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IMHO: Warum ich nicht Diablo 3 spiele
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Game of the Week: Diablo 3 • Articles • PC • Eurogamer.net
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Hack’n’Slash Fic: On Diablo III Difficulty and Dumbness
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Will Work for Fun
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IMHO: Warum ich nicht Diablo 3 spiele

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http://www.golem.de/news/imho-warum-ich-nicht-diablo-3-spiele-1205-92006.html     23.05.2012 15:11

Diablo 3 ist toll, sagen viele Spieler - Diablo 3 ist eine Stimulus-Response-Maschine, sagt Rainer Sigl. Der Blogger und leidenschaftliche Gamer erklärt, warum er sich Blizzards jüngstem Werk verweigert.
Zwölf Jahre Wartezeit, eine seit Monaten auf Hochtouren laufende PR-Maschine, eintrudelnde Fan-Lobeshymnen, alle Medien voll mit Berichten und Werbung: An Diablo 3 kommt man heuer nicht vorbei als Computerspieler. Zweimal war ich beim Onlinekauf schon nur Sekunden davor, mir per Preorder den Zugang zu Blizzards neuen Dungeons zu sichern, heute Vormittag bin ich mit zusammengebissenen Zähnen am Elektroriesen vorbeigefahren, der das Objekt der kollektiven Hysterie sogar um nur 49 Euro anbietet. Ich habe standgehalten.

Ich verweigere. Und zwar aus guten, wohlüberlegten Gründen.

Ja, ich habe Diablo 1 und 2 gespielt, den ersten Teil mit ungebrochener Begeisterung bis ans Ende, Teil 2 bis irgendwohin ins letzte Drittel. Und schon beim zweiten Teil, trotz all seiner Detailverbesserungen zum Vorgänger, machte sich bei mir leises Unbehagen breit. Unbehagen, hier Opfer einer perfekt optimierten Stimulus-Response-Maschine zu sein, die in exakt berechneten Abständen Belohnungen und Endorphine produziert, um mich bei der Stange zu halten. Unbehagen gegenüber einem Spielkonzept, das seine so verlockend oberflächlich angebotenen Optimierungsstrategien - das Sammeln von Sets, Unique Items, der Horadric Cube - freimütig nur durch repetitives Grinding verfügbar machte. Unbehagen, dass so viele meiner Freunde dieses Grinding ungefragt und mit starrem Glanz in den Augen als selbstverständlich ansahen und in tage- und wochenlangen Runs dem Fluch von Diablo verfielen.

Man bedenke: Das war noch Jahre, bevor mit World of Warcraft das fast verboten perfekte Potpourri aus Kampf, Leveln und Inventory-Management die Lebenszeit ungezählter Spieler in Beschlag nahm, und dennoch war es ein Vorbote. Man muss es als höchste Leistung von Blizzard ansehen, diese Wechselwirkung von Herausforderung und Belohnung, von Routine und Endorphinstoß, von Grinding und kleinem Glücksgefühl perfekt wie wenige andere zuvor verwirklicht zu haben.

Und nun: Diablo 3. Zweifellos keine Neuerfindung des Spielprinzips. Zweifellos grafisch keine Offenbarung. Sicherlich nicht ein Spiel, das das Medium voranbringt, das die Grenzen erweitert oder neue Gruppen zum Spielen bringt. Stattdessen ein wahnsinnig komplexer einarmiger Bandit, in dem man auf Monster klickt, Prozentbalken beim Steigen beobachtet und per Zufallsgenerator benannte Gegenstände hortet.

Das klingt zu negativ? Okay: außerdem eine einzigartige Faszination, ein perfekt wie aus einem Guss gemachtes Spielerlebnis, das auf unserem Belohnungszentrum im Gehirn wagnerianische Symphonien spielt, uns die Nachtruhe raubt und unsere Tage mit dem nagenden Gefühl erfüllt, lieber wieder in den Dungeons sein zu wollen.

Ich verweigere mich diesem Sog wie ein trockener Alkoholiker dem Rückfall, auch wenn meine Abhängigkeit bei weitem nicht so stark war wie bei vielen anderen. Ich verweigere mich, weil ich mit demselben Spielprinzip schon Hunderte, im Verlauf der Sucht immer zwanghafter und freudloser werdende Stunden mit Diablo 1 und 2 verbracht habe und weil für mich “Spielspaß” und eine zugegeben meisterlich herbeigeführte Zwang- und Suchtspirale zwei verschiedene Dinge sind.

Ich verweigere mich, weil meine Zeit kostbar ist, weil ich sie nur in Ausnahmefällen in rauen Mengen in einzelne Spielerfahrungen investiere, statt in viele kleinere, die mir nach zehn Stunden ein gnädiges “The End” gönnen statt der nagenden Ungewissheit, ob nicht beim vierzehnten Run doch noch “Gorls Goldener Armschutz des Lichts +5” zur Komplettierung meines Rüstungssets abfallen könnte. Ich verweigere mich dem Sog der freiwilligen Zwanghaftigkeit, der ein Ergebnis der widerhakenbewehrten Psychologie des Nur-noch-bis-zum-nächsten-Levelaufstiegs ist.

Kurz: Ich verweigere mich aus Angst. Diablo 3, das traue ich mir auch aus der Ferne zu beurteilen, ist wie ein meisterhaft ausgetüftelter Mechanismus, in dem das Gehirn des Spielers in einem minutiös perfektionierten Wechselbad von gekonnt abgestimmten Emotionen manipuliert wird: Neugier, Meisterung, Routine - Belohnung. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Dieses Mal: ohne mich, Diablo 3. Leider. Das Leben ist zu kurz.

Rainer Sigl bloggt auf Videogame Tourism - das Games Feuilleton. Dort erschien auch zuerst sein Text Warum ich nicht Diablo 3 spiele.

IMHO ist der Kommentar von Golem.de. IMHO = In My Humble Opinion (Meiner bescheidenen Meinung nach).  (rs)
Verwandte Artikel: Diablo 3: Spekulationen um gehackte Benutzerkonten und erster Patch    (22.05.2012 11:37, http://www.golem.de/news/diablo-3-spekulationen-um-gehackte-benutzerkonten-und-erster-patch-1205-91951.html) Diablo 3: Blizzards Server seit Stunden kaum erreichbar    (15.05.2012 20:58, http://www.golem.de/news/diablo-3-blizzards-server-seit-stunden-quasi-unerreichbar-1205-91830.html) IMHO: Bitte aufwachen, Hollywood!    (11.05.2012 14:46, http://www.golem.de/news/imho-bitte-aufwachen-hollywood-1205-91744.html) IMHO: Kooperationen - eine feine Sache?!    (18.06.2001 09:53, http://www.golem.de/0106/14397.html) Test Diablo 3: Der dunkle Fürst der Zeitvernichtung
(18.05.2012 15:09, http://www.golem.de/news/test-diablo-3-der-dunkle-fuerst-der-zeitvernichtung-1205-91888.html)

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Riders on the Shitstorm: Kurzer Nachtrag

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Riders on the Shitstorm: Kurzer Nachtrag

Dass die Veröffentlichung meines Artikels “Warum ich nicht Diablo III spiele” so viele Spieler auf die Palme getrieben hat, war eigentlich abzusehen und vermutlich auch Kalkül vonseiten Golem.de: Kontroverse bringt Quote, Provokation generiert Klicks. Ich überlasse es bei derartigen Stürmen in den jeweiligen virtuellen Wassergläsern den Lesern selbst, meine Texte zu verteidigen, und siehe da: Es gab doch einige, die meiner bescheidenen Einschätzung von Diablo III etwas abgewinnen konnten. Über 700 Mal wurde der Text auf Facebook geliket - nachdem’s keinen “Dislike”-Button gibt zwar keine verlässliche Statistik, aber immerhin.

Einen Kritikpunkt der Kommentatoren nehme ich ernst: Tatsächlich habe ich in meiner kleinen Polemik nicht erwähnt, was für mich persönlich denn Spielspaß bedeute, wenn ich ihn in Diablo III schon nicht zu finden glaubte. Stattdessen habe ich nur verraten, was für mich Spielspaß nicht ist:

Ich verweigere mich, weil für mich “Spielspaß” und eine zugegeben meisterlich herbeigeführte Zwang- und Suchtspirale zwei verschiedene Dinge sind.

Drum kurz fürs Protokoll: Es folgen einige Definitionen dessen, was für mich Spielspaß bedeuten kann - und was ich unter Umständen stattdessen in all der Zeit mache, die ich nicht in den Dungeons von Diablo III verbringe.

Spielspaß ist für mich:

… in Day Z im Morgengrauen den Banditen in den Rücken zu fallen, die mich gestern abend eine halbe Stunde lang in einem Bauernhaus belagert haben, um mir meine Bohnen und meine Medikamente zu stehlen. Die Flucht durch den nächtlichen Wald war halsbrecherisch und denkbar knapp, doch heute weiß ich, wo sich die Mistkerle aufhalten. Rache ist süß.

… in Portal 2 hirnverknotende Teleporträtsel zu lösen, während mich GladOS per subtiler psychologischer Manipulation dazu bringen will, mich mies zu fühlen. Humor, wenn er denn in Spielen vorkommt und gut gemacht ist, ist ein noch rareres Gut als das legendärste Item. Echt ehrlich.

… in The Walking Dead die schwierige Entscheidung treffen zu müssen, ob ich die verzweifelte junge Dame in den Suizid gehen lasse oder nicht. Ich habe es getan, ihr meine Waffe gegeben und mit dumpfem Schmerz in der Magengrube zugesehen, wie sich meine Entscheidung in digitale Realität verwandelte. Hier ist eine Welt, in der ich Entscheidungen mit ihren Konsequenzen erlebe; es gibt noch andere, rarere Stoffe als Endorphine, die Spiele in uns erwecken können.

… zuzusehen, wie in Dwarf Fortress meine in stundenlanger Kleinarbeit durchkonstruierte und, okay, ich geb’s zu, vielleicht größenwahnsinnige Magma-MassenvernichtungswaffeVerteidigungswaffe endlich zum Einsatz kommt. Oh, der Zwerg, der den Hebel gedrückt hat, um meine mich belagernden Feinde mit heißem Tod zu überraschen, wird durch einen bisher unbemerkten Konstruktionsfehler miteingeäschert? Wär nicht so schlimm, wenn er nicht siebzehn enge Freunde hätte, die angesichts dieser Tragödie in Berserkerwut verfallen und im Festsaal randalieren. Uh-oh.

… in Tiny Wings mit einem perfekt gelungenen Perfect Slide die siebte Insel zu verlassen und mich ganz im Flow von Schwung, Bewegung und sich endlich auszahlender geduldiger Übung in die Lüfte zum Anflug auf Insel 8 zu machen, während hinter mir die Sonne im Meer versinkt. juchhuuuuuuuu.

… in Skyrim bei Vollmond die höchsten Gipfel zu erklimmen, ganz ohne den Blick auf die endlose To-do-Liste, und im Tal einen majestätischen Elch vor dem gespannten Bogen zu erblicken - und ihn dann zu verschonen. Hinter diesem Berg dort war ich immer noch nicht - auch nicht nach über 100 Stunden Spielzeit.

… in Super BomberMan mit höchster Geschwindigkeit und größtem Bombenradius auf leergefegtem Feld gegen meine Freundin ein Bombengewitter zu entfachen, dem ich dann meistens selbst zum Opfer falle.

… in Nethack, jawohl Nethack, diesem Uropa von Diablo III, diesem hässlichen, kleinen, uralten Spiel mit einem Barbaren auf Level 7 dem jämmerlichen Hungertod zum Opfer zu fallen, nur weil ich so unvorsichtig war, meine Futterrationen gegen diese vermaledeite Plattenrüstung einzutauschen, die noch dazu verflucht ist und mich nur mehr zwei Felder sehen lässt. Und nein, bei Roguelikes ist nix mit Saven oder Respawn: Try again - ist es zu hart, bist du zu schwach.

Die Liste ließe sich beliebig fortsetzen, denn ja: Ich spiele gern. Und nein: Ich habe selten die Zeit bereut, die ich mit Spielen verbrachte. Selten, aber doch manchmal. Die mechanische Abgrasung von Kerkern zur Charakteroptimierung empfinde ich dagegen durchaus als weniger prickelnd als, sagen wir mal, einen netten Spaziergang, einen Abend mit Freunden oder ein gutes Buch.

Aber hey - that’s just me. Spielspaß ist wohl subjektiv. Drum hieß mein Artikel ja auch nicht “Warum du nicht Diablo III spielen solltest”. Mit seiner Lebenszeit, so viel ist klar, darf jeder anfangen, was er will.

Das Leben, so habe ich auch meinen ersten Text beendet, ist zu kurz. Für mich persönlich zu kurz für Item-runs. Und weil Blizzard weiß, dass auch viele, die Diablo III gekauft haben, das so sehen, gibt’s bald das Auktionshaus, in dem man die geilsten Items dann einfach kaufen kann. 15% der Gelder bleiben dabei bei Blizzard.

In diesem Zusammenhang verweise ich dann auch mal auf den Begriff der “fun pain” als Monetisierungsstrategie im Spieldesign:

Tactics for Game Monetization.

Huch - ich glaube, das ist aber fast schon wieder ein Grund mehr, warum ich nicht Diablo III spiele.

Verfasst von rainer sigl am 25. Mai 2012 - 16:56

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Game of the Week: Diablo 3 • Articles • PC • Eurogamer.net

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Tempus fugitaboudit.

Remember when we had to wait, really wait, for a new game in a beloved series to come out? I barely do. These days, while we’re happy (and, if you ask me, correct) to moan at the annual overexposure that progressively washes the fun out of hits like Assassin’s Creed and Call of Duty, we also start looking pointedly at our watches when three years pass between BioShock games. It’s become routine to assume that we’ll get through three episodes of an Uncharted or a Gears of War in one hardware generation.

We’re being spoiled, frankly, and so are the games. So it’s been fun, this week, to reacquaint ourselves with a few older friends. But also a little troubling.

The youngest of the three is contract killer Agent 47, who makes a pre-emptive return after six years away in a micro-game called Hitman: Sniper Challenge. It’s being doled out free with pre-orders for Hitman Absolution - but since you can cancel your pre-order at no cost and keep the game, it’s more like a particularly imaginative demo that twists a single assassination mission into a toothsome and addictive score-attack game.

Agent 47: sneaky.

“It’s immense fun,” wrote Dan Whitehead. “What’s interesting is that Sniper Challenge also acts as a refresher of sorts. This hit won’t appear in Absolution, but it definitely trains the player to get back into an Agent 47 mindset.

“It’s easy to complete the challenge, but incredibly difficult to finish to the professional standard you’d expect from Agent 47. Replays are vital, and as a welcome back to hardcore Hitman fans, it should offer reassurance that the unique flavour of the series hasn’t been dumbed down for an audience now more used to wielding the blunt instruments of Marcus Fenix and pals.”

Although a pre-order incentive is an ungainly vehicle for this kind of taster, Sniper Challenge is a novel and clever way to re-introduce a series that has slipped out of range of our deficient attention spans. And pre-empting a prodigal’s return in this way is a smart move, because what would be an acceptable sabbatical for a Hollywood hero can seem like an age for the stars of our fast-changing medium.

Take Max Payne. You can’t say that action games have changed beyond recognition since 2003’s Max Payne 2, so perhaps it was an understandable mistake on Rockstar’s part to assume that a coat of its dazzlingly thick gloss was all that was needed to bring the series back up to date after eight and a half years on the shelf. But a mistake it was - the game’s storyline has all the cool cachet and bitter kick we’ve come to expect from Houser productions, but the action has none of the slick pacing and smooth modulation we’ve enjoyed in more recent blockbusters.

Max Payne: past it?

“All this polish can only sustain your enjoyment for so long when it’s punctuated by such repetitive and increasingly frustrating combat,” wrote Tom Bramwell in our Max Payne review. “We’ve learned to cope with the occasional balancing issue in a vast Grand Theft Auto game, but the difficulty spikes and checkpointing mistakes in Max Payne 3 betray Rockstar’s lack of experience in pure third-person shooters.

“If anything’s going to stop you trading in Max Payne 3, it’s likely to be Max himself… You empty rooms together, then Max makes the empty rooms interesting with his tired, cynical, self-deprecating, cheesy and often drunken monologue. It all makes him hard not to like.

“Max the man emerges with credit from Max Payne 3, then, but time hasn’t been kind to the ropier elements of the game he stars in.”

As happy as we are to see a battered warhorse return to take the spotlight, rather than last year’s model in a new wrapper, Max Payne 3 proves that resurrection without reinvention can be a dangerous game. Our game of the week, however, shows that too much reinvention can be just as likely to land you in hot water.

Diablo 3

Even Rockstar can’t teach Blizzard anything about production values, but Blizzard could teach Rockstar - anyone, in fact - everything there is to know about polishing game mechanics. The Californian outfit is obsessive about it to the point of lunacy, and that’s a big part of why there’s been a hiatus of over a decade in the Diablo series’ dark fantasy histrionics.

Diablo 3’s superficially conservative, surreptitiously daring update to Diablo 2’s rarely-bettered action RPG formula plays as fresh as the day is long.

SD
Play in standard definition

HD
Play in high definition

It’s also why Diablo 3’s superficially conservative, surreptitiously daring update to Diablo 2’s rarely-bettered action RPG formula plays as fresh as the day is long. You can read more about it in my review early in the coming week. (Blizzard doesn’t grant press early access to its games, and I want to try tougher difficulty settings and all classes before offering our verdict; thanks for your patience.) Suffice to say that it’s a blistering ride with a bracing new approach to how role-playing games can work.

But it isn’t in the gameplay that Blizzard has really stuck its neck out. With the insistence on a permanent internet connection and embedded trading features proving vastly unpopular with fans, as well as creating a painfully unreliable service in launch week, Blizzard has made the opposite mistake to Rockstar’s and jumped its ageing series too far into the future.

It seems as though, over the past 12 years, there’s been a schismatic divergence between what Blizzard thinks a Diablo game is and what the series’ fans expect of it. The always online requirement is absolutely a hard-headed business decision, but it’s also a philosophy, a statement of intent from a company that - from the top down, and in its game design departments as well as its accounting ones - simply has no interest at all in making games that aren’t connected. Blizzard’s mavens were probably dreaming of this future when they launched Battle.net with the first Diablo all the way back in 1996, but they were too far-sighted by half, because sixteen years later we’re still not ready for it - and neither is our internet infrastructure.

More on Diablo 3

- Blog: Eurogamer.net Podcast #113: Diablo 3

Oli, Donlan and Champ talk skills, auctions, internets and Anna the Ukrainian.

Review: Diablo 3 Review

The devil is in the details.

Interview: The Mythology of Diablo

Chris Metzen talks about tie-in The Book of Cain - and the origins of Blizzard’s darkest world.

- Screenshots: Diablo 3

Tom and I differ on whether it’s worth it. “We’re being bullied into accepting a future where we don’t actually want to buy the things that we’re buying, because there is no other way to experience this phenomenal entertainment medium that we’ve all come to hold so dear unless we do so on terms that we find unacceptable,” he said. “I’m not sure there’s ever been an online game that was so easy to enjoy. The requirement for a permanent internet connection might seem a heavy price, but Blizzard has at least had the good grace to make that connection feel valuable, with fun features and peerless execution that genuinely enrich the game,” I said.

We’re still arguing about it, but in the cold light of day, we’re both right. That a permanent connection is an unreasonable demand doesn’t devalue the advantages of one, any more than those advantages actually justify it.

Growing pains. It’s crazy that, in games, a mere decade can be a tough gap to bridge while keeping everybody on the same page. It’s confusing, scary, even depressing sometimes. But hopefully we can remember that it’s exciting, too, to be part of an entertainment medium that’s still moving so fast.

And hopefully those growing pains won’t detract or distract too long from the real Diablo 3, the game itself, which is a rip-roaring entertainment with its head screwed on and its heart wide open. I don’t think they will - it’s just too good. May your connections be stable and your caps unlimited in the days, weeks, months, years, decades ahead; you’re going to need them.

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Hack’n’Slash Fic: On Diablo III Difficulty and Dumbness

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Night of the demons

By Alec Meer on May 22nd, 2012 at 5:00 pm.

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I’ve been playing Diablo III solo, in snatched time during the wee small hours of the last few days. Late to the party as always I know, but the urge to muse ‘pon what I’ve played so far was too strong to resist.

I was unlucky, and yet incredibly lucky, to be away during Diablo III launch week. That means I’ve missed the worst of the server troubles resultant from the blatantly mercenary and ill-considered always-online DRM for singleplayer. That means I’ve been able to simply login and play the thing, leaving my my mind free to consider Diablo III itself, rather than its nasty corporate trappings. Like I say: lucky.

I’m glad I don’t have to give it a score. I’m not sure I could. I’m digging it more than John did, as despite being relatively basic in the graphical department it sure knows how to present a satisfying spectacle when it wants to. The escalating character powers are the greatest treat, turning into feats of gigantic, high-speed mudersurdity once some of the mid-game Runes have been added to them. Watching my Monk summon a giant iron bell from the skies then punch it to release a wave of death, or performing a Flash-style kick that clouts seven enemies in about as many milliseconds never gets old. truly.

At the same time I’m far more conscious than I’d like to be that it’s a stupid game for stupid people (or, at least, clever people acting stupidly). I include myself among the latter without hesitation, needless to say, but that doesn’t mean that I want any game to make me feel that I am indeed stupid. Click, click, click, collect, collect, collect – we all know that song so well and outside of the rightfully divisive auction house Diablo III doesn’t do much to remix it. It is purely about the methodical eradication of everything that moves, and the methodical collection of everything that doesn’t (and isn’t architecture).

There is nothing wrong with that. There is quite a lot right with it in fact, but there have been long stretches where my self-awareness of my own stupidity became undeniable. I’ve realised since that the problem isn’t quite what it appears to be. Yes, it’s intrinsically a hollow game, but it’s not been designed to be otherwise – it’s consciously a time sink, an unapologetic communion with that strange, silent, sleepless, social-phobic lizard part of our brain that so tirelessly hungers for ever-greater intangible numbers. Frankly, my eyebrows would have popped right off my face and flown to Saturn if there had been any attempt at depth beyond the mathematically tactical. Mathemactical.

There is, one might argue, The Story and The Lore, which will doubtless attract the sort of rabid fandom that Blizzard’s narratively generic but backstory-soaked fictional universes always have done. Despite gravitas and tragedy and aggressive attempts to put Diablo’s lead characters on pedestals, I don’t truly believe there’s been a concerted effort to make it a game with depth. The character animations, acting and writing are so openly pantomime, superficial and 90s videogamey that it simply seems impossible that so many development veterans could have waved it out the door believing it to be serious, moving or nuanced.

There is, I notice, a strange but palpable disparity between the cartoonish writing and acting in the game proper, and the more polished and dramatic in the between-chapter cinematics. Those go hell for leather in terms of spectacle, as is Blizzard games’ wont, and seem to have derived from an entirely different mindset to the kids’ TV banality of the in-game toy-people.

At the very least, I suspect plot, narrative and characterisation are treated by Blizzard as merely props for the game mechanics. D3′s characters, as were Starcraft II’s, are heroic and villainous stereotypes built upon the bedrock of countless tales of myth, cinema and comicbook. They are ambulatory sign-posts for the action to follow, possessing only as much personality as is required to instantly grasp their purpose in this surely consciously shallow tale.

I digress. Diablo III is certainly stupid on many levels, but its calculating heart is anything but. It’s computer chess writ at lightning pace and with countless bolt-on new pieces. That is to say, it’s always and forever the same thing. You can change the look of the board and you can raise the challenge of the opponenents, but the game itself is reliably unchanging no matter how far through it you play, no matter how many times you play it. What can and likely will change is you – your skill. And that – finally – brings me to Diablo III’s true failing. You can’t select the difficulty until you’ve completed the game. You’re stuck on Normal.

Normal is a piece of piss. Normal is insultingly easy. Normal is, very often, incredibly tedious when tackled solo, because it can broadly be played on auto-pilot. Finish the game and you’ll unlock a harder setting. I haven’t done that yet (I’m only just approaching Act III) but between web reports and studying the skills, runes and weapons carefully it’s very clear to me that the game intends to be highly tactical. Death is intended to be a constant and pressing danger, and keeping it a bay requires near-absolute understanding of what does what in combination with what and what tools will best amplify it.

Except, for the 20-odd hours playing directly through the campaign on Normal apparently takes, that simply isn’t the case. I can’t speak for the later chapters admittedly, but I’m some ten hours in now and I’ve died once. That was because I took a phone call while some goat-men were bothering me, and my muscular grip upon the left mouse button was briefly interrupted.

Especially coming off the back of Legend of Grimlock’s unblinking cruelty, I crave the higher difficulty settings. I want to be challenged, I want to be making agonising choices about which runes to equip and which skills to quickslot. Goddamn it, I want to die. Beat me harder master, harder! But I’ll have to finish the game on the numbing Normal first. I’m enjoying myself. I feel the desperate, urgent, constant craving for better loot, the attendant transitory sense of progress and the giggly delight whenever I use a new skill or briefly overpowered weapon for the first time.

But the thought of another 10, 20, who knows how many more hours of this tedium, pleasant though it may be, makes me do what it’s so terribly important not to do with a Diablo-like.

It makes me catch sight of myself in the mirror and ask ‘why am I doing this? Why I am spending these hours like this?’ Away, away foul thoughts, nagging conscience. Just let me indulge myself. So, game, treat me mean. Please.

Salvation, I’m told, may lie in co-op. So far, I’ve been playing the game in the strange twilight hours of 10 pm to 2 am and have no companions to call on, but tomorrow I’ll change that, and hope that more players = more monsters = more challenge, and a more involved way to plough through the campaign to then unlock Nightmare mode.

Or perhaps there could simply be an official update to make difficulty selectable right from the start. Yessir, that would do it. In the good old days, before that lord of hell that is unwavering DRM seized control of PC gaming, someone would have made a mod or a hack or a trainer. Now, our destinies, our choices, our histories, our ability to choose and change, even the option of when and where we might play, is all locked securely away in that damnable cloud.

I grieve for my lost power of choice. I grieve that I can only be a masochist on this game’s puzzlingly protracted terms. Yet I can’t wait until I can. Sock it to me, baby.

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Will Work for Fun

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May 14 2012 Essays By Michael Thomsen

Will Work for Fun

What are the roots of free-to-play capitalism? Michael Thomsen argues that in-game commodities and microtransactions are not new ideas so much as the latest ways that videogame companies instrumentalize us.

Revolutions are often thought of in terms of conflict and disorder, but they just as often come on waves of peaceful obsolescence. The old way of doing things is allowed to linger as long as it likes while everyone else gets on with the future. In the last few years the “free-to-play” model— where games are given away on mobile phones or online while the developer makes money through advertisements or the sale of in-game items—has encircled the videogame industry. At first it seemed like a curiosity, a unique idea that made sense in China and Korea, where loot-hoarding games like Ragnarok Online, The Legend of Mir, and World of Warcraft found a perfect match with internet bar culture. Meanwhile Activision and Electronic Arts competed for dominance in a luxury business energized by dreams of $180 Rock Band bundles and franchises with the “potential to be exploited every year across every platform.” When rumors began circulating last month that Nexon, one of the biggest free-to-play companies in the world, might bid to acquire EA, it seemed clear that an era was passing.

The original Super Mario Bros. defined the console blockbuster with more than 40 million copies sold worldwide. After going free-to-play, Angry Birds has been downloaded over 700 million times (though some versions are still sold for 99 cents). The scope and stakes of videogame commerce have irrevocably changed, and, in a way, the value of the medium has degraded as a result. Designers are no longer selling games to people who want to buy them, they are selling their audiences to advertisers. Worse yet, they are using them as an interactive form of muzak, creating a lively backdrop against which the small percentage of people willing to spend money on new quests or in-game trinkets will feel more likely to spend.

While this transition is alarming, it is also a predictable function of the capitalist lifecycle. “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production,” Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto, “and thereby the relations of production and with them the whole relations of society.” In societies where the creation of capital does not frame social relationships, the traditions of production are preserved from generation to generation, and the things created through them accepted for their inherent value. In early Maori villages, for instance, creating food was not a means to make money or increase one’s station in life. The foods created through fishing and farming were openly exchanged as a way of showing commitment to the community, and the method of producing them remained relatively constant. In a capitalist mode of production, the ultimate value is not in the object but in the “need of a constantly expanding market for its products,” something which pushes those who control capital to “nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.”

Designers are no longer selling games to people who want to buy them, they are selling their audiences to advertisers.

In the 1990s and 2000s the supply chain was essential to the ever-expanding reach of videogames. EA did not sell tens of millions of copies of Madden because it was the best football game in the world, but because it was the best football game that could be mass-produced on cartridges and discs, shipped to the biggest retail chains, and advertised en masse through an increasingly complex network of marketers. The value of that vast and highly-developed supply chain is waning, having been surpassed by a model that does not require retailers, shipping companies, or manufacturing plants. The means of production have changed. There are still animators, environment artists, level designers, and AI programmers. What has changed is the method of producing value from the game created by those groups of people.

You might have waited in line at a midnight launch to get Madden NFL 06 a few years ago and today find it in a bargain bin for $1. The game is unchanged, and its inherent value as an experience is identical to what it was then. What has changed is the perception of its value, driven by corporations whose business model relied on there constantly being a new game every year, one which necessarily obviated last year’s model. We were not simply buying games in the days of brontosaurus-sized publishers like EA, we were paying for the privilege of participating in a zeitgeist that was largely created by corporate branding. With the advent of Facebook, iOS, and Android, people no longer need to pay to participate in the zeitgeist (save the price of the computer or phone), it’s given to them for free. And the creation of a valuable-seeming zeitgeist for a free game versus for a $60 game requires completely different means of production, one which companies like EA, Activision, and Ubisoft are struggling to adopt.

Thinking of videogames as “free-to-play” reminds me of why I hate to play games with other people. In its purest form, play is a creative act negotiated between two people without intermediary. I am not playing when I’m interacting with a videogame, I’m accepting someone else’s rules and experimenting with them, allowing the designer to delimit my instincts for behavior. Doing this with another person feels like a waste of time, an inherent loss of the generative possibilities of play without intermediary limits. Videogames are the experience of being ruled. In contrast, play is the experience of generating new rules in collaboration with someone else. The idea that “play” is free is redundant. It is only ever free. As soon as money is involved it no longer simply “play” but a perverse form of labor, proving one’s worth as a participant in, and exponent of, the zeitgeist.

This playful labor is best incentivized through systems that turn skill and learning into capitalized quantities. When we say a player is “good” at a videogame, we are essentially saying they have mastered the craft of play, they have internalized the limiting rules of the game to such a fine degree they have achieved a sort of hyper-efficiency. A good Combat Arms player is substantively more efficient and productive in his aiming, movement, and item management. A “fun” match of Combat Arms is one where players of similar skill levels test their proficiency against one another and the most efficiently willing to adopt the game’s rules is awarded with recognition in the form of a hierarchal list that tells them they are number one. It is labor, capitalized by a release of new items, skills, and perks that reward efficient performance.

The best players in the world are workers, not players. They login regularly and accept the game’s imperative limits and, week-by-week, learn to master them. People who play Combat Arms with no respect for the rules and no interest in being an efficient shooter on a hierarchical list are reported to moderators and treated as spoilsports. Play in its simplest sense is prohibited; what’s needed are rule followers.

Videogames are the experience of being ruled.

“Capitalism cannot make use of the labour of those who practice the doctrine of undisciplined liberum arbitrium, any more than it can make use of the business man who seems absolutely unscrupulous,” Max Weber wrote in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber’s argued capitalism was uniquely accelerated by the emergence of Protestantism and its philosophy of general prosperity reflecting holy virtues in the prosperor. Frugality, efficiency, and prosperity are not secular distractions but true reflections of grace.

“If God show you a way in which you may lawfully get more than in another way (without wrong to your soul or to another), if you refuse this, and choose the less gainful way, you cross one of the ends of your calling, and you refuse to be God’s steward, and accept His gifts and use them for Him when He requireth it: you may labour to be rich for God, though not for the flesh and sin,” the English theologian Richard Baxter explains, as quoted by Weber.

With the emergence of professional pastimes in the 20th century, the Protestant work ethic becomes a philosophy of play as well as vocation. Michael Jordan is not a world-class basketball player because of his innate skill, but as a reflection of 15 years of labor spent improving his efficiency relative to the particular rules of basketball. Jordan’s creative skill playing within those rules is not a natural expression of who he is but the inflated byproduct of a labor system that favors competition over stability. The mirage of wealth and fame are the righteous payoff for all the diligent 5 a.m. workouts and late-night shoot-arounds after everyone else had gone home.

As videogames have been added to the list of professional pastimes in the 21st century, we see the same essential values favored in them, with the added perversity of requiring their audience to spend money to buy into them. That the high cost of the disc and cartridge has been circumvented by the “free-to-play” model only amplifies the nature of videogames as non-productive labor, loosely built upon structures that demand skill acquisition and increasing efficiency. Because console games have, in all but the most spectacularly escapist incarnations, lost a significant part of their surplus appeal now that “free-to-play” has undersold them, the laborious core of videogames is emerging.

When you’re out of money to give a company, you can always give them your time.

In an interview with PC website Seven Day Cooldown, Gabe Newell described the challenges Valve has had in developing Defense of the Ancients 2 as a free-to-play game, asking how the company can “properly value people’s contributions to a community? We’re trying to figure out ways so that people who are more valuable to everybody else [are] recognized and accommodated… It’s just a question of coming up with mechanisms that recognize and reward people who are doing things that are valuable to other groups of people.”

This is explicitly capitalist language, where commodity rewards are directed toward those who create the most for those in control of a community’s surplus capital. That a person’s behavior in any setting needs to be properly valued is an indication that the experience in the game is not sufficiently rewarding in its own right: developers need to create a structure surrounding the repetitive actions—like League of Legends’ tiered ranking system or Combat Arms’ limiting access to certain weapons based on player rank—to incentivize more and more intense mastery in a way that encourages other players to do the same. The deeper the engagement, the more utility or identification one sees in the otherwise superfluous items sold through microtransactions or the more irritating the running banner ads in the corner of the screen become.

It is not an accident other flagging industries—like big airlines, fitness equipment manufacturers, and consumer electronics—have discovered in videogames a powerful tool to spur new commerce. Gamification is an ugly and obvious form of exploitation, but it is not so far removed from what modern videogames are in the first place. While gamifiying your credit card purchases with point bonuses seem like an obvious booby trap, there is at least a material payoff. What is the payoff for the hours one spends with a videogame? It’s fun. But from whom did we get this idea of “fun?” What does it mean exactly? How can anyone have fun by obediently following the rules someone else has set out for them? It’s just another power structure, where the fun comes from competing against your peers for the condescending pat on the head, the exploding rainbow at the end of the Peggle round, the bragging rights of a high kill-death ratio, the reassuring tabulation of your worth, ticking upward like a retirement account. When you’re out of money to give a company, you can always give them your time. The company will always find a way to reconvert the gift of your time into profit, though you probably won’t care when transfixed by the glittering explosions of fun lighting up the screen like framed miracles.

Illustration by ericskiff

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Notes and Videogames

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For people who played videogames in the 1980s and 1990s, reading the manual of a newly-purchased game was just as important an experience as actually playing the game. Players would devour every piece of information the document offered, eating it up in anticipation of the actual gaming experience. This might be the only game they would play that year. They took all of it in.

Manuals barely exist now, having been shrunk down to the barest minimum over the years. There are other, similar gaming experiences that have faded away, but one has staged a curious comeback in the past few weeks.

The idea of taking notes for a game in this development generation is almost preposterous. Why bother? Most gaming experiences are so fluid, finding the solution to a problem is never that hard. Maps are provided in tremendous detail, characters explain their motivation and backstory to you on demand. There’s no reason to write down any of this information when you can come back to it at any time. Moreover, there simply aren’t many challenges that require you to visually sort them out on paper.

Where have all the note-takers gone?

It’s such a far cry from the current world of gaming that it’s almost impossible to comprehend for people who didn’t experience the need for note-taking firsthand. Games like Secret of Mana or Legend of Zelda relied so heavily on taking down notes to solve puzzles and other riddles that it was an intrinsic part of the experience. To have aspects of games jumping off the screen and onto the page made those games more tangible. Just as we create narratives for ourselves within games, taking notes creates an entirely new experience as well.

It wouldn’t be unusual for some gamers to have entire notebooks filled with passwords, maps and solutions for hundreds of games.

No one takes notes anymore, but the launch of Fez has prompted many players to rethink that credo. The game visually taps into a collective nostalgia for the eight-bit era, but it has also managed to prompt gamers to emulate the same experiences they had with these old games – like taking notes. Without any prompting, Fez players have started creating entire blogs dedicated to the notes they used when solving the game’s puzzles. Codes and riddles are littered throughout the game, begging for translation. They require time and patience – and gamers have returned to those forgotten habits in order to solve them.

The fact that this is a novelty indicates just how long note-taking has been dormant. Where have all the note-takers gone?

The rise of the Internet surely claimed some; patience is a virtue long gone when you have YouTube playthrough guides. But there is a larger issue here – the abandonment of complexity.

Aside of game lore, the primary purpose of a game manual was to tell players what to do and how to play. As in-game tutorials evolved, however, the experience became more interactive and the need for a printed manual diminished. Take a look at a manual for a blockbuster like Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. In the 1990s, it would have included a huge manual, detailing maps of different levels, details of ordnance and descriptions of tactics. Now, it’s a few sheets of paper warning you not to have a seizure.

As games have become more technically complex, they have become simpler to play. The old-style save systems, where long strings of codes were needed to skip back to a level, became obsolete with the introduction of cheap rewritable memory. The physical aspects of gaming – big boxes filled with discs and maps and guidebooks – diminished as it became possible to include that extra material within the confines of the game.

The last time I had to take notes for a game before Fez was in Splinter Cell: Double Agent. You’re given the task of solving a mathematical puzzle, putting numbers on a cube without repeating any numbers on the opposite side. It’s extremely difficult and it was a rare moment when the means for solving the puzzle weren’t available within the confines of the game. Eventually, I had to reconstruct the entire box in paper form just to finish it. It was an odd experience, but triggered plenty of memories from my early gaming days when this wasn’t just a novelty. It was a necessity.

Games are no longer complex. The puzzles in Portal may take a mental effort to finish, but the solutions are often simple. Dark Souls may be a punishingly difficult, but it’s not necessarily complex – you navigate the world and try not to die. Complexity is handling many different factors all at once – a juggling act of thought and skill. Fez is littered with complexity, including its own hieroglyphic language offering clues and hints to unlock new secrets and hidden treasures.

Most of the time, puzzles aren’t complicated enough to require serious dedication. And in other instances, they’re literally given to you. In Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception, Nathan Drake is given the task of walking over a large floor of tiles in a particular order to unlock a secret door. If you make one wrong move, the entire sequence is ruined and you have to start over. But not only does the game provide you with sound cues as to whether you’re doing everything right, it literally gives you the answer – in a notebook, no less. You flip through the pages and find your answer. The game has done all the work for you.

Imagine if the game had given you no clues, if all you could do was just spend hours figuring out the solution. What would players do? They’d have to write it down.

Fez has littered its world with a stamp of authorship that requires a dedication to the game itself, not just a passive experience. It’s not a ride. It’s a conversation. The resurgence in note-taking in support of that conversation reveals something lamentable – a regrettable decline in artistic vision and complexity. It’s time we were given a challenge.

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News - In-depth: Is it time for a text game revival?

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In-depth: Is it time for a text game revival?
by Leigh Alexander
May 11, 2012

For years, the traditional publishing industry has been telling us that nobody wants story-driven adventures or game forms oriented around interactive storytelling. But the Kickstarter age has been showing us something a little bit different, amid successful fundraising for developers of renowned adventure games of yore.
But there’s more than just nostalgia contributing to a potential revival for interactive stories. A broader gaming audience means appetites for game forms we might have once called “casual” in another time — and furthermore, the popularity of tablets and e-readers means there’s a real appetite for game forms that take advantage of a culture now habituated to reading on luminous screens in ways prior generations were widely not.

In a market where books and games are close rivals for the most popular category on app stores, what happens when today’s new gamers are hungry for something more than word puzzles?

Text gaming: Back to the roots

Of course, interaction via simple text commands was how video games were born — it used to be that supporting graphics was an impossibility. Early designers would add graphics as soon as it became feasible, but before that they were forced to get creative, sketching tactile universes only from words that glowed pale green against dark monitors.

To be a good game designer, you had to be a good writer. Serious players were folks who liked the surreal dialogue that could take place between the writer of a game and themselves; many even liked the absurdist frustration of learning a puzzle that could be solved simply by using the word “take” instead of “get.”

I can’t count how many games I’ve played since I was a child, but nothing can ever quite substitute for my long young days and years spent with Will Crowther’s Colossal Cave Adventure, the widely-known “granddaddy” of text games — mapping mazes, crawling quilted bedrock and chasing hollow voices into impossible crevices.

The game industry has spent most of its time since then marching hungrily toward ever-expanding technological horizons, taking every wild leap it could across the gulfs that spanned play and the real world — sometimes without consideration to whether better graphics or higher fidelity were necessary, whether they served. Often, simpler and more abstract modes of interaction fell by the wayside.

The adventure games of the ’80s and ’90s, pioneered by Sierra and LucasArts, held to spines of witty, playful writing as core to the experience even as they relied on expansive, brightly-colored worlds and their litanies of objects and tools. The result was experiences strongly impressed with the voice and identities of their creators, so that players still valued games because of descriptive humorists and fun character writers above anything else.

That’s probably why renowned and well-remembered folks like Tim Schafer, Jane Jensen, Al Lowe and the Two Guys From Andromeda have such opportunity today to revisit the style of game in which they excelled. But even more primordial modes of storytelling in games — including those that rely on text primarily — are making something of a comeback too, thanks to the diverse mobile climate and a new wave of appreciation for storytelling and adventure.

An appetite for wordplay and the “lean-back” game

Actually, the text-only game has never wholly disappeared. All the while a close-knit group of interactive fiction writers and designers have kept the form alive through community, tools and annual competitions.

That means its veteran leaders are well-positioned to lead as the IF space takes its own share of today’s new opportunities — in 2010, well before Double Fine Adventure, Andrew Plotkin asked for $8,000 through Kickstarter to fund Hadean Lands, an interactive fiction game for the iPhone. He got over $30,000, validating his stated curiosity about whether anyone would actually pay him to make the text games his fans had loved for so many years.

Writer and designer Emily Short is also a longtime leader of the IF community, and much of her work has focused on creating plausible interactions among characters in interactive fiction experiences. Her company, Little Text People, was recently acquired by Second Life creator Linden Lab, and her current project underway at the studio is an AI-driven interactive storytelling experience backed by the sophisticated social simulation engine she presented during GDC this year.

She agrees that her field is uniquely positioned for a blossoming. “With the rise of tablets, we’ve got a form factor that’s really comfortable for reading, and for interacting with things with high-intensity graphics,” she tells Gamasutra.

Instead of designing for the lean-forward, action-oriented living room experience consoles brought to the home television screen, tablets’ popularity means there are all kinds of opportunities to design an experience for somebody sitting back on a sofa, casually reading.

Playing with books, too

“There’s also an increased interest from people in the publishing industry in looking at what they can do with books that really takes advantage of the ebook form,” Short continues. She’s heard from people in traditional publishing who are intrigued by what interactivity and new tech can continue adding to books.

For example, Penguin Group has published an App Store version of Chopsticks, a teen romance story by Jessica Anthony and Rodrigo Corral. The app edition provides an alternate take on the paperback story that lets players interact with artifacts from the characters’ lives and explore the narrative through visuals and tactile interaction.

Many have experimented with augmenting novels with other digital media content, or with creating choose-your-own-adventure type experiences, “but a lot of publishers are aware there’s more they could be doing,” Short says. “What are the possibilities of interactive storytelling that go beyond?”

“Obviously I’m bringing my own biases to this, because this is what I’ve always wanted to see, but I think there is an increased interest in some of the kinds of stories and interaction that are more challenging to do in traditional game formats,” Short continues.

Gamers are hungry for deeper characterization and worlds to which they can truly attach, and text can be a way to illuminate inner worlds, thought processes or other elements that aren’t easily demonstrated by imagery.

“The approach that we’re taking tries to leverage people’s familiarity with books to make it feel like something they already understand,” Short says of Little Text People’s project. “We’re doing something that is very unusual in terms of game formats; you understand how to read a story, and here’s a page — but things are being added to that page.”

In terms of demographics, Short hopes that interactive stories will attract the same kind of “relaxed attention” audiences that are drawn to simple touch-based games like Angry Birds. “I enjoy playing console games, but there are certainly times where if I’ve had a draining or busy day, the last thing I want to do is sit down and play an FPS that is going to be adrenaline-fueled and anxious.”

“What do you get from a game if you want it to be low-commitment?” poses Short. “There’s more of that spectrum we could explore… what do games look like when you want something that gives you the kind of relaxation that a chapter of a book would give you? You want something where you feel like you’re retaining some kind of gained value you don’t necessarily get from playing one more round of Tetris.”

Where interactive stories fit

It’s also a cultural climate where audiences are increasingly used to thinking of books as media companions — popular film series like Harry Potter, Twilight and The Hunger Games, or TV series like Game of Thrones, all feel richer to fans if they read the books as well as enjoy the films.

Designers of text-based games can take advantage of that familiarity to bring audiences into worlds they can read and participate in. Not every fan would want to create fan art or fan fiction or do cosplay (though thousands do!), but it’s clear people very much want to interact with things they read, or to access written content in new ways.

“There’s always been a desire, when you read a book that you really like, to remain in the setting, and to remain engaged with it,” she suggests. “You put the book down, and somehow wish that world could go on… so I do see that as an opportunity. I see that as a place where i want people to re-engage.”

At the same time, Short says she can’t help but look at things from the perspecive of her “previous life” as a classics professor: “I feel a lot of the things people are doing now actually have really profound roots in human nature,” she says.

“The whole idea that a story is a kind of intellectual property and only counts the first time you tell it, and that it’s cheating to repurpose someone else’s story, to retell it, is… not the way people conceived of these things in the ancient world.”

Through interactivity, participation and game design, today’s stories can gain the complex permanence of mythology, where players can explore narratives as multidimensional things — for example, the same series of events from the perspective of multiple characters, or where the villains are now the heroes.

“I know there are a lot of people obsessed with the cult of the author, but I think there is something that is not anti-literature about having people take a story that they really care about and play with it,” she reflects.

Past the parser: into the modern climate

The tech with which Short and her team are currently working determines possible affordances within a situation, but doesn’t actually ask for text input — one thing the new generation of gamers might not easily hurdle is a persnickety parser, even an up-to-date one.

“There’s sort of a design issue we’ve had to take from the parser world into the world of selected choices,” Short explains. “The thing the parser gives you is on one hand, there’s the possibility of tremendous player frustration.”

“But what goes with this is the possibility of making a leap on your own as a player, of realizing the game wasn’t holding my hand,” she adds. “I didn’t get told to ‘press the X button’ — I thought of a possibility on my own and then I executed it.”

“For me, that’s a lot of the appeal of especially the classic text adventures: the process of realizing you live in a world with a tremendous and unbounded number of verbs,” she continues. “As an author, the challenge is always to figure out how to communicate with the player… without spoiling that sense of mystery.”

[Colossal Cave Adventure image source]

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Ludum Dare #23 – The Report

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Ludum Dare #23 – The Report

Welcome, dear international readership!

Please allow me to introduce myself: I’m Sebastian, I’ve studied “Cultural Sciences and Aesthetic Practice” (2008-2011 in Hildesheim), right now I’m studying “Staging of Arts and Media” (in Hildesheim). Having a preference for the digital game, game studies quickly became my research area. They’re also my reason for writing papers about computer games as well as articles for the German TITEL-Magazin.

For Superlevel, I went on a quest to test all 1.402 games of the Ludum Dare #23 – yes, every single one. I’d like to give you an overview over particularly innovative gameplay, wonderful ideas and exquisite digital entertainment. Have fun!

It all started back in April of 2002 when Geoff Howland established the Ludum Dare – a friendly and productive competition between hundreds of programmers around the world. Each participant develops a game set to a common theme (this year’s was Tiny World). The developers have serious time pressure, though: In the Jam Category, teams of developers must create a game in 72 hours, while in the Competition (Compo) Category, games have to be created by a single person in only 48 hours. This year’s result: 1.402 games.

The atmosphere of minimalism

Playing this year’s submissions, I found that the choices of protagonists and scenarios were very distinctive. You often play as a mini-, micro- or even nano-organism. Ants and spiders, germs and cells, individual pixels, nano robots or quark particles. The exact opposite was a popular approach as well: Playing as a giant or a big planet surrounded by the infinity of space naturally makes you feel small just as well. But it’s not just the fundamental decision of setting that is influenced by the slogan; a disposition towards graphical minimalism is clearly recognizable, too.

(Download Incomplete)

The pixel and its retro aesthetics are a common element of the games, even if they’re contradicting the respective genre. Pixelated science-fiction games are not a rarity: Download Incomplete lets you play the ghost in the machine. Equipped with your trusty jetpack, you have to find the last missing bytes of a download. The puzzle platformer Millinaut refines this approach even further by using anthropomorphized enemies like angry-looking stars or aggressive suns. It reminds me of the good old days in school, white GameBoy in hand.

This feeling is intensified by excellent pixel graphics with shades of black, white and gray as well as the very appropriate bleep-bloop music. Furthermore, Millinaut offers great puzzle design. You’re playing a group made up of an astronaut, a rocket and a moon. The three are stacked on top of each other, with the astronaut being the bottom part, making the whole group jump and run. Both the rocket and the moon can be fixed in mid-air as platforms, but it’s possible to deploy them on command, too. The rocket can fly, the moon falls. This lets you defeat enemies or gain access to unexplored areas.

(Millinaut)

What makes Millinaut special is its fragmentation of the essential abilities of movement and fighting. Even the fighting ability itself is fragmented through the rocket and the moon. A common (and trite) convention was broken: The union of all essential skills in one single character. All of this leads to a particular aesthetic, an atmosphere of minimalism. We become aware of a pool of skills, stripped down to their basic elements. But it gets even more interesting when the game’s narration is detached from the game itself.

A great example for this is Acari Love. You support Bernardo the mite in a shooting carnage against other, bigger monsters. The music is fast and keeps the pressure up. It’s minimalism on two levels: The player directs Bernardo with the mouse and drops the occasional bomb with a left click — you don’t have to worry about shooting, Bernardo does that automatically. This limits the gameplay to mouse control. The other, much more important feature is the break of the game within itself. Following each victory, the music slows down abruptly. Suddenly, it’s quiet. The player sees nothing but a white text on a black screen. And then Bernardo tells his tragic story about the death of his sister and his fight for his only love.

The story may seem idiotic and absurd (keep in mind that he’s just a mite in a mattress), but really it doesn’t matter at that precise moment. Developer SergioAwoke knows how to properly use language. Instead of writing something like „Oh damn, these stupid humans killed my sis with an anti-mite-spray! >:(“, Bernardo only says: „My sister died last night.“ Acari Love seriously touched my heart, even more than most current role-playing games. And that’s no easy thing to do, believe me.

Reduction of game mechanics and its added value

(Pow! Pow! Pow!)

Ludum Dare #23 turned out to be a site of pilgrimage for programmers affected by minimalism (both on a visual as well as an thematic level). There’s a certain suspense when the whole game mechanic is reduced to one active opportunity for action — but it’s even more powerful if that action has several functions.

Let’s take a look at the little blue alien in Pow! Pow! Pow!: His energy projectiles not only defeat enemies, but they also influence the game world itself. For example, you’re able to shrink down enormous metal spikes or use environmental elements — such as compositions of huge triangles with purple bubble-frosting standing all around –- to sling yourself and overcome obstacles and gorges. It’s just one skill, but it’s got three core functions – not too bad, is it?

The game gravity is minimalist in a similar fashion: Playing as a yellow cube on a tiny island floating above deadly lava, you have to shoot red cubes that fall from the sky. But the thing is: Red cubes don’t vanish, they turn into gray cubes and start occupying the small island of your yellow cube. If you don’t shove the additional weight over the edges, the island will sink right into the red sea of death.

The reduction of game mechanics leads to additional value for players as soon as multiple factors influencing each other need to be considered. New challenges appear at the same time, only to be solved by one single action.

Super Meat Boy’s new garments

Another ongoing theme is the hommage to earlier, iconic games and the gaming culture in general. The point’n’click-adventure subAtomic shares not only the look of its ancestors from the 90s, but also their humor. Another example is the short ‘adventure’ Tiny Quest, which can be solved via knowledge of one pop-culturally relevant cheat co… Nope, I won’t tell you. There’s a hint in the image on the left. But psssst… Don’t tell anyone!

Regarding rip-offs (but with their own perks) of Super Meat Boy, there’s two that stick out immediately. One is Muffin Time!, in which you perform some wall-jumping in an inceptionesque world. An alien, who is obsessed with muffins, stole one of them on a spaceship and thus activated the ship’s self-destruction mechanism. To deactivate it, the alien fights robots and other safety measures. Each of them is made out of a number of levels, though. Seems like we can file that one under MuffInception.

Fortunately, Superpixel was much more enjoyable. Nearly everything here reminds me of Super Meat Boy: The form of the protagonist (well, it’s a pixel…), the ‘Super’ title, deadly spinning objects and – of course – the wall-jumping at the very core of the gameplay. But it’s much more than a simple copy of a superb indie game. Its programmer lectvs poured a huge amount of love into the detailed level design: In just 48 hours, he created an easy and a hard level of difficulty for all of the 21 stages. Actually, the easy mode itself is a considerable challenge and the hard mode is… well, very very very hard. It’s frustrating and fun at the same time –- just like the original.

(Superpixel)

Another theme shared by many submissions is the relationship to other individuals and the consequences of them for your own life. There’s games where love is embedded in the narrative arc. Even the choice of the survival-genre can be explained by through loyalty to a higher power. Other games discuss the relationship between players and game designers. But two of my top favorites contextualize the abscence of relationships. Let me try and explain it like this: A limited surface (tiny world, remember?) causes closeness between its inhabitants. If that closeness doesn’t exist, we miss it even more.

Adventures about the lack of relationships

(Tiny Journey)

I was impressed by two adventures in particular. Although they both have completely different gameplay, graphics and atmosphere, their protagonists share a lack of relationships. The bizarre/tragicomical point’n’click-adventure Tiny Journey tells the Jack Skellington-like story of a lonely kid without a name. There’s only one day a year when the little guy can leave his room: On his birthday. In his tiny chamber, he’s drawing blueprints for a rocket. As you begin to play, you see him dreaming of freedom, waking up, changing from depressed to encouraged. He decides to escape the awful place he’s stuck in, even without the permission of his parents. Going outside, he notices that nobody else is there. The player helps the poor guy search the missing rocket parts. The whole time playing, we never see anybody else. There’s just him and his dead dog (which we see only once). His destiny is heartbreaking. You’ll leave this game with mixed feelings, but you will certainly be aware that its creators did amazing work.

(Ancestor’s Sword)

The other splendid achievement is the platform adventure Ancestor’s Sword. Here you explore a world filled with friendship, lovely and calm. There are children playing, lovers, peaceful people knowing that there’s nothing evil in the world. There’s cute little cats, too. You control the bored grandson of the local hero (who made the world safe in the first place). The grandson wants to become an adventurer and sets out in search for his grandfather’s blade. Derived from the central idea of VVVVVV, Ancestor’s Sword lets the player flip gravity with a single keystroke and thus move from platform to platform, from floor to ceiling. as long as he is near enough to make the jump. To access new areas you have to find a watering can and use it to grow giant plants, climbing them to journey onwards/upwards/downwards. The spatial riddles are complicated further by nasty thorns on the platforms, which restore the ‘hero’ to his previous position whenever he touches them. According to developer JaJ, there are two endings. I merely found the most obvious one. Still, it should become clear what I mean by lack of relationships. Ever handed a bored youngster a sharp blade? No? Do it! You’ll see what I’m saying. My mad giggling got stuck in my throat for a while, until I had to laugh again. A marvelous feeling. But there are even more fantastic games grappling with love and longing. Is there anything better than to commit oneself, heart and soul and all, to another person?

The melancholy of pixel-love

(Pretentious Game)

The platformer Pretentious Game uses this theme in a very clever way. The sometimes more, sometimes less cryptic game instructions are written as a love poem. A gentle piano score won’t let you avoid the romantic atmosphere. Although you only play a single love-struck pixel, everything seems to fit this amusing, emotional pleasure. Furthermore, Pretentious Game teaches us a lesson about the format of the digital game as well as about life itself. I don’t want to spoil it right now – experience it for yourself.

Tiny Vessels on the other hand isn’t really a game in the traditional sense at all, rather a melancholic story about exploration. As a small pixel block, you wander around the perfectly circular world. You carve a heart into a tree, you leave a note at the house of your beloved, you build a fence for her and pick up her favorite flower as a present. All the while, you try to follow her, but she moves simultaneously to you and seems to distance herself. Quickly, it becomes apparent that this was the past, because you now control the pink block and your tiny world is in ruins. The tree with the heart becomes a grave, the house is ruined, the flower gone, only the fence remains. The lover is dead. I shuddered, briefly. I haven’t thought about that before. Surely, something must’ve gone wrong. I noticed it, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

(Tiny Vessels)

Both Pretentious Game and Tiny Vessels tell us — each in their own way — a simple, yet important message: Carpe diem. It doesn’t take fancy graphics in high quality to tell an emotional story. It requires aesthetics. The atmosphere of minimalism is used to foster identification. It’s not a human shape of a character or its ingenious personality with an elaborate backstory that makes a game a touching work; it’s the atmosphere, the mood. Love is a trans-cultural phenomenon. Nearly anyone can connect: it’s love that connects us to our families, to our best friends, our partners. There is always a certain someone who must not be absent in your life. Due to the universality of love, these usually abstract pixel heaps can be filled with life by players. The atmosphere of minimalism becomes a strategy, an invitation for empathy.

The survival genre and the higher power

If that’s too too smarmy for you, there’s a variety of different genres offered by Ludum Dare #23, such as in the survival game The Underground Court. Here you take over the role of the last remained insect servant beside its queen. She must be fed to secure the continued existence of your colony, which forces you to move into the outside world to scavenge for food. If you don’t, the queen will die, so you pick up fruits of trees, search dumps for food — you can even snatch cake from a neighbor’s garden. Should you carry too much food, you’ll slow down, though. This is dangerous: The queen can die of hunger if you don’t move quickly enough or you can be ripped apart by stray cats. Without the implied hierarchy of worker and queen, assigning you a value based on the insect’s societal rank, this game would just be ridiculous. The simple act of carrying objects from place A to place B offers no motivation to play at all if it isn’t contextualized.

Meta: Do it yourself!

This leads me to a question: Is a game designer the higher power superior to the gamer? Some interesting games make this relationship the subject of discussion. Level editors are a wonderful example. They turn gamers into game makers themselves. This is why I like the basic idea of the puzzle shooter Nineties Holywood Hacker so much: On a 10×10 field, you create a circuitry by linking up a start and an end element with pseudo-technical symbols. When you’re done, you have to get a tiny aggressive robot through your self-made maze fighting anti-virus programs along the way. The execution is a bit boring and inconvenient, but I was amused by the great idea at the core.

Another great editor is the minecraftesque dungeon editor Wunderworld. With its simple handling it’s fantastically user-friendly. You can choose how many fields long, wide or deep your dungeon should be, whether there are destroyable dirt- or impenetrable metal-walls, where your starting point is, if and how many enemies (there’s kittens again — warrior kittens, rawr!) shall be fighting against you, and much more. Wunderworld offers huge freedom to the player; kudos to the development team Ratking for making the relationship between the player and the designer interchangeable! By the way, I created a tiny dungeon for you guys: It has a big old heart of meta.

(Wunderworld)

To infinity and beyond?

Of course there are still some borders between players and designers. Borders are important, as they define the game environment and its system of rules. In some games, they become a central part of the gameplay or the narration. A great example is the platformer Another Kind of World. You need to kill every enemy with a bomb to find a hidden door, which leads you to the next level. Admittedly, that sounds like an average game, but there’s a twist: The horizontal and vertical borders are connected — like portals. The transformation of the visual 2D borders (the player’s point of view) to spatial non-borders (the character’s point of view) makes the amusing level design of Another Kind of World possible. It enables a bigger scope of action: Across detours, you throw bombs on your enemies. You need to pay great attention as well, because it’s kind of unusual to imagine a room without borders. You’ll often run into the levels’ holes and jump straight up into enemies.

(Another Kind of World)

The totally marvelous Microscopia uses the model of a room without borders as well. Here, your goal is to lead a little black line into the center of the white round world. This time, the usage of a boundless room doesn’t lead to a extension of the playing strategy like in Another Kind of World, because you aren’t the only line in the tiny world. There are dozens of them, moving like crazy, even through visual borders. In later levels, the objects adapt to the speed of your movement, sometimes moving in the same direction. The game wouldn’t be playable with determined spatial borders at all, because you’d be able just move into a corner to focus on your character. Its creator, azurenimbus, managed to work around this with the simple extension of the room expand a simple objective — reaching a central point — to a nearly impossible enterprise. Microscopia is a brilliant example of conceptual simplicity.

(Microscopia)

Spatiality of the narration and narrative room structure

Conventions of a genre may be regarded as borders just as well. You can make them visible by a simple change of roles, such as in the ‘Capitalism simulator’ Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale, which lets you play a young shop owner instead of the brave hero. My Little Dungeon does something similar: Instead of fighting monsters using a sword and shield, you must support the hero by building an underground passage to the monstrous boss. Meanwhile, the AI-controlled adventurer fights against slimes and evil knights, loses life points, gains experience, and even becomes hungry. The hero has to travel a way that you built out of three types of chambers: One chamber with weak enemies, one with stronger enemies and one monsterless cave for relaxation. The choice of rooms has to be balanced to make the adventurer vital and strong enough when it’s time to fight the final enemy. My Little Dungeon centers the structure of a typical role-playing game: a strictly bordered, linear game with a balanced difficulty level can lead to an optical training curve. The miniature rooms are a metaphor for the basic structure of a whole genre, the story of a role-playing game can be told in as much as a small, bordered environment.

(My Little Dungeon)

So we see, borders aren’t something we should categorically define as bad. They don’t automatically result in boring game design. IÄTI, for example, is an inspiring game because of its borders. With the encrypted help of a lyrical myth — a symbiosis of a Finnish creation myth and the national epos Kalevala — you build up the level. The myth tells you the game mechanisms:

„From the eggshells of a bird the world was born. Earth, water, grass and man. But be careful, for water drowns him, earth buries him and ill spirits will surely be his undoing.
Grass to Man. Water to Grass. Grass to Shrub. Sing the old chants.
Grass to tent. Man to tree. Water to boat. Sing the old chants.“

You control a flying bird and let it lay eggs in different colors, each creating something new: Green eggs produce grass, orange eggs create humans and so on. Should a green egg fall down on a human, they will become a tent. It’s the mix of the elements that lets players become storytellers of the myth.

(IÄTI)

Boundaries as the basics of a game

Sometimes borders are simply entertaining. In Spaceship In The Sky With Colors you fly a spaceship through a four/five-colored galaxy. Your fuel consists of the colors blue, yellow, orange and red. If you move through an area, the same-colored fuel gets consumed. This has you switching neatly between the borders to win the game. Boundaries become the basic element of the game.

Until now, I’ve only been talking about spatial borders. Asylum starts off in a locked padded room. A schizophrenic talks about the voices in his head, whom he describes as his friends. The doctors try to keep them under control using psychotropic drugs, but the man doesn’t want them. He thinks they’ll summon a monster, so instead he wants to kill it to become a free man. I don’t want to spoil too much, so play it for yourself — it’s really great! The absence of music just makes the story more potent. It’s about a man who gets lost in his own psyche. One part of him, his schizophrenia, is his very own boundary.

(Asylum)

About the essence of a genre

Let’s talk about one concept in particular: a part. To me, it’s a pretty indefinable term. Is a part just a single fragment of a bigger system? Is it possible to disconnect it from its context? There’s a saying that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. But then what does it mean to be a part of something? When people talk about games, they often talk about about discrete parts. There’s graphics, level-design and so on. But could there be something — anything — that makes a game the game it is?

(A Super Mario Summary)

Let’s take a look at Super Mario, the ultimative video game pop icon. To many people, the games about the adventures of the chubby plumber with a gusto for mushrooms are the quintessence of the jump’n’run- and platformerbgenre: Running, jumping, stomping Goombas, collecting coins/points, getting to the finish line. A Super Mario Summary underlines exactly this. It seems to be a copy of Super Mario Bros. – with indie-aesthetics. Both the level design as well as the gameplay are minimal. You’ll recognize the over two and a half decades old game as a representation of the platforming genre itself. Exempted from additional features like the invincibility star or the instant growth spurt by consuming mushrooms, you just play by running, jumping, overcoming obstacles and successfully arriving at the end point. The features may influence your experience with the game, but they’re not its core. They seem to be redundant parts, needed to be removed to identify the essence of a game and a genre.

But what does ‘successfully arriving’ mean, exactly? That a hero doesn’t die? The platformer Crysthurl begs to differ: Here, dying is at the core of the game. You play as a small but very strong creature with a block over its head. You can throw it away, but the block is a unique. For most riddles, one block isn’t enough, so the mini-character must die to reproduce itself with a new block — throwing a block, dying, coming back to life with a new block, over and over again. Crysthurl shows that countable lifes or energy points are not a core element of platformers.

(Crysthurl)

In accordance with the environment

But is there an essence to the digital game itself? Video game theorist Jesper Juul wrote (in an awesome anthology) that a game requires a system of rules. As you start to play, you become a part of that system, because you participate in it. The controls of a game are rules themselves, i.e. in some games you can let your character move to the left or the right only, but he isn’t able to jump, fly or dig. You can’t simply change the environment while playing. Boxed in eases that structure. In addition to controlling the character, you need to literally shake the game environment like a little box in to influence the laws of physics.

(Inside My Radio)

Inside My Radio, on the other hand, relies on non-controlable room physics. It links the movements of the player character (except for going left or right) to the bass of the background songs. The small green thing can only jump or sprintas long as the player doesn’t sync keystrokes to the background music. That’s pretty unfamiliar, which makes the movement a little clumsy at the beginning. But within a short period of time, it’ll feel pretty natural; the player will literally move in sync with the game.

Me, myself and I

(Memento XII)

To go a step further: What are the essential parts of personality and identity? Which parts are needed to be a human being, a person? The great adventure Memento XII deals with these question. An old man wakes up in a jail cell for the 4380th time. Over the course of twelve years, his whole life has become a routine. He recognizes the three ripped parts of the photo of a woman. He remembers her, her name is Lydia. Suddenly, the cold jail cell transforms into a bright, warm living room, in which he finds various other memorabilia about his past. They’re not just relevant to the scenario of Memento XII; they also show that no human identity can exist without them. Without the knowledge of the past we can neither tell who we are nor what we do and why we do it. I don’t want to spoil the ending of Memento XII, but it mediates this idea to the player in a wonderfully tragic way.

(Flyspeck)

I already had 800 games behind me when I played the short adventure Flyspeck and suddenly asked myself why exactly I was writing this report. In Flyspeck, there’s a kitten named Kitteh appearing as a secondary character. It helped me find an answer by asking existential questions like this one: “Are there fixed and accepted standards for judging artistic experiences or is art best left to relative assessment?” As I read that, I had to smile. Indeed, these questions could work as pointers for reviewing digital games for some people.

Not for me, though. This article is not a search for some fixed and accepted standards for judging games; it’s extremely subjective. I’m trying to transform my most important experiences with the Ludum Dare #23 games into text and share it with you. This is about the liveliness of the games medium, of its agility. Digital games are not just entertainment products. They can touch us, physically and emotionally, they can mediate knowledge about the structure of systems and events, they can develop and extend our consciousness. We can’t accept that they can be rated with some markers like five stars for graphics, four for sound and gameplay. Those single parts don’t add up to the sum of the whole thing. This is why I’m writing this thing. This became a part of me. But what happens as soon as it ends? I’ll certainly have more time for other things — more time for myself, too — but for a short while I will definitely be feeling kind of empty. That’s pretty normal, I guess. For the last eight or nine days I spent around 16 hours daily testing games. And then there’s… nothing.

Emptiness

(The Dream Sequencer)

The point’n’click adventure The Dream Sequencer tells a harsh story about emptiness. You control an astronaut, familiar with the galaxy and his spaceship. But he’s longing for a planet named Earth. He wishes to witness a real day, a real night. However, he begins his daily routine and something goes horribly wrong. Suddenly, he’s standing in a strange room with weird messages on the walls, where he sees shadows come to life. He wakes up yet again. Everything feels like a déjà vu, but now he tells you about his never before mentioned life as a married farmer. In the end, the mystery is solved: He never was an astronaut in the first place. He also was neither a farmer, nor a human. And he certainly wasn’t a living thing. He’s part of ‘the void’, a manifestation of emptiness. His master tells him that he’s been dreaming again. He gets obsessed with each of these dreams and thinks that they are real — but that’s impossible, because he’s nothing. All of this seems to happen again and again. He’s troubled with his non-existence, his literal nothingness. The player is told a subject-specific, superficial yet thrilling dialogue about existentialism.

(Obsolescence)

The exploration game Obsolescence is another one about emptiness, but more in an apocalyptical way rather than a metaphysical one. What happens to mankind when Earth loses all of its resources? The player fires probes to find a new home. If you’re lucky, the scenario changes to the new planet with a filled resource bar, sinking over time. Mankind starts to cut down all trees and to build skyscrapers. If your resources are completely used up, and you can’t find a new planet — Game Over. There will be no planet, no humans, no life at all. In this game, emptiness is your motivation to continue playing. Obsolescence has a moral message. It’s an appeal for sustainable thinking and acting. Only mankind itself can protect the planet from emptiness.

Mind the gap

(Scape)

Emptiness can turn into something positive, because it is a reason to act. In the puzzle game Scape, the subject of nothingness is present as you fight against blank spaces in a tiny world. You’re forced to plant a tree into each of its fields. Do it carefully, because two steps later, the trees are fully grown, which could lead to you blocking your own path. Every step must be well-considered. Another element that needs to be kept in mind at the same time are brown, theoretically not plantable fields — they only become plantable when there’s a fully grown tree right beside them. The level design of programmer intmain was a blast and I sincerely hope he’ll further tap its potential, even after Ludum Dare #23. He sure knows how to use emptiness as a creative and enjoyable part of gameplay.

Emptiness itself is not that much of a new theme, actually. Just remember the 1972 published video game classic Pong. Here, the omnipresent black background is a screen-filling, giant void, but because of its very nature, the players can focus on the white game elements: Their paddle lines and the pixel ball. The emptiness is what lets the player focus on what’s important. MacroPong exaggerates that principle with its ludicrously big background and small striking surfaces. The ludic core of the game gets visualized by the lack of decorative and unnecessary elements, by the emptiness itself.

(MacroPong)

„I’m So Meta, Even This Acronym“

The meta-comment Wander, which pretends to be a game, uses that knowledge to offer a special moment of enlightenment. The title screen promises an „immersive interactive experience“, but then error messages about hardware requirements (i.e. the weak graphics card of the player) appear. Wanders shows nothing but a pixelated mini map. You can recognize a castle, a forest, a big city, the ocean and a river, which passes through the whole area: It could have been such an amazing experience, if only the hardware would comply to the game’s needs. But is the gaming experience really coupled to technology that much? What distinguishes my SNES/PSOne generation from the C64 veterans or the Xbox360/PS3/Nintendo 3DS youngsters of today? It’s true, the electronics and the respective graphics changed, but the basic requirement of playing never changed. We always just needed one single ability to play, regardless of whether we played with Lego bricks, puppets, plushies or with digital games. Which one might it be? The developer Dramble reveals this little secret in the following elegant and brilliant expression:

(Wander)

Constant coincidence as restrictive practice

(Tinysasters)

But what happens when your imagination — and by that, your gaming experience — is limited from beyond your control, for example through constant coincidence? In the ostensible construction simulation Tinysasters, everything could be so easy. Its 8×8 field is a tiny world with surfaces of grass, forests, water, mountains and deserts. Your aim is to build a level 4 shrine. To receive the required resources, you need to construct other buildings like mines (for stones) or small towns (for tools). But you must be careful, because even those can’t be built out of nothing; that’s why you have got a limited starting capital of resources. So you’re forced to figure out how to establish an optimal, profitable system. Suddenly, the incredible happens — a natural disaster. Out of the blue, a mountain arises and kills off any other fields in its row. Another variety of uncontrollable catastrophe is the drought, which transforms lush meadows into an unusuable desert. These natural disasters happen in a determined time interval (somewhere between 15 and 40 seconds, depending on the difficulty level), but in random order: Sometimes there’s two earthquakes in a row, sometimes a flood, maybe another earthquake, a drought, and your whole strategy turns out to be waste of time. The liberated feeling of playing the first minute of the game becomes a test of reaction time, at least in the highest difficulty. The permanent presence of the coincidence offers the players a challenge of problem solving and quick adaptability.

(Serendipity with Cubes)

In a similar fashion to Tinysasters, while in a more subtle way, the mechanic of coincidence is implemented in the puzzle game Serendipity with Cubes. A 3D cube can be viewed from all perspectives. Each round, two random components of the cube begin to pulse, indicating the start and end points of a path the player has to create. The path from A to B must consist of isochromatic components. Along the way, each component can be exchanged with any other. If that connection is established, every path component is removed from the main cube. The final goal is to remove every component, but the real highlight of this game is the condition for losing: If only one single component remains unlinked to the others, the game ends. Each and every step must be carefully planned. By the mere implementation of such a simple random generator, a limitation in playing occurs — but along with that, there’s an enormous suspense. It’s a very captivating game.

The moment of enlightenment

(6 Degrees of Sabotage)

Another interesting employment of coincidence appears in 6 Degrees of Sabotage. It’s a logic game where the player must reconstruct a crime. In the aftermath of a bomb attack, you receive three pieces of information: 1.) The identity of the attacker, 2.) the identity of the constituent, and 3.) that three other people were involved. The group of five is randomly mixed at the beginning of each new game: Sometimes it’s the butcher who executed the attack, sometimes the colonel or the sailor. This reconstruction is exciting because four ambiguous sequences are shown. In the first, the executor meets two other — maybe completely innocent — persons on his or her way to work. In another, you see the constituent in an afternoon cinema movie with three suspects. You need to investigate the footage for information about the relationships of the people. The last act marks the final strike: In a panicky mass of human targets, all guilty suspects need to be killed, each with a single bullet – without hurting the innocent, of course.

(Nanofactory)

The puzzle game Nanofactory, is no subject to a random generator, but it is related to something remotely similar to coincidence. If you played any adventure of the 1990s, you’ll know the following situation: You solved a particularly absurd riddle (hint: The Secret of Monkey Island) and you need to laugh – in a liberating way. Why liberating? Because nobody could have solved them by purely logical deduction. You try to combine any items of your hopelessly overcrowded inventory without any thinking. Here the coincidence isn’t a part of the game itself, but a part of playing it. Use grog on metal lock. Sure, sure… The irrationality of riddles offers an inexhaustible number of potential possibilities for solutions. That’s how Nanofactory works. The pieces of each puzzle are bigger circuit elements which themselves are splitted into individual, movable elements. The doubled structure of gameplay — on the one hand rotating a piece of the puzzle, on the other hand rotating each individual part — complicates the riddles, makes them absurd. You will reach a point where you just click and flip parts around for minutes. Somewhere along these desperate acts, the solution generously reveals itself to you. By the random rotation of one element, the greater pattern becomes visible. A moment of enlightenment.

No Country for Coincidence

(Real War)

There seem to be a few genres that don’t allow coincidence at all. To me, playing Real War, a war game, was an unbelievable experience. As a nameless soldier, you make your way across the battlefield, talk to your commander, shoot enemies, hopelessly watch your comrades fall victim to cannon shots, and you see a frightened, young soldier struggling with his first kill. War shooters these days, especially the historically oriented ones (think world wars), follow extremely linear paths, as any of these given wars has already happened and is known to anybody who can get his hands on a history book. A quote by Christian Huberts from the German anthology „Welt|Kriegs|Shooter. Computerspiele als realistische Erinnerungsmedien?“ (“World|War|Shooter. Computer games as realistic memory media?”) breaks it down very well:

„Fundamentally, the war ends before it has even begun, we just drive through the most thrilling scenes in a historical setting once again.“

And he’s right. Nevertheless, Real War manages to offer a much more memorable idea of war as unoccasional force, an achievement that your average Call of Duty title could never accomplish, and all simply through its aesthetics.

(Real War)

Farewell

Dear Ludum Dare #23,

at the very beginning, you seemed innocuous and harmless. Testing 150 to 200 games per day – okay, come on, how hard can it be, if the games were programed within 48 or 72 hours? Laughable — at least that’s what I thought.

Turns out it’s not. Just like a little planet, directed by a bacterium-parasite-hybrid, you let laser rays and rockets rain down on me, filled with digital cultural artifacts. At no point you ever stopped to invade more parts of my galaxy. You grew from a tiny world to what’s become my own temporary universe.

(Tiny Conflict)

There was nothing else but you. You and me. You were a new world, one I wanted to explore. Sure, the human need to eat had to be satisfied here and there, but that wasn’t a problem. Frustrating series of tests were much worse, marathons of dozens of games in a row I didn’t even like one bit. It felt like being attacked by small aliens, or – much worse – by zombie astronauts, not feasting on brains, but on my spare time. But you know what? Sometimes, there was a sparkling stone among them, a rough diamond. My motivation kicked in again. Because I knew that I did it all for the right reason: The love for digital games and their special culture. In the end, I simply wasn’t able to bail on you because of a few little obstacles.

(ONLY US)

With all that said, I hope you never thought I was simply looking down on you, analyzing you. No, I didn’t mean to evaluate you like a mysterious goddess. I didn’t mean to impose those ‘objective standards’ such as graphics, sound, gameplay, story and whatnot. I never ever intended to do that. In the end, all your participants were united by one single thing — and it wasn’t the Tiny World slogan. It was their engagement towards you. Just think about this: With 1.402 submitted games, each developed in 48 hours, a total of almost 67.300 hours has been invested. Invested in you! I would never have been able to evaluate a mass of games as huge as this with conventional and objective rating systems, which is why I tried to pick out all those that meant a lot to me and make them accessible to as many people as possible.

(Tiny Religion)

But I kept some special secrets like BEEFWAR, Buggy, Tank and Missile Launcher!!!, Copulous, Cosmicro, Fracuum, Intersection, It’s a Tiny Life…, Miniature Worlds, NaMa Tek, Recluse, Rubiq’s Garden, SAVE YOUR FOLKS!, Singularity, Sirus the Virus, Soul Searchin’, The world of Marceline, Tiny Boss and Tiny Garden of Hope to myself – just for formal reasons, because I thought that I wouldn’t be able to include them. That there were simply too many. Games started to appear too identical. Too many weren’t describable for me. What I then did is pick out five to seven interesting games and bundle them in meta topics like coincidence or relationships. But even that method quickly reached its limitations.

(Bottlecolonies)

At times, your enormous variety seemed like a plague. An apocalyptical writer’s block hovers over my head just like my own personal Damocles sword. I looked back on my favorite games of the last testing session and tried to establish a connection, but somehow… It wasn’t possible. My relationship to the games was still there, though. I didn’t want to let them go unnoticed.

(Crimson Booties)

Your games aren’t perfect, naturally. The majority wouldn’t sell. But is that necessary? I don’t think so. The developers produced them with their concentrated, wild passion. That’s a wonderful thing. It’s a hobby that not only programmers can engage in, but gamers, too. You got it going, dear Ludum Dare #23, I’m certain of it. You provided people with new contacts, ideas and pleasure. It won’t get you big money, neither today nor tomorrow, but you can certainly count on this: Every participant is thankful for you. Even I, in my position as a journalist and gamer, am thankful, because I didn’t only get to know new games and some programmers, but also the team of Superlevel.

I’d also like to thank Dennis and Dom for their help translating this article into English!

(ONLY US)

Dear Ludum Dare #23, you truly were an enrichment to me.

Thank you, xoxo,

Sebastian.

Hidden treasure chest

Atomsmash: Got a place of nostalgically honor, because it’s a Commodore64 disk image!
Cylcubere Origins: An amusing game with the most geometrically varied, sadistic villain of all time. Very nice dubbing!
Desire: On an 8×8 field-island you need to place people according to their personal desires. Very relaxing game to play every now and then.
Discovery: An interesting reenactment in the form of a short point’n’click adventure.
Exposed: An high-end point’n’click adventure about absurd and influenceable evolution.
Finding Yourself: A search for identity and a very, very, very (!) challenging puzzle game at the same time.
Freezen Break: A pun as title, three fruits as protagonists and a good puzzle design. Who can resist that?
It’s a tab: It’s self-explanatory, isn’t it? It’s recommended to play it in Firefox or Chrome.
Microbial: Amazing organic puzzle design — of course in a body cell. It may be a little buggy, but is sure is worth playing.
microrail: Excellent puzzle design with railroad tracks in a micro-organism.
Minilization – Dawn and Fall of Man: Can you prevent the apocalypse by enhancing religion or science?
Mirror Rays: A game with a great gameplay concept, using the reflection of mirrors to offer extraordinary complex riddles.
Moon Base: With the growing Earth in hand, you’re linked to its gravitation field, so that you are forced to factor it in jumping. Very nice gameplay principle.
Naos: For the daily dose of surrealism; may cause headaches.
Nina Nueve: Entertaining 9×9 field puzzle game paired with zeldaesque aesthetic.
Overpopulous: An excellent polished space colonization trip. It’s great fun!
Prince of Leaves: I recommend it just for the unique cute song. Playing, listening, enjoying!
River Runner: A generator for „Just one more try…“-moments. Frustrating good addictiveness.
Tiny Wor ds: Hundreds of tweets to a topic of your choice as a platform! Sweet!
Tinyville Confidential: What would happen if the popular ‘Social Network’-‘game’ cough-cough-cough-Ville portrayed interpersonal relations?
Tondie and Zupe: A tower defense jump’n’punch game, where anything — from towers to the jumping ability and the size of the world — can be upgraded.

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Nicht schon wieder ein Artikel über Kickstarter

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Nicht schon wieder ein Artikel über Kickstarter Geschrieben von: Arne    Mittwoch, den 23. Mai 2012 um 08:00 Uhr
Kickstarter scheint zu einem Spielplatz für alte, unattraktive Männer zu verkommen und sich zumindest in der Rubrik “Videogames” immer mehr von der eigentlichen Grundintention zu entfernen. Inspiriert vom Erfolg eines Tim Schafer’s mit seinem Projekt Double Fine Adventure fällt immer mehr sogenannten Branchenveteranen plötzlich ein, olle Kamelle aus dem Keller zu kramen und diese mit einer Hand voll Konzeptzeichnungen und einem netten Video an das Volk zu verramschen.

Die Spannweite reicht von Neuproduktionen, die gar nicht so neu sind, da sie auf alten und zum Teil überholten Spielmechaniken basieren, über uninspirierte Remakes wie Leisure Suit Larry oder Carmageddon bis hin zu Neuinterpretationen und Fortsetzungen á la Shadowrun Returns und Wasteland 2. Und irgendwo quetscht sich dann noch ein Hülsbeck dazwischen und möchte ein wenig in Erinnerungen schwelgen.

Ist es das? Erinnerungen? Ist das die Hauptmotivation, die Menschen veranlasst, solche Projekte mit Geld zu überhäufen? Ich besitze tatsächlich keine emotionalen Bindungen zu einem der erwähnten Spiele und ihren Schöpfern. Möglicherweise ist das der Grund, warum ich bei einem gespendeten Betrag über 3,336,371$ für ein Adventure nur mit dem Kopf schütteln kann.

Nach der E-Paper Watch Pebble, die mit 10,266,845$ die Liste der “Top projects by funds raised” anführt, folgen mit Double Fine Adventure, Wasteland 2 und Shadowrun Returns drei Videospiele, bei denen es sich weder um innovative Produkte, noch um wirklich unbekannte Studios handelt. Dies entspricht der Natur des Menschen. Man klammert sich an Altbewährtes, vertraut denen, deren Fähigkeiten man zu kennen glaubt und lebt ein wenig in der Vergangenheit, in den bereits erwähnten Erinnerungen.

Und darin liegt für mich ein wenig die Crux, die Basis der Entfremdung des Konzeptes von Kickstarter und dessen Funktionsweise wie ich sie begreife.

In seinem Grundkonzept ist Kickstarter eine Crowd-Funding-Plattform, die es Einzelpersonen, Gruppen und Institutionen ermöglicht, Geld für Projekte zu sammeln, die mit eigenen Mitteln nicht umgesetzt werden können. Sie ist offen für alle. Und somit auch für Personen wie Tim Schafer.

Ich empfinde Kickstarter jedoch eher als Geburtsstätte und Katalysator für kleine, unbekannte und vor allem neue Ideen, egal in welcher Form. Das bezieht sich auf Musik, Filme, gedruckte Publikationen, Spiele und den ganzen anderen Kram, den ich über Kickstarter noch unterstützen kann. Es schmerzt mich zu beobachten, wie großartige und ambitionierte Projekte wie Spate, Legend of the Time Star, Cross of the Dutchman, das unbetitelte Bio-Kinect-Spiel oder Kitaru sich nur schleppend ihrem Ziel von lächerlichen 50.000$ und weniger nähern, während parallel Leisere Suit Larry und andere Spiele, die kein Mensch braucht, mit mehr als einer halben Millionen Dollar unterstützt werden.

Diese Beträge sind nahezu abstrus, besonders wenn man bedenkt, dass wir weder von Double Fine Adventure noch von Wasteland 2 oder Shadowrun auch nur einen Schnipsel bewegte Spielszenen gesehen haben und uns nur mit einem halbwegs lustigen Video und ein paar Worten aus dem Mund von Brian Fargo & Co zufrieden geben müssen. Aber das reicht scheinbar. Vergleichbare Projekte wie Republique umschmeicheln den potentiellen Backer mit In-Game-Material, Teaser-Trailern und zahlreichen Informationen zum eigentlichen Spiel. Und trotzdem konnte Camouflaj nur mit Ach und Krach die benötigten 500.000$ einsammeln.

Tim Schafers Projekt bietet dabei noch den meisten Mehrwert, immerhin finanzieren die Backer nicht nur das Adventure sondern auch die Behind-The-Scenes-Dokumentation der 2Player-Productions. So gelingt eine spannende Verknüpfung zweier Formate, die eigentlich viel öfters vollzogen werden sollte. Auch wenn sie in diesem Fall sogar doppelt von etablierten Namen profitiert.

Ob diese unverhältnismäßige Verteilung von Ressourcen nur auf Namen und Titel zurückzuführen ist, vermag ich nicht zu beantworten. In diesem Zusammenhang wird auch spannend zu beobachten sein, wie sich das Projekt Diamond Trust of London des Indie-Stars Jason Rohrer schlagen wird.

Natürlich hat die ganze Aufregung um Kickstarter, die stark von den besprochenen Projekten getragen wird, auch den positiven Effekt, dass die Vorzüge der Plattform nicht nur immer mehr bei zahlreichen Spieleentwicklern in den Fokus rückt — auch der ein oder andere spendable Besucher wird dank dem Blick über den Tellerrand auf die vielen kleinen, liebenswerten Projekte aufmerksam. Und diese müssen nicht immer befremdlich neuartig sondern können auch mal sehr romantisch und klassisch sein. Womit wir wieder bei den Erinnerungen wären.

Am Ende entscheidet jeder selbst, welches Konzept er mit ein paar Dollar unterstützen möchte. Und auch der ein oder andere Große hat verstanden, welche Macht ein Name haben kann, und was das wieder rum für die kleinen bedeuten kann. Projekte wie Kickin it Forward von Brian Fargo könnten dafür sorgen, dass das Ökosystem von Kickstarter deutlich erstarkt. Es wird aber auch die Aufgabe der zahlreichen (Spiele-) Blogs sein, auf die wirklichen Perlen bei Kickstarters hinzuweisen und einen Gegenpol zu der einseitigen Berichterstattung der Großen zu entwerfen, die leider viel zu oft nur auf die Spitze des Eisberges hinweisen. Ich halte Crowd-Funding-Plattformen für einen der möglicherweise bedeutendsten Trend dieses Jahrzehnts, nicht nur in Bezug auf Videospiele. Ich möchte nur nicht, dass wir unser Geld nur den alten Männern geben.

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Tief verwurzelte Geschichten « Go To Haneda

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Ebenfalls neu erschienen, aber längst besprochen: Der zweite Teil der Witcher-Saga, in dem ich mehr Western als Western Fantasy entdeckte, und einen kraftstrotzenden Helden, der in seiner Impotenz menschlich wird. Einige Überlegungen zur Überlegenheit des ersten Witchers und der weltenschöpfenden Kraft lokaler Sagen und Mythen.

Das polnische Rollenspiel The Witcher 2 ist jüngst für Heimkonsolen erschienen. Ich habe es bereits letztes Jahr anlässlich seiner Erstveröffentlichung auf dem PC besprochen und bin nicht davor zurück gescheut, es als “wichtig” zu bezeichnen. Dabei bleibe ich: Es ist wichtig, dank seiner “No Bullshit”-Attitüde, mit der sich die Entwickler gerne und zurecht brüsten: The Witcher 2 gehört nicht nur zu den wenigen Spielen, die es wagen, den Spieler narrativ zu fordern – es traut sich auch, seinen Helden zu überfordern, und steht damit beinahe allein da im Reich der Power-Phantasie. Wenn das Spiel trotz aller pubertärer Späße und eskapistischer Fantasyanwandlungen das Wort „mature“ verdient, dann in diesem Sinn. Für das Titel-Magazin habe ich versucht, es so auf den Punkt zu bringen:

Der Witcher ist nicht der ritterliche Fantasy-Heldenarchetyp; vielmehr ähnelt er dem Revolverhelden des Spätwesterns, der seine persönliche Vendetta verfolgt und sich auf dem Weg dahin eventuell überzeugen lässt, das eine oder andere Problem mit aus dem Weg zu räumen. Während er jedoch hier und dort Brandherde löscht, überrollen ihn die Ereignisse wie eine Feuerwalze. In beiden Witcher-Spielen findet sich der Spieler in der Titelrolle wieder im Zentrum eines doppelten Konflikts (einer mystisch, der andere realpolitisch), der so komplex ist, dass er nur gestützt auf das extrem unterhaltsam geschriebene Spiel-Kompendium nachvollzogen werden kann. Und nur sehr bedingt beeinflusst: One man is never enough, denn Einfluss auf die Welt zu haben heißt nicht, sie nach seinem Willen gestalten zu können.

Tom Bissell, einer der besten Journalisten, der sich mit Computerspielen auseinandersetzt, hat sich das Spiel  kürzlich ebenfalls angesehen und fand nichts von alledem – oder sonst etwas von Interesse. Ein harsches Urteil. Nach dem Sprung erkläre ich, warum ich geneigt bin, ihm zuzustimmen.

Bissells Kritik am Spiel ist breit abgestützt und, wie er offen zugibt, sehr persönlich. Letztlich läuft es aber darauf hinaus, dass sich das Spiel unnötig sperrig gibt: das Interface scheint nicht für die menschliche Motorik gemacht, Spielerführung gibt es kaum, und wenn, dann höchstens in die Irre. Damit spricht Bissell einige der Schwachpunkte an, die selbst von Liebhabern des Spiels unter wiederkäuenden Lopreisungen gemurmelt werden. Doch sind sie nicht der eigentliche Grund für Bissells vernichtendes Urteil – sein Problem ist es, dass nichts im Spiel ihn für diese Unzulänglichkeiten entschädigt hat. Bissell hörte zwar (von Leuten wie mir), dass das Spiel für die Geschichte spielenswert sei… aber genau diese wirkte auf Bissell in den ersten Stunden absolut stromlinienförmig und bar jeden lokalen Charakters – das Kriterium, das Metro 2033 zu Bissells Lieblingsspiel von 2010  gemacht hat:

The Witcher novels are apparently heavily grounded in Slavic mythology, but nothing I saw in The Witcher 2 felt at all distinctly Slavic, other than the low-hanging fruit of a Russian-accented, vodka-drinking troll.

Dass Bissell für sein dreistes Urteil mit einem donnernden Hasshagel bestraft wurde, war im auf Selbstbestätigung bedachten Klima der Game-Kultur zu erwarten. Wohlan denn, speuet auch auf mich, Verteidiger des Metacritic-Stores, denn ich reiche Bissell meinen Schirm und verkünde: CD Project haben vielleicht die alte Tolkien-Ausgabe aus dem Regal genommen und auf das staubfreie Rechteck George R. R. Martin gestellt. Doch wie sehr dies The Witcher 2 innerhalb des Genres auch adeln mag – im Vergleich zu einem anderen Spiel fällt es in Sachen Schöpfungskraft streckenweise doch steil ab: Seinem Vorgänger. Über den ich notabene geschrieben habe, dass man ihm eine Art von Beachtung schenkt, wie man sie zwei beim Feiglingspiel in Flammen aufgehenden Piloten entgegenbringt: Mit erhobener Augenbraue angesichts des Scheiterns, aber einem Heidenrespekt vor dem Versuchten. Entscheidend aber ist: für eine kurze Weile überstrahlt der Respekt alles andere.

Sie läßt sich sogar genau bezeichnen: Es ist jene Strecke, der quer durch das vierte Kapitel des ersten Witchers läuft, einer Küstenlinie entlang, durch einen Wald hindurch, und hin zu einem von allen menschlichen und unmenschlichen Unbilden heimgesuchten Dorf. Zwischen der Küste und diesem Dorf aber finden sich majestätische, wogende Kornfelder. Herrgott, diese Kornfelder! Sie sind der Grund, warum der erste Auftritt des Witchers in meiner Erinnerung lebhaft wie eine Schimmelpilzkolonie auf feinster Großmutterkonfitüre fortexistiert, während die Erinnerungen an den zweiten Teil bereits jetzt zu einem verschwommenen, wenn auch kunstvollen Prisma prächtiger Bilder zerlaufen sind. An Tagen, an denen ich Konfrontation suche wie ein Tanzbär den Schalter der Herdplatte unter seinen Füßen, behaupte ich sogar: Diese Felder sind das Beste, was dem Rollenspielgenre in Jahren passiert ist.

Nicht nur, dass die Ähren darin so proppevoll sind, dass sie ohne weiteres für Jahrzehnte Brot für die gesamte Welt© bereitstellen könnten. Die Felder sind auch ein extrem fruchtbarer Boden für das, was Bissell im zweiten Witcher vergebens gesucht hat: Eine Fantasie, die nicht von den Visionen englischsprachiger Zuspätromantiker zehrt, sondern dem lokalen Sagenschatz der Heimat der Entwickler. Bekenntniszeit: Ich komme aus einer Gegend, die in einer fruchtbaren Mischung aus heidentumfördernder Abgeschiedenheit und standhaftem Katholizismus eine Sagenwelt hervorgebracht hat, so reich in ihrer verwinkelten Morbidität, dass Tolkien mit ihr konfrontiert seinen Original-Vintage-Gänsekiel-Walter-Scott-Edition zerbrochen hätte, sein Hemd zerrissen und mit klagender Stimme gen Himmel geschworen hätte, nie wieder einen Bogen Pergamentpapier anzufassen. In seiner Sagenwelt grenzt dieses Bergtal aber durchaus an Polen. Es genügt, sich einmal im polnischen Hinterland bewegt zu haben oder die dort entstehende Literatur zu lesen (Andrzei Stasiuk. Menschheit, lies Stasiuk!), um zu verstehen, dass diese Gegenden eines teilen: Ihre Sagen frönen bis heute eine verwässerte, aber unverkennbar vitale Existenz.

Ich kenne Leute aus meiner Generation, die gewisse Straßen zu bestimmten Uhrzeiten meiden, um nicht einer Prozession der dort verkehrenden toten Seelen in die Quere zu kommen. Ich kenne noch einige Leute mehr, die keinerlei Grund dafür sehen würden, an der Zurechnungsfähigkeit dieser Person zu zweifeln. Religiöser Glauben, Sagen, Gerüchte und Pulp-Fantasy waren in meiner Kindheit und Jugend ein unentwirrbares, bestrickendes Knäuel, und ich erkenne ihre schiere poetische und metaphorische Wucht auch heute noch, als ich längst gelernt habe, Atheismus schick zu finden. Insofern ist es für mich völlig unverständlich, dass CD Project nicht mehr auf diesen Sagenschatz zurückgreifen. Zumal sie es im ersten Witcher-Spiel zumindest ansatzweise taten. Ob dies in Anlehnung an Sapkowskis Roman-Vorlage geschah oder auf Eigeninitiative von CD Project, ist unerheblich. Fest steht: Das vierte Kapitel des ersten Witchers gibt eine Ahnung davon, was mit einer Umarmung der unendlich reichen, unendlich seltsamen und von universellem Halbwissen und Ahnungen getränkten Sagenwelt gewonnen wäre.

Das vierte Kapitel verfrachtet den Witcher unvermittelt in einem Küstengebiet, das angesichts seiner Abgeschiedenheit genauso gut eine Insel sein könnte. Der Bruch der geographischen Kontinuität ist auch einer der narrativen: Wie Gerald dorthin gerät, warum er dorthin gerät, ist ohne Konsequenz. Das vierte Kapitel ist eine krude Bemerkung über die Mutter der Drei-Akt-Struktur und ihre Vorlieben für Zwergenpenisse, ein narrativer Umweg. Aber der Umweg zu dieser isolierten Welt scheint die Entwickler auch befreit zu haben. Ein Blick auf die Fauna dieser Biosphäre genügt: An den Küsten verstecken sich Elfenflüchtlinge aus der Alten Welt vor Fischmäulern, die gurgelnde Akzente hervorstoßen. Die Dorfbewohner sind machtlos gegenüber einem Volk pixelhoher Koboldwesen, die Nacht für Nacht den Bau einer n Brücke sabotieren und nur mittels eines Katzenharnisches beruhigt werden können. Raketenwürmer pflügen sich durch den Boden, während in Ruinen, deren Herkunft niemand zu interessieren scheint, Geister mit Würfelbechern warten. In der Nacht werden die Felder heimgesucht von geschwülstigen Nekrophagen, die schändlicherweise der einzige Versuch sind, der Langtüttin in diesem Medium Gestalt zu verleihen. Und über allem schwebt bedrohlich die Wilde Jagd, eine der düstersten und faszinierendsten Ausgeburten der europäischen Sagenwelt, die zentral ist für die Geschichte des Witchers, aber im zweiten Teil zum Hörensagen degradiert wurde. In den Feldern des vierten Kapitels kommt es dagegen nach langem und heftigem Vorausschatten endlich zu einer Konfrontation mit dieser vielgestaltigen Allegorie aller zerstörerischen Kräfte der Natur und Psyche. (Dass das Spiel mit dem Wesen des Sagenhaften vertraut ist, zeigt sich im Übrigen nur schon daran, dass in dieser Auseinandersetzung die korrekte Durchführung eines Rituals wichtiger ist als das Schwert.)

Einige dieser Kornkreise bewohnenden Gestalten sind Gemeine Wald- und Wiesenfantasybewohner. Die entscheidende Differenz ist aber: dass sie im Witcher Teil einer Lebenswelt sind. Sie interagieren, und sei es nur als Hintergrundgeschichte, mit den Menschen, die sich zwischen ihnen angesiedelt haben, Menschen, die sich über diese Wesen Geschichten erzählen oder sich mit ihnen anlegen. Es ist ein Wechselspiel, das diese Welt, so fantastisch sie auch gezeichnet ist, glaubhaft und belebt erscheinen läßt.

Im zweiten Spiel ist davon wenig übrig: Ein Blick auf die Monsterkompendien beider Spiele zeigt, dass im zweiten Witcher nicht nur deutlich weniger unterschiedliche Lebewesen vorkommen, sondern dass diese auch ungleich näher beim Einfallsreichtum eines Dragon Age sind. Immerhin scheinen sie nicht völlig willkürlich platziert: Harpyien, Insektenwesen und was da sonst noch kreucht und flucht, haben ihre spezifischen Lebensräume. Doch sind sie darin relativ allein. Sie finden kaum Erwähnung in den Kneipen der humanoiden Siedlungen, oder höchstens als Objekt in einem „Gehet hin und tötet“-Satz. Sie sind keine Bewohner eines Lebensraums, sie sind Fremdkörper… Monster.

Dass dies auch anders geht, zeigt eine der schönsten Mikro-Geschichten, die in der Witcher-Saga zu finden ist, „The Heat of The Day“, die das gesamte vierte Kapitel durchwebt: Murky Waters, besagtes Dorf und die einzige menschliche Siedlung im Küstengebiet, ist, wie Dörfer dies an so an sich haben, enorm aufgewühlt angesichts eines für lokale Verhältnisse großen Ereignisses: Der Bürgermeister will seine Tochter mit einem reichen Kaufmann vermählen. Der ist der jungen Braut ergeben, die sich ihrerseits aber lieber täglich zur Mittagsstunde mit ihrem Liebhaber in einem Brombeerhain zum Schäferstündchen trifft; die Schwester der Braut beobachtet dies eifersüchtig, da sie ihrerseits heimlich den künftigen Bräutigam und (weniger heimlich) die Aufmerksamkeit liebt. So weit, so Shakespeare im Park. Außergewöhnlich aber ist der Fortgang der Geschichte: Im Laufe des Kapitels verschwindet die Braut plötzlich, und Geralt wird beauftragt, sie zu finden. Schließlich findet er sie, in den Feldern unweit des Brombeerhains, im Brautkleid tanzend in der Mittagshitze: Sie ist tot, und sie weiß es nicht.

Die Details sind hier alles: Diese Braut sucht – ganz Katholizismus – den Ort heim, an dem sie gesündigt hat und an dem eine noch größere Sünde an ihr begangen wurde, ein Symbol, dazu verdammt, auf ewig das an diesem Ort begangene Unrecht anzuzeigen, oder jedenfalls, bis sie erlöst wird. (Als dies dem Witcher schließlich gelingt, stellt er fest: „I solve human problems, not always using a sword.“) Und es ist ebenso entscheidend, dass die Braut nicht irgendeine übernatürliche Erscheinung ist, sondern ein Elementargeist, der nichts, aber auch gar nichts zu tun hat mit den üblichen Wasser- und Erdklötzen gleichen Namens, die mit dem generischen Fantasy-Magier Hol-das-Stöckchen spielen. Dies hier eine Verkörperung eines gebrandmarkten Orts und des ihn beinhaltenden Lebensraums, eine Allegorie der Kräfte, die diesen Raum und alle seine Bewohner dominieren. Und, zugleich, ein Mensch. Werasethakul wäre stolz: Die Grenzen zwischen der Welt der Geister und der Lebenden, sie ist fließend geworden, alle natürlichen und übernatürlichen Wesen sind nichts anderes als Bilder in einem Spiegel, mit dem Land, das sie verankert, als dessen Rahmen: Metaphern, die so viel mehr beinhalten können als Schadenspunkte und das Potential für künftige Powermetal-Cover.

Das hier ist die weltenschöpfende und -erklärende Kraft der Sage, die so wenigen Leuten bewusst zu sein scheint. Eine kurze Strecke, ein Kapitel lang, schienen CD Project davon zu wissen. Ein Wissen, dass man ihnen – und so vielen anderen Designern – mit der Hardcover-Ausgabe von Leander Petzoldts Kleines Lexikon der Dämonen und Elementargeister sanft wieder einprügeln sollte.

Ich biete bereitwillig das Buch – bietet mir jemand bereitwillig die Hand?

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How Rooster Teeth Won the Internet With Red vs. Blue - Game

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An exclusive still from the 10th season of Red vs. Blue, the Halo parody series that will premiere on May 28.
Image courtesy Rooster Teeth

At about 5 p.m. one weekday in 2002 in Austin, Texas, Michael Burns clicked a button and uploaded a video to DrunkGamers.com.

It was a website that he and a couple of co-workers had started in their free time. The video was a parody of Apple’s Mac ads, showing a young man (played by Burns’ friend Gustavo Sorola) extolling the “virtues” of gaming on the undersupported Mac.

“Another great thing about the Mac is upgrades,” Sorola says to the camera. “On a PC, you have to open up your case, swap out your video card, change jumpers. On the Mac, when it’s time to upgrade, you just pick it up, throw it away, and go buy another one. Now that’s convenience.”

Burns and Sorola created the video purely for the enjoyment of their gamer nerd friends. But the very next day, one of those friends went to work at his Los Angeles office and dropped in on a friend who was always watching online videos. In 2002, this was not so common. YouTube was still 3 years away. But when the friend saw his buddy Sorola on the screen, he asked his co-worker if he also knew Gus. No, he said, he’d just heard this video was funny. The parody had gone viral in less than 24 hours.

Before the parody ad, DrunkGamers.com had just been for fun. But now Burns, always called “Burnie,” began to understand the power that the internet had to instantly find an audience if the content was good enough.

“It was this weird moment where we realized, man, the world’s just flat,” he told Wired.

Burns, now 39, is the CEO of Rooster Teeth, a company that he and Sorola established one year later to create humorous web video content. Their flagship creation is called Red vs. Blue, a parody of the popular shooter Halo created by adding voice-overs to actual footage pulled from the Xbox game. The 10th “season” of Red vs. Blue will premiere on Monday, May 28.

Burnie Burns is the kind of guy who will call you both “dude” and “man” in the same sentence. He is a film school dropout who created a multimedia empire, adapting along with the internet as it changed its shape. At 10 years old, Red vs. Blue has outlasted most science fiction shows on television. Rooster Teeth has conquered YouTube (it had the eighth most popular non-music channel of 2011) and iTunes (its podcast is the most downloaded one in the crowded Video Games category).

Rooster Teeth is a force to be reckoned with, but it all started in a spare bedroom in an Austin apartment.

When the parody “Switch” ad started taking off, Burns and Sorola were working at an Austin dial-up ISP called teleNetwork. They were friends with another employee there named Geoff Lazer Ramsey. He’d had his middle name legally changed to Lazer “as a joke.” The three became fast friends, starting a website called Ugly Internet in which Sorola and Ramsey penned scathing reviews of aesthetically unappealing websites, then emailed the link to the webmasters. They even wrote petitions to the American Registry of Internet Numbers to have the most egregiously hideous websites’ IP privileges revoked.

“We started getting death threats,” says Sorola. “People started e-mailing us photos of where we live. People were telling us that they were going to stab us in our sleep.”

Ugly Internet soon gave way to Drunk Gamers, which Burns joined. The three would review videogames while inebriated. The site was mostly an attempt to scam free games from publishers’ PR departments. In this sense, it was a failure. The only game they ever got in the mail was the mediocre Xbox game Blinx: The Timesweeper.

“That’s a game about a cat with a vacuum cleaner on its back that can alter time,” Sorola says with a laugh. “We gave it a perfect score. 10 out of 10.”

Burns was taken with another Xbox game — Halo. He’d post video captures of games, sometimes with humorous voice-overs. In August, he posted a trailer for an animated series called Red vs. Blue, promising that episodes would be “coming soon.”

Then they forgot to do it.

Everybody got bored with Drunk Gamers in a few months. The trio shut down the site, replacing all of the content with a photo of Ramsey and Sorola flipping the bird.

That could have been the end of the story, had the editors of Computer Gaming World magazine not been in love with the “Switch” parody and wanted to include it on the promotional CD-ROM that they included with their popular PC gaming mag. They emailed Sorola asking for permission.

“Whenever you get any press at that size, you think it’s going to be the biggest thing ever,” Burns says. He and his friends were flipping out with excitement when they realized something: The video had a link to the now-dead Drunk Gamers site.

“Well, what if we did that Red vs. Blue thing?” one eventually said.

They registered redvsblue.com, added the link to the new version of the parody video, and set to work on actually creating an episode of the promised web series. On April 1, 2003, Rooster Teeth officially formed and uploaded the first episode.

The original Rooster Teeth office, in Geoff Ramsey’s spare bedroom, circa 2004.
Image: Rooster Teeth

The Machinima Revolution

While first-person shooters had been a popular PC game genre since 1992′s Wolfenstein 3D, things really got into full swing with the landmark 1996 game Quake. With its emphasis on team-based multiplayer deathmatch, Quake started the competitive FPS scene. Players teamed up, formed “clans” and developed battle strategies in a quest to be the best in the world. One of these clans, called the Rangers, did something unexpected with their copies of Quake. Using modified software, they patched together a short film called Diary of a Camper, using the game’s text chat feature to write lines of dialogue and moving the camera independently of the “actors.”

The format caught on. More players started making what were then called “Quake movies.” Eventually, one of them developed a better term: machinima, a portmanteau of “machine” and “cinema.” An eponymous website appeared in 2000; in 2002 a group of creators got together to found the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences.

Rooster Teeth had no idea that any of this had happened.

“We thought we had invented it,” says Sorola. They’d named what they were doing RenderVision.

But when Academy co-founder Paul Marino saw an episode of Red vs. Blue, he called up Rooster Teeth to tell them that what they were doing had a name. Marino — now the lead cinematic designer on the MMO game Star Wars: The Old Republic — had been creating machinima on his own for years. He saw that Rooster Teeth had something special.

“Their stuff was transcending… the gamer audience,” Marino said. “Red vs. Blue led the way in a lot of ways.”

Most people had never heard of machinima before seeing Red vs. Blue. This was true for Allen DeBevoise, who is now the CEO of Machinima.com. “They’re pioneers of the field,” he said.

The first episode of Red vs. Blue immediately achieved a level of popularity that Drunk Gamers had never managed. The site was linked to by Slashdot, Penny Arcade, and Fark on the same day. Within a week, it had been downloaded over 20,000 times.

The second episode was exponentially bigger: 250,000 downloads. Soon, Rooster Teeth was seeing numbers north of 750,000 for each show.

“It was like falling up a cliff,” said Burns. “We suddenly had to figure out how to pay $6,000 a month to host a video file.”

Despite its popularity, Red vs. Blue wasn’t making any money.

“People think that if you get a lot of views, the ad truck just shows up at your front door,” Burns said. “That’s just not true.”

Desperate to cut server fees, Burns brought an extra computer with him to work and connected it to a spare Ethernet port in his cubicle. With the extra computer hidden out of sight, Burns was free to go about his regular work day while the machine served up downloads.

Sorola, who was in on the plan to hide the server, says that the scheme didn’t work for long. “The guy who ran technology came in and said, ‘All of the bandwidth in the company is being used in this room.’”

Burns told the tech guy that he didn’t have any idea what was going on, and hurriedly unplugged the machine as soon as no one was looking.

After that incident, Rooster Teeth decided to distribute new episodes with the peer-to-peer BitTorrent service. They posted instructions on their site instructing users about how to use a BitTorrent client to download episodes of Red vs. Blue. It was cheaper than hosting the file directly, but it wasn’t intuitive.

“You had to teach people how to use it,” says Sorola. “And then, when we finally had a DVD to sell, we’d already taught everyone how to steal our DVD.”

On a whim, Rooster Teeth decided to add a PayPal donate button to the site, just to see what would happen.

“The moment we put up the PayPal button, some guy donated $300,” says Burns. “That’s when we realized that if you give somebody a chance to support something on the internet, they’ll do it.”

Around the same time, Burns noticed that almost all of the oldest comments on online videos or posts simply read “first.” Users would click on something, realize that they were one of the first ones to access it, and comment to celebrate. Being first, Burns realized, was a big deal.

In response, Rooster Teeth set up a subscription model that allowed “sponsors” to get early access to new episodes of Red vs. Blue each week for $20 per year. The program continues to be a huge success, earning the company enough money to pay server fees and hire more employees.

Joel Heyman and Gus Sorola rehearse a scene from one of Rooster Teeth’s live-action shorts while Geoff Ramsey reviews the script in the foreground (2009).
Image: Rooster Teeth

Bungie Calling

All the while, Red vs. Blue continued to grow in popularity. At 29, Burnie Burns had become president of teleNetwork, the company where the Rooster Teeth co-founders met. He quit his job and decided to go full time at Rooster Teeth.

At that time, Sorola had set up a system that allowed him to track the IP addresses that downloaded files from their site.

“You could see how things were viral back then,” says Burns. “Somebody at the corporate Dell.com would download an episode. Then you’d see five more from Dell. Then 30 more.”

Soon enough, the videos spread to employees working at Microsoft. “We got one download from Microsoft.com, then 20,” says Burns. “Then, a thousand.”

A day later, the phone rang. It was Bungie, creator of the Halo series.

That phone call might have meant that the party was over. Rooster Teeth had spent months profiting from unlicensed footage created using Bungie’s game, and the Microsoft-owned developer could have sent a cease and desist letter. But it didn’t. Instead, the Bungie rep told Burns that they were fans of the show, and wanted to know how they could make Rooster Teeth’s life easier.

In later Halo releases, Bungie added a button that lowered the player’s gun. This had no point in competitive multiplayer, but made it easier for machinima directors to film their sketches.

Today, Rooster Teeth is a licensed Halo partner. Its relationship with Bungie carried over to 343 Industries, the internal Microsoft studio now in charge of Halo.

“They’ve always been very respectful and protective of the fact that this came from a fan base,” Burns said.

With Microsoft’s official blessing, Red vs. Blue has grown to be a unique and highly popular facet of the Halo universe. Lord of the Rings star Elijah Wood will joins the cast this season as a new character.

But the series is just one part of Rooster Teeth’s business. On its YouTube channel, which recently surpassed 1 billion total views, it hosts a variety of in-game and live-action videos. Their sister site AchievementHunter.com posts popular compilation videos like “Fails of the Weak,” which sees Rooster Teeth employees providing humorous commentary over short clips of players exploding, team-killing, and otherwise failing hard in Halo: Reach.

It debuted a live-action series called “Immersion” which ran for eight episodes last year, and one-off comedy videos like a parody trailer for an Angry Birds movie.

Rooster Teeth’s diversity of content has brought it over 1 million devoted fans that are active on the company’s web forums.

“If somebody’s in the community doing cool stuff, we’ll hire them,” Burns says. One of the company’s more recent hires was plucked from the boards after his “Animated Adventures” series of cartoons based on Rooster Teeth’s podcast became popular.

Rooster Teeth recently moved into a new, 20,000 square foot office space in Austin, and now employs 38 people. It’s a long way to come for a company that started out with no profit model, no office and only a handful of passionate employees.

“When I think about the growth of the company I think about all the different projects we were doing,” says Sorola. “There’s so many possibilities. I’d just like to continue to create content that I enjoy.”

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News - When digital dies, where does that leave game preservation?

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When digital dies, where does that leave game preservation?
by Brandon Sheffield
May 15, 2012

[When online games shut down, they could be lost forever. In this op-ed from the June/July issue, Game Developer magazine editor-in-chief Brandon Sheffield argues that the game industry seems determined to lose its history.]
When your game goes offline, does anyone care?

I may be an anomaly, but I play a lot of Xbox Live Indie Games (XBLIG). They’re like the iOS games of the console world — targeted, often bite-sized experiences that can be had for around a dollar. My taste in games was forged largely in the 90s, when arcades still had a decent presence in the world.

Because XBLIG lends itself to this kind of single-mechanic experience, as well as odd experimental titles like the avant-garde Vidiot Game, I have amassed well over 100 of these games. And I want to keep them — but it’s not entirely up to me.

In order to play XBLIG, you have to have an internet connection and an Xbox Live account, even if the game doesn’t support any sort of online content. With rumblings about a new console from Microsoft on the horizon, what is going to happen to the many hours and dollars I’ve put into these games, if the Xbox 360’s online services are no longer supported?

On top of that, Microsoft has asserted that Windows 8 will not fully support XNA, the SDK used to make most XBLIG. XNA is almost universally loved by its userbase - it’s pretty much the only Microsoft product you can say that about. But Microsoft is essentially killing it off. Five years from now, if I want to play an XBLIG that I’ve purchased, what can I do about that? Microsoft may come up with a stopgap solution — but what about 20 years from now?

There’s an even larger problem with games whose multiplayer resides on private servers. Most games have some content that is only accessible through multiplayer, and when those private servers shut down, that functionality is forever lost. MMOs that shut down tend to give players credits toward future games, which is a small concession (I say, if I payed 40 cents for a Purple Sword of Smiting, I want to keep it).

But then there are games like EA Sports MMA. That game came with an online pass, which was the only way to access the game’s online content. It came free with new boxed copies of the game, but used players had to buy one in order to gain access. The MMA servers were shut down in March, and content people paid for was lost forever.

I live still!

At a certain point, beyond the human drama and cries of money wasted on the consumer side, this becomes a preservation issue. The teams that made these games worked hard on these creations — if people can’t play them, how much do we really care about our art? We live in a complex digital landscape, and greater efforts should be made to preserve the experience of these games. If we had anywhere near the preservation efforts seen in other industries, I would be able to play EA’s MMA title 20 years into the future if I wanted to.

Preservation has largely been left to well-intentioned hackers, ROM-dumpers, and coders of emulators. There are private groups like OnlineConsoles.com, for example, which continue to privately serve games from the Dreamcast and PS2 eras. But given the affordability of scalable cloud servers and the importance of maintaining our digital heritage, a larger push is necessary, and within reach.

Any self-respecting company should preserve the work of its employees. With every game that stops getting served, and with every service like XBLIG that gets taken down by a console shift, hundreds of hours of developer work get tossed aside like so much trash. We have to care more about our industry than that.

Not two months ago, I went to a showing of Abel Gance’s Napoleon, a silent film from 1927. It’s not your average film. It’s a nearly six-hour epic, and the finale is shown across three separate screens, creating a panorama view, complete with different tints on each screen - a sensory overload unheard of for the time. It’s impressive even today.

Huge sections of this nearly 6 hour epic silent film were presumed lost forever, until they were found in the 1980s and restored. There are still pieces missing, even now. Since that time, the film industry has learned a lot about preservation, and has several organizations that work together to preserve and restore older works. These organizations have set up preservation guidelines, so we never even have to worry about losing our ability to see crap like American Reunion, 50 years into the future.

Napoleon is a difficult experience to replicate, though. You need a full orchestra to perform the score live. You need three projectors running the film at the right speed, three screens, and a theater that can accommodate all of this. Because the film industry cares about its history, I was able to watch this film in almost the same way an audience in 1927 might have.

Can we say the same in games? In 20 years will I be able to take a group of friends and play Ultima Online? If I wanted to discover the early days of the Korean online game scene, and learn about the roots of microtransactions first-hand, could I? How will I play a 3DS game?

In a recent feature on Gamasutra, Frank Cifaldi proved that we can’t even accurately pinpoint when Super Mario Bros. came out in the U.S. We can’t tell you with 100 percent accuracy when one of the most popular games of all time was released in the world’s largest console market. This is how behind we are.

I’ve written before about the importance of preserving our digital culture, but as we move to an increasingly online-based industry, it is even more important that we set up guidelines for preserving content as soon as possible. We may not need to preserve every game out there, but then again, who knows what will be perceived as important in the future?

How many painters were underappreciated in their time, only to be lauded later? Compared to how many game players there are in the world today, and how many developers it influenced, how many people have actually played MUDs, the foundation of our online game worlds? I can look at a Van Gogh painting, even today. But can I play Phantasy Star Online for Dreamcast?

It is my assertion that an organization that already gets funds from large publishers and developers — such as the ESA or IGDA — should be leading the preservation charge; defining best practices, collecting games, and figuring out how to serve them at low cost. If we don’t make this happen, we forget our history. Would anyone care about Van Gogh if he were just a legend, and we could never see his work?

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The Trouble With Call of Duty's Scary New War of the Future

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The future is black, announces the trailer for Call of Duty: Black Ops II.

The next iteration of the popular first person shooter hardly needs any marketing campaign: immediately after the official announcement, the gaming press diligently started to operate as an extension of Activision’s PR department. Small and big media scrambled to produce the most comprehensive list of features, talking polygons and frame rates, revealing plot fragments, speculating on new gameplay additions that may or may not rejuvenate the trite shooting genre.

Given the predicable hype, it is surprising to see among the promotional material a serious, high-production-value “documentary” about 21st century warfare, touching upon cyberterrorism, robotics and counter-insurgency.

The 6-part video—available here in “interactive” form or here in sequential form—prominently features military commentator P.W. Singer and Oliver North, the key figure of the Iran-Contra scandal that nearly brought down the Reagan administration in the mid ’80s.

Allow me a digression. The Iran-Contra affair is one of those rare cases in Cold War history where it’s absolutely clear who the bad guys are. Oliver North, at the time working for the National Security Council, was involved in the clandestine sale of weapons to Iran (a rather common practice during the Cold War’s proxy conflicts). The proceeds from the sales were then illegally diverted to finance the Contras, a network of CIA-trained guerrilla groups, who opposed the democratically-elected government of Nicaragua. Contras were notorious for their human right abuses such as murder, torture, rape and executions of civilians. They also funded themselves through drug trafficking and it’s been alleged that the CIA was supporting, or at least, tolerating these activities. These last allegations were disproved after an investigation led by, well… the CIA.

The story of how Oliver North went from being a convicted felon for these activities, to Republican candidate for the Senate, best-selling author, news commentator for Fox News and eventually testimonial/media-stuntman for Activision, is a kind of twisted version of the American Dream that I’m not going to tell.

Back to the trailer: it’s quite unusual to see a major game developer contextualizing a title in relation to current, hotly-debated issues; that is, avoiding the notorious “it’s just a game” stance and acknowledging that military-themed games are part of a larger discourse around war. It’s also somewhat gutsy to take a clear political position by hiring a figure like North. I personally would love to see more game companies taking their roles as cultural producers this seriously.

It’s quite unusual to see a major game developer contextualizing a title in relation to current, hotly-debated issues; that is, avoiding the notorious “it’s just a game” stance and acknowledging that military-themed games are part of a larger discourse around war.

As it turns out, it’s hard to sell a shooter about black operations without glorifying the real black operations. The “documentary” feels like a polished piece of propaganda that may have come straight out of the Department of Defense.

I’m talking about a rather new kind of propaganda here. The post-9/11 triumphalist rhetoric of America’s Army, Kuma War or Full Spectrum Warrior (just to mention other games set in contemporary or near-future scenarios) can only sound awkward after the epic failures of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Hence, the militaristic fable has to assume a different tone—in this case, a dark, apocalyptic—and envision scenarios of inconceivable horror to strike an audience desensitized by a decade of continuous war. As Oliver North puts it in the trailer: “I don’t think the average American grasps how violent war is about to become”.

The bulk of the narrative is provided by P.W. Singer, a prominent military expert and fortunate choice for this type of contextualization. His book Wired for War is an outstanding account of robotic warfare (and, by the way, the main source and inspiration for my latest game Unmanned). The treatise describes the state of the art of unmanned systems and examines the political, ethical and legal issues emerging from this ongoing technological revolution. It inevitably raises difficult questions: How does our perception of the frontline changes when we can remotely control a UAV from home? How important is the risk of losing human lives when waging a war? Will robots make us more inclined to use violence in resolution of conflicts? Who is responsible when an autonomous machine kills a human? The personnel who deployed it? The commander of the operation? The engineer? The programmer who made the software?

Of course, all these questions are not even hinted at in the Black Ops II “documentary”. Singer is simply used to tell us that “the future is here” and that robots may have dangerous bugs, while North spins his Fox News-style terror scenario.

How does our perception of the frontline changes when we can remotely control a UAV from home? How important is the risk of losing human lives when waging a war? Will robots make us more inclined to use violence in resolution of conflicts?

Oliver North’s nightmare seems to coincide with the premise of the game: in a imminent future, a supervillain (possibly affiliated with Anonymous) is able to hijack an army of unmanned war machines and attack Los Angeles.

In the game, or in North’s vision (at this point it’s hard to tell) the future of warfare is with black ops. Clandestine Special Forces can be deployed anywhere, in no time, with the most sophisticated weaponry to confront a diffused, unfathomable enemy.

Don’t understand the connection between cyberterrorism and covert operations? Don’t worry, that’s nothing but a non sequitur that serves the purpose of introducing the main themes of Black Ops II. Nevertheless, this kind of nonsense, especially if repeated ad nauseam in news media and pop culture, contributes to the way we think about conflicts and future threats.

I believe there is a twofold process transforming the way we perceive war. On one hand we have a normalization of images of war: in media, in electronic entertainment, even in viral videos showing robotic Big Dogs or other DARPA-funded marvels. On the other hand, we have a massive deployment of “strategies of separation” such as unmanned aerial vehicles or undercover operations that work together to make the material reality of war as distant as possible from our daily lives. Black Ops II will probably end up contributing to both sides of this equation by trivializing war and celebrating the culture of secrecy at the same time.

You may ask: what’s wrong with celebrating black operations anyway?

In the Ramboesque universe of Call of Duty, black ops are presented as an elite force type of operations, carried out in secrecy by modern ninjas. But in reality, what makes certain operations “black” is not that they go undetected by enemy forces—after all, most of military engagements are meant to surprise or deceive the opponent. The peculiarity of black operations is of being untraceable and deniable by the very institutions which finance and conduct them. This secrecy is desirable whenever the operations, if done overtly, would cause popular uproar, diplomatic crisis or legal troubles. It allows the perpetrators to bypass public scrutiny, democratic oversight and the Laws of War, a complex system of liability under which the “proper” military must operate.

Real-world black operations are often indistinguishable from terrorism. The 1985 Beirut car bombing, in which American and British intelligences failed in their attempt to assassinate an Islamic cleric, resulted in the deaths of about 60 civilians, including children leaving school.

Examples of contemporary black operations include the murder of several Iranian nuclear scientists, the virus Stuxnet, the undeclared drone wars in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and the Extraordinary Rendition Program that involves the kidnapping of suspected terrorists and their illegal detention and torture in a network of secret prisons operated by the CIA.

Real-world black operations are often indistinguishable from terrorism.

The most paradoxical aspect of black operations is that they are mostly invisible to the public opinion here in the West, but not in the countries where these operations take place. Venezuelan people know and remember vividly that the 2002 coup against their democratically-elected government was funded by Washington. For the families and friends of the thousands of victims of drone strikes in Pakistan, those operations are not that secret anymore. The news that U.S. drones are deliberately targeting rescuers and funerals may be of secondary importance here, but abroad, it fuels an ever growing anti-Western sentiment.

In the West, we live with constant cognitive dissonance because these practices clearly conflict with our supposed moral high ground and the official mission of “exporting democracy”. We deal with it by quickly forgetting troubling events, by buying into sanitized stories such as the ones presented by video games, or by crafting elaborate echo chambers where the only news stories we are exposed to are ones that relate with our hobbies and interests.

It’s entirely possible that Black Ops II may end up telling a fascinating story, the story of a country that achieved such a complete military supremacy that the only thing it fears is its own arsenal. It could also attempt new forms of gameplay to describe the complexities of asymmetrical warfare and the vaporous world of cyberterrorism, but I suspect we’ll end up with a refinement of the same shooter, this time with robotic enemies as targets.

This coming November, you may be one of the millions who will purchase Call of Duty: Black Ops II. Before you start fantasizing about a Los Angeles under drone attack and the undercover soldiers who will save us all, you may want to think about the horrifying history of undercover operations and the actuality of drone wars today.

The future may indeed be black, but the present isn’t bright either.

P.S. If you want to see a real documentary about the robotics revolution in warfare I recommend Remote Control War produced by the CBC. There are many good films about United States’ foreign policy in Latin America. A recent one is John Pilger’s The War on Democracy, available on Netflix. This topic is also central to the seminal educational/strategy game Hidden Agenda by Jim Gasperini.

Paolo Pedercini is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Art. As Molleindustria, he develops games addressing issues of social and environmental justice (McDonald’s videogame, Oiligarchy, Phone Story), religion (Faith Fighter), labor and alienation (Every Day the Same Dream, Unmanned).

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Quick-Saves: Player Control Over Narrative & Meaning

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Quick-Saves: Player Control Over Narrative & Meaning

By Jeremy Antley

May 10, 12

Rob Zacny, a freelance writer who often specializes in computer games, recently wrote a piece for the new GameSpy series ‘Command Lines’ titled ‘Quick-Loading Kills Strategy Games‘.  Detailing the practice of using save games and constant re-loads to overcome obstacles found in many strategy games, Zacny states that not only is this practice ruining strategy but also encourages lazier game design.  It’s a good read that asks some interesting questions about the impact player culture has on the larger question of game design and mechanic implementation.  I want to push this analysis a bit further to discuss larger themes of how player culture impacts the actualization of play and how the ‘quick-load’ issue raised by Zacny points to general questions on the interactions between game players and game designers.

Take this quote from Zacny:

“When we start rigging outcomes by reloading after suffering setbacks, we are cheating ourselves.  If the heart of a strategy game is interesting decisions, it is their consequences that give those decisions meaning.”

Zacny goes on to state that strategy games don’t work if players constantly re-load in order to ensure success.  As a long time player of the Civilization franchise, I am certainly guilty of this crime.  My desire to achieve absolute control over the situation means I can’t or won’t tolerate ‘chance’ events that could disrupt my larger play goals.  While I’m trying to build a perfect narrative, I have, in effect, robbed myself of any narrative at all by eliminating the possibility of deviation.  Zacny echoes this sentiment when he states that this ‘perfect narrative’ made possible by re-loading is anything but as the aim of strategy games is to provide interesting decisions- and the consequence of those decisions are what create meaning.

When I tweeted this thought a few weeks ago, Sunny Moraine (@dynamicsymmetry) responded with the following:

This is the larger issue at stake with Zacny’s article- who should have control over the narrative and meaning of play?  Clearly, game designers create AI’s (by which I mean algorithmic intelligence) that attempt to assert total control over the narrative and meaning.  Players who constantly save and re-load could be seen as attempting to reassert control over this narrative and create their own meanings- a prospect not considered in Zacny’s essay.

This last point is made clearer if we briefly leave the world of games and enter the reflective mode about games found in literature.  Steven Belletto does this in his book ‘No Accident Comrade‘ through a discussion on the use of ‘chance’ narratives, linked to the emergence of Game Theory in 1950′s popular culture, as found in American writing.  Analyzing Robert Coover’s novel ‘The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J Henry Waugh, Prop.’, Belletto details a scene in which the narrator, while playing through a fantasy baseball setup of his own design, enacts revenge for having his star player killed by an errant bean ball, produced by the narrators own roll of three ‘ones’, by ‘killing’ the offending pitcher later in the season through a purposeful roll of three ‘ones’.  Belletto states:

“…the results of Waugh’s intervention are paradigm-shifting because a chance roll was converted into a willful strategy. The novel is about the veils between fiction (or myth) and reality: once Waugh intervenes to adjust the dice, the characters in his universe intimate the guiding hand of the Association’s author, and deify the players involved.”

The implications of this ‘willful strategy’ become apparent later on:

“The Universal Baseball Association, baseball functions as a metaphor of both religious control and of the control of game theory: “the canonical form of M,” like the M-Game in Solar Lottery, alludes to minimax, the notion of balance and equilibrium, so that “old strategies, like winning ball games, sensible and proper within the old stochastic or recursive sets, are, under the new circumstances, insane!” (148). In a world in which Waugh has loaded the dice, former normative standards (“old stochastic or recursive sets”) become irrational-”insane”-because the rules of the game are no longer chance governed. While manipulating the dice is a way out of the “loneliness” that came when “pattern dissipated, giving way to mere accident,” this control of accident has religious reverberations, as well as secular ones.”

If we extend this idea to the play-design mechanics found in many strategy games, then we can begin to see why players would embrace constant saving and re-loading as the control these actions provide make the ‘old stochastic or recursive sets’ found in the design of strategy games cease to be normative.  They become, in fact, insane from the players point of view.  Again, Zacny points towards a players comprehension of this insanity when he brings up the ridiculous challenge of attempting to beat the more difficult levels of Panzer Corps or the Total War franchise of games:

“It’s not hard to see that high difficulty settings…are predicated on the expectation that players are reloading to achieve perfect victories, or else are superhuman.”

This is a difficult problem to solve as game designers must balance providing satisfying play through increasing levels of challenge, all the while making sure that the player has the ability to overcome these challenges.  The save game becomes a tool players use to help overcome these challenges- a tool which designers tacitly acknowledge through their design.

Another angle to this player/design-mechanic relationship implied in Zacny’s article, but not stated explicitly, is that ‘quick-loading’ is a phenomena largely found in single-player games.  With multiple players the issue of ‘quick-loading’ largely disappears.  This is because the challenge the AI once provided is now substituted by the most challenging player of all- another human mind.  Zacny suggests that perhaps strategy games could embrace something akin to ‘hardcore’ or ‘iron man’ modes that simply don’t allow saving in the middle of a mission.  Unity of Command, Zacny mentions, accomplishes this task extremely well due mainly to its execution of challenging design through short bursts of play- a level is short enough that trying and failing a few times generally doesn’t discourage the player.  There is another example, a way out of the ‘quick-loading’ problem, that I would like to quickly discuss- that being the design philosophy found in the design of the popular horror game Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

At a GDC Europe 2011 presentation titled ‘Evoking Emotions and Achieving Success by Breaking All the Rules‘, Thomas Grip, the project manager of Frictional Games, detailed the core design choices the Amnesia team made in production.  Essentially, the entire thought behind the choices made centered on the idea that the game shouldn’t punish the player for making a wrong move- it should let the player role-play instead.  For example, while many horror games use the fear of character death as a driving mechanism for creating tension and immersion in their game world, Amnesia specifically does not penalize the player for ‘dying’.  If a player fails to accomplish a ‘chase sequence’ (in which a monster attempts to hunt down the player) or finds difficulty in evading the placement of a particular enemy (brought about by passing a certain point or picking up a particular item) two times in a row, the game will remove that obstacle from the players path and move it to a different part of the game.  The challenge is still present, yet the trial-and-error approach is removed so that even if the player realizes the penalty for dying is very slight (like the quick mission approach embraced in Unity of Command) they still are immersed in the game world and find no need to utilize constant saving/loading to achieve success.

Now I realize the mechanics and design decisions found in horror games differ from the sort of strategy games Zacny describes in his article- yet the fundamental issue of player interaction with the design-mechanics holds true for both genres.  Perhaps the solution to the ‘quick-loading’ issue is to focus on giving the player permission to cede the need for control through mechanics that create deeper immersion and less realization of the trial-and-error process that many strategy games take as a bedrock in their design. The ‘quick-load’ may be killing strategy games, but until designers address the more fundamental issues inherent in player interactions with meaning and narrative in game play, the ‘quick-save/load’ will remain a shortcut towards providing challenges that only partially compensate for the lack of control players feel.

Choice, multiculturalism, and irrevocability in Mass Effect, part 1 (rules of the text 7)

By Roger Travis

May 03, 12

This post contains spoilers about the endings of the three Mass Effect games.

We still don’t know what, if anything, will change either in superficial or in substantive ways, about the ending of the Mass Effect saga. But Mass Effect as it stands demands analysis. Perhaps the practomime is as complete as it will ever be, because any materials added in a revision won’t in fact amount to a substantive change. Perhaps readings of the current version will be of importance in a history of interpretation and critique that shifts with the shifting of the practomime itself.

It does seem clear that the modifications to come in a few months’ time will not in fact make changes that greatly affect our understanding of the trilogy, and thus it seems a good moment to begin what I hope and think will be a very long process of critical engagement with Mass Effect as a deeply inflected (meaning that we can identify an “ending”), through-constructed (meaning that that ending has a relation to a “beginning”) practomime.

This project of a fine-grained critique of the saga as a gamespace dovetails magnificently, in my opinion, with my goal for the “Rules of the Text” series: to argue for the usefulness of the theoretical construct of the Great Chain of Practomime. If that argument has merit, then Mass Effect, as almost certainly the largest through-composed set of performance materials marketed as an example of the medium “digital game,” with perhaps the most obvious transformation of a textual ruleset (call it “key works of science fiction” for now) into what is more recognizably a gamespace, and with a transmedia presence that extends to multiple ludic experiences on multiple platforms, should on the one hand serve as a perfect laboratory for experimenting with and developing the sort of ruleset-critique that the Great Chain of Practomime allows, and on the other demonstrate the usefulness of the construct.

To put it another way, if the ruleset-critique invited by the Great Chain of Practomime works anywhere, it should work here.

Choice is the hallmark of the kind of practomimetic ruleset generally called “game,” as I have discussed previously in this series. Mass Effect has been marketed as the game of choice par excellence–that is, as the game in which “your choices matter.” “Experience the beginning, middle, and end of an emotional story unlike any other, where the decisions you make completely shape your experience and outcome,” proclaims the “Interactive Story” page of BioWare’s Mass Effect materials.

There’s no point in quibbling about the exact valence of the word “completely”: either it’s a throwaway word or it’s a thoughtless one; probably it’s both. It is, however, extraordinarily revealing, because the real trouble with “completely” is that when we remove it, this declaration describes every game, indeed every practomime, including the works of Homer, Austen, GRR Martin, and Cocteau. The choices I make as an audience-member of Game of Thrones, like whether to get up and make popcorn while some bit of eroticism is unfolding on the screen (or, perhaps better, whether I choose to understand Westeros as being like America, or like Europe, in some way), shape my experience and outcome of Game of Thrones as much as the choice of whether to kill the Rachni queen in Mass Effect changes my experience and outcome of Mass Effect.

This is not a small problem, and I want to argue that the cultural effect of Mass Effect–what it means, what it’s about–actually depends on the ambiguity inherent in this problem, an ambiguity Mass Effect exploits really in spite of itself. From the very beginning of a player’s performance, he or she is trapped between the panoply of available choices for his or her Shepard’s background and the limitation of that panoply. To put it very simply: you can play a huge variety of Shepards, but they’re all named Shepard.

This is of course what games do, just as, when we remove the word “completely,” the notorious BioWare marketing formulation describes every game. But I want to suggest as the beginning of this analysis of Mass Effect as a link in the Great Chain of Practomime that this game is at least thus far unique in the way it foregrounds this “trap of choice.” I have argued that BioShock is unique along similar lines, and the contrast between that game and Mass Effect is in my opinion very revealing: whereas BioShock exposes the illusion of choice, Mass Effect insists, and bases its legibility, upon choice not being an illusion despite (paradox coming) all appearances to the contrary.

For this reason, I have come to think that the controversy about the ending of the trilogy is precisely commensurate to the gamespace created by the choices presented in the game’s performance-materials: the apparent lack of choice, the game seeks to persuade its players, is an illusion, and behind that illusion is a kind of choice in which the player must have, yes, faith.

Do you believe in choice, players? Clap your hands!

I write this with a great deal of affection for Mass Effect, but truly the way the game produces its effect is little different than JM Barrie’s famous ludic moment in Peter Pan: choice matters because the player convinces him or herself that it matters; the story can’t proceed unless choice matters, because the story proceeds when the player makes choices.

Shepard is a kind of choice-making machine, just as we ourselves are, and because s/he can make no choices that don’t end in the galaxy uniting behind him, his/her multiculturalism–our multiculturalism–becomes just as irrevocable as his/her appearance and origin-story, which are set in stone, as the game sternly warns the player, at the moment when the player’s performance truly begins. Whether the player destroys the Rachni, whether the player destroys the Geth: the extent to which these choices shape the player’s experience and outcome will always be precisely the same extent as the extent to which the player subjects him or herself to the trap of choice, consciously or unconsciously. To repeat: this machinery of choice works on the same principles as the mechanics of any other game; the difference in Mass Effect is the way the irrevocability of those mechanics is thematized into a multiculturalism that is, I’ll try to demonstrate over the course of this mini-series, messianic and very, very Western.

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In the Zone of Alienation: Tarkovsky as Video Game by Gabriel Winslow-Yost - NYRblog - The New York Review of Books

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In the Zone of Alienation: Tarkovsky as Video Game

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

Jean Gaumy/Magnum Photos

Pripyat, the abandoned city in the “zone of alienation” near Chernobyl, Ukraine, May-June 2008.

Zona, Geoff Dyer’s recent book about Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece Stalker, has been much discussed for its almost comically thorough dissection of the stately 1979 film. In an account that combines summary, memoir, meditation, tribute, and citation into a kind of deluxe version of the TV recap, Dyer sets out to convey the hypnotic effect Stalker has had on decades of viewers, and on himself. And yet, after reading the book, I was left feeling that something was missing. In both the book and the deluge of Stalker coverage its release has occasioned, perhaps the most crucial, and most popular, part of the film’s afterlife has gone entirely unremarked: the video game version.

It may at first seem improbable that a decades-old art film in which very little happens could be embellished with firefights and mutant psychics and converted into a violent action game. Adapted from a popular Russian science fiction novel, Stalker depicts three men (“Writer,” “Professor,” and “Stalker,” their guide and the film’s protagonist) journeying into a mysterious, dangerous “Zone,” which supposedly contains “the Room,” capable of granting wishes. This fraught, high-stakes quest consists mainly of the three men walking a couple hundred yards in a grassy, abandoned landscape and talking (with a break for a nap); the film ends after 163 minutes with no wishes apparently made or granted.

But one aspect of Stalker’s enduring fascination has been the way it seems to prefigure the Chernobyl disaster that occurred seven years after its release: the nuclear meltdown created an abandoned, radioactive “zone of alienation”—over a thousand square miles considered too radioactive to enter, though tourists began to be allowed in last year — that to many was eerily similar to the Zone of the film. It is this parallel that inspired a Ukrainian video game developer named GSC Game World to create a series of first-person shooter game adaptations of the film called, respectively, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (Pripyat is the name of the abandoned city built to house Chernobyl workers). The different “levels” or settings in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games are detailed (though thoroughly fictionalized) recreations of Pripyat, the cordon itself, and so on. Released between 2007 and 2010, the games have been absurdly successful; Shadow of Chernobyl alone sold several million copies around the world (and, bringing the cycle of adaptation full circle, a series of novelizations based on the game were released in Russia).

GSC Game World

A still from the video game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

On the face of it, the games don’t have much in common with the film. A large part of the genius of Tarkovsky’s Stalker was its singular combination of mystical yearning and artistic precision. The actors, even in the midst of weighty metaphysical discussions, always seem like real people, dirty, contradictory, and changeable. Stalker is all anxious faith. The Zone is, he says, the only place he feels at home, and he knows its dangers enough to fear them utterly. Professor moves from phlegmatic commonsense to righteous violence, threatening near the end of the film to destroy the Room with a homemade bomb. While Writer, for his part, begins the film drunk and foolhardy, attempting to bring a floozy along on the expedition, and ends it in anguished, self-loathing sanity. As they move from the grimy city on the edge of the Zone to the verdant Zone itself, the cinematography switches carefully from a rough-hewn sepia to gorgeous, almost overwhelmingly lush color (Tarkovsky sometimes painted the leaves of trees to make them properly green). The soundtrack slides back and forth between an unsettling electronic score and natural sounds, often combining both.

None of this cinematic intensity or psychological depth remains in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, which have subpar graphics, horrid writing, abysmal voice-acting, tasteless menus, and tediously clichéd music. Tarkovsky’s enigmatic title has been turned into a ridiculous acronym (“Scavenger, Trespasser, Adventurer, Loner, Killer, Explorer, Robber,”) and the series is ridden with technical glitches, even after a host of corrective delays and patches.

But it doesn’t really matter. As games, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series are remarkable, the first one especially so (few have much cared for Clear Sky). While they all have the elements of a standard action game—guns, monsters, missions, traps, loot—much of the player’s activity is oddly in keeping with Stalker’s spirit, sometimes even managing to expand upon it. Each game has an overarching plot—you’re a stranded soldier, or an amnesiac with a mission tattooed on your arm—but these are largely beside the point. The focus of the action is simply exploring: skirting battles or fighting in them, completing optional missions from other Zone residents, hunting for hidden treasure.

The Zone in the video games is a beautifully dangerous place, bigger and grimmer than Tarkovsky’s, but somehow still appropriate. There are plenty of long, tense walks through damp weather or empty, creaking tunnels. Packs of dogs wander the landscape, ruined farmhouses give shelter from the rain; here and there the ground ripples strangely. Stalkers gather around campfires, bandits take potshots at passersby, and a man lies wounded in a ditch, begging for help. Watching Stalker, one is occasionally brought up short by remembering that it was not filmed in Chernobyl, so perfect an analogue does that event seem for the film’s images of technology and nature, beauty and danger in strange alliance. The games, at their best, can seem like a sort of miracle: a dead man’s masterpiece, come home at last.

Andrei Tarkovsky

A character in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker inside the Zone.

Yet there is something deeper that sets the series apart. Most video games are designed to unfold entirely around you, the player: everything happens for your benefit; you’re always coming into a room at the most dramatic moment, and only you can complete the mission. In many, if you simply don’t move for a few minutes, the entire world comes to a standstill. The signal new feature of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, in contrast—the source at once of all those delays and bugs, and much of their unique power—was something called “A-Life,” an elaborate artificial intelligence system that populated the world with thousands of creatures and people who go about their business with no special regard for the player’s actions.

A-Life doesn’t really care about you; events take place, whether you see them or not. You’ll spend half an hour defending a friendly group from bandits, only to come back later and find they were overrun by a later attack; or you’ll accept a mission to kill a misbehaving stalker, only to find he’s been killed by a wild dog a mile away. These events—and many more that you may never find out about—emerge from the complex set of goals (find treasure, for instance, or sleep) and behaviors (shoot, trade, wander aimlessly) that A-Life provides for every character and creature throughout the game.

In some ways, the video games are closer to Tarkovsky’s source material than to Tarkovsky. In the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic, the science fiction book on which the movie is loosely based, the stalkers are numerous and mercenary. The elements of the Zone are many, and named, if not quite explained—there’s “Mosquito Mange” and “Burning Fluff,” “Full Empties” and “Black Sprays.” In the film most of these are not present—Tarkovsky leaves in only one, the “meatgrinder,” though his Stalker is clearly terrified of many more. But the video game returns them, and adds more: strange traps known as “anomalies,” that crush, dismember, and electrocute; and “artifacts,” weird little objects with supernatural properties—infinite batteries, death rays, and so on—which are the reason people venture into the Zone. (In Roadside Picnic both the anomalies and the “artifacts” are discarded alien technology; in the games they are somehow the result of the nuclear meltdown.)

GSC Game World

A still from the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

One of the lasting enigmas of Tarkovsky’s film is the odd, intense expression—at once consumed with worry and lit up like a child’s, or a fanatic’s—worn by the actor who plays Stalker. After playing the video game, it suddenly makes a new kind of sense: It’s your face, rapt in front of a screen, playing. The games’ first-person perspective and open-ended structure have a similar effect. You can go more or less where you want, provided you don’t get poisoned by radiation, shot by bandits, or mauled by mutant dogs on the way; it’s just you and your gun, and no one, not even the game, seems to care what happens to you. Eventually the silly central plot kicks in and all this goes by the wayside, but until then, the game’s indifference can seem a kind of grim, bracing rejoinder to the smug exceptionalism that defines American games: in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. you aren’t special, you’re just there.

May 1, 2012, 12:55 p.m.

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Dear Mitu, Dear Emily « « Mitu Khandaker Mitu Khandaker

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Dear Mitu, Dear Emily

“We are young women involved in games industry and culture and despite many encounters, mutual friends, common interests and shared respect for one another, we have never had the opportunity to get to know one another or talk in any depth about our love for videogame form. We have been meaning to have a meaningful dialogue and so have started a correspondence to talk, as women, about women’s issues, and about ourselves, our perspectives, observations and experiences in play and the wider games community.”

This is an exchange between Mitu Khandaker & Emily Flynn-Jones; initiated by Emily, this letter series explores our ‘origin stories’, as well as our feelings about feminism and about our identities as women in games development and/or academia. It is, at times, deeply personal, but has been important to our respective journeys as feminists. This forms a part of our contribution to the Feminists in Games workshop in Toronto, Canada.

Alternatively, you can view/download this exchange as a PDF too.

Letter 1: Dear Mitu (14 March 2012)

Dear Mitu,

So, we are doing this. I’m excited to see what happens.

To begin, a paraphrasing of the Leigh Alexander TIFF NEXUS (approx 10:45 on) keynote excerpt to frame this *thing*. She said she had some conflicting feelings assumptions on the part of others that she would connect or have something in common with other women who were in media, like those two things define them and make them compatible, but that at the same time feeling that we  do share something, things that are not gender and admitting that it is difficult to accept that gender is a legitimate part of what we share.

I thought this was a good point, one that could be easily overlooked in bigger picture discussion, and made me think of you immediately. I remember the first time we met and you commented that a mutual friend had always assumed that we knew one another, because we were girls in/into games. I was probably a little dismissive of that but there is something weird about that assumption, no? Problem is I can’t decide in which way this is weird. Is this my problem or someone else’s?!

US. Our relationship is friendly, respectful and casual. We are really connected by a network of mutual friends (100% male?), mutual interests and the same occupation (that blasted PhD). We end up in the same room often enough and we always check if one another will be there but have still never really hung out or had personal conversations. I can think of 100 hundred reasons why we should connect and not one why we wouldn’t. I like you, you are an interesting and admirable lady and yet we find ourselves separated even when we are together. Yeah, OK that can reasonably happen, we are busy, we go to these things for our jobs, but even in social time we have missed, not dismissed each other. Yeah, there are practical reasons for this, we are busy, we meet places that we go for work and bring legitimate agendas. Totally understandable but I get a nagging feeling that maybe there is something else.

I guess that kinda frames my interest in doing this. There is somehow something uncomfortable with pursuing a connection with someone based on their gender, maybe that is doubly gross when its for the purpose of discussing gender issues. I don’t wanna feel that way and I didn’t until recently notice or real care about being a girl in the games world, but gradually things are seeping through and sinking in. There are numerous things that could be contributors to my change in heart/mind but I feel like I am wanting to engage with these issues when I never even felt like they were MY issues before. I don’t even really know how to enter into this discussion, I feel like an amateur at my own sex and I definitely lack the critical background that I would usually think standard for opinion having in an academic context. BUT, we have the sum of our experiences and I think that is a place to start. That is not abstract or theoretical. That is real and tangible so I hope we can share stories like its not a selfish thing to do and see what the hell is going on.

So I guess I want to start by offering a summary of reasons that I find myself conflict and want to engage with gender issues in games, or HOW I SUDDENLY REALISED I AM A GIRL.

Basically, I’ve been in HE doing games stuff for nearly five years now in different capacities, as aPhD student, a teacher and more recently a researcher, writer and producer at times. The demographic has largely been the same, whether I’m at work or an industry conference, it’s male dominated. I have always been comfortable with that. I was treated equally at my old work, was respected by seniors (mainly guys) and welcomed by strangers at social events. I felt like I was doing this based on merits other than my gender, I still believe that for the most. I’m smart and passionate and that seemed like the ticket. I felt totally safe in the boys club and the “no girls allowed” sign has never applied to me. I have liked this, not as attention seeking (a gross female gender stereotype) but as a sense of belonging maybe there were the underlying wins that I, a girl, infiltrated the gang or some secret pleasure in being one of the few girls.

But lately I don’t feel as securely ‘in the club’ for various reasons. At work I am being directed towards more stereotypically female duties sometimes relegated to event organising despite my title and job description and encouraged to leverage my femininity as a promotional ploy. I was very blunt in my responses but the attitude was persistent. I couldn’t get that my gender was being pointed at and not my nerdery, yes I would rather have identified as a nerd. I have to admit to some overreacting here. What I was in fact being asked to do was repeat a job I had been successful at once and being told that I was a girl in games, and that was ‘rarer’ and that I had an opportunity there. What I thought was coming from a negative place was actually the kick up the ass I needed to come to terms with the fact that I am, like, a girl and that that is, like, ok.

Meanwhile, and maybe because I was becoming more accustom to the idea of ‘girl’, I noticed some other things in my networking circle and activity. Things that made me query the reason i was allowed to play in the first place and I was suddenly aware that my actions and opinions were being interpreted, that I was maybe on the edge of falling into a perceived stereotype and losing favour if I did something ‘female’. Even if I wasn’t doing anything female sometimes my sexuality was an issue, heterosexual female. I wasn’t as comfortable in the same company anymore even though it was the minority making me feel like ‘a girl’ and like that was not ok. Maybe this is jibbing that comes with familiarity, maybe as I am more experienced in this field the seriousness that I want to convey is at a higher risk of not being taken seriously…

Regardless I found myself self self-censoring sometimes even though I was not withholding a gendered opinion/behaviour and I don’t want to do that.

At the end I wonder if this sounds trivial and concerned that I’m not really able to articulate what I have encountered or felt. But hell, this is a warm up. Maybe something resonates? And in closing I guess I ask what spurs you to be interested in being a woman in games these days?

Emily

Letter 2: Dear Emily (19 March 2012)

Dear Emily,

Firstly, I’m glad you wrote to me, and I’m very glad that we’re doing this. I took a good few days to respond, and I’ve been worried that you’d take that as some sort of dismissal. In fact, the opposite is true. It’s taken me a while to reply precisely because this feels so difficult. It’s complicated stuff, and I have a lot to say. If you’d told me, a few years ago, that I’d be able or willing to talk about this stuff at length, I wouldn’t have believed you. My guess is that it feels the same way for you. But, here we are. My hope is, though, that we’ll be able to unpack some of that complication over the course of our correspondence.

The other reason it’s been so difficult is because really, this stuff matters to me.

The curious thing is, until a few years ago, it didn’t matter. It seems it was the same for you too. But my experiences as a woman in games, first as an academic (yes, that blasted PhD!) and now as a developer, have shaped my feelings significantly. I suppose growing and maturing helped, too.

So yes, I love that we should start by discussing our respective journeys of “HOW I REALISED I AM A GIRL”, as you put it. Perhaps it’s telling that neither of us started off thinking that way, yet our experiences have led us both here, somehow.

You bring up a very good point – I very much admire and respect you too, but why haven’t we spoken much, despite often being in the same places at the same time? I vaguely remember that conversation from when we first met, too. Back then, though it was only a few years ago, I felt so much more young and naive. I was still the sort of person who, when thinking about gender disparities in games and the industry, thought there would eventually be some magical equilibrium, without anyone having to think or worry about it too much. Oh, how much I’ve learned since then!

First off, I’d like to highlight some nuance (which, I hope, is how the rest of this discussion will go, as these are nuanced issues): I think there’s some truth to the notion that women in games should not necessarily be obligated to be friends just because they’re women. To think otherwise is to sort of ignore the whole of third-wave feminism, which was a reaction to the previous feminist assumption that all women had a sort of universal experience – being, the experience of upper-middle class white women. We know that isn’t true, of course, because being a woman means so many different things; as Mare Sheppard of Metanet Software said at GDC 2012, “woman is not a culture.” So many different things contribute to who we are as women – to recognise this is to recognise the concept of intersectionality – that is, the way that different parts of our identity – be it class, race, or gender – interact, and shape who we are.

I bring this up for a reason, because I think it sort of informed how I thought about sexism for a very long time. That is, I was lucky enough, while growing up, not to think of it at all. I did, however, think about race, rather a lot. Growing up in a mid-sized english city in the 90s and beyond, I experienced a lot of direct, ugly racist comments. But, perhaps more importantly, there was also, a far more subtle, more uncomfortable, unspoken feeling of always being different. This – race – was my ‘otherness’ while growing up, and being a girl was not. For this reason, I grew up being fairly blind to gender issues.

The other part of my identity that intersects is that I was fortunate enough attend a small private, all-girls school. Whilst no-one else there particularly shared my love of playing video games, this was because it was a ‘cool vs nerd’ thing, rather than a gender issue. (Of course, I realise now that it was partly a gender issue, because the same wouldn’t have been as true for a sample of teenage boys, but it was not obvious to me at the time.) After all, I would go home and play video games with my sisters (I am the eldest of three girls), and dream of one day making these things. At school, I was simply the weird nerd who ‘knows about computers’. That was my identity, and, being such, I didn’t think of sexism at all during this time, because there was no obvious reason to; this is the privilege that comes from being sheltered. I hadn’t realised my blindness, and the reasons for it, until my youngest sister – attending my same school ten years later – told me about how her friends think that Beyonce’s pop-feminist empowered narrative is trite, tiresome, and unnecessary; they thought that women have total equality now, ‘so why go on and on about it?’ It’s jarring how so many women and girls think we live in a post-sexism world. But, they are wrong. I was wrong.

This wrongness was largely responsible for, in my teens and early twenties, my casual shunning of initiatives for girls in technology and such. For example, a few years ago, when Computer Engineering Barbie came on the scene, I felt offended; I hadn’t needed CE Barbie to get my Masters in Computer Engineering, and had not once felt disadvantaged in terms of gender (as I said, race/culture was another issue) as I went from my all-girls education to a mostly-male work environment at IBM, and then onto an all-male university course in Computer Engineering. I simply couldn’t empathize with women who felt threatened by an all-male environment.

I’ve been thinking about what you said about “being part of the club”, and how I too, after starting my PhD, and my early days of attending games networking events and such, I felt welcomed by strangers. Like you, I’d never thought much of it either, attributing it to being passionate about what I do, and, what was, back then, my natural lack of hesitation in speaking to new people. I’d been used to being in male-dominated environments – in tech and ‘pure’ software, rather than games, admittedly, so that didn’t feel like a barrier to me. However, crucially, at no point did I ever feel any desire or achievement in being ‘the only woman’ at such events, but then again, and I was not inclined to think of gender much at all, really.

However, things began to change, with age, and with maturity, and with being open to listening – really listening – to other women’s experiences of discrimination. And then this was also unfortunately cemented by having difficult experiences of my own. It took me a long time to realise that there were people, men and women alike, for whom my gender was actually an issue.  It is important to remember that gender-inclusion issues in the industry can only be solved through collaboration, and work, from both genders.

The thing is, it takes living in the real world to find this stuff out for oneself; once I started getting to know people in the wider industry, beyond my own academic institution – and, of course, getting involved with the games industry through wonders of the internet, I began living in the real world at last.

Of course there are the usual instances of casual dismissal: when I am in a group of people who do not know each other, and they introduce themselves to each other, sometimes, men are often reluctant to shake my hand or ask what I do, assuming I could not possibly be a developer. Then, there have been more open incidences, such as one quite recent incident, in which I was outright accused, by a male associate, of being “a fraud”, and of “not really being a developer”, even after I had explained that I had been working full-time in development for six months by then, with a publishing deal in hand. That incident was particularly painful, and difficult, and made me double guess myself a lot, even though I knew it was massively irrational to do so, given the facts.

I’d also discovered that, far more insidious than women who feel a mild sense of disdain at expecting to automatically befriend other women in the industry, is the small undercurrent of women who are threatened, suspicious, and even hostile, by the presence of other women. This sounds awfully cynical, and I feel bad for reinforcing what is also a horrendous stereotype, but no matter how many amazing, inspiring women I meet, it saddens me deeply to know that this is a thing that can exist. Of course, it we must note that it exists because it is an awful stereotype; it is expected, patriarchal behaviour, which is reinforced by the media, more recently through countless reality television shows. My own experience encountering this began with, (but sadly, has been not limited to), an early experience in which I was pulled aside at an industry party to be asked by a much older woman, in a very unfriendly way, what I was doing there. I found these isolated, rare instances jarring, because I realised I’d actually expected there to be solidarity, so in cases where I found none, I felt lost.

So, basically, there’s been this weird confluence of many factors contributing to my being aware, and interested in, gender issues. Not only were some of my own uncomfortable, gendered experiences a factor, but also, I’d started thinking about womens issues in a global context; I’d started a womens charity in Bangladesh, which also made me start realising that maybe my own life wasn’t as post-sexism as I’d thought.

It took me time to realise that the bubble in which I lived was actually part of a larger picture. Any time I’d previously been casually dismissed, or someone had said something disparaging about me, even when gender was brought into it, I had put it down to some personal failing. I am inclined to do that (another gendered response, I’ve since learned). I also suffer from massive Imposter Syndrome (very common amongst women, and amongst graduate students – an unfortunate positioning in the Venn Diagram for us, then!), so this simply reinforced the latter.

Despite knowing all of this – knowing, and realising, the way in which the industry’s problems with gender – even as a subset of a larger societal social issue – have led to all of these things, I’ve still ended up in a place where, like you, I do self-censor in some regards. It’s automatic, almost. While I have no trouble talking about feminism and gender issues, I’ve developed a sort of paranoia about how it looks if I make new friends, or share a picture of myself online, etc. (As a result, I recently changed my Twitter avatar to no longer be a picture of myself – even though it makes no difference if a man has an avatar of himself, I began feeling tired of people assuming things about me.) I’m simply a lot more hesitant about trusting people, I guess, which perhaps isn’t necessarily a healthy outcome.

I’m sort of at a weird place now, where I am simultaneously both proud of my femininity, and aware that I have to push through these barriers – but also, a tiny part of me sometimes secretly wishing that I were not a woman at all. Then, perhaps, I would not have to double guess so many of my actions. That probably sounds awful to say. But, like I said above, it’s complicated. All of this is.

Actually, a quick aside on that front. I’ve noticed, Emily, that throughout your letter, you referred to yourself repeatedly as ‘a girl’. I’m interested in why you use ‘girl’ instead of ‘woman’; especially as I used to do this myself. It wasn’t until a year or so ago, that I stopped being so uncomfortable with ‘woman’. I used to think it was a personal thing; that I didn’t feel ‘very grown up’, and so, in a sort of semi-self-disparaging way, I was ‘just a girl’. The thing is, the more I’ve grown aware of gender issues, the more I realise how the world systematically infantalises women. It was only upon realising this, it clicked that iit wasn’t just about me any more. I am a woman, and, complicated feelings aside, I am proud of being a woman. You too are a woman, and should not be afraid to call yourself one, even if it feels weird at first.

I realise I covered a lot of ground here (sorry for the rambling!), and I hope some of this made sense. I have several questions for you as a result. Firstly, I’ve shared my ‘origin’ story here, as it were. I’m very keen to hear more of yours, too. What do you think were the reasons, growing up, that you have never felt like being female has been much of an issue for you?

Also, something else I’m keen to know, related to this: given my own progress into “HOW I SUDDENLY REALISED I AM A GIRL”, I became a lot more interested in reading feminist blogs and literature, and educating myself on the wealth of work and thinking done by so many amazing people on the subject so far. As I’ve described previously, feminism was, to me, a weird, unnecessary concept while I was growing up; but I’m very glad I grew to see sense, and can now declare myself a proud feminist. What are your feelings on this? Is feminism, as a concept, something you’ve felt engaged with, and why, or why not?

You specifically asked me what spurs to be interested in being a woman working in games, these days, and in closing, I will finally answer. At the core, it is my passion for the medium itself; that I think games are so important, culturally, as well as personally. I believe that if you love something, if you really care, then it is your responsibility to nurture it and to do what is best for it; even if some parts of that experience are personally difficult, even painful. I care about games, and as such, I want them to be diverse, and inclusive; loved by all. So, then, if not me, then who? That is what motivates me to keep going. Keep going.

Mitu

Letter 3: Dear Mitu (22 March 2012)

Dear Mitu,

Wow. What a first response, it’ll be a hard act to follow. I’ve got to start with a confession re: my first letter. It was brief and little low on the level of discourse and timid, This is a little because I just needed to get it started as a master procrastinator and busy busy bee and a little because I suddenly realised that this required a huge amount of honesty on my part, something that I don’t generally dole out on a personal level with relative strangers. A lot of this exercise for me is about being honest, we’re not going to get anywhere with insensible censoring, and opening up requires some comfort on my part. There is always that potential for being judged, even though I didn’t expect to be by you, but as you say the minority negative encounters do have effect. I don’t want to give the impression that I wasn’t taking this seriously or that I happily defer to others, I’m just a little (a lot, notoriously) guarded when it comes to personal subjects so thank you for an amazing return that not only resonates on so many levels, but challenges some of my thinking whilst also managing to put me rather at ease.

You spoke of your origins and your narrative is perfectly unique. I really enjoyed learning where you came from, are coming from. I don’t think that this offers an easy incite to the complexities of you but you own it, that is clear. For me owning my history has definitely been a huge part of my connection with feminism or female issues.

Much like you I could not relate to feminist issues or sexism, when I came across feminist discourse in my 1st year undergrad I had nothing in my experience to compare that to and other things did resonate with me, things that I still pursue today, so I am comfortable with my early critical decisions to a point but looking back these interests often flirted with feminism without my awareness. I could connect with class issues but most of all I felt a really strong connection to difference, the Weird with a capital ‘W’. To make this story make sense I’m gonna have to backtrack with a wee me narrative, I promise relevance.

I was raised with two substantially older brothers until I was 8 when I came to live with my Dad in the UK and he raised me as a single parent for the most. I am the only female in my direct family. I got my first console of my very own when I was 10 and this was a really significant object that has been crucial to my relationship with my father. That sounds hyperbolic, I will explain. We had never really found a way to connect and I was massively resentful at being made to live with a stranger and depressed by the rather sad circumstances leading to that, my Mom’s passing. But, honestly when we played we could relate, even if only superficially. I’d say this is my strongest evidence to date of the magic of the magic circle.  As I got older gaming gave me and my Dad a way to communicate even for massively loaded arguments, that were not really about missing a collectable item, as I was becoming a teenager, something we had no idea what to do about. Anyway I escaped to uni and we became estranged for a few years and really only re-connected around graduation. To mark this my Dad brought me my first PS2. I was just chuffed at the time but I get it now. That was a really significant gesture he was looking for a way to communicate and relate to me. Games still mediate our relationship, which is much less fraught overall but we still play platform games (his favourite) and talk about games a lot, not just because it’s what I “do” but because its what we do. We can enjoy games and enjoy each other. This leaves me with some really powerful memories and opinions on the possibilities for games that completely drive my interests… returning to this!

I think it’s pretty heavily implied that I never had the conventional female role model or a safe, supportive space to develop as a female. I don’t ever remember being totally uncomfortable with my gender but I wasn’t particular effected/interested either and I never thought about my own story and situation, I thought it was indulgent and kind of a sob story. So, I never talked about it, to this day I don’t think I have discussed this history with some of my closest friends, they know or have an idea but no words have exchanged. I developed a very unhealthy detachment from my history which I definitely has had an impact on the way I constructed identity, because I never did so as ‘female’ and perhaps this is a factor in my casual use of the word ‘girl’. Instead I was totally comfortable in riotous and retrospectively lame rebellious acts of difference. The riot grrl thing was happening, which I didn’t equate with any wave of feminism that I could grasp at the time so I was really just riffing off an empty version of that, I’m going to leave dress and behavior to your imagination. Later at uni I was constantly reading and writing about horror, because this let me explore my interest in difference and alterity, or explore personal feelings without having to admit that’s what I was doing. I was reading the monstrous feminine, about abjection and final girls (it’s too late to change my twitter name) but still somehow logic-ed my way out of understanding the projections and politics of the representations that fascinated me. I’m not dumb, I just still could not find in my actual world a point of reference. Until I did.

I referred to a few instances in my previous letter but there are grander things, there is so little diversity in my classrooms, the teaching agenda leaves no spaces for gender issues (absence is so striking), we teach skill and don’t really foster creativity so there’s no space for express for a female student should they want it, there are an increasing number of women in games that hold my esteem (not that they didn’t before but I can see the gender now), the stories in the press re: inappropriate treatment of women in the workplace and as gamers online don’t seem to be one-offs anymore… There’s too much to for me to even contemplate neutrality anymore. I was missing many possible meanings and pretty much denying something of my own that could contribute to my readings.

Basically what I am trying to illustrate is that I didn’t identify as female and I think my ability to appreciate and increasingly adopt female perspectives has a lot to do with me coming to terms with my gender overall. As I my attitude about my own femininity has changed and I’ve been able to see that my gender is noticeable to others, that Imposter Syndrome is setting in, as though if my perspectives are changing it’s not as valid for me to be interested in the same things. I’ve got to fight that, because it’s just expanding my knowledge and experience and my ability to contribute but there’s that nagging anxiety anyway.

At this point I really only have a set of opinions, observations and some objections to offer but it is a start. Knowing that feminism doesn’t require a dogmatic adherence and that the third wave doesn’t have a particularly cogent agenda is kind of relieving in a way. It’s giving me my space to try things on and see what fits and how I wanna wear it (it seems I am rolling with this analogy). I guess what I am finding most appealing is that feminism is responding to culture and less politics, and as cultural objects games have a place in this discourse. I LOVE videogames. They have meant a great deal to me, I’ve connected with them and they’ve connected me with other people in so many meaningful ways. As texts and facilitators of play I think they are a powerful communication tool, and facilitate a variety of positive interactions for us human types. So, I guess I’m intrigued to consider more deeply where these themes intersect on a textual level, because I’ve never seriously applied such a reading, on a cultural level, on a personal level and implications for pedagogy. That is big stuff, but I don’t like that vastness of my uncarted territory.

God, I must be stopped. Sorry for rambles. The origins are out there and I’m going to battle the urge that I’ve always found to make that irrelevant which brings up my strongest objection to what I’ve found in feminism – essentialising. I’ve been in situations where I have been reprimanded or scoffed at questioning feminist logic, not aggressively but reasonably, validly. I’m accustom to dialogue in a HE setting and even sometimes stronger debate, but I felt peeved that I was expected to agree based on some essential sameness. Maybe if I had not offered them reason I could understand outright dismissal. That I am not okay with and understand it to come from an older form of feminism and politics (I didn’t really know how to phrase that), so there’s some mutual acceptance to be done here too.

Which brings me to a couple of questions for you about experiences with games but please feel free to write what you need. How do you feel about identification in games? Would you play the female character or make yourself a lady avatar? Have you ever had instances where you thought a game had challenging, positive or negative messages for a female player? Are you considering representations and context in the development of your game? These sound basic but I think there are a lot of issues here, most certainly because we neither never felt the female issues when we first came to play.

Gosh. Done. Be well and good luck reading/replying to my madness.

Emily

Letter 4: Dear Emily (29 March 2012)

Dear Emily,

Wow, this was an incredible response. I’ve already sent you a brief note earlier in the week thanking you for writing this, but I want to reiterate that here, too. You mentioned that you have not discussed this story with even some of your closest friends, so I am honoured that you were as open and honest as you were here. I hope writing this was as personally enlightening for you as it was for someone reading about it.

You mentioned my own circumstances being unique, but your story blew me away and moved me more than I expected; I’ve been thinking of it lots, actually. It does such a disservice to us all to assume our own experiences are universal; and even worse, to outrightly assume things about others. This is why I am glad we are taking this; though united by some common goals, we are all such different people with such different stories which shape who we become, and why we think the way we do.

I am so fascinated by the way that we both, in our very different lives, coming late to feminism, still touched upon some (often subtle) varieties of feminist thought at various points, without ever really knowing or understanding it fully. I’m especially taken by your admission that you had logic-ed your way out of understanding the politics of the representations which fascinated you – of ‘final girls’ and such.  I do agree that essentialism gets in the way with helping us ‘get there’, and I agree with you that there is mutual acceptance required those who engage in ‘second-wave’ thinking.

I am going to try to be purposely briefer here, and address those very pertinent questions about how I feel about identification in games, and to tell you the truth, I realize that while growing up playing games, I had not thought too hard about it. Or often, I skirted with thinking about it on some level which I did not understand. Let me explain: I was as happy to play male characters in games as I was to play a blue hedgehog (and I did a lot of the latter) – I did not feel misrepresented. However, looking back, I realise that where a female character was available to play, I would invariably choose her. In those earliest days, I was Chun-Li, or Sonya Blade (much to my own detriment, perhaps, in the case of the latter.)

Indeed, my first brush with realizing that there may be something up with how women are portrayed in games was when it came to Tomb Raider. I know, it’s a trite example, but for me, this was genuinely an important discovery; I played the firstTomb Raider a few years late, after TR2 and TR3 were already out, and TR4 was just being released. At age 14, I absolutelyadored it, and was obsessed with it, and could not wait until I could get hold of TR2. I sought out everything I could find about it online. Of course, on doing this, what I came across was a wealth of stuff which made me realize that perhaps Tomb Raider wasn’t aimed at me at all. The way fans seemed to be discussing Lara was one thing, yet the discernible effort put into Lara’s increasing bust (and all the talk of breast physics, of course) was another. I remember I made a little Yahoo! Group for “female fans of Lara Croft”, explicitly for us “girls who wanted to grow up to be like her.” I think there ended up being 8 members in total during its short-lived run. (Remember, I was around 14, so this is embarrassing, though definitely my first foray into anything resembling feminist action – though, wearing my post-sexism hat at the time, I failed to see this as a wider issue.)

Perhaps more appropriately, much later, when I got into CRPGs and MMORPGs, I definitely went through a phase of trying to create characters which represented me; games in which I am explicitly trying to ‘inhabit’ the character, rather than view them as observer. (Character identification as a general thing is, of course, fairly complex!) I have this memory of the first time I played EverQuest, and I thought I was making a dark-haired, dark-skinned human lady character, and once I loaded in the game, I wondered why it was all so dark in the world. I eventually found the brightness settings, much to my embarassment, and realised they were somehow turned down. On adjusting them, I saw my character was actually blonde and fair-skinned. Oops. (Indeed, there were no other skin colour options for humans; I was disappointed.)

I realise I’m listing slightly into race again, but this underscores the general importance of diversity. Indeed, while I personally grew out of that phase where I was keen to make ‘myself’ in RPGs, I grew more aware of the importance of having that diversity there. After all, I am not everyone. It’s an important fight.

Which brings me to the game which I am currently developing; Redshirt is all about letting you experiment within an open social world, and, as such, is all about the player being free to choose who they are and how they want to play. I’d known from the beginning that I wanted to include a character creation process which would allow for as much diversity as possible, in terms of gender, race, and sexuality. That’s something I’m working on now, so perhaps later in the letter series, I can get back to you on how it’s going!

One relevant issue I’ve dealt with so far in the game’s development however, is what happened with the game’s logo: I’m lucky enough that though the game has a publisher but, moreover, it is another indie developer whose values about game development I share. It was up to me to suggest some concept ideas for the logo, and then the publisher would commission it via outsourced artists. The idea that the logo would feature one character was casually bandied about, and although it wasn’t explicitly stated, I knew that the default would be ‘white male’. However, I wanted to make sure we push for more diversity, and represent more types of people than this.  However, when it came down to it, I suddenly felt this weird, irrational sense of reticence in asking my publisher about it, even though I know he is the sort of smart, understanding person who gets these issues. I’m not sure why that is, other than feeling like making a fuss about these issues would draw undue attention to my own otherness. I guess even I, with my strong ideals on diversity, fall prey to that feeling, sometimes. But ultimately, it came down again, to the question I asked in my last letter: if I don’t push for these things, who will?

I was relieved when we discussed it, and it turned out that he saw my point, and we decided to proceed. The final design ended up featuring a white male character, but also a darker skinned female character. While it doesn’t even begin to encompass the breadth of diversity that it should (I’d also wanted to feature a more gender-ambiguous character), it’s a start, I suppose. I hope the game itself does a better job of that.

So we started off these series talking about our histories – and again, I want to underscore how important that is, even if it feels tempting to shrug it off as irrelevant – but, here we have arrived, quite rightly, at games themselves. You mentioned quite rightly that games, as cultural objects, absolutely have a place in feminist discourse. There is much to say and explore in this regard, but I’ll leave this email by returning the questions you posed to me: how have you regarded character identification in games, with respect to gender? Also, how did you respond to various ‘controversies’ over representation in games over the years? What are your current feelings?

Mitu

Letter 5: Dear Mitu (1 April 2012)

Dear Mitu,

Thanks for your letter. I wanted to start by mirroring your opening sentiments. I too am very glad that we are doing this and think it’s been really interesting to learn where we are coming from as very different ladies and how our histories are really determinant in how we position ourselves and our thinking.

What I found most arresting about your last letter was how apologetic it seems that you feel when it comes to voicing race issues. That is horrifying. I can’t relate to the ugly experiences you said that you have had, but I deeply sympathise and am really proud (almost too patronising a word but I am proud, also inspired) of your conviction when it came to your own game.  You are absolutely right, there is too little diversity in the representations in games and an awareness of that when constructing your representations is the best attitude towards defeating the homogenous, trite and tired stuff we’ve been playing with for too long now. I also like your idea of taking it further with a gender-ambiguous character. I think this could be particularly effective in the context of your game where sci-fi and future themes completely allow you to explore ‘uncomfortable’ difference. I’m not saying that it is ‘comfortable’ that difference/diversity is so often relegated to the realms of fantasy but if this is where we can begin to shape these representations then hopefully there is a platform for diversity to become more acceptable and step out of the fantasy. That is probably optimistic but I think there is something in setting an example regardless. SO DO SET IT PLEASE.

I’ll try and be briefer this time too and stick to the points. When it comes to issues of identification I have long been rejectionist, I am still strongly of the opinion that the avatar is a ‘tool’ and I use it to access the game and perform actions. I too have to be honest, I realise that I am in a privileged position when it comes to critical responses to games. I have studied them a great deal and been exposed to a lot of great thinking that has informed my own opinions and while I don’t think every player identifies deeply, or that we ever really flirt with ‘becoming’ our avatars, but the skin we put our pixels and polygons in does make a difference. Representation is loaded for those who care to read it and so this should be a design, player and critical consideration.

One of the important things about postmodern feminism is that it situates knowledge, knowledge is of the body and imbued on the bodies that we look upon in visual media. However, this is not that liberated utopic virtual body that androids/cyborgs dreamt of, it’s predominantly male generated even if the image is female and the positions that we view them from are powerfully placed, objectifying them from third-person and ‘god’ modes, again privileged male positioning. In this respect the user is also constructed as a male thinker/looker given to objectivity and a preferred and powerful viewing position. Never was this more apparent to me than in the joke scene in the Suda51 game Michigan: Report From Hell, where you disturb a man in the shower and he accuses you of ‘homoerotic intentions’. (I have another Suda51/shopping in CEX anecdote for another time – oh lordy).

Of course this was not ever my reading when I was playing games when I was younger. I didn’t want to play the princess in Mario Kart because I found out that she sucked and her pinkness was not appealing to me, cuteness was appealing to me though, so I’d play the Toad over and over trying to get different results. Definitive madness. Like you, I’d like to think that I didn’t care what body I was playing with but that is not accurate, I’ve played a lot of women and I think it has been a more conscious choice that I would have liked to admit. In Soul Calibur, for example, (I played a lot of the last game) I was not at all interested in the ‘normal male’ characters. I don’t think I ever played them. I did play the girls and the beasts though and it seems to me that maybe they exist on the same level of otherness on the games character selection board.

In this case and in others, I think what I am responding to is the construction of female that is insidious when I think about it. I want to see how these women; scantily clad, exaggeratedly cute or overtly sexual, and otherwise represented as weak; can perform. In other cases, their gender is compromised; it’s stripped from Samus in Metroid (I don’t remember querying gender in this case when I was young, masculine was assumed), they purge emotion, a gross female attribute, to become strong and focused, become outcasts wondering alone to take their revenge.

I think something I am struggling with here is deciding where the power lies. I know often these enhanced females, mechanised, weaponised females are seen as sites of resistance, and for sure they signify empowerment but it seems to come at the cost of femininity. I mean I was a huge fan of Molly Millions and other cyberpunk bad-ass females because they were delightful combinations of sex and strength, and I understand that is about appropriating masculine properties but I wonder somewhat where this leaves us with the representations of ‘norms’ and that pesky ‘diversity’ thing.

Of course, it comes down to nuance again and despite the representation of the girl in Ico, for instance, I would indeed defend this representation of a weak young willowy girl because it allows for one of the most emotive and original mechanics that I have seen in games. This is simply great game design and that representation is beautifully integrated in the design. I can’t take exception to that, it can be a shining exception. Also the Scythian in Sworcery appealed to me. In this case it was not explicit that you were dealing with a girl because of the pixilation of the character, in fact she was stripped of most everything that we would normally employ as characterization, she was silent and only pieces of her history and purpose are revealed slowly to the player. I’m not sure what I am trying to say here, but she is interesting, another exception, and I’m going to have a think on that! I also have not played ALL of the games so I am missing pieces, particularly in terms of RPGs, I can’t stand an intense RPG so I’ve got a knowledge gap when it comes to in-depth characterization.

You also asked about controversies and despite what I have observed and said above, I am rarely offended by a female representation. I find some things tiresome and they might provoke a ‘sigh’ but then I also don’t know how else we get a kick-ass woman in a game, or any form of fiction really. I thought that I would find ‘girl games’ offensive, but actually having picked up a Hello Kitty game as research, it really isn’t what I thought it would be, for example, you go around bashing the hell out of things until they explode in sparkles. It uses the blood ‘gibs’ aesthetic from violent games – ultra-violence in glitter! This is still videogame language, just in another skin. I think it is an offensive branding strategy though, and I resent that implication that these games are not just for me, but my gender.

Anyway, this is getting long(er) so I will cease. To summarise, I am interested in the representation of strong females but I am also not quite on board with it being THE representation. Moving a little out of games again, I have been reading some disturbing things this week about ‘geek girl’ backlash and was wondering about how you feel about the positive/negative connotations of the female geek trope? And indeed any totems for that trope, you mention CE Barbie previously…

Writing this had made me think a lot about razor girls for some reason, I think I need some cyberpunk tonight.

Write me more lovely things soon

Love,

Emily

Letter 6: Dear Emily (6 April 2012)

Dear Emily,

I hope you’ve had a lovely week, and ended up getting your cyberpunk fix!

I’ll cut straight to the chase this time: the brilliant analysis of power and femininity in your last letter has given me a lot to think about these past few days. It has sent me down the rabbit-hole – the the abyss – of gender and what it even means, and I have emerged with no clear answers.

I mean, in part - of course I haven’t, because within the context of academic gender studies, the notion is troubled also. Yet, of all the various theories, the various models for trying to understand gender, many find a model which resonates with them, which they can adopt as their own. At least, this is how it seems to be as an outsider, but I may be wrong. Instead, I feel like I come to this land of critical gender thinking anew, am circling over this new territory, and am feeling increasingly troubled and overwhelmed by what it all means. I have no idea where I should land. Where I should plant my flag, claim my stake.

Maybe I should rewind a bit. Your analysis of gender identity within videogames was fascinating; I had not thought too hard before about the notion that the positions that videogames place us within is male, even if our avatars are presented as ‘female’. I guess this naturally follows as an extension of the theory of ‘gender as performance’ then, which I agree with, in part – within the context where it was brought to my attention (this Gamasutra interview with Dance Central designer Matt Boch: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/39514/Harmonix_on_gender_selfexpression_in_Dance_Central.php) – it makes sense, certainly, as a way of understanding gender ‘in the wild’, as it were. Though, I also find it a bit troubling.

So, what then, if, within games, if our performance is inexorably masculine? In a way, this also reminded me of another thing I read this past week, which intrigued me. An interview with Jenova Chen in Eurogamer, in which he said:

“I believe that very often it’s not really the player that’s an asshole. It’s the game designer that made them an asshole. If you spend every day killing one another how are you going to be a nice guy? All console games are about killing each other, or killing one another together… Don’t you see? It’s our games that make us assholes.”

I can see how this thinking can extend to games making us perform as men. Though, the part of gender as performance which continues to bother me (and this may be down to a misunderstanding of it) is that it seems to continue to perpetuate a certain sort of essentialism, which seems counterintuitive. You noted, for example, that ‘emotions’ are  widely-regarded as female attributes. I’m not sure how I feel about that.

I feel like I’m clutching ineffectually around already deeply-established work, so I will return to my own experience, then. Growing up (and returning to ‘Post-sexism Young Mitu’) I remember it would always irk me when I’d heard certain parts of my behaviour or personality – e.g. my ambition, my technical aptitude, etc – described as typically ‘male’. It is easy to see how feeling like that can lead one to a place of rejecting gender identity altogether; to see gender as this made-up construct, where it is damaging to apply any sort of behaviour to either sex. But then again, is being able to see certain behaviour as gendered crucial to furthering – and thus expanding – our understanding of gender?

Basically, what I am trying to say, is that I am throwing my hands up when it comes to asking: what is ‘femininity’?Because, I’m sure I have no idea. Like you, when I was tiny, I had an aversion to ‘pinkness’, and I didn’t feel nearly as comfortable in dresses as I did slobbing around in jeans. But then again, I did not feel an explicit desire to be anything but female. There is SO much more nuance here, but in conjunction with the other ‘male’ traits of my personality, and my hobbies, I guess I might have understood this as overcoming what was ‘expected’ of me as a girl growing up. As I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve re-embraced feminine clothing, reconciling these various parts of myself.

Maybe that’s why I used to be annoyed at Computer Engineering Barbie, then. Although, obviously, she is but a plastic doll, I feel that she is not the sort of woman who went through the same gender journey as I did; I imagine she grew up truly embracing all parts of the performance we know as ‘girly’, whereas I did not. I perhaps, felt a sense of pride in my ability to navigate through to graduating from my own Computer Engineering degree without needing a role model who was explicitly female – and certainly not one who was so feminine, maybe. And, if I am to admit, in the darkest parts of myself, perhaps that is also how I felt about the sorts of girls who would aspire to owning a Computer Engineering Barbie; back then, the notion of wanting to get into computing because of someone and something so feminine, and not for any other (more masculine?) reason, seemed bothersome to me.  There is a lot to unpack there, I’m sure. But, I know I certainly do not think that way anymore.

This certainly ties into the online ‘backlash’ you mentioned about the ‘female geek trope’ over these past couple of weeks; I feel as though at some point in my life, I might have empathised, or even agreed with the things that were suggested within that article. As it happens, my point of view now is very different; I wrote about it actually (http://mitu.nu/2012/04/04/on-fake-geek-girls-and-gendering-of-problems/), prompted by your asking about it in your last letter! My response calls out how we shouldn’t unnecessarily gender certain problematic human behaviours. Though, of course, this thinking leads me back to the questions I was asking above about gender performances vs. essentialism vs. oh-god-what-is-all-of-this-stuff-anyway?

Anyway, I’m not sure if there are specific questions, here – and I’m sorry I’ve veered away from discussing games explicitly, especially after your smart, insightful analysis in the last letter, and into a more generalised conundrum. I was amused and intrigued by your Hello, Kitty anecdote – I’ve never explored such games myself, but I was fascinated to hear about glitter explosions, nonetheless!

I realise I’ve not left with any explicit questions, this time – so I will leave the floor open to you, for now – there’s a lot of ‘general’ gender questions to unpack, I suppose.

I DO, however, want to ask you about your Suda51/CEX anecdote, though!

Be well, and have an excellent weekend.

Mitu

Letter 7: Dear Mitu (13 April 2012)

Dear Mitu,

I hope you are settling into the ring well. I am loathed to distract you with this stuff at such a happy time, but a woman’s work is never done.

I really liked your blog post/response to the Tara Tiger Brown piece and I agree whole-heartedly that there is an unnecessary gendering of issues that is to prevalent and as you point out what she was in fact talking about was a more universal guilt of insincerity, or, I think, perceived insincerity. As the so-called geek culture gains weight and elevates to boarder the mainstream there is a not altogether uncommon reaction. Devotees of any marginalised media and forms have responded similarly to the ‘mainstreaming’ or popularisation of their niche interests. That is not a gender specific thang, not a bit. Boys as well as girls griped and then deserted the punk scene, for example. It seems we are dealing with something as simple as styles cyclical nature, geek chic was bound to come round and it too will fade out and give back the kingdom to those who want to own it. I don’t think this makes the new arrivals that disingenuous either because fandom especially in the extreme, which is how this article and the venn diagram place geek, have always been a little competitive or at least craved a particular ownership. Matt Hills and Henry Jenkins et al describe the way that knowledge, even extra-textual fan-generated knowledge (slash and video edits) are a form of knowledge that serious appreciators prize. In that regard I completely understand how the arrival of the casual game has irked the ‘hardcore’. I don’t agree at all. Casual has invited a wealth of new people to games, both male and female. I would rather see a rich variety of games and players alike; I think that really underpins my affinity for weird, marginal, forgotten and even hated games.

Warning: I had a thought…

You’ve said that you have no idea what femininity is, and I don’t either, but I think I’ve had a breakthrough in this respect. I’ve been reading a lot about ‘taste’ recently in my forays into ‘bad taste’ (I am immensely proud of my poor taste) and Pierre Bourdieu offers this summation on the cultural distinction of taste, I paraphrase because I can’t find the essay… he says something along the lines of: tastes are primarily based on distastes. It seems there is a similar problem in the conceptualisation of gender norms, not only are feminine and masculine held up against one another as oppositions but their supposed common gender attributes and behaviours only really seem to exist in terms of anxieties of being not masculine or feminine. Gendered behaviour and performance is certainly frequently judged as what it is not. Of course this is the product of some seriously structuralist thinking which vexes me some because that is where the essentialising lives and somehow seems a little convenient or obvious, but I’ve not said it out loud before and it still makes sense when I do so I’m filling that observation under ‘achievement’ in my personal process towards a feminism. Though  even that isn’t fair or accurate. It’s a gender things across the board and I think in this respect men are as likely to women to experience some gender-based persecution, that is to say if one is perceptibly effeminate or if they are a stay-at-home dad they are not fulfilling some archaic idea of ‘man’. Whilst in gaming I have observed gentleness to be a perceived weakness in men, this could be a ‘lad’ backlash to the once disdainfully ‘geek’ image or something to do with the competiveness of many games. That is conjecture of course but I mean to illustrate the ways that men are also subject to some negative gendering in games culture also.

Gender is always in negative terms? Kinda… oh fuck!

This is not good, but aligning this ‘standard setting’ for gender with taste kind of completes an equation for me even though I think integers are all fucked up and wrong. I think this also speaks to the problem with the ‘performance of gender’. Is gender performance something we are performing against and not towards? With the Matt Boch example, I am really encouraged that this level of thinking and consideration is informing game design and I will have to pick up Dance Central to see exactly how this idea rolls out. Might even try it on housemates, who are constant victims of my videogame experiments. I also don’t think that this level of R&D is publicised outside of an already existing fan and dev community though. Shouting about this could go a long way towards promoting the popular positive opinion of games as inclusive, innovative, smart products.

Thought over…

Oops, more thoughts…

So, having found myself stumped a little by feminisms and gender and what does it all mean, I decided to look elsewhere to see if things that I know about games and such compliments the process of feminism. Basically, I wondered if I was coming at this wrong. Should I use what I know of feminism and try and accommodate games or the other way round. And I think I may have found a little, tiny, baby something that works for me. It is by no means a resolve, an answer, or even a suggestion but I’m pretty pleased that I think I can marry two things and play on my strengths again and gives me a glimmer of hope that what I have to say may be valuable or at least on track to being so.

I love games. Not all of them, but I just do love them. In that respect, and I think some of your writing reflects, I find it difficult still to conceive of a way to make games more appealing to females, but through games I can think of ways that feminism can be explored, reified, analogised. I’ve been writing a lot about participatory culture alongside this project (and I think feminism is something of a project) and come across Axel Bruns. His concept of the produser (you gets the portmanteau) seems significant but more so when considered alongside his conception of 2.0 culture as palimpsestic. Feminism too is palimpsestic (I’ve clearly learned a new word). What I thought were neat, coherent movements were in fact a small part of a wide discussion. Post-stucturalist feminism wrote over the gender work of its predecessors, that in turn split into numerous groups with as many opinions, there is written of an age of ambivalence too. What I am saying is, feminism is written constantly, under and over written; we add an erase as needed, caveats appear, huge appendixes, there’s scribbles in the margins, love hearts on top of the ‘i’s, spelling errors, mess – whatever. We are working it 2.0 style. As to all this and games, or at least super media literate online culture in which a section of games certainly sit, even those that are not identifying players understand the language of amateur edits and contribution that constitutes 2.0. We all get to have a go, we are used to save-die-retry and repetition until we find the right approach to a puzzle. This is a productive analogy for me at least and having felt like I was floundering for a while (like all this week hence late response) – I’m positive again. This feels more like a welcoming space that I know how to use… I will better apply it next time.

I’m also thinking that letters is so perfect for illustrating feminism as project and always in motion because it captures beautifully how much I feel like not only is the conversation going forward but that we are even making crossing-outs and rewriting as we go.

Sorry, that whole letter is parentheses.  I hope you are enjoying FEZ and making plans for our epic geographical journey as part of this philosophical one. I am struggling to lay down questions this evening, but as I’ve babbled please feel free to return.

Emily

Letter 8: Dear Emily (2 May 2012)

Dear Emily,

Gosh. It’s been a few weeks now since I last wrote to you, and, as happens when one is in  a period in one’s life where one is feeling especially self-reflective, my own feelings have been constantly shifting, changing. These past few weeks have, for me, beenpalimpsestic, even. (Heh, good word indeed!)

I think there is some truth to what you describe, with gender descriptions being shaped by the always-negative. But, for all my ineffectual clasping at what even defines femininity might really be in my last letter, I think I have been working towards a definition of femininity that works for me. I say that in the present tense, of course – because as you insightfully pointed out, this is always a process - but more on that later.

I think my moment of realization that I can be comfortable and empowered in my skin as a woman came when I finally began reading Alan Moore’s graphic novel Promethea. Lo, what’s, I hear you say? A work of supposed ‘low culture’ influencing thought? Surely not?!

Heh sorry, pardon my sarcasm – I guess this literally never-ending debate has been brought up again with respect to games thanks to this (kotaku.com/5906484/most-popular-video-games-are-dumb-can-we-stop-apologizing-for-them-now) Kotaku piece – in the face of those discussions (and I don’t think they’re not useful, for what it’s worth), all I want to do is to continue creating. And, I would love, one day, to make a game that does for another person what Promethea is doing for me. A reminder that any of us who choose to identify as a woman can, at any point, become an ass-kicking magic demi-goddess full of fiery heroism just by writing and thinking. That’s pretty cool, no? Finally, some essentialism I can get behind, heh. (Or, maybe my aspiration towards Alan Moore-esque magical battiness by age 40 is just kicking in early. It is, after all, my 28th birthday today…)

Anyway, that is a massive aside. Just another personal anecdote. I do think there are ties to be made there with what we could achieve through games, too. It makes me feel good about the potential of culture to change thought, and thereby lives. Which is one of the reasons I am doing what I’m doing, after all.

Back to the point you made about feminism as a process; again, you are spot on, and this is also an insight I heard in a talk by fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson a few weeks ago – who, get this – is amazingly just 15 years old. She said:

“One thing that can be very alienating about a misconception of feminism in that girls then think that to be feminists they have to live up to being perfectly consistent in their beliefs, never being insecure, never having doubts, having all the answers… and this is not true and actually recognizing all the contradictions I was feeling became easier once I realized that feminism was not a rulebook but a discussion, a conversation, a process.”

(from http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6osiBvQ-RRg)

I mean - bam. There is one young lady who gets it, and at such a tender age. I wish I’d had one tenth of that insight back then; no doubt it would have made a lot of the journey easier.

I wonder what sort of support might lead to a teenage girl reaching those kind of conclusions by herself at a similar age, or even older (but still younger than ourselves, heh.) Thinking of this, and of our letters as an ongoing conversation made me begin to wonder about whether there is anything that can be done. Positive action, as it were, to support other girls as they go through their own ‘origin stories’. One of the things which this letter series has been underlining for me is the importance of support, and of relating to others. To use the cheesy aphorism, ‘no man (nor woman in games!) is an island”.  I definitely see the value of support-giving initiatives in this regard. (That’s not to say that that isn’t a complicated and fraught territory in itself, of course – Mare Sheppard, in her GDC talk this year, gave a thoughtful account of the potential problems which may therein. Basically, there is no easy answer to any of this stuff. But, it is a process, and, as part of that process, I’d love to keep stumbling towards potential solutions.)

That was a big parenthesis. Anyhow, I’m excited to see whether this adventure continues to lead us, both in the short term, and in the long term.

Feeling oddly positive,

Mitu

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