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Escapism Squared: High Times With a Video Game

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Sep 28, 2012 6:00 PM 23,180

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Patricia Hernandez

[Editor’s Note: What follows is a story about someone who took drugs and writes honestly about her experience. We do not endorse the use of drugs and warn you to be mindful of the risks of any substance that’s subject to abuse. We accept the reality that many who play games use drugs or have tried them. We wanted to bring you a story about it.]

“How many of these am I supposed to take again?”

I held a piece of foil dotted with a dozen candy-colored pills. They were meant to treat common maladies, but that’s not what we intended them for. The idea was that we’d use them as a complement to the newly released Dyad, the trippy-looking tunnel shooter.

“All of them. Wait, no, this is your first time. Eight?”

“That’s, uh…a lot of pills.”

“Don’t worry about it—I’ve done it before, this is safe. I’ll be like your spirit guide.”

But this inexperienced dork didn’t take the word of a drug veteran. No, I took it to the Internet—my safe realm of comfort. Wikipedia. Urban Dictionary too, because that seemed like a good place to read about illicit drug usage. Ah, the wonders of the Internet: a place where I can read up on how to best make stupid decisions.

If taken in enough quantity, the pills acted as a dissociative capable of producing closed-eye hallucinations which were sensitive to music. Perfect for a psychadellic game with a good electronic soundtrack, right?

As far as drugs go, this is largely considered as ‘kiddie’ as it can get. It was the sort of thing my friends would mess around with in high school, often meant as a switch from the tried-and-true teenage favorite, weed. I wasn’t one of those kids. While my friends were busy experimenting with their sexuality or downing a bunch of substances they shouldn’t have, I was hitting the books. My objective: earn scholarship totaling as close to $280,000 as possible to be able to afford fancy private college.

College was my way of partially distancing myself from protective, strict parents that would get upset if I so much as came home late after school. It was also almost this holy ground in my head, where I’d be able to get away from the poverty I grew up in. Where I grew up, girls were likely to get pregnant before hitting 18. Boys got lost in the gang scene and tended to end up jailed or dead. It’s not like I wasn’t offered drugs and alcohol or around them while I was growing up, but the possibility that they might act like a road to ruin—that they might keep me stuck with everyone else without a future if I wasn’t careful—seemed too risky.

We’re all a little lost in our early twenties, but some of us more than others.

That didn’t change in college, even though I had ample opportunity. Bored rich kids going to school in the middle of the woods? The likelihood of that environment not becoming overrun by drugs and alcohol is laughable. But by that point, the scene was too alien to me, and kids who saw Andrew W.K. as a hero seemed too adamant about excess and overindulgence, which made me uncomfortable. We’re all a little lost in our early twenties, but some of us more than others.
***

Writing about it now seems almost silly, childish—this was my first time getting high? On THAT? Not acid, not even something exciting like ecstasy or something dangerous like heroin? Really?

I guess. Here’s the thing about my college experience: it turned out to be so taxing on my personal health, that I ended up graduating with a feeling that I threw my life away for something that wasn’t worth it. At least, I don’t think putting so much effort into going to a nice school was worth getting there and having a bevy of professors who refused to read my work or would tell me I didn’t have a future.

That wasn’t what I fantasized about. I didn’t imagine college would ‘save me’ by making me a depressive wreck who couldn’t sleep, who developed trouble being in a room with more than a couple of people—if I could even work up the energy to leave my bed—and who would cry at the smallest thing.

I started to think about all the things I hadn’t done yet, that most people had—in their teens no less. I felt less worldly, felt like I was missing out on something. And if I didn’t find the answer in academia or in pixellated worlds, maybe it was out there somewhere on the street, in a bottle, in a group of people. Somewhere I hadn’t been yet.

I started drinking, noting that it felt like a weight was lifted off me when I was inebriated. I think I felt happy, and that wasn’t something that someone with dysthymia like me experienced often. Even the smallest, stupidest thing became hilarious and exciting. More than that, I could talk to people in a way I couldn’t before. It felt like a revelation. But then there were a series of events that set off an avalanche.

I’m no stranger to having love cloud my judgment and cause me to make stupid decisions, though I’d like to think I’ve grown up a little in this department. I’m the girl who traveled via Greyhound for two weeks to meet someone off the Internet who I was enamored with. I’ve dropped everything around me and left the country with barely any money, planning to camp outside the city of someone whose love I wanted to win back. I’d left school without permission mid-semester to go visit a significant other for a month. More than once, I almost dropped out to go live with a love interest. Heck, as a teenager, I almost went to school in Canada just to be near my then-boyfriend.

This was a little different.

“I don’t think I can be happy, I don’t think I’m meant to be happy,” someone I loved said to me.

“What? No, you can’t believe that, what are you talking about? Of course you can be happy. We’ve all got to believe that, else what is the point?”

“No, really. Look at all the endless clusterfuck that follows me no matter where I go.”

“Yeah, but…”

“No, listen, it’s okay. I don’t think I can be happy, but I can make games for people like me, people who need certain places to exist that don’t. I can make the world I want to live in.”

A couple of weeks later, that person boarded a plane to go across the country along with a good friend. Feeling alone was predictable, I expected that. What I didn’t expect was to feel haunted by the idea that someone I loved didn’t think they could be happy. It upset me. It made me feel powerless—not just in my ability to help them, but in thinking about my own happiness.

When you’re a teenager, it’s likely you’ll wallow in how terrible the world actually is. For me, it almost seems like the realization was deferred. I took my circumstances and my mental health as temporary conditions, and hoped that there was something better waiting for me.

And if I didn’t find the answer in academia or in pixellated worlds, maybe it was out there somewhere on the street, in a bottle, in a group of people. Somewhere I hadn’t been yet.

I noticed something curious in my field. All these brilliant, brilliant colleagues and developers are terribly sad. And I couldn’t even really talk to anyone about it, because that’s just how it is. Don’t you know, Patricia? Creative fields and depression practically go hand in hand. Plus, the smarter you are, the more capable you are of knowing how much the world sucks. Duh.

Like I’m just supposed to accept this, resign to it, swallow it. I couldn’t. You know what I could swallow that made things easier to handle? Booze. How do you just plain accept that the people you love have something wrong with them that you don’t think they deserve? Worse: does this mean I won’t ever be happy, either?

There was a period not too long ago where you’d be hard-pressed to find a day I wasn’t getting drunk, absurdly drunk. Large bottles disappearing in a day drunk. You’d think it was more alcohol than I needed, but no, it was just enough: I was trying to externalize what I was feeling, exorcize it from me. Like I could just throw up all this stuff I couldn’t come to terms with. Out, out.

So when someone offered me the opportunity to feel something else—while playing video games no less, I jumped at it. Escapism squared. It was me changing things up, doing with a drug what I normally would have done with alcohol.
***

I took more pills than I was supposed to—YOLO, fuck it, who cares? We crowded around the television and booted up Dyad. Mostly, I zoned out to it—there’s a certain calm in letting your mind go blank while you stare at pretty pictures. Well, not completely. I kept wondering when the drugs would kick in, especially given that earlier dabbles with weed seemed to produce no effect regardless of how much I took or what quality it was.

And then, finally, when it was my turn at the controller, things started feeling way off. Like I had to put extra effort into moving my arms and legs, which didn’t seem to belong to me any more. That’s why it’s called robotripping; the body feels detached. In the same way, as say, having your mouth go numb after the dentist can produce an obsessive fascination with otherwise normal sensations, I started flailing my limbs—bewildered at how different it felt.

Intricate, endless patterns that seemed to channel themselves into a tunnel, much like Dyad did-only more ornate.

I, uh, wasn’t very good at Dyad in this state. And I was playing really low key stages, including one where it wasn’t possible to die! But it didn’t matter. Once I started hallucinating, it felt like my consciousness was melding with what was happening on the screen, like I just intrinsically understood what Dyad ‘was.’

And then Dyad started living in my head. I closed my eyes and dropped the controller, much to the chagrin of my friend. I slumped over on the side of the couch while they took over. I got off the couch and somehow ended up face-first on the floor.

I don’t know what other people see while robotripping, but I saw endless patterns—like the kind you see on fancy carpets. Intricate, endless patterns that seemed to channel themselves into a tunnel, much like Dyad did—only more ornate. This fascinated me, because under normal circumstances, I can’t really ‘visualize’ things. When I read descriptions in a book, not much materializes in my head. Perhaps if you’ve read my writing closely enough, you’ll notice I don’t really describe how things look, either.

I was seeing all sorts of crazy things all jumbling into each other. For a moment I thought I understood where creativity came from, how artists saw the world. But any time the music from Dyad stopped, so did the images in my head. Or worse, if someone was losing, Dyad started playing horrible sounds that made me feel like the world was ending. So I lumbered over to my room, turned the lights off, put some music on, and collapsed onto my bed.

Thanks to my blanket, I think I know what Freud goes on about when he talks about how we all just want to return to our mother’s womb. The funny thing about me in an altered state was that I couldn’t actually escape my neuroticism. So I briefly went into a manic state where I started writing and editing pieces, and collaborated with some people on websites and other work.

Me: “Okay, now that we’re done with all this, I can go back to passing out. Sorry, I’m really high right now.”

Them: “What? Are you serious? We just did all that and you’re high?”

Me: “Yes. Bye. I’m sorry.”

Thank god that was a colleague who was a friend!

I’ve spent the last two months largely sober—feeling equally lost, but slightly freer than I did before.

Then came that dry, cottonmouthy hangover—and the need to eat. So me and my roomate headed down to our local corner store, where we got nutritional things like popsicles and chips.

Me: “You know what’s amazing? You know what’s amazing?”

Roommate: “What’s amazing?”

Me: “I don’t care about anything at all right now. Not a thing. Everything seems so far away and disconnected from me. I don’t even…oh my god,” I say as I stop mid-street.

Roommate: “What! What! Why are we stopping?”

Me: “I don’t even care about HER any more. I…I need to remember this feeling. I need to hold on to this.”
***

The next day, I sobered up—and sure enough, any time I thought about this person, I remembered how detached I felt while high. Hypnosis? Who knows. But I think my opinion on what ‘real’ love is has changed. I don’t think the authenticity of the feeling is a useful concept anymore. You feel what you feel, and regardless of why you feel it or what changes that feeling, I don’t think it’s any less valid or ‘true.’

But beyond that? Honestly?

I’m not sure how to parse the excessive drinking, or my drug escapade with Dyad. I’m not sure where I’m at nor what to make of what’s led me here. I know I liked some of what I experienced. I have a box of the pills at my desk that I look at sometimes, because I crave being able to see something when I close my eyes again. But I’ve spent the last two months largely sober, and I’m not pining after a particular person anymore. I’m trying to focus on myself and my work for now—feeling equally lost, but slightly freer than I did before.

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Valve On Steam Greenlight’s Failings, Fixing Them

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Communication Breakdown?

By Nathan Grayson on September 27th, 2012 at 9:00 pm.

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Over the weekend, I attended Fantastic Arcade, an indie-focused gaming show in Austin, Texas. It was – as is often the case with these things – full of passion, creativity, and the guy who played that one kid in Dazed and Confused. You’ll be hearing tons more about it soon. First, though, we’ll look at what was perhaps the most incongruous moment of the event: a Valve panel. Steam Greenlight, of course, has had some pretty serious ups and downs since launching, and this panel gave the very people who are fighting to set up shop on the ubiquitous storefront a chance to voice their complaints directly. Here’s how it all went down.

Generally, I like to save the moral of a story for the post-car-chase conclusion, but Fantastic Arcade’s Steam panel had roughly one theme: confusion. Between rapid change and some less-than-clear communication on Valve’s part, it’s been tough for many developers (not to mention potential players) to stay in the loop. And so, somewhat fittingly, the session’s Q&A kicked off with developers attempting to pinpoint what exactly Valve’s hoping to achieve with Greenlight in the first place. After all, Steam’s old selection process is still ticking along in the background, and many devs both large and small are bypassing Greenlight entirely for its greener pastures. So who should go where?

“Greenlight’s for games we don’t really know how to evaluate – from developers we don’t know or haven’t heard of necessarily,” replied designer Alden Kroll. “They can even be from other publishers whose games haven’t done well in the past, so we don’t know how to prioritize those. So it’s to answer those questions about what the community wants to see.”

“In addition to that, the section for concepts and future projects – we really envision that being an area that you guys can use to talk to your fans early on,” added business developer Augusta Butlin. “So even though we may have an established relationship and, yes, we would more than likely take the game when it’s ready, we still think that being able to talk to your fans super early is going to be of value to you.”

“It might be one of those games we would’ve taken anyway, but it doesn’t have to be binary. It doesn’t have to be Greenlight or talk to us. It can be both.”

Meanwhile, Greenlight’s been undergoing rapid evolution, growing new arms and leg fast enough to make heads spin (and, in turn, sprout extra noses). Much of it, though, has been a rather silent process. Even after official announcements via blogs and whatnot, developers and players have been left shrugging their shoulders. On the dev side, it’s that pesky $100 fee. Potential players, meanwhile, can no longer see any ranking data about their favorite prospects. What followed, of course, were multiple questions to the effect of “Wait, why?”

And while Valve was hesitant to discuss the fee beyond what it previously stated, it did open up about rankings. In short, the previous system was skewed too heavily in favor of those already at the top. It simply wasn’t fair.

“We consciously designed Greenlight to not be a self-reinforcing cycle of the top games getting votes because they’re in the top,” explained Kroll. “There was initially this big confusion over why there’s no top-rated list. Well, for exactly that reason. We don’t want a few people to overly influence the system by being early voters and getting things to the top. We don’t want something getting voted up because everyone’s piling on it.”

“Previously, probably 80 or 90 percent of games were at one percent. That’s why we ended up changing that metric. So [formerly low-ranking games] are probably a lot closer to shipping than that reflected. We’re seeing now that we’ve changed the system, a lot of developers are really talking to their communities and telling them how they’re doing. They’re talking about those things and trying to keep community support going.”

More than anything else, Valve continued to drive that point home: Greenlight isn’t meant to be a free ride straight to the top. For developers, the focus should be on initiative and self-sufficiency. Without rankings, the system’s less organized and more chaotic than ever, but right now, that’s the point. It’s on developers’ shoulders to form communities both on and off Steam, and it’s also their duty to point the way to their game’s Greenlight page.

“I think this applies not just to people on Greenlight, but selling games on Steam in general. [Success comes from] using channels outside of Steam. We have a big audience, sure, but Steam is not going to be a golden ticket necessarily. You also have to work on marketing and getting buzz out there. Getting people excited about your product. There’s a lot of people on Steam, but they’re not there every day looking at the front page.”

As is, then, Greenlight’s less of a magical, crowd-powered game factory and more of an anything-goes gladiatorial arena. Unfortunately, that leaves non-developers like me and probably you in a bit of a tight spot. For normal folks, digging through more than a thousand candidates (and counting) without any rhyme or reason simply isn’t, well, reasonable. As a result, promising games are still bound to slip through the cracks – which is what Valve designed Greenlight to avoid in the first place. So what’s the next step? How does Valve give attention to deserving games while also continuing to encourage its – at least, in theory – open, developer-driven system?

“That’s definitely another concern that we’re trying to figure out how to test for and handle,” Kroll answered. “We’re kind of walking this delicate balance between having a crowd-sourced system where the fans feel like they’re being heard and their input is valuable, and us having the ability to pick things across the crowd’s selection of genres that may suit an audience that’s not participating in Greenlight at all. How do you peek in and ship some things that maybe aren’t getting traction? But we want to make sure Greenlight is serving its full purpose – and not just the things that are popular.”

“Evidence we’ve seen so far is that a surprising variety of games are getting voted up to the top. But it’s also hard to figure out if something’s getting missed, so we’re trying to figure out how to test for that. For instance, we might find something that’s really interesting and could succeed as a playable game, but may not be doing so well as just a video. So how do we make sure we’re not missing that?”

Right now, Valve fully admits that it doesn’t have an answer. But Greenlight’s also still new to this whole existing thing, and it’s far from assuming any sort of final form. For better or worse, it’s the kind of thing that’s not really possible to test in the lab, so it’s got a bumpy road ahead of it. From the looks of things, communication will continue to be a serious issue (For instance, Kroll also noted that the actual schedule for greenlighting games isn’t concrete and can vary according to all tons of internal factors – which is all kinds of problematic for devs. Also, this is Valve we’re talking about), but the underlying intentions are obviously good.

If nothing else, though, remember what Steam was like when it first launched? Slow and steady wins the race. It was probably Gabe Newell who first said that. He just took too much time to take credit.

__________________

« An Eventful Ending: City Of Heroes | Bro-op: Starbreeze Reveals Fantasy Romp ‘Brothers’ »

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The Many Lives of Max Payne

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I can’t help but wonder if I’m playing the same games as everyone else. I just put down the controller and looked up Max Payne 3′s Metacritic in a fit of irritation: “A technological tour de force,” sighs G4TV; GamesRadar rates the game at 100 out of 100 while looking away and muttering “It maintains the mechanics that made the previous games great while modernizing them to excellent effect,” the Guardian coos that its controls are “smart, seamless, and intuitive,” IGN praises the “strongly-authored narrative.” It’s a surfeit of back-of-the-box quotes, enough to make even the most withered PR executive toss away bins of marital aids.

Why, then, am I so underwhelmed by Max Payne’s latest outing? Rockstar’s built a reputation for interesting genre games; the recent Red Dead Redemption was a very fun recollection of moments from the Western Film Canon, and they’ve had an ongoing love affair with Tony Scott since GTAIV. LA Noire, its checkered production aside, was an unusual take on investigation that deserves props in spite of being a fairly unpleasant game. They should have had no problems with the embittered ex-vice cop from New York and his preternatural reflexes.

What I suspect, however, is that Rockstar’s attitude towards its genre pieces is basically incompatible with doing justice to Remedy’s vision of Max Payne. Remedy has shown itself over the past decade to be Rockstar’s light side, a developer which comments on genre’s reflection of reality even as it invokes it – a trick which Rockstar seems unable to pull.

The Trouble with Wish Fulfillment

The problem, of course, is that so many of Rockstar’s parodic moves -seem- to be saying something about American culture at large. Kill Screen’s Filipe Salgado waxes rhapsodic about Dan Houser, the VP of Rockstar and writer of Max Payne 3, and his prediliction for making snarky references to American culture. When you take a second look, though, so rarely are these games saying anything at all; how many of the radio ads in GTAIV are anything other than exaggerations of elements already present in pop culture? If someone in-game accuses Max of playing out action hero fantasies, and then the player proceeds to control him so that he or she can do just that, how much of a statement is that making? Salgado ends his piece by saying that despite trying to make a statement, Houser and co end up blithely reinforcing the tropes they seek to comment on – but I don’t see them even trying to do that, no matter how hard I look.

Noir is a genre fundamentally concerned with being critical of our modern existence. The detective is a modern knight errant – he’s sleazy, he has a checkered past, but he sticks to his morals and principles. He always falters, perhaps isn’t the poster boy for the morals he claims to protect, but life is dirty and mean and requires compromise and he always stands up when it counts, no matter the cost. In Max Payne 1 and 2, Max is tempted by money, revenge fantasies, seductive femme fatales, dreamlike acknowledgements of his genre and medium as excuses for his behaviour, is corrupted by the drug that killed his family, and faces scores of other potential downfalls. That’s the whole point of noir fiction – to highlight the temptations of the modern city, of modern life, and showcase how hard it is to live decently when you’re surrounded by compromise and corruption. They’re essentially moralist tales, about how humanity isn’t something you take for granted, and that’s why they have such a strong effect on us. Despite Remedy’s literally comic-book treatment of the genre and injections of bizarre humour and self-reflexivity, they understood the implicit statement of the noir genre, and the reasons for the detective’s appeal. I’ve heard plenty of comments akin to “the writing isn’t good, but neither were the originals’” – while Sami Lake isn’t the most technically elegant writer in existence, he’s certainly a craftsman who understands the emotional fulcrum behind the genres he uses. I have no doubt that the capable evocation of the noir genre is one of the huge reasons for the franchise’s initial success.

So when Houser starts Max in a terrible place and has him sink lower and lower over the course of the game, we’re playing a knight who has already fallen, doesn’t much care about it, and hates the idea of trying to reclaim his past glory, which he sees as futile and wrongheaded. The constant comparison of MP3 to films such as Man on Fire and Heat rather than the actual noir pieces which the first two games took as their inspiration is telling – the Sao Paulo in which Max exists is a place of bare capitalism and utter, unthinking hedonism, perhaps the most mercenary and cold a fictionalized city could be. But the tired cynicism with which Max reacts is far more off-putting than any presentation of modern-day crime could be; when our avatar is pessimistic and mocks the world he lives in, why would we want to identify with him in the first place?

Favela of Leaves

In many ways, Max spends the game in search of a higher principle to defend; having lost his family, job, and femme fatale, he is reduced to acting based on personal safety and economic need. He doesn’t find much in Brazil, and waits until late in the game to find the point beyond which he will not go. On a replay, the machinations of the political scheme that runs the mystery are clear – but given that the game provides a literal Powerpoint presentation to sum up the plot before the third act, it’s mostly nonsensical on a first playthrough.

The game actively distances itself from the player at every opportunity: most of the whack-a-mole cast speaks only Portuguese, and Max’s allies often take the lead in a depressingly Homefront-esque way, relegating the former hero cop to a support role where he cleans up the dregs or reinforcements. The level design is often shoddy, missing the elegance of the first two games in favour of a compulsive versimiltude; where the Remedy productions lacked in realism, they made up for in attention to gameplay flow and multiple angles of attack. Too often Rockstar neglects this last point, requiring players to step through levels while attempting to guess the designer’s intentions as to what to do and where to go.

This is particularly apparent in the combat: far from being “modernized to excellent effect,” the gunplay misses or ignores many of the improvements made in the second game, such as on-the-fly reloading, dynamic restoration of bullet-time reserves, and other mechanics which encouraged Gareth Evans-like moments of firefight-as-ballet. One final segment of the game required use of the new cover mechanics to proceed – some will say I’m just bad at the game, but when one approach lets you through unscathed and the other results in death due to environment or enemy 9 times out of 10, I suspect more than just player skill is to blame.

Another objection which came up again and again was the visual design of the game: random snippets of dialogue are superimposed on the screen as the (mostly unskippable) cutscenes play. I think these were intended to reference the comic-format segments of the first two games, but it just comes across as laughable. When Max’s supposed partner in personal security voices yet another cynical observation that “politics are everywhere” and the screen flashes “POLITICS EVERYWHERE,” it implicitly paints the player as an idiot, incapable of even the basest level of attention and comprehension. This only contributes to the ludonarrative dissonance which Tom Bissell noted in his piece for Grantland – when the game as a whole seems to be hitting me over the head with the existence of politics, corruption, and unsavoury characters in everyday life, I can’t help but think that someone forgot that pointing at something does not equate to scathing commentary.

The controls were equally unfocused on the 360; although the PC’s mouse is more precise, the dual joysticks compare unfavourably to the previous games’ emphasis on elegantly executed combat. This was exacerbated by the difficulty I had reading the battlefield: often enemies’ silhouettes were compromised by scenery or lighting, making aiming and prioritizing a chore at the best of times. The snap-to control was needed for anything approaching good gameplay. On the PC this was much less of a problem – with a mouse, it plays much more like the originals. On either platform, the emphasis on grit and realism translates unexpectedly to gameplay – while the earlier games treated each dodge as its own floating shield, allowing you to glide down walls if it meant a few more seconds of slow motion, Rockstar’s version has Max awkwardly bump into walls and fall to the floor. Sure, it’s more realistic, but it’s also frustrating as hell in the often tight confines of the game’s environments.

I wish I could put my dissatisfaction down to being a fanboy of detective fiction and as the first two games in the series. I like Remedy’s sometimes-whimsical approach to genre, and I admit that I prefer their outsider’s perspective on American habits to Rockstar’s introspection. But even if Rockstar had managed to salvage the noir aesthetic from the mire of development – something LA Noire almost did – the gameplay would remain as shallow and frustrating as it stands today. In the end, Max’s quest for meaning made me question why I was playing in a way that Spec Ops: The Line tried, failed, and would kill to do.

Further Reading

Knowing is Half The Battle: Max Payne 3 And The Fourth Wall by Adam Maresca

Hired Guns: The Real Price of Game Violence by Adam Maresca

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Hands On - Featured Article

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There’s a classic episode of Beavis & Butthead where the titular morons start thinking about how to pee and then realize they can’t do it anymore. Once they start actively thinking about the simplest physical action, there’s this insurmountable mental block. It gets even better when their gym teacher tries to force them to go, then forgets how to pee, himself. This episode always stuck with me: It highlights why, by rights, it should be physically impossible, or at least difficult, to play video games at all.

The keyboard and mouse. The various multi-buttoned controllers with their joysticks, plus-sign D-pads and arbitrary alphanumeric buttons. Even the misleadingly simple Wii wand or Kinect—every game requires you to move an imaginary body in an imaginary space using some device to interpret your intent. You need a translator. You can’t just walk to the right and watch Master Chief follow suit in the digital world of Halo; you have to push the controller’s left analog stick to the right without it ever consciously occurring to you to do so.

Video game controls should create the kind of crippling cognitive dissonance that makes you forget how to pee. They don’t, though, and the reason that games are as easy to manipulate as they are is the result of 30 years of experimentation, refinement, and painfully slow standardization. The result is that great game controls don’t feel like a consciously considered act outside they body. They make you feel like you’re physically part of that imaginary world.

Epic Games’ Gears Of War series is a result of that refinement process. There are plenty of games out there that slide you into the role of a burly soldier fighting monsters and desperate odds, but few games feel as good. The controls have a fluid logic—the right trigger on the Xbox 360 fires the gun that lead Marcus Fenix is gripping in his right hand—but the inputs feel heavy. They’re thick but responsive, brought to life in the lumbering pace of the characters on screen.

Gears Of War 2

“Controls are about finding a way for players to not have to do too much translation,” says Rod Fergusson, formerly of Epic Games. His official title while working on the whole Gears series was Director Of Production, a fancy way of saying that he chose the staff who made every part of the game and then guaranteed that everything they made worked just right. “Basically, when you look at what’s happening from a player’s perspective—I want to move over here, I want to look that way—they can’t do that directly, so there’s a translation layer to let them do that. So what you’re trying to do is to look at the ergonomics of the controller, and you begin to map the important things in your game in terms of what’s most important and then what’s most accessible.”

All of this should feel real. Controls are meant to affect a mental and physical connection with your avatar in the game, whether you’re controlling a person or abstract shapes like in Tetris. It’s control, more than graphics and sound, that achieves that illusory sense of immersion that games are so quick to flaunt on the back of the box. “Players are meant to feel like they’re there,” says Fergusson. “Take rumble, for example. The vibration of the controller is meant to put you in that place. Games are, especially [those like Gears], aspirational. They’re meant to make you feel what we want you to feel—the tension, the fear, the adrenaline—so you can connect more when the controller ceases to be a part of the equation.”

It’s control that achieves that illusory sense of immersion.

Epic’s dexterous science stands on the shoulders of other giants. Gears’ controls have been mimicked by tons of games, but they were also built on standards created by similar, recent games like Halo. Before that foundation was laid, most game makers started from scratch trying to create their own Rosetta Stones for translated intent. Fergusson remembers what it used to be like. “My first game was a PC game. When you were doing PC, you had 101 keys, so you’d become lazy. Anytime you wanted to do something with the controls, you’d just map it to a new key. As you move onto a console, having a controller means you have to find an efficiency of design, and I like that. A lot of times when I play PC stuff, I ask, ‘How would we do this with a controller?’ It forces you—that constraint of having only 10, 14 inputs—you have to be smarter about your design.”

Gears has, because of that economy of thought and execution, been a standardizing force since the first game came out in 2006. Games that have you controlling a character in the third person—when you’re controlling a person’s body on the screen rather than seeing a view through their eyes—and shooting a gun in a three-dimensional space used to be less predictable. The iconic 1996 horror game Resident Evil doesn’t allow you to simply push a joystick in the direction you want to go. “Up” is always forward, meaning you constantly have to turn the character to reorient yourself. This approach has a stilted feel, heavy like Gears but with none of the fluidity. You move like a tank rather than a person, lumbering through digital space. By the time Resident Evil 5 was released in 2009, most third-person shooting games had adopted Gears’ template. So while the old style of control remains in RE5 for purists, the developers added new options that borrow Epic’s control scheme.

That’s not plagiarism; it’s smart design. The idea is that by making controls familiar, players will feel comfortable as soon as they hit Start. They can focus on learning who they are and what they’re doing, rather than figuring out how to walk.

Still, that original Resident Evil, with its cumbersome tank controls, served a purpose. Because your character is so difficult to control, you’re likely to feel more helpless in the game’s monster-filled mansion. The controls are counterintuitive—no one in reality walks like these goons—but they also have the power to create tension. They also have a tendency to annoy some players out of their skulls, which is why using complex, non-standard controls is such a tricky proposition.

From Software, the studio behind unforgiving medieval phantasmagorias Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls, has a penchant for creating games with elaborate control schemes. From’s series Armored Core, for example, is pretty familiar on the surface—you build a robot and then you make it punch other robots—but to properly control it you’re meant to hold a PlayStation 3 controller backwards with its analog sticks facing away. Pretty weird.

Dark Souls

“Controls for our games are not so complex 100 percent of the time,” says Dark Souls director Hidetaka Miyazaki, defending his studio’s idiosyncratic style. (My interview with Miyazaki was conducted over email, through a translator.) “However, it is true that such games are common in the lineup. We want to allow users the opportunity to be creative, as well as realize benefits from learning.” The idea is, mastery leads to grand expression. There’s more to translate between brain and screen, but ultimately you can express yourself more fully in the digital world. The Resident Evil effect is the rub. Some people are just annoyed by the non-standard controls. “In other instances,” Miyazaki admits, the “idea of fairness may be connected to the impression that controls are complicated.”

Dark Souls isn’t quite as demanding as Armored Core, but it is a far sight more complex than Gears Of War. That’s a sword in your right hand, and you swing it with the right trigger, but then things get weird. Tapping B makes you do a little jump backward, but if you press it while running with the left joystick, you’ll roll away. Nearly every button serves that sort of double duty. When you’re fighting a giant hungry death moth, you don’t want to have to remember the difference between a hop and a tumble. That dissonance get you gobbled up. When you kill the moth, though—when you’ve overcome that dissonance—it’s a hell of a lot more affecting than shooting one more monster in Gears.

Why shouldn’t the controls of Dark Souls challenge the player?

Is that the point? Is wrapping your brain around Dark Souls’ controller language and killing the moth supposed to be sweeter? Miyazaki says he wasn’t trying to make something bafflingly complex, but he had to make a trade: the simplicity of Gears or the versatility of Souls. “Our intention was never to make the controls difficult to remember on purpose. We did not intend to burden the user with remembering completely original control schemes. This may have to do with the kind of game that Dark Souls is, but one difficulty for this game is to not make the player feel like they failed as a result of the controls. As a result, we have to be strict with the rules. We also have to make sure that feedback is responsive. Dark Souls unfortunately does not completely meet these goals. I believe this is one important issue to address moving forward.”

It lost the simplicity, but not necessarily its clarity. Dark Souls is a game that demands patience and study in order to succeed. If recognizable, standardized controls like those in Gears Of War are meant to feel as natural as walking, then it follows that a more demanding game should demand more complex motor skill, like skiing or knitting. Why shouldn’t the controls of Dark Souls challenge the player?

One reason: The point is to play the game, not the controls. Evolutionary experiments like Resident Evil’s tank style and Souls multipurpose layout have benefits (tension, a sense of accomplishment) but in practice, those benefits aren’t felt by everyone. “The words ‘overly complex controls’ make the hair stand up on the back of my neck,” says Fergusson, “That’s the 101-key keyboard. It’s not about the game then, it’s about the interface, and you shouldn’t be playing the interface. I think it’s fine to have constraints that allow the gameplay to come through. It’s one thing to say you turn slow because we want you to be scared, but that’s different than saying that in order to open a door you have to hold down the A, B, and Y buttons at the same time. People want to be able to pick up a game and know. That’s why you see people gravitating towards a standard.”

Miyazaki agrees. “As games continue to mature as a whole, it seems completely natural to me that not only controls, but game design, etc. becomes standardized. When I say ‘standardized,’ it may be mistaken for a negative statement, but that is not the intent. Rather, standardization brings friendly competition between game makers to refine. As a result, we come up with a multitude of wonderful games.”

Ryan Payton, a former producer from Metal Gear Solid studio Kojima Productions, is working on a game called République for the iPad that’s trying to have it all. It’s a science fiction thriller set in a totalitarian city-state, inspired by classics like that janky first Resident Evil. You don’t actually control protagonist Hope; you’re her guide as she flees her oppressors, swiping on the screen to tell her where to go. Payton thinks that doing away with the controller altogether will lead to the ideal standard. “We need more standardization, and it’s the stubbornness of huge corporations like Microsoft and Nintendo and Sony, and their reluctance to build towards standardization across the industry as a whole. I think it’s incredibly shortsighted of Nintendo to—on the Wii U’s Controller Pro—to make the A, B, X, and Y buttons opposite from Xbox 360. They’re swapped! You have to retrain your brain to play these games.” (The point remains, but in fairness, Nintendo was first.)

So maybe the controller is a vestigial organ in the digital body and we should just cut it out, like an appendix, so game and player can speak more clearly. Instead, all games will use touch screens and motion inputs like the Kinect so you can talk directly to the game. Want to go right? Just point yourself to the right. No more translation.

It’s a nice idea, but right now, it’s an impossible standard. Controllers still offer a level of precision that touch screens and motion inputs can’t touch. “There was a time when I was working at Microsoft,” Fergusson says, “back when this dirt bike game Motorcross Madness had just come out. At the time, Microsoft had just released something called the Freestyle, one of the first controllers that had a gyro inside. So they marketed the two things together, because for the first time, you could play a motocross game and feel like you were controlling the bike just like you’d control a bike. You had to lean the controller just like handlebars. What you noticed when you played with other people was that in order to gain that sense of reality, you had to lose precision. What you find happening with other types of control systems [like Kinect and touch screens] is I can either feel like I’m riding a motorcycle and lose every race, or use a controller and not have that feeling of riding a bike and win.”

République

Payton’s found a way for République to work around the problem Fergusson’s describing. If a touch screen can’t offer you the precision to properly control a body, then don’t put players in control of the body. “The project’s forced me to completely reconsider what the purpose of what game controls actually are,” says Payton. He thinks that game makers are “still trying to figure out a way for people to sit down and easily move around a 3D space. Most of the time, we just resort to the dual analog sticks. I didn’t want that problem of moving through space. I just wanted people to be able to touch where they’re viewing, so they still have agency, and they’re still moving things, but in a logical way that ties the fiction around it.”

République’s problem, then, is starting from scratch. It doesn’t have the 30 years of experimentation with buttons to build off of like Souls and Gears do. How do you make a new standard and avoid translation woes? By watching what people do naturally.

“We assumed going in that players were going to play this way and that way and use these gestures. So we put that stuff into the game and tested it,” Payton says. “Early on, we had zoom as a double-tap on the screen, but when we observed players they weren’t just double-tapping, they were triple- and quadruple-tapping the screen really quickly to send Hope into cover.” Instead of anticipating and failing to translate what players wanted to do, Payton’s team started watching players’ reactions, tweaking the controls based on what people did naturally. “We’ll sit people down and say, ‘Send her there.’ Maybe they’ll drag their finger, or maybe they’ll swipe. So now, we’re letting players’ instincts drive our controls. It would be like if they took Dark Souls, and they sat somebody in front of the game, handed them an Xbox controller, and said, ‘We want you to swing your sword.’”

Swing your sword. Don’t think about it. The more you think about it, the more impossible it seems. There’s no unified secret to making controls yet, no perfect standard. Gears’ are familiar, but they lack the revelation that Souls’ can yield. Souls won’t be as instantly accessible as République because Souls needs a bunch of buttons to play, but République won’t let you move as freely about its world. Games still need a translator because the languages are still changing. There’s only one rule at this point: Great controls aren’t about skill but instinct. They need to be made so that when you can pick up your translator—keyboard, controller, touch screen—you don’t forget how to pee.

Words by Anthony John Agnello. Illustrations by Richard Hofmeier.

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The Sometimes-Beautiful Struggle

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Commentary

09/19/2012

Life resides in a broken frame. Games must acknowledge this, not try and save us from it.

Lana Polansky

238

A 1997 Italian film directed by Roberto Benigni tells the story about a family ruptured apart by war, genocide and oppression.

“La Vita è Bella,” (or, Life is Beautiful), engages with some terrible subject matter: a boy Giosuè, and his father Guido are torn from their mother Dora after Nazi officers transfer the three of them by train to a concentration camp on Giosuè’s fourth birthday, in 1943.

Committed to keeping his son alive and keeping his morale up, Guido pretends that their predicament is a game in which they have been elected to play, in order to 1,000 earn points and ultimately win a tank.

Giosuè can lose points by crying, begging to see his mother, saying he is hungry, and so on.

In so many words, “Life is Beautiful” is about a game.

This is a game that protects a child from a harsh reality, keeping him motivated and spirited enough not to give up against terrible odds. This game also teaches Giosuè, his father using this set of rules to instruct him on the conduct, interactions and habits that will keep him alive— and making up many rules dynamically, according to whatever new threat is presented to him, but always integrating them into the same basic framework.

Described this way, we forget the heart-rending dramatic irony of the situation: a family torn apart by intolerance, a boy desperate to see his mother again, a father desperate to keep his son alive in an impossible situation. We’re brought into the world of the boy, who cannot understand the adult world very much, outside the constant reaffirmation and instruction of his father. He relies on the game, on the authority of his dad, because he is a child.

Whenever he wants to leave, or wonders why the guards are so mean, or wants to know where the other children are, Guido is there to pull the comforting veil over his son’s face. You must keep playing, Giosuè, otherwise you will lose. You mustn’t give up. Even when the Americans close in on the camp, and the guards scurry and scramble, Guido reminds Giosuè to follow his tutorial: stay in the sweatbox; don’t leave until everyone is gone.

Even here, he plays along for Giosuè’s sake, while dressed in female prisoner’s clothing and avoiding searchlights, while being caught by a guard with an assault rifle and a pugnacious attitude. While mocking the guard’s goosestep, being marched off-screen, being audibly shot and left in an alley.

It is in the prologue and in the affective epilogue for Life is Beautiful, when the adult Giosuè reflects on his experiences, that we realize the necessary difference between the game and real life. In the context of the game, he won: he exits the sweatbox to be greeted by an American tank; he reunites with his mother while riding in it along a dirt road lined by liberated prisoners. In the context of real life, he realizes the sacrifice his father made to bring his family back together. He realizes the profound loss that he could only mourn long afterward.

In retrospect, Guido offered his son a “gamified” experience—a term we have not heard for a long time but whose theoretical approaches still afflict us in a fairly big way. Guido gave his son a strategy for survival which eliminates the real-world anxiety and boredom of being imprisoned, using a series of noble manipulations to convince Giosuè there was something to work toward.

But it seems cheap to label this story something which, as Ian Bogost writes in his well-known critique, Gamification is Bullshit, “…ticks a box” on a marketer’s clipboard. It goes without saying that this boy really did have a meaningful goal; that the achievement of getting the tank was a shallow motivation for a deeply profound experience—one which he only realized later.

Looking up the word “gamification,” one finds a quarry of business-related articles. Games as motivation. Games as productivity. Games as a morale booster. In some cases, as in Jane McGonigal’s now-famous work Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, the arguably more altruistic presumption is declared confidently that games can “change the world,” as a teaching and community-aid tool.

But there is a problem with superimposing games on the real world. Bogost, at least insofar as gamification is used as a business strategy, is right when he writes that,

“This rhetorical power derives from the “-ification” rather than from the “game”. -ification involves simple, repeatable, proven techniques or devices: you can purify, beautify, falsify, terrify, and so forth. -ification is always easy and repeatable, and it’s usually bullshit. Just add points.”

Gamification as a strategy reveals itself to be a method of manipulating people into performing all kinds of boring, repetitive or mundane tasks for meaningless or impertinent achievements, using only “incidental” qualities of games (points, win conditions, etc) as incentives. McGonigal’s approach is philosophically and ethically different from the business-side of gamification, at least on paper, but it suffers from the same conundrum: superimposing games onto life.

“The real world just doesn’t offer up as easily the carefully designed pleasures, the thrilling challenges, and the powerful social bonding afforded by virtual environments. Reality doesn’t motivate us as effectively. Reality isn’t engineered to maximize our potential. Reality wasn’t designed from the bottom up to make us happy,” McGonigal writes in Reality is Broken. McGonigal wants saving the world to be easier and more engaging. Fun, even. To tap into the best of us.

And while none of this is immediately offensive, the idea that one can bypass the murky difficulties and injustices and contradictions of life simply by making it into a game-like experience seems to miss the point of what makes life impactful in the first place.

Sometimes life has to be boring. Sometimes it has to be hard. Sometimes it has to be tragic and unfair. Sometimes the hero has to die ungraciously, and be left in an alley.

Games have an incredible, novel, awe-inspiring capacity to frame experiences. Games can translate life, ideas, themes, skills and so on in a fascinatingly tangible way. Games have this ability to reveal to us sublime truths using only small details, teach us lessons using patterns and consequences, and impart symbolism and meaning through clever and heartfelt dynamic systems.

But to do this really well, games must also look to life. The hard parts. The dirty parts. The horrid and terrible parts. We cannot ignore them. Rather, games must reflect on what about life is resonant, formative, human. Reality has to be broken—and that’s ok. Art is one of the ways in which we try to organize it.

We simply can’t have experiences like Spec Ops: The Line or To the Moon or Journey—or hell, even DOOM—without appreciating the uncertainties of war, or the despair of profound regret, or the sensuality of wordless intimacy, or that which frightens us, and makes us feel vulnerable.

This is where the notion of the game as a kind of messiah becomes problematic. By creating strategies and approaches which “gamify” life, we forget that the superimposition of games onto life actually serve to detach us from what it is we are doing. We become fixated on getting the tank, perhaps, even when in the back of our minds, we know that things are not quite right around here.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think it’s bad to treat some things as games, especially those trivial matters which we must be more motivated to accomplish some other way—and it may well be extremely serviceable to instruct and educate people using game-like approaches. It may well be extremely soothing to use game strategies ease one’s body and mind in stressful scenarios. I understand that. I even respect it.

It’s not up for debate for me that in the context of Life is Beautiful, Guido does do a valiant, selfless, heroic thing for his son—a very young child. He reframes the narrative of the war for Gosuè in a way that inarguably allows him to digest and survive it. And certainly, being that it is meeting certain filmic and thematic constraints—Life is Beautiful operates on two levels, showing us both the indispensible value that this game has for Gosuè, but also the very human, very real context that makes this game both necessary and tragic. To be resonant—to be humanizing—the film must reach beyond the efficacy of the game and into the brutality, the anguish and the familial love that push it into existence.

Life is Beautiful needs to remind us that life can be very, very ugly. That yes, Gosuè won his game, and that Guido’s imagination kept his son alive—but that the cost of this sacrifice was a mortal, permanent one. That Dora has lost the love of her life; that Gosuè has lost his father; that Italy and much of Europe has been ravaged by war and pain and misery. That people died here.

Must we reframe, or conceal, these things with games—games that we can only play along with until life flips the board on us? If it makes reality more palatable, game-like qualities can possibly be applied to life without any conflict. But to entertain notions of empathy—even of awareness of both the world outside of us and within us, it’s necessary for us to endure, accept and engage with the ugly and the difficult, the unfair, the unjust and even the oppressive. I’m not convinced that these are things that can satisfactorily be understood by looking to game-like incentives as a global panacea. Games as an expressive medium are still figuring out how to portray these themes and issues better as it is.

And I believe that part of the way to do that is to accept the powerful and anguishing—and yes, even boring—things that constitute real life. The greater intimacy we have with life, the greater intimacy we can have with games.

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Lana Polansky is a game critic and writer peddling her wares at Kill Screen, Gameranx, Medium Difficulty and here at Bit Creature. Also, a ludonarrative disco-dancer.

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The Journey to Game Design Theory

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I’m thinking back now on the long journey that has led me to this point where I feel confident enough to present my ideas on game design, not just to people on the internet, but also as an actual, real book.  A book that I will be distributing all over the world, including to some serious thinkers in the field – peers, college professors, etc.

So, perhaps it would be interesting for some to hear about what led me to believe what it is I believe.  The short answer is, of course, reasoning and experience.  But, if you’re interested, here’s a longer answer.  Note that these are far from the only examples that led me to some of the foundations of what I believe;  they are just a couple of big examples.

RTS Games

I think that it started, probably, with a long relationship I had with RTS games – specifically, Warcraft II, Starcraft, and Warcraft III.  They’re a great case study for this topic, although they are just a tiny piece of the whole picture that led me in this direction.

I grew up absolutely loving these games, but there was always something about them that seemed really different, in some really basic way.  There was a unique brand of frustration that went along with RTS games that I never witnessed in any other kind of game.  Regardless of whether you won, or lost, there was always this feeling.

So that feeling was what got me to start really exploring the games on a more fundamental level, asking really big questions about how the games could be different.

One of the more frustrating things was this idea that despite doing the following two things:

1.  Know what the opponent was going to do, often well in advance (often even before the game started, due to trends that were followed 95% of the time)

2.  Build and prepare the forces which should counter them, sometimes even in a novel or clever way

… you would still often lose.  In fact, it usually felt like cleverness was punished.  It felt like by making choices and exercising creativity, I “wasn’t playing right”.  If I had some kind of cool strategy to try, I was “dicking around”, and that “playing right” meant getting the 2 unit types I’m supposed to get and following protocol, and simply working on my micro.

Since I was young, the ability to exercise creativity in a game was always what was so intriguing about them.  I’ve never been terribly interested in puzzles, for example, because – and this is something most people innately understand – they don’t allow for the user to be “expressive”.

Most people who play RTS games understand that there are indeed two major things going on.  Often, people will refer to these as “micro” and “macro” – micro being essentially tactical execution ability, and macro being larger-scale strategic decisions.  I accepted that these were two parts of one singular whole for a long time.  That’s what we were told, and the popularity and beautiful presentation of the Blizzard games certainly seemed to support this.

For so long, I was in denial about a completely obvious pattern, though.  Nowhere was the pattern more obvious than it is on the Warcraft III ladder, where I spent approximately 6,000 games.

Mana burn!

Warcraft III was, possibly more than any other Blizzard RTS, a deeper promise of the future of strategy-games.  Coming from Starcraft, it cut the food cap down to 100, and even imposed a clever upkeep system to keep unit count down.  Gold miners were capped at 5 per mine.  Unit health was increased overall.  These changes were made so that the game would become more about army composition and tactics, and less about massing resources and sheer numbers of units.

Coming from Starcraft, which the community (not the developer) cranked to the highest speed possible, a new focus on battle tactics sounded great.

Only, the problem became that actually, the game was now almost totally about micro.  Watching pro replays of Warcraft III – which I spent years doing – was really pathetically boring.  It was all about whether or not his Archmage got one extra fireball off on the other guy’s Archmage before he got his second water-elemental out, and who picked up the circlet first from the shop to get +2 to his INT, etc etc.  Totally ridiculous tiny minutia that was purely about maximization and that ignored 99% of the game’s mechanisms.  Some strategies involved never building any units at all and just harassing endlessly with your hero.

This experience really highlighted the difference between those things which are decisions, and those things which are memorized, perfectly executed patterns.  Simply put, there is a strategy game in WarCraft III, but if you try to use it, you’ll be punished by another player who simply focuses on execution.

Roguelikes

This is really just one example, though.  My experience over the past five years with Roguelike games also helped me understand some things about the nature of “a decision”.  Roguelikes, (as well as Mount & Blade, actually) reminded me of something that had been missing for so long from single-player games:  decisions with consequences.  Sure, you can choose to keep the consequences of a decision in Fallout 2, but it’s your choice.  It’s not cheating (at least, it was never made clear to me that it was cheating) to simply reload if you don’t like how something went down.  In fact, plenty of single-player games of the past 15 years were balanced with save-scumming in mind, so if you did choose to take the high road, you were often presented with an imbalanced (unfair) level of challenge.

The whole idea that “no, you don’t even have the ability to go back after you’ve made a decision” really changes the way that a decision plays out.  Suddenly, the idea of true uncertainty entered into single-player gaming.  What will happen after I make this move?  I can’t just save it, find out, and then load my game.  I have to make a kind of educated guess.  The optimal move is ambiguous, and I express my skill at this game by trying to decide between multiple seemingly equal options.  You can only feel this if you don’t have the power to look into the future, which save-scumming gives you.

This thing I just described – this moment where you’re on the precipice between what you understand and do not understand – is a very special thing, I started to understand.  It is really just fundamentally different from those kinds of things wherein someone merely has more ability and they are guaranteed to win, like “contests”.  It doesn’t matter what I decide before I engage in an arm-wrestling contest with a body-builder.  I am simply going to lose.

But there is this other property that systems can have.  It is related to this thing that I’ve always liked in games – this “creativity” I spoke of earlier.  There are multiple, seemingly equal options here, and I can be a little bit expressive in the choices that I make.  Not only can I be expressive, but I can exercise ingenuity; a-ha moments and clever plans are all within a player of any skill’s grasp, if he allows himself to think creatively.

Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup

Now, I should mention that Roguelikes themselves also often fail miserably, and in their failings, gave me even more insight into the nature of these systems.  For example, Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup has an “auto-explore” function, I learned after months of playing.  In one fell swoop, it was made abundantly clear to me that most of the decisions I had been making – those about where to go in the dungeon next – were essentially meaningless.  An algorithm that moves me about randomly did it just as well as I could.

This got me to start thinking about and looking for other false choices in games, and dear god are videogames full of them.  Running down linear corridors, doing fetch quests, mashing the A button to get through combat, fixing the camera, pressing A because the game told you to press A — these are all examples of no-brainers, or false choices.

From there, I had established the foundation of my theory:  that decisions were something really special.  I often attach the word “ambiguous” to the front of “decisions”, to explain the nature of what I mean by “decisions”, but really, I argue that if a decision isn’t ambiguous, it isn’t a decision at all.  In other words, if you know that one choice in a decision is definitely more optimal, there really is no decision to be made – it’s already made for you.

This is the foundation upon which the rest of my theory is built.  I hope that this shines some light on how I got to where I am today.

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The Ghost in My Game Space

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I play videogames because they put me into a space that feels entirely separate from reality. For years, when I was in the throes of depression and using marijuana to self-medicate, I abused this aspect of gaming. I’d get high and spend hours playing Wing Commander or X-Wing, ensconced in the experience and trying to ignore the outside world for as long as I could, even fighting sleep to delay stepping out of that safe, distracting space playing videogames.

A videogame surely had to be a sort of consensual hallucination, a result of the increasingly deep and engaging universes I was being offered.

I’ve always thought of that space as being merely a virtual place, something more conceptual than real, because there’s no physicality to it. I’m torn about considering Internet-only friendships as real for the same reason, because the physicality of human communication matters. They aren’t entirely illusory friendships any more than playing a videogame isn’t a real experience, but the lack of eye contact and body language makes me hesitant to denote reality upon the friendship.

I never feel like I’m entering a different space when I read or watch television or movies or listen to music. It’s all still part of my baseline reality. Videogames are obviously different because they’re interactive and participatory, but the feeling of being in a different space when I play a videogame surely had to be a sort of consensual hallucination, a result of the increasingly deep and engaging universes I was being offered.

Then I let someone I was extremely close to into that videogame space with me, and now I’m not so sure anymore.

———

My cat Rufus loved to hang out with me while I played videogames. I’d sit down in my gamer slouch chair and he’d stretch out right in front of me, a 26-pound distraction I couldn’t help but give attention to whenever my hands could come free from the control pad without consequence. I could invariably depend on Rufus keeping me company during a gaming session and I loved it.

Downloading the Xbox 360 version of Minecraft was every bit the mistake I’d suspected it would be. I had ignored the PC version despite all the hype because I knew I’d become addicted. Minecraft is like playing with Legos, but you actually create the Legos before you build with them.

I love Legos. Rufus and I spent a lot of time playing Minecraft together. I also love the Minecraft soundtrack, and like to sing out my own spontaneous lyrics to songs.  Much to the amusement of my wife, they’re usually related to whatever is going on at the time – I will sing a song about how she’s making a mess in the kitchen or how we’re stuck in traffic. One of the pieces in the Minecraft soundtrack turned into a lullaby for Rufus.

If you hit up this link to a compilation of Minecraft music, the very first song that plays is the song I’m talking about. Now add the lyrics “I love Rufus, he’s my kitty. I love Rufus, he’s my gato,” throw in some variants around the same theme and with the same cadence to the recurring melody and you’ve got the idea. Yes, it’s embarrassing as fuck to admit this, but understand that my wife and I adopted Rufus from a shelter and then spent four months treating a fungal skin infection, many thousands of dollars on fixing poop blockages and treating other assorted nonsense which required a lot of money and time to fix because he was the best cat in the world.

All he ever wanted to do was cuddle with people. If my wife or I sat down on the couch he’d be passed out, head on our leg, within minutes. The night we adopted him, one of the vet techs from the shelter had to run out and hug him goodbye. “You’re getting a really special cat,” she told us. She was absolutely right. Everyone who met him loved him. My wife turned Rufus into an Internet character and was constantly bombarded with requests from people who wanted more Rufus stories. So, yes, I sang lullabies to my special, sweet, awesome and huge cat. And when he developed really serious medical issues that required the installation of a feeding tube, and liquid feedings four times daily, and medicines, and other special care, it wasn’t a choice. Our boy got what he needed.

Rufus would still lay down in front of me sometimes while I played Minecraft, but often he’d lie close by with his head resting on the edge of the ceramic water bowl that bubbled in the living room, which is something cats do when they’re feeling nauseous. Rufus was still close to me when he did this, so while I was playing Minecraft, I’d sing the lullaby to him, but now it was different. It really was something I thought might soothe him. His eyes would droop and close whenever I started singing the lullaby softly.

After eight weeks of intensive medical care, which dominated the lives of both my wife and myself, which cost us way too much sleep and required several more thousands of dollars’ worth of treatment – after getting all the medical evidence in the world that his treatment was working and that Rufus would finally get better and we could remove the feeding tube – his kidneys collapsed suddenly and we had to put him down. We had him for less than four years, not nearly enough time to appreciate him.

———

When I load up Minecraft and step into that particular videogame space, I can feel the emptiness of Rufus’s absence more keenly than I’ve ever felt the absence of anyone I’ve loved who’s died. When his lullaby song comes on it’s all I can do not to burst into tears, and I often don’t bother trying. I started up a new Minecraft world shortly after Rufus died because I couldn’t stand to be in the world he and I had “built together,” but it doesn’t matter. His ghost is still there in the new world, haunting me.

And it’s not just Minecraft. That’s one particular location within this videogame space. Rufus hung out with me when I was gaming, period. For a while after his death I could barely stand playing videogames at all. It was like being in a room filled with familiar objects that belonged to a loved one who’s died. Sometimes when the grief is too fresh you actually cannot tolerate being in that space because the grief is waiting for you there.

That space is defined as much by the emotional reality as by the physical. The space we’re in when we play videogames might be no different.

———

Dennis Scimeca is a freelance writer from Boston, Massachusetts. He blogs at PunchingSnakes.com, and you can tease him for singing cat lullabies on Twitter: @DennisScimeca.

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The Final Approach

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I keep having this weird dream.

I’m on a rocket ship in outer space. Sometimes I’m strapped into a seat, but often I’m in free-fall. Often there are other people on the rocket ship, but sometimes I’m alone.

Sometimes the rocket ship isn’t floating through space. Sometimes, instead, it’s on fire and trembling – it is reentering Earth’s atmosphere, presumably because of a mechanical failure. Sometimes it isn’t a rocket ship at all: sometimes it is an airplane that is crashing. A few times I’ve found myself inside a flooded submarine.

Sometimes it’s an elevator wheezing toward the top of a swaying building. In some versions of that dream the wires snap, and everyone in the elevator plunges toward the bottom floor. Sometimes we hold hands.

I know these don’t sound like the same dream scenario repeating itself, but I also know they are, because the same feelings of tremendous emptiness – of very lonely terror – color all of them. My dreams are themed.

I have another recurring nightmare where the elevator doors open and I step out onto the rooftop of a very tall building, thinking I will be all right. But then the building shudders, lurches, and begins to tip over.

———

September 17, 2012

Just as my little blue car broke away from the outskirts of Chicago, I cursed out loud.

“What,” Whitney said. “What did you forget.” Whitney was driving.

“Oh, it’s,” I said, and I sighed heavily. “God damn it. I meant to pack a CD-ROM. Outpost, Sierra, 1994. It’s, uh, a space colony sim. That’s what I forgot.”

Whitney’s eyes were trained on the dark highway ahead of us, but I saw her jaw set, the corners of her mouth get tight.

“I can mail it to you,” she said firmly.

“Sure, it’s still on top of the – it really isn’t important, actually,” I said. I put my forehead against the window.

The nighttime made the window seem perfectly dark and blank. I took off my glasses and closed my eyes.

———

July 19, 2009

The Dig, LucasArts, 1995: You play as Boston Low, commander of a small crew that will be, in very short time, stranded on an alien planet.

Upon its release, critics frequently likened The Dig – sometimes unfavorably – to Myst, another oppressively cheerless adventure game of the era.

“I will say this,” I typed three years ago. “I do remember that feeling of alienation, some intrinsic melancholy, in playing The Dig.

“I had – perhaps narcissistically – misattributed those feelings to simply being a 13-year-old girl,” I continued, “and to being the sort of 13-year-old girl who sits all cooped up, hours at a time, with a CD-ROM spinning and spinning in front of her.”

It was hard for me – back then, but maybe now, too – to decide whether the game’s characters were lonely, or if I were the lonely one instead.

———

January 18, 2011

“I am thinking about volunteering for NASA’s one-way voyage to Mars,” I type. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”

I am confessing this in a small chat window. I had read about the proposed mission in October. Now, three months later, I’m lying on my stomach in my mother’s bed, legs swinging, instant-messaging my friend Conci.

“Um,” Conci types, “I’d miss you?”

“See, I can’t stop thinking about it because I have this recurring nightmare, right,” I explain to her, “where I am on a space shuttle and as we break out of the atmosphere, I realize I have been an idiot for being scared of crashing my whole life, because even scarier would be to be lost floating in space.”

“Fair enough,” Conci types.

“Recurring nightmare, seriously,” I type.

“I believe you.”

“So how cool is it that NASA is making a list of volunteers who want to live my recurring nightmare,” I type, “and how cool would it be to face it!”

“It’s close to being a Gabriel García Márquez story,” Conci replies.

“Things I have thought about,” I type. “One. I would probably burn up. Two. If I lived into my 60s they would probably have to send a different guy up to shoot me dead like a horse. I mean, they obviously do not expect the astronauts to live into old age. And most of all, three. We would all die of weird viruses or bacteria or skin diseases in the most face-meltingly horrific ways.”

There is a long pause on the other end.

“You’re a little twisted,” Conci types. “You know that, right?”

———

May 16, 2010

My friend Kevin gave me this really strange Atari 2600 game called Space Shuttle. Activision, 1982.

The cartridge is supposed to be packaged along with a 30-page manual and an overlay, but of course my copy is loose. So when I play Space Shuttle I’m usually cross-legged on the floor, squinting at my laptop for instructions.

Space Shuttle requires your fiddling with the physical switches on the console itself, where each switch represents a toggle on the shuttle’s control panel. The VCS’s switches are small metal barbells that make a satisfying “clack” when they’re flipped, giving the entire simulation a kind of corporeal authenticity. My Atari has six switches instead of four, so my spaceflight could well be more complicated than somebody else’s.

From Space Shuttle‘s manual:

Launch sequence:

1. Internal Power on.

2. Primary and Backup Engines Shutdown.

3. Cargo Door closed/Landing Gear up.

4. Activate Countdown.

5. At MET-015 activate Primary Engines.

6. At MET-004 ignite Engines by pressing red button on Joystick. Match “T” arrow with “C” arrow during launch.

7. As Shuttle rises, watch both dots on the computer screen. You must follow the indicated launch trajectory AND continually correct your “plane” by keeping your Shuttle centered in the small box at right.

8. At about 205 nautical miles, quickly shutdown engines. The closer you come to the 210 altitude, the closer you’ll be to the satellite’s orbit.

Space Shuttle is very slow, very tedious. Docking is probably the hardest part, but reentry is much more stressful.

Reentry Sequence:

1. Pull back Joystick to set +24 pitch for proper reentry attitude.

2. Close Cargo Bay Doors.

3. Follow reentry course on computer screen. Pull stick back to go right; push forward to go left.

Reentry Summary:

There are three important stages to Reentry: Entry Interface, TAEM and LOS. Position, altitude, velocity and heading must all be exact to both properly manage the tremendous heat buildup and correctly position your shuttle for the Final Approach.

———

December 23, 2007

I am scared, most of all, of falling out of the sky.

“Do you mind if I ask you when it started?” the stranger sitting next to me is wondering politely.

I tell her it began in college. She asks me whether my phobia has anything to do with the 2001 terrorist attacks.

“No,” I tell her.

The truth is too embarrassing to admit, but anyway, it’s this: I don’t like flying alone. I used to not mind, but now I do.

I don’t like flying on planes without my mother. If a plane’s engines were to stall, if a wing were to suddenly snap off, I think I would be okay just as long as I could hold my mother’s hand during it.

———

September 26, 2012

A couple of days ago, one of my closest friends – a retired Latin teacher – called my cell phone.

“I was thinking you might not want to stay there by yourself,” she said.

“Yeah, uh,” I said. “There are all these oxygen tanks in the living room now. So that’s weird.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. You’re living with a lot of ghosts.”

This morning my mother’s nurse stopped by the house to pick up a check.

“Did anyone talk to you about the tenants?” she asked me.

If a plane’s engines were to fail, if a wing were to suddenly snap off, I think I would be okay just as long as I could hold my mother’s hand during it.

“Not yet,” I said, dropping wearily into a kitchen chair.

“Well,” said the nurse. “The current tenants are moving out. You owe them their security deposit. The new tenants are moving in on the first of October.”

“Okay,” I said. I grabbed a yellow legal pad and wrote some things down using a permanent marker. Then I stared at my notes. Then I looked up and stared at the nurse.

“I know,” she said.

In the evening I walked the dog, finally. I had been avoiding it.

“How’s your mom doing?” the man who lives around the corner asked me.

“She passed away,” I said to him. “On Sunday.”

He blinked. “I didn’t read anything about it in the paper,” he said.

I nodded. “That’s because I haven’t written it yet.”

“I didn’t realize her health was so bad,” the man said.

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I think she was trying to keep it a secret.”

“Mothers do that,” he said.

I hurried home, newly committed to writing my mother’s obituary. I sat down at my childhood desk. How to begin? Well, first I needed a proper mouse pad.

I opened a drawer. Nope. Another drawer. No. Another.

I opened my top dresser drawer and stared at a 98-cent copy of SimCity 2000.

SimCity 2000. Maxis. 1994.

I smiled. I groaned.

“Ha, ha,” I said, reaching for it.

———

A couple of months ago the rocket ship dream came back, except this time I was outside the rocket ship, pressing buttons, throwing switches, concentrating on some sort of launch procedure.

In that dream, I turned just in time to see the ship’s doors closing.

It has taken me a long time to understand this dream.

———

I’ll never type it out, I don’t think ever, but I did stay for it, and I held my mother’s hand.

———

Follow Jenn Frank on Twitter @Jennatar.

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