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?

April Ryan: we meet at last!

The Longest Journey came out in 2000, and since roughly 2001 I've had a veritable cacophony of friends telling me I need to play it.  I'd started once before in 2006, but the copy (not even mine *cringe*) got stolen before I could progress.

There are two main venues of discussion available with The Longest Journey.  The first is of it as a game: its artistic, technical, and narrative merits.  The second is of it as different from other games: how Ragnar Tornquist and company appear to be at least 20 years ahead of everyone else [it's a 10-year-old game and others still aren't there yet] on diversity in gaming.

I'm learning to be better about jumps for post length: 

Tricksy Memories...

My husband and I were on the road traveling through the South to see his side of the family over Thanksgiving.  We left early Thursday morning and drove back late the following Tuesday.

Since before I started this blog, people have been telling me, "You really need to play The Longest Journey."  And since I started this blog, people have been telling me, "You write about female characters, and gender issues in gaming?  You really need to play The Longest Journey."

It's possibly my husband's all-time favorite game (well, maybe second to the Journeyman Project titles) so it was an obvious set-up for something we could play together: him introducing me to a cherished favorite.  I knew I had played the very, very beginning introductory sequence before (with the egg) but I thought that was it -- I didn't remember playing anything farther.

So while we were on the road with the laptop, we finally had the chance to sit down with the game and start playing.  And right at the beginning of Chapter One, when April wakes up in her room, I suddenly started remembering things.

I remembered playing a game -- something about a time-card, and a café, and a cheerful British lesbian to talk to, and a park with some metal bridges.  And I most definitely remembered taking a rattling, littered subway.  And the words, "Hey, did you ever play a game that had something about a time-card, and a subway?" were on my lips when Husband had April pick up a book, and take her time-card out of it.

"OH HOLY CRAP, I PLAYED THIS GAME!"

The good news is, I still didn't get very far the first time, before the copy I had got stolen.  (And it was my ex-boyfriend's copy, that he was lending me, and I'm still very sorry it got stolen but at least thanks to GOG.com it's not out of print and irreplaceable anymore!)  And we've gotten farther now, and I think I'm better-placed now to appreciate the game than I was five years ago.

It's wordy and dialogue-heavy (which tends to be more his thing than mine, despite me being the avid-reader half of this couple) but unlike many games, the dialogue is great, and plausible.  And I look forward to meeting more of these characters.  For now, we've left April wandering around the market and the docks by the temple, talking to people.

Strong vs. Violent (Part 3...)

I was looking back over some Twitter stuff the other day, and I discovered one of the very first things I actually tweeted, during a panel at PAX East 2010:

Strong and violent are not synonyms. If we keep acting that way, we keep undervaluing womens roles

I'd forgotten, between now and then, that I completely nailed in under 140 characters the fundamental thought that seems to drive so much talk about women in gaming, both as characters and as players.

We say, "It features a strong female character," and we tend to mean, "A female of reasonable sexiness who doesn't ever show girly emotions, and who shoots things."  But I don't think "strength" and "violence" should be synonymous.

Admittedly, this points to a much larger problem in gaming: what would we consider a non-violent strong male lead?  The best I came up with offhand is the Metal Gear Solid series; you can be a reasonably non-violent Snake much of the time, and he is a character given to serious emotion and lots of it.  MGS3 and MGS4 each contain several hours' worth of emotionally driven cut-scenes.  (Aside: I wonder how many gamer guys would be convinced to sit through a 3 hour movie with that much convoluted emoting?  But put a controller in their hands...)  And still his primary objective is generally to blow stuff up and win boss fights.

It's hard enough to think of true 3rd-person games driven by female lead characters (narrative games with a defined arc -- as opposed to games where the player has a hand in creating or defining the character).  It's even harder when you start looking for female leads who wear sensible clothes and don't travel heavily armed.

I know perfectly well that the example I need here of a strong female character is The Longest Journey but I've never actually finished that game.  I promise it's on the playlist and that I'll revisit this topic by year's end.  Meanwhile, the fact that I have to resort to an 11-year-old European adventure game to make the point at all is telling.