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

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.

Cheers,

--David

Slouching towards Bethlehem: Darksiders II and the Modern Apocalypse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheers,

--David

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.

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.

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

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:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Journey, thatgamecompany (2012)

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

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

Landscape from Minecraft (2011)

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

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

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

Cheers,

--David

"(A)n impalpable grayness" of Moral Terror: Ruminations on Spec Ops: The Line

I killed a mob of civilians. Not out of gleeful delight. Not because I had to. I chose to gun them down because of something they did, and my squadmate followed my example. I didn't feel better afterwards, not justified or avenged or anything. I did not even have time to regret my actions because I needed to push forward because...now I forget. It must have been important, though. But I remember how they ran and they screamed, these piles of pixels draped in colors resembling flesh and blood. I remember explosions of red of cries of pain. I'm sure they deserved it. Two days ago, I killed a mob of virtual civilians in a video game, and I'm still thinking about it.

Yager's Spec Ops: The Line would not have even been a blip on my radar had it not been for significant press about the game's story. Military shooters like SOCOM, Ghost Recon, or Call of Duty never hold my interests. I recognize the near flawless controls of Call of Duty, but I'll likely not purchase another one because I cannot get into the multiplayer. On the surface, Spec Ops is one of these games, and it stays this way just long enough for the player to realize this, pitting the player, who controls a more macho Nathan Drake, against non-white enemies alongside trash-talking grunts in some desert wasteland. At some point in the game, though, things go from status quo to FUBAR--I just can't pinpoint the exact moment.

Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! . . . The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.--Joseph Conrad, "Heart of Darkness"

I think the fact that I cannot find the locus at which the story shifts is testament to the writing behind this game--or at least its source material. Drawing from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (the game has more in common with the latter), Spec Ops: The Line builds its narrative around two works that are giants in their respective media of literature and film. The problem I faced going in, though, was that I knew what to expect because I've read the novella and seen the film countless times. It's an ambitious project, perhaps one that stands a bit too comfortably on the shoulders of giants, but it is a successful one. The story is damn good and worth the time and money I invested in the game. Its elements were familiar, but the specifics were unique. It's more homage than re-imagining, which works in the narrative's favor.

The game's initial concept is simple, if not a bit stupid. Dubai has been hit by a sandstorm of biblical proportion, and the 33rd Battalion, led by John Konrad, tries to help evacuate those left behind, eventually staying behind after the U.S. asked them to come back. The United Arab Emirates declare Dubai a lost disaster zone until a transmission from Konrad breaks the radio stormwall, prompting the U.S. to send a Delta Force reconnaissance team into Dubai. At first, I questioned the plausibility of radio silence in the year 2012 when the game starts off as a standard military shooter in a hyperreal environment, but what begins as routine jingoistic, macho-military combat erodes into existential battles against former American soldiers. About midway through the game, I realized that "reality" (or some Baudrillardian "hyperreality") had broken down down, buried under piles of corpses and sand. Spec Ops never strives for realism that Call of Duty or Splinter Cell or numerous others attempt; instead it offers a surreality, a parallel military narrative that uses the tropes of other games in the genre only to undo them. The shifting sands, the hallucinations, and the psychedelic rock music all build an atmosphere on "unreality" in a genre that seems so focused on realism. To say much more would venture into spoiler territory--though shame on you if you've never read Heart of Darkness or seen Apocalypse Now.

The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there — there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were, — No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it — this suspicion of their not being inhuman. --Joseph Conrad "Heart of Darkness"

As with all games, though, the narrative's effectiveness leans heavily on the actual gameplay. Here, I found the game's mechanics to be somewhere between adequate and good. Gears of War and Max Payne 3 offer more competent cover mechanicsthan Spec Ops does, but I cannot help wondering if Spec Ops' simple controls are by design. Just as Conrad parodied the adventure novel and Coppola parodied the epic war film, the team at Yager Development may be lampooning the controls of the third-person cover shooter--with the addition of elementary squad commands. If so, it works. In fact, the enemy AI is far too good for the cover mechanics to offer any sort of unreliability. The gameplay is nothing revelatory, but it crashes so beautifully with the narrative that I can't help asking myself, "Why the hell am I playing this game?" I know nothing good will happen at the end, but I want to see where it all is going. To do that, I have to put myself through what feels like mediocre gameplay but opens up as I realize its importance. Each explosion carries meaning as you tear apart a city that once stood for excessive decadence and architectural beauty. The ruinous Dubai setting is perfect for a game hell-bent on dealing with the very idea of mindless destruction and its repercussions.

I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable grayness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. --Joseph Conrad "Heart of Darkness"

And while the city crumbles, so too does your platoon of Not Nathan Drake and his two Not Nathan Drake's Buddies. While they start out with quippy banter and stupid machismo, their bonds are stretched and eventually snapped. While I've harped on Nolan North's over-exposure in the game industry, he delivers a stellar performance as Capt. Walker. The overall voice work is excellent, and it evolves too, in-game. Walker's reaction to suppressing enemy fire changes from an initial call for cover to a growling, "Fuck you," delivered toward the approaching enemy. A lot of times, I found myself uttering the same thing in tense firefights, resulting in looks from wife that fell somewhere concern and annoyance. It was a bit more sobering than I thought it would be.

I've made it fairly obvious here that I've a fascination with video game violence. I've discussed it's purpose in God of War and Red Dead Redemption, but rarely does a game so blatantly turn that violence outward, so much to tell the player, "You know you're a bit messed up for playing this, right?" It's a big question and one that needs asking. While I can't say I enjoyed the game without admitting my own appreciation of the macabre, I can recommend it, and I can do so highly. It warrants your attention if only to give you an abyss to stare into to see what looks back. In Apocalypse Now, Colonel Kurtz posits in what is likely the most chilling monologue in cinema history, "Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies." Perhaps this game will make a worthy introduction to both of them.

Cheers,

--David

The Difficulty of Comedy in Video Games and How Portal Got It Right

It's difficult to write comedy. I found this out when I tried incorporate humor into a creative writing class once. I could never make it work consistently. Sure, I'd slip in a pun here or there, or I'd get a laugh through the use of a particularly biting metaphor. But overall, my fiction wound up more dramatic than humorous, with humor popping up only to interrupt the narrative in a forced, out of place manner. While I never really succeeded in that aspect, the exercise taught me two very important lessons about the fundamental mechanics of creating humor. The first is that the writer has to get the timing right. Douglas Adams, P.G. Wodehouse, Kurt Vonnegut, John Kennedy Toole, all of them find a rhythm in their writing that they can punctuate with clever jokes. There's a cadence to Slaughterhouse Five that carries Vonnegut's comedy, and Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide books have inspired a wave of humorists in almost all forms of media. Timing is arguably the single most important aspect of comedy because we've all seen how well an ill-timed joke goes over: freakin' crickets. This is largely the reason that there are so few legitimately funny games out there. When discussing humor's place in video games, timing is a bit of a bitch.

Since a game relies on player interaction, the timing that writers rely on so heavily breaks down due to player interaction. A comedian works on his/her own time, not at the behest of the audience. Humorous games must find ways of clearing this hurdle. The simplest (and most common) strategy is to work humor into cutscenes. It's easier because during the cutscene, the developer team takes the player out of the equation, and the comedic timing works the same way as it does in film. Take this cutscene from Ninja Theory's (sadly undervalued) Enslaved: Odyssey to the West:

While I wouldn't call Enslaved a "funny game," moments like this crop up every now and then, mostly in the cutscenes with Pigsy, the stout character who functions as comedic relief. It's a funny scene in a world that does not strive to be humorous, which allows the scene to be funny because it is so out of place. We see this all the time in games when humor pops up in the cutscenes in games that aren't largely thought to be funny (Infamous, Mass Effect, Red Dead Redemption). But when a game fully commits to humor, comedy operates as part of the gameplay, the atmosphere, the larger concepts. In other words. the best games that claim to be comedic don't half-ass it.

Take Portal, for example. Humor weaves in and out of the game's architecture through its setting, characters, and mechanics. Portal constantly calls attention to its bizarre concept through the brilliantly designed levels and the soothing yet threatening voice of GLaDOS. All these aspects work in congress to put a funny spin on what would normally be a horror scenario. Chell awakens in an eerily sterile science facility wherein she's forced to undergo a series of trials at the behest of GLaDOS, the murderous AI who offers false promises of cake *shudder*. The horror is magnified in Portal 2 when Chell awakens to a facility in ruin and accidentally activates a very functional and a very pissed-off resurrected GLaDOS. Other elements, like the background story of a man who lives in the walls and the ambiguity of why the deadly neurotoxin was released also heighten the horror atmosphere, and there is recorded dialogue of GLaDOS' creation (which J.K. Simmons opted out of because it sounded too much like rape) that, thankfully, did not make it into the game because it played the horror a bit too convincingly. GLaDOS' shape even resembles that of a person bound and gagged--not a far fetched comparison, given her origin story. The world, however, exists alongside hilarious robots that provide ample comedy and a portal-creating mechanic that can lead to some very funny unscripted moments. Valve uses horror elements, therefore, with the specific purpose of undercutting them for the sake of humor. One of my favorite moments in the game occurs early when Chell and the always charming Wheatley tour the bowels of the Aperture facility, prompting the robot to tell a "ghost" story:

Everything about this moment is perfect. The player navigates the corridors of what looks like a survival horror game, with ambient noises echoing from parts unknown, but the story the robot tells completely unravels the tension that the atmosphere builds. The comedy, then, comes not necessarily from the story itself but from its juxtaposition with the horror elements the game uses. The gameplay doesn't pause or force the player to watch a cutscene. Instead, the joke lies in making fun of the horror games that Portal 2 apes in ways only a game can: by allowing the player to explore his/her environment. The player should be unnerved, but isn't because the makes fun of its horror element. It's really nothing short of brilliant.

Valve even found a way to make comedic timing work in game space. Since Portal is a puzzle game, reliance on when the player reaches certain points automatically creates specific points in which to inject humor. GLaDOS insults Chell by making fun of the player's progress (or lack thereof). For instance, the game provides a red-herring in the form of GLaDOS' promising Chell that she will be reunited with her parents, but after the player endures trials and insults, he/she is rewarded with...this:

Again, only games can provide this type of humor because it subverts the whole dangling carrot reward system to which we've grown so accustomed. We found out over a decade and half ago that our princess was in another castle, and, still, we fall for crap like this. It's insulting, and it's awesome. Even in multiplayer, the two people playing can make their avatars mess with each other as GLaDOS tries to sow discord between the players by lauding one's prowess in front of the other. If you accidentally kill your teammate, GLaDOS will try to convince him/her that you did it on purpose, possibly prompting a funny (albeit macabre) revenge scenario. The game plays the player. In fact, the central concept of escaping the environment is a joke simply because the game is, quite literally, inescapable. Though the game is built on the dichotomy of confinement and escape, it cannot offer liberty because, ultimately, Chell is literally confined to a disc spinning in a box sitting in someone's living room as she's directed by a person with a controller. The player is given the means to get past trials in rooms, yet he/she can only go where the game allows. So it makes fun of the player for trying to get beyond the walls of the game. Pretty damn funny.

The Portal franchise is just one example of the few games that use humor to full potential of the medium. Nearly any game that Tim Schafer heads brings the funny and the charm, and a lot of early point-and-click adventure games (Day of the Tentacle, Quest for Glory, and the Monkey Island series come to mind). Still, it's a rare thing when a game works the way a game should to deliver humor by fulling committing all aspects of the medium to deliver a solid punch to the funny bone.

Oh, and that second lesson I took away from trying my hand at humor? There are few things less amusing than laboriously explaining why something is comedic...unless you do it to annoy someone. Then, it's funny as hell.

Cheers,

--David