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Bioshock Infinite: Headshots im Luftschloss

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Dass ein profilierter Titel wie Bioshock Infinite Meinungen teilt wie Noah das Meer, ist eigentlich nicht überraschend. Nach der ersten Welle der Begeisterung, versteht sich, denn man muss ja immer noch froh sein, wenn Spiele zur Inspiration mal nicht in den Fundus billiger Science-Fiction, Fantasy und Actionfilme greifen, sondern in Kunst, Geschichte und Kunstgeschichte. Aber dann, ach, bemerkt man die vielen Risse in der Fassade der schönen, alten Welt und von allen Seiten hagelt es Kritik.

Interessant ist diesem Fall aber, worüber die Kritiker streiten, denn anstatt sich seinem schwachen Metakommentar zu widmen, dreht sich die Diskussion derzeit vor allem um die in Infinite marginalisierten Thematiken von Gewalt, Rassismus, Patriotismus und Evangelismus, vor allem aber um die Frage warum ein Spiel mit so schlauen Ansätzen unbedingt in die Shootergussform gepresst werden muss.

Aber langsam. Losgetreten haben die Kontroverse vor allem Kirk Hamilton, Chris Plante und Michael Abbott, für die Infinites Überfluss an Blut und Enthauptungen im Konflikt mit seiner kopflastigen Narrative steht. Jim Sterling sieht das anders: In Infinite gehe es nunmal um Gewalt, Booker sei ein Mann der Gewalt und die reichliche Ausübung der selben sei nur passend. Jeff Kunzler vermutet hinter der Bitte um weniger exzessives Blutvergießen gleich den Wunsch, das rassistische Luftschloss Columbia unversehrt lassen zu dürfen.

Diese Gegenpositionen missverstehen aber, dass es der ursprünglichen Kritik nie um völlig pazifistische Gewaltfreiheit ging, sondern um deren Behandlung auf thematischer Ebene, oder besser, das Fehlen dieser Reflektion. In Infinite schießt man auf Leute. Ständig. Man schießt auf Systemerhalter ebenso wie auf Revolutionäre, zerfetzt Gesichter und lässt Köpfe durch Stromschläge platzen. Weder Aufteilung noch Ausmaß dieses Blutbads dient aber irgendeiner Botschaft, es wird lediglich zu unserem Gaudium eingestreut.

Zwar spielt Bioshock Infinite in einer Ära rassistischer Gewalt, gegenüber deren realen Gräueltaten diese fiktive Darstellung noch untertrieben sein mag, dennoch wird man diesen geschichtlichen Extremen kaum gerecht, indem man die eigene Mechanik ebenfalls zum Massaker macht. So absurd es klingen mag, exzessive Gewalt ist nicht der beste Weg um exzessive Gewalt darzustellen. Sie verbraucht sich selbst, wird durch ständige Wiederholung nicht zunehmend absurder und schockierender, sondern immer normaler.

Exzessive Gewalt ist nicht der beste Weg um exzessive Gewalt darzustellen.

Am bewegendsten sind Leid und Tod je persönlicher und einmaliger sie dargestellt werden, nicht je blutiger und brutaler. Man betrachte zu diesem Thema etwa Telltales fantastisches The Walking Dead: Im Verlauf des Zombieadventures tötet Protagonist Lee nicht nur Untote, sondern, je nach Spielerentscheidung, auch einige der wenigen Überlebenden. Diese Szenen zeichnen sich nicht durch Häufigkeit oder komplexe Mechaniken aus. Ganz im Gegenteil: Gerade weil diese Momente so selten sind, die Figuren so bekannt und die Mechanik so reduziert, bleibt die schwierige Entscheidung im Gedächtnis und wird zum verdammenden Urteil: Du hast getötet.

Störender als die überzogene Gewaltdarstellung in Infinites immer gleichen Schusswechseln, ist aber, dass sie nicht der Erzählung dienen, sondern umgekehrt. Die Gefechte sind mechanischer Selbstzweck, Beschäftigungstherapie für Spieler, deren Interesse wohl mit regelmäßigen Adrenalinschüben am Leben gehalten werden muss. Der Wunsch das eigene Publikum zu packen und zu unterhalten ist in diesem Medium verständlich, wenn er auch nicht selbstverständlich sein sollte.

Störender als die überzogene Gewaltdarstellung in Infinites Schusswechseln ist aber, dass sie nicht der Erzählung dienen, sondern umgekehrt.

Das schließt aber nicht aus, die Mechanik auf sinnvolle Weise mit der Narration zu verknüpfen, und auf dieser Ebene versagt Infinite völlig. Das Spiel orientiert seine Frontlinien an keinem der Interessenskonflikte in Columbia, sondern breitet sein Gemetzel gleichmacherisch über sämtliche Fraktionen aus, verwirft angeschnittene Thematiken um sich völlig der verworrenen Quantenmär um die Herrscherfamilie zu widmen. Letztlich geht es in dem Titel weder um Gewalt, noch um Politik oder Religion, sondern nur um Booker DeWitt. Es ist die Tragödie eines einzelnen Mannes.

Dabei konnte die Serie das doch schon besser. Wo Columbia nur als Fototapete für einen interdimensionalen Familienstreit herhält, war im ersten Bioshock noch der Schauplatz die eigentliche Hauptfigur. Die Unterwasserstadt Rapture ist beim Auftritt des Spielers bereits verkommen, verwüstet, kaputt. Warum? Weil die ihr grundlegende Ideologie der völligen Deregulierung, der absoluten persönlichen Freiheit auf Kosten der Gemeinschaft, immer scheitern muss. Der Spieler selbst mustert die präsentierten, verqueren Ideale nicht nur unbeteiligt, sondern passt sich ihnen durch Plasmidzauberei an, erkauft sich Macht auf Kosten seiner Menschlichkeit.

Allein in dieser Prämisse steckt mehr politischer Kommentar als in ganz Infinite, das ein System gewaltsamer Unterdrückung auf eine Ebene mit dem Umsturz desselben stellt, und DeWitt, als Avatar des aufgeklärten Spielers, gleich über beide. Er genießt Zauberei ohne Nebenwirkungen, wird im Verlauf seiner Reise unabhängig von moralischem Wachstum, Verfall oder Stagnation immer mächtiger. Er kommt auch nicht in die Verlegenheit, sich zu dargestellten Problematiken äußern zu müssen: Weil beide Seiten in ihm den Feind sehen, muss er sich für keine entscheiden, steht damit weder für Unterdrückung und Rassismus noch für Freiheit und Gleichheit.

Warum ist das Schießen immer noch die konkurrenz- und alternativlose Mechanik, der sich selbst tiefgründige Historiendramen unterordnen müssen?

Mehr als einen feigen Aufruf zu politischem Zentrismus und Passivität kann man daraus kaum lesen. Auch das gelingt nur, wenn man den fatalistische Aspekt des dargestellten Multiversums ignoriert, nach dem ohnehin jede denkbare Version dieses Klassenkampfes existieren muss. Manche scheiterten, scheitern, werden scheitern. Andere hatten Erfolg, haben Erfolg, werden Erfolg haben.

Vielleicht ist es Bioshock Infinites größter Quantentriumph, dass das Spiel einerseits voller Gewalt ist und doch zu dem Thema eigentlich nichts zu sagen hat. Es füllt die Lücken seiner Geschichte mit Feuergefechten, um massentauglich und unterhaltsam zu bleiben, aber diese unterstützen nicht etwa die Narrative, sondern müssen im Gegenteil von ihr gerechtfertigt werden, mit einem geschichtlichen Hintergrund, den das Spiel nicht weiter beleuchten möchte und einer Hauptfigur, die man auch einfacher als Brutalo charakterisieren hätte können.

Auch wenn es dieses mal keine Absicht gewesen sein mag, wirft Bioshock damit erneut Fragen über unser Medium auf: Warum immer nur Shooter? Warum ist das Schießen immer noch die konkurrenz- und alternativlose Mechanik, der sich selbst tiefgründige Historiendramen unterordnen müssen? Warum muss man denn jedes Problem mit der Waffe im Anschlag betrachten? Geht es nicht auch anders, geht es nicht auch besser, geht da nicht noch mehr?

Genau um dieses Mehr geht es bei der Kritik an Bioshock Infinite. Es ist nicht etwa so, dass alle Welt auf einmal Actiontitel hasst - aber ein so feingeistiges, hochtrabendes Konzept wie das von Bioshock Infinite hätte Potential zu so viel mehr als einer weiteren unreflektierten Machtfantasie geboten.

Man versprach uns die lebendige Karikatur des politischen Zeitgeistes einer interessanten Epoche bei gleichzeitiger Auseinandersetzung mit deren grundlegenden Problematiken. Was ist es stattdessen geworden? Nur ein Shooter. So klingt das verdammende Urteil verfehlter Erwartungen.

Verfasst von Joe Köller am 19. April 2013 - 9:28

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Unload your weapons! - Wege aus der Shooter-Krise

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Unload your weapons! - Wege aus der Shooter-Krise

Klick, päng, tot: Es ist die beliebteste und massentauglichste Spielmechanik der Gegenwart, doch irgendwie riecht der Shooter schon ein bisschen nach alten Socken. Jan Bojaryn hat für die letzte WASD einen wunderbaren Text zum Thema verfasst, doch mir geht es diesmal weniger um Grundlegendes als vielmehr schlicht pragmatisch Spielmechanisches. In Zeiten, in denen jedes Archäologenabenteuer hundertfache Schusswechsel bieten muss und in den narrativ spannendsten Luftschlössern schnöde Headshots der Story im Wege stehen, könnte man auch ganz abseits von Fragen ethischer oder moralischer Natur auch schlicht mit Recht von einer Übersättigung sprechen. Muss das sein - oder kauern sich die Gamesdesigner nur aus purer Angst im vermeintlich kommerziell sicheren Hafen der Shooter-Massenbegeisterung zusammen?

Ein wenig Mut wäre angebracht, vor allem, weil im Gefolge der Diskussionen um Infinite, Tomb Raider und Dead Space auch immer mehr Spielern auffällt, dass das obligatorische Gegnertotklicken ein wenig schal geworden ist. Ein paar Gedanken darüber, wie sich First- und Third-Person-Shooter von ihren namensgebenden Wurzeln entfernen und dabei neu erfinden könnten.

These 1: Weniger ist mehr.

Hunderte Gegner per Mausklick ins digitale Nirwana zu befördern, mag verlässlich die ohnedies immer weiter schrumpfende Spieldauer anfüllen, doch irgendwie geht angesichts immer anspruchsvoller oder realistischer werdender Stories der Spagat zwischen Massenmord und Handlung immer weiter auseinander. Wie wäre es, wenn statt hunderter Morde gesichtsloser Henchmen der verbissene Kampf mit einigen wenigen, aber dafür umso härteren Gegnern stehen würde?

Volker Bonackers Tomb Raider würde von einer derartigen Reduktion ebenso profitieren wie meine eigene Vision eines vom Shooterfließband abkehrenden Dead Space 3 - dann klappt’s auch mit der ludonarrativen Dissonanz.

These 2: Alternativen anbieten.

Es gibt, mit Karl May gesprochen, eine Erotik des Anschleichens, und eigentlich ist nicht einzusehen, dass prinzipiell immer die Waffen sprechen müssen - mit Realismus hat das übrigens ja auch nix zu tun. Sich verstecken, weglaufen, die Feinde austricksen, KO schlagen, weglocken, in Fallen scheuchen, sie gegeneinander aufhetzen, von hinten überfallen, ihnen Angst machen, sie in die Flucht schlagen, sie umgehen, die Umgebung gegen sie einsetzen - Himmel, der Fan jedes noch so tumben Actionfilms könnte den meisten Gamedesignern in Sachen kreative Gegnerbeseitigung mehr Tipps geben als selbst in ansonsten innovativen Spielen zum Einsatz kommen.

Klar: Abknallen ist einfacher zu programmieren - und weil sich die Branche in den letzten Jahren mit der Besessenheit religiöser Fanatiker an den Fetisch Fotorealismus geklammert hat, mussten Kleinigkeiten wie AI leider ein paar Runden aussetzen. Jetzt wär’s an der Zeit, halbwegs intelligente Gegner zu programmieren und dafür, sagen wir, dem Spieler pro Feind zur Abwechslung mal nur mehr 0,3 Patronen Munition zu geben. Deal with it.

These 3: Neue Werkzeuge ausprobieren.

AK-47, Desert Eagle, Uzi, H&K MP5 - dass ich als Pazifist ein gutes Dutzend moderne und historische Schusswaffen beim Namen nennen und sie sogar optisch identifizieren kann, sollte uns vielleicht zu denken geben. Fakt ist, dass die Bleispritzen aller Marken auch abgesehen von ihrer realen Verwerflichkeit inzwischen kaum Originalitätspreise gewinnen. Wie wärs mit ganz anderen Werkzeugen? Das muss nicht mal so pazifistisch sein: Dass die schlichte Einführung von Pfeil und Bogen in verschiedenen Titeln für solche Begeisterungsstürme gesorgt hat, zeigt, wie fade reguläre Schusswaffen geworden sind.

Wie wärs mit realistischen Schleudern? Wie wärs mit einem Spiel, das uns zum Lasso-Meister macht? Wie wärs mit gutem Nahkampf - oder muss da Zeno Clash 2 wieder alles selber machen? Habt ihr gewusst, dass das Yoyo ursprünglich eine Waffe war?

Dabei rede ich noch gar nicht von dem, was sonst so möglich wäre. Gravity-Gun, Portalkanonen, Magie, eine Waffe, die die Zeit manipuliert - und Crysis 3 bietet uns als “Innovation” ein Maschinengewehr, das “500 Schuss pro Sekunde” abfeuert. Seufz.

These 4: Andere Architekturen nutzen.

Die flachen Schlauchlevels in erdigem Braun, die gefühlt in jedem einzelnen Call of Honor: Medal of Black Ops seit den späten Neunzigern vorkommen, sind nicht nur optisch und spielerisch alle gleich - Stichwort: Whac-a-Mole in Bagdad -, sie werden auch von den gleichen Großraumbürobewohnern gestaltet, die niemals Stiegen steigen und ihre malerischen Dritte-Welt-Locations von Spiel zu Spiel auf Karopapier durchpausen.

Warum? Weil mit dem Siegeszug der Konsolen-FPS leider der Blick nach oben oder unten aus der Mode gekommen ist. So läuft man in den meisten “modernen” Shootern mit der Genickstarre jener Hundehalskegel herum, die verhindern sollen, dass sich Lumpi die Ohren wundkratzt. Zum Glück könnte mit neuer Hardware wie dem Oculus Rift jener “natürliche” Blickwinkel ins Spiel zurückkehren, den - pssst! - Keyboard-und-Maus-Spieler seit jeher als die natürlichste Sache der Welt ansehen. Wie wärs mit einem Spiel, in dem man konstant nach oben klettert - oder aber in eine endlose Unterwelt absteigt? Wie wärs mit einem Bioshock Infinite, das tatsächlich etwas aus seinem Setting macht?

These 5: Nicht alles wollen.

Ein Spiel, auch ein großes, muss nicht alles können, auch wenn die angstschwitzenden Heinis aus der PR-Abteilung behaupten, dass zwecks Zielgruppenmaximierung vielleicht doch noch ein Open-World-Pflichtteil samt Rollenspiel-Wurmfortsatz, Inventory-Management und Multiplayerkomponente mit rein muss.

Statt also einen grundsoliden id-Software-Shooter wie RAGE mit jedem Unsinn zuzukleistern, statt Tomb Raider ein Item- und RPG-System zu verpassen, das so nötig ist wie ein zusätzliches Nasenloch, statt Dead Space ein nicht funktionierendes Coversystem und Bioshock Infinite einen halbherzigen Stealth-Appendix und ein kaputtes Diebstahlssystem zu verpassen, könnte man das alles sein lassen und darauf vertrauen, dass die Spieler all diese netten Sachen nicht als Selbstzweck lieben, sondern weil sie in anderen Spielen relevant und essentiell waren.

Ich bin gerne zuversichtlich: Spiele sind ein innovatives Medium. Wahrscheinlich ist es gut, dass sich die Diskussion um die Sinnhaftigkeit des Shooter-Erbes ausgerechnet an grundsätzlich gelungenen Spielen wie Tomb Raider, Infinite oder Dead Space entzündet - und auch hier nicht als Shitstorm, sondern als Hinterfragen von zu Konventionen erstarrten vermeintlichen Selbstverständlichkeiten. Das heißt natürlich nicht, dass der First- oder Third-Person-Shooter, wie wir ihn kennen, verschwinden wird - doch den Ehrenplatz als Industrieparadigma sollte er langsam, aber sicher räumen.

Die neuen Antworten, sie werden kommen - und es würde mich wundern, wenn nicht genau jetzt so mancher innovative Gamesentwickler zu ähnlichen Schlüssen kommt wie ich. Oder, was ich fest annehme, zu noch besseren. Tschüs, Shooter! Du hattest einen guten Lauf.

Zeit für etwas Neues.

Verfasst von Rainer Sigl am 15. April 2013 - 16:33

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bioshock infinite

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a review of a videogame developed by Irrational Games and published by 2K Games
for PC, the microsoft xbox 360 computer entertainment machine and the sony playstation 3 computer entertainment system
text by tim rogers

2 stars

Bottom line: is “the best game of all-time … and the worst game of all-time, inserted into opposite ends of a transdimensional nuclear supercollider.”

~if you would like to view a video of me reading this review — with question-and-answer periods at the beginning and end, please click here (audio-only version forthcoming)~

A Steam banner advertisement for Bioshock Infinite declares:

“10 out of 10. Unforgettable.” –Game Informer

This tells me one thing: the world’s largest videogame retail establishment owns a magazine, and that magazine cannot forget about Bioshock Infinite.

This tells me that money and mouths crouch silently in wait for this game’s release. It is a great experiment, wrapped in mainstream appeal, wrapped in artistic appeal, wrapped in mainstream appeal — just a never-ending (infinite) sometimes-downward, sometimes-upward, cyclone-hugging twisting torpedo forged by the unholy fusion of casual (curious non-gamers who find the sophisticated veneer attracting) and hardcore (shooting fans (and art appreciateurs)).

Bioshock Infinite is The Best Game Ever and The Worst Game Ever, inserted into opposite ends of a transdimensional nuclear supercollider.

Before I can (indirectly, weirdly) address the above nebulous statement, however, I will need to talk about the box art for around four thousand words:
Chapter One: Let’s talk about the box art.

The Bioshock Infinite box art “controversy” was one of the more interesting videogame-related events in recent memory. Fans of the game series torrented the internet with their words of disappointment that this game series they so loved for its ornate production design and fruitcake-dense atmospheric plotting (“plotmosphere”?) might show itself to the shelf-gazers of the world’s videogame retail establishments as yet another picture of a guy with a gun.

Ken Levine, the Bioshock series mastermind, apologized to these fans through press interviews. He communicated that they focus-tested the game with “frat boys” — yes, that exact phrase: “frat boys” — because the humans who videogame companies pay to know math stuff estimate that the billion-some money sacks big games grappling-hook and/or kraken-tentacle in year after year largely originate in Abercrombie cargo-short pockets.

I watched the backlash to Levine’s comments in a state of morbid, heckish, lonely bemusement reserved only for people who have started and ended careers in finance, game development, and advertising multiple times throughout their lives. Many peanut gallerians believed that pandering to “frat boys” was the “renegade option”, to borrow a phrase from Mass Effect. It was the low-hanging fruit. By pandering to frat boys, the game’s creators were putting off players who were tired of so many games about guys with guns. By putting a guy with a gun on the box, they were excluding the other interesting characters and environmental elements. The game also stars a cute girl — with visible cleavage (which might have interested the frat boys, right?) — and among its enemies are 1912 animated gun-wielding robotic George Washingtons. Also, it takes place entirely on a city which is literally flying in the clouds. Also, there’s a big menacing robot bird thing which screams, tears things apart, and shoots lasers. And the main bad guy has a huge beard — don’t dudes love huge beards, these days? Huge beards are about as hip right now as the word “bacon”.

None of the comments that I saw explicitly came out and said it, though I couldn’t help thinking that an “Indiana Jones” movie-poster-style cover could have fit this game perfectly, and appealed to both sides of the weird argument.

The most common detailed negative reactions were lamentations that big game companies will never try to create a “new” audience. They’re doomed to keep sequelling Call of Duty or Halo. A glimmer of understanding tinged these complaints: here was a game a large group of people had used One Hundred Million Dollars to make over the course of five years. Those who scream loudest that games are art once yearned for a world in which all of their friends were able to get to the end of Bioshock; alas, many peoples’ friends only lasted an hour or two. Here was Bioshock Infinite, another chance to redeem games as art, another chance to show The Uninitiated that, “Hey, look at this! We’re not all the same”, and it looked even better and denser and richer than the first … and the most daring maneuver the marketers were willing to pull off was to make the game look “Kinda like an old-timey Uncharted I guess?”

And so, once again, according to the loudest booers, The Uninitiated remained The Uninvited.

So one conspiracy theory goes: there was a time, before Uncharted came out, when the black-robed, silent, telepathic octogenarians in the videogame corporate boardrooms of the world would have shot down any game that looked like Uncharted: “The kids want space, or the kids want real god darn marines,” they’d have said. Believe it or not — and it’s wholly your choice, as this is yet an Urban Myth — Uncharted was a bold new frontier (in addition to being “Sort of Tomb Raider with a guy”).

We could say that electronic games are buying their “certifiable mainstream entertainment” status one molecule at a time.

If Bioshock Infinite meets financial success, we might see yet another big-budget action game set it an interesting place. We might see another game with as meticulously positioned three-dimensional art assets. We might see another hundred-million-dollar game that isn’t about marines, space marines, swamp marines, war marines, or even Navy SEALs.

If Bioshock Infinite trips and falls on a tree root full of gold, we might someday see a far better game than Bioshock Infinite.

Today, the only game we can compare to Bioshock Infinite is Bioshock Infinite. It is here, it is in our living rooms, and it has bills to pay.

It has two hundred million dollars’ worth of bills to pay.

“Bring us the girl and wipe away the debt”, says a blood-spattered note on a lighthouse door at the opening of the game. “Bring us the girl and wipe away the debt”, says big, italicized font on the back of the box. “Bring us the girl and wipe away the debt”, say all the eager players. Oh, Bioshock Infinite — will you bring us the girl?

Oh brave new world, that has such Bioshock Infinite.

(Be right back, everybody — I need to grow a mustache and then twirl it for six nonstop hours.)

I’m having another look at the box art right now. Personally, I think it’s not so bad, in the grand scheme of things. It’s a guy with a gun, sure. However, the guy is wearing an interesting coat, and he’s holding an interesting gun. The logo is more dramatic and bizarre than a Call of Duty or Halo logo would ever be. An American flag is burning in the background. Sparks are flying in the foreground. The guy is wearing one of those old-timey ties. There’s a Big Daddy from Bioshock One looking angry in the lower-right corner, for appeal to players of the original … oh, wait, I’m looking at the PlayStation 3 version, which includes Bioshock on the disc.

Okay, now I’m looking at the Xbox 360 version. We can see the guy’s belt. He’s wearing khakis. He has a bandage on his right hand. The color palette of the illustration works well with the green plastic of the Xbox 360 case.

I suppose I’m sort of “the right audience” to genuinely appreciate this box art. Many emails arrive in my inbox daily, either telling me that my tastes are too mainstream or too niche. I gave Gears of War and Gears of War 2 four out of four stars, I gave Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare four out of four stars, and I gave Bioshock just two out of four stars, so obviously, yes, I’m too mainstream. I gave Super Mario Galaxy two out of four stars, so I must be the devil. However, I gave Super Mario 3D Land four out of four stars, so I must be one of those “contrarian” “art-gamer” “niche” “jerks”. I said Cave Story was “better than Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night combined”, so obviously I have “soul cancer”, as one comment put it. I plead not guilty on all counts — for example, souls aren’t real, so “soul cancer” isn’t even a thing. It’s just that I like what I like. I like holistically complete experiences. No one element ever gets my perfect score — except sometimes.

I like what I like.

I don’t dislike Bioshock Infinite’s box. Those who say it makes the game look “just like any other shooter” are dead wrong. The color palette is subtly subversive — sporting red, yellow, and blue, all at once. The gun is interesting; the coat is interesting. The burning American flag? Hel-lo, that is interesting, given the patriotic “fuck ‘em all up” mentality of nine out of ten games that score a nine out of ten from NRAGamer.com. And the bandaged hand? Well, that’s a reference to what “true fans” will ultimately agree is the most interesting part of the whole game. If a group of marketers is going to paint by the (demographical) numbers, if they are going to tick every box on the checklist, I can’t imagine they could have done it in a classier fashion. I dare say I detect the creative-directing hand of Ken Levine somewhere deep in the background of this box art: if he was going to follow someone else’s rules, he was going to make sure he got away with as much as he could get away with.

And I like Booker DeWitt’s haircut. I like it so much, I got that same haircut about a year before I saw Bioshock Infinite’s box, and I still have it today. On the other hand, I got this haircut because I’m one of those weird jerks who shaves after lathering up with ocean kelp soap applied with a badger-hair brush. On the other other hand, I own a $400 Burberry scarf. On the other other other hand, I understand that that scarf is Just A Scarf, and that a $4 scarf would perform the same function — a Uniqlo Heattech scarf would actually generate heat, and those only cost $10; that’s superior performance at superior value. On the other other other other hand, I found that scarf in a bag on the street, so it’s not like I paid $400 for it — and it’s not like I still don’t wear it.

So: that’s me. That’s the kind of person who likes Bioshock Infinite’s box. As this particular person, I’m pretty sure I’m the only person in the world who could properly review Bioshock Infinite — which is, in all likelihood, what the game wants me to think. I’m sure everyone else on the internet thought the same thing immediately upon completing the game — the internet, don’t you know, is a fantastic place if you’re into seeing smart people talking at length about Bioshock Infinite.

See: in an alternate universe, I would have grown up to develop Bioshock Infinite. I would have done a few basic things differently, and probably written punchier dialogue in parts.

Then I would have released it with the exact same box.
Chapter Two: Let’s keep talking about the box art.

The pre-installed fans’ outcry surrounding Bioshock Infinite’s box art penetrates to the deepest spiritual layers of the game. Here is a game that is showing itself to the world as “definitely some kind of action game”, meanwhile hinting at some colorful creativity. One of the quietest critiques of the critics of Bioshock Infinite’s box art was that, well, this is, in fact, a game in which you play the role of a white man who shoots people in the face — to death.

I remember seeing that particular critique and letting out a sub-verbal “Excellent”.

Now that I’ve played the game — lord. Lord is this game ever a game about a white man shooting cops in the face with high-powered weaponry.

As a concession to the most violently vocal critics of the “shameless” shooter-y box art, Ken Levine announced that his crack art team were cooking up a variety of “artistic” alternative covers, and the fans would be able to vote on which of these alternate covers would appear on the inside of the game’s sleeve.

The developer stressed that the winning illustration would go inside the game’s more fratboyfriendly sleeve; players wishing to elevate their shelf of dumb games a notch higher toward “Criterion Collection” could choose to flip the sleeve around, slide it back in, and then receive a knock on the door. It’s [your favorite eighties band name here]: they think you’re cool, and they want you to hang out with them.

The illustration that won the fan-off is a mystical depiction of the bizarre robotic Songbird — flying, humanoid-ish, birdoid-ish, hulking, mysterious protector of the flying city of Columbia. In the background, we see some floating buildings, some wispy old-timey ink-illustrated clouds, and a quaint and stately zeppelin. Surrounding all this is a stoic picture-frame. The logo is a minutely shaded vintage-magazine-cover-worthy ink illustration. Looking at it, the person deep inside me who once owned enough Criterion Collection releases to tile a middle-class bathroom floor lets out a quivering little, “Hey, thanks”.

However: this quiet red print is not the game I played. The game I played looked a lot more like Cool Haircut Guy With A Cool Gun And Fire.

In a fit of reflex that has roots in my childhood — during which I read rented games’ instruction manuals cover to cover at the dinner table while eating a bowl of cereal before I’d let myself play the game — I removed Bioshock Infinite’s instruction manual my first time opening the case, and there, behind the manual, was a line of text. If I were to flip the cover around, this line would be on the back of the box.

This is the line:

“The mind of the subject will desperately struggle to create memories where none exist …”

The line is attributed to “Barriers to Trans-Dimensional Travel, R. Lutece, 1889″.

The attribution contains the words “Trans-Dimensional Travel”. Well, I managed to avoid any sort of media that would contain spoilers, so I sure didn’t know this game was going to have any trans-dimensionality in it. So those two words there shoved my brain kicking and screaming right into Sherlock Holmes mode.

The quote itself is sloppy both mechanically and structurally in a way that serves as a perfect top-down analysis of Bioshock Infinite itself:

1. It’s attributed to a piece of extra-diegetic lore (in this case a book or an academic paper)

2. It appears on the back of the “alternate cover”, which the player has to consciously remove from the game box and slide in backward in order to truly experience

3. The people who flip this cover around likely hate and resent the Action Man Guy on the front of the actual cover

4. The people who flip this cover around would probably rather play a modern Final Fantasy than Call of Duty, even though each of those things is precisely as idiotic as the other

… by now I’ve lost my composure. Uh —

“The mind of the subject –” Who is the subject? Am I “the subject”? Oh good lord I better not be the subject — I mean, me the person, not me the character I’m controlling. If this game tries to talk about me being a “player” or “controller” of this guy I am going to shriek –

“– will desperately struggle –” Whoa, haven’t you guys read Stephen King’s “On Writing” chapter about adverbs? “Struggle” implies desperation. If the author of this sentence is a scientist — especially one back in the late 19th century, when people read books, and authors composed prose with a nod to the backbreaking work of the manual printing press typesetter — concise precision likely would have come naturally.

“The mind of the subject will struggle” — . . . actually, it’s more economical to say “The subject’s mind”. An apostrophe-S is not always, don’t you know, a sign of lack of sophistication. (They were in fashion in the late 19th century — in the time of the printing press.)

“The subject’s mind will struggle to create memories where none exist.”

Wait, has this game already got me? Am I already struggling to create memories where none exist?

I get worried for a second; then I cut off the “where none exist”: obviously, “create” means “to make something from nothing”. “Create” also implies action — willful, voluntary, concentrated action. These memories the subject’s mind are creating are results of a struggle — a desperation to make something. Making a memory of a fun day at the beach, for example, is effortless. For what reason would we struggle to create a memory? Because one does not exist.

“The subject’s mind will struggle to create memories.”

I have now discerned the relative unsophistication of the game’s narrative. I gear-shift down from Sherlock Holmes Mode into “I’ve seen a couple of M. Night Shyamalan movies” mode.

It’s time to play the game.
Chapter Three: ACTUALLY TALKING ABOUT THE GAME NOW

Bioshock Infinite begins with a surprise birthday party.

This is a metaphor: it’s my birthday, all of my friends are busy, and two of them mention dead grandmothers. One friend isn’t busy. He calls me and offers to take me to a restaurant I’ve never been to. The restaurant has no windows. As we approach the door, I can’t see who’s inside.

At the beginning of Bioshock Infinite, my mind is the Indianapolis 500 (by which I mean it’s racing):

The hero’s name is Booker DeWitt.

Booker, as in book. Book, as in something someone working on this game might have given careful consideration to reading at some point before they decided “Sesame Street” was probably education enough.

DeWitt as in “De Wit”, as in “Of Wit”, as in “imaginary”? By god, if this story turns out to be “just a dream”, I am going to throw up all over my shag carpet. I am going to turn my shag carpet into a vomit swamp. I am going to turn my shag carpet into a diarrhea marsh. If it turns out that girl character, Elizabeth is just the schizophrenic voice in my main character’s head, I am going to scream so hard the neighbors kick my door down. If the “twist” here is that I’m mind-controlling the main character — that I’m both the good guy and the bad guy, I’m going to go outside and shriek until all the birds fall dead from the trees, I swear to god –

(It turns out that “DeWitt” is a Dutch name, and it means “Of White”. Oh, so it’s probably a comment on race.)

We’ve come a long way since 1994: we’ve now got first-person shooter action videogames that we’re expected to talk to adults about — as adults ourselves. They say you have to walk before you can run, so I’m guessing videogames need “The Sixth Sense” before we get “The Fifth Element”. Stories you can spoil in a sentence are the ones that get people talking (either straight at, or dancing around) — they get people Two Hundred Million Dollars’ Worth Of Talking.

So here I am, spending my whole first ten minutes with the game trying to find that sentence.

I realize that they made this game in the Unreal Engine, and I’ve made some 3D first-person shooter levels, myself, so I know how easy it is to just go back and polish, to add details. Right off the rowboat, I’m seeing a billion little tiny things in the lighthouse area, and a bunch of huge ones. There’s a jar of pickles on a bookshelf … there’s a dead man in a chair. Outside, there’d been a note on the door: “BRING US THE GIRL AND WIPE AWAY THE DEBT”. In the lower-left corner of the note is a brick-red blood stain. Is this a clue? Is it a red herring? Or is the game just being wild and reckless? Is it supposed to be a detail that hammers into my Player Brain that This Be Serious Business? I’m guessing it’s the latter.

Before I saw the note, when I got off the boat, I noticed a second boat, under the pier.

While I was on the boat, the man rowing the boat asked the woman to row; she said she didn’t want to row, because coming out here was the man’s idea. She asked why he doesn’t ask Booker DeWitt to row, to which he responds, “He doesn’t row”. She asks him to clarify. He says, again, “He doesn’t row”, emphasizing the “doesn’t”, and I think, “Time travel?”

“OF YOUR SINS I WILL WASH THEE”, reads a quaint, embroidered sign over a bowl of water inside the lighthouse. DeWitt looks at the sign, yanking our camera in the direction of his head. “Good luck with that, pal,” he says, the first of many to-come dialectical anachronisms.

My detective hat materializes on my head, and I ponder: “This man sounds like he feels guilty about some things that have happened in his past, like he feels that his guilt and sin is unwashable, and he seems simultaneously skeptical of religion and averse to the idea of baptism.”

So I realize that I’m headed — upward (the only way) — toward a place where religion and its varying symbolisms are important.

I get to the top of the lighthouse, and there’s a door with three bells that have symbols on them.

Booker removes the photograph of Elizabeth, flips it over, and there’s the combination written right on the back of it. It says to ring one bell once, the second bell twice, and the other bell twice. I do this, and the door opens. What the heck was that? It’s like, “Here, if you weren’t born with painted-over wood shop goggles glued to your head, we’ll let you play our game here.”

Inside the room is a rocket chair.

“Looks like they expect me to sit in that fancy chair,” Booker says, as a “SIT IN CHAIR” tutorial button prompt materializes on the screen.

Thanks for the tips, guys.

So here’s where I settle fully into “Oh, I’m playing a videogame” mode: I press the indicated button to sit in the chair, and Booker DeWitt rodeo-jockeys his way right into the thing. He rides it like a pommel horse. He slams each hand down on an arm of the chair and wheels himself around with garish abandon. All that’s missing is a Super Mario 64 “Let’s’a Go”.

It is not 1993; this is not DOOM. It is 2013; it is twenty years after DOOM. I’m still a floating head with floating hands, though now the game makers are courteous enough to give me some circus clown theatrics along with every insignificant motion of my character. He doesn’t just sit in a chair — he wheelie-pop-glides his way around and down into it. He doesn’t just press an elevator button — he jerks his head to one side, pulling the camera into a canted angle, he makes a fist, he cocks that fist back to his chest, and he murder-stabs at it like he were holding a knife.

The rocket chair explodes into the sky, in a scene uncannily reminiscent of the original Bioshock’s descent scene: we watch through a window, with limited movement control of the first-person camera, as a mysterious, majestic, enormous, expensive-3D-arted city descends (ascends, in the first Bioshock) into view. My intrigue switch is flipped “on”.

There, outside my dirty little window, is a several-stories-tall billboard, with the face of an old, bearded man on it: “COMSTOCK: OUR PROPHET”, it says.

“Aha. That guy must be important. He must be the guy responsible for the John The Baptist imagery downstairs.”

The Intrigue Switch stays on for a while. I’m in a hall with a high ceiling, full of statues and candles and a slow, spooky chant of “Amazing Grace”, and I’m remembering the Catholic cathedrals that were our only tourist destinations (always for Sunday mass) during the eighteen years of my life I spent moving every three months with my Army family, and — [“Law and Order” Sound Effect!]
Chapter Four: “FIND A WAY INTO THE CITY”

Appears at the top of the screen. Oh — okay. Now I’m back in I’m Playing A Game Mode, and I look down, and see I’m standing in water, and that I can’t see my reflection in the water, and this makes me wonder how they got all this water up here into the sky, and I freak out about halfway and then –

The first person I meet in this moody hall in this city up in the clouds tells me that I’m in Heaven — or, the closest we’ll get to heaven while we’re alive. This is where Bioshock sinks a robotic bird talon into the meat of my soul: this is a weird, little, pebble-sized, interesting concept for a science-fiction short story, the kind I’d come up with while hanging out with good friends, over delicious pizzas and tasty root beers. “What if some rich weird guy built, like, a flying city, and it was, like, meant to be a replication of the Christian Heaven?” One of my friends would tell me that sounded sort of like Hayao Miyazaki’s “Laputa [Castle in the Sky]” (excellent film, by the way; if I were a movie critic, I’d give it four out of four stars), and I would be like, “No it doesn’t! I’d defamiliarize it — I’d make the guy, like, American. And I’d set it around the time of the Civil War!” We’d laugh about it a bit, and I’d probably find a way to say that if they made a movie Sean Bean could be in it, and then we’d be talking about “Game of Thrones”, and then I’d talk about my Big Hollywood Dream to someday direct a nine-hour three-part big-screen adaptation of “Moby-Dick” starring Sean Bean, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Tom Hardy (audience participation: guess who plays what role) … and that’s the end of that.

So I had an “It’s A Wonderful Life” George Bailey Jimmy Stewart “What do you know about that?” moment, right there, at the gates of Columbia, thinking, hey, it’s pretty god darn cute that someone went ahead and spent a hundred million dollars on the sort of thing I’ve been writing sci-fi novellas about since I was fourteen. (I’ve written so many of them that if I started printing them out and burning them, one at a time, it’d take me until I was forty-five to finish burning them.)

Then the first big theme beat rains down: in order to enter the city, you must accept baptism from a saintly raving robed priest. Booker DeWitt has already expressed skepticism at the idea of baptism. He’s already scoffed at the idea of his sins being washable. He had said “Good luck with that, pal”. Now this guy is strong-arming him into the loving embrace of The Lord. Booker panics. He’s like, “Get your hands off of me!” He’s like, “I just need to get into the city!”

And then the guy dunks him. The camera quickly cuts to a scene in a river. Believers are applauding in a circle. Booker is screaming.

I think of the film “The Cell” — boy oh boy there was a J-Lo in that one — where Vincent D’Onofrio’s serial killer character’s particular type of schizophrenia activated during an early childhood incident involving water. The story explains that this particular type of schizophrenia’s activation is almost always associated with near-drowning experiences —

For a sixteenth of a second, I figure out the whole of the game’s plot — it grows for this time like a pea-sized cancer on the bottom of my brain. Then I narrow my eyes and scrunch my nose and pucker my lips and I’m like, “Nah, that can’t be it”.

Days later, when the deed is done, my friend Christian Nutt is in my house. We’re talking about Bioshock Infinite — he’s come over to borrow my copy.

“Try as hard as you can,” I tell him. “Just set your brain into overdrive for those first couple hours; see if you can figure out the ending. I was M. Night Shyamalan-viewering as hard as I could, and I didn’t see the ending part coming. It rubed me right through.”

It’s true; Bioshock Infinite’s surprises managed to rube me. If only I’d stuck to my initial suspicion, and refreshed my memory of it repeatedly during the middle third of the game, I’d likely have felt like a genius when revelation time came around.

Instead, I feel like a loser: Bioshock Infinite rubed me the way Bioshock didn’t.

Oh my lord, how easy it is to spoil this game! You can do it in a couple of words! It wouldn’t even be a real sentence — it’d be a tiny decrepit thimble-wearing mutilated pinky finger of a sentence, with the brain of the listener filling in all the holes.

Oh, well: my perfect spoiler guess pushed aside, I entered Columbia. Booker DeWitt was face-down in a fountain in a garden. The first big detail to greet me was the hummingbirds swarming around a fragrant shrub. Okay: those look cool. Then came the three massive statues: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin. At the feet of the statues, worshippers had gathered; if I drew near, they talked about the statues. Benjamin Franklin was “The Key” — because of his knowledge and/or his electricity experiment — and George Washington was “The Sword”, because he was a military guy. Thomas Jefferson was “The Scroll”, et cetera.

“These religious guys are real religious about America.”

I started to walk in the only available direction, immediately noticing the Disneyland structuring of the game’s environment design. I’m all for a good Virtual Disneylanding, as long as it’s dressed up well enough. Half-Life 2 is hecka Disneylanded, and I don’t mind one bit.

The first pedestrians I happen upon outside the garden aren’t dressed in any fancy religious clothing. They’re just regular city jerks. If I approach them, I can hear them talking. Some people outside of a cafe are talking about “The Vox Populi”, and a lady asks, “What does Vox Populi even mean?” And I say, aloud, “It means ‘The Voice of the People’”, and another guy at her table says, “It’s Latin”, and she scoffs, and spits out the word “Latin, huh?” This interests me because I know that Catholic masses were conducted exclusively in Latin well into the twentieth century, and I also know that these people are some offshoot of Protestants, which means they wouldn’t necessarily be Latin fans, and also that modern American Christians in my acquaintance have that same eerie ignorance of that particular ancient language. I start thinking that this game is clever.

I also start thinking it’s better than Bioshock — instead of audio tapes lying around all the place explaining the story to me, I have actual animated human people conversing with other actual animated human people.

This is also around where I notice a life bar has appeared on the screen. Uh-oh. I wish I’d noticed it earlier, because I’d love to be able to time the “appearance of life bar to first dangerous obstacle”.

Let’s go ahead and spoil that: the life bar was on the screen for about an hour before I encountered the first dangerous obstacle.

I’m not complaining: it was a lovely hour. Nor am I trying to say that it’d take everyone an hour to get to the first fight. I took my time. I treated the game like a stroll in the park. Here was a weird, fancy, elaborate, deliberately bizarre imagined place, alive and delicious with 3D art and colorful colors. Signs abounded, and the signs had words — more than two or three words. Sometimes there were a dozen words. Sounds of fireworks and electricity and excited humans filled the air: it was the day of a festival, an anniversary of the city’s founding. For three whole minutes, I stand by a flower-pot-lined railing overlooking a blue-skied cloudy abyss, listening to an animatronic-like tin soldier-y robotickish barbershop quartet singing an earnestly, fabulously creepy cover of The Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows”. The barge atop which this ghastly grinning quartet perform floats with merry yayness; upon it are signs, declaring the quartet the “Most Popular In Columbia”. I feel like I’ve stepped into a nightmare world — and not the kind of world most people are talking about when they joke about nightmares. This is literally the kind of nightmare I actually have in my real sleep. When the song is done, the animatrons and their barge descend beneath the sill of the world, and I’m a little humbled for a minute, impressed with how sincerely and straightforwardly this game is Being Disneyland.

The stroll through the Columbia parade is remarkable. I loved every third or fourth second of it, and liked every other second at least a little bit. At first it weirded me out because the trees looked like jumbles of flat polygons, and then I stopped being a jerk: they started making this darn game five years ago. For five years this game was several hundred peoples’ lives. It was their rent and grocery money. I stopped actively searching for technical inconsistencies and let the game absorb me.

I was having an exceptionally good time, letting that game absorb me. It sucked me right up and into itself. The world was so terrifically dense. If I entered buildings, magazines or newspapers were open on tables, and I could read actual words on them. Posters were all over the place: I read all of them. I stared at statues from all angles. After thirty minutes of this, I realized I hadn’t seen the same male haircut twice.

What an unthinkably visually dense piece of entertainment! What a confidently, virtuosically jam-packed imaginary world! Scenes like that first hour of Bioshock Infinite are enough to give me extreme confidence in the videogame medium: here’s how it can be as strong as film: it can let me walk around in a beautifully rich and unquestionably imaginary place, bursting with tiny, medium-sized, and huge details, dripping with the conversations of humans with cute little outfits and hats and shoes and haircuts and cute little roles to play in this densely imagined virtual world. Here’s all that I wanted in games like Skyrim or Fallout: a brick-dense fantasy environment that feels too real to be real, a hyper-real mega-scale Disneyland attraction.

That’s a powerful declaration for me: I don’t even like Disney.

Meanwhile, in the corner of my eye, the health bar lingers … it’s winking at me. It’s a silent specter of my otherlifely recollections that this game is about shooting people in the face. I see that life bar, and I think about the box art, with its haircut, its shotgun, its burning American flag …
Chapter Five: Let’s talk about ludonarrative interference.

Well, write today’s date down in the ledger: this is the day on which I accidentally, finally, almost painted myself into a corner wherein I’d have to use the phrase “ludonarrative dissonance”.

I try to keep myself plain-spoken, writing whole paragraphs instead of using buzzwords. This gives me a … well, I can’t say so objectively, though I think it gives me a “charming” demeanor in business. Here’s a conversation I had the other day:

“We’re just kind of shopping around these days, trying to find the right project that’s worth our while money-wise, meanwhile working on our own little stuff, trying to whip our own stuff into something maybe someone would be interested in putting up a little money for.”

“So you’re bootstrapping?”

“Boot– … what?”

“Bootstrapping.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

(Hint: I actually know what it means.)

“It means you’re — I mean, it means what you said you were doing, about trying to find out what thing is … what thing you’re interested enough in to focus on … you know, doing.”

Now the other guy thinks I’m stupid — I’m Columboing him, and Columbo always wins.

Et cetera. If I continued citing examples, I’d end up with an essay longer than my review of Bioshock Infinite is going to be.

So here I was, today, faced with writing the following section, and I realized the word count would grow stupidly huge if I didn’t cut to the chase and use the phrase “ludonarrative dissonance”.

Then I actually read a little bit about “ludonarrative dissonance”, and realized that it doesn’t mean exactly what I thought it means.

I thought it meant something along the lines of that special quality that Conan O’Brien exudes in his “reviews” of videogames — where he asks the dumbest questions at the smartest times. Asking those dumb questions has been, in fact a founding mission of Action Button Dot Net, and it is one of the pillars of our “brand” of “criticism”.

So now I don’t know what exactly to call this exact thing. I can’t very well name them for Conan O’Brien, because we’ve been championing these dumb “Non-Gamer Questions” as a pillar of game criticism since our foundation.

Since this thing we’re dealing with is a close relative of ludonarrative dissonance, I figure, for now — until I come up with a snappy (awful) Action Button Dot Net brand name for it, I’ll call it “ludonarrative interference”.

Ludonarrative interference is a convenient phrase for pointing out instances of game-mechanicky elements flopping dead-fish-like at the feet or into the face of the story a game is trying to tell. Ludonarrative interference is when a little taken-for-granted videogame design trope unceremoniously bubbles corpse-like to the surface of a game’s story’s otherwise pristine ocean.

“Gamers” don’t appreciate acknowledgement of ludonarrative interference, the way some of them also don’t like the word “shower”, the way the manager of a candy shop doesn’t like the word-combination “Whole Foods”, or the way a guy who owns two “Fangoria” T-shirts doesn’t like the word “sexism”.

Ludonarrative interference is something that, more often than not, persons unfamiliar with games will be able to point out with striking, horrendous frequency, to the point where, sometimes, the True Gamer has to pause the game and offer the non-gamer a book. The non-gamer makes a face like they’re seeing an oasis in the desert, and then promptly returns to picking apart the game, after seeing that — duh — the True Gamer’s bookshelf only contains coloring books, issues of Maxim, and Skyrim strategy guides (like, forty of them).

A perfect example of ludonarrative interference is this one: Link in The Legend of Zelda: Twlight Princess falls into a lava pit. He shouts a squeaky shout. The screen cuts to black. When the screen fades back up, Link is lying on the ground. He gets up, rubbing his head. His life energy depletes by one “heart” unit.

The Non-Gamer in the room asks, “Wait, didn’t he just fall into a lava pit? Shouldn’t he be dead?”

The True Gamer says, “What? No. Lava doesn’t kill you in Zelda games.”

The Non-Gamer asks, “Why not? Does he have a magical spell that makes him immune to lava?”

“What? No — he just … it takes off one heart. If you died you’d have to reload the save; it’d be annoying to have to keep starting the whole dungeon over.”

“So he’s magically immune to lava so the game can be easier?”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, he’s rubbing his head when he gets out. Maybe it was just a dream that he fell into the lava?”

(Here the Non-Gamer is trying to think of in-game-world explanations for the curious incident they witnessed befalling this human-like character.)

“No, it’s not a dream — it’s just — it’s not a dream.”

“Well, it’s a little weird.”

“Lava doesn’t kill you in Zelda,” The Gamer says. “And that’s it.”

Silence.

“Do you want to read a book, or something?” the True Gamer says, ending a sentence in “or something” — a sure sign of a person who thinks not offering an alternative is horrible or impolite, even if one doesn’t have an alternative in mind specific enough to match their one specific example.

Ludonarrative interference graduated from disease to plague thanks to games like Bioshock, whose opening hours I once criticized for presenting me a lovingly crafted world … and then sending my disbelief burrowing toward the core of the earth when my character, not eight milliseconds (I counted) after clicking “search trash can”, began crunching on potato chips which he had found in the garbage. “Potato chips”, read the text at the top of the screen: “+Health”.

My disbelief penetrated the core of the earth when My Bioshock Guy, upon inspecting a vending machine, grabbed a syringe full of glowing green liquid and jackhammered it into his arm, causing him to leap back explosively and fall backward off a balcony onto a concrete floor.

The ludonarrative interference in that moment was three-fold:

1. Whoa, I just barely pressed the darn button in response to an “INSPECT” prompt, and he grabbed that thing and needle-jockeyed it right into himself

2. Why would this guy be that willing to stab a needle into himself?

3. Wait, this needle syringe glowing radioactive-ish drug-thing gives my guy the power to shoot deadly electricity from his fingertips? Why, uh, are they selling that in a vending machine in an underwater utopia full of poets and artists and philosophers? Isn’t that just kind of asking for trouble?

Bioshock, in those opening hours, reminded me of why I kept my videogame collection secret from even my friends until around age 20. It was just a weird, nonsensical world, where a dentist’s office drawers were full of potato chips and shotgun shells, where an audio cassette tape reel — sitting in a portable player device — sitting right next to a couple of frozen pipes contained a janitor’s voice, as he explained that maybe with some fire powers, he could melt the pipes, which would get the water flowing again, and allow him access to the area the player is trying to gain access to as well.

By the end of Bioshock, ludonarrative interference graduates from plague to pandemic, when the game reveals that everything your character did, up until now, was the result of mind-control. The Real Bad Guy was controlling the hero. Wait, you’re controlling the hero! Whoa, you’re The Real Bad Guy! That’s why your guy didn’t care about eating out of the garbage: his callous controller only wanted to keep his physical spirits up long enough for him to finish the job.

For the record, Bioshock didn’t rube me: not an hour in, I wondered, “What if the whole story is that someone is mind-controlling my guy?” I didn’t let that thought out of my head, not once.

It didn’t matter that I’d figured that part out, because I couldn’t for the life of me figure out

1. Why do they sell guns in vending machines in this artist’s utopia?

2. Why do the vending machines for guns and destructive psychic powers have slick and polished product design?

3. Wait, how can this guy eat a bag of potato chips in less than half a second?

4. How can this guy teleport the potato chips out of the garbage can in less than half a second?

5. Whoa wait hold on why can this guy recover partially from multiple gunshot wounds within seconds of eating a bag of potato chips (which he found in the garbage (in less than one second))?

At another day, on another sofa, some non-gamer is asking a True Gamer, “Wait, how can your guy carry all of those guns? Wouldn’t that be like 400 pounds of guns?”

Elsewhere, it’s “Wait, how can you buy ammunition wirelessly in the middle of a battle just by opening up a menu? Isn’t this game [Metal Gear Solid 4] being sort of realistic in asking you to lie on your stomach under a car while waiting for the person you’re fighting to come near?”

Elsewhere, and many years ago: “Where does Mario go when he falls off the bottom of the screen? Does he die? If he dies, how does he come back?”

The answer to that last one — and sort of all these other ones — is, “Look, man, these things aren’t any smarter than Looney Tunes”.

And then there was Bioshock: “Look, man, this thing is smarter than Looney Tunes! There’s a reason for all the stuff.”

Ludonarrative interference is like a hole in a jean-crotch: the harder you try to fix it, the more damage you do.

The solution to ludonarrative interference is: you suck it up and buy a new pair of jeans.

Now just let me say this: if one were to write a textbook on the subject of ludonarrative interference, it wouldn’t even be printed on paper — it’d be a ten-hour YouTube in which someone’s grandmother observes them playing Bioshock Infinite.

“Why would someone throw away live ammunition in that there trashcan?”

“Why can this guy with no feet make coins disappear from off a tabletop with a cash register sound just by looking at them?”

“Why isn’t he using his hands to pick up the coins?”

“Why are so many police officers carrying whole pineapples?”

“Why was there a hot dog, ten dollars, and a pack of cigarettes in that box labeled ‘box of chocolates’?”

“Why is there a can of beans inside that lock box in the basement of an abandoned mental hospital?”

“How can he eat those canned beans so quickly after finding them?”

(“Look, grandma — see how the little graphic next to ‘Can of beans’ shows a can which has been already opened, with the top clearly bent upward?”)

((“Wouldn’t the beans be rotten, sitting there opened for so long? Was that lock box airtight?”))

“Wait, so this guy has a grappling-hook gauntlet thing on his arm, right, and that’s why he can glide along those rails, sure, though how does that explain him being able to jump fifty feet straight up into the air to get onto the rails? Are they magnetic? Wouldn’t he at least have dislocated his shoulder or broken his knees by now?”

Et cetera.

Nothing beats seeing clearly behind a bookshelf and into a room with a light on, and thinking “Hmm”, and then a quarter-second later seeing some hovering help text: “Press this button to move the bookshelf”.
Chapter Six: The game creeps into the game.

We were talking about the health bar, just in the corner of my eye.

Inch by inch, gram by gram, the game creeps into the game. A vendor at a lovely, detailed carnival asks if I want a free sample of “Possession”. This is a “vigor” which will, at the cost of “salt”, let me control machines or people.

Well, okay.

The first “puzzle” I encounter which requires this “vigor” involves a ticket vending machine three feet away from where I receive the “vigor”: the ticket machine says tickets are sold out, so I use the magical telekinetic psychic power, and it opens, and I have a flashback: “Why would they just hand this sort of power out to people in this here religion-obsessed city?”

I wonder this, of course, before I’m acquainted with the copious police officers in the city.

As a person who scored high enough on the SATs to go to a better school than the one I went to (Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana: heck yeah), and also as a person who played all of Bioshock, I’m remembering Bioshock’s “twist” at this point, and I’m thinking, “So help me god if they reveal that all of this game — this whole story — is about my guy being mind-controlled by someone using the ‘Possession’ ‘vigor’, I am going to call the cops until they geolocate my phone, show up at my house, and tase me.”

Later, the game will give me a “vigor” named “Murder of Crows”. This is a fourth-grade-level pun on how the name for a group of crows is a “murder” of crows, and how this power literally manifests psychic crows to peck your enemy to death.

(Here I should point out that “vigors” are beverages. They come in alcohol-bottle-like bottles with kitschy labels and ornamental caps (glass blown in the form of the drink’s chosen inspiration). Booker thooks the cap off and dook-glug-dooks the beverage down.)

Uh, what? How is a drink that, when drunk, would grant the drinker the power to telepathically manifest and then telekinetically control physical psychic murderous crows, be a thing that someone somewhere would design a package for, and then sell that package in a vending machinein a religious utopia? I mean, I know that Walmarts in the US sometimes sell guns, so maybe it’s a quirky little parallel. However, it falls flat: this would be like Walmart also selling canisters of Glade-brand Ebola.

With the introduction of the “possession” power, I deflated my expectations a little bit, realizing I was in for at least a partially silly romp. Then The Mysterious Twins showed up — two English-accented humans, a brother and a sister, who speak in weird crypticisms. The man was wearing a sandwich shop signboard around his body, with a chalkboard on the front. On the chalkboard were two columns — one marked “Heads”, the other marked “Tails”. Under “Heads” were a dozen tick marks. Under “Tails” were zero. The twins flipped a coin and asked Booker to call it. I had no choice in the matter: Booker called Heads. The coin is tails. The twins are disappointed. When the male twin turns around, we see “Heads” and “Tails” columns on the back of the signboard, with 110 tick marks under “Heads”.

This moment distracted me for a second, as I considered videogames full of David Lynch moments, or Stanley Kubrick moments. This is the kind of thing that interests me — then, with sudden vigor, I was thinking about the “possession” power again. Lord, what a stupid thing for them to be selling in a hyper-real fantasy place full of chilled-out people, even (especially) when there’s some kind of underground revolution brewing.

So it is that, even before The Racism Scene, Bioshock Infinite has impressed upon me the flimsy, jarring, shoddy construction of its world as a narrator.

This won’t be the last time we revisit Ken Levine’s famous mission statement from the original Bioshock: “The world is the best narrator”. In Bioshock Infinite, the game won’t stop slapping its hand in front of the world’s mouth.
Chapter Seven: whoa the racism thing

It turns out that the place I’ve beverage-aided-telekinectically machine-manipulated my way into is a raffle for a prize. A timely telegram earlier informed me not to pick number 77.

Booker, of course, picks number 77. We the player are offered no choice in the matter.

The number 77 is written on a baseball. Booker has the baseball in his hand. The presenters unveil the prize: an interracial couple, a black woman and a white man, rise slowly from the stage. Booker’s prize, you see, is that he gets to throw a baseball at these “criminals”.

So it is that “the racism thing” comes completely out of nowhere, after the game has warmed you up with a cheerful celebration and a gorgeous atmosphere. This is what story-writers call “timing”.

The aiming crosshair is stuck frozen equidistant between the couple and the carnival barker. We see two control labels: the left trigger will throw the baseball at the couple. The right trigger will throw the baseball at the announcer.

Now, here’s where we have a conversation about racism.

No — that’d take too long, and be too interesting. It’d be more interesting than Bioshock Infinite’s story — which conveniently drops the racism ball at the speed of sound the moment it starts yanking the drop cloths off its metaphors — deserves. Suffice it to say that racism, in Bioshock Infinite, isn’t a “theme”: it’s part of a theme. I can wholly understand many peoples’ reaction to the scene, and subsequent similar scenes — Anna Anthropy called Bioshock Infinite “a whirlwind tour of Ken Levine’s privilege”; Daniel Golding likens the presentation of “racist or not?” as a “choice” of “would you rather be Abraham Lincoln or the Ku Klux Klan?“, and I understand those reactions with vigorous thumbs ups. Meanwhile, I understand the intentions of the author — and, furthermore, I understand the way the partial theme of “racism” fits into The Big Story Reveal, and you know what? I sort of respect the heck out of the game for even trying to have a mature: “racist scene early on” is a heck of a bullet point razor blade to purposely leave sticking up out of your mainstream videogame’s proverbial Snickers bar. It’s a “talking point”, sure, and hey, it is a problematic piece of a theme that ripples out and eventually rots the narrative down to a termite-chomped stump, though hey, at least they’re trying something new … -ish. I could go on for tens of thousands of words about why using racism as a theme is a terrible idea unless you’re Very, Very Smart, and if I did that I’d also have to write tens of thousands of words about how we never, ever need to stop talking about racism, because if we ignore it it will never go away, and I don’t have time for that today, so Bioshock it is.

Let’s talk about choices in videogames instead.

It’s vaguely, slitheringly disgusting that Bioshock Infinite presents this hate crime as a “choice” — the way Bioshock presented us the “choice” to kill or save the Little Sister characters after murdering their murderous protectors, the Big Daddies. Little Sisters were, of course, helpless little girls who, if saved, can go on to be perfectly healed of their weirdness. So not killing them isn’t a “moral” choice — it’s a not-psychopathic one.

Meanwhile, and interestingly, Bioshock Infinite has, up until The Baseball Scene, presented the player with a few non-choices:

1. We have to press the action button to “accept baptism” in order to enter the city. Failure to role-playingly submit to the in-world religion results in literal inability to advance into the game.

2. We have to press the action button to “flip coin” — which Booker calls “Heads” in the air, without asking for our input. Of note is that we have to press the button to flip the coin.

3. We’re asked to take a baseball out of a basket full of baseballs, after earlier being told to not pick #77. Booker’s hand magnetizes toward #77.

Now the game asks us — who do we throw the baseball at?

We’ve already submitted to a Christian baptism, despite Booker’s vocal protests. Maybe Booker has learned to play along? Maybe, if we ask ourselves, “What Would Booker Do?”, we’d come to the conclusion that he’d subscribe to the “When in Rome” theory of doing things. Outside of his hating being baptized and his massive debt which he wants to wipe away (by bringing them the girl), we know close to nothing about Booker — least of all his shoe size (epic burn re: us being twenty years Beyond Doom and still FPS heroes have no feet) — so how do we know he’s not such a die-hard believer in civil rights that he would throw that ball at that dumb racist jerk, and risk causing a police incident? According to the cigar box that contained his pistol, he fought at the Battle of Wounded Knee, participating in the slaughter of many Native Americans. So maybe we take the time to role-play, and consider that Booker has such a horrible gambling debt and is in such a sad place that in order to keep his cover, he’ll go ahead and pelt those sad innocent people.

As with so many other things in Bioshock, it’s only interesting if you talk about it, and only enthralling if you talk way too much about it.

Whichever option you choose (I bet the game remembers, and keeps the data on a server somewhere …), as soon as Booker winds his arm back, a police officer spies the tattoo on the back of his hand. Booker is identified as “The False Prophet”, and the onslaught begins. Booker rips a chainsaw grappling hook blade-gauntlet thing off of the first attacking police officer’s arm, and then digs it into the guy’s face. He rips those blades right the heck through that guy’s face. He just about tears that face half off. The face-skin pulls back and ripples like a waterbed. Blood the texture of spaghetti sauce and the trajectory of Jell-O flops out of the cop’s head like worms having seizures. When the cop is all the way dead, Booker’s got a pistol.

The next thing that happens is, you kill cops for ten hours.
Chapter Eight: Gettin’ Worse All The Time

Several hours thick into Bioshock Infinite, a skirmish erupts in a hallway similar to other hallways — only lit and colored differently. Elizabeth is with Booker, and they are evading the police the only way Booker knows how: by killing the police. Four armed and angry men pop out of doorways and down staircases; you, the player, guide Booker DeWitt’s hands with your mouse or analog stick. You aim, fire, and murder. These four murders occur at perhaps the midway point of a dozen-hour-long parade of murder. When the last bullet icepicks into the last face and the last corpse smacks the marble floor, Booker DeWitt exhales a line of dialogue which is neither a sigh nor a groan nor a one-liner:

“This job’s gettin’ worse all the time.”

I felt like this deserved a genuine, loudly spoken reply: “No duh, jerk!”

Booker has killed at least two hundred men by this point in the story. He’s blown up airships. He’s shot clouds of telekinetic ravens into the vulnerable gears on the backs of many automated George-Washington-headed robocops. He has seen explosion, fire, bathtubs of blood, shattered stone, burst zeppelins, a corpse-pile in a theme park attraction (literally), sad racism, and evidence of the existence of time-travel or transdimensional travel. So he kills four more cops and …

“This job’s gettin’ worse all the time.”

It doesn’t compute from a narrative perspective.

Nor does it compute from a game-design perspective: we’re only fighting a handful of enemies of varieties we’ve fought in literally dozens of previous skirmishes.

What computes is the explanation that the developers were dead out of ideas for any way to differentiate this encounter — for any way to snap it into adherence to the creative writing rule “show, don’t tell”. So what they could not show with inventive level design or enemy formation in this cramped, perfunctory encounter, they told:

“This job’s gettin’ worse all the time.”

Bioshock Infinite, unfortunately, prohibits ignorance of its combat. I say “unfortunately” for various reasons.

One of the reasons is that I agree in part with the many writers complaining that the game was “too violent“. Here is a story about a man infiltrating a fantastic place — a place so magical it sells itself to any fan of interesting destinations — to rescue an interesting girl from a bizarre prison. In its opening hours it proves in quadruplicate its ability to populate astounding environments with tiny, medium, and huge details, so much so that we derive immense pleasure just from looking at another cool thing and figuring out where it belongs in the grand mystery of the plot. This game is — to borrow a phrase I’ve already used many times — a unique and weird interactive Disneyland. The story eventually grows dark, though we don’t know that at the point the violence spikes toward sensory assault. I can allow the maybe-mistaken conclusion that the game would have been good enough without gore and shrieking — it could have been a nice little Disney story.

Of course, “I agree in part” allows that I disagree in part, and I disagree in quite a large part. What literary value Bioshock Infinite grips in its fist would slip through its fingers if not for the dark themes and hideous violence. Ninety-nine percent of the big story reveal revolves around Booker DeWitt being a guy who’s killed a whole lot of people before, and feels horrible about it. It’s tough to cite that as a “sort-of positive”, because, I tell you what, I sure am getting tired of games that make me kill a bunch of people in order to proceed and then have a bad guy — a bad guy, of all people! — tell me that I’m a murderous psychopath. If I had any sort of work ethic re: writing, I’d establish a “Start To ‘You’re A Murderous Jerk’” rating system for action games. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (review forthcoming, I promise) would score a “Twelve Minutes”.

I dare say the violence fits in Bioshock Infinite. The game, after all, has a guy with a gun on the box.

When I say I sort of agree that the violence doesn’t fit, what I mean is this:

It’s not an argument anymore. It is absolutely one hundred percent totally not an argument: games don’t need to be violent to be interesting.

The world is “the best narrator”, as Ken Levine himself once put it, and that’s barely rocket science anymore.

Last year’s Journey was an epic adventure in which the action purely focused on the joy of navigation; in a move that severely outclassed any multiplayer action game in recent memory, it went one step beyond the call of duty, by pairing players with other real, live, human players with whom they had to cooperate without speaking.

Journey is a weird example, however. Gone Home is a non-violent game in which the player explores an environment bursting with visual clues. The game involves a mystery of sorts. You could play it if you like playing good games.

Like Gone Home, Bioshock Infinite features environments bursting with tiny visual details, and it features a mystery of sorts. It’s huge and it’s amazing to experience. It’s got probably a hundred times the budget of Gone Home, so it goes without saying that it’s a hundred times the size and complexity, and it has infinity times more shooting.

Once upon a time, game design genius Clifford “CliffyB” Bleszinski said, in an interview, that because raycasting is such a simple function in 3D simulations, it’s easy to make a game understand when any given point is geometrically aligned with another. Bleszinski said that entertainment experiences, in general, are about reaching out and touching people, and that because of the ease of raycasting and its natural similarity to aiming and pointing a gun, games, as entertainment, are more often than not about “reaching out and touching someone with your gun”.

I believe in Bleszinski (“Cliff”, as he’ll let me call him … someday), and I also believe that the abundance of violence in videogames is spillover from the parts of the brain that the original Grand Theft Auto poured lighter fluid on: “here are objects on my screen, and they resemble objects I’ve seen in my real life, and I can do things to them that I’d never do to anyone in the real world.”

What I mean is, games are power fantasies — and it’s easy to make power fantasies, because guns are so powerful, and raycasting is simple, and raycasting is like a gun.

Most likely, the only worthy conclusion here is that when you’ve spent One Hundred Million Dollars building the densest game environment in history, if shooting games are the only ones making billions of dollars, you probably want shooting in your game.

It is the greatest compliment that I can conceive of when I say that I would enjoy a game like Bioshock Infinite, only without the shooting. It’s a way of saying they made a game environment so thick and full of character that I wouldn’t mind if you lobotomized one of the game’s two core elements (shooting). I await the day — maybe not too far off, now — that Rockstar announces it’s making a Grand-Theft-Auto-sized romantic comedy. And for the record, if I had a hundred million dollars, I’d find the team that made Raw Danger, and I’d pay them to help me make my game about a young boy … who grows up to become The Greatest Basketball Player Alive.

Until then, I’m going to flip-flop: in addition to reading books and drinking fine coffee, I also enjoy videogames about shooting people. They often present me pleasant exercises in honing my reaction time, spatial awareness, and ability to read the tactics of intelligent opponents.

I played Quake in 1996, okay?

So I have no problem with violence, and I have no problem with shooting.

I have no problem with the violence in Bioshock Infinite, and I’d have no problem with the shooting in Bioshock Infinite, if the shooting was any good.
Chapter Nine: Call of Duty With Your Mom

A loading screen tip occasionally tells us:

“TIP: Consider not shooting first. Not every situation needs to be a fight!”

Yeah, so i counted literally two out of nine trillion situations that didn’t need to be a fight, so …

After four years in development and less than a year before Bioshock Infinite’s release, reports surfaced that Bioshock Infinite’s multiplayer modes had been canceled.

The public relations spin was that the developer didn’t want to take on a half-baked multiplayer mode, and that jettisoning the task allowed them to focus one-hundred-percent on the singleplayer game. The original Bioshock didn’t have a multiplayer mode, so they felt confident not making one in Bioshock Infinite.

The consensus of internet commentators was “good riddance”. It seemed that fans near-universally agreed that the game was better off without any sort of multiplayer. I recall seeing a comment suggesting that maybe multiplayer could have been cool, and a response to that comment told him to “shut up and go play Call of Duty”.

In a way, the response is right: if you want multiplayer, you will not find a more thriving community full of competition of all skill levels than Call of Duty — or Team Fortress, or Halo.

In another way, this response is frightening, because that guy probably genuinely considers Call of Duty some plebeian pastime that is culturally beneath him as a Bioshock fan.

In a third way, it’s sad that The Typical Game Person thinks so lowly of online multiplayer games — or so highly of Call of Duty (or so absent-mindedly of creativity) — that they automatically presume that any game which has guns in it would necessarily have to play exactly like Call of Duty or Halo. Don’t they realize that we have Forza and Mario Kart in the same world?

And here’s where I, again, remember that Bioshock is a game about shooting people in the face with any of a variety of guns.

Play Bioshock Infinite for an hour and, if you’ve ever played the original Bioshock and also any Call of Duty, you’ll immediately notice the snap of the guns. Bioshock’s guns felt like otherworldly gummy bear toy objects — in a quaint-enough, weird-enough, interesting-enough way, that is. Bioshock Infinite’s guns feel like Call of Duty’s guns. They’re hard, sharp, cold, and precise.

In Bioshock, every enemy encounter was a miniature event. The most typical enemy was a drug-addicted aimless psychopath scrounging for cash and smack in a ruined underwater utopia. Every battle was a weird little puzzle imbued simultaneously with catharsis and some situation-design-centered role-play (the enemy is standing in a puddle of water, with his back turned: fire your electricity power into the water, etc).

In Bioshock Infinite, the fights are fast, furious, and plentiful. The enemies are able-bodied, sound-minded police officers with weapons as hard and fast as yours. They swarm you, they corner you, they converge down upon you.

You can kill most of the enemies in Bioshock Infinite by finding the safe zones in the level designs. Usually the safe zone is the far side of a wall. You can stand against these walls and let guys come to you one at a time. It’s like playing Call of Duty against thousands of clones of your mother. Conquering any given skirmish in Bioshock Infinite is about as thrilling as finding the bathroom in a restaurant you’ve never been to before without having to ask a waiter.

Sometimes you’ll hear a guy yell, “Moving into cover!” … and then he just runs around and rotates a bit until you shoot him.

Sometimes the last enemy on the battlefield will be like, “DON’T MAKE ME HURT YOU!” … as he runs in slow-motion away from you as you walk behind him, shooting him in the backs of his legs.

Sometimes you fight a big enemy. Mixing up enemy formations is how Bioshock Infinite reuses areas and keeps the game feeling “exciting”.

Bioshock Infinite introduces each of its big enemies as mini-bosses. Kill one, get a power-up from it, and then freak out when you see it again. Well, they only fool you once: eventually, you realize that every enemy you see in Bioshock Infinite is going to be something you see again — many times.

The first of the big enemies is the Fire Man. He lobs fire grenades. He takes many hits to kill.

Then there’s the … Crow Guy. He shoots crows at you. He teleports. He takes many hits to kill.

Then there’s The Mechanized Patriot. He is the robotic George Washington. He fires long clips of gatling guns. It takes him a few seconds to reload. He moves slowly. He takes many hits to kill.

Then there’s the Handyman. He’s huge. He’s fast. He attacks physically. He takes many hits to kill.

You don’t need thirty years’ experience on The Detective Squad to locate the pattern here: these guys are bullet sponges.

Bioshock Infinite’s battles — even the ones where the goal is “kill all the dudes” — are invariably endurance contests. Sometimes, it’s your patience that must endure, particularly during the Crow Guy fights.

Lord, the Crow Guy: he fires crows at you. He makes “crow sounds”. He turns into a cloud of crows and hover-teleports around. For the love of god, can we stop it with teleporting enemies? You just stand there like an idiot watching this cloud zip and bobble around, eventually turning into a guy you can shoot.

Attention Game Developers: this is advice I usually charge $128 an hour for:

1. No teleporting enemies in your shooting game

2. No levels where it’s dark and you need a light — they call them “video” games for a reason

3. If your game’s big plot twist is that OH MY GOD YOU’RE PLAYING A VIDEOGAME I will call M. Night Shyamalan and he will show up to break your pet’s neck with his bare hands and be like, “How’s that for a … twist?”

In fights with Crow Guys, I remember Dynasty Warriors, where the boss characters’ only challenge is that they slash furiously and then leave a window which is precisely the length of 4.8 of your spear-slashes, and sometimes you are so bored you want to slash five times, and you end up taking damage. We call this “Red Light, Green Light Game Design”, and it’s basically the game design equivalent of cheating on your spouse. It’s gross. Don’t make the player wait for something.

So this is Bioshock Infinite, home of the bullet sponge. Eventually, we meet a new epic monster character. I won’t spoil anything, though let’s say this epic monster happens to be a ghost. It’s the kind of boss I wanted Big Daddy to be in Bioshock. I didn’t like that there were dozens of Big Daddies and their Little Sisters all looked exactly the same. I wanted just one Big Daddy, and just one Little Sister. I wanted fighting or running to always be a choice; I wanted huge rewards for axing the beast early on …

… well, I might not get that for a long time, and I might have to make that game myself (HINT: it’s called “ZIGGURAT” and it’s coming to PC in 2015). For now, Bioshock Infinite’s “ghost” boss is only half of what I want. The “ghost” shows up late in the game and stars in three key extended skirmishes, during which it animates corpses with ghostly power and flings them into battle against you.

These battles, in addition to being the sort of thing I like — I like fighting a single boss repeatedly, in changing venues — also suck like a Dyson Ball.

Here’s your for-the-record, Dear Reader: I played most of Bioshock Infinite on “Hard” difficulty. I was like, “Dude, I played Quake in 1996,” and then I felt old, and then I picked “Hard”.

Bioshock Infinite lets you change the difficulty level at any time in the game. When the ghost rolled around, I said, “I played Quake in 1996, and I get it already.” I flipped the game over to “easy” and stamped the life out of it in one quiet sitting.

In this next chapter, I want you to understand why I think the combat in Bioshock Infinite is bad, because it’s bad in a complicated, multi-layered way. It’s boring, for starters, though it’s also simultaneously too easy and frustrating, which is an innately interesting combination of complaints. So, while it’s boring, it’s also interesting, so here I am, hip-deep in my own critical mess. Lots of people are going to disagree with me, though those who don’t disagree can probably go ahead and friend me on Facebook.
Chapter Ten: Beauty and the Clump

Bioshock Infinite begins with a thrilling, atmospheric Disneyland theme-park-riding through a breathing, believable environment ridden with tiny details pointing to sinister politics and dangerous social unrest. The first climax comes during The Baseball Scene, when the player has to choose to (pretend to?) be racist or not, at which point the police recognize the main character and unleash an onslaught upon him.

For the next hour, the game teaches you its combat. You learn how to point guns and pull triggers. You fight your first mini-boss — the Fire Man — and you earn his power, Devil’s Kiss. (It’s a flame grenade, only it runs on psychic juice.) You learn about sky-lines — to which you can attach with your stolen grappling-hook-chainsaw-arm-thing, and slide along at high speeds. You learn about freight hooks, which you can hang from, earning an enviable vantage point. You learn about dismount attacks — aim the crosshair at an enemy from a freight hook or sky-line and then press jump to “dismount”, crashing into the enemy and killing him. And you also learn that, basically, just pointing and shooting dudes is usually the best way to murder them.

After a whirlwind tour of carnage — across sky barges, down streets, up avenues, into back alleys, and through multi-level houses (which are claustrophobic in a cozy, airplane-toilet sort of way) in which rich people shriek in fear at you and progressives offer you shelter in a room where they’re printing pro-civil-rights fliers while they distract cops in the other room — the game crash-lands into an extraordinary atmospheric set-piece in which we meet Elizabeth, the game’s emotional / spiritual center.

This set-piece sees us climbing an enormous tower; on each floor a great big sign warns us of the quarantine level, and it all feels really exciting.

We get to the top of the tower, and now we’re close to Elizabeth’s quarters. We can see through two-way mirrors, at Elizabeth’s day-to-day goings on, and we feel like a creepy voyeur. We see her open a portal to what appears to be Paris in 1984, the song “Everybody Wants To Rule The World” is playing on a radio, and a cinema marquee displays the information that “La Revanche du Jedi” is coming soon. (That’s the original title of”Return of the Jedi”, yes. So, if you were on the fence about Bioshock Infinite, rest assured: yes, it contains a smart, direct “Star Wars” reference.)

We finally meet Elizabeth. We talk to her for a few seconds. She didn’t like being trapped in this tower. She agrees to come with us. The big scary robotic Songbird now attacks the tower, ripping it to shreds. We escape with Elizabeth, headed for the nearest zeppelin.

Just before the next gunfight pokes its happy head back into our gleeful atmospheric world-narrated Disneyland moment, the action freeze-frames, and massive tutorial text informs us (and this is a paraphrase):
YOU DON’T NEED TO PROTECT ELIZABETH. SHE CAN TAKE CARE OF HERSELF DURING BATTLE.

This was a red flag. This was as red and flaggy as red flags ever get.

I imagined the scene at Irrational Games a year before the release of Bioshock Infinite — four years after they started developing the massive thing.

It’s just after one PM. It’s a Thursday. The lead level designer steps into the room, and puts his or her hands on his or her hips:

“Okay everybody: we’re making Elizabeth invincible.”

The ensuing collective relief-sigh could push a ping-pong ball across the Sahara Desert.

This is an imaginary scenario, of course. I am not sure if Elizabeth was ever not invincible. Something — tells me she wasn’t.

Shooter fans hate “escort missions”, it’s true. Escort missions are difficult to make well. Nobody ever does an escort mission correctly — is what every level designer is going to say two seconds after someone uses the word “protect” or “defend” even once during a game design meeting during the development of a first-person shooter.

Ico, for example, was one big escort mission, and people didn’t hate it, right? What if you make the escorting part fun?

I feel like Bioshock Infinite takes wild stabs at being an “American Ico”, with its magical female lead who can, mysteriously, open doors (Yorda in Ico uses magic; Elizabeth picks locks (oh my god if that is a Resident Evil reference I am going to stab myself in the knee with a fork)). And given the Pac-Man-maze-like, simple, “iconic” geometricality of nearly every skirmish zone — they are all quite square and delightfully symmetrical, which is not at all a bad thing in itself — I feel like the game could have possibly worked if Elizabeth occupied a “hiding place” somewhere in each one of them. I feel like, maybe, one of the game designers working on the title thought something similar, and that’s why we have the vigor trap “Return To Sender”: place a magnetic field that catches enemy bullets fired in that direction, and throws them back at the enemy. It’s a curious power that only proves super-convenient in one battle — the very, very last battle.

Hmm.

What you’d need for a first-person shooter to work on such a system is to ratchet the action-density down — slowly! gently! — from “Halo” toward “Mario Kart Battle Mode”.

Let’s start, hypothetically, by saying our guy should die if he takes one hit.

Now let’s say we have a gun — just one gun. It’d probably feel just like the “repeater”, which is a hybrid of the carbine, the pistol, and the machinegun: zippy, peppy, fast repeat rate, and precise aiming all rolled into one, it’s clearly The Only Gun In The Game.

Let’s say our gun has unlimited ammo.

Let’s say the enemies all have simple behavior patterns — and that they die if they take one hit. Maybe they all require that hit to be in a different place.

Maybe the Patriots’ predictable, loudly signalled “firing” cycle (and contrastingly silent “reloading” time) is a remnant of this ghostly system, in which enemies behaved predictably and in fashions that were enjoyable purely based on their geometrical exercise.

Maybe instead of the Patriots’ back being the weak point, it could be the only place you can hit them to kill them.

A combat system like this would require more than guns; it’d tempt players to use re-pick-uppable, limited landmines to protect areas and create bottlenecks. If the general rule of the game is that the bad guys want to take Elizabeth alive and thus won’t risk shooting her, a landmine could serve as a perfect gating mechanism.

And once the bad guys captured Elizabeth, it’s not an immediate game over — you can still shoot them to get her back. Maybe we could create a little Stranglehold-like “standoff” mini-event out of this, wherein aiming at the enemy carrying Elizabeth away and aiming down your gun’s sights grinds the game into slow-motion, and lets you take one good shot at the enemy’s head. After saving her, she retreats back to the “hiding place”.

A simple system like this would lend itself well to a fast-paced arcade-style puzzly hardcore action game that just happened to incorporate mechanisms from acclaimed best-selling first-person shooters. It’d be, quite frankly, A Weird Game, though it’d also be heck of unique. This is the kind of thing I’d have insane fun with as a player, though as a level designer it’d probably drive me half insane. (Just half. I could pull it off — eventually. So, mom, no, you’re wrong: I could have a job if I wanted one.)

All this theorizing is not, I believe, pointless: it’s clear to me that Bioshock Infinite changed much, as an action game, between conception and a year ago, and it changed a whole bunch between a year ago and release. Something happened wherein they rebooted the entire nature of the game as an interactive action experience, and though I’m sure I could ask someone what happened, I have a real “use it or lose it” policy about my imagination, so I’ll pass.

I imagine that the game was going to be an escort mission, and also that Elizabeth wasn’t totally helpless — that she helped you fight, in some capacity. Maybe she created cover points and hid behind them as you advanced forward. I’m guessing that the designers really wanted to bring a slam-bang innovation to the experience of protecting a tastefully beautiful girl who is, at the same time, protecting you in a different sort of way. Maybe they had aspirations toward making a cooperative asymmetrical multiplayer experience.

This didn’t happen.

What Bioshock Infinite’s combat system ends up being is standard first-person shooter stuff with the toilet paper of “Role-Playing Elements” stuck to its boot heels.

Let me phrase that more clinically: Bioshock Infinite’s combat system is a first-person shooter atop which converges roughly a basketball-sized mucus clump of systemic superfluity.

Here’s a list of the game design systems vying for supremacy within Bioshock Infinite’s bullet-spongy first-person shooter combat:

1. Vigors: You collect these magical abilities over the course of the game. You can equip two at a time, and switch between them with a button press, and fire them with the left trigger. Most vigors have two modes: pull the trigger to fire an elemental bullet of a sort (fire burns, electricity stuns, etc); hold and release to create a trap, which has roughly the same effect as the projectile, only it triggers when an enemy walks into it. I managed to make it through the entire game on hard difficulty without using traps more than twice. (I’m told that if I hadn’t changed it to easy, I would have likely had to use traps in the final battle.)

2. Sky-lines: In some battles, the arena is equipped with sky-lines that you can jump onto, grab with the grappling hook, and slide around at high speeds. Except for a few battles which require you to use them to change location — including some thrilling set-pieces that take place aboard multiple airships — the sky-lines are rarely more than a gimmick.

3. Tears: Elizabeth can open “tears” in the fabric of space-time. She summarizes them as “a form of wish-fulfillment”. The “tears” bring objects from one dimension into another — I think. The explanation isn’t airtight. We’ll critique the science-fiction in a minute. The catch with “tears” is that you can only bring one otherdimensional object into the current dimension at a time. So you have to make a choice. You can always reverse this choice, by highlighting another tear and opening it instead, closing the other tear. Tear-able objects include freight hooks to hang on, gun turrets, friendly Patriot automatons, large cover objects, and boxes of health kits. Some of these sound like great ideas — letting me choose to build a wall of cover at the expense of a high-ground freight hook births an interesting thought in the middle of a heated battle. Then, sometimes, it’s like, “Oh, I can materialize those health kits there,” and when that happens, I’m just pressing a button to make a health kit appear.

4. Upgrades: Between battles, you sometimes find vending machines, at which you spend the quite interestingly limited currency (“Silver Eagles”, a classy, historically accurate-ish name for a seceded ex-American nation’s currency) on permanent upgrades to your guns or vigors. These might make your guns reload more quickly, do more damage, increase the clip size, or increase the reserve capacity. You have to upgrade each type of gun individually, and man, it’s a lot of guns. (I stuck to the repeater and the carbine, myself, though a quick sweep of the internet shows that, interestingly, no two people seem to agree about the best two-gun combination.) Vigor upgrades are more decision-paralyzing: you can make them cost less “salt”, you can make them more powerful, or you can add special effects — such as crows turning enemies into crow traps when they die. The bulk of the game’s Big Decisions happen at these vending machines. Also, the bulk of my mechanic-narrative-laziness-related ponderings happened at these vending machines: I’m carrying a bunch of guns, right? Can’t I just blow these things open and get All The Stuff?

5. Gear: If you are as obsessive about poking around the gorgeous(, decreasingly interesting ) environments as I was, you’ll end up with a vast assortment of “gear”. These include hats, pants, shoes, and shirts. Each piece of gear has a weird magical enhancement. For example, the first (I think the first) piece of gear you get is a pair of pants that creates a shockwave of fire every time you jump down from a sky-line — which burns nearby enemies. That’s sort of a weird one to give out first, though okay, sure. Later gear pieces will increase the chance of enemies’ dropping health when dying if you kill them with a melee attack. Choosing what gear you are wearing at any given moment is a key part in strategizing any battle … in hard mode. At the very end of the game.

6. Guns: You use these to shoot people. If you shoot them in the face, they die pretty much right away.

7. Recovery items: Search dead soldiers — or bookshelves, cigar boxes, hot dog carts, pottery, et cetera — in the thick of battle to view the contents of their pockets or drawers. Press the action button to “Take all”, which will immediately grant you the effects of any healing items contained in the corpse or cupboard of choice. Yes, even if the healing items are cans of beans or whole pineapples, Booker DeWitt can take them without ever seeing them, without ever using his hands, and he can eat them without a second transpiring, and he can obtain curative health care from them within an instant.

8. Elizabeth Finds Stuff: During battle, every once in a while, Elizabeth will shout, “Booker!” Or she’ll say, “I’ve found something!” The action button icon appears on the screen, next to “Catch ammo”. “Catch health”. “Catch salts”. Press the button, and you’re healed, restored, or reloaded.

9. Your Regenerating Magnetic Shield: Early in the game, The Mysterious Twins give Booker DeWitt a “magnetic shield”, which will take damage when enemies shoot Booker. If Booker gets into cover, the shield restores. If enemies shoot Booker while his shield is completely depleted, his health energy decreases. Health energy does not replenish automatically.

Which of these myriad systems wins, in this hunger games of action game systems?

Well, the winners are, in this order:

1. Guns — If you shoot the enemies with these, they die.

2. Vigor traps — those idiotic crow traps! How does that make any sense! How is that The Best Weapon in the game! Can’t I just play a game about guns? I only give these #2 because you need “salts” to use them.

3. Upgrades — your carbine can one-hit-kill just about anyone you shoot in the chest or higher with two damage upgrades. And the upgraded crow trap, which turns dead enemies into crow traps, is a bonafide system-breaker.

4. Elizabeth Finds Stuff — eventually, when you realize that Elizabeth is always going to find stuff during battle, and that Elizabeth will never find health, ammo, or salts outside of battle, and then you realize that god, sometimes that last enemy is a real idiot and I have no idea where he is, it dawns on you that you can hide out on some part of a level until Elizabeth heals, restores, and reloads you, then kill the last guy. And, quite frankly, that’s a weird strategy to have.

On top of all this, we have the endless varieties of between-skirmish pickups — items which restore a trivial amount of health or salts. Some items restore salts while depleting health, or deplete salts while restoring health, or restore both health and salts — though seriously, there are barely enough apples in the game to fill a single life meter. Clearly this is a game heavy with “stuff”, and with its “currencies” of health items, salts items, money, and ammunition, it’s about as unbalanced as a fat kid on a unicycle.

This is a combat system with the weight of the world on its shoulders and, like Atlas, it shrugs again and again. You can understand the pride of a game designer who’d want to not sacrifice a thing; you can think of this as a creative endeavor that snowballed over five long (or short — time flies when you’re freaking out) years and your heart will be still for a moment to consider the frequency and violence of the gut-checks regarding this game’s systemic complexity compared to its predecessor. Players loved the choices in Bioshock; they loved the intimacy of the skirmishes, and the way the environments figured into every psycho encounter. Bioshock Infinite’s enemies — zealous cops or rabid rebels — approach with fever in expansive courtyards of majestic staircases and blinding blue skies. The game is bigger in scale and feel, and they’re focus-testing it with Actual Frat Boys, and they want those Frat Boys to love it, and they know those Frat Boys like sports, and that sports have a lot of statistics and numbers, though sports are also just a reason to drink beer and eat Doritos, though this isn’t a sport, it’s a videogame, and Call of Duty is a popular videogame, and so is Halo, and … and … the Bioshock fans want complexity or they’re going to freak out so what do we do?

They did what they had to do. They looked at Bioshock Infinite on paper, they looked at it in the software, and they pulled it together the only way that was probably mathematically possible. I salute their fortitude — much as I didn’t wholly enjoy their game — in keeping every one of these god darn systems intact. I personally would have at least made health and salt replenish automatically, over time — and I would have fused “health” and “magnetic shield” into one. If you want to say “auto-recharge health” doesn’t make sense in the fiction of the world — well, does Elizabeth’s invincibility make any sense?
Chapter Eleven: CAN’T LOCKPICK

Once you’re acquainted enough with Bioshock Infinite’s combat system to consistently win a dozen long battles in a row on hard mode without dying once, that’s when Elizabeth starts to really get under your skin.

During friendly segments, she exhibits a spectacular range of interesting emotions. She’ll stop in front of a painting, and look at it. You’ll walk up beside her, and she’ll say something about the painting. When you stop into a shop to ransack the desks and cupboards looking for jars of pickles, hot dogs, or cash, she’ll approach a shelf, turn her back to it, put her palms on it, and lean back against it. I like those kinds of little touches.

During battle, however — and battle is, perhaps, Most Of The Game — she’s a buffoon. She lumbers around, occasionally animating surprise or fear. She’ll crouch down and put her hands on her knees, and then throw her hands up above her head when she hears a loud explosion.

She’s squatting right in the middle of the god darn line of fire.

An all-too-common sight, while you’re in the middle of sliding in and out of cover and capping approaching marauders, is Elizabeth, doing her Disney Princess Run in your direction, weird look of amused morbid fear on her lips, as bullets whiz past her and bombs burst in the air above her.

“You don’t have to protect Elizabeth in battle . . .” the game had told me, earlier, and it stuck with me for the rest of the game.

So, so many times during battle, my bullets’ flight paths intersected with Elizabeth’s buffoonishly positioned head. By the end of the game, I’ve accidentally shot Elizabeth in the head so many times that her head should be heavier than an adult rhinoceros.

“You don’t have to protect Elizabeth in battle . . .”

Oh god — what if they never planned to make this an escort mission at all? What if … what if she’s not real, and “Elizabeth is not real” is the cure for the ludonarrative laziness? If that is the case I will steal a car and drive to Boston and throw up perfectly consistent Progresso minestrone all over Ken Levine’s desk–

Eventually, Elizabeth is kidnapped — because of course she wasn’t going to be around forever.

Now a harrowing, gut-wrenching, horrifying sequence of events occurs. My gut tells me this is the end of the game. Elizabeth is probably dead. The way this game is winding down — by winding up and then down multiple times in succession — with how bizarre the story is getting, I realize that I can’t really expect anything, much less The Unexpected.

I’m getting ready for some crazy narrative voodoo to happen, when I walk by a door, hear a nonchalant “chankle”, and see this: the text “Elizabeth Busy — CAN’T LOCKPICK”.

So, there’s that. The game has gone ahead and spoiled its own closing scenes with its game-mechanicky BS jutting in and out.

So here’s where I look down into my notes at the list of “game-mechanicky BS & jerk maneuvers”, in which I pains-takingly cataloged an orgy of anecdotes in which “hilarious” things occurred involving on-screen text or game-mechanics during otherwise poignant story moments. Among those moments was the time I trained my carbine’s sights right on the place between Elizabeth’s eyes while she talked about her dead mother.

Another moment was when Elizabeth was crying, and an on-screen prompt told me to press the action button to “Comfort Elizabeth”. My analog sensitivity is quite high, so the slightest touch of the right analog stick yanked my viewpoint just too far away, so pressing the action button instead resulted in me loading my shotgun, one shell at a time — one, two, three — as the crosshair hovered in the center of a crying Disney Princess’s lower back.
Chapter 12: What happens in Bioshock Infinite?

Every scene of Bioshock Infinite carries some narrative weight, be it trivial or crucial. Every crucial scene offers steak-sized clues as to the nature of The Spoiler. As the game grows old, it becomes impossible to ignore that, in this world, something messed-up is going on. Eventually, its narrative and world taper to a point which avid viewers of films and readers of books might literally slap themselves for not seeing coming. Its final moments are thought-provoking, and at least as interesting as the entirety of the film “Inception”.

In “Inception”, they sure do explain the world and the particulars of the story for the first hundred minutes of movie. It’s a slow burn toward a weird payoff. In the end, it looks like you’re watching a bunch of famous people play virtual-reality Call of Duty.

Bioshock Infinite has the added bonus of interactivity. We guide the character toward his revelations, and we participate in key conflicts. We don’t just ride the Disneyland attraction — we jump out of the boat and we body-slam the Pirates of the Caribbean.

Yet Bioshock Infinite (like this review har har) grows long and weary. The game gets its money’s worth out of its meticulously crafted level areas by staging repeat battles with different enemies, grinding its “game length” number ever higher and higher.

Despite their ultimate narrative significance, some of these longest, weariest stages at first appear to have no interesting connection to the mysterious tale. After we’ve received a beverage that allows us to throw psychic fire grenades, and another beverage that lets us shoot murderous crows, the story requires us to find another beverage, which will allow us to shoot lighting, so that we can power up a machine to earn access to an airship.

The quest to get the “Shock Jockey” vigor is long and arduous. During this quest, we meet Slate, a man who fought alongside Booker DeWitt in the Battle of Wounded Knee. This sequence is very important to the true nature of the story, though on first play-through it feels like we’re walking through a theme park attraction (which we are — we’re in an actual theme park inside the game world), shooting psychos while a grizzled war veteran spouts nonsense over an intercom.

At one point, Elizabeth picks up a book, and says, “This is my mother’s diary. Why would Slate have it?” And I speak to my television: “To advance the story, yo.”

By the end of the quest, it occurs to us that we just spent an hour getting a thing so that we could power up a thing so we can ride a boat to a boat. In a game where all of the magic power-ups are elemental-themed projectiles, this whole sequence is about as interesting as “your pistol is blue, so please spend an hour finding a red pistol so that you can shoot this red lock off this red door”.

Bioshock Infinite’s campaign structure is a Frankenstein’s monster made out of fetch quests.

Sometimes, this monster is annoying: like when Booker explains to Elizabeth that we need to get out of this city, and we need to just let the rebels and the police fight each other … and then we have to win the rebels’ fight for them so that the rebels’ expert blowtorch guy can get to the door and blaze it open.

Bioshock Infinite made me tired. By the end, I was exhausted. (Maybe that’s because I only played it every day after I was done with work, late at night, with six milligrams of melatonin in my system.)

By halfway through, the battles and the long-form fetch quests were boring me with ebbing and flowing tenacity, so I ended up pausing frequently and taking many notes. Here’s a sample:

Would a district of a town, seriously, have a sign which proudly announced its name was “SHANTYTOWN”? Isn’t that sort of like naming a bridge “Hoboroof Bridge”?

Et cetera.

The bulk of the rest of those notes have become this review.
Chapter Thirteen: Conclusion.

I realize that some humans might read this article and decide that the game is interesting enough for them to want to experience for themselves, so I won’t spoil the ending. There’s no real reason for me to spoil it. If you want it spoiled, half the internet will oblige you. I’ve read every work of Tolstoy I could ever get my hands on; Anton Chekhov once wrote that Tolstoy “saw everything”; if I’ve read Tolstoy, I’ve experienced the wisdom of one who has seen everything. I’d talk about Bioshock Infinite’s ultimate cute plot implosion if I weren’t so close to the end of this review, and transitioning into thinking about books.

Will a metaphor do? Here’s something ridiculous: Bioshock Infinite’s plot is what would happen if Thomas Pynchon’s mother, aged eighteen, were lying at the bottom of a staircase, and Dan Brown, struggling to tie his shoes (as must happen to him often), accidentally tipped over, fell into a space-time portal, hurtled down the staircase, bursting his pants in the process, and — well.

In summary, it’s thick and heady and deliciously dumb. I recall the time I interviewed Hideo Kojima on the subject of Metal Gear Solid 3, and I asked him what books he liked, and he said, “I’ve just read Angels and Demons by Dan Brown and it was amazing“.

For the record, Angels and Demons by Dan Brown is, in fact, amazing, though I think maybe not in the way Hideo Kojima meant.

Bioshock Infinite is amazing in the way Angels and Demons is amazing, and I genuinely love that about it. However, take this with a grain of salt(s), because Kobo Abe’s Kangaroo Notebook is literally one of my favorite novels, and it’s about a guy who wakes up to find radish sprouts growing on his legs and ends up on a traveling through Shinto hell aboard a magical hospital bed.

What I’m left with when it comes time to rate Bioshock Infinite is my impression of its narrative as attempted sophistication — not the gleeful absurdity of Kangaroo Notebook (which would make a great videogame, by the way). I’m left remembering those jarring moments wherein my jerk brain forced me to stop and process the thought of why they’d sell a beverage that lets people command swarms of murderous crows in a vending machine in utopia. I understand that those vending machines are attempted pop-art, and that — as many naysayer-down-shooting YouTube comments are quick to point out, it is, in fact, “Just A Game”, so I should “Chill Out And Enjoy It”.

I wish I could do that.

The further games cross through this uncanny valley toward the promised land of “ready for primetime”, the more the tiny inconsistencies are going to pop out and touch my eyeball: I can shoot police officers’ heads clean off and I can pop bullet holes in this painting, yet this vase here never cracks, not even under machinegun hail.

And then there’s the constant stop-and-violence, the grueling and unbalanced combat, the goopy, gummy cluster of mutilated or half-formed systems, the popsicle-stick narrative flow, questions like “seriously how is a drinkable porcelain cup of coffee in this garbage can here”, and the lazy science-fiction — like, this story is about alternate dimensions, right? So there are infinite dimensions, meaning we can just, like, go to a dimension where all the stuff is the same except for the one thing which is a little bit different because, uh, we need it to be different for this thing to happen right now? Oh my god if these alternate dimensions are a layer-caked “commentary” on the repetitive nature of side-quests in videogames I will eat every T-shirt in my dresser —

– … when I think about Bioshock Infinite, this impression is as big in my mind as a slice of apple pie.

Then there’s the theme-fragment of bigotry. By the end of the game, the rebels — a group largely composed of minorities — has risen up against the elite, and you’re one of their enemies.

I can’t focus on the good things. I can’t focus on the gorgeous atmosphere-em-up of its beginning hours — where it’s neither boring nor Myst — or the (mostly) consistent visual density of the environments.

I keep falling back on the stratospheric (tohoho) price tag — One Hundred Million Dollars for development, One Hundred Million Dollars for marketing. I keep thinking of the amazing games that, in some alternate universe, One Hundred Million Dollars could have bought. I’d love to flip the coin or roll the dice on some of those possibilities.

In short, Bioshock Infinite makes me sad. Bioshock Infinite makes me sad that I’m not offered the choice of a dozen more games like it every year. I want so many games this big, and this weird, and this stuffed full of stuff. I want this game to be successful. No matter how stupid I ultimately decided it was, I want it to succeed, so that we can start breaking the cycle of every triple-A game being about some super-boring regular dudes on earth fighting in a desert or a jungle. I want to go weird places with weird people — in real life and in videogames. I know it’s cool for “people like me” to hate Bioshock Infinite unconditionally, because that’d be the opposite of what everyone else is doing, though I arrive at the end of this critique genuinely conflicted.

I sincerely love that a game as visually and thematically dense as Bioshock Infinite exists. I admire that it aspires to narrative significance, among other games which cannot graduate beyond “shoot all the guys”. It refreshes me to, for once, experience a triple-A game behind which I constantly feel the presence of an author — not a committee, not a focus group: an author. I am weirdly flattered to no end that this sort of experience has grown up into the sort of interactive electronic entertainment corporations will pay Two Hundred Million Dollars for. As Clint Hocking said many years ago, of Bioshock, this sort of experience proves that games really are something. Hocking theorized that the game which “is to Bioshock as Bioshock is to System Shock 2″ will be the “Citizen Kane” of games. That game is definitely not Bioshock Infinite, and even though I did not precisely walk away “liking” Bioshock Infinite, I can say with conviction that it is a landmark game, in that it proved to me that intelligent life does in fact exist in a yet-unexplored — though quite nearby — region of videogame history.

In summary — hey guys! If you keep trying, I’ll keep playing.

–tim rogers

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The Australian Job: A 13 Billion Isk Heist - Finders & Keepers

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The Australian Job: A 13 Billion Isk Heist

This is a long one, but who doesn’t like a good story? TL;DR: a 500k SP alt of mine joined a corp, set up a Ponzi scheme, absconded with 13 billion isk in cash and assets, and I let a cross-section of the Eve community live-vote the final outcome. This is hardly the greatest, largest theft in the history of Eve Online, and I doubt this makes much of a ripple elsewhere in the game, but great stories are worth sharing. The first parts of this are chronicled in the “Wolf in the Flock” series, found here.  Enjoy.

An avalanche can start with the smallest snowball.

As with mostly everything in Eve, the best laid plans have a way of changing and altering their course and even outcomes right in front of your face; this is the true beauty and genius of a game of this size with so many different and utterly random player interaction and input. Originally, the plan was simple: get a blank alt into a corp, train into some sort of high DPS ship, and take out as many corp members as possible before getting booted; a standard AWOX safari. I had the alt, I had chatted up and been accepted to In Omnia Paratus, a mostly Australian corp in the Fearless Flying Frogs alliance, and I was beginning to settle in nicely.

The idea took shape on its own; unplanned and almost organically after one senior member deposited 40mil into my account as a way of “getting the new guy on his feet”. I’d thanked him in corp chat, but after a few more days had gone by, I dropped him a note, profusely thanking him again for the isk, telling him how great being in corp was, and casually mentioning that through market play, I had magically turned that 40 mil into 200 mil. Moreover (!), the complex markets of Eve were actually totally open books to me, due to my (and had I possibly neglected to mention this to corp leadership yet??) real life job as an investment and trading manager! I mentioned offhand that since I had no real in-game skills, I’d been having a blast playing with the markets and making isk hand over fist; what a great game! Thanking him again, I signed off.

When I logged in the next night, I was immediately invited to a private chat with the CEO, a director, and two officers who were all very impressed with the (completely ludicrous) 400% profit I had managed to achieve in a 9 day turnaround. More importantly however, they were keen to see if I was interested in filling the much needed position of trade officer within the corp. Let it never be said I don’t stand and deliver when asked to serve; of course, I accepted.

When people are uneducated about something, but are afraid to appear so, they will tend to almost overly agree with anything you have to say on the matter wholeheartedly. I do this in real life when talking about Football, a game I enjoy watching yet whose rules and history I know shit all about; God knows how much bullshit I’ve enthusiastically agreed with over the years. The reverse scenario played out like a script in Eve; I would start talking about high finance, stocks, and investments, using power-suit buzzwords I gleaned from an online business school study sheet, and everyone around me would nod up and down and agree. They considered me a sort of wizard, which I suppose taken literally in the sense of a wizard being a made up fantasy caricature, was completely accurate on their part.

I was given access to the “trade” section of the wallet, consisting of a paltry 200 million isk. But I schemed, and I began to plan the first fake paper bricks of what would become my towering house of cards.

****

Borrowing liberally from the book of James315 in the infamous Currin Trading scam of years back, as well following almost to a letter the business practices of Charles Ponzi himself, I began to set things in motion. Though my barely 800,000 skillpoint toon was still training towards large blasters and a Talos, I realized very quickly that the potential was there for quite a large sum of isk; enough to be worth scrapping the plan to simply AWOX some miners. Hell, if all else failed, I decided, I would see how much isk I could scam and then simply AWOX a bunch of miners; everybody wins.

After outlining my “business plan”, the CEO and directors enthusiastically endorsed me. Again, borrowing heavily from the Currin Trading scam, I set up a website for my “investment fund”, complete with weekly trade reports, an investors list masked by “code numbers” (the master list to which only myself and the CEO would have access to – my idea – to create a mix of “transparency and security”) so investors could anonymously track their investments, a back-story, and even a fictionalized account of a fake real life career. I figured I had at most a week or two with this thing before it would crumble under its own weight, and I decided to shoot for a somewhat lofty 2 billion isk goal before that happened.

I crafted and sent out a corp-wide eve-mail, detailing the investment fund, talking about the website, and encouraging people to ask me questions any time. I made a point of doing two things in this mail: First, I very purposely used the phrase “feel free to evemail or convo me anytime with any questions” or “make deposits to…”; I made sure never to introduce doubt or hesitance through negative words like “concerns” or “give isk to”.

Secondly, since I already had the CEO on board with the idea of the fund, I made sure I subtly tied his endorsement into “implied participation”; I managed to attach his name to both me and the scheme, cementing a figure of notoriety, leadership, and most importantly trust to the fund itself in peoples heads. For instance, when talking about the guaranteed weekly 10% returns, I made sure to say things like “we’re guaranteeing”, never “I” or even directly mentioning him by name. By using “we”, I created a false implied pretense that there was a “group” of us involved in this thing, including the CEO. Satisfied with my handiwork, I send the mail and went to bed.

The response was immediate. The very next night, within 5 minutes of logging in, I had my first 100 million isk “investor”; now things were rolling.

Gradually, over the next 2 days as the weekend approached and people started logging in more often and checking their mail, I began to receive more and more convo requests, every single one of which resulted in an investment of some kind, because A.) I’m that good, and B.) no really, I’m that good. First a 50mil deposit, then a string of 100mil drops, and finally a 500mil investor. When the CEO himself as well as an investing corp officer began talking opening in corp chat about the success of my trading and the fund, I had official endorsement, and the money started doubling. When I soon reached 1 billion isk, I was incredulous, and thought for certain that things would crash at any moment and someone would finally call me out on my bullshit. Within an hour however, I was at 1.5 bil and still climbing.

When I hit the 2 billion isk goal in the first 48 hours of announcing my investment fund, I realized I needed to aim higher. I mentally reset my sights on 5 billion instead, figuring that once word got out of my first payout actually going out to people, even the skeptics would start thinking seriously about letting me turn their liquid cash into more money. I decided I’d give myself one more week to see how close I got. Sure enough, after my first round of “returns” went out, my number of investors nearly doubled in numbers.

As a means of solidifying my own possession of the isk handed my way, I pulled a classic and blindingly obvious Ponzi-scheme move: I encouraged investors to “re-cycle” their returns back into their “accounts” in order to keep things rolling for everyone, and of course solidify them a much larger payout later. This way, I didn’t even have to worry about juggling new investments into payouts for old investments. “Make your money work for you!” I told them, and with a few small exceptions, the money flow became a one-way street.

****

Eventually, a few nights later, the CEO (we’ll call him “Jack” from here on in) convoed me privately. So far, despite enthusiastically endorsing my fund, he had not actually invested a single iskie himself, and the paranoid spider-sense in me kept tingling that he was on to my schemes and just waiting to catch me in a lie. That night, I was wary of finally getting a “listen, how can we trust you” talk, and resolutely steeled myself to smooth talk my ass off.

As it turns out, I was couldn’t have been more wrong. Jack told me again how impressed he was with the investing, and then dropped a bomb: he wanted to match the fund’s current holdings, doubling the investment capital; I took a very healthy swig of my beer and stared at the screen. As much as you see or read about the brainless moves and unimaginable naivete of Eve players, sometimes you don’t always believe it. However, Eve always, always delivers in this regard, and here it was staring me in the face telling me to take its money already.

Jack wanted to keep his investment “off the books” (cue: dramatic eye roll from me) and off the website, yet I convinced him to let me split up his number into what would appear to be 3 new investors on the website’s coded investors list; seeing more investors on the page was a sure-fire way to attract more capital I reasoned with him, and he agreed. We also decided that his larger investment warranted higher return rates, and agreed on 15% instead of the standard 10%. I would later use this draw of a higher % return to lure more big money investors willing to invest at least a billion into the fund.  My wallet flashed with Jack’s deposit, and now we were at 4 billion isk.

After our conversation though, I looked at my spreadsheet and grimaced; an investment like this could cripple the whole scheme if investments tapered off. “Paying” Jack back on his investment would be money coming directly from his own corpmates, and could potentially dry up the entire fund. Thinking quickly, I convinced Jack that the fund would, naturally, need time to “absorb” his large investment, and I voiced my concerns about his returns hurting the fund’s ability to generate better returns (don’t worry, that last line shouldn’t make any actual sense at all). Sagely (and thankfully), Jack agreed, and consented that for the good of the fund, he would hold off on getting any physical returns for another two weeks. I decided then and there that I would NEVER be paying Jack a dime back of the money he’d given me; now, I had my deadline.

With Jack’s blessing (encouragement really), I decided to “open the investment up” to the whole alliance, and while we were at it, heck, friends of the alliance as well! Another mail was crafted and sent, all positive buzzwords about the raging success of the investments so far, the funds paid out, and the financially golden future of sunshine and flowers any members of the fund could look forward to just by signing up and making a one-time deposit.

What followed became a non-stop “press butan, receive bacon” routine; I literally couldn’t log in without being barraged by convo requests and a constantly blinking wallet. I hit the 5 billion isk goal the next day, and decided that 10 billion was my new, firm goal; no matter what happened, I was determined to walk away from this thing by my deadline with an 11-figure number.

****

At 5.7 billion, I hit my first roadblock, in the form of massive, almost unavoidable temptation. Jack asked me to dock at our home station, whos corporate hangers I had almost full access to, and told me to “check out the POS hanger”. Uh, we have a POS hanger?

Apparently, now we did, and it was currently filled with a large Amarr tower, a few hundred million isk in POS modules, and about a billion isk in PI materials; I had no idea what to do. This was it; this was my moment to clean out everything I could from the hangers, undock in the Talos, and just go murder people in the face until downtime. My hand trembled as I moved my cursor to the hangers, fingers twitching. My heartbeat raced as I considered my options: I could grab everything now, netting me probably just over 7 bil, but that would be it; game over. The fund would be finished, I’d be kicked from corp immediately, and the isk flow would stop. Breathing deep, I made a decision: I got up and walked away.

It was awful. I commiserated by myself, drinking and just staring at the screen for the longest hour of my Eve career before the director logged on to cart everything away to the WH the tower was destined for. That was a low point, and now I knew I had to make my 10bil goal or I’d be furious with myself for letting this prize slip through my fingers.

It turns out, thankfully, that my instincts were spot on; over the next few days, I added more investors, and more isk to my collection. I grew more bold, asking for new investors outright in alliance chat, and sending out almost solicitation-type evemails. I invented a new “investment project” that “we” needed huge cash backing in order to get into and make us all tons of money on, and every single one of these tactics worked like a charm.

My second round of payouts came and went, and as I’d convinced almost every single investor to “re-invest” their returns rather than take them as cash, my wallet was bursting at the seams. That very night, I learned that we had a “corp” Charon that was sitting in the director’s hanger, and in my new-found boldness, I enquired if I could borrow it soon since I’d “be able to fly it in a few days”; it was sitting in the hangers the next day. Additionally, a corp member asked me if I could do him a solid and sell a bunch of ships for him (around 750mil worth, including a Rattlesnake), and on top of that, word of the investment was starting to leak out to new, not as active people in the alliance who wanted in on things, and I found myself another 1.5bil richer. I was reaching the point of no return, and I began lining things up for my power play.

****

At 2 a.m. eastern standard time on Easter Sunday, I made the first moves. I secured the Charon into my own hanger,  leaving everything else as not to raise the alarms. I noticed that the corpmate who needed help selling his ships (for some reason) was logging on, and as I let him know that I could start getting his ships “into the marketplace”, he immediately opened a trade and started dropping around a billion isk worth of ships into it, including a Raven, Gila, a bunch of faction Frigates and Cruisers, and a Talos alongside the anticipated Rattlesnake. As I was finishing that trade up, a SECOND corpmate asked me to sell some ships for them as well! After finding another trade window popping open for me, I found myself the proud owner of a few more faction frigates, a Hurricane, and a Loki as well.

Grabbing a fresh drink, I sat back and calculated where I was with all this. Adding the 3.2 billion isk in ships I now had secured to the 7.8 billion in the “fund”…I realized suddenly with a grin that I had passed my goal, and was now sitting on just over 11 billion isk, with around another 800 million or so in the corporate hangers ready for the taking when I decided to cut and run. I stood on my chair and did a happy dance.

After that, everything else was just extra. A new member to the alliance needed his things moved to home base, and I selfless offered my shipping services, accepting the contract. I also decided to set up and host a series of “lotteries” celebrating the holiday weekend and the success of our investment fund so far. While this was hardly the highpoint of my whole scheme, it did net another couple hundred million over the last few days of my house of cards’ existence.

Finally, late Wednesday afternoon, I decided to make my final play. I noticed one corp member and his in-corp alt mining away in our home system in a Skiff and an Orca, and barely anyone else was online. I joined in on the mining with my Venture while I set up my logi, and prepared.

CCP has a great tagline they used in an Eve hype-video a while back, referring to a term from chaos theory called the butterfly effect, to describe the open-world sandbox that is Eve Online. Here I was, sitting on 12-13 billion isk in ill-begotten, thieved, dirty money, and at this point I could walk away; no killmails, no trail. However, this is a massive MULTIPLAYER online RPG, and as such, I decided the decision was not mine alone to make. I’d already done my evil deeds, and so I decided to put my next actions into the hands of everyone else; I opened it up to the Eve Online #tweetfleet:

The response was pretty much exactly what you’d expect from your average hyper-plugged-in cross section of the Eve community:

A few objections, but the Roman hordes had spoken (are you not entertained!).

In a twist of horrible irony, I was actually about to kill the Orca pilot with the very Talos he’d given me to sell for him. I docked up, moved my logi into position, emptied everything I had access to in the hangers, and undocked. I warped back to the belt, locked up both ships, and started laying down a heavy dose of sudden but inevitable betrayal. I knocked down the Skiff first, before turning my attentions to the Orca.

At that point, chaos pretty much ensued in corp chat, to which I added to by inventing a dramatic story of revenge, claiming the Orca pilot “owed me” and I was going to get my stolen isk come hell or high water. I stalled and stalled, trying to get either isk or an ejected-from free Orca out of the deal, but to no avail. Finally worried about the possibility of Guristas jamming rats in the system we were in ruining the whole thing, I pulled the trigger and finished it off.

…and here I’d been wondering why that Orca was so tough. Eat a dick Loot Fairy.

After that, it was all over. I warped to a safe, stuck my Talos in an Orca, aimed my pod in a random direction and went to grab dinner and drinks. Oh, and here’s the obligatory “giant pile of loots” screenshot (does not count all the stuff I pulled out of the corp hangers, and I’m not docking yet to get one):

Now on to the critique: yes, I possibly could have stayed and made more, but there was no guarantee of that, and investments were slowing down anyways. Without more and more input, a Ponzi scheme collapses pretty fast, and the trick to cashing out is predicting the peak before the decline. Also, it was only a matter of time before the Director, who never did invest and I’m quite sure never swallowed my bullshit, asked for the freighter back, and there was also only so long I could pretend to have 1.7 bil in ships “on the market” without paying people out for them. But in 3 1/2 weeks, I walked away with 13 billion in isk; I’d set a goal, I’d passed it with flying colors, and I’m content with that.

While I did some pretty underhanded (read: “smart, crafty, and awesome”) things, I did drawn the line a few places: when a noobie wanted to give me 15 mil towards the fund, his entire Eve savings, I turned him down, and when one member completely bought my line about being an investment banker/stock trader in real life and wanted advice on what to drop loads of acutal, real life money on, like the next day, I talked him down into buying a book and playing penny stocks until he got the hang of it; I hope he gets rich off stock in something like American Beef someday and thinks of me.

So thats my story, and at the risk of this turning into a John Irving novel, I’ll end things here. Many thanks go out to Psychotic Monk (for CSM!) for his fantastic guide to Safaris, which convinced me to roll some new AWOX toons and get back out there, and to a certain extent James315, who gets a definite nod for his work in the Currin Trading scam years ago; imitation is the highest form of flattery and all that.

To InOm corp: it was real, it was good; it was real good. Nothing personal, good luck, and welcome to Eve Online.

-Aiden

P.S. Oh, and I still have an alt in your corp

~ by Aiden Mourn on April 4, 2013.

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Grumpy Gamer If I Made Another Monkey Island...

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Yeah, I know, that sounds like the title of the O.J. Simpson book. I realized that after I typed it, but I’m not going to change it.

So, before I get into this fanciful post, I want to make one thing perfectly clear… actually, I’m just going to make it my first point.  It’s probably the most important one.  Actually, I’ll make it the first two points.

One - I am not making another Monkey Island. I have no plans to make another Monkey Island. I am not formulating plans to make another Monkey Island.

Two - Let me say that again.  There is no new Monkey Island in works and I have no plans to make one.  I’m just thinking and dreaming and inviting you come along with me.  Please your keep your hands inside the boat at all times.  No standing or you might get wet.

But, If I made another Monkey Island…

Three - It would be a retro game that harkened back to Monkey Island 1 and 2.  I’d do it as “enhanced low-res”.  Nice crisp retro art, but augmented by the hardware we have today: parallaxing, depth of field, warm glows, etc.  All the stuff we wanted to do back in 1990 but couldn’t.  Monkey Island deserves that.  It’s authentic.  It doesn’t need 3D.  Yes, I’ve seen the video, it’s very cool, but Monkey Island wants to be what it is.  I would want the game to be how we all remember Monkey Island.

Four - It would be a hardcore adventure game driven by what made that era so great. No tutorials or hint systems or pansy-assed puzzles or catering to the mass-market or modernizing.  It would be an adventure game for the hardcore.  You’re going to get stuck.  You’re going to be frustrated.  Some puzzles will be hard, but all the puzzles will be fair.  It’s one aspect of Monkey Island I am very proud of.  Read this.

Five - I would lose the verbs.  I love the verbs, I really do, and they would be hard to lose, but they are cruft.  It’s not as scary as it sounds.  I haven’t fully worked it out (not that I am working it out, but if I was working it out, which I’m not, I wouldn’t have it fully worked out).  I might change my mind, but probably not.  Mmmmm… verbs.

Six - Full-on inventory.  Nice big juicy icons full of pixels.  The first version of Monkey Island 1 had text for inventory, a later release and Monkey Island 2 had huge inventory icons and it was nirvana.  They will be so nice you’ll want to lick them. That’s a bullet-point for the box.

Seven - There would be a box. I imagine most copies would be sold digitally, but sometimes you just want to roll around in all your adventure game boxes. I know I do.  Besides, where would you store the code wheel?

Eight - There would be dialog puzzles.  They weren’t really puzzles, but that’s what we called them.  Being able to tell four jokes at once and meander and getting lost in the humor of a conversation is the staple of Monkey Island.  No one has done it better since.  Just my opinion.

Nine - I would rebuild SCUMM.  Not SCUMM as in the exact same language, but what SCUMM brought to those games. It was a language built around making adventure games and rapid iteration.  It did things Lua could never dream of.  When Lua was in High School, SCUMM beat it up for lunch money.  True story.  SCUMM lived and breathed adventure games.  I’d build an engine and a language where funny ideas can be laughed about at lunch and be in the game that afternoon.  SCUMM did that. It’s something that is getting lost today.

Ten - It would be made with a very small team.  Not 30 or 20, but 10 or less.  It means the game would take longer, but it would be more personal and crafted with love. Monkey love. Wait… that’s not what I meant…

Eleven - The only way I would or could make another Monkey Island is if I owned the IP.  I’ve spent too much of my life creating and making things other people own.  Not only would I allow you to make Monkey Island fan games, but I would encourage it.  Label them as such, respect the world and the characters and don’t claim they are canon.  Of course, once the lawyers get ahold of that last sentence it will be seven pages long.

Twelve - It would be called Monkey Island 3a.  All the games after Monkey Island 2 don’t exist in my Monkey Island universe. My apologies to the all talented people who worked on them and the people who loved them, but I’d want to pick up where I left off.  Free of baggage.  In a carnival.  That doesn’t mean I won’t steal some good ideas or characters from other games. I’m not above that.

Thirteen - It won’t be the Monkey Island 3 I was going to make in 1992. I’m not the same person I was back then. I could never make that game now.  It is lost to time.  Hopefully this one would be better.

Fourteen - The press won’t get advanced copies.  I know all the reasons they want to get a game in advance, and they are all valid, but I feel they should play it at the same time you do.  I hope they won’t be mad at me.  My Metacritic score hopes they won’t be mad it me.

Fifteen - It would have full voice.  It’s something we dreamed of back then and we can do it now.

Sixteen - If I used Kickstarter, there would be no fancy videos of me trying to look charming (as if I could).  No concept art or lofty promises or crazy stretch goals or ridiculous reward tiers.  It would be raw and honest.  It would be free of hype and distractions that keep me from making the best game I could.  True, I wouldn’t raise huge sums of money or break any records, but that’s not what I want to do. I want to make a game.

Seventeen - The game would be the game I wanted to make.  I don’t want the pressure of trying to make the game you want me to make.  I would vanish for long periods of time. I would not constantly keep you up-to-date or be feeding the hype-machine.  I’d show stuff that excited me or amused me.  If you let me do those things, you will love the game. That, I promise.

I hope you’ve had as much fun reading this as I had writing it.

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Why Freeware?

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Many of the developers that I respect release their games for free. And so there comes a point that you may want to give them something back for bringing you hours of playtime for absolutely zero monetary gain. There are those that accept donations or sell merchandise, but the vast majority just tell you that the joy of having someone play their game is enough, especially if they hear that players were fond of it too. I refer mainly to Locomalito when I say this, who has a philosophy that he abides by when developing and releasing games. One of his tenets is to create freeware, and the reason for that is:

“I publish as freeware for many reasons. Mainly because I’m a crazy man who loves the freedom of publishing games in his own page, right when – and how – he wants. But also, to predicate a video game scene that exists beyond industry boundaries, a video game scene centered on the joy of playing.”

I should add to that that Locomalito does accept donations now, though he hasn’t always. Fans insisted that they were able to do it somehow, so after some unwillingness, he got around to doing it. But the important thing is the reasons. As he says, it’s partly because he wants to have complete freedom and having paying customers can upset that at times. The other reason is in hopes of having a scene that is focused purely around the “joy of playing.” It seems almost poetic, and to some it’s a pipe dream, I expect.

Apparently, there are people out there who have a problem with swallowing truth about the reasons behind freeware games. I guess it has something to with the current trends when it comes to releasing games. There are more free-to-play games on offer than ever before these days, and while the price of entry has been removed, the presence of microtransactions are an easily identifiable answer to why these games are free to play – because the money is made elsewhere. So I’ve been asked by a few different people as to why developers release their games for free, and frankly, I’m not the one to answer that. For a start, I’m pretty sure that every developer has their own reasoning, so giving one or just a few answers wouldn’t really cut it. Naturally, I reached out to a few developers to see what kinds of answers I’d get from them. Just how many answers are there?

The simple question posed to them was: why freeware?

I was searching for the answers that were not tied to money in any form specifically. For instance, there are plenty of Flash games that are uploaded to various websites and are free, but the reasoning for that, quite often, is because they are sponsored or bring back revenue to the developer from adverts. So I’m deliberately avoiding those kinds of releases. We’re talking about free free. No adverts, no sponsors, no microtransactions. FREE.

Freedom

My first chat, and the longest, was with Sophie Houlden. She decided to throw many answers my way, a few of which were repeated by other developers, it’s worth noting. Sophie has a range of free games and games available at a price, all of which you can see here. So what was interesting to me is what she perceived the differences were for her when developing a game she intends to release for free against one that she would ask a price for.

Sophie started off by saying that, for her (and doubtless many others), the reasons for creating freeware varies quite a bit. She elaborates:

“Making something for money is craaaaazy stressful. Will it sell? Will I have to support it later? Do I really want people judging me on this (I assume and I guess most people judge a dev on what they are prepared to charge for)? How long can I afford to work on this?

But the thing is most of us like making games, so we’ll make stuff anyway, but that’s kind of like a hobby, whereas games I make to sell I feel like that is work. It’d be weird to sell stuff I made just to please myself in my off-time, I guess. But there is also an issue of freedom. With Splat Death Salad I could tweak it a bit and totally charge for it, but then people would expect 100% uptime, balancing fixes and so on, but since it’s free, I owe nobody nothing. I’m free to spend my time working on other stuff.

But that’s not the only freedom. Like I made Swift*Stitch PC free for an entirely different reason; I was wanting to make money from it, and nobody was buying it. It was kind of killing me that I was so broke. It felt like clinging to a life-raft made of lead or something. Much better to just sever ties. Instead of having all that stress tied up in the thing, now it’s just a game I’ve made, and I can’t resent it for not helping me out or anything. Obviously, stuff like that is pretty personal. I know a lot of devs just like to release stuff for free. We want people to play with our stuff after all.”

It’s the answer I was expecting, partially. And I suspect that it’s one that many hobbyist and upcoming game developers will concur with. Charging for a game adds a pressure, and I think it does incite players to judge a developer and their work – surely what you’re prepared to charge for is a measure of what a developer feels is worthy of a price gate? Perhaps it doesn’t indicate what a developer perceives to be their best work, though. Moreover, it’s what they think people are prepared to pay for, and will be satisfied upon doing so. And that consideration is more likely weighed against What Sells rather than a measure of quality.

It’s also a matter of taste too. If a developer wants to charge for a game, they may consider a small but affecting experience, or a weird trip through a strange land worthy of the asking price, whereas the vast majority of paying players will expect something that can be equated to other games of the same price. If they’re paying the $60 asking price of a AAA game, they’ll want something with features that add up to be about the same. Unfortunately, I think that mostly comes down to gameplay hours and quality of graphics for a lot of players. The question in such a case is always what else you could spend the same amount of money on. Releasing a game for free mostly eradicates those thought processes.

Sophie adds that she never sets out with the intention of “testing the waters,” as in seeing if a game concept is able to catch attention, and if so, then developing it further for a commercial release. Adding to that, she acknowledges that a couple of her free games have been worked on more and developed into commercial releases (like Zagi-Zigi becoming Swift*Stitch), but the intention was never there initially; it wasn’t until after that the potential was seen. She says she makes free games entirely for the pleasure she gets from making stuff. The joy of the craft.

Lastly, Sophie notes that making free games is something that she does primarily for herself. And for that reason she doesn’t feel the need to get rid of the rough edges or to make sure that it’s compatible with all the different computers out there.

“They say that “the last 10% of a project is really the last 90%,” and that’s true. For my free games I usually just skip that last 10%.”

Free Play

Next up is Joshuah Riley, who says that he doesn’t class himself as a freeware developer as his ambitions lie beyond making games of this type. However, he acknowledges that all of this games up to this point certainly are freeware. His first reason for making freeware is related to the amount of time he can offer game development, and that affects the type of games he is able to create. Having a full-time job, a wife and two kids and having that pestering need to sleep means that game development is confined to tiny numbers of hours a week. And while he does think his games might be worth something, and the same argument could be pitched as a reason to charge for his games, he’d rather release his games for free simply so that more people will play them.

“A game I sell will likely have fewer than 100 people play, and will be a “success” if I even breach double digits. Games I release freely are basically guaranteed to have thousands of players. It’s also really cool that a decent amount of those players will choose to interact with me, which is incredibly satisfying. The idea that people I will likely never be within a thousand miles of have gotten to know me in this unique way is really incredible to me.”

Another reason Joshuah gives is being able to make weird things, like he wants to. He notes that his current game in development is a “roguelike/shmup with randomly generated dubstep and a color palette that changes on screen to the beat,” and that he hasn’t seen any of those on Steam. Nor have I, unfortunately (now I want to). Not having to worry about profitability enables him to create whatever it is that he wants, and enjoy creating. Related to that is his other reason, and that is being able to learn new things while making his games. Before his current project, he had never tried randomly generated maps, AI or music generation, and he says that if he went out with the intention of selling the game, then he probably wouldn’t have taken the risk in doing so. As we touched on previously, Joshuah says that making a commercial game would lead him to make something familiar and easy, and that he knew people would want to buy as based on proven sale stats.

Joshuah finished up by saying that if he could make games full-time, then he would, as it’s the most rewarding and challenging thing he does. However, he says he makes the games that he wants to play, and not the ones that will sell. If a happy middle ground does occur, then he’ll jump at the opportunity, but he’d still be very excited to see as many people play the game, and would probably give it to people for free anyway.

I’m glad to say that Nuphrator also got in touch to add his reasoning behind making free games. You can read my previous article about him and his games here, but to say they’re experimental and highly interesting (to me) would be an understatement. He said:

“When you create a freeware game, your game is literally free – you don’t need to adjust any aspect of your game to a particular audience. You can make anything you want. You’re free. And if you are making short and experimental games with lack of classic gameplay and good looking graphics, you shouldn’t demand money for your games.”

Another who got in touch to add a couple of sentences on this topic was C.Y. Reid, who makes games under the name Failnaut. If you haven’t played Hug Marine yet, then go and do that; it’s sweet. His reasoning for making freeware games is as follows:

“For me, it’s because game development is still a learning experience, and my games are my attempts, rather than my products. Up until that point, advertising seems the wiser option, especially as I think you run the risk of cutting off a massive part of a 2013 audience by asking for cash before entry. I do worry this is devaluing the art form, though.”

Last one for now is Kerri Brown of Living Midnight. Kerri noted that she and the others at Living Midnight do have one commercial game, but the rest of their game development efforts are part of One Game A Month or Ludum Dare and, as such, can take anywhere from a day to a few weeks to make, as opposed to the commercial app, which was made over the course of a year. She was generous enough to give me a list of reasons for making free games:

- to battle obscurity and raise our company profile - to take risks we might not take in a commercial game - to churn out prototypes and gauge public reception to determine the direction we should be taking with our commercial games
- to build community with other developers
- to keep my skills as a composer/artist tooled up, since there’s always less for me to do than Wampus (the programmer) on our commercial games

So, to those people who have approached me (for reasons unknown to me) with the question of why developers make games and release them for free, I hope that goes some way to answering that question. It’s certainly a much more rounded answer than you’d get from just me, and it showcases the many different and often personal reasons why developers spend so much time on making something and don’t put a price on it.

Are games this; are they that, I hear them say. Can games tie shoe laces? Is it a game if there’s no challenge? What about if you have to catch a live bird and feed it for a week? Is that a game? Among all the silly and pointless debates about what is what and what isn’t a game, Might & Delight raise a furry paw and squeak with a little “hey, hey, guys…GUYS,” at which point everyone turns around with a bemused look. “Um…what about we all shut up and play a game about mothering tiny baby badgers?”

At this point, half the room leave to go and shout angrily at the static on their television screens, while the other half ease the stress in their faces and emit a unified “d’awwwwww.”

Considering that Might & Delight’s debut, Pid, was more interesting for its world, and not so great for the janky mechanics, their newly announced title, Shelter, is worth paying attention to. If they can craft worlds well, with characters that are both quirky and feel as if they have a history behind them, then don’t you want to see what they can do with a family of badgers as they attempt to find a new home among the perils of the natural world?

I’ll answer that for you: yes, you do. But why?

“As the mother of a litter of cubs, you are forced out from familiar and safe surroundings to find new shelter in a beautiful, but dangerous world.”

Consider this: games are making me cry more recently, a lot more than they used to – and the only reason for that used to be because they were SO damn hard, and I was a child who was prone to tantrums. In Shelter, you play as the mother badger, whose role it is to protect your cubs and scout out a new home. But it’s scary outside, and there are animals that want to eat you and your cubs, roads to cross that are made dangerous due to the cars, and many other dangers. Basically, if you ever read or watched The Animals of Farthing Wood, then – oh, god – this is like the emotional game to accompany it.
Might & Delight have said little about the game, other than what you play as, your objective and that Shelter “focuses heavily on creating attachment between the player and the badger family.” In other words, they want you to not only want to look at the badger cubs and see cuteness, but to feel love for them and a need to protect them. That would be an achievement itself, right? But what if one of your cubs was killed? I’m already crying inside at the thought of what this game will make me feel.

But at the moment the only thing we have to go on is a concept and a stylized vision of the natural world, the woods in particular. I’m not sure if I like the green/grey sheen over the game, actually; I was hoping for something a little more colorful. It could just be that there’s so much green, with just different shades of it throughout, mostly. Some other colors, like the light brown bark and the blue waterfall, help a little, but I’d like to see some different colors, just to break up the images. It also doesn’t help that the textures are made up of very repetitive tiles and seem very flat in places, suited more for 2D landscapes, rather than 3D. That said, it reminds me of a patchwork quilt – the ground the badgers walk on, at least. Perhaps it will look different when you’re playing the game and everything will come together.

That aside, we’re also left to ponder how the game will be structured – it gives the impression that it could be an open world, particularly as the goal is to find a shelter, and an open world would lend itself to exploration. But there’s also the chance that it’s a level-based journey too, just as Pid was. I’d much rather the world was open, with some guidance when necessary, but really it depends on what kinds of gameplay moments the game is based around. I mean, if you think about it, this could just be an escort mission stretched across a whole game, and we’re just being distracted by how cute the concept is. Devious! Well, I’m hopeful, and I’m sure, if handled right, then Shelter could be a touching experience. And it’s great just to play from a different perspective, particularly if it means exploring animal behaviour and the challenges that different lives have to go through.

You’ll want to watch the trailer below, but don’t be misled – Shelter is a third-person (not first-person) adventure game coming to Windows and Mac in the late summer of 2013. Currently the game is on Greenlight, looking for those “Yes” votes.

Often, I have to decide at what stage to write about a game, mainly because a lot of developments are detailed from inception to the finished thing (and beyond). And I’m wary of jumping the gun and covering a game before it might be ready due to this. CrossCode currently has a tech demo – that’s it. Well, it’s more of a tutorial that introduces the game’s ball-throwing mechanic and the many possibilities of it, and it also manages to portray the feel that Radical Fish Games are trying to capture. After playing this 5-10 minute tech demo, I’m thoroughly in love with how it plays, and, although it won’t be finished for a long time, I’ve decided anticipating its eventual release is permitted. For me, at least. The rest of you can…I dunno, bicker among yourselves. Better still, go and play the tech demo, of course!

Summing up how CrossCode plays, even in these early stages, is quite simple. Radical Fish have already said what their approach to game development is, and I’d say that they’ve nailed it. They say that they’d rather keep the concept and graphics simple, and “max out” everything else about the game. So, although CrossCode is just a simple action RPG in which you throw energy balls at absolutely everything, it comes with “good level design, polished controls, high quality assets, many animations and lots of love.”

One thing they don’t mention is how good the music is. My goodness! The music is so sweet and gives me tingles – mainly the section with the swells from the strings. It REALLY has the vibe of an epic RPG and gives me a lot of confidence in the direction CrossCode is going. It’s unfortunate that we aren’t able to see some more varied environments and meet other characters at this point in time, because that music makes me want to go on an adventure with ups and downs, deception, hope and loss – all the good stuff that makes an incredible plot-drive action RPG.

But, anyway, the game isn’t that far along yet, but it’s already very confident with the controls, both with a game pad on the keyboard. Oddly, the two controller types end up differing how you play slightly. With the analogue sticks, you play this like a twin-stick shooter, and as you hold in the fire button, you fling energy balls without much accuracy, but at a high quantity. Using the mouse, however, holding down the fire button causes you to prepare a shot and wait for the firing cone to turn into a line and give you accuracy. You can do this on the analogue sticks too by just pointing where to aim with the right analogue stick and not firing. And to fire faster on the mouse, you just have to click like mad. But I tended to play more frantically with the game pad and focus more on accuracy, and therefore slightly slower, with the mouse. In the end, it doesn’t really change the game that much, and if I’m honest, it felt more natural to play on the game pad.

“CrossCode combines retro-style 2D graphics with the unique theme of throwing energy balls at everything.”

As you pass through this tutorial, which is set out like an obstacle course in a warehouse, you discover the different ways the energy balls are used. Firstly, it’s to activate switches. You do this by firing at them directly, or if you can’t do that, you may have to hop up to a higher position to get level with them or bounce the energy off walls and around corners. You’re then tasked with luring shots from turrets at yourself in order to hit switches to open up the way, this also ties in with getting to grips with dodging. And when you’re through all of those sections, taking out mouse robots as you go, you then have a few enemies to deal with that can actually damage you. They’re very easy to deal with, providing you dodge when appropriate and keep shooting them until they explode.
CrossCode may not be anything too impressive at the moment, but considering that a tech demo gives off those vibes and the gameplay is already feeling solid, I’m hopeful for its future. With a combination of action-based puzzles, simple but fast combat, including big boss battles, and a whole load of gorgeous pixels and a story to escort you through it all, it could really be something. Give the demo a go in your browser

Some friends and I were recently discussing whether or not certain games have managed to balance their message and their mechanics when it comes to issues of player responsibility. A few games have stepped up to confront this dissonance – Spec Ops: The Line being the obvious one – but critics and designers alike will agree it’s challenging. The game would have to carry the message through the actual mechanics, harmonizing both within its design. This, too, is a challenge. How do you make a game that compels players to carry the weight of their actions when more often than not, the game is forcing the player’s hand? During this debate, I brought up a little indie game I had just recently come across that confronts this issue with simplicity and grace. It’s called Find Me A Good One.

Created by Haitham Ennasr and Andy Wallace as part of their MFA thesis at the Parsons School of Design, and a finalist at IndieCade 2012, Find Me A Good One is a puzzle platformer where the player navigates a young girl through a surreal dreamscape. Her brother is suffering from nightmares, which manifest as swarms of black, winged diamonds that hover above him as he sleeps. To cease these attacks and alleviate the brother’s terrors, the player has to find and recruit dream creatures to repel the demons. Doing this requires solving puzzles, which are simple, but tedious tasks. The real “fun” in the game is exploring the dreamscape and playing with the bizarre, toy-like environments within, but the more time you spend neglecting the game’s primary chore, the longer your brother suffers. After a while, the nightmares will take him away for good.

What makes this game work is the lack of value the actual system places on your actions. Within the first minute, you understand what it is you can do, but the game never tells you what you should do. Instead, you’re free to explore, prioritize and act according to your own personal whims. If the brother happens to be taken away while you’re off having fun, a little flying creature will come and deliver the news to you, but lets you know that you can keep exploring if you’d like. The lose condition is dependent on the player’s own judgments. Do you care about the virtual brother, or do you not? Was this a failure of responsibility, or did you simply not accept the challenge to begin with?

Some of the objects within the game produce more nightmares the longer you play with them, which will eventually find their way to your brother’s room. This means you have an active hand in the loss of your brother, turning idle play into an ethical dilemma. That is if you feel that way.

There’s one particular area in the dreamscape where two face-shaped fountainheads will release a flood of bouncy balls you can use to propel yourself into the air. In the sky there is a platform with a golden crown on it. The more time you spend trying to bounce your way onto the platform to get this crown, the more nightmare creatures the fountains produce. This is you directly sacrificing your virtual brother for the sake of a virtual treasure, placing value on one object over another simply because the activity associated with this one is more fun.

While I appreciated the way scenes like this were clear reminders of the game’s intentions, I did take slight issue with the fact that I didn’t know what the crown was supposed to do. While playing, I thought that maybe it would help me in my quest in some way, but it ends up not doing anything, at least from what I could tell. Perhaps the crown does serve a purpose, or perhaps it was just meant to be a whimsical distraction. It’s just too bad that I didn’t know and could not make an informed decision in regards to my actions.

Then again, a lot of games do exactly that anyway.

Find Me A Good One is a simple, reflective game that you can download here, for both PC and Mac. Thanks to freeindiegam.es for the great find.

Today I successfully “ripped” the wool off a sheep. It was painless for the animal, somehow, and I was grimacing the whole time. But we got through it, that sheep and I. A team consisting of a sheltered word nerd and a slightly perturbed grass muncher. Dream team right there. Yet it was not the oddest pairing I would encounter during my playthrough of Spellirium, not by a long shot. How about my time spent with a blue tunk – the worst of their kind – monsters, that is. Luckily, this one was friendly, and as I saved him from a deadly, tiny spider (yeah, right) with my SpellCaster, he offered his services as a bodyguard under the promise that I would turn him back to his non-monster form once I had learned the appropriate spell. It was the start to a long journey.

Part of me is hesitant to tell you that Spellirium is a game about words, and that a fair amount of playtime involves doing a word puzzle upon a grid consisting of 49 letters. I’m hesitant because most people would jump back, groan a bit and pull a disgusted face before running off. But you shouldn’t, because not only is it incredibly smart in its word puzzling parts, but it’s also a funny and wonderfully animated graphic adventure. As you play it, you’ll find it very hard to not get completely drawn in. You know that magic that some really well illustrated kids films have? I’m talking Disney here (the funny ones). Well, Spellirium is a bit like that.

But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s bring it back for a moment and go through the game one step at a time.

First off, I should point out that the version I’ve been playing is only an alpha build, and it came with barely any sound whatsoever, and still it managed to suck me right in. You can play it yourself right now; all you have to do is pre-order the game, which is something I know some people have a problem with, but if you’ve got the money, then there is some consolation in that the game is moving on into its final stages, rather than being conceptual at this point, like many many of the games that are crowdfunded tend to be. Basically, the gist is that the game is guaranteed to come out soon, barring an unpredictable and unfortunate event that would rock the whole game sideways happening.

You play as a young man called Todd, who is part of a group of Runekeepers posing as tailors. In this land, Lord Steve rules, and no one is allowed to read or write under his law, and due to this there is no one who is even the slightest bit literate. No one except the Runekeepers – runes being the letters of the alphabet in this case. They taught Todd to read and write, and he’s been sheltered inside their small shop, dungeon and surrounding field all of his life. You join him on his initiation day, which is when he gains his cloak and gets to explore the wider world, doing the things that Runekeepers do.

Before long, you discover that one of your Brothers has been killed, and in his hand he had the SpellCaster. With this you can start casting spells, and you do that by matching words in a grid on its interface. You can move any letters on the grid – they don’t have to be adjacent. What limits you is a bar at the top of the device that is drained every time you switch letter tiles, and more energy is drained the further apart they are. But wait; there’s a lot more to it than that, and it gets very fun.

“While the ever-changing gameplay in Spellirium will keep players on their toes, the engaging story will glue them to the experience.”

Your first challenge has you matching any old words just to get you used to the process. Next you have to shear a sheep, and to do that, you need to create words that pertain to such an act. This is where I discovered I could rip the wool off. But I also used cut, shave and shear to finish the job. After that, you then get a bunch of red tiles to use as you dye the wool red – you have to specifically use these to create words to complete the challenge. Next up, you use a yarn, which requires you to match words in a certain direction in order to spin the wheel, so first you’d go right, then down, then left and then up, for a full revolution. From the very start, Spellirium shows how diverse it can be, just in having you matching words in a grid.
Later on in the game you start fighting monsters, and to defeat them, you have certain parameters to stick to. My favorite example is the monster that has big ears that can only be defeated by using onomatopoeia. Words like bang, crash and boom do it right in! The game tracks every single word that you create too, as well as all of the monsters you’ve fought – a dictionary and bestiary do the trick respectively.

Extra challenges can be taken on throughout the game too. As you collect extra parts for your SpellCaster, you soon unlock means to store words off to the side of the interface so that you don’t have to memorize them. These words are challenges set by some of the characters, or it may be a way of paying for junk from the shop. These are optional, of course, but while you’re going around defeating monsters, you may as well just have the challenges open in case the opportunity to complete them presents itself.

Complementing Spellirium greatly, as said before, is its setting, cartoon graphics and touches of humor. The game’s world is one that is described as “trashpunk.” It’s an odd setting as it feels like traditional fantasy, albeit with more quirky creatures, which would place it among knights on horses and all of that lark. But as you meet The Mystic – a woman who apparently knows everything – it is revealed that electricity has been discovered and gadgets that use it invented. So it’s post-apocalyptic in many ways, almost a less cluttered and, quite frankly, more likeable version of Deponia’s trash world setting. Importantly, everything seems to flow together well, and none of the story or setting feels out of place.

I know that cutscenes are a hit or miss with people, but in Spellirium they’re used sparingly and when appropriate, just to give that extra bit of character to the game. I’d happily sit down and watch a cartoon series of the game. You might do with your kid, if you have one, especially. And this brings me on to the vast educational possibilities of Spellirium! I’m pretty sure that the majority of kids will find it an absolute blast and won’t even realize that they’re learning, which is the best kind, isn’t it? I mean, there’s certainly a bit of a mature line of thinking running through the game as it’s quite grim in places and could require a decent grasp of the English language to understand parts of it. But other than that, it’s fun, a bit silly in places, and it’s got some great game ideas at its core.

And sure, I may enjoy my words and messing around with them, but anyone could get into Spellirium due to its presentation and engaging story. Definitely worth giving a look if it sounds up your street. It’s as clever and silly as it sounds.

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A Response To PAR’s Adblockers/Games Press Article - John Walker's Electronic House

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A Response To PAR’s Adblockers/Games Press Article

by John Walker on Apr.17, 2013, under Rants

Today Ben Kuchera, of the Penny Arcade Report, wrote an article in which he explained how games journalism works in relation to content and advertising. That gaming sites put up the galleries of cosplay babes because it’s necessary to fund the better, less popular content, all driven by a constant need for pageviews and unique hits. In his article, he writes as if he’s speaking for the whole industry, although excludes himself from the process. I’d like to add RPS to that exclusion list, thanks very much, because I don’t recognise a word of how he says my business works.

I’m not going to get into how RPS’s advertising works, because frankly I don’t know, and I prefer it that way. That’s all done by someone who works at Eurogamer, with whom we have an advertising partnership. We have laid down strict rules, they follow them, but how the charging works I’ve no idea.

Kuchera makes a few statements which I want to make clear don’t speak for me, or the business I co-own.

“People like to say that the games press is just chasing page views with certain stories, but let’s be honest: We’re chasing page views with every story.”

This is a very loaded statement. It’s both as banal as saying “Newspapers only include news stories because people want to read news,” and as sensationalist as saying, “They’ll do anything to make you click!” The truth is of course somewhere between. RPS, and I can only ever speak for RPS and no other gaming site, is a business. We make money from advertising, and we get advertising because we have people reading the site. So yes, we post things on RPS in order to run our business. But how that defines what you post is always the business’s choice, and Kuchera’s frequent inference in his piece that it automatically causes nefarious or unsightly content does not speak for me. If anything, at worst his article ends up being apologist propaganda for the sites that lazily rely on crude hit chasing, as if it were the only way.

“This is the reality of the business. It takes so many page views and so many uniques to stay in business, you find yourself going after stories you know will be popular. You may pass up covering games that don’t have a large following. You may break one long story into two chunks to stretch it out. You do anything to get people to click.”

No, we don’t. It’s central to RPS’s ethos that we do no such things. RPS has always had the policy (although that’s too strong a word – it’s just a thing we did because it was what we felt like doing) to give obscure indie gaming and AAA blockbusters the same coverage. Of course a AAA game everyone’s interested in is going to do more PR, put out more trailers and pre-release teases – that likely tips the balance. But when it comes to what we review and preview, it’s about what we’re interested in, and what we hope our readers are interested in. In fact, we do far more interviews with indies than we do with big name developers, not least because they’re far easier to interview. We review more indies than triple As, because there ARE more indie games than triple As. If a game has a trailer worth posting, we post it, no matter the budget behind it. And why? Because readers ARE interested. Certainly, my review of an obscure indie platformer is going to get a fraction of the views of a review of a big-name FPS. But we want to post it, so we do. That’s partly because we have a platform from which we can promote good games. But also, fewer hits isn’t no hits, and it all adds up.

But the last statement is the most egregious. No we bloody well don’t. Were that true, RPS would absolutely be tailored to suit the stereotypically perceived gaming audience, posting endless list features and galleries of half-naked women, because the reality is, that WOULD bring in a ton of hits. It’s gross, we hate it, so we don’t do it. There are better ways.

“How do sites justify running longer, in-depth stories that won’t bring in the huge page views? I have bad news. They write shit. Popular shit.”

Of all the claims made in this piece, this is the one that’s riled me the most. Primarily because it’s so monstrously untrue in RPS’s experience. We have never, ever, set out to “write shit”. We’ve posted trailers for games that are very popular, because we know that a large portion our readers want to see those trailers, and will complain if they’re missed out. But in doing so, we’ll comment on them, mock them, criticise them, or celebrate them. They are almost never posts that get big hits, apart from peculiar exceptions where for some inexplicable reason a bunch of other sites will link to us rather than the YouTube page, or whatever. We’ll never understand that phenomenon, but we don’t expect it, nor aim for it, because it’s rare and insane. In general, such posts aren’t big deals for us, since every other site has likely posted the same, around the same time. Just without our commentary or analysis, which we hope makes it worth reading them on RPS rather than elsewhere.

But that’s not the issue with Kuchera’s claim. The issue is that for RPS, it’s the longer, in-depth stories that see the huge page views. Looking at our most popular stories, they’re the ones that are based on our own original journalism, whether they’re our having sourced interviews or information from developers that other sites haven’t got, self-sourced news stories on topical matters, particularly well written reviews of popular games, or carefully researched editorials. (There are peculiar exceptions – one of the biggest stories ever on RPS is a collection South Park RPG screenshots, that were publicly accessible to everyone. We’ll never fathom that one.) But the rule is for RPS, the in-depth, longer posts are those that bring in the larger page views. You know – the best stuff.

And this is the important point: RPS isn’t magic. RPS isn’t a fluke. There’s this perception in the industry that goes, “Yeah, but you guys are lucky.” Piss off. We are not simply lucky. We work incredibly hard, ruled by our principles, and do our best to be very good at what we do. I’m sure luck comes into it somewhere, but it’s obviously not what brings success. The site is a successful, profitable business, paying five people’s full-time wages, along with paying good rates for freelancers, without ever having compromised our values. It didn’t start off with money (although we’ve never had any debts) – we worked very hard for very little, and were very fortunate, to get here. But we’ve never needed to post a gallery of booth babes to be able to write what we otherwise want to. Not because it wouldn’t have made it easier – it would have! But because it’s gross, and we’re not willing to be gross.

RPS is a commercial site, and we’re not pretending that we’re not doing it to make money. But we’re doing it for other reasons too – our passion for gaming, our desire to communicate, and the opportunity to provide readers with entertainment, information, and discussion. We love those things. We have a platform where we can do this stuff, and we’re delighted that we’ve proven that such a platform is possible if you’re good enough at what you do, and work damned hard at it. (Which is why it’s all the more galling when it’s dismissed as an ideological fluke.) That we’ve realised we get the biggest hits when we work the hardest is, perhaps, the good side of this motivational model.

I’ve only talked about RPS here, because as I’ve said, I’m in no position to talk about anyone else’s business. But I want to be clear that this isn’t unique! There are many other sites who have not resorted to the scummiest practices of the industry, and are very successful. The suggestion that commercial success is impossible without base behaviour is a lie the industry tells itself to feel better about itself. Kuchera seems to have bought into that lie, no matter his opinion of it.

There’s one other point I want to make here, regarding Kuchera’s point on adblocking. Adblocking does suck for us, and every other site that relies on advertising. At RPS we make sure that the ads we run are the least offensive options. We NEVER have ads that obscure the content, pop up, or make noise without your permission. Sometimes – not often – they can be a little annoyingly flashy, but that’s as bad as they get. We do that because we want the site to annoy as few people as possible. Adblocking us does hurt us, and we’d obviously prefer readers didn’t do it. And on top of this, I think there’s an issue with the argument so many make, including in the PAR piece:

“Whitelist your favorite sites from your ad-blocking program, and share your favorite stories on your favorite social networks. Tweet a story you like, or share it on Facebook.”

Good stuff, except approaching it in the wrong order. Whitelist EVERY site. Set your adblock to be automatically off. When you encounter a site that then spams adverts at you, repeatedly covering the text you’re trying to read with their crap, block the hell out of it. Sites should not have to earn being unblocked – they should have to earn being blocked. This idea that you should only whitelist those that you like best is incredibly selfish. Because what about the time a Google result takes you to a site that gives you some amazingly useful information? You’re not going to bookmark it, or visit it again – you got what you needed. And they got nothing for it. That’s messed up. But I totally agree with the bit about sending money into your favourite sites : )

(It’s probably worth noting that this site carries no advertising at all, and it makes no difference to the entire universe how many clicks it receives.)

All content on this blog, including Rum Doings, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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Raph's Website » A Letter to Leigh

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A Letter to Leigh
April 9th, 2013

when people say games need objectives in order to be ‘games’, i wonder why ‘better understanding another human’ isn’t a valid ‘objective’

games need ‘challenges’ and ‘rules’, isn’t ‘empathy’ a challenge, aren’t preconceptions of normativity a ‘rule’

-  Leigh Alexander writing on Twitter

Dear Leigh,

I have such a complicated emotional response to this. And I think you like getting letters, based on what I see on the Internet.

I would rate better understanding of another human and the challenge of empathy as bare minimum requirements for something reaching for art.

The assumptions underlying this question are the interesting thing. A game of bridge demands great understanding of another human, and great synchrony of thought. A huge number of the games of childhood are designed to teach empathy. We play games all the time in order to get to know people.

But that’s not what you really mean, is it. What you are really talking about is something else entirely.

The debates over “what is a game” have been going on for a long time now. They have an uncomfortably personal edge lately. We are seeing powerful works of art created in the digital medium. Further, they are deeply personal statements. And even further, many of these works are coming from groups that have been marginalized, oppressed, discriminated against.

Many of these works are brilliant.

The assumption implicit in what you’re saying is that a work’s formal structure isn’t as relevant as what it accomplishes. This is a completely valid point of view, but not, I think, all that useful for sorting something into a genre. But I accept that many simply don’t care about sorting that way.

But it also sort of implies that games with objectives and rules haven’t been reaching for these goals too. And that’s not only not true, but unjust to games’ expressive power.

What is reveals is a preference for the kinds of understanding you want, towards specific modes of conveying that understanding.

An aesthetic of unplayability

I have been fascinated lately by the fact that many art games accomplish their power and effect by subverting “gameness.” And what I mean by that is denying the player agency.

When we think about what makes a game, we almost always come back to some degree to interactivity. I’ve argued in the past that interactivity is hardly unique to games, and therefore can’t be used as the sole yardstick. But I sure wouldn’t try to classify something as a game that is non-interactive.

Historically, many signature emotional moments in game have been accomplished by using non-interactivity. When Floyd dies in Planetfall, we do not have control. People still rhapsodize over the death of Aeris in Final Fantasy VII. We did not have control.

More recently, I have seen the following currents develop:

- The game which “lies” to you about a winnable situation to accomplish its effect. Freedom Bridge is one such example. It does not meet the formal definition of “game.” You can’t beat it. You can’t even make progress. There is only one pattern to perceive: futility. In a different way, the painfully honest That Dragon, Cancer (which I haven’t played) is apparently also accomplishing its effect through helplessness.

- The game which uses the fact of engaging with it at all to accomplish its effect. These games have complicity as their means of making a point. Brenda Romero’s Train is one such: a game whose only moral move is not to play, but of course stating the mechanic baldly reminds one of the line from the film Wargames. September 12th is another.

- The game which uses the form of gameness but which pulls off its emotional impacts through moments of presenting false choices. At GDC I was treated to a lengthy description of To The Moon, which sounded like it fit this definition (and which I need to go track down and play), and it’s interesting to read the review on IGN as the reviewer attempts to explain why it’s a great experience while not being “gamey.”. This is also the signature move in Porpentine’s Twine games such as Howling Dogs or How to Speak Atlantean, where we find ourselves taking actions as rote, finding the same hyperlink twenty times on a page, all with the same effect.

I think all of these games are awesome, and am humbled by them. But I also wonder about the overall aesthetic. I would pose the following questions to their creators:

- Does choosing non-interactivity as the central defining characteristic effectively put you in a broadcasting position, and therefore turn the games into monologue rather than dialogue?

- What does that mean for creators who outright state they are seeking to create empathy? Is dialogue not actually the best way to create empathy? If so, what are its weaknesses? Or is it that we cannot truly yet accomplish dialogue yet through our medium?

- Does choosing to deny players agency mean that you are in effect giving up on whether game rules can accomplish your goals?

- In effect, are all of these games subverting games themselves? Is it conscious? To what degree is the insistence that these are in fact games reflective of an ambivalent relationship to games?

I end up with these questions because these by and large feel like narrative moves, not game-like moves. Or perhaps, they feel game-like in the sense that I the player feel like I am being played, in the “are you playing games with me?” sense. They feel, in the end, like the twist ending, the O Henry moment, like it was all a dream. Like the ending of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, or John Cage’s 4’33”, something that should probably only be done once, marveled at, and then moved past.

The impositional narrative

Don’t get me wrong – something like the power of daily ritual, as displayed in Howling Dogs or Cart Life, is something that only this medium could do. The moment when you are a Tetris piece that does not fit, in Dys4ia, is something only our medium could do. I am not making an aesthetic judgement here about these tools; I am posing a craft question. I want to believe that despite the political layers that adhere to the discussion of this topic, that we are all craftspeople who care about the carpentry of what we do. We all need to reach our own accommodations and understand our own aesthetics.

Games have had an element of futility for a long time. Single-player games especially. The robots always won, in Robotron. The Space Invaders always conquered the earth. But at least we were able to make a go of it. The games themselves have different messages, but the aesthetic here says that we can’t make a go of it. It’s a rigged world. You can’t do better at Train. You can only do worse. The message of September 12 is “don’t play me.”

It’s probably me seeing things, but I can’t help but wonder to what degree the overall aesthetic in the art game community is a descendant of (bear with me) Super Mario. If there’s one overriding factor in the aesthetic of a Nintendo game, it’s control. Miyamoto is said to plan absolutely everything. Every outcome. Every permutation. Every possibility.

In this, the underlying fundamental kinship of the big AAA game and the arthouse darling Twine game is apparent. They are both more about the author than the player.

Are they games?

Can we, should we, do I, exclude these things from the realm of games? Not only do I not exclude them, I welcome and evangelize them and have been doing so for over a decade (despite what some say about me). But I actually think it’s the wrong question on many levels.

I wonder instead whether the work is trying to exclude itself from “gameyness.” By and large, these are games about people who lack power and lack control. The message gets across because games have always been about agency; gamers are used to having power and control, and to have the game itself deny it is a wake up slap across the face.

Effectively, these are games as rhetoric not games as dialectic, moving against the fundamental current of gameness. And the rhetorical move is “destroy everything,” as Porpentine put it in her GDC13 session with Terry Cavanaugh on indie games.

Overall, to me it feels like it speaks to a conflicted relationship with games. The creators of these works do not want to be excluded: it is their medium. At the same time, the aesthetic argues for un-gaming things.

Nor do I mean to pick on indies here; Warren Spector made a statement in his session about how “story is finally getting taken seriously” that was a moment of great cognitive dissonance for me. To me, it feels like story is all that gets taken seriously in AAA, certainly, and to a large degree in the art game and indie movements. And in AAA we have seen some moves lately that speak to a conflicted relationship there as well: No Russians using exactly the same rhetorical devices as the art games, Spec Ops: The Line, the arguably failed narrative line in Far Cry 3, even the discussions over violence in Bioshock Infinite.

Games are uncomfortable with themselves, and not just on the level of “what are our narratives.” But actually on the level of “what are games for?” We see our tools taken up by crass moves into marketing and monetization, we see the craft we developed being used for manipulation, and we start asking ourselves whether everything we do is manipulation, whether we are fundamentally crass.

I find myself cheering on the punk neon fringe. But I also find myself saying “please don’t destroy everything” because some people live in there, and it is always worth getting to know people, especially the ones not like you.

Ranting is not conversation

I was hesitant to write a lot of this down, because while many found this year’s GDC to be the most inclusive ever, I also was struck by the degree to which GDC time was spent not with “the good guys winning” but rather with good guys fighting good guys. I found myself cast as an excluder because I am interested in definitions, and I am sure this article will land me there again. (In fact, the height of cognitive dissonance was having a lovely conversation about design with Cara Ellison at a late night party – about many of these same topics, in fact; and finding myself sort-of-namechecked the next day when Anna Anthropy read a modified version of Cara’s poem “Romero’s Wives” aloud — a version filled with righteous anger that is impossible to quarrel with). I literally had one indie developer whose work I admire run away from me in the street.

On the political level, every word is charged. On the theoretical level, the pomo stream of thought says there are no boundaries. But in both cases, we see these tools turned again and again towards reinforcing labels, asserting identities. A monologue is implicitly reinforcing boundaries, just like defining a term is. None of what I have written in this little essay is about the messages in the works or about the games’ creators. But I fear it will be taken that way anyhow, just as my earlier writings on narrative and mechanics were taken. I find myself wanting to say sorry sorry sorry for — having an academic debate about minutiae of the structure of interaction?

But then we get something like the Experimental Gameplay Workshop, where everything we saw was actually about mechanics. Including mechanics that work to create empathy in profoundly non-narrative ways: Spaceteam, Searchlight, Ninja Shadow Warrior. I found it deeply inspiring in a way that the prevailing narrative of the conference was not quite. But I also recognize that I took away little understanding of people and a lot of understanding of math from most of the games presented, being as they were “about geometry” rather than “about empathy.”

All in all, I wonder whether fundamentally we as a community are doing a bit too much ranting. In the games and in the aesthetic and yes, from stage at GDC. Oh, I don’t mean in the literal sense of strident complaint. I mean in the metaphorical sense of holding forth. Games have had nothing to say for so long that I worry that we have collectively concluded that “saying something personal” is what makes them worthwhile art.

Ranting is a rhetorical device. It’s unidirectional. Yes, it’s all part of a larger conversation, of course. And sometimes we need to speak loudly to be heard, especially if we are from a marginalized group. But fundamentally it is hard to listen when everyone is loud, and the aesthetic of control is all about the player listening, and not getting to speak. Fundamentally, these design moves are about impositional narrative, not about the narrative the player constructs. Imposing a narrative, a norming, a worldview – I thought that is what we were ranting against. Running away from attempted engagement – I thought that is what we were ranting against.

The unique power of games, to me, lies in the conversation between player and designer. That happens to be my aesthetic. I often despair of whether games even have this power, because I have seen the way in which we end up having to retreat back to the comforts of other media. But to me, it still feels like a lodestone. I chase formalism in order to better understand the tools it affords because I already know how to write, I already know how to make music, I already know how to draw. I already know how to get a message across – except perhaps in this rambling mess of a post.

So yes, Leigh, understanding other people is a challenge. Empathy is a goal. I’ve argued for them for a long time now myself. It is fantastic that we have the disparate points of view, the fresh voices, the outsider art, and all the rest of it.

But I also find myself looking to the future, where I hope the games have empathy for the player, rather than the other way around, because it is a far harder artistic, and empathic, challenge to understand an opposing point of view than it is to present one’s own. I’ll be entertained by a rant I agree with, and angered by a rant I don’t, but a debate is far more likely to change my mind. To me, this is why Cart Life deserved its win, the way it argues with itself.

So I guess my reply to those tweets is, “yeah, but I’d rather argue with a game than be told what to feel.” Because games are the only medium you can argue with – and maybe change the game’s mind.

Anyway, Leigh, this is the convo we didn’t get to have at GDC, and that didn’t fit in a tweet by about 2400 words. I think all of this – my craft questions, the general anger I see, all of it – is probably something that we as a craft and a community grow through. We just can’t quite tell how, just as a teenager can’t quite know the adult they will be. We’ll probably muddle through, and the debates — and even the anger — will be our tools for doing so.

I don’t claim to have answers on all this. Just a lot of questions. And the desire to express how conflicted I feel about it all.

See you at the next conference.

-Raph

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Radiator Blog: A letter to a letter

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Dear , You were right when you said that the authors of “personal games” would probably take you the wrong way… It’s hard not to. It’s impossible to divorce the politics from the forms of these games, which, yes, makes them difficult to critique as formal designed objects without appearing to attack their politics. These authors argue that “apolitical formalism” is inherently political, that the worst politics pretends it’s not politics. Porpentine she prefers “blatant bullshit over honeyed poison.” (Uh, she was talking about you, by the way!) I’m sure you’ll understand these authors’ reluctance to trust this kind of criticism after the past decade of sustained critical attack on such games and their contexts — perhaps these “crimes” weren’t always inflicted by you or whatever, but it’s certainly a trigger when you begin your letter with wondering, “what is a game?” That line of inquiry has been a long favored tool of well-intentioned oppression, because these arguments often masquerade as thoughtful discourse but function as a weapon of de-legitimization, that argue these personal games can’t really fit a formal definition of game. The emotional leap is that these people can’t really fit a formal definition of people. Adding, “it’s okay if it’s not a game” comes off as sounding like, “it’s okay if you’re not a person,” which doesn’t really help you seem apolitical. Again, you’re aware of this. You are a very carefully written letter. I do think that you imply that this inability to separate content from form is an inherent (formal) weakness of personal games and the ways they mean things. That, because these games can’t fit into a formalist frame, they are thus less game-like. Instead, I’d argue that this is a weakness of a traditional formalist approach:  (I’m construing your use of “agency” and “game-yness” as meaning “mechanics”, because that’s how I think you’re actually using those concepts.) I also think your idea of “dialogue” is too formalist. It emphasizes the shape of dialogue and presumes a positive effect, when I know better. In general, “promoting dialogue” is usually code for ” Outside of philosophy books, a dialectic is rarely fair and is subject to a power dynamic between the participants. (Poor Glaucon.) Fox News, for instance, often uses the “form” of dialogue to intimidate and mislead under the guise of being fair and balanced; and a few years ago, the completely rational dialectical democratic process of the state of California removed my right to marry. Dys4ia does not “argue with itself” because that’d compromise its politics — it’s taking its turn in the larger dialogue outside of the game, saying, I’m just trying to explain why authors of personal games don’t / can’t trust formalism… and now I notice what’s happening: I’m rhetorically casting you in the role of Fox News, bigotry, and ignorance. See? You can’t take the politics out of this! There’s simply no way to say, “Anna, you should’ve ” without coming off like an asshole with an axe to grind. Maybe if we were talking about Starcraft, that nitpick could be legitimate critical dialogue and we could add it to the annals of Starcraft Studies and Starcraft theory because Starcraft is (partly) *about* the graphics on level 3, and “tight graphics” actually means something to the Starcraft developers. For personal games, it isn’t and it never will be, partly because So here’s what I propose: don’t take this as, “these games think they’re above formal criticism.” Instead, perhaps formal criticism just occupies a space that’s orthogonal / lateral / irrelevant to this game design space. We need a new mode of games criticism! I mean, I do agree that formalism has its uses. Sometimes putting things into classes, categories, and types is useful. (Starcraft sure is interesting! Let’s analyze all those systems!) Unfortunately, here, I just don’t think this is one of those situations. Here, game design is not physics, engineering, or science — rather, it’s political science, it’s history. Maybe we could approach our criticism of these games more like those fields?
I remain your most obedient servant,
— Robert Yang

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Alternate Ending » Triptychs

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Criticism

Triptychs

April 13, 2013

We tend to see them as objects. When we talk about games, we’re referencing a thing, either with physical boundaries or digital limitations. Games are objects with qualities, to be dissected, parsed, and valued. A game is something with a challenge. A game is something with a goal. Besides the usual questions of who is deciding what a game has, it is, first and foremost, a thing.

Most arguments over objects pull from essentialist rhetoric: if it has these qualities, it must be this. If it does not have this feature, it can’t be this. Games then fall into all the usual traps most objects do- commodification, determinism, colonialism.

But, perhaps, the object involved with what we care about games is the least important part. Instead, the experience, the space that exists between the two objects, player and screen/table/player, is where play happens. Navigating systems, giving back to the feedback loop, doesn’t occur within the object of the game. So why is it when say someone designed a game, we highlight the file instead of the play space?

–

My mother likes to tell this story, about the time I was born. Literally- she swears she was staring straight at the clock in the hospital as she gave birth. She told me the time on my birth certificate was wrong, which made me think about what else could be. But the story didn’t stop- she also remembers the nurse who came in to fill out forms, asking my mother for her background and other information. The nurse looked at my mother and I, and wrote in that I was white. Then, as the story goes, my father came into the room at this moment. She looked to my father, to my mother, then to me. “Oh, no, black.”

Race is a category used to prescribe traits on a person. I know this because I’ve spent my life listening to others guess mine. Did I have a temper because I was latina? Was I black, and therefore pitiable? I sure acted white. What people wanted was for me to pick a side- are you with us, or over there?

Growing up, I always checked the ‘other’ bubble whenever filling out forms. I remember, for my first job, I wrote in ‘other’ because the option wasn’t there. My boss said I couldn’t do that, and chose black for me instead.

–

what is a game?

win, challenge, rules, play, emotions, death, empathy, fun, not art, art, experience, iterative, none of your business, mechanics, photorealistic, legitimacy, exploring, shooting, systems, enemies, growth, abstract, losing, agency, puzzles, interactive, fantasies, graphics, i just want to impress you, escape, your’s, mine, something else entirely, visceral, story, love, fear, disconnections, chance, outcome, whatever i decide

–

There is much to be said in the way of a game’s form. How is it structured, and how does that structure make a difference? Let’s say someone submits something that doesn’t look like a poem to a poetry contest. The judges don’t necessarily go “This isn’t a poem, therefore, it is not worth considering.” Rather, the form itself critiques the established genre, it says “I’m a poem, and what are you going to do about it?” The formal genres in writing are for convenience only- ultimately, the kind of criticism needed for flash fiction, prose poems, short stories, novellas, and novels, is ultimately one in the same. Maybe everything is really just poetry. Boundaries, bones of old men before us, are only there to be transgressed.

There’s much to be said about someone who uses form to decide what something is. Formalism, in itself, doesn’t have the definition for something like ‘game’ used by formalists. It is part interpretation, part common wisdom. These boundaries are not meant to be crossed, rather, imply the fractal growth of even more categories. And without that bedrock of an initial definition, everything else crumbles, and the world doesn’t make sense anymore.

–

I always tell this story, about my job at Starbucks. It stars me and some customers.

The first customer came up to order a drink. He was a regular, and liked to wink at me a little too often. He always addressed me formally, with a “How’s your day going, ma’am?” He did that this time, we exchanged pleasantries, and he went on. The second customer, overhearing our chat, looked indignant. She pointedly said, “I’d like a grande soy extra hot no foam chai, sir.” It struck me how, without acting differently, I appeared to be two different things to different people. That was out of my control- I was an attractive women to one, and a deceptive deviant man to the other. This happened often, with every pronoun flying around every which way, I lost track who said what.

Who cares what category you belong to? I care. I care because I say I’m a woman, and many important institutions disagree. The government, my schools, my family, security guards, bartenders, people in bathrooms. I can scream out loud what I am, but someone put a category on me, one that decides what side of a prison I’ll go to, one that says I have the wrong ID, one that won’t let me marry my boyfriend, one that has the power to ban me from public spaces, to insist I don’t wear makeup or else I’m kicked out of the house.

I was on my way to LA, going through the usual drill of airport security. I went through one of the big scanners, and was stopped. Two TSA officials, one a man, and the other a woman, argued who between them should do the pat down, right in front of me. Someone saw my body and decided to put me in a category. The man laid his hand on my stomach for a brief moment, as if there was a ticking bomb inside my body, ready to blow.

–

what is personal?

emotions, immature, untrustworthy, feminine, impatient, queer, meandering, confessional, free, uncomfortable, zinester, dubious, empathy, illogical, revolution, manipulative, perspective, egalitarian, not up to standards, polemic, cheap, voice, over there, unprofessional, resists, loud, exploitative, conflicting, my only chance

–

If life is a game, we are good at ignoring its systems. Preoccupied by blips and marble board pieces, where are the critiques of the systems we live in every day? The ones that decide who will be rich and poor, the ones that frame the discourse we discuss ideas. What are the rules, who is valued- who isn’t?

There are times I think we are our own little islands. We see the world at our particular angle and are the only one with our particular crossroads of experience. Why is there such a force to smudge this away?

–

My fashion is weaponized. It is a strategic tool to navigate the minefield of interpersonal relationships. It’s all about control- if you can set the terms someone approaches you on, then you get an upper hand you rarely get. If I present myself as exotic and sexy, I at least limit the harmful ways a person can treat me.

I remember walking through the crowds of my first GDC. Many wondered why I put so much effort into my looks, possibly the only woman off the expo floor with heels on. Men liked to take me by the shoulders, pull me along with them. I had the only professionalism I was allowed- the kind where I have to be as much of a spectacle as much as I am intelligent. I knew the rules of the game, and moved my pieces accordingly.

I both love and dread the bars and parties. Eventually someone will touch me without permission, and I must leave without a fuss. Walking quickly through the Mission to get home, a man called out to me:

“Hey, mami, how much?”

I knew what he meant. I kept walking.

“Too good for me? You suck that rich white cock, you get that white man money?”

I walked faster, even if I was used to hearing something like this.

“How much mami, I can pay it.”

I didn’t cry when I got home. Instead I went through and looked at all of the names, all of the names of my editors, those receiving my pitches, giving me opportunity to further myself in the industry. The names on the business cards in my purse, the names already in my inbox. The guy I was dating. That man on the street knew. He knew.

I’ve never told this story before.

–

what is

Don’t worry, it’s yours. You can have it.

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