300 Word Review – Bayonetta (Normal, Durga/Kilgore & Shuruba/Onyx Rose)

Bayonetta is a Cent mille milliards de poèmes game. Its innovation is singular: providing a combat system that is not only fluid, which is to be expected, but also combinatory. The titular heroine holds two weapons at a time, one in her hands and one on her feet. There are eight weapons in total, many of which can be wielded on either hand or foot. The peak of her witchy powers is that she can instantly swap between two loadouts in the middle of a combo, moving from one matching of weapons to another. The potential number of combinations is boggling, but I’m innumerate.

Bayonetta is a game that wants to be played repeatedly. Your first playthrough will be rife with thrilling victories swiftly followed by disappointing defeat in the face of a poorly-designed QTE. The backtracking of the first third of the game reminds one of a less obnoxious Devil May Cry 4. Although the enemy variety leaves much to be desired, it follows the same basic principle of the game’s combat: it’s not about how many different kinds of enemies there are, but how they can be arranged within a unique set piece.

Bayonetta is a Cutie Honey game. When Bayonetta summons a demon, her clothes retract into her skin to be replaced by a one-piece bathing-suit of hair. Like the Moon Prism Power Makeup and Honey Flash before it, this transformation reflects a changing cultural role for women in Japan. As in the best anime, the male gaze finds itself embodied in a buffoonish foil. His profession as a journalist chasing folk tales adds to the game’s critique of scopophilia. His lifelong, hopeless pursuit reflects exactly the age-old questions we the players ask: “Does ‘feminine sexual power’ exist? What is it?”

Dedicated to the analytic style of Charles Pratt, who specializes in 300-word reviews on mastery.

Link Dump & My GOTY

Hey friends. So the other day my blog hit its highest single-day traffic of all time. Thanks to everyone who has RSS’d me in the past few months and those who linked my AC2 piece for making that happen. I have about 50 regular readers now, which is 25 times what I had at the beginning of the year. My blogroll has ballooned in size, each with a mutual link between another blogger who I’ve made the acquaintance of over course of the past year. It’s kind of hard to remember what life was like without 130 friends on Twitter ready to indulge my every desire to nerd out about one game or another.

I’ve finished my lists for my top ten films and videogames of the past decade, but I’m still polishing up the explanations on those. I would like to note a few things about 2009 in particular first.

GOTY 2009: Shatter

Charles Pratt posted this cute quote a few months ago; one of his friends (maybe his girlfriend?) said of him that, “he’s so hardcore that he only plays casual games now.” In a way, I feel like that sort of describes me as well. This year, I played in excess of fifty “small” games on top of the sixty or so AAA games that I completed. I had, by far, a much more enjoyable time with the smaller titles. They’re singular in their expressive goals, and they tend to represent the efforts of a small group of designers hoping to break into the industry. Of course, I wouldn’t describe my experience with them as “casual”—most I ravenously devoured within a sitting or two. Up there on the list would have to be Panzer General, PixelJunk Shooter, Critter Crunch, and Trine, all of which I had the great honor to review (for free) at my newish gig as associate editor and go-to-guy for downloadable games at Sleeper Hit.

But my game of the year, by a long shot, is Shatter. This game was quietly released one night on PSN at a bargain price, something like seven or eight dollars. It’s an Arkanoid or Brick-Break or Breakout clone, whichever you like to recognize as your first of the kind. Shatter is different. It’s a game about breathing.

Supplementing the somewhat rote action of knocking a Pong-like ball into a wall of individually-breakable blocks is a mechanic for blowing air out and sucking it back in. By calculating your inhalation or exhalation, you can arc the ball in any direction you wish. It’s highly user-friendly, with a little arrow showing you where the ball is currently headed. You don’t even have to use the paddle most of the time if you don’t want to, choosing instead to constantly exhale. On top of this novel mechanic are the added benefits of a shield, special ball-types, and an overpower assault. Each of the ten levels has a unique boss that remind me of R-Type in many ways. I completed the game in the course of three hours, using only one continue, that first night it came out, and I haven’t picked it up since. Yet, it’s stuck with me—one of the only games this year that was perfect from start to finish.

My favorite consumer reviewer of the year: Simon Parkin of Eurogamer.

My favorite unsung videogame blogger of the year: Gatmog of Tales of a Scorched Earth.

My videogame review archnemesis: Brad Gallaway of GameCritics.

Links to my other recent work around the Internets:

The Humble Crickler – Excerpt by Ian from our upcoming book on newsgames, supplemented with some added analysis by me, about the crickler—a form of interactive online crossword puzzle (News Games).

Gotham Gazette’s NYC Election Games – Analysis of a suite of editorial games produced by the Gotham Gazette, funded by the Knight Foundation, to critique the 2004 NYC electoral process. An example of lightly-skinning classic games to great effect. Also, heavy use of the rhetoric of a “broken” game representing a broken real-word system (News Games).

QIXX++ – This Taito remake has nothing to do with Jeff Minter, despite the somewhat neon visuals and “++” epithet. Stay the hell away from it (Sleeper Hit).

Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising – I have no idea how this made its way into my hands. I think our staff is pretty down on the tactical shooter genre, and I was the only person willing to make an honest go at it. In contrast to many games in the genre, this one doesn’t take place in the dusty city streets of Somewhere, The Middle East… so that’s a plus (Sleeper Hit).

LostWinds 2: Winter of the Melodias – Awesome short-form narrative, family game for the WiiWare. My only complaint was that my hand hurt from how jumping works (hold A and swipe the controller). Beautiful art style, cool contrasts between elemental energies that I considered really incredible until I played PJ Shooter the very next week (Sleeper Hit).

Rainbow Islands: Towering Advenure – Another half-assed Taito remake that was actually the first bad game I had to review. I don’t really know what else to say, except that I’m still waiting for someone to tell me whether or not it’s redeemable as camp (Sleeper Hit).

Dragon Age: Origins – My editor made me write this consumer review after I’d already written my NGJ-style post about the relationships in the game. Mostly I complain about how bad the combat system is (Sleeper Hit).

Panzer General XBLA – Chronicling my attempt to learn how tabletop wargaming works and my thrilling online victory over Owen420Canada (Sleeper Hit).

Assassin’s Creed 2: 0 out of 5 stars

Assassin’s Creed 2 teaches its player one thing: there is no problem that can’t be solved by throwing hookers at it. Spoilers follow.

Assassin’s Creed had some problems with repetition; however, it remained a fairly competent system for the purposes of climbing and assassinating. In contrast, Assassin’s Creed 2 has a problem with heaviness. The climbing and hidden-blading remain, but they’re weighed down by the choices of a design team who brainstormed for their sequel and literally threw none of their half-formed ideas out.

This heaviness is reflected in the character design differences between Altair and Ezio. The former was lithe and competent, and we bought it when he bowed his head to disguise himself as a passing monk; the latter is a bulky, slovenly mess. One killed swiftly and silently, while the other employs brute force as his primary modus operandi.

There are two things people mention when they need to explain what’s “better” about this game after noting that the problem of repetition remains: Leonardo’s Flying Machine and the Assassin’s Tomb explorations. We’ll get to the tombs later. There are two missions involving new vehicles in this game, both tied to Leonardo. These are the ludic equivalent of McBay explosion scenes: labor wasted on short set pieces rather than on balancing and playtesting core mechanics.

The first is a carriage chase through the Appenines, which I have to admit was the most fun I had with the game. You’ve got three obstacles: soldiers pursuing you on horseback, roadblocks, and archers shooting flaming arrows. The physics on the cart are quite complex, and you’ll spend most of your time sending it careening from side to side in an effort to emulate Andre the Giant’s strategy against Wesley in the Princess Bride: you’ve got to crush these fools against rocks. If the carriage had less health, then the roadblocks and archer flames would be more of a challenge; as it stands, you’ve got to dodge roughly half of them. Still, the experience is thrilling while it lasts.

The flying machine sequence, on the other hand, is patently ridiculous. This takes place in the context of needing to rush into San Marco to save the Doge from being poisoned. Time is of the essence, so, naturally, you waste the entire day climbing towers with your friend Antonio the thief. He shows you how to ascend to the top of the structure via a construction site, which you already knew how to do if you were thorough about clearing the Assassin’s Tombs.

Then… oh no! There’s a fence! Only a flying machine could get over that! You waste even more time killing pockets of guards so your thief friends can build pyres to keep Leonardo’s flying machine in the air. Finally, as night falls, you’re allowed to partake of the set piece that was advertised so heavily in AC2 promotional material. It lasts all of 45 seconds. You hit one hot air pocket, kick a few guards in the face (by double-clicking the left trigger instead of hitting X, which is a breathtaking usability failure), and fly toward San Marco for a cutscene. This raises two new points: cutscenes and the fact that Batman can fly.

I can’t remember whether or not Assassin’s Creed was cutscene-heavy. AC2, on the other hand, is. A new addition to the formula is everybody’s favorite ludic abortion: the quicktime event. Ubisoft’s Anvil engine presumably can’t handle subtle physical expressions, so things like hugging need to take place in cutscenes. Near the beginning of the game, the player pointlessly presses a few buttons to allow Ezio to have casual sex with… drum roll… Amerigo Vespucci’s sister. Amerigo was a pornographer, get it? We never see her again; nor do we see Caterina Sforza, whose family was later tied to the Borgias through marriage, after “saving” her from being somehow stranded on an island and engaging in some extramarital flirting. More about the women in this game later.

Other QTEs cover such things as shaking hands, double-hidden-blading captors in the throat, and the choice to hug Leonardo or not. What’s the idea there? This hug is the only QTE that the player can actually “miss” in the game, and the window of opportunity is quite small. Is this some kind of knock against Leonardo for being a homosexual? You’re in an involved conversation about either the Codex or a new gadget, and all of a sudden the game prompts you to hit the B button. My controller was on the floor, so I missed the opportunity. Leonardo pretends he wasn’t really trying to hug you and says, “Ah well.” Explain this for me, please, because I love Leonardo more than I do Amerigo Vespucci’s sister.

Moving onto combat and Batman now: this game shows how quickly a combat system becomes outdated when competition enters your niche. Freeflow in Arkham Asylum is both fluid and brutal. If you’re good you can rack up combos of over one hundred hits, all the while flinging yourself through the air and pummeling heads into the floor. Batman doesn’t need a QTE to execute a beautiful beatdown. Contrast this with AC2, where there’s always one solution to felling each enemy archetype.

In the first Ninja Gaiden reboot, countering was somewhat overpowered. You could make it through three quarters of the game doing nothing but blocking and counter-killing. Team Ninja fixed this problem with Ninja Gaiden 2, adding enemies fairly early on that can break your blocks, punishing you for sticking to dominant strategies.

In AC2, there’s never a reason not to turtle into a defensive stance: no matter how rapidly you upgrade to the best weapons currently available, direct attacks do nothing. Lightly-armored enemies will always fall to a single counter. Heavy guards can be dispatched with a single disarm move, and their larger weapons can then be used to one-shot counter any other enemy archetype. Oddly, medium soldiers are the most difficult to crack: you’ve got to dodge them and take cheap shots at their sides in order to whittle their health away for a killing blow. The final gambit is a “special move” for each weapon type that you’ve got to pay an arm and a leg for just to learn that their animations take too long to be useful. This is boring, tedious stuff that, once you’ve got the money for it, you’ll probably avoid completely by spamming escape gas.

You know what was fun in Assassin’s Creed? Running along rooftops and dispatching archers with throwing knives. Now I’ve a limited amount of knives on hand and three times the archers shouting at me to get off the roof before I hurt myself. Is everybody in Italy rich enough to hire an archer to stand on top of their goddamn houses? I’m not into immersion, but you can consider it broken at this point. If I do kill the louts, it’s only going to increase my notoriety level. That would mean wasting roughly one minute out of ten tearing posters off the wall. So, parkour is ruined for me.

All of the preceding were minor complaints; on to the fatal flaws.

The Assassin’s Tombs are not “a breath of fresh air.” They’re environmental “puzzles” with poor camera scripting and a single solution. Whenever you pull a lever to start a timed segment, the game refuses to return to your prior camera angle while disengaging your right trigger button (which I hold down almost constantly). So you begin each of these segments spinning around in slow motion, like a drunkard. When you approach key jumps and see what you have to do, the camera will swing to the right or left at the last minute to screw up your aim. I suppose this was designed to help people who were tip-toeing toward the jumps. If that were the case, then they should have added a line of code to disable the camera movement if the player were moving at a given speed when she passed the triggering zone.

If a tomb puzzle is triggered by a pressure plate, then you can reset it in the event of fumbling over the first jump and wasting precious seconds. But if the trigger is a lever, you’ve got to wait for the allotted time to run out before you can restart it. They already had the code and the animations in place to create this allowance, but they ignored it.

The tomb chase sequences, on the other hand, are symptomatic of the core problem with Assassin’s Creed 2: they’re fake. Your prey is designed to always run fast enough to remain within sight yet out of reach. The only way to actually kill him is to gain higher ground through parkour and execute an aerial assassination. What they’ve done here is forced a cathartic climax, the one solution they’ve allowed. Janet Murray calls it “scripting the interactor.” This isn’t ludic; it’s cinematic.

This general fakery adds to the heaviness problem I mentioned earlier. You get a bunch of new weapons, including poison and a gun. You never need to use the gun unless you’re bored, and the poison can only be used in situations where your hidden blade would accomplish the same thing: once you’re spotted by a guard, you can’t even select it for use. The double blade is nice, because you can now kill two oblivious AI at once, but it’s clearly just there to look bad-ass. It actually got me into trouble quite a few times, when I was trying to kill a Borgia courier who was right in front of me and it triggered double kills against innocent bystanders instead.

Platforming also has two new additions: fling jumps and pivots. The fling jump is only useful for reaching the tops of three map synchronization towers and two pointless little parapets in the game’s final chapter. It looks great to grab a pivot and swing around the side of a building, but none of them are in key segments of the map. There’s also never a guard on the other side of the pivot to kick in the face.

One thing Assassin’s Creed had down pat were the main assassination missions. The Assassin’s Guild was scattered throughout the city, and I had to scope everything out in order to earn the right to take the Templar scum out. You didn’t know where they were hiding, because nobody can be everywhere at the same time. There was a nice little ritual involving dipping a feather in some blood. Most of all, the targets had personality. There was a doctor who-may-or-may-not be experimenting on his patients, and a gluttonous merchant who-may-or-may-not be a repressed homosexual. The player was rewarded for killing these men with tact.

In Assassin’s Creed 2, the target is almost always either running from you or waiting in one specific location surrounded by guards. You run up to him and stick a blade in him, then you kill the remaining guards and go home. I know who some of these men are, because I studied European history eight years ago. The player sees history pass by, but she’s unable to engage with it. The Borgias were a brutal family, the Medicis patrons of the arts… and all they could dig from this was some stabbing and poisoning?

I haven’t mentioned how bad the meta-narrative is, because it’s too easy to nitpick. I actually enjoyed the change of pace the Desmond and Lucy story provided in the first game, because it gave me an opportunity to learn about this world Ubisoft was crafting. Here we just get an annoying, mean British guy and some inane rambling about how every major catastrophe in human history was caused by the Templars and the pieces of Eden. Oh, and a bunch of spinning tile puzzles.

If you read reviews and check forums, only children find this stuff compelling: “Dont u get it? The Roman gods knew that 1 day ppl would invent memory machines, so tey left hidden msgs for Desmond!” The only question remaining is, “How much money did they pay Corey May and Dooma Wendschuh to churn out such tripe?” That’s right, Ubisoft has been employing the crack team responsible for Terminator Salvation: The Game for more than five years now.

Generally, I don’t care about a game’s narrative—especially if it’s about Illuminati and the Bible post-Da Vinci Code. All I want it to do is stay the hell out of my way, but Assassin’s Creed 2 insists on rubbing its poor narrative design in my face. There are a number of times when I have the chance to assassinate three or four of my main targets at a time. I’m literally standing ten feet from them. Instead, the game enters a cutscene and the targets inexplicably disappear. There are also pacing problems here, like a bad season of Battlestar Galactica stuffed with filler episodes. I’m approaching a climactic battle, but I’ve got to spend ten minutes dispatching a random thug guilty of cuttin’ up, or otherwise harming, a whore (that’s a Clint Eastwood line).

Now we return to my opening line. It doesn’t take an expert feminist analysis to see that there’s something deeply wrong about how this game treats women. You can flirt with a Sforza and couple with a Vespucci, but they’re never heard from again. Two of the strong female characters are brothel-owners, one with the ridiculous notion that prostitution is a form of religious worship. The third is a thief who Ezio must carry like a baby through the city after she gets wounded by an arrow.

And I repeat: every problem can be solved by throwing hookers at it. Is there a room containing a Codex entry surrounded by guards? Send the courtesans to distract them. How about a festival party filled with guards searching for you? Hire some courtesans and “blend in” with them to hide. Do you need to progress through a heavily-guarded sequence of bridges? Flit from one group of courtesans to another to ensure success. You can also hire thieves and mercenaries, but why would you?

What do you like about this game? Building up your estate? Why don’t you play a Sim game instead? Why should I have to return to my estate constantly to collect my 20-minute tithe? The Borgias have couriers for that sort of thing, don’t they? If Our Creators couldn’t stop a solar flare with the pieces of Eden, why would Desmond be able to? Why would they care about the fate of humans, their traitorous enemies? Why design 22+ weapons when they never provide an advantage, only a way to keep your attacks from being constantly deflected? Why do I need a flashback telling me that Altair made a baby on top of a tower that one time? I’m his ancestor, aren’t I? Why are there only two types of vantage point towers for each city? Why would I ever complete a side mission? Why does the game come to a complete standstill so I can try to win an invitation to the Doge’s Carnivale party? If all the people I help throughout the game are Assassins, why are they all such ineffectual morons? Why do these idiots keep coming outside when they know I’m trying to kill them?

What the hell, Niccolo Machiavelli? Really?

How does a game about killing people, the Old Testament, and the Borgias completely bore an Italian Jew?

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:

http://jenifervandagriff.com/mafia/VID00001.MP4

http://jenifervandagriff.com/mafia/VID00002.MP4

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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.

———————-

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.

Double Life of Infinite Undiscovery

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?

Nine Months of DLC

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.

Desert of the Real

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.

Newsgame, or Editorial Game?

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.