Chungking Espresso

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.

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 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.

In my mind, Infinite Undiscovery is the greatest Japanese RPG of this console generation.

Truth be told, it is the only JRPG I’ve played this generation. Winner by default.

Okay, I lied. I did try Eternal Sonata for about two hours before deciding not to play it anymore: I fought one unwinnable boss encounter, then killed a real boss, and then ran into random encounters with angel goats that could kill me in two hits. I realized I needed to grind a few levels to continue, and I thought to myself: “They still do this shit?” Unwinnable bosses are lame, because they encourage you to waste your time (and mega-elixirs) trying to win. Grinding is lame, because it’s a sign of exploitative, lazy pacing. Infinite Undiscovery has no unwinnable boss encounters, no need for farming or grinding, and no fast travel. I’ve written about fast travel before—I don’t think it’s an unalloyed evil, but (following Forrester’s description of the negative effects of an interstate system in Urban Dynamics) I hold that it encourages lax world design and “game sprawl.” For proof, play Morrowind and Oblivion back-to-back.

Infinite Undiscovery features a tightly designed world map with numerous paths between key areas and a healthy dose of backtracking. Backtracking can be done well—in Dead Space, for instance, it worked because new enemies and hazards were added whenever the player had to pass back through a space—but usually it’s done poorly (for instance, I don’t fancy how Metroid Prime handles it). Infinite Undiscovery handles backtracking passingly, but they blow it in the end with this miserable, albeit entirely optional, “Seraphic Gate” dungeon that forces you to run back through a masochore mashup of most of the maps from the actual game on brutally-hard mode… with only one save point. My favorite ancillary design choice for this game is how the menu is implemented. When players enter a menu, the game doesn’t pause itself. Instead, the player’s party forms a circle and sits cross-legged as if around a fire. In this state they are vulnerable to surprise attack, but as this is a hack-and-slash RPG you can almost always see enemies coming. The best part about this is that you can craft things while sitting in the menu; a cook character can heat up a kettle inside the party’s circle, and then the party can share the benefits of whatever food items you create with each other. Little touches of social realism like this are often sorely lacking in Japanese RPGs.

Here is where I’m going to do something I don’t usually do: a strictly narratological analysis. Despite most accounts (including those of the creators), the title of the game actually does make sense; unfortunately, the meaning can’t be explained without giving away the secret of the connection between the game’s two protagonists, Capell and Sigmund. This is where you stop reading if you care about spoilers.

One of my running questions throughout the game was: “Is this a game about privilege—an escapist fantasy for the oppressed?” Characters called “the unblessed” are chastised and evicted from major cities simply from a coincidence of their birth—they were born during a new moon and thus did not receive a mystical brand called a lunaglyph from the god Veros, who watches over the world from his palace on the moon. The rulers of each city-state in Infinite Undiscovery are called Aristos, men and women who have shuffled off their mortal coil and been resurrected as avatars of Veros’ lunar energy. “Meags,” or humans with lunaglyphs who aren’t worthy of ascending to the Aristo-cracy, receive gifts such as they ability to light dark spaces but are vulnerable to becoming “vermified.” The moon on which Veros lives has been chained to the planet by a mysterious cult called the Order of Chains, and as the moon draws nearer it begins emitting lunar rain. Lunar rain feeds the energy of the lunaglyph inside a meags’ body, and as lunar energy accrues within them they will either die (if they are weak) or become insane, invisible monsters (if they are your party members). Only the unblessed can see Vermiforms, but only meags can hurt them.

As it turns out, Veros is in fact an evil god on par with FFVII’s Jenova: the chains are of his own creation, and he seeks to collide with the planet in order to destroy it, thus freeing himself from servitude as its patron deity. Meags are incapable of damaging a chain, as both they and it are imbued with lunar energy. Only an unblessed hero, an unlikely eventuality due to their chastisement and poverty, has the potential to free the world from Veros’ influence. As it turns out, Capell and Sigmund “the Liberator” are two such unblessed heroes.

The relationship between Capell and Sigmund, a secret unraveled near the end of the game, raises a more pressing question: “Is this The Double Life of Veronique: The Videogame?” For those unfamiliar with Krzysztof Kieslowski’s work, The Double Life of Veronique is one of the Polish master’s later films. It precedes Three Colors (his trilogy on the values of the French Revolution) and follows closely on the heels of The Decalogue (a Polish television miniseries on the Ten Commandments and contemporary life). These films were all scored by the Polish composer Zbigniew Preisner. Preisner’s music is important in creating the oppresive atmosphere in all three of the works, but in Three Colors: Blue and Veronique it is absolutely vital, because these films are both about musicians. Wikipedia summarizes the plot of the Veronique much better than I ever could, so:

The film follows the lives of a young woman first in Poland, Weronika, and then a young woman in France, Véronique, both played by Irène Jacob. Though unrelated, the two appear identical, share many personality traits, and seem to be aware of each other on some level, as if they are doppelgangers, but except for a brief glimpse through a bus window in Krakow, they never meet. After Weronika sacrifices everything in the pursuit of a singing career, Véronique abandons her own similar goal because of poor health and attempts to find an independent course for her life, while becoming involved with a manipulative man who is fascinated by clues to her double nature. The man is a puppeteer and maker of marionettes, helping raise the questions that are central to the film: is there such a thing as free will, or is it up to a creator of some kind, or is it just a matter of chance that one acts and thinks as one does?

Capell and Sigmund appear physically identical, they are both unblessed, they are the same age, and they are both skilled flautists. Throughout the game you constantly wonder about the secret origins of Capell’s birth and subsequent orphanage. Capell is something of a layabout; because of extensive bullying by meags early in his life, he has no ambitions. He seems content to play the part of a penniless, wandering musician. Sigmund, on the other hand, is “the Liberator”; he has raised an army tasked with the goal of destroying the chains and the mysterious Order behind their creation. He has forsaken his musical abilities and pursued an independent course for his life (much like Veronique), but the process of destroying the chains has begun to weaken his body (again, much like Veronique). Capell and Sigmund are separated by combat prowess and the pitch of their voices. Although physically weaker, Capell can use the power of his flute to weave a few somewhat useful (though largely neglected) magical auras. A major turning point in the game comes when Sigmund dies and Capell takes on his mantle; then, later, Capell’s voice grows cold and deeper following a tragedy, and he begins developing the battle moves that only Sigmund once possessed.

The intuitive answer to the connection between Capell and Sigmund would be that the two are twin brothers separated at birth, but, as it turns out, Sigmund is actually Capell’s father. Sigmund was once an Aristo, the king of a fallen city-state that the Order of Chains now claim as their home. His former life essentially ended when his wife gave birth to Capell under a new moon: two Aristos had just given birth to an unblessed. The queen committed suicide for shame, they sent the baby away to die in the wilderness, and Sigmund sought to free himself from his bondage to the cruel lunar god. Sigmund underwent a ritual to remove the lunar energy from his body, requiring a corporeal regression to the state he was at the moment he first received a lunaglyph: he became a baby again (hence the name Infinite Undiscovery), the same age as his estranged son.

Thus, the god Veros becomes an inverse of Veronique’s puppeteer boyfriend. Sigmund commits the greatest ontological act of free will by divorcing himself from this divinity. Kieslowski leaves the connection between his protagonists to a metaphysical riddle about our supposed uniqueness as individual people, while the creators of Infinite Undiscovery make the connection between its doppelgangers literal through their narrative twist of reincarnation. My question for you is: how could the creators of this game not have drawn inspiration from that film?

I haven’t blogged in awhile, so I’m going to keep this one short (if I spend myself, then I won’t be able to get back into the swing of things). This summer I’ve been writing chapters for a book with Ian Bogost and Bobby Schweizer, so much of the pleasure of writing long-ass blog posts that only about four people read had diminished. A new semester begins in a few weeks, and I’m hoping that my blogging will increase. Going to try to keep these at a consumable 1k-word hard cap. I’ve got notes for about ten posts on the games I’ve played throughout the summer, so this probably won’t be one of those things where somebody says they’re going to start blogging again and then peaces out for another month before publishing anything. If I’ve stayed in your blogroll throughout this absence: many thanks, my friend.

In an hour or two I’ll finish Mothership Zeta and clear all the Fallout 3 DLC off of my meagre 20GB hard drive forever–a moment nine months in the making. I’d been meaning to write about the DLC packs as they came along (I played them all within a day of their release), but for some reason I never felt inspired enough to do so. Because they’re so short, mainstream reviewers really had to stretch themselves to write a thorough consumer report; thus, they managed to say most of what I wanted to say, and I don’t like contributing nothing to a conversation. Today I finally realized my angle; I’m going to cover something that doesn’t often come up when talking about what’s good about Fallout 3: its gunplay.

Sometime in the middle of Broken Steel (the third of the DLC releases, upping the level cap to 30 and extending the main storyline ad infinitum), I stopped caring about Fallout 3. At this point I had tens of thousands of caps, enough ammo to run around the virtual world shooting off any gun I cared to constantly, 300 stimpacks, maxed out skills, and  a locker full of so many copies of every weapon that I could repair anything to one-hundred percent at any time. To be sure, the game started off difficult–running through labyrinthine decrepit halls disarming booby traps, scrounging for shotgun shells, nearly dying to the assault fire rounds of Raiders and Super Mutants; however, at this time even upping the difficulty to “Very Hard” just means a few more trivially easy headshots to perform and a few more spiked veins to pump my body up with stimpacks.

As far as story and thematic level design go, the DLC for Fallout 3 progress in quality to pitch perfection. The Pitt and Point Lookout added some of the most compelling quests since Oasis and Tenpenny Tower, and I’d be lying to you if I said that I haven’t always wanted to get abducted by aliens so that I could break out of my cell and bludgeon them to death in a sprawling steampunk UFO (Mothership Zeta). But I reached a moment of clarity when the guardian drones started lobbing exploding balls of energy at me, almost killing me for the first time in about 6 hours of playtime in the game world: Fallout 3, a game where (despite everything else that’s lovely about the game) the primary mechanic is shooting, lacks a necessary variety of projectiles.

There are six threats in the game: bullets (including lasers), melee (including flamers), missiles, mines, grenades, and radiation. Usually you’re only confronted by 2-3 of these at a time, because when a fourth is introduced it becomes almost too much for the average player to manage. Combat-with-words was available in a few quests (Tenpenny Tower, for one), but it’s not as extensive as in the Bioware’s KotOR titles. I realized that the only time that I’d been thrilled by the game since I’d hit level 20 was when it hit me with explosives and snipers. Some of the best battles of Point Lookout and Broken Steel come when you accidentally trigger waves of Feral Reavers in the graveyard and Presidential subway (respectively), because the Reavers lob exploding balls of radioactive goo at you. In the main Wastes, I always loved passing by substation towers, because often there were raiders manning the scaffolding with missile launchers and sniper rifles that would end me if I didn’t creep by or pick them off one by one from a distance.

The optimal moments from the DLC took into account the fact that by the endgame you were so decked out in gear that escalating enemy health and damage wouldn’t provide enough of a challenge, so it introduced novel approaches to some of the six threats listed above or restricted your equipment (or both). For this reason I’m going to make a somewhat controversial (not really the word for it) claim: Operation Anchorage is the best DLC for the game.

Admittedly, the greatest weaknesses of OA are its length and its story. That it was the first Bethsoft expansion pack after Oblivion’s incredible Shivering Isles (it was more engaging than the main quest of the original game, featured varied visuals and memorable characters, and included some nominal alignment choices) didn’t help OA’s case at all. The limited equipment enforced by the training simulation, which many complained of, was a boon for me: once again it was somewhat difficult to kill, like in the early stages of the game. Crawling through the cliffside tunnel complex with the mortars blasting was the most physically visceral experience provided by Fallout 3, and the crackling erasure of enemies when they died is exactly what you want to see when you’re playing a virtual reality within a virtual world.

The Chinese stealth soldiers, with their swords and sniper rifles, were a formidable opponent, and it was a wonderful payoff when you finally claimed their armor at the end of the simulation. Best of all was the tactical combat section, adding a mechanic unseen throughout the rest of the game: planning out your team was fun and important, because the Chinese snipers and flying droids presented a tangible threat to you as you crawled through the final trenches toward the dampening field generator. The Pitt–featuring moral ambiguity, a Wicker Man, and the same limiting of equipment and slow progression toward more powerful gear–is arguably the second best of the DLC packs from this perspective. Which of the DLC was your favorite?

Morrowind remains the best Bethsoft title, by the way; I’ll argue that one out in the comments section if you like.

Today we take a slight detour from our series on editorial games to celebrate an editorial machinima of exceptional quality, produced by everyone’s favorite editorial game creator: La Molleindustria’s Paolo Pedercini. Simultaneously posted on Bogost’s News Games blog.

It isn’t easy writing about thinking, talking, or writing about machinima. One of my professors (Michael Nitsche, who I just found out is heavily cited on the Wikipedia entry on the subject) is hopelessly obsessed with augmented reality and digital performance, so last semester he dragged us through the “serious” machinima canon in an effort to inspire us into creating cinematic experiences within the 3D prototype worlds we were creating. I can honestly say that I don’t remember a single one of them, except perhaps the fact that many featured Half Life 2’s G-Man. Comedy is there, as evidenced by the broad popularity and honing of craft achieved by Rooster Teeth’s Red vs. Blue, but I’ve yet to see a dramatic or serious piece that worked for me.

I admit that I’m being a snob about this—I can’t quite get past the fact of my film history and video editing education, and I know I’m judging these works unfairly by cinematic standards. Even when they’re made by people who are serious about pushing what’s possible with the form, they’re not made by filmmakers—they’re made by videogame fans with their own goals, standards, conventions, and communities. (Author’s Note: This is me prodding you to write about machinima if you care about gamer-based videogame interpretations, by the way.) Sometimes, they’re made by artists who already have the skills to make mods and games of their own, yet choose to express themselves in machinima form. This work is a vital counterpoint to the fan-based production that drives the bulk of machinima development (we must attack the middle-brow from both above and below, as they say).

Paolo Pedercini, the mind behind the anti-entertainment videogame cooperative La Molleindustria, recently revamped his brawler about religious hatred, Faith Fighter, to accommodate complaints from numerous Islamic organizations and news media companies. The result was Faith Fighter 2, a parodic appropriation of Gonzalo Frasca’s “commemoration mechanic” from Madrid: click on numerous gods from the first game to feed them with love and prevent their memories from fading away. When you fail, you’re treated to the claim that many made against Paolo himself: “Game Over: You failed to respect a religion, and now the world is a total mess!” Contrary to popular belief, it was in fact possible to “win” Madrid by filling up a meter in the bottom of the screen. It may be possible to keep a game of Faith Fighter 2 going indefinitely (I certainly can’t click fast enough to do so), but it doesn’t appear to have an end. At some point the player must slow down or give up, prompting the Game Over. This is clearly a self-deprecating rhetoric of failure from Paolo: when you deal with religion, you’re going to “lose” no matter what you do.

I applaud Pedercini’s ability to swiftly respond to the demands made of him with such intertextual snark, but I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t eagerly awaiting a legitimate follow-up to his Oiligarchy, which I see as his most significant work to date (largely because of the winning condition he snuck in). Last week I revisited his website to play some of his games that I’d missed (including an Italian-language “propaganda game” called Embrioni in fuga made before a national referendum on embryonic stem cell research… it is a Lemmings-like that I’ll examine in future discussions of the “editorial line” in games), and I was surprised to find out what he’d been working on lately: two videos and an installation!

The first video is an incisive, wistful, and often beautiful look at urban ecology and Craigslist’s “missed connections.” I love everything about it except the robotic voices used for reading the original Craigslistings in voiceover (which, if Paolo stumbles upon this, I’d enjoy reading the explanation for). The installation piece, called The 21st Century Home, appears to be a black-lit tarpolin wigwam zig-zagged with neon tape in order to replicate the aesthetics of Tron. Visitors (or players) stumble around in the “real virtuality” to another roboticized voice spewing pop philosophy about our transhumanist digital future. I think the robot voice works much better in this one, but I can’t really judge it all without experiencing it firsthand. Finally, to the subject of this article, the second video is (as you probably guessed by now) a machinima.

Welcome to the desert of the real isn’t the first politically-charged machinima; however, it is probably the first one to compliment an identically-titled collection of essays by Slavoj Zizek. Zizek named his seminal essay on the mainstream US reaction to September 11th after a quote from Morpheus about the nature of The Matrix, which (of course) further referenced the Simulacres et Simulation of Baudrillard. Here Paolo filters his commentary on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars through another two layers of simulacra: a videogame, and the machinima filmed within that game. The subject of the work is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It is a “counter-propaganda” video, recorded within the America’s Army wargame/military recruiting tool.

I know that I’m assessing a new form with an outmoded vocabulary, but I can conceive of no greater praise than to say that this 6-minute machinima feels like a distillation of Errol Morris’s Fog of War and Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (one of the greatest films of all time).  Spoilers follow.

An American soldier crawls forward over a dune with a sniper rifle (in third person perspective). We cut to a first-person point-of-view through the rifle’s sight, following an enemy combatant lazily traversing a ridge. Just when you think the protagonist (who is you, now) isn’t going to fire, a loud crack rings out and the screen fades to black. Returning to third-person, the protagonist leaves his rifle laying in the sand. After this follows a hallucinatory trek through the desert intercut by a series of questions, in text form, from the handbook on self-testing for PTSD in American veterans.

Call-and-response is a popular mechanic in documentary film: the earliest example I can remember of this sort is the 1968 film Inquiring Nuns, in which two nuns walked the streets of Chicago asking people, “Are you happy?” Pedercini replaces the call portion of the call-and-response with those from the PTSD checklist, and he replaces the response with a segment of the aimless trek through the desert.  He essentially subverts the rhetorical query (“Are you happy?”)—to a viewer who could either be a gamer or a veteran—with a suggestive one: “You aren’t happy, are you?” I can personally relate to the question pictured below, having suffered for years now from increasingly violent nightmares that force me to wake up suffering from heavy breathing and chest pain (of course, I don’t think that Paolo is saying these questions apply equally to gamers, or that all gamers endure the same dreams that I do). One of the questions “Feeling emotionally numb and incapable of loving feelings?” reminds me of the problem of Everquest Divorces.

Remember that Molleindustria’s stated goal is to subvert the entertainment industry’s influence on the videogame medium. This is a very Zizekian mission in itself—the scabrous philosopher holds that dominant ideology completely structures the subject even in an era when we’re increasingly cynical and aware of its functioning. One could argue that a machinima about PTSD is irrelevant by now, that we’ve all known about it for years now. But Pedercini asks us to recognize an analogous condition: gamers also suffer from a kind of PTSD, a mental dulling following prolonged exposure to videogames that encourage violence without reflection. The America’s Army games, in which the mission is never justified nor questioned and everyone plays “the good guy” (American troops) in various roles, are an obviously egregious contributor to this ludic ideology (as detailed in Bogost’s Persuasive Games and Halter’s From Sun Tzu to XBOX).

Fog of War isn’t an exact match for how the intertitles work in Welcome, but I feel that they are relatively close in spirit and form. Morris’s work is composed of a series of lessons (as opposed to questions) from former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, focusing on what he has learned after a lifetime of studying and waging war. McNamara’s final lesson from his original eleven on the Vietnam War is as follows:

“We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions … At times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.”

This in fact roughly equates with the message of Zizek’s writing on post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy: America must recognize its cultural imperialism and acknowledge that the choices and solutions we’ve established to the event thus far are completely reactionary, obscuring the reality of the situation and the way out. It’s possible that Paolo is saying something similar about mainstream games and their solutions to the demands to “grow up” from academics and highfalutin critics. On the one hand we get “tactical shooters” that replicate the immediate physical repercussions of gunfighting while still ignoring other consequences and assumptions. On the other, we could argue that something like Bioshock attempts to reflect on the nature of violence through the form of the shooter, but we’d be lying to ourselves if we asserted that the game didn’t end up valorizing it in the end—plasmids don’t provide ways around direct conflict, but different flavors of mutual slaughter. Neither tactical nor pseudo-philosophical violence is the answer to the goal of making games more serious, honest, mature, artful, etc. As the original Faith Fighter argues, violence as a primary mechanic must be subverted instead of “improved.”

Welcome to the desert of the real reminds me of Taste of Cherry mostly because of its minimalism, spare color palette, meandering non-narrative, and extreme take length (which are typical of many of his films). Most machinima adhere to what we would identify as a postmodern editing style of incredibly short takes: taking a look at a random selection of works on Machinima.com, I clocked an average take length of 2 seconds. Red vs. Blue, having been refined and developed over time, has a longer average at around 5 seconds. Welcome features an 11-second average shot length, truly the machinima equivalent of the extremely long take practiced by Kiarostami (at least by current standards). The takes pulse like a cardiogram: they begin at around 8 seconds, reach a crescendo of over 20 seconds just prior to an intertitle, and then drop back down.

Taste of Cherry deals with problem of suicide in the Muslim world. Suicide is incredibly taboo in predominately Muslim countries, especially those with theocracies (Kiarostami is Iranian). Having decided to take his life, the protagonist (Mr. Badii) of Taste of Cherry wanders the dusty landscape for roughly two hours trying to find someone to cover his body after he dies. Badii has crossed a religious Rubicon with his decision, leaving him in a walking Purgatory between life and death. A similar problem confronts the protagonist of Welcome—once a soldier has killed for her country, what is the rest of her life going to be like? Once a gamer decides to put the gun (controller) down, what is there to think, say, or do? Taste of Cherry finishes with a short meta-documentary on the filmmaking process cued to Louis Armstrong’s Saint James Infirmary Blues, while many veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars find themselves dealing with mental and physical health issues by the end of their tours of duty.

I’m not saying the experiences of war and war gaming are the same, only that they are essentially subject to the same dominant ideologies. Once you’ve begun to combat the structuring of your subject, how long will it be before you find a new social frame to latch onto? “What comes next” is the nagging question La Molleindustria continually strives to answer for our medium.

Welcome to the desert of the real ends where David Byrne’s True Stories begins: a frame split like a Rothko painting, the horizon line perfectly dividing ground and sky. Such a shot connotes new beginnings and infinite uncertainty for the future. I’m left with one lingering question: Pedercini uses the PTSD checklist as a cinematic and  metaphorical framework, but would we actually want to try to make a videogame that emulated a light form of PTSD in the player? How would we go about doing this? Would it be ethical to do so, simply to make a political point or allow empathic access to the mindset of the mentally damaged veteran? I wonder if these are questions Paolo asked himself before deciding to create a machinima instead.

Continuing the thread on editorial games from my history, part one. Published simultaneously for Bogost’s News Games blog.

Author’s note: While I was finishing up this piece, Ian forwarded me an upcoming DiGRA paper by Michael Mateas and Mike Treanor of UC Santa Cruz on *roughly* the same subject (though they focus much more on further defining the shared qualities of both genres). It thus became difficult to round off the article without seeing almost every claim as an argument made against their position. I’m not going to reply directly to any of their assertions, nor am I going to include any further insights into the subject that I may have gleaned from reading their piece. When their paper is presented at DiGRA, I hope you’ll take the opportunity to contrast my definitional stance with theirs. We will be incorporating and replying to their article directly, and in long form, much later on down the road. Thanks for reading!

The line between “newsgame” and “editorial game” is fuzzy no matter how you slice it. Basically, our suggestion is that most games called “newsgames” don’t have the same intentions or goals as traditional reporting, or “the news,” but rather those of the op-ed piece: to persuade; therefore, we should label these digital opinion pieces as “editorial” rather than “news.” Most people are probably inclined to ignore the possible distinction, because there doesn’t seem to be enough proof that we need one in the first place (we can’t exactly place a finger on what a “properly journalistic” newsgame would look like, as Paolo Pedercini has pointed out to us before). By the end we will (hopefully) have a slightly better understanding of the relationship between editorial and newsmaking, as well as a firmer grasp on how procedural rhetoric is used in editorial games.

Miguel Sicart provides a constraining set of attributes in our quest to find exact definitions for these terms. He claims that newsgames, like the news, should be “timely” and “ephemeral.” First we’ll address timeliness. Gonzalo Frasca was able to produce Madrid within 48 hours after the train bombings, and he made Kabul Kaboom within a few hours on an airplane trip. There’s also the example of Raid Gaza! that Ian recently wrote about, released only a few days after Israel’s most recent offensive. But in the same article, Ian shares his experience that it personally takes him at least two weeks to craft a quality newsgame, such as those he created for the Arcade Wire series. I’ve already hinted that I see the Arcade Wire games as more editorial than news (for obvious reasons, including the fact that they only sometime comment directly on a news event).

Perhaps one distinction between news and editorial game is that the latter isn’t bound by Sicart’s strict criterion of timeliness? Simplistic opinion pieces are easy to craft directly in the wake of a news event, but a more refined editorial stance requires time to develop and be iterated upon (much like a videogame). We could then see news and editorial games as developing along the rough timeline that Alberto Cairo provides for his infographics workflow: at first the important thing is to present all the facts to the reader (a newsgame proper), and over time more information is added and synthesized (the editorial game). In this light, we can see quickly-produced editorial games such as Hothead Zidane as strange, partially developed hybrids of the two genres: the game presents us with the basic fact of the headbutt and the red card (the news), as well as providing fleeting, unsubtle commentary on the shame that Zidane should be feeling for his actions (the editorial).

Moving along, Frasca provides us with his own rough definition for the genre whose name he coined himself in a paper he presented to Vodafone. Frasca sees newsgames more as an extension of the editorial cartoon than the written op-ed; therefore, he cites the attractive and satirical flash games by Molleindustria as the pinnacle of the genre. Political cartoons hold a special place in Gonzalo’s heart, because the cartoons in French textbooks were the only thing that made secondary public school education tolerable for him. Just as public school takes itself “too seriously,” Frasca asserts that print journalism is too stolid for a new generation of readers—he posits this as one of the primary insights that led to the success of The Daily Show. This isn’t to say that the news isn’t serious business, but rather an indictment of a monolithic institution that has largely failed in adapting to contemporary trends in media distribution and tastes—largely because of what many perceive as its steadfast belief that what has worked in the past (or what has developed gravity through shared values over time) should continue to function unchanged into the future.

In Persuasive Games, Ian discusses the difference between “visual rhetoric” and “procedural rhetoric.” Procedural rhetoric is basically how a designer/programmer can use computational processes and tools to express an idea or persuade others. Comics are not procedural, so they fall wholly within the sphere of visual rhetoric – the study of how images persuade or express. Neither one of these rhetorics is inherently “stronger” than the other, but they do function differently enough for us to question the indiscriminate equation of political comics and newsgames. (Author’s note: This is exactly where the Mateas and Treanor piece shines most—it lays the groundwork for how we can break down editorial cartoons and adapt their thematic qualities and goals into procedural expression.) Right now we are reading a few books on the subject, which we will return to in the future once we understand thoroughly. For now, our biggest takeaway from Frasca’s excitement about the future of the genre (and the medium as a whole) is that procedural representation has the potential to speak directly to contemporary media consumers without taking itself too seriously—both newsgames and editorial games have the ability to tackle serious and disturbing issues playfully.

Returning to Sicart, I believe there’s reason to disagree with his criterion of ephemerality—the notion that a newsgame should be thrown away as easily as an article on the same subject. For instance, a newspaper story with the headline, “Tactical Missiles Strike Hospital”—essentially covering the same topic as September 12th—isn’t an artifact that one keeps around. September 12th, on the other hand, is a game that can be played time and again and used to reflect on future events. So before Raid Gaza! came out, I sat and watched the news of Israel’s latest offensive while playing September 12th. Something about putting the argument and the event into code has the chance to make it timeless. This appears to be another point at which we can distinguish editorial games and newsgames—perhaps a newsgame can be thrown out (or recycled, if we take one of Bartle’s suggestions to heart) with the paper, but an editorial bears numerous readings and reflections over time. In this way, we see that a good editorial game shares almost as much with documentary games such as JFK Reloaded as they do with quickly produced, ultra-shortform newsgames.

Both Sicart and Frasca end up asserting that objectivity is not an explicit goal of what they call a newsgame (remember that, according to R+K, striving for objectivity is a fundamental tenant of journalism). For Frasca this seems to just be a working, practical method: newsgame creators care enough about on issue (read, they have a strong enough opinion about it) to spend their time working on these comparatively unprofitable ventures in order to both persuade/express and to develop the burgeoning genre. Sicart is considerably more specific in his explanation, and it stands to take a close look at his view of the “editorial line” in a game. For him, what the newsgame designer chooses to include and exclude determines the game’s editorial line. Bias is taken for granted in Frasca’s chosen model of the editorial cartoon, which never claims objectivity; however, in Sicart’s model—where the newsgame equates roughly to a news story—this privileging of bias conflates the functions of the “factual” news story and the op-ed, thus confusing possible distinctions between editorial games and newsgames.

What does it mean when Miguel Sicart says that “the editorial line” of a game is determined by what is included and excluded? It’s easy to state this, but somewhat harder to understand exactly how to design around the idea. Going back past Bogost’s explication of procedural rhetoric in Persuasive Games, we can look to what he writes in Unit Operations: simulation games are already about such a selection process of inclusion and exclusion.

When creating a simulation game, as opposed to an actual useable scientific model, one must understand that not every fact or possibility can be included when procedurally modeling a system or event. Instead of hard-coding each important aspect, the game programmer crafts algorithms that will, when generalized, create an impression of the system one hopes to represent. Specifics can be derived by tweaking the algorithms until the two systems match up even closer, but there will always be a “simulation gap” between the real system and the game system.

The goal of an editorial game creator would thus be to narrow the simulation gap as much as possible in order to convey their “line” on the issue, while a newsgame creator would strive to close the simulation gap in such a way that as little bias sneaks through as possible (for Sicart asserts that newsgames “do not persuade” or have “political interests”). For an example, let’s take a look at Frasca’s September 12th. The game generally works well as a political game, because it effectively delivers its argument against “tactical” bombing; however, as an editorial game one can see a gap in Frasca’s line. Essentially, one could read it as a call to military invasion—bombing creates more terrorists, and they’re not going away on their own, so a ground strike seems called-for. An admittedly unfair reductio ad absurdum such as this shows the difficulty in designing around the idea of exclusion and inclusion.

Perhaps the key for an editorial game is to be as blatantly one-sided as possible? In the case of Raid Gaza!, almost everything is excluded: Palestinian terrorists’ reasons for shooting missiles at settlements and the motivations of rogue Israeli settlers—two of the many important problems ImpactGame’s Peacemaker attempts to explore—are not addressed at all. All that the player understands by the end of the experience is that Israel is using undue force and that the United States will seemingly never cease military and fiscal support for their efforts. The game carefully picks its fight and then plumbs the depths of possible, relevant consequences.

In either case, the “simulation fever” that Bogost warns us about in Unit Operations is just as likely to strike the players of newsgames and editorial games as it is the players of a work such as Sim City. For instance, the simulation gap between what I saw as actual McDonald’s business practices and the hilarious hyperbole of Molleindustria led to my somewhat negative reflections on playing the game. While it is by no means a goal to please everybody, another distinct line between newsgames and editorial games seems to be the level of inclusiveness sought (and earned) by the designer. News strives to present information as objectively as possible in order to reach the widest possible audience, while editorial refines its scope in order to persuade or inflame.

Thus, we’ve established three possible distinctions between newsgames and editorial games: limitations of timeliness, ephemerality, and the simulation gap (and the different ways to close it). I recognize that I’ve covered and justified these in unequal amounts, and I hope that if you have any detracting comments you’ll present them in a constructive manner so that we might move forward with more rigorous definitions in the future. Next time we’ll return to our history of the editorial game with an examination of the Arcade Wire series. Thanks for reading.

“You were too strong to change, Sonic,” says Chip—an annoying side character who is actually half of God Itself—near the end of Sonic Unleashed, in regard to the reason that Sonic alone maintains his wits after being infected by God’s nasty half, Dark Gaia. Perhaps the wording of the statement is simply a matter of coincidence and localization, but it seems (to me) to be kind words to a dying hero from his creators. Most people think Sonic wasn’t strong enough; they say he did change, and for the worse.

Sonic Unleashed isn’t a horrible game. I admit that I picked it up from the clearance bin at Target (a fairly reliable place to get cheap unused games, by the way) for all of twelve dollars, so it was easy to find pleasure in such a flawed piece of work. Rather, I should say “easier”: the first few hours of the game are so filled with bothersome cut scenes and text-box dialogue that I almost shelved it for a rainier day. I picked it up primarily because I hadn’t played a Sonic game since Sonic 3 (same reason I picked up Tomb Raider Underworld). Generally I enjoy these late entries in obviously decaying IPs, simply because I’ve played so few of them. I was really excited to see what Sonic (even bad Sonic) was like in 3D—and to be honest, the experience didn’t entirely disappoint (though it did feature a sharp learning curve).

Sonic Unleashed isn’t horrible in the same way that Wong Kar Wai’s 2046 isn’t horrible. They’re both eye candy, they’re both over-produced and somewhat stretched in the middle, and they’re both double-sequels. What I mean to say is that a lot of people didn’t understand what the Hell was going on in 2046, because very few critics made it clear that the movie was not only a sequel to In the Mood for Love but also to the short, cryptic coda at the end of Days of Being Wild (as well as featuring a minor female character from the latter film). The minute I started playing a Werehog stage in Unleashed, I realized that the game was not only an entry in the Sonic series but also a spiritual successor of Team Sonic’s Ristar. It took some digging, but I did find one or two mainstream game reviewers (and a good number of Sega loyalists) who picked up on this fact.

I didn’t own a Sega Genesis (Master System) when I was younger. I got an NES when I was two years old (the year it was released in America), and I only played Genesis games (mostly Sonic 1 & 2) at friends’ houses or when on vacation—people always keep a dusty Sega Genesis in their rental beach home, have you ever noticed that? If you’re a Sega loyalist: I was your enemy during the first console wars, and Sonic isn’t sacred to me… which may have something to do with why I didn’t completely hate Unleashed. In any case, what this all means is that I actually didn’t play Ristar until a few months ago.

Somehow I also managed to miss every Sega Omnibus retail disc sold over the years since the death of the Dreamcast (I know, I know—it lives on). Hoping to remedy this fact, I bought Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection the day it came out. I have to admit that I didn’t have a wonderful time with the disc. Old games really are only fun if you played them when they were relevant—I suppose I buy the argument that a scholar should be able to analyze them and appreciate them historically and for their design innovations (and I did), but really we’re talking about a bunch of IPs that made tiny improvements in graphics and hit detection (for projectiles, punches, or axe swings) over the course of a decade. Three games (besides early Sonic) stood out for me as particularly well-designed, making the experience of playing over 30 of them completely worthwhile: Vector Man, Comix Zone, and Ristar.

I’m only going to talk about Ristar, because you probably all played Vector Man back in the day. And you owe it to yourselves to experience Comix Zone on your own when it gets its own XBL release in a few months. Ristar was this pseudo-3D starman (not like Earthbound or Ziggy Stardust, like a star with arms and legs and big, stupid eyes) who could do one thing: stretch out his arms. He could stretch them out to punch something, to grab ledges and poles, and to grab dudes to pull them close for a headbutt. I know it sounds really lame, but the game succeeds for me on multiple levels (and is one of the few smooth, enjoyable Genesis games by contemporary playability standards): hit detection had been perfected for both combat and platforming, every new “world” had a unique theme (forest, water, fire, ice, etc.), and the level design eschews repetition (like Braid claims to).

Since Ristar exists in 2D, his arms only stretch forward. As far as Sonic Unleashed is concerned, the B and Y buttons (during Werehog stages) come directly from Ristar. The B button stretches Sonic’s arms to grab ledges and pick up baddies, while the Y button always punches forward in a straight line (just like Ristar). A lot of reviewers saw Unleashed as a weak, children’s version of God of War, because the X button causes Werehog Sonic to swing his floppy arms around in a circular motion a la Kratos. While the fairly robust RPG-lite features and combo system contribute to viewing the game as a God of War knock-off, it ignores the considerable influence of Ristar on combat and platforming.

I would also add that the world design is significantly Ristar: while Sonic games often use thematic locations (green hills, casinos, factories… I need a better word), Ristar travels between elementally different environments. The world of Sonic Unleashed is a thinly veiled version of our own planet (as Yahtzee comically notes), with the only notable major difference being that the Middle East has been placed on top of the United States (where Canada belongs). Because each “zone” represents a different well-known country, the levels are either Sonic-type thematic tropes (such as the Windmills of Apotos) or Ristar-style elemental worlds (the Arid Sands and North Pole locations). In general I agree that the game relies a bit too much on an open-world structure that isn’t filled with enough interesting people (to follow Gaynor’s immersion model), but Team Sonic does attempt to hammer in a message of world harmony through the frequent and visible traveling of NPCs between different cities and the appreciation of world food culture—and, besides Chip explicitly mentioning it at the end, they do manage to pull it off with some subtlety.

I initially hated the Day stages because of the trial-and-error flow of progress, but by the end I really appreciated the speed and multi-linear complexity of the things. The transitions between 2D and 3D felt natural, and once you’d memorized a level it became really enjoyable to do speed runs (that’s the whole point of a Sonic game, right?). My only caveat here is that there wasn’t nearly enough verticality and backtracking in these stages to liken them to my favorite locations from Sonic 2 (the best of the series in my mind). Night stages started out as entertaining—I’m quite good at hack-and-slash games, so they’ve come to be my videogame guilty pleasure over the years—but quickly faded into monotony as Werehog Sonic became powerful enough to plow through every enemy with a powered-up forward punch. Adept blocking and rolling are what separate the men from the boys (and the women from the girls) when it comes to games like Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden, but I don’t think I used the block a single time during Sonic Unleashed. This leads me to my final question and observation.

Who exactly was this game designed for? I ask this because the final zone of the game, Eggmanland, is about as difficult as a Wiley stage from early Mega Man titles. I played through it as such, pretending that if I got a Game Over I’d have to start the entire two-hour sequence over again. It was some of the most thrilling and anxious gaming I’ve had in years. The first segment is the longest by far (around an hour if you don’t lose all your lives), finally incorporating a mechanic the player has wanted all along: the ability to switch between Werehog and “regular” Sonic during the course of the same level. After this follows a series of somewhat tedious boss battles, all with different control schemes and avatars (one of which is a pretty incredible Mayan Voltron throwback to Shadows of the Colossus). The final two hours are a bit like playing a WarioWare game—you never know exactly what the game is going to throw at you next or how you’re going to be controlling your avatar, but you don’t really care if you allow yourself to get lost in the flow.

What Sonic Unleashed ended up doing for me was this: it recalled the days of the third generation of consoles when my father and I would play NES platformers together. I would beat the easy parts, and he would tackle the hard stuff. (I suppose it’s possible that I’m not as proficient a gamer as the average 10-year old who might be interested in the cartoonish contemporary Sonic, but I really can’t imagine too many younger players being able to beat that first segment of Eggmanland easily.) Call me a sucker for controversy, but I ended up really enjoying this game—and I don’t even have ads here to catch eyes in the event that I start a flamewar!

Simultaneously posted on Bogost’s News Games blog.

Pictures for Truth is a newsgame funded by Amnesty International, produced using Microsoft’s XNA software development kit. You play an American journalist in China just prior to the Beijing Olympics. You have a date to meet with a Chinese journalist covering poor living conditions at a toxic electronics dump. When you arrive at your hotel, you receive a call informing you that your friend has been detained by authorities at the dump.

A police officer at the dump confiscates your camera and hauls your friend off to jail. You must find a new camera, interview people at the dump and outside a jail, and take pictures to accompany the “stories” generated by the interviews. You write three stories: about the health issues surrounding the dump, the working conditions of those living near the dump, and about China’s municipal system in regards to the death penalty (this story is unlocked by completing the first two).

Aesthetically the game is rather beautiful. Unlike many of these investigative reporter games we’ve played (like Homeland Guantanamo), PFT is rendered in realtime 3D. So instead of clicking between discrete composed scenes, you get to move through sensory-immersive recreations of the dump and the Chinese jail. The game is in black and white, presumably to compare the game with a newspaper. Texturing is spare, mostly hatched greyscale or pencil scribbling. The characters look like white paper cutouts.

A lot of effort has gone into making PFT “gamey.” You receive fame points for every interview question you ask and for adding pictures relevant to the stories you are composing. Fame unlocks three “power-ups:” a zoom lens, an extended hard drive for your PDA, and a hidden camera.

Unfortunately, only the hidden camera is actually useful. You must have this in order to take pictures inside the jail cell where your friend is being held. The zoom may increase the fame points you receive for taking pictures, but if this is true it would violate the photographic rule of thirds (placing the focus of your pictures in a third of the screen, with axis of action from the subject aiming toward the unoccupied two thirds (this assertion is disputable, but the fact that the NPCs remain static means that there’s no real reason to zoom up close to their faces to catch, say, teardrops forming in their eyes). The PDA hard drive space is only needed to store pictures; you can delete unwanted or used pictures, and there aren’t really enough subjects to require massive amounts of space.

The biggest problem with the game is that there’s no real room for agency on the part of the player. All one has to do is click through every available conversation piece with each NPC. Anyone used to playing games made by Bethesda knows the drill: swiftly click through the conversation tree without paying attention to much of anything in order to unlock everything, and then find the one piece you need to progress the game state and read it carefully. Adding insult to injury, the game only takes two lines of conversation and forces you to use them for the article you’re writing. It would have made much more sense to add a score for each line and then allow you to combine then to maximize the “fame” points for the article. This would at least provide some feedback educating the player on the quality of different types of information. The picture mechanic does some work to remedy this: much like in Dead Rising, capturing points of interests (represented as nodes or “hot points” once the cameras snaps) awards more points; re-using the same subject twice in an article subtracts points.

In the end it’s obvious what Amnesty’s purpose was for this game: not to teach one how to be a journalist, but to teach one how difficult it is to be a journalist in China. There’s also the ancillary educational goal of teaching players about living, working, and municipal conditions in China.

The makers do connect these three educational points with their narrative thread. Another occupant of the jail holding your friend is a woman who has been jailed for trafficking heroin. She did this in order to buy medicine for her daughter, a girl you encountered earlier in the dump standing around by herself. You can choose whether or not to enlist a doctor’s help for the child, but it really doesn’t make sense not to do it and your ending condition doesn’t change if you do this or not.

As a side note, this game did highlight for me the difficulty of using XNA to create one of these games. Only a Windows machine will run games made in this way, and they have a somewhat high barrier of entry on account of the fact that Windows has to install the .NET Framework 3.5 in order to run them. This requires roughly 15 minutes of downloading, installing, and configuring (plus a mandatory system restart) – of course, this is a one-time only thing, and now your computer is set up to play anything else built in XNA. The payoff seems worth it in the end, however, because the product comes off as much more polished than something developed in Flash. Realtime 3D rendering is always a plus, and at the very least this game didn’t require as much of a download time as a game distributed through Kuma War’s download client.

This is the first of my two-part series on Fallout 3 (the second will be specifically about the DLC).

Minor Broken Steel spoilers. Don’t read if you haven’t finished the original main quest.

I finished Broken Steel last night. Everybody knows by know what happens in the original ending, so I’m not giving anything away here: when you wake up at the beginning of Broken Steel, you are lying on a hospital bed across from the inert body of a female compatriot, Paladin Lyons. The strange thing is that, until this moment, I had largely forgotten that I had been playing the game as a female. On waking, Elder Lyons addressed me as “Sarah” (the name of my girlfriend, after whom I modeled my avatar). But he also referred to his comatose daughter (Paladin Lyons) by the forename “Sarah.” Was this a fluke of the way I had named my character or a glitch in how the dialogue was programmed, or does the game procedurally match her name to yours if you play a female? I’d like to leave this question as a personal mystery, instead of finding the answer from others… because, regardless of whether this was designed or not, it bound me to her. More on this further along.

L.B. Jeffries and I had a conversation in Savannah, while sipping Victory Prima Pils, about the difficulties of writing well about large, open-world games. How could we be sure that we were getting to the important stuff, that we were “playing it right?” I played it right, if doing so means min-maxing to such a degree that the game quickly becomes a sadly simple process of one-hitting any enemy I come across. One way to maximize your total damage output in Fallout 3 is to roll a female avatar and then select the Black Widow perk. This is only available to female avatars, and it does extra damage to male characters (males have a corresponding Perk called Lady Killer). The reason Black Widow maximizes potential damage is that there are numerically more male NPCs in the Capital Wasteland.

Here’s one question: was it slightly colonizing that I rolled a female avatar just because I knew that I would do more damage that way? Answer: yes! Follow-up: would I have been able to write this piece without doing so? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

Laziness, Oversight
The most common complaints about Fallout 3 that I have found from female gamers (thanks to Jonathan Mills, Kateri, and Denis Farr for the links on related posts by Twyst and Heroine Sheik) is that the tailoring of graphics, dialogue, and sound effects to a female avatar have been handled poorly by Bethesda. No arguments here: NPCs shouted the word “Bitch!” during combat (I quickly selectively listened against this), clothing found on the ground is always in its “male” state, and there were frequent errors wherein an NPC would refer to me as “brother” or “man.” Also, in the original ending montage one screen will always mistakenly show you as a male. What these programming errors show, as explained by Brinstar in the Iris Network forums, is that Bethesda added the functionality of the female player character as an afterthought. My experience confirms this—although I was a male playing a female character, I forgot this fact over the course of my playthrough; this highlights the fact that Bethesda approached the subject of gender neutrality by ignoring gender altogether (which Others female players on a meta-level).

One note by Twyst finds her annoyed at the dialogue options (or lack of them) that the Black Widow perk opens up. Basically, if a female avatar with Black Widow speaks to certain male NPCs in the game world, she will have the option to instantly persuade them to perform an action unavailable to male player characters in the same position. Usually the characterization of the Black Widow dialogue option is that of seduction. Twyst doesn’t go into much detail as to the reason for her annoyance here, but I’d like to posit that there are at least two feminist reactions to the feature.

Naming the perk “Black Widow,” with its connotations of castration anxiety, is likely to aggravate across the board. A second wave feminist will probably find the Black Widow option to be colonial on the part of the game designers—basically this form of feminist thought would color the interaction as women being only able to interact with males based on a sexual model holding the woman as desirable object. This is a valid criticism; however, a third wave feminist or postfeminist (with the possible exception of the riot grrl) might see the Black Widow option as sex-positive and female-empowering—asserting that women have the right to use every means at their disposal to draw weak male minds out of their position of power. For instance, one such male holds the fate of the town of Megaton in his greedy hands; a Black Widow can persuade him to simply leave town on a false promise of possible sexual reciprocation.

Others
Before I enter into a discussion of specific feminine paradigms explored by the game, I’d like to assert that the primary Others of Fallout 3 are the Ghouls and the Super Mutants. Ghouls are otherwise normal humans who have been exposed, over generations of incestual mating practices, to unhealthy doses of radiation—causing their skin to crack and peel from their bodies. At late stages of Ghoul transformation, the former humans become feral. Ferals are characterized as being completely not-human: they attack regular humans on sight (non-feral Ghouls are safe from this), they “screw like animals,” and at the latest stage they become radiation-manifest: the Glowing One. Regular Ghouls still carry visible signs of gender (including feminine names and breasts, despite the otherwise decrepit bodies), but feral ghouls—despite the assertion that they can mate—display no such signifiers. On the other hand, Super Mutants—or humans who have been purposefully exposed to the Forced Evolution Virus—are neuter, and can apparently only procreate through some unseen form of test tube growth.

Regular humans in the Fallout world despise Ghouls and Super Mutants in unequal amounts. Ghouls act as an oppressed minority that is regularly banished from cities and forced to live a meagre subsistence in areas of high radiation (encouraging their descent into feral form). Super Mutants have declared all-out-war on humanity, and they serve as the primary antagonists of the middle section of the game. The question is: are Ghouls a model for racial discrimination? This is a possible move (even though there are Ghouls of multiple human ethnicities), but it’s more interesting to look at them as a possible analogy to the HIV-positive community. While racist whites treat minorities as inferior in a variety of ways, members of almost every ethnic community fear the specter of the AIDS virus. Ghoul-ism is non-communicable, yet humans fear physical contact and proximity with Ghouls—much like people who irrationally fear that HIV will be spread to them through casual contact. Thus, throughout the 70s and through today (in most locations), the HIV-positive community has been ghettoed and left to die in silence; similarly, Fallout’s Ghouls are practically forced into advanced stages of their disease by being pushed to irradiated areas in order to seek an isolated place to live and die in peace. Ghouls are angry, tired, and sometimes hateful creatures as a result of their mistreatment at the hands of regular humans (a conflict which climaxes in Roy’s brutal slaughter of the humans in Tenpenny Tower). One other group of people uniquely treated as Other in the wastes are children, and I leave it to someone with a particular interest (more knowledge than I have) in this subject to explore this fact elsewhere.

In contrast to the Ghouls, women in the Capital Wasteland live a (mostly) egalitarian existence. Despite its masculine name, women are largely treated as equals in the Brotherhood of Steel; however, there appear to be few in positions of leadership, and the primacy of Paladin Lyons can be written off as a result of her father’s nepotism. Likewise, women are given the same status as men in Raider and Slaver communities. In fact, the only women in the game who appear to be decidedly non-empowered are the Ghoul-hating, upper-class women of Tenpenny Tower. I say this because they appear greedy, frail, and dependent on their relationships with their husbands. Unlike the hardworking women of the wastes (good and evil), these anachronistic socialites are some of the most despicable characters in the game—of course, the husbands are just as awful. Their slaughter at the hands of Roy and the feral ghouls is simultaneously cathartic and unsettling according to many player accounts (and my own experience).

All of this strikes me as a unique move on the part of Bethesda: if they characterize the world of Fallout as one without law, then what is the likelihood that women would maintain nominal equality despite the fact that it took five thousand years for them to finally achieve legal equality? Here is one possible, positive answer: the women of the Capital Waste are hard-as-nails—as powerful, dangerous, and cunning as any man. Another, negative answer would be: Bethesda was too lazy to design a world that explored the many possible gender/sexual dynamics that might emerge in the event of an apocalypse. One would do well to remember that in humanity’s early years, women commonly held positions of power in tribal cultures. Patriarchal hegemony is an artificial construct developed over the course of thousands of years. It would have been truly enlightening to be able to navigate a Capital Waste that featured communities where women were the sole leaders or, alternatively, where they were treated as chattel. This would allow for an intriguing exploration of the processes by which how women might rise to power in a future tribal society or how misogynists might take the event of a nuclear apocalypse as an opportunity to once again strip women of their equal legal standing. For now we can only hope that such a game might come around on another console, in another decade.

3 Women
Three female NPCs stood out as particularly important to my experience in Fallout 3, shining examples of positive female paradigms in the Capital Wastes: Agatha, Leaf Mother Laurel, and Paladin Lyons.

Agatha is encountered in the quest named “Agatha’s Song.” She is an elderly woman living alone in a fairly uninhabited, dangerous section of the wastes. Some explanations for her ability to survive alone might be that she’s the most resilient woman in the realm, that her home is largely hidden from passersby by an outcrop of rocks, or that she wields a powerful revolver (the Blackhawk) bequeathed to her by her late husband. Agatha’s husband also built her a radio transmitter, with which she broadcasts her violin music throughout the wastes. This story is one of eternal and reciprocal conjugal love: her husband’s spirit—in the form of his sidearm—lingers to aid in Agatha’s protection. I’ve written before about the disruptive, female sound space constructed by Faye Wong in WKW’s Chungking Express, and for me the transmitter that Agatha’s husband built for her is a metaphor for his supportive expansion of one aspect of her femininity—a personal aural space. Agatha tames the wastes in the only ways she knows how: surviving alone and granting a dying world the gift of simple, classical beauty.

Players encounter Leaf Mother Laurel during the “Oasis” quest. In my opinion, this is the single most complex quest afforded by Fallout 3. A group of naturalists have established a community in a miraculous forest to the far north of the wastes, a forest gushing forth from the roots of a tree-man named Harold. One must decide whether to grant a tortured tree spirit/mutant his wish of assisted suicide, to limit his growth so as to hide his presence from the outside world, or to apply a salve to his heart that will increase both his growth and his pain many times over. Leaf Mother Laurel, contrary to her husband’s wishes (he wants the second option), gives you the special concoction that will bring the third choice about. I had no idea what to choose. Material gain had no bearing on the decision, and there was no straightforward good or evil choice. Harold was in pain, the High Priest wanted to keep his community safe from interlopers, and the Leaf Mother hoped that the Oasis would spread to rejuvenate the entire Capital Waste. I went with Mother Nature. I sacrificed the desires of one for the hope of the future, siding with a single female against the desires of two males. I didn’t do this because I was playing a female, but because the decision felt right to me: this is good design in the highest.

I close by revisiting the inert body of a female compatriot that opens the storyline of Broken Steel. I will not tell you if Paladin Sarah Lyons emerges from her coma or not. In the volatile bowels of Project Purity, she stood by me as I attempted to activate the water purifier. I awoke from the resulting purging of radiation after two weeks, but she was still lying there in that hospital bed. I could have chosen to let her turn on the machine herself—this was the more dangerous option, and self-preservation would have dictated that I let her take the job. But I didn’t. Why then was she punished? The path to purified water in the Capital Wastes is littered with the bodies of the selfless—my mother, my father, Paladin Lyons. At the end of the game, I realized that Lyons had been an almost constant presence throughout my main mission and growth in the wastes—evolving from a protector to a sister-in-arms. The fact that she and I worked together to activate the Eden machine, coupled by our sharing the name Sarah, was (for me) a ludic expression of Simone de Beauvoir’s thesis in The Blood of Others and The Ethics of Ambiguity—to be a woman is to be responsible for the well-being of other women. The ending of the game would have been painfully less profound if I’d played as a male, in which case my decision to go into the radiation chamber could likely be read as patriarchal chivalry.

Bethesda, despite all your faults and oversights: thank you for this experience.

Footnote: Readers, remember that “Freud is most interesting in his footnotes!” The discussions brought up in this post are fleshed out and clarified in the comments section. Thanks to Denis Farr, Nick LaLone, and Tom Cross for getting these comments going.

pictures courtesy of The Vault