Crawling toward Jules et Jim
———A progression of spoilers occurs at each picture break.———
Dragon Age: Origins is a game about a relationship. Your core goal is to develop as many alliances as possible: an invading army of darkspawn necessitates the use of the Grey Warden treaties. These four tattered pieces of parchment, signed by the long-dead leaders of every nation, bind their descendants to the service of the greater good in perpetuity. This conceit relies on the “go to four places” trope of BioWare games, but its focus on army-building brings it closer to the spirit of real-time strategy games and the recent Brutal Legend. Choices made by the player via discrete “moral” decision points determine which factions fulfill their eternal promise to the Wardens.
These binaries are more ethically ambiguous than those of previous BioWare games: the player is constantly drawn away from her desire to roleplay either a “good” or “evil” character and into a pragmatic calculus. It helps that healing and destructive powers aren’t tied to a moral compass such as Jedi/Sith or Open Palm/Closed Fist. Another difference from previous titles is that party members can be abandoned at will; in some cases, if a particular party member has a vested interest in the outcome of one of the main quests, they may choose to side with your enemy during a boss fight. You can even kill a few of them before they have the chance to join your team, though the game never presents you with a particularly good reason to do so.
Although your decision to fill your ranks with former assassins and dark magi may give you pause, the game never betrays your trust in them. These relationships stand on a higher order than the alliances you make in the war against the darkspawn: your team members have meters that display their affinity to you, and increasing them unlocks new stories, quests, and latent abilities. You will come to care for some of these people—really care about them—in contrast to the emotionally- and motivationally-static citizenry that you’re attempting to spare from destruction. You will probably even despise some of them, depending on how the choices you make affect their interactions with you.
But the relationship that matters is a love triangle, forged by how you interact with two of the four party members the game has arbitrarily decided to establish as worthy of sexual engagement. In the case of my playthrough (as a straight, male, elven mage), the relationship that mattered was between Morrigan, Leliana, and myself.
Morrigan and Alistair are with you from the beginning of your adventure; they’re also essential to how the endgame plays out. These two characters are the most developed of all Dragon Age’s NPCs, which is only problematic when you consider that BioWare essentially makes a rule that the two heterosexual companions are the most important. Zevran and Leliana join your party during the first quarter of your playthrough; any player can make love to them, regardless of gender, because they’re designated as bisexual. There are no purely homosexual characters: Lel and Zev make it clear to you that their free sexual orientation arose from former occupations as spies and contract killers—a westernization of the Japanese “geisha assassin” trope.
It is also possible, though I cannot confirm it, that in the transition to consoles (which has been documented and critiqued by sites such as Eurogamer) BioWare preserved the integrity of the Alistair and Morrigan models and animations while compressing those of Zevran and Leliana (I observed a number of jagged edges and hard lines around Leliana’s features, a stark contrast to the warm, rounded faces of Alistair and Morrigan).
I began my playthrough of Dragon Age intending to be an evil blood mage. In my magi “origin story,” I betrayed a man named Jowan to the First Enchanter and doomed his relationship with a loving priestess. Certain later events made me realize that my decision didn’t make much of an impact here, but my intent to cause harm to someone established as my first friend remained. When I met Alistair, I found immediate distaste for his chivalrous demeanor. On the other hand, Morrigan was a godsend: a cynical, dispassionate “witch of the wild” to engage in conversation about the frailty of human emotion.
Cupping with Morrigan was easy. I proceeded through her dialogue tree on the stairwell leading to the first village the player encounters (Lothering). I sent Alistair and my dog away to kiss her. Within five minutes, I was back in the party’s camp ready to spend the night in her tent. When she asked me about my opinion of love, I told her that it was a farce. This is what she wanted to hear. Morrigan only goes to bed with you when she feels like it; if you press her, she’ll become angered and criticize your need for companionship. Both the feminist and the malevolent mage in me cherished her casual sexuality and freedom of choice. Once you achieve full alignment with Morrigan and begin your sexual relationship, she laughs at you whenever you begin a conversation with her.
The sex scene with all characters is roughly the same. Clad in underwear, you and your mate caress each other, kiss, and then engage in a number of your favorite positions (missionary and cowgirl included) until sated. Ridiculous, Enya-inspired music swells with the rising flames of a nearby campfire. After the achievement for being sport-fucked by Morrigan popped, I proceeded with my mission. That’s when I met Leliana.
Players encounter Leliana in a bar. She’s a priestess, fresh from the confines of a nearby Chantry nunnery, attempting to reason with a number of rowdy soldiers. I was still roleplaying “evil” at this point, so I slaughtered these men before even attempting to persuade them to leave peaceably through dialogue. Afterward, Leliana introduces herself to you and offers to join your party. I didn’t want another Chantry member tagging along—least of all one who receives visions from God—but I acquiesced because I knew there was another achievement for cupping her. Over the course of the next few hours, the things Leliana said made me decide that neither love nor the Chantry were things to abhor while playing Dragon Age.
I’ve never actually been involved in a love triangle or casual sexual encounter in real life, so I can’t confirm whether this is how these things actually play out; however, my relationships with Morrigan, Leliana, and Alistair began to feel true. I was no longer seeking to have sex with all my party members simply to ding achievements and increase their alignment. Leliana makes the transition easy for you: unlike Morrigan, she has both a French accent and an appreciation for tenderness. She was also slightly more difficult to court. Although I proceeded to the point where I could kiss Leliana rather quickly, the chance to make love with her didn’t arise until after I’d dealt with an enemy from her past.
One night, sitting around the campfire, I used my superior persuasion skills to convince Leliana that nothing was going on between myself and Morrigan. That same evening, I confided in Alistair the fact that I was close with both women. This both disturbed and titillated him: although Alistair fears Morrigan, it is obvious that he holds a perverse, virgin’s desire to see what making love to someone so dark and free would be like. I’ve read in forums that it is possible to maintain a sexual relationship with multiple party members at the same time; this was not the case for me, perhaps because I was honest with Alistair that night. That conversation with him reveals something often neglected in videogames: good, old-fashioned, Greek off-stage action. He reveals the fact that everyone else gossips about you behind your back; therefore, you no longer feel confident in the secrecy of your machinations and lies.
Before I was given the chance to engage Leliana sexually, she made me choose between her and Morrigan. I must have reloaded my game ten times, in vain, trying to find a course through the dialogue tree that would allow me to lie to her again. Eventually I chose to break things off with Morrigan. I didn’t think she’d mind, because she had been so insistent on keeping love out of the equation. She was simultaneously displeased and courteous, explaining that her man was hers and hers alone; this led to the loss of fifteen alignment points with her and a future of curt replies whenever I began a conversation. Now Leliana didn’t press me about visiting Morrigan’s tent at night. We made love in a scene nearly identical to that with Morrigan (they even wear the same underwear), and the next morning I awoke to her gazing at me adoringly. Achievement unlocked.
After beginning your monogamous relationship with Leliana, she always greets you with an, “aren’t you sweet and attentive?” Yes, in fact I am; I am in love with you. You, the only bard that matters, tell the stock Dragon Age story about Andraste better than anyone else in the world. I keep you in my combat party despite your lack of battle prowess, because you can unlock any chest and door. You’re perfect. After leaving camp and returning once more, Morrigan chides you for being so keen on Leliana. What can you say, other than that Leliana offers something she cannot? At this point, I’m fully on board with indulging priests in their lectures about the Chant of Light and the glory of God. I help every pitiful NPC in need that I come across. I never accept kisses as rewards or visit the brothel in Denerim. I make love to Leliana every time I return to camp: unlike Morrigan, she never denies my sexual appetite.
I maximized my potential awkwardness by maintaining a constant combat party composition of Alistair, Morrigan, and Leliana. I never managed to reach full alignment with Alistair, and much later in the game I was able to take revenge against him for betraying my trust. Every once and awhile I would stop to ask Leliana what she knew about our current locale, kissing her to make Morrigan jealous. Whenever Leliana or Alistair disagreed with my decisions, I would change them at the last minute. When this chafed against Morrigan’s tastes, I told her to keep her mouth shut. This situation remained the same for roughly half of my play experience.
———Magi Circle mission completion spoilers follow.———
Dragon Age complicates things after you visit the Circle of Magi, the core quest fragment that I completed last. In the office of the First Enchanter, you find a Black Grimoire that was somehow confiscated from Flemeth (the adoptive mother of Morrigan). When you present the tome to the cold witch, she is immediately disturbed. The book explains that Flemeth has made herself immortal by raising a new daughter every century and possessing her body when she comes of age. Flemeth sent Morrigan with you on your quest in the hopes that her daughter would become more powerful. The more attuned to magic Flemeth’s current daughter is, the easier it is for her to subdue and invade her body. Morrigan asks you to kill Flemeth and free her from this fate. This I did, simply because I was curious to see what would happen. Afterward, when I returned to Morrigan with news of her mother’s demise, things changed. Morrigan calls me her friend.
At this point, I realized that I may have made a mistake. Leliana indulges your need for sustained love and attention, but she has no meaningful character arc. Morrigan, on the other hand, was a real person. Maybe, if I’d stayed true to her, she would have eventually declared her love for me? There was no option to begin another sexual relationship with Morrigan, but I was happy to have her as a friend. Then, on a lark, I came across a golden mirror that Flemeth had taken from Morrigan when she was a child. When I presented the gift to her, I was given the chance to say that she was beautiful–she deserved this trinket and her vanity. I meant this as a friend. You can tell your female friends that they’re beautiful without implying sexual desire. That’s not how Leliana and Morrigan took the comment.
Perhaps it was a glitch caused by maxing out Morrigan’s alignment with the gift of the mirror. The next time I spoke with Leliana, she again accused me of spending the night in Morrigan’s tent. This was identical to the conversation I had with her near the beginning of our relationship. This time, I broke things off with Leliana. I was angered that she’d be so jealous of a harmless flirtation between myself and a friend. Then Morrigan revealed that she was in love with me, though she was obviously afraid to admit it. She wouldn’t have sex with me anymore, though, because “it would make things harder for us later.” She begged me to say that I didn’t care about her; I refused. You lose alignment points every time you broach the subject with her again, but she no longer has scruples about snogging in public or referring to you as “her love.”
Leliana proved remarkably amicable to my choice; a few times, on returning to camp, she would pull me aside to explain that she understood what I saw in Morrigan. I suppose this was the design team’s way of screaming, “Remember she’s bisexual!” But it worked. She required no convincing or gifts to establish the fact that she cherished our time together and continued friendship. She remained my trust lockpicker, and now she had the full spectrum of powerful Ranger and Bard skills at her disposal. Leliana is like a sister to me.
———Endgame spoilers follow.———
Near the end of the game, you learn that a darkspawn Archdemon can only be killed by a Grey Warden who sacrifices him- or herself while delivering the final blow. The demon’s “taint” melds with that of the Grey Warden and combusts (or something). One choice is to have Alistair or Loghain make this sacrifice. Morrigan presents you with a different option; finally I understood what she meant when she insisted that forsaking our relationships would make things easier in the end. Flemeth had warned me from the beginning, and again at the moment of her death, that Morrigan was a woman cut from the same cloth as the crafty witch of the wild. Once Morrigan learned from the grimoire how to possess another, she made a decision and hid it from me. Now, just before the final battle, she asked me to give her a child. When I killed the Archdemon, its soul would find the tainted fetus in her womb. She could sustain its life, and raise it in a faraway land. She told me I wouldn’t be able to follow her.
It’s obvious that Morrigan intends to someday possess the child, who would store the powerful soul of an Old God within it, in much the same way that Flemeth planned on betraying her own daughter. This is the “evil” ending of the game, but I nevertheless granted Morrigan her wish.
This love scene is different from the others. Instead of a few short caresses followed by a gauntlet-run of multiple sexual positions, Morrigan presents herself in a way befitting the occasion. This is the only time you see a near-naked mate standing in full profile for more than a split-second–the other scenes are shot mostly in medium close-up. Morrigan sways toward the bed and begins kissing you. She positions herself beneath you, you make a single thrust into her, and the scene is over. Morrigan is the only party member (besides Shale) not present during the playable celebration scene at the end of the game. You talk to a number of your compatriots, with the chance to follow to accompany them on new journeys. There’s an option to flirt with Leliana about the hero “always getting the girl,” but that would cheapen the entire experience.
When Anora, the queen of the land, asks me what I plan on doing now, I tell her that I’m going to go find Morrigan.
———————————
This was my first attempt at New Games Journalism, something I personally despise—but I recognize its strength, even if I can’t passably wield it. I intended to write this as a pure, mechanical analysis of how the alignment system influences what relationships and dialogue options become possible, but that would require many more hours of testing and reloading to divine the secrets of the code’s black box. It also wouldn’t be as personally meaningful. I am convinced that this is the most realistic relationship depicted in any videogame I’ve ever played (my apologies for the hyperbole, Mitch); moreover, it wouldn’t play out exactly as it did if I hadn’t made the decisions I did at the precise moments that I made them.
The tacit feelings between Gordon and Alyx in Half-Life 2 are tangible, but bereft of agency. Your connection to the companion cube in Portal is a farce. In Mass Effect, making love to a party member is only possible during an intensely emotional time preceding what you know may be your death; the chance to build a relationship with an emotionally-damaged racist like Ashley was a major step forward for roleplaying videogames, but Dragon Age makes that particular space opera look like an early Edison film. This is a relationship rife with deceit, the tangible phenomenon of mistaken love, second-guessing, and second chances—to my knowledge, the first of its kind in this medium.
Dragon Age: Prelude
I finished Dragon Age: Origins last night. I’d told somebody that I would finish it by Sunday, but playing it on Hard led me to waste about eight hours on reloads. I also knew that I wouldn’t have the time to play through it ever again, so I spent a lot of time reloading saves to see what happened on both sides of every decision point. I thought about writing a proper review of the game for Sleeper Hit; instead, I’ll again share an anecdote about the analysis of multilinear RPGs.
Sipping Victory Prima Pilsner at a miserable, empty bar in Savannah, Kirk Battle and I discussed how to best write about something like a BioWare game. We were talking about Mass Effect, which he’d been afraid to touch (later he wrote this). A breakdown of basic mechanics and storytelling techniques, the staples of consumer reviewing, don’t do justice to a branching game. You could cull together a bunch of links to what other people said about their play experiences, but what the hell does that mean to you and those reading? “Ah yes, so many insights in such a small space.” You might even say the word “interesting” aloud; and, as J. Murray says, “‘interesting’ means ‘fuck you.’” You could take the extra time to play through the thing in every way possible, but then you’d simply have a chart to show for your work. Charts, wonderful for showing how something complex has been put together, don’t do any work toward explaining why a BioWare game is compelling. Why?
Because it’s your first playthrough that matters–the choices, friends, and enemies you make in that one pure ludic experience. You don’t need to see what else was possible; it’s the potential for missed opportunity that matters. You play through it again not to see what else happens (nothing ever surprises you or changes much), but because you’re chasing that dragon.
My answer to the question Kirk posed is, admittedly, overtly academic: construct a thesis, cut a chunk out of the game, and make it make sense to you. A while ago I briefly spoke with Michael Abbott about academics and our proclivity toward traditional thesis structures. Maybe it hurt my ability to write a compelling, regularly-updated blog? I’ve certainly failed at maintaining this quiet corner of the web. That said, there were a few months where I was calling it in on keeping up with Michael’s writing: too many games I didn’t want to play, too many disagreements on games we’d both played, too many generalities and what I’d call “NPR style” thoughtful commentary. I read it all, but I didn’t put the extra work into replying or thinking further.
Recently he wrote an extended suite of articles about why Uncharted 2 matters, and it snapped me back into caring. He had a point to prove, and that’s what he did. The only disagreement I might have with the endeavor is that I can’t believe he didn’t save it for proper academic publishing. I suppose the web is changing academia quickly, and I’m too busy learning the ropes to think about the future (I save all my good ideas for papers).
This was meant to be the opening paragraph to a counterpoint article, a reply to the design skewer Michael wrote today about Dragon Age. Instead it became something ungainly and far too general for my own tastes. I hope you didn’t read it. Tomorrow I’m going to post an article about DA:O. Take a look at Michael’s complaints, noting the tension between a desire for realism and the inhuman absurdity created by the bones of old and dead design necessities. Did anything about Dragon Age strike you as particularly true, despite its faults? I’m going to write about something that made sense to me. It’s going to spoilerific.
Sleeper Hit review digest October 12-29
I’ve been neglecting posting here, because school work is ridiculous and I’m busy writing things non-casually for News Games and Sleeper Hit. I’ve been working at Sleeper Hit for a little under a month now, and I’m finally getting into a groove for product reviewing. I’m still trying to figure out how to mix in personal touches without being too NGJ and how to insert meaningful game studies lessons without coming off as overbearing or tangential. Receiving free games is weird. We’re a pretty small site, but basically all it takes is one or two polite emails to get anything we want sent over. Nobody emails us to ask how the review is going if it’s taking more than a week, and nobody posts angry, anonymous comments if we write a slam piece. I guess, because we don’t have advertising (and a payroll), things are just idyllic. Also, I get a press pass to PAX East, so that’s awesome.
ODST – This is where I got myself a little too into the NGJ mess, with 800 words about what the first Halo and its pistol meant to me.
Trine – One of the best indie games I’ve played on Steam yet. Great contrast between the mage and thief characters, lame level design and reliance on “physics.”
Critter Crunch – This is where I tried to insert a lecture about puzzle games and the power of context… and failed. It feels tacked on; better luck next time. Good game!
Oh and, “Editing. Editing never changes.” Apparently having an MFA in creative writing doesn’t automatically imbue one with the ability to construct complete sentences.
LARP field study: Mafia
For my LARP field study I played a night full of Mafia with Paul, Pauline, and Jenifer from class (along with a number of their friends). Doug Wilson of IT Copenhagen calls Mafia “the most political game ever conceived.” The game is an ideal LARP for non-traditional roleplayers, because there are no combat rules to remember or stats to track. Typically the game is played with between 10 and 20 people, seated in a circle. We had ten for our session, a number which lends itself to a more intimate and competitive experience.
One player takes the role of the narrator (game master) who randomly doles out roles at the beginning of each play experience, tracks the state of the game, and provides a narrative context for every game action. There are two cycles in the game: night and day. The game begins at night, with all heads bowed. Six players were assigned the role of basic townsperson; they have no special abilities or duties. Two players constitute the Mafia, and each night they raise their heads to select one person to kill. One player is the detective, and each night they can point to one person, asking the narrator if that player is in the Mafia. Finally, one player is the doctor, able to select one person per night for protection. Nobody knows what role the other players bear.
During the day stage, the results of the Mafia’s activities are reported. If the marked player was not protected by the doctor, they die. If the detective accurately discerned a Mafia member, she may want to declare the fact. But if she reveals her identity, she becomes an easy target for the Mafia if the doctor is unable or unwilling to protect her. Then the townspeople begin accusing each other of being in the Mafia, stating their (usually tenuous) reasons for believing so. Players can choose not to condemn anyone, but usually the Mafia players will attempt to sway the townspeople toward killing each other (which leads to counter-accusations, etc.). An accused player gives a defense speech, then the players vote on which person to lynch.
When the Mafia murder somebody, the narrator does not reveal what role the dead player bore; however, when the townspeople lynch a player they are told what role the dying player held. The game ends when either all townspeople or all Mafia members are killed.
It took awhile for us to get the game started. During the first round, I forgot which role I had been given and ruined everything. Everybody forgave me when the narrator forgot what was going on during the second round and spoiled that one. The third attempt was a success, especially for me. Because I knew what roles everybody had been assigned during the first two unsuccessful attempts, I used fuzzy math to try to discern which players were the most likely to be Mafia. Basically I went on the false mathematical assumption that the chance of three successive “heads” in a game of coin-flip is 1/8 instead of 1/2 (I still want a look at the theorem that establishes that bit of nonsense).
As it turned out, my fuzzy math worked! I successfully picked the two Mafia even though I was only playing a lowly citizen. The first time I nominated one of the suspect players, nobody believed me and didn’t vote for him to die. So during the next round, I falsely stated that I was the detective and that I knew the second suspect was mafioso. The healer was dead at this point, so I knew I would be killed after the round was over. I gave an impassioned speech about self-sacrifice, everybody bought it, and we lynched the suspect player. I was right about the pick, and I was also right that the remaining Mafia player would off me that night. But the real detective was still alive, and he found out who the second murderer was in time to win the round for the townspeople.
The next round, I was killed straightaway. I assume it was because I had such good hunches during the first game. This is similar to the experiment of iterated prisoner’s dilemma in game theory, where bias from previous plays affects how the players within the dilemma choose in subsequent rounds. I watched the players to figure out if any of them had tells, and I discovered that one of the players giggled whenever he was in the Mafia. During the third game, I heard the distinctive giggle on the first night and outed him to everyone during the day. After I explained my reasoning, a few players believed me and we successfully lynched him. Then I got killed the next round. Playing Mafia too well usually means you’re going to get axed.
By the fifth and final match, I’d consumed a bit too much alcohol for my own good. This resulted in me persuading the townspeople to murder two innocents in a row. I’m glad we stopped after that round. So I’ve played Mafia twice now, and I’ve never actually gotten to be in the Mafia. As a result of this, I can’t speak for how to strategize a defense while playing one of them. The rounds that I was the healer and the detective were the rounds where I died the first day, so I also don’t know how to play as those roles. Mostly I’m good at playing a standard townsperson, and I’ve got a knack for picking at least one of the Mafia off before getting slaughtered the following night (healers tend to be very stupid; they never protect me, their star player).
Is there a difference in embodiment while playing something like Mafia over a videogame? I don’t believe so. Identification with avatars in first- and third-person camera views has been well-documented. There’s a palpable, giddy energy to live action play, but for calculating players such as myself the difference seems negligible. This is probably because of the principle Gee calls the “psychosocial moratorium,” or what Huizinga calls “the magic circle”; this is a protection from real-life consequences and harm that some believe is intrinsic to play (perhaps the only exception would be in what Caillois identifies as Ilinx, or “vertigo,” play… there is a real danger present with things like roller coasters and skydiving).
I have no problem sacrificing myself for the team in Mafia, because I know I’m not dying in real life. The act of taking on a role is always a necessary step away from absolute embodiment and identification. I shun anonymity in online play, so I’m always just playing an accentuated fraction of my real self when I play any game. This appears to hold true in live play: I was sarcastic, calm, and reasonable (except when I became inebriated… which can affect performance in online games as well).
As for the strategic difference between NPCs and real human players, I hold, along with Jason Rohrer, that there isn’t much of one. I didn’t know any of my fellow Mafia players exceedingly well, so I tested and prodded them much as I would an alien computer intelligence. As a material and physical determinist, I think people behave with predictable regularity (except in panic situations). I read the one player’s giggle-tell much as I would a sound cue in a videogame. If I’d been playing with family or close friends, this might have been different–but only because I would know them and their personal rulesets all the better. They could act to upset my predictions, but I would probably be able to counter-predict that if I were playing carefully enough.
One notable exception to this rule was that we had a player named Akido who spoke little English. His defense was always, “Why do you think I’m in the Mafia? I am innocent!” It was impossible to read him, because he wasn’t fluent enough to craft different responses based on his current role and situation. I correctly identified him by luck during the first round, but every time after that (if he were mafioso) nobody was able to nail him. We avoided accusing him, perhaps out of fear that we would be discriminating against him. I wonder how this could be simulated in an NPC?
Jenifer made two videos of the experience, but I can’t speak to their quality because I don’t want to download them:
End of Life IF
End of Life is an interactive fiction about family life and decision-making. It started as an idea in Ian Bogost’s newsgame project studio. One of the branches of newsgames we have identified for our book is the documentary game. Typically these have a medium-length (20 minutes to two hours) playthrough time and are built as a mod for a 3D engine. There are three major types: spatial, procedural, and personal. Personal documentary games mix spatial and system-based models in order to tell share a story from a unique, subjective point-of-view. End of Life is a text-based adaptation of the documentary game form, addressing the real-world issue of “end of life counseling” or the decision whether to pull life support from a dying loved one.
The high concept pitch for EoL would sound something like, “It’s Ruben & Lullaby meets The Sound and The Fury.” Point-of-view switching is a powerful literary device, but in static texts this typically implies a forced perspective. In EoL, the player can switch back and forth between five family members at any moment and in any order. If they don’t like a character, they can ignore her for the course of the playthrough. The invalid family patriarch is our Benjy Compson (the mentally handicapped member of Faulkner’s fictional family), providing commentary that the active family members do not have access to. Some characters always do the same things in every playthrough; most have branching choices based on their moods at certain points in the day. When there is no choice in action, mood will instead dictate how the character mentally reacts to her situation.
Ruben & Lullaby provides the inspiration for the interaction model: the player controls a wisp that can nudge the emotions of one family member per hour. I see this as a direct contradiction of the interaction model of The Sims, where players are cued to a desire or feeling in the Sim that they can rectify or not by dictating action. Players of R&L and Facade are often frustrated when their commands don’t lead to tangible results in game, and I wanted to capture a similar frustration in EoL. Each family member begins the playthrough in a randomized mood. Each is variably susceptible to particular mood swings, leading to healthy dose of guesswork and replay value. The player can also choose to abstain from influencing the characters, letting the drama play out based on the beginning values.
At the end of the game, the family convenes to decide the fate of the patriarch; some will vote to keep him alive if they are in a good mood, some if they are in a bad mood. This decision takes place offscreen, much as in the violent sections of Greek tragedy (mostly because I wasn’t good enough to code it dramatically). The player has gleaned parts of their personalities in the playthrough, but he doesn’t know everything about each family member. Most importantly, their ethics aren’t considered. The game argues that people make decisions based on who they are and the mood they are in. Ethics certainly make up who we are, but they tend to be remarkably malleable under duress. Decisions are also relational; some people, under some circumstances, will take radical action to counteract what they see as the controlling influence of others.
In discussing digital media, we often fall back on an essentialist logic that says that an artifact is aesthetically legitimate if it maximizes the affordances of the medium; however, there is a slightly older aesthetic criterion, coming from Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School, which states that aesthetic legitimacy arises not from essentialist qualities but from the reflection of the work’s means of production–it has to reify the cultural milieu of a time and place, adopting a suitable form for conveying it. End of Life draws from the latter school of thought, directly confronting a relevant public issue and encapsulating how one specific family deals with it.
The suggestion that a digital artifact should provide always immersion, embodiment, and agency is perverse. It only makes sense if one views digital media as escapism, created to fully engage the user in the place of the real world around them. A brute fact of human life is that we don’t have control over much of our lives or the lives of others. Aarseth argues that games become more “gamelike” if they are configurative, that the player should be able to see the meaningful influence her actions have on a virtual world. I would argue that agency and embodiment mean more in configurative work when they are directly contradicted in non-configurative work. By taking these essential qualities away sometimes, we make them more cherished. Such qualities should be selected from to suit the work, not the other way around. Defaulting to what is important to us robs it of importance. This is an educational opportunity, an antidote to the intoxicating sense of power that most digital artifacts provide. Some things simply aren’t configurative in the real world; families are a good example.
A week before finishing this project, I finally found published theoretical grounding for my position. In their early work on augmented reality games, Jay Bolter and Blair MacIntyre argue that point-of-view switching provides adequate embodiment in lieu of actual agency in a digital environment.2 I actually don’t find their particular example of this principle compelling; basically they simplified Twelve Angry Jurors to Three Jurors, strapped a backpack computer and a virtual reality visor to a player, and then allowed the player to switch between inhabiting the mindset of one of the three characters as a static drama played out. I think EoL takes point-of-view switching one step further and provides a better proof-of-concept for their argument.
I consider End of Life no small success. My writing is admittedly the weakest element; mentally I finished the piece the moment I finished coding the framework girding the story. This project combines everything I’ve learned how to do in Flash thus far (excepting animation), and it constitutes the first true state machine I’ve ever made completely by myself in the platform. Even though the writing is somewhat trite, pulling from every cliche of everyday family life I’m familiar with, it becomes true in that I pulled it from one specific, real-world family (my own).
There is some room for future development here, both graphically and procedurally. Right now there are two variations for every character in every round based on there mood. Given the way the structure is set up, I could add mood variations to the branching story sections or add a third mood variation (neutral) given enough time and literary inspiration. I would also love to try to remake this project as a true documentary game, in a 3D engine, with unique art assets and dialogue. The current iteration of this project represents the utmost level of my design and programming abilities given the time constraints and the specifications of the assignment.
I should note that this situation didn’t actually happen to my family, and the personalities have been a bit blown own to be more compelling. My grandfather died five years ago from Alzheimer’s disease, asleep in his bed, in the room that I grew up in. This isn’t meant to be a universal story, though it can be generalized to the extent that families are, after all, families; it is a directed experience featuring characters with largely determinate personalities. This is the way I wanted it, and I hope the player enjoys what I crafted for them. A big thank you goes out to Graham Jans for teaching me how to randomize variables in Flash. I’m also indebted to my family for providing me with the strong personalities embedded in the family members of this fiction. Thank you to my father, who used to work as an intensive care nurse, for describing the hour-by-hour care of a comatose patient.
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Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 16-45.
MacIntrye, Blair and Jay Bolter. “Single-narrative, multiple point-of-view dramatic experiences in augmented reality” in Virtual Reality 7 (London: Springer-Verlag, 2003), 10-16.
Hey I’m a Journo Now
So I’ve been a bit absent from this blog lately, pouring most of my time into schoolwork. I just finished my thesis proposal, which I’m split about posting here because 1) it’s ridiculously long and 2) I don’t want to share the core concept until I’ve written a lot about it. Is that selfish or stupid? Anyhow, the main goal is to expand Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric to incorporate subversive readings by players and understandings of game space that go beyond simply acknowledging them as the places where mechanics and players meet. The ancillary goal, from a design perspective, is to flesh out that vague middle letter in the MDA formula.
For News Games we’ve mostly been prepping the book for review at a couple of university presses, and we’ve got a number of fresh, new writers who’ve tackled a bunch of the more recent games we’ve come across. So I haven’t written much there, except for a piece about the Dante’s Inferno marketing campaign that got a nice amount of buzz for a day or so.
The big news is that I recently acquired an associate editor position at Sleeper Hit, which is an ideal foray into enthusiast press for me for a number of reasons. First, I spend a lot of time and money on new games, but I usually don’t have any school-related reason to write about them. If I don’t write about a game right away, my memory of the play experience slowly fades into vague talking points for arguments on Twitter. Being an editor at Sleeper Hit means I’ll get first pick on review copies of games, which will save me a lot of money and give me a reason to write about almost everything I play (something I used to do on this blog). Second, I’ve never played a game that I hadn’t read anything about beforehand. Doing product reviews means I’ll need to write about games before I get a chance to read what other reviewers have thought about them–an exciting and scary opportunity. Third, the website is relatively new (having broken off from GameTopius, I believe), so I’ll have a chance to influence its direction and expertise.
Finally, it’s a long-awaited chance to work with my friend Tom Cross of GameSetWatch fame. Tom was my first game blogging compatriot, introducing me to Jon Mills, who introduced me to the Brainysphere bloggers. Tom is a fairly strict narratologist, and I’m a fairly strict ludologist. We’ll be able to learn a lot from each other by editing each others’ work, clashing in the “Versus” column and podcasts, and generally having a good time reviewing games. So please stop by the site in the next few weeks to see my first honest efforts at pure consumer reviewing, and thanks again for being such good friends and readers.
Benchmarking Fiction & Interactive Drama
“Speaking in Djinni” spoke directly to my childhood self: I remember quite clearly, after seeing Disney’s Aladdin, pondering for hours how I would perfectly phrase my three wishes so as to maximize their potential and avoid fatal misunderstanding (I was terrified of the tale of Midas). Harrell relates the difference between human language, which vaguely describes phenomena in highly subjective ways, and the imperative languages of djinni and computers, which literally have the power to create but only produces satisfactory results when worded carefully and in the proper grammar. The argument that follows shows how the peculiarities and affordances of programming languages inform the software and development kits that are built upon them, which in turn constrain and guide the actions allowable within the artifacts constructed with those digital tools. This work can be seen as a direct antecedent of the work of Bogost and Montfort on creating the Platform Studies series for MIT Press.
“Benchmark Fictions” seems to be a relatively early work in comparative media studies; I say this because of its matching of a strong conceptual frame with a disappointing proof-of-concept executed in tedious early digital standbys such as wikis and chatbots. Benchmarking fiction takes its name from benchmarking software, which tests the performance of the computer hardware that runs it through a series of procedural pings. The prime directive is to separate the “content” of a literary work from its original printed or digital “form” in order to learn more about both through a series of procedural translations or adaptations. A major problem here seems to be that the authors quickly write off the suggestion that form and content really can’t be separated, just before they mangle a fairly revelatory short story by attempting a number of crude digital “adaptations” that have little or nothing to do with what or how the story means. They also note how the interaction models of games require novel forms of adaptation, but the best they can muster is a chatterbot that responds to pre-scripted questions with coy hints as to who is The Lady and who is The Tiger.
Mateas and Stern finally answer that final question for the authors of “Benchmark Fictions,” by recognizing the possible antagonism between interactivity and narrative before finding an out in Laurel’s work in interactive drama. Drama is an ideal model because it already involves actively constructing a “story” arc through acting. It also operates on a model of causally connected actions with a tight rising in tension. Mateas takes the Aristotelian hierarchy of drama and substitutes “character” for “user/player,” showing that in an interactive drama that player is the inferred formal cause of all meaning except the action/plot which undergirds the experience. We can see this at work in their Facade, a game that will always progress from introduction, to initial signs of unrest, to drinks, to open conflict, and finally to either a happy resolution or the player’s expulsion from the apartment. Yet within each of these major stages, procedural variation and player choice lead to a number of possible conversations and revelations.
Years before “Benchmark Fictions” had been written, two satisfactory procedural translations of complex source texts had already been undertaken. Chris Crawford left his job at Atari to create Balance of Power for the Apple II. The game allows the player to take on the role of lead negotiator either for the United States or the U.S.S.R.; the goal is to avert elevating tensions leading toward mutually-assured destruction. In fact, this game was Crawford’s interpretation of the memoirs of Henry Kissinger; while working under Nixon, Kissinger speculated that the U.S.S.R. would run out of fiscal security sometime during the 1980’s–the way to “win” the cold war was to survive until that occurred. Nixon and Kissinger embarked on a number of compromises with Soviet authorities that both conservatives and liberals in the U.S. disparaged. Balance of Power communicates this tangible sense of danger and walking-the-tightrope.
Will Wright and his team at Maxis, on the other hand, created one of the first popular citybuilding simulations called SimCity. This game allows players to build basic public utilities such as transportation and power, specify three city zoning types (Residential, Commercial, and Industrial), and maintain growth and the public interest through taxation rates and law enforcement. Wright came up with the idea for the game after studying Forrester’s Urban Dynamics, a book about urban growth and decay cycles containing both reflective analysis and prescriptive suggestions for managing public welfare, sprawl, and re-gentrification. Most infamously, Forrester argued that social spending on underprivileged minorities in the inner city would decrease a city’s worth instead of increasing it; on the other hand, he also had the foresight to predict that the construction of the Interstate system would lead to the neglect of areas in between major highway hubs. Wright attempted to model as much of these principles and arguments in SimCity as he could, including the famous example of encoding a correlation between rising tax rates and social unrest.
Crawford worked alone, rigorously working and reworking his procedures and datasets until he could fit all the information and complexity he desired into the constrained memory that he had available. The programming language and platform had a massive influence on the finished product, so much so that Crawford spent nearly twenty years crafting his own “Storyworld” development kit and scripting language in order to present Balance of Power again. SimCity, on the other hand, has gone through a number of translations and versioning for every new operating system that emerges. The countless number of spin-offs to the series, some more popular than the original thread itself, provides us with an ideal model for how benchmarking fiction should work. These games also show us how the expression of the same idea changes based on the imperative languages and development kits used to create each new iteration.
1) Do you think it’s possible to separate form from content? Or do you think a better experiment toward finding the essence of digital media art would be to construct novel works such as Facade?
2) How convinced are you by the solution of substituting a dramatic arc for narrative? Are Mateas and Laurel overly relying on old Greek paradigms of meaning creation in their insistence of an arc-like structure with tension, climax, and denouement?
3) Benchmarking experiment, following my work in Ian’s project studio: in groups, pitch two different kinds of games (from editorial, documentary, infographic, or puzzle) dealing with the same public issue (traffic, healthcare, the war in Iraq, etc.).
Oh, cool
Look what I came across while ego-surfing myself, from Ian’s CV:
Books:
Bogost, Ian, Simon Ferrari, and Bobby Schweizer. Newsgames: Doing Journalism with Videogames.
Under review. Expected publication 2010.
Book Chapters:
Bogost, Ian, Simon Ferrari, and Bobby Schweizer. “Newsgames.” In News Online: Transformation and
Continuity, edited by Graham Meikle and Guy Redden. London: Palgrave, forthcoming.
News & Games Digest, 8/19-9/10
So I’ve decided to stop double-posting my News Games articles here and on that site, because I realized it was probably annoying for my readers. But I also don’t have the time to write clever sidenotes for each one, because I’m writing like four research papers right now. In any case, this is still just as much an archive as it is a blog, so here’s what you missed if you don’t follow the News Games blog.
Making Stimulus Readable & Playable is about an interactive map of California that helps you track where stimulus money has gone, breaking it down by county and category of each project funded. Made by one of the alumni of our project studio, it attempts the ideal of directed activity through an infographic. Basically he added a quiz to the thing, and the quiz requires you to teach yourself how to use each feature on the map. Pretty cool stuff.
Red Faction Guerrilla: Proceduralizing Terror? takes apart a Kotaku interview with some dude from Volition wherein he claims the game has nothing to do with the Iraq War. Rather, they looked to the struggle of Afghanistan against the Soviet Union for inspiration. Really? Of course it’s about Iraq. In attempting to create a blank slate of a space, they wrote all their own ideas about the conflict onto it. They also allow players to do the same. So you get people crashing airplanes into buildings.
Batman and the Rhetoric of Incarceration is my take on being Batman and the evils of Arkham, including a healthy portion of what it means to practice non-lethal apprehension of criminals and the thin line you walk when you depict the mentally infirm. I don’t really know if Arkham Asylum is an evocative space; it’s pretty drab for the most part. But I suppose you can treat it like it’s the primary antagonist, because it’ll kill you more than any stupid mutated thug with a peashooter will.
Game Bloggers Search Engine I created this nifty thing with Google Custom Search (beta). One of the things I hated about blogging was that I always had to sift through a million archives and ask people stupid questions on Twitter, all because Google was clogged by press releases whenever you searched for a game. This thing only searches independent, non-commercial blogs that avoid printing news and previews. Also, I created tabs that let you parse the search for gameplay, narrative, social issues, etc.
I got in a fight with a Joystiq editor a few days ago, by the way, because I maligned the writing of one of his fellow snarky aggregators. Basically, this dude wrote a “column” on Batman that had a neat three-part structure: 1) you play a role when you play videogames 2) this game’s role is a flying ninja 3) this ninja doesn’t kill people. This wouldn’t be something to comment on if the article didn’t begin with a warning that it was “pedantic” and “verbose,” or if the commenters on the site and a number of other Joystiq editors hadn’t told the guy that he was the best critic on the Internet, a genius, and various other honorifics he didn’t deserve. As long as these morons continue to clog my Google queries and ignore actual game critics, I’m going to make fun of them on my Twitter feed. And I’m going to be mean if they try to talk to me.
Narrative Grammars & Level Design as Narrative
Short Essay: Analyze and compare the narrative grammar of Propp, Greimas, and Aarseth.
From earlier studies in film history and comparative literature, I’ve been familiar with Vladimir Propp’s narrative grammar for quite some time. Propp broke down a selection of Russian folk tales into 31 functions and 7 generic characters, elaborating possible combinations and causal sequences. That Propp was able to create his typology was no surprise to me, because I had already learned about oral mnemonic techniques used in commedia dell’arte and the codification of Platonic dialogue and Homeric epic. Once you understand that oral storytellers memorize a set amount of objects, characters, and events along with a structure for connecting them and then improvising, the revelation that folk stories carried down from an oral tradition follow such a grammar is almost trivial. My major problem with this grammar is that it ignores everything that’s wonderful about folklore—the flourishes and improvisations. In the face of Mark Turner’s ability to create compelling prose building upon otherwise stale research in cognition and early childhood development, Propp’s grammar strikes a dull chord. I am reminded of Janet Murray’s ability to find personal meaning in the rote act of manipulating the falling bricks of Tetris. Perhaps Propp too felt this lacking, reflected in his later decision to study literature instead of linguistics (Wikipedia).
Greimas attempts to bridge the gap between deep linguistic structure and surface narrative structure, explaining “the fact that a narrative enonce is represented at the linguistic level by a whole paragraph” (797). Much of his work goes into breaking down subjects, object, and verbs (which he renames “functions”) into the form of signs. Greimas expands narrative grammar into story grammar when he dichotomizes narrative and non-narrative enonces. A non-narrative enonce builds from a stative verb, or one that addresses being and qualification (800). Toward the end, Greimas conceives of how to represent the literary device of asyndeton (he merely labels it “ellipsis”) as symbolic logic in the form of a series of conditional statements—or a narrative syntagm (804). Greimas understands that a compelling narrative grammar must explain the structural affordances that allow for story grammars and literary devices.
Propp was a Russian formalist, meaning he identified with the goal of separating the artist from the text and then showing how formal elements such as syntax and structure were inherent in how a text means. Greimas, on the other hand, was closely associated with structuralists such as Levi-Strauss. Structuralism attempts to break down a text into signs and the structures by which they’re related. These structures are held as “real,” whereas the signs they order merely refer to the signified objects and events that exist outside the literary artifact. From the introduction to his Cybertext, Espen Aarseth appears to adhere to a variation on post-structuralism—a movement that critiqued such assumptions as the importance of the author’s intent and the inherent “deep meaning” of a text. Poststructuralism originated primarily in France, but I’d argue that Quine’s indeterminacy of translation principle made the first step toward establishing the cultural relativity of the connection between signifier and signified. Poststructualists (according to Wikipedia) break down the distinction between signifier and signified to hold the combination as “real,” but I’d add to this that they recognize that there exists a culturally-specific (and personally-specific) version of each of these constructs.
Aarseth’s model of an ergodic textual machine—placing the “text” inside the vertices “operator,” “verbal sign,” and “medium” (21)—seems to uphold the idea that there is no single meaning to a cybertext; rather, this meaning is generated through the conflict of the vertices. These textual machines constitute localized microcosms of the general poststructuralist mission of critiquing social structures through playful deconstruction. Although Aarseth specifically establishes the textual machine in order to explain cybertexts and not textuality-in-general, I think it also applies back all the way to oral storytelling in a way that Propp was unable to capture. In “Double-Scope Stories,” Mark Turner imagines a dialogue between mother and child to accompany the reading of a bedtime story—it is this dialectic (trialectic?) that Aarseth ends up capturing with the ergodic machine.
Assignment: Write a design sketch for a narrative engine to be coded next week.
For my narrative generation project, I’d like to create flash fiction that describe the varying experiences of moving through discrete zones in a level from a generic FPS game. The initial idea for this comes from an earlier essay I wrote for Michael Nitsche last semester, about reading Left 4 Dead as a team-based rhythm game. In that essay I elaborated on what I saw as a somewhat vague but valid set of ideas from Henry Jenkins and Celia Pearce about “evocative space” and “game design as narrative architecture.” I delineated a few basic binary options for any zone in a level, such as whether it is wide or narrow, linear or multi-linear, light or dark, defense or offense, enclosed or open. Although I didn’t fully flesh the idea out, I grappled with explaining the psychological effects that various combinations of these attributes—and the act of moving between different zones—would have on the player.
Around six months later, I came across this short article by Justin Keverne. In it, he breaks Resistance: Fall of Man down into seven distinct models of gameplay and attempts to show how various combinations of these can elicit aesthetic responses such as “pushing through to teammates” and “camaraderie followed by loneliness.” His explication of this design method lacks the binary structure of mine, but he takes the critical step toward integrating it into the MDA model of starting from an aesthetic goal and working backward to determine the dynamics and mechanics required to elicit it. In the MDA model, level design seems to be a bounded box surrounding and structuring dynamics—it is a conduit through which dynamics can be fed directly into an aesthetic grammar.
Thus, for this project I will attempt to create a narrative generator that asks for desired aesthetic responses (in sequence) as input. The engine will generate an introductory zone based on the binary attributes I delineate, then it will attempt to create a sequence of zones to match the emotional flow described by the user’s input. Another desired feature will be the user’s ability to constrain the choice of binary attributes (such as ordering the machine to only use enclosed and linear spaces). The output of the generator will be in the form of a short story. This is a decidedly structuralist approach to the assignment, but I don’t mean for the output to be the final product of the endeavor; rather, I see the project as being a tool for brainstorming and design-sketching for level designers. I have no idea if my coding abilities will be adequate for this project, but I hope to be able to at least mock up a convincing prototype using PHP and mySQL. Even if I can’t hack the back-end sufficiently, I at least hope to develop the vague notion of level-design-as-narrative into a comprehensive grammar.
Images from Wikipedia, Creative Commons, etc.
