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The Walking Dead, Mirror Neurons, and Empathy

psychologyofgames.com

Oh man, have you all been playing The Walking Dead from Telltale Games? I have, and with every installment of this episodic game I’m newly impressed by how hard it yanks on my emotions. Like the comic that spawned it, the game is unapologetically bleak and its appeal comes largely comes from watching characters getting crammed into really bad situations from which some of them just won’t emerge –unless they do so groaning and hungering for brains. Like many horror stories it’s appealing the way a roller coaster is appealing. The characters are full of despair, heartbreak, anxiety, regret, and desperation.

Stop. Freeze your face. Did you catch yourself imitating Clem’s expression here, even a little?

And the amazing thing is that the game gets me to feel all those emotions too. I’m glad that it comes in monthly installments, because I need the time between episodes to recover. But why is that? By what psychological, neurological, and biological mechanisms do video games like The Walking Dead get us to not only empathize with characters onscreen, but also share their emotions?

For the answer let us start, as we so often do, with tiny Italian monkeys.

Years ago, neuroscientists in the Italian city of Parma were conducting experiments on macaque monkeys in order to understand the functions of individual brain cells. This involved inserting wires into the brain so that the researchers could detect activity in cells related to functions like grasping and bringing food to little monkey mouths. As researcher Marco Iacoboni notes in his 2008 book Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect With Others, stories of a particular breakthrough are varied and apocryphal, but most of them involve a monkey wired up and awaiting his next round of experiments. In walks a researcher, who then reaches out and grasps something of interest to the monkey like a piece of fruit or a big red button marked “ACTIVATE TO FREE ALL MONKEYS.”

Suddenly the researcher noticed that according to the equipment hooked up to the monkey’s brain, neurons were firing that were associated with grasping motions, even though the animal had only SEEN something being grasped. This was odd, because normally brain cells are very specialized and nobody knew of any neurons that would activate both when performing an action or when seeing someone else perform the same action. Yet here the monkey was, blithely firing neurons previously only associated with performing motor actions while just sitting still and watching.

Thus was the first observation of a mirror neuron in action, a brain cell set apart from many of its peers and which are also present in delicious human brains. It turns out that many researchers like the aforementioned Dr. Marco Iacoboni, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at UCLA, believe that mirror neurons are important for our ability to empathize with things we see, like the plight of poor Lee and Clementine in The Walking Dead. “Mirror neurons are motor cells,” Iacoboni tells me via e-mail. “That is, they send signals to our muscles to move our body, make actions, grab a cup of coffee, smile, and so on. However, they differ from other motor cells because they are also activated by the sight of somebody else’s action.” For example, a mirror neuron for grasp is fired when I grab an Xbox controller, but also when I see my friend grabbing a controller. “By being active even when we do not move at all and simply watch other people moving, they sort of create an inner imitation of the actions of others inside us.”

Curious about exactly how this phenomenon works, Iacoboni and his colleagues conducted a study (Carr, Iacoboni, & Dubeau, 2003) where they used very expensive equipment to monitor the brain activity of subjects who watched images of faces expressing different emotions. As expected, mirror neuron areas activated when people saw the expressions, and so did the limbic system, a portion of the brain known to be related to emotions. In short, upon seeing facial expressions, mirror neurons fired as if the subjects were making those expressions themselves, then triggered activity in the brain’s emotional centers so that subjects could actually feel the emotion being imitated.

Iacoboni notes that this process “puts us immediately in ‘somebody else’s shoes,’ in an effortless, almost automatic way. This is why we get so immersed in the movies we watch and the novels we read.” When we see Lee Everett or any of the other Walking Dead characters grimace in disgust, our mirror neurons for grimacing activate as if we were making that expression ourselves. And because of that inner imitation, we actually DO feel the emotion to some degree and thus understand what the other is feeling.

I think this is one of the reasons why The Walking Dead is so good at eliciting emotions: it frequently shows us the faces of the characters and lets us see all the work put into creating easily recognizable and convincing facial expressions. And so it’s not the zombies that elicit dread in us. Instead it’s things like the face that Kenny makes when Lee tells him to make a hard decision about his family. “We spend a ton of time on the facial animations for the characters in the game,” The Walking Dead’s Creative Lead Sean Vanaman said when I asked him about this. “After writing the first episode we start to make lists of the type of things characters are going to feel in the story and then start to generate isolated facial animations to convey those moods and emotions. Those are then used throughout the game.”

But it’s not just seeing an expression and imagining ourselves mirroring it. In the 2004 study cited above, Iacoboni and his colleagues also had some subjects physically imitate the expressions they were seeing and the cascade of mental activity increased. This suggests that actively imitating expressions helps us better empathize and understand, and it’s part of a fairly established line of research called the “facial feedback hypothesis.” For example, in one 2005 study researcher Paula Niedenthal had two groups of subjects look at the facial expressions of other people One group, however, was made to hold a pencil between their teeth, which severely limited their ability to mimic the expressions they saw. The result was that those clenching the pencils in their mouths were less able to detect emotional changes in the faces they observed because the lack of mimicry short circuited their brain’s ability to replicate facial expressions, feel the emotions themselves, and then recognize it in others.

So, I suppose the moral of all this is that if you really want to get the full effect from The Walking Dead, don’t cover your eyes and peek between your fingers in a way that inhibits your ability to mimic the expressions you see on screen. Your mirror neurons don’t appreciate that when they’re trying to get your to replicate expressions of crippling, existential doom.

REFERENCES

Carr, L., Iacoboni, M., & Debeau, M. et al. (2003). Neural mechanisms of empathy in humans: A relay from neural systems for imitation to limbic areas. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 100, 5497-5502.

Iacoboni, M. (2008). Mirroring people: The new science of how we connect with others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Niedenthal, P., Barsalou, L., & Winkelman, P. et al. (2005). Embodiment in attitudes, social perception, and emotion. Personality and Social Psychology Reviews, 9, 184-211.

psychologyofgames.com

Sexy Videogameland: How To Be A Game Journalist

sexyvideogameland.blogspot.co.uk

Do you like video games? If so, you may already qualify for your dream job. That’s right: Games journalism, the art of writing about games in order to gain fame, prestige, and free copies of things. It can also be quite lucrative, so if you’re reading this, feel free to send your boss the kiss-off email you’ve been composing in your head for years. The rest of your life is about to begin now.

Not only will games journalism give you a career, it’ll give you the social network and peer recognition you’ve always longed for. Lonely? Not anymore! Get ready to meet your 200 new internet friends and thousands of Twitter followers!

This sounds great, you’re saying. But how do I do games journalism?

You need a lot of feelings and opinions. This part is essential. Unlike other people, when you play a video game you have experiences and responses and thoughts, and probably most people have never had those before. You should write them down. If you don’t have particularly strong opinions, fear not: Just be very emotional, and you will get a lot of attention. Attention is, of course, the measure of quality.

You need a lot of passion and faith. Nobody believes in the games industry like you do, and you need to show those jaded assholes how much you care. That you have a heart in your chest that beats sets you apart from so many others who don’t have feelings or who don’t believe in anything. You are more honest than everyone else, and that’s admirable. That’s all that counts.

You need the nobility to pour your heart out for free on a daily basis if gaming is ever to be saved. Oh, yeah. It needs saving, which is why you must write that blog post. Spend three weeks on it. Tweet about it many times; it is tough but you are making progress. It’s important work.

You must keep in mind that everyone who is more experienced than you are is always wrong. Doing games journalism is not a want, it is a need. You have suffered in silence too long, praying quietly at the altar of your living room console while all of these boring jerks do all this work in the industry. How have you let them ruin everything for so long? Why have you deprived them of the change engine fueling your single voice? Rise now, tell them what’s broken and how to fix it. You can make, like, two bucks a word telling people how to fix things. Didn’t you know that?

Wait. No. You don’t care about money. This isn’t about money. You and your friends have run a fansite for years because you care, and your caring about video games must continue to supersede your self respect or your interest in craft or boring things like that. You don’t want to be a professional, you just want to live your dream, do what you love and save the games industry, and those are the most important activities.

Like, you’re just a games journalist, not some, like, journalist. Anyone who asks to be taken seriously or paid well is the enemy. Don’t forget it. Scrutinize everything they do. It’s a thankless job, but at least you’ll get to be the first person to see some trailer someday. You will get a bobblehead that none of your friends have. Tell them that they can’t even buy it in a store. It’s a press gift. You’re press. Oh my god, your badge says press and you can walk to the front of the line.

You might even get an email from a developer you’ve heard of telling you that you did a good job writing about their game. The day you see that name in your inbox will make up for all of your suffering. You can tell your colleagues you were ‘just talking to’ so and so. 

You must root out corruption wherever you find it. Don’t stand for it. Everyone but you accepts junkets, bribes and freebies. This is just how the games industry is, and you don’t even have to work in it to know that. You’re just that special. And if you’ve been at this for a long time, like a year or something, that’s when you get really good at calling people out on their shit. Think about it: One day they’re names on your most favorite website, the next they’ve got a lot of explaining to do. They’re accountable to you. That’s part of your job.

Wait, yeah. This is your job. You’re not some fan writer. You’re going to get an award for this someday. People who say there’s no journalism in games have never read your interview with the guy who made that thing, and they’ve never read it because they don’t get it so you have nothing to explain, not to that sort. You can laugh quietly to yourself; they’ll learn.

You should be a contrarian. You get together with your coworkers in the bar and have a beer and laugh about how you’re going to do this, like, crazy thing. You’re going to give Halo 4 a score of 2. Wait, how, why? Oh my god, you guys. You’ll see. Spread yourself out in the booth. Stick your chest out. You’re a breath of fresh air, you’re a rebel. Fuck professionalism, there’s no name for what you do.

This is your work. This is your identity. You are above reproach, except for when you’re not, and then while you seethe in secret about having your incredibly hard work and your precious integrity undermined, you know how to blog the perfect apology. You are so deferential. You call your readers “folks.” You tell them how hard you’ve been working to build something or other and how they’ve been helping. You all love games. Isn’t that what it’s all about, the games?

Yeah. It’s all about the games. That’s why you do this.

sexyvideogameland.blogspot.co.uk

The Monster Within

midnightresistance.co.uk

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Liz Ryerson November 5, 2012

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  There are a lot of stupid games in the world.   If you weren’t the kind of person who plays videogames very often, you probably wouldn’t be able to see the why these kind of games continue to be the object of obsession of some otherwise very intelligent human beings. Much game criticism exists for the purpose of pointing out to you why dismissing all these games as mindless sludge fails to understand the network of very fragile, finely-tuned elements that are all simultaneously at play in an effective stupid game. The genius in the design of these games, we say, is in the nature of the complexities of the interactions between the game and the player, which can only be properly understood by someone who has played and mastered at least one of them.

Hotline Miami - a new game by well-known indie developer Cactus and partner Dennis Wedin - is one of these games. HLM follows the “high difficulty, quick death, quick respawn” pattern of recent commercial indie games like Super Meat Boy, VVVVVV, or Limbo. This approach efficiently maximizes the time the player spends directly engaged in the game, and not having to frustratingly endure anything else that is not the game for very long. In this particular instance the action takes place in a top down view (similar to Mission Impossible for the NES) and our “hero” is a man who runs through a bunch of small buildings with different creatively-assembled configurations of enemies and wonderfully colorful rug patterns. Our hero’s only goal is to massacre every living thing in his vicinity before he is shot dead himself. Somewhat like Super Meat Boy, the levels are short and difficult, sometimes requiring a massive number of retries. There is also a letter-grade scoring system at the end of each level that that evaluates your performance based on your methods for killing the guards, how confidently you moved through the level, how long you took, and so on.

HLM is a very finely-tuned game. Every little part of the system seems to hold together impeccably. The goal of players is merely to find the most effective way to penetrate this system. This requires excellent timing, which is most of what the game is about - effectively completing each level means anticipating the the positions of the enemies and getting to them before they have very much time, if any at all, to respond to you. The intensely varied layouts of the rooms and the constantly shifting positions of the guards mean that the player has to be able to effectively manage a pretty large number of different situations to be able to beat a level. Some have compared this kind of play to the oft-praised beat ‘em up God Hand, which is not a bad comparison, but the mechanics here are much simpler.

HLM, while difficult to play, is very approachable for people who regularly play games, so its critical and (I’m assuming) commercial success is hardly a surprise. Anyone who has become immersed into these sorts of games for any period of time will confirm how completely exhilarating the experience of playing them can be. Each new life is a wonderfully, gracefully rhythmic dance with the AI as you wait for the chance to turn your enemies into more blood fountains and paint those glorious carpets red. This is the rapturous release that often comes from all the tension that builds up over many previous failed attempts. The tension that comes from the terrible fear of lack of planning, or an unpredictable AI leading to situations falling out of your control and resulting in an unceremonious death. This is the sort of beautiful, nuanced play that videogame designers have spent years trying to perfect, and now the indie game world seems much closer to finally achieving it! Games that have attempted this sort of play in the past were often not nearly as successful at it, because they were both constrained by commercial demands which forced developers into narrow existing genre tropes, and just did not yet understand how to effectively deal these sorts of experiences. And now, these games like HLM are the ones that the old game industry veterans can tearfully hold up and say “yes!! this is what I have waited my whole life to make!!”, right?   And how could we forget the game critics, those very serious young white men in their 20’s and 30’s, who will join them to celebrate of the final refinement of these sacred formulas. These critics would never stoop so low as to see these games at face value, oh no. They are on a very important mission to bring to light the great achievements of art that these games truly are. So what if they stretch them so paper-thin that they’ll start to resemble something completely different from the actual games themselves.   How can you rhapsodize at great lengths about the joy of violence in a videogame without sounding like a complete psychopath?  

We are no longer living in the mid-90’s. The public is much less sensitive to violence in videogames now (though is still far from being over THE EVILS OF SEX). A game with ultra-violence is now one of the most commercially accessible, least controversial things a game developer can make. Don’t believe me? Then don’t try to look very hard at how the US military uses games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare as recruitment tools, because they see how similar the skills required of playing a first-person shooter and being a solider in real life are.    Violence is power. We are living in age where people increasingly need to feel empowered at all times. Just being the one who’s right, or smarter, isn’t good enough. You can use your superior wits to completely conquer your opponent in a game of chess, but you can’t leave their bloody chess pieces strewn across the board after taking them. And you certainly can’t kill your opponent at the end of the game. Thankfully, some videogames finally allow you this opportunity.

Anyone who survived the old “concerned parent” debates will talk about how violence in videogames is symbolic and shouldn’t be seen as analogous to real-world violence. This is basically true, but there are other, more disturbing things at play here as well. Anyone who has tried to enter the mind of a serial killer will note how much they approach their act of killing as a game. And so-called “realistic” first person shooters like Call of Duty continually serve the purpose of glorifying violence in a real-world setting. It is fair to say that there is at least some kind of connection between killing in real life and killing inside a game.

So, it is fair for us to ask a question of a game about murdering large numbers of people: does Hotline Miami put us into the mind of a killer? Yes, it’s probably fair to say that. Now that we’re pretty far inside the mind of this killer, what is the game teaching us?   The game commits the egregious error here of trying to make your mass-murdering protagonist somehow sympathetic by making him not in control of his own actions. Instead, he is under the control of a strange, powerful organization that somehow uses cheery phone calls to convince him and others like him to get in his car and go kill a bunch of people. Or something. This could be taken as a statement about what bloodthirsty players want out of this protagonist versus what the character in the story really wants, but if so, it kinda falls flat into nonsensical videogame tropes. Knowing Cactus, I was willing to go into a David Lynch or Kubrick-style analysis where I look at the “surface narrative” vs. the “real narrative”, but I couldn’t find any real entry points of where I could begin that sort of analysis. If that is what it’s aiming for i’ll leave it up to it maybe, possibly, being my own failure.

But anyway, the story is really just a bunch of set-dressing for the actual game, which is about murdering people. From the title “Hotline Miami”, I originally thought the game was either about prostitution or the drug wars (ala Vice City). That wouldn’t exactly be new territory for a game like this to base itself on, but at least it wouldn’t be much of a leap to believe that your character is a complete psychopath who approaches the violence he engages daily as some kind of a game that he is constantly grading himself on. Bruce Willis does that kind of shit all the time in the movies, fer chrissakes! It could also make sense if your character is a serial killer living inside of a poorly-constructed game world of his own creation, which is where I thought the game was going, until it wasn’t.  

The blood and guts of HLM could be seen as disturbing, but it’s not unique. Violence is an unavoidable part of our culture, and an even more unavoidable part of videogames. So I am not, and cannot, say that that the violence can’t, or shouldn’t be there. I am saying, however, that we should be looking at why the violence is there in HLM and games like it, and how it affects us, as individuals who are presumably not planning to murder a large house full of people.

Games like HLM cut to the core what of what a pretty big chunk of life in the modern world is about. People feel that they have no control over their own lives. They want to be able to exercise that control somehow, somewhere. They want some sort of release - otherwise they feel like they’ll just explode. videogames have come to fit the desire for release like a glove. Games have done this so well, in fact, that they’ve created a significant culture of people who use playing games for the sole purpose of feeling in control over the rest of the world. Anything that might come into those people’s digital spaces and breaks their feelings of control is so incredibly enraging to them that they will fight viciously against it.   Imagine videogames as a kind of PCP. Videogame designers often tend to approach their designs on the terms of “How can we provide our players with more PCP?” Every aspect of the game - from the mechanics, to the world designs, to the visuals and the sound, are designed if having players feel in control is always the goal. They act as if the alternative is not even up for discussion. And they’ll talk about how all experiences in games are the sacred ownership of the players, as if they’re not the ones who put everything in the world in the first place.

It’s important that we understand what games like Hotline Miami really mean to us, deep down. If the act of murdering a human being and leaving his or her bloodied corpse behind is so deeply satisfying to us, we should probably try and understand why. Otherwise, we are ignoring the monster that lives within us - the monster that will probably go post some rape threats on a 19-year old feminist girl’s tumblr if he doesn’t get what he wants. 

I’d like to imagine that in the future we’ll see a game that uses mechanics as effective and addictive as Hotline Miami, but in a more self-conscious, more self-aware, and more insightful fashion. I’d also like to imagine that it becomes the obligation of any game critic, or any other person who loves and defends these kind of games to death, to find some way to push these games to actually, meaningfully comment on the effect they have on the people who play them.

This is something to which I know a lot of people involved in games will scratch their heads in faux-puzzlement. As if they don’t know exactly what I’m fucking talking about.

© Midnight Resistance 2012 - Designed by minkee; fabricated by JAM

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Snuff Enough: Hotline Miami, Manhunt, and the Theater of Killing

mediumdifficulty.com

The question posed in Hotline Miami is rhetorical.

“Do you like hurting other people?”

Of course you don’t. Or you shouldn’t. But this is a game, and so you do.

Killing is often the language of games. It lubricates plots, and, in capable hands, can create something of emotional and physical heft to participate in. It passes time.

In Hotline Miami, killing is parallel to breathing, twitching, and clicking. With a deceptively simple aesthetic and trial-and-error gameplay, the game’s use of death — both yours and others — may seem trivial. When you die, you’re instantly ready to restart and hit the ground running; when you kill, it’s only an iota of progress in the face of the next, inevitable death. The game fits you into a system of hurried action and scattershot decisions, leaving you to rely on your reactions to indiscriminately cut down everyone in your way and make an exit, at which point you receive a wave of point tallies and bonuses for aggressive or wily improvisations. It’s an absolute bull-in-a-china-shop experience, except the bull can use weapons, and sometimes opts to look like some other animal.

The game’s question lingers every time you receive another mysterious assignment and put on another beast’s face. If you manage to make it a few stages in, the implicit answer is probably an emphatic yes; you’ve likely found pleasure in the deeds you do, and come to enjoy the disarming appeal of the gameplay, or the striking goriness of its sprites.

By making the act of taking another life deeply satisfying on a visual and primal level, the game subjects you to a certain indirect scrutiny. Games that strive to make subtle point about the player’s actions aren’t rare, but few tackle the simple subject of hurting and killing with the confidence and narrowness of Hotline Miami. The game’s sole contemporary in this regard may be Manhunt, the grisly, cynical stealth game from Rockstar.

Both games portray brutal, reprehensible violence in stylized ways that compensate the player’s actions. Manhunt populates its grimy, dystopian world with gangs of hardened sadists and psychos, each deplorable in their own way, giving you a moral free pass to execute with excess and impunity, without the need for messy regret or remorse. Look, it says. Look at this filth: beasts that deserve to be put down. Kill them, enjoy it, and don’t feel bad.

That Manhunt is a stealth game somewhat directs how it approaches your involvement in killing. If you do it right and play by its rules, you’re little more than a creeping shadow, a grim, plodding thing sneaking through hellish playgrounds and slaughtering pigs. Manhunt also has a structured cleanliness in killing Hotline Miami lacks; its kills are choreographed and brutal, snuff films as an incentive for tolerating its stealth gameplay.

“Brutal!” you say, no longer tightly gripping the controller because film grain has taken over the screen and you see “you,” The protagonist/murderer, tighten a small, plastic bag around another man’s head and wrestle the gasping frame to the ground. You do nothing in these situations, aside from steering this character through the shadows, away from fields of view, and up to a victim. It wasn’t easy – here’s the payoff!

Manhunt’s removal of player control at the peak of an encounter represents an idea recently re-presented by Hotline Miami (even though the latter is all about having full agency in your actions at every turn). Each takes an act that has become numb and ubiquitous in games — taking a life — and makes it objective. Other games will make abstract this action as numerical value, a check box, or some other abstraction; Hotline Miami and Manhunt give you the thing you can expect to see, but undiluted, for as long as you’re willing to involve yourself and persevere.

Manhunt gets there by stripping you of interactive power in each sick crescendo; Hotline Miami does it through repetition, and by giving you intimate control. In each, you’re led to seize the opportunity to be a terrible, opportunistic thing. In the former, you prey on other slime from the shadows, only truly succeeding when your victims-to-be don’t see it coming. The latter has you hiding behind the name and identity of different kinds of animals—repeatedly reborn entities that roar back after death again and again.

Hotline Miami and Manhunt starkly exhibiting these explicit actions adds some largely unspoken commentary to each. Each treats ultra violence in a way that presumes and rewards an aggressiveness on your part, but also amplifies it into an ostentatious and unavoidable production. Manhunt does so with sober clarity, giving you the privilege of calmly viewing of each life you snuff out. In the flighty, surreal experience of Hotline Miami, successful murder comes in a haze, and the spoils of your victory are paraded back to you in the muted trek as you walk through the now uninhabited level, back over your handiwork and towards the hollow tallying of points. Your character only stops at the moment when you’ve cut down every other living thing in your way, when the instinct fades and the weapon in your hand becomes nothing more than an awkward, bloodied prop. The music dulls, your once-manic perception slows, and reality catches up.

We respond to this kind of morbid emphasis—as many have already done in the wake of Hotline Miami, and many did in Manhunt’s time when a spotlight is given to behaviors we take for granted, when our actions through an avatar are the objects of both exploitation and repulsion, and our own desensitized obsession is shown in stark relief. Both games ask the question, but don’t bother wasting time waiting for our “yes.”

Further Reading: Why Are You Doing This? Hotline Miami and Drive (Medium Difficulty)

Nuns with Guns: Hitman, Grindhouse, and Gamer Expectations (Medium Difficulty)

Hired Guns: The Real Price of Game Violence (Medium Difficulty)

mediumdifficulty.com

Two years with Vlambeer: the inside story on gaming's greatest new studio • Articles • PC • Eurogamer.net

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The indie developers behind Super Crate Box have enjoyed an astronomical rise. Here’s their tale.

By Phill Cameron Published Monday, 5 November 2012

The typical game development studio will get about halfway through a game in two years. They’d be just about at the stage of a working build, burgeoning with bugs and still riddled with placeholder art. Two years is a lot of time, and getting that far is a lot of work.

Vlambeer has released twelve games in two years, and before 2012 is done, there’ll probably be another pair added to the mix. For an indie studio, that’s all kinds of prolific - not to mention a little bit insane. But then if you look at the likes of Super Crate Box, Radical Fishing and Serious Sam: The Random Encounter, ‘insane’ seems fairly accurate.

“Gorillas.” Rami Ismail, one half of Vlambeer, starts his own story. “It’s two gorillas throwing explosive bananas at one another,” he elaborates. “At some point I got interested in what all those characters on my screen were before the game started, so I changed stuff and that changed the game, which fascinated me.” And for all that Vlambeer has done to sidestep conventions and tread its own path, it’s tinkering that defines it most accurately.

“When I was 12 I read in a children’s computer magazine about Game Maker, which let anyone make games.” Now it’s Jan Willem Nijman’s turn to share his origins. “So I downloaded it and changed the tutorial so that the car sounded like a cow, and that was my first game, pretty much. And I kept doing that for the rest of my life.” Which makes it especially interesting when, by the time the two met, they were on very different paths, albeit within the same field.

“I was coming out of the type of indie development where you work on a game for a year or two and then commercially release it,” says Ismail. “And Jan was coming from working on a game for a few hours and then giving it away.”

“We were on the train to college one morning and I was talking to some friends about the space sim I was working on, and at the other end of the train there was this sort of hooded character sitting there.” Both Ismail and Nijman were attending the same game design college in the Netherlands, both being funneled into the bosom of AAA development. Four years ago, there wasn’t much of a Dutch indie scene.

“It was 8am or something,” Ismail continues. “And the hooded guy looks up and says ‘Could you please shut the f*** up?’ That was Jan, and I kind of hated the guy. Whenever I saw anything Jan made I always thought it was a bit s***. It was 2D, it was simple, and it always looked like a rush job.” And there’s a fair reason for that; they were all those things.

While Ismail was breaking away from their game design college in the direction of ‘commercial’ independent development, where you craft something that at least superficially competes with the AAA developers, Nijman had become part of the Poppenkast, a collective of seminal European one-man developers who could toss out multiple games in a single day.

Super Crate Boy remains Vlambeer’s most high profile game, and it embodies everything that’s great about the studio.

“That’s probably where I started to learn how to make games. There are a lot of three-hour game jams, and no one ever finished anything.” Nijman was in good company, too; the likes of Messhof (Nidhogg, Pipedreamz & Turbo Turbo Turbo) and Cactus (Hotline Miami, Norrland & Hot Throttle) both ascended through the community, and while it’s sadly defunct now, its legacy of quick iteration and execution is thriving in the form of game jams worldwide.

Regardless, they somehow ended up in the same disillusioned funk at the same time in the same place, and naturally gravitated towards one another. “I had done some flash games for money, and realised I could actually make money from games. And Rami could help me polish one and release it so that we could have more than 50 people play it. So we decided to release Super Crate Box for free and then apply it to the IGF.”

The only problem with that kind of plan is that it ends up with you being poor. So they needed a contingency. “We ate noodles for a few months and worked on Radical Fishing to release as a flash game to tide us over while we finished Super Crate Box.”

If you don’t know much about Vlambeer, you won’t know that Super Crate Box was a pretty massive success for the studio, or that it was nominated for the IGF as a finalist, losing out in the Excellence in Design category to Desktop Dungeons. But it put Vlambeer on a level with Nidhogg and Minecraft, which is more than enough in terms of validation for a startup company.

Radical Fishing kept them off the streets, and Super Crate Box meant people paid attention to what they were doing. With a few more flash games under its belt, Vlambeer found itself at the Global Game Jam in early 2011, faced with the concept of ‘Extinction’.

Only Ismail and Nijman didn’t make a game where you’re a dinosaur desperately trying to evolve into a mammal before the meteor hit, or the last dodo evading hungry sailors. Instead they made a game that itself had a lifespan, where every time anyone played it they would invariably make it a little weaker, sapping a little more of the game’s health.

It was called Glitchhiker, and it may well be one of the most interesting games that has ever been made.

“It was - and I hate this phrase - but it was a happening.” Nijman suddenly sounds a little less animated, and the tone of both men turns sombre. “We were sitting in a bar after the Game Jam.” Ismail continues. “And we got a text message from Paul [Veer] saying there were three lives left.”

Glitchhiker, a game whose legacy far exceeds its own short lifespan.

The way Glitchhiker works is that each time you start up the game, you take a life from the pool. You play the game, and collect coins, and if you get enough coins you put a life back into the pool. Do even better, and you can even add a life. Needless to say, most players were detrimental to the game’s health.

“So we refreshed the page and it was down to one life,” Nijman continues. “And then we refreshed again and it was up to two. Then we refreshed once more and it was down to zero.” And that was that. “The phone started erroring out because that’s what we’d programmed it to do when Glitchhiker died,” says Ismail. “And it really did feel like it had died.”

Vlambeer, along with a few other indie dev friends, had made a game, and now it had died. They had players refuse to play because they were too afraid of hurting the game, and others acting like nurses in an ER desperately keeping it alive.

“There was one guy who was super good, and he was trying to keep it alive. He was getting tens of lives for the game, and it was when he was on the train home that the game died.” Vlambeer had created a one-off event, a game that now lives in infamy among anyone trying their hand at making a game in such a short period of time.

This sidestepping of expectation runs through all of Vlambeer’s games. Super Crate Box is an action platformer where the aim of the game isn’t to kill the enemies but instead collect as many weapons as possible from the eponymous crates. Yeti Hunter, their first person claustrophobic stalker, plays tricks with you, making you never quite sure if you actually nabbed the yeti, or even saw one. The Random Encounter is a turn based JRPG, but also very much not that.

The original pitch document for Random Encounter.

In fact, Serious Sam: The Random Encounter was insane from its conception.

“Devolver [Digital] came to us and said they liked what we’d done with Super Crate Box, and they wanted us to do a Serious Sam spin off game. So we were sitting there thinking ‘F**k. They just want Super Crate Box in a Serious Sam skin. F**k that.’”

Nijman continues. “We went to a restaurant and decided to come up with a pitch that was just about the most ridiculous thing we could think of that would be just about doable.” Both Nijman and Ismail sound amused looking back on it, like they were punk rockers screwing with a label. “We actually wanted them to say no,” Rami states, as if that would have proved everything they ever thought about game publishers.

“We almost immediately got an email back saying yes,” Nijman laughs. “Which meant on the one hand we knew these guys were probably pretty cool, and on the other we had to make a turn-based RPG out of Serious Sam.” They’d just played chicken with a publisher, scanning in a crude drawing and emailing it off like it was a proper pitch. Only Devolver hadn’t blinked, and now Vlambeer had to actually follow through.

Which would probably have been absolutely fine, except, well… Ismail says it best. “Then shit happened. A lot of it. All at once.” A game called Ninja Fishing had started its marketing campaign, and it was looking a lot like Radical Fishing, the game that had first floated Vlambeer back in 2010. More than that, Ismail and Nijman were working on their own iOS version of the game, and Ninja Fishing was headed for the App Store.

‘Looking a lot like’ is a bit of an understatement. It was an outright clone, taking every single concept, from the smallest detail to the biggest idea, and claiming it for their own. “We asked them to change the theme and they said no.” Ismail sounds exhausted just talking about it. “Then we asked them to delay the release of the game until we got Ridiculous Fishing out, and they offered us money instead.”

When your studio is just two people it’s hard to deal with your idea being stolen, but even more than that it’s hard to deal with the media fallout when it happens. “The clone hit and all my time went into doing interviews, doing talks and generally managing the situation. My full time job became telling people we got f**ked over.”

They could well have just ignored it, focused on getting The Random Encounter and Ridiculous Fishing done and then just hoped people wouldn’t accuse them of cloning Ninja Fishing, but instead they decided to fight it, becoming very public with their opposition of both the practice and this specific game.

“If you look at the industry now and how they deal with clones, it is different. I like to think my efforts weren’t in vain. Doing all those interviews, and nearly killing ourselves doing it. A lot of the arguments for cloning are very defensive, like saying cloning is part of the industry. That’s just not true. Iteration is part of the industry, and it’s our industry; it can be what we want it to be.” Ismail even jokingly claims credit for EA suing Zynga over Cityville.

Through all of this, even though Vlambeer found itself on the bad side of a lot of situations, it’s still come out of it one of the most prolific studios in existence today. More than that it’s putting out games that aren’t just interesting and inventive, but polished, too, in their own way. “We try to mess things up and do things that are new. We don’t want to do games that have been done already.”

Luftrausers, which is due out soon, should continue Vlambeer’s run of excellence.

Which explains a lot of the thought behind the 7 Day FPS on Nijman’s side, and Ismail’s upcoming F**k This Jam. Both are game jams that focus on forcing independent developers out of their comfort zones, confronting them with genres they either hate or have no interest in. The idea being that they want people who have no love for a genre to breath new life into it, or at the very least bring a new perspective.

In the case of 7 Day FPS, the post child has been Receiver, by Wolfire Games, which puts you in a procedurally generated apartment complex with the most lovingly recreated gun mechanics I’ve ever seen. Not just in how they fire, but in how you have to load each bullet individually into a magazine before slotting it into the pistol, and pulling back the slide. It’s a completely new feel to the gun, that focus of so many games, but almost a throwaway mechanic in the vast majority of them. New life, and a new perspective.

And when you really get down to it, that’s Vlambeer, both in what it’s done in the past and what it’s doing now. It’s an independent studio that is actively thrusting itself into the unknown, rather than languishing in the familiar. Every one of their games has explored a new genre, and occasionally a brand new idea for games in general.

“Our very first game was an IGF nominated title, and there’s plenty of studios that do nothing after that.” Ismail might have sounded a little more nervous about this a few months ago, but now the two are sitting on Luftrausers, a 2D arcade flight sim that is looking all kinds of excellent. “We don’t want to be one of them. We’re still pushing and we’re still having fun.”

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eurogamer.net

An argument for easy achievements

ramiismail.com

An argument for easy achievements

5 nov 2012

Last week I ended up in a discussion about the use and abuse of achievements as a progression support instead of offering challenges that either changed the players approach to the gameplay or that allow for extra –more difficult- goals. My fellow Vlambeer Jan Willem Nijman tweeted to point out that Assasssins Creed II hands out three different achievements or throphies before the game actually starts – you’ll have moved the left and right analog stick, pressed a few buttons as instructed by a giant, flashing prompt and you’ll have climbed a building to get that far in the game.

It’s a discussion that has been raging on and off – ridiculing the achievements and trophies that games hand out so easily for the most trivial of tasks and normal progression. It’s also a minor subject within a broader discussion on whether games have dumbed down too much to cater to non-gamers. Slowly paced tutorials walk players through everything with command prompts and sequences and cutscenes queue up to teach players how to move their analog sticks and how to jump. At the end of every step – how trivial it might be – an achievement is unlocked.

It’s a sentiment commonly heard amongst ‘core gamers’ and it’s a sentiment that I agree with on many levels – a lot of contemporary videogames simply do not dare to offer challenging gameplay anymore in fear of alienating a rather significant portion of their audience. The relentless difficulty Demon Souls or Super Crate Box offer is a concrete risk when you’re gambling with tens of millions of dollars. Thus, the lowest common denominator reigns, actual challenge locked away behind difficulties that are hopefully available from the start of the game.

A few months ago my girlfriend decided to check out what this medium I rave about all the time entails. Together, we decided she should start with Assassins Creed II because I felt it had a well-paced and expansive tutorial. She’s someone that has played every Angry Birds game, The Sims and Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego. I had suggested Sword & Sworcery before hoping its relaxed nature would ease her in, but instead its reliance on gaming tropes and perceived monotony shunned her away.

As every gamer knows, it’s tough to sit back and watch someone walk into walls endlessly. She did exactly this in her first ten minutes of Assassins Creed II, frustration levels rising slowly to the point where she would just give up and never try again. After minutes that seemed like hours of desperately trying to steer a character straight ahead, she finally succeeded.

I used to argue that just achieving that goal in itself should be an adequate reward to motivate new gamers to continue playing, but I did not take into account that new gamers are fully aware walking should be a trivial tasks; they know that it isn’t a tough challenge to walk straight in a game, even if it is fully reasonable for them to find it difficult having never used gamepads before. They realize it is not an accomplishment by any standard and thus the argument fails.

She was already tired of playing and about to quit when the console played that unmistakable notification sound: achievement unlocked. She noticed the pat on the back and gave the game five more minutes of her attention – whereas if the game had just continued without the achievement, she would’ve been likely to just give up. The three achievements my colleague was quipping about were exactly the ones that kept my girlfriend’s attention and motivation up for the twenty minutes she played that day.

The reality is that ‘non-gamer’ as a concept has changed from what it was. Where previously, ‘non-gamers’ were people without any gaming experience, the recent rise of casual games has ensured ‘non-gamers’ practically don’t exist anymore. Where it used to be that non-gamers were a blank slate that would learn to deal with the oddities of the high barrier of entry in videogames through practice, nowadays they are anything but a blank slate. They have years of gaming experience – only the games they play are Angry Birds and Farmville.

One of the things that sets casual games apart is their short feedback/reward cycles, rewarding players for pretty much every action through exaggerated feedback. These are games that are accessible beyond anything the mainstream industry can ever hope to achieve through their simple pickup-and-play designs. While playing, the games will carefully detail every step of progress through little popups. When done, players are bombarded with over-the-top scoring systems with clear ceilings and values. The goal, of course, is that players might feel good about themselves.

Achievements and trophies can take the place of such feedback in mainstream games. While the ease of achieving such goals seem trivial to more proficient gamers, for many new to the medium they are actual achievements that they’ve been conditioned to expect reward for in a measurable way. These games are not simple to control and they are far from pickup and play – Assassins Creed II takes several hours of slow introduction and half a dozen achievements before feeling confident enough to let players into its wonderful world.

The longer I mulled over the problem, the more I realized that an achievement is actually an extremely elegant solution to easing new players in. They’re unobtrusive, they’re measurable, they do not affect or corrupt the design of the game and they can be handed out in abundance at the start of a game. They do not require attention or interaction – they can simply be an indication of progression that is concrete instead of abstract. They’re exactly what a casual gamer needs without negatively influencing the core experience more seasoned gamers are interested in.

I started reading websites dedicated to achievements to see what the objections were to simple achievements. This being the internet, I found an unquantifiable amount of complaints about achievements being ‘too easy’. As I started digging deeper, a realization set in: the problem these people were having wasn’t so much with the achievement being too easy to unlock for them – the problem was that others could unlock it just as easily. It’s the idea that if a ‘non-gamer’ can do it, things can’t be an achievement. At best, it’s a cry for more challenging games – at its worst, it’s an attempt to safeguard the exclusivity of hardcore gaming from newcomers. The underlying thought is simple: achievements are supposed to be for ‘real’ gamers.

It is often wrongfully assumed that accessibility means sacrificing challenge or complexity, but it is neither – it is a way to allow people that otherwise couldn’t to experience the challenge and complexity that a game can offer. Such considerations are even – or more so – relevant to indie game developers. Whereas mainstream game developers have to deal with the consideration of non-gamers playing their game, indie game developers do not have the luxury of necessity – they might simply not consider the possibility of non-gamers playing their games.

My girlfriend and I are now playing through Halo 2. Last week, she suddenly backed off when overwhelmed by two Elites and strafed sideways into cover, proving she has succesfully mapped the actions on the analog stick to movement in the virtual world. She has rapidly evolved a sense of battle flow in Halo and will shout at me to help her or jump into the fray when she hears my shield depleted sound. If she had quit Assassins Creed II for not rewarding her with a concrete, measurable reward – she might’ve given up on gaming beyond Angry Birds altogether and miss a wide spectrum of amazing things.

So if I may recommend something that’ll take thirty minutes of your time, just to get some new perspective as a game designer: sit down and watch your parents, partner or friends struggle through all the trivial tasks in any game that you consider absolutely great. If anything it’s amusing, at best it’s a great way to challenge your assumptions of accessibility.

With that new perspective, take a look at what your games do to usher in new players. No-one says you have to implement your findings if you don’t want to, no-one says you have to dial back on the challenge in a game or sacrifice complexity. Maybe your game isn’t meant to be more accessible, maybe you’ll find that it is a good idea to reconsider. There might just be an argument for your game to hand out a concrete and measurable pat on the back if someone does something that might – to you and me – seem trivial.

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ramiismail.com

Games are too damn long

killscreendaily.com

Nov 1 2012 Essays By Jamin Warren

Games are too damn long

Why length of playtime should no longer be a defining criteria of the medium.

If you’ve used Tumblr for long enough, you find yourself with a collection of people whom you’ve followed on a whim; people to whom your attachment is negligible. These people are often teenagers, a fact that leaves you mildly embarassed, but also jealous that these kids’ tastes developed faster in a digital age than yours ever could have. For me, one of these people is a man named Ron Workman, who as far as I can tell is a.) not a teenager, b.) works as a “technology consultant” and c.) represents some sort of id for gamer psyche. 

Nonetheless, his Tumblr spits content innocuously into my feed and I glance at his posts the way one might peek at a neighbor in nearby apartment complex, gaining little insights into their world and occasionally catching them in the odd act of shame, or, in this case, clarity. Last month, Ron posted the above achievement.

Then the following note:

276 hours in multiplayer aka 11.5 non-stop days worth of Call of Duty and I finally made it to 10th Prestige. My first time ever on any COD game getting to this point. Am I proud? No. I am relieved though.

276 hours. Let this marinate. For the time that Ron spent on a *single* game he could have: finished the works of Tolstoy, listened to most of the major works of 20th century pop music (or at least a portion of Lil B’s mixtapes), or watched every film on the AFI 100 (or a rough quarter of the Criterion Collection.) And that is the moment of self-realization that Ron has reached, a moment of ugly personal comprehension, the inkling, step one Alcoholics Anoymous moment “that my life has become unmanageable.” From Ron’s weary eyes and twisted mouth: “To let one game or franchise (even a great one) take up so much of your time makes it hard to enjoy gaming as a whole.”

In short, games are too damn long. 

***

Over the past few years in writing about games and talking to game makers, I have often been disappointed, and almost never surprised by, their cultural touchstones. More often than not, when I ask a game designer who influenced or inspired them, the answers come from a pat set of characters: Tolkien, John Romero, George Lucas. Typical geek shit. In one particular instance, in passing, I asked a game designer if he knew of information design pioneer Edward Tufte was. He shook his head. Granted, this shouldn’t matter for most people, even ostensibly “cultured” ones, but this was to someone who was overseeing game design for a large independent franchise that relied on conveying information to public in a succinct, efficient, and honest fashion. Tufte, I think, would be quite helpful.

(For the record this is not something that is split along indie/mainstream lines. In fact, in independent game communities, the problem has metastasized into a sort of self-referential navel-gazing that’s resulted in a swath of “important” games by people who played Passage and now make games like Passage. This is not good.)

 This happens for several reasons. Traditional game design programs are only starting to offer liberal arts programs to round out those left-brain types. Games as a culture have been segregated and thus prevented from engaging other art forms on the honest level of creator-vis-creator. Games’ status as low culture has become a self-fulfilling, transitive declaration that games are stupid ergo those who play them are stupid ad infinitum. This raises the nervous proposition that perhaps games really *are* low culture and now I can’t sleep because my headmaster/mom/conscience was right. The list goes on.

But by far, the most convincing argument is that games themselves have been their own worst enemy; that one’s commitment to games is so all-encompassing that mastery of the medium demands an almost exclusive, selfish dedication of time, patience, and education that it shutters out a rounded cultural existence. 

We have defaulted to length as a defining principle of games as a medium.

What’s worse is that long games have been presented as a moral imperative on the part of game makers. A game’s worth is determined by cost/hour calculations — a 60 hour game is a better “value” because it offers more enjoyment than a three-hour movie at a $15 movie ticket. This assessment not only reduces an art form to the cold metrics of cash (Is MoMA a better value than the New Museum because it has more paintings?) but it makes wicked use of what economists call “default bias.” New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki describes the concept in relation to the Big Apple’s recent soda ban:

If you offer a choice in which one option is seen as a default, most people go for that default option. People who are automatically enrolled in a retirement plan, for instance, are more likely to stay with their original plan than those who choose plans for themselves. In countries where people have to choose to be an organ donor, most people aren’t donors; in countries where people have to actively say they don’t want to be an organ donor, most are donors. The soda ban makes sixteen ounces or less the default option for soda drinkers; if they want more, they’ll have to make an extra effort.

Essentially, we have defaulted to length as one of the key defining principles of games as a medium. In this case, the “extra effort” means not playing Skyrim through to completion at the risk of having your gamer card revoked.

There are signs of change, but, of course, our value calculation carries along with us. Games like Journey and the episodic content for The Walking Dead point to a future of shorter content but are the exception to the rule. In particular, the domain of games on iOS and Android devices has suffered from a lack of importance because we don’t give cultural weight to these fleeting transactions. These games are invariably free or cheap (under 5 dollars) yet the perception remains these experiences are “time-wasters” because the time spent playing them is disposable. We do not hold such values in other mediums: Pixar has their shorts, Chekhov wrote in spurts, Motown kept everything under 4 minutes. 

For the last few years, we’ve been pushing this idea that games are in need of a vernacular. The reality is that very few ever cross into the mainstream without the backing of a large marketing budget. Angry Birds and Minecraft are the two immediate independent successes that come to mind, but until we begin to look at breadth of game experiences as the sign of a well-played life, and not depth in a particular title, we will continue to pass each other like ships in the night. 

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killscreendaily.com

Here are some emotions invented by videogames

nightmaremode.net

Greetings, it’s me, or rather us; we are the Mammon-Machine, aiming to open your mind to new entertaining and dangerous Video Game Experiences. Video Games are sometimes “fun” and that emotion is okay or whatever but we believe that there are better emotions to be had in Video Games. We like emotions. You’ve probably already had emotions before, and those were probably pretty good, but perhaps you’ve grown bored of the old emotions, like happiness and sadness and horror. Lame, right? Are you eager for someone to save you from this tedium?

Well, do we have the emotions for you! The Mammon-Machine has invented brand new emotions straight out of video games, the likes of which we are sure you will have only heard of in forgotten whispers, or on the Internet. Our top experts have identified many new emotions, some of which we hope to release to you today. These emotions, though they are very dangerous, will provide you with entertainment enough to last through cold decades trapped in the Mammon-Machine. Perhaps you’ve experienced these emotions before, perhaps even in real life. If this is the case, we hope that through video games, you will fall in love with them all over again.

Blissful Death

This just in: top scientists have discovered feelings of great relief that occur in video game players the instant their avatars are killed. Previously, death was thought to be nothing but frustration, yet we know now that the tension of hanging onto one’s life by a thread can be resolved by failure as well as victory. The other night, I had a dream in which I was being eaten alive by insects. “This really sucks,” I screamed in terror, but then they killed me, and it was a huge relief, because I didn’t have to be eaten by bugs anymore.

Imagine the pure relaxation of not playing a video game, a world in which moving a joystick is no longer a matter of life or death, and how sweet does that feel? Sweet as a high score screen. Did you know that the reward for being bad at a game is exactly the same as being good at one? The reward is not having to play the game anymore. Equally important to the fun of playing video games is the fun of not playing video games. Practice enjoying the moments without tension or thought immediately following your virtual death.

We recommend a meditative approach to death. We recommend getting really good at those brief in-between moments in video games in which you are not playing video games. Getting better at those moments may make you better at video games, or more likely, better at something better than video games.

Dream Paralysis

We, or some of us, remember waking up from a nameless night terror. Night Terrors are: a dream that isn’t a dream at all, just a sudden spike of terror so absolute it wakes us up without enough control of our own bodies to even scream, but tragically, only 1-6% of children and 1% of adults will experience this emotion naturally. The sweet center of this emotion is the sensation of wanting and needing to move your own limbs when they will not respond. This technique lends itself naturally to horror of a slow and certain kind.

The first to use this technique effectively and intentionally in a game were the designers of Silent Hill, a video game series created under the premise that it is possible to scare people with things other than zombies jumping through windows.

When, in Silent Hill 3, the reflection of Heather in the mirror is slowly consumed by wriggling shadows that pour out of the bathtub and onto her and onto everything, and the door won’t open and there is nothing she can stop them with and no way out, we felt that it was the closest sensation possible to the feeling of being able to move our tongues and jaws and throats but not able to force a noise out of it, so we hope that those of us who have not had night terrors will benefit from access to this rare and precious emotion.

Benefits include gratefulness and understanding of helplessness and mobility. They also may include a deep and penetrating sense that one’s body is machine, a fragile machine specifically, that is prone to errors and short circuits just like the consoles we play Silent Hill 3 on. The body is supposed to work, until suddenly it doesn’t.

It’s not a pleasant thought, and it can get worse. At the end of Shadow of the Colossus, when Wander has become a monster, the only thing you the player can do is the only thing he can do, which is stumble blindly forward, swatting at the soldiers dutifully slaying him. A game can give you a choice, but a game can also give you no other choice. What video games give us they can also take away. Novels have no capacity to give us hands to feel and feet to walk and just as suddenly take them away. We understand this emotion is not pleasant. For that reason, we request you experience it.

Jumper’s Crash

Do you have a hideous pit in your stomach that consumes you every time you fail? We do, and it is because of video games. Our parents were worried video games would waste our time and make us violent, but they should have been more worried about they made us afraid. Jumper’s Crash is the consequence of repeated failure, in which the anticipation of the crash becomes reality.

Jumper’s Crash was invented by Super Mario Bros. at the moment at which everything is lost. It is the moment at which a series of impossible leaps, each made carefully, harrowingly, cautiously, will be undone by your next mistake. It is when you know all of these steps by heart, except for this, the last one. If you make this leap, you will be safe, if you do not, you will die.

You will not make this jump, you think, and then you don’t, and that’s Jumper’s Crash.

You don’t have to be jumping to experience Jumper’s Crash, but not just any sequence of precise motions will do: no Guitar Hero or Super Hexagon will do (this emotion is different). The key to jumper’s crash lies in the waiting, not the rhythm, the anticipation of the leap that psychs you out of making it. Jumper’s crash isn’t about flinching at the last second. Jumper’s crash is about getting to the same place in Super Mario 64 and missing it for the seventieth time.

We don’t feel this emotion so much nowadays, with the retreat of platformers from popularity, when the pits open in our stomachs as we miss the jump once more.

Animembarassment

Some human beings occasionally wonder what has happened to the Japanese Role Playing Game. We have a little theory about that.

This is the most memorable scene in all of Final Fantasy, and if someone else was in the room at the time, it may have become one of the most memorable scenes of your life. The apologetic comments on this youtube video break our hearts. No matter how well written they are, they will never convince our mothers that it was a good idea to buy this game for Christmas.

There is the embarrassing sexual innuendo, the androgynous heroes and heroines, the campy bright colors and J-Pop flair that did not Quite Sit Right with your parents and teachers and middle school friends for reasons they were too embarrassed and afraid to explain.

Bad voice acting makes us laugh, but Final Fantasy X is not bad enough for us to pretend we are watching it ironically. We didn’t watch Final Fantasy X ironically—we really, really liked it. Even when Tidus bugged us, even though so much about the game was so silly, we really liked it, and it meant a lot to us. We spent many hours in that world and we came to love it very much and so we wrote long apologies for it on the forums we posted in. We knew it was dumb, though, and we didn’t tell our friends we played video games and we didn’t bring the strategy guides to school, because when we did, they laughed at us, HA HA HA HA HA HA.

Though some of us are older and know not to be embarrassed by bright colors and melodrama anymore, we are still a little grateful to not have to endure them so much any more.

Artificial Wistfulness

There are not many games that allow us to walk for more than a few paces without being attacked by a dragon, or a space marine, or a racial caricature, but we cherish these few games. Though most games are single player, very few games allow us to be alone. The forests and plains between the fights in Shadow of the Colossus. Daytime in Minecraft. Riding the hills of Skyrim (until an army of fantasy idiot monsters descends upon you).

It is hard to take a lonely walk where I live. Here in the Mammon-Machine, we are connected by lovely electric wires to best friends who we know exclusively through the data they have created. It’s scary, but I like it. We should fear it, but we must love it.

Fortunately, there are little lonely places inside the Mammon-Machine where we can take our time to think. True idleness is a great gift, but most games want to direct our idleness to some higher purpose, like murdering polygons or putting polygons in the correct order. A game about wandering is a game about true play. A game about being yourself is a game without anyone else. Sometimes that is not good. Sometimes it is.

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