I haven't posted anything new here in a while because I'm currently writing for the website Awesomeoutof10.com. It's a different type of gaming journalism not based around review scores or news snippets. Check there for a different perspective on gaming.
My articles can be found here. I will have new posts up every Tuesday.
I hope you check it out!
Cheers,
--David
Saturday, November 10, 2012
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Art/Anti-art -- Games/Anti-games: The Indie Platformer
It's no secret that I value, quite deeply, the connections that exist between 20th century art and video games. I've already mentioned how certain games adopt stylistic conventions that have been around since the dawn of Modernity, and I wish to re-visit that concept less in terms of a game's art direction and more for its mechanics. During the Modernism movement, art gained significant momentum due to mechanical reproduction; so much so that Ezra Pound (the poet known for his dictum "Make it new," which became a sort of mantra among modernists) remarked, "You can no more take machines out of the modern mind, than you can take the shield of Achilles out of the Iliad." People saw new machines of locomotion (planes, trains, and automocars), of reproduction (printing presses, phonographs, film, and photography), of manufacturing (steel mills, assembly lines), of infrastructure (suspension bridges, cranes, elevators), and of destruction (tanks, bombs, gases, automatic weapons). As a result of this mechanized world, art became more protean, shifting among different movements--the anger of Vorticism, the violence of Futurism, the subconscious mind of Surrealism, the perspective-shattering Cubism, and the political fire of Dada. Art became often reactionary, a glaring "fuck you" to established tropes of beauty, and it found its numerous homes in the publishing world of the"little magazines," publications where groups of artists could share ideas and works. The poems and images contained therein often took the form of "anti-art," a terribly ill-defined term describing numerous movements based on rejection of aesthetic ideals rather than an attempt to embody them. Anti-art is still art, but it's art that is self-aware to the point of self-destructive irony. I elaboratetthis background of anti-art and its world to provide context for my larger point: just as certain art movements use their own mediums of paint and language to reflect on the construction of the piece, so too do games use the mechanics of play to adhere to and reject the genres they embody. And, like the market of the literary magazines, the indie game scene gives the developers of what I call "anti-games" a community to publish their works that arise as responses to the more widely-played mainstream games.
So what makes an anti-game? On a small, fundamental level, I would consider an anti-game to be a game that is about itself, that signifies, to some degree, on its own mechanics. For example, Duchamp's readymades--physical, found objects that he made artistic by small augmentations so that they are still recognizable as individual objects--are quintessential examples of early anti-art. They exist to reject the notion of artistic creation; something could become art by simply signing it, tilting it, putting it on a pedestal. Taking a urinal and calling it a Fountain made a statement about the object itself as well as the viewer and critic. Anti-games do the same, using mechanics to provide experiences that make the player aware he/she is playing a game while simultaneously altering our perceptions of such mechanics. I'll show you what I mean by moving from a theoretical approach to a practicum by looking at the most recognizable of game types: the platformer.
The first game I want to discuss is Jonathon Blow's Braid, a game that is mechanically complex as it is conceptually simple. Braid plays like a normal platformer until it transforms into a puzzle game. The puzzles rely on manipulating time, and they increase in difficulty as the game progresses. Just as the player gets used to reversing time, the game shifts, adding new dimensions like characters who are immune to Tim's (the protagonist) control or by adding a ring that slows down time by varying degrees regarding its proximity to certain objects and characters.
Where Braid becomes more than just a clever platformer with a twist, though, relies in its relationship with the platformer genre. Braid constantly tests what a platformer can do mechanically as well as narratively. Tim is a character searching for his "princess" which may, depending on how you read the game, be a lost love or the secrets of the atomic bomb. Nods to Mario abound in this game, but the game seems less focused on homage and more geared toward revealing the nihilism inherent to the genre. Mindlessly jumping over gaps in some feeble attempt to right some past wrong is pointless and self destructive because the character can have no true agency. Sure, Tim can manipulate time, but he can only do so as the game allows him. By reading books that appear on pedestal's in the game, the player learns that Tim is some sort of narcissistic control freak, obsessed with his own work. It's only fitting, then, that game makes the player participate in Tim's solipsistic pantomime, forcing us to relive our own mistakes, and learn from them, only to kick us in the teeth with the game's explosive ending. It's as brutal as a Futurist painting and as maddeningly confusing as a Cubist poem, and this mechanical and thematic violence crashes against the game's beautiful visuals and (initially) serene music. Braid gives the player the opportunity to jump through mechanical hoops, experience the ins and outs of platforming in its most complex ways possible with the singular purpose of showing how we don't play games--games play us.
While Braid achieves its anti-game status and self-awareness by pointing out its own complexity, PlayDead's Limbo provides more of an experiment in abject minimalism. Narrative, complexity, color, music, hell even characterization, all take back seats to the trial-and-error gameplay. Limbo, like Braid, is a platformer/puzzle hybrid yet with an all-too-familiar narrative (the protagonist is a boy searching for a girl) and initial mechanic (death is your teacher). It differs from its predecessors, however, through its gruesome depictions of the protagonist's many demises. It's a widely accepted rule in almost any medium that you don't kill children, and this is especially true in video games. Skyrim is probably the latest in this long run of debates, and it's understandable why they don't allow. The media fallout would be more than severe. Yet the child protagonist in Limbo dies time and time again in some of the most brutal ways possible.
When I was little, I often wondered what happened to Mario when he fell down a pit. Now I guess I know. But the game makes meaningful the lessons death teaches in a responsible way--namely by assaulting the viewer with graphic images. At a glance, the game tasks the player with guiding a child through some nightmarish hellscape. The echoes of Dante resound throughout the entire game with the protagonist beginning in the woods and moving through hellish settings to find the woman he seeks. Like theDivine Comedy which the game's title directly references, Limbo asks us to go through hell and climb back the upper air. The child is not just the protagonist for Limbo; he's the faceless jumper in every 2D side-scroller, devoid of anything but motivation and compulsion and is completely at our mercy. Thus, when he dies at player's hand, the player should feel bad because it's his/her fault. The character respawns not far from the trap that killed him, but each death is still wince-inducing. You can't help but feel a loss of innocence when, only through shocking brutality, do you know how to avoid death and keep the child alive until his (or your) next inevitable misstep. The game is platforming at its most disturbing, commenting not only on itself, but all other side scrolling games as well. It suggests that gamers have a moral responsibility to the sprites on screen to keep them alive as long as possible, and each time we fail is a sin. Limbo asks us to rethink what it means to pick up a controller and steer an innocent pile of pixels right into the gaping maw of ravenous death.
Obviously, these two games are just a couple of examples of what I mean when I say "anti-games." They are not "anti" in the sense of "not being." They are "anti" in terms of how they use familiar mechanics to make them unfamiliar and jarring. They do mechanically to game conventions what Picasso did aesthetically to aesthetic paradigms. They make us rethink the tools of the platformer genre--two dimensional movement, jumping, enemies, failure--in terms of what they can accomplish digitally, aesthetically, critically, and even emotionally. And without the rise of the indie marketplace, these games would not exist in their current form. It's not hard to see the parallels between the indie gaming scene and the 20th century avant-garde--especially when artists and consumers are willing to take the risk and bet on a gaming experience that expand the frontiers of what it means to interact with digital art.
Cheers,
--David
So what makes an anti-game? On a small, fundamental level, I would consider an anti-game to be a game that is about itself, that signifies, to some degree, on its own mechanics. For example, Duchamp's readymades--physical, found objects that he made artistic by small augmentations so that they are still recognizable as individual objects--are quintessential examples of early anti-art. They exist to reject the notion of artistic creation; something could become art by simply signing it, tilting it, putting it on a pedestal. Taking a urinal and calling it a Fountain made a statement about the object itself as well as the viewer and critic. Anti-games do the same, using mechanics to provide experiences that make the player aware he/she is playing a game while simultaneously altering our perceptions of such mechanics. I'll show you what I mean by moving from a theoretical approach to a practicum by looking at the most recognizable of game types: the platformer.
The first game I want to discuss is Jonathon Blow's Braid, a game that is mechanically complex as it is conceptually simple. Braid plays like a normal platformer until it transforms into a puzzle game. The puzzles rely on manipulating time, and they increase in difficulty as the game progresses. Just as the player gets used to reversing time, the game shifts, adding new dimensions like characters who are immune to Tim's (the protagonist) control or by adding a ring that slows down time by varying degrees regarding its proximity to certain objects and characters.
Where Braid becomes more than just a clever platformer with a twist, though, relies in its relationship with the platformer genre. Braid constantly tests what a platformer can do mechanically as well as narratively. Tim is a character searching for his "princess" which may, depending on how you read the game, be a lost love or the secrets of the atomic bomb. Nods to Mario abound in this game, but the game seems less focused on homage and more geared toward revealing the nihilism inherent to the genre. Mindlessly jumping over gaps in some feeble attempt to right some past wrong is pointless and self destructive because the character can have no true agency. Sure, Tim can manipulate time, but he can only do so as the game allows him. By reading books that appear on pedestal's in the game, the player learns that Tim is some sort of narcissistic control freak, obsessed with his own work. It's only fitting, then, that game makes the player participate in Tim's solipsistic pantomime, forcing us to relive our own mistakes, and learn from them, only to kick us in the teeth with the game's explosive ending. It's as brutal as a Futurist painting and as maddeningly confusing as a Cubist poem, and this mechanical and thematic violence crashes against the game's beautiful visuals and (initially) serene music. Braid gives the player the opportunity to jump through mechanical hoops, experience the ins and outs of platforming in its most complex ways possible with the singular purpose of showing how we don't play games--games play us.
While Braid achieves its anti-game status and self-awareness by pointing out its own complexity, PlayDead's Limbo provides more of an experiment in abject minimalism. Narrative, complexity, color, music, hell even characterization, all take back seats to the trial-and-error gameplay. Limbo, like Braid, is a platformer/puzzle hybrid yet with an all-too-familiar narrative (the protagonist is a boy searching for a girl) and initial mechanic (death is your teacher). It differs from its predecessors, however, through its gruesome depictions of the protagonist's many demises. It's a widely accepted rule in almost any medium that you don't kill children, and this is especially true in video games. Skyrim is probably the latest in this long run of debates, and it's understandable why they don't allow. The media fallout would be more than severe. Yet the child protagonist in Limbo dies time and time again in some of the most brutal ways possible.
When I was little, I often wondered what happened to Mario when he fell down a pit. Now I guess I know. But the game makes meaningful the lessons death teaches in a responsible way--namely by assaulting the viewer with graphic images. At a glance, the game tasks the player with guiding a child through some nightmarish hellscape. The echoes of Dante resound throughout the entire game with the protagonist beginning in the woods and moving through hellish settings to find the woman he seeks. Like theDivine Comedy which the game's title directly references, Limbo asks us to go through hell and climb back the upper air. The child is not just the protagonist for Limbo; he's the faceless jumper in every 2D side-scroller, devoid of anything but motivation and compulsion and is completely at our mercy. Thus, when he dies at player's hand, the player should feel bad because it's his/her fault. The character respawns not far from the trap that killed him, but each death is still wince-inducing. You can't help but feel a loss of innocence when, only through shocking brutality, do you know how to avoid death and keep the child alive until his (or your) next inevitable misstep. The game is platforming at its most disturbing, commenting not only on itself, but all other side scrolling games as well. It suggests that gamers have a moral responsibility to the sprites on screen to keep them alive as long as possible, and each time we fail is a sin. Limbo asks us to rethink what it means to pick up a controller and steer an innocent pile of pixels right into the gaping maw of ravenous death.
Obviously, these two games are just a couple of examples of what I mean when I say "anti-games." They are not "anti" in the sense of "not being." They are "anti" in terms of how they use familiar mechanics to make them unfamiliar and jarring. They do mechanically to game conventions what Picasso did aesthetically to aesthetic paradigms. They make us rethink the tools of the platformer genre--two dimensional movement, jumping, enemies, failure--in terms of what they can accomplish digitally, aesthetically, critically, and even emotionally. And without the rise of the indie marketplace, these games would not exist in their current form. It's not hard to see the parallels between the indie gaming scene and the 20th century avant-garde--especially when artists and consumers are willing to take the risk and bet on a gaming experience that expand the frontiers of what it means to interact with digital art.
Cheers,
--David
Saturday, September 1, 2012
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.
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
Cheers,
--David
Monday, August 27, 2012
The Peculiar Position of Game Trailers: A Critical Perspective
The video game trailer occupies a very peculiar place in media consumption. Whereas a preview for a movie gives the audience a glimpse at what the movie offers, a video game trailer is always external to its own medium. A movie trailer works because cinema is a passive, visual medium; the viewer sees a bit of what he/she will see in the movie proper. Similarly, reading the back of a novel or a sample of the novel in another book serves the same purpose--it advertises the novel through the medium of the novel. Game trailers to not have that luxury. They operate solely within the spheres of the visual and aural, but gameplay requires the physical touch and feedback of inputting commands on a controller (or waving your arms like a lunatic, if you're into the whole motion gaming thing). Game trailers cannot communicate the ludological sensation of gameplay, hence the necessity for demos--a far more relevant method of advertising a game than a trailer could ever be. It is because of these limitations that I always approach game trailers with a fair degree of skepticism. Don't get me wrong, trailers serve a fundamental purpose of hyping the company's product and introducing it to consumers. After all, we can't all attend Gamescom or E3, and sometimes demos can be a little slow at hitting the download scene. As bafflingly illogical as game trailers are on a fundamental level, they are absolutely essential to the industry, and as such, warrant discussion about how best to accurately and honestly advertise their products.
I find that the best trailers fulfill a few certain criteria. The trailer should first and foremost always provide an accurate introduction to its game's mechanics. If I'm watching a trailer, I want to see how I'm going to be playing the game. Whether or not this takes place in-engine is negligible compared to the importance of showing the ways in which the player will manipulate the game's world. Second, a trailer should give the viewer a glimpse of the game's world in terms of its atmosphere while maintaining a certain degree of mystery. If the game will be funny, provide a funny trailer. For a horror game, instill a sense of dread and gloom. If it's a story heavy game, focus on narrative--without giving too much away. Lastly, the trailer better damn well be entertaining and memorable. We're all so plugged into the world of mass media devices and viral videos that it's easy to see a trailer and then immediately forget about it. A great trailer has staying power. Since trailers operate in a visual medium, I'll turn to a few examples of trailers that have created significant buzz this generation.
Gears of War: Mad World Trailer
When I saw this trailer for the first time, I finally grasped what this new generation of gaming could produce. I like Gears of War well enough, and when it hit the scene as one of the premiere flagship titles to sell the Xbox 360, this trailer was a bit of a risk. It's heavily atmospheric, hauntingly lonely, and bizarrely reflective. I'm a sucker for dissonance. I used to play a lot of games by turning down the game's music and providing my own soundtrack, often playing shooter games while listening to serene music to provide bizarre contrasts. This juxtaposition of the hyper-masculine soldier with the dreamlike melody of Gary Jules' "Mad World" makes the trailer certainly memorable, and this contrast emerges in the game's aesthetic. The game's setting, planet Sera, teems with ruined Hellenistic architecture, creating a world of apocalyptic beauty. Some gilded age has fallen to ashes, and the game's art direction makes destruction quite beautiful, providing a similar contrast evoked by the trailer. The gameplay, though, never quite reaches the thematic sophistication of the trailer. Sure, the game controls like a dream, and its violence is almost operatic. I nevertheless can't help but feel a bit misled by the atmospheric sense of isolation and terror in the trailer. I never feel as vulnerable as the trailer makes Marcus Fenix out to be. This is certainly a good thing for gameplay because its a game that lets you feel like a badass, but there is a slight disconnect between the promises of the trailer and the game--though the trailer is still remarkable.
Killzone 2: E3 2005 Trailer
Killzone 2: E3 2005 Trailer
I remember how this trailer was met with both excitement and incredulity. Some people thought it heralded the new age of gaming while others called shenanigans and claimed that such gameplay was impossible. Whichever side won out (and I'm inclined to think the former), the trailer certainly had people talking until the game's 2009 release. The trailer showcases the gameplay through a fully-rendered CG sequence, making some onlooker wonder if the game could possibly ever look as great as the trailer shows. Killzone 2 looks sharp, to be sure, but the trailer was way before its time. Releasing it four years before the game's publication date built expectations that could not possibly be met.When critics finally played Killzone 2, they couldn't help but compare it to the trailer revealed in 2005. For me at least, the trailer spoke true--others had dissenting opinions. The trailer captures the chaotic atmosphere and dynamic combat in Killzone 2, and I can't help but speculate that the team at Guerilla needed the four years to catch up to their own advertisement. Even if they did bite off a bit more than they could chew, the time spent paid off by delivering one hell of a game.
Dead Island: We've all seen it...
This trailer for Dead Island is a textbook example of how not to make a game trailer. When it hit the internet, it absolutely blew up; people who didn't even play games paid attention to it. It's an emotional, artistic and atmospheric mini-movie. It's extremely well done. The music helps facilitate this family's tragedy perfectly, providing a different spin on the zombie horror genre in a way that I thought was just reserved for The Walking Dead and 28 Days Later. The trailer is a remarkable piece of CG art, and on that level it excels. Dead Island was in development hell since its 2006 announcement, and this trailer announced its resurrection, building audience anticipation and undoubtedly resulting in a massive surge of pre-orders. But the game it advertises is not the product on the shelf. After being underwhelmed by seeing gameplay footage, I gambled on a rental, and I sadly found my misgivings to be true. While I'm sure there's plenty there for others to enjoy, I don't think anyone can seriously make the claim that the trailer captured the essence of Dead Island. Dead Island is not a game about tense, emotional situations. It's not a story-driven survival narrative. I never felt any connection to people I protected. And at no point did I throw a child out the window. Other than the resort setting and the zombies, the trailer has little else to do with the game. The game is nowhere near as good as its trailer. The trailer is a well-made movie, challenging narrative and genre; the game is a bit of incoherent mess. And never the twain shall meet.
BioShock: Near perfection
BioShock was a hard sell. Combining a bizarre environment, Objectivist philosophy, and intelligent first-person shooter gameplay looks just as strange on paper as they do in theoretical practice, but this trailer reveals only what is necessary to build excitement while maintaining mystique. We see the combat in the way a splicer fights against a Big Daddy. We see, from a first-person perspective, a deeply disturbing scene with a man forcing himself on a helpless child, the camera's position mocking the viewer's passive complicity in the grisly pantomime. We hear a synopsis of Andrew Ryan's Randian philosophy. We catch a panoramic view of the underwater, ruinous dystopia. We see strange powers, a vita chamber, a shotgun, a monster with a drill, a pipewrench. All the key elements of the game's mechanics appear...yet we're left wanting more because we don't know how they fit together. It's unlike anything we've seen before, even those of us who have played Ken Levine's System Shock 2, BioShock's spiritual predecessor. The trailer tells an ambiguous story with provocative gameplay elements on display all while building a sense of atmosphere and keeping the audience engaged. We're left wondering what the hell we just saw and wanting to discover--and play--something more in this weird world.
There are most certainly others that work just as well as these. The Dark Souls trailer set to The Silent Comedy's "Bartholomew" combines mood, mechanics, and an awesome (and relevant) song. The gameplay trailer for Dishonored works well, too, though it has its flaws--mostly due to its making the game look like a throat-slitting simulator. I love the atmospheric short film trailer for Metro: Last Light, but it provides nothing useful in terms of describing gameplay, unlike the short film for Halo 3: ODST, which worked in the mechanics through the combat sequence.
A video game trailer must accomplish more than provide a fun little video. It must accomplish more than a film preview or a sample of a novel. The most successful game trailers break the constraints of the visual to offer aspects of the ludological. We interact with games in much more complex (or at least different) ways than we do with film and literature, and trailers should acknowledge this fact by accurately portraying the ways in which the consumer/player will interact with the digital world on display. As silly as I think trailers are, we need them, and the industry needs to get the word out somehow. But they can only take us so far. Otherwise, we wouldn't rely so heavily on sites like IGN to keep us informed. We, nevertheless, should always approach the videos we see with critical and analytic eyes--and then forget them completely we play the demo.
There are most certainly others that work just as well as these. The Dark Souls trailer set to The Silent Comedy's "Bartholomew" combines mood, mechanics, and an awesome (and relevant) song. The gameplay trailer for Dishonored works well, too, though it has its flaws--mostly due to its making the game look like a throat-slitting simulator. I love the atmospheric short film trailer for Metro: Last Light, but it provides nothing useful in terms of describing gameplay, unlike the short film for Halo 3: ODST, which worked in the mechanics through the combat sequence.
A video game trailer must accomplish more than provide a fun little video. It must accomplish more than a film preview or a sample of a novel. The most successful game trailers break the constraints of the visual to offer aspects of the ludological. We interact with games in much more complex (or at least different) ways than we do with film and literature, and trailers should acknowledge this fact by accurately portraying the ways in which the consumer/player will interact with the digital world on display. As silly as I think trailers are, we need them, and the industry needs to get the word out somehow. But they can only take us so far. Otherwise, we wouldn't rely so heavily on sites like IGN to keep us informed. We, nevertheless, should always approach the videos we see with critical and analytic eyes--and then forget them completely we play the demo.
Cheers,
--David
Thursday, August 23, 2012
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
Monday, August 20, 2012
Hating Call of Duty Properly
Autumn is on the horizon, which can only mean one thing for gamers: an avalanche of fall releases. It's that magical time of year when we gather around Gamestop or any other retail colossus and make our yearly sacrifices of dollars and cents and hours of time to the almighty gods of the gaming industry to receive blessings of discs and pixels and badass games. But for a large number of people who follow the industry closely, the fall season signals the arrival of something else entirely: another opportunity to hate on the unstoppable juggernaut that is the Call of Duty franchise. What began as a solid franchise in the World War II shooter-saturated early 2000s has transformed into an inevitable annual money-making machine. Yet the reviews of each game have been consistently good. The latest release, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 boasts a Metacritic score of 88, but that score exists alongside the obnoxiously low user score of 3.2. So why the discrepancy? The simplest answer, I suppose is that it's fashionable to hate the game because of its popularity. But simple answers aren't fun, so I want to dig a little deeper. There are some legitimate reasons to dislike Call of Duty, to be sure--they just happen to be buried under hollow rants and raves.
I don't hate Call of Duty. In fact, I think the first-person shooter controls are superb, and the multiplayer can be addictive. The Modern Warfare series contains some standout moments. I still think that the nuclear detonation in the first Modern Warfare is one of the greatest moments of this gaming generation:
The scene strips the player of the power fantasy so commonly associated with a gaming genre dominated my hyper-masculine stereotypes, and it does so by forcing the player to control his/her character during his death even though the player knows there is nothing to be done. It calls into question the meaning of control and its relationship with futility, touting the game and its narrative as the true players in a game of modern warfare instead of the person holding the controller; the player is just someone playing soldier. Modern Warfare 2 has a similar moment with the notorious airport scene, but it never reaches the impact of the nuclear explosion. The mission "No Russian" brought significant press to the franchise, and pundits and critics debated its inclusion in terms of its exploitation of and desensitization to violence. I think it's a fairly brave--but problematic--attempt to dare the player to enact the apotheosis of power fantasy in the darkest way possible, but the character's death at the end of the mission does not provide enough punishment to make the war crimes he (and the player) committed (or didn't commit, as the player can choose to play it or not) matter. There's trauma, but no exploration of its implication in a meaningful way, putting the scenario in a weird place between exploitation and attempted insight.
Even if we think of the game as a sports-type, so what? Call of Duty is still a cash-grab machine. The publisher is still an evil powerhouse representing everything that is wrong with the gaming industry. The gameplay is shallow. Online multiplayer is filled with douchebag teenagers who have all apparently had some nasty sex with my mom while calling me racist slurs.
At least that's what the message boards would have me believe. The truth of the matter is the simplest to state but the most complex to understand: the franchise is hated because of its popularity, but that doesn't mean that the flak is unwarranted. Gamers love to think of themselves as vanguards for their favorite pastime. Gaming should be protected; furthered, yet preserved. We demonize big corporations because, for the longest time, gaming was such a marginal hobby. The early console wars raged only among a smaller group of individuals who debated on campuses whether the Sega Genesis could outstrip the Super Nintendo. Most kids could give a damn, but for those who cared it was private, important. It was ours. Since gaming has become the defining entertainment medium of this generation, our community has grown, and, for the faithful, this is terrifying. Gamers, it seems, always need a machine to rage against. The people who play Call of Duty are often not those who appreciated gaming in its infancy, and as such, should not fund a game that threatens to undo the culture we all worked to create and value. For many of us, Call of Duty doesn't just represent a huge corporate evil; it represents stagnation, a genre-defining experience that has gotten too comfortable in its own skin. Shooters, for many of us, are getting stale, and we blame Call of Duty.
I'm uncertain, though, that such over-saturation will create the FPS wasteland so many people predict. It's hard to deny that few shooters can step outside of the long shadow of Call of Duty. A fun, self-aware shooter like Bulletstorm sold next to nil when Black Ops was still breaking records. Still, players looking for something different in the FPS category may owe Call of Duty more than they realize. Colin Campbell's recent article "How First-Person Shooters Are Growing Up" gives players hope that the genre is evolving despite much assertions of the contrary by showing that games like Borderlands 2 and Far Cry 3 offer a heavy dose of character alongside gunplay. I cannot help but think this is step in the right direction specifically because of Call of Duty's popularity--not in spite of it. Franchise fatigue can encourage developers to step beyond the genre's fixed paradigms, and, if people are genuine in their desire for something different, the risk could pay off for all of us. Hating Call of Duty really isn't preservinganything if risks are still being taken and great games are still cropping up.
The industry needs a juggernaut like Call of Duty, and, to be honest, it's not a bad game. I don't really enjoy the franchise (because I suck at multiplayer), but I can see why people do. Sure the games are largely shallow, despite a few standout moments, but the mechanics work, the visuals are impressive, and there's a lot of replay value online. It will continue to be hated because it's popular. It will be hated because of its developer's business practice. It will be hated because it's fashionable right now. And it will be hated because we're just plain tired of it. But it will also sell--we just can't be sure of how long it will keep it up. Maybe the best way to hate Call of Duty is to not hate it all but to rather see it for its underlying complexity of reactions. If gamers really wanted it to end, it would end. We could stop buying them, stop supporting multiplayer and DLC. If they're really just releasing the same product in a new box, people should stop buying the damn things. Screaming in impotent rage on message boards or spamming Metacritic is almost as useful as getting into an argument with a 14 year-old, Mountain Dew-fueled online trash-talker about your mother's sexual exploits.
I don't think the franchise has held back the first-person shooter, or any other genre, to the extent that warrants such outrage. This generation has seen some excellent games--some of the best ever made if we're willing to remove our nostalgia goggles. If we must hate Call of Duty, let's do it in a way that helps the industry. Let's hate it by supporting alternate products. Let's hate it by just letting the people who enjoy the game play with each other while we look someplace else for entertainment. That way, we can all support the games we like--with or without mom insults.
Cheers,
--David
The scene strips the player of the power fantasy so commonly associated with a gaming genre dominated my hyper-masculine stereotypes, and it does so by forcing the player to control his/her character during his death even though the player knows there is nothing to be done. It calls into question the meaning of control and its relationship with futility, touting the game and its narrative as the true players in a game of modern warfare instead of the person holding the controller; the player is just someone playing soldier. Modern Warfare 2 has a similar moment with the notorious airport scene, but it never reaches the impact of the nuclear explosion. The mission "No Russian" brought significant press to the franchise, and pundits and critics debated its inclusion in terms of its exploitation of and desensitization to violence. I think it's a fairly brave--but problematic--attempt to dare the player to enact the apotheosis of power fantasy in the darkest way possible, but the character's death at the end of the mission does not provide enough punishment to make the war crimes he (and the player) committed (or didn't commit, as the player can choose to play it or not) matter. There's trauma, but no exploration of its implication in a meaningful way, putting the scenario in a weird place between exploitation and attempted insight.
But I digress. In my years of playing video games, I've never seen a game franchise that is simultaneously grossly successful and violently reviled. The logical conclusion, then, is that the two are intrinsically linked, but that still doesn't satisfy. After all, other franchises like FIFA, Madden, and NBA 2K don't catch nearly as much hell as Call of Duty even though new versions crop up every year. Would it be a stretch, then, to think of Call of Duty as a sports franchise? The standards are there. Minimal story (except for Black Ops, of course) that could be completely bypassed, a strong multiplayer community, and tense competition all play into the game's success. Since one of the complaints leveled against the game is that each entry is just a re-skinned version of the previous game with some tweaks here and there, thinking of the series as a sports franchise could help gamers understand its marketing appeal. You need new teams to play against and new equipment to play with.
Even if we think of the game as a sports-type, so what? Call of Duty is still a cash-grab machine. The publisher is still an evil powerhouse representing everything that is wrong with the gaming industry. The gameplay is shallow. Online multiplayer is filled with douchebag teenagers who have all apparently had some nasty sex with my mom while calling me racist slurs.
 |
| My mother is a saint, you ass captains. |
I'm uncertain, though, that such over-saturation will create the FPS wasteland so many people predict. It's hard to deny that few shooters can step outside of the long shadow of Call of Duty. A fun, self-aware shooter like Bulletstorm sold next to nil when Black Ops was still breaking records. Still, players looking for something different in the FPS category may owe Call of Duty more than they realize. Colin Campbell's recent article "How First-Person Shooters Are Growing Up" gives players hope that the genre is evolving despite much assertions of the contrary by showing that games like Borderlands 2 and Far Cry 3 offer a heavy dose of character alongside gunplay. I cannot help but think this is step in the right direction specifically because of Call of Duty's popularity--not in spite of it. Franchise fatigue can encourage developers to step beyond the genre's fixed paradigms, and, if people are genuine in their desire for something different, the risk could pay off for all of us. Hating Call of Duty really isn't preservinganything if risks are still being taken and great games are still cropping up.
The industry needs a juggernaut like Call of Duty, and, to be honest, it's not a bad game. I don't really enjoy the franchise (because I suck at multiplayer), but I can see why people do. Sure the games are largely shallow, despite a few standout moments, but the mechanics work, the visuals are impressive, and there's a lot of replay value online. It will continue to be hated because it's popular. It will be hated because of its developer's business practice. It will be hated because it's fashionable right now. And it will be hated because we're just plain tired of it. But it will also sell--we just can't be sure of how long it will keep it up. Maybe the best way to hate Call of Duty is to not hate it all but to rather see it for its underlying complexity of reactions. If gamers really wanted it to end, it would end. We could stop buying them, stop supporting multiplayer and DLC. If they're really just releasing the same product in a new box, people should stop buying the damn things. Screaming in impotent rage on message boards or spamming Metacritic is almost as useful as getting into an argument with a 14 year-old, Mountain Dew-fueled online trash-talker about your mother's sexual exploits.
I don't think the franchise has held back the first-person shooter, or any other genre, to the extent that warrants such outrage. This generation has seen some excellent games--some of the best ever made if we're willing to remove our nostalgia goggles. If we must hate Call of Duty, let's do it in a way that helps the industry. Let's hate it by supporting alternate products. Let's hate it by just letting the people who enjoy the game play with each other while we look someplace else for entertainment. That way, we can all support the games we like--with or without mom insults.
Cheers,
--David
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Meet Me Down South: A Neglected Gaming Locale
Note: Feel free to read the rest of this post in a southern accent.
Let me get this out of the way: I'm a southerner, born and raised in the state of Mississippi. Needless to say, I've heard every damn stereotype joke out there. I'm intimately acquainted with all the problems and history that comes with the region, and, growing up there, I've come to appreciate its complexity. Despite its rich presence in literature and film, few games have attempted to use the region, and none that I've played have used it to its full potential. Of the few, Infamous 2 and Left for Dead 2 both occur in the southern United States. Even the godawful Redneck Rampage franchise makes fun of Arkansas, but the game itself is a parody rather than a solid game in its own right. The South is not a simple place to live, and it's an even harder place to defend--which is why I'd like to see some developers take a crack at the region.
When I heard that Infamous 2 was taking place in New Orleans (though in the game, it's New Marais), I couldn't wait to play it. New Orleans is my favorite city in the world. The architecture, the music, the food, the endless flow of alcohol...I have fond and foggy memories of each. Running and climbing across the rooftops of New Orleans (New Marais) would be great, as I would visit familiar places like Bourbon Street, Cafe Du Monde, the Garden District, and Jackson Square. And the game nails the look:
 |
| Bourbon Street, NOLA |
 |
| Infamous 2 (2011) street view of New Marais |
The architecture of New Marais is beautiful and bizarre, equal parts elegance and debauched slum--much like its real-life counterpart. The city of New Marais boasts beautiful cemeteries, an old cathedral, swamps, a plantation, parishes, and even a flooded region due to a a hurricane that hit sometime in the recent past. The city plays host to an excellent game with all the trappings a superhero game should have, and, since I no longer live under three hours away from the Big Easy, I must admit that nostalgia plays no small part in my attachment to the game.
As much as the setting factors into the game's mechanics, I can't help but feel that the game shortchanged the city of New Marais because it's mostly a covering. New Orleans is a weird, wonderful, haunted place full of fascinating people and a painful, beautiful history. There is nowhere like it in this country or any other, yet the game seems bent on keeping these aspects under wraps. We get hints of the racial tensions that possesses the town with Cole's war against Bertrand and the Militia as well as Nix's origin, and we get the weirder folklore side of the city in Festival of Blood. There are hints at religious fervor and drunken debauchery, the trauma of a natural disaster, and plenty of redneck stereotypes, but it just seemed to lack soul. I get that it's a "fish-out-of-water" type game in that you play an outsider in a hostile insider world, and for the most part that's fine--it's a hell of a lot of fun. So much of the game though, could have taken place in damn near any other city out there. After I finished the game, I couldn't help but ask, "Why did this game need to be set in the South?" It was the South "lite," which, to be honest, is fair for a game that's not about a Southerner--just a guy passing through on his way to better things. But for God's sake, the game's set in New Orleans, and they did so little with it! If you set a game in New Orleans (or some type of facsimile), then you best give this Southern boy some home cookin'.
New Orleans provides the easiest entry into this field because it is both urban and Southern, and it's different enough in its own right to not be completely absorbed by the South so much that it alienates visitors. In William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Quentin Compson (a native Southerner) fields his Canadian's roommate's request for him to "[t]ell about the South. What's it like there? What do they do there? Why do they live there? Why do they live at all?" Indeed, the novel is largely about the difficulty to encapsulate history and culture of the South through written and spoken language. Yet Southerners are, by nature, storytellers (God knows I've got mine). It's what we're raised to do. So why not incorporate that in a videogame. Let play a game where a Southern protagonists attempts to recreate or understand dark past events or a family secret. The Southern literary tradition boasts some of the most freakish characters out there, and, as Flannery O'Connor one said, "Whenever I am asked why Southern writers particularly have this penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one."
The South is a world where the values of the old are constantly troubled by the region's bloody past and the encroaching progress of the new, and so much of Southern fiction focuses on trauma. For Faulkner, the two greatest sins of the South were the destruction of virgin land for industrial agriculture and, of course, slavery. While there have been plenty of games that deal with a protagonist fighting an evil corporation that wants to greedily tear up the land for whatever reason, few, if any, games deal directly with the history of American slavery. It's a tough topic, but if film and literature can attempt it, I see no reason why games could not. The shadow of slavery looms long over the South, but it hasn't made it into the video game medium as it has in film and literature. Perhaps a game set in the American South that deals with the issue of race directly could broaden the very, very problematic portrayal of race in video games. There's so much there to mine, even Quentin Tarantino is tackling the issue with his new exploitation-type film, Django Unchained:
As much as the setting factors into the game's mechanics, I can't help but feel that the game shortchanged the city of New Marais because it's mostly a covering. New Orleans is a weird, wonderful, haunted place full of fascinating people and a painful, beautiful history. There is nowhere like it in this country or any other, yet the game seems bent on keeping these aspects under wraps. We get hints of the racial tensions that possesses the town with Cole's war against Bertrand and the Militia as well as Nix's origin, and we get the weirder folklore side of the city in Festival of Blood. There are hints at religious fervor and drunken debauchery, the trauma of a natural disaster, and plenty of redneck stereotypes, but it just seemed to lack soul. I get that it's a "fish-out-of-water" type game in that you play an outsider in a hostile insider world, and for the most part that's fine--it's a hell of a lot of fun. So much of the game though, could have taken place in damn near any other city out there. After I finished the game, I couldn't help but ask, "Why did this game need to be set in the South?" It was the South "lite," which, to be honest, is fair for a game that's not about a Southerner--just a guy passing through on his way to better things. But for God's sake, the game's set in New Orleans, and they did so little with it! If you set a game in New Orleans (or some type of facsimile), then you best give this Southern boy some home cookin'.
New Orleans provides the easiest entry into this field because it is both urban and Southern, and it's different enough in its own right to not be completely absorbed by the South so much that it alienates visitors. In William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Quentin Compson (a native Southerner) fields his Canadian's roommate's request for him to "[t]ell about the South. What's it like there? What do they do there? Why do they live there? Why do they live at all?" Indeed, the novel is largely about the difficulty to encapsulate history and culture of the South through written and spoken language. Yet Southerners are, by nature, storytellers (God knows I've got mine). It's what we're raised to do. So why not incorporate that in a videogame. Let play a game where a Southern protagonists attempts to recreate or understand dark past events or a family secret. The Southern literary tradition boasts some of the most freakish characters out there, and, as Flannery O'Connor one said, "Whenever I am asked why Southern writers particularly have this penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one."
The South is a world where the values of the old are constantly troubled by the region's bloody past and the encroaching progress of the new, and so much of Southern fiction focuses on trauma. For Faulkner, the two greatest sins of the South were the destruction of virgin land for industrial agriculture and, of course, slavery. While there have been plenty of games that deal with a protagonist fighting an evil corporation that wants to greedily tear up the land for whatever reason, few, if any, games deal directly with the history of American slavery. It's a tough topic, but if film and literature can attempt it, I see no reason why games could not. The shadow of slavery looms long over the South, but it hasn't made it into the video game medium as it has in film and literature. Perhaps a game set in the American South that deals with the issue of race directly could broaden the very, very problematic portrayal of race in video games. There's so much there to mine, even Quentin Tarantino is tackling the issue with his new exploitation-type film, Django Unchained:
A similar project could work in a video game. Though a Tarantino unltraviolence-soaked revenge fantasy provides an interesting experiment with the subject, a quieter, more contemplative game could provide an equally interesting approach to the subject. We just need a development team brave enough to try.
Other genres are also well-suited for Southern settings. A survival horror game set in an old, haunted plantation would work well in the Southern Gothic tradition. The drug trade with the Dixie Mafia (it's a real thing) could make a great story for a shooter game. A historical game about the Civil War would also work well; it's been done before, but not recently--and not very well. A neo-noir story like Winter's Bone could provide a fascinating game set in the Appalachian hills, or something more action-oriented along the lines of Justified would make for a hell of a story about renegade cops and corrupt families. A survival game about a journey across the post-Katrina coastline of Louisiana and Mississippi practically writes itself.
The rolling hills of Appalachia, the long coastline, the deep woods of the Natchez Trace, the stain of human bondage that pervades the still standing plantations, and the small towns that dot the region all contain untapped potential for video game settings and stories. In an industry saturated with urban steel jungles, I can't help but feel tired of Empire City, Liberty City, Steelport, Los Angeles, Manhattan and countless others. The American South has numerous locales, a rich, troubled history, and countless stories to draw from for a potential video game. For it to happen, though, someone needs to take a chance below the Mason-Dixon Line.
Cheers y'all,
--David
Other genres are also well-suited for Southern settings. A survival horror game set in an old, haunted plantation would work well in the Southern Gothic tradition. The drug trade with the Dixie Mafia (it's a real thing) could make a great story for a shooter game. A historical game about the Civil War would also work well; it's been done before, but not recently--and not very well. A neo-noir story like Winter's Bone could provide a fascinating game set in the Appalachian hills, or something more action-oriented along the lines of Justified would make for a hell of a story about renegade cops and corrupt families. A survival game about a journey across the post-Katrina coastline of Louisiana and Mississippi practically writes itself.
The rolling hills of Appalachia, the long coastline, the deep woods of the Natchez Trace, the stain of human bondage that pervades the still standing plantations, and the small towns that dot the region all contain untapped potential for video game settings and stories. In an industry saturated with urban steel jungles, I can't help but feel tired of Empire City, Liberty City, Steelport, Los Angeles, Manhattan and countless others. The American South has numerous locales, a rich, troubled history, and countless stories to draw from for a potential video game. For it to happen, though, someone needs to take a chance below the Mason-Dixon Line.
Cheers y'all,
--David
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)