Finding the Lack of Fun...and Why It Can Be Rewarding

I'm a Scotch drinker. I don't however, consider it a fun drink. I like it because it's often smoky. I like it because it burns going down, and, if you're not careful with it, it can knock you right on your ass. I like my art like I like my Scotch: challenging, complex...and with maybe just a hint of absurd nihilism. It doesn't have to be fun or pretty. I like it to challenge me, make me rethink the way I understand language and narrative or color, subject, and perspective. It stands to reason, then, that I approach games in the same way I drink a glass of Scotch--to experience something complex. Sometimes I play because the story hooked me more than the mechanics. I play because the game is beating me senseless, and I'm too pissed to quit. I play because a game's thematically challenging, and I just want to see how deep the rabbit hole goes. I play because I want to see which glitches I can exploit (Bethesda, folks...Bethesda), to discover where the boundaries of the world end, to figure out how I can read this digital text in a meaningful way. As a literature scholar, I constantly ask myself questions regarding the pleasure of a certain text, and I posit that games can be approached the same way. Sure, approaching a game with a goal other than having "fun" seems like a ridiculous idea, but it can lead to new insights on how games function as forms of art and entertainment.

My general rule, like almost everyone else's, is that once I stop getting some type of satisfaction out of a game, I stop playing. There are games that I've played, however, that I found less amusing than was worth the time I put into them. I never finished Crysis because, try as I might, I just couldn't get into it. I finished Dead Space, but I didn't really enjoy it. I just wanted to get my money's worth and see if I like its brand of genre horror (I do, but not enough that I'd ever return to it). I hated Dead Island. I'm worse at Madden and NCAA football games than I am at actual football. I got bored with Red Steel 2. I cannot find the joy in user-generated content. I only played Assassin's Creed: Revelations so I could get the story before ACIII; for me, the game was close to joyless. These games I usually abandon or sell fairly quickly because there's just not enough there for me to keep them.

But the ones I do keep, I don't always hang on to them because they're "fun" in the traditional sense. One such game that I enjoy without having fun is Dark Souls. I've already written about Dark Souls, so I won't repeat my larger argument there. The game does not entertain me in nearly the same way other games do. The combat system tasks my brain to constantly anticipate my enemies' reactions, making every single encounter a puzzle with a set number of variables. Exploration fills me with dread, as I approach each new area with more trepidation and anxiety than excitement. I cannot play the game for long periods of time, and it, like its predecessor Demon's Souls, requires more time to master than I have to give it. I, nevertheless, have held onto it, returning to the game every now and then when I'm feeling masochistic. I play it because I am fascinated with how it attacks not just my character, but my actual psyche. Yet, in those brief moments after I've killed a massive boss or I've successfully navigated through a trap-filled fortress, the trials seem worth the effort. Dark Souls' play structure functions as a type of Zen master, and the player serves as the game's apprentice, willing to undergo ruthless tutelage in order to achieve "enlightenment" in the form of a successful playthrough. Dark Souls is a digital koan I play to achieve satisfaction through struggle--not a game I enjoy for its "fun factor."

Whereas Dark Souls provides a gameplay experience akin to taxing meditation, the converse type of meditative experience arises in thatgamecompany's Journey and Flower. I love these games because they offer the potential to create meaningful, emotional experiences in digital playgrounds, but I wouldn't classify my experience with them as fun. I did not initially play Flower because it's fun to play; I played the game because I wanted a gameplay experience not built around violence. The first time I moved pedals across the meadow, I was calmed. I immensely enjoyed the responsiveness of the controls as they synced with the waltz-like movement on the screen. I came to Journey with a similar expectation of enjoying an experience driven by emotion and isolation rather than the pursuit of some obvious goal. The haunted vagueness of Journey's world becomes not a series of digital rooms and challenges toward that white light at the end, but rather the game itself, insisting on nothing but its own existence. I cannot (and nor would I want to) deny that my time with Journey was worthwhile and enjoyable (even deeply meaningful), but I still don't see it as a "fun" game.

Beautiful? Yes. Meaningful? Absolutely. Enjoyable? Infinitely. Fun? ...erhm maybe?....

A game does not have to be either brutally punishing or quietly calming to offer something other than fun. Sometimes, a game is worth playing because its content is challenging. Spec Ops: The Line provided the most compelling game experience for me so far this year, and it did so without being fun. The mechanics serve the narrative and themes at play, and that's about it. I did not enjoy my time in Dubai, per se, but I have completed the game twice. The story drags the characters through a hellish pit of surrealist military nihilism with the player in tow. It breaks apart not just the characters but the shooter genre, all by exploring what it really means to play soldier. Every person I killed had weight and significance. I felt every atrocity my digital avatar committed. I've done horrible things because a game directed me to...and I've tread even darker virtual paths because I chose them. I continued to play Spec Ops not because the combat was enjoyable and fun. I wanted to finish the story and continue on this path of self-destruction. And when it was done, I went back and did it all again. It's not a fun trip, but it's one worth taking.

You just phosphorus bombed a group of civilians. Are we having fun yet?

Though Spec Ops proves to be an excellent exercise in gameplay nihilism, it is not alone in this respect. Playdead's Limbo and Jonathan Blow's Braid offer ambiguously dark game experience, albeit through different means. Both are platformer/puzzle hybrids taking place in strange lands, but while Limbo's black and white aesthetic makes loneliness and despair apparent from the outset of the child protagonist's journey, Braid masks its darker, solemn tone with lush, impressionistic art direction. I did not play these two games because I found them fun--the puzzle/platformer does not really appeal to me. I played them because I found their core concepts fascinating. The time-based puzzles in Braid required intricate solutions that, while rewarding once conquered, provided me little in the way of fun in experimentation. I kept playing because the game's mysterious story and surreal puzzles came together in meaningful ways that challenge narrative and generic conventions. Limbo, on the other hand, is built on a "trial-and-death" mechanic that forces the player to kill the protagonist time and time again. While I enjoy the game immensely, I don't focus on the fun of the platforming and puzzle solving but rather the dismal beauty of its art direction and the hauntingly minimalism of the core system. It disturbs instead of enchants me--and that keeps me coming back.

It's terrifying and disturbing, but is it fun?

I recognize how completely subjective my position on the issue of fun is. "Fun" is a loaded term, and positing some objective definition would be an exercise in futility. A gamer's relationship with a game is personal, and while I may find the sadistic gameplay of Dark Souls rewarding for its difficulty but not for its fun, I see no reason why someone could not have a blast with the combat. I get why someone would have a lot of fun playing Braid or Limbo, too. My point is simply this: sometimes, approaching a game for a reason other than fun, yields worthwhile results. With the games listed above, I rarely sit back and appreciate what a joy it is to play the game. I play them because they're maddening. I play them because their emotional. I play them because I want to see just how far the game can punish me without me biting back. I test them as much as they test me, and in the end, I turn the machine off, still thinking about how meaning or insight can be delivered through groups of pixels floating across a screen. Now, if you'll excuse me, it's time for a Scotch.

Cheers,

--David

Slouching towards Bethlehem: Darksiders II and the Modern Apocalypse

The word "apocalypse" originally referred not to a cosmic, metaphysical event, but to the act of divine revelation. Roughly translated from the original Greek apocalypsis, the word more literally means "a lifting of the veil," or "an uncovering." The final book of the New Testament, the Revelation of St. John of Patmos (often erroneously called "Revelations," and my inner biblical scholar cringes), is sometimes called "The Apocalypse of St. John." Other apocalypses, such as the Shepherd of Hermas and the Apocalypse of Peter found their ways into early Christian canons (though later made apocryphal), and, as a result, the term "apocalypse" became associated with an entire genre of literature, extending to Dante's Divine Comedy, Milton's Paradise Lost, the poetry of William Blake and William Butler Yeats, as well as visual media. My personal favorite is Albrecht Durer's Apocalypse, a series of woodcuts depicting in vivid detail the visions of St. John the Divine. THQ and Vigil Games' Darksiders franchise offers the most recent attempt to bring a biblical apocalypse to the video game medium, and it's second installment largely succeeds where the original failed--though it's not without its shortcomings.

"Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" by Albrecht Durer (1497-98). From bottom left to right: Death, Famine, War, Pestilence (Plague) 

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse provide a great central concept around which to build a video game mythology. In this aspect, Darksiders works very well. In fact, my favorite aspect of the original Darksiders is its story--though I do have a fascination with Judeo-Christian texts and mythologies. I love the comic book art direction and the over-written story and dialogue. I also enjoy its bizarre mixture of Talmudic, Babylonian, and various other biblical mythologies that re-purposed the names and stories of gods, angels, and demons. In the original Darksiders, the Apocalypse occurs ahead of schedule, and War, one of the four Horseman (along with Death, Fury, and Strife), gets the blame as the hosts of the High Heavens and the Burning Hells use earth as the location for the biggest cage fight in the Creation. The game follows War as he seeks to clear his name and defend himself against charges of premature apoculation. The first game sticks so close to its Hebraic hegemonic structure that it can come across as awkwardly complicated, but I always wanted to know what War would encounter next. It's a fun, fresh take on the biblical Apocalypse. Its scope, however, is weirdly limited. The Apocalypse seems only to have smacked one small part of the earth--an unnamed city--which seems at odds with such an epic event. Localizing the Apocalypse may be the only way to capture it in a videogame, and perhaps creating a third-person adventure that can encapsulate such a cosmic event is impossible commercially and practically. Nevertheless, Darksiders, for as much as I enjoy it, left me wanting. This feeling magnified when the game ends on the biggest cliffhanger since God of War II.

Though Darksiders II does not provide closure to the story left hanging in the first, it is a better game. Most aspects of the first are improved, as the player shifts from control of the duty-bound War to the mysteriously remorseful Death. The traversal mechanics of Darksiders II work very well, though sometimes the game does not register button presses every now and then. The clunky menu system of Darksiders has been thankfully addressed, and using certain weapons/abilities no longer ties my fingers in knots (like that damn boomerang). New leveling systems allow you to craft your character and his armor in significantly, albeit streamlined, ways. Death even begins with his mount, Despair, readily accessible, unlike his brother who spends the first half of the game's predecessor as a Horseman without his horse. Death is a much more approachable, if not complex, character than his younger brother; Death's confidence and sense of humor facilitate more interesting interactions than War's stoic demeanor. The angels, demons and all between fit Joe Maduiera's comic book apocalypse aesthetic extremely well, offering modernized interpretations of preternatural characters and eldritch creatures.

"And over them triumphant Death his dart / Shook, but delay'd to strike, though oft invok'd"-- John Milton, Paradise Lost (Book XI)

Where Darksiders II truly surpasses the original, though, is its world. Darksiders sat comfortably in its ruined metropolis, and, though the world has a few interesting locations, it never really shakes the "been there, done that" vibe. Players visited post-apocalyptic Washington D.C. in Fallout 3, slaughtered enemies in the bombed out world of Gears of War, survived the zombie-infested sewers of Left 4 Dead, and fought with Chimera across the war-ravaged U.S.A. in Resistance. Darksiders' vision may be a different version of the apocalypse, but its setting is certainly not unique. Darksiders II, however, takes place across multiple planes, each as imaginative as the next. From the verdant plains of the Forge Lands to the ashen mausoleums of the Kingdom of the Dead, Darksiders II boasts some of the most inspired architecture designs I've seen. If the story of the first game kept me playing, the locations of the second made me want to see more of this bizarre world. Unrestrained by the established tropes of apocalyptic settings that tethered the the original Darksiders, the team at Vigil Games came up with some truly awe-inspiring locations and set pieces.

I'm tempted to posit that, because of its setting, Darksiders II is much more apocalyptic, in the classical sense, than the first game. The game seems much more dreamlike, more like a spiritual vision of a mystical world, than the original Darksiders. Death's journey to clear his brother's name and restore humanity, though not without bloodshed, is far more focused on exploration than War's single-minded hunt for justice. Darksiders II's story takes itself a bit seriously, but no more so than something like Skyrim or Kingdoms of Alamur--though its not quite as focused as the story told in Darksiders. The world abounds with numerous side quests and optional dungeons, but, overall, the large areas are weirdly vacant. For Audrey Drake, these barren landscapes are drab and uninteresting:

"The freedom Darksiders II offers is something to behold - you’re able to journey around huge areas as you please, slashing enemies and seeking out treasure and loot drops to your heart’s content. But the bloated environments are simply too barren and often devoid of anything interesting to do or see. Since so little is done to vary up the gameplay, the pacing drags and the length of the adventure feels more like a chore than a bonus." Audrey Drake IGN Review

For me, this aesthetic of dead lands and isolation resonates with the aftermath of some distant apocalypse. The Kingdom of the Dead should be a hollowed husk of a land, and the autumnal twilight of the Forge Lands drips with sorrow and loss. It also helps that one of the best game scores this year compliments these large areas with atmospheric music that crescendos and dissipates with a serenity I would not have expected from an action-heavy game with light RPG elements. During combat, the score speeds up without overshadowing the action, as Death moves with swift precision in his danse macabre of blood and steel. As satisfying as the combat is, the eerily quiet journey across dead and dying planes of existence will be what I remember most fondly.

"Fiery the Angels rose, and as they rose deep thunder roll'd / Around their shores: indignant burning with the fires of Orc." William Blake, "America, a Prophecy"

Though Darksiders II does not take place in the post-apocalyptic earth, it is certainly more similar to the other-worldly visions that are the genesis of the term "apocalypse"--albeit not a true revelation of new, secret knowledge. There's little to nothing here gamers haven't seen before, but I find it difficult to harp on a game for being too derivative. Sure, I played Darksiders years ago when it was called Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver. I enjoyed it then, and I enjoy it now. The loot collection makes it seem like Diablo "lite," though it is satisfying when a piece of gear really clicks with your play style. I do have an issue with the game's ending, as it looks like Vigil and THQ are building to an epic conclusion that I'm skeptical we'll ever see--with two games ending on the same cliffhanger, I find it hard not to be a cynic.

Distilling a cosmic apocalypse down to a video game franchise proves to be an overly ambitious project, often revealing its limitations rather than overcoming them. But the medium of gameplay offers a chance to participate in and rectify world-ending events in ways other art and literature cannot, modernizing texts from thousands of years ago to present a contemporary vision of the apocalypse for the video game and comic book era. Darksiders II may just be the end of the world all over again, but there's plenty there to entertain anyone willing to slouch toward Bethlehem for a vision of the end times.

Cheers,

--David

The Great Graphics Debate: Photorealism, Emotion, and the Uncanny Valley

That's not me in my profile picture. Well, it is, but not really. Those are my clothes, my hat, my shape and form, and it was certainly taken in New Orleans when I visited the art museum with some friends the week before Thanksgiving, but I swear it isn't me. It can't be because I'm typing this post. It's a moment captured in time when I was someplace in the past, a snapshot that I wasn't even aware was being taken. In fact, the figure in the photo looks a little too much like me for my comfort. It's a shell, a construct made by a machine to replicate my appearance. It's...unsettling.

In 1906, Ernst Jentsch coined the term "uncanny" as a bizarre state in which an object in perceived in terms of its uncertainty, but it was not until everyone's favorite psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud, took the term, injected some sexual insight, and produced the meaning we have for it today. I'll spare anyone reading this the details, but the "uncanny" is, more or less, a concept of a particular moment when something is both familiar and alien at the same time, creating a feeling of discomfort. It is this concept that led to Masahiro Mori's hypothesis of the "uncanny valley" which posits that as robots and graphics become more human-like without behaving exactly like humans, people will approach these technologies with a fair degree of disgust and discomfort. The most oft used examples now involve robots that look so close to human that their flaws become magnified, making them, well, creepy. Video game graphics suffer from the same obstacles as robotics; the uncanny valley seems impassable.

Recently, 2K Games' Chris Hartmann spoke out in favor of photorealism and how it can help evolve the industry and elevate the medium in terms of emotional content.

"Until games are photorealistic, it'll be very hard to open up to new genres. We can really only focus on action and shooter titles; those are suitable for consoles now...To dramatically change the industry to where we can insert a whole range of emotions, I feel it will only happen when we reach the point that games are photorealistic; then we will have reached an endpoint and that might be the final console." Chris Hartmann, 2K Games

The photorealism Hartmann so earnestly strives to reach lies on the other side of the uncanny valley, the gulf that separates the recognizably false from the earnestly real (as seen in the following chart):

Current graphics and character models seem to be stuck in this uncanny valley. Sure, character models look great in stills, but as soon as they start moving, they seem off. The lip sync is strange. Sometimes they float above the groundf. The character's hair doesn't move like it should. And in the instance when sex is involved, it looks about as convincing as smashing two naked Barbie dolls together (and almost as arousing). In order to get to the emotional photorealism that Hartmann sees as the zenith of graphical progress, traversing the uncanny valley provides the only logical route. This is the promise held by every single next generation console since the days of the 64 bit machine. I, for one, can't help but see the ultimate goal as a calculus limit rather than the graph above. We'll get closer to zero, but I can't tell if we'll ever breach that invisible wall. I do agree with Hartmann, that there are indeed merits to striving for photorealism in graphics, but I don't think that they are the only way to get a new ranges of emotion. And I've arrived at this conclusion because this is not a new issue.

When photography and film were young, many people had adverse reactions to it, finding the replications of themselves a bit frightening at the honesty it captured. Images looked a bit too real (or uncanny), so much so that some found them initially disturbing. When the camera came into common use, painters and artists of all traditions began to question whether or not there was a purpose for what they did when an object could capture an image with realistic clarity better than a paintbrush ever could. Their goal, then, shifted to offer new perspectives of the "real" or rather to reveal alternative ways of seeing the world. Hence the rise of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Surrealism, Cubism, and a few other "-isms" that seemed to pop up and disappear as quickly as art trends tend to do. Video games, especially indie games, enact a similar reactionary process of rebellion and perspective shifts. As graphical fidelity approaches photorealism, some developers provide alternative experiences, similar to the ways in which artists experimented with form, structure and subject during an age of technological revolution.

For example, below are two images, the first a Post-Impressionist painting from 1891 and the second a still from an indie game in 2012:

"Plage a Heist," by Georges Lemmen (1891)

Journey, thatgamecompany (2012)

The images are strikingly similar. Lemenn's painting shows a beach, a sailboat, and a lone figure. The dreamy movement of the picture captures something that a camera cant quite do in 1891. There's an unreality to the painting and a blending of water, earth, and air that are distinguishable but somehow draw together in an array of natural and unnatural color. Quite similarly, the lone figure of the desert in Journey evokes a feeling of isolation, loneliness, and quiet contemplation amid a sweeping landscape. To say that these images cannot depict emotion because they lack the photorealism offered by the technologies of their respective eras seems absolutely ludicrous (though the Post-Impressionists were often mocked by their contemporary critics). Here's another example from a different school of art:

"Quarry Bibémus," by Paul Cézanne (1898-1900)

Landscape from Minecraft (2011)

Cezanne's proto-Cubist landscape (like the "high" Cubists would a decade later) highlights not the subject itself but the shapes that compose it. The image challenges the viewer and critic by changes perspective and forcing us to think in terms of its construction of shapes rather than its fidelity to reproducing a "real" image of the quarry. Similarly, the landscape from Minecraft foregoes realism in favor of showing the components of the game. Since Minecraft is a game about building and composition, its aesthetic enforces this concept by boldly showing the blockiness of its architecture. Gameplay is reflected through art direction in the same way that Cubists reflected the act of building art by focusing on the shapes that make up the subject rather than the subject itself.

As games evolve and attempt to bridge the uncanny, we will see games come closer to photorealism, and this is not a bad thing. In fact, it's a great goal. It will keep pushing artists to reach for smoother textures, utilize more complicated engines, and strive for the true emotional impact that Hartmann posits. As a result, we will see more independent games work with alternate aesthetics to build games that are not focused on photorealism, offering different approaches to emotional experiences. In this sense, I disagree with Markus "Notch" Persson's rebuttal to Harmann, in which he said, "No, Christoph, you LIMIT the number of new genres if you focus on photorealism." Without the focus of photorealism of the mainstream market, we wouldn't have great alternative games like Journey, Minecraft, Limbo, and Braid. The smart money says, the indie market isn't going anywhere.

However, these are just visual goals; the gameplay has to match the emotional weight of what's on screen. I can get visual emotion from paintings, photography, or film. I play games because gameplay can offer experiences that other media cannot, and unless developers can use gameplay to provide emotional context for what's on screen, they are missing the point of a game.

Cheers,

--David

Heroic Violence in the God of War Franchise: The Ultimate Postmodern Myth

I knew I loved God of War from the very first moment I made the pale barbarian Kratos pick up an undead warrior, dig his massive hands into the monster, and savagely rip it in half, showering himself with an arc of red blood. The motion was smooth and brutal, and the ripping, crunching, tearing sound that wretched from the rotting corpse made the beast's execution all the more satisfying. From that moment, I knew that I was in store for a whole new world of video game violence. I enjoy the over-the-top combat and epic battles of the game, and, yes, I freely admit to being fascinated by the spectacle of violence. While the franchise sometimes catches hell for being too violent, I don't think its goal is simple shock value. The game asks us to dare to enjoy the bloodshed while also punctuating the combat with moments of genuine discomfort. Over the course of five games, players have steered Kratos on his quest for revenge and see him fall more deeply into a hate-soaked frenzy, so much so that he eventually unleashes plagues on mankind that can only result in genocide. But Kratos doesn't exist in any real universe. His is the realm of Greek myth (albeit modernized) where heroes could be vicious and brutal. The result is a postmodern version of a very old world, where the violence of the tales the rhapsodes sang are given visceral life in the new medium of gameplay.

"Rage--Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles, / murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses, / hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls, / great fighters' souls, but made their bodies carrion, / feasts for the dogs and birds, / and the will of Zeus was moving towards its end."

So begins Robert Fagles' translation of Homer's Iliad, the chronicle of the Trojan War of Greek (and later Roman) myth. We all know the story more or less, despite the mediocre Wolfgang Petersen film, but I want to call attention to the fact that the first lines of the poem, in its earliest written form, translate to an invocation to a muse to sing specifically about rage bears significant influence for situating Kratos in the epic tradition. His ethos stems from the aristocratic warrior archetype in Greek myth; princes and generals are the heroes of ancient Greece, and, since Kratos is the son of a god and a general in the Spartan army, it's easy to find his locus in ancient Greek literature. It is also easy to see why the Greeks looked to violent figures as heroes because it became a cultural necessity. Torture and gladiatorial combat were state-sanctioned in Athens and Sparta, and violence served as the most powerful political tool in antiquity, despite advances in philosophy that led to establishing schools of rhetoric. It's almost refreshing, then, to see a character that so perfectly embodies this cultural ethos. We'd like to believe that Achilles is as good looking as Brad Pitt or Hector as handsome as Eric Bana, but Greek concepts of beauty rarely intersected with what they thought of as "heroic." In a gaming landscape filled with handsome lovable rogues (Nathan Drake), dashing demon hunters (DMC's Dante), and attractive androgynous adventurers (pretty much any guy in Final Fantasy), it's refreshing to play as character who is ugly as sin and pissed as all hell.

A face only a mother could love...and he freakin' kills her, too. 

And it's only fitting that Kratos be so brutal. His story slides ride into the lexicon of Greek myth, but with a postmodern twist. As the ancient world's most adamant atheist, Kratos actively seeks the undoing of the entire Greek myth tradition. Since Kratos is a victim of control of gods, his character is also at the whim of the imagined worlds of Greek mythology. Killing the gods is not simply a fun narrative hook--it's Kratos' escape from the narrative itself. Greek mythology kills his wife and child because Ares makes Kratos kill his wife and child. Unlike every other hero in Greek mythology, Kratos sees the world he lives in for its ridiculousness. He is almost self-aware, as if he knows that he is trapped in the song of Greek poet--or in the case of the game, a narrator voiced by Linda Hunt. He kills to be liberated from the world of the game, not just for retribution or satisfaction. For this reason, Kratos' brutality increases with each installment and his goals become cloudy. First, he wants to kill Ares, then Zeus, then the Fates, then Zeus again, then Gaia, then everyone, then Zeus... It's exhausting and convoluted, and his motivations become less convincing each time he paints a new target, especially when the death of an Olympian means subjecting the innocent people of the world to plague and natural disasters. But whereas reviewers initially saw this dissonance as one of the game's flaws, I see it as part of the game's inherent design. Kratos' pathos erodes over time and he becomes increasingly alien to the player because he wants his freedom from the world that ensnares him, and the only way he can do that is through the tools the system and the ancient Greek tradition affords him: sheer, focused brutality.

Still, it's when that brutality is turned outward toward the player when the genre of the Greek myth really starts to break down. After all, by controlling Kratos, the player is complicit in this undoing of the Greek tradition. But it becomes doubly relevant when the player realizes that, though Kratos constantly tries to break bonds (bonds of humanity, of godhood, of fate, of Ares, of lineage), he simply can't because there's still someone yanking his metaphorical and literal chain: the person with the controller. Chains appear so often in the God of War that they become a recurring motif symbolizing not only Kratos' bondage to the gods, but also the bondage of video game architecture. When the player steers Kratos as he moves up and down (and eventually breaking) the Great Chain that connects Olympus, Earth, and Hades, it's a metaphor for his moving through (and sundering) the world of Greek myth recreated in game space. As the player is involved in the breaking of Kratos' universe, so too is he/she complicit in the violent atrocities Kratos commits. Killing a helpless caged warrior in God of War, two priests in God of War II, and a vulnerable woman in God of War III all in the name of Kratos' progress toward self and societal destruction issupposed to disturb the player and solidify his/her connection in the game's hero's quest. We're controlling Kratos, and we're the very apotheosis of the inescapable shackles he longs to break.

The game finally calls attention to this relationship in God of War III when Kratos kills Poseidon, and the camera shifts to the victim's perspective:

Here, we see firsthand the unflinching savagery of the monster we control, and that violence is projected out to the person with the controller. The player presses the buttons that makes Kratos attack the camera--a macabre act of self destruction. Kratos hates Poseidon, and he hates the player as they are both cruel masters and abusers of their power. This concept is reversed at the game's finale when the perspective is switched to Kratos' first-person view as the player fights the spirit of Zeus after Kratos' reconciliation. Both the player and Kratos know that the only way for him to truly be free is through his own execution. His only option, therefore, is suicide, and, with the player's help, Kratos delivers the coup de grace to both himself and to his slavery.

When I mention that God of War is the "ultimate" Greek myth, I dont' mean that it's the best; I mean that it's the last. It is a story constantly focused on its own terminus and the end of the Greek tradition. And only through gameplay could we enact this process of myth-destruction. I'm very eager to see if the newest entry in the God of War: Ascension follows the trajectory I've mapped out, but I'm betting it does. After all, can we really have Kratos without unspeakable violence that will lead to nothing but destruction? I really hope not.

So what do you guys think? Who's amped for Ascension? Do you buy my reading of the games? Let me know, and we'll get to talking.

Cheers,

--David

In Defense of Game Criticism

We've all heard it. Hell, we've probably said it. "Don't take it so seriously, it's just game." Or perhaps, "People are too sensitive." Or, my personal favorite, "They just don't understand." As much as critics love to voice their opinions about games, they are just as often demonized by self-proclaimed adamant defenders of gaming. Here, problems arise from both sides. The critics who are constructive get attacked almost as often as those who seek the undoing of the game industry. Just to clarify, this blog post is not a defense of the latter, but rather a case for the former, for those who work to enter into a dialogue about what the cultural significance of video games. If games are indeed the artistic products that fans so desperately argue, then they must be subject to the same critical exercises that have been used to discuss art, literature, and film--which means taking the game architecture and narrative under consideration when evaluating them.

First, a disclaimer: I absolutely do not condone the actions of pundits and politicians who see games as the root of all evils in the world. The Jack Thompsons of the world have little say in this discussion, if only to provide an example of how not to be a game critic. Those who see violent video games as the cause of violent actions such as shootings, beatings, rape, or any other violence, not only lack a basic understanding of the relationship between gameplay and understanding, but also they diminish the severity of the crimes themselves. Blaming a video game for a school shooting is irresponsible because it dangerously equates the explosions of pixels across a computer screen to very real, very tragic physical actions, which devalues the physical harm of the victim. And, quite frankly, it's bullsh*t. Similarly, the sensationalism in the media about sex in games such as Mass Effect is equally stupid. While I still think games haven't really dealt with sex responsibly (the only exception maybe being Atlus' Catherine), getting parents and politicians up in arms about some titillation offers nothing but a colossal waste of air time. Sure, sex and violence have seen a drastic surge in game presence this generation, but the people who condemn games are often not the people who know the state of the gaming industry or are unfamiliar with the game title in question. Just watch the clip below to get an idea of how not to go about the discussion:

These are not the people I defend. Instead, I want to focus on the people who offer real critiques of the games they play. For example, Keza Macdonald's opinion piece "What the Hell is with that Hitman Trailer?" offers a valid discussion of why some people have a serious problem with the Hitman "Attack of the Saints" trailer:

Her argument is well-executed, pointing out specifics in the trailer that should give the viewer pause. She states the issue that concerns her very matter-of-factly, saying,

"Let’s be clear here: the problem is not that Agent 47 is graphically murdering a group of women, though that’s pretty nasty. It’s that it fetishizes the violence and sexualises the women, drawing a clear line between sex and graphic violence that makes the trailer really distressing to watch, and leaves you questioning who the hell it’s designed to appeal to."

Furthermore, her opinion is not an unpopular one. Grant Howitt at theguardian states that watching "a chap who is murdering these naughty, naughty nuns (with details that border on the pornographic – lingering arse and crotch shots, sprays of blood over cleavage … you get the idea) makes the viewing a little uncomfortable," and Dan Silver at Mirror News calls the trailer "a shameless piece of sexist tat designed to get the internet worked into a lather and millions of YouTube plays." While I think Silver and Howitt are of the same opinion, McDonald provides detailed analysis of the trailer to back up her statement, implicitly offering the reader to take into account his/her own reading of the nuances of the trailer. She ends her piece with a few questions--"Are we supposed to find this trailer appealing? If so, why? What is supposed to appeal to us about it – the violence, the sexy nuns, the slow-motion gun pans, the image of scantily clad women getting taught a brutal lesson?"--and then provides her own conclusion: "This isn’t cool. We shouldn’t shrug and accept this kind of marketing material as representative of what we, as gamers, want to see. Publishers need to stop these tactics. It’s not acceptable, and in the eyes of many, many people it does a lot more harm to Hitman Absolution’s image than good." Her writing brings together questions about violence, feminism, and spectacle as well as the central question of of what a trailer is supposed to do. This is what a critic does; asks challenging questions while providing her own opinion to spark discussion.

Then the comments section happened. Some comments offered good counterpoints, citing actual gameplay from the Hitman franchise, which often features brothels and sexual situations as well as the obvious gratuitous violence. But others just outright denied the problems the trailer presents and resort to attacking her for offering a feminist critique of the trailer. Reverse sexism is obviously a provocative lens to view the game trailer, but without offering a counterpoint with civility, the comment section devolves into a series or rants instead of giving people the opportunity to discuss the issues raised by the trailer. Feminism in video games is a great topic for discussion, yet a quick view of the comment section provides no indication that people actually know what feminism is. The critic, then, is reduced, through no real fault of her own, to a caricature of herself: a bra-burning rights activist instead of someone offering a legitimate interrogation of where she can situate her values in the game. It's not entitlement; it's investigation. It's keeping a critical eye on the industry that we love, that we want to see flourish, and that we all enjoy. But most importantly, the work of critic engages in a conversation about cultural values and how we read/play/view works of art.

Obviously, this is just one example. The problematic race issue is Resident Evil 5 brought similar criticism and controversy, and the more recent issue of the implicit rape in the new Tomb Raider game brings, again, the issue of female empowerment and victimization to the discussion table. It's healthy and though-provoking to discuss these issues, but it's not productive to automatically side with the game and demonize the critic outright. People should have their opinions. People should voice their opinions. People should, most definitely, defend their opinions. But wouldn't it be better to discuss them and engage with them with each other in ways that do not alienate our peers. It's damn good to disagree with critics, but it's even better when someone can do so by providing some sense of why he/she has come to that opinion.

I no doubt feel this way because I've been a teacher, an editor, and because I'm in the early stage of my dissertation. And I understand that it's hard to "talk" to each in the lewd alleys of a virtual community without anonymity making people much braver without the threat of consequence. But I cannot help but be disappointed when I see discussion boards turn into schoolyard sandboxes where name-calling and insults are the primary method of communication. It takes away from the function of criticism instead of sharpening it, and, without good criticism, the video game industry will inevitable stagnate, producing little of cultural, aesthetic, or (God forbid) entertainment value.

Cheers,

--David

Existential Horror and Gameplay Compulsion in Dark Souls

Horror in video games is a fairly well-trod region. Some developers approach the genre through grotesque enemy design, pitting the player against hordes of disgusting monsters, often with a fair degree of gore (e.g. Splatterhouse). Others focus on place and time, building games in Gothic settings (e.g. Castlevania). The best, though, strive for an atmospheric approach to horror that combines narrative, setting, action, and gameplay mechanics to provide a totalizing horror experience. When used to its full potential, the video game medium provides an authentic horror experience that film and literature simply cannot achieve.

Like so many others, I had my first taste of horror in the medium when I played Capcom's Resident Evil in 1996. After watching a ridiculous cut scene in which unintentionally hilarious B-movie style actors delivered some semblance of story my young could not care less about, my friend handed me his controller, gave me a brief rundown of the controls, and set me loose in a mansion infested with walking corpses. Unused to the Playstation controller, I took a while to learn how to move Jill Valentine across the screen, but, after some practice, I began navigating the halls like a pro--until my first encounter with a monster whereupon I forgot what any of those damn buttons did. In that moment, everything came together--the shambling corpse, the lack of ammunition, the limited visibility of awkward camera angles, the knowledge that my character's death would lead to a restart that would undo what felt like significant progress--and created not just a great moment in my subjective gaming history, but also a sincere state of panic. This, I thought, is what horror feels like: hopelessness in the face of a foe that I knew meant certain death. Jill Valentine did not survive the encounter, and it was purely my fault. That instance would never be duplicated for me in a survival horror game. Sure, I had my fair share of scares in Dead Speace, and I felt the bizarre atmosphere of Bioshock. But nothing came close to replicating that moment of genuine terror...until I started playing Dark Souls.

I had played it's predecessor, Demon's Souls, but I never got into it. I gave it two serious tries, but I found that the game required more time to put into it than I actually had to give. But something about Dark Souls' open world and disturbing beauty drew me to it. In Dark Souls, the player's character is a nameless undead who wanders around landscape ripped straight from someone's darkest, depraved nightmare. Beginning at a place called the "Undead Asylum," the player journeys beyond the walls of his/her prison to fulfill some prophecy about something because some demons did bad stuff and it needs fixing, maybe. And that's about all you get, if you don't go to great lengths to find out the story, and it, like so many of the game's oddments, is, by design, withholding. I have no idea why my character must do what he does, and the game gives little to no direction (so much so that an internet community has grown up around trying to help newcomers and experts alike). The player must find his/her way through a demonic hellscape, and damn near everything out there is hunting for blood. It is this initial feeling of despair and unknowing that sets the tone for the game.

I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing /
Looking into the heart of light, the silence. --T.S. Eliot

The tone of utter hopelessness is not the only link the game has to the horror genre. Dark Souls offers a vast array of demonic creatures and terrifying bosses that leave the player literally shaking after a narrow victory. They attack with ground-shaking power, and they outmatch the player at every turn, if he/she is not careful. The game is not merely content with providing a borderline insurmountable challenge; the developers designed the character models to be visually revolting and intimidating. One look at the Gaping Dragon guarding the key to Blighttown is enough to turn the stomach of any seasoned player:

"I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies
of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me.
But I do not think my life will be long. " -- H.P. Lovecraft

The Gaping Dragon plays off the player's initial disgust at the creature as it emerges slowly from an abyss, and, while the player's shock at seeing the demon has not subsided, it advances on the player with devastating attacks, leaving the player helpless. It will kill you numerous times before you kill it. Another ungodly creature is the Butcher, a large masculine-looking creature, which the player finds out via an NPC is actually a female. She carries a giant cleaver--a Freudian symbol for castration if ever there were one--which she uses to hack and slash at the player, and a burlap sack obscures her face. This faceless giant is quite reminiscent of Silent Hill 2's Pyramid Head, largely believed to be the most horrific video game monster ever created (likely due to his own status as a metaphor for perverted masculinity). These two examples of the horrors the player elects to face when he/she boots up the game. Everything wants nothing more than to eviscerate the player in the most brutal fashion possible.

Though I have mostly compared Dark Souls to games in the survival-horror genre, Dark Souls is not a survival horror game. Its mechanics stem from a strict RPG tradition, so much so, in fact, that the game can easily alienate the unseasoned gamer--which is, of course one of the game's many goals. Casual gamers need not apply. The game is so alienating, in fact, that its multiplayer component (a complex system of entering others' game worlds for good or ill, cryptic messages, seeing ghostly apparitions of other players, and replaying the last moment's of another player's in-game by touching bloodstains left on the ground) is only hinted at through NPCs and item descriptions. Since player is almost always alone, seeing the specter of another player reminds the player that others share his/her fate--but they remain separated by some force that has sundered the world. The ultimate payoff is that the player must evaluate what it means to play with someone online. The connection online gameplay provides is only fleeting and superficial, but when strangers team up to take down an impressively difficult boss, the feeling of gratification is on par with beating an entire game. Players blink in and out of each others' worlds, and as well, each others' lives, inviting a metatextual pondering of existence and connection in a world of abject despair. Can we really know the people we play with? The game posits that we cannot, that they are just hollowed shells of people projected on a screen--bodies turned into ghosts by ones and zeroes. These interactions, nevertheless, are meaningful in that they help us traverse some virtual wasteland, and maybe that's all we can ever ask for in online interaction. The game offers a grim truth, beautiful in its bleak frankness.

"Those who have crossed / With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom /
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost / Violent souls, but only /
As the hollow men / The stuffed men." --T.S. Eliot

It is here in which the true horror of Dark Souls stirs, opens it jaws, and howls.  Whereas most horror games choose to keep the elements of horror within the game itself, Dark Souls dares to reach out and infect the player's psyche.  In her review of Dark Souls, Keza MacDonald writes, "It appears to be FROM's mission to send you into harrowing spirals of despondency and self-pity at every opportunity," acknowledging that game is designed to infect and twist the player's psyche.  Should one choose to play the game, he/she will inevitably ask the question, "Why the bleeding hell do I keep playing?"  And then it strikes.  The player no longer plays because it's enjoyable; he/she plays because success after repeated failure is an addiction.  Gaming becomes compulsion, not unlike gambling, except the player constantly bets hours instead of chips.  The player willingly undergoes the constant threat of failure in a world where respite is a luxury not afforded when it is often most needed.  Danger lurks not only around every corner but also long after the system is powered down, as the player constantly wonders about better strategies to get past that one boss that seems impossible.  Losing thousands of souls due to a misstep or an unknown ambush is certainly cause for despair and anger, but the persistent player continues to fight, using each failure as a teaching tool.  Death and punishment serves as the game's central pedagogy, turning the player into a student.  The game actively trains you to rethink what it is to die in a virtual space.  Through some perverse game coded witchcraft, the developers turn failure into progress, an uncomfortable inversion of what we assume video games should do.

The horror influences in From Software's Dark Souls are clear in creature design and Gothic architecture, but it is the horrific nature of punishing gameplay that pushes the bounds of what video game horror can be.  A novel or film can linger in the reader/viewer's mind, but only in games can the player actively participate in his/her own waking nightmare.  As I make my way through the dilapidated hellscape of Dark Souls, I can't help but be reminded of the poet T.S. Eliot's poems The Waste Land and The Hollow Men (both from which I have quoted in the picture captions above) which are both known for their beautiful bleakness.  The same could be said of From Software's Dark Souls (as well as its predecessor, Demon's Souls), as the game design is both elegant and horrifying.  It's a journey into a Nietzschean abyss that doesn't just stare back.  It rends the player with claw and fang and leaves him/her with questions as to why he/she continues to play while spurring the player downward into a world of unspeakable horror, only claw back out again.

Cheers,

--David

Beenox's Amazing Spider-Man: An Issue of Trust

In an earlier post, I explained why I was excited for Beenox's new Spider-Man game. I did not like Shattered Dimensions, so I didn't bother playing Edge of Time. Nevertheless, I felt drawn to The Amazing Spider-Man simply because I wanted to swing. After reading Greg Miller's IGN review (and several others), I decided to buy the game despite its lukewarm reception. Now that I have completed the game and spent substantial time with it, I find that the game can be a lot of fun, but I do not think I'll return to it. I agree with most reviews that if you come in with low expectations, you'll be pleasantly surprised. Overall, though, Spider-Man fans and gamers alike should ask for more control and nuance, as well as a certain level of trust in the relationship between player and product.

The Amazing Spider-Man has its great moments. Beenox really nails the Spider-Man aesthetic--not so much in the comic book sense, but it seems like a world where Spider-Man fits. The story and characters come together and create a genuine atmosphere, and in no where is this more present than Spider-Man's swinging movements. The camera's close focus on Spider-Man's movements brings the web-slinger to life as he thwips around Manhattan. The web rush mechanic, although simple, sets in motion some stunning traversal animations. Just looking at this gameplay video reveals the elegance of Spider-Man's swing animation:

Bringing the game back to Manhattan proves successful. As I said in my earlier post, Spider-Man needs his concrete jungle to be Spider-Man just as Batman needs Gotham to be the Dark Knight. It's an absolute thrill to swing around the city, and the numerous comic book pages scattered throughout give the player impetus to explore every corner of the island. The buildings shine, and the changes in time of day breathe life into the city. Due to poor to middling draw distance, though, sometimes the streets look deserted, but this changes as Spider-Man falls toward them, catching himself at the last moment, whether you want to or not. And therein lies my biggest gripe with the game. Beenox does not trust the player to control Spider-Man.

The repetitive mission structure doesn't bother me. I am more or less unfazed by the indoor missions; they neither interest nor bore me. The sometimes awkward or uninspired character models have no real bearing on my dissatisfaction with the title. And I could ultimately care less about spoilers for the upcoming film. The problem I have with The Amazing Spider-Man is the fact that the game does not seem to respect the player's ability to work to become the titular hero. In what is undoubtedly an attempt to be more cinematic, the game moves Spider-Man almost automatically, wresting control and consequence from the player.

IGN community members (myself included) have made comparisons between The Amazing Spider-Man and Rocksteady's Batman: Arkham City, and these are not without warrant. Beenox borrows heavily from the Arkham formula, especially in combat and stealth mechanics. Spidey strikes from the shadows, and he takes on groups of enemies with the Batman's method of attack, reversal, jump, and stun (in this game, you can stun enemies with webbing). While this combat system works, most encounters left me feeling bored and cheated. The system works in the Batman Arkham games because Batman's combat style is precise and punishing, incapacitating enemies with surgical efficiency. Spider-Man's fighting style relies more on speed and disorientation; the character flips, webs, punches, kicks, and bounces all around the combat area in order to confuse his opponents while administering a barrage of pain and wisecracks. Beenox clearly understands Spider-Man's spectacular style as the character moves quickly in combat, but the Webhead doesn't perform these actions because the player makes him--he moves this way because simply pressing one button will launch the character into a dynamic finisher involving web shots and a beatdown that the player can watch without touching his/her controller. This problem occurs most glaringly in boss battles when Spidey leaps over giant robotic limbs and kicks the crap out of weak points, all with the press of a button.

Yes, you eventually fight it. Or, rather, game kind of does it for you, but it still counts, right?

Now, gamers are not strangers to quick time events, but we usually weaken the boss first with a (hopefully) intricate and intuitive combat system. Most of the boss fights here, at least the larger ones, employ a "strike here" type of gameplay where you web rush to a certain point on the enemy, watch the attack action, and retreat. Lather, rinse, repeat. Spider-Man performs wildly acrobatic and impressive moves without requiring complex inputs, thus negating satisfying feedback to the player. As a result, I never felt like I could control Spider-Man. I felt like a mediator between the onscreen Spider-Man character model and the internal systems of the game that make him move. It feels like Spider-Man lite, not a Spider-Man experience.

These issues appear in the locomotion of the character as well. Simply holding the web swing button down allows for what appears as radical flips and gravity-defying feats. As I mentioned, web rush moves look impressive, but for the player, it can also feel cheap. I wanted to be able to place the webs on the buildings with a mechanic similar to Activision's Spider-Man 2. (Note: I will never understand why a developer cannot keep the swing mechanics from Spider Man 2 in tact and build an open world game with an original story from there) I wanted to save Spider-Man at the last millisecond of free fall with a flick of his wrist right before he becomes a red and blue on the city street. But it's hard to feel satisfied with a quick save when the underlying architecture removes fall damage from the game. This twisted Manhattan--where potential death at the hands of physics is no cause for alarm--undercuts the importance of Spider-Man's sacrifice for the city and its citizens because in a world without danger, being a superhero is profoundly less super. An invincible hero, after all, is a boring hero...or Superman (I'm kidding, kinda).

I can honestly say that there are parts of the game I enjoy. I love swinging, and the combat works fairly well. For Spider-Man fans, it's worth playing. But I have my reservations about the way Beenox insists that this game provides an authentic Spider-Man experience when it removes complexity and nuance from the controls. Unfortunately, this move is indicative of the current state of video game development that infantilizes the individual with the controller in his/her hand. So seldom do games trust the player enough to find his/her own way in the game's system or take time to learn complex controls that, when it happens, it becomes novelty or niche (i.e. Dark/Demon's Souls). In order for the game to teach the player a satisfying input system, the developers need to trust the player to fail and to use that failure to learn. The Amazing Spider-Man swings along at great height and top speed, but it does so with a safety web the player does not need nor should want. We're all still waiting for a great caliber Spider-Man game, and this one is far from that ideal. Maybe the figure on the screen can do whatever a spider can, but he does so without much help from the player, which makes me wonder whether I actually played the game at all.

Cheers,

--David

Gaming the West in Red Dead Redemption

Likely the most instantly recognizable genre in any form, the Western has endured through the 20th century by undergoing transformations as varied as the stories told around campfires built in the moonlit night of the American frontier. From the gratuitous spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone to the revisionist novels of Cormac McCarthy, the genre shifts and bends according to the person behind the camera or the pen, but the fixed archetypal elements remain present enough for the viewer/reader to understand the work's function in its generic history. The Man With No Name trilogy gave Hollywood Clint Eastwood's iconic portrayal of the titular hero (aka "Blondie"), the quintessential "drifter" character living outside the law. McCarthy's Blood Meridian depicts the West as a place steeped in myth and blood. Due to the versatility of its elements, it amazes me how seldom they are used in video games.

The first Western-themed game I played was LucasArts' Outlaws (1997), a first-person shooter in which a retired U.S. Marshal hunts down the evil railroad baron who killed his wife and kidnapped his daughter. Though I never really liked the in-game cartoonish graphics (this was before cel shading solved the problem of placing cartoons in a 3D envioronment), the cutscenes made the atmosphere come alive. Outlaws spins a good yarn, and would be my favorite traditional Western game until 2010, when Rockstar released Red Dead Redemption, an award-winning game that I'm sure everyone who is reading this has played. Finally, a developer nailed the genre in look, atmosphere, and overall feel. The writing, the voice work, the mechanics, all of them crystallized in a near pitch-perfect work of genre fiction that paid homage to its inspirations while carving out a new niche for games in the Western genre. John Marston's journey toward redemption seems like standard fare for the Western genre, but Rockstar gave us a way to pick apart a genre the only way an open world video game can: we control how John Marston lives.

Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been.
His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again
in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous
to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to
man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.
--Blood Meridian

Red Dead Redemption's New Austin is violent...extremely violent. When the player first control Marston, the character is already wounded and bloody, barely a survivor of his first encounter with Bill Williamson. Even the household chores, as anyone who grew up on a farm (myself included) can attest, involve a fair degree of violence as you shoot vermin to protect crops or livestock. Violence in the frontier is unavoidable. Through these simple gameplay elements, the game invests meaning in the most mundane daily activities. Roping and breaking broncos, driving cattle, hunting, they all involve violence or danger in some form or fashion, and it is in these situations where the video game breaks from the Western film genre and becomes more novelesque.

I think that Red Dead Redemption owes just as much influence to Cormac McCarthy as it does John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. In his Western novels (particularly his Border Trilogy), McCarthy finds significance in almost every aspects of daily life in the American West. For instance, this passage from All the Pretty Horses shows how the protagonist, John Grady Cole comes to a deep, metaphysical understanding of pain and existence simply by listening to the horse eat:

He lay listening to the horse crop the grass at his stakerope and he listened
to the wind in the emptiness and watched stars trace the arc of the hemisphere and
die in the darkness at the edge of the world as he lay there the agony in his heart
was like a stake. He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being
seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew
what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless
and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there might be no limits.
--All the Pretty Horses

McCarthy's language is elegaic, tragic, and hauntingly beautiful. But the language of Red Dead Redemption (and video games at large) functions much more differently, namely through gameplay. Every task that Marston performs raises questions about control and motivation. The men forcing Marston to hunt down his former gang members are metonymous for the player's physically controlling Marston. The person with the controller is, of course, just as culpable as Edgar Ross in Marston's torment. We make John Marston kill, we make him hunt, we make him go to missions in Mexico and New Austin. Marston, as he gets pulled into the Mexican Revolution, even admits to Abraham Reyes, "I'm a semi-literate farmer. I ain't in the power game," a meta-narrative comment that, by no coincidence, calls attention to his position as a character in a game. Yet we, too, are limited by the game's scope in what we can do. In these moments of the game, we can pause to enjoy a Western sunset or have drink at the local bar because the game allows us certain freedoms, but those freedoms are bound to the system of the game just as Marston is bound to Edgar Ross. Thus, performing the mundane task of shooting rabbits gains significance about what constitutes gameplay. Can chores be made fun if they're performed in virtual space? The game asks these questions, if tacitly, through its gameplay and mission structure.

The similarities between McCarthy's Border Trilogy and Rockstar's Western do not end in the world of the mundane--these texts are elegies for the American West. In All the Pretty Horses, for example, John Grady Cole, a young man who grew up on his grandfather's ranch until his grandfather's death in 1949, elects to, rather than to live in town after the ranch's closing, to leave his home on horseback in search of work on a ranch in Mexico. Cole begins his journey as a romantic believer in the ethos of the Old West, but he finds the same inescapable truth that Marston does--that the West was settled through blood and political corruption rather than through ideals of American exceptionalism. McCarthy explores this concept broadly in Blood Meridian as well, setting the novel in pre-Civil War America where the West becomes a place of unfathomable horror and grotesque cruelty.

He can neither read nor write and in him already there broods a taste for mindless violence.
All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.
--Blood Meridian

It's easy to see Red Dead Redemption as a spaghetti Western, but I find the powerful narrative and gameplay work to create something more powerful than films or (most) novels are capable of manufacturing. The game does not just question Marston's actions or the actions of his enemies. It makes us participants in the founding of a virtual Modern America, working for or against the closing of the frontier and inhabiting the American West during its twilight years. In my very first post, I used Marston's story as an example of ludonarrative dissonance. Yes, he can tie a nun and leave her on a railroad track, and the game still tells you that you are a tragic hero and bandit-turned-family-man. But perhaps that's why the game is something special. It gives you the story structure and shootout gameplay of a Sergio Leone movie as well as the contemplative depth of a Cormac McCarthy novel. Red Dead Redemption casts a long shadow over the genre of Western fiction, and I don't see any text coming out of the dust to challenge its place anytime soon.

Cheers,

--David

Video Games and the Legacy of Genre Fiction

When most people think of the word "literature," their minds conjure up images of Shakespearean tragedy, of epic poetry, of large books about white whales and national revolutions, of the Romantics (Byron, Shelley), of the Victorians (Dickens, Eliot), and of modernists (Joyce, Hemingway, Woolf). Unfortunately, most also think of crippling boredom and tweed-clad professor types who talk ad nauseum about the cultural importance of these works and writers in front a group of people who would rather be somewhere else. I've been on all sides of the classroom--a rapt listener, an exhausted teacher, a bored student. This post, however, is not about the canon or instruction of English or American literature. Hell, it's not even about literature (that part is for context), but rather a discussion of genre and how it fits in with current video game trends.

Just as great artists like T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf were writing great works that would greatly influence and define early 20th century art, other writers churned out books as quickly as they could, forsaking linguistic complexity in favor of fast-paced plots, cheap laughs, or easy thrills. This tradition is called "genre writing," and it was often viewed as vulgar and amateurish by the high art literati--but it sold. The genres of mystery, adventure, vaudeville comedy, horror/gothic, and science fiction (still in its infancy) became established, and with them, so did the rules that governed each genre. For adventure, a group of men needed to explore a remote corner of the world, meet the natives, and reify the importance of civilization. In mysteries, the detective investigates his case with mathematical precision and dizzying intellect. A horror story worthy of H.P. Lovecraft needs a blend of psychological terror and supernatural influence. Genre fiction is comfortable, predictable, safe, and, above all else, profitable.

The influence of these generic formulas in the video game scene is more than evident. Gamers no exactly what they're getting into when they pre-order a science fiction, war epic, fantasy, adventure, or horror game. It's a brilliant marketing tool, and it's always effective. Just take a look at a few games' cover art juxtaposed with covers of novels from the same genre:

Adventure

Uncharted 3 cover art (2011)

One More Step, Mr. Hands from a 1911 edition of Stevenson's Treasure Island

Both Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and Naught Dog's Uncharted 3 fit nicely into the adventure genre. Each involves a cast of rogues outside of their own countries and cultures, a fair bit a violence, and, of course treasure. The images, then, are noticeably similar, giving the consumer a quick look at the product. We can easily tell that these will contain the tropes of adventure fiction--violence, action, set pieces, etc--as well as key plot points (a plane crash and an encounter on the ship).

Horror

Resident Evil 2 American cover art (1998)

Stoker's Dracula book cover (1902)

Here, both covers achieve more in atmosphere than they do in plot--a hallmark of the horror genre. The character on the front of the book cover (presumably the titular count) evokes a threatening, and intensely gothic, feel. The same could be said of the game cover, though a bit more modernized: the source of fear looks directly at the viewer, intensifying the threat of danger. We know what we're getting into when we buy either of these products.

Mystery

Heavy Rain cover art (2010)

Dorothy Sayers' Clouds of Witness (1926)

I find this pair to be the most interesting of the three. Both contain an object in close proximity to blood. We know these objects will be of great importance to the overall plot, but what that connection is remains...well, a mystery. Mysteries and whodunits often involve a single item wanted by multiple people that is the central cause of the conflict--this object is often referred to as a MacGuffin. (Note: They're also called "plot coupons" by people who look down on formulaic writing) Here, the MacGuffins appear to be the focal points of the artworks, letting the viewer know that the plots revolve heavily around these objects.

Obviously these three examples do not entirely encapsulate all of gaming and genre fiction traditions into a set of rigid instructions. Indeed, one of the most interesting facets of genre writings is not how each work fits into its generic category, but rather how they deviate from the established paradigms. Even some of the most widely respected novelists of the 20th century worked within such paradigms to test their own experimental writings. Joyce's Ulysses, for example, is well known for (among other things) transforming one day in the mundane life of an Irishman into an exploration of language and literature worthy of an epic poem, while simultaneously interrogating the division between "high" and "low" art styles.

Also, that same Irishman masturbates in an episode
written in the style of contemporary woman's magazine.
Literature, folks.

I posit that video games often function in very much the same manner. A "good" video game challenges the constraints of its genre. Uncharted 3 addresses Nathan Drake's compulsion to complete his adventure even if it means the death of his partner, Sully. Resident Evil 2 asks the player to subject him/herself to the horrors of the game universe by employing controls that limit the onscreen character's mobility. Heavy Rain affords the player the opportunity to not follow Ethan Mars through the physical and psychological torments of the Origami Killer. These games play with genre convention in ways offer interpretive insight into the inner workings of gameplay and narrative.

My goal is a series of posts that discusses games (hopefully with help from fellow IGN community members) about how games employ and challenge the paradigms of their respective genres. Complicating the matter, however, is the fact that gaming culture has invented its own system of classification, lumping games into categories of first-person shooter, role-playing game, survival-horror, third-person shooter, dungeon crawler, sports simulator, fighting, etc. Looking at games from the perspective of generic convention reveals how they--just like novels, films, dramas, and poetry--toy with such restraints, often testing the limits established archetypes. Video games have become one of the most culturally important avenues of interrogation of contemporary values, and writing about their connections to genre fiction can make more evident the importance of adhering to and breaking from paradigms. I hope you check back soon to read about and discuss this topic.

Cheers,

--David