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

Opinion: A Longtime Batman Fan's take on Nolan's Batman Trilogy

Note: This is not about video games (obviously). It is, instead a collection of thoughts on Nolan's Batman trilogy.

I've always been a Batman fan. Having read numerous comic books and owning over twenty of them, I'm well aware that my knowledge of Gotham's protector extends further than the average Batman fan's (though not nearly as far as the die-hard DC enthusiast, so if I misspeak, please correct me). One semester, I used Alan Moore's The Killing Joke in a freshman writing class in order to discuss how we read comics, and just this past weekend, the groom's cake at my wedding was adorned with the Bat Signal. Needless to say, Nolan's movies stay on constant rotation in my blu ray player, and bout midway through what was likely the twentieth time I watched The Dark Knight, I realized a possible logical terminus for the story Nolan had begun with Batman Begins. Speculation surrounding the fate of the Dark Knight abounds, and, since the first trailer released last summer, fans everywhere have been wondering whether Nolan will kill his titular hero. I must confess, though, don't find this question as tantalizing as most loyal fans do. I cannot wait to see how it all ends, but I don't really care if Nolan's Batman lives or dies or passes the mantle or any other scenario in terms of its narrative importance; the movie's going to be awesome, that's a given. Nolan's said repeatedly that this is going to be his last Batman film. He's explained that he's looking to early film epics like Metropolis or maybe Birth of a Nation in terms of cinematic scope. We know he's going big, also, because the movie is nearly three hours long.. Perhaps a more useful question than "Is Batman or Bruce Wayne or both going to die?" would be "Why would Nolan feel compelled to kill off the Dark Knight?" The key difference is that the latter question broadens the discussion of of the films in dialogue with not only other incarnations of the Batman but also discussions of American ideologies. Nolan's changed the way we perceive one of the most influential and persistent contemporary American icons, and I think it's about time we talk about what exactly that means.

"But They never talk about the mean one. The cruel one. The one who couldn't fly or bend steel in his bare hands. The one who scared the crap out of everybody and laughed at all of the rest of us for being the envious cowards we were." (Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns)

Nolan's movies are not as divisive among comic fans as one might expect. He grounds his project in a reality that asks us to think semi-realistically about what would happen if Batman would enter a real world scenario, and few people with whom I've discussed the films tell me that Nolan's tampering with the Batman universe borders on blasphemy--and we all know how loyal fans can be. I like to view his films as Elseworld's type stories (i.e. Thrillkiller or Gotham by Gaslight), a type of alternate Gotham that gives the auteur a large enough sandbox to play in. The result is a movie that "feels" like a Batman movie even though it's not the same Batman as the one ("ones"?) in the Post-Crisis continuity. The Dark Knight entertains as both a cape and cowl caper and a provocative crime drama. Nolan's films can have their cake and eat it too, so to speak.

Placing a comic book concept in a very serious, real-world context, though, should call attention to how weird it would be for a guy in a costume to swoop around the city and attempt to stop crime, but that rarely (if at all) happens in Nolan's movies--at least not explicitly. Sure, people have discussions about whether the Batman is "doing good" for the city or whether he is simply, as Gordon puts it in Batman Begins, "Just some nut." But the overall seriousness of the film suggests that its world could (or ostensibly does) exist. In this way, Nolan's trilogy offers the best experiment with the Batman mythos I have ever seen, but it yields problematic results. The films are so damn good that casual fans begin to think of Batman as a real character rather than a pop culture icon, and I'm not sure Batman can withstand the seriousness. I think the Joker in The Dark Knight calls attention to this problem directly with his (painfully over-quoted) mantra, "Why so serious?" The famous line is a meta-question not just to his victims but to the fans. Why do we need such a serious hero in a serious movie that deals with serious subjects like murder on massive scale simply to cause societal chaos?

"No, I don’t keep count. But you do. And I love you for it." (Joker to Batman in Miller's The Dark Knight Returns) 

Christopher Nolan's Batman is played seriously because he's in a serious universe that would never involve Killer Crocs, Clayfaces, or have the main hero hanging with aliens, yet fans are willing to forget (or they just don't know) that the universe(s) of the comics contains these characters and incidents. As a comic book character, Batman is no more grounded in reality than Spider-Man or Superman, nor is his origin more tragic--hell, as much as I don't like Superman, he lost an entire planet along with his parents. Nolan, however, draws on the aspects of the Batman mythos that humanize rather than immortalize the Dark Knight, and, by doing so, deceives the viewer into thinking of not just his Batman but the character in general in terms of his realism. Others, of course, have tread this territory before, but they did so by exploring Batman's humanity in an unreal universe. One story that comes to mind is Grant Morrison's Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, in which the inmates of the titular madhouse take over, and Batman wanders Arkham's halls, battling inmates and his inner demons. But the difference here is that Batman is humanized in a world where the supernatural (aliens, mutants, Solomon Grundy, etc.) exists alongside the natural, whereas Nolan's Batman attempts to become "more than a man" in a purely natural world. At any rate, it's made it much more difficult for me to recommend Batman comics to friends who just know the Nolan movies...though everyone should read the top five graphic novels in IGN's list.

"People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy, and I can't do that as Bruce Wayne. As a man, I'm flesh and blood. I can be ignored, I can be destroyed. But as a symbol … as a symbol, I can be incorruptible. I can be everlasting." (Batman Begins)

So what happens when we introduce Batman to real world besides bad ass action sequences and damn good storytelling (despite the fact that three men can meet on a rooftop while one wears a bat suit and no one takes a step back to say "Wait a minute...what the fu....")? We get a world of consequence. In Batman Begins, the main conflict is about administering justice to preserve balance. Gotham is a functioning system of political corruption and underworld crime, and Batman serves as a destabilizing element. When Batman stops Ra's Al Ghul's League from dismantling Gotham's infrastructure, he does so to give himself time to destroy the criminal structure of the city, but the increased pressure on the mob prompts them to employ a mercenary psychopath who, in turn, spreads chaos through the city in a way that neither the mob nor Gotham's protector could have anticipated. It's textbook chaos theory, in which a single alien element introduced in a system has the potential to ramify unpredictably. By the end of The Dark Knight, Batman understands that in order for the system to be reset, he must remove himself from the equation, giving the police someone to hunt (himself) and someone to idolize (Harvey Dent). Then, eight years later, something ambiguous happens (though the trailer in which Selina Kyle cryptically warns Bruce Wayne has clear overtones of the occupy movement) which awakens the Batman from his eight year slumber--Bane brings hell itself to the streets of Gotham. And we all know why Bane's dangerous...

  

I am Bane -- and I could kill you... but death would only end your agony -- and silence your shame. Instead, I will simply... BREAK YOU! Broken...and done. (Knightfall: Broken Bat)

It's only appropriate that Nolan endshis trilogy with Bane. The Joker essentially "wins" his battle against Batman at the end of The Dark Knight when the Gotham police hunt Batman just as the Joker predicted:

Don't talk like you're one of them! You're not... even if you'd like to be. To them you're just a freak, like me. They need you right now, but when they don't, they'll cast you out. Like a leper. See, their morals, their "code"... it's a bad joke, dropped at the first sign of trouble. They're only as good as the world allows them to be. I'll show you. When the chips are down, these uh, these "civilized people", they'll eat each other. See, I'm not a monster. I'm just ahead of the curve.--The Dark Knight

Since Batman has had his struggle with Ra's al Ghul and the Joker (my two personal favorites in his rogue gallery), the logical terminus for this trajectory is brutal, punishing agony. Bane provides Nolan with the perfect vehicle to kill the Batman, to kill Bruce Wayne, or, on the other hand, to provide the greatest physical and mental challenge for the Dark Knight. Ra's al Ghul strives for order and obedience. The Joker thrives on chaos. Bane utilizes pain with surgical precision to break Batman physically, mentally, and spiritually. He is a brilliant tactician and a juggernaut of hurt. If there is anyone capable of delivering the killing blow to the Bat, it would be Bane, and that seems to be Nolan's goal here: to punish the Batman for upsetting the system that keeps not only the microcosm of Gotham working, but also the macrocosm of the perceived real world.

Thus, my long belabored point emerges: I think Nolan's films illustrate that being Batman in the real world is a potentially bad idea, and we're about to find out if Bruce Wayne's choice to become the Batman was the right one. By that, I don't mean it's a cautionary tale about why you shouldn't dress like a bat and fight crime--that's a terribly obvious lesson. The lesson runs much deeper. Much like Alan Moore's Watchmen, one way to read Nolan's films is to say, "Thank God all we have to deal with in real life is nice, clean organized crime. Because when people actually become superheroes, things...go awry." Batman enters a fragile system as a chaotic element, and we see these repercussions in The Dark Knight more clearly than any other Batman story I've encountered. It'll be interesting in The Dark Knight Rises to see how deep the rabbit hole goes. All in all, I think Nolan's films are about consequence rather than about character. Perhaps people do need a dramatic symbol "to shake them out of apathy," but Nolan proposes a scenario that explores what happens after the system that symbol disrupts fights back. Whoever wins, fans will have a lot to chew on and debate for years to come.

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