Reality, rebooted

We're in an era of endless reboots and sequels.

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.

Maybe sometimes we have sequels for a reason.

L. A. Non-Noire

There he is, our square-jawed all-American rookie cop!  Ladies and gentlemen, Cole Phelps:

"Hello! I specialize in flying off the handle unexpectedly."

We installed L.A. Noire on Tuesday, but it then took us three hours to download all of the DLC so we didn't actually get to play until Wednesday.  Since then, we've been taking it a case or two at a time, when we have the hours, and so we're advancing slowly through the game.  Last night we just got promoted from Traffic to Homicide, and haven't started any cases yet on the homicide desk.

This is another game that's caused some marital controversy, though not on the order of, say, Portal 2.  My spouse wants to play in black & white, and I want to play in color.  Right now color's winning, because I put up a bigger fuss.  But on the occasional replay (it took us a while to get the hang of questioning witnesses, and then there was that time that I hit what I thought was X and turned out totally not to be) he switches it to black and white, so I get to see both.

The interesting thing is, it took that shift in visual tone for me to understand something about L.A. Noire.  The game actually suffers from losing the color, and not for any technical reason.  Rather, it's that when you're looking at it in shades of grey, it's easier to realize: L.A. Noire is not actually a noir.

The overarching story may yet get there, I grant.  Flashbacks of Phelps's time in the war, combined with the story unfolding from found newspapers and some other cut-scenes (visiting the singer Else between the end of the last Traffic case and the start of the first Homicide one), are building up into a large secondary tale.  We've hours of gameplay ahead of us yet, and we're still early on in our young cop's skyrocketing career.

But that's where I get stuck: a film noir isn't about a promising young man's skyrocketing career.  It's not about a man's successes at all.  Noir is, rather, about a man's critical failures, and the society that made him fall.

Double Indemnity, 1944 - film noir, as classic as it gets. Go rent it.

Team Bondi / Rockstar have shown extraordinary dedication in re-creating post-war Los Angeles.  The degree of geographical fidelity and attention to detail that they put into this game has been lauded everywhere.  They also deeply understand, and start showing early on in Phelps's flashbacks, that film noir is an expression of post-war cultural crisis.  The Film Theory 101 definition is this:

Like Double Indemnity, these films thrived upon the unvarnished depiction of greed, lust, and cruelty because their basic theme was the depth of human depravity and utterly unheroic nature of human beings -- lessons that were hardly taught but certainly re-emphasized by the unique horrors of World War II.  Most of the dark films of the late forties take the form of crime melodramas because ... the mechanisms of crime and criminal detection provide a perfect metaphor for corruption that cuts across conventional moral categories.  These films are often set in southern California -- the topographical paradigm for a society in which the gap between expectation and reality is resolved through mass delusion.  The protagonists are frequently unsympathetic antiheroes who pursue their base designs or simply drift aimlessly through sinister night worlds of the urban American jungle, but they are just as often decent people caught in traps laid for them by a corrupt social order.  In this latter sense, film noir was very much a 'cinema of moral anxiety'' of the sort practiced at various times in postwar Eastern Europe ... i.e., cinema about the conditions of life forced upon honest people in a mendacious, self-deluding society.

Here's the other thing, though: what we the modern audience recognize of a noir is its artifice.  We recognize the shadows, the blinds, the hats, and the women.  We recognize the black and white film and the framing.  There's a very specific visual language used to tell these stories, and that visual language conveys crucial elements.  The decay of society, the moral ambiguity (or amorality) of the characters, and the literal and metaphorical darkness of the world they inhabit -- we take those lessons from the camera.

The Killers, 1946

By now, these artistic tactics are cliché.  The audience of 2011 hasn't seen The Naked City, but they've seen thousands of episodes of its modern heir, Law & Order.  Our cynicism no longer lurks in shadows, but rather is worn on our sleeves from a very young age.  Our society is so inundated with media that most of us start learning to speak the visual language of the camera before we learn to speak our mother tongue.

But in a video game, we lose that framing.  Cole Phelps is a detective, not a shadowy killer, and so much of his work takes place in broad daylight.  Shadows are minimal and carefully placed, because otherwise they will interfere with the player's ability to read witness faces and find crucial clues.  A game, and especially an investigative process game, must by necessity cede a significant amount of framing and camera control to the player, who maneuvers Cole Phelps at will.

I deeply appreciate the use of actual history in the game, but part of what happens when you set a game in such a carefully re-created reality is that you lose the artifice attached to the genre.  Film noir isn't about faithfully investigating the crime scene in the California sun; it's about the shadows cast across the face of a disillusioned man, the shadows that allow him to hide his true intentions from a man like Detective Phelps.

Cole Phelps is indeed a character type that exists in film noir -- but that character is never the protagonist.  The protagonist in a noir is the antihero, the man that has become corrupt from the degeneration of society (and in particular has often been brought low by a degenerate grasping woman).

What we are seeing, in L. A. Noire, is a long series of film noir stories in which we are playing the bit part.  A case about a scheming B-movie actress, a starry-eyed young girl, and a licentious and immoral film producer?  As a two-hour cautionary tale in which people end up dead at the end, that would be a classic noir.  But instead we're the cop.  We come in after everything's gone all to hell and then reverse engineer the story.  Our player character is not in these stories, but rather is an observer of them.  As a player avatar, that's a little eerily on target.

All of this said -- please don't mistake this criticism for dislike!  So far L. A. Noire is playing out like Ace Attorney: Grand Theft Auto Edition, and I love that.  I'm into investigations, I love finding clues and solving mysteries, and now that we're getting the hang of Cole Phelps it's starting to be quite fun.  (I was taken aback the first time we selected "doubt," thinking that the witness might not have been entirely truthful, and Phelps immediately burst into a loud and angry tirade and accused the witness of being the killer.  What?!)

I look forward to seeing the shape that the game takes by the time we finish it.  We may yet find that the story wrapped around all of these cynical little nuggets is, itself, a film noir frame.  But even if we don't, I'm enjoying the ride.

The Gamer's Gaze, part 2

We're going to take a brief step back from diving deeper into the idea of the male gaze and spend a moment talking about straight up looking: how do we see what we see in games?  We began by working through what the gaze means when we're discussing the cinematic camera.

But in gaming, the camera goes beyond cinematic.  Games contain a level of spectator participation and interactivity above and beyond that of film.  In addition to the director's choice of camera placement, the player has choice in camera placement.  Whether through direct control or through controlling our avatars, in most modern gaming we participate in the camera's positioning.  However, even when we define the literal point of view taken on the scene, the actual angle, we don't necessarily control the gaze.  It's a delicate balance, but the player does contribute to the gaze in games through active choice, in a way not present in most other media.  The game's authors, by creating the content and the camera, and the game's players, by choosing character perspective both literal and figurative, work in tandem to create the final gaze that the spectator takes.

Our ability to take on a changing and well-defined (or ambiguous) gaze has changed over time, as the technology of game design has improved.  The literal points of view available to us have shifted through the years.  Most players, for example, can admire the landscape and imagery present in an isometric game, but few of us will actively control the camera in such a layout for any reason other than better to understand tactics or strategy.  The gaze is akin to the way a player would look at a chessboard, rather than the way an audience member would look at a play or film.

Diablo II was the grand-daddy of a generation of clone RPGs.

In film, the camera represents and guides our view.  It leads; we follow.  Indeed, we have no other choice.  The director has pre-determined our viewpoint and the boundaries of frame and of on-screen space for us.  Film works because of limitations on the spectator gaze.  In order to create illusory spaces with real people and objects, a director needs to play with the camera and with space in all kinds of ways.

Forced perspective can make hobbits of us all.

Older generations of games were subject to nearly identical limitations.  For example, Myst -- now so very dated, but at the time so groundbreaking -- billed itself as "photorealistic" and meant just that: you moved through a world that was, essentially, a long series of complex and interactive photos.  The landscape was lovely but in terms of how we saw it, Myst was as much a flat pixel-hunt as Maniac Mansion or any shareware adventure game before it.

But in the 1990s, we gained a rather dramatic change with the arrival of explorable 3D game space.  Although it would take some time before our game worlds could be "true" 3D (and even in 2011, we're still fairly limited on that front), the difference was stark.  Given the chance to wander through a three dimensional space, the player suddenly gained some measure of autonomous control -- and notoriously, that measure was aim.  

The Doom games were beyond influential on the perennially bestselling FPS genre.

The most basic mechanic of the first-person shooter hasn't changed all that much in twenty years.  The game's camera and the player's point of view are meant to be one, intertwined.  Through fine mouse control (or later, and now more popularly, the analog stick), the player is expected fully to immerse himself (notably, not herself) in the role of the avatar.  The player explores the world, takes aim, and fires while fully inhabiting the persona of the character.  As a result, the player character may or may not be a well-defined individual.  Indeed, the player character can be nothing but an empty vessel, reduced to nothing but the gun -- but the world through which the avatar, and therefore the camera, moves is of utmost importance.

And those worlds have gotten pretty impressive, as Modern Warfare 2 shows us.

What's most interesting about the spectator's gaze in the FPS, though, is that game designers didn't invent it.  Alfred Hitchcock did, over 60 years ago.

Spellbound, 1945.

It's with Hitchcock (and the eternally fantastic Ingrid Bergman) that we vividly see that the first-person perspective is no accident and is not merely utilitarian.  The transgressive or voyeuristic potential of the gaze suddenly becomes apparent when we, the passive spectator of a film, are unavoidably thrust into the position of aiming a revolver at the film's star.  (The full clip is here, but it's from the end of the film so I'd recommend watching the whole movie instead.)  Whether or not we want to, we are following the aggressor's gaze -- and so we, in a sense, become the aggressor.

In a game that uses the first person perspective, we the player are put into a certain point of view on the narrative world; we are asked to inhabit the space in which the game takes place.  We take on the character's perspective in looking, in all the things that means.  The camera is in someone's head, and we literally see through those "eyes."  But unlike in Spellbound, or any other film, we choose where to look.  There's a level of player control available.

In a game like Bioshock, that control is the absolute key to the telling of the story.  The core narrative is framed around choice, while the story visibly runs on rails.  Progression through Rapture is intentionally linear, and yet the dialogue in the game speaks to freedom.  And of course at the key moment in the narrative, player control is completely removed, up to and including the ability to look around during cut scenes.  In fact, Bioshock is using Hitchcock's trick: the player is no more able to stop targeting Andrew Ryan than the viewer is able to stop targeting Ingrid Bergman.

The third person perspective, on the other hand, is both simpler and more complex.  We the player do not literally inhabit a character's point of view.  Rather than the role of protagonist, we are cast in the role of director, and we move our actors through their stage. We can see the player character, and how she or he is framed in the world.  In a sense, it's the difference between puppet and puppeteer, although that analogy makes the distinction sound sinister, which it's not.  Rather, it's a matter of artistic choice and mechanical necessity.

In a third-person game, the player does have the anchor of being tied to a player character, but also has the freedom to move the camera independent of the PC's perspective.  The trade-off for a broader perspective, though, is more limited range.  The game's designers control what positions are available to the player, and while in some settings the player can put the camera anywhere that doesn't require pathing through a collision plane, in other cases the view is as tightly scripted as Hollywood.  EverQuest II is a good example of the former, in that the player can put the camera anywhere around the character except underground, can zoom in or out as much as she likes, or can choose a first person perspective.

The latter option, however, seems to be the current trend in most console game design.  If the player is guiding Kratos, Ezio, or Drake through a story, then the camera will be a fixed tool that provides directional guidance and a set perspective.  Camera motion shows the lay of the land, potential climbing or escape routes, and likely avenues for weapon retrieval or enemy breakthrough.

In terms of gaze, this fixed third-person camera operates effectively as a cinematic camera.  Because the player does not contribute to its placement, the player is effectively freed from the implications of its gaze.  We may be watching all manner of unfortunate scenes, but our role is considered passive, at least in the sense that it is unintentional.  The damsel may be in distress or in disarray, but if we happen to watch her a certain way, it's because the game put it there for us.

Although I'll actually give credit; the Assassin's Creed games don't present this view all that often.

So when we take a deep examination into the presence of the male gaze in gaming, this is what we mean: when does the player have a choice over where to look?  How does the player look?  What is the physical presentation of women (and of men) when the player has control of the camera?  What is the physical presentation of women (and of men) when the player doesn't have control of the camera?  How is character agency reframed when the player controls the perspective?

The very literal gaze of the camera is what we've just digressed to here: what angle does it view from?  How far afield can we see, or how close up?  But our real concern is this: what viewpoint and bias do those cameras reveal through their placement and methods?  How is player perspective from inside, say, Duke Nukem's (ick) head different from perspective six feet behind Lara Croft, and what do those literal perspectives tell us about the value and archetypes assigned to the worlds they inhabit?

In short: how does literal on-screen framing tell us more about the figurative framework of the society that made the game?

We'll loop back around to that question, and unite parts 1 and 2 of this little series, in the third and final (I promise) installment.

[Edit: Part 3 is here.]

The Gamer's Gaze, part 1

The gaze is a term you hear thrown around quite a bit in critical media studies.  It is, at once, both simple and complex.

"Gaze."  It's as easy as looking, right?  And at its most basic level, that's exactly what the phenomenon describes: who is looking, what is being looked at, and why? All visual arts have, in one way or another, a built-in gaze that can be examined and analyzed.

In the 1970s, film theorist Laura Mulvey brought the term "male gaze" permanently into the lexicon of film criticism.  Her essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" [PDF] relies heavily on Freudian theories (even while in a film studies graduate program, Your Critic found this essay a particularly thorny read) but also basically defined feminist film theory.  It's a difficult piece from which to pull a key quote or single definition, but I'll run with this one:

"In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active / male and passive / female.  The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly.  In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness."

In its most basic, shortest form, the idea is this: on screen, the primary purpose of a woman is as a sexualized (deliberately or not) object, and the viewer for which film is designed is a straight male.

The essay that defines this idea is now closing in on 40 years old, and came out of a different era.  I don't think that, here in 2011, I'd ever be inclined to apply straight-up Freudian theory to media analysis.  (If I ever do display the urge to do so, please take away my computer.)  But the idea of the gaze does indeed hold up, as does the idea of the default viewer.

Here's the thing: it works at a mostly subconscious level.  With very few exceptions, a film director or a game designer doesn't set out actively thinking, "I am going to make this to appeal directly to straight white men and everyone else can get bent."  Rather, the likelihood is high that the creator himself is a straight white male, and so comes to production with unconscious biases in place, that then are reflected through things like the framing of shots or the motion of the camera.  And even if the creator in question is not all three (straight, white, male), the media landscape has been dominated by those elements for such a long time that this perspective is the default, and its point of view may not be challenged.

Thus: the male gaze.

So as we talk about the gaze and the male gaze in gaming, what do we really mean?  What are we talking about?

Wikipedia has a nice little run-down of the areas of gaze -- the "who" in "who's looking."  The three that are most important to us are:

• Characters' gaze at other characters
• The camera's gaze
• The spectator's gaze

The spectator, in our case, is the person playing the game.  Whoever is holding the controller, or gesticulating at the Kinect, or sitting at the keyboard: that person is the spectator.  The spectator's gaze is unbelievably crucial to both first-person and third-person narrative games.  So important, in fact, that it will be standing alone as a Part 2 to this discussion.

The camera's gaze is the easiest to talk about, and the way characters gaze at other characters is tied into it.  We the viewers see how characters see each other by how the camera behaves.  This is every bit as true in gaming as it is in cinema, although in modern 3D narrative gaming, character placement and framing also play a large role.  (Non-interactive cut-scenes essentially are film, and can be analyzed in the same ways.)

As a general, broad rule of thumb, the way the camera moves around or is positioned on a character tells us something about how we are meant to view that character, both literally and figuratively.  Media saturation is now so high in our culture that we're very nearly all born speaking this language of visual cues and ideas.

We know what heroes pose like, and how they're framed.  You can actually tell a lot about each character from how he's standing.  Ezio's design conveys his positioning in the grey areas of life (he's a good guy by being an Assassin), Supes is, well, Supes, and Snake over there looks straight at you.  But note how they all stand: strong, confident.

You work those shoulders, gentlemen!

We know what villains pose like, and how they're framed.  They are men of action, in motion, presenting their challenge.  And their weapons.  And their black costumes and / or hidden eyes.

No comment on Sephiroth's sword vs. how happy he is to see you.  Such as.  *ahem*

For us, the issues arise with women, and how they're framed.  And so it comes to pass that a super-spy, a world-renowned adventurer, and the galaxy's best thief mainly display their... assets.  When they have weapons, they're held pointed toward the floor.  They don't stand straight; rather, they pose their hips.

And then of course there's wardrobe design. Lookin' at you, Eva.

Of course, gaze is constantly in motion (think of the classic head-to-toe scoping out of the hottie across the room), not static.  These are all just promotional images, right?  So let's go to the video.

There's always Miranda offering her loyalty mission in Mass Effect 2 (00:01 - 01:08):

Or of course there's our introduction to Madison in Heavy Rain (probably NSFW):

With Madison, the issues of what we see and how we see it are both in play.  The camera is... not shy.  (The censored bits between 03:00 and 05:00 are to make it YouTube-safe; nothing's covered up in the game.)  For extra credit, watch Ethan Mars's morning shower from the same game.  The camera is much less fond of his curvature than it is of hers.

In gaming, the camera's gaze and the characters' get tangled together, because we aren't just viewers, but players.  We take on the role of someone in the story, and the camera serves as our eyes.  Male characters tend to be the point-of-view characters, even in a third-person game.  We watch what interests them.  Miranda's deliberately putting herself on display for Shepard.  This makes the moment of male gaze particularly jump out if you're playing a female Shepard, as then the on-screen dynamics feel misplaced, rather than feeling like a default.

So when characters gaze at other characters, the camera follows their lead. Hundreds of games do it.  The running comment I had while playing through the Metal Gear Solid series (spouse held the controller 90% of the time; I provided the running MST3K-style commentary 100% of the time) was that clearly, working buttons and zippers for women were too expensive for these high-tech organizations.

Seriously, Naomi? You're going to leave your boobs hanging out with a kid like that flinging hot food around?

The other issue of gaze in gaming, however, is made more complex by the interactivity and choice factors in the medium.  Heavy Rain is a deliberately cinematic game and so the camera, framing, and direction behave in a deliberately cinematic way.  Madison may not have an awareness of the viewer but she will behave for his eyes all the same.  But what about another genre of game?  How does the gaze behave in an action platformer, an adventure game, a first-person shooter, or an RPG?  How does the male gaze function when the lead character is a woman, or when the player has full control of the camera?

In the interest of not presenting a 10-page paper for your Monday morning, the player's gaze is Part 2, coming in the next post.

[Edit: Part 2 is here.]

No, but if you hum a few bars...

Your Critic was four years old when she had the privilege to meet John Williams (at the time, conductor of her hometown Boston Pops), and informed him -- to his face -- that she thought the Star Wars music superior to that of Superman.  Her simultaneously mortified and proud parents report that he agreed.

By the time Your Critic was seven, she was ardently insisting that, when given the chance to pick a band instrument in fourth grade, she was going to go with the French horn.  And at age nine, she made good on that threat.

There are two main reasons, as a young child, that I was so desperately in love with the horn.

  

In high school I made a mix tape (well, a tape, not so much a mix) pulling out all of the leitmotif themes I was able to find on the newly-released expanded Star Wars trilogy soundtracks.  (I came up with 53, if I remember correctly, although some might have been variations.)  In college I devoted much time to writing an (at the time, very popular) accessible analysis of Howard Shore's Lord of the Rings scores (for non-musicians), that I posted first on LiveJournal and then on my now-defunct first website.  Until this blog, it was easily far and away the most-read thing I've ever put on the internet.

So.  I may have become a passionate gamer fairly young, but before the games there was music.  (The music came before everything, in fact, as my mom was a performing choral and opera singer while pregnant with me.)  And so here I am, with close to three decades of intense movie score fangirlism behind me, and over twenty years of experience as a musician (choral singing in addition to the horn).  Film scores are what put me on the path that eventually led to film school.  And now I am a writer on the subject of video games.

Oh, what fun!  Mwhahahahaha.

Game music is shamelessly manipulative (as is film music), but that works and I love letting it.  Music is what takes a ridiculous trailer or cut scene and makes it genuinely gripping.  It's that extra layer that punches through the player's armor of cynicism and grips his heart.  At least, ideally.  Too minimal, and the player doesn't buy it.  Too over-the-top, and the player walks away in disgust.

So here's what I've been listening to over and over at work:

I can't help it.  I don't even like Halo or own a 360, but this track has everything I love to groove to right now.  It's in an almost nautical 6/8 time, with crazy bass, men's chorals, heavy percussion, and many layers moving at once.  (Bass and percussion will get me every time.  See also: Battlestar Galactica and Bear McCreary.)  And in fact, the first time I heard it was at Video Games Live -- and their version had a cello duel.  A CELLO.  DUEL.  That is a thing that always makes me happy.

I won't be making a formal series of this or anything (like "Beyond the Girl Gamer" is), but music in gaming is going to become a definite regular feature around this place.  There are so very many things to talk about in the kind of scoring that goes with a film or game, and in gaming it's made much more complicated by the player's ability to manipulate time and point of view.  Howard Shore knew, to the second, how long the battle of Helm's Deep was on screen and what was being showcased in it, frame by frame.  Jack Wall had no way of knowing exactly how long a player would take to retrieve the Reaper IFF, or what that player would stop to look at while doing so.

There has been no time in gaming where the soundtrack was totally unimportant (the same is true of film: in the silent film era, the music was played live in the theater).  But narrative gaming in the modern era borrows so much of its artistic philosophy from film that the score becomes ever more prominent.

I'm not sure what game I'm going to write about first, although in this household we've been talking a lot about the evolution of the score in Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 as we played through them so I may end up starting there.  In the meantime, here are some things to read:

From the Arcade to the Grammys: The Evolution of Video Game Music [The Atlantic]

The Importance of the Soundtrack in Video Games [The Big Pixels]

A whole bunch of game music analysis (scroll down to the "music" category)
The Unsung Secret of Great Games - and How Some Games get it So Wrong [Kotaku]

Beyond the Girl Gamer 2.1: The System of the Worlds

Beyond the Girl Gamer: Introduction | 1.1 | 1.2 | 1.3 | 1.4
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So far, we've talked a lot about characters: our protagonists, antagonists, and supporting casts.  Character design drives our gaming, to a huge extent, but it's just one part of the overall element of game writing, which is what we're going to examine in chapter 2 of this series.  And we're going to delve into some actual critical theory in order to do that.

Our transition, though, begins still with character to some degree, and the concept of the "coin flip" character in gaming.  The concept is this: you need to determine something binary (a male or female character), so you flip the coin to see if it comes up heads or tails and run with it.

I think of Chell, in Portal and Portal 2, as a coin flip character.  The game is completely, 100% unaffected by the PC gender.  In this case, the coin came up female.  In Half-Life (2) there doesn't need to be a particular reason that Gordon Freeman is male.  Valve probably didn't flip the coin, but when you do -- sometimes it still comes up heads.  There doesn't need to be a particular reason that Shepard of Mass Effect (2) is male; in the future, space marines come in all types.  And so BioWare has given us this most basic choice: to flip that coin ourselves.

This doesn't usually happen.  Not only does the coin not land on non-male, it also doesn't land on non-white or non-straight.  The straight white male is still an absolute default, and in the context of most games (and movies, and books, and...) any deviation has a distinct narrative presence.  There's a reason that THIS character has to be black, or female, but there's never a reason that a player character has to be a straight white dude.  He just is.  It's the unquestioned default.  (This is why the default Shepard is so boring to me.  He's generic, and there are thousands like him.)

Contrary to what some alarmists believe of all feminist thinkers, I agree that there's no good reason to make a specific man's story about a woman.  Sometimes you're telling the story of a man's life and that is totally cool.  If you are writing a historically accurate game about a knight in 12th century France well then by god, I expect him to dude up the joint in the manliest possible way, and I expect most of the powerful figures in his story also to be men, especially among the warrior and clergy classes. 

But when are our games ever historically accurate*?

Games take place in worlds of our own creation.  Law and Order can purport to represent New York City as it is.  We cannot claim to be representing Ferelden as it is, because there never was such a place outside of a writer's imagination.

But in fact, even when claiming to represent a place, like modern Manhattan, as it actually exists, all fictional media fail to some degree or other.  The story being told is always one that was written by a human, and one that is being filmed and edited by a human.   In any TV show, movie, or game the world, as we see it, is entirely constructed.  Someone came up with it, and made it, and everything in it is intentional.  Even the "reality" that bumps in (as in traffic on the street in Law and Order) is a deliberate choice -- someone chose not to use a soundstage, not to close that street, and not to use a different, traffic-free, take.

This basic idea -- that we are not ever watching reality, but are looking at a construct -- is at the core of all film studies and so it is in one of my old introductory film textbooks that I looked for the best description:

 "What film reviews almost always evade is one of the few realities of film itself, that it is an artificial construct, something made in a particular way for specific purposes, and that plot or story of a film is a function of this construction, not its first principle." 

Robert Kolker, Film, Form, and Culture, 2nd ed (2002). (p. xvii)

Rephrased, the most important concept to understand in early Film Studies is this: the characters are never the creators of the story's events.  Han and Leia don't flirt with each other due to mutual attraction; they flirt with each other because a script-writer called for it and a director put it on camera.  The story that you see unfolding is an element of the film you are watching.  The same is true of gaming.

Further, the sum total of everything put into the image you're looking at, in film, is called mise en scène (because the French had the first crack at written film theory).  It's basically the idea that lighting, set design, and every other visual in a scene help tell your story.  The textbook example (literally, it's in every introductory film theory and film history book out there) is the 1920 German film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.  One look at a famous shot and it becomes obvious why:

91 years and thousands of films later, it's still creepy.

For us, and for our purposes going forward, the really important, unbelievably crucial point is this: Game worlds are 100% digital and therefore, 100% constructed.  Nothing is simply "found" and nothing is incidental or accidental.  Every pixel is deliberate and intentional -- even though those pixels can also be utterly thoughtless.  "Created" is not the same as "carefully created."

Let's take ourselves back to mise-en-scène for a moment.  Can anyone argue that this environment, shown below, is not absolutely as carefully crafted, and as essential to the story, as in any film?  It has, in fact, been argued that the real main character of Bioshock is the underwater city of Rapture, and there's something to be said for that.

It's like a murderous and awkward Renaissance painting in here.

But the fun part is, it's not just the modern, cinematic games that use this concept so crucially.  I think the first game where I became really aware of the environment beyond my character as essential was Super Mario Brothers 3.

Yes, this game.

In SMB3, the sun itself pulls right out of the background art and becomes an enemy.  All of the brick types work differently (two are shown here).  Enemies, fatal to the player character, come popping out of the environment regularly (the plant in the image above being just one example).  And in levels comprised of large, scenic blocks (World 1, Level 1 for starters), the player can actually drop behind the white ones.  Literally, the player can take herself behind the scenes of the video game's environment -- but only at certain times.

So when we're looking at a game, and analyzing it in any way, the crucial thing is for us to remember that everything is created.  We need to remember to step outside of the narrative and to repeatedly ask how and why the designers of the game chose to frame it or to make it progress in the way they did.  If we're asking, "Why does Naomi Hunter wear her shirt unbuttoned so far down in the lab?" it's the wrong question.  We should be asking, "Why is this world designed in such a way that our scientist is an attractive female who keeps her shirt unbuttoned so low while working?"  If Nathan Drake bumps his head going into a tunnel, the question is not, "Why is he so clumsy?" but instead, "Why did the game's creators decide this tunnel was two inches shorter than their protagonist?" or, "What are we meant to learn about this character through seeing this collision?"

Sometimes, when we're asking these questions from outside of the narrative, the answers will be mundane.  "Budget restrictions" or "tight deadline" are probably the most common answers, across all games and studios.  If we're asking why the Courier in Fallout: New Vegas is silent, that's probably the answer we'll get (not enough time and money in the world to make recording every possible line a worthwhile design choice).

But sometimes, we'll find, on asking, that no-one thought carefully about a design choice one way or the other, and instead just made an assumption based on his or her own cultural defaults.  Those are the most interesting answers.  From these moments, we learn more about the culture producing the game -- we learn more about ourselves, and about what will need to change in the future if we want different games.  From the same text I cited earlier:

"The idea of culture as text means, first, that culture is not nature; it is made by people in history for conscious or even unconscious reasons, the product of all they think and do.  Even the unconscious or semiconscious acts of our daily lives can, when observed and analyzed, be understood as sets of coherent acts and be seen to interact with each other.  These acts, beliefs, and practices, along with the artifacts they produce ... have meaning.  They can be read and understood.

Robert Kolker, Film, Form, and Culture, 2nd ed (2002). (p. 116)

Here in the real world where we live, everyone is allowed to be incidental.  People come and go, because they're people.  The main character of my life is a straight white woman (and I am she).  When I am at work, if I am taking the elevator from the ground floor to the 10th, and the doors open on 6, the odds are about 50/50 whether a man or a woman will board.  Similarly, in my workplace in particular, the odds are about 50/50 that the person boarding would be white or a racial minority, and about 1 in 6 that the person boarding would identify as non-straight.  I would expect and understand any of these, because I move in a world full of people.  If I am taking the Metro home, and the doors open at Union Station, I would expect an even bigger range of diversity in boarding passengers.

If Solid Snake were in an elevator going up ten stories, and the doors opened on 6, there would have to be a story-driven reason for a woman to board.  (In fact, there would need to be a narrative reason for the doors to open at all.)  Snake moves in a world of ideas, concepts, and tropes, not in a world full of people.  We say "truth is stranger than fiction," because we expect fiction to make sense.  But what kind of sense?  Does fiction deserve as much random diversity as reality has?

And so, in the next chapter: what spaces do our characters live in and why do our characters live in these spaces, when they could be anywhere?

*Your Critic will not have a chance to play L.A. Noire until later this summer, so if this one is the exception that proves the rhetorical question, well, try not to leave spoilers.

One Year In...

A few days ago I woke up to find the following in my Droid's overnight Twitter alerts:

I was, as you might imagine, ecstatic.  Blog love from a complete stranger, with no mutual friends!  I followed it through and came across the following conversation:

I've left everyone's names off because I genuinely don't intend to call anyone out -- rather, I would like quite sincerely to thank these two gentlemen.  First and foremost, for reading!  It is a writer's greatest pleasure to find that she has an audience.  *bows*  Second, for leading me to this post today.

It's been exactly a year since I first started this blog -- and I'm happy to report that I've moved well beyond Roger Ebert.  I started with him, though, because for between six months and a year I'd been saying to myself, "One of these days, I really need to start writing about games..."  That moment provided impetus to make "someday" become "now," and I was happy to run with it.

I feel that on the one-year anniversary of this blog, I get to do a wee bit of navel gazing -- and I'm going to explain what started me writing critically about games in the first place.

In the fall of 2004, I was still working on my Film Studies MFA, and that semester I was enrolled in one of my favorite classes.  It was called something like "International City Film," but it was a great course that really looked at how space inside of film and space outside of film worked together, and also talked a lot about the rise in and perceptions of urbanization in the 20th century.  Trust me -- it was much less dry and more interesting than I make it sound.

Near the end of the semester, the professor excitedly brought in a DVD-ROM that would allow us to navigate interactively through the Ambassador Hotel.  He explained what was innovative about it, and how it connected the viewer to the space, and how it worked as experimental art, and some other things.

But what I remember most clearly is that another student and I both raised our hands, and nearly in sync asked, "Um.  Haven't you ever heard of Myst?  This is an old kind of gaming you're talking about..."

And just like that, sitting in Roy Grundmann's class, the connection was made.  I finished up grad school with a thesis on David Lynch films (I know) but sat at my computer the whole time thinking, "games?  It's like a game.  How is it like a game?  Everything applies to games!  Game game game game game game."

But as much as I enjoy writing and talking about games, games haven't always wanted me.  And that's where we come full circle: part of the reason it says "K. Cox" in the sidebar there and not my full name is because of the culture and assumptions out there.  Gender representations in games and gamer culture became a flag for me to wave because it's a flag stapled to my back anyway.  By being here, by talking, by playing -- I'm part of that system and part of that solution.

For what it's worth, the Tweeter up above figured out that Your Critic was a she pretty damn fast after reading other posts, and said so.  I don't exactly hide it!  But I don't go around shouting it from the rooftops, either.  (This blog never has been and never will be themed in pink.)

And all of that is why I write.