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Dead Man Walking

Ein Ende mit Schrecken oder die Lehren des Permadeath-Prinzips

Veröffentlicht: 12.01.2013 | von: loess | Rubrik: Blog

Das Wissen um die eigene Endlichkeit kann Fluch und Segen zugleich sein. Die ständige Präsenz des Todes ist etwas, das zutiefst ängstigen, aber auch unheimlich motivierend kann, das Beste aus der begrenzten Zeit herauszuholen, die einem gegönnt ist. Nachdem in den letzten Jahren Spieler schon mal das Ende eines drögen Spiels herbeigesehnt haben, erscheinen dieser Tage vermehrt Titel, die mit der existenziellen Angst vor dem plötzlichen Aus spielen. Der dauerhafte Tod des Avatars transportiert ein, insbesondere  für einen Großteil jüngerer Spieler, bisher unbekanntes und schmerzhaftes Gefühl des Verlustes und kreiert bisweilen Spielerlebnisse, deren Sinnhaftigkeit und Sinnlosigkeit so lange parallel zu verlaufen scheinen, bis einen das endgültige virtuelle Ableben dazu zwingt, sich für eines der beiden zu entscheiden. Ein Spiel schafft es sogar, diese Sinnfrage nicht nur für sich selbst zu stellen, sondern in gewisser Weise für das Medium Videospiele an sich. DayZ ist die spielegewordene Version von Hobbes’ Menschenbild in “Leviathan” und zeigt in bizarr spröder Weise, dass auch Videospiele dem Spieler ein Wolf sein können. 

Danke für die Hilfe, Trottel!

Das Grundprinzip von DayZ ist dabei so originell wie der Name des aktuellen Seeed-Albums. Post-sowjetischen Zombieapokalypse ist das Stichwort, darin überleben das Ziel. Zombies sind schließlich das Salz und das Wasser des derzeitigen Film- und Videospielmeeres. Ohne geht gar nichts mehr. In DayZ gibt es auf jeden Fall genug davon, was fast ein wenig schade ist, da sie die mit Abstand banalste Komponente dieses Spiels darstellen. Denn wie schon Dreiviertelnamensgeber Jay-Z hat der Spieler in DayZ nicht nur ein singulares Problem in Form der obligatorischen Gehirnefresser, sondern muss sich gleich mit einem ganzen Haufen Unwegsamkeiten auseinandersetzen. So braucht man im Spiel stetig Nahrung, muss Verletzungen möglichst authentisch behandeln, wird auch virtuell von Panikattacken gebeutelt und, jetzt kommt der wirklich interessante Teil, man muss sich mit den anderen Spielern arrangieren. Nur Frauenproblemen wird man auch in DayZ eher nicht begegnen.

Die beschriebene Ressourcenknappheit und die beständige Gefahr durch die Untoten ergeben eine ähnliche zwischenmenschliche Situation wie sie auch in The Walking Dead vorzufinden ist. Nur gibt es in DayZ praktisch keine Nichtspielercharaktere, so dass die zwischenmenschlichen Interaktionen tatsächlich zwischen echten Personen abspielen, mit all ihren Vorteilen und Risiken. So entstehen spontane Bündnisse zwischen mehreren Spielern, die sich vorher nie begegnet sind und die nun trotzdem gemeinsam gegen die lauernde Gefahr antreten und ihre Ressourcen miteinander teilen. Bis plötzlich einer von ihnen das Feuer auf die anderen eröffnet und die frisch aufgeteilte Ausrüstung den noch warmen Leichen seiner naiven Mitstreiter entreißt. Der Mensch ist dem Menschen ein Wolf, zu oft kann man hier mit eigenen Augen sehen, was Hobbes damit einst aussagen wollte. Es sind Situationen, die einen nicht kalt lassen, auch wenn es sich hier nach wie vor nur um ein Spiel handelt. Die Enttäuschung ist echt. Die Wut ist echt. Und der Tod fühlt sich zumindest ein kleines bisschen so an.

Der Erfolg von DayZ, das bisher lediglich als Modifikation zu dem eher nebensächlichen Militärshooter ARMA II erschienen ist und diesem nun ungeahnte Verkaufserfolge beschert, kann wohl auf dieses besonders intensive Spielerlebnis zurückgeführt werden. Dabei bricht es in fast schon grotesker Weise mit den verkaufsfördernden Genrestandards, die auf ständige Erfolgserlebnisse und persistenten Fortschritt ausgelegt sind. Das alles ist hier hinfällig. Prinzipiell bin ich auch davon überzeugt, dass der Mensch in Anbetracht seiner Mortalität darauf aus ist, etwas zu schaffen, das bleibt. Etwas, das weit über ihn hinaus Bestand hat und die eigentliche Bedeutungslosigkeit seines eigenen Daseins mit Sinn erfüllt. Videospiele gelten in diesem Bezug seit jeher eher als Zeitverschwendung, als unproduktiv und hemmend bei der persönlichen Entwicklung, was sicherlich in der Form nicht richtig ist, aber durch Spiele wie DayZ neu diskutiert werden sollte. Schließlich haben uns viele große Spiele in den letzten Jahren immer größere Erfolgserlebnisse, verbunden mit stetig abnehmendem Aufwand, vorgegaukelt, um ein Gefühl einer nachhaltigen Leistung zu erzeugen.

Nicht der Einzige mit 99 Problemen

Wer in Alan Wake tatsächlich auf das Achievement für die sammelbaren Thermosflaschen aus war, der weiß nun hoffentlich ganz genau, wie plump teilweise versucht wird, diese Pseudoerfolgserlebnisse im Spieler hervorzurufen. DayZ und auch andere Permadeath-Spiele ziehen ihren Reiz aus der Reduktion auf ein Kernziel, dessen erreichen praktisch unmöglich ist, dessen Weg dorthin jedoch gleichzeitig in unterschiedlicher Weise so belohnend ist, dass er das eigentliche Spielziel markiert. Da hierbei oftmals auf einen erzählten Plot verzichtet wird, wird es dem Spieler ermöglicht, seine eigene Geschichte zu bestimmen, ohne sich dabei für gut oder böse, friedlich oder gewaltsam und schwarz oder weiß entscheiden zu müssen. Virtuelle Extremsituationen, wie die doch recht platte Zombieapokalypse von DayZ, mögen nicht zwingend das Verhalten von realen Extremsituationen hervorrufen, es hat sich jedoch gezeigt, dass eine glaubwürdige Bandbreite an Gefühlen und Reaktionen daraus entstehen kann.

Sinnvoll investierte Lebenszeit?

Eine erlebbare, vorgeschriebene Geschichte, wie etwa die im Zombiekollegen The Walking Dead, ist mit dem Permadeath-Prinzip jedoch kaum denkbar. Seine wahre Stärke ist auch nicht das Erzählen, sondern das Erleben von extremen Emotionen. DayZ zeigt auf eindrucksvolle Weise, dass das wahre Extrem in diesem Spiel nichts mit den Untoten oder der Endzeitstimmung zu tun hat, sondern in der Interaktion mit anderen Mitspielern verborgen liegt. Es ist ein Spiel, dass den Spieler in jedem Moment seines Spielens fragt, warum er sich das hier überhaupt antut. Warum er immer wieder von Null beginnt, obwohl er genau weiß, dass er, egal wie lange er durchhalten wird, am Ende stets mit leeren Hände dasteht. Es stellt allerdings gleichzeitig auch den allgemeinen Wert von Erfolgen in Videospielen in Frage, indem es den Erfolg schlichtweg von vorn herein ausschließt. Was haben die unzähligen Stunden gebracht, in denen man jede noch so blöde Trophäe gesammelt hat? War es die Zeit wirklich wert, die es gekostet hat, das komplette Raumschiff Enterprise in Minecraft nachzubauen?

Videospiele können die Illusion erwecken, in ihnen Dinge erreichen zu können, die bleiben. Das Permadeath-Prinzip raubt einem diese Illusion und macht deutlich, dass auch negative Emotionen als Triebfeder für ein Spiel funktionieren können. Es ist mit Sicherheit kein besseres System, aber eine willkommene Alternative zu dem Quicksave- und Auflevel-Geballer anderer Titel. So wie Hotline Miami in den letzten Wochen auf sehr eigenständige Art und Weise eine erwachsenere Reflektion mit dem Thema Gewalt nach sich gezogen hat, stößt DayZ, wohl größtenteils unbewusst, dazu an, den Wert von Spieleleistungen und -zielen zur Disposition zu stellen. Letztlich ist jedes Spiel auch mit einer persönlichen Investition verbunden, sowohl finanziell, zeitlich wie auch emotional. Nicht immer stellt sich eine solche Investition als lohnend heraus. Das Sammeln von Thermosflaschen ist hierbei nur ein Beispiel von vielen.

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Die Grenzen meines Mediums: The Walking Dead

videogametourism.at

Der folgende Text ist ein Gastbeitrag von Jagoda, die als @scheinprobleme auf Twitter und auf ihrem Blog (nicht nur) zu Games schreibt. Vielen Dank für diesen - auf VGT längst fälligen - Ausflug zu Telltales bemerkenswertem The Walking Dead. 

Ich hebe meine Hand und beginne zu hacken. Klick. Das Beil senkt sich und die Schneide bohrt sich in das Bein des Verfangenen. Klick. Erneut hole ich aus und höre, wie sich das Metall durchfräst. Klick. Das Beil trifft auf einen Widerstand, den Knochen, und ich benötige noch mehr Kraft, um auch diesen zu zertrennen. Mein Arm hebt sich. Klick. Blut und mein erschlaffter Arm zeugen von der Vollendung meiner Tat.

Jeder Klick ein Fortschritt. Jeder Klick bohrt sich immer tiefer in meinen Kopf. Mein Schädel wummert, brummt. Herzrasen. Nur langsam beginne ich zu realisieren, was ich gerade getan habe. Ich habe einem Menschen das Bein abgetrennt, um ihn aus einer Falle zu retten. Hätte ich es nicht getan, hätten ihm die Walker, die Zombies, wie sie in The Walking Dead genannt werden, vielleicht einen sehr grausamen Tod beschert. Nein, nicht vielleicht. Definitiv. Es war für mich unausweichlich, aber ich empfinde keine Genugtuung. Keine Befriedigung und keine heldenhaften Allüren. Widerwärtig, unmenschlich war meine Handlung und doch unausweichlich. Doch wer ist eigentlich dieses “Ich”, das diese Tat vollbrachte? Warum fühle ich mich nun schlecht und möchte das Spiel beinahe beenden? War das wirklich Ich, die ich dort saß und klickte? Ich, die Figur auf dem Bildschirm in Gestalt von Lee, dem verurteilten Mörder? Lässt sich beides trennen? Die Kluft zwischen digitalem Ich und analogem Ich war noch nie so klein.

Diese Kluft gibt es nur in unserem Sprachgebrauch, denn eigentlich hat sie noch nie existiert. Natürlich bin Ich es, die ich bestimmte Handlungen in Computerspielen ausführe. Sei es, dass Ich über eine Röhre hüpfe, Ich mich als Polygon im Raum bewege oder Ich einer zum Tode verurteilten den Gnadenschuss erteile. Nicht mein Nachbar hat geklickt, nicht der Entwickler hat geklickt. Ich war es. Ganz real. Diese körperliche Erfahrung des Klickens spiegelt sich medial vermittelt durch das Computerspiel auf meinem Bildschirm wider. Real ist alles an der Handlung, virtuell nichts.1 Mein Ich endet nicht an der Tastatur. Computerperipherie erlaubt es mir durch das Spielemedium Handlungen auszuführen: Steuern, lenken, schießen, hacken, Polygon oder Pixel. Ob Ich nun in meiner Küche eine Hühnersuppe koche oder ein Raumschiff auf dem Bildschirm lenke: Ich bin immer Ich.2

Warum ist es überhaupt wichtig die Begriffe Realität und Virtualität fein säuberlich voneinander zu trennen? Warum ist es wichtig, dass der umgangssprachliche beschworene Unterschied von Realität und Virtualität eigentlich keiner ist? Um es mit dem plakativen Ausspruch Wittgensteins zu sagen: „Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt“. Was ich nicht sagen kann, kann ich nicht denken. Wenn ich es nicht gewohnt bin, auf eine bestimmte Art und Weise zu reden, so fällt es mir auch schwer, in diesen Bahnen zu denken. Mit der den Computerspielen vermeintlich innewohnenden Virtualität empfinden wir das Medium Computerspiel lediglich als eine Art imaginäres Objekt in Raum und Zeit. Unsere Handlungen, Meinungen und Empfindungen in Spielen und durch Spiele seien gar nicht ‘echt’, nicht ‘real’, sondern gar Ausdruck pubertärer Spätfolgen. Die unsaubere Trennung der Begriffe und ihre Missdeutungen versperrt uns aber die Sicht auf die Tragweite unserer Handlungen, die wir in Spielen vornehmen. Dass unsere Sprache der technischen Entwicklung der letzten 50 Jahre hinterherhinkt, ist sicher kein Geheimnis. Begrifflichkeiten, um dieses digitale Er- und Durchleben exakt und dennoch umgangssprachlich benennen zu können, müssen sich erst noch etablieren.

Eine Welt in der die Zombieapokalypse ausgebrochen ist, mag zwar an sich ein sehr unrealistisches Szenario bieten, die damit verbundenen Probleme allerdings sind weder fiktiv noch veraltet oder hochstilisiert. Kurzer Blick in die Vergangenheit oder in Entwicklungsländer müsste genügen. Es stellen sich ganz banale Fragen der Nahrungsbeschaffung, Sicherung des eigenen Lebens und des Lebens meiner Familie und Freunde, Fragen der medizinischen Versorgung, Möglichkeiten der Überwinterung und der Gruppenbildung. Das ist der Schwerpunkt des Spiels, in dem Lee in The Walking Dead agiert.  Die Gesellschaft wurde auf den Nullpunkt gesetzt. Ein Urzustand, in dem die größte Bedrohung vielleicht nicht die Zombies sind oder der Hunger, sondern die Mitmenschen. Bereits zu Beginn begegnet Lee dem kleinen Mädchen Clementine und nimmt sie in seine Obhut. Das Ziel dieses Spiels ist das Überleben Lees. Sehr schnell verändern sich aber unsere Prioritäten und fortan setzen wir alles daran, das Überleben Clementines zu sichern. Ein direkter Angriff auf unseren Beschützerinstinkt.

Möchte man verstehen, weshalb ein Spiel wie The Walking Dead die Kraft hat, uns in einen solchen emotionalen Tief- und Höhenflug zu versetzen, muss die vermeintliche Distanz zwischen Ich und Spielfigur in den Keller der urbanen Mythen verbannt werden. The Walking Dead ist es gelungen, diese gefühlte Distanz auf ein Minimum zu reduzieren. Natürlich ist jede meiner Aktionen in Spielen genauso real wie das Kochen einer Hühnersuppe. Nur die Repräsentation - digital oder analog - ist eine andere. Dennoch fühlt sich nicht jede spielerische Interaktion so nah an, längst ist nicht jedes Spiel so immersiv, dass wir sie auf eine Ebene mit der Zubereitung einer wirklich guten Hühnersuppe stellen würden. Wie hat The Walking Dead mich nun wirklich fühlen lassen, ich sei Lee, mitten in einer wissenschaftlich fragwürdigen Zombiekalypse und die neue Vaterfigur von Clementine? Wie schaffte es The Walking Dead selbst gestandene Männer und Frauen dazu zu bringen, öffentlich mit der Dauer ihrer Heulerei zu prahlen und von ihrer inneren Zerstörtheit zu berichten?

The Walking Dead bricht die Grenzen des Mediums Spiel nicht auf. Ein Spiel ist ein Spiel bleibt ein Spiel. Es zeigt aber, wozu ein Spiel fähig ist, wenn man bereit ist, sich darauf einzulassen. In diesem Fall geschieht das in der geschickten Kombination von Spielmechanik, Story und ethischem Dilemma. Die Spielmechanik zwingt die Spielerinnen und Spieler immer wieder zu vermeintlich selbstverständlichen Handlungen und beschwört dadurch so etwas wie das Gefühl eines Alltags herauf. Der Grad der Authentizität steigt mit jedem Klick, den ich in der eingangs beschriebenen Szene des Beinabhackens vollführen muss. Ich gebe im Gegensatz zu vielen anderen Spielen nicht einen einzigen Befehl und die Spielfigur erledigt den Rest und ich bleibe als passiver Betrachter vor dem Bildschirm zurück. “Hacke Holz. [50 Holz wurden ihrem Inventar hinzugefügt.]” Das wäre zu einfach. Das Repetitive an vielen Handlungen in The Walking Dead ist ein Schlüssel zur Einfühlung. Die Drecksarbeit muss ich eigenhändig erledigen. Sei es, dass ich das Beerdigen eines verhungerten Jungen mit fünf Interaktionen hintereinander bestätigen muss oder immer und immer wieder klicke, bis das verfluchte Bein endlich ab ist. Mit jeder neuen Interaktion steigen auch die Zweifel: “War das jetzt wirklich die richtige Entscheidung? Ist das, was ich hier mache, wirklich gnädiger als das, was die Zombies mit ihm getan hätten?”

Das Repetitive an vielen Handlungen in The Walking Dead ist ein Schlüssel zur Einfühlung.

Diese Fragen münden sehr schnell in einem ethischen Dilemma. Ein ethisches Dilemma ist eine moralische Zwickmühle, die eine Person vor eine Aufgabe stellt, für die es nicht die eine richtige, wahre und gute Lösung gibt. Es sind Probleme, mit denen wir uns im Alltag wenig beschäftigen und die doch unser Leben unterschwellig stark beeinflussen. Unsere Auffassung von Politik, Recht, Gesellschaft, Kindererziehung etc. basiert auf einem uns innewohnendem Moralverständnis. Fragen wie “Sollten wir Armen, Kranken, Schwachen und Kindern helfen, wenn sie es nicht selbst können? Sollen wir das tun, selbst wenn wir alle drunter leiden? Selbst wenn ich oder meine Familie darunter leidet?” Das sind alles Fragen nach unserer Solidarität, unserem Mitgefühl und unserer Opferbereitschaft. Möglicherweise werden, wollen und können wir die Prinzipien unserer Moral nie explizit benennen. Wenn wir versuchen, unsere Moralauffassung auf eine rationale Grundlage zu stellen geraten wir schnell in Erklärungsnot. Die besten Philosophen scheitern seit Jahrtausenden daran. Bestenfalls haben wir ein ‘Gefühl’ davon, was richtig oder falsch ist. Wir haben eine ‘Ahnung’ oder eine ‘Intuition’. Wir glauben zu fühlen, wann ein Diebstahl gerechtfertigt ist und wann nicht. Reicher Schnösel umgeht den Fiskus? Falsch! Arme Frau liegt im Sterben und benötigt teure Medikamente die gestohlen werden müssen? Richtig! Genau jene Intuition sichtbar -  und natürlich dadurch auch angreifbar - zu machen, ist sicher die größte Leistung eines Spieles wie The Walking Dead.

Hierfür ist ebenfalls ein spielmechanisches Element entscheidend. Die Einführung eines Timers bei fast allen wichtigen Dialogoptionen ist vielleicht Telltales größter Hebel in dieser Richtung. Ich habe die Wahl zwischen vielleicht drei bis vier mittelprächtig erscheinenden Alternativen und die Uhr tickt. Stress. Angst. Ich werde genötigt, aus meinem Bauchgefühl heraus zu handeln. Nur selten habe ich die Zeit, rationale Überlegungen mit einfließen zu lassen. Selten bleibt die Gelegenheit, das Nützlichkeitsprinzip meinen Entscheidungen voran zu stellen. Das sind typischen Erwägungen von Spielerinnen und Spielern, die uns oft in Rollenspielen begleiten: “Wenn ich der armen alten Frau helfe, springt für mich bestimmt was Tolles und Wertvolles heraus.” Aber hier: Keine Zeit. Kein Abwägen. Nur Bauchgefühl. Was dabei zu Tage tritt, hat die Kraft, uns selbst zu erschüttern. Bin ich so wirklich? Wäre ich so?

Diese Spielmechanik kombiniert mit Entscheidungen, die oftmals das gewaltsame Ende eines uns lieb gewonnen Begleiters beinhalten, transportiert eine derart erdrückende, ausweglose und authentische Stimmung, dass das Spielen einem emotionalen Kamikaze gleicht. Mit Freude stürzen wir uns in den emotionalen Abgrund, suhlen uns darin und wenn möglich, graben wir uns noch ein wenig tiefer in den Dreck hinein. Abgesehen natürlich von dem perfiden Szenario, das uns in einer entmenschlichten Welt so etwas wie Menschlichkeit aufzwingt, indem wir versuchen nicht uns, sondern unseren Schützling Clementine zu retten. Unser unausweichliches Schicksal in Form der verwesenden Zombies stets vor Augen.

Natürlich kann das Erleben der schwindenden Distanz von Spielfigur und Ich scheitern. Das Medium Spiel ist und bleibt eben ein Medium, das mir Inhalte, Gefühle und Anreize vermitteln kann, aber nicht muss. So wie jedes Buch kann mich auch jedes Spiel in seinen Bann reißen oder daran scheitern, mir die ihm innewohnende Tiefe zu vermitteln. Ein Medium bietet mir viele Möglichkeiten, die ich nutzen oder erleben kann. Abhängig von meinem Vorerfahrungen, meiner Lebenssituation oder einfach meiner momentanen Stimmung kann mich ein Spiel, ein Buch oder ein Film ergreifen oder langweilen. In keinem anderem Medium als dem Computerspiel kann es allerdings so einfach und emotional so erschütternd sein, die Barriere zwischen mir und der fiktiven Spielfigur zu durchbrechen. In meiner Welt wurde diese Barriere durchbrochen. 

Mit The Walking Dead lernte ich Dinge über mich, die ich eigentlich nie wissen wollte.

Verfasst von rainer sigl am 10. Januar 2013 - 11:33

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1. ‘Virtuell’ ist nicht das Gegenteil von ‘real’, sondern von ‘physisch’.

2. Lesenswerter Text zu Virtuell vs. Reel http://philmath.org/Virtual.pdf

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Gaming Made Me: Nathan Grayson’s Violence

rockpapershotgun.com

Enjoy Responsibly

By Nathan Grayson on January 9th, 2013 at 1:00 pm.

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I don’t think violence is necessarily bad. But I do think – especially in gaming – that it’s highly misunderstood, and I argued as much quite recently. But what can we do about that? As ever, I’m erring on the side of reflection and transparency. So here we are. I’m Nathan Grayson, and I was made by violence.

Walking down an unfamiliar San Francisco street one night, I passed some people. I didn’t feel overly threatened or anything. They were just other humans meandering down a junked-up road, and it was dark.

But then I started fantasizing about what would happen if one of them attacked me. Details gushed out of my brain as though from some enraged thought-volcano.

First, I’d knock the guy unconscious. Knee/knee. Up against a wall, face/mid-section, one/two. Crack, crack, crack, crack. Knees and clinches offer control. Basic self-defense. Doing what’s necessary. But that’s not where my mind stopped.

Eventually, he’d wake up. It probably wouldn’t take long. Maybe I’d break an arm while he was out. Or stomp a hand into a tangled mess. Perhaps something more drastic. My next thought was teeth. One by one. Crack, crack, crack, crack. Because maybe this hypothetical assailant had hurt other people before. Badly. Maybe he deserved to suffer.

As my fantasy faded and I saw the eerily empty street in front of me again, a crystallizing moment provided two epiphanies. One: That is fucked up.  Two: In my head, the vision had been of a stylized videogame action sequence. The camera angles, the satisfying heft of each strike, every crunchy splat of sound, each whistling note of blood. Even the role I’d placed myself in – that of some twisted arbiter of relentless, necessary justice – was one I find myself drawn to in games and other media.

The thing that struck me most, though, was that it all rushed in so quickly. So automatically.

—-

One day in elementary school, a teacher pulled me aside from a couple friends I’d been chatting with. I grew up scared to death of disapproval, so I desperately avoided stepping out of line whenever possible. This, then, was terrifyingly atypical.

“You talk about death and killing a lot,” he said. “You really shouldn’t do that so much.”

—-

I was one of those kids. Games – many of them quite violent – were a part of my life from the word “go.” I actually had a conversation with my mother about it very recently. I don’t think she really knew what I got my hungry little hands on back in my single digit age, but I don’t really blame her for it. My young life hardly revolved around games or other potentially violent media. I was always expected to achieve good grades in school, get involved in various extracurricular activities, be reasonably social, engage in a constant ideological war with “You must be this tall to ride…” signs.

Games. I couldn’t see the ones and zeroes yet – the thin, easily twisted puppet strings and smoke-and-mirror hallways that held each illusion together – so it all felt so real. No, no, not in the “Pikachu tells me to kill” way out-of-touch politicians dream about, but I thought I was gazing through some rainbow lightning technomagical window into another world.

Around the ripe old age of seven, I became obsessed with Warcraft II. Obsessed in the strictest sense of the term – in that unfaltering, unquestioning childlike fashion we all wish we could recapture and hurl in the general direction of our wildest hopes and dreams, resulting in a froth-and-spittle enthusiasm explosion. I spent months playing and replaying the campaign, making my own maps, imagining new scenarios, wishing I was a badass ogre mage, poring over official art, and – perhaps most impressively – making my own. These were full-blown artistic endeavors, too. My Sistine Chapel was a series of me-sized paper recreations of pretty much every unit in Warcraft II. To be clear, I mean that they were my height. Gleaming, glorious, blood-soaked warriors of suitably imposing stature. My paper dolls were not to be trifled with.

I embarked on similar projects with the likes of Diablo, Goldeneye 64, and Doom – all before I was even ten. I drew pictures of men being shot in the head (and, naturally, given my still-maturing comedic repertoire, the groin as well), people losing limbs, weapons caked in rust and blood, and many other things of that nature. I thought it was all so damn cool. But I also don’t think violence was necessarily the core of the appeal. Sure, it might have been the hook, but I was ultimately reeled in by a desire to bring these places and characters and sights and sounds to life. I so badly wanted to make them real that, well, I tried. And in doing so, I made them my own.

—-

Veins throbbed in the teacher’s neck like worms crammed in a can. He was purple, bellowing anger. One of my classmates wouldn’t stop talking. He hurled a marker in the student’s general direction and then stormed out of the room.

Later, I found out he went on to have another, similar episode, only it ended with a steel chair instead of a marker. Thank goodness chairs don’t fly very far.

—-

Christmas Eve, I am thirteen. I receive the then brand new Dragonball Z: Budokai as a gift, and rush up the tinsel-and-ornament-strewn stairs to play it. After cruising through the story mode’s early bits, I confront the series anti-hero Vegeta. And I die. 29 times.

I know this because I started keeping count, and I remember the exact number to this day because I got so angry. I shouted, kicked, hurled the controller, bit the controller until my teeth hurt, went on extended diatribes about how stupid my character was, ranted at the game for being unfair, and just generally, well, lost it.

I’ve always had a temper. Over the years, I’ve become better at controlling it, but games have a way of bringing it screaming to the surface. Sometimes, I cool down quickly. Other times, my mood’s ruined for hours. There’s just something about constant, repetitive, out-of-my-control failure that presses my buttons far beyond any sort of breaking point. I hate it. Hate it, hate it, hate it. So it makes me act violently – at least, in the moment, anyway.

But there’s a certain absurdity about it, you know? I mean, it’s just a game. And when I pull back and examine what I’m doing, I feel like I’m watching someone succumb to ridiculous road rage in highway traffic. It’s not fun, but worse things have happened. So it just looks… silly.

For me, though, gaming rage and road rage really are two sides of the same coin. Futility is the root of those temper tantrums – not the inherent aggression of shooting a man or (gasp) turning a wheel. I think the maddest I’ve ever been at a game was Mario Party. Because seriously, fuck random star handouts and sudden, impossible come-from-behind comebacks and everything Luigi loves and stands for. When I hold a controller, I want control. If that expectation is denied – whether I’m behind a keyboard-and-mouse or a steering wheel – I don’t take it well.

Are my reactions problematic? I’m not entirely sure. But I’ll take hitting a controller over a person (or, er, a car) any day of the week.

—-

I remember walking into the locker room and being shocked at just how much blood there was. Granted, the near-blinding white tile made it stand out all the more, but still: could a human head really hold all that blood?

There’d been a fight. At my tiny private elementary school in suburban Texas, those never happened. Well, almost never. I don’t remember being disturbed by it, though. Just curious.

—-

I’ve never gotten into a fight. Not a real one, anyway. But I love hitting. It may very well be one of my absolute favorite things in this world.

Like many starry eyed nerdlings, I was first attracted to martial arts because Ryu, Ken, Scorpion, Sub-Zero, and all of their furious-fisted ilk wailed on my imagination until the brain damage was molded in their image. Basically, I wanted to punch and kick and produce whaling harpoons from my wrists. (Incidentally, I was Scorpion for Halloween one year.)

In middle school, I clumsily fumbled my way into a gi and tried my feet at Taekwondo. I was never a particularly athletic child, but martial arts just stuck. I loved the purity of it all. I didn’t need to worry about complicated rules, having crappy aim, or getting screamed at by umpires or vampires or however baseball works. It was just me and one other person. And we’d hit and hit and hit, and whoever hit better won.

Granted, there was a bit more to it than that, but it was all so satisfying and immediate. It felt amazing – my brain basting in a stew of its own chemicals and each blow rattling off cheekbones and rib cages – in between getting punched in the nose all the time. And training was just like Everquest, only a million times better. Each day, I’d grind until I cried blood and sweat tears, but progress – though slow – was obvious. Tangible. Addictive. Little by little, I was becoming strong.

But I wasn’t just hitting bodies. My training partners became my community. My family. We’d train for hours each day, and then we’d go out and watch UFC cards together or descend upon smoothie stores like some kind of protein-powder-lusting plague. I had friends, I had an outlet for my feelings, I had a work ethic.

I had a home.

—-

“The new kid’s slacking,” one of my seniors at my Taekwondo gym whispered to me. “Spar him extra hard.”

I did. I hurt him so badly that he had to sit out for the rest of the session. And it was fun.

—-

He looked so surprised. Shocked, even. Zone of the Enders 2 on PS2: the main character had just been shot. An alleged ally stabbed him in the back, and he just sort of floated there, baby planetoids of his own blood orbiting around him in a space station’s low gravity. His face was a mask of fear and pain. Eyes wide. Helpless. Scared. Dying.

It was the holiday season, and my mom, my sister, and I went out to lunch with my grandparents later that day. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. That face. That scene. I had no appetite. Months later, thinking of that scene produced the same effect.

I still haven’t finished Zone of the Enders 2.

I’m glad. If growing up with games had desensitized me to the ramifications of violence, pain, and death, experiencing that scene from an M-rated game suddenly put it all in perspective. Was I too young for Zone of the Enders 2 when it first came out? Absolutely. But, in retrospect, I think I needed it. For a lot of reasons.

—-

Recently, I was talking with a friend about life and perspectives and extremely well-informed (and attractive) viewpoints on early modern philosophy. Eventually, that brought us to the topic of humor and how it manifests in different people.

“Yeah, I’m pretty whimsical,” I offered. “You know, prone to winding, ridiculous flights of fancy and all that stuff.”

“Hm?” he grunted back, chewing on my statement for a moment. “I don’t know. I always thought your jokes were pretty morbid, all things considered.”

—-

I’m a bit of a hypochondriac. Usually, it’s cancer. Everything’s cancer. Last year, I nearly missed my best friend’s college graduation because I was certain I’d found something in my chest. I wanted to cancel my flight and go home. I spent the night before wide awake and sick to my stomach. I was so, so, so scared. I cried a bunch. I called my mom at 4am and she talked me down a bit. But I was so sure I was dying. This was the end. I was going to waste away into an empty husk of dead skin and mulched bones, and my precious consciousness would fade into nothing. Forever.

I’ve never been more terrified in my entire life.

The world’s a horrifying place. To hear some people tell it, everything’s out to kill us, and death’s primed – coiled, snake-like – to strike at any given second. In many ways, my life hasn’t really gone out of its way to disprove that point of view, either. I’ve had a fairly pampered existence in the grand scheme of things, but even then, I grew up in a world of easily enraged authority figures and peers, constant fear that “the terrorists will win,” pain, disease, shootings, paranoia, sadness, and war. Meanwhile, the unending information barrage of the modern era ensures I never have a chance to forget about those things. Don’t get me wrong: I love living in these times. I love life. I’m happy. But I’m also afraid, because let’s face it: there’s so much to be afraid of.

I think I seek out violence because I’m so scared of death. I crack jokes about killing and death, I laugh in the face of over-the-top murdersplosion action movies, I listen to all kinds of exceedingly angry music, I’m addicted to fight training, I have all these empowering, in some cases sick fantasies. I surround myself with violence. Because when I do it that way, I’m in control. I can explore it. It’s mine. I own it.

And, as ever, in the game.

—-

In spite of the ups and downs of my relationship with it, I personally enjoy violence. I really do. It’s empowering. It’s intoxicating. It’s fun. But it’s also one of the scariest things in the entire world, and what’s even scarier is that – if I lost control, if my temper beat the teeth right out of my conscience – I could inflict it on someone else. I’ve done it in my head a thousand times. It’s not even hard. I’m human. On some level, it’s natural.

When I walk down those dark, nearly naked streets, I’m most afraid of my fantasies. Afraid of myself.

But there’s a voice, a whisper, a lingering tickle between my ears that tells me to stay in control. I mean, duh. I have to. That’s the way it’s always been. Over the years, games have told me a lot of things. They’ve told me that violence looks cool – some without even attempting to demonstrate potential consequences. Others have beaten it into my brain that death is an awful, awful thing to be feared above all else. But most of all, games have taught me that – at the end of the day – I’m accountable. If things go horribly awry, it’s probably because I – the player, the human being – fucked up. I can’t blame the situation or the heat of the moment or someone else, and I certainly can’t blame videogames.

Violence is natural, but so is control. To conveniently write off or forget either one of those facts would be a horrible abomination of a folly. No matter how constricting the situation, my actions are ultimately my own. Sometimes, I take pride in that. Other times, I dread it. And when I’m walking alone at night? I’d say it’s probably a mix of both.

I think that’s how it should be.

__________________

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Wot I Think: Slave Of God

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The most psychedelic club night you’ve been to

By Cara Ellison on January 4th, 2013 at 4:00 pm.

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Slave of God is a new, free game from Stephen Lavelle, aka Increpare, he of English Country Tune. It is a game about visiting a nightlcub, with all the attendant music, magic and horror. Young Cara paid it a visit.

The first thing I wanted to do to Stephen Lavelle after finishing his game Slave of God was grasp his LCD-bleached face and kiss him passionately on the lips. By the time I had finished Slave of God, I felt drunk, high and in love. No alcohol had passed my lips, no drug had been near me, and no man had made bodily contact with me since Tuesday when a fat balding airport security man had patted me down with the vigour of someone who is saving this for the wank bank later.

No, Stephen Lavelle made me drunk, high and in love merely by the power of his interactive environment. Isn’t that neat? On my planet that makes him Superman.

Slave of God is a nightclub experience in a tin. You open it up and it drops you, already tipsy and woozy from drugs, at the entrance to the most psychedelic club night you’ve been to (seizure warning – do not go near this if you are photosensitive in any way). The best thing about this whole game is that even before you begin you remember that night. You remember it. It is instant deja vu. Paralytic under the lights, so minced off your pus the world slowed for you, the lights bulged for you, the opposite sex were staring at you, the music liquid through your skin into the sexy, velvety part of your brain whilst the drink you are sure you bought two seconds ago is gone and now all you can do is go and get another one and get sexier and sexier. And the lights were the thing, weren’t they? And the music, the vibrations and bass you held out your hands to touch.

Behind you, two burly bouncers look at you sternly, and in front of you your friend drifts off into the distance, the horny wanker, leaving you to fend for yourself and he knows you are never going to leave with someone here because you’re shit at dancing and people in clubs don’t want to talk about the works of D.H. Lawrence because – YOU CAN’T HEAR A FUCKING THING. CAN YOU HEAR ME? I SAID I REALLY LIKE THAT ONE ABOUT THE TORTOISE ORGASMING. YES.TORTOISE. ORGASMING.

Oh fuck it I’m getting a drink.

They aren’t serving here. It is a no service area.

The dancefloor pulsates towards you, intense, expanding outwards like a fluorescent rug that stings the eyes. When you reach it the music seems to reach its zenith and you almost forget that there is anything else to do but move. A Boy moves in the centre of the floor like some smouldering anakim and you try to drift away from him in case he notices that you are dancing like Napoleon Dynamite. But you are aware of him at all times. He is a blip on a radar screen that you are pretending not to notice.

Slave of God is wonderful at capturing the way music muffles and meanders in the brain when you are drunk under flashing lights; it’s a sort of little prayer to a one-off experience, something halfway from a nightmare to a delirious hallucination in the mind of someone who has been abandoned. The music weaves in and out and changes to adapt your environment down corridors and by the DJ stand. Better still, Slave of God’s eye-searing art stylings are angular bright primary colours, burning themselves onto the back of your pupils like laser on camera film. Your view, controlled by your mouse hand, is constructed so that it gives a lazy fisheye vision that could only ask you to feel inebriated. Things pulse and flicker and the dancers on the dancefloor strobe oblivious. If you’ve ever been to a drum ‘n’ bass night in Tokyo’s club Womb, this is what it looks like. (Like the mythical last level of Tetris, or something.)

Time to pee. Where’s the bog in this joint? How do you even get off the dancefloor? Is that even possible? You are lost. You can’t see anything. Ugh where are you? Mike is off with that girl and you haven’t got anyone. You are the fucking George Osbourne of the fucking dancefloor. You drift over to a boy with a drink but he just stares at you, empty-eyed. He’s… He’s probably got a girlfriend, I bet she’s one of those effortless chicks with the asymmetric haircuts who occasionally sings badly in a band.

You find the corridor that you assume leads to the toilets but it is a dead end. This always happens to you. You backtrack and take another corridor. The music echoes tinny past your ears, muted and pleasant but there is that low-level nausea and self-loathing creeping up on you as you realise that you are awful and your entire life is a pretense that you are cool enough to be here and that beautiful boy that seemed taller than the entire dancefloor will never look at you and you will have to drink a lot to avoid thinking about Mike’s smug face tomorrow at hangover AM in the flat for sure.

You can’t get into the ladies’ toilets. TYPICAL. Men’s it is. Just don’t look. Everyone will hate you if you look.

Are you peeing or throwing up?

Oh RPS, I found the magic bartender and I… oh god I did horrible things. No. You don’t understand. I drank and I drank and I did awful things. But I did everything and nothing and He was there and I fell in love with the Boy and he was the only thing there it was like the music was changing and morphing and…

Last night was awful, RPS. I was in love but… I did terrible things. I woke up this morning feeling guilt and dehydration and…

I guess I was just hallucinating. But the music, the music and the Boy were wonderful. You have to go to that club. You have to go to that club. I’ll take you. I won’t abandon you. I promise.

Unless He’s there. If He’s there you can buy your own drinks.

Slave of God is free, very short and totally worth challenging yourself to get to sunrise, and you can pick it up from here. The settings window is entitled “Dancefloor Configuration”, sadly there is no Saturday Night Fever option.

__________________

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Claire Hosking

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Playthings

The other day I saw the new character model for Cortana and I was thinking it seemed pretty alright - she looked older, stronger, far less caricatured. If Cortana was always going to be titillating, at least she seemed a more appropriate object of desire: more 25 than 15,  more flesh than real doll. So I got a bit nervous when I saw a lot of negative reactions to Cortana’s new larger boobs. Not because that reaction wasn’t coming from a good place - these were people I respected,  reacting against objectification of women and the presentation of unrealistic ideals to young women.  But just a couple of weeks earlier I heard they’ve got plans to make the new Lara Croft incarnation deeper, and part of that will be making her boobs smaller. The implication that larger boobs are a liability to well-presented, deep characters makes me nervous because, well, how many stacked women get to have complex stories in popular media? I can think of Joan Holloway and…? Boob sizes have been neatly separating  the mistresses from wives, the sexy/trashy good-times-girls from the arty/pretentious hipsters, the ciphers from the plotlines. Video games have certainly fed the first part of the stereotype, that ‘e-cup women are playthings’, but wouldn’t only giving empathetic roles to C-cup-or-less  women just reinforce that? (It’s also implying small-boobed women can’t be objectified because they’re insufficiently sexy. The beauty of this system is no-one wins!) Where are the ‘twist’ video games for this gaming trope, promoted as indulging the players’ desire to objectify women, but surprise! actually gives you that character’s perspective about what it’s like to live with all that objectification? Lara Croft isn’t running towards her goal, she’s running away from you, thousands upon thousands of leering players.

But there’s another point I want to make, because the logic that suggests “Sex is fun, fun is trivial, certain bodies are more sex than others, therefore certain bodies are more trivial than others.”, comes from the same place as that attitude towards media: “Play is fun, fun is trivial, certain media forms are more about play than others, therefore certain media forms are more trivial than others.”

Both rely on the assumption that fun/bodies are trashy & the opposite of deep/mental/virtuous. It conflates anything sensory or tangible, then contrasts that to idiotropic pursuits.   It’s a weird dichotomy of pleasure vs worth, play vs meaning. That the presence of fun degrades the artness, & vice-versa. It’s super pervasive in the wider culture, (Probably the clearest example I can think of this is the idea that the artistic value of a nude picture somehow nullifies the sexuality, de-pornifying it. Or vice-versa, the presumption in classification that titillation, particularly real sex, is less suitable or unsuitable in a publically available artform.), but oddly gamers buy into it all the time.

Comments on a post about Brendan Keogh’s Killing is Harmless. Gamer gets caught up arguing that art-ness kills fun.
It’s a dichotomy I hear every time a geek gamer looks down on the blind enjoyment of frat bro gamers, it’s there when the bros complain that analysis and reflection somehow kills their fun, it’s there in the success and dominance of games that feel they have to layer the strange delights of play with impossibly epic themes, it’s there when heavy games are still forced to include “achievements”. 
Even (or especially) passionate gamers get caught up in this, distancing themselves from the goofy and absurd, although it’s something that the medium excels in. It especially annoys me every time someone points to the most serious examples of the genre as evidence that games are art, and the habit of calling serious or pensive games ‘art games’.

Fencing off a little area for sober games to get called art is counterproductive. It’s kinda implying that fun undermines something’s claim to artistic worth, and ultimately, that just undermines a medium that revolves around play.
Oddly, it’s also undermining women’s push to be able to be sexual beings (subjects, not objects) and still be recognised as worthy humans. It hurts people’s, particularly ‘others’, ability to lay claim to leisure without it being held against them.

If fun dilutes virtue, it’s considered especially corrupting for those who society expects to be working. Society shames gamers in part b/c it’s an entertainment form of choice for the young adults and the poor, and at least in Australia, strongly associated with immigrant esp. Asian people: all groups who struggle to lay claim to leisure. (From Gina Reinhart’s assertion that poor people need to drink less and work more; to the persistent high-fidelity style myth constantly repeated to young adults that you’ll magically be granted proper adulthood by giving up your hobbies; or the way Asian humour/entertainment doesn’t just get to be humour but always considered ‘weird’: Some groups just get their leisure/fun demonised as a matter of cultural habit. That these groups often comprise the useful service class for the powerful seems awfully convenient.)

And vice-versa: Every time you imply a woman diminishes herself, or her worth, or her right to safety by having too much fun/a certain body type, (or let someone else do it) it undermines videogames. (Hello fake-geek-girl crusaders!) And obviously, don’t bash people for having quaint hobbies into their twenties, or suggest poor people have too much fun, or call Asian humour weird, either.  So don’t buy into it. Dismantle the fun/worthiness dichotomy so it can’t be used against any of us. Don’t wed certain bodies to either fun/sex or art/depth. It’s easy not to talk about games like that, ‘cause Art doesn’t care how serious you are, only whether you represent an idea, any idea (be it ‘killing is bad!’ to ‘RED!’ to ‘thick paint is THICK yo’) through any means. Good art represents a good idea* and expresses that idea really well.** And good ideas are just the ones that humanise us to each other, that let us better understand others or ourselves or both.   If only serious art was legit, it would be all broccoli and no lasagna. You’d die on a diet like that, overloaded with one type of thing, however ‘good’ that thing is supposed to be for you, and so does culture (So too, does any attempt at representing ‘women’, if your definition of women is limited to one acceptable type). Fortunately, joy & humour & fun and accomplishment (ideas video games are really good at) and thousands of other ‘trivial’ emotions are just as important to any well-rounded exploration of the human condition. (YMMV, but Groundhog Day is my personal favourite example of this. GREAT ART.***) Videogames meet the ‘idea + expression’**** criteria all the time, which is unsurprising, because huge amounts of human production is art, usually while being something else a well: The sculptures lining the edge of cathedral roofs provide downward force that helps redirect the outward push of the roof on the walls; a mausoleum is both a shelter and an artwork about solemnity, and so on through design, chairs, cups, photocopiers, street signs et cetera. (The birth of Venus is actually a large billboard advertising the beautiful fabrics produced in Florence at the time, the ones Venus is being draped in. Celebrity endorsement, the old way). It’s just that most of it is *bad* art. That a lot of video games represent heinous ideas and poorly just makes them bad art, not un-art.

It’s also easy not to talk about women/ women’s bodies like that. There are better ways to talk about the sexualisation of female characters beyond whether they have certain proportions or not. We could talk how Cortana’s supposedly less-sexualised body in Halo 2 threw more weird body-thrusty poses than in 4, where she has a more natural stance. Let’s talk more about the portrayal of bodies instead of attacking the bodies. Master-chief is a tall, muscular super-soldier, yeah? In the videogame world of incessantly beautiful people, one can only assume he’s practically Daniel Craig in there. But there’s little reason to criticise an impossible and beautiful body when it’s never objectified. So with regards to existing characters, if you want to deepen them, it’s about rehabilitating your attitude and portrayal of their bodies, not changing their bodies.

Game designer doin’ it wrong.
I don’t want to justify a whole bunch of character designers’ cheap fan service, either. This isn’t a pardon for the lazy and exploitative ways women have been portrayed in games up to this point. Arguing that even thus-far objectified characters should get a chance to be portrayed as subjects/agents is the opposite of being happy with them as objects.
This is a call for better character design, better character criticism: Just as we should avoid establishing a new category of ‘serious and therefore worthy’ games, we should avoid establishing a new consensus on the body type of a deep woman.  Every body type deserves to have a deep and nuanced parallel in gaming. And it’s not enough that characters are seen as noble in spite of their bodies. Games if anything, so mechanically based on constructing the abilities of characters and allowing that to dictate their approach to the world, should understand that bodies aren’t separate from characters. Growing up with a particular body interacts with a character’s own personality to inform their destiny. That’s something that’s understood for male characters (it’s a large part of Chief’s story), but still patchy for female characters. For all I know, Lara was a talented gymnast whose dream of olympic gold vanished when she grew into the wrong body type, and, sick of the side-eye she got to being too bouncy whenever she ran or danced or jumped, said ‘Fuck you all’ and decided to use her talents to kick ass. And given how hard it is to navigate women’s clothing choices to pick something that’s attractive but not too sexy but still friendly but professional enough but not too expensive or I’ll get bashed for vanity, and the sheer waste of time this takes up for me, if I had a choice I’d make like Cortana too.

So yeah, just try to uncouple of the idea of sexy/fun/earthly as trashy in your heads please. The fun, the silly, the sexual, all need to be judged according to the skill and complexity with which their expression reflects our experiences, not regarded as cheapening forces on their own.

I have this song stuck in my head now which isn’t a bad thing.

_________________________________________________________ *I think ‘Jumping is bouncy!’, which is an idea videogames express with such delight, is a great idea to be honest. The experience of our bodies in physics is a great thing to share. On the other hand, outside of a consensual BDSM setting, ‘Rape is exciting!’, the jist of any ‘Rape of the Sabines’ painting, is a shitty idea no matter how you look at it. **Which is how ‘Rape of the Sabines’ paintings scrape into any reasonable definition of good art - they’re so well painted/composed etc, they had people convinced for centuries that actually this was a pretty good idea to represent and a reasonable way to depict it. ***I think Art’s really easy to define, but figuring out which examples get to be Great Art varies a bit depending on what particularly resonates with your experience of the world. For some reason this is pretty well practiced in music taste but far less practiced in visual art. I suspect because the more exposed to a medium you are the better placed any person is to figure out what’s important to them. ****This is all putting it very simply - of course the ‘idea’ isn’t inside the art, there to be distilled - it’s one & the same as the work itself. But in Architecture, we still simultaneously talk as though our idea for a building (ie the mood/atmosphere we’re trying to summon) is separate from our strategies for realising it (materiality, tectonics etc), yet fully understand that the building itself is the idea, there is no intention besides the final building. The building will be perceived as itself, not a symbol for something else (“ducks” exempted) ie. medium is the message. I don’t see the clash between talking about it in both ways. If it helps, It might be simpler to talk less about idea & execution than the intentions of the artist vs the impressions of the viewer - ie whether they have a good idea to begin with, and how fruitfully that’s perceived. You don’t have to agree with my definition of art, but please don’t give me that ‘art is impossible to define’ excuse. Read up a couple of definitions, pick one you agree with and then use it. It’s how every other word/concept works.

1:11 am  •  3 January 2013  •  45 notes

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It's Time We Put The Bald Space Marine Away. It's Time To Make Games For More People.

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It’s Time We Put The Bald Space Marine Away. It’s Time To Make Games For More People.

Patricia Hernandez

Not everyone knows the joy of playing as a protagonist that is like them—someone with the same skin color, with the same hair style, with the same sexual orientation, or the same gender. Sometimes, ‘who you are’ is not an in-game option simply because you are not the target audience. What choice are you left, if, say, you are a person of color, or queer, or trans, or a woman, than to almost perpetually play as someone else… or to make your own games?

Such was the case with game critic (and full disclosure, personal friend) Mattie Brice, who instead of waiting for the unlikely scenario of having a triple-A developer make a game for her, picked up a copy of RPG Maker and made a game called Mainichi, where she takes you through a typical day in her life—from banal things like choosing whether or not to play a game, to the type of harassment she might face as a trans woman whenever she is out in public.

Playing through such a game can be touching from a player perspective, but Mattie felt something cathartic when she made it, too. She saw herself in a game for the first time only after she made herself pixel-by-pixel.

“Seeing myself as a protagonist was surprisingly emotional,” she told me in an interview, “There were no characters in RPG Maker with my skin tone or hair, so I had to do some scavenging and editing to finally get me in there. I remember looking at myself and crying, I was so moved.”

Years ago, without the proper training, income or know-how, making a game like Mainichi would have been impossible for many. But now, thanks to the ease of use of tools like Twine, RPG Maker, and Construct 2 along with the power of dissemination that comes with the internet has given rise to game developers who might have otherwise never had a voice in this industry. And they’re making games for people outside the typical market demographic of triple-A games.

Mattie is joined in this ‘revolution’ by other like-minded game designers like Merritt Kopas, a queer trans woman. Both Mattie and Merritt might have grown up with games, but they didn’t set out to be game developers at first. “When I was young, I wanted to be too many things. Zoologist, actress, psychic, interior designer,” Mattie, who is now a creative writing grad student, recalled.

Merritt, meanwhile, studied sociology in grad school. “I don’t have any formal training in game design or programming, so having a network of encouraging people has been really valuable,” she explained. These backgrounds didn’t stop them, and in some ways, have better equipped them to speak to more people. Both Merritt and Mattie became visible as game developers after Anna Anthropy’s book, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, urged everyday folk to take it upon themselves to make games.

The kind that allow us to step in someone else’s bubble, the kind of game that doesn’t aim to be entertainment inasmuch as they are about empathy and connection with one another.

Specifically, personal games—the kind that are not beholden to the financial interests of stockholders, or the tastes of mainstream consumers, or the proclivities of marketing tactics. The kind that allow us to step in someone else’s bubble, the kind of game that doesn’t aim to be entertainment inasmuch as they are about empathy and connection with one another. Given how most games tend to be about glorification of the player or solipsism, that’s incredible—not to mention subversive.

Merritt’s most famous game would have to be Lim, which is an abstract game about fitting in. You play as a square that can become the color of other squares, if you choose. If you don’t, the other squares violently attack you—so even if you brave ‘being yourself,’ it’s not a pleasant experience. Though metaphorical, connections to Merritt’s own experience as a trans woman can be made.

Part of not being afraid to hide their backgrounds comes from an effort to empower others who are either aching to see games about themselves, to be represented in games, if not be a game designer themselves.

“I try to be very open and visible as queer and trans in my games and elsewhere primarily for the sake of other queer and trans people,” Merritt explained to me via email, “or folks who may be questioning who they are. I don’t believe that there should be an obligation to disclose or be “out”, but I’m in a place in my life where it’s something that I can do, and I very much want to show people that yes, there are other ways of being—if you want to be queer you can do that, if you want to change your gender or your body you can do that too, and I want to help however I can.”

Mattie, meanwhile, has had a number of people tell her that her game “help[ed] them understand what’s going on that I can’t quite vocalize.” Here, the merits of a video game become abundantly clear: they are capable of putting us in the shoes of anyone we’d like, and that can be powerful—doubly so for those who typically don’t have the privilege of playing as themselves in a game.

Of course, as inspiring as all that is, making a game about your own experience can be revealing in ugly ways. Lack of media representation, along with societal standards of beauty, can instill deep-seated hatred for how one looks—much in the same way that Brown vs Board of Education’s famous doll experiment revealed that young black girls did not think they were as beautiful as white girls.

“I used to straighten my hair two times a week, four hours at a time, and it was a huge burden on my life,” Mattie recalled when describing the difficulties that came with making a character with an afro, “I was taught to think that any sign of blackness is ugly, and society often reinforces that when there’s a white-centric standard of beauty. But I wouldn’t be me without my hair, and there’s an aspect of the game that would be missing without it, so I kept it in.”

Merritt, meanwhile, is making a game that directly deals with discomfort around appearances. It’s called Deface Me, and it deals with her painful relationship with her face. The player will experience what she experiences both when looking in a mirror and when making a new character in a game: the inability to have the luxury of “adjusting sliders to our liking or choosing from six dozen different noses.”

As interesting as these projects are, both Merritt and Mattie regularly come under fire for the games they make. RPG Maker games carry a certain stigma, for instance, in that they are easily recognizable and are often made by ‘nothing more’ than hobbyists.

Lim, meanwhile, sometimes gets accused of being too simplistic, both in message and in terms of visuals. Sometimes, people will assert that what developers like Merritt, Mattie and even Anna Anthropy make things that do not classify as ‘games,’ because they do not follow standard game paradigms. Interestingly, many of the criticisms almost sound like attempts to delegitimize progressive efforts more than anything else.

“There are a lot of people who criticize games like mine that have simple graphics, few ‘gameplay’ (I hate that word so much) features,” Mattie laments, “thinking that just because they say something interesting doesn’t mean they are good. And I want to challenge that… gamers need to be challenged and made uncomfortable sometimes, and not given what they want just because they stamp their feet about it.”

“Gamers need to be challenged and made uncomfortable sometimes, and not given what they want just because they stamp their feet about it.”

Merritt asserts that “most of the people making those kinds of remarks didn’t seem to have had any significant experiences of social liminality—of not quite fitting into categories. They were, for the most part, straight white cis men.” Many of the underrepresented folks insist that they are grateful and happy to have games like Lim and Mainichi exist.

Speaking to game designer Anna Anthropy about this issue, she didn’t seem surprised at all. She explained that almost everything about the game industry has gatekeeping in it.

“Videogames have been one of the most exclusive communities i’ve ever encountered,” she said to me via email, “some dudes, like Raph Koster, insist that when he says dys4ia ‘isn’t a game,’ that’s not a value judgement. That’s bullshit. the attempt to label games like dys4ia as ‘non-games,’ as ‘interactive experiences,’ is just an attempt by the status quo to keep the discussion of games centered around the kind of games it’s comfortable with—cus if there’s one thing existing videogame culture is good at, it’s making a certain kind of dude very, very comfortable.”

An apologist will tell you that personal games don’t get made because not only because game development teams are so large, but also because it’s difficult to propose playing as a character that may be less ‘relatable’ to most players.

Is that idea not insulting to the target demographic—to say that they cannot possibly relate to minority characters? Morever, does a character’s relatability not hinge on how well written they are?

Is that idea not insulting to the target demographic-to say that they cannot possibly relate to minority characters?

But more importantly: might we be dealing with myths? As John Brindle over at Nightmare Mode writes:

“Latinos drive videogame sales but are poorly represented in the medium. Black and hispanic people play more videogames but don’t get to make them (or be in them). Games with woman protagonists have marketing budgets 40% lower or less than man-games. The straight, white, male, young ‘target audience’ is a fiction and a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

It makes one wonder whether or not mainstream games even have the capability of providing us what we want—or need—when much of the wisdom that moves them forward comes from a focus group. It’s not just about who that focus group might be leaving out, but also about what harmful, backwards practices get adopted in game development, all in the name of making a game that people are likely to buy.

But if people like Merritt or Mattie are any indication, we may not have to wait for triple-A developers to wake up.

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Communicating Games: Violence, Consequences and Barriers

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Communicating Games: Violence, Consequences and Barriers

How do we communicate games to non-gamers? Declan Skews gives the topic an in-depth approach.

by Declan Skews on 6th Jan, 2013

Communicating the passion, the beauty; the romance of games to non-gamers is a task that can oftentimes seem impossible. How do you explain the draw of sneaking down a corridor, slowly losing your sanity, in Amnesia? What’s so appealing about repeatedly dying and becoming frustrated with Dark Souls? Why bother to learn new and confusing button configurations to play Uncharted, when you could just pop Indiana Jones into the DVD player? How do you explain to someone why it’s fun to massacre wave upon wave of seemingly helpless bad guys?

Over the Christmas period, I tried again to get my mother into gaming; to convert her to my favourite hobby. I’ve tried before, and I’ve always failed miserably. The difference was that, this time, I was armed with Journey. It’s short, simple to play and beautiful. I was pessimistic, expecting at most an uninterested shrug after twenty minutes of aimless wandering. To my surprise, my mother took to it immediately, finishing the game three times in two days.

This highlights what I’ve long suspected about gaming: the difficulty in evangelising it has largely been down to significant shortcomings in the variety of games, and more specifically the entry level games. Entry level, or “gateway”, games are by definition very easy to play; often quite simple in concept and are well executed. Journey isn’t a magical cure-all to this problem, but the combined force of Journey and Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead are a fantastic start.

Simplicity of play is doubly important because those dipping their toes into gaming will not only be learning new button mappings, but also controller layouts and how to properly use things like analogue sticks. As a long time gamer, even I struggled the first time someone put a Wii-mote in my hand (to pre-empt cries of “noob”: I will out-waggle anyone on Wii Sports Tennis). Conversations I’ve had with the various people in my life indicate that getting used to new controls is not a problem that only I suffer from.

There is, of course, an entire genre that fits the bill of skill-based accessibility: point and click adventures.

Point and click adventures have been around for a long time, and they highlight perhaps better than any other genre the second major barrier to someone just getting into games: the conceptual barrier; sometimes referred to as gaming logic. Over the course of their existence, puzzles in games have developed their own unique style of logic, and this brand of logic can be opaque to new gamers. An experienced gamer will know the signs, will know how to search a level to begin to decode the puzzle being communicated, and will know whether or not they can push the games’ mechanics far enough to make a particular solution viable. Much of this is based on prior experience with similar games, and is not often explicitly communicated.

Game logic extends far beyond puzzles, however. Even something as simple as path-finding can be troublesome to a new gamer. My mother required fairly regular directions during her first play-through of Journey, and, on subsequent games, continually struggled with navigating her way through a particular area towards the end of Journey. If simply orientation and puzzle solving are difficult to get the hang of, it’s no wonder that new gamers struggle with optimisation in more stats-focussed RPGs and in competitive RTS games. Some genres are definitely less newbie friendly than others (here’s looking at you, FPS).

The conceptual barrier of games goes far deeper than just game logic. We’re only just beginning to see games mature and diversify the topics they discuss to include more difficult, more nuanced, themes. Beginning in a significant way with the original Bioshock, Irrational Games managed to mix a rich art style with a fantastic conceptual setting which lent itself well to the introduction of more meaningful philosophical questions. Bioshock places an emphasis on, amongst other things, the philosophy of science and epistemology; Bioshock asks what results when science, and indeed all aspects of human endeavour, go too far and break free from the restraint of ethics and morality.

Pair this with the aforementioned Journey, and we have two games that deal with the idea of discovery and exploration, but in fundamentally different ways. Bioshock asks the question from a very human perspective, whereas Journey is happy to let the player ponder without a baseline. Bioshock directs the conversation by asking difficult questions, whereas Journey is the question. Bioshock and Journey aren’t necessarily the first games to attempt this, but they are certainly amongst the more successful examples.

Bioshock and Journey have begun to break down the conceptual barrier, the perception, that games are ultimately shallow and thoughtless experiences. Looking at the wider array of games, there are other examples, too: Binary Domain presents questions on post humanism and L.A. Noire tells a story which is predictable, but is still much deeper than the average Rambo-esque rampage, and manages to deal with very sensitive themes along the way; Shadow of the Colossus makes you acutely aware that your heroism is an almost purely selfish endeavour and this poses a problem about the importance of perspective. 

Another reputation that games have struggled to rid themselves of, is the image of an over-abundance of violence. We are bombarded with images of destruction in games. On TV, YouTube, billboards, in cinemas and on the front covers of our morning papers you will find adverts for the latest and greatest in war simulation. It’s understandable that gamers, non-gamers, and even journalists (who are expected to have a broader view of the industry), may be left with the impression that this is a hobby with an unhealthy, and possibly quite dangerous obsession. 

It’s not possible to make the argument that there isn’t a lot of violence in video games: there is a lot of violence. Combat of some form or another has been, if not an essential feature, certainly a key feature of a great number of games, and even those games which don’t feature combat as part of the game-play, often depict physical confrontation at some point.

It’s worth noting that a lot of this violence, possibly even the majority of it, is in fact no more realistic than the equivalent depictions in children’s cartoons. The truly violent games - the likes of Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Kombat and Battlefield - are over-represented in advertising and in the public consciousness. This isn’t to say that violence isn’t present in video games; rather that it is only one aspect of a very diverse medium, and shouldn’t be considered to be representative of it.  The distorted image of games presented in mainstream media and in advertising is only a pale imitation of what is swiftly becoming the cultural keystone of the modern age.

Parallels could be drawn between games and movies, music, or even books, but this would only distract from the real argument: that games are not purely for children. They haven’t been a children’s toy for a very long time. Just as there are movies, music and, yes, books, that aren’t appropriate for children, so are there games which are not appropriate for children. From Max Payne to Saints Row, L.A. Noire to The Witcher, some games were simply not created to be consumed by a young audience. Mature games for mature people. 

“What about those gamers who describe in vivid detail and with rather too much relish, the latest brutality they inflicted on a virtual enemy”, you may ask. It’s true that some gamers can become almost disturbingly focused on the kill, particularly in games where the difficulty of killing pushes it almost to the point of being an art-form. In the majority of cases, this is likely to be a case of mistaken achievement. The gamer in question is not so much focussed on the kill, despite what they may be saying they are likely focussed on the fact that they have just overcome a very difficult challenge, and they are revelling in their success. If the kill was all they were after, they could hop into Call of Duty or Dynasty Warriors and mow down hundreds of enemies in a few hours.

Whether they are talking of that one, perfect headshot in Sniper Elite, or the trail of motorised destruction in Burnout, it’s important to remember that games are, if nothing else, a fantasy. Actions here are largely devoid of consequence. They’re a virtual playground where indulging in behaviour which is unacceptable in reality, is fine. Human nature pushes us to test boundaries, whether this is our own skill at a particular task or a more grandiose goal, such as space flight, games provide an environment in which we can do these things free of the ramifications that accompany such shenanigans.

The concerned individual may ask about violent games’ effect on children. I’ve written before that this is the responsibility of parents; to control what content their children view and to ensure that their children understand that driving recklessly, hurting the people, and creatures around them, is not acceptable behaviour.

The final point often made about gaming, is that it is an anti-social activity. This particular argument is swiftly crumbling in the face of the rise of the MMO, and other online gaming trends. These days it’s very easy to fire up a console, phone or PC and connect with anything from dozens to thousands of other people at the same time.

Upon the expected retort of “what about single player only games”, it should be noted that being alone from time-to-time is not an inherently bad thing. Retreating from the world and not talking to anyone for a few hours is a fantastic way to relax, and relaxation is vital for slowing the aging process thus gaming can be used in the maintenance of both physical and mental health.

Communicating games to the uninitiated can be a tough task, it can be daunting, and it can test your knowledge of gaming, but it is well worth trying. You may learn something and the ever growing hive mind of gamers will only expand through assimilation!

gameranx.com

Untold riches: The brilliance of Half-Life's barnacles

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Untold riches: The brilliance of Half-Life’s barnacles

4:00 PM on 12.27.2012

Hamish Todd is a game designer and journalist. His article on Castlevania’s medusa heads just made the longlist for the games journalism prize. You can find out about his game, Music of the Spheres, here.

Some of the most fun I’ve ever had playing videogames has been with the Half-Life series. The games are most famous for their scripted sequences, but there are a lot of other clever pieces of design in them. Today, I’m going to look at a bunch of great Half-Life setpieces all themed around one entity: the barnacle.

The barnacle can do horror, action, and even comedy. It can assist you and puzzle you. To do all that, an object needs to have some pretty fundamental stuff in its design.

This video shows you how Half-Life 2 introduces the barnacle. A lot is communicated by this loud, eye-catching animation (captured by Daniel Holden). It’s good because it lets you find out that barnacles are dangerous without you having to endanger yourself — if you were just walking along and got unwittingly picked up and killed by this unfamiliar thing, it’d feel unfair and time-wasting.

“Many of our scripted sequences were designed to give the player gameplay clues as well as provide moments of sheer terror” ~Ken Birdwell in Half-Life’s post-mortem

So we’ve been shown by that animation that the barnacles are unmoving ceiling-dwellers that reel up and eat things that touch their thin, dangling tongue. We’ll later find out:

If you touch the tongue, you’ll be pulled into its mouth unless you kill the barnacle first.

While you’re being pulled up, you can look and shoot, but you can’t move.

Barnacles have low health.

Barnacles will reel in and try to eat literally anything. This is a double-edged sword: they can go for you and your allies, but also your enemies, which works to your advantage. Unfortunately, AI in Half-Life is pretty complex, so you’re unlikely to be able to manipulate a moving enemy into getting caught (it’s easier to just shoot it). A barnacle can lend a nice ripple to a shooting arena, though.

Real animals

Half-Life’s barnacles have some things in common with real animals. This isn’t necessarily because Valve was mimicking nature. It’s just that “things which make a videogame enemy effective” and “things which will help an animal survive” can sometimes be the same, so ingenious examples of both will converge.

Jonathan Wojcik alerted me to the fact that the Half-Life barnacles’ hunting method of dangling a sticky thread and eating the animals that get stuck to it is a method that has been encountered in nature. It’s utilized by some spiders, and by the beautiful “fungus gnat” larvae you see in the video above.

Real barnacles were probably a direct inspiration for the appearance of Half-Life barnacles. Real barnacles have an extremely long, prehensile appendage coming out of them — but unlike the barnacles we’re talking about in this article, that appendage is NOT a tongue!

Half-Life 1

Barnacles have the ability to cordon off danger zones, and that’s used well in this area. These barnacles encourage you to take a certain path, and present you with harsh but delicate limitations during a fight. They’re also a warning that you’re entering a room which is more dangerous than it looks…

In the middle of this picture, on top of the box, you can see some shotgun shells which you’ll instantly want to jump to when you enter the room (going down via the sloping path is obviously an unappealing option). But when you get onto the box, the wood you’re standing on collapses, leaving you no way back out of the room — and then a pair of aliens teleport onto the slopes and start running up and down them, shooting at you! It’s a uniquely constrained battle, and it gets particularly crazy if you happen to run into a barnacle and have to continue shooting while ascending.

Here’s another setpiece. This screenshot was taken while looking directly up. The four greyish lines coming out of the ceiling are barnacle tongues hanging around you.

Barnacles don’t move, so they’re easy to shoot at — unless YOU are moving in some complex way. In this scene, the player is standing on a platform that is descending and rotating, a mathematically interesting movement that creates a cage. Aim at a barnacle, and your cross-hairs will curve around and move outward due to the motion.

It is possible for you to pull a lever and stop the platform moving. The barnacles here gently encourage you to start making use of that lever.

Another room, another way of using barnacles. When a barnacle catches you it pulls you up, which is pretty bad because you’re going toward its mouth — but it’s not so bad if it means being pulled away from the mouth of something else!

In this water tank, you’ll fight the first “ichthyosaur,” an underwater enemy [not pictured]. There are half a dozen barnacles dangling their tongues in the water. During the underwater fight, while fleeing the aquatic creature, you might touch a barnacle tongue either accidentally or on purpose. Being hoisted out of the attacking ichthyosaur’s reach by a barnacle will provide a strange kind of momentary relief. The ceiling is quite high, giving you lots of time to turn around and smack the barnacle before it tries to eat you.

This is our final thing from the original Half-Life. This setpiece again shows how the immobility of the barnacle makes it useful. Note, by the way, that an unmoving enemy in a game is usually called an “obstacle” — one example would be bottomless pits in platformers. Barnacles basically do the same jobs as bottomless pits: they carve out “areas that you don’t want to go.” Barnacles are much neater in 3D than pits though, as the above diagram of the “treadmill” setpiece shows us.

FYI: jumping onto a treadmill is a jarring and stressful experience, because of the abrupt changes in sideways and forward velocity. In Half-Life, and in real life, you’re likely to fall off the treadmill if you’re not a little smart about it. You do not want to fall off a treadmill! If you fall off one in real life, the floor will punish you painfully. If you fall off one in Half-Life, these barnacles do the same thing.

Think about pits again — imagine if there were no barnacles here, but instead there were pits on the ground that you’d fall into if you came off the treadmill. It would have the same effect, but the pits would have to take up a lot of floorspace. The barnacle performs the same function in an efficiently smaller space.

Before we look to the Half-Life sequels, here’s a scene from Blue Shift. One of the cutest aspects of the barnacle is how you can use them as a way of elevating yourself to a higher place, if you remember to kill them when you get to the top. Several setpieces from different Half-Life series entries use this. The above picture is my favorite example of an “elevator-barnacle.”

The player has to cross this gap, but they can’t jump the whole thing. They have to hurl themselves at the tongue of the barnacle, which will then hoist them up so they can dismount on the other end.

Why is this the best elevator-barnacle? I like that it involves a jump arc. Also, suppose we made the gap five times wider — the strategy of jumping toward the tongue would still work, provided the tongue was long enough. We could make the gap five hundred times wider if we wanted!

Now notice the pipe on the left. You actually don’t have to use the barnacle to get across this room — you can just walk across that pipe to get to the same place… although doing so is more roundabout and way more boring. Why did the designers add an extra boring solution to this puzzle? Well, it’s there in case the player (reasonably) assumes they just have to kill the barnacle, and does so… rendering themselves incapable of safely jumping the gap.

Some pretty cool things there in Half-Life 1 then. Now the sequels!

Half-Life 2

Barnacles can be hard to notice. Their body is hidden on the ceiling (nobody ever looks at the ceiling), and they have no movement for you to look out for. And their “danger zone” is so thin. Barnacles can consistently take you by surprise.

As you’d expect for a surprising enemy, there are lots of barnacle-infused horror scenes, but I want to show you the scene in the picture above, which is from Half-Life 2’s hovercraft sequence. Look at the thin lines below the bridge — they’re actually barnacle tongues!

Sorry if you have to squint at that screenshot, but that is actually part of the point of these particular barnacles. The player drives under these bridges with great speed, so faint lines in the distance don’t stay in the distance for long. This leads to a particularly jarring but funny situation where you can be leisurely speeding along, and suddenly you’re suspended in midair while beneath you your hovercraft pootles to a halt. It’s a stern warning to reckless drivers, and a novel piece of technology: things aren’t usually able to haul you out of your vehicle in driving games!

Here’s a great scene from Half-Life 2. The barnacle feature being played with here is “barnacles can be manipulated into moving things around for you.” But there’s quite a lot more to be said about this corridor.

The scene is a puzzle: you want to get to the exit. But to get through the room, you have to kill loads of barnacles. Shooting every barnacle individually is a tedious waste of ammo since you only have a pistol. However, there is an explosive barrel around. The “solution” is to carry the explosive barrel to a barnacle, let them pick it up, wait until it’s been pulled right up close to the ceiling, then shoot the barrel to blow it up. This takes out almost every barnacle in the room simultaneously with only two bullets. It’s a good puzzle. It gets you to be resourceful and imaginative. It’s made more fun by some satisfying animations and cool physics. But the beauty is in the polish.

There’s a specific game design tool on show in this scene: an “antepiece.” Let’s say you’re making a game containing a very challenging setpiece, and it requires awareness of some specific pieces of information. One thing game designers can do to help things along is to have a very brief encounter just before the challenging setpiece which clarifies some possibilities within the game. That’s what I call an antepiece (a portmanteau of “antechamber” and “setpiece”), and you can find some clear examples of them in Portal, Super Mario Bros., and The Mighty Jill Off. Antepieces are cool because they reward players for being attentive, and help them get through games quickly and fluently.

This is the exploding-barrel-barnacle puzzle’s antepiece. Before you enter the barnacle-filled room, you have to move down this hallway. Your path into the hallway is blocked by three [non-explosive] barrels. To get through you must move a barrel, either by pushing it or carrying it. Wherever you place it, it will roll down the slope in front of you and almost certainly get picked up by one of the two barnacles you can see at the end of the hall. This clarifies three important facts for the player: 1) you can move barrels 2) the floor here is slippery, and 3) barnacles will try to eat barrels. The two barnacles are easy to avoid, so there’s zero challenge in this small place. It contributes to the game purely by helping you with the confrontation around the corner.

One last clever aspect of the exploding-barrel-barnacle room is the second slope, just before the huge barnacle crowd. It makes things both easier and harder. Easier because you can just put the explosive barrel onto the slope and it’ll roll toward the barnacles on its own (just like what happened in the antepiece). Harder, because you’re at risk of sliding down the slope yourself!

Half-Life 2: Episode 1

This is a terrible picture of a room that explores a clever challenge in a minor way. You can see some dangerous barnacle tongues dangling down here, but not the vulnerable barnacle bodies. This shows you how a barnacle can hide. It’s the only game enemy I’ve ever seen hide behind a ceiling! Here’s a crude diagram that will hopefully help you understand the challenge:

There are a couple of ways of killing the hidden barnacles. I’m not so interested in them; what I want to talk about is the structure that’s built up around these barnacles.

This setup presents a problem for the designers: if us players were just walking along and we came up against a barnacle placed in this irritating way, it might feel unfair. We might wonder “How come the holes in the ceiling convenience my enemies so much?” “How come they get to use this separate upper area I have no access to?” So the designers took steps to make sure it felt fair.

You actually enter the lower floor by breaking through the ceiling yourself. In other words, you got into this room in the same way the barnacles are getting their tongues into it — so you have less right to feel annoyed at their advantage.

When you’ve completed this area, you go up a staircase and get to strut, triumphant and risk-free, through the upper room. You can gloat at the barnacles you killed, finish off the ones you missed, and pick up a supply crate or two that you find near them. Most importantly, you are finally given access to this location that was so annoyingly advantageous to your enemies.

Half-Life 2: Episode 2

This is a wordless piece of slapstick comedy. The feature on show here is “barnacles can take objects out of your hands.”

We see a machine that requires a cog. We go and get the cog. When we find the cog, we run excitedly back to the machine … with the cog blocking our view. While we’re away, a barnacle tongue has been scripted to descend over the machine. We’re not looking where we’re going, so it’s able to snatch our treasure out of our hands!

When an object is snatched away from you, it doesn’t hurt you. It’s not a “hostile” act — it’s just a little “mischievous.” And when showing off a “mischievous” feature, the best structure to set up around it is the structure of a joke.

A joke is more funny if you have some reason to expect the punchline. And an event in a game is more fair if you have some reason to expect it. Valve’s people know this: note that there’s another barnacle tongue dangling over the place where the cog is picked up. This implants in your head the idea that you should watch out for barnacles, so it doesn’t feel cheap when the new one comes along.

I should apologize for part of this — I know that a joke is definitely less funny when someone explains it to you. Let’s round this off!

My personal assessments

I’ve described about a quarter of the barnacle encounters that appear in the Half-Life games. They’re not all winners: designers sometimes get lazy and just bung a few barnacles into a corridor to make you tiptoe around them. Some exist purely to make a room look more scary or challenging than it really is. So barnacles can be mishandled. But they’re still really a cleverly-designed enemy.

Barnacles are fundamentally a great big bluff — they’re actually very unlikely to damage you. When you get caught on a tongue, you’re slowly drawn toward a pair of ravenously clamping, sharp jaws. But if you face toward them, you can take them out with a single whack of your crowbar (which never runs out of ammo). At heart, they’re ”toothless”… and yet, all players will try to avoid barnacle tongues, because those jaws are just terrifying.

Valve is successfully having its cake and eating it too with the barnacle. They’ve made an entity that you want to avoid, and can therefore be used to make tense, interesting challenges. But it’ll seldom waste anyone’s time, because it won’t usually kill them.

Barnacles are extremely simple: they’re just a line going through 3D space. They make no movements, no decisions. They’re sensitive to no contexts. There’s no timing to their behavior. Some videogame entities need to be put in specially-set-up environments, but you can always use a barnacle (so long as there’s a ceiling in the current environment).

Complex enemies are hard to introduce to players. Barnacles are effortless to introduce. Once you’ve been introduced to them, the level designers can combine them with other things, like the ichthyosaur, the explosive barrel, the spiral walkway, or the other enemies. It is in combinations of objects that the intellects of designers can shine, because combinations are allowed to be more complicated than enemy behaviors can be on their own.

I see the barnacle as a feat of engineering, rather than a feat of artistry. It’s not designed to be in one place, present one challenge, elicit one emotion. It’s a tool, to be used to construct any situation you like.

Valve is famous for its design processes. Everyone’s voice gets heard, and everybody happily works hard for one another’s benefit. It’s a little utopia. And in all these moments I’ve spoken about, I feel the harmony of that process comes through in the game: the barnacle was a tool made by one person, as a gift to a bunch of other people. And it provided great help to those people, in all their varied endeavors.

Related: #Destructoid Originals   #Game design   #Half-Life   #Valve  

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Wii U

CES: Pro Commander: Nyko’s cheaper Wii U Pro Controller

2:13 AM on 01.10.2013   //   Dale North

Have you been meaning to pick up a Wii U Pro Controller but chicken out every time you see the $50 price tag? Nyko’s Pro Commander does the same thing at $15 less, coming in at an MSRP of $34.99. I tried one out today at CES …   more

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These Were My 8 Favorite PS2 Games...

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Jan 9, 2013 5:00 PM 55,179

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These Were My 8 Favorite PS2 Games…

by Tim Rogers

On 7 January 2013, Sony announced they had stopped production of the PlayStation 2 computer entertainment system. Google says that more than 1.5 billion games were sold for the PlayStation 2 worldwide in its 12-plus-change years of success.

The PlayStation 2 was everywhere at a time when video games were not everywhere. Not everyone had a PlayStation 2, though most people who identified as game-players had one. And as DVD finally replaced VHS—I sold my parents on DVD by explaining you didn’t have to rewind them—the PlayStation 2 made a whole bunch of extra sales. Who can forget the “Compatible with PlayStation 2” stickers on every other DVD, back then?

Was the PlayStation 2 the most successful game console in history? Maybe it was.

Much as I’d like to say that the Super Nintendo Entertainment System was the best and most historically important, maybe it’s not—maybe the Nintendo Entertainment System is.

What the PlayStation 2 had, though, was market penetration and literally thousands of games. The PlayStation 2 allowed some awesome people to make some weird stuff. I worked at Sony in Tokyo back in the early PlayStation 2 era, for a couple of years. Part of my job was playing games as they came out. I tell you what: there was a lot of weird stuff on the PlayStation 2, and so much of it was brilliant. There was a puzzle-action game about working at a Yoshinoya beef bowl shop. I played a dozen for-girls dating sims I’d never have played if they weren’t free in a stack on my desk.

There was a lot of weird stuff on the PlayStation 2, and so much of it was brilliant.

This isn’t an obituary or a eulogy.

The PlayStation 2 isn’t “dead”. It’s just that they aren’t going to be making them anymore. This is hardly a sad occasion—look at how long Sony held on to the darn thing! They didn’t abandon it. Remember when Microsoft abandoned the Xbox in order to focus on Xbox 360? Look how Sony doesn’t abandon the PSP even today, with the Vita on the market. The biggest upcoming Japanese Vita games have PSP versions available on day one. That’s borderline insane, business-wise, though talk about customer service.

The PlayStation 2 is the child of the PlayStation, which was home to the beautifully scary-weirdest collection of brilliant games we’ll likely ever see on one non-iOS console (Jumping Flash! Suikoden II! Popolocrois! Breath of Fire IV! Tail of the Sun! Tail Concerto! Linda Cube! Devil Dice! No One Can Stop Mister Domino! Incredible Crisis!).

In time, PlayStation games will become The New Retro—it was not until the PlayStation 2 days that retro pixel art became the cool sort of thing to put on a T-shirt. In two years’ time, when Hot Topic shoppers gaze upon Megaman and weep, it will be Megaman Legends Megaman upon whom they gaze while weeping. It will be Jumping Flash—not Sonic the Hedgehog—that everyone pretends to have always loved. Well, maybe this is a fantasy of mine—I am in fact a bit of a polygonist. [Editor’s note: Watch it, Tim.] Though I like to think it was because Sony was so benevolent toward weird ideas that they ended up with so many great games on the PlayStation, and that it was because the PlayStation had so many quirky games that it attracted a mainstream-enough audience (Gran Turismo!) which allowed for the PlayStation 2. Say what you will of Sony’s next (and current) business moves; PlayStation and PlayStation 2 were a golden age for games—maybe the golden age for games. And on PlayStation 2, there are so many that no critic might ever know them all.

I come to you today with a list of my absolute favorite, most-adored PlayStation 2 games, and a few words about why each one of them is special to me.

I owned many dozens of PlayStation 2 games in my day; what follows are the ones that will stay on my Shelf Of Heroes for eternity, alongside The Best Films Of All-Time: “Apocalypto,” “Conan The Barbarian”, “The Fifth Element”, and “Heist” (which isn’t even on Blu-ray yet).

My failure to include legendary games such as Persona 3, Persona 4, Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, Katamari Damacy, or any number of other fantastic experiences is not meant in the least as a slight. I tried to pick games I consider overlooked or under-appreciated. Lack of Metal Gear Solid games, however, is in fact meant as a slight. Sorry! (Just kidding: Metal Gear Solid 3 is an all-time great.)

I will not mention Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, or Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, because those games, though brilliant, were mere prototypes of the experience I believe Rockstar will deliver in the future. The same general rule applies to the Devils May Cry (which, for the record, I love) the Gods of War (which, for the record, I hate), or the glorious Winning Eleven Pro Evolution Soccer games. I prize holisticism, completeness, and the spice of originality. These games are complete experiences.

Get thee to a GameStop, then, before used PlayStation 2 titles go the way of Dreamcast and Gamecube.

8. Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy

I don’t have too much to say about this game, other than that the Japanese box art is by frequent SNK contributor Shinkiro, and it is amazing. I lost my original Japanese copy in a freak accident, though it will never leave the shelf in my heart. Psi-Ops is a weird shooter, and you know what? As the next entry will illustrate, we need weird shooters. We absolutely need them.

Psi-Ops’ chief weirdness is your character’s telekinetic ability: you can push and throw boxes around. No, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed has absolutely nothing on this. Psi-Ops is relentlessly, stupidly smart and its action is full of more nifty nuances than a box full of nifty nuances. Aside from that, I don’t have too much to say—just that I’d have to shoot myself in the face with a potato gun if I didn’t mention it.

7. Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex

Developer cavia (that’s trademarked lowercase) is one of those game development tragedies. They were a weird sort of super-group cobbled together from frustrated developers of yearly series such as Ace Combat who, after striking out on their own with huge ambitions, ended up doing only licensed games. Sometimes, the mission was to make a Naruto or Dragon Ball Z game, which was easy enough. Other times, they had to turn a marathon runner (Naoko Takahashi) into a video game, somehow, anyhow. What happened more or less every god darn time was—well, they made something brilliant. Even Naoko Takahashi’s Let’s Run A Marathon! is a pretty original sort of quirky decision-heavy (fitness-themed) graphical adventure.

Their first original title—Drakengard—didn’t set the world on fire, so they hopped back over to sports games and licensed games, eventually developing the not-so-profitable Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex for the PlayStation 2 in 2004. Here’s the reason licensed games usually suck: Activision’s James Bond 007 games may be made with the Call of Duty engine, though why would Activision pay 20 full-time level designers competitive salaries for two years to make a game they’re going to owe royalties on? They want those guys over on something they own. Now, for a starting-out company like cavia, they have to prove themselves somehow. So they raged into Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, and no one noticed because it was “just a licensed game”.

American reviews summarized it as banal. It’s most certainly not: I love this game like a little brother. It’s a Japanese-made proto-third-person-shooter with platform elements (wall-jumping!). The guns pop. The camera movement is smart. The levels are spatially striking, dynamic with regard to elevation, and typically small in scale. Every gunfight is a frictive, snappy, tight little contest. It’s by no means The Perfect Video game, though it is crammed so deliciously with perfect 30-second bursts of level design that it warrants a re-study or two.

Win Back: Project Poseidon, a questionably late, cavia-developed sequel to Koei’s patently unloved Win Back for the Nintendo 64, feels very much like Stand Alone Complex (for excellent reasons), though Stand Alone Complex has neat platforming, some Yoko “Cowboy Bebop” Kanno music, and voice-acting by Akio “Solid Snake” Otsuka, so it wins out. Win Back: Project Poseidon, however, is available for $9.99 as a PS2 Classic on the PlayStation Store, whereas Stand Alone Complex most certainly is not).

6. Steambot Chronicles

Beneath any “wacky” summary—an open-world role-playing game where you customize a stomping, punching, shooting robot and can play a harmonica rhythm minigame on the city streets to grind for cash—you have what is easily the biggest exhibition of “heart” in the history of video games.

I glowed about this game in Edge magazine and gave the US marketers at Atlus a fantastic smorgasbord of review quotes for the box, though they ended up going with a Hardcore Gaming 101 quote: “If Hayao Miyazaki made a sandbox game”, the quote insisted, Steambot Chronicles would be it. I am not so sure about that—I would rather say, if Shigeru Miyamoto tried to make a Final Fantasy game, it would be Steambot Chronicles. It’s beautiful, huge-big, and weird.

Do you know anyone who loves Megaman Legends? If so, hug them. And then, know that Steambot Chronicles delivers a whole ladleful more of what that game promised. The sadness is that sequels or inspired-bys never came. The game is glitchy and rushed and is bursting at the seams. (For the love of god, it’s $5 used at GameStop.)

5. God Hand

I have been a big evangelist for this game, over the years. I said in my review that it’s “like writing a friendly letter by hand while wearing brass knuckles”.

It’s like using a chainsaw to cut your birthday cake.

It is true that, as I wrote, the first time you play it, God Hand makes about as much sense as the first time you wear ice skates. Anyone coming to the game today—it’s $9.99 as a PlayStation 2 classic on the PlayStation Store—might say they hate the way the camera moves, or the way the character moves. You might want the right stick to control the camera. However, the right stick is for your hyper-multi-directional dodge. You are going to need that dodge.

This is a game soaked in its milliseconds. It is brutally beautiful. It is brutalful.

Its story is flaming hideous nonsense, with a voice script reading like the work of a vintage typewriter dropped down a spiral staircase. Its visual themes exert passing familiarity—definitely not what we’d call “knowledge”—of several genres of film, such as “western” or “schlock”, and its music is incredibly peppy-weird stuff. Though Shinji Mikami’s next game, Vanquish, carried the banner of God Hand’s weird mechanical playfulness, nothing—nothing (nothing)—beats God Hand.

Like a wizard, it shows up precisely when it means to. There is no harder game—where, by “hard”, I mean tough and real.

4. Spartan: Total Warrior

Spartan: Total Warrior is the sharpest game in existence, bar slitting your wrist with a DVD shard. I once called it the twenty-fourth-best game of all-time, shunning even God Hand.

Spartan is action game perfection, with exactly as many tells and telegraphs and single-frame-precise parries and blocks as a game would need. It happens to be set under the umbrella theme of “Ancient Greece”, so its graphics are pleasantly full of glittery bronze armor, silver swords, and brown sandals. I was there, at the E3 where this game was announced: the first God of War was in the booth next door. Journalists were forced to make an unfortunate comparison between the two. Lacking God of War’s bombast, Spartan was eventually passed down the ladder and compared to Dynasty Warriors, of all things. It is not Dynasty Warriors. To paraphrase Bruce Lee, enemies in Dynasty Warriors don’t hit back. In Spartan, they’re always hitting back, flinging themselves at you with terrifying ferocity.

The folks at Creative Assembly—makers of the Total War series—unfortunately erred in the choice to be decent and respectable about the mythology theme. Oh, well. Spartan: Total Warrior, with its nail-sharp combat and strategic level design, is the online deathmatch e-sport game we deserve here in the 21st century. It was never meant to be: Creative Assembly made one more action game (the stumbly open-worlder Viking: Battle for Asgard) before heading back to strategy games, probably for good.

A sharper, snappier, stickier, crunchier action game you will not find, not among the Devils May Cry and the Gods of War or even the Bayonettas. (Just $12.99 used at GameStop! Also released for Xbox and Gamecube, though PS2 was the lead platform, and the game was designed with the PS2 controller in mind.)

3. Breath of Fire V: Dragon Quarter

Where others would place Shadow of the Colossus, I place Breath of Fire V: Dragon Quarter.

It’s a sort of work of art.

It’s dark, it’s depressing—and it has an opening voiced monologue in that same made-up language used in Shadow of the Colossus. Hey! What a coincidence. I love this game.

It’s a fantastic twist on the “escape from an undesirable place” theme of prior games like S.O.S., and later games like Dead Rising. The player is a police officer of sorts in a city deep underground. The common knowledge is that the human race had to head underground thousands of years ago, when the surface became uninhabitable. Some bad things happen. You meet a girl. She has fairy wings. You’re supposed to kill her. She’s too cute and frail, so you don’t, and your partner turns on you. A mysterious bounty hunter shows up. You escape. You, the girl, and the bounty hunter spend the rest of the time climbing—(rough rock) walls, (dilapidated metal) stairs, (rickety) elevators. What’s up there? Who knows. Your instruments for answering the big question are a rock-solid battle system (in which fights occur on in-game terrain using a sort of prototypical Valkyria Chronicles real-time movement scheme), the ability to start the whole game over whenever you want, and a blast of omnipotent dragon breath which slowly depletes a long, always-on-screen (always!) power meter. It’s perma-death when that meter runs out.

To top it off, the music (by Final Fantasy Tactics’ Hitoshi Sakimoto and Chrono Cross’s Yasunori Mitsuda) is incredible. The main criticism at the time of its release was that it was “too short”. Too short! It’s 10 hours long. An amazing 10 hours.

2. Raw Danger

Raw Danger, Irem’s nearly invisible sequel to Disaster Report, is one of the best video games ever made. Disaster Report gave players a somewhat boring tour through the life of a survivor post-massive-earthquake. Raw Danger is denser and weirder, taking place in a high-tech floating city on a futuristic man-made island. The opening scene sees the player as a waiter, pushing a service cart at a packed dedication ceremony in a fancy hotel ballroom. Oh, also, it’s Christmas. Hard rain is pelting on the roof above, and Christmas carols are jingling. When you head back to the kitchen after your first successful service, you just barely see an object fall over. Water is seeping in under the door.

This isn’t some graphic adventure, either—it’s a fully realized three-dimensional sandbox world—one from the same heartful public-lovers at Irem who brought you Steambot Chronicles.

Little things add up—help someone find a contact lens in the ballroom, make eyes with a politician’s daughter—and sooner or later the kitchen staff are up to their ankles. Things get terrifying with horrifying quickness, and sooner or later you know a dozen fictional peoples’ names and are squeezing your controller so hard it might crack.

Then, you finish the game, and learn that your decisions—this is, after all, a love story and a survival story hugging in a restless spiral—actually meant something.

Now you can play as someone else… and then someone else, and then someone else. And hey! There’s Previous You, doing what you previously did. It’s all the charms of the graphic adventure games people love, in an action-game world full of beautifully-sketched soap opera characters.

Released at a time when critics were just starting to seek for a “Citizen Kane” of games, unfortunately no one was looking for the “General Hospital Hugging Die Hard” of games, so Raw Danger fell into obscurity (also, it is ridden with performance-related bugs (still holding out hope for a PC version (that was a joke))). Whenever I tell people I want a “romantic comedy Grand Theft Auto”, I’m probably thinking about Raw Danger, and the rainy flu-sick four-day weekend of my life it once painlessly devoured.

Maybe now that Walking Dead is sweeping all those awards, we’ll see Raw Danger’s legacy avenged.

1. Jak II

Though my weird jerk heart burns to put some weird jerk selection at the top of my hall of fame, there is only Jak II. After Crash Bandicoot, Naughty Dog claimed their next series was going to be something truly special. Was it? I’m not sure. Jak and Daxter was the vanguard of many Sony-published, excellent cartoon-mascot games on the PlayStation 2—among Ratchet and Clank and Sly Cooper—though did it set the world on fire, even a little bit? Did any of those series become household names? I don’t reckon so. I reckon Angry Birds won that battle.

Jak and Daxter was a weird little Banjo-Kazooie-like, which was itself a Super Mario 64-like. Jak and Daxter was the video game equivalent of a Saturday morning cartoon. Jak II was a cartoon they’d maybe play on Saturday afternoon at around two-thirty.

Jak II is the PlayStation 2.

It’s got guns and cars and hover-bikes and a hovering skateboard that can grind up rails. It’s got a massive, living, breathing city. It’s got alternate French, German, Italian, Korean, and Japanese voice tracks. It’s got hours upon hours of voice acting. It’s got wacky writing. It’s got a huge plot. The hover skateboard feels amazing—like Tony Hawk shaking hands with Sonic the Hedgehog before hugging Super Mario. One can’t overestimate the involvement of Hirokazu Yasuhara, game and level designer of the original Sonic The Hedgehog games.

Again—this was a time when people were just starting to wonder what the “Citizen Kane” of games would look like. Here was the spark of a Saturday morning cartoon, captured sublimely, possessive of the size and scope and verve of a Final Fantasy and the virtuoso of a Super Mario, and though financially successful, oh, how it went critically un-screamed at.

With an enormous budget comes great gameplay variety, and so Jak II is home to some still-mind-rending action set-pieces.

You can get all three Jak games in one beautiful high-definition package for your PlayStation 3 for 20 darn dollars, man. Let me warn you, though: the game is crazy-harder than it looks like it’d be. You’ll be a superhero by the time you’re done. (And when you’re done, check out Jak 3, home of possibly The Greatest Plot Twist in games. And also superlative dune buggy physics.)

Special Bonus: I’m A Weird Jerk Section

As mentioned briefly, earlier, I am a weird jerk (thanks for not pointing it out), so I have some other games here on my PlayStation 2 shelf. I didn’t include them in the above list because they are not, strictly speaking, holistically perfectly recommendable works. I love so many things about them, though, so here we go. (Note: these are games that might not be available in English, feature defunct online play, or some similar sadness.)

Resident Evil: Outbreak

This was an experiment that didn’t work. It’s a weird little online Resident-Evil-themed action game that can best be described as a “sitact”, or a “SAG”—a Situational Action Game. Okay, that’s a terrible word. Though hey! It’s mine and I made it up and you can’t have it.

Outbreak sees players inhabiting the roles of various zombie-movie-stereotypical characters, and cooperating to complete small-scale objectives (“Get Out Of This Room”, for example). It’s heavy on cooperation and contextual voiceless chat. I mean, it’s you personally who are voiceless: your character can talk just fine. You’re playing with real people, and you need to communicate with them by delivering (at the push of a button) simple single-word phrases delivered in-character. It sounds stupidly simple, though trust me: I played this game at the height of its unpopularity, and its level design elevated the chat mechanic to transcendentally incredible. So—nope! Journey didn’t invent that feature. Sorry, Journey: you’re still cool (and a much better game than Resident Evil: Outbreak).

Berwick Saga

Do you scoff at people who say Final Fantasy Tactics is their favorite Final Fantasy game? Do you agree with people who say Fire Emblem is a better game? Have you ever maybe slightly disliked a person, found out they prefer Fire Emblem, and then wished you had a reason not to like Fire Emblem anymore? First of all, you may be a sociopath. Second of all: hey! Berwick Saga!

Shouzou Kaga, original creator of Fire Emblem, left Nintendo to form his own studio, Tirnanog, who released the really hard Tear Ring Saga for PlayStation in 2001. Berwick Saga, Tear Ring Saga’s sequel, arrived in 2005, and I required a parking lot full of ambulances (metaphor) to recover from what then ensued.

I was a real adult with a job and a significant other and a band and a life, and here was a strategy game ripping my heart out and feeding it to me eight hours a day for two solid weeks. In Berwick Saga, there is only God Mode, by which I mean the computer is God, and not you. It’s probably the best tactical strategy RPG I have ever had the pleasure of playing.

It is like, what if Advance Wars were a serial killer? That’s this.

Next time someone says Final Fantasy Tactics is “like chess”, scoff at them and say, “More like Connect Four—you haven’t played Berwick Saga you dumb noob.” Then put on your sunglasses and dolphin-flop out the nearest thirty-story window.

Armodyne

Armodyne is a strategy RPG by the developer of Culdcept, with art by the author of the manga “Gantz”!

How can you not love that?

Well, it’s possible that you don’t know or care who those people are, and I’m with you on that. It also has music by Yasunori Mitsuda, and is one of the best strategy RPGs I have ever played (and I have played them all (literally)). Lots of what the world loved in XCOM: Enemy Unknown was flopping around fish-gasping on dry land here in Armodyne.

It’s a mega-mapped turn-based strategy game with high unit numbers and pseudo-real-time flourishes. To wit: you give a unit medium-term orders, instead of short-term. What I mean is, you tell a unit where you would like it to eventually be. You then assign it an adverb from a short list (“cautiously”, “fearlessly”, et cetera), and it instantly moves as far as it is able. It will stay that course over multiple turns, altering its path with attention to its adverb to account for enemy movement (“cautiously” = “avoid the enemy”, et cetera). At each new turn, you can tweak individual units’ orders, or simply hit “next”.

If variety is the spice of life, minor borderline predictable randomness is the spice of heck yes. This game could have been an arena sport. It’s got some strapped-on dating-sim-like neat systems, too: assign pilots fitness or training regimens in the barracks to level up their skills in battle. And you know what?:

I sort of like Yasunori Mitsuda’s phoned-in soundtracks more than some of his passionate ones.

Drakengard 2

I am a weeping widow at the grave of cavia, whose Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex and Win Back: Project Poseidon I have already recommended you. Well, here’s the sequel to Drakengard, their would-be Dynasty Warriors With Panzer Dragoon Elements. The first was a weird game with a weird plot, and the sequel is a soupy chaos of aspiring art-fragments. It is, however, faster than Drakengard, and brutally harder. It has a sweet parry mechanic, the spears feel nice, and its set-pieces brought me back to my childhood spent watching my brother throw GI Joes at the Millennium Falcon.

It’s atmospheric and dynamic—you can jump on a dragon, shoot guys from the air, and then jump off!—and it has, as mentioned above, a sweet parry mechanic.

Spoiler: if I ever make an Xbox 360 Obituary Article, cavia’s Bullet Witch and Nier (Drakengard 2’s pseudo-sequel) will probably be up at the top of the list.

Wild Arms V

Sometimes I like dumb RPGs, and none are dumber than Wild Arms V. Its battle system, however, is neat—it’s more or less Final Fantasy X, on hexagons, with location-specific attacks and movement of characters. It’s Wild Arms IV’s system, grown into its own. The dungeons have little puzzles. The characters are cute and say cute things. It’s a Saturday morning cartoon sort of game, and it good-touches the brain during the boss battles. I’m not trying to pass it off as literature, not by a longshot, though it’s a sweetly-nice little software-gesture, one that people who shrieked about Xenoblade might have a heck of a weekend with, if they were so inclined.

Tim rogers is someone you can follow on Twitter. You can also follow his game studio Action Button Entertainment, here. Check out insert credit dot com for a wacky weekly video game-related game-show-like podcast starring him and his friends from Gamasutra.

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The PA Report - The time she missed: how a circus shooting “mistake” led to a horror game without violence

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Photo Credit / Dene Waring

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The time she missed: how a circus shooting “mistake” led to a horror game without violence

Sophie Prell / Fri, Jan 11, 2013

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Dene Waring spent his childhood in a New Zealand circus troupe. Now, he lives at the edge of an Australian rainforest. From this dramatic locale, he works to finish his first video game, Huntsman: The Orphanage, a horror game without blood, gore, or guns.

Huntsman is a first-person title that has you rescuing orphans who have been trapped in an alternate dimension by a supernatural entity known as the Huntsman. The children are portrayed by real-life actors, and can only be seen through the screen on your cell phone. You can see a brief game play demo below:

Jungle creatures cawed in the background as we discussed the game, and how Waring’s family past, as well as New Zealand culture, have influenced its design.

Born into violence

You mentioned to me in the emails we sent setting this interview up your personal history with violence. It sounded really… I don’t even know how to describe it. Can you talk about your personal history with violence?

I was born into and spent my early childhood through to my mid-to-late teens in sideshows and then the circus.

Of all things, my father came up with the idea of a sharpshooting act as a circus act that was gonna make us some real money, and it was very successful. It was a very polished and highly-skilled act. It took a couple years of solid practice.

My mother would stand on another guy’s feet when he’s lying on his back with his legs straight in the air, and shoot into a heart box that my father would wear while he’s standing on a revolving pedestal. She would fire shots into that heart box, which would spin him faster and faster on his pedestal because of the off-center position of the heart box.

Heart box?

It was a square box about two inches deep with no front face. It was made of heavy steel plate. The box is strapped onto your chest and positioned over your heart, and bullets are fired into that small steel box. It was the size of a packet of cigarettes.

On the inside back face of that – so when you look inside the box – it had a heavy-duty, steel knife blade running vertically down the middle of the box. We would place a small birthday candle in the bottom of the box on each side of that blade and light them, and my father would stand onto a free-wheel pedestal holding onto two handles to stop himself from being knocked over by the impact of the bullets.

My mother would stand on the feet of another acrobat who was lying upside down on the floor with his legs straight up in the air. She would climb up and stand on his feet, what we call a foot-to-foot. She would have her 15-shot Ruger semi-automatic .22 caliber rifle. She would fire the first shot into the box, which would split the bullet in half on the knife blade. Each half of the bullet would fly sideways, and nip the wick off the birthday candles, and extinguish their flames. That was how the public and audience could see that the first shot went into the heart box, because it split the two candles in half.

That first shot would, because it’s off-center on a human body, spin my father around on his pedestal and it would slowly almost come to a stop when he was facing the rifle again. A second shot would go in, and he would pick up a little more speed and come back around to the front again, and a third shot would go in and he’d pick up a little more speed, and the fourth, and fifth, and sixth, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen… he would spin faster and faster and faster, and a bullet had to go into that box each time he spun around and was face-on to the rifle again.

As he picks up speed, he’s only facing the rifle for a small fraction of a second. The last five or six shots are practically at semi-automatic speed, so the precision and judgment that would be required to know when to squeeze that trigger was quite exceptional. It was our show-stopper, our grand finale to the half-hour show. It was a show-stopper, it really was. We had been performing it for some years, it had taken 18 months of practice before it was even presented to the public.

After several years, when I was 11, one particular performance, it was a national-scale performance at a very large show, we were on for maybe a 10-day contract and around day six or seven, my mother missed a shot into the heart box and my father was shot in the chest. He managed to get backstage, my mother and I took our bows and rushed backstage to see what was going on. When I came around the back of our big steel backdrop which catches the bullets so they don’t go astray, there he was on the floor, propped up against that wall. Our satin, sort of Gypsy blouse shirts we wore, very loose and flowing, it was filled out like a pouch with very thick, dark brown blood that was pumping straight out of his chest.

He was put on the back of a circus truck and driven to a hospital because the ambulances couldn’t get through the crowds at this big, national show. They operated on him and removed a bullet that stopped one millimeter, actually less than that, of the wall of his heart. He was a very barrel-chested, athletic man. He was only 5’2” but he was built like a brick shithouse, built like a barrel, and the unusual depth of his chest, from years of trapeze work and so on actually saved his life. On any normal build person the bullet would have been inside his heart and that would’ve been the end of it.

The truth of the matter is my father was a very violent man, and an alcoholic. And he was an abusive guy. Many, many years later, my mother is still alive at 82, and now that he’s passed away several years ago, she can actually talk, and she says it wasn’t an accident.

Oh, jeez.

It was the only way out of a violent relationship, and she took a gamble. It was a very extreme way out of a very intense situation. It was a pressure cooker; we were living in a 1931 schoolbus, only 16-feet long and 7-feet wide, and we were living that way for a decade. So a very intense environment. I guess she took the path that was open to her.

So guns as a solution, violence as solution, I’ve had some perspective and plenty of time now to be able to consider the perspectives. And it’s… I have six kids myself, two of them are still at home, they’re 17 and 12, they love their video games. They play them all the time. When I look over their shoulders, and I look at the game mechanics and the mode of operation, what many games seem to fall back on… I look at them and I go, ‘It just seems like it’s the same old.’ Don’t get me wrong, I’m not out there crusading. I’m not advocating burning games, which is a topical subject at the moment, but I do keep seeing the same old mechanic.

It just seems there aren’t many alternatives. There seems to be basically one way: gore, violence, ultra-violence, and shooting. Surely there must be alternatives. And if there aren’t alternatives, why not make one?

This game is a personal experiment to see how we can get those creepy feelings without using violence.

Is that why you went the route of using real actors and real video?

That one is actually more a case of me trying to work out a methodology that was going to enable me to pull the project off. The project started with zero funding and no other people involved apart from my own family.

At that point I thought, to create the range of characters that I want in this game, in this story… to have a dozen orphans, a caretaker, a cook and so on, that’s a lot of CG. And then I see bad CG characters and I’ve lost my immersion. I don’t feel immersed anymore because I’m so conscious of the clunky graphics. Therefore they need to be bloody good… like, really world-class, or don’t go there. So I had a dilemma, because I didn’t have funds, I didn’t have CG experience, I didn’t have a team to build the game.

I thought, ‘Well, I can shoot video. I can edit video, I can use after-effects, maybe the way to do this is to use live actors, and find a method to integrate them into the environment which I could build in 3D, and I’d have live actors in a 3D environment, but not just copy and pasted on top. They’re from another dimension; thread of time and space, I like to say. You can only see them through your phone’s screen. You can’t see them standing in the environment.

These orphans, that are lost, they’re focusing, they’re using all their energy to communicate with you. They’re struggling through this veil of time and space to try and reach you, to plead for your help.

That plot device enables me to use video in a CG environment and hopefully have it add to the story rather than detract. So there were pragmatic reasons, and then I started thinking about it, and I thought, ‘You know what? This actually helps the whole storyline. There’s a logic that allows this to happen in the story.’

So if they’re trapped in another dimension and not of this plane anymore, it would make sense… You know, when you place actors into a scene and surround them with CG, there’s something off about it. It seems like you’ve turned that into your advantage?

There’s a very pioneering attitude in New Zealand. Being that most of the colonists came from England… once you’re dumped on the shores of New Zealand as one of the first settlers, there’s no ‘Gee, I forgot the milk’ and ducking back to the corner shop. You want supplies, you’re gonna have to wait maybe a couple years, and they might never come. So everybody got used to making do, and looking at the resources they have, and seeing how they could think laterally to exploit those resources to create some tool, function, or solution to a problem.

We call it ‘Number 8 fencing wire,’ ‘A bit of Number 8.’ When you say in New Zealand, ‘That’s a Number 8 solution’ or ‘a Number 8 fencing wire solution,’ that’s a reference to 8-gauge fencing wire, which farmers used for just about everything. When their tractor falls apart, you know, the back axle falls off when they go over a pot hole, they’ll wire it back on with Number 8 fencing wire.

It’s become the in-joke in our country that you can fix anything with a bit of fencing wire, you just have to sit down and look at it and think.

When I sat there going, ‘I don’t have the resources to be able to create 13 totally convincing, beautifully-animated human beings in a first attempt indie game, so I have to think about how I’m gonna do this.’ That’s where the video solution came out, and then it was, as you said, a matter of turning it around to being an advantage instead of a disadvantage.

It’s a cultural approach. Instead of saying, ‘I must raise money so I can hire the best CG artists in the world,’ you just go, ‘What can I do with what I’ve got?’

Using Number 8 fencing wire.

Yeah! Yeah, basically.

How has the reaction been from Greenlight?

That was the test, the litmus test, for us. We woke up one day and checked our Greenlight and Valve was publishing the placement figures. All of a sudden there was a little stat box and it showed us sitting at 32 out of 860 games at that time. You could’ve knocked me over with a feather. Thirty-two? I thought we’d be 860, 832, 800. We didn’t think this concept would get to where it is.

They all know there’s no guns, there’s no blood, there’s no violence, there’s no corpses, there’s no guts, there’s no gore. And yet, they still want to see what the game’s gonna be like when it comes out, so that spurs us on.

You can check out the Huntsman’s Greenlight page and vote for the game’s inclusion on Steam. The images in this story were scanned from Waring’s personal collection, and he also shared a newspaper clipping describing the shooting incident.

Waring’s personal scan of the newspaper clipping describing the shooting

penny-arcade.com

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The one thing, as gamers, that we all want… (self.gaming)

…more than anything, is time.

Money? Sure, that’d be great.

Gifts of games? Awesome.

A girlfriend? Hell yeah.

We get home from our 9-5 job, or from classes at college; household chores are done, bills are paid, dinner is prepared, and finally, FINALLY, our time has come. We finally have a chance to sit down and turn on our battlestation, hear that wonderful little “boo-beep!” noise when our 360 lights up, or the melodious tones of the PS3’s cross media bar, and our hearts that have grown cold from the harsh reality outside begin to warm up just a tad.

An hour goes by, maybe two, but then you look at that clock and realize you have to sleep, and get ready for the next day. There’s that feeling again - like you’ve been robbed of your time. How is it possible that it’s already 11:00 PM? It just doesn’t feel right, or fair. It’s time to start that endless cycle all over again.

Some of us have four hours a day, and the chronological freedom to work on that Steam library that keeps growing and growing. Some of us have only twenty minutes to lose ourselves in the universe of that $5 bargain bin game that’s four years old, because we had just enough left over from our last paycheck. It’s wonderful, either way.

So no matter how much time you have…

…appreciate it.

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