Boom Culture

"No Children"

2011-09-10T06:00:00.000-07:00

I first listened to The Mountain Goats some time around 2005. The song was "No Children," which is a good place to start with the band. It's a savagely witty tune, and catchy, but it's also part of an extended song "cycle" that stretches across decades, featuring an alcoholic married couple with a tortured relationship.

In the absence of that bit of context, I loved the song, but read it somewhat differently. I assumed it was a joke, a novelty song written from the exaggerated perspective of the singer (band leader John Darnielle). As such, I couldn't tell how serious it was. At times, the singer seems to be winking at the awful things he's saying, but there's little justification for the humor in his voice when he states that his beloved is "coming down with me, hand in unlovable hand," or hopes that "we both die."

Now, with a greater knowledge of the band's catalogue and the "Alpha" song cycle, I see it as the crystallization of a single desperate moment in the course of the couple's relationship. It's a square of color in a patterned, textured quilt.

The sophistication of this kind of songwriting staggers me. The idea that songs can convey a sense of place in the aggregate is nothing new, nor is the notion that a collection of songs can serve as a portrait of the songwriter over time. Would we know New York in the '60s without Dylan, and would we know John Lennon without the evolution of The Beatles? But what Darnielle is doing is different. He's painting a portrait of someone else, presumably a fictional construct. His portrait is at once nuanced and grand. The songs, in themselves, are wonderful songs; the sole album that consists entirely of songs from this cycle, Tallahassee, is a wonderfully cohesive album.

Darnielle is using songs as short stories that make up a whole tale in the same way that Denis Johnson did in Jesus' Son (I'd cite Chaucer, but I've never read him). This is a leap on the order of O'Brian's use of the novelistic form to make up an epic. Comparing earlier narrative songs to the Alpha cycle is almost unfair; it makes Dylan's Hurricane come off as a movie of the week, while Darnielle's work is The Wire.

Masters of the mindfuck

2011-09-08T21:16:00.001-07:00

I love books and movies that undermine the confidence of the reader in her own reality. David Cronenberg is fabulous at this, as are David Lynch and Philip K. Dick. They all work in different ways, use different techniques, but the effect is the same: we begin from a place that seems real, but the ground crumbles underneath us.

Lynch
Sometimes, as in Mulholland Drive we can tell where things must really have begun—where the characters left terra firma—because we see it. Sometimes, as in Lost Highway, we can extrapolate. There are themes, characters, plot points that seem to echo a recognizable trauma. Lynch has bookended this gradient of mindfuckery with solid colors: real worlds (Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks) and ever-shifting desert mirages (Eraserhead, Inland Empire).

Cronenberg
Again, it's hard to tell at what point Cronenberg's characters spin off into nightmarish hallucination. Odd touches abound early on in Videodrome and eXistenZ, suggesting that Max Renner, Ted Pikul and Allegra Gellar already inhabit a world of madness.

Cronenberg's fantasias, which mold media into pathology (Brian O'blivion, anyone?) are ultimately rabbit holes. It's fun to chase the "truth" of the scenario, but you'll never find it. The fear and uncertainty are the entire point. Any intellectual games you can play with the plot are just distractions from the highway being opened up between your conscious mind and the most paranoid parts of your neanderthal, cave-painting shaman-brain. These aren't puzzle-box pictures, like some of Lynch's work.

Dick
The emperor of the world turned upside down, a metaphor that appears quite literally in Ubik, which may be his masterpiece along these lines (he did write in other modes, notably pulp sci-fi and literary fiction):

JUMP IN THE URINAL AND STAND ON YOUR HEAD.
I’M THE ONE THAT’S ALIVE.
YOU’RE ALL DEAD

Dick's characters frequently find themselves transported into worlds where the rules of life are inverted, and their place is lost. This is quite literally the plot of Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, and of the middle parts of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Falsehoods abound, and authenticity—often equated with durability and value, either financial or moral—cannot be distinguished amid the noise, haze and quality of the knockoffs. Androids, of course, makes explicit the fundamental subtext of this theme for Dick, which is the impossible alchemy of divining humanity from its simulacra.

Dear Mr. Google

2011-07-20T14:15:00.001-07:00

The recent announcement that Google will be discontinuing its "Google Labs" experiments is to be sincerely regretted. Among the more interesting projects that may be lost is Google Scribe, an unusual mashup between Google's search engine and online word processor. Scribe suggests words that might appropriately follow the ones you have already typed in. As a tool, it is next to useless; as an example of inadvertant humor, it is but the latest example of Google's great benevolence.

Having long meant to write more letters, I thought that Google Scribe might be of some assistance (as it would relieve me of the odious responsibility to think of things to say). Sadly, that proved not to be the case. My abortive attempts follow.

Attempt no. 1.

Dear Mr. President,

I have a lot of people inside my head and I hope you will find them and remove them painlessly.

No, no. That won't do. I really don't want to be on that list.

Attempt no. 2.

Darling Wife,

Your eyes are nothing like the real thing, baby.

Shakespeare never did this.

Attempt no. 3.

Hey gorgeous,

Did you know that you are not a lot of people?

I would imagine that she does.

Attempt no. 4.

To my adoring public,

I wish only to be told that I am wonderful, and that I continue to be a part of your favorite products.

Too honest.

Attempt no. 5.

Dear Grandpa,

It's been a long time since we last spoke. I have been using. Do you have any money, or questions about what I do with your money when you give it to me?

Woah. Have you ever looked at your relationship with your grandparents? Like, really looked at it?

Attempt no. 6.

Clearly, this isn't working. Perhaps I'm the problem? That's usually the case. I'll try letting the software speak for itself, to as great a degree as possible. It has to start somewhere, so I'll give it the word "I," which seems as good a place as any. I'll add punctuation, and suggest bridging words as necessary in brackets, to try to make some sense of the will of the hivemind.

I have [noticed that] a lot of people are not aware of any other person or entity.

Word! Me too.

[Do you think] that is not the case?

I do.

For the other two are the same as the one of the same.

You've lost me.

The same time of the year and the year of the study was a significant difference in the lives of the people who are not in the same way as the first and second portions of the first.

Well, that was less than elucidating. Good news, in a way; the hivemind remains retarded, and we get another brief reprieve before Google chooses to drop the first word in its motto.

Dear Mister Marston, part 3

2011-05-26T07:43:00.001-07:00

Hey Max,

My second letter is below. I know the pony express took a long time to arrive. I don't plan to go on another two week hiatus!

Harrison

Dear Mister “Max” Marston,

It is always good to hear from you, sir. Remembering that your experience and mine oddly echo one another is always a relief, for I find myself so frequently alone. Be it on the high plains or in the desert, passing atop a bridge circumventing a great river or exiting a canyon littered with the dead, I am continually the only person present. The others I encounter move as if they are actors in a stage play, producing a program that proudly proclaims its own structured repetition. Only wild beasts and glimmering night skies are my companions. The seemingly random, motivated attacks of the former and the breadth of the latter remind me that not everything is predictable and that space exists outside of the physical boundaries I so frequently encounter, be these rivers, mountains, or bullets.

And yet I insist upon this solitary life. I refuse to take carriages or trains, and I absolutely disdain what I have come to term moving blackouts, when I enter the darkness of sleep at camp only to awake in a place nowhere close to where I had made my bed. Carriages or trains are expressions of a loss of control; I insist upon setting my own pace. Blackouts are worse; they make life unreasonable. How could I fall asleep in the desert and awake in Armadillo? How could a night on the plains deliver me to Thieves’ Landing? It makes no logical sense, and therefore I avoid it. No more magical cacti for me, only wolf meat and rabbit from now on.

And yet, I must continue. During moving blackouts, how am I to know what I have missed? What opportunities did I not take due to my unconsciousness between the hills and the city? Were I tallying my achievements, such lapses in memory would chalk up to a blank slate. Time and space are joined, yet traveling fast while producing and enacting nothing lends a unity to neither.

This disjointedness troubles me. I am a man existing seemingly outside of time. You mentioned this feeling. I refer to a past I cannot recall. I allude to friendships I did not know I had. More so, I am gone from the ranch for two nights and, upon my return, ranch hands and Ms. MacFarlane herself greet me as if a month had passed. These proclamations lend a hollowness to life, leading me to question my experiences and their reality.

Clearly, I have had a few too many drinks at the Armadillo pub. Before I head toward hopefully stationary dreams, let me mention a positive side effect of this timelessness I’m currently experiencing. Simply put, I allow my gaze to linger. Returning a prized horse to its owner, my focus remains on the horse a few beats longer than it should. Riding away from Ms. Bonnie MacFarlane, I observe her seemingly well after I am gone, noticing the subtleness of her movements and the contemplative look upon her face. I enjoy these moments, even though they may seem impossible and therefore off-putting. They remind me that this stage upon which I act exists beyond me. Though I may feel solitary and alone, the program continues unhindered.

Regards,

John “Gish” Marston.

Dear Mister Marston, part 2

2011-05-25T15:54:00.004-07:00

Hey Harrison,

Here's my second letter. I think my Marston might be losing it a bit—but he recovers at the end. We'll see what the future brings for him.

John Coffee Hays. Enchanté.

Apropos more of the West than of Red Dead specifically, I just finished reading a book about the Comanche people, called Empire of the Summer Moon. It seemed solidly researched, and it presented a nuanced portrait of the various white and Indian cultures in west Texas during the 19th century. Maybe it's a function of being a white Jewish liberal, or maybe of being a New Englander (our Indians were, on the whole, more docile), but the picture that emerged for me of the pre-reservation Comanche was far closer to that of the Apache in Stagecoach than to the Pequot or Wampanoag of my childhood textbooks. Morality is relative—I almost wrote "of course," but of course not everyone agrees with this—but even so, the dissonance between horrifically violent and noble and free is not so easily resolved.

The book also talks about the foundation of the Texas Rangers, and about the man who I assume was the model for Woodrow Call of Lonesome Dove. I suppose this is (in part) the sort of stuff that Texas school boards are talking about when they say they want students to learn more about their state's history?

Cheers,

Max

"I am looking down a hall of mirrors..."

Dear Mister "Gish" Marston,

Events conspire to make me very much at home here in New Austin. Hard travel and gunfights remind me of better days with worse companions, and the beginnings of a plan to repay Bill Williamson's latest kindness have begun to stir. The men who are to be the instruments of Bill's destruction (or at least of the destruction of his front door) are not, in the main, what you might call upstanding citizens, but they are the men I have a hold over at present. And before you say so, I do realize I must sound like the hog making fun of the bacon.

I too find a measure of serenity in the lonesomeness of the plain and the beat of hooves beneath me. It is a pretty land, though parched and sharp. I have taken to watching the slow shift of the vegetation from one place to the next; from high plains to scrub brush to cholla, prickly pear and saguaro. I pick flowers from time to time, which is happier work than hunting animals, or men.

I rode the same horse for some time. He was a broke-down old nag, and tired easily, but I felt the stirring of a bond between us. Riding down by the Rio Bravo five days ago, I heard an awful screech, and felt the horse collapse beneath me. I killed and skinned the wildcat, but have not sold the pelt. It sits in my camp as I write this, uncured and mouldering, a grim reminder that—whatever the faithful may say of heaven—trust, love and sorrow make up the only trinity that you and I have ever known.

Miss MacFarlane continues to ask my help around the ranch, and I am both happy and obliged to lend a hand. I enjoy breaking horses, and have replaced my lost mount in this way. She—Miss MacFarlane—is a fiery sort, and I hope that she reminds me of my wife.

Your letter described a strange dream, and though I have not encountered anything so alien as floating horses, things are exceeding strange at times. I have no clear memory or knowledge of my family, my past associates or the agreement made between myself and the federal government. Much is obscured to me. This seems scarcely possible, and when I consider it at any length I feel cold and frightened. You know that I am not a man to scare easily.

I sense falseness everywhere, shadows and artifice. I met an actor playing a gunfighter, and a newspaperman seeking entertaining trifles—neither could tell where his story ended and reality began. Mister Marston, I left a young girl to die in the desert. She would not ask my help, and I could not offer it—I know not why. Her eyes saw God in everything. If that is so, then God is in the beasts of the Earth and the birds in the sky. Vultures eat the eyes first. I am looking down a hall of mirrors.

I am sorry, my friend. It is a spell, and it will pass. There are madmen aplenty here, and I do not mean to add to the glut. Tomorrow I must find a dishonest, drunken Irishman—but I might have just said "an Irishman," and you would have known the rest.

In haste,
John "Max" Marston

History, genre and conflicting narratives in Red Dead Redemption

2011-05-20T15:33:00.000-07:00

The judicial system treated the Wild West bandits with an unusual degree of understanding. Those who surrendered and survived—Frank James, Cole Younger, Emmett Dalton—served a few years in prison and then went on with their lives...The West was closing up. The cattle drives ended in the early 1880s. Reconstruction ended in the South. Automobiles and movies and telephones and record players and electric lights and unions washed the continent. The world in which these men had murdered and robbed and plundered no longer existed, and no one felt much need to punish them here and now for the crimes they had committed long ago and not merely far away, but in a place that wasn't there any more.

Bill James, Popular Crime

As a Rockstar game, Red Dead Redemption draws heavily from previous entries in its genre, mostly in the medium of film. Ambient activities and quasi-linear missions surround a central narrative thread, and a vast map opens incrementally to player-directed exploration. Broad satire coexists with more serious themes. What is the balance between morality and expedience? What does it mean to be an American within the confines of a specific time, place and community? This earnestness is undercut by constant shifts in tone, uneven writing and pacing and structure that do not (and in fairness cannot) anticipate the precise path of the player through the game, either externally ("gameplay") or internally (the relationships and actions of my personal Marston).

As a Western, Red Dead Redemption references numerous genre touchstones:

"Hell, Will. We ain't bad men no more. Shit, we're farmers."

the nature and expression of savagery and civility;
the functions of solitude and society;
the disproportionate power of the determined individual in a sparsely populated and policed land;
the efficacy of violence;
the noble burden of stoicism and masculinity;
and the private tragedy but public good engendered by technological progress.

These motifs recur in the Western genre because they address questions that we have about life. Questions about how to live with other people, and about what leads us to commit good acts or evil ones. The Wild West is a mythic landscape—it has been so since (and even while) it existed as a real place. It's a stage, a world with certain parameters, on which certain kinds of stories are told, and in which we are given possible answers to difficult questions. Is this character a stock type, and if so what does he or she represent? What conventions are being reinforced or subverted?

Red Dead hits these those notes, but there are two main problems that keep it from being successful as a Western. The first is so fundamental that it would ruin any story, in any genre, in any medium: there is no subtext. Everything that pertains to one of the themes above is overtly stated, loudly and bluntly. I'm not saying that there's no subtlety; the relationships between characters are well-drawn, and are allowed to exist and develop with a minimum of explicit commentary or exposition. But the themes are presented with the idiot frankness of a dog offering a tennis ball.

As historical fiction, Red Dead Redemption is mostly the latter. The game is an extremely late-period Western. 1911, when most of the game is set, was not a time when the West was changing; it had changed. The time of bandit gangs and fur trading was over, decades since. Buffalo Bill Cody offered his first Wild West show in 1883. Over the course of the next three decades, Bill's show toured the United States and abroad, bringing together cowboys, cavalrymen, Mexicans, Indian chiefs, retired outlaws, famous trick shots and riders—you name it, it was featured at one time in Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World. Bill had an 18,000 seat arena just outside the 1898 World's Fair in Chicago. Here's a description:

Visitors entered through a gate that featured Columbus on one side, under the banner "PILOT OF THE OCEAN, THE FIRST PIONEER," and Buffalo Bill on the other, identified as "PILOT OF THE PRAIRIE, THE LAST PIONEER."

Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

Does that sound like a reference to a way of life that's still ongoing? Remember, this is 1898, fifteen years after Bill started doing the show—but still thirteen years before Red Dead Redemption is set.

Most of the big outlaw gangs in the west had been killed or captured in the 1870s and 1880s. I should mention here that much of my research about this was done online, including through Wikipedia—I did some reading, but I didn't do much verification, and I don't claim to be expert on the history from this era. I just had a sneaking suspicion that Rockstar didn't know any more than I did.

Like John Marston, many of the men who survived their brushes with the law chose to reform themselves. Take the three men referenced by Bill James in the quote at the top of the page:

Frank James, the older brother of Jesse James, was involved in a string of robberies and murders in the 1860s and 1870s. In 1882, tired of running and hiding, he surrendered to the Governor of Missouri. James was held in jail for about a year, but was acquitted of the few crimes he had committed within Missouri; he surrendered with the understanding that he would not be extradited to other states, where he had done worse things. James lived to 72, dying in 1915.
Cole Younger ran with Jesse and Frank James, and was arrested after a bank robbery and gun battle in Minnesota in 1876. He spent 25 years in prison, and when he was released, Cole and Frank James got together and ran their own Wild West show for a time. He found God near the end of his life. Like James, he died at 72, in 1916.
Emmett Dalton is the most interesting comparison to Marston, partly because he's more of a contemporary than the men above. Marston was born in 1873, Dalton in 1871. Dalton was arrested in 1892, after a failed bank robbery (sensing a trend here?). He suffered a reported 23 gunshot wounds, but survived to face a life sentence. He didn't serve it. Pardoned in 1906—the year of Marston's own fictional failed robbery and departure from gang life—Dalton began trading on his celebrity. He wrote a couple of books, and in 1918 he starred in the Hollywood version of his own story.

What does this tell us? Well, 1906 was pretty late to be running around like yahoos and robbing banks. Marston is an anachronism not because he represents a dying way of life, but because he spent his youth playing at imitating one that was already dead. Possible, even plausible, but strange.

The date also introduces more serious problems with story details. The Wright Brothers flew the first heavier-than-air craft in 1903, and this was widely reported in exactly the kinds of newspapers Marston is always reading. Is it really plausible that he would be completely ignorant of this? He understands how telegraphs and trains work; the man grew up in an orphanage, not a cave.

I didn't realize all of this when I was playing, and obviously Rockstar is entitled to a bit of sleight of hand with the dates. Red Dead doesn't take place in actual towns or states, and there's no reason why it should be beholden to an accurate timeline. There is a telephone in Armadillo, and an automobile in the opening cutscene, and there are numerous mentions of the fact that times are changing—but still, I was unprepared for the shock of entering Blackwater late in the game and realizing how late it truly was.

It's in Blackwater, of course, that the central conceit of the plot is finally laid out in detail, and we learn how and why the Bureau of Investigation has coerced Marston into killing his former comrades. The "Bureau of Investigation" is the correct name, by the way—I had assumed that this was a fictional FBI analogue, but it turns out that the "Federal" wasn't added until 1935.

Jack Johnson

Founded in 1908, most of what the Bureau did in its first few years was fight prostitution. It was the primary enforcement agency for the Mann Act, a.k.a. "The White-Slave Traffic Act." Bureau officers enforcing this law were officially known as "local white slave officers" (it's on the FBI website, I'm not making this up). The Mann Act was a broad and selectively enforceable law, and as the name suggests, it was inherently racist. The black boxer Jack Johnson was the first person arrested under the law, for having sex with his white girlfriend, who did happen to be a prostitute; just like John and Abigail Marston, the two later married. I don't know anyone who ended up marrying a lover they first met that way. Maybe society has changed, or maybe I don't know the right people, or maybe it's just not the kind of thing you talk about in mixed company.

Anyway, the Bureau arrested pimps, prostitutes, madames and Johns, and fought land fraud. It also did some other stuff, although the modern FBI is intentionally vague about this, even a century after the fact:

Field offices existed from the Bureau's inception. Each field operation was controlled by a Special Agent in Charge who was responsible to Washington. Most field offices were located in major cities. However, several were located near the Mexican border where they concentrated on smuggling, neutrality violations, and intelligence collection, often in connection with the Mexican revolution.

History of the FBI, Early Days: 1910 - 1921

That really does not sound like what Red Dead's Edgar Ross has Marston doing. Look again at the Bill James quote, too: he's using the end of the Old West as an example of a time when American society was willing to forgive and forget past transgressions, up to and including felony robbery and murder. Rockstar must have some sources that I'm not aware of—after all, they worked on the game for years, while this post is the product of a few days' cursory research—but I'm not sure that those sources would support the idea that the nascent FBI would ransom a man's family against his extralegal cooperation in murder. Particularly when that cooperation seems likely to set off an international incident.

Williamson's gang might plausibly be involved in smuggling or "neutrality violations," but Ross explicitly demands that Marston cross into Mexico and kill or detain a Mexican citizen, which... well, I'm pretty sure there's a treaty against that kind of thing. Nor does Ross seem at all interested in what Marston could tell him about Rockstar's fictionalized Mexican Revolution. If he was, he could have done more than collect intelligence. Marston basically decides the outcome of that conflict.

"Decides" is perhaps not the right word. As a narrative arc, Red Dead seems to come in for the most criticism for the meandering Mexican section of the game. This is fair enough. The Nuevo Paraiso missions are badly paced and full of silly stereotypes. They're also full of rapists and misogynists, and these scenes don't add up to either a meaningful satirical indictment, or to a realistic portrait of life—two avenues that would tend to justify such material.

What these scenes do accomplish is throwing into sharp relief the fundamental problem with how Rockstar structures its games: the player and the Housers are not telling the same story. The player's freedom to portray John Marston as she sees fit through thought and action outside of cutscenes and missions is undercut by main story sections, and the player's personal interpretation of Marston is frequently rejected by the game.

I felt that Marston was a man sincerely troubled by his past actions, and unwilling to add to his sins. He didn't terrorize innocent people. He saved strangers in the wilderness. He skinned every animal he killed, because to do otherwise would have been wasteful. Equally to the point, my Marston wasn't stupid. He would not have believed that Colonel Allende was going to help him find his quarry, and even if he did, he would not have done the things that Rockstar's Marston did in Allende's service. My construction of Marston made sense within Red Dead until I got to Mexico, at which point the game blew me a raspberry and said "Fuck that, fuck you. You, who have saved a half-dozen prostitutes from sexual violence, will now stand there indifferently and watch girls get raped. Also, despite your past as a violent proto-Bolshevik bandit revolutionary, please throw this firebomb into a peasant village or else stop playing."

I'm not saying Rockstar makes bad games. I liked Red Dead Redemption quite a bit. After Mexico, the narrative does beautiful things that I'd never seen done in a game before. Red Dead would have been a stronger game if the entire southern half of the map and the middle third of the story (which really does not function as a second act) were taken out entirely. And obviously the conflict that I see between player narrative and developer plot hasn't stopped their games from selling. But there is a conflict there, and it's not one that Rockstar seems interested in solving.

I'm not sure what this has to do with Red Dead Redemption, but I thought I'd mention it anyway: There are three things that often draw me deeply into a game, to the point where I start looking around for information about its development (and thus the intentions of its authors). Red Dead has two of these three characteristics, but for some reason I have no interest in the particulars of its development.

The first characteristic is a strong ambient emotional landscape, by which I mean an actual landscape—the world within the game, augmented by nonvisual elements like music and dialogue—which conjures emotions within me and allows them room to breathe. A world with a vibe, in other words. Nier has such a world, and Half-Life 2. BioShock. Often I find that games are successful in this regard because they create a convincing embedded narrative: you can tell that something happened here before you happened on the scene. Red Dead Redemption does have a strong ambient emotional landscape, in my opinion, but for the opposite reason: much of the nature is so unspoilt that it often feels like virgin territory. It's a beautiful land, and it's rewarding to just to spend time there.

The second characteristic is good writing. Games are multimodal, etc. etc., but I'm an old-fashioned kind of guy, and I'm as likely to have my nose buried in a book as I am to be glued to a glowing screen. I will never be really engaged by a story that is rendered crudely or naïvely. Bungie used to have fantastic writing in their games; the worlds of Marathon and Myth are totally engrossing, with vibrant characters and hints of knowledge and machinations beyond the player's ken. The writing in Red Dead is mostly in the form of dialogue, and in general, I found the dialogue to be of good quality and well-delivered. There are some bad scenes, and some characters who could have been left on the cutting room floor. The quality of the voice acting and the writing also suffers significantly in the optional conversations that take place while traveling within certain missions. But this is forgivable in a game with so much content. Tell me, can you think of any other relationship within a video game with such subtle sexual tension as that between John and Bonnie?

Third, I'm always fascinated by artifacts of the development process that make it into the final game. Locations with no clear purpose; vestiges of cut features; storylines that dead-end because there wasn't time to finish them. Think of the ending of Knights of the Old Republic 2, or that tantalizing island in the distance in the dam level of Goldeneye. There's really nothing like this in Red Dead.

So, why don't I care about Red Dead's development? My best guess is that it's because there's no sense of mystery to the game. I never really cared about Marston's past life, although I did adore his family when they were finally introduced. And his present life wasn't particularly exotic to me. I live in a desert very much like the one in Cholla Springs, and I can walk outside to see that landscape any time. I love whiskey and poker, I own a pair of cowboy boots, and if I want to follow a mutt around and watch him bark at people I'll just take my own dog for a walk. The setting was just not hugely fantastical for me.

The Year of No Guns

2011-05-05T08:43:00.003-07:00

Games I have played in the past year that feature shooting as a prominent mechanic:

Red Dead Redemption
Metro 2033
Borderlands
Perfect Dark Zero
Gears of War
Dead Space
Resident Evil 5
Alan Wake
Vanquish
Dark Sector
Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood
Singularity
Darksiders
Far Cry 2
Grand Theft Auto IV
Halo 3
Halo 3 ODST
Battlefield: Bad Company
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
Modern Warfare 2
Alpha Protocol
Fallout 3
BioShock
BioShock 2
Mass Effect
Mass Effect 2
Bayonetta
Crackdown
Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter
Left 4 Dead 2
Half-Life 2
Half-Life 2: Episode 1
Half-Life 2: Episode 2
Portal

...as my old boss used to say, "'Dis too much, wey."

Once I'm done with Red Dead Redemption, I'm taking a year off from shooters—in fact, from games that ask me to shoot a gun at all. That means no Portal 2, no Deadly Premonition, no Mass Effect 3, and probably several other games that I was looking forward to. There's just too much of this shit, and it's depressing. I'm tired of apologizing for it when I try to make a case for games as a serious medium. I enjoy shooters, but I'm sick of them, and they tend to exemplify the things that I find most upsetting about the state of the market.

Obviously, Portal and Far Cry 2 are not "what's wrong with video games," but I need to cleanse my palate. Or detox, take your pick. That means nothing played in the first- or third-person in which centering a target and firing is a main mechanic.

This is The Year of No Guns.

Dear Mister Marston

2011-04-25T19:15:00.003-07:00

I recently reconnected with the brilliant and engaging Harrison Gish, a college friend and now a Ph.D. candidate studying games and other media at UCLA. Harrison was one of the first people I met who took what you might call "popcorn movies" really seriously on an intellectual level. He always found more in them than I had realized was there: reflections of the times, cultures, mythologies and personalities involved—and he was able to distill these disparate elements into something more than surface meaning. Anyhow, we got back in touch, and I was delighted to discover that he's turned his spotlight of a mind onto video games.

Harrison more or less strong-armed me into playing Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption, a game that I had skipped with great gusto, not having enjoyed Grand Theft Auto IV. I like Red Dead better, and I was inspired to write my fellow Marston a letter, in character (ish). Here's our initial exchange, hopefully to be continued.

Emails to actual people are italicized. We're addressing each other by Twitter handles, because I started the exchange that way and am only now realizing that it makes me sound like an asshole.

Hey HZAB0t,

Back and forth letters about games are so hot right now. It's a ridiculous affectation on the part of people who (like us) think too much about games, but I also think it's kind of funny—and ripe for satire. So without further adieu, I present you the first letter in what I hope will be an ongoing series between John "Gish" Marston and John "Max" Marston. Monosyllables make better nicknames.

Kind regards,
Maxathon

Dear Mister John "Gish" Marston,

I hope this message finds you well. You west coast city folk are oft occupied with concerns both complex and morally dubious, which I imagine must take its toll on a man. Do not allow this to test your spirits, however, but instead recall what our blind Scottish father always told us when we were young: "Keep a dram in your glass and a whore on her bed, and let the bastards have it when their backs are turned." Of course, Pa was perhaps no lodestone to set your moral compass by.

As for my own trials, I have faced more than a few of late. At your behest, I have undertaken to pursue my former companions. You know, the ones from the gang? Bill Williamson, and presumably several other fellows. It is the damnedest thing, but I cannot recall their names just now, having not yet heard anyone speak them. Some government men are forcing me to do this by threatening my family, whom I presumably love.

Due to gross incompetence, I allowed myself to be gutshot by Bill Williamson early on in this pursuit. As it was a cutscene bullet, the wound was serious. Fortunately, a woman rancher saved me. She has taken a liking to me, no doubt because I am polite and implausibly verbose for a bounty hunter with mysterious political connections and a heavy burden of conscience.

Speaking of exposition, have you noticed that times are changing? For they surely are. The Indian wars are largely over, and old women and preachers are fond of smugly relating this fact on trains. In addition to railroads and steamboats, we now have horseless carriages and telephonic discourse lines—even down here in Armadillo. Which I take to be a version of Amarillo Texas, despite the fact that the prevalent cactus include Saguaro, which grow primarily in Arizona and Mexico.

There I go again, finding fault. Inaccurate cactus notwithstanding, it is a beautiful country. Everything is highly detailed, and I can see quite far. I would be remiss not to mention the way that the muscles flex and ripple in my horses' hindquarters—it's quite thrilling to observe.

I frequently hear music when no diegetic source is present, and for a time I feared I might be going mad. Upon further reflection, I take this to be a genre convention of the Western and am willing to accept it.

But I fear I'm getting off track, and out of character. I was endeavoring to speak of the work I have found, in lieu of pursuing my primary goal. To begin with, I have shot many things, including a buck, an owl and a coyote. Oh, and several horse-thieves. It seems to be a fashion among the horse-thieves in this area to carry between $4 and $5 on their persons. You have to wonder how that sort of thing gets started.

I quite like the Sheriff here in Armadillo. He and I have much in common. We both have ill-advised facial hair, and we are both well voice-acted. I hope we will remain friends, and that he will neither die tragically nor prove to be corrupt and standing in the way of my quest (when I see fit to return to it, that is). I was going to see him the other night when I ran into a woman who had somehow lost her son. Upon investigation, it appears the boy has been eaten by cannibals. I have not seen fit to inform the Sheriff or the distraught mother, yet I feel that I have done the honorable thing somehow.

I hope to hear of your own adventures soon. I believe that you are further along in your quest than I, and perhaps you have some wisdom or insight to share. Can a man change his fate, when that fate has been decided by the Housers? Perhaps we'll know in time.

Fondly, I remain,
Your alternate self,
John "Max" Marston

Maxathon,

Thanks so much for forwarding these excellent exchanges, particularly those between Bissell and Ferrari. Fascinating stuff, and very interesting to hear two fellows who fall on different sides of a divide that I hope and continually attempt to straddle hashing out and working through their differences. I'm also pleased to be turned on to Paste, which is quite the informed blog that goes beyond simple gaming news.

HZAb0t

Dear Mister John "Max" Marston,

Terrific to hear from you, dear friend. It has been too long since last we exchanged both pleasantries and details of our personal journeys, and it is very good to hear of both your current station and progress through the glorious American southwest. While I am too much of a heathen and a self-determinist to claim that this is God's country, I would be a downright liar were I to tell you that this expansive land did not move me spiritually. There's always something to do around Armadillo--where I have also found myself recently--but one of the true joys I receive daily is in traveling between the missions Bonnie MacFarlane, the Armadillo sheriff, and the fair townsfolk have for me. There is a resplendent nature and meditative quality to galloping these barely formed roads on my trusty stallion, and therein lies what I might term a "pleasure in process" or a "meditation in movement." I can reflect on myself, my station in life, and the serenity of the landscape while I travel through it, only to be brought back harshly and directly to my senses when attacked by sickly wolves or highwaymen.

Recently, I've passed the time raiding canyon outposts and mining shafts populated with criminals and vagabonds. Dreaming I was a man named Niko, living inside an urban nightmare, allowed me to have an innate knowledge of gunplay that exceeds my own rather limited experience. You will recall how cocky a man I can be. Walking into a mine shaft with my volcanic pistol or rifle drawn, I have successfully laid waste to numerous cretins and boxes of TNT with the same excessive zeal, frequently attempting not to hide behind barriers in the completion of securing a machine gun or finding hidden treasure. This emboldens me as a rogue gunfighter and bounty hunter. Blowing off a man's hat and head while fully exposed is the equivalent of giving the middle finger to these uncontrollable impediments to progress and the tightly regimented world within which both they and I live. No doubt as I continue exploring the vastness of what I assume to be Texas, I will have to become more cautious, strategizing more and not walking into gunfire with careless abandon and an unwholesome confidence.

One other comment, before I allow you to return to your adventures. I have noticed that the natural laws of Armadillo are frequently violable. For example, attempting to jump my horse over a rather low fence, I embarrassingly did not vault high enough, and instead caught the horse's midsection on the upper rung of the fence--And there the horse remained, seeming to float as if possessed by a spirit!! Also, raiding a canyon recently, I completed my task, ridding the world of a horde of lecherous thieves. After being informed of my success, both my horse and myself were inexplicably visited by the Reaper. My only explanation is that this was a fever dream; I awoke to find my horse tethered outside Ms. Bonnie MacFarlane's farm.

Anyhow, time is short and I have preparations to make for the morrow. I look forward to continuing our discussion, and hearing more concerning your progress.

Sincerely yours,
Your alternate self,
John "Gish" Marston

Not Quite the Holy Grail

2011-03-24T14:26:00.000-07:00

Hi there. My name is Max, and I do side quests in JRPGs.

I've never said it out loud before. It's actually kind of liberating.

I think I was born this way. There was never a time when, if a Final Fantasy let me do something extraneous to the critical path, I would not do it. Even if it's not congenital, my compulsion to aid imaginary villagers is certainly tied to some deep-seated psychological traits.

I'm a bit of a completionist, and that's always the first pull. The urge to collect, and the inability to leave something undone. Over the years, this aspect of my personality has manifested in relatively normal ways: collecting baseball cards and comic books as a child (wholesome!); procrastinating on college essays, then pulling all nighters (inadvisable!); responding to emails as they come in, rather than letting that little red number on my iPhone grow (neurotic!). For me, a task left undone feels like the sword of Damocles.

QUEST

SIDE QUEST

If the procrastination sounds counterintuitive, think of it as a pressure valve. When something is too big, too daunting to take care of in the usual fell swoop, I try to forget about it. Until I can't. The desire to clear my slate is all about forgetting—or rather, being afraid to forget things, to disappoint, to not live up to others' expectations. It's the waking equivalent of dreaming you're at school with your pants off. Oh, you never had that dream? How about the one where it's the last day of the semester, and you realize you forgot about one of your classes? Just me, I guess.

Which came first, I wonder: the need to excel, or the satisfaction of escaping to a world where excelling, being special, is all but guaranteed? By any sane measure, the effort required of your average RPG hero doesn't warrant much praise. Checking off tasks in a quest log is rote business, closer to reading email than to helping an old lady cross the street.

I realize I've just painted a terrifying self-portrait, and demeaned a venerable genre in our marginalized medium. Games can change the world, we're told of late. They're not passive escapism for the maladjusted. But it's not really like that! I'm not really like that! I don't sit there plucking keywords from the dialogue: "OK, 10 chickens, your sister in the forest. Got it." Efficiency is not a virtue for Maxathon, the hero of the age. (If it was, he wouldn't be off delivering poultry while Kefka poisons Doma Castle. Or whatever.)

Wanting to tie up loose ends is a motivating factor, not an end in itself. No, I help people because I'm a genuinely nice guy. Believe me. I mean, if you can't trust me, who can you trust? Nobody. And then where would you be? Holed up in your trailer clutching a golf club as you peer through a slat in the front door, because you don't believe the Girl Scouts are just there to sell you cookies. And that ain't healthy.

RPGs are like reality in this if nothing else: everybody has problems. And as a nice guy, I can help them with those problems. Sure, doing so is easy, but that's not because it's a matter of pressing buttons; it's because the situations in games are solvable. Saving the world isn't a slog through the mire of politics, but a straightforward quest to find the crystals. Even the most mundane of real world problems can be tangled webs of pain, and there's rarely a thread to pull. Last week, someone put up some lost dog flyers in my neighborhood. In a game, I can help that person—the dog is bound to be in the cave, bravely fending off a goblin. In the real world, all I can do is feel sad and move on.

Games let me pretend that what's broken can be fixed, and that can be cathartic. Side quests are often derided as monotonous, repetitive, and unimaginative: "fetch quests." This is a fair criticism. Yet that predictability can be relaxing, even freeing. It's true that there's no real challenge in it. Do what's expected and you'll never fail at the tasks put before you—like solving a sudoku puzzle, or, more charitably, a crossword.

If that puts you to sleep, I understand. For me, it's meditative: I close my eyes and imagine a world where I can make order out of chaos. Where I can take control, instead of sometimes having none.

Control and predictability might be at the heart of it. I was most passionate about role-playing games in the early 1990s, at an age when life was scary and confusing: filled with rapidly evolving social rituals, increasing responsibility, and more hormones than blood coursing through my veins. Spending an hour wading through the surf, looking for the right kind of fish to nurse Cid back to health in Final Fantasy VI was the childhood equivalent of taking a mental health day. It allowed me to be someone else, somewhere else. It required focus. It provided the illusion of selflessness. And perhaps most importantly, it operated according to unspoken rules, so that I was on safe ground: I knew what was expected of me, and what to expect in return.

Well excuuuuuse me, princess.

For all their predictability, side quests are often the only opportunity outside of battle to decide for myself what my experience will be, and who my characters really are. Remember, we're talking about JRPGs here: I don't get to pick responses from dialogue trees, or shape the direction of the main quest. But I can decide that my party leader is a diehard Marxist, and refuse to help the capitalist swine in the mansion; or that he's a greedy jerk, and pick up the necklace on the ground before I help the girl who dropped it.

My final thought in this confession/paean is that the most tired tropes are precisely the ones which clever creators subvert in interesting ways. Nier, the game that inspired this post, absolutely revels in the tediousness of its endless fetch quests. But it does so in a way that both winks at the convention and enables these seemingly thankless tasks to flesh out its characters and world. One particularly long goose chase ends with your character learning that he has inadvertently returned a runaway child to the loving arms of a family of conmen, who stiff him on his promised fee for good measure. It's a frustrating quest, leavened by one companion's sardonic criticism of you for undertaking it in the first place. This minor story beat, seemingly inconsequential, is one of several moments that foreshadow's the game's central theme by upending player expectations.

Not doing that side quest, and others, in other games, would have been like reading a novel but refusing to bother with subplots or digressions. You'll never know whether you've just missed Tom Bombadil.

More thoughts than you need about Alan Wake

2011-03-05T18:35:00.003-07:00

Multimodality
Alan Wake draws on a collection of interesting sources—but if you've heard anything about the game, you probably know that already. Between obvious references to Twin Peaks and frequent shout-outs to Stephen King and other writers, developer Remedy Entertainment is ingratiatingly eager to share its inspirations.

The game calls out The Shining by name and

shot in this early scene. Image from Wikipedia.

That's a shame, since it gives the initial impression that the Alan Wake is simply the latest in a long line of games that reference but fail to reinterpret iconic entries in other media. We get Aliens more often than Paul Auster, but drawing on the work of others so flagrantly is mere borrowing—and you know what Picasso said about that. Having rented Alan Wake and played through the first of six TV-like "episodes," I was unsure whether to press on. Only finding a very cheap copy of the game saved me from abandoning one of the most intricate and layered game narratives to date.

Alan Wake takes time to establish itself as more than a pastiche in part because the game does not speak with a single voice. Some games take very clear, cohesive approaches to storytelling—using only cutscenes and dialogue, for example, or only atmosphere and interaction. But games can do more than this. Jim Gee, one of my academic heroes, has written extensively about how video games are a multimodal literacy made up of numerous component literacies. Some of these components are traditional (written text, spoken language, interpersonal cues, visual design), some are experiential (trial and error, systemic relationships) and others are so new that they're hard to define (the ability to do several things at once).

Remedy was clearly devoted to making full use of these available narrative channels, and although the result is occasionally cacophonous—with themes butting up against each other and disparate interpretations jutting out at cross-purposes—the attempt was admirably ambitious and generally successful. Each storytelling form within Alan Wake speaks to one or more levels of reality existing within a single narrative. Many of these elements feed into each other, changing the meaning of other elements and the overall story as they reveal more about the world. Others directly refute assertions made elsewhere about the nature of the game's story and characters.

How Alan Wake uses multimodal narrative to build complexity (click for full size)

What's the game about?
Fans tend to praise Alan Wake for the quality of its story, and for giving the impression of being aware of itself and its medium. Rob Zacny's excellent piece at the Escapist is along these lines: he explains the game as an artifact of, and metaphor for, its own creation. I don't agree with all of Zacny's points in specific, but I think on the whole, he's probably correct about Remedy's intent. However, I experienced Alan Wake as a messy, emotionally fraught story, one designed to be broadly plausible on two levels (without working entirely to my satisfaction on either individually). The ways that these readings inform each other make the game an interesting storytelling experiment that overcomes undeniable problems.

Narrative A: On one level, we have the literal story of the game. Alan Wake is a writer of thrillers whose wife is abducted by a supernatural presence. Though successful, Wake is insecure about his own talent, a self-doubt that he medicates with drugs and booze. He's an emotionally unstable wreck, an emotionally abusive "asshole" who takes his success, fans and wife for granted. Still, with a little help from his friends, he finds the strength to overcome the "Dark Presence" and save both his wife and the town of Bright Falls. By writing a novel. Yeah. People may doubt his sanity at points—even Wake himself does so—but they all come to realize that the danger is real, no matter how crazy it sounds. After his victory (i.e. in the DLC), he finds himself stuck in a place where his dreams take physical shape, where he must overcome his depression and self-loathing.

Narrative B: The other available reading is essentially the same as my initial impression of the game: dude crazy. Our protagonist is the same man, but he isn't actually fighting a supernatural dark force. He's going off the deep end. When his wife asks him to seek help for his longstanding, deep-seated problems, he snaps and throws her into a lake, where she drowns. In this reading, the events that follow are confusing and disjointed because Wake is moving in and out of touch with reality, trying to reorganize his life into a narrative of which he is the hero. Even through his distorted perception of events, we get hints of what is really happening—Alice screaming at the cabin ("Alan! Alan, no! No") and Barry acting increasingly uncomfortable about his friend's delusions. The cops after Wake aren't led by a rogue FBI agent with a hard-on for writers (and an obsessive need to prove his deep literary knowledge). They're just police chasing a man who has been behaving erratically in public—a man who may or may not have committed several murders.

To be clear, Remedy explicitly suggests both readings at different points—I'm not pulling any rabbits out of my hat here. Narrative A is precisely the story you'll get if you pay attention while playing, but don't want to worry about thorny problems like narrator reliability. Narrative B is the version of events offered in-game by a smarmy psychiatrist whose practice focuses on artists.

So much for being subtle
Neither narrative succeeds completely. Some sections fail to rise noticeably above the deliberate mediocrity of Wake’s own work. In creating a work of art intended partly to satirize bad art, Remedy set themselves a high bar. Both versions of the narrative are rather trite, and both suffer from the game's tendency to provide unnecessary and even obvious information in Wake's own voice. This works when the exposition comes in the form of scattered manuscript pages, perhaps because I enjoy real thrillers and horror stories and can appreciate this light poaching of the genres. Unhappily, Wake's voice actor is simply not convincing, which means that much of the spoken dialogue—not to mention the running internal monologue—loses its impact.

Don't get me wrong, Wake isn't Final Fantasy XIII-bad, but he's off-putting enough that I was constantly checking myself: returning to my notes to make sure that I wasn't wrong; that the game really was doing interesting things; that I hadn't become so much the game-narrative-hammer that any half-decent telling of a third-rate tale would look like a nail worthy of a long blog post. (I realize that I'm a tool in this metaphor.) The latest episode of Californication convinced me that the problem really is the acting. Watch how completely David Duchovny embodies the troubled writer Hank Moody. Then listen to Wake. Granted, the genres are completely different, but so is the ability of the actors to play a stylized character believably.

Fortunately, Alan Wake also has high points and moments of unusual depth. Many of these are slyly meta, as when the game's lead writer Sam Lake appears alongside Wake on a late night talk show, or when Emerson, a video game developer, complains about his industry and colleagues. Emerson's room contains a sketch of a level within Alan Wake, and an Xbox 360 with a copy of a game based on an in-game television show, Night Springs, which is allegedly based on the town of Bright Falls itself.

This circle of self-referentiality—ouroborous as plot structure—is present in other ways as well. Poet Thomas Zane went through Wake's ordeal decades prior, and his fiction defined some of the rules that govern Alan Wake's actions in the present, but Wake also has the ability to change reality with his typewriter, and it's he who writes Zane into the story in the first place. The whole thing might seem like a cheap trick were it not for the fact that questions of authorship and inspiration are also central on a thematic level.

Watching Black Swan this winter, I was struck by how obvious many of the film's symbolic choices were—and how little that mattered. Many of the rhetorical devices Alan Wake employs are a similarly shopworn, but then the best ones always are. Take the plethora of dualities within the game:

Thomas Zane/Alan Wake
Night Springs/Bright Falls
Night Springs/Alan Wake
Barbara Jagger/Alice Wake
Barbara Jagger/Cynthia Weaver
Barbara Jagger/Agent Nightingale
Cynthia Weaver/Alan Wake

Agent Nightingale/Alan Wake
Agent Nightingale/Sarah Breaker
Shadows/light
Sanity/madness
Past/present
Fiction/reality

Not all of these symbolic pairings are fully developed, but even those which are not contribute to the game's air of doubt and mystery, its themes of confused identity, obscured motive and uncertain agency.

Wake may have a lousy voice actor, but he and his world are rendered well. Sidekick/agent Barry provides needed comic relief while also undercutting the player's confidence in Wake at key points (witness his reaction when Wake pulls a gun on his psychiatrist). I buy Alan Wake as a writer of tawdry thrillers, and I buy Barry as his schmoozy agent. Alice, though she serves primarily as a damsel in distress, is also credibly written as a woman at the end of her rope in a difficult marriage. The game's arc away from realism towards the mystic vagaries of the ending was well-paced and felt right; in a game about the pain surrounding the process of artistic creation, the artist ends up abandoning his interest in the world around him once the muse at last returns.

Linearity and openness
In a (failed) series of posts on game narrative from last year, I commented that linear design was entirely compatible with an exploratory approach to narrative:

[T]he player's own sense of exploration and discovery is more important than the objective game design. An air of mystery and a sense of history—of things having happened before the player character's emergence on the scene—can go a long way in this regard.... The result [of encouraging this curiosity] is a recurring narrative feedback loop of exploration and discovery, fed by a combination of the player's curiosity and her satisfaction.

Alan Wake proves the point. Its levels are funnels from point to point, and although small acts of exploration are occasionally rewarded with a manuscript page or a few lines of dialogue, they are more often punished, both by monotonous combat—how much more irritating, when you know it was optional!—or through the meaningless "reward" of a collectible coffee thermos. Yet there is a palpable sense of discovery, and of exploration.

The Italian novelist and academic Umberto Eco has written extensively about the idea of "open texts," meaning texts that leave themselves open to interpretation on the part of the reader. I've been thinking about this theory quite a bit in the context of video games lately. It seems to potentially overcome the primary objection to games from a traditional narrative arts standpoint, which is that the author lacks strict enough control over the pace, tone, trajectory, scope and outcome of the story. Eco's theory (which I confess I have only encountered in summary form) holds out the possibility that these weaknesses are in fact strengths, because they require more work on the part of the player.

In games like Alan Wake, players must take the building blocks provided by the game and synthesize them together with what we have decided through our own actions and judgments. Only I can answer the question "Is Alan Wake crazy?" for myself, just as Rob Zacny had to answer it for himself, and neither of our answers should satisfy anyone else—they should merely inform your own reading.

Unserious Game: Alan Wake early impressions

2011-02-17T11:03:00.006-07:00

This post contains spoilers for Alan Wake, BioShock 2, the film Lost Highway and a couple of Stephen King novels.

The first time I loaded up Alan Wake, I was hanging out with a friend. We were playing, but we were also chatting, and I was lending only half an ear to the dialogue during the game's tutorial nightmare (a literal nightmare, that's not a value judgement). I started paying closer attention when a bright light with a deep voice and a Canadian accent appeared. The light addressed Wake, reciting an odd poem and telling him that the man from whom he'd been running "had been taken over by a dark presence." Wake blinded the man with a flashlight, but the light informed Wake that the darkness was still "inside of him, controlling him....he can't be saved." Then the light gave Wake a gun. I waited for a minute or so before I used it, just dodging the man's attacks, but there was no choice to be made; it was kill or fail to progress.

My immediate thought: "This game isn't about the supernatural, it's about a guy having a psychotic break. Those are going to turn out to be real people he's killing."

Lost Highway? Alan Wake circa 2006. Pic from Xboxic.

I've restarted the game since then, to catch quotes and reexamine the opening. Thus far, my initial reading has proven supportable. It's not even much of a stretch. The enemies I'm encountering are saying things you might expect locals to say to a guy visiting their town: describing cabin rental policies; offering restaurant suggestions; making comments about their work ("Logging is a hazardous occupation" got a laugh). Still, it's early hours, and Remedy might be lobbing a red herring.

Alan Wake isn't the first game to tread this territory. Several of the Silent Hill games showcase horrors of the characters' own making. A famous line from Silent Hill 3 ("They look like monsters to you?") distills this potential plot twist down to its essence. Even the first Postal did it, way back in 1997. BioShock 2 briefly pulls the reverse trick, showing you what the spoiled world of Rapture looks like through the eyes of a little sister.

Even outside Alan Wake's nightmare world, there are several hints at some emotional disturbance in the titular protagonist. He has trouble sleeping. He cannot write. His nightmares torment him with allusions to his writing ("How does it feel to be destroyed by your own creation?"). These things seem related, as does his wife's fear of the dark, which I'd like to read as a subconscious acknowledgement that she is in fact afraid of her husband, who writes and dreams of darkness. This last would require an unreliable narrator and a modicum of subtlety on Remedy's part, something that has not been their strong suit to date (trouble sleeping, get it? A. Wake?).

The relationship between Alan and his wife Alice is clearly troubled, and Wake himself seems to be the problem. Wake's agent Barry calls him every five minutes, which seems initially like a joke, until it becomes clear that he's really keeping tabs on his friend. In one of the game's mysterious manuscript pages, which describe events that Wake cannot directly observe, Barry calls his client "unstable" and "messed up." Barry is unable to believe that the temporary loss of contact could mean that Alan and Alice are "on a second honeymoon"; more likely, "something was wrong."

The game's central quest to find Alice is set up by a scene in which she and Alan argue over his inability to write, and his unwillingness to seek help. During this argument, the lights flicker, and we see a menacing, shadowy figure in the darkness. Alan checks his wife with his shoulder as he rushes past to leave the room, and she looks down—dejected? Resigned? Regardless, I wondered whether his failure to pause or apologize meant that he had laid hands on her in anger in the past.

Wake tells us he leaves the house to cool down and take a walk, but I'm not sure we're meant to believe him. Certainly, his wife's screams back in the house ("Alan! Alan, no! No!") would tend to implicate rather than exonerate him. After Alice disappears, Wake recalls their fight when he sees a book by the therapist whom Alice asked him to see. He says doesn't want to think about it.

I understand why Twin Peaks comes up again and again in discussion of Alan Wake. As with another recent game, Deadly Premonition, the deeply quirky television classic is a clear inspiration. Small northwestern towns, good coffee, eccentric side characters (log lady, lantern lady; owls, crows; the homages are exactly what they seem). In truth, I think that Alan Wake may have more in common with another Lynch masterpiece: the film Lost Highway.

Lost Highway is surreal and open to multiple interpretations, but my take is that it tells the story of a man who jealously murders his wife, and then constructs a completely new persona and imaginary life for himself in order to escape the pain of realizing his crime. This escape is unsuccessful on both an emotional and physical level; he cannot shed the darker aspects of his self, and he is ultimately executed in the electric chair.

Is Wake's apparent waking life unreal?
Remedy at least holds out that possibility.

Remember those manuscript pages that Wake keeps finding? They remind me of nothing so much as the videotapes mailed to Fred Madison, the main character in Lost Highway. In short clips, the tapes show someone walking through the Fred's home while he and his wife are asleep. They culminate in images of his wife's dismembered corpse. Within the film, the key to understanding these tapes is Fred's explanation of why he hates video cameras: "I like to remember things my own way"—i.e., not how they actually happened. Is it possible that Wake's reality is false, and that the pages tell the truth? Is this why he's unable to write?

Stephen King is also often cited as an inspiration for Alan Wake. As with Lynch, King is concerned with the duality of identity: what we show to the world, and what we keep hidden even from ourselves. King often uses writers as protagonists—men who often don't know what their dark sides are up to until it's too late. Jack Torrance of The Shining and Thad Beaumont of The Dark Half come immediately to mind.

Of course, King is himself possessed of a strong dark side. He is a recovering alcoholic, and was for many years addicted to cocaine and pills. In addition to this, King literally has another self: he wrote many novels under the name Richard Bachman, a bifurcation of identity that began for prosaic reasons (it's hard to sell two books a year from the same writer) but which he eventually worked into his fiction and his real-life mystique.

Wake may also have a second identity. On arriving at his vacation cabin, he encounters a box of novels by an author he says he has never heard of, Thomas Zane. Zane's books have his name in big gold leaf letters down the spine, with titles all in the same font and only different colored covers to differentiate them—all evidence that he works in the same commercial vein as Wake himself. The titles of Zane's novels don't all make sense to me at this point in the game, but two of them—Kept from Sleep and The Labyrinth of Me—make it clear that this isn't just a minor decorative touch. Zane and Wake are, somehow, mirrors.

Unfortunately, I can't spend all day playing Alan Wake, and I'll have to wrap up here. I wouldn't usually post impressions so early, but in this case I think that the fact that I might prove wrong about the plot is actually quite interesting. How well was Remedy foreshadowing? Did I read into things too far (I always do)?

A few more scattered thoughts before I go:

The game has fantastic lighting effects, and it uses them to build atmosphere effectively. Walking through dark woods filled with mist and shadows drew me in to the spirit of the game. Unfortunately, the distractingly awful lip syncing along with other questionable choices regularly broke the immersion. This sentence brought to you by SYNC from MICROSOFT. Who thought it was a good idea to include collectibles in a tense thriller? Every time one appeared on the horizon, it completely spoiled the mood by immediately turning me into Homer Simpson. "Running... fighting... waiting... man, this game sure is cree—Ooh, a shiny thing!"

Shave him bald and you're looking at J Allard.
Pic from Electric Revival.

Wake himself is somewhat unconvincing as a character, mostly due to poor voicework. Hearing him exclaim, over the opening credits, that "I'm a writer" called to mind Keanu Reaves playing big boy lawyer dress-up in The Devil's Advocate. I did enjoy Wake's odd sartorial choices, though. Nothing says "I'm 40, I'm cool, and I love layering" like a blazer over a jacket over a hoodie.

The combat became boring just three or four fights in. I'm not looking forward to another eight hours of this. Not every game needs combat, folks! Not much of it, anyhow. So far, I think this game would keep me enthralled without it. There have to be other ways of building tension besides being worried about impending character death.

Narrative in Games-Based Learning

2011-02-15T22:38:00.002-07:00

Over the last two years, I have spent a lot of time reading studies about K-12 and college courses that incorporate elements of game design. Sometimes, these elements are directly adopted into the structure of the course:

educators use points instead of traditional grading systems (Jackson, Sheldon, me and my colleagues);
students conduct serious role-play and pursue situated goals (Shaffer, Travis, Kelly);
students are able to chart their own path through the "world" based on personal interests and goals;
assessment is integrated directly into the learning experience; etc.

Essentially, this is the gamification of education.

Other educators take a blended content-alignment approach, in which situated learning occurs within a video game or multi-user virtual environment, which is then framed by a more traditional course design (studies with River City, QuestAtlantis and Second Life often take this approach).

Reading about these studies is exciting. The people involved are smart, creative and frequently brave, taking on the simultaneous and challenging roles of designer, educator, and (when necessary) evangelist. Although much of the foundational work underlying games-based learning has already been done—few papers fail to cite such deservedly famous names as James Paul Gee, Kurt Squire, Constance Steinkuehler, Marc Prensky, or David Shaffer—it's still a very new field focusing on an uncommon application of a very new medium.

Many of the research projects I read about have something in common: a strong focus on narrative. The divide between narrative and systemic gameplay is fundamental to game design; the degree to which they overlap depends on the game in question, which in turn depends partly on the personal preferences of the game designer and the players. Narrative is frequently presented as being fundamental to the players' engagement with the game. Without a story, the suggestion seems to be that students will not be able to take on a new role—and that assumption of a role that exists partly within and partly without the student's real identity is critical to situated learning.

Where's the line? It's subjective.

The project I'm working on is called Game Attributes and Mechanics in Education, or "GAME" for short; cute, right? It's a design-based research project, which means that our tools and methodology will continue to evolve based on what we learn. At the moment, we are in our second semester using GAME in a graduate-level course about teaching with technology. ~~I can't talk about the current state of our design or our findings in detail yet, because we're in the midst of applying for grants and working on papers~~. This post, from July 2010, gives a snapshot of a preliminary design. You can see more recent info at our project blog, http://gameua.wordpress.com.

One thing I can say is that we have had numerous conversations about narrative. How would we implement a narrative? How do we ensure that it's engaging to our student population, and to future students of different ages and in different disciplines, since we hope to implement GAME more broadly? Is it possible to achieve real situated learning without a narrative component (in other words, can expertise be founded in a dialogue that acknowledges the real nature of the course as a course, rather than one that attempts to simulate a specific professional environment)?

Up to now, we have refrained from implementing a narrative in our GAME-based course. We chose not to for three basic reasons:

We wanted to focus on establishing the core technology and pedagogy first;
Very little of the previous research supporting narrative as an important component of games-based learning was conducted with graduate students, rather than K-12 or undergraduates;
We felt that a poor implementation of narrative, one rejected by the players, would be quite detrimental to learning outcomes and students' experience of the course.

Now that the technology and methodology have been through one cycle of refinement and revision, we are again looking at implementing an overarching narrative into our design. I'm hoping that I have a few readers in academia with similar research interests. If so, I want your take: Do you see a clear case in favor of including narrative in the research, or in your own experience?

For non-academics, a quick survey:

What's your educational background (what did you study, to what level, and what do you do now)?
How would you feel about taking a course that integrated significant RPG-elements and social gaming-style mechanics?
What kind of "story," if any, would feel appropriate in such a class?

Sources not exactly cited

These are just a few of the studies and other papers that prompted this post. If you've got others to suggest, please mention them in the comments.

Dickey, Michele. Game design narrative for learning: appropriating adventure game design narrative devices and techniques for the design of interactive learning environments. Educational Technology Research and Development (2006) vol. 54 (3) pp. 245-263

Hickey et al. Designing assessments and assessing designs in virtual educational environments. Journal of Science Education and Technology (2009) vol. 18 (2) pp. 187-208

Jackson, Janna. Game-based teaching: what educators can learn from videogames. Teaching Education (2009) vol. 20 (3) pp. 291-304

Kelly, Kathleen. A Yearlong General Education Course Using “Reacting to the Past” Pedagogy to Explore Democratic Practice. ijb.cgpublisher.com

Ketelhut, Diane. The Impact of Student Self-efficacy on Scientific Inquiry Skills: An Exploratory Investigation in River City, a Multi-user Virtual Environment. Journal of Science Education and Technology (2007) vol. 16 (1) pp. 99-111

Malone, Thomas. What makes things fun to learn? Heuristics for designing instructional computer games. Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGSMALL symposium and the first SIGPC symposium on Small systems (1980) pp. 162-169

Shaffer. Epistemic frames for epistemic games. Computers & Education (2006) vol. 46 (3) pp. 223-234

Travis, Roger. (2010, August 15). Operation LAPIS is ĪTE!. [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://livingepic.blogspot.com/2010/08/operation-lapis-is-ite.html. (2011, February 15).

Warren et al. A MUVE towards PBL writing: Effects of a digital learning environment designed to improve elementary student writing. Journal of Research on Technology in Education (2008) vol. 41 (1) pp. 113-140

Hanging up the cloak and dagger

2011-02-15T21:05:00.000-07:00

A childhood favorite (the movie, that is).
Image courtesy the Killer List of Video Games.

I don't write about my research on this blog very much. This is because my colleagues and I are in the process of applying for grants. Honestly, the idea that you have to keep your ideas and findings secret until you've secured a source of funding is a bit uncomfortable for me—"information wants to be free," and all that. Is someone going to steal our ideas? Will funding sources determine that we're doing such a great job as volunteers that there's no need to help us ramp up our work? Doubts aside, when I have little experience of a situation—no real understanding of why things are the way they are—I am inclined to trust people who do possess that experience and knowledge.

Academia, like everything else, is as much of a culture and a mindset as it is a collection of information and procedures. In graduate school, I learned to how to formulate questions, conduct research and publicize results; how to make professional contacts; how to lecture and lead discussions; how to design curricula. I know stuff, and I know how to do stuff, and in many ways I've begun to "think like an expert." But I'm not yet at home in the culture. That takes time.

But I am engaged in research, and I do want to talk about it; if not in the specifics, then at least in generalities. I have questions about things that bear on my research, and I want to hear what others have to say. I see work being done by by brilliant people at other institutions, and I want to share my thoughts and excitement. So I hope this post will be the start of a more open dialogue—a more frequent monologue, at least—about my own work with games-based learning.

Expect more soon.

Unserious Game: Singularity

2011-02-12T14:36:00.005-07:00

A confession: I write slowly, and I while I'm rarely at a loss for words, I frequently find myself at something of a loss for ideas; at least, for ideas that can sustain a blog post without requiring hours of research. That's why I occasionally recycle material prepared for other purposes as a Boom Culture post. Look back through the archive and you'll see posts that exist just to embed a paper I've written, or a design document, for example. All of which is merely to contextualize and excuse the fact that this post started out as a comment on Infinite Lag's review of Singularity, and has been amended and refined just enough to justify reuse here.

Concept art from Raven Software's developer diary.

Singularity is not the most linear game I've ever played, but it sometimes felt that way. Silent protagonist and blandly American soldier Nate Renko is either the most unfazable man in the world, or else is mute (perhaps brain-damaged from the game-opening helicopter crash?). As Renko, I picked my way through the mutant-strewn remains of a secret Soviet research base. Though armed with a powerful time manipulation device (TMD)—a scientific breakthrough that clumsily combines Valve's gravity and portal guns with a time-shifting mechanic that may be original, or may have been stolen from a game I have not played (Timeshift, I'm looking in your direction)—I had no agency whatsoever.

I could not travel through time at will. I could not travel through space at will. I could not solve puzzles in more than one clearly prescribed way. Despite the presence of cryptic messages urging me not to trust specific characters or information, I could not make choices about whom to trust, aid or hinder (there is technically one choice in the game, at the very end). If I saw something that could be time-shifted or moved, doing one or both of these things was always correct. If I saw a switch, flipping it was always necessary. If there were ever two paths available to me, the better-lit one was always the path forward.

...so DON'T MAKE ANY NOISE, GOT IT?
(Pic from Kent Sutherland's review on CrispyGamer)

I did have the option of exploring a few rooms that lay just off the critical path, for which I was rewarded in clockwork fashion with ammo, health and "E99 energy." J.P. Grant has already identified many of the sources for Singularity's hodgepodge of mechanics, so suffice it to say that Adam:Rapture; E99:Katorga-12. The "chrono-ping" that points you in the direction of your next objective is the most useless mechanic I can imagine, since I never once felt lost, sidetracked, confused, befuddled, or anything other than completely certain of the direction I should be heading at any given moment. The most meaningful decisions available to me in the game were tactical: which weapons to bring into battle, which weapons to upgrade, which enemies to aim the weapons at from which positions, when to fire said weapons, etc. Unfortunately, several of the weapons are neither fun nor terribly useful, which further limits meaningful choice and deflates the dynamism of the combat.

There's a real conflict between Singularity the game—a corridor shooter with so-so weapons and a few neat tricks up its sleeve—and Singularity the story. The story is a campy, creepy work of genre fiction that draws equally on Cold War-era sci-fi tropes and modern twist-a-minute series like Lost to create something that is, if not exactly great, then definitely solid B-grade fun. The game is a theme park ride. Strap in and feel it creak as it shoves you forward. Honestly, who thought it was a good idea to marry this inflexible gameplay and narrative structure to a story about time travel? It makes no thematic sense, and hurts both the ludic and narrative elements of the game. I'm reminded of the episode of Full House in which Michelle makes tuna fish ice cream [PDF].

The audio logs, another barefaced theft from BioShock, are dull and add little to the atmosphere of Katorga-12. I think developer Raven Software would have been better served to stick with the scripted scenes in which Renko watches the ghostly past unfold before him. Audio logs have always been distractingly pseudo-diegetic, and I'm ready to decree them off-limits without an unusually convincing explanation. The lack of subtitles is also a serious oversight, since the logs are only audible if you stand around next to them. I was frequently left tapping my foot in an empty room on the off chance that the tape had something to say other than yet another variation on "They are feeding us strange orange food," "Strange things are happening," or the ever-popular "We have holed up here for the night, because it seems safe." This last is always found next to a pile of corpses.

The most interesting aspect of Singularity's plot is the relationship between two research scientists who begin as colleagues, but begin to suspect and fear each other. The problem is that this plot exists mostly in my imagination, since the game only bothers to sketch it in the most cursory manner. The best part of the narrative as it actually exists in the game is probably the canon ending, where you re-watch the opening of the game as it plays out with a single significant variable shifted in the timestream. This is the only point at which I felt like the game lived up to the potential of time travel stories, in which the rules of reality can easily be altered in surprising ways.

Singularity is a very well-made game. There is excellent craftsmanship at work here, even if little of it is original. It's undoubtedly a looker, and the impressive tech and workmanlike art design help to sell the experience. Watching a time-shifted cargo ship disintegrate around you as you race against time may have been reminiscent of the opening of Call of Duty 4, but it was also freaking cool. The enemy types are varied and are used sparingly, and the boss fights—though all of the "shoot the glowy bit" variety—are fun. In another game, the fact that I was never confused about where to go would have been a testament to careful level design and the appropriate use of minor visual elements (a little extra bloom here, arcing electrical sparks there) to "subtly" direct me. The theme and tone of Singularity, however, would have been more appropriately matched by a design that wasn't afraid to challenge or even confuse me.

Similarly, the puzzles that make me roll my eyes aren't much less sophisticated than those in Half-Life 2, a game whose design I venerate. Then again, Half-Life 2 is nearly seven years old, and even back then Valve had the good sense not to repeat the exact same puzzle three or even four times. Darksiders, another Frankenstein game stitched together from clear "inspirations," chose a far more exciting source for its puzzle design philosophy (Zelda). Maybe the lesson is that, if you're going to steal iconic design elements, think through the implications and design a game around them that really uses them to full effect in a new context.

In the end, I'm torn partly because I wanted to like Singularity more than I did. I view the relationships between publishers and developers in almost Marxist terms, and I hate to see a talented team like Raven treated so badly. Singularity deserved a decent marketing and PR campaign; instead, it got nothing (representative comment in the Neogaf official thread: "What, it's released?"). Alas, we don't always get what we want, even though sometimes—when we try—we get what we need. Christ, you know it ain't easy to make an original work. You know how hard it can be! But you can't just cobble something together from someone else's hits and hope to have it achieve real greatness. I'll leave you with one final thought, as well-suited to this blog post as many of Singularity's mechanics were to its overall design: In the end, the love you make is equal to the love you take.

Phffffbbt.

In Praise of the "Let's Play"

2011-02-08T23:20:00.003-07:00

"The Terrible Secret of Animal Crossing."
Art by Demon Allie, via the Let's Play Archive.
Fabulous Let's Play thread by Chewbot.

I have never played the following games (or if I have, I haven't played much of them):

With the exception of Dwarf Fortress and Deadly Premonition, I have no intention of playing any of these games. Some of them are inaccessible to me for technological reasons (I have a Mac without Windows). Others I would probably consider unplayable, or not worth overcoming usability issues to play (apologies to Michael Abbot). A few I remember from years ago, but never finished for one reason or another (Arcanum was buggy; Darkseed, awful). None of my friends are profoundly knowledgeable about the history, technology or content of these games, and even if they were, I doubt they'd have time to sit down with me and talk about them at length.

So how is it that I know these games—know them, if not inside and out, then at least well enough to talk about their mechanics and plots, their flaws and glories? How is it that I've shared meaningful experiences, have heard or even taken part in stories told by them and about them?

It's all thanks to that wonderful artifact of online gaming culture known as the "Let's Play."

Let's Plays are a collaborative, multimodal storytelling form, where the story being told is the experience of playing a specific video game. The term and format originated in a subforum of Something Awful, a sprawling humor site. Let's Plays (hereafter LPs, since I can't take the grammar) can include text, screenshots and videos. They may be written from the perspective of a player, or from the perspective of a character within the game, or something in-between. They may take the narrative of a game at face value, or they may embellish it, adding subplots, characters and depth that wasn't there to begin with. Some LPs are extremely meta, featuring commentary more about the LP format or the nature of being a gamer than about a specific (or even a real) game. It's a flexible, fascinating format—just the kind of delight you might hope would emerge from a site that's something like a friendly 4chan.

Even when catalogued and nicely packaged by the Let's Play Archive, a free website founded by Something Awful member Baldurk, LPs reflect their rowdy forum origins. Let's Play threads deliver on the collective, community-oriented sensibility implied by their name: they often incorporate conversations between readers and players/posters. Sometimes the games are even passed around, like a ghost story (or a bottle of Jack) around a campfire, offering different views on anything from mechanics to setting to objectives. The classic LP "Dwarf Fortress—Boatmurdered" is a perfect example: several players take turns spending one in-game year as the administrator of the title fortress. Some players act as competent administrators focusing on military or economic issues; others talk more about the game's ungodly deep mechanical systems; and still others role-play as incompetent nincompoops, concerned only with glory or odd personal obsessions. In every case, the attitude of the player is reflected in the fate of the fortress.

My love for the Let's Play is born out of my love for good stories and good storytellers. LPs have let me experience games I might never have encountered, and have given me new insights into games I adore. I've enjoyed LPs in situations where playing a game is not an option (they're great on lunchbreaks at dull jobs!). Some LPs have led me to interests outside of gaming. The best LPs teach you about a game while also offering a hearty helping of comedy, drama and personality.

If you've never read an LP, why not start today? I strongly recommend all of the ones linked from this article. Chewbot's Animal Crossing LP is a genre-defying horror classic. Research Indicates' Jurassic Park: Trespasser LP takes you on a tour of a game that might have been one of the all-time greats, and explains exactly how and why it fell short. Seorin's Arcanum LP is a fabulous fantasy that goes beyond the already complex plot of the game itself. And Thuryl's Might & Magic LP—the first I ever read—is a generous, funny and highly social playthrough of an older game that I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole today.

Or visit the Let's Play Archive yourself, and scroll through the list of games until you see something that piques your interest ("I remember that!"; "I always meant to play that one!"; "What the hell?"). If you're a Let's Play addict, share your thoughts or recommendations in the comments. And if you're a Let's Play author... thanks!

Serious Game: But That Was [Yesterday]

2011-02-07T15:58:00.005-07:00

At the suggestion of J.P. Grant, whose excellent blog I recently discovered, I checked out But That Was [Yesterday], a small art game that took 1st place in this year's Casual Gameplay Design Competition. For another perspective, Grant's review is up at Kill Screen Magazine. The game probably takes 15 minutes to play from start to finish, so if you're interested, you might as well try it.

The puppy in question

I'm generally a fan of "art games"—my glowing review of The Path ought to be some evidence of that. I like But That Was [Yesterday] as well, although I wouldn't say that I'm evaluating it by anything like the same criteria that I apply to games which offer meaningful player agency. Before I get into critiquing the game, I'll volunteer that I had a strong emotional reaction to the game. As soon as I was done, I went outside and played with my puppy. Awwww!

Briefly, the premise: you're a guy. You have to move forward with your life somehow, but a roiling black wall of memory seems to be preventing you from doing so. There are three main sequences in the game, each of which introduces a new loved one and a new mechanic—these sequences seem to be memories as well.

The opening screen.

Although it's a completely linear, author-directed experience, BTWY probably does meet my definition of a game. I'm of the opinion that designer Michael Molinari's QTE-like design feels a bit rote when contrasted with other art-game philosophies, but that's subjective. Jason Rohrer and Terry Cavanagh make games whose mechanics are more fully realized, and although their work is precisely as linear as BTWY, they don't give me the same impression of running through a tunnel. Daniel Benmergui's games are also very different, more like little poems than animated shorts with added interaction.

One thing I do like about the limited nature of the interaction in BTWY is that it allows close reading in a way that many games don't. For example, take horizontal movement, the primary measure of progress in any platformer. I read BTWY as suggesting that moving to the right represents the "moving forward" of the tagline ("A personal journey about learning to move forward in life"), which would suggest that moving to the left—or facing the left, since we in fact cannot move in that direction—represents being focused on the past.

However, it is actually running to the right that halts progress, as the main character is apparently overwhelmed by ghosts of the past. This suggests that some crisis is created by moving forward without pausing to reflect on the past. Given the tagline of the game, this is superficially confusing. The game tasks us with moving forward, and does not allow us to do anything else, yet we cannot move forward without first looking back. I'm willing to accept this as a statement that we must come to terms with our past, but there is still a mechanical contradiction: shouldn't we be overwhelmed by powerful nostalgia when we spend too long looking back, rather than when we move too quickly ahead? That's my experience of life.

There is a clear contrast between the brief, vivid flashes of past memories we get when diving into the wall and the softer images of our lost loved ones which appear when we move forward "properly." To give in to nostalgia is to live in an imaginary world in which we have no agency, because the choices were all made long ago; if we instead make new choices and forge new bonds in life, our past will remain with us in a positive way (the mechanics which let us progress are also echoes of the past).

None of this reading is valid if my assumption about the left/right symbolism is wrong, but I can't imagine another interpretation. To assume that BTWY adopted the platforming convention of always running to the right as a purely formal element gives it too little credit, given how well-thought out many other small details are.

One mark of the game's success is that the relationship between the boys, with their prep school clothes and tree climbing, brought to mind the novel A Separate Peace. I have no idea whether this is a deliberate allusion, but the fact that I can connect a small Flash game with a book that I regard highly without the book "outclassing" the game is quite an achievement.

A final thought: Games I have played that aim (ambitiously) for an emotional impact always take a very abstract approach. What is it about loosely sketching a story that works so well, vs. filling in all the details, either mechanically or narratively?

On Inhabiting False Realities

2011-02-04T17:51:00.004-07:00

"Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. And that led me to wonder, 'If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities?'" —Philip K. Dick

Dick

Welles

This morning, my friend Jon—a fellow Dickhead—send me a link to a Philip K. Dick essay that I hadn't read in some time. Ready for a break from reading other essays, I went ahead and started reading it out loud to myself, in the Orson Welles voice that I always imagine Dick had (even though he didn't) due to the vague physical resemblance in their later years.

It's a brilliant essay and I'll finish the out-loud reading another day, but I got to the following point and had to pause:

It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question "What is reality?," to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." That's all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven't been able to define reality any more lucidly.

But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener. Sometimes when I watch my eleven-year-old daughter watch TV, I wonder what she is being taught. The problem of miscuing; consider that. A TV program produced for adults is viewed by a small child. Half of what is said and done in the TV drama is probably misunderstood by the child. Maybe it's all misunderstood. And the thing is, Just how authentic is the information anyhow, even if the child correctly understood it? What is the relationship between the average TV situation comedy to reality? What about the cop shows? Cars are continually swerving out of control, crashing, and catching fire. The police are always good and they always win. Do not ignore that point: The police always win. What a lesson that is. You should not fight authority, and even if you do, you will lose. The message here is, Be passive. And—cooperate. If Officer Baretta asks you for information, give it to him, because Officer Baretta is a good man and to be trusted. He loves you, and you should love him.

So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.

I want to run out this tangent. Though frequently insane, Dick was also prescient. In this passage, he identifies a trend that has continued and intensified in the years since his death. I immediately think of two phenomena in modern American society, about which I feel completely differently.

The first is the Balkanized state of modern American news. It is now impossible to read or watch an account of factual events without either A) being aware that the account is filtered through an ideology, or B) being aware that someone else who holds strongly ideological beliefs would identify the account as being filtered through a competing ideology. In other words, we can watch Fox News or we can watch MSNBC, and we know what color glasses we have on. Or else we can listen to NPR or read the New York Times, and even if we think we're not wearing glasses, the other guy thinks that we are. (Reverse the left/right polarity if you must, but that feel you must is precisely the point.)

The second is the fact that our "pseudo-worlds," and "the electronic hardware" that we use to deliver them, have become quite complex and deep in the form of video games. It's easy to argue that most games are essentially shallow, or that it's easy to see through them to the bare rules beneath—but that's no less true of the cop drama that Dick cites.

Both phenomena prove Dick's point, which is that we're getting disturbingly good at fabricating false realities. Why is it that one of these situations terrifies me, and the other does not?

My wife—no great fan of video games—might argue that it's precisely because I can't see the glasses I have on when it comes to games. I'm completely inculcated, a culture warrior; to extend the metaphor too far, I've had the laser eye surgery. Unsurprisingly, I don't think this is correct.

The issue is that only one of these categories of false reality holds out the possibility that readers will completely mistake the media they consume for the real world. News is ostensibly descriptive, but in fact it's like the shadows on the cave wall. It becomes our reality. As the market ("market realities") ensures that news channels will absorb stronger biases, those shadows will stretch into shapes that resemble less and less the objects, people and events that cast them. We'll end up with no shared experience to discuss, nothing to bridge the gulf that divides and threatens to devour us.

Dick uses mental illness to address the question of our ability to communicate across disparate realities:

What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe, it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown of communication... and there is the real illness.

A month ago, I would probably have argued that this is an example that downplays the danger of that breakdown. Who cares whether we can communicate with a few million schizophrenics, when I'm talking about dividing lines that run right down the middle of society? But I live in Tucson, and just 10 miles from my house, a young man with a "real illness" shot my congresswoman in the head. I'm going to go ahead and say that communicating across all kinds of realities has become important to me.

Still, I don't worry about games, violent or otherwise. I don't see The Matrix in our future—not even Strange Days. Why not?

To begin with, there is a question of fidelity. The more ambitious a simulation of reality is, the more difficult it is to pull it off without triggering some analogue of the uncanny valley. Characters in paintings don't animate poorly. No one in Middlemarch runs out of ambient dialogue. Consider the example of reality television: it's easy to edit the raw footage of reality into invented narratives. Creating a simulation that anyone could inhabit and accept as true? That's science fiction.

When people accept false realities, they accept realities that directly supplant what they previously believed. That's part of the allure, the notion that you're moving into the group of those in the know. ("The watered down one, the one you know / Was made up centuries ago.") With the exception of ARGs, games don't attempt to supplant reality in this way. It's a significant exception, but I'd argue that anyone getting into an ARG knows that what they're doing is a form of role-play.

The title of Dick's essay is How to Build a Universe that Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later, and this is really the essential difference between news (a worldview) and games (a false world): durability. "I like to build universes which do fall apart," Dick confesses. I would argue that most game developers also build fragile universes, although this is usually a function of limited ambition and questionable execution rather than intention.

Only MMOs are demonstrably durable, but they rely heavily on social bonds and cultural markers imported from the real world to establish a sense of place and society. And just as with other false realities, we regard as sick the people who choose to inhabit MMOs as fully as possible. In this case we use the language of addiction, since there's no chance that players accidentally mistook which world was real; only which was important to them. This isn't good or desirable, but at least it's subjective, rather than an objective error.

False universes are dangerous when they become worldviews, and worldviews are just narratives that have become robust. We're still learning to tell stories in games, and even when we succeed, we run into the same reality Welles did: all you have to do is look outside to see there are no Martians.

In his essay, Dick feints at first, holding out the possibility that reality is subjective, and then concludes that it is not. "I watch the children watching TV," he writes, "and at first I am afraid of what they are being taught, and then I realize, they can't be corrupted or destroyed. They watch, they listen, they understand, and, then, where and when it is necessary, they reject. There is something enormously powerful in a child's ability to withstand the fraudulent."

If he's still talking about Baretta, much less Bayonetta, no doubt he's right. I wish that's all we had to worry about.

Time Management

2011-01-27T12:36:00.000-07:00

I've been doing a poor job of managing my time lately. I've had a lot on my plate on the homefront, but that's really not the issue—I just haven't been focusing. Cases in point are the four partially-written posts that I will likely leave abandoned on the Blogger dashboard. Instead of finishing them, here's a brief update on my current projects:

Had an interview for a job I really, really want this week. Keeping my fingers crossed and my hopes reasonable.
Continuing to look for and apply for other jobs.
Continuing to read Challenges for Game Designers, and thinking about trying to design a board game as a side project. Should NOT let myself do this at the moment.
Working on an idea for an essay examining video game narrative through semiotic theory.
Waiting impatiently for the time when I can talk in more detail about the game-based course project that I continue to work on.
Trying to make new professional connections using Twitter (@Maxathon), but feeling like it's not useful unless I already have an audience or a personal relationship with like-minded people. Might give up on this one.
Taking notes to shore up the grant application.

Those are the things I really need to concentrate on at the moment. I'd love to work on other things, but I know myself, and if I try to do more than three or four serious things at once, nothing will come of it. The blog will likely be neglected for a while as a result.

Here are just a few of the ideas bouncing around in the background. If you're interested in seeing a post on any of the following, let me know. It may be a while, but I'm more likely to get around to it in the end:

Does Assassin's Creed II teach anything about Renaissance-era Italian history?
Does Tropico 3 teach anything about history or politics in Cold War-era South America?
Reevaluating my opinions about video game violence (not so much the state of the research, but the implications for the medium)
Is all the hype over "gamification" misguided? (The answer is "yes;" the reasons why it's misguided are what is interesting.)

Schooling Myself

2011-01-10T10:54:00.001-07:00

Well, it's been about two weeks since I graduated with my M.S. in Educational Technology. I learned a great deal over the past two years, but now comes the hard work of finding a job and making a career.

I've had jobs before, of course. I liked some of them, and I didn't like others. In almost every case, there were things I enjoyed about the work or culture and things I disliked. Ultimately, I returned to school because I wanted to work on something that I felt passionate about. I have had a taste of that kind of work in the form of the research that I've been a part of in the past year. But even so, I have a hard time answering a question that I've heard a lot recently: "What do you want to do?"

I want to do all sorts of things, and few of them (if any) amount to a traditional career path. Which is not to say that they don't amount to possible careers, in various aggregations. I have always been happiest and done my best work in situations where I have the freedom be creative and to carve out an independent role for myself.

As a New Englander by birth and by temperament, I don't tend to use this blog for self-reflection—good fences make good neighbors, and all that—but what the hell. It's a new year, I'm looking forward to a new phase of my life, and I only have about twenty readers in any case. Here's a list of what I want, professionally.

I want to continue to research how game mechanics and game-like interfaces can used to improve online (and blended classroom-online) education. So far, my colleagues and I have conducted one case study on this, and we are currently revising our technology and methodology in preparation for a second. My role has focused on game design, interface design and user experience design. Analyzing game mechanics and systems in order to predict their value and efficacy in a new context is a kind of creative synthesis that I really enjoy.
I want to work with people who can challenge me in all sorts of ways. People who know a lot about pedagogy and/or games will question my assumptions and help me to think more clearly and reach better conclusions. I have been lucky enough to have research colleagues who can advocate strongly for student-centered learning and for good instructional design. I also hope to work with people who know more about game design than I do, and from whom I can learn.
I want to experiment more deeply with game design. I am the kind of person who obsessively analyzes the construction of the media I consume—books, movies, games, journalism, everything. But I have much less experience designing game systems than picking them apart. I understand mechanics and genre, and I love listening to intelligent discussions of design minutiae (Idle Thumbs used to be fabulous for this, and Three Moves Ahead remains a must-listen), but this isn't good enough. I feel like someone who can read but not write. I recently picked up Challenges for Game Designers, an excellent book by Brenda Brathwaite and Ian Schreiber, and it's only stoking this fire even further. I plan to pitch my D&D buddies on trying to prototype a simple tabletop game tonight, so we'll see how that goes.
I want to gain more hands-on experience in instructional design. My current position at the University of Arizona College of Medicine has evolved from simple web design and implementation to project management and instructional design, and this has proven to be a rewarding learning experience. I enjoy talking to educators and students about what they want and need, and then finding creative solutions that rely on technology, interaction and curriculum design.
I want to write about games for a wider audience—or rather, I want to expand the circle of people with whom I have meaningful conversations about games. I'm in awe of sites like Experience Points, Lost Garden and The Brainy Gamer, whose authors manage to frequently produce insightful and interesting content about games. I find myself talking back to my iPod or my computer screen more often than can possibly be healthy. I've already begun to use Twitter more, and I also intend to actually communicate my responses to other writers and podcasters. Look forward to more comments from me on other sites. Or dread it, you know. Whatever floats your boat.
Relatedly, I want to develop relationships with more of the people I admire in both academia and the game industry. I have a tendency to assume that people who I hold in high regard will have no interest in talking to me. This is a stupid thing to assume, particularly when it's repeatedly proven false. I suppose this stems from a fear of seeming like a sycophant, or of being ignored. I have had the opportunity to meet some brilliant people lately, including James Gee and Liz Danforth; and there are others with whom I've established contact online. Everyone has been kind and has gone out of their way to be helpful. I'm going to keep starting conversations with people when I have something to say to them, and if I occasionally come across like a doofus, so be it.
I want to keep playing more games. I only recently got an Xbox 360. Between this and Steam support on the Mac, I've been spending far more time playing games lately than I had in the previous few years. I nearly skipped a generation of games, and that would have been a big mistake—I would have missed some really interesting and innovative games, and I would have been unable to understand how gaming culture, business and technology are evolving.
I want to return to working on The Educational Games Database. I think it needs to be a true wiki, rather than a Drupal site. I need to focus on more practical content-alignment articles; that may not be the only way to teach with games, but it's the one that most teachers are looking for right now.

That's a start. I've pushed myself a lot over the past two years, and I see no reason to stop now. Here's to a fabulous 2011.

Schwarzenegger v. Irony

2011-01-03T11:02:00.003-07:00

The US Supreme Court recently heard a case that bears on video games and the first amendment. I tend to come down very far on the side of protecting speech in general, and of considering video games to be a protected form of speech, so I have a strong ideological bias on this matter—in addition to my professional interest in the outcome of the case (neutered games will hurt innovation, which will hurt the value of the medium for serious applications like education). I therefore followed the oral arguments in the case, but I really don't have the background to evaluate the legal merits.

Fortunately, my fabulous sister-in-law (Lawyer of the blog Nurse and Lawyer) has a brilliant legal mind and a passion for the Supreme Court in particular. She has kindly contributed her thoughts on the case, which are rendered in pink below. I've interspersed my own comments where appropriate.

Enjoy—and if you have an interest in either law or healthcare, make sure to check out Nurse and Lawyer.

California passed a law—Cal. Civil Code Section 1746-1746.5—prohibiting the sale of violent video games to minors. The law itself is fairly interesting to read, and I think it would be interesting even for the non-legally inclined—take a look at the definitions at the beginning, if you have a chance!

As you might expect, those definitions are rather explicit. For example, part of the definition of "violent video game" requires that "the range of options available to a player includes killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being." Further definitions are provided for "cruel," "heinous," "depraved," "torture," and "serious physical abuse." Anyone who plays video games with a T rating—let alone an M—knows that these descriptors are frequently appropriate, or at least accurate, to describe video game violence. Another clause includes this gem:

Pertinent factors in determining whether a killing depicted in a video game is especially heinous, cruel, or depraved include infliction of gratuitous violence upon the victim beyond that necessary to commit the killing, needless mutilation of the victim's body, and helplessness of the victim.

So, if they can fight back, and you stick the knife in just far enough to sever the spinal cord, then it's OK... right?

The law does provide for exceptions in the case of violent games which possess "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors"—or rather, it fails to provide exemptions for games in which the level of violence causes them to lack this kind of value. This is such a subjective provision that I shudder to think what that debate looks like in a courtroom, much less in a jury room. I've studied and written about the educational merit that exists in commercial games—yes, even the violent ones—and it's not something that's easy to explain. To really understand all of the ways that games have value, you need to understand games at a fairly deep level.

The question is: Are such restrictions permissible under the First Amendment?
The main argument against restriction is that we don't allow laws restricting content in other media (movies, books, TV shows). Where there are restrictions, they are extremely narrow. The First Amendment states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." These limitations on lawmaking now apply to states as well, under the Fourteenth Amendment.

So the short argument is that video games are no different, and should not be singled out for restriction.

Main argument in favor of restriction: The obscenity standard that we use to forbid the sale of pornography to minors, developed in Ginsberg v. New York, 390 U.S. 629 (1968), should be extended to apply here. The point of that exception to the First Amendment was to prevent harm to children, and violent games are just as harmful as obscene images—and the state found plenty of evidence that the games are harmful in considering and passing the legislation.

Where? What evidence? I have yet to see a study that convinces me that playing violent video games has any significant negative impact on the average teenager. As for younger children, there is already a very robust content rating system in place, the ESRB, which provides information and protections akin to what exists for film in the MPAA. In fact, the MPAA filed an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief against the California law in this case. If parents choose to make their own decisions about the media that their children consume, whether online, in games, in movies or in books, that is their right.

So who's going to win? Tough call. The Court held the case for a while, possibly awaiting resolution of U.S. v. Stevens (which struck down a federal law barring videos of cruelty to animals.) They then went ahead and took this case instead of sending it back to the lower court to reconsider in light of the new decision. That suggests that at least some justices thought this case was different, and/or disagreed with that decision and wanted to decide this one themselves instead of letting it fall into line.

One of the most contentious points seems to be about whether we as a society have reached some sort of consensus. Pornography and children don't mix—we can agree on that. But we don't agree about what is an acceptable level of violence to which minors may be exposed.

I know that "a reasonable person" and "prevailing standards in the community" are established criteria for evaluating the prurience of content, but I don't like them. Those kinds of standards led to films being censored in the 1930s and comic books being censored in the 1950s. Looking back, should they have been? Why don't we take that kind of historical experience into account when considering how to react to new forms of media?

I'm familiar with the argument that games are different because of the degree to which they are experiential. I haven't researched this issue, so I can only respond to it anecdotally. As a passionate reader and a film buff, I don't feel that I experience games more deeply or strongly than books or movies. I recently read Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho, and I found some of the passages in that book to be far more disturbing than anything I've ever played in a video game—and I played Manhunt.

The age-old conflict lives on here: original intent versus living constitution. (Should we ask what James Madison would've thought about violent video games, as Justice Alito suggested at oral argument, or should we try to adapt the document to our changed circumstances and think about its spirit and how it can best be carried out in this new context?)

Given the current court, I'd have a hard time believing that the law will stand.

But... I guess you never know...

For more about the case, you can check out the SCOTUS blog, which links to resources ranging from plain English summaries of the case to amicus briefs filed by interested parties on both sides of the case (including ID Software, Activision, the MPAA and Microsoft).

Jim Gee talk at the University of Arizona

2010-12-17T12:37:00.001-07:00

Dr. James Gee of Arizona State University recently spoke at the University of Arizona, which (as of my graduation this weekend) will soon be my alma mater. The title of the talk is "Embodied Situated Learning and Digital Media," but in layman's terms it's really about how young learners respond to specialized language in different situations.

Gee is a brilliant, brilliant man and quite an engaging speaker and writer. His book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy was one of the things that inspired me to return to school to study educational gaming, and I find myself consulting it again and again.

I was present at this talk, and I ask a question at about 49 minutes in, but you can't really hear me. No matter, because I'm not the one worth hearing.

How "Epic Win" fails

2010-11-19T14:11:00.002-07:00

In this post, I'll be taking a look at an interesting iPhone app called Epic Win. Epic Win touches on a lot of the same ideas I'm working with, but it applies them within the context of a to-do list, rather than a college course. My friend Jon Weigand joined me in writing this post. Jon is a fellow tech geek, and has been considering designing an app that is similar in premise to Epic Win.

Some of the possible avatars in Epic Win.
iPhone wallpaper courtesy of RexBox.

Epic Win is a to-do list with a lovely premise. You know all that boring stuff you have to do during the day? Why not be rewarded for it through the same kind of addictive gameplay systems at the heart of games like Diablo and World of Warcraft? From the game's website, some marketing spiel on this point:

Our lives are full of quests. Remember that birthday card, send that email, or drag ourselves to the gym on a regular basis.

...

Rather than just mentally ticking off your chores, completing each one improves and develops your character in an on-going quest to level-up, gain riches, and develop skills.

By getting points for your chores it's easier to actually get things done. We all have good intentions but we need a bit of encouragement here and there. Doing the laundry is an epic feat of stamina so why not get stamina points for it?!

Watch as your avatars stats develop in ways to represent your own life. Will you be a Maiden of Juggled Priorities, or a King of Win? The lifestyle you lead will decide.

An app with the slogan "Level-up your life" is right up my alley. This is in my wheelhouse. That's why I'm so horrendously let down by the actual product behind the pitch. Let's break down the promise and possibility, the decisions and disillusionment, the ideas and implementation... what was I talking about? Alliteration is awesome, but definitely distracting.

Epic Win is a terrible RPG
If you're going to implement RPG elements in order to increase user engagement, it's probably wise to first consider why people get so into these mechanics in the first place. You know how you can't stop clicking on dudes in Torchlight? One of the main reasons for that addictive behavior is something called the "variable ratio reinforcement schedule." Variable ratio reinforcement is a concept that comes out of behavioral science, and it basically states that people (or animals) will continue to perform specific actions for a very long time if you reward them on a regular but unpredictable basis for those actions.

Most loot-based RPGs build on this highly effective foundation by offering several types of rewards, each of which further engages the player by presenting interesting choices and by enhancing the player's effectiveness in some way. For example, many western RPGs reward desirable behavior with points to spend on specific skills in a skill tree. Skill trees present choices—do I want to be able to sneak up on people, or throw lightning bolts?—and also enhance player effectiveness—wow, lightning bolts are powerful! Over time, skill trees also encourage experimentation—sweet, now I can throw sneak lightning bolts! Finally, in a well-designed game of this type, progression down a skill tree will itself open up new opportunities to make choices, both because a more powerful player can take on new and challenging obstacles and because special skills can be applied in specific situations (e.g. speech checks in games like Fallout). Aside from skill trees, rewards in RPGs can include equipment, stat boosts, level raises, access to new areas and quest chains, etc.

Epic Win throws these mechanics out the window. Instead of sporadically earning cool rewards that improve your ability to progress through the game or require thoughtful decisions, Epic Win instead rewards you with useless items. These items come with mildly amusing flavor text, if you like that sort of thing, but they really do absolutely nothing—no bonus to stats, no new graphics for your avatar, nothing. Want to equip that helmet you earned? Well, too bad. There's no such thing as "armor" or "weapons" in Epic Win—only loot. You can go to your loot sack and look at it. Have fun.

OK, you might say. The reward items aren't very exciting, but so what? There's all sorts of other stuff, like gold, and leveling up and character stats! Tell me about that stuff! Well, all right, but you're going to be disappointed, you poor bastard.

Let's start with gold. It exists in Epic Win, and that's about all that can be said for it. The same screen that shows your earned loot displays a tally of your miles travelled and the gold you have earned. Neither number applies to anything elsewhere in the game. You cannot use the gold to purchase things that might benefit your avatar, any more than you can use the miles to burn calories in real life. They are pointless decoration, present out of some misguided notion that, since players seem to like watching numbers go up, more numbers must be good.

Statistics in Epic Win are exactly the same—cogs that someone forgot to connect to a larger machine. You can designate tasks as feats of strength, stamina, intellect, social or spirit. (It drives me crazy that "social" is not the same part of speech as the rest of the items on that list, but I bet no one else cares, so let's move on.) After completing enough tasks associated with a given statistic, that statistic goes up on your character screen.

Level progression is handled slightly more elegantly. Each time you gain a level, your avatar gets a nifty new piece of equipment. This is a purely cosmetic change, but by God at least it's something. Unfortunately, gaining levels is a plodding affair. Even if you assign each task the maximum possible XP value, it takes quite a while to reach level 2. There's a reason why most games stack the deck in favor of hooking players on their progression system by doling out relatively high amounts of XP in the early going: it makes it clear what you're working for. Given that leveling up is the only system that has any impact on the player's experience whatsoever, that might have been a good idea here too.

The ultimate problem with the design of Epic Win as a game is that it isn't one. It looks like a game, it barks like a game, it pees on the fire hydrant like a game, but in fact there is only one thing in the program that can even loosely be defined as a "game mechanic," and that is holding your finger on a task in order to complete it. You place your finger on the task, and a green bar appears. Your avatar enters stage left, and punches the green bar until it disappears. This takes a few seconds—longer for more valuable tasks—and is less than thrilling.

A more charitable person might argue that to-do lists are inherently about intrinsic motivation, rather than ornate reward systems. Nonsense, I say. Epic Win is entirely predicated on the appeal of such systems. That's how they're marketing the thing, and they've failed to deliver.

Epic Win is a mediocre to-do list
Even if you do judge it solely as a task manager, Epic Win comes across as lazily designed. There is no way to enter tasks through a web-based interface, so not only can you not easily add tasks when you're using another computing platform (I prefer to check my email on the computer when possible), but you're stuck with the iPhone keyboard. Even if the creators of Epic Win didn't want to create an elaborate database-driven/cloud-based task manager, they could have piggybacked on an existing product like Google Calendar, Gmail, Remember the Milk or Evernote (see also Egretlist). Apparently this feature is planned in the future, and hopefully that update comes through some day.

There's not even a way for Epic Win to notify you of overdue tasks. The app does offer push notifications, but only before the due date. Other communication channels, such as email, are not supported. If you're excited enough about earning XP that you've chosen a to-do list which operates on an RPG model, wouldn't the threat of devaluing a task if it went past due be at least marginally effective? Conversely, I'd like to be able to define bonuses for completing meta-tasks. For example, you might have a daily task to "go running" as a feat of strength. I should be able to designate "go running five times in a week" as a meta-task, a feat of stamina worth extra XP and skill points.

Finally, Epic Win is dumb. It's a dumb app, by which I mean that it has no ability to learn, and no contextual or user-generated information on which to draw to improve itself. Remember how I said you have to enter the XP value and skill association for each task? That's ridiculous—you shouldn't have to do that. There's no reason why an app like this should not include a searchable database of common tasks, each with a suggested skill and XP value. Don't like those defaults? Override them and the app should remember your preferences. At the very least, Epic Win should remember tasks that you have personally entered in the past. It doesn't, of course.

Always look on the bright side
My laundry list of gripes notwithstanding, Epic Win does have some positive qualities. The art design is gorgeous, for one thing—it's got this stylized hair-metal-meets-Dungeons-and-Dragons going on. If I lived in New Jersey in the early '80s, I would have wanted these characters painted on the side of my van.

Hells yeah. Images courtesy of Cyclopeatron.

The app runs well and is stable, even on my aging iPhone 3G. It also continues to be supported, although the updates thus far have been underwhelming (better task repeating options) or else features that the app should have launched with (push notifications and a completed task archive). So there's always hope that the existing shortcomings will be addressed.

Experiential {Exploratory, Interactive}

2010-11-02T22:53:00.001-07:00

If you read my last post, examining how exploratory narrative is employed in several games, you'll see that I mentioned Dear Esther, an interesting short story told in a game-like format. The team behind Dear Esther also produced another atmospheric first-person tale, Korsakovia. Since I don't currently have a PC, I can't play Korsakovia, but I did watch some video of it on YouTube. It's making me wonder whether I should reevaluate my taxonomy.

Initially, I conceived of three narrative approaches available to games: exposition, exploration and interaction. However, as I've tried to describe my experiences with exploratory narrative, I find that it's often very hard to separate (or occasionally even to distinguish) from interactive narrative. Perhaps both fall into a larger category? Experiential narrative?

Or perhaps not. There are clear examples of both exploratory and interactive narrative that I can think of, and which aren't intertwined; similarly, I can think of games that blend exposition with either or both of these two approaches. I'm open to comments, if anyone has them.

How games tell stories, part 5: Wandering the Wasteland

2010-11-01T13:28:00.003-07:00

This is part 5 of an ongoing series on the techniques that game designers employ to tell stories in video games. If you haven't read the earlier posts, you might want to do that first.

II. Exploration (continued)

If my last post was fairly heavy on theory, it's because I want to make sure that I'm not reinventing the wheel. This blog exists in a space somewhere between academia and more general games commentary on the web. I aspire to the level of a blog like The Brainy Gamer, with more frequent posts and a community of intelligent commenters. Clearly I'm not there yet, and I can't help but wonder if it's because I've failed to fully engage with other people who are interested in the same things I am.

When I studied books or movies in high school and college, I had guides to help me along—teachers to probe with questions and critics who provided their insights and analysis in written form. Perhaps more importantly, I had friends who would gladly engage in a conversation on Kazan's use of framing in On The Waterfront or the symbolism of fire in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (to quote my high school film teacher, "Sex!"). With gaming, I have no immediate community of fellow travelers. The conversations that I do engage in are often one-sided, and are scattered across a landscape that includes formal academic work, recorded conference presentations, blogs, podcasts, and magazines. There are fewer "seminal works," at least as of yet, and more small a-ha moments that combine and connect in ways that aren't always obvious. I have to be careful when writing about ideas that I feel to be my own, but which draw from countless other voices that echo constantly in my mind. It often takes a long time to track ideas to their sources.

I also often wonder whether the posts that I most enjoy writing—those in which I apply my own ideas to reality, offering examples of how actual games that I have played have employed various narrative techniques—are worth the time. Does the world really need another post about how Half-Life 2 has a story better than most video games? Maybe not, but I need to write those posts, because they force me to sift through the emotional impressions created by games. Those impressions come out of the ways that we read games. The whole impetus behind this series of posts was my frustration at our lack of a common language to describe the multifarious elements of gaming literacy, so that process—breaking down and intellectualizing (hopefully) the experience of play as it relates to narrative—is critical.

Fallout 3
Fallout 3 is one of the largest and most self-directed games I have ever played. The world—a postapocalyptic Washington D.C. known in-game as "The Capitol Wasteland"—is so large that the game feels quite desolate for long stretches, despite in fact being filled with hundreds of unique and detailed locations. The game begins with a fairly standard tutorial and character creation sequence, disguised as a series of vignettes illustrating the player character's childhood. Following this mandatory sequence, the player is thrust into the wider world, and the true scope and scale of The Capitol Wasteland begins to come into focus.

The Fallout 3 world map. Each colored square represents a major location. Image courtesy of The Vault, the Fallout Wiki.

Fallout 3's central embedded authored narrative tasks the player character with finding his or her father, a saintly doctor with a mysterious past. At first, I tried to follow this thread. I stumbled through a blighted landscape, asking everyone I met if they knew where my father was. Some offered clues, but many didn't care about my personal troubles; they were more concerned with survival. After a few ambushes by cannibalistic gangs of raiders and giant green super mutants, I decided that I didn't care much myself. After all, the old guy had left me to my own devices. Those devices quickly grew to include a veritable armory of rickety weapons, ranging from golf clubs ancient B.B. rifles to nifty ray guns.

I began to focus on quotidian concerns like scrounging food and making sure I my equipment could stand up to the next run-in with a wild dog or malfunctioning robot. My immediate environment became more important. I started making calculations about risk and reward: "That barn ahead is still standing. It might have useful equipment in it. But I'm out of medical supplies, and my best gun is broken. Maybe I'll head back to town." Each ruined corporate office or makeshift fortress had a story to tell. Sometimes these were pre-baked—audio recordings a la BioShock, or text files on computers that reminded me of Marathon—but these expository narratives paled in comparison to more dynamic interactive mini-narratives. Seeing a well-equipped band of super mutants behind a makeshift barricade, I decided to wait for nightfall and snipe the lookouts; afterwards, I freed their captives and looted their stores of ammunition.

Someone making their own fun in Fallout 3, releasing a captive super mutant behemoth in the middle of a raider camp.

Sometimes these self-told tales were intertwined with quest lines written by the game's developers, as when the would-be author of a guide to a "wasteland survival guide" asked me to investigate an abandoned town in the middle of a minefield. I expected to have to step lightly, but I was terrified to realize that someone was sniping at me from the cover of a destroyed building. The bullets whizzed by and I lost my head, running straight into a series of landmines. My leg was blown off at the knee in spectacularly gory fashion. I reloaded an earlier save, muttering to myself about the impoliteness of shooting at strangers, and embarked upon my revenge.

Half-Life 2
I replayed the seminal FPS Half-Life 2 earlier this year, and found myself marveling once again at the feeling of total immersion I felt in a world, and a series of events, that would have seemed trite, even dull, on the page. What was it about this game, with its hastily sketched alien invasion and its tabula rasa protagonist, that made it come alive? Why did I accept its reality so completely, to the point where I would turn aside from the obvious path forward in order to see everything the spaces around me had to offer?

It's difficult, in describing the experience of playing Half-Life 2, to separate the identity of the player from the identity of the game's protagonist, Gordon Freeman. Freeman's dorky-intense mug, framed by Elvis Costello glasses and a grad-school goatee, may be an iconic image for many modern gamers, but you wouldn't know it from playing the games he stars in. Both Half-Life games take pains to establish the absolute unity of Freeman and the player, and their primary tool is restricting the player's physical window on the world: your view is Gordon's view. You will never see something he is not looking at. You will never see him, because you are him (although there may be a mirror at some point, I can't recall). Gordon will never speak, because the words that developer Valve Software would have to put in his mouth would not be your words. Prior to the original Half-Life, first-person games often moved to third-person perspective during non-interactive cutscenes which moved the plot forward. Valve refused to alter the player perspective or to take control away from the player; except in sequences where Freeman is himself helpless, you can always continue to move and look around during Half-Life 2 "cutscenes."

These extreme choices—a mute protagonist, no division between reader knowledge and character knowledge—would be awkward in most media, and the truth is that they are sometimes awkward in the Half-Life games as well. In particular, deliberately creating a protagonist who has no personality feels crude and primitive—like solving an attitude problem with a lobotomy. Valve intersperses quiet moments, moments of perceived or actual safety, between the frequent mad scrambles, physics puzzles and heated firefights. In these moments, characters will speak to Gordon, bringing him up to speed on the plot (exposition) or simply reacting to his presence (character development and establishing relationships, so often ignored in games). To use another mental health analogy, Gordon's failure to respond feels autistic, practically inhuman. It's a sharp reminder that gaming is a young medium, akin to film when films were still essentially recorded stage plays.

But Valve's approach is undeniably effective, in that it allows Half-Life 2 to tell its story in a subtler, more player-directed manner than would otherwise be the case. Because Gordon never speaks, the player's own reaction to the things that she has seen become canon fiction within the game world; if the player is horrified by the degradation of humanity, then Gordon is quietly horrified. If the player is angry, then Gordon is a determined avenger who minces no words. Players primarily concerned with shooting aliens will have no trouble imagining Gordon as a man of action. All of this identification reinforce the player's acceptance of the game world as her world, and this in turn encourages the exploration that Valve rewards so effectively.

Half-Life 2 opens, like its predecessor, with Gordon Freeman on a train. It's a conscious reference to a sequence that was much-remarked upon in Half-Life, and it's only the first clue that Valve has looked seriously at what worked and what did not in their earlier game.

Although I do argue that Half-Life 2 employs exploratory narrative, the game is very linear at times—practically a cattle chute. Half-Life 2 begins with a brief, cryptic speech that exhorts Gordon to "wake up and smell the ashes," whereupon the player gains control of Gordon on board a nearly empty passenger train. As the train arrives at a station, the player shuffles out alongside two nervous men. Everyone wears what looks like a prison uniform. Despair is in the air—characters make passing comments about missing loved ones and drugs in the water. At this point, neither Gordon nor the player know what is happening. Large screens broadcast hopeful messages from a professorial man who welcomes viewers to City 17—"one of our finest remaining urban centers." Policemen with strange, full-face masks menace the broken bystanders. There are several small opportunities at rebellion, and disobedience is met with a beating from an electrified baton.

Just before he boards another train, an old friend appears and pulls Freeman aside; only much later in the game does the player visit the destination of that train, and realize how literal the cattle chute comparison really is.

A surgically mutilated human slave, as seen late in Half-Life 2. Image courtesy Combine OverWiki, the Half-Life Wiki.

Although things do open up later on, particularly during a chapter that has Gordon driving along the coastline of a drained ocean, Half-Life 2 never becomes an open experience in the manner of a Fallout game. The game does tell stories through exploration, but that exploration is limited to small spaces and specific details: hidden refuges where scared people hide, or where they died, discovered by the Orwellian Combine; newspaper articles that offer clues to what happened to this ravaged world; graffiti that seems to lay out the case for resistance.

Rebellion propaganda referencing evolution vs. assimilation. Image courtesy The Half-Life Saga Story Guide.

Newspapers offering the only clues to the history of the world since the original Half Life. NPCs in the game don't realize that Gordon Freeman was not present for these events, and so do not explain them. Image courtesy Combine OverWiki, the Half-Life Wiki.

More common are the details that the game puts in front of the player by default, but which it is up to her to "read" or to ignore:

The Combine subjugates alien races through surgery and genetic modification, turning them into mere tools. Many enemies and even some enemy vehicles are previous victims of what human collaborator Dr. Breen terms their "beneficence."
Combine technologies are designed only for purposes of control and exploitation: weapons, trains, cameras, video screens, brain surgery, mineral extractors. This suggests that the player is correct to reject arguments in favor of appeasement and submission.
Humanity is very close to extinction. The Combine prevent human reproduction, and the entire world is occupied. Most of the characters Freeman encounters are American, but the actual location of City 17 appears to be somewhere in Eastern Europe. Human buildings are all falling apart, and there are relatively few human beings left in such a large city.

Not everyone agrees with me that Valve's narrative is outstanding. This writer argues that the Combine mechanical wall, which crushes and consumes all in its path, is a wasted image; I think it's powerful and relatively clear as it stands, and Valve's refusal to script a traditionally over-explained sci-fi narrative is a mature, restrained decision.

Exploration vs. linearity? Not necessarily.
Linearity, in either plot or environmental design, is not incompatible with exploratory narrative. I think that the player's own sense of exploration and discovery is more important than the objective game design.An air of mystery and a sense of history—of things having happened before the player character's emergence on the scene—can go a long way in this regard. Witness Dear Esther, an odd and utterly enthralling single-player mod for Valve's Source Engine. Dear Esther is nearly undefinable: it's not quite a horror game, but it's scary. It's not exactly a game, although there is interaction. It's an evocative short story that takes the shape of a video game, relying on a combination of exploratory and expository (audio) narrative. There's no physical gating in Dear Esther, not that I recall, but the environmental design and narrative drive demand that the player move forward, up to the summit of the island and the conclusion of the tale.

Myst is a similar case, although one that, as it features both strict gating and a larger environment, is arguably both more and less linear. Although Myst relies on cinematic and textual exposition to explain the details of its plot, these details only become prominent fairly late in the player's experience of the narrative. Prior to that, the "story" of Myst is the story of the player's exploration of the world, and her discovery of its many secrets. Those secrets provide few answers, more often instead raising new questions about the nature of the game's world(s). The result is a recurring narrative feedback loop of exploration and discovery, fed by a combination of the player's curiosity and her satisfaction at solving the game's perplexing puzzles.

How games tell stories, part 4: Exploratory narrative and the player-as-author

2010-10-23T14:42:00.002-07:00

This is part 4 of an ongoing series on the techniques that game designers employ to tell stories in video games. If you haven't read part 1, part 2, and part 3, you might want to do that first.

II. Exploration

"Game designers don't simply tell stories; they design worlds and sculpt spaces." —Henry Jenkins, Game Design as Narrative Architecture.

Expository narrative, which you can read about in the first three parts of this series, essentially encompasses the ways that games tell stories at players. Aside from postmodernists or insane persons—a David Lynch or Philip K. Dick, in whose work the viewer/reader must find their own meaning or even their own plot—most forms of media stop there. Games that do not rely primarily on exposition are different, because they allow the player to create her own experience in the game world. When this narrative emerges from the player's exploration of the world, it falls into the category of "exploratory narrative."

I use the word "emerges" deliberately. The idea of emergence has been popular among the gaming literati for some time now. Sometimes it refers to players finding their own fun as a result of the unpredictable interaction of many complex systems; Grand Theft Auto III was widely touted as an exemplar of "emergent gameplay" on its release. Emergent gameplay can also result from game systems which rely heavily on the interaction of multiple human players, as in EVE Online. Other times, it refers to player-created narratives of gameplay—like this outstanding example, in which a player uses The Sims 3 to examine the problem of homelessness.

Many writers consider emergent narrative to exist somehow in opposition to the narratives that game designers present more overtly. In a recent article on GameSetWatch, James Bishop examines the extent of player control within games with predominantly designer-controlled narratives. Bishop uses the phrase "embedded narratives" to describe non-emergent narratives, and although he's not the only one [PDF link], I think it's worth noting that that term first appeared on my radar in the fabulous Henry Jenkins article linked at the top of this post. Jenkins wasn't talking about designer-controlled narrative in the aggregate. He specifically meant those narrative clues that exist as part of the mise-en-scène in a virtual world.

As defined by Jenkins, exploratory narrative includes both player-created narratives of events, and embedded narratives which are "pre-structured" by the designers and "awaiting discovery." The former type—player-controlled narratives—occupy a hazy space that lies between my notions of exploratory and interactive narrative.Does this call into question the validity of my absurd little taxonomy? Maybe, but I don't think so. Very few games tell stories using only one of the three major techniques—the give and take between player and system, and the impossibility of identifying a single universal experience shared by all players of a given game means that they couldn't if they wanted to. The study of storytelling will never be an exact science in any medium. Who would want it to be?

A player does not invent a narrative from whole cloth when playing a game, no matter how open-ended. She takes hundreds, even thousands of cues from the game designers. To offer just a few examples, these clues are embedded in the immediate environment, the broader setting, the behavior of non-player characters, the progression of the plot and of course the palette of options available to the player as she tries to interact with the world around her.

In his 1998 Master's dissertation, Jesper Juul explored how games can imply narrative in the most cursory of ways, using "narrative frames" that draw on common cultural knowledge. Juul offered the example of Space Invaders, an iconic early arcade game whose simple graphics and mechanics offer less story than its very title:

The concept of invasion presupposes a time before the invasion, and from the 1950's science fiction it draws upon, we just know that these aliens are evil and should be disposed off. So there is a story, and from the title screen we know all of it: Earth attacked, Earth freed from the alien menace. —Jesper Juul, A Clash Between Games and Narrative

In a very real sense, even player-controlled interactive narratives are authored by the game designers—just not solely. They are player-controlled because the sequence of events depends largely on the player's actions, and because the establishment of meaning behind the events depends almost entirely on the player. But even emergent narratives that seem absent of any kind of designer voice depend on choices made by the designers. The story of a firefight in Doom is different than a firefight in Fear. The setting and atmosphere are different. The enemies are more or less human, and behave in very different ways. The tools that the player has access to are different, as are those of the AI. Even the graphical fidelity of the games makes a difference. Most of these differences exist on smaller scales within individual games, and the variations in meaning that such decisions create are also reflected on this level.

Exactly what difference these elements make—what each of them conveys, and what they convey in ever-changing combination—is difficult to divine. We can say that such and such game creates a "general impression" or "atmosphere," but this is crude stuff. Perhaps game developers like Valve and Bungie, well known for collecting extensive play-testing data on endless variations of the same level or sequence in their games, have a good sense of how most players respond to these small changes, but even then there are players who will play differently, or think differently about what they have played. Contrast the uncertainty of exploratory and interactive narrative with the solid linearity of expository narrative, which ensures that all players experience the designer-authored narrative elements in the same way (or at least mostly the same way, allowing that different play experiences prior to or during exposition might color the experience).

Jenkins talks about the need for redundancy of information within embedded narratives, noting that "one can not assume the player will necessarily locate or recognize the significance of any given element." The art of drawing a player's attention to the things that matter is even more difficult in games than in traditional media. Here's Shawn Elliot, a former games journalist and current level designer for Irrational Games, in a recent episode of the Out of the Game podcast:

It's true that every reader of a book is different, that every viewer of a movie is different, but that agency that allows [players] to look where they want... creates such enormous complexities in game design... are we gonna spend another 300 hours getting someone to look and see this fucking enormous boss in front of them?

It's possible to play off this very kind of freedom, of course. To cite yet another gaming podcast (and I wonder where my free time goes!), The Idle Thumbs Podcast once spent some time discussing how much the various NPC "barks" in Grand Theft Auto IV can add to the experience. The example I recall revolved around a major multi-car pileup; as the player character walked away from the debacle, an old lady on the sidewalk regarded the carnage and remarked, offhandedly, "That looks expensive." BioShock plays with the illusion of player choice and freedom in a very different way, but I've written about that already.

More to come...
This post has been in the works for some time. It has been delayed for good reasons (doing some actual research, instead of just shooting my mouth off; attending a wedding), for unfortunate reasons (rest in peace, Matty) and for "good reasons" (playing Fallout 3). It's time for publication. I'll probably edit myself a bit in the next few days, but my next post will focus on examples of exploratory narrative—instead of pure theory. I promise.