus far, not very good at checking our understanding of the narrative/fictional rules, rather concentrating on the supposedly separate rules of gameplay mechanics. When designers master the technique of integrating these two things so they are the same rules, we may have some deeply satisfying experiences to play with.

Goals: Goals are implicated in my discussion above about learning and rules. In game studies the existence of goals seems to confirm or deny the ‘gameness’ of a particular object. The discussion of ‘player goals’ as opposed to ‘game goals’ has cropped up here on this blog a few times and I’d like to explore the difference. Game goals are the internally validated, hopefully consistent win state, or objectives which move the player towards the win state. These kind of goals implicate an objectively (or at least externally) justified win state. That is to say, among the possible ending states (should there be any) one is classified as better than the other based on game rules. If the game lacks discreet end states, then conditions or operant states such as an avatar’s state of mind (ie. Happiness) may be substituted this way. The game assesses performance against a rubric that cannot be explained within the gameworld’s fiction.

I have goals in real life, such as becoming a full-time university lecturer, but that does not make my daily activity a game. Commander Shepard in Mass Effect has the goal of stopping Saren and the Reapers, that does not make the narrative fiction within Mass Effect a game, to Shepard. A goal which is explained through means other than winning a game does not necessarily imply game-ness. It implies challenge, opposition, or conflict between active agents, but if all conflict is a game, then everything is a game and nothing more needs to be said. Like explored above, many (if not all) contexts in life can be articulated as conforming to a set of rules. That does not make all contexts of life games.

For the player of Mass Effect, goals can take the form of a role to play. Much like the player of a theatrical role, the player will project an identity into the gameworld as best he is able, by manifesting that personality through the choices BioWare have implemented. James Paul Gee helpfully outlines the projected identity in this way. The goal of playing a ‘paragon’ or ‘renegade’ Shepard does not imply a formally-defined win- or loss-state. It implies a manner of engaging with the fictional world of Mass Effect. Further, playing a compassionate Shepard, perhaps engaging in a romance with a crew member is an even more subtle goal, since unlike the Paragon and Renegade example, there is no meter for love. The human need satisfied by playing a role this way is more akin to the need that causes people to watch sentimental and romantic movies, the satisfaction is not one of victory, but of dramatic pleasure. The pleasure of witnessing a positive resolution within a human drama. (The same could be said in the inverse, horror films, tragedies and negative outcomes, these satisfy different human needs again, and further complicate associating these outcomes with ‘winning.’) The person who justifies a romantic sub-plot with the gamifying reference to extrinsic rewards exposes a great deal about that person’s understanding or appreciation of love.

So goals can characterise, influence the choices individuals make when presented with the free space within a contextualising structure in which to play. This is analagous to a musician deciding to play a mixolydian or phrygian scale–neither one ‘wins’ the playing of a song. They are expressive of the player’s feelings, personality, or mood. This is the case when the structure of rules doesn’t imply winning or losing, sometimes they do, so the goals are bound up in that. But the mere presence of structure, rules, the ability to make choices, does not necessitate the external validation of one choice as ‘right’ and the other as ‘wrong.’ No one can dismiss the experience of Hamlet because he didn’t ‘win.’ We learn about the rules of humanity through his motivations, choices and their consequences, just as players of Mass Effect do.

The Metanarrative of Videogames Part 1 & 2

Original Post: November 15, 2010

Part 1

Videogames teach their players things: at the least how the internal system of the videogame works. This is a central principle on which Raph Koster’s theory of fun and Ian Bogost’s procedural rhetoric are both built on. Murray’s conceptions of agency and immersion rely on this fact in a way as well, since one criterion of immersion is a meaningful interaction, through intelligibility and verification, with the system. James Paul Gee also assumes that games are teaching their players something, the lessons there are communicated through simulation and play-acting. More widely, all designed objects-to-be-used teach their user about how to use them, at the very least. Videogames are objects-to-be-used in that they must be activated, manipulated with manual skill and dexterity, as well as a conceptual understanding of the aesthetic context and content which they exhibit. Perhaps most fundamentally, videogames are games, and so posit a winning a condition most of the time. This activates the player’s understanding of positive and negative outcomes, therefore leading the player down a path or erecting a framework for behaviour: one choice will lead closer to winning, the other will lead away from it. This win/lose structure reinforces the lessons being taught by the game, explicitly, and ties those messages of approval/disapproval to the aesthetic content. How can we suppose that a medium with such strong potential to first define the range, then approve or disapprove of the player’s actions while playing do not make arguments about the world we live in?

If the implicit mechanics of a videogame are functions such as Mario’s triple jump, a siege tank’s two deployment modes, and the choice between harvesting or saving a Little Sister, what are the ‘meta-mechanics’ of a videogame? If those internal mechanics within the game are analogous to the events within a narrative, what is the corresponding message to literary fiction’s metanarrative? What is the ‘big lesson’ that comes out of certain videogames? What is the metalesson of the videogame medium itself? The first I will explore here is the concept of the Orderly World. 

Escape to an Orderly World

Videogames presuppose that everything contained in their worlds are eventually knowable. They simply must be, at this point, due in part to our understanding of what it is to play a game, and what it is to program a computer. So two elements of the videogame, the computational architecture, and the gameplay framework conspire to create an eminently deterministic space where each event is caused in turn by its predecessor in a very clear line, and triggers other events in extremely predictable fashion. The machine component of the videogame is the combination of these two parts, and is of course, a logical structure itself. This overarching, determinist logic is perhaps an artefact of the modern: as a grand metanarrative, it corresponds well with the very concept of metanarrative, referring to Lyotard’s progress of logos over mythos. The dual purposes of viewing the world in a deterministic light coupled with the rebuilding of the world on an undoubtedly deterministic model can be read in virtually any videogame world one cares to mention. The joy with which people enter these orderly worlds indicates a modern craving for answers, for reason and subsequently, mastery, over this kind of orderly world, despite Lyotard’s contention that we are incredulous of these grand narratives. Whatever aesthetic material is linked up to this logical structure becomes logical, consistent and knowable itself. Following smaller metanarrative examples will be made possible or more intense by their foundation in this concept of an orderly world.

One may contend in contradiction of the above assertion that: videogames are individual experiences, with myriad configurations creating a fractured, local, personal experience and so have no metanarrative that is true for everyone. That may be true, and indeed I would agree that it is true, but that is the experience of the videogame, not the videogame itself. Every experience had within the videogame system, no matter how normal or deviant, is made possible by the same governing rules that the player, either in accord or subversively, is engaging with their predictable, intelligible behaviour. Perhaps I can focus the discussion by invoking McLuhan: the medium is the message; I am looking at the object called videogame, not the experience of that object. Furthermore, the farther from a normalised play-style a gamer moves, the more likely it is that he is aware of the structures the game is presupposing, and in subverting them, he may be acknowledging that. However, he may be moving in the opposite direction: valuing the winning outcome so much he is willing to cheat in order to get there.

One may also contend that though the rules may be deterministic, the player of a videogame doesn’t necessarily know all the rules and thus is not able to play as though all the rules are known. This is the precise process videogames rely upon for entertainment. The rules are not all known to begin with, but are ultimately knowable. Raph Koster ably illustrates how the primary pleasure of many videogames (and games in general) is in the learning, in the gaining of knowledge of the system. Once worked out, that system becomes mundane and uninteresting. Just as tic-tac-toe is no longer a challenge once either player works out the dominant strategy, a videogame will become less and less interesting once the player has internalized the rules. Some games offer other pleasures, additional pleasures, that will keep a player engaged, but that initial awe of discovery and feeling of new mastery will be hard to replace. MMOGs rely on content updates to introduce new mysteries to the world and new challenges to overcome in order to maintain player interest. Single-player, offline gameworlds will struggle to maintain the kind of dedication WoW enjoys, simply because of the amount of new content being poured into Azeroth.

Finally, one may point to the ‘random’ probability of dice-rolls in gaming in general, and videogames in particular. These surely indicate a chaotic, non-determined element to a videogame world. Firstly, these dice-rolls are never truly random, in fact, they involve yet another determined algorithm often taking the time of day (down to millisecond resolution) as a seed value to generate a seemingly random number, though really it is a precisely calculated number that is unlikely or impossible to be calculated again due to the nature of the seeding algorithm. In effect, though, the numbers do seem random, or at least unpredictable, to the player. But these occurrences are usually compartmentalised and carefully denoted. Players of paper-based RPGs know when a dice is being rolled because the group has to actually do the rolling. Experienced players of computer RPGs will know when probability is being incorporated into the game when such key words such as ‘chance to hit’ are employed. Indeed, most gamers familiar with RPGs will already know that most of their character’s actions are influenced in whole or in part by a certain set of percentage chances. The most expert players will know what those percentages are exactly, because the computer must maintain a table of values somewhere which will very likely be extracted by the most industrious of players and published to the wider player base. Gamers already know this information is there, the only question is how to get at it. Once extracted, simple spreadsheet calculators make it a relatively simple task to unlock the exact function of a given attack manoeuver, defensive action or spell. This effectively eliminates the indeterminacy created by dice rolls, since all possible outcomes can be known and planned for.

According to Koster, gamers are constantly working to eliminate the indeterminacy of the unknown within videogames, because the act of discovering order in an apparently chaotic environment is what constitutes “fun.” This is certainly the case in online RPG titles, perhaps most visibly there, and in online games in general, where the players’ combined efforts are pooled into online websites and resources. Certainly though, in single-player games, individuals will make notes, draw maps, or read other player’s accounts on how certain mechanics work, where items are located, or how to go about preparing for a difficult encounter. The paradox is, though, that the harder players work at uncovering the unknown, the closer they bring the game to being “unfun.” The further paradox is that all those so-called mysteries were placed there by designers specifically to be discovered. So whether or not the player, individually or collectively, knows all the secrets of the game at some given point in time, all the inner workings are internally consistent, measurable and even documented somewhere, by the development team.

The pleasure in this, I suggest, is for the highly determinist among us. This kind of game (virtually all games today) caters to the player who wishes there to be order in the world, or assumes that there is, and that there should be. This appeals to the positivist understanding of this world, and our fantasy game worlds, where the player will try something out, and learn from the feedback, assuming that the next time he tries, the result will be affected in a logical way by the change in approach. Science assumes that in the real world the same input will have the same output when all elements of the system are understood. Videogames are based on this same understanding of the world; their gameworlds are built to behave this way by connecting fictional material to an active logical machine. This includes the supposedly sentient life forms in videogames as well as their more physical characteristics. In gaming terms, bosses only have one mechanism for defending themselves, and once figured out by the player, the boss will not react and learn a new defensive tactic. Allied NPCs will not negotiate the requirements of a quest; only one behaviour will trigger the desired action.

There is a definite comfort in this kind of world. This ‘knowability’ affirms the methodology we are taught to apply in the real world by the positivist, scientific tradition. Even a spiritual player could take solace in the intelligence with which each element of the game world was designed, and know that each was playing its proper role in the fictional hierarchy. Some of the specific ways which this orderly world is activated to create experiences will be fleshed out in following posts.

This stuff is very much work-in-progress, so I’d really appreciate commentary on the quality of the argument.

Part 2

Original Post: November 22, 2010

Constructive criticism requires the presentation of suggestions to ameliorate some if not all of the shortcomings identified by an assessment as scathing as the one presented above. While it is beyond the scope of a theoretical thesis to actually implement and test these suggestions, the following are essentially design ideas that, theoretically at least, alleviate some of the limitations observed above. The first area to explore are alternative concepts for what the object we currently call ‘videogame’ could be. When relying on existing definitions of videogame, many of these suggestions will very likely seem like very bad design choices. What must first be addressed then, is the nature of a videogame experience, the goals of the medium, which can then allow for slightly or wildly different formal structures. These new concepts are fashioned in hopes of creating new gameworlds that provide experiences with a wider range than is possible with the very determined, game-like and predictable systems presently available. Perhaps some of these simulations will be more true-to-life in some ways, certainly in certain contexts, than is possible through the determinist model. Whether true-to-life or not, though, this wider palette will allow artists in interactive media to express a wider range of ideas than rigidly game-like concepts allow.

Escape the Tyranny of Game-Fun

Industry-focused game design texts advise budding game designers that not everyone likes the same thing you do, not all players will find the same games fun. They advise to pick a market, a genre, or some other identifiable goal and work towards that. This is obviously sensible, the kinds of players who like the Sims are often not the same as those who like Fallout 3 or FIFA 2010. If they do crossover, it is usually to satisfy very different desires at a given time. However, as much above assessment describes, the very high-level kind of fun that these same game design texts assume is a ‘game-fun’ involving mastery of rules. That game-fun constructs an end-point of power, then builds a ramp for the player to ascend towards it, until eventually, there is no challenge the player cannot overcome. The player-character has become the most powerful being within the game system. There is nothing the player has failed to do, he has ‘beaten’ the game. This does not correspond well with life experiences, nor does it allow for other archetypal narrative types, from comedy to tragedy. The question is, can a system be designed that abandons this strict, rule-focused and progress-based framework for experience, and what would we call it?

I am not arguing for any system which abandons operational rules by any means, my own model does not allow for that. I am simply exploring the possibility of a change of focus. Instead of becoming master of those rules, what kind of experience is available to a player who always remains subject to them, and even unable to grasp exactly what the rules are? This is the first departure from the game-fun, namely, that a player might not be able to know all the rules precisely. There will always be rules, of course, within the machine, but hidden from the player, ambiguous, perhaps even contradictory in certain places. There are many times in life and art where contradictions are relevant: maintaining a work/family balance, when providing well for a family often means long hours at work or obeying a directive of non-interference with indigenous alien culture, though they are dying of a disease easily cured by the technology aboard one’s starship (see any episode of Star Trek exploring their Prime Directive). There are rules, or guidelines, here that contradict each other. Which is the right choice? Often, if not always, there are shades of grey, different interpretations, and most importantly, no reliable way to verify if one has made the correct decision other than one’s own personal moral code.

Typical ludic pleasure as it is described today is not compatible with ambiguity because games are defined as having a winning outcome. Who ‘wins’ in either of the two situations mentioned above? Even more basically, who are the competitors? Games rely on competition, confrontation and conflict between active agents. Often these are human players or combatants, but in videogames the system itself can be resistant. Drama can arise in much the same way, as direct conflict between people, whether violent or not. Drama can also arise, however, from conflict within one person—in this case the player is an obvious possibility. Inner turmoil is fundamental to some of our greatest works of art, perhaps personified by Hamlet or King Lear. The dramatic power of the interactive medium is that systems could be created to instigate conflict within the player him or herself.  If a videogame were to ask a player a question that is not easily answerable by referring to the one and only winning outcome as benchmark, the player could easily be torn between the alternatives, and forced to think rather hard about which choice he would make. The argument against choices which have no ‘mechanical weight’ would fall apart here because the system has no preferred outcome labelled ‘win’ so neither choice will lead the player closer or farther from it. The choice will have consequences, these are defined by the operational rules and logic of the system, but that system simply does not designate a winning or losing attribute to an (or any of the various possible) end state. The challenge is not in simply getting to the end, but in the decisions along the way. The fun here is not game-fun, but rather dramatic fun, exploratory fun, if we can call those experiences of introspection and revelation ‘fun.’

There are no other art forms which must be any particular adjective to qualify as properly within that form. Visual arts perhaps must be ‘beautiful’ but humanity has redefined what constitutes beauty constantly throughout history, and will not stop doing so. One might demand ‘unity’ but the exact definition of unity has been challenged and reconfigured by entire artistic forms: the collage or edited film for example. Even music, perhaps must be ‘heard’ but there are musical pieces consisting of nothing but silence. Why then, must all videogames be fun? Rather, we should look for objects that do not waste our time, from which we walk away with more than what we approached it with. What exactly we gain from these objects is difficult to imagine, but consider what many people throughout time have experienced in other art forms: joy, humour, grief, sadness, revulsion, terror, bewilderment, understanding, education, spirituality, sexual arousal, frustration, anger, satisfaction. Art has worked to evoke every human emotion and experience human beings have conceived of, why should the interactive medium be limited to titillation?

By way of example, in contemporary mainstream games, there are only a sad few titles to refer to that explore this notion. Indeed, so few videogames present anything like a real-life experience that it is not surprising that there is room for so many that are of the highly rule-focused and deterministic as described above. The farther these games are removed from the chaotic ambiguity of average daily life, the more abstract and codified the experiences can become. The more game-like. One I will refer to a number of times is Heavy Rain, not because it is a perfect piece of art, but because if one can actually consider it as a work of art, new insight into the potential of the interactive medium is gained.

The question I would ask of the critics of this approach would be ‘What is the game in Heavy Rain?’ This example does not present the player with more than a tiny handful of predictable, repeatable actions. Those that are predictable include such fundamentals as walking (with the trigger buttons) and navigating Jayden’s investigation computer (itself a computer, therefore a predictable, rule-bound system). There are so few repeatable mechanics to cite, there is nothing like a strategy to be described, that traditional game design analysis is very difficult in this game. Virtually everything that happens in the game is a one-off event, when compared to the repetitive gun fights, car chases, climbing puzzles, or other core mechanical challenges that arise in typical action-oriented games. This is made possible by an unusual interface decision by the developer, that is to place action cues on screen for the entirety of the game. Because the player-characters can take so many different actions throughout the game ranging from opening a refrigerator to climbing through a glass-filled tunnel, to performing a strip-tease, the typical controller configuration is not adequate—there are not enough buttons and too many actions. So, though there are many examples of conversations (as a possible repeatable mechanic) there is nothing as formulaic as the Bioware standard of Red, Neutral, Blue responses in a consistent menu at the bottom of the screen. Indeed, in some cases, the player-character can fail to respond at all.

In the case of Heavy Rain the game is not the issue. The player does not have to learn a large schema of rules for this particular game—including button configuration, character abilities, weapon characteristics, squad control, objective interpretation, enemy recognition etc. Instead the experience is much closer to a real life situation that the average player will need very few cues or clues as to what the expected behaviours are—very few people would need to be cued into grasping that Ethan Mars is distraught and wants to get his son back. Much more explanatory effort is required to convince a non-gamer why the fate of the world relies upon the hero collecting trinkets for a local farmer. Using a relatively believable, recognisable life experience required the developers to implement many more actions into Heavy Rain, though, because the typical, limited range of interaction with the gameworld—namely violence—would not have been enough to solve the case of the missing Shaun, and the identity of the Origami Killer. What relevance does simply shooting everyone (or anyone) in the gameworld have when the challenges mostly revolve around information? In this respect, we can return to a tenant of game design fundamentals: for every challenge present in the game, the player must have the ability to overcome it. And vice versa, there is no need for abilities that are not useful to overcome some challenge. The challenges in Heavy Rain simply cannot be solved by pointing a gun at everyone.

To conclude on Heavy Rain, the notion of ‘ending’ in this example does not posit a ludic win/lose dichotomy. The obvious positive/negative is entirely narrative, completely supported by the fiction, not the game rules. That is, the only way to interpret winning or losing rather unambiguously is by whether Shaun lives or dies at the end. This ending can be tempered (in either direction) by the deaths or survival of the other three major characters, however. There is no steady ramp up of challenges, enemies or puzzles to overcome that once beaten, indicates mastery of the system. There is simply the conclusion of the story. The nature of that conclusion, the details described in the various combinations of live and dead characters must be combined with the player’s own feelings toward each character in order to achieve a sense of satisfaction or displeasure. The question is not ‘Did I win or did I lose?’ Instead the player asks how happy he or she is with the way things turned out, ‘Did I do a good job?’ ‘What choices did I make, and why did I make them?’ Getting to the end of Heavy Rain is not hard. Coming to terms with the consequences of decisions along the way is the interesting experience. Heavy Rain is not game-fun or game-challenging, by and large. It is something else, drama-fun, drama-challenging, perhaps? It is challenging the way A Clockwork Orange is challenging, not the way Space Invaders is.

Note: I wrote this on Friday, Nov 19 having not read the very excellent article here by the gentlemen of Experience Points. I am astounded at how closely our two arguments parallel, out of sheer coincidence.

Unpacking Mechanics and Meaning in FarCry 2

Original Post: November 1 2010

The following is an unpolished ‘critique’ of FarCry 2 in which I attempt to extract meaning from the combination of very strong, though sometimes hard to believe mechanics, with what narrative/aesthetic information is available. This will assume a lot of knowledge about FC2, and doesn’t provide any kind of introduction really. My basic premises around FC2 is that Clint Hocking was more concerned with the mechanics and experience than with the dramatic arc of the narrative, and on his limited time and budget, this is what got the treatment. While this may be true, there is still “stuff” there to interpret: though I find the narrative aspect fairly disappointing, what does the game say?

The game could be read, by combining the strong mechanics and setting with weak narrative, as a ‘the mundane horrors of war’ experience. Unlike a large-scale strategy game, FarCry 2 puts the player in the shoes of one burnt-out mercenary going after just one more assassination target—the fact that the Jackal is probably the arms dealer who supplies the player with weapons (through the local arms dealers) is seemingly irrelevant to the internal narrative. The game doesn’t allow the player to pursue the Jackal directly; instead he must participate in a bloody conflict with little or no distinguishing character of its own. The nameless African country is just that: an unrecognisable place that will be drawn off the map sooner or later. The factions are simply mirror images of each other existing only to provide conflict; their aims and objectives are never clearly defined or articulated either by the game system or the characters themselves. Further, the facelessness of the conflict is heightened by the homogeneity of the enemies out in the field. While the two factions occupy different buildings in each city centre, and have recognisable banners adorning those buildings, the foot soldiers the player regularly encounters in the field have no such distinguishing character. Regardless of who the player is currently working for, everyone in the country will always fire on the player, and it is unclear to which faction any particular enemy belongs to, if either.

So instead of a high-level, clearly defined goal such as those found in Call of Duty 4 or Command and Conquer, and characterised by an altogether evil enemy, the focus of the player’s mind is merely on survival. The banalities are brought into sharp focus: clever tactical manoeuvres are replaced by planning a jeep route through the constantly-respawning guard towers. Every shot fired could bring instant death from an unseen mortar soldier. Even simply walking across an open field could spell disaster. The degradation of weapons becomes a primary concern; a weapon sufficiently ‘used up’ will start to jam during a shoot-out. These must be replaced at one of several out-of-the-way arms merchants, yet more long road trips through the enemy infested territory.

In the end, the only character that presents clearly-defined principles is the Jackal himself. Exactly who he is, or when he had such a change of attitudes (if he was ever merely the bloodthirsty entrepreneur he was reported to be) is unclear. In any event, he expresses quite plainly that he is there to break the cycle of civil war, by annihilating both factions, and then himself and the player character. The player is co-opted into this strategy without any room for dissent, perhaps because the Jackal has demonstrated so many times that he could kill the player at will, or perhaps the malaria the player suffers is getting worse and will become fatal anyway, this is unclear. The player dutifully accepts this final mission after executing all his former allies either in a firefight or cold blood to further demonstrate the transience of factions and alliances. The final mission sees the player make one of two choices. The first: setting off a bomb to seal the warring country off from the outside world, just after a group of civilian refugees escape. This bomb must be detonated manually, though, and will inevitably kill the player. One is left to interpret this, because the notion of a bomb that cannot be detonated by wire seems laughable, even in this backwater country. (Surely the arms-dealing Jackal could have obtained a length of copper wire.) Is the final detonation a metaphor for the entire scenario? The player-character’s role may be necessary, a cleansing fire so to speak, but in shouldering that mantle, the p-c is ultimately sacrificing himself to become one of those that must be cleansed. Surely, the experience of constant, intense paranoia that the jungle induced would have had its effect. The hundreds if not thousands of nameless African soldiers mown down by the p-c would be stacked alongside those characters with which the p-c had become familiar. What kind of man would emerge from the bloodbath between former ‘buddies’? Like the country itself, is the only solution total annihilation?

The second choice is to escort the civilians safely out of the mountain pass, then turn a gun on oneself. This seems altogether ludicrous for the player-character, as the entire game experience is spent in desperate self-preservation. What great change has occurred to convince the p-c to actually pull the trigger? The alternate scenario at least provides a reason to take such action: saving the civilians and cutting off the army. This second voluntary suicide seems not to materially benefit anyone, other than the Jackal’s own convictions. As the player-character, electing to detonate the bomb causes the Jackal to take this second route, which seems plausible enough given those above mentioned convictions. However, the Jackal has always been one step ahead of the player. He has toyed with the player-character’s life more than once and always walked away unharmed. Tapes scattered around the savannah describe his brutality in dealing with other problematic people. Does this suddenly change, or does the Jackal lead the player down this path simply to tie up an unusually dangerous loose end? Does the Jackal turn the gun on himself? The player-character won’t ever know, he dies well before the Jackal would. The player, after the final scenes, is left to doubt as the epilogue says that though officials insist the Jackal was killed during the conflict, his body was never found.

Like the rather more graceful Bioshock, FarCry 2 presents the player with choice. As a videogame, it uses its mechanical nature to allow the player some agency, though in truth the choice is only between two deaths, neither one answering plot questions in a dramatically resolving way. Of course, this drama is not meant to be resolved in a comfortable manner. FarCry 2 is not a James Bond game, with a genre-driven good vs. evil story that will come to a satisfying conclusion. In that regard, FarCry 2 succeeds in its experiential goals. There are problems, of course, like that believability of the circumstances surrounding the bomb. One solution to this is that the Jackal simply lies to the player, telling him that they’ll escape; the bomb won’t kill him, but instead traps the player on the wrong side of the rockslide, standing alone against the UFLL and APR soldiers. The game wouldn’t need to actually kill the player with deus ex machina, instead the same mechanics that have been attempting to kill him throughout the entire experience will simply, eventually, overwhelm him: a jammed gun, low ammo, or just a rush of soldiers he can’t fight off.

The ponderous ending sequence aside, the game seems to make claims about the uselessness of this kind of war, about the harm outside agents do to the competing interests that exist within the country already. There are obvious statements made by some NPCs about the foreigners who enter the country, take what they can, and leave—exemplified by the player-character’s own collection of diamonds perhaps. But the mechanics demonstrate the ultimate futility of the player’s mission: regardless of how many are killed, more guards repopulate the sentry points and map locations. Those soldiers are interchangeable; their factional ideologies are based entirely on the extermination of the opposing faction. They can only exist as a violent counterweight to the other, and the player’s only purpose is to keep the exchange of death even. Though heavy-handed and awkward at times, a seed of poignancy does reside within this game, akin to that found in films such as Blackhawk Down or The Hurt Locker. The war is meaningless, the only thing that matters is when your gun jams, and in the case of FarCry 2, the player is the one holding that gun.

The Great Undiscovered of Minecraft

Original Post: October 26, 2010

I have to admit, I am not much of an indie gamer. I spend most of my time with the big-budget mainstream titles in my research. There is a reason for that, but it isn’t the point of this article. What is important is that Minecraft managed to get my attention, partially due to its intensely addictive fun, and to the buzz its created within the gaming/blogging community. I’d like to address the game and its context a little here.

Firstly, why is this thing so fun that around 500,000 people have parted with their 10€ to play an alpha release that would have been known as a demo five or ten years ago? The reasons aren’t that hard to grasp, and have been documented in a few places already. There is the intense feeling of agency: the player is able to affect this world in deep, meaningful ways relative to the complexity of the world itself. This world doesn’t have a narrative or social structure, it only has a physical presence. So, the physical interactions the player can have with every block of space, whether filled with material or not, is akin to being a small God in a simple universe. Every square block is offering its existence to the player to be tampered with, shaped and molded into something greater, offering no resistance and bending to the will of the creator.

This is a powerful feeling, and demonstrates the rule of agency quite nicely. Many AAA games are far richer in content, but that content is out of the player’s reach. Whether it is the physical landscape or architecture, whether a vehicle, a door, or an NPC, these rich pieces of the gameworld are impervious to interaction. The player can’t do anything to them. These parts of the gameworld simply do not care about the player. Every part of the Minecraft world does care.

The second feeling is combined with the above to generate a strong feeling of presence. Tele-presence one might call it in the parlance of the late 90s game scholarship. The feeling is wonder. Many games generate this feeling: my first and most powerful feeling was stepping to the crest of the first hill in Ashenvale in World of Warcraft and realising for the first time just how big Azeroth was. Minecraft’s world is also big, but like anyone’s first experience with an MMO, it is mysterious. Not only is the randomly generated geography a necessary mystery–literally no one can give you a map of your own private rendering of the world–but the game’s rules are also mysterious. There is no tutorial, there are scant usable websites online; you have to figure a lot out yourself.

I explore this concept of mystery with my students, asking them to imagine what it would be like to play a new sandbox/RPG game with a large explorable world without the benefit of the internet. We imagine those heady days of the early Ultima Online explorers or WoW noobs (prior to their discovery of WoWHead or QuestHelper) where the experience was genuine exploration and discovery. Sometimes the discovery was of bad things, fear and death, and other times it was the discovery of a winning strategy, a place to hide, or simply something of such surprising beauty one could only stop and star in wonder. These were the days when players didn’t know what they were looking for when they went looking. Perhaps they had a quest objective, but they didn’t know exactly where that objective would be found. They certainly didn’t know what would happen to them along the way.

Our current playing experience for many games is characterised by a deluge of pre-release publicity, beta-testing and websites. The world of WoW is so thoroughly indexed online that something as real as a ‘delicious chocolate cake’ will bring up WoW references in Google before an actual cake recipe. This gazette of what any particular game contains, from plot points and characters, to gameplay mechanics and mechanisms, strips contemporary games of one of their intrinsic pleasures: discovery and wonder.

This is a noted key differentiator between two player types, in Bartle’s terminology, the Explorers and Achievers. Broadly, the Achiever positions himself outside, atop the game in a dominant posture, to act on the game system and master it. An Explorer will position himself within the gameworld, coming to it through the fiction rather than by mastering the game’s rule set. Of course these are the two extremes and a continuous spectrum of actual players exists in between. The Achievers, however, have the dominant position in the general discourse of vidoegame play. They are the ones who both establish and prioritise the conceptions and definitions of ‘playing well’ or even ‘playing right.’ These players are the ones who most readily substitute numbers for experiences, in scores, achievements, levels, etc. Explorers, on the other hand need to describe their adventures in qualitative, not quantitative terms. Their concern is with the journey, not the numerical representation of their efficiency, nor their rank amongst others. Playing as an Explorer becomes increasingly difficult when the ubiquitous internet fills our heads with so much information–what is there left to explore once we know all there is to know?

That is the final, fatal Catch-22 of any designed gamespace. Our brains are constantly learning what the game has to offer us, whether it is an innovative mechanic, an NPC’s personality, or the lay of the geography. We cannot experience the discovery of the same thing twice. The sadness with which this author is filled having realised he has ‘worked out’ what there is to see in Minecraft is a perfect illustration of Raph Koster’s problem with learning: “The destiny of games is to become boring, not to be fun.” Eventually, we learn the game and it has nothing more it can offer us. This works both for single-player and multiplayer comepetitive games. Koster’s example is tic-tac-toe which even most children can work out the dominant strategies for, but can be applied to much larger games–to which most competitive players of StarCraft can probably attest.

The point here is that the initial pleasure of Minecraft relies very much on its great undiscovered. Once found, the feeling that this potential creates in the player vanishes, and yes, there is not a lot to the game other than that. This has little or nothing to do with Notch’s intentions–as has been said many times now, this game is not a complete picture. Even if it were, though, it demonstrates the dominant Achiever mentality that exists in (the writing) gamer culture. ‘So now what?’ is the question of someone who hasn’t appreciated the experience for its own sake. We have become far too accustomed to walking away from games with a medal, a notch in the belt, or some other trinket to prove that we have ‘finished’ it, that we expect all games to have a ‘finish.’ What about: “Well that was fun.”? Games, and videogames in particular, do not require a resolution, dramatic or goal-oriented, to be enjoyable. Is it the fault of Lego that having built the model helicopter all the player is left with is a model helicopter? Or is it the fault of the player for not having enough vision to realise that he can either play with that helicopter or dismantle it and build something else?  In Minecraft we don’t even have to dismantle our previous creations to build something new.

You’re meant to like the playing not the award you receive for having played.

Attempting to Appreciate Gears of War

Original Post: August 24, 2010

Where to begin with Gears of War? Yes, its a big-budget, AAA console action type game, which are meant to be just the kind of thing I’m mostly focused on, but I have only just played through it.  Having played it now, I feel only slightly more inspired to write about it than I did before playing it.  Tom Bissell explores videogames in a deeply personal way in his book Extra Lives, and comes to the conclusion that Resident Evil made it possible for videogames to be stupid.  If Resident Evil paved the Roman road, this makes Gears of War a German autobahn. Yet in the same book, Bissell makes a long claim for Gears of War as something slightly more than what it appears to be on a superficial, surface level.  Can this game serve as a case for critics to put their ludological money where their mouth is?  What do we find if we look past the aesthetics of the game, to the purportedly more important mechanics?

These COGs, armoured piles of man-meat with voices so guttural they would make the movie voice-over guy sound about as tough as Orlando Bloom are just about as uninspiring characters as I have ever personally witnessed.  I couldn’t be farther from ‘identifying’ with these creatures, nor do I even want to.  Many commentators have observed the power fantasies that videogames tend to offer–this certainly is one, but it is not mine.  This hyper-masculinity screams homo-eroticism to me, in the same way that I never understood locker room behaviour.  Indeed, the parallel this videogame shares with sport, particularly American NFL is and spelled out in the first 20 minutes or so by the ‘Cole Train.’  In some sort of hideously mutated hero-worship we see a sports star transformed into a war machine; equating the senseless headlong charging into one another on the football field with the senseless charging into each other on the battlefield.  That Cole’s voice sounds very much like it has been passed through a pitch-shifter to make it even more manly than the actor’s voice presumably is did not go unnoticed either.

Physically these men could not possibly exist–no more than Barbie could.  I spent a lot of time during the game trying to decide if their armour and other gear bulked them up, or if I was to believe they really were that buff, and I am undecided.  The necks and bare arms seem to indicate hefty size, but the impossible size of their feet makes me picture ogres or Sasquatch.  The COGs were, for all intents, identical to their enemies, another sporting parallel.  The bipedal Locusts would have even been based on the same wireframes and animation skeletons the COGs were.  Their similarity brings me back to the opposing teams of the football field.  These huge lumbering beasts of similar attire and build squaring off against one another in some noble conflict the purpose of which is a forgone conclusion.

I have yet to do any further research or reading on Gears, other than what is found in Bissell’s book, and at this point, I have no idea what the Locusts are, what that device Baird picked up that had all the map data in it was, when the Lightmass Bomb wound up on a train, how the hell a footsoldier like Marcus Fenix was in possession of an estate as large as his, or why that estate looked like it had been hit by a tsunami.  I don’t know why a Lightmass Bomb was able to destroy those Locusts it did, when the only ones seemingly affected by UV light were the Kryll.  I haven’t got a clue what imulsion is or why it would be valuable, other than to the Locusts who might use it to mutate various kinds of Wretches. All this is to say that despite the game’s rich graphics and eye-catching presentation layer, there’s very little substance to the game at all.

This all culminates in my initial assessment of Gears as exactly what Bleszinski says it is, “cool.”  The trouble is, I don’t like what the American mainstream thinks is cool most of the time, things like football, guns, Wipeout, beer in cans and Hooters.  I don’t have a hero-worship complex for sports stars and I don’t confuse quarterbacks with military tacticians.  Bleszinski says in Extra Lives that he feels his job is to make gaming cool–part of his whole gamer image being coupled with a ‘cool guy’ persona that drives a sports car and likes guns and other macho stuff.  Fine, I say.  That’s great.  But that means that this game will appeal to exactly the kind of person I’ve spent most of my life not being.  I’ve never worried about the coolness of whatever hobbies I pursued, and I pursued a number of decidedly un-cool past-times (videogames, reading, writing, etc etc).

While Bissell goes some way to redeem both the game and the designer, I still can’t help but dislike the game.  The most telling quotes from Bleszinski are when he speaks of being in a purgatory between geeky and cool, where he seems to find himself today.  The game that Gears is presents little more than the mad-dash testosterone-fest.  Yet Bleszinski speaks of a melancholy embedded in it, especially within Marcus Fenix.  The advertisement backed by Gary Jules’ version of Mad World does speak of something “else” within the mind of the developer, but his game doesn’t.  Not loudly enough.  Not in the language of videogames.  In the end Marcus and the other COGs are too brutal, too masculine, and too effective to be viewed as tragic in any way.  Why am I to believe that Marcus has any sense of loss or pain, why would he ever question his motives or methods when they prove so unrelentingly efficacious?  The mantra of “show don’t tell” instructs us to look for demonstrations of Fenix’s weaknesses, and I don’t see them.

Perhaps this game is decidedly intertextual, and can be saved.  Perhaps one must view this game in and of its time: the very early 7th generation title, that followed hot on the heals of Epic Games’ own Unreal Tournament frag-fests, but also Halo 1 and 2, early Call of Duty, and of course Quake 3, Doom 3 and other frantic, competitive PC-based shooters.  Is the cover mechanic, so banal now as to be difficult to even notice, the hint of Fenix’s weakness?  Despite his seemingly impregnable armour and hyper-masculine toughness, he hides as often as he shoots.  No player could get through Gears without hiding from most of the enemies he encounters at least briefly.  This, as opposed to the literal headlong charge into battle typified by earlier shooters, where there was no such built-in mechanic suggesting to the player that taking cover might be advisable, rather than simply holding down the fire button.  Perhaps the painfully long reload times are a commentary on Fenix’s dependence on his equipment, especially when he fails to ‘active reload’ it properly.  Could the outward hyper-masculinity and toughness be a facade for the more accurate, mechanic-based description of Fenix as a vulnerable target entirely dependent on his not-so-perfect Lancer rifle?

Possibly.

Something About Starcraft

Original Post: August 2, 2010

To jump on a hyped-up bandwagon: StarCraft.  That long-awaited sequel to a game I did actually play, rather religiously, back when it was current.  I can’t say that I was among those eagerly awaiting its return, but it is a bit like an old friend you haven’t seen in a long time, and he’s aged rather well. That said, SC2 is a wonderful example for any of those theorists still in the games-aren’t-stories camp, because SC2, despite its substantial overhaul of narrative delivery technique, still doesn’t do it very well.  The “game” bit of StarCraft really, really does not want to tell a story, while the story bits aren’t game-like at all.

I will keep the recap very very brief as I’m sure most of us are familiar with the narratology vs. ludology ‘debate’ that took place–and if you aren’t, look up First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game, and you’ll get the gist.  Essentially the argument is that because narratives are constructed by an author to be accessed by a reader in a particular order and at a particular pace, they deliver story in a very precise, author-controlled way.  Games on the other hand are rule-bound systems which are by their nature very unpredictable and largely place control in the hands of the player.  While neither of these statements are unequivocally true, StarCraft would be a great example of how stories-in-videogames simply doesn’t work.  (I have maintained for a while now that videogames are not just games, so we can’t judge them purely on their game-like qualities.  Keep that in mind.)

What is the game of StarCraft?  Mostly when we ask this question we can refer to rules, as in basketball or poker.  We can say that the former is a sport played by two teams of 5 players, on a court with a ball and two hoops.  You put the ball in the hoop and stop the opposition from doing the same etc.  The rules of the game are spelled out pretty clearly in handbooks and such.  The ‘game’ of StarCraft is really problematic to define.  Usually, one would describe it as a real-time strategy game about base construction, resource management and large-scale combat tactics.  The Terran, Protoss and Zerg factions are defined in certain ways by their units and building possibilities.  Yet throughout the campaign portion of the game, the rules change quite dramatically.  Where is the resource management or base-building in the missions revolving around Zeratul?  Several of those involve controlling him, and only him, throughout much of the mission.

The Prophecy missions focusing on Zeratul are probably the most plot-heavy in the game, where Jim Raynor is actually reliving the memory of the Protoss Templar.  So essentially, Raynor and the player are ‘hearing a story’ in so far as the events have already happened and are being relayed as a narrative.  To do this, Blizzard remove all the player’s capacity to strategize–a fairly large chunk of the game–and we are left with a crappy third-person action-adventure sequence that I’d much rather play the way I play Assassin’s Creed (for example) and not in a top-down click-click-click format.  Through these missions, we proceed through a very narrow set of objectives, moving from Point A to Point B mostly.  We, as Zeratul, are really just moving across a number of different planets to consult with various important NPCs, from the Immortal Protoss historians to the dying Zerg Overmind.  These tasks are reminiscent of the story-filling quests in any number of RPG-styled videogames.

The other major storytelling device is the ever-popular cinematic.  Admittedly these 2010 cinematics are quite a bit more pleasant to sit through than the between-mission briefing screen conversations throughout the first game, but they leave something to be desired.  They fall far behind in terms of aesthetic competence in comparison to contemporary videogames, like Uncharted 2 or even Assassin’s Creed (I have yet to see anything that compares to Uncharted 2, just quietly).

The sum of these two elements is the ‘proof’ that an RTS can’t actually tell a story, because to do the story-telling stuff you have to remove all the RTS.  First pare back all the in-game abilities that typify the genre, by eliminating the base, the construction, and the resources and bind the player to one character.  Then just take out the game altogether and use the trusty cinematic.

This kind of talk would come as a surprise to anyone familiar with my general stance that videogames can be quite capable story-telling media.  I still believe that to be the case, only that the kind of story they tell needs to agree with the kind of game they are.  Videogames are a communicative medium, no doubt, but they rely on a systematic, functional logic that will inevitably govern how the aesthetic content is experienced.  Novels have a systematic rule also, they just happen to (almost) all be the same rule: read from page one to the last page, top to bottom left to right.  Those are rules that govern how the narrative is experience.  Videogames can change those rules, play with them, activate them and make them part of the experience.  StarCraft has those rules, but chooses to tell a story that runs across the grain rather than with it.

The game of StarCraft is about war–the story is about individuals.  The game of StarCraft teaches the player not to care much for the individuals, the story asks us to identify with their personalities, or empathise with their desires, fears and ambitions.  The videogame asks something rather difficult when we are meant to empathise with Raynor, or even Tychus, immediately following a battle in which we ‘build’ then send hundreds marines charging into the open maw of doom in the middle of a Zerg base.  The gameplay experience, during the missions, is largely detached from the ‘humanity’ of warfare, as we are suspended as an omniscient non-presence above the battlefield.  There is no suggestion that we are occupying Raynor himself while controlling the flow of battle, as he himself turns up (as a Marine, rather than a Vulture, perhaps trying to humanise him from vehicle into identifiable man?) on the battlefield early on.

The tentative questions I ask here are what else do we do?  Narratives about war are almost inevitably about the individuals.  Especially modern war films, such as Blackhawk Down or Saving Private Ryan are all about the individual humans caught up in a larger-than-them conflict.  Television series like M*A*S*H were shot almost entirely on the hospital site, and never depicted actual battle–it was about the people there, not about the war.  The game of StarCraft is absolutely about the war, in a more engaging way than a film or novel probably can be.  A forty-minute long battle scene in a movie would be pretty excruciating, where a forty-minute StarCraft battle can be gripping.  Especially given the medium’s ability to suspend us over the battlefield, and put us in control, we are able to experience what a large-scale battle is, in and of itself, as opposed to the individual’s experience of that chaos.  The player of an RTS is not experiencing an individual’s perspective on warfare, because no individual, not even the commanding general, can have the kind of perfect perspective over everything, in real time, that the computer-chair general can.

The key is to communicate through that experience, not the supposed introspection of Raynor as portrayed in the cinematics.  There was one point in which I felt this was executed: in Zeratul’s final mission, the Fall of Aiur.  This mission puts the player in command over the last of the Protoss forces–a considerable army, with considerable resources–to defend their home planet from the Zerg onslaught.  The mission is designed to fail, and so the player simply does not have enough time/resources to actually overcome the Zerg army.  Nothing in the system changes, the player doesn’t lose abilities, or through some other deus ex machina lose half their base, they are simply overrun.  The mineral deposits finally run out, and the player can’t build reinforcements.  They lose the mission naturally, as it were, and instead of being told: “The Zerg attack was relentless, it seemed as though for every one that fell, two more would take its place,” this experience is actually shown to the player, on a large scale.

The question I have is how do we position the player?  Could the player become a Commander who through some technological conceit (I’m thinking Ender’s Game here) can be aware and in control of the whole battlefield?  Is that where we could place Raynor, and then the player inside his head?  If so, could we tell story through some introspective audio ‘thoughts’ in a similar way that Bioshock et al. use the audio logs?  Or do we continue to develop along the disembodied presence above-it-all logic and attempt to transcend the human character with which the player will identify and empathise with?

Kerrigan, Queen of Blades

Kerrigan, Queen of Blades

Final note is that when many people speak of StarCraft, they speak of the multiplayer aspect of the game, which is, to me, another wholly different experience.  The rules change again, down to the available machines of war.  There are quite a few more in the campaign than there are in the ranked matches I’ve played, to ensure a balanced play experience one assumes–or simplifying the experience for those in the lower leagues.  I honestly do not know at this point.

There simply must be a more nuanced use of the word ‘game’ when talking about videogames.  Videogames are not only games, and may in fact contain several ‘games’ in the traditional sense, within the software.  StarCraft is indeed a great game–its more than one great game in fact–but it is also going to be a poster boy for critics (such as myself) explaining why story doesn’t work in videogames.

Red Dead Reflections

Original Post: June 11, 2010

Yes, I’ve been waiting weeks to use that title.

I actually had a very brief review of this game published at Kotaku so check it out there.  What we have here will be a longer version with more elaborations than the 500 words allowed me there.

Read Dead Redemption is the spiritual successor to Red Dead Revolver by Rockstar (San Diego).  Using the same basic open-world framework and gameplay mechanics as Grand Theft Auto 4, the player is John Marston: an outlaw trying to turn over a new leaf, but being played like a hand of cards by higher powers.

Wide Open Spaces: Red Dead Redemption has presented a truly beautiful, detailed and convincing representation of the  American West.  I lived in Arizona for many years and can personally vouch for the authenticity of most of the landscapes presented.  Of course, Rockstar have not built a world quite the right size for all the things in it, but they learned how to approximate reality through a kind of architectural metaphor in Grand Theft Auto.  As is rightly noted by Bogost and Klainbaum, in a videogame, cartographic accuracy is less important than getting the ‘feel’ right.  That feel is based on a cultural understanding of the pieces that the overall place is made up of.  The American frontier, as a place, is composed of deserts, mountains (of the particular red shade), prairie, and forested highlands.  If these areas are present, we will understand the concept of the frontier.  The vagueness of New Austin as a place is precisely because it is an abstraction of several places, combined together in a distilled format.  Something like making a video documentary of New York and quickly filming Queens, the Bronx, Little Italy and Times Square in succession.  The experience of New York will be condensed in time.  The equivalent for a game is to compress the space.

Procedural Encounters: Sometimes the desert is empty, hauntingly so.  Other times its teeming with wildlife and random strangers to divert your attention.  This is a remarkably entertaining variety of experience.  The various behavioural engine technology first applied in GTA4 is obviously in effect here.  But the signalling of interaction in that game was really only just that: a signal, a sign without referent.  In RDR, I was actually (virtually) interacted with by many strangers who invited me to sit down with them, asked me for help, and occasionally stole my horse.  These interactions went rather deeper than the greetings and exclamations made by the citizens of Liberty City.  The soft, opt-in/opt-out mechanical structure of these tiny missions (the ‘get my carriage back’ or ‘stop the thief’ type) was very welcome as it achieved two goals: firstly it made the world feel more alive, inhabited by real people with goals and motivations beyond making the world seem more alive!  Secondly, by allowing me to not assist everyone, I was allowed to remain in control, and so blast through story missions more quickly if that was what I wanted to do.

The more formal Stranger missions were equally well-handled.  Being able to pursue them in the middle of other missions was a great example of learning from other games and refining the mechanics of quest administration to a very smooth experience.

The experience of hunting seems fairly genuine, unlike an MMO where there are always animals everywhere.  There was a real sense of adventure when I attempted to break the American Standardbred.  It was the single hardest thing I had to do in the game—partially because I was hunting for them in a more difficult area, I came to discover, that was heavily populated by cougars.  I could have found one in another area, but I didn’t know that at the time.  Instead I chased a single horse across the map for a solid half-hour.  This is after I initially lassoed it, only to be dragged down a cliff when it reared and bolted.  The fact that I didn’t die from the fall (I sort of rolled and tumbled down a steep slope rather than free-falling) meant I could call my own trusty steed, and set off in pursuit of the same horse.  It felt like I was actually chasing a genuine individual, not a computer subroutine, replaceable with any other predictable copy of itself.

Gunplay: There are lots and lots of guns in this game, but none of them are out of place.  In a gaming world of plasma cannons and multiple assault rifles, the economy of a single-shot rifle was really refreshing.  There were the repeater rifles, but these weren’t fully automatic weapons either.  The sound effects on the various kinds of weapons combined with the one-or-two shot kills gave the shoot outs some real oomph!  I am going to make the call here: best gun sound effects since the Goldeneye:007 Dostovei pistol.  I can’t even pick on that I think is better, because I think they might (almost) all be.

Riding Shotgun: Seriously, riding in a stagecoach flying down dirt tracks blasting rustlers or outlaws with my Winchester never got old.

Rookie Mistakes: The storytelling here is not as refined as I’ve come to expect in these big-budget titles.  One of the first rules of effective storytelling is “Show, don’t tell.”  The game gets off on a bad foot when we are simply told that Marston’s family have been kidnapped, so we’re obliged to carry out their orders.  This fundamental error troubles the entire plot, as it establishes (or rather, doesn’t) Marston’s motivations for doing anything.  I as a player had no idea what is family were like, I never saw them, didn’t see them kidnapped and so have no emotional connection to them at all.  This could have been rectified with a simple cut-scene, or better yet, with a Mass Effect 2 style opening episode.

Arguably, videogames actually introduce a third ‘-esis’ which I’m not sure there is a name for yet.  The first is diegesis, that is, the explanation or verbalisation of a fact or explanation.  This is the ‘telling’ of expression that we use in daily life, in art and media, and its obviously where we get the word ‘dialog’ to mean some kind of interactive communication.  Mimesis is the sort of ‘showing’ I recommend above, and is the ‘miming’ or ‘mimicking’ of reality rather than a verbal rhetoric.  This is the fundamental principle of stage theatre, where stating “Lear was upset” is ridiculous and the idea is to show how upset poor King Lear is through acting.

Both of these modes of expression rely on a clear boundary between ‘expresser’ and receiver or observer.  The orator must be telling something to someone for the concept to make sense.  A dramatic performance must have an external observer to interpret the presentation of information.  Games, including live-action role-play and other sorts of participatory fiction, enable a new kind of simulated experience of the “narrative” (for lack of a better word).  The fiction can be not just seen, but played at from the inside.  Of course, actors, or players, in drama are experiencing the fiction from the inside themselves as they seek to identify with their characters, understand their motivations, etc., but they do so for the benefit of the audience.  In Gaming, we do so for our own benefit as one of the players.  Furthermore, we are not simply experiencing the fact that Lear is upset, we are manipulating and being manipulated by a series of functional rules.  Whether these are algorithmic code in a computer, conventions of a LARP group, or the mixture of code and convention used in a session of Dungeons and Dragons, we the players are learning, and having our understanding tested, as part of the game system.  This should be a fundamental goal of the game designer: do not only tell or show, but cause the player to experience and understand.

Grit in my Spaghetti: (Full disclosure: I am not a film scholar with no claim to understand the Western or spaghetti Western genres.)  The game is a bit confused between the comedy of an over-the-top spaghetti Western and the grit and something darker and more meaningful.  The entire cast of the first chapter (other than the MacFarlanes) are painful caricatures that a hardened outlaw like Marston wouldn’t have allied himself with in a million years.  He certainly wouldn’t have made himself errand-boy for them.  This is related to one of the other problems that doesn’t really have to do with characters, but with action: why doesn’t Marston just go looking for his quarry himself?  There are only so many places to hide in New Austin and Mexico.  Couldn’t he have just walked away from the crazy people in Hannigen’s Stead, and had a look around himself?  Failing that, why wouldn’t he just pull a gun on that ass West Dickens and tell him to get on with it?  I really, really wanted him to.  You can, of course, tell me he needed the machine gun, but that fails to convince me that Marston couldn’t have ridden in with the marshal and taken care of business without all the fooling around beforehand.

The middle chapter is more balanced—and by balanced I mean ambivalent.  The disconnect between Marston killing a couple hundred rebels, then being invited to join them and lead a counter-attack seems very strange.  The numbers just don’t add up.  How many rebels are there that they can suffer the kind of losses that Marston inflicts on them while working with the Mexican Army, and they are immediately prepared to actually take the city?  Simply spin these questions around, and ask the same: how many soldiers were there occupying the various strongholds in Mexico that the battalion (or whatever the division name would be) wouldn’t have fallen apart and abandoned some of their territory, at least long enough to regroup and reinforce?

The third becomes increasingly dark, and this is the only one where I believe in Marston’s deference.  He is at the mercy of the Federal agents, so when they tell him to go run errands, he has little choice.  The cocaine addicted professor is a bit caricature-esque as well, but at least realised he was out of place and ran back to the East.

The final chapter I found truly remarkable.  GTA4 has the problem of ‘after the story’ the world simply stops.  Obviously, it doesn’t ‘stop’ but there is no place for Niko there, the world stops interacting with him, and Niko is naught but an observer (maybe that’s the whole point of the game, haven’t decided  yet).  The idea that Marston was working on building up his farm, giving him a place to settle, as the player begins to sense an end to the game, is wonderful.  Then the real climax hits, and it’s a genuine surprise.  The gentle slow-down Rockstar give us on the ranch lulls the player into a false sense of security, then capitalises on it.  That is what I mean by showing, not telling.