At their worst, they're artless, pointless; form without function, retelling an old story without understanding what made earlier versions worth hearing, and without adding anything worthwhile. (Star Trek Into Darkness, I'm looking at you.)
At their best, though, sequels and reboots are a chance for a new generation to take an old story and say why it still matters, to point to certain aspects and say, "Hey, this is a thing of relevance to us."
And right now, Star Wars is there.
When The Force Awakens came out in 2015, the most common criticism was, "This is just a remake of A New Hope." The Empire was already beaten, critics said; why was the First Order a thing? Why rehash this same old fight, in this same old way, against a same old foe, just with a new generation of heroes?
But if there is anything that the two years between Episode VII and Episode VIII have taught us, it is this: Wars do not stay won on their own.
Ideology resurges. If you don't fight the Nazis in every generation, they get new clothes and come back, with allies in places they should not be.
Star Wars ended up being accidentally prescient. But it will not be the last popular art of this era to have to engage with that idea. It is the challenge of our culture, right now, and it will continue to emerge in all the stories that were started this year, and that will not see the light of day for months or years to come.
I wrote an entire post about Civilization VI, over the past few days. It started with observations about the theme music, "Sogno di Volare," and went from there, about what is or isn't disappointing about the game.
I can't write that post, anymore. I've got it saved. Maybe, another day.
Here's the video, anyway, because why not.
I wrote a lot of other things about the song, musically, and then I wrote:
The song is so earnest. It's absolutely refreshing in a way, after more than a decade of irony-based, cynical, and occasionally nihilist culture being dominant -- but it also leaves out what makes the task of simulating all of human civilization itself so interesting and daunting.
And I said that for all that Civ tries so, so hard to mount a global approach, deliberately seeking out non-Western, non-colonial civs and non-white, non-male leaders to head them... the game is still very profoundly an American one, with an American outlook towards what civilization itself should be and is.
It is the march of progress, of science, of commerce and war, and the nexus where those meet. It is the forward, upward momentum of technology and social progress, inevitable even if you aren't leading the pack.
I wrote that all during the first week of November, before the U.S. election. That election has since transpired, and everyone in the world knows what happened.
America just made a series of interesting decisions, and chose to go backwards and take the world along with. Yes, the world -- because a huge percentage of the planet is buying our blue jeans and listening to our pop music. We've had the cultural victory in the bag for decades, and nothing that happens within our borders stays within our borders.
And culture is the hole. It is this -- that ability to go backward, to regress, to be done in not by external forces but by the competing tides of movement and counter-movement within your own society -- that is missing from Civilization.
The map on my screen is a sterile world, where social forces have no sway and rational economic ones are the only ones modeled. I have, in four games (three won, one lost) and twenty hours, already come to find it profoundly unsatisfying.
A war, in Civ, is always against external forces. It is a neighbor who wants land, a conquering force that wants your natural resources, a religious zealot who will convert by force.
Civ cannot account for the fact that within your real civ, people look, think, and act differently from each other, and may, too, come to war within their own country.
Progress is not inevitable. It is hard, ugly work, and it always comes with regression as its twin.
The two are inseparable. For every reformation, there is a counter-reformation. For every revolution, a counter-revolution. For every black president, someone literally endorsed by the Klan and actual, non-metaphorical Nazis.
Maybe if we made a computer model of the world, we could see how it turns out and convince ourselves there's a way. But it wouldn't be a "game" anymore.
I am not sure I would find it any more satisfying to find my play civilization suddenly regressing or entering a civil war with itself, to be honest. If that's where Civilization went, I think I would find myself spending more time in hero's journeys, where the dragons might be present but can always be beaten.
Truth be told, I might need to go home today and do that anyway; I am not above escapism, and we all have to care for our mental health in our own ways. Watching disaster unfold in real-time around me is hard enough.
Because right now, there are at least 50 million people out there who don't seem to understand that the actual course of human civilization -- the real one, the real thing, where people live and breathe and eat and fuck and shit and die and want and hope and despair -- is not a game. That it is not a set of interesting choices and well-sculpted tiles. That a "game over" doesn't mean you reset; it means extinction.
It's a balmy spring day in New England, almost certainly in 1988. It's late April, probably; the air smells of mud and grass and growing things and we unruly kids have been sent to go play outside. I'm at Tommy's house, on the next street over from mine, and some other kids -- one each of our two neighborhood Matts, Brians, and Corys, and Brendan (my later first crush) -- are there too.
We're on the swing set, playing Ghostbusters until we get bored and someone announces we should play pirates instead. I pick up a well-balanced stick and give my mightiest "ARRRR," until one of the boys says: "No, you're the princess. Girls can't be pirates! We need to rescue you."
I hit him with my stick for a while and claim it's "fencing." Eventually a truce is reached and a compromise made: I'm the Princess Pirate. Childhood harmony temporarily restored, we take to our "ship" with gusto.
You know what "princess pirate" gets you by the time you grow up?
Also sometime around 1988, these friends started to get NES systems as Christmas and birthday gifts. (I got mine in very late 1993.) One day, I asked for a turn at Mario after one of the boys botched a jump and had to restart his level. It was a no -- but rather than "it's my turn still" I got, "Do girls even play Nintendo?"
Well, this girl would have. And years later, when I could buy my friend's used NES for $25 with my saved-up babysitting money, I did.
This past month has seen a lot of social justice talk in the broader, mainstream game-sphere. Kotaku, whether through a desire purely for pageviews or through a desire actually to engage with the world-that-is, has (re-)published must-read, knockout pieces by Denis Farr, Leigh Alexander, and Mattie Brice that collectively have stirred up nearly all of the bottom-feeding muck and slime to be found in the gamer community. On top of all that, this week writer Tom Bissell is in the news, first for having been offhandedly sexist for no reason and second for having issued one of the better public apologies I've ever read.
Naturally, there's a lot of push-back. Any discussion of gamers who are female, any kind of queer, any race other than white, or indeed any other non-dominant population tends to kick up a fuss. Some of it just goes under the heading of trolls, or "haters gonna hate." But what's most disappointing and frustrating to me is when gamers who could, in theory, be allies say: "Why don't we just talk about the games? Whatever happened to having game sites just be about games already?"
A selection of Kotaku comments
It's not necessarily done as an intentionalderailing tactic (though it is above), but the effect is just the same. In short, it tells a whole set of players that our experiences don't matter.
Because for many of us out there who aren't the "right" sort of gamer? It has never, ever been "just" about the games. From age seven, in second grade, when the boys in my class asserted that girls don't play Nintendo. To age seventeen, in high school, when despite using a girly alias and telling everyone I was a girl, the guys all called me "he" when I won science-fiction trivia games. To twenty-seven, when I started to understand that just because my Lone Wanderer looked female, didn't mean the game's design treated her that way.
"Can we just play the video games?" Sure. As soon as conscious and unconscious sexism vanish from the stories, the art, and the reviews.
Culture exists, and we all must live in it. Our culture means that if you're the girl at the party, you might have a really hard time getting the guys to let you in on GoldenEye. It means that if you're the girl behind the counter at the GameStop, you have to deal with a constant level of leering and commentary that your male co-workers never get. And if you're the girl, it means that any time you try to talk about the uphill battle, you're going to get smacked right back down.
The end result is exhaustion. Swimming upstream against culture is tiring. And journalist Tracey Lien is right: it's not just one incident, or just one joke. It's every last one of them. For many of us, life is a pile of these. There are no "simpler days" to go back to.
The ability never to be alienated by the games we play or by the people who play them is the very core of privilege. Bust out that p-word and gamers get riotous, but there's no way around it. Despite all of the crap that's been handed to me over the last three decades, I have privilege by the metric ton. I'm as white as white can be, identify perfectly well with the sex and
gender I was born with, and have almost exclusively heterosexual
attractions. In those senses, I'm pretty thoroughly represented in game worlds, plots,
narratives, and characters. Further, I have two good hands, two good
eyes, and two good ears -- so I'm pretty thoroughly catered to in terms
of game mechanics, audio-visual design, and control schemes. For a number of my friends and peers? The layers of crap to deal with just never end.
The golden days of everyone being able to "just play a game," if any such days exist, are ahead of us still, not lying dormant in some sepia-tinted past. They are the same as the golden days of all our other pop culture and pop art: lying in a society that's come to terms with understanding sex, gender, race, and a whole lot more.
This weekend's tragic event in Tucson has triggered a number of national conversations for the past few days: one around mental illness, one around violent rhetoric in the modern political scene... and one, that's always going on somewhere in the background, about American gun culture, including the presence of gun violence in our media.
My boyfriend's theory in more depth, and I think there's a lot to this, is that lots of people learn about guns from movies and TV rather than from gun instructors or people who actually know what they're doing. ... TV and movies have absolutely horrendous gun safety and don't accurately depict what happens to your body when you get shot. ... He thinks that if films and television did a better job of showing how guns work and what happens when you actually get shot, people would be aware of what they can actually do and would therefore be much more careful, both of their own bodies and of others.
I was intrigued by this line of thought, particularly as a counterpoint to the more common (and, I believe, false), "violent movies and video games cause kids to become violent people" trope.
And on thinking about the "reality" of guns in media, I immediately went to Heavy Rain.
Heavy Rain features four player characters. Among their stories, the player sort of tag-teams the narrative, coming at the fundamental story -- a serial killer has kidnapped a young boy and there are only a few days left to rescue him -- from a number of angles. Occasionally their stories intersect (players A and B or B and C will appear in the same chapter).
One of the four player characters is FBI profiler Norman Jayden:
Jayden's role is a fairly archetypal one. He investigates the crime scenes and works with a database of evidence to put together a profile and likely locations of the killer. His partner is Asshole Cop Variation A, Lieutenant Carter Blake.
Jayden and Blake seek out and eliminate multiple possible suspects on the road to solving the case. One of the first they visit is Nathaniel Williams. As you can see (click to embiggen -- the split shot is original to the game), Nathaniel is... not quite right.
The situation develops into a tense and intense triangular standoff with Blake, Nathaniel, and Jayden. Jayden pulls out his gun; Nathaniel may or may not himself have one. Neither Jayden nor the player knows for sure.
All of the commands here are optional -- R1 is the gun's trigger, and X, O, triangle, and square provide options by which Jayden can attempt to defuse the situation:
But here's where the game, I feel, is unusual, and where the educational component comes in: to shoot is completely optional. The game does not require or demand it at any time, just as the game frequently gives you the choice to act or not to act (and makes this explicit in the tutorial Prologue). R1 is an option, not a command. Most players tend to have a finger hovering over or near R1 when holding a Playstation controller, and in particular during this scene.
The really important part? Without fail, every player I have seen with his or her finger near R1 flinches and shoots Nathaniel when he makes a sudden movement. And almost every single time, the player immediately shoots, "Wait! Damn it! I didn't mean to do that!"
For all that we spend a load of time in gaming with the virtual gun in our hands, for all that we learn to speak caliber and reload speed, for all that we collectively play first person shooters and third-person bloodbaths: one game puts us in the position that real law enforcement officers face all the damn time, creates a situation where we can shoot almost against our will, without meaning to, and then immediately makes us sorry for it.
Heavy Rain manages to create an emotional moment where the lives of the player character and his partner both depend on a split-second, hair-trigger, almost gut-level decision being made -- and it's a moment that reflects a reality that gets people killed with alarming regularity.
I don't know if this kind of game could ever reach the audience that would most need to think about what it shows. But if a scene like that lingers, and makes any of us think about the reality behind the story... can that ever be a bad thing?
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Bearing in mind that the writers of video walkthroughs can make a number of different choices along the way, if you'd like to watch the scene here's one where you shoot Nathaniel and one where you don't.
