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News - What AAA can learn from indies -- according to indies

gamasutra.com

December 28, 2012   |   By Colin Campbell
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Yesterday we asked some leading indie game developers about the lessons they had learned in the past year. Today, we ask what — if anything — big triple-A publishers could have learned from the indie game community in the last 12 months.

The indies we spoke to generally pointed out that big publishers can never truly attain the elusive “indie spirit.” That’s not meant as an affront, but the fact is that large game makers are set up in different ways and work to different scales.

And while indie games have enjoyed a very good year, it’s rare for an independent game to achieve the sort of financial success that would muster a flicker of interest among triple-A publishers, who increasingly are about going big or going home.

Still, small independent game developers offer plenty of interesting insights into the overall game development ecosystem. Here are some of the takeaways.

Innovate with fewer people

Randy Smith is the developer of Waking Mars. He says, “I don’t see much evidence that the industry proper is taking lessons from indie teams. It’d be nice to say they realize you can do amazing and innovative things with fewer people, but the truth is the larger triple-A studios are staffing up to 500 people on a big project, which is mind-blowing.

“The large game publishers are also heavy contenders in the mobile and casual space but mostly by refining existing formulas. It just seems like the two worlds don’t overlap much yet — triple-A just keeps evolving toward bigger and fancier, whereas indies are discovering and remembering how games can be high quality without a mountain of polygons and shaders. Both serve important roles in the overall ecosystem.”

Respect the talented individual

Dean Dodrill, creator of Dust: An Alysian Tail, believes things might improve for talented individual within large corporations. “I would hope that large companies learn to respect their creative talent. The most talented individuals out there remain at large studios, but they aren’t given the freedom to stretch.

“The big money still comes from triple-A titles, but those are also the costliest risks. And with the large number of studios and publishers going under, I would hope they’d stop chasing the same few genres and look at what’s happening in the indie space.”

Spread the risk

Steve Gaynor, who worked on the triple-A BioShock series at 2K, is now working on Gone Home with The Fullbright Company. He says that indies have shown that there are different ways to approach the problem of risk. “If they were learning from indies, I would think that triple-A would be making more, smaller bets with more, smaller teams of developers, to diversify their lineups and get their employees more invested in what they’re working on.

“I’d think they would be letting their developers off the leash more, taking advantage of the huge influence of social media, allowing players to connect personally with the people making the games. I’d think they’d be branching out from traditional genres more and investing in giving players truly new experiences, to find new ways to stay relevant instead of burrowing deeper and deeper into known territory.”

Dan Pinchbeck, creator of Dear Esther with thechineseroom adds, “It is as valid a business model to spend less on more games that all make a good return and spread the risk of that investment. If you spread the risk across a number of games, then if one flops, you’ve mitigated that loss by the successes. If you back one title only, it’d better be damn good, and you can end up having to keep sinking money into it, polishing and polishing that turd until it gleams in the sunlight.

“The last couple of years have proved you can make a really good return on a lower budget game, even with a tiny marketing spend. You might not have billboards and TV ads and retail shelf-space, and you might not make a gazillion dollars like Call of Duty, but you’re not spending Call of Duty money, and that buys you a lot of creative freedom as well. That’s pretty cool, and it’s good business sense. So hopefully they’ll continue to develop the understanding that investing in smaller teams, and then staying pretty hands-off and letting them do their thing is smart business.”

Pay attention to indie-friendly business models

Kyle Pulver, creator of Snapshot with Retro Affect points out THQ’s recent foray into an area traditionally reserved for indies. “Strangely enough the biggest example of big game publishers trying a recipe from the indie scene can be found right now at Humble Bundle. THQ has jumped on board with a massive pay-what-you-want sale, and although that might be directly related to their current financial situation, I think any big publisher or studio can learn a lot from what indies are doing in both commercial and creative spaces, just as indies can learn from the big studios.”

Experiment within AAA

Nathan Vella created Super Time Force (pictured at top) with Capybara Games. He says, “I think developers everywhere see the growth of the independent games movement as validation of experimentation. This is something that everyone can learn from, and some large developers have already started leveraging. Bethesda’s “Skyrim Jam” [YouTube] is a perfect example of large-scale devs applying this in a super positive way and seeing ridiculously positive results.”

Don’t try to be ‘indie’ if you’re not

The Binding of Isaac and Super Meat Boy designer Edmund McMillen says large publishers are learning “nothing” from indies. “A lot of large game publishers try to figure out what indies are doing right and come to all the wrong conclusions. It’s not something you can replicate in a very large studio because what indies have over large teams is just that, they aren’t large teams, they don’t have huge budgets that require great success to continue, they have the freedom to take big risks and speak honestly through their work, they have the freedom to experiment and improvise.

“Indies have a very clear voice,” he adds, “their games represent who they are and aren’t muddied by the control of their many bosses telling them what they should do to make their games sell more copies. Indies are individuals, and that’s something large mainstream studios can never be.”

Think of what ‘indie’ means

Derek Yu, maker of Spelunky, believes the biggest lesson might be learned by individuals working within large organizations. “Beyond a certain size I think it’s hard to understand one another,” says Yu. “It’s clear, however, that individuals within those large companies are seeing a lot of potential within the indie scene — it seems like each year more and more are taking the leap themselves.

“And that really highlights the importance of the word ‘indie’ to me. There’s been a lot of discussion around what it stands for or whether we need the label at all, but at the end of the day, it’s great that someone can look up ‘indie’ and discover a vibrant community of people that they may fit in better with. It emboldens people to take a chance on being happier.”

Colin Campbell is a feature-writer for IGN.

gamasutra.com

This Is Indie: 2012 | OwVideogames: This is Indie 2012

owmyindies.wordpress.com

Yeah. Twenty Twelve. Look at you, look what you did. A year of great victory and great sadness. A year of anger and the crumbling of giants. Fuck, Twenty Twelve you’ve been a rollercoaster, you really have.

WATCH as the big hitters paper over the cracks of XBLA’s demise as a viable sales route for most indies, the transition from game box to media box screaming BEWARE WINDOWS 8 to all and sundry.

SHOUT as Valve accidentally expose the dark secret that “indie” is not a catch all term, the differences in approach, heart, ethics and end goals spewed onto the internet over $100 to chance your indie arm at being on a store. And lo, Greenlight was born and it was so very shit.

CELEBRATE the press finally fucking realising that yes, it’s absolutely fine to take a look at indie games for realsies and no-one will set fire to them for it. It’s been a long road from Indie Zone to Noitu Love 2′s Edge review to twenty twelve indie reviews as normal content but it’s done. Fuck you, we’ve landed. Only this time, you’ve noticed. The rest of the world is catching up with RPS, finally.

CRY at the realisation that there’s still the console release=legitimate actual real videogame narrative, ex studio staff make game is still considered an interesting story over actual real person with more facets than ex-cog makes a game but nod knowing that we can all make better stories, there’s still ground to be gained. There’s still fuck you’s to be done. We’ve got time.

REJOICE as for the first year that I can ever remember, thanks to Twine, thanks to the proliferation of other easy game dev tools and more, there’s more important voices joining the chorus of WE MAKE GAMES than ever before. I am a white man with a beard, I am not the lone voice of indie anymore. The world of videogames benefits oh so much from this. It is a brilliant thing. I can’t keep up. That’s fantastic. We’re fantastic.

WORRY because it’s always worth being concerned.

SCREAM because sometimes, it just fucking helps, you know?

And the games, those bloody videogames. Oh, look at you all. Just look at you. You’re brilliant. The consoles may be on a death cycle but the games just keep on coming anyway because that’s what we do, that’s how we’ve always done. We make videogames. We always have.

And you know what? We do that fucking amazingly, all told.

Just play videogames, alright? Yes, let’s do this. Let’s play some fucking videogames because what else are we here for if not that? Let me help you out with that today. This is Indie 2012. This is videogames 2012. There now follows a party political broadcast on behalf of the let’s play some videogames party.

I’ll help you have yourself a very indie xmas but try and squeeze in some time for human beings as well. There’s lots of good people out there, you should probably embrace that. They’re worth more than the glow of machines.

owmyindies.wordpress.com

Why Aren’t We Discussing Videogame Violence?

rockpapershotgun.com

Level With Me, Understand

By Nathan Grayson on December 28th, 2012 at 12:00 pm.

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Everyone? We need to talk.

I didn’t feel right playing Far Cry 3 the day after the awful, disgusting, utterly tragic shootings in Newtown, Connecticut. I didn’t at all.

I think that says something. I know that says something. But what? That’s the important question, and I’m disheartened to see that very few people are discussing it.

But I know why we’re not discussing it. That’s the easy part. It’s because that’s the sort of thing the enemy talks about. “Videogames cause violence,” they hoot and holler, pitchforks aloft atop their dusty dinosaur steeds. “The medium just belches out puerile filth that teaches our children how to kill. All games should be banned forever. Period end.”

The most recent last straw in a string of straws that have broken the camel’s back a million times over came when the US’ National Rifle Association primarily blamed violent media – games, Hollywood, etc (but especially Bulletstorm and 1989 beat-’em-up Splatterhouse for some reason) – for the recent school shootings. To say that the NRA’s stance was rooted in horrifyingly willful ignorance is the understatement of the century, but the fact is, they said it. On a national stage. And the NRA has some pretty serious lobbying power to boot. So what happened next? The same thing that always happens: everyone got super pissed off.

The NRA has quite an affinity for fireworks, and boy did it ever get them. And honestly, it deserved them. It deserved to be publicly denounced by longtime supporters and verbally tarred and feathered for what was frankly a disgusting, opportunistic display in light of such a terrible tragedy. But suddenly, the attention was on them and how completely, incontrovertibly wrong they were. Because that’s what always happens: opponents of the gaming industry fly off the handle and end up in Cuckoo Land on the goddamn moon. Whether it was politicians denouncing Mortal Kombat back in the day, Jack Thompson a few years ago, or the NRA now, there’s rarely any logic or reason backing their claims. Just loud, knee-jerking agendas and spittle-soaked shouting. They may go on and on and on about how they despise games and all they stand for, but their favorite game of all time is clear as day: the blame game.

So naturally, we take up our tower shields and defend gaming’s honor. I mean, I know I do. I love this medium. It’s provided some of the coolest experiences I’ve ever had in my entire life. Of course I’m going to speak up when it can’t speak for itself. Unfortunately, in this scenario, there’s rarely room for compromise. If gaming’s detractors say one thing, we say the opposite. Gaming causes violence? No. There is absolutely no problem with the fact that most big-budget games spill enough blood to make the Red Sea’s name literal. None whatsoever.

But can we just drop the fever-pitch finger-pointing and be honest with ourselves for a second? Forget the nutty politicians. Forget the “studies” that have been tailored to say whatever people want them to say. Just breathe, count to ten, and look inward. We take tremendous joy in virtual violence. We squeal with glee when life-giving liquid squirts out of men’s necks. Does that cause violence? Probably not. I don’t have any concrete reason to believe so, anyway. But it gives violence an active, constant role in our day-to-day lives. We can’t just ignore that. We shouldn’t ignore that. It’d be outright irresponsible to do so.

And really, that’s what this comes down to: responsibility – whether you’re a game-maker or a simply a player. Again, I don’t think gaming causes violence, but it would be impossible for frequent immersion in violent scenarios – fictional or not – to not have some kind of effect on us. We’re humans. We’re molded by our environment. Between games and movies and TV and commercials and billboards and everything else, Western (and especially American) culture treats violence like it’s perfectly normal. It’s just… there. All the time. For me personally, there’s still certainly a line between fiction and fact (I could hardly even move after I heard about the shootings in Newtown; I just sort of stared at a wall for a while), but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t affected people in other ways.

What I’m suggesting, then, is that it’s up to us to be aware. Examine yourself. Understand the effect – if any – that violence has had on you and those you care about. Don’t let your judgement be clouded by the fact that dumb people believe games to be the new rock ‘n’ roll comic book devil as heralded by literate people who – gasp – weren’t landed gentry. That’s not the point, and this certainly isn’t conceding defeat or anything like that. But gaming’s still a young medium. Heck, the modern world’s still young as, well, a thing that exists. It may move at a million miles per hour, but that’s no reason to avoid slowing down and taking the time to understand it.

This is something the industry stands to benefit hugely from, too. For one, big-budget gaming’s in a thematic gutter. Relentless manshooting gives even the best creators a pretty limited pallet to work with, so we just see the same strokes over and over again. Lo and behold, things finally get interesting when games examine themselves in a truly critical light (see: Spec Ops, etc) or do something new entirely. This is important. This is healthy. This is how an art form grows.

But also, knowing violence’s place in gaming and what it really does to us can help us turn these sudden outbursts against the industry from wars of words into semi-level-headed discussions. Yes, the tide of public perception is turning in gaming’s favor, but organizations like the NRA still have a lot of pull. And who knows? Maybe they’re too far gone. Maybe we can’t convince them of anything, and they’ll cut a swathe through portions of civilized society in some horrible, backward way. But it’d be utterly – and here’s that word again – irresponsible of us not to try. Reasoning with people (especially fundamentally unreasonable ones) doesn’t always work, but it’s incredibly depressing how often people opt to skip that step altogether.

But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. And that’s why I’m going to start at square one. Within the next couple of days, I’ll be publishing a followup piece to this one in which I’ll take a very close look at the places where games and violence have intersected with my life. From blissful, naive childhood all the way up to right now. Sure, the whole exercise will be inherently biased, but is there any other way to do it? And if I end up being completely full of shit, please – by all means – tell me. I want to start a discussion. Whether that means you end up contributing your own anecdotes, tearing mine to shreds, or doing something else entirely, that’s great! Regardless, I think it’s high-time we talk about this topic in an open, frank manner. So, right then. Pause your games of Far Cry 3. Let’s get to it.

__________________

« The Very Best Of RPS 2012: Interviews | The Very Best Of RPS 2012: Gaming Made Me »

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There Are Reasons I Don't Talk About Video Game Violence Much

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There Are Reasons I Don’t Talk About Video Game Violence Much

Patricia Hernandez

As a writer, it’s my job to put things together, to construct a narrative out of disparate pieces. As human beings who try to make sense of the world, we all do that unconsciously: when everything is a story, the world makes sense.

The stories don’t help sometimes. Hell, the stories go away sometimes. In their place comes a void, a puncture in our ability to reason and understand why things happen the way they do.

You might notice this phenomenon after a death, after a tragedy—they all seem kind of senseless when put under scrutiny, huh? The Columbines, the Virginia Techs, the Sandy Hooks.

So right now, I have only pieces. Memories of things I’m afraid to talk about—maybe the timing isn’t right, or maybe it would make me sound unhinged.

They’re recollections of things, sometimes games I know for certain go together somehow, amount to a small piece of some puzzle that’s supposed to help me understand where violence and death fit in my life.

***

“No more Power Ranger games. No more video games, period,” my mother lamented.”They’re not good for you.”

The SNES and the accompanying Power Ranger game had been a Christmas present when I was about six. But one night I pulled a butter knife on my mother, demanding whatever it is a child demands at that age. Who knows? And just like that, the console went away as easily as it had appeared.

Thinking back, I couldn’t have meant to hurt her. I couldn’t have. That would be ridiculous. Games don’t have that effect on people.

Right?

I couldn’t have meant to hurt her. I couldn’t have.

***

Well, if we want to be technical, that SNES was my first console. But if asked, if prompted to talk about my early gaming days, I don’t mention it. It didn’t exist.

My first console was the Gamecube. Wholesome little thing, adorable handle and everything. I wanted to be Mario. Mario defeats things, he doesn’t kill them. It’s good, clean fun.

I agonized over that Gamecube, in the way a kid that finally learns the value of money does. I spent over a year saving up for the console, saving up every last nickel I could.

***

With my family, violence is there even when it’s not there—maybe at a party I make out the lyrics to a popular song that goes: “hit your woman with a club, put her in her place,” booming overhead. I’ll try to ignore it, only to notice the dancing—my sister, my cousin, my mother all in tune—and I’ll need to excuse myself before I get angry.

Sometimes it’s there as a historical record, something for everyone else to see. The women in my family tend to have a number of visible scars across their bodies, scars we never talk about.

Maybe it’s noticing a belt starting to unbuckle from the corner of my eye.

Sometimes it’ll be a threat—maybe you should settle down before I make you settle down sort of thing. Maybe it’s noticing a belt starting to unbuckle from the corner of my eye.

Then the women stop the shenanigans. But sometimes this looming thing finally arrives, finally finds a release. One of the moments that refuses to leave my head is one that happened over a decade ago.

***

I am laying in bed with my eyes closed, pretending to be asleep. This is what you do when my stepfather is drunk, you try to get out of the way. We try to avoid this situation as much as possible, my mother and I, by making sure we never stay too long at a social event and that he’s not around alcohol much. But every so often, he’ll pull a fast one and get drunk anyway.

When he’s drunk, something snaps. Something goes wrong. The meekness and niceties fade away, and are replaced by anger, sometimes by rampage. Nothing in the house is safe.

From under the covers, I can see that he’s playing my Gamecube. But he can’t stop losing his matches in Mortal Kombat. That’s the game he turns to when he feels agitated. His favorite parts are the fatalities, they go farther than other fighting games dare to.

As the night goes on, he’s getting more and more visibly frustrated, until eventually he stands up. Then I notice he’s not playing anymore.

He makes his way to the Gamecube, rips it off the TV, and sets it down on the table. I hear him fumble through his power tools, trying to pick out the best one for the job.

I know what he’s about to do. I know what he’s about to do but I can’t move and I don’t dare open my eyes. I just hope that he can’t hear me crying.

He always apologizes after things like these the next day, always tries to make things right by repurchasing whatever he destroyed. But I never played the new Gamecube he bought. The new one wasn’t mine and I felt sick looking at it.

***

A few years later I’d stop with all the wholesomeness and Nintendo, instead opting to purchase a 360. It’s on this 360 that I learned how to play shooters—I started out with the ridiculous ones like Gears of War, but eventually moved my way to ‘realistic’ shooters like Battlefield.

I adored them. They tapped into something that I couldn’t explain, couldn’t name. What I did know was that I wanted to share this interest with my significant other, in the way you want to share everything with someone you love. But he wasn’t having it.

“I fucking hate it when you play that thing,” my then-boyfriend once growled. “But it’s so good! Look at how realistic it is.” “… realistic. Right.” “Yes—like, listen to the way I play. Listen! I’m giving out orders and moving like I’m a squad. It’s all very—” “What, fun? You think this is fun?”
“—tactical.”
“I just can’t stand the sound of bullets. I can’t stand all the shooting. I don’t understand how you like that shit.”

Was there something wrong with him or was there something wrong with me?

Sure, we were in conflict with some of the countries in the games, and sure, maybe with games like Medal of Honor, there was the possibility we were playing as the type of groups highlighted in Wikileaks for committing war crimes, but I still thought he was being completely absurd. A well-rounded human being should be able to understand when something is just entertainment. Jesus christ, come on!

Thinking back on it now, it seems stupid to imply that someone being sensitive about this stuff is in the wrong—like the only way to live is with cynical fortitude. Rationality dictates these things are obviously divorced, our entertainment and our reality, so can we stop talking about it already?

Like we shouldn’t be phased by something that’s supposed to be uncomfortable. Even now, I keep going back to it: was there something wrong with him or was there something wrong with me?

It stuck with me, that conversation. It got under my skin. After we had it, I noticed how games were often hours and hours and hours of killing endless mobs of men that often looked exactly the same. Why does every room and level have a bunch of shit to kill no matter what it is I’m playing? And why can’t I just turn my brain off like I used to; what’s wrong? Why can’t I just aim and shoot?

Games became exasperating for a long time after that.

***

The girl in indie platformer They Bleed Pixels starts off looking so innocent. Just a precious little kid, you know? All it took to change that was one book; one evil, corrupting book and suddenly she’s transformed into this terrifying creature with claws for hands.

Much of the game focuses on what you can do with those claws. You juggle your enemies with them, you throw them into spikes and gears and chain combos where you lacerate them into pieces.

You do this because if you don’t, then the game is much harder. Every kill, every combo fills a meter that lets you put down a checkpoint. The game is basically the Dark Souls of platformers, and my being awful at video games, I need those checkpoints. I don’t want my inevitable death to catapult me back to the start of the game. I need to be creative in how I kill for my benefit.

It’s ugly. Stylized and therefore detached, but ugly if you really think about it. And it feels so, so good to play.

I hate how often this is true no matter what I’m playing. And now we’ve got the situation of having games become self-aware about it, kind of going ‘you like this, don’t you, you sick bastard’—there is Hotline Miami, Bulletstorm, a few others.

I feel like these games implicitely ask me if I like it, and I can’t help but answer “yes, yes I do.” At the same time… I don’t know if this is me absolving myself of responsibility, but I like the way Andrew Vanden Bossche puts it:

Game: “You pulled the trigger. You are holding the gun.”

You: “You gave me the gun. You ordered me to pull the trigger.”

***

I’ve shot a gun before. I must have been 10, maybe 12. I was in El Salvador.

“We can shoot these cans,” my uncle offered. “Or, we can aim for the lizards crawling about the jungle.”

Cans seemed boring to me versus a living creature. The humane thing seemed boring to me. What?

“You gave me the gun. You ordered me to pull the trigger.”

But the moment that revisits me about that trip to El Salvador isn’t learning how to shoot a gun. It’s a different memory.

My family is largely composed of farmers who own horses, chickens, cattle—that sort of thing. In those years, we’d visit El Salvador often as a group, which meant that we needed enough food to feed dozens of people.

We needed to kill one of our cows to do that. We all know where the meat comes from, but you know how the saying goes, right? Don’t want to actually see how the hamburger is made?

I can’t remember what I felt when I watched my grandfather pick up his machete and bring it down hard on the cow’s neck. What I do remember is the horror of seeing the meat pile up—there was a lot of it, sure, but… sometimes, some parts of the cow will pulsate well after the cow is dead, even if it’s completely detached from the skeleton.

Like the thing is giving one last reminder that it was alive once, damnit. Don’t you dare forget it.

***

I kill people nearly every day via controller, but I don’t actually know death. Not really. I’m 22. I’ve never known anyone who has died—personally, I mean. I’m afraid there’s a critical gap in my experience because of this, or that when it finally does happen, I’ll react worse to it than one is ‘supposed’ to. Whatever that means.

I live in a crystalline place right now. Death mostly exists on a pixellated plane. You don’t have to deal with a dead body here, they often simply disappear into a level. Poof.

But I have nightmares about death sometimes. I have nightmares of what would happen if so and so who is important to me died, if I wake up one day and finally, finally, it happened—someone is gone.

Just like that, gone.

***

Playing against an AI, you can tell—there’s no will to live, not really.

I’m not sure if I feel uneasy or excited to talk about why I love multiplayer games. Maybe both. I could frame this love any which way I wanted, I could make this sound less ‘bad,’ but this is how I articulate what I like about them: there are people on the other end.

People who don’t want to lose die. People who are trying their best, out of competitiveness, to survive. Playing against an AI, you can tell—there’s no will to live, not really. The movement is too precise, too measured, acting out scripts of logic of what to do under pressure.

A person will be creative. They will fumble. Your interaction with them will be messy and haphazard in a very human way. And best of all, I can practically taste the tension, the fear that comes when someone is closing down on you, about to kill you in a game. I imagine their heart racing madly, because that’s what happens to me when under pressure. It’s exhilarating to think about.

Managing to overcome an aggressor in a situation like that to me is like saying, “no, I want to live. I want to live. You’re not taking this from me.”

Ultimately, you might have a good kill/death ratio at the end of a match. But what does it mean if all your lives were laughably short? The one that kills and lives the most, that person is the one that gets to gloat at the end.

There is a reason I don’t talk about this much.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

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Game Theory: When Death Makes Us Laugh - NYTimes.com

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A screenshot of Super Hexagon.

Kirk, Chris, Stephen, everyone,

For me, the year’s best in video games started and ended with low-budget titles homegrown by independent developers. At a glance, games like Super Hexagon and Hotline Miami appear to share little in common. Both ooze style, at least, thanks to eye-searing colors and crunchy electronica soundtracks. Critics especially noted both for their steep difficulty curves.

Hotline Miami is a blood-spackled gorefest in which the guts and brains of fallen enemies are represented by fat trails of salmon-pink pixels. Bullets ricochet spasmodically, and once an opponent sees your character, enemies rush in faster than you can escape. A single swift blow and you’re dead, game over. “Hotline Miami is an exercise in survival,” the game developer Rami Ismail wrote at Gamasutra. “Any mistake I make is my last.”

Super Hexagon, meanwhile, is a careening acid-trip of a game, almost a tunnel-shooter (just, without any shooting), your cursor orbiting concentric rings in search of escape. Suffer an indecisive moment, any hesitation, and your tiny triangle is already hurtling into the maze’s wall. “Super Hexagon is a game,” the reviewer James Cunningham lamented, “about failing to not die.”

It’s a return to the oldest of old-school game design, really. As in Pac-Man or Donkey Kong, the ultimate goal is to jump every obstacle and survive the stage. These games demand physical knack, but they also hinge on pattern recognition and memorization. In a sense, they are puzzle games.

Both Super Hexagon and Hotline Miami are torture to play. But upon “death,” players — I’ve taken an informal survey, here — tend to toss their heads backward and giggle riotously.

That’s because players are never discouraged. In Super Hexagon, one slap at the space bar (or, in iOS, a tap on the screen) returns you to the beginning of the 60-second stage. In Hotline Miami, too, death is hardly final. “R to restart,” the last screen entreats, and suddenly you are returned to the first entryway of a very short level.

How does a game torture you, the player, without making you stamp off in defeat? It’s a fine line to walk, and the makers of both games handle it deftly: These games succeed by making the barrier to re-entry so low. The player, in turn, is never permanently punished. (Some games are needlessly vindictive; Hexagon and Miami are instead forgiving, in their own way.) “ ‘Dying’ isn’t the right word,” I recently told a friend, struggling to explain Hexagon’s appeal. You don’t “die”; you just fail. And you repeat that failure until you succeed.

The ultraviolent Hotline Miami is, at its heart, a character study, driven by a narrator who becomes increasingly unreliable as the story moves forward. Without giving too much away (I hope), Klei Entertainment’s excellent Mark of the Ninja employs the very same trope.

Mark of the Ninja is a 2-D action/stealth sidescroller. Sometimes it more resembles a puzzle game. You can either tiptoe or brute-force your way through; to succeed, however, you’ll have to do multiple trial runs, committing every obstacle to memory. In a review for Paste, I wrote that, despite my innate gracelessness, “Mark of the Ninja turned me into a meticulous, thoughtful person, pulling from reserves of patience I didn’t know I had.”

To play Mark of the Ninja properly, you must play it twice. The first time, that’s all just training. By Ninja’s second half — New Game+, it’s called — a single misstep will send you spinning back to the latest checkpoint. Your ninja’s vantage is now limited to the few short paces just ahead, and if your character can see an enemy, that must mean … ! New Game+ plays out exactly the way, I suspect, the designers intended the entire game to play, if only the players themselves could handle it.

It’s really, really tough. You’ll “die” a lot. And yet the game is never frustrating (except for one ill-conceived sequence where the pacing is off-kilter, and suddenly Mark of the Ninja is not frustrating, but infuriating). It’s my personal pick for overall game of the year.

All these indies succeed because they offer deep challenges with low-stakes failure. “Challenging your player,” I recently speculated in an e-mail to a colleague, “is very much like challenging a reader. It’s how you tell him that you trust him, that you care.”

Jenn Frank writes for Unwinnable. Her work has appeared at Motherboard and GameSetWatch, and in Kill Screen Magazine. She also provides the futuristic and minimalist voice of Super Hexagon.

artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com

Game Placebo

keithburgun.net

Homeopathy, for those who don’t know, is a form of alternative “medicine”.  It involves diluting an active medicinal ingredient into a solution so many times that there ends up being a mathematically near-zero chance of the solution containing even a single molecule of the active ingredient.  Yet the United States spent 3.1 billion on homeopathic products in 2007, which can seem pretty strange to someone who understands what it really is.

Now, clearly homeopathy doesn’t “work” in the sense of having actual medicinal effects.  Homeopaths have tried to claim that it does by conjuring all sorts of bizarre theories, one of the most common being that “water has a memory” – it can “remember” the molecules that used to be in it, and somehow that memory has an effect.  Whatever – pretty obviously nonsense but that’s not what concerns me here.

Delicious. It’s impossible for anyone to tell the difference between pure sugar pills and homeopathic drugs. That’s because they are the exact same thing.

What does interest me is the fact that homeopathy does work in the sense that people think it works.  The placebo effect is very powerful (for some kinds of ailments, anyway), and having a “school of medicine” with practitioners all telling you that this sugar pill will stop your headache may alleviate the pain, since pain is understood to be a highly subjective sense that can be affected by the state of mind of a person.  The simple concept that “you’re being taken care of now, everything will be OK” may bring comfort to that person.  Here’s a really great Derren Brown video showing the great power of placebo.

More often, though, is probably the following scenario:  the person gets a headache, takes a homeopathic remedy, and then the headache goes away.  This is erroneously marked a “hit” in that person’s mind – the remedy worked!  Nevermind that it’s incredibly likely that the headache simply happened to go away.

We tend to remember the hits and forget the misses in this way.  Psychics and astrologers have been using this against us for ages, and techniques such as cold reading are a very real method that can be used to make (help?) humans believe that which is almost certainly very fake.

The Desire to Believe

I should perhaps use the term “help” rather than “make”, because there’s another important aspect to this problem, which is that people generally want to believe the sorts of things that work because of placebo.  The very idea of alternative medicine is a pleasing narrative that appeals to both our modern first-world guilt (“I’m hip to these ancient/third-world remedies, I’m not really one of the insensitive conquering Westerners!”) and our justifiable distaste for some of the actually evil or irrational policies taken up by mainstream medicine in the past or the present.

We also have a desire to simply “have been right”.  After all, we went against the grain and chose an alternative.  We invested in this alternative, and it would definitely cost us a little more to end up having to admit that it was a big waste of time and money.

Finally, we may be evolutionarily tuned to “see agency/causality where there is none“.  With regard to survival, it’s in our interests to imagine agency behind a rustling bush and run.  Those individuals who did otherwise were taken out of the gene pool over time after enough rustling bushes turned out to be lions rather than raccoons.

The famous Jesus toast. We’re bread to see patterns.

So, before I move on, it’s good to review these two specific reasons that we sometimes believe things without reasonable evidence:  the desire to believe, and our biology making the job easy on us.

Games

So how does any of this relate to games?  I’ve been struggling over some concepts with regards to randomness in games for a few years now, and I think I’ve come to understand some things that might be helpful to others.

Before I go on, a quick disclaimer:  I’m talking about games in a specific context here.  I’m talking specifically about interactive systems that involve winning and losing and decision making – systems wherein you express your level of understanding through those decisions and meet a win/loss outcome.  There’s a bit more on my definition for games here.

Games with high levels of output randomess – i.e., card draws, dice rolls, or other random things that get between a player and his agency – tend to have more random outcomes.  This isn’t really contested.  A professional Poker player will win a smaller % of games against a new player than a professional Chess player will against a new player.  There’s more randomness in the system of Poker, so the win percentage naturally moves towards 50%.

This guy is really bad at the game

What’s much harder to pin down is an individual game’s outcome.  If you won that game of Dominion or Settlers of Catan, how much of it was because of your actions, and how much of it was because of sheer chaos?  It’s extremely hard – practically impossible – to pin this down, because of layers upon layers of many decisions that were made.  Maybe one of the decisions you made was somewhat poor, but it was only because you were put in a bad position due to randomness.  And maybe that’s not so bad, except for the fact that maybe your opponent wasn’t put in any kind of compromised situation at all – his randomness dealt him a nice steady flow of problems that he was used to dealing with.

I don’t care about this question for some alpha-male “who’s better” reason.  I care because if we can’t determine the cause of the outcome, then feedback for your agency is diminished.  And the agency-feedback loop is what games and all kinds of interactive systems are all about.

Of course, the defense is that over a large enough number of games, it’s not really a problem.  The better player wins most of the time.  However, that doesn’t detract from the phenomenon I want to explore – that of imagined agency.

Imagined Agency

I’ve talked about this a bit before back on the Dinofarm blog.  The idea is that after and during a specific highly random game (i.e. almost any card game or game involving dice, virtual or otherwise), players tend to imagine that they have a different level of agency than they actually do.

For instance, if a player is doing well, he’s quite likely to attribute that success to himself.  Of course, he won’t do this if the random swing is so strong that it’s patently clear.  For example, if a player lucks out and finds an extremely powerful weapon early on in a roguelike, they’re likely to point that out whenever they explain how their game went.  “I did really well – I mean, I got this crazy sword early on, so most of the game was a total pushover…” they might say.  But, barring freakish outliers like that, they’re likely to take  credit for a successful game.

It makes sense.  If we watch children playing Candyland, Trouble, War, or any other 100% random children’s game, we can see that despite the fact that the game is completely random, the children are assigning agency to their actions.  They take credit for the 6 they rolled.  We can clearly see that this was not a product of their skill, yet they can’t see this.  It’s similar to how Tic-Tac-Toe is interesting for children because they can’t see the solution, whereas to us adults it’s boring because we can.

In Candyland, everyone loses

So then doesn’t it also make sense that a game with a large degree of randomness – say Poker or Dominion – would have a similar effect?  Some players will see through the illusion and point out that there is no direct line between player input and game feedback.  These players will see – as clearly as every adult sees for Candyland – that the outcome of the game is not determined by the players, but rather by randomness.

In short, highly random games tend to be built on a similar illusion – a placebo effect, if you will – of agency.

The Game Placebo

What determines whether a person is able to see through a highly random game or not?  Well, it’s similar to the factors that cause a person to see through a fake drug’s illusion.  Firstly, a base level of intelligence does factor in.  If the person just doesn’t even have the faculties to start asking the question “is this real”, as most children do not, then the question won’t get asked.

But the second aspect, which interests me more, is the inclination to ask that question in the first place.  Most gamers I know do not see the indirect relationship because they do not ask the question in the first place.  They aren’t thinking along the lines of “tracing the steps between my actions and the outcome of the game”.

This is understandable, of course, as most people play games to simply have a good time, and sitting there and analyzing exactly what’s going on probably isn’t in their interest for doing so.  But as the film critic Plinkett often says, even if these players don’t consciously notice this disconnect, their brain does.  What I mean by that is that even if they are consciously ignorant of the mechanistic processes that make up the play of the game, the effect of those processes is real and undeniable, and your brain feels them fully.  If your brain is able to detect that lack of agency-feedback, it will diminish its interest in the game.  In short, your brain gets tired of the randomness, even if you don’t, and many gamers will find themselves simply wanting to move on to other games without knowing exactly why.

To paraphrase something Richard Garfield said at PRACTICE this year, something along the lines of “you don’t have to be an engineer to feel the effects of a faulty bridge”.

The Problem

So what’s the matter?  Why can’t I just let people enjoy their games for a short time and then move onto something else when they get bored?  There’s two problems with this whole setup.

Firstly, game designers should basically never, ever be in this camp.  Game designers should be fighting at all times to be fully aware of the actual stuff that’s really happening when people are playing games.  Game designers not being able to discern between the illusion and the reality is similar to a doctor who really can’t tell the difference between medicine and sugar pills.

The second issue is that this kind of creates a loop of consumers buying games, getting excited about them, and throwing them out after a year or so, and then moving onto the next one.  This is great for companies who want to sell games, but it’s a treadmill that wears people out.  After enough cycles like this, players will eventually feel as though it’s not even worth looking – that they already know how it’s going to go.  They’re going to get a game, get super excited about it, grok it, and then throw it away.

There is certainly value to this placebo effect.  It can attract people in the short term, and act as a “shortcut” to interesting or otherwise “fun” game designs.  However, it’s just worth being conscious of the downside as well.  If we’re talking about how to achieve great game designs, we should probably rule out shortcuts.

I think that the more we rely on this illusion to get people interested in our games, the less healthy our gaming ecosystem becomes.  We should be fostering games that can stand up to a lifetime of play, or more.  We should be striving to make games whose depth can be felt.  We should want players to know that if they invest time in learning this game, it will continually give back to them.  We should make games that strive to become a facet of a person’s life.  This is how we can establish trust between designer and player, and through that trusting relationship, everyone really wins.

keithburgun.net

Magnificent & Important Advent Calendar: Bonus Door

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A quest to find a Phillips screwdriver

By Cara Ellison on December 25th, 2012 at 12:00 pm.

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Our Senior Scottish Correspondent makes a welcome guest appearance to talk about an important PC game that wasn’t in our just-concluded advent calendar, but perhaps should have been. This is also an ode to the mysteries and the magic of the device we choose to play our videogames on.

DOTA 2 is my game of the year. Go and play it with nine people you like, and, in the midst of your inevitable confusion, yell MERRY CHRISTMAS very loudly over voicechat and gift them all your stuff.

DOTA 2 takes a while to get into. It takes a while to learn. It takes a while to love.

DOTA 2 is 1% complete

DOTA 2 is downloading slowly on a laptop that isn’t mine. Outside snowflakes press themselves glittering onto the window panes, the head of someone else’s cat nuzzles my ankle, my life’s equivalent of Wallace Wells hangs baubles on a tree. I think of my PC back home, and how I am cheating on it out of lust for closeness. I am far from home, from both where my games are and where my heart is. Christmas will be lonely.

But there’s that memory of what it’s like. There are the voices for one. The cries of delight. The stern voices of anger. And then, there’s the grin in the dark. The ripples in the water. The cry of the wolf as night drops. People made that machine. People live in that machine. They are there now, with hands outstretched towards you.

DOTA 2 is 20% complete

My monstrous PC back home, with the crappy white monitor and the weird shaped mouse and the terrible, oversized, dusty keyboard. I think of the beautiful women my artist flatmate has painted on the wood of the desk my tower sits under, their faces distorted by my bills and uninstalled review copies of games years old and the time I spilt Shiraz on that pretty drawing’s legs.

I remember unscrewing the PC’s case and looking inside, afraid. It looked too complex, to a newbie’s eye. Explorers more audacious than I told me about it, how I’d learn, how I’d come to know the strands of that jungle and where they led, learn to trail my finger over the tangled cables to the source, wrench them out and plug them back in, how I’d get invested, lost, how my knowledge would increase with each turn of the screw, how my HDD would no longer be this abstract idea but tangible, tangible, an actual vault of items where all my thoughts and savegames are, a stacked panic room full of The Cure mp3s I no longer listen to and the most precious builds of indie games that are feelings and memories and thoughts and hours of button-click heart-wrench. Fuck, I didn’t know I loved you like this.

DOTA 2 is 40% complete

I remember from far away, it looked complex and terrifying. But one cannot go in alone. You must rub shoulders with the best ones you know to find the secret. The first of these was the Merlyn who dropped off a tower with a graphics card better than mine as if it were a broken-down car with no love in it left. “It isn’t Excalibur,” he said. “It has no magic in it.” This seemed matter-of-fact when uttered, but when taking it apart, gently hoovering its insides, squinting at the enraged fan on the PSU and earthing my fingers for static by stroking the copper pipe of a radiator, it was like an ancient ritual. I had journeyed over a threshold and I could see a glimmer of love. I was earning the right to occupy that space. Look at all these parts, I despaired. Screws and cables and metal boxes were a banquet across the floor. But I was thirsty.

DOTA 2 is 50% complete

You need ‘wingmen’, and like a winged creature she alighted on my doorstep, a soigné grin on her face, chipped nail polish and punk hair. “Teach me,” I said. She nodded and asked only for tea, no milk. Later, we would go on a quest to find a Phillips screwdriver. We trekked metres from my flat to the local Costcutter. “What do I get again?” I said, uncertain. “Where would it be?” I stood looking at a rack labelled “Household Items” for what seemed like an hour whilst people either rudely shoved past me or told me to move. Each object seemed occult in its way – there was a sewing kit with a rainbow of different threads, a hairbrush like a wand, is that Guinsoo’s Scythe? I lift it dreamily, and underneath, there is the Phillips, for 1 gold 89. Player 2 and I squeal in delight; the rest of the shop grumbles and carries on down the aisles of the shop as if automated.

DOTA 2 is 60% complete

By the light of the wolf-waking moon, I wrapped myself in a blanket and stretched my fingers whilst my instructor talked me through RAM and where it goes and which mythic places Merlyn had probably picked up his collection from. It felt like we were looking through his record collection as we laid it out in dust motes. We were archaeologists at work, blowing powder from hieroglyphs and coughing. At one point I produced a paintbrush to clean out the case. We smiled at each other whilst we worked in the city of dust. I think at one point I said, “I’m so excited,” though now that seems odd because the feelings are only remembered. It’s just a thing. It’s just a thing of many parts, and in many ways I still don’t know how it works. It is more doing than understanding. And yet my hands can feel what connection is right and what is not now. They understand, if anything. They just know. Fuck, I love you.

DOTA 2 is 70% complete

A computer is made of so many parts. The component parts are computers in themselves. There are many selections to be made, and many ways to put them together. Their complexity is staggering, and to previous generations, that can seem daunting, terrifying, prohibitive sometimes. But that complexity, ever increasing at every iteration, allows for the most beautiful things to be made or shown to us, be it music, visual art, scientific research. The unique flair on show can be breathtaking. The combination of this with the sprawling grace of the internet makes the personal computer the most powerful tool for communication we have ever made. Within a PC is an incredible orchestra of sounds, graphics, words, numbers and interactions that can have someone across the world connect headlong with you. To be able to reach across the heaving mass of the world and make someone who is alone smile, laugh, or feel their own value is something that has become of the utmost importance to me. It is in a small box under my desk.

DOTA 2 is 80% complete

The most important thing about DOTA 2 is the complexity of it. You could spend hours and hours devouring the literature and still never understand. It is so complex that even the greatest, most learned players still feel that there is more to the game that they could know. From afar, it is the tangled gut of a PC. But there is room for you to learn, and a slice of life will be hidden from you if you don’t. Many people have been here before. Those people will become important to you. Keep them close.

No, the most important thing is the history DOTA 2 is built on. Like computers, it has been engineered and tweaked through hundreds of fixes and balances and features, years of agonising and people complaining and testing. DOTA 2 is a strong and ancient behemoth: built on medieval foundations and rebuilt and fortified into a handsome castle so all encompassing and fancy you can see it for miles away.

It is constantly changing, fortifications are added, it is updated with the latest military equipment, always changing. It is tended by both professional and amateur staff, who know its odd quirks and winding corridors and ornaments and trap doors and workarounds and who talk of ‘jungling’ and ‘ganking’ and ‘denying’ as if everyone knew their secret language. They know the flair and showmanship that is available. They know about the new heroes approaching. They have seen everyone at their most vulnerable 1 health and that is why they are there. They know.

No, more important still is the capacity for ten players. It is a place for listening and for advice, particularly amongst players you know. It is a place to get the news. It is an important place to strengthen friendships and learn about yourself. Once you are in the machine, you are within the bosom of others who understand you and what your task is.

The task is hard, but it doesn’t negate the everyday. It is a game that becomes second nature through practice, but you can add your own hum and your own sentimentality to theirs. You add your own meaning to the tower you have just demolished. You can pretend it was that last problem you were solving at work that tomorrow you will have to tackle, and others will help you do it.

DOTA 2 is 90% complete

No. No no. The most important thing about DOTA 2 is the complexity of it, the ability to create moments and invest in them and talk about it with other people. When I opened up that PC, I did not care for it. I didn’t know what was in there, and I didn’t understand what it would enable me to do. But pull it apart, converse over it, talk about its foibles and how your first PSU can’t swap out the second broken one because of this dumb reason, go on a journey, participate in great raging triumphs – invest in its parts and how they fit together, the new iterations and the updates and downloads and ever changing surge of improvements to the topology. You can fall in love with your conduit to the world outside. Technology presents all of these possibilities for new shared moments. There never stops being something you can discover through others. Now I cannot stop thinking about how I will improve how my PC runs, about the next innovation. I think about improving myself. I think about improving my knowledge, my ties to the outside world. About knowing by doing.

DOTA 2 extends the PC’s reach. Only a PC could host a machine as complex and interesting and wonderful as DOTA 2. DOTA 2 is why the PC is great. It is the PC.

DOTA 2 is 100% complete

Seduced by possibility, I put my headset on and straighten my spine. I touch the unfamiliar keys: laptop keys – what are these flattened cubes? Who are you, I wonder, frowning at the dark, handsome, flimsy stranger. You feel strange to the touch. You are different. You are an electric current to nine other people’s hands, and four other people’s voices. Let’s go again. Let’s go. I’ll do it again.

Steam kicks me into a game, Skype yells ecstatic in my ears, and I smile because I am not alone. Neither are you.

Merry Christmas, RPS.

__________________

« Merry Christmas: Here, Have A Free RPS Christmas Game! | The Complete Magnificent RPS Advent Calendar 2012! »

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Far Cry 3′s Jeffrey Yohalem On Racism, Torture And Satire

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Escape The Loop

By John Walker on December 19th, 2012 at 1:00 pm.

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Having completed Far Cry 3 a while back, I found that so much of the game’s story just didn’t sit right with me. Not simply in the sense that it appeared to contain colonialist nonsense and clumsily handled rape plots, but that I felt I was missing something. That the game was trying to say something to me, perhaps partly through that which I found problematic, and I hadn’t been able to hear it. So I pursued the game’s author, Jeffrey Yohalem, to talk it through.

Yohalem proves to be a very animated, very passionate writer, who sees Far Cry 3 as a complex exploration of many ideas, mostly questioning the role of the player in a game, and what they’ll do in order to win. It was, he says, an attempt to break the loops of modern gaming, to ask the player to start to demand better. Fortunately, I’m animated and passionate too, so we get to discussing how successful this really was. What follows is a heated chat about what gaming could and should be. I return at the end with some thoughts on the conversation.

A frame of reference: Far Cry 3, an undoubtedly brilliant shooter, seemed to come with some odd baggage. Many who played it, including me, found its apparent use of “white messiah”, “magical negro” and “noble savage” tropes to be somewhat disconcerting. While there was certainly no hatred or malice displayed to a particular race (unless that race is translucent white Hollywoodians), it seemed difficult to understand how the game wasn’t employing stereotypes more familiar to 19th century literature. Along with that was a strangely vapid sequence in which you learn of the repeated rape of a friend, and some very peculiar sex scenes, all of which seemed like the worst of gaming in the midst of the best of gaming.

But at the same time, it didn’t feel that simple. It felt like it was there for a reason – but a reason I couldn’t grasp, and one I didn’t think was explained by the time the game had ended. That’s the position from which I began our spoiler-filled conversation.

RPS: My impression of Far Cry 3 was a game that wanted to say a lot more than most games do, but also a game that perhaps didn’t quite manage to say some of those things. What was your overall goal when you started writing this game?

Jeffrey Yohalem: My goal was to say exactly what I think I say. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. There’s not really anything I would point to – I mean, there are a couple of things missing I guess, but those things supported points that are already made. The goal was to create a videogame that examined what shooting does to us in a videogame. When I play a videogame there are all kinds of systems that work on my brain, and most videogames try to hide those systems under a story. And that story is intended not to be about what’s going on in the game. Almost every story in videogames is – I don’t love this term but – ludo-narratively dissonant. It’s purposeful, because stories usually pave over potholes in videogames. There are systems that don’t quite work together, there are systems that create emotions in the animal parts of our brains that are uncomfortable, and so story is used not as something that conveys meaning, but as something that hides uncomfortable stuff, sublimates uncomfortable emotions.

RPS: Can you give an example of the kinds of things that are hidden by games like that?

Jeffrey Yohalem: You have a secret ops agent who’s killed hundreds of people before as your protagonist, so it means that if you shoot hundreds of people over the course of the day in your videogame – which would never happen in reality unless you had a mass-murderer – that you, the player, are okay with that because the story has paved over the pothole. There’s a lot of secret stuff going on behind the scenes in videogame companies and development houses. Players aren’t seeing inside the box. I’m trying to expose the mechanisms inside the box.

RPS: I guess one of the key moments for what you’re talking about in FC3 is when you return to the caves. Each time you return to the cave, and you see your girlfriend and friends, you have those moments of reconnecting to your humanity. But midway through the game those stop. So where do you see that continuing commentary on how Jason is being affected by shooting so many people? Or indeed how I’m being affected.

Jeffrey Yohalem: It’s the player. The player is experiencing the loop. There’s that moment where you’re torturing your little brother to get information, which is taking something to the extreme. Other games have torture scenes and they try to pave over the pothole, by saying it’s essential to saving humanity, you’ve got to find the terrorist and the bombs going to go off soon. They’re trying to get the player to be okay with torturing somebody, because the gameplay mechanics of doing it are fun for them. So in this case it’s torturing your little brother, and there’s no real reason to be doing it. You’re not saving the Earth, you’re not doing anything that makes that act okay. That was meant to really shock people.

Also, the end! The end of this game is all about what you as a player are. It’s your turn to be whoever you want to be. Who you want to be in the face of these gameplay loops. Throughout this whole game we took you through all of these loops, and at the end we point them out to you. Citra literally says it, that she’s going to erase your save game, and she says if you want to win, you’re going to complete the final tattoo. So the question is, do you want to win? Do you want to go through these gameplay loops.

So I think there’s this misperception out there – and this is the most interesting misperception that I’ve found – people who thought the game was going to be an examination of shooting. Like, what it would be like to be a real person in this jungle, shooting people, and if you kill hundreds of people what happens to you. That’s not what this game is about. It was never what this game was about. That may be what Spec Ops: The Line was about, it’s not what this game is about. This game is about entertainment, and about how far will you go in these loops, and how much entertainment are you actually having from them. Are you willing to kill these characters in the game in order to finish your entertainment.

It’s not a judgment about you, either. It’s really something for the player to approach as smart, intelligent grown ups. It’s a riddle for the player to solve. The player goes to the game and experiences this riddle – and if you go to this game without looking at it as a riddle, it’s like looking at a building that has four supports and should have six. The game is not supposed to make sense if you’re not looking for the riddle. It’s supposed to destabilise your sense of what a traditional story is in a videogame. If you look at the story on the surface, then it doesn’t hold up. There are all sorts of shocking exaggerations that are there to intentionally destabilise the player.

RPS: Would you suggest that one of those destabilisations is what has been perceived as racism?

Jeffrey Yohalem: Yes! It’s NOT! It’s the opposite! The game is the opposite. It’s so funny to me. I’ve seen these arguments on forums, and I think these arguments are fantastic because people are engaging in a discussion about art, which is exactly what I was hoping would happen. But, the game’s argument is that Jason is basically used by everyone on the island – Jason is basically a gun, that is upgraded by the natives on the island. It’s the opposite of Avatar. And it’s fantastic to me, because Citra is standing in front of the home tree when you first meet her, you’re called Snow White, the people are called the Rakyat, which means “the people”. It’s the laziest name for a tribe ever, they’re not real, they’re a metaphor. People need to be looking at the names of these things. There are all kinds of secrets in this game for people to figure out, that tie into the main plot. It’s all part of what the game is trying to say.

I wanted to create this gigantic riddle. I created the glyph puzzles in Assassin’s Creed 2 and Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, and this is a gigantic glyph puzzle.

RPS: Do you not think there’s a danger of having your cake and eating it? You’re deliberately being a hokum story, you’re deliberately evoking lazy stereotypes, but at the same time, aren’t you just evoking lazy stereotypes?

Jeffrey Yohalem: Yes! Do you know what the name of the island is?! It’s Rook Island! Which means to fraud people! Look up the definition – the definition of “rook” is, someone that steals your money, or it’s a piece in chess. So this is an island that is a fraud. The point is, look under the surface. Not because the game is a fraud, the game is not a fraud, but the island is. What is going on on this island, and the clues are right there in front of you. In my mind it’s an interesting undertaking to take on some kind of examination of deeper issues like this, because like you said if people don’t examine it that way, then maybe they don’t see it? But like I told you, I was building a building that has four legs instead of six. If you don’t see those issues, the thing doesn’t make sense. I find it fascinating again, all the stuff that people are discussing on the internet, because you can see that the people who only looked at the surface are really uncomfortable. So much so that they keep discussing it. So to me that says that the story is not fitting. If the story functions correctly, like say Avatar – Avatar allows you to fit with the story. The story completes, then there’s nothing to discuss any more. So your brain goes, “Yes, I like it.” As humans we’re always looking for meaning, and for things to make sense. So if you miss the deeper meaning it doesn’t make sense any more.

The end of this story is very blatantly a subversion of any kinds of racist stereotypes. What I feel like what’s happened is to explain this story you need more than a soundbite, and I feel like a lot of people just glancingly looked at the thing and then got upset. They didn’t actually explore the whole game.

RPS: When I got to the end of the game what I saw was a depiction of a tribe, standing topless in simple clothes, dancing in a tribalistic way. It was very clearly an image of this archaic 19th century perspective of natives on an island. And I was given the choice to join them and as a white man become their leader, or walk away. I’m not quite sure how that squares up with a dramatic statement. How is it more than what I saw on the screen?

Jeffrey Yohalem: [Very animated] Because if you choose to become a part of that tribe and become their leader, it’s completely manufactured in your head! It doesn’t come from them at all! They never said “become our leader”! She says “become our king”, she doesn’t say “become our leader”! And then if you choose the tribe, she kills you! It turns out you were being used by them. The entire time you thought you were the leader of the whole tribe, you were nothing. You were just a gun that she upgraded with tattoos.

RPS: But is that any different from the tribe making you their leader, carrying you on their shoulders, and then boiling you in a pot?

Jeffrey Yohalem: [laughs] Yeah! It’s exactly… I’m playing with all of that! The game is about playing. I was just reading an article this morning about the conceptual artist who did Lose/Lose, the space invaders game that deleted your files, created by Zach Gage. He did a piece where you’d come in a museum, and stand in front of the piece, and when you stand in front of it, it tallies that you stood in front of it. The point was to be a satire of popularity. Why would you judge something by the number of people who’ve seen it? Some people said, “This is great, that I stood in front of this piece and it’s acknowledging my existence.” So they were missing the satire. The artist is very clear in the article about what he wanted to say with that piece. So what I was hoping for with this game is that people would say, “Maybe there’s something more interesting and different going on here that I can examine?” That videogames can be more than what they’ve been before. Which is covering up potholes in meaning instead of conveying it.

RPS: Do you not think that part of the problem of people’s not interpreting it this way comes from the fact that the majority of games’ stories are as bad as the thing you’re parodying? They are atrocious. So people come into a game expecting these incredibly immature and incredibly simplistic, and often incredibly stereotyped storylines, so when they approach Far Cry 3, instead of saying “This is an arch commentary on that,” they say, “Well this is another one of what most games are like.”

Jeffrey Yohalem: That question is an interesting one, because I thought we went so extreme in such a huge number of ways, that we had been totally exaggerated. I’ve played all of these games, so the shocking thing for me is that people would think this is serious. At the same time, all of the articles coming out didn’t come out for other games. So there must be some form of exaggeration, I must have succeeded at exaggerating. For example, the rape by Buck being glossed over, where he rapes Keith, or implied rape, that’s so exaggerated because it’s taking the exploitation of female characters in videogames and saying, well what if it’s a man, how do you feel then?

In most games that exploitations is glossed over, so in this case it’s glossed over. So by swapping out the Keith character for a female character, and then not having this deep emotional scene acknowledging the sadness from how these guy feels from that, it makes you really uncomfortable.

[Becoming agitated again] The sex scene [at the midpoint] – first Jason is shooting at that gigantic monster. He kills the monster, and it jump-cuts to him orgasming with Citra! He’s firing sperm at this gigantic monster, and then suddenly he’s on this alter with Citra, having sex with her, and then he thinks he’s the leader of the tribe and makes the big speech, and it’s his power fantasy! That’s the other thing – it’s all from first-person, so it’s completely unreliable. There’s a reason why Jason is a 25 year old white guy from Hollywood – these are all ideas that are in his head. You’re seeing things through his eyes. That’s why the Alice quotes are there, and why Willis’s database entries are written from Willis’s perspective, and not written from a universal perspective. So the game is all from a series of perspectives, and I think it’s all there. And again, you could say to me, “Why isn’t this even more exaggerated?”, but why should it have to be? I don’t understand why what I did isn’t so insanely exaggerated already. What you’re saying is that games are so bad with this stuff that it has to be so through the roof – I mean, male rape, having this transition, having the end of the game be that she kills you while having sex with you? And she says, “you win,” as you’re dying. The only thing more outrageous I could think of is if she castrated him.

RPS: You say the rape scene is critiquing how mawkishly rape scenes can be shown, but I’m not sure I understand your point when you say you changed it to a man to say something. When I played it, I saw that it was a situation where a man had been repeatedly raped. I didn’t think, “Ah, but it’s a man rather than a woman.” I didn’t find anything to make me compare it to rape scenes featuring women. What I fear with that scene is that it ends up becoming a sarcastic remark, at the expense of a really traumatising subject.

Jeffrey Yohalem: Well, I don’t think it downplays a traumatising subject. Keith is not okay after that. He says very little for the rest of the game. You know, in Assassin’s Creed II your mother is raped, and she doesn’t talk for the rest of the game. So Keith is very similar. What he says after the rape is he tells you your brother is dead. Then he doesn’t talk. I don’t think that it downplays or is sarcastic. None of this is intended to be ironic – I don’t like games, or jokes, that hold people at arm’s length – that the only emotion that people can experience is the irony or the sarcasm of it, which is something I think was going on a lot in entertainment three or four years ago, maybe even two years ago, where it was all about, “Look how funny we are – we’re making fun of this.” That’s not the point at all.

It’s not intended to be glossed over in that sense. The intent was to not allow there to be some kind of cathartic sad scene where people get to deal with the fact that Keith’s been through this. I don’t give you the satisfaction, and it is a satisfaction, when you watch a character go through experiencing the torture of what they’ve just been through, it satisfies the player’s expectations of that thing being addressed. So that scene is taken away from the player. So you have this disturbing exchange of power, something Jason and Buck experience, where Buck forces Jason to call him sir, demeans Jason and his manhood, this diminishing of who Jason is – of who the player is, because the player is in Jason’s body.

And then the player experiences what Buck did to Keith. I really do think that it being a man matters. Throughout the game you have Daisy and Lisa, and Citra, and you expect certain things, the mistreatment of those characters, because of how past videogames have treated them. I don’t think you’re expected Keith to be treated as an object in that way. The fact that Buck did that is shocking, because it hasn’t really happened in videogames before. And at the same time, videogames have a primarily male audience, so it’s very easy to have this gratuitous portrayal of women in other games be glossed over and allowed by its audience, because it’s not them. To really hit someone where they live, I think destabilises the trope. I’m hoping in the future when you encounter the objectification of women in games, you go, “Maybe this is uncomfortable, the way I felt uncomfortable in Far Cry 3.”

To be fair, Far Cry does it twice. When Citra kills you at the end, it’s like Mario thinking he’s rescuing the princess for the whole game, and then the princess stabs Mario, and says “You win”. The point is, she didn’t need saving. She didn’t need rescuing, she’s not a princess in a castle, and she’s not waiting for you to save her. In fact, it’s all part of this elaborate ritual. It’s not even clear that she needed your help to begin with. In fact Vaas was there to do it first, and Vaas left because he didn’t want to be a part of her crazy ritual. It’s not that she needed a white saviour at all. She didn’t need a white guy at all. She was just looking for the ultimate warrior and someone to be her gun.

RPS: The problem for me is I didn’t choose that ending. I chose not to slit the throat of my girlfriend! There’s no way I was going to do that, so I walked away. While you get one less scene of her tits, you get a more elaborate ending for walking away, but you don’t get this delivery of the punchline.

Jeffrey Yohalem: Correct. And with YouTube so big right now, I assumed everyone would go and look at the other ending, and I created it that way.

RPS: And I did – the first thing I did was look at the other ending on YouTube. But then I was vicariously seeing someone else’s ending, I wasn’t experiencing my ending, I wasn’t getting my punchline to the game.

Jeffrey Yohalem: But if you don’t choose to win, if you don’t choose to get the final tattoo, to me you’ve chosen who you are – you’re the guy who saves the girlfriend. The curation for you is different.

RPS: Do you think this understanding was carried by the rest of your team? I’m listening to your arguments, and I understand the points you’re making, and I’m coming from the position of thinking this is one of the best games I’ve played in a long time. But stuff like the hunting for skins is so ridiculous in the game…

Jeffrey Yohalem: Right! Right, cos Jason asks why he’s doing it. Isn’t there a line where he says, “What am I supposed to do?”, and an objective pops, an objective gives you what you’re supposed to do.

RPS: Yeah, but the way it’s delivered by the game, the mechanics of the game, don’t seem to be carrying the same satire. To the point where, when you ‘skin’ an animal its skin is left on and you seem to take a lump of guts. Do you think the delivery of the game in some places fell short of the message you were trying to convey?

Jeffrey Yohalem: To me that helped the delivery. Games are built by gigantic production teams. So even if everybody on the team doesn’t understand what the point of the game is, what I understood was: here’s the direction that these people are going to go in. So to me all that continues to support the message of the game. Because the message of the game is, look at all these systems that we’re creating, and if they’re illogical, and if they’re not challenging you as an individual but are just things for you to do that pass the time, then see how that makes you feel. The crazier the things that you’re doing are, the more interesting it is that you’re not going and helping the friends.

People who have looked at the surface of the game think that the story and the game are at war with each other as they are in most games, with the story just plugging potholes and the gameplay is going along its merry way. I think it’s very exaggerated that, “Oh, go save the friends! Go save the friends!” but most people are out on the island doing all this other crazy stuff and experiencing the gameplay. And that’s actually the point of the story.

It’s not a game about go save your friends. It’s a game about – doing a lot of picking skins from things, and wait, it’s just a pile of meat – this doesn’t even make sense, yet I’m still doing it instead of saving the friends.

RPS: How on board were the project leads with your ideas?

Jeffrey Yohalem: The director was a hundred percent. Pat Plourde is a genius. We worked together on Brotherhood and AC2, and something called The Lost Archive, which was a DLC for Assassin’s Creed Revelations, where we started exploring some of these ideas. Of how gameplay and story could be one-to-one. That’s about a guy named Clay, who’s got all these support structures in his life, like his parents and assassins and his job. And gradually he loses all those support structures or they fail him. It’s a game where you shoot blocks, and a block is a support structure that you’re walking on, so the game gets increasingly harder to play, an ultimately he runs out of blocks and he has to kill himself by falling. It’s a game about the loss of support, and that’s conveyed literally through the gameplay. If you muted it, you’d still experience a game that’s about the loss of support.

Far Cry 3 is a continuation of those ideas. He was entirely on board. And everyone else, in all of their different departments, understood what was going on, and what we were trying to say. But again it’s such a labyrinthine production – as it is with every triple-A game – that on some levels it’s like the Wild West. You have this freedom to express things in a way you wouldn’t have in a blockbuster movie.

RPS: In Roland Barthes’ essay The Death Of The Author, he argues that the author is meaningless once the piece is out there, that the understanding is in the interpretation of the viewer. If most people come away from this game saying either it’s racist, or it’s old-school colonialism, do you still think you’ve succeeded in what you’ve set out to do?

Jeffrey Yohalem: I think that’s an interesting hypothetical question, because my feeling is most people aren’t feeling that way. I get the impression that it’s a small minority of people who feel that it’s racist, or talking about that. So my hope is that a vast majority of people do not come away feeling that way, because then they’ll have missed the point. But, the point is for them to examine who they are. I feel like we’re living in this incredible time when you can actually experience someone else’s curated mind. To me that’s what games are. To me that’s where the Death Of The Author argument doesn’t necessarily hold up. This experience is curated. It’s curated by us. So all the systems you’re playing on that island, and all the things that happen in the story, and all the moments that you play, are chosen. If an artist curates his installation in an art gallery, and it’s very important spacially how things are laid out, although you could just ignore that and go to the bathroom in the art gallery instead of looking at anything, I think that there’s no argument that if someone goes into that installation they’re going to have some kind of impact that the author intended.

My argument is that the player is an actor, and the game is the director. And it’s the job of a great director, as opposed to a bad director… A bad director says, “Look at this thing! Look at this! Feel what this thing is! Feel the power of this – cry!” A bad director tells an actor, “Cry now.” Which the actor in their head goes, “Fuck this guy. I’m not feeling that.” In fact, I want to do the opposite of what the director just told me. Not explaining why – it’s really offensive. It’s distrusting the actor’s intelligence. Or even the actor’s essence. So a great director instead says, “Here are all the things that are going on in the world in which this play occurs, and the script. We take those and see what fits with you and give me that.” The goal of Far Cry 3 is to allow players… I think the problem with narrative in the past has been that writers are trying to say something, and they’re trying to get the players to sit down and listen to it. My feeling is that games are interactive, they’re about what you’re doing in the world, they’re about gameplay, and they’re not about sitting there and telling anyone anything.

So they player gets up, and explores the world, and explores the curated experience, and he can’t find everything in the world in that experience, and that’s very intentional. The director has chosen what this island is made up of – it’s called Rook Island, it’s not called some other island – and the Alice quotes have an effect on you, and there’s a meaning behind all the Alice quotes. And there’s meanings you may find then in those things that surprises me as the author. Which is wonderful, because it’s then like you’re expressing your self. You take the story, and the puzzle pieces in the story, and you put them together in a pattern that I didn’t realise, I go, “Wow, that isn’t what I thought of at all when I was writing it.” And it works. The only thing I wanted to ensure was that the surface reading of this plot didn’t work. Like I said, I was trying to remove support structures from the building so the building would fall down if it was analysed that way.

RPS: Right, but I’m coming at this with the perspective of a player. So take the boss fight – in that moment it doesn’t matter whether this is metaphorical, or if it’s an arch commentary on the nature of boss fights – the reality is I’m still having to play through a really crappy boss fight. In that moment it doesn’t really matter what commentary it’s making – as a player I’m still having to struggle through a crappy fight. Do you see how the intention can become mistranslated in the mechanics of what the player has to do?

Jeffrey Yohalem: This is the most collaborative art form we’ve ever done as a species. It’s incredible. If what you’re saying is that not every element in this game lived up to what you feel is good as the player, that’s valid because there are so many different art forms here. At the same time, what we try to do with Far Cry 3 is – you’re choosing to go on this vision quest mission. So you could be hunting animals, or you could be… And by the way, you’re hunting endangered species on these island – that’s also intentional – it’s supposed to be an exaggeration of things you do in other games. It’s supposed to make you uncomfortable. Everything that we curated in there is supposed to make you feel uncomfortable in some way. Some of it I think didn’t quite succeed, because it wasn’t exaggerated enough as you said, but a lot of it is.

RPS: But again, we’ve just been trained over decades to shoot endangered animals in Tomb Raider and Uncharted and so on – we’re just used to shooting endangered animals. It’s just another game having us shoot endangered animals at this point.

Jeffrey Yohalem: Yes, but if that were true then I wouldn’t see articles on the internet about it.

RPS: But people have always mocked the Tomb Raider games for the fact you’re shooting endangered species!

Jeffrey Yohalem: Yeah, but then there are all these articles online talking about how disgusting it is in Far Cry. Modern art felt like it couldn’t shock anyone any more. Modern art’s been in this strange period where it’s trying very hard to be relevant, and to shock people, and this videogame seems to have shocked a lot of people.

RPS: But so do sick, stupid videogames. A game like Medal Of Honor I felt was deeply revolting, a really vile game. I find it problematic that the writer of that game could come back and say, “Ah, but it was satire.” Do you see – it’s maybe too easy a get-out?

Jeffrey Yohalem: Yes, of course it’s too easy a get-out! That’s why I put all the clues in there. There are dozens of clues! Of course it’s lazy if it’s not real satire. If it’s not real satire I can’t come after the fact and tell you – that’s the point of the clues. Before the game is produced, all the clues are put in there, so when you say exactly what you just said to me, I go, but wait, look at this, this, this and this.

You may say that the things I’m saying to look at, like the name of the island – if you analyse each of the Alice quotes it’s about the metaphor behind each of the characters you’re experiencing – and the island is clearly Never Never Land, and there are all these references… You pointed out one of the clues – the Snow White clue. If this was about the white messiah motif, would I be so stupid as to have a main character’s nickname be Snow White? I’m making fun of that!

RPS: But I think where you say, “Would I be so stupid?” you really get to the key issue here. Most games writers are being stupid! We don’t have any background to assume you’re being smart here. It’s so much simpler for the player to assume you were being as stupid as most game stories are.

Jeffrey Yohalem: My experience of this has been that literally… that gameplay has a tutorial at the beginning of the game, where it’s explained how to play. Or over the course of the game – in Assassin’s Creed, over the course of the whole game you’re explained how to play all the different systems. So I never thought that story should have a tutorial until experiencing this. Whether maybe there was a point where I should have literally had a tutorial in the game. For me it was the death of Grant, that Grant as the main videogame classic protagonist being shot in the head at the beginning of the game – this game is not that. And Alice quotes at the beginning. All of that was supposed to put you in this state of, “Okay, I’m going to examine this differently.” Maybe I needed to be even clearer. What I’ve been doing now in interviews is trying to explain the story tutorial, which for me is not a negative because gameplay gets to do it. I don’t feel like I’m cheating in some way to say that maybe you should examine this as a riddle or a puzzle. That’s what I would have put at the beginning of the game if I were putting a tutorial in. What I was trying is create a game with the story, which means it’s interactive. And it’s something that players come to if they want, not something that they’re forced to.

My biggest surprise has been that people didn’t expect something like this, and I guess I should have anticipated that.

RPS: Do you think that because this is following on from Far Cry 2, for whatever it achieved it didn’t have this sort of depth behind it. Do you think people’s expectations are set because it’s the third game in a series?

Jeffrey Yohalem: I don’t think so. I think Far Cry 2 talked a lot about philosophical and artistic issues, and that was my opening. For me FC2, with the guns jamming and the malaria and all these systems that were considered not fun, it was about deconstructing the fun of a videogame. I thought Clint was very clear in a lot of interviews he did that that was what he was doing. He was trying to be philosophical about videogames, about their fundamental mechanics. If you have a gun that can jam at any point when you’re shooting it disrupts the flow. So he’s examining what makes a game fun, if I take away what’s considered traditionally fun.

So Far Cry 3 is actually doing the same thing – and I’m surprised that no one’s referenced that connection between the two of them – it’s just that Far Cry 3 is saying, what if I give you so much quote-unquote fun that it becomes uncomfortable. It’s a different approach to the same problem – they’re both trying to approach building the same building, I think. Everyone keeps saying how they’re so different, but in reality I think conceptually he approached it from the mechanical side by disrupting the mechanics, and I approached it from the story side by disrupting the story.

RPS: But at the same time you can argue, you know, I’m spending my £30 on this game – I don’t want to have my fun interrupted, and that…

Jeffrey Yohalem: YES! That’s my…

RPS: …I don’t want to be the victim of your experiment.

Jeffrey Yohalem: That’s my argument! What I experienced in Far Cry 2 is that I didn’t have fun playing it, although I found the ideas really, really interesting – let’s say. I’m not saying that was my experience, but that’s something that you see out there. If you approach Far Cry 3 you’re not going to find any of those problems. This is where the level of exaggeration issue comes in – if you turn the volume to 11, it’s like you’re screaming at the player and it’s very uncomfortable. It turns a lot of players off. I was trying to reach a volume of, err, six. Like Cronenberg’s A History Of Violence, you can approach Far Cry 3 on the surface level and still have a lot of fun. Now you may say that compromises some kind of artistic ideal, that if I had cast it so it was so exaggerated that it was not entertaining at all, unless you read it as commentary, then I would agree with you that it is forcing my opinion down the player’s throat and being a bad director. My goal was to bring joy to everyone. But at the same time I’m hoping players can look at the riddles in the story and see that there’s a lot more going on there. And actually look into themselves and learn something through the journey. The goal was really not to waste players’ time, because we’re going to die soon, and there’s so much to read and watch and do on this planet.

RPS: You talked about how in previous Assassin’s Creed games you questioned themes and tropes, and have gone far farther with that Far Cry 3. Do you think it’s a fair criticism to say, why not make a game that doesn’t make all these mistakes? Why set out to highlight the mistakes or the laziness, or the issues, or the laziness in the players – why not set out to make a game that’s really good?

Jeffrey Yohalem: First of all, I don’t think there’s any laziness in the players. I think our players are some of the most intelligent, grown up, free-thinking people that there are. I feel like a lot of games don’t respect that. I feel like we’re in this place in the videogame industry where we’re in an abusive relationship. Players feel like game developers don’t respect them, and don’t create meaningful works for them, so they call a lot of games stupid. And a lot of developers get upset because things are being called stupid, and they say that players don’t get it anyway, so they just handhold them all the through. I think that’s an abusive relationship. You need to break that cycle. You need to cause both sides to step back and say, “Maybe there’s something else that we can both have between each other.” We can create situation where players go, “Huh, maybe games have something interesting to say after all, and I’m going to listen.” And then that puts the pressure on game developers to not create lazy crap. Players will see it. As soon as players are listening, game developers have to deliver. In that context you can see that Far Cry 3 is trying to break that loop, rather than create the thing that’s going to happen when people are definitively sitting there, listening.

I feel like we’re in a place still where there’s this dark anger between the two sides. Far Cry 3 was trying to break that loop and say, maybe what we’ve been doing before… Vaas’s insanity speech is the lynchpin of the game, because he’s talking about videogames. If you take what’s been done before, and you see it for what it really is, then can we make something better? Which is what Jason’s speech and the good ending is about. Where he says, “I’ve been a monster, maybe I can’t come back from this.” But he thinks he can. So it’s a statement of hope about the industry.

RPS: So are you now going to go on to make something better?

Jeffrey Yohalem: Yes… I’m not allowed to say anything…

[At this point a PR on the line panics and jumps in, assuming I’m asking what his next game is. I explain that I’m not. That it’s a philosophical question.]

Jeffrey Yohalem: I’m not going to give away anything, but there’s a statement at the end of that game, and I will hold true to it.

RPS: That seems a great place to stop. Thank you for your time.

So then. I think what I feel most strongly at this point is a wish that I’d experienced the Far Cry 3 Yohalem believes it is. It’s unquestionably one of my favourite games in a good long time, but not because of the story, and perhaps even despite it. I can only imagine how more brilliant it would have been to have been understanding the experience on that level, alongside adoring the simple mechanics of playing the thing. I’m also fascinated to realise that the game’s biggest mistake might have been covering up your tattoo with a wing suit. If completing it was so important, concealing it for the second half of the game seems to be a surprisingly dumb decision.

It’s tempting to believe that some of Yohalem’s claims about the game’s intentions are a little too convenient, but he’s right – what about all the clues? He said there were dozens more, but he wants people to find them for themselves. While I doubt very much that things like the crappy skinning animations are really a deliberate conceit to this meta-analysis, I have come away far more convinced that much of what felt simply poor about the game was genuinely an attempt to make me feel uncomfortable, to “destabilise” me, as Yohalem would put it. I think the mistake, perhaps, was the belief that being destabilised would have any profound effect on a player.

There’s one larger issue, however, when it comes to my feeling that this is a case of wanting to have their cake, and smear it all over their faces. You may well have noticed that at the start of the interview, Yohalem says,

“The goal was to create a videogame that examined what shooting does to us in a videogame.”

Then surprisingly soon after he said,

“This is the most interesting misperception that I’ve found – people who thought the game was going to be an examination of shooting. Like, what it would be like to be a real person in this jungle, shooting people, and if you kill hundreds of people what happens to you. That’s not what this game is about. It was never what this game was about.”

Where might they be getting this misconception from?! And it’s worth noting that in a previous interview Yohalem said,

“We want this game to be about shooting. Let’s make a game about shooting, and what it does to humanity. This game is our statement, and it’s a very clear statement, about what we feel shooting means.”

There’s definitely an impression that the answer changes to excuse the game. With such stark contradictions in intent, it doesn’t seem too surprising that the game has failed (in my mind) to convey the meaning he wished.

And as I say a few times above, we’re pretty well worn when it comes to dealing with exaggerated, unbelievable plots, and no more so than with shooters. We make excuses for nonsensical stories because we enjoy the mechanic of shooting at targets in well designed locations, so there was no jarring moment in Far Cry 3 to make us think this was being any different. In a year that’s contained the jingoistic stupidity of Black Ops 2, and the outright racist stupidity of Medal Of Honor, if anything Far Cry 3 felt less exaggerated and offensive. Throwing in racial stereotypes and colonial backward thinking just feels disappointing, rather than shocking. When you make a game that’s satirising shooter power fantasies, and questioning what the player will do in order to progress through a game, you have to be more effecting and more grotesque than the norm, and Far Cry 3 simply isn’t.

Sure, you aren’t trying to save the world when you’re torturing your brother, but you are trying to get through this scene so the game you paid for keeps progressing. And that’s the same reason you might simulate torture in a game where there’s some loose plot about preventing a terrorist – it doesn’t matter that Jason’s intentions are personal, we’re only ever doing it to turn the page, and the point gets lost. In neither is the real world in any peril – there’s only the concern that we don’t get to see what happens next. Sure, that’s something that’s open to satire, but the mistake here was believing that there was ever any player-perceived noble intent in any of the other games that asked you to do it.

That’s the mistake Far Cry 3′s plot keeps making. I love that it was trying to be about gaming itself, that it was a statement, and I applaud it wholeheartedly for attempting this. But again and again, what Far Cry 3′s story really does is just put another selection of negative examples on the piles of negative examples in gaming. From my perspective as a player, it wasn’t pointing at them and asking me to question them – it was joining in with them, and asking me to accept it yet again. Yohalem is completely correct that his missing support structures for his house made me feel unsure what it was really about – I ended up writing much about how that made me feel, as did many others. Like he says, if all these articles are appearing about his game, and not the others, he must have done something right. But unfortunately, I think, rather than making us aware of the horrors of the starving Irish when he says they should eat their babies, instead it too often felt like he was publishing baby recipe books to the very hungry. As a work of satire, Far Cry 3 fails, simply because it required this interview to be apparent. But as an attempt, I’m delighted it’s there, and I am thrilled to see what comes next.

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