The evolution of the RPG... and me.

A year or two ago, I (rather infamously) drew my line in the sand: I do not like party-based games, I declared, and never had.

Following this assertion (brought on at that moment by disliking Dragon Age: Origins), I've played both Mass Effect games, am currently in the midst of Chrono Cross, and just devoured the entirety of Dragon Age 2 in a few days.  And yet in many ways I stand by my original statement -- so what's changed?

I'll be honest, lady rogue Hawke pretty much always took Fenris, Varric, and Merrill, by the middle of Act II.

I'll admit that in part, I've changed.  Though I've been loving games and digital worlds since I was a kid, my consumption of various game types has really ramped up in the last three years and I've been exposed to, and learned patience for, some kinds of game design that I hadn't gained wide experience with before.  Game appreciation, like film appreciation, is tied to a sense of time and place, and an understanding of the history of the art.  My sense of history is still developing.

Crucially, though, the games themselves have also been evolving.  The difference in feel between Dragon Age: Origins, which hearkens back to an older era of games, and Dragon Age 2, which feels very modern, really crystallizes that evolution for me.  Thanks in large part (though not solely) to BioWare's recent design choices, I've been able to narrow down a bit what it is I actually hate about party based gaming.

In a word?  Micromanagement.

For some people, this is fun. I will never truly understand those people.

For me, the joy of playing has never been in the numbers, the tactics, or the methodical min/max situation.  I am fundamentally a lazy gamer: I don't want to control a hundred things at once.  I'm willing to be responsible for one character and for her tactics, skills, attributes, gear, inventory, and personality.  I tend to gravitate toward one character type and I tend to play that type the same way across games.* I like passive skills and quick kills, and I prefer not having to overthink every single character placement or tactical choice.

If I'm playing a game where character development is the focus -- in broad strokes, the RPG genre -- then what I want is to take control of my avatar and to understand and master her personality and talents.  I don't want to be responsible for controlling others.  It's a selfish impulse ("don't be dead weight I have to drag around") but also a self-protective one ("I just can't manage both of us correctly at once; you'll get short shrift").

My aversion to having to worry what others are up to has led to some downright comical contortions. During my EverQuest II years, I was three solid months into the game and level 28 (back when it was much less solo-friendly)  before I ever joined a group.  The folks I grouped with were all in the same guild and I joined up with them a few days later.  That's how I eventually discovered the pleasure of watching a plan laid and executed with a minimum of communication.  Everyone knew their roles: tanks took the hits, healers healed, chanters controlled crowds, and DPS damaged things.  Sure, for special bosses or raid zones (or one memorable five-Fury group) we discussed strategy at greater length, but each character always knew her role because each was controlled by an autonomous being somewhere, an individual man or woman at a keyboard just like me.

Some of those raid strategies worked better than others. Running a new x2 zone on Test, June '05.

When handed Divinity II and Dragon Age: Origins in the same week, I gravitated to the former because I could simply strike out into the world as I pleased, without worrying about what others wanted, needed, or thought of me.  I've been bored, in the past, with having to make the rounds among companions and crew to check in on each and every one of them and their personal needs.

I've been thinking about the "why" a great deal over the past week.  I think it's because for a long time, in many of the games I played, companion characters' personal needs either felt mechanical, pointless, or kind of unhinged.  That's a personal assertion, and not necessarily a quality-of-games one; it has to do with my own particular wiring.  As much as I hate to admit it, because I'm a book-lover through and through and an imaginative one at that, I think what's actually hooking me into this new RPG era is the voice-over work.

When I play a game like Chrono Trigger or Chrono Cross, everyone sort of sounds the same.  Yes, I imagine characters speaking differently, with different cadences, accents, and mannerisms, but in the end every voice is still, on some level, mine.  I can't give other characters inflection that I can't imagine and active as my imagination is, in a text-only world my interpretations might run counter to the scene's intent.

In fact, I'm running into this fairly often in Dragon Age: Origins, which I'm now giving another try.**  With an unvoiced Grey Warden, it's up to me to guess whether a comment she can make is sarcastic or genuine, and whether that comment is made jokingly or earnestly.  As a result, other characters' responses are not necessarily what I expect or what I'm aiming for.  I've run into some disapproval situations that I didn't see coming, because I didn't realize the Warden was going to be perceived as confrontational rather than as politely direct.  (Also because Morrigan disapproves of roughly everything.)

And when Morrigan disapproves, she lights you on fire. It's just her way.

Having companions find their voices has upended the way I view these NPCs in my games.  It's an emotional connection to the narrative and its world that isn't a new concept, but that makes me personally care a great deal more.  Even in a silent protagonist, fundamentally single-player game like Fallout: New Vegas, companion voices make me feel differently and realign my priorities.  I want to earn Boone's respect, not his easily-granted disgust.  Hearing Arcade move from self-effacing sarcasm to honesty over time makes me feel trustworthy.  Disappointing Veronica makes me feel like I've kicked a puppy.  And actually getting to hear Christine talk and explain, after she had been rather violently robbed of her voice, is deeply satisfying.

The recent BioWare titles (the Dragon Age and Mass Effect franchises) have done a rather extraordinary job of surrounding me with characters I care about.  Between advancements in game tech and a strong investment in decent writing, I'm able to immerse myself in the illusion that my [Hawke / Shepard / Warden] is surrounded by other people, as real as my intervention has made the PC, with their own voices, stories, and personalities.  And they can control themselves.

Should I be so inclined I could order Garrus which baddies to shoot and when, but I never have to.  (I choose not to play on difficulty settings where that level of tactics would be required.)  I can take control of Isabela or Aveline, or issue direct commands to them, but I don't have to.  Without very much intervention (adding health potions to their tactics), Fenris knows how to watch my back and stupid Anders knows how to heal the party as needed.  Varric doesn't need me to issue a complex set of numbers and commands in order to seriously own that crossbow.

The ability and choice for the player character to have intimate and meaningful one-on-one conversations with non-player-characters has reframed the way I relate to a game.  If I need to make a complex or consequential decision in Chrono Cross, I look at a guide, or I talk it over with a friend (i.e. the spouse) who has played the game before and can give me non-spoiler guidance.  But when I need to make a complex or consequential decision in a game like Dragon Age 2, I have Hawke talk to her friends.  They become her guides and, by extension, mine.  Does Aveline disapprove of a choice?  She must have a reason and it's worth asking her before I act.

I'm used to NPC companions either feeling burdensome or feeling invisible -- for all that I liked, say, Lucca and Frog in Chrono Trigger, taking their turns in combat just meant me moving through one list of all options, and switching party members roughly meant switching combat tactic options and not much else.  That both game design and I have reached a stage where player companions feel almost like MMO buddies has been revelatory.  For the first time, when given the choice I care more about my companions' quests, evolution, and goodwill than I do about exploring every corner of the world (though I still do) or about the main story (which always comes around again in due time).

I haven't always particularly enjoyed characters' quests (bite me, Anders) or supported their loyalty missions (you too, Zaeed).  But as this year in gaming starts to wind down, I'm realizing that now, the companion quests are the ones I want to appear more often.  I enjoy making it a point to wander around the Normandy, or around Kirkwall, or around the campfire.  Fenris, Anders, Aveline, Varric, Isabela, Merrill -- their stories, their trust and forgiveness (or betrayal), are what was important to me in Dragon Age 2.  And as I look toward 2012 and Mass Effect 3, I know that Shepard can stare down the Reaper threat, but what I really want is to be sure that Garrus, Liara, Wrex, and Tali will trust her and stand by her side while she does.

Until then, back to Chrono Cross, where Kid is Australian and Poshul is desperately annoying -- but everyone is as silent as Serge. 

*For the record, that type is rogue / thief / assassin, heavy on the stealth and dual-wield or, in a futuristic setting like ME, on sniper tactics.  Sneak-and-stab or sneak-and-shoot: if they see me coming I'm doing it wrong.

**Because seriously, I want to see if I can find out why [DA:O character who appears at the end of DA2 with Cassandra] shows up then and there, 6-7 years after the events of DA:O.  Context: I needs it.

~~~~~~~~~~

And for more discussion on party-based gaming, that happened to come up while I was in the middle of this personal meditation, see Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Horde on The Future of the Computer Role-Playing Game.

The Gamer's Gaze, part 3

In part 1 and part 2, we discussed the historical origin of the term "male gaze" and went over the actual literal ways in which the camera "looks" in gaming.  There are some great commenter insights in the comments of those posts, too.

The inspiration for this whole mini-series originally sprang from a comment Enstarstarstar left on the Tomb Raider post, where he asked:

"my question is this: isn't this true about games in general? that is, the format of a game--you, the player, have control over much of the perspective and action--makes it in many respects about you. horror games in particular do this prolifically: they take you (and the character you control) through situations that make you feel helpless, or threatened, or out of control. at the very least, narrative games put your character into situations that are designed to play your emotions (think, for instance, bioshock, which even explicitly takes control away from you at the climactic moment).

i guess i'm wondering--aside from the looming threat of sexual violence, the echoey shrieks of the main character, and the different tone of the story and setting--how that intro is different from the intro to uncharted 2. drake wakes up, shot, on a train hanging off from a cliff, and the whole place is falling to pieces around him. there is no question about it: the threat to drake is meant to be something that you feel, something that tosses you into the middle of the action in order to pull you in to the story.

lara's situation strikes me as meant to do exactly the same thing. where they differ, i would argue, is in the way they go about doing it."

My initial response to his insight?  "Exactly."

Modern narrative games are designed to put you into a character's metaphorical shoes.  First-person and third-person games go about it in two different ways, but either way, at least some element of the narrative is in your hands.  That's what makes it a game.  Which elements you can control, and how deeply you the player can affect any of them, vary widely.

Enstar is right to observe that in one sense, Naughty Dog and Crystal Dynamics are indeed aiming to accomplish the exact same goals.  But he also highlights a crucial problem: in this instance, the difference between a male character and a female character is in the looming threat of sexual violence, the echoey shrieks, and the tone of the story.  And he's exactly right: the difference is not even so much in the story that is told, but in the way the story is told.

All of it, across three posts, adds up to this: the stories we play contain visual (and sometimes auditory) cues that tell us, in unquestionable terms, that the player meant to be viewing these stories and sharing these perspectives is an archetypal sort of heterosexual male.

Most of the time it's so ingrained and built-in that we don't really notice it until we're presented with an exception.  None of us were surprised to be in the role of a mystery man in Bioshock, but discovering Chell in Portal made many of us utter a surprise squeal of delight.   Madison's treatment in Heavy Rain isn't shocking, just disappointing.  And because lady Commander Shepard is so great, Miranda's ...assets... particularly stand out.  

When the player character is male, we don't have as many opportunities to notice this design bias.  We're seeing what we expect to see, what we've been trained to see.  It's easy, however, to come by moments of cognitive dissonance when the male perspective is being filtered through a female player character -- and it's especially easy to catch when the player gets to pick the sex of the protagonist, as in Fallout 3.  In "When 'You' Is A Girl," Jenn Frank observes:

I admitted I wasn’t very far into Fallout 3, so my impression was, and remains, cursory. But it would have been one thing, I reasoned aloud, if I genuinely felt bonded to my Fallout 3 character, or if I had felt like the Character’s story were my story, too. But I didn’t feel that way at all.

Like, in the story, when another little girl comforted me during my botched birthday party, I suspiciously felt as if she were coyly putting the moves on my (ten-year old?) “self.” And I think I was supposed to like her, at least in the context of the game, and instead I just felt sort of weird, a dissonance, an artificial and completely fabricated gender dysphoria. And it would have worked if she had talked to me, well, I guess maybe like a lesbian, but instead the dialogue was vaguely heteronormative, like when eight-year old girls play House together and one girl says, “Now you be Dad” (we did! We did do this!), and then she talks to you in this put-upon, artificial way like she thinks Mom talks to Dad, instead of using the vocabulary and lexicon eight-year old girls use to talk to one another, which on an especially well socialized child sounds like “Can you please braid my hair.”

And then, I complained on the patio about how, maybe twenty minutes further into Fallout 3, some teenaged bully is following me around, shouting, threatening—and trying, I think, to punch me in the teeth—and I just cannot shake the feeling that he thinks he is shouting at a guy. It’s as if his every pronoun has been shifted from “he” to “she,” carefully rerecorded for my personal edification, and yet it is glaringly obvious that the game’s “You!” was never intended for me.

She later writes a fantastic line about how Fallout 3 lets you change the player character sex, but not actually the character gender -- all of the behaviors of NPCs and narrative still default the Lone Wanderer to male.  As with so many other games, it reads as a reskinning of the default male player character with long hair and breasts and a find / replace on some pronouns.

There's this argument one hears all the time from male gamers (I have lost track of how many hundred times I've seen it): that they create female avatars in third-person-perspective games so that they have someone attractive to look at.  Which is funny, because when I create female avatars in third-person games, it's so that I have someone attractive to be.

That difference in approach is, right there, the player's personification of the male gaze.  There's certainly no crime in appreciating your protagonist's physique.  (For example, I'll grant that I, a straight woman, definitely appreciate Nathan Drake's character design.)  But a game isn't designed for a male player to appreciate a male lead character's ass.  It's designed for a male player to project some aspect of himself into that male character, and to take back some of that male character's general badassery unto himself.  When a female player character arrives, she is pretty much always still the personification of that male ideal, just now also dressed up in a slim and curvy body for the male player to appreciate.

When we play Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, there is absolutely no doubt in anyone's mind that the player sees the game through Monkey.  Trip is, well, a problem character.  As designed, she's a force for compelling Monkey to reveal his heart of gold, and a prize to be endangered, thus requiring rescue.**  As the game is presented to us, Monkey is absolutely justifiable in his early rage toward her and, other than an ability to become completely useless over time, Trip has very few defining characteristics overall.  In fact, Trip's character could have been written a hundred different ways (and has been, as in the original myth her role was filled by a Buddhist monk).  And of those hundred different ways, which is chosen for gaming?  The attractive, somewhat under-dressed, doe-eyed girl, who needs the player character.

Right.

This is what made Commander Shepard's female incarnation such a landmark character: Shepard's behavior, motivations, animation, and so on really do apply equally well to either the Mark Meer or Jennifer Hale iterations of the Commander.  As Line pointed out, Shepard can veer neither into overly "masculine" or "feminine" behaviors, as both versions are given full respect by the development team.  So while the world Shep inhabits still has some definite issues with male gaze, the player character generally does not.

In terms of success in a first-person game, I actually felt that Fallout: New Vegas had the neutrality that was absent from Fallout 3.  Generally the newer Fallout games are played in first-person and the Courier is unvoiced, so the third-person nuance from the Mass Effect titles isn't present.  But in general, every NPC to whom the PC talks is presented front and center, in a neutral straight shot.  The S&M styled hookers in New Vegas come in both male and female varieties and none are presented as particularly alluring.  Villains, companions, and denizens of the Wasteland are indeed a relatively organic mix of male and female, and the removal of limitations on sex-based perks removes a significant chunk of the privilege from the default.  

This is not unique to gaming by any stretch; film and television are just as guilty as they have ever been.  The difference is that while film and TV have also created genres (still problematic) that do inhabit "female gaze" territory, gaming has been slow to catch up on that front.  As we see over and over in every other aspect of gaming -- writing, art, and especially marketing -- the common target is still the mythical basement-dwelling adolescent (but with adult income) socially inept male.  Many games are designed, up front, to appeal to that small handful of modders who, first thing, are going to apply nude textures to every woman in the game, as if the internet didn't have enough boobs on it already.

If we were to look for a female gaze in gaming, my hunch is that we would find it in a handful of jRPGs.  My memories of Final Fantasy XIII are hazy because all I ever did was make fun of it, but as I recall parts of it at least had what I would consider a "girly" take.  (Though it may just be that I'm remembering the use of soft focus, which would be read as feminizing to the characters on screen but not necessarily a female point of view.)

Regardless, my preference is for attempts at gender neutrality in the construction of games.  Some male characters are going to be chauvinists and some female characters are going to be seductresses; those are (still) the stories we tell.  But when the use of camera and framing in a game make those characters more "okay" than others, we run into a system that keeps making games about men and for men, even when the player character and the player are both women.  And that's just not going to do.

**I'll mention here that we're still in chapter 8 or 9 of this game, and have not yet finished it.  It is possible that in the last act Trip and the design studio will redeem themselves, but I am decidedly not optimistic.

Beyond the Girl Gamer 1.4: Best Supporting Actress

Beyond the Girl Gamer: Introduction | 1.1 | 1.2 | 1.3

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In this series, so far the character discussion has focused on protagonists and player characters -- our heroes, as it were. But the worlds in which we game are teeming with sidekicks, companions, antagonists, villains, and other NPCs.

And when I say teeming, I mean it.  First I sat down to list off "just a few," but even limiting myself only to games I personally have played in the last two years, I immediately came up with: GLaDOS, The Boss, Naomi Hunter, Liara T'Soni, Jack, Miranda Lawson, Dr. Chakwas, Rose of Sharon Cassidy, Veronica Santangelo, Christine Royce, Chloe Frazer, Elena Fisher, Lucy Stillman, and Madison Paige.  That batch was just my immediate first thought -- clearly, there are hundreds or thousands more we could discuss.

Cass, Dr. Chakwas, Chloe, Elena, GLaDOS, Jack, Liara, Lucy, Madison, Miranda, Naomi, and Veronica.

There's more than a bit of variety in types there, to be sure.  Some of those characters are presented in a deliberately sexualized way; many, interestingly, are not.  Some of these characters defy stereotypes; some reinforce them.  (And despite the variety in their names, there's not much racial diversity in this collage, nor in the characters I named but didn't grab images of.)  But what they have in common is that most of them do actually get to be characters.  We don't know as much about them as we hope to know about our player characters, but many of them are at least given histories as plausible and deep as those of the main characters.

What I want to see in a female member of the supporting cast is a woman who helps to serve the story by what she does, rather than by what is done to her.  And let's face it: fiction (not just gaming, but also literature, television, and film) is chock-full of women whose purpose as a plot device is to be victimized.  This is where we get the Women in Refrigerators trope.

As with many of the issues of representation in media, the issue is more an aggregate one than an individual one.  One story of a man avenging his raped and murdered wife would be one thing, but hundreds of stories about a man avenging a raped and murdered woman add up to another thing entirely.  The same applies across all problematic, over-used tropes: the incompetent father, the black criminal, the Spanish-speaking housemaid...  By itself, any of these stories could stand as a story of one incompetent man, or one victimized woman -- but together, they add up to an ugly and problematic cultural picture.

One of the best things about Portal (the first) is that GLaDOS serves the plot entirely, 100% by what she does.  Nothing has been done to her and she is not in any way a victim: she is the guide and antagonist, full stop.  On the other hand, by Portal 2 this has changed.  Her motivation is now based on something that was done to her in the first game: she's pretty damn pissed off about you having dismantled her in the boss fight.  But her "murder" at the end of Portal isn't exactly what I would call "victimization" and even through being transformed into a potato she maintains her vindictive core.  Whichever way you look at it, circumstances force her into a passive role, rather than an active one, and that is indeed where so many female characters find themselves.

For the most frustrating example of passivity (in the "what is done to her" sense) in modern gaming, I nominate Madison Paige of Heavy Rain.

Oh, Madison.

You first meet her while she is asleep in her apartment, in her underwear.  She putters around with insomnia for a while (where the player can look at her digs and even have her take a shower).  Then she's suddenly attacked by a team of shadowy men assaulting her, a (surprise, dream!) sequence that always ends in her capture and death.

This is your first impression of Madison Paige.  Not with her family (like Ethan Mars) or at work (like Norman Jayden or Scott Shelby), but inexplicably the victim of a violent physical attack.

Further scenes with Madison have her escaping a horrific serial killer with some pretty damn creepy rapist overtones, removing half her clothes to get access to a slumlord, removing the other half of her clothes at the slumlord's violent insistence, playing nursemaid to the male lead at least twice, spontaneous sex with the male lead, and being trapped in a burning apartment (although there "woman in refrigerator" is actually the non-death answer).

And that's if you do the "good" Madison who survives the whole game as a character in play with all the "right" choices: boobs, nursing, boobs, nursing, ass, sex, boobs, and repeated victim or near-victim of graphic, horrible, sexualized violence and attempted rape.  Even my extremely mild-mannered, no-strong-words, no-drinking, no-swearing, even-tempered father-in-law remarked aloud that the best (and only memorable) thing about her was her rear end, and that the only understanding he got from her scenes was that she was fun to watch.  And I think that's about all Quantic Dream intended.

I recently wrote about the role and presentation of some female companion characters in Mass Effect 2.  I had wanted to write that first so I wouldn't repeat myself here -- so if you're curious what I think about Miranda's rear or Jack's outfit, look there.  In terms of writing, though, I do give BioWare full credit: all members of your party seem to be roughly equally developed.  They each have a loyalty mission (most of which seem to involve some serious daddy issues) and they each have roughly the same amount to say when you're just kicking around the Normandy.  Although some of their physical assets may be overdeveloped (and isn't that always the way), their stories at least aren't underdeveloped, at least as compared to the male characters.

Not all female sidekicks get that level of development.  Elena Fisher of the Uncharted games is a journalist who's fairly kick-ass (and certainly competent) in her own right.  But she and other similar characters (Lucy in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood leaps to mind) blend together by being underdeveloped.  I really would have loved a few more lines in Uncharted or especially Uncharted 2 just letting us know why Elena was around, and what she ever would have seen in Drake.  Her character was so close to being awesome that I really wish they'd taken a few extra steps and brought her farther to the front. (On the other hand, Uncharted 3 seems to be setting itself up with a prominent female villain, so I do look forward to writing more about this franchise at the end of the year.)

There's always so much going on in the supporting cast of a video game that sometimes it's hard to unpack all the steps that are involved.  Are there even any women?  If so, must their gender serve a specific narrative purpose or is it the "coin toss?"  If there are women, are they granted the same character status as men?  And how do they dress, walk, speak, and present themselves?  I've only mentioned the tiniest handful of games here, because I'm just one gamer and this is just one post.  There are thousands more we could discuss, some of which I would agree "do it right," and others... not so much.  (And I'm sure they'll come up in the comments.)

Next chapter: we transition to section 2, writing, by tackling the "coin toss," the default avatar, authorial presence, action, and intent, and examining the worlds in which our characters move.

Beyond the Girl Gamer 1.3: Perspective and Identification

Beyond the Girl Gamer: Introduction | 1.1 | 1.2

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There's a kind of game character that's pre-defined for you, and you just play through his or her story.  He is Nathan Drake, Ezio, or Solid Snake; she is Lara Croft, April Ryan, or Samus Aran.  We've talked about some of those female leads before, in this series.

But then there's the other kind of character.  One where you pick your character's gender and looks, where you decide if he's a short white guy or if she's a tall Asian lady.  And we haven't talked about them, yet.  Being given choice in the kind of character we play can change how we identify with that character, and how we feel about that character.

There are also two different ways we see our characters in video games.  We are either looking at them (third person) or looking through them (first person).  And the way we do or don't see that character on screen can also change how we identify with that character, or how we feel about that character.

Choosing and seeing a character are two big elements in character identification; the third is hearing your character.  None of us heard Guybrush Threepwood in his first two outings, because as awesome as Dominic Armato is, the tech just wasn't there yet.  But we all heard April Ryan, and we all hear Nathan Drake.  In 2011, the choice of whether or not your player character speaks audibly is no longer a technical one, in an AAA game, but an artistic one.

And where so far many of the leading ladies featured in this series have come from older gaming titles, this post will finally bring us firmly into the 21st century.  The altered dynamics of player-chosen gender as well as of visual perspective have been a big thing in three (well, six) big games of the last few years:

• Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas
• Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2
• Portal and Portal 2

I have put rather a shocking number of hours into those two Fallout games since 2009.  Well over 100 hours into Fallout 3 and all its associated DLC, and about 90 so far into New Vegas (including Dead Money).

The Lone Wanderer and the Courier, the way I play, are always female.  The Courier looks a lot like me.  She shares my outlook and moral core, and she moves through conversations the way I personally would like to move through conversations.

In short, I move through the Mojave Wasteland, making decisions about the future fate of New Vegas and all its denizens.  Why?  Because Fallout: New Vegas is best played as a first-person game (although you can switch into third-person at any time), and the Courier is completely unvoiced.  As I read her dialogue, before I select the best option, I hear it -- I hear myself thinking through it and making a choice.  Thus, the Courier is as female as a character can get, because I'm female and strongly self-identify as such.

To other players, I imagine the Courier is thoroughly male or thoroughly genderqueer, because those players strongly self-identify as such, and are given a chance to fill in this character's shell with their own values and morals.

And then, in mute protagonists, there's Chell.  I've just recently written extensively about Portal 2, including spoilers, but with Chell the gist of it all begins from that "Holy crap, I'm a girl!!!" moment in the beginning of Portal.  That moment felt great -- and then it stopped being relevant, because the fact of the matter is, it's an entirely first-person game, unvoiced, and so I assume most players just put themselves in the protagonist's spring-loaded shoes and felt that they were dismantling GLaDOS. 

Portal 2 does a better job of reminding you consistently that you're represented in this space by a female body, with Wheatley and GLaDOS giving fairly constant references to "she" and "her" when describing you, and a high number of puzzle solutions requiring you to place portals in such a way that you can see yourself.  But the player not only remains unvoiced -- she also remains entirely mute.  There is no player dialogue; there are no dialogue options.  Indeed, there are no actual choices to be made, and so although it's great we're a girl and all... I know I felt "female" playing that game but I don't think one could say the same of all players.

Interestingly, the unvoiced first-person works both ways: despite the very explicit, defined player character in Bioshock being male, between plot exposition points I stopped thinking of him that way and simply perceived of myself as moving through Rapture.  Then again, female consumers -- of all media, books, games, movies, and TV -- are used to having to put themselves into the space of a male protagonist.  It's second nature at this point, after spending my childhood planning to grow up to be Robin Hood and Indiana Jones.

But there is one very notable game (franchise) out there right now where you have the choice of your player character's voice and appearance.  Commander Shepard (cosmic badass) is a fully voiced, third-person, completely fleshed-out character -- male or female depending on the player's choice.  Commander Shepard will have the same lines, the same attitude, the same behavior regardless of gender.

FemShep is notoriously awesome.  Female players love her.  Male players love her.  In the first Mass Effect game she was considered to be the superior character for voice acting reasons.   Go Make Me A Sandwich has rhapsodized on Shepard as female protagonist done right:

She never winds up playing second fiddle to her team members because in the end it’s all about helping her get the job done. And, ohmigod I can’t possibly articulate how much I love BioWare for this. Honestly, sitting right here I can’t name a single female video game character besides FemShep that is 1) not sexualized 2) in charge and 3) the main character.

And all of this is improved by the massive amounts of choice the player gets in deciding the fate of the universe. FemShep is a character whose decisions affect the entire galaxy, again not a role that you often see female characters in. And she gets to do all manner of epically awesome things. FemShep isn’t just a person – she’s a force of nature. So when people ask me what exactly it is that I do want in games? This. I want this. More of it. A lot more.

Interestingly, though, although I am protective of "my" Shepard and her perspective on galactic doom -- because obviously, that's totally how it happened, duh -- I don't relate to her the way I relate to an unvoiced player character (third-person or first-person).  She speaks with a clear voice that isn't mine, and her dialogue options are often constrained to things I would prefer not to say.  But that's a complaint for another day.

Character design and game design are informed by a lot of different technical needs and artistic wants from game to game -- there isn't a one-size-fits all solution, and nor should there be.  But FemShep stands out among modern game characters for being the very, very rare example of a third-person visualized, fully-voiced, true female lead character.  More often women are part of an ensemble cast (Final Fantasy XIII), or are left to the voice of the player (Fallout 3), or are completely invisible and completely mute (Portal).  Mass Effect does indeed stand out in the current crop of big-budget games.

Next chapter: We move from examining player characters into the supporting cast.

No medal for you!

The debate around "what are games?" comes up a lot, and today, elsewhere on the web, Roger Ebert came up again.  We all know how that goes.

But that conversation brought me back to something I've been thinking about for a long time.  (Blogger's draft archive says that I, in fact, started this post originally over two months ago.)  The thought applies to film and to modern TV as well as to gaming, but we're talking specifically gaming here now.

I would love to see reviews (which are different from analytical criticisms) split up like Olympic ice skating scores are split up. "Technical" and "Artistic" are both important elements of visual storytelling, and they each deserve their own mention.  The graphics and mechanics of a game are its technical merits; the writing, mood, and storytelling of a game would be its artistic ones.

When it's working, you get a product where the two play off each other.  The framing of shots tells you part of the story: who's in the foreground?  Why is there a crazy angle?  What's with all the shadows?  Those elements are narratively relevant.  Similarly, in gaming, player control or the lack thereof can have an enormous impact on the story.  The way Heavy Rain tries to have the player mimic the motions of the characters is one example; the infamous moment in Bioshock is another.

Meanwhile, modern narrative games are stories of both breathtakingly intimate detail, and shockingly epic scope.  Heavy Rain, Mass Effect, Half-Life, Uncharted, Bioshock, and Fallout are all telling wildly different stories, but they're all doing it spectacularly well.  Whether it's trying to save one child's life or whether it's trying to save the entire galaxy / world / kingdom, modern games sweep us up into a narrative, and that story is conveyed through writing first and visual means second.  Even in a game that doesn't rely on dialogue (Shadow of the Colossus), the story is still a tale being told by some means, and that tale can be judged on its own merits as well.

When well thought-out, the technical aspects add something to the overall feel of a game.  When poorly thought-out, they subtract.  But even when a game isn't really working in that fluid, seamless sense, it can still achieve in one way or the other.  A graphically stunning, bug-free, easy-to-move-in game can be one that doesn't tell a story worth the hearing... and the world's most compelling tale can also be wrapped in bad performance, memory leaks, terrible graphics, and F-grade mechanics.

So I'd love to see reviews broken up into Technical and Artistic, with an overall weighted determination based on both.  (But of course, I'd treat them like I always treat reviews and read them after I'd seen the movie / played the game and formed my own opinions, haha.  I like not to be biased going in to something new.)

Fallout: New Vegas pissed me off because although I wanted to give it excellent marks for artistic merit, I had to flunk it on technical.  To extend the skating metaphor, it fell on its ass every time it tried a jump.  It fell on its ass skating laps around the practice rink.  It just plain fell on its ass.  This was not a new outing for the engine, nor for the dev team, nor for any part of it.  This, in a technical way, was Fallout 3 in a different location and with a better script.  So why didn't they just hold it for a month or six until it was ready?

This rant has been brought to you by my new playthrough of Divinity II.  This patched version, which I got through Steam at the Holiday sale, is technically about a million times better than the disc version.  And given that I had bugs in the initial release so bad that I had to send my save games back to Larian for repair multiple times... why didn't they just do this in the first place?!

The technical and the artistic -- the form and function -- are inseparable in a gaming in a way they are not in other media.  The existence of patching makes studios lazy here.  You don't get to sneak a chapter 14 rewrite into a book someone has purchased, and you can't go tweaking Act II of episode 4 a prime time TV drama after the whole season is already in the can and delivered to the network broadcast center.  But games have constant patching, all the time.  Constant DLC.  Constant implications that the creators of our art throw it at us before they consider it to be their finished, or even functional, product.

You can take a high technical score and a high artistic score and still be played, or observed, or talked about -- but no Game of the Year, no game that will place in the Canon will ever exist that doesn't master both.

Craving

Your Critic and her spouse are at an impasse.  For the first time since early 2007, we have no idea what our next "us" game should be.

We've played through a huge historical archive together, as he caught up on all the PC games he missed in his Mac-based youth, and as I found myself, for the first time, living in the same household as a PlayStation.  But last night, after completing the BBC Doctor Who adventure series from 2010, we sat on the couch and said... "Now what?"

Well, the truth is, I do know what I want.  But I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist.  I want an adventure game for grown-ups, for 2011.  I want a non-combat, thoroughly realized, full-world game, and not a cartoon.  I do love me some cartoon games (the entire Ace Attorney series, everything Telltale's put out in the last 3 years) but I want to be in a world that's fully explorable, with an open map, WASD-friendly... thinking and solving.

I suspect The Longest Journey is what gave me this bug, really.  It's a brilliant and wonderfully-realized world, just hampered by its decade-old technology.  I wish it could give me more.  I hated how the Doctor Who games pandered to brainlessness (family-friendly: good, could be solved by a 3-year-old without help: bad) and although I'm really loving how Telltale is handling Back to the Future, as a 30-year-old gamer I'm getting tired of feeling like I'm playing through puzzles and stories that I could have handled in 3rd grade.  (If full-color monitors and 3D graphics had, y'know, been a thing when I was in 3rd grade.)

I'm a particular fan of non-linear games with worlds to explore and smart writing.  Fallout New Vegas (and 3), Divinity I and II -- those are games where you're rewarded for opening every barrel and looking under every rock.  Not with things that necessarily advance your character or help with the storyline, but with things that are fun and that you feel clever for having discovered.

The problem is: adventure game worlds are almost always linear.  Even when they're not strictly linear, there's still a modular linearity -- as in the Myst titles.  You might have many Ages to explore and solve in the order you see fit, but that's still just rearranging the middle of the flowchart in a way that doesn't much seem to matter. Whereas when I'm running around Broken Valley in Divinity II, I can do pretty much everything there however I like, while working on the story or not, until such time as that area is forced to become unavailable to me.  The same applies to the Capital Wasteland in Fallout 3, or the Mojave Wasteland in Fallout: New Vegas.

I've been unsatisfied with many of the latest Telltale offerings and with the BBC Doctor Who game, feeling that these games aren't relying on my intelligence or abilities.  I don't feel a genuine sense of suspense -- I'm not asking for timed events, but I long for a concept of urgency, for a real threat, for an unknown survival element.  I'm asking for puzzles with multiple avenues of solution.  I'm asking for the illusion of agency, rather than to feel like I'd be better off watching a TV show because at least then I wouldn't know what happened next before I got there.

I feel that the innate drama of the courtroom (even a wacky, WTF courtroom) in Phoenix Wright helps create necessary narrative tension.  The Longest Journey had necessary narrative tension due to sharp writing, and you learned to trust that early on.  Dreamfall is an entirely problematic game (omgwtf Kian, he had epic character development and apparently some Big Revelations... all off camera?  Show, don't tell!) but even it created a great deal of narrative tension -- although it also relied on the sort of artificial puzzle placement and combat moments that games we don't think of as adventure games use.

This post was going to be 2500 words long, so I'll break it up.  Coming next: a meditation on genre.  But in the meantime... why doesn't this game I need to play exist?  And can someone make it for me?

The Ego of the Gamer

I've spent a large part of the last few days discussing history elsewhere.  I majored in history in college, have read quite a lot of it over the years, and generally find the subject interesting.  Yay history!

But of course, history isn't just names and dates.  I'm fond of referring to it as an incomprehensibly large jigsaw puzzle, made up of all the stories that ever have been, all the stories that are, and all the stories that are yet to come.

It's hard, when reading of some particularly egregious era, not to insert yourself.  I read about the 1850s, and I think, "I hope I would have been an abolitionist."  I read about the 1930s and 40s and think, "I hope I would have helped protect Jews."  I read about the 1950s and 60s and think, "I hope I would have worked on civil rights."  At least I have the good grace to hope I would have been a certain way, rather than to assert that I know I would have lived up to my own 21st-century ideals.

There's been a lot of choice-based gaming going on in my circle lately.  As chronicled here, I recently completed Fallout: New Vegas.  One of my close friends is finally playing Fallout 3, and she and my husband have been giddily discussing Mass Effect (1 and 2) for months.  I've mentioned how I grappled with the choices I had to make in New Vegas.

I've realized, putting these threads together, that in many ways, a game with a rich, detailed world is what gives me the chance to "prove" that I'm the person I like to hope I would be.  When I'm in a world like the Mojave Wasteland, I feel compelled to create the maximum possible good for the maximum number of people.  I want to make their world a better place; I want to give them the chances to be good people.  Granted, I also go and vanquish evil, but somehow that always feels secondary to me to the side quests.

When we say, "games let us play the hero," that's true.  And often it's in a very black-and-white, save-the-kingdom-from-the-dragon kind of way.  But the component of choice in modern games makes that feel a hundred times more powerful.  If I'm playing Super Mario Brothers, then rescuing the princess is non-optional.  If I'm playing Fallout: New Vegas, I can remake the world according to my own morality.

What power.  And what a rush.  And how robust a chance to feel Good, and Right, and Vindicated.

I think that's what it really means when a game lets you "be a hero."  Not that you get to stomp out evil (although that's always entertaining, not gonna lie), but that you get a visceral way of being the person that, deep down, you always like to hope you would be, given that kind of a world.

Food for thought.

War: War Never Changes. (But New Vegas Does.)

So, I finished Fallout: New Vegas around Christmas.  Or at least, that is to say, I chose an ending arc to the game, and since it was the first one I played (achievements make me compulsive and I expect to spend another 20 hours in the game in 2011 unless there's DLC, in which case it'll be a lot more) it's the one I'll always feel is "real."

The rest is behind a jump, because there are significant spoilers for the plot and most characters.

When the Going Gets Tough...

...the tough get confused and go do something else for a while.

I've officially put about 68 hours into Fallout: New Vegas, by my Steam account, but about 55 hours into the game according to my saves, because I've done a bit of backtracking and reloading.  Some of that's been due to bugs -- a quest not proceeding as it should (I still can't make the one at the Camp McCarran tower work properly) -- but a lot of it's been down to me being indecisive.

From what I can tell, there are a total of four different quest arcs you can choose from, to reach the end of the game and complete the story.  I know I have no interest in helping the Legion, ultimately, but otherwise I'm still undecided about what the best or worst outcome for New Vegas may be.

And on the one hand I like that the game isn't as clear-cut as Fallout 3 was (Brotherhood good; Enclave bad), and I enjoy that there are a number of different major and minor factions at play.  But on the other hand, I have this burning need to follow all possible roads as far as I can.  I think, for the three or four end-game series that have stages 1 - 7, I can get up to about #3 or #4 on all of them before I have to pick one path and stick with it.  So that's what I'm going to do.  But I can tell it's going to get very tricky...

(In the meantime, folks who like me include the NCR, the Brotherhood, the Strip, the Followers, and a number of towns around the Mojave Wasteland; folks who really can't stand me are mainly just the Legion but I have a safe passage token for them.  The other baddies are not pleased with me but only one of them is kill-on-sight (and not the ones who Vilify me, oddly) so I've been free to explore the map.  Only 8 locations left uncovered!)

Still Wandering the Wasteland

There is a brief list of reasons why I should probably not have been allowed to buy Fallout: New Vegas.

1. I am a completeist.  I can leave no quest undone!
2. See #1.  Even if two quests are diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive (if A is "Go kill B" and B is "Go kill A"), I will probably try my hardest to complete both before I give up and pick one.
3. I am an explorer.  I can leave no corner of the map uncovered!
4. I am an adult with a full-time job and a partner.

I am between 45 and 50 hours into the game, somewhere around level 24.  I have recruited all 8 possible companions, completed 20 achievements and a pile of Challenges, and am still only maybe 50% through with what I want to achieve in this game.  I am still playing my first character through and other people have already rolled their evil toon and completed *that* game.  

At this rate it'll be 2012 before I get to play anything else and by then I'll be in Bioshock Infinite.  Which at least will probably go straight start to finish like the first two and leave me off my own just-one-more-location, just-one-more-quest hook.

I'm impressed with a lot of elements of New Vegas, though.  The whole cycle of drugs, prostitution, and gambling in New Vegas is handled with more personality and nuance than I've come to expect from gaming.  RedJenny once asked me what was different playing a female Wanderer in Fallout 3, and of course I had no idea because I've never played a male one.  The same is true so far of New Vegas but given all of the options, and the Perks and such, I suspect it's actually the exact same game for both a male and a female Courier -- including who's available for seduction and so on.

If I ever finish the game I'll write more about it.  And until I do finish it, I'm not going to get to play much else.  Except Uncharted 2, which we started yesterday and I enjoy yelling at. ;)

The Stories We Tell

One of the most fascinating things about gaming, to me, is that all gaming is narrative.  Even Tetris, or Pong.  Why? 

Because players are always, always creating stories around their actions.  We are creatures of pattern, creatures seeking for reason, and for us even the most non-narrative game has a beginning, a middle, and an end we can tell.

Even in games with explicit stories, the stories we tell aren't necessarily the ones that are written for us, which is the really fun part.  In Fallout: New Vegas, for example, there's a clear story arc.  It's a game with a potent, well-defined setting and very clearly-written quests.  But I've been finding that the most potent moments are the ones I generate, not the ones the game does.

My favorite F:NV story so far?  There I was, level 3, on the road trying to get to the next nearest town.  I had a 9mm and a weathered 10mm and not much ammo for either.  And every time I tried to go anywhere, I'd be surrounded by a mob of big, fatal, deadly radscorpions.  Finally, in desperation, I clambered up a sloped rock.  And very suddenly, realized a few things:

1. I can climb this rock
2. They can't climb up this rock
3. They are all gathered together in one clump now, and
4. I have dynamite.

That was a great moment for me, because I, the player and I, the character had come up with a solution to a problem that wasn't explicitly carved out by the game.  It's a better Fallout story than, "oh, yeah, I did exactly the same quest that everyone else did in Goodsprings."

The other really strong moment for me, so far (about 12 hours into the game, level 8-ish; I tend to explore the whole map and do every side quest before wrapping up the main arc) was in a town where a man, a sniper, is seeking vengeance on the person responsible for his wife's death, and asks you to help.  You help by bringing someone in front of his sniper nest, and he does the rest.

Where that quest really got me was in the power given to the player character: as soon as you've accepted the quest, "Come with me to [sniper nest]" is a dialogue option for every single person in town.  The game doesn't force you to make a right or wrong choice, or indeed any choice at all.  The game leaves it completely up to the player to decide what kind of person her character is.

(For me, I was shocked at the thought of doing such a thing, and in fact even had trouble bringing the right person in... at least, until I found all the evidence. *shudder*)

So, yeah.  Playing Fallout: New Vegas in that way that addicts with a shiny new toy do.  And I don't at all mind that it's more of a Fallout 3: 2 than a Fallout 4, 'cause I really liked Fallout 3 and the real sequel will come soon enough!