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Ich spiele gut, also bin ich gut - Telepolis
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This is a post about shooters, Katy Perry and Pop Culture
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DesuraNET's quest to make a better indie community
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Gaming Made Me: Tomb Raider
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Press X Not to Die
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Hotline Miami and America’s narrative of masculinity and violence - Laser Orgy
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First-Person Perspective and the Untroubled Gaze
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Pokemon Blue Part #1 - The beginning
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Ich spiele gut, also bin ich gut - Telepolis

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Ich spiele gut, also bin ich gut

Giuseppe Paletta 15.12.2012

Spiele wie das neue GTA 5 können bessere Menschen aus uns machen

Wenn wir Videospiele spielen, dann sind wir ethische Agenten. Wir erleben jede Handlung unserer Spielfigur bewusst und stellen sie in Bezug zur Realität. Das sagt zumindest der Philosoph, Miguel Sicart. Oliver Schultes, Chefredakteur von M!Games erklärt, wie viel Ethik aus seiner Sicht in der Spielebranche steckt.

Im Frühjahr 2013 ist es wieder so weit: Wir schlüpfen in die Rolle dreier krimineller Protagonisten mit Allerweltsnamen wie Michael, Trevor und Franklin. Wir fahren wieder mit geklauten Autos durch die Straßen von Los Santos, hören Oper im Radio, während wir über rote Ampeln fahren und wer uns dumm kommt, der kriegt einfach auf die Fresse: Die Welt liegt uns zu Füßen.
Alle Bilder: GTA 5
Liegt sie uns wirklich zu Füßen, oder ist alles nur ein Spiel? Ist der Spieler ein Verbrecher, oder ist er nur Handlanger der eigentlich kriminellen Spielfigur? Geht es nach dem Philosophen Miguel Sicart, dann ist jede Handlung im Spiel auch eine bewusste Handlung, eine ethische Handlung. Der Spieler trägt die Verantwortung für die Handlung seiner Spielfigur. Der Spieler ist ein Verbrecher.

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Videospieler sind ethische Agenten

“Als Spieler sind wir moralische Wesen, und unsere Handlungen in einem Spiel werden von unserer Natur als moralische Akteure ausgewertet”, schreibt der Philosoph Sicart in seinem Buch The Ethics of Computer Games. Ein Videospiel zu spielen, das sei ein Akt, der sich aus mehreren Handlungen zusammenfüge: psychologischer Art, kultureller, ethischer und ästhetischer. Als Spieler seien wir ethische Agenten.

Damit ein Videospiel für uns ethisch relevant werde, schreibt Sicart weiter, müssten die Handlungen im Spiel den Spieler mit Situationen konfrontieren, die er so auch in der realen Welt vorfinden könnte und die in ihm ein ethisches Bewusstsein aufkommen lassen. Davon gibt es etliche in GTA. So konnte der Spieler in GTA 4 den Protagonisten Niko Bellic zum Beispiel zum Sex mit einer Prostituierten anstiften, um extra Lebensenergie zu bekommen. Hat er die Prostituierte gar umgebracht, dann hat ihn das Spiel dafür belohnt: Er hat sein Geld zurückbekommen. Auch wenn diese Spielhandlung in GTA 5 nicht mehr möglich sein soll, so hat sie laut Sicart eine ethische Wirkung auf die Spieler. Nicht nur habe der Spieler die Werte innerhalb des Spieles hinterfragt, gleichzeitig habe er auch seinen aus der Realität stammenden, individuellen Wertekodex mit dem des Spieles verglichen.

Ein Videospiel ist nach Sicart ein aufeinander abgestimmtes System von Regeln, die eine Spielwelt erzeugen. Sowohl die Spielewelt als auch die Regeln könnten ethische Werte transportieren: “Die Verhaltensweisen, die sie schaffen, und wie diese den Spielern kommuniziert werden, bilden die Ethik des Computerspiele-Designs.”

Game-Designer von morgen lernen Ethik

Die Macher von Spielen sind deshalb ethisch verantwortlich für die Gestaltung der Regeln und der Welt, während die Spieler für ihre Erfahrung im Spiel verantwortlich sind, wie sie also die eingebetteten ethischen Werte interpretieren.

Dieser Verantwortung scheint sich zumindest ein Teil der Spielebranche bewusst zu werden. Professor Jens Müller zum Beispiel lehrt den Game-Designern von Morgen an der Hochschule Augsburg bereits Heute Ethik:

Die digitalen Spiele von Morgen werden ein normaler Bestandteil unseres Alltages sein. Prinzipien des Spieledesigns werden unsere Erwartunsgshaltungen an das Interagieren mit technischen Umwelten leiten. Zudem werden Inhalte der Spielewelten als zentrale mediale und inzwischen ‘natürliche’ Sozialisationserfahrung unser Wertesystem beeinflussen und vielleicht sogar stellenweise den Bezugsrahmen für unsere mentale Orientierung bilden.

Neben der Medienethik und der Frage nach Nutzungsszenarien von Videospielen beschäftigen sich die Studenten an der HS Augsburg auch mit der Frage, welche Werte innerhalb der Spiele vermittelt werden sollen.

Auch Professor Müller sieht GTA als ein interessantes Beispiel für Ethik in Videospielen, weil dem Spieler viel Freiheit zur Exploration gegeben werde und die Reaktionsmöglichkeiten innerhalb der Spielewelt sehr vielfältig seien.

Videospiele seien insgesamt eine der spannendsten und technisch anspruchsvollsten medialen Formate. “Bereits mit den vielfältigen Nutzungs- und Ausdrucksmöglichkeiten werden Fragen unserer Lebensentwürfe berührt. Ob ein Spiel mich aus der komplexen Unwirklichkeit der Realität in archaische Reaktionsschemata in bunten Fantasywelten entführt oder im Multiplayermodus meine Reputation erhöht und Kontakte vervielfältigt, in jedem Fall ist Spielen Teil meiner sozialen Handlungsweise”, sagt Professor Müller.

Ausblick in die Zukunft der Videospiele

Und wie sieht es ein begeisterter Videospieler selbst, abseits von grauer Theorie und philosophischer Begriffe? Oliver Schultes, Chefredakteur von M!Games, einigen besser bekannt als MAN!AC, ist seit gut dreißig Jahren Videospieler.

Grundsätzlich finde ich es gut, dass sich Videospiele mit der Thematik beschäftigen und versuchen, dem Spieler - meist am Ende etwas holprig durch unterschiedliche Storyausgänge - die Konsequenzen ihrer Handlungen vor Augen zu führen. Neben Open-World-Spielen probieren sich auch Action-Abenteuer wie Hitman: Absolution daran: Der Spieler erhält je nach Handlung Plus- oder Minuspunkte, zum Beispiel negative Werte für das Erschießen von Zivilisten. Auch Ego-Shooter wie Call of Duty: Black Ops II behandeln die Thematik, in dem nämlich moralische Entscheidungen, wie das Töten oder Nicht-Töten eines Kameraden zu dezent verschiedenen Storyabläufen und Endsequenzen führen. Persönlich sehe ich diese Entscheidungen mehr als Teil der Spielmechanik, die den Spieler zum mehrfachen oder anderen Spielen animieren sollen - durch solche Optionen steigt der sogenannte Wiederspielwert.

Oliver Schultes

Oliver Schultes glaubt, dass eine gelungene und nicht nur oberflächliche Einbindung von ethischen Themen in Videospielen einer großen Kunstfertigkeit bedürfe, die nicht so einfach von jedermann zu leisten sei. Es bedürfe quasi eine weitere Evolutionsstufe von Videospielen, die heute im Vergleich zu den Anfangstagen in puncto spielmechanischer Grundlagen (Steuerung, Inszenierung, Grafik, Sound) eine durchweg hohe Qualität erreicht hätten - in Sachen Erzählung oder Einbindung ethischer Themen aber oftmals noch in den Kinderschuhen steckten. “Die Studios und Köpfe, die so etwas jedoch kompetent und für den Spieler überraschend leisten können, werden es auch tun und damit hoffentlich Erfolg haben.”

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Der 24. Dezember ist nicht nur ein Tag des Konsums, sondern auch eine Gelegenheit, den berühmtesten Konsumverweigerer zu feiern

Im Dezember 1947 erschien in einem 20-Seiten-Comicheft die Geschichte “Christmas on Bear Mountain” (später von Erika Fuchs als “Die Mutprobe” ins Deutsche übertragen), in der Carl Barks die Figur des superreichen und supergeizigen Scrooge McDuck in sein Enten-Universum einführte. In den Comics selbst wurde Dagoberts Geburtsjahr später auf 1867 gelegt, womit er dieses Jahr seinen 140sten feiern würde.
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This is a post about shooters, Katy Perry and Pop Culture

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Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 sold over 7.5 million copies in the US, but I don’t think we take its kind seriously anymore. I find that lamentable.

It’s a massively consumed entertainment product that’s scoffed at in the corners of the room that shelter the enlightened, the particular consumer, the astute observer who is either pained or confused when the artistically unambitious and flawed resonate with so many. Like Transformers movies, Justin Bieber, and Barbie dolls – the Call of Duty series has attained commercial success and general popularity that, according to its critics, isn’t consistent with its artistic quality.

They aren’t even necessarily saying the game isn’t enjoyable, or that there aren’t any interesting observations to be made concerning design or storytelling in Call of Duty or other shooters, but that among a niche group of thoughtful gamers, we find the genre less compelling than the general population which, according to sales, finds the genre more compelling than any other in video game history.

It isn’t a disparaging distinction exactly. Certain observers are trying to offer honest observations and analysis about a medium that hasn’t always gotten that treatment. In doing so, they’ve found that it’s the subtle works, the ambiguous themes, and the personal indie titles that hold the most potential for meaningful observation, not the bombastic tones of Call of Duty that seem to cast such a wide net commercially.

But I think they – nay, we – might be missing something.

I came to this conclusion while listening to a Katy Perry song.

Katy Perry

I don’t often listen to Katy Perry songs, and ther than the one I’m about to discuss, I can only name one other. In someone else’s car, iPod on shuffle, a song called Last Friday Night played and I was forced to listen.

Before I get to the contents of the song, there are a couple of important observations about pop music I’d like to share with you. Both of them are from English novelist and essayist Colin MacInnes, and both are referencing popular music in England, in the late 50s. But both also apply to popular media in general today.

“I’d like to say I think the abysmal ignorance of educated persons about the popular music of millions is deplorable. First, because pop music, on its own low level, can be so good; and I must declare that never have I met anyone who, condemning it completely, has turned out, on close enquiry, to know anything whatever about it. But worse, because the deaf ear that’s turned, in pained disdain, away from the pop music, betrays a lamentable lack of curiosity about the culture of our country in 1958. For that music is our culture: at all events the anthropologist from Sao Paulo or Peking would esteem it so, and rightly. Alfred Deller, yes; but what about Lonnie Donegan, he’d say? They’re both of our world, and there’s no doubt which of these siren voices penetrates and moulds more English hearts and brains.”

From “Pop Songs and Teenagers” published in The Twentieth Century, February 1958. (emphasis added)

I like to look for games that go unnoticed. I never thought I’d be guilty of a “lamentable lack of curiosity”. But I have. I’ve been remarkably uninterested in media that has had wide reaching effect, only because its aesthetics don’t appeal to me.

In another article, MacInnes observes:

“Although these songs are despised by educated persons (who never hear them), and even more so, by lovers of serious jazz music (who, with pain, occasionally do), there is no denying that pop songs have a certain artistic quality which resides almost exclusively, in the art of the individual singers. The tunes and lyrics in themselves are often of meagre quality – although manufactured with extreme competence – and the emotions they evoke are almost invariably synthetic: that is, they are songs about the idea of life, but rarely about life itself. Yet when projected from the larynx of a compulsive pop singer, they acquire an obsessive power to hold the mind and feelings, even if at the most superficial levels.”

From “Young England, Half English” published in Encounter, December 1957. (emphasis added)

These are observations I read for the first time around the Summer of 2011. I’ve tried to keep them in mind and they’ve helped shape the conclusion of never dismiss what’s popular. So as I was essentially forced to listen to a popular song I didn’t care for, I tried to figure out what it was in this song that resonates with the millions of people who do enjoy listening to it.

I didn’t just finish listening to it during that car ride. I kept listening to it – over, and over, and over again. I wasn’t looking for anything profound, I was just looking for something that clicked. Little kids sometimes like Batman just because he beats up bad guys and that’s the right answer for them. It doesn’t have to be profound to be accurate. I just wanted to know what the song meant for those millions that liked it.

The first listen or two, it was easy to dismiss the song as just bouncy, pop drivel. It’s easy to think, “they just like the beat,” or “it doesn’t have any meaning; these kids today like it that way.” But that wasn’t the right answer. There was something there.

On the surface, Last Friday Night is a song about a girl who goes to a large house party that spills over into her parents’ house. Watching the music video (which has nearly 200 million views on YouTube) gives certain clues.

Katy Perry plays ‘Kathy Terry’ who is the aforementioned girl; she has large glasses, oversized braces with a wire head piece, awkward clothes, and bad hair. There is a stereotypical “nerd” character who gets to punch out a stereotypical “jock” character while vying for Kathy’s affection. And Rebecca Black appears as herself in a favorable cameo that, given the song’s name, is clearly a kind of redemptive internet culture reference. So the theme of the outcast redeeming him or herself is evident, but it’s a minor part of the song’s appeal.

The real draw is something more broad, more universal. It’s the thing that hits home with most people, if not all people. It becomes obvious in the second verse.

Trying to connect the dots
don’t know what to tell my boss
Think the city towed my car
Chandelier is on the floor
Ripped my favorite party dress
Warrants out for my arrest

The song is upbeat throughout, and it’s about a bunch of people having a good time at a huge party. But strangely, tucked in the middle of this hedonistic anthem is a medley of what should be highly concerning things. From the teenager’s perspective, the nascent beginnings of responsibility start with having a job, which would seem be in jeopardy according to the lyrics. You’ve also got property being impounded, damage to a chandelier that is presumably someone else’s property, and a telling inclusion about what should be far less concerning damage to a dress. Last but not least, the possibility of incarceration.

But this is all in a song about a party. While these are mentioned, they aren’t really a concern in the context of the song. The chorus makes this plainly obvious.

Pictures of last night
Ended up online
I’m screwed
Oh well
It’s a blacked-out blur
But I’m pretty sure it ruled

For teenage culture that ever more quickly approaches responsibility at a young age, and for young adults in their first few years of dealing with adult pressures, the idea of simply disregarding social expectations about image, minor legal infractions, and career expectations has obvious appeal. I think that’s the level on which most people engage with the song.

Whether you’re a fan or not, whether that message of disregarding responsibility in order to have some fun resonates with you or not, I think it’s obvious that’s the surface level meaning of the song.

But I think it goes deeper than that. We observe some concerning things in the first verse as well.

There’s a stranger in my bed
There’s a pounding in my head

And after a couple of funny lines about other ridiculous things, we get this gem:

Is this a hickey or a bruise?

And in the music video Kathy pulls back her turtleneck to reveal a sizable purplish-black mark on her neck.

What occurred to me while listening to this verse over and over is how afraid we all are. It isn’t until the chorus and the second verse when the song starts to delve into all the things we’re afraid of, but it’s in the midst of viewing and hearing about teenage recklessness that it dawned on me how cautious the rest of us adults are.

And it’s not that they (teenagers) are any less fearful, but that their fear seems to compel them to a kind of boldness in response. What they’re afraid of is not living fully enough, not trying, not falling in love, not having fun; and they’re willing to risk physical harm, public humiliation, and legal fallout to avoid the dullness their parents view as safety.

Certainly adults can be willing to take similar risks, but what’s peculiar is that the younger, who presumably have more time to live, have a kind of urgency to live as fast as possible that lessens with age.

The pressures of life crowd around us quickly in adulthood and we’re taught to scurry fast to the usual shelters of steady work, good medical benefits, a retirement savings account, and a house that will go up in property value. Watching anyone, especially those only a few years behind us, stand around and not run from the fire can be maddening. It’s like they just don’t understand how hard life is, and that they shouldn’t be carousing around at parties and such nonsense when that fire of life’s pressure is surrounding us fast.

But those teenagers they see a polar opposite. They see the pressures of life fast approaching, and they’ve learned to scurry to shields of distraction, levity, and momentary enjoyment. Especially for those them just old enough to know a little responsibility themselves, it can be maddening for them to watch us old folks (even just a little older) dive head first into the fire of life while there’s still a few parties left to go to. It’s like we just don’t understand. But in some ways, a song like Last Friday Night gets it – it sees the fire, gives it the middle finger, and tells it to fuck off for a minute so people can have some fun.

But it’s as I started to further ponder that youthful pursuit of happiness that I came across my final set of realizations about the song. The line from MacInnes comes to mind again: “they are songs about the idea of life, but rarely about life itself.”

Scott Mosier, film producer most known for his work with director Kevin Smith, while doing a podcast with Smith went over a list of goals he had made for himself when he was eighteen. They included some oddities like taking a balloon ride, but mostly consisted of predictable things like having lots of money, owning expensive homes, driving nice cars, and attaining a successful career. Mosier, now 41, made a simple but poignant observation about his 18-year-old self – that he didn’t know what he wanted at that age. He knew he wanted to be happy, but didn’t know enough about himself to know what that meant or what it would look like. So he listed all the typical things he associated with success, and assumed he if he got those, he’d be happy. He was listing all the things society said would make him happy.

In that observation, I think lies the final layer of meaning in Last Friday Night. It’s appeal to the masses, whether they be bored adults or eager teenagers, is that it paints a vivid picture of a colorful night and promises that up against any of life’s concerns you’ll still have fun. There’s a good chance many of the younger fans of the song have never had a ménage-á-trois, gone streaking in the park, or skinny dipping in the dark – as is described in the song – but damn it if doesn’t sound like fun when you’re fourteen and haven’t done much. That’s not to say someone wouldn’t have fun doing those things, it’s to say one doesn’t know until they’ve tried things out in life, figured out who they are, and what they really want.

But, mostly, mass media isn’t interested in helping you find out who you are, it’s interested in telling you who you are and then selling you something based on your new demographic.

Last Friday Night has a clear message: all those bad things in the chorus and verse two (injury, assault, reputation damage, financial ruin, arrest) – they don’t matter. You can have fun and here’s how. These things over here, they’re fun, and if you do them you’ll have fun and be happy.

And then I understood why series like Call of Duty do what they do.

Call of Duty

I remembered just how afraid we are. Amidst all the real conflict and turmoil in the world, both states and complicit media are all too eager to formulate propaganda that invents panic where there should be none.

We are afraid, but it’s not just fear of getting old, or not being happy. As if that weren’t enough, in so many western nations we’re conditioned to the idea that Arab nations are a threat. The U.S. still views China as a potential threat (not officially, of course). And if a particular nation is not a threat, we should always be afraid of terrorists, who could pop up at any minute, in any place, unmarked and out of nowhere.

It’s that kind of illogical fear that drives an aggressive identity. We’re taught that our enemy could be anywhere, that they’re unknowable, and their motivation and zeal is inexplicable and not worth trying to understand.

I recall playing the original Black Ops and during the first mission, while trying to assassinate Fidel Castro, he (actually a double for Castro) uses a woman as a human shield, and then she also tries to kill you. It’s explained later that Castro’s supporters are so devoted to him that they’ll do anything. Basically you’re told, they’re all crazy so it’s fine, just light ‘em up.

But it can’t just be that we’re afraid. Rational people with a strong identity can react to fear in all kinds of ways. But I think back to Scott Mosier’s observation about his young self. He didn’t know what would make him happy, so he adopted the typical ideas society puts forth for what makes people happy.

Everyone wants to be safe, but we don’t know what safe is anymore. All the things that used to look and sound safe, we’re told aren’t safe anymore (like going to the airport). We’re inundated with a constant message that we’re not safe unless we trust the government, but common sense and reality tells us that often makes us less safe. In western culture, the fallback we’ve always had is aggression. We’re taught, “here’s a gun, kill some people, that will make you safe, that makes you powerful.”

Most military shooters (not all, but most) have a clear message. It tells us to ignore all those ugly bits about war; being killed, maimed, losing limbs, being traumatized by combat – those don’t matter, it can’t happen to you here. You can be powerful, and here’s how. Take this gun, go kill a bunch of people who aren’t from your country, then you’ll be safe, then you’ll be powerful.

And yet so many of us who have pretended to kill playing a shooter have never taken a life for real. We don’t know how it would make us feel, but we’re taught that killing bad guys will make us feel good.

But there’s one more clue to Call of Duty’s success and it is vastly more subtle. It may also not apply to everyone, as many fans admittedly have never touched single player.

The clue, in a way, is hidden in the second verse of Last Friday Night. The key is you have to mention all the things that could go wrong, all the things that should worry you about having this awesome night of partying. Missing work the next day, being arrest, getting your car towed. You have to mention all that so you can tell it all to piss off and that you don’t care. If you’re going to make a party song, you need to make sure nothing can stand in the way of your good time, not even reality.

When the protagonists started to die in Call of Duty games it was considered innovation storytelling and then it just became repetitive. It became predictable. But it also became almost necessary. Because if you’re going to make a war game, you need to make sure nothing can stand in the way of your power fantasy, not even death.

Respawns are fine, but something with a little more finality would drive the point home all the better. I know, let’s kill off the player-character. That will get people’s attention, remind them of all the things that could really go wrong in a real war like, you know, death. Then we’ll conveniently give the player another caricature stereotype to embody and use as a death siphon.

That’s the point, right? Ignore all the bad stuff, have a good time.

Even if it’s a blacked-out blur, you’re pretty sure it ruled.

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DesuraNET's quest to make a better indie community

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By Richard Moss @MossRC
on December 18, 2012 at 12:00p

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How Scott Reismanis gave a big voice to small-time game developers.
Scott Reismanis is changing the way developers find and reach their fans, and he may be the future of the game industry. He’s been at the forefront of game distribution for the past decade, almost singlehandedly building Desura — a Steam for indies — and running websites where game developers big and small can share their projects with their peers, gain feedback and build an audience.

“The best thing that we do is we don’t have an editorial gateway team, and so the strength of our site is the content the developers are writing,” Reismanis says. Anyone can sign up, post some news and drum up attention. “[On other sites, game developers are] at the mercy of editors to pick up their press release and write about it,” he explains, “whereas with us if they want to take five minutes to write a good article they can end up on the front page.”

In 2002 Reismanis created ModDB, a website dedicated to mods — essentially, games like Counter-Strike or DayZ that are made from the engines, and sometimes also assets, of existing commercial titles — after being frustrated at the difficulty of finding good mods. It started small, but now boasts a million members and attracts close to 200,000 visitors a day — the recent release of Half-Life remake mod Black Mesa drove a record 300,000 people to the site.

Desura, an indie-focused digital distribution service, followed in 2009, with developer-driven indie games database IndieDB in 2010. Reismanis also collaborated with IndieGames.com on the Indie Royale game bundle website. Business is thriving for his small Melbourne-based company DesuraNET, which just launched a new website for mobile games called SlideDB. The journey to this point was a long one, though, and it hasn’t always been smooth sailing.

The road to ModDB
The road to ModDB

Scott Reismanis (left) and Dave Traeger (right). Reismanis with Double Fine head Tim Schafer.

Reismanis started coding when he was around 15 years old. His high school math class required use of a TI-83 calculator, on which he wrote a program called CompSquare to output step-by-step solutions to quadratic equations. CompSquare became so widespread across Melbourne schools that authorities enforced compulsory wiping of calculator memory to prevent students using it to cheat on exams.

Around the same time, Reismanis took up web development as a hobby. He crafted a website dedicated to his passion: video games. After getting his feet wet with GamerZoned and GameinZone, Reismanis decided to go big and create his own network. He bought his own domain, ChaosRealm.com, and chased hits by posting Counter-Strike cheats and top 10 lists. The Realm Network grew to host more than 20 websites — most notably ModDB’s predecessor ModRealm — before it fell apart in late 2001.

A Bible site snapped up the ChaosRealm domain before Reismanis realized it had expired, then hosting provider Playnet went bankrupt — giving just a week’s notice that the entire Realm Network would be shut down. Now at university and faced with the prospect of starting over, Reismanis wanted his next website to grow itself. He had been producing most of the content alone, but he hated writing. “I detested English in high school,” he confesses. “I was a math student.”
“That sort of stuff didn’t exist in games — that’s why Counter-Strike just killed it.”
Inspiration came from his hobbies. Reismanis was hooked on modding culture. “We’d go to LANs and just load up every single mod we could find and play through them,” he says. His passion for mods started with War in Europe, a Half-Life multiplayer mod, which was novel in that it rewarded players with better guns as they killed more opponents.

Reismanis and ModDB/IndieDB editor Dave Traeger speak with genuine fondness about the scene, reminiscing about their favorite mods from the late 90s and early 2000s. They cite team and squad-based multiplayer modes and other features that mods introduced at a time when commercial games focused on single-player modes. “Mods were innovating,” Reismanis explains. “That sort of stuff didn’t exist in games — that’s why Counter-Strike just killed it.” Mods stayed ahead of the curve, he argues, in a similar manner to indies today — with fresh ideas and new mechanics.

The problem was finding them. “I was trying to play mods on a LAN,” Reismanis says, “and it was just so goddamn hard to find them.” He couldn’t go to Twitter or Facebook because they didn’t exist. Broadband was just catching on, Steam was a gas made by heating water and Google was still a few years away from becoming a verb — the dominant search engine was AltaVista.

What did exist, though, was IMDb — the Internet Movie Database. “AltaVista was keyword search, and the worst part was that you would find mods … but they weren’t released,” Reismanis recalls. So he decided to create something structured. “IMDb’s really good for movies; I’ll make ModDB for games.”

Success breeds more success
Success breeds more success

It worked. Reismanis and his small army of volunteers ran the site in their spare time, and the audience grew at a tremendous rate. At the end of the first year, ModDB had a little over 5,000 members and 535 mods. Membership quintupled in the second year, while the number of mods tripled. Despite frequent downtime, both numbers tripled again in the third year, as ModDB debuted its second major redesign.

For all of ModDB’s success, however, Reismanis had never seriously considered doing it as a job. He worked for Accenture, a huge global IT consulting firm, where he consulted on big Australian websites such as AFL.com and Telstra Online Billing. ModDB remained a hobby, just as it had always been.

Then a call came out of the blue. “In 2006, IGN’s FilePlanet division called me up and said, ‘We’re interested in buying your site,’” Reismanis says. Still wet behind the ears and excited at the prospect of a free flight halfway across the world from his home in Australia to IGN headquarters in California, he jumped into the discussions. “They basically wanted it for nothing,” he recalls, “So I said, ‘Nah, screw you guys. This is crap.’”

“At this stage, the site was getting a ton of visitors but earning nothing — about 40 bucks a month,” he says. “I thought, ‘If they’re willing to buy it and try to copy it, perhaps I should focus on it and try to make a business.’ So I quit Accenture and formed DesuraNET, and started doing it full time.”

Know your audience
Know your audience

Reismanis soon hired his first paid employee, Ryan “Stenchy” Anderson, and set about trying to turn ModDB into a profitable business. DesuraNET was meant to be the parent company of all sorts of community-driven entertainment websites, but the focus both started and stayed with games. Reismanis’s ideas and ambitions often outstripped the realities of the community and resources at his disposal. “All these ideas that I had just kinda failed,” he admits. “The only one that kept succeeding was ModDB.”

He tried rebranding ModDB as GameCore, with plans to launch Gameura, but community backlash against what was seen as “just another generic gaming site” convinced him to shelve the idea. He saw that digital distribution was turning into big business, and drew up plans to create gameinjector as a competitor to Steam back in 2005. This too was shelved, largely because of the negative connotations associated with the name. AddonDB’s short-lived stint was put to bed after it failed to gain any traction as an FPSBanana alternative for PC game add-on downloads. “I kept trying to move away from just mods and being shoehorned into just ModDB,” Reismanis insists. “But those ideas never worked.”

A place for indies
A place for indies

DesuraNET introduced its Desura digital distribution service, which tied directly into ModDB, in December 2009, in response to the community’s growing desire to sell indie games and mods through a service like Steam. IndieDB followed in April 2010. “The indie games just kinda snuck in,” says Traeger. “They just showed up, then we built the functionality for them.”

“We’ve always [been reactionary], almost to the point where I think we’ve missed the boat on some things,” Traeger explains. They realize that Desura could never seriously compete against Steam; that IndieDB may never be as popular as ModDB, despite the indie scene being arguably bigger; and that the just-launched SlideDB for mobile games is late to the party. But they spend too much time talking about trends and not enough acting on them.
“Every time you add an extra step of five seconds, I reckon you’ve got about a 20 percent chance the customer’s not gonna buy your game.”
“If you turn around to me and say we should start a Kickstarter before it exists,” Reismanis jokes, “I’ll take you up on the offer.”

Rather than dwell on his mistakes, Reismanis remains a man on a mission. “If you watch [indie] developers these days,” he laments, “they’ll work for two years on a game — two years in silence — and then they’ll release it. The entire two years — the profit on that game — is dependent on the press that they get in the next four days.”

That’s ridiculous, he argues, because “it’s so freaking hard to succeed today.” People are familiar enough with Gears of War to consider buying it because they’ve seen it advertised at the movies and their friends are talking about it. “With indie games, people walk into the store and see something they don’t know,” Reismanis observes. “Nobody’s ever going to buy something they don’t know, so the people at that point either have to read about the game or watch a video and then decide to buy.

“Every time you add an extra step of five seconds, I reckon you’ve got about a 20 percent chance the customer’s not gonna buy your game. If they already know about your game from a Rock, Paper, Shotgun article — even if they just glanced and didn’t read the article, they’ve already heard about it — it reinforces a little bit of confidence.”

Reismanis hopes his websites can help developers get over this hurdle. Both he and Traeger give frequent advice to indies, encouraging them to publish more blog posts and videos and to publicly document their development. Traeger even edits developer-posted news updates to be more presentable and interesting. The pair like to contact developers with cool games to suggest they sell pre-release copies through alpha funding.

“Alpha funding is something that we identified is good for us and good for developers,” Reismanis says. Project Zomboid, Desura’s most successful game, became their test case thanks to some lucky timing. “We saw that PayPal closed them out and said, ‘How can we help?’” Desura stepped in to handle payments and distribution, saving developer The Indie Stone from a logistical nightmare.

Project Zomboid

An uncertain future
An uncertain future

With Windows 8’s app store and Steam’s new Greenlight and Community features threatening to cannibalize their audience, Reismanis is worried about the future. “[They] do basically what we’ve always done — developer-driven communities,” he says. “Now the developers of these games can add profiles for their games and promote them to their fans and get comments. That’s actually what we’ve been doing forever.”

Many developers use Desura and IndieDB — and even ModDB — as a means of building exposure before the big push to get their game on Steam. I Shall Remain, Cute Things Dying Violently and many others leveraged their popularity on Desura to Kickstart or pay for their Greenlight campaigns (to varying degrees of success). Of the 31 games successfully Greenlit, seven — Project Zomboid, Towns, Gnomoria, Black Mesa, Neotokyo°, Kenshi and The Stanley Parable — have huge prior success on ModDB or Desura, while only a few have no presence on these sites at all.

Cute Things Dying Violently

Reismanis checks the ModDB servers.

Reismanis isn’t bothered about developers seeking greener pastures elsewhere. “We’re realistic; we’re a really good stepping platform,” he says. Traeger echoes this idea: “I think it’s enough to make it easier for them to get started. When they’ve got the feedback, they can start putting the effort into the places they want.”

DesuraNET’s business is now helping developers. “There are a lot of things changing, and I hope that we are able to keep doing it because I think we’re great for the indies that we do help,” Reismanis says. They claim to answer every email and go out of their way to give advice to newcomers. The goals have realigned over the years, but one thing remains constant — a community-focused website dedicated to giving a voice and a support network to game developers of all ilks. Every game, every mod and every developer is welcome, no matter how big or small.

As for his own journey, Reismanis is bemused about his early choices: “When I look back over 10 years, I’m like, ‘why the hell did I choose mods?’ I could have chosen anything back in 2002.” But he has no regrets. “It takes a long time to learn those lessons that you’ve stumbled on something good — you’re fortunate.

“It’s bloody hard to get something that works, so just be happy and embrace it.”

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Gaming Made Me: Tomb Raider

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A Dream of Machetes

By Cara Ellison on December 19th, 2012 at 9:00 pm.

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June 2003: a remote jungle clearing outside Moshi, Tanzania. I am seventeen. It is sometime after midnight.

My skin is sticky with pesticide and sweat. In the treacle dark, my friend Rachael’s face presses hot against my shoulder. The hiss of the jungle soars into the sky in a cacophonous, unbearable symphony.

I need to pee.

Unzipping the tent door, I reach for my boots outside and hesitate, before upending them and shaking them vigorously. This lesson has been learned in machetes. Satisfied, I pull the boots on, grab a torch, and bind an emergency strip of toilet paper around my wrist. I press out through the long grass.

Wet air kisses bare skin. The remains of my once plain rice dinner is pitted with grass bugs: with no lid to prevent them jumping towards the heat, we had eaten the rice black and crunchy. I grimace at the thought of the swallowed bugs and stride through the grass into the murk. I can hear the insects screech, jump against my ankles. Fuck the jungle, I think. Everything here is trying to kill me. I think about machetes, hallucinate one in my hand. But I had left it behind with the Maasai.

A scream from above punctures my eardrum. I freeze. To my seventeen-year-old ears it sounds like the scream of a Velociraptor. I switch off the torch. Steven Spielberg told me there would be days like this.

Three more terrifying screams; I stand in the grass with the cold strands touching my exposed legs, exposed, exposed. They’re in the trees, I think. And I am here. And they can see me.

Freeze-framed by fear, my mind escapes to another place, an unreal place whose dangers nevertheless felt no less real…

That malfunctioning ATI card kicks me straight into that first desolate corridor. No cutscene. I am twelve, terrified. The computer screen looms over me. The soundloop kicks in – hollow noises like huge footsteps boom in the background: creaks, low moans. I’m aware the woman on screen is wearing very little. You can see too much flesh on her – she is miles away from help, shut in this cave. She can see wolf tracks, hear whispers… But she is on her own.

What is the worst that can happen to her? I glance at the manual. I draw Lara’s guns. I walk into the claustrophobic darkness.

At seventeen, standing in that grass alone in the jungle, I wonder if I am doing Lara Croft a disservice. I imagine that some small girl is watching me through the lens of a computer screen and I see everything map out before me. I think, if I don’t get over myself, that small girl watching will never do anything impressive like go exploring in a Tanzanian jungle; she will never block blows in a budoukan in Okinawa or climb temples and tree roots at Ta Prohm Kapok. She will never have the guts to do anything by herself. Get over yourself, I thought, just then. Lara got over herself.

I breathe the close air. I control my own body, where once I controlled Lara’s. I have developed the curves that denote adulthood. I no longer look like a tomboy girl: I am a grown woman. Women deal with things. They are in control. They are calm at all times. They are together.

Adulthood swells into my lungs: I am that composed woman; I can walk into that forest and deal with what happens just as she killed wolves and jumped into bear pits.

Lara: the impractical figure, the idealized sex object. Surely there’s no way she could offer anything but detriment to the way that young women look at themselves? Many regard Lara Croft as nothing more than a tool for male voyeurism. And while I didn’t notice the extent to which Croft was sexualised when I was twelve, I certainly notice now. That original game presented Lara’s figure at its worst, its most implausible. The painful outrageousness of her waistline; her breasts, so engorged they might carry more water than her measly backpack.

But what was more important to my young eyes was Lara’s frailty. She looked thin and incapable, those narrow gun-toting wrists like stems of a flower. Climbing seemed a labour. She stumbled on things, bumped into things with a dramatic ‘oof!’ Every animation blend glitch evidence to me that she was panicking, breaking. She was at the mercy of her environment. The fact that she had few supplies, little clothing, and nobody to help her: these made her task even more daunting. But that was what was amazing about her. All my life I’d thought only men put themselves in these dangerous, isolated positions. It didn’t matter to me that men might look at her. She is the doer now, and not the helper. She is the hero. For twelve-year-old me, Lara had chosen to take a risk for the sake of thrills. I admired that.

Women are routinely advised to be safe. You’re going out late at night? By yourself? In that? That’s dangerous. In London there is a campaign to ensure women only hire officially endorsed taxis, because minicab drivers have been known to sexually assault women on back roads. Take safer taxis, women. Don’t go alone – anywhere. Don’t go alone.

Men, by contrast, are encouraged to do foolish, dangerous things. People thought it was funny when Steve Irwin poked a crocodile with a stick; if a woman did it for a laugh she’d be putting herself in danger. Which is stupid and might never be entertainment, right? Even with that charismatic grin. And certainly, if the female Steve Irwin had died doing what she loved (poking crocodiles with sticks) it wouldn’t be considered heroic. It would have been, “Well. We told her so.” It’s taken as read that maybe a man might die as a consequence of putting himself in danger – but that’s the life he chose. What a principled hero. If a woman dies, well, that’s her fault: we told her not to do that. It wasn’t safe.

In that jungle, at seventeen, I am so far from those voices. My gender makes no difference here, in the wild. It seems like a construction to pretend that we are anything but a set of consciousnesses traversing a fraught earth. It seems odd to regard Rob and Josh, whose tent is out of sight somewhere near, as being somehow able to cope better here, or as somehow in less danger.

At twelve, back in Tomb Raider, I was in the tight grasp of monophobia. For the first time, I’d been allowed to go out into town by myself. I was aware that some of my friends were still not allowed to do this – because it is dangerous for little girls to go into town themselves. Everything seemed dangerous to me. The bus driver was dangerous. The people on the streets were dangerous. As I grew up that caution never waned. By sixteen, boys aren’t told as often to be careful any more, as equally unfairly, they become the danger. At twenty-six, I am still often told that being out alone at night is dangerous.

Tomb Raider encouraged me to be alone. The very act of playing it was solitary, away from friends. Our computer was shut in a tiny ‘study’ (a cupboard) at the top of our three-storey house (just next to the gymnasium with the secret entrances) and I always played it in the dark. My dad never set the heating to anything less than full blast as if he were an orchid threatened with wilting, so the study was always sweltering. I’d play until I couldn’t bear being afraid any more. And it was terrifying: I would scream at every bear and I was not particularly squeamish, not a ‘girly’ child. And still I was determined that I needed no help. I wanted to do it alone.

Outside of the study I came to realise that wanting to do things alone was not always a bad thing. If Lara Croft can raid tombs by herself, I figured, then I can go anywhere by myself. I started enjoying my own company more and stopped worrying what my friends were doing. I visited town by myself sometimes, not to meet anyone, but to buy ice cream and shop for clothes because I wanted the time to ponder things. I started to value my own judgement more. I wrote outrageous opinion pieces for the school newspaper. I became more active in identifying and chasing the things I wanted. I used to get frustrated that I didn’t have a boyfriend. Well. Lara didn’t have one either, I reasoned. She probably chose to be alone. The very idea that one could choose not to have a boyfriend blew my young mind.

Lara didn’t have a love interest in the original Tomb Raider. There was no ongoing romance beyond the romance of finding secrets, climbing colosseums, shot-gunning T-Rexes. Larson was shot dead, a footnote. Frustrated at missing jumps, terrified at being impaled on spikes, you willed her to jump farther, shoot faster, swim for longer. At twelve I was a competitive swimmer, and the thing you always strove for in the pool was a Personal Best time, not finishing a heat first.

Both Lara and I didn’t really need someone to help us out or encourage us. We competed against ourselves. Years later, Crystal Dynamics would ruin that in Tomb Raider: Legend by providing not one, but two or three different men supporting her, as if she couldn’t lop off an endangered species’ head with the help of a good nutritious breakfast and her own sheer determination. It was as if a jaded Ripley had been put on an infested ship with three fratboys who’d read a report on Aliens and decided they’d come and help her out. Perhaps it was just bad writing. Perhaps it was an essential part of the game. Perhaps.

Is wanting to do things alone dangerous for women? Much of the ‘danger’ surrounding women and girls who dare to do things alone is framed as the threat of sexual assault. It is kind of terrifying that women are warned that men will be looking at us in a sexual manner in every situation – and horrifying that all responsibility for men controlling their sexual or violent urges is absolved by an emphasis on keeping women in a safe space. Ultimately, if society started valuing self control and respect for others’ personal space, we probably wouldn’t have to patronise women, who, let’s not forget, are also capable of sexual assault. This last fact is shrugged off constantly. It’s as if the threat of the male gaze penetrating our heroine is what makes Lara vulnerable. Is she being sexually assaulted by us, the viewer? As if the very act of seeing women turns the voyeur into the threat.

When I played I was Lara, experiencing everything through her character. My male friends sat there identifying with the camera – with the looking, the controlling, with the interfaces. They were outside her body. I was her body. It was survival horror.

My most vehement wish was to keep Lara alive. This is the same wish I clutch now, in the jungle. I wonder: would I have taken as many risks in life if I hadn’t been Lara all those years ago?

My toes twitch in my boots. I master myself. The screaming is all around me, up in the trees.

If you were going to attack me, you’d have done it by now, I think. I unfreeze the frame and wade into the dark. I feel a guilt sting at having failed to match Lara Croft’s composure faced with similar peril. Fine barbs of vines cling to my skin, threatening to trap me, trip me up. Again I lust for a machete, licking dry, bug-stained lips. I forget the last time I saw my face in a mirror, but I imagine that my face, all grit and mosquito bites. I am Kurtz.

Unseen tree animals scream around me. No, I decide: here is where I stop and pee. I’m gonna do what I came here for. You hear that jungle? That is the sound of me pissing on you. Yeah? Well I hope it’s a freaking ant hill I’m pissing on. Your ant hill.

Oh god, it’s an ant hill.

I spend the rest of the night and the following two days picking the pincers of suture-strong Siafu ants out of my legs. I still have the scars. Rachael slept on through what I later found out, over a stiff pint of sugar cane liquor, was the Tanzanian equivalent of the Bush Baby mating season – they have Velociraptor screams.

During warm weather I sometimes dream of machetes. Machetes and Lara Croft. I hear she’ll get a machete in the new one.

__________________

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Press X Not to Die

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Dec 11 2012 Essays By Mary Hamilton

Press X Not to Die

Games weren’t always an escape from my mental illness. They were one of the symptoms.

We were jealous of the younger kids in the one-to-one ward, because they had a PlayStation. It didn’t have the best games, but it had Micro Machines and Tomb Raider and it was better than what we had. Over in the general adolescent ward we had a Mega Drive with two controllers, in a small room kept locked with three chairs and one double-glazed window. There was a limited selection of games: Sonic, Ecco, Jurassic Park. My favourite, Bio-hazard Battle, I played curled up on a square, plump chair, with a boy two years younger than me and mostly recovered. It was an addictive, twitchy, side-scrolling bullet hell game where you controlled biological ships that fought the strange, new, malevolent forms of life that had invaded the planet, and hunted for different weapons that would help you eradicate the world’s new sickness. In retrospect, it seems sort of obvious.

Mortal Kombat was the game I played on my own. That was the game that I first remember igniting the debate about violence in video games. I was glad that the controversy hadn’t reached our ward, or that the staff had chosen to ignore it. I picked up the habit of asking for the games room to be opened after school, some days, and spending half an hour beating Sub-Zero and Scorpion into a bloody pulp, savoring (FINISH HIM) that moment just before the final blow where you could, if you wanted, hold back. I never did.

It is seven years now since I put a new mark on my body. I don’t remember which lines I left the last time I held a blade to my skin and pushed down and drew blood. Many of my scars have a time and a place - this one in the woods at lunchtime, that one the day they said I should take some time off school, this one the day I couldn’t get into the games room. Others are blanks that run together. A map of me, on me, where roads I don’t recall walking are laid out still on my skin.

In a quiet room with a blade, it’s only ever yourself you’re trying to beat.

In hospital you learn not to number your scars or describe your weight with actual figures. They watch for these things. They tell you off for competing. But of course, you’re just trying to find out what the leaderboard looks like, and whether your personal best is good enough, bad enough. In a quiet room with a blade, it’s only ever yourself you’re trying to beat.

Before I went into hospital I played Tetris for hours on my parents’ computer. Eventually I played it for so long that the high score went round to the bottom again and I finally finished with -28,000 or so points. In the end it was pointless. The work never stopped. Minesweeper, on its hardest level, that was better: you could win. You could try to win. There was hope, vague hope that if you were just good enough you could beat it and get a little smiley face.

For more than a year I lived with a woman whom I thought I loved, and who pretended to care about me. I bought a PS2 on credit I didn’t have and lost myself in Final Fantasy games for hour upon hour upon hour. We moved in together. I bought Morrowind and delved deeply into dark Dwemer ruins, searching for the tools I needed to break a heart. Later, much later, in my final year of university, after I was rejected from both the postgraduate courses I want to take, I discovered a natural aptitude for Guitar Hero 2. Bright flashing confusion came towards me on a big screen and I sorted it into sound with my bare hands. I was 5-starring Free Bird on Expert as I failed to move to Oxford to start a publishing career.

At 15, in an adult ward on constant observation, at lunch I hid a metal knife up my sleeve. I carried it around for a time waiting not to be watched in the bathroom, the toilet, the shower; a flat metal bar against the tendons on the inside of my right wrist. At 23 I was Altair, an assassin with a blade strapped hidden to my arm, springloaded. I hid from the guards. I took wound after wound but did not stop fighting. I regenerated. I lept wildly from towers and did not die. In real life I moved out of the house I shared with my boyfriend, had shared for more than a year, to sleep on the sofas of friends. I snuck back in to take my Xbox 360 so I could carry on climbing impossible buildings to gain new sight and falling from great heights and landing safely, while I jumped from a long relationship into a new house, a new job, a new life.

A year later, I was in Newcastle six hours by train away from all my friends, training to be a journalist, not self-harming. I was writing shorthand, learning media law, tramping the streets of a strange city searching for stories to tell, not self-harming. Every night I went home to a tiny room where I ate roast vegetables or stir fry and played one single puzzle of Portal and did not self-harm. Every night I solved one thing neatly and did not self-harm. When I could not sleep I loaded up Fallout 3 and wandered through destroyed Washington amid the ruins of buildings and found hope, sprouting, amidst the abundant ruin and I did not self-harm. I found things to do to make the wasteland more bearable and I did not self-harm. When my boyfriend visited and took my Xbox away, so I could get the train home for the last time three weeks later, I wrote out each day as a series of quests to fulfill. Sometimes each hour, at the worst.

In the end, I did not break. My skin stayed unbroken. He bought me Rock Band 2 for Christmas and that eased me back, safely, home. The next year, the day after our wedding, we bought a PS3 and ate Burger King breakfast in the mall. On our honeymoon, we alternated long walks with games: Assassin’s Creed 2 for me, Uncharted 2 for him, Little Big Planet together, where we are both lions and we run holding hands. My longest quest did not come with achievement points, or a leaderboard. The leaderboards are lies, in any case. I am better off with cake.

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Hotline Miami and America’s narrative of masculinity and violence - Laser Orgy

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All Blogs Laser Orgy Hotline Miami and America’s narrative of masculinity and violence

Hotline Miami and America’s narrative of masculinity and violence

Published Dec 17 2012, 02:28 PM by Maddy Myers
3
Hotline Miami has a twist ending that you have seen before. You have seen it in Fight Club, and in the first Black Ops game. In some ways, you have felt it shake you to your core in every game that asks you to kill anyone. The twist is that You Did It. The game asked you to do it, but you’re the one who did what the game told you.

In Hotline Miami, you killed hundreds. It might feel like thousands, depending on how many times you played and replayed the levels. The game desensitized you and forced you to calculate each of these kills from a distant vantage point. The end of the game points out your participation with chilling clarity.

The bouncy dance beats help to distance you. The splashy, neon-colored levels help; nothing seems real here. The retro pixilated aesthetic helps, too. The screens at the end of each level tally up a score. But you do not “win” Hotline Miami. You only realize what you have done.

This disturbing narrative of anxious masculinity occurs in Fight Club as well, perhaps most famously. Edward Norton’s character awakens the animal within himself, and, eventually, within all the men around him. Every man, according to this story, is on the breaking point; men are violent inherently, and it is all they can do to keep that violence under wraps. Men can use that violence For Good - by “protecting” women, kittens, cookies, or any other objects that they “own”. But this “protection” requires men to use their violence for Evil: by destroying. Destroying men, at first, as they are “reasonable” targets. But also, eventually, destroying objects. And women. It is up to Men to understand how to use their inherent violence powers, but chances are, it’s going to go wrong.

This narrative pops up not only in Fight Club but in almost every super-popular video game of the past few decades. Even Mario games tell a tale of failing to protect the precious object that is Princess Peach, of fighting with other forces of masculinity (with Bowser as the pinnacle) and destroying them to “protect” the damsel. But why is Peach better off with Mario, or with anyone else? The game doesn’t want you to ask this question, because the story is not about Peach. Peach is a fire flower. Peach is a mushroom. Peach is just another Important Thing that Mario must grab before it rolls off the screen, before someone else grabs it first, before the game is lost.

Characters like Mario enact a childish, simplified version of the same events that transpire in Hotline Miami. This is why the twist ending should not surprise you. You have seen this story before.

You play as Jacket; that’s a fan-given name, by the way, as he does not have a name, much like Edward Norton in Fight Club. You are a hit man. At some mysterious point before the game begins, Jacket signed up for this career choice (just as you, the player, at some mysterious point before the game began, decided to download it). Jacket gets messages on his answering machine, which tell him to go to certain areas and perform non-violent actions like picking up food or making repairs. But these messages are a code. The secret code behind every message is: go to this location and kill every last person there. Every person you can find, in tactical order, with slick precision. Don’t ask why. Just do it.

And you, the player, will do it. It will even be fun.

At first, the game has no female characters. There are only men, almost all of whom are armed, all of whom look nigh-identical to one another, and all of whom will kill you on sight if you don’t kill them first. You will learn to kill first, and you will learn it fast.

Eventually, you will meet a woman. This woman is a prostitute. You have killed everyone before her, you have destroyed the building around her, but you will not touch her. If you try to leave, she begs you to take her with you. And you do, picking her up in your arms like a princess or a bride, carrying her through corpses of men you have killed and over the threshold of the doorway. It’s the only option the game provides.

This woman becomes your girlfriend, somewhere in the next few scenes … or perhaps, throughout, she is always your prisoner. Does she have Stockholm Syndrome? Does she know you are a murderer for hire? Is she afraid of you? Who knows?

Throughout the game, everyone (gangs, the cops, the SWAT team) is hunting you down. As well they should be. You are a remorseless mass murderer. Eventually, your girlfriend becomes collateral damage.

Her death seems to be an event intended to make the player feel as though they have failed. This was a woman that you, for whatever reason, decided to protect. It’s not clear why - perhaps the only reason needed is, Because She Is A Woman. A woman whose sole purpose in the game is to be taken in by you and owned and objectified and killed and used as a plot device to give your character a “reason” to keep fighting … never mind how many murders he committed before she even showed up to “justify” them. She is a tool, as much as any damsel in distress is a tool. She is Other, a delicate victim who must be protected. You fail in your duties as a man by not proecting her, and you should feel ashamed.

The only reason why this works is because Hotline Miami doesn’t seem to want you to believe you are a hero. Hotline Miami wants you to hate yourself.

The game’s secret ending offers some further clarification on this point. (It’s worth noting, given how much of this game appears to be a representation of America’s brand of anxious masculinity, that the secret code you use to get this ending is “I Was Born in the USA”.) The end of the game introduces you to two janitors, two “Patriots” who have conducted an “experiment”. This pair has been sending out the voicemails to the hit men, asking them to kill certain people in certain areas. The pair plans to create similar operations worldwide; again, recall Fight Club and its supposition that once the inherent violence of men has been tapped, it cannot be rebottled.

Theoretically, the janitors’ murder ring acts in service of America, but the details of how the murders will “help” anyone at all remain unclear, even at the game’s end. This secret ending concludes with you killing these two janitors and riding a motorcycle off into the sunset.

If you don’t manage to find out the secret password to this section, the janitors will justify their murder ring by saying that they were bored and needed something to do.

These two janitors intentionally resemble the game’s developers (who are Swedish, not American, by the way). Their answers for the player will not satisfy most people. Why have they created this game? Why have you played it? Why have you committed all of these murders? Well, it was something to do, and you were bored. Oh, you want a lengthier explanation for why you did this? The answer is America. Are you still confused? You should be, because this is terrible, and none of these justifications should satisfy you.

At the end of the first Black Ops game, as well, you discover that much of the game was not real and that your character had been brainwashed and/or tricked into committing horrific murders and betrayals. Fight Club and Hotline Miami echo this theme. Who is responsible for this horrific violence? We want to believe that the protagonist isn’t - we identify with him, by now. If it’s a video game, then we are him, we have been him all along. We don’t want to find out that we are the murderer … even though, on some level, we know we are, because we were there. But we did all of those murders “rightly”, we think? We don’t know, anymore. But we have participated in the story. And, outside of the game, we have participated in the narrative of equating masculinity with violence.

As a shooter fan who happens to also be a woman, I often find myself feeling alienated by the masculine-centric narrative on display in all of these games. But that alienation allows me to see this particular form of social brainwashing from an outsider’s angle.

The brainwashing goes deep, here. It happens in real life, not just in these fictions. To what extent have we internalized the narrative? We need not look far to see this view of masculinity in American society - as an unstoppable, uncontrollable force of power and violence. Why do we agree with this supposition in so many of our stories? Why do we accept violence as the “natural” way that men behave?

In Hotline Miami, you have only one person that you are supposed to protect, and you fail. But, remember, you are the person of which she should be most afraid. You are the person who has killed the most - the person who has “protected” her the most. You are Monster and Man.

I don’t buy this. I don’t buy this, and neither should men or women or anyone. Why, why would we normalize a narrative that anyone is inherently violent? By normalizing violence as supposedly “natural” behavior, especially from men, we make it harder for people to seek help and identify what is and isn’t okay. Often, games present men in particular as embodying a supposedly uncontrollable urge to commit violence, and this is a gender norm that I can only hope male gamers begin to see and reject in the future.

I often talk about wanting to see games that tell different kinds of stories. Stories about the way gender roles exist in our society now, but also stories about how our society might change, stories about different kinds of “good” and “bad” people and about in-between people. Hotline Miami tells the story of where we are now, and it is a sad story. It is a story that needs telling. But it is also a story that I hope we don’t have to keep telling and retelling. Eventually, these “wake-up call” games need to actually wake something up.

You can always reject the narrative. You can’t, within the rules of Hotline Miami, decide what Jacket does, beyond the options provided. But the rules of the game should be different, out here. The story can be changed.

Filed Under: video games, Black Ops, Fight Club

[photos] Videodrome Discothèque Xanadu Night @ Oberon

Boyfriend Maker’s back, now on Google Play

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First-Person Perspective and the Untroubled Gaze

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The other day I was playing Fallout 3, and in my zeal to kill as many guards as possible before escaping Vault 101, I switched to third person perspective. It was jarring, but I decided to give it a shot: it had been awhile since I’ve played any games in the third-person perspective, and thought I’d give it a try. This is when I realized something about myself as a gamer: I hate playing in third-person now.

Okay, well “hate” is a strong word. I greatly prefer playing in first-person for all my shooter game needs. Third-person feels…wrong, somehow. This is weird, right? I didn’t always feel this way. Perspective was never an issue with me, before. I grew up playing the Resident Evil games and loved the perspective, just as much as I adored games like Quake and Unreal. And it’s not to say I won’t play and enjoy a third-person perspective game (Batman: Arkham City is testament to this), it’s just that I’m aware now that it will absolutely affect the depth of my involvement and enjoyment in the game.

For me, it comes down to character identification. I’ve written before on the importance of character selection for me as a feminist, but perspective is a different situation. In spectator theory and feminism, Laura Mulvey and Mary Anne Doanne both assert that female spectators have a troubled identification process with a character on screen, as they are often forced into either a “passive or masochistic position,” to quote Doanne from her article Film and Masquerade.

The gaze has always belonged to masculine subjects (characters on screen have always been established in relation to a male audience), relegating the female character on screen to an object to be looked at (what Mulvey calls “to-be-looked-at-ness”). Video games are able to side-step this in a way by forcing gamer identification with female heroes, such as Tomb Raider. But also as the Tomb Raider example shows, there is still a masculinisation of the gaze happening: Lara Croft is very much still an object of desire.

In my experience, first-person perspective in shooters bypasses this gendered complication. During actual game play, the character as an object becomes completely subsumed into my experience as the subject. Aside from some occasional grunts and shouts, there is very little that disrupts this experience for me. Take Borderlands 2, for example. I played as Salvador, but never once did I notice a dissonance between his character and my experience while playing. Even when the psychos and marauders hurled insults at my character, they were typically about Salvador’s height, which also resonated with me, as I am quite short myself.

Salvador may be a fraught example, because technically it’s still in line with traditional problems of the spectator’s gaze: if we’re playing by those rules, I am still identifying with the masculine subject. So let’s take Fallout 3. My character, as best as I could, looked a lot like me. She had dark hair and…okay, I guess that’s where the resemblance stops. But it wasn’t until I switched between perspectives that I became aware of her. I kept playing in third-person after that, but felt entirely removed from the story and the situation. I even thought of my answers to questions differently than I had been before. There was a switch, and I started to think of my character as someone I was controlling rather than myself. It was like being aware that someone else was in the room with you the whole time when you thought you were alone.

Hey, I never said this wasn’t a weird thing, okay?

What I’m saying here is that for me first-person shooters eradicate the dissonance that Mulvey and Doanne elucidate as intensely problematic for females. There is no complication of gaze, because the character is not an object on screen, but rather a vehicle I, as a gamer, am fully inhabiting. Non-visual cues, like character grunts and catch-phrases, do not have as profound of an impact on this experience because they’re not visual. Mulvey discusses Lacan’s mirror-stage (where a child looks into a mirror, sees their reflection and acknowledges the reflected image as themselves) as a means of linking “looking” with “self-awareness.” It is the gaze that mobilizes our recognition of “self” versus “others.”

The problem in spectator theory has always been with the gaze: what we see, and how what is shown is influenced by who is watching. In first-person shooters, the experience is no longer gendered because there is no traditional subject/object on screen to mediate our identification/experience. With statistics showing the extreme increase in female gamers (where female gamers my age exist in a larger number than adolescent male gamers), we can’t even posit that video game narratives are exclusively constructed for a male audience, the way Mulvey thought of Hollywood cinema. Audiences are changing, and our relationship with the gaze is changing also.

When I think back to the games I loved growing up, I can recall a marked difference in my attitudes. When I think about Resident Evil, it is very much about Claire Redfield and how she reacted to her enemies and obstacles. But when I think back to my experiences playing Unreal, the memory is of me on that alien planet running through ancient temples. I invest more of myself into games with the first-person perspective. There’s no complication, no distance.

In effect, first-person perspective eliminates the object of the gaze, so there is never a subjective distinguishing moment. Back to Borderlands and Fallout 3: our first game experiences are other characters speaking to the screen, to us directly. There is no gendered gaze happening, because gamer and character become condensed into one subject that isn’t hampered by the gaze or what we can see of ourselves screen. If female characters have typically existed only to be looked at, then removing them visually and collapsing them in gamer/character removes this gendered aspect of the gaze. There is no gendered complication between playing as Salvador or as Maya, but there exists a certain tension when playing in third-person perspective for me.

Further Reading: Why All My Characters are Ladies (Medium Difficulty)

Milking Cows: Female Subjectivity in Harvest Moon: Boy and Girl (Medium Difficulty)

Girls, Games, and The Products They Create (Medium Difficulty)

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Pokemon Blue Part #1 - The beginning

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The Let’s Play Archive

Pokemon Blue

by Metroixer

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Part 1: The beginning

Let’s horribly break Pokémon blue

In the late 90s Nintendo released a gameboy game in America. This game was simple, a bit rough around the edges, childish, but very very good and very very addicting. This, my friends, was the start of the Pokémon craze. The reception was unlike anyone has ever seen, children were glued to their gameboy screens for so long that parents tried to keep them away by connecting the little monsters to the devil. Schools made futile attempts to ban the drug as 10 year olds snuck in with little portable systems hidden in their lunch boxes. Only to end up in a fisticuff brawl as a trade or a battle went horribly wrong during recess. No one was safe, Pokemon affected everyone, and for being such a popular series rumors eventually arose.

Oh the rumors that arose.
Every neighborhood had their own special pokemon rumor, Bill’s backyard, Mewthree, how to get Mew itself, POKEGODS, fighting Prof. Oak, all involving ridiculous methods of access, like using a precious itemfinder in a particular location 1000 times and right at the thousandth time pressing start and saving the game then restarting but you need to have pikablu in your party and to have him you need to do something or other.

Ladies and gentlemen, in this thread we will not only be exploring these rumors, how to do what is mentioned in these rumors, but much more. We will encounter creatures that were meant to be sealed forever; we will enter forbidden lands that will most likely crash the game after taking one step, WE WILL DO WHAT NO MAN HAS HAD THE BALLS TO DO.

FOR TONIGHT. WE. WILL. BREAK.

Q: OH MAN ANOTHER POKEMON LP HOW ORIGINAL

A: Wait! Before you hit that back button allow me to say this will be a very different Pokemon LP. At least I think so. Instead of the usual collecting badges with first person narration and general confusion over how the world works, we will focus on one-well two-maybe three-things only. The main one being glitches. Wonderful unpredictable glitches.

The LP will be informative in the fact that I will try to explain how some glitches occur. Some, not all of them though. My knowledge all comes from internet research, most of the stuff you’ll read here has already been discovered by a larger source, with an explanation to support why it happens. Other than that I’m just as clueless as you.

I’m still gonna get badges and beat the E4 and all that shit but that’ll be more of a sidequest perspective than anything.

Q: Glitches!? What!? That sounds stupid.

A: Perhaps it is, but in the first generation pokemon games glitches run rampant and are quite interesting. Well they don’t really run rampant, since I’m going to be sharking this game a lot to do what I need to do, but there are enough out there to allow anyone to break the game without the use of a gameshark.

Q: there are a bunch of blobs and the music is weird oh man there’s a letter therewhatsgoingon

A: A lot of the glitches we will run into will be graphically oriented, as well as sound. I guess you can call this LP a bit of a hybrid since some of what happens when running into a glitched pokemon/trainer can’t really be described in words. Let me just say this, and I know it’s going to sound stupid, but when listening to some of these videos/soundfiles for the first time, try not to do it before bed. It sounds really stupid, but if you have fond memories of the first gen games as a kid the manipulation can get kinda freaky.

Q: Will you be taking Glitch requests?

A: Uh, sure. I don’t see why not.

Q: You’re using a gameshark you CHEATER

A: Don’t even think about saying this, you’ll just look stupid.

Also to people who want to ask what I’m going to show off please use spoiler tags. I know spoiling GLITCHES of all things is probably trivial but I like to keep what I’m gonna do a secret for this thread.

Alright, I think I got everything settled, let’s get started.

NO

Pretty simple name, but what we name ourselves actually affects a certain famous glitch in the future. Granted, if I made my name a bunch of symbols said glitch will turn out more entertaining, but I decided to stick with this for easier reading (more for me than for you). Besides, what we can’t encounter we will through gameshark!

Keep thinking “Derp” is spelled “Durp”. Not that it matters much for this LP anyway, I can’t be the only one who thinks Blue’s overworld sprite is the derpiest thing made.

Aaand just like that we’re ready to walk in the grass, begin our adventure with Oak and have good clean fun. I would like to take this moment to thank god the Gen 1 games don’t force you to have any tirades with your mother. Hell, you can completely ignore her in this game! From gen 2 she forces a bunch of pointless story crap that no one ever cares about. So, let’s just take our first step in the grass and…

Haha yeah right

Q: Wait, are you walking over the barrier?

A: Yep! The walk through walls code is on now, and I’ll be making good use of it for most of this playthrough. It’s a bit annoying turning it on and off since the game crashes if you go out of bounds, or it’ll freak out during a scripted event where red has to walk himself. For example, when you have it on when you meet Oak for the first time Red will just keep walking north until he goes out of bounds and the game crashes. There can be some neat things to be found through the WTW code and I may not know it all, if you know some interesting places to check out feel free to share!

Now, what we’re doing here is just a quick show off of what happens when you go into a fight with no pokemon. I’m pretty sure every kid with pokemon and a gameshark has done this, but we’ll do it anyway just to ease into the explorative spirit of the thread.

A wild blank! (Well actually it’s a pidgeotto) What is happening now and what is about to happen is pretty much the same for any wild pokemon you meet without pokemon yourself. Also notice how it says I have nothing but fainted pokemon, not sure what that means but hey it’s there!

Since the game NEEDS to have red let out a pokemon we have this monstrosity out. The ” !” is the first pokeglitch for this LP, and it’s pretty… Lackluster actually. It only has one move, you can’t keep it (Which will be seen why shortly), and it’s also kind of weak. However, as you can see its release just pretty much fucked up the battle screen! Pidgeotto’s name is now replaced with a bunch of blobs and its health bar has shot through the roof! I should also state that with ” !“‘s release the music slowly quiets down until it’s completely silent, no interesting glitchy music here but it’s kinda creepy how the music just dies. ” !“‘s cry is a strange sequence of a distorted Seel/Dewgong cry followed by a regular Zapdos Cry.

This is ” !“‘s one and only move. It doesn’t even have a name! However, the typing is interesting in that it’s the “Cooltrainer” type. For those that don’t know or may not remember, Cooltrainers are one of the many different types of trainers you can fight, they tend to be the hardest ones too, just ranking behind certain gym leaders and the Elite 4. This won’t be the first we’ll see this kind of typing in a glitched pokemon.

Now, when you try to use the one move ” !” has it’ll disobey you for some reason, either it won’t obey or use a different move, in my case it always used “Pound” despite the fact that Pound isn’t even part of its move set… In general, this guy acts like a high level traded pokemon, despite the fact that it’s only level 12, and traded pokemon won’t disobey you until level 20 if you don’t have any badges. Honestly, the simple answer is that the game just doesn’t know what to do here, so it’s all jargoned up, everything is going to hell and at this point it’s just trying to get out of this situation.

Pidgeotto is using its own weird attack, but it seems to just be a renamed quick attack, also I may have been wrong about ” !” being weak, since it’s only level 12 and can survive a quick attack with little damage from a level 30 pidgeotto. Then again it’s impossible to look at its stats because the “Pokemon” screen is blank when you try to view it. Every time I try to use it, Pidgeotto’s health bar also increases in size.

After four attempts of trying to have the Cooltrainer move work, ” !” is already out of PP. It never does work really, and interestingly you can’t use “Struggle” to fight. Struggle is basically a last resort move any pokemon can use when it’s out of PP. I’ve actually never seen it in action myself, but allegedly it’s not very affective. No other moves can be chosen, so we’re gonna have to run out of the fight, which makes the game crash

What just happened is the same for pretty much every WILD pokemon encounter, but what happens when we fight a trainer with no pokemon?

To answer this question we must venture south of Pallet Town toward Cinnabar Island, if we try to go north Oak will stop us at any place. Yes even if you try to go across a barrier Oak will interrupt you. He’ll actually just be moving across the screen from right to left in an endless loop that you can’t get out of but it’s still interrupting nonetheless!

This fine gentleman will be our test subject. A fisherman stuck upon an island waiting for any traveling seamen to give him a hit

This guy has a seaking (Not glitched at all during battle!) and we have good ol ” !” again. The same thing pretty much happens, except in the middle of the battle…

A sudden flash of gray screen appears!

The game restarts, you would think that because this is something a lot of people have done there’d be an explanation on why this happens, but I can’t find anything. Either way, the game doesn’t restart as cleanly as you would expect…

Jigglypuff turns into… THAT.

The various pokemon that appear on the intro screen now face the wrong way… They also flicker in and out randomly but good luck grabbing a screen cap that could appropriately represent that. Pressing start will bring up a gray screen again, but if we press “A” twice the game will continue on from the last save point!

I actually had a save file on this ROM before this LP where I tested out a bunch of other glitches just to see how they behaved and such. The game appears normal, but it’s far from it. When you try to talk to people, there are no text boxes; you just have to keep mashing B blindly until the person stops talking. You can’t see the start screen when you bring it up, but if you happen to click the pokemon menu…

The overworld sprites disappear and the area becomes the background for your pokemon menu! Sure you can’t see their names but you can go between them just fine. Bringing up their stats makes all hell break loose though, it brings up this mess…

And then the game suddenly thinks you’re in a battle and apparently you throw a pokeball and catch some unknown entity and then the game crashes. At this point everything flickered like crazy and I couldn’t get such a good screenshot, you can see nurse joy at the top flickering a bit so you know I’m not just speaking bullshit.

Other than that, the game in this state if you DON’T look at pokemon stats is pretty boring, trainers don’t notice you, you can’t get into any random encounters at all, you just walk around with nothing to do. Still, the random battle in the overworld was pretty entertaining, so I guess we got that out of it.

RUMORBUST: What happens when you walk into the grass fields east and west of Pallet town?

Absolutely nothing, except for the game crashing. There are no secret pokemon, no level 100 wilds, your best friend in Elementary lied to you. I just thought you should know.

That should be enough for now. Next time: Pokegods! Oh and Brock too I guess

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