Antichamber, Unhealthy Relationships, and putting Mass Effect in the Smithsonian (again).

Back in December, I got an e-mail that made my day.  It was an editor for Smithsonian Magazine, asking if I'd be interested in taking on a short piece looking at the use of film noir style lighting in video games.

The finished piece is indeed very short (I could definitely write a few thousand more words on the topic) but I had a great deal of fun writing it and my editor was excellent to work with.  It's in print on newsstands today, in the March 2013 issue, or available online.

My picture is on the Contributors page for the issue and everything.  Next to Jane F*cking Goodall.  I'll probably be pleased with this for quite some time to come.

(And yes, that's the piece that inspired my meditation on light in ME3.)

In other work I am pleased with, I have been doing some light contributing to Gameological, who are also a delight to work with and a fount of patience.  I pitched in to the Valentine's Day Inventory of Unhealthy Relationships in games (guys guys guys there are so many) and I got to review Antichamber, which is a delicious mindscrew of a game.  I found its logic best explained in the language of the dreamer. 

The Surprising Moral Clarity of Mass Effect 3

I've been working on a commissioned feature about film noir lighting in video games.  Without going into what I'm writing in that essay, my very first thought was: "Oh, that's easy. I've played Mass Effect 2."

It's Blade Runner! It's Double Indemnity! No, wait: it's Thane!

ME2 casts Shepard in an ambiguous moral position.  Not only does the paragon/renegade problem carry over from the first game, but its effects are amplified dramatically.  With interrupts added to the game--sudden, one-click decision points that add to Shepard's paragon or renegade scores--as well as charm and intimidate keying to reputation, rather than to skill points, the question of Shepard's soul begins to matter more.

As well, she is in a more tenuous position with regards to, well, everything.  Now employed by the shadowy Illusive Man, she is working for Cerberus, known from the first game only as a terrorist organization.  The crew she assembles around her is full of misfits, exiles, and murders who, if we're lucky, mostly turn out to have hearts of gold, or at least good intentions.

Of course, we all know where the road paved with good intentions leads.

The essay in question will be running in early 2013, and I have been asked to make it current, to tie it to one or more big 2012 releases.  Knowing how strongly Mass Effect 2 relies on the conventions of film noir and neo-noir, I thought that my sprawling, ludicrous collection (1800+) of Mass Effect 3 screenshots would lend me the perfect inspiration.

I was wrong.

 

With only a handful of exceptions (as in the shuttle, above), Shepard's lighting in Mass Effect 3 is surprisingly clear and unambiguous.  Even when she is in a visually dark location, the lighting spares her.  Shadows fall around her, but not on her; even her companions are largely of the light.

As the game itself gets darker, in every possible sense of the word, the ambiguity becomes stripped away from the Normandy and its passengers just as it becomes stripped away from the plot.  Yes, every decision has consequences, and the strings of three games' worth of choices bear out in many meaningful ways.  But even while that matters, the time for ambiguity is, simply, behind Shepard and behind us.

By ME3, the reapers are here. They are destroying worlds, cultures, civilizations, life... everything.  There is no question of "sides," of "morality."  Respect her (paragon) or fear her (renegade), Shepard is our hero and the hero's time is now.

In fact, the more I browse my enormous gallery of images, the more I feel like Mass Effect 3 is lit with a series of spotlights.  Where Mass Effect 2 threw diagonal shadows around the place to create effect, ME3 is doing everything it can with framing, light, and color to highlight our heroes, fighting to the end in a darkened world.

Sometimes that world is darkened a little too literally.

Indeed, even in an area and on a mission where moral ambiguity and character confusion could easily have been added, the game avoids that construction.  I am speaking of a point somewhere near the end of Act 2 (relatively speaking) where the asari Council representative has summoned Shepard, to impart a secret and necessary piece of information.

The asari's motives and goals are unclear.  She could be honest; she could be dishonest.  Shepard's reaction is unclear: the player can be angry or resigned.  The conversation takes place in an office, where light and posing could easily have conveyed ambiguity and confusion.  Instead, the conversation is brightly lit, with all the whites the Citadel presidium has to offer.  The greatest distance the scene ever creates comes through framing one shot on the other side of a window, hinting at a sense of voyeurism and eavesdropping.

You know, if you had mentioned this BEFORE your planet was invaded, that would have been helpful.

By the time the Shepard's saga reaches its third and final game, that which is... well, is.  Most of the questions and mysteries are removed from the story, and the moral ambiguity of our players along with.  This is not a game for introducing new characters, or questioning their motives; this is a time to revisit the consequences of the stories we already told, and resolving the fates of characters we already know.

Even knowing that, though, I was surprised at how strongly the visuals bear that out.  Subconsciously, they of course reinforced that message the entire time I was playing.  That's what visual language does.

There is also, of course, an exception.  Or in fact, a pair of exceptions.  The Leviathan and Omega DLC add-ons each provide dozens of examples of moral ambiguity and character confusion conveyed through noir-like use of light and shadow.  And it makes sense: these are the segments of game that introduce new characters and new concepts that stand slightly to the side of the hero's straightforward quest for war resources.  Aria, Nyreen, and even the Leviathan itself are all moral wildcards when they are introduced, standing aside from Shepard's binary perspective, and so the lighting lets us stand in Shepard's shoes for a little while, uncertain about who we have just met.

Mass Effect 3 and Me

I've written a lot about Mass Effect 3 in the last few weeks.  Suffice it to say, I'm a fan of the game and don't feel the slightest bit "betrayed" by it, though I do think some (not all) of the concerns many players have with the endings are indeed valid criticism, and I understand deeply why there's so much emotion tied up in the criticism as well.

Here's a brief round-up of the interesting things I've had to say about the game so far:

Review: based on a very fast, default-Shep playthrough; it had to be ready to go into the world at midnight on launch day.  And it was still a great game.

I also got to make a cool gallery of some of the voice actors, and my co-worker Chris made a video I love out of the screenshots I took from my Shep's game (contains spoilers). 

And then there's the piece I'm most glad I wrote (spoilers, obvs), Why Mass Effect 3's Ending Doesn't Need Changing.  And if I'm being strictly honest (eeeeeeeeeeeeee) this tweet about that piece, from a certain Jennifer Hale, made my week. 

There's a huge discussion to be had about authorship, art, participation, interactivity, ownership, and entitlement.  Some pieces have been doing a good job digging into the actual issues (my boss did one; Leigh Alexander, another; Dan Bruno, a third) but I think for my part I'm going to wait a few more months to have a final opinion on the matter -- here, at work, or anywhere else.  I want to see how it actually shakes out first.  There's kind of a lot going on in that.


(Edited March 24 to add Dan Bruno article link.) 

EDIT Afternoon March 24: I have deleted all comments and locked the post. The discussion, such as it was, was circular, uncivil, and unproductive.  For readers wishing to discuss the merits of the game itself, see previous ME3 post.

It's Mass Effect 3, People!

You want to talk about Mass Effect 3.  I want to talk about Mass Effect 3.  We all want to talk about Mass Effect 3.

Romances!  Characters!  Dramatic moments!  Sad things!  Funny things!  Happy things!  Decisions!  Locations!  It's all in our heads a-buzzing.

So  here is a place where we can all talk in more than 140 characters.  THERE WILL BE SPOILERS IN THE COMMENTS.  However, you can collapse comment threads on Disqus.  So I ask that if you are writing about the very, very final act of the game, you say so in a comment and then reply to yourself with your spoilers, so that folks who want to talk mid-game but not blow the ending can still scroll on by.

Have at it!

The Music of Mass Effect 3 - Preview

I've got Mass Effect 3 on the brain bad, guys. So bad. I had a dream about it a few weeks ago, that's how bad.  (It was a sad dream.  Shepard had to choose between two populated, thriving planets to save and she was really upset, talking to Garrus about how she was just one person and couldn't be everywhere at once, and didn't know what to do.)

I've been avoiding watching any leaked footage or reading anything with story spoilers, because I want to go into it fresh.  (These weeks are worse than when I was neck-deep in the Lord of the Rings fandom a decade ago. At least I already knew how that story would end!)

But when there was that ME3 leak on XBox Live, some kind soul created an edit of just the soundtrack music available in it, without any dialogue or visuals (spoilers!) to go with.  I listened to it once, thought, "Good, Mansell's definitely on the right track," and then the next morning woke up mildly obsessed with it.

There's also this:

Yes, it's true. I'm working on Mass Effect 3. :) #ME3 - and this is a preview of some music I've written: facebook.com/masseffect/pos…
— Sam Hulick (@SamHulick) December 19, 2011

Which was just followed by this link (non-Facebook version), to a snippet of ME3 soundtrack that Hulick wrote. 

I wsa going originally to do some intelligent total guesswork analysis on the snippets from the video, but right now I just need to get some completely irrational fangirling live.  Any game series that puts its hero's theme in 7/8, even for just the middle game, is a series that has me forever.

(Related: The Music of Mass Effect part 1 and part 2.)

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.

Beyond the Girl Gamer 3.1: Box it Up

Beyond the Girl Gamer: Introduction | 1.1 | 1.2 | 1.3 | 1.4 | 2.1 | 2.2
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[This post is very image-heavy and so much of it is behind a jump.]

The discussion so far, over the last six months or so, has focused on what we see inside games: how the characters, both player and non-player, are designed; how the characters comport themselves; how the scenery of the narrative world is arranged for the male gaze; that the scenery of the world is, in fact, arranged; and how so many of the game worlds we visit use the same tropes to tell the same stories with the same kind of gender problems built into them.

The umbrella of "games, gaming, and gamer culture," though, goes well beyond the in-game, narrative, digital worlds.  Arguably, the biggest and most persistent problems we face aren't in the text, but rather, are wrapped around it.  And so we reach the third bucket of this series: marketing.

We've looked at the existence of the Chainmail Bikini trope before (1.2), but the problems of female characters in game marketing are bigger than, well, boobs.  Broken down, we're presented with two major areas of concern: the invisibility of non-sexualized female characters in marketing art, and the over-visibility of minor female characters just for the sex appeal.

A huge number of games do this.  After thinking of some on my own, I put the question to Twitter and received another few dozen suggestions in the first hour.  Sadly, there's no shortage of examples.

Win, Lose, or Fail

A bunch of gaming writers have recently cycled back around to one of the most foundational questions of our art.  No matter what perspective each of us prefers, no matter which lens each of us uses, down at the bottom there's a single question even more important than the perennial argument of "Are games art?"

Our core issue is this: what are video games?

Michael Abbott over at The Brainy Gamer launched this most recent salvo with Games Aren't Clocks:

I say it's time to let go of our preoccupation with gameplay as the primary criterion upon which to evaluate a game's merits. It's time to stop fetishizing mechanics as the defining aspect of game design. Designers must be free to arrange their priorities as they wish - and, increasingly, they are. Critics, too, must be nimble and open-minded enough to consider gameplay as one among many other useful criteria on which to judge a game's quality and aspirations.

This caused a nearly instant rejoinder from journalist Dennis Scimeca at his personal blog, Punching Snakes, in which he asserted that actually, Games ARE Clocks:

Video games can afford to suffer some modicum of technical errors and still be playable – we routinely look past the regularly-scheduled bugs in Bethesda titles all the time without letting them ruin our fun – but if their mechanics are so broken so as to preclude play? Without play, there is no game, at which point nothing else matters.

I think the salient aspect of Abbott’s post starts midway through, when he expresses his frustration with the term “video game.” Rather than trying to redefine what the term means, in order to fit everything inside the same, comfortable box, however, I think we need new language entirely.

A few paragraphs later, he continues:

I might argue that The Sims has never been a video game, for the same lack of victory conditions. It is a simulation, a digital sandbox, and winning or losing has nothing to do with it. When competition ceases to be part of the equation, I think an object’s definition as a game should immediately be called into question. We don’t do this because even if we determined that “video game” no longer works as a descriptor, we have no fallback positions or options available.

It's an interesting debate, to me, because I think that in their own ways, both gentlemen are quite right.  Games are more than the sum of their mechanics, to many of us, and the word "game" is also loaded with connotations that may not apply to our modern interactive narratives.

Where I've gotten caught up, though, is in this idea of "winning" and "losing."  I don't think they've been the right terms to discuss game completion for a very long time.  BioShock isn't chess,  Plants vs Zombies isn't basketball, and Tetris isn't poker.  How do you decide if you're "winning" the character arc of Mass Effect, Fallout: New Vegas, or Fable III?

At its most basic, a game is something playable.  Whether it's got a story or not, no matter the genre, system, or type, a game is something that requires player input.  You, the consumer, are in some way integral to this experience.  Whether you push one button or speak a word into a microphone, whether you wave your arms at a motion sensor or deliberately hold still when you could act -- a game requires you to contribute.  That's the sum total of the agreement on our current definition of "gaming," and really that's quite a low bar.  Small wonder, then, that we keep looping through these arguments.

We don't just have a win / lose dichotomy anymore.  We do have completion and backlog; we have sandbox and short story.  But every title I can think of -- every title I've ever played and a thousand more I haven't -- has either a failure state or a success metric, and some have both.  Our metrics aren't necessarily competitive, and they might be imposed by the player rather than intrinsically by the game.  There are little successes and big ones, game-ending failures and completely surmountable ones, but every pixellated problem I've ever pounced on has at least one or the other.

(If at first you don't succeed, you fail.)

Writing about L. A. Noire and death in gaming back to back started me down the path of contemplating the failure state in general.  I hadn't really given it any thought before, but recently I've started to understand just how important it is.  Coupling the failure state with the success state (and no, they are not necessarily binary opposites) creates pretty much our entire dynamic of gaming.

Depending on the sort of player you are, this is either a total failure, or a smashing success.

While I was starting to muse aloud on this idea on Twitter, Mattie and Line challenged me with The Sims.  That challenge leads to a critical point: player-determined goals are still crucial goals.  Your Sims can fail at their own little lives: going hungry, getting fired, burning the house down, or getting dumped by SimSpouse.  But it is common to play the game aiming for maximum drama in SimLives -- so, the argument runs, those aren't failure states at all.  They're successes.  That's all well and good, but the players who want SimHouse to burn down still have failure conditions available: the scenario in which the house, in fact, does not burn down.  The standard failure and success metrics, as envisioned by the designers, might be reversed but there are still measurable goals present, waiting to be accomplished. 

To a certain extent, most success goals can be said to be player-determined.  What's true success in Peggle: beating the story mode, or going back for an Ace and a 100% on every level?  What's good enough in Tetris: getting to level 10?  Beating your own old high score?  Beating someone else's?  What's a successful play-through of Mass Effect: paragon, renegade, or somewhere in between?

Even in Minecraft, the most popular sandbox to come along in gaming since die were first rolled for stat sheets, there are successes and failures.  Both wear many faces, of course.  But success can look like this:

Image source: http://www.kevblog.co.uk/how-to-build-a-hollow-sphere-in-minecraft/

And failure can look (comically) like this:

Creation and destruction are player goals, rather than creator goals, but the game itself is still a set of tools that enables the player to achieve those goals (building a nice house, which is the sum of many smaller goals) or fail in them (committing accidental arson while installing the fireplace).

A huge amount of our gaming, though, is deliberately narrative.  Most of the games that I play certainly are.  This year alone has seen me in Fable III, Portal 2, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, Fallout: New Vegas, Bastion, L.A. Noire, both Mass Effect titles, and another dozen or two that I can't immediately call to mind.  These are all cinematic stories, designed with beginnings, middles, and ends; the mechanics of their telling are a vehicle to carry us from plot point to plot point, mainly via weaponry.

Stories don't have failure conditions, but they do have endings.  Story-based games often have clear fail states, though, and that's the game over screen.  Your character has died, or the setback you face is so adverse there can be no overcoming it.  Game over, mission failed, you suck at shooting bad guys so your planet is destroyed.  Go back to a save point and try again.

Of course, sometimes they're just kidding about "game over."

But a game like Mass Effect doesn't need to rely as heavily on the fail states (though the game over screen most certainly exists), because its relying on the player input to define the character.  We care about keeping Shepard alive in the face of certain doom, but we tend to care more about whether she aims for diplomatic solutions, or shoots a guy in the face.  A failure state in Mass Effect 2 doesn't look like the game over screen given to the player if a mission goes bad; it looks like being unable to keep one of your crew members loyal, or like being unable to keep one in line.  We're playing to achieve the successes, in whichever form we feel they take, rather than to avoid the failures.

Most narrative games don't take the "define this character for yourself" trajectory that BioWare titles are famous for, of course, but they still rely on that delicate combination of success and failure.  If you're playing Phoenix Wright, the game is completely on rails.  But it has fail states: you can press the wrong statement or present the wrong evidence.  You need to have a decent understanding of what's going on in order to make correct accusations and put the evidence together properly.  And you can get it wrong to the point of seeing a "game over" screen.  (Unless you're me, and save compulsively, and reload if you're doing badly.)  Success in meeting goals -- finding evidence, correctly questioning a witness, or surviving a cross-examination -- will advance the story to the next set of goals. 

Purple's the evil one.

My most beloved games of old literally do not have a fail state.  The classic LucasArts SCUMM-engine adventure games -- Monkey Island 1 and 2; Day of the Tentacle, Loom, and more -- were revolutionary in that the player literally could not get permanently stuck or die.  (As compared to the Sierra adventure games of the era, which were death-happy, or to older games like Zork, where you could waste hours playing on past the point where you'd already screwed yourself over.)  Rather than ending with failure, the games rely on continued success.  These stories have natural bottlenecks built in: the narrative will not continue until you figure out what Bernard should do with that hamster or how Guybrush can use the rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle.  There are items that need to be found, contraptions that need to be built, and discussions that need to be had in order for the player to progress.

In a sense, these games -- of which you could easily argue L.A. Noire is the most recent descendant -- are very proactive.  Reliance on cut-scenes is very low and mainly, non-playable sequences are just showing the consequences of whatever action the player just took.  The absence of a game over screen may remove a certain kind of tension from the story, but it also removes a major source of potential frustration for the player.

With all of this said, it's true that not every game has a visible set of goals, or any available success or failure metrics.  There are titles out there that deliberately subvert the very idea of success and failure states; this is where I would say the avant-garde of gaming truly lies.  From one point of view, The Stanley Parable has six failure states.  From another point of view, it has six success states.  What it actually has are six conclusions and ways to reach them, the ultimate meanings of which are left to the player.  None are particularly desirable (at least, of the ones I saw); nor is any one better or worse than the others.  An existential crisis in every box!

The Path is another art game that subverts the idea of success and failure states.  There are six player characters; each girl has a starting point and is told to go to an ending point via the given path.  The game, such as it is, happens in the experiences along the way; the journey is the destination and the destination is incidental.  Grandmother's house is more of a concept than a crucial place to be.

One of six sisters finding maturity, sexuality, and experiential horror between home and Grandmother's.

The avant-garde exists deliberately to undermine the tropes and tools of our media.  That's what it's for, and I have long thought gaming would truly come into its own as an art form when a thriving independent and avant-garde scene could generate new ideas that would, in time, filter into mainstream development.  Film history and the histories of other arts have evolved along this path, and evolving technology and the ubiquity of distribution venues (i.e. the internet) have now made the production and release of art games common.

Aside from deliberately subversive arguable non-game experiences like The Stanley Parable (see Line Hollis for links to and reviews of more obscure art games than you can imagine), I don't think I've ever played any interactive digital experience in the "game" category that didn't have either some kind of failure or some kind of success built in.  Even the visual poem Flower partakes: you can't really fail (I was dreadful at using the motion controls, but as I recall you just keep trying, except perhaps for the stormy level), but as with a classic adventure game, you do need actively to succeed to continue.

If a game had absolutely no success metrics or failure states in any form, whether intentional or untentional, direct or subverted, dictated or player-driven, would it still be a game?  Maybe, in the same way Andy Warhol's Empire is still a film.

So, after all of this, we come back around to Dennis and to Michael.  As much as I think Dennis is wrong to assert that these digital experiences we all enjoy aren't "games," he's also right.  That is: we have to use the existing vocabulary for the time being, even if only to transition away from it as our discussion evolves.  We've only got so many words right now, and we -- players, critics, and designers -- need to be on the same plane to communicate.

But is "video game" really the right term for the transcendent, new immersive-media experience Michael seems to covet?  As long as those experiences have discrete goals, and as long as player input determines the failure or success of those goals, I think we can use the words we have.  We have a while yet to revisit our lexicon; I hope we've decided what to call the experience before we get to the point where the Holodeck actually shoots back.

Let's talk about sex!

I had an unexpected amount of video game time to fill, this past weekend.  After an hour of Bastion and an hour of Chrono Cross I cast about for something new, feeling at odds.  What I really wanted to play was Mass Effect 3, and that's physically impossible for another six months.  I tried other games as a distraction but none of them actually satisfied my craving, no more than a bag full of carrot sticks actually satisfies a craving for a bag of chips.

Everyone on Twitter gave helpful, thoughtful suggestions for what I should try, and in the end I ignored every last one of them and got sucked into a marathon six-hour session of Fable III.

This is my pretty pretty princess, kicking your ass. She had a piratey hat but NPCs made fun.

Fable III isn't exactly challenging, as far as game play, story, or game design go.  And yet, it has challenged me in a most unexpected way.  I knew, offhandedly, before I started playing that this was considered a "mature RPG."  And yet I was surprised (pleasantly so, but still taken aback for a moment) to find that among the character attributes for nearly every adult NPC in the game, there is a sexual preference qualifier.

The game was telling me, bluntly, in no euphemistic or uncertain terms, which of the characters I was interacting with were straight or gay -- and, by extension, letting me know up front which men and women were considered to be in the dating pool for my character.

Knowing all of this, and knowing how the Fable franchise prides itself on a choices-and-consequences approach, I was still surprised further to discover that the bed in a player's house can be interacted with -- and on interacting, the options are "sleep" and "sex."  Sleep has essentially an alarm clock option, and sex can be chosen in the protected or unprotected varieties.

I am in my thirties and have been playing video games since the middle of the 1980s, and this is the first time I've ever seen the existence of sex, as an event unto itself, so explicitly and practically addressed in my pixels.

To be sure, I have played my fair number of games that contain romantic interludes, or the plain ol' bumpin' of uglies.  Divine Divinity contains an unmarked quest for finding the main city's brothel, and rewards a large amount of XP for employing services therein.  (The brothel in question has both male and female staff, and the player character can pick either, without comment and with equal experience awarded.)  Then of course there are the just-barely-offscreen quicktime event shenanigans in God of War (I, II, and III), in which Kratos turns his ragey gusto toward anyone with boobs for a time.

Fallout: New Vegas does not tread the BioWare-style path of party member romances, but sex workers (both voluntary and involuntary) feature fairly prominently in quests and on the Strip, and there are indeed some questionable fade-to-black moments the player character can select if so inclined.  And then of course, there are the BioWare games, with their array of party member romance options, based on conversation and consummated in a carefully choreographed fade to black.

I ship this so hard, but I'm actually grateful for the fade to black.

Indeed, the fade to black is what I'm used to seeing in games (with "suggestive offscreen noise" its crass and less-often seen cousin).  We all know how this goes: provided you've said the right things throughout Mass Effect 2, someone comes up to Shepard's quarters during the last quiet moment on the Normandy, they exchange a few more words, there's some suggestive motion, press "F" to continue, and it's the next morning.  (Relatively speaking, since they're in space...)  The romance option with Liara in the first game was much more explicit, but even so, probably less tawdry than many R-rated movies I've seen.

It's actually just as well that ME2 fades to black; if, later, you choose to call your special someone back up to Shepard's quarters, the "couch" and "bed" animations might actually be the most awkward, least natural, most static, least romantic, and least sexy interactions on Earth.  Even as PG rated cuddle sessions, they fail.

It's not just a body-shape thing; male Shep with Tali is equally wretched but you can image search that one yourself.
(Warning: don't image search that one.)

Still, the real surprise for me with sex in Fable III is not that it exists; sex is implied in plenty of games.  The surprise is that its existence is announced independently.  By adding "sex" to the bed options, and indicating NPC sexual orientation (and flirtatiousness levels) in info boxes, the game is putting out there the idea that sex is a thing your PC might do for any combination of fun, profit, and love, depending on any number of whims, emotions, and circumstances.

Almost like the real world, there.  How novel!

Now, I know I'm late to the discussion, and I haven't played Fable or Fable II.  (I was interested in Fable II but there's no PC port and likely never to be.)  I knew going in that a wide array of player choices existed in the game, but "vague understanding they exist" and "actually having a choice in front of you to make" are two different things.

For what it's worth, my Princess hasn't shacked up with anyone yet, mainly because she hasn't met a soul worth her time.  Most of the NPCs she's encountered and interacted with are neither attractive nor interesting, so "friend" is more than enough work there.  (Also I can't actually find the way back to my house, which was free DLC content and doesn't appear on the world map that I can find.  I may need to buy an apartment in town.)  I certainly have no moral objection to my character having (safe, consenting) sex.

Once again, though, I've been surprised by the baggage that I the player bring into this world with me.  Although its wardrobe cues are drawn from the 16th - 19th centuries, Fable III takes place in a version of the 1820s that never existed, where most fantasy RPGs take place in a version of the 13th or 14th centuries that never existed.  Its "Albion" is yet another false Britain, and so I find myself instinctively guarding against the roles reserved for women in the Georgian and Victorian eras.  In that environment, I feel that marriage is not actually an option for my female character.  In order to remain a successful, independent, respected agent, my gut says she needs to stay single.

These are totally assumptions I the player bring to the world, and really I only notice and question them because I take the time to write here.  I mean, as mentioned, I have no problem pairing off my Shepard.  Yes, I felt that not only did she have the burden of representing humanity to the galaxy, but also of representing women.  But when forced to examine it, I find that in a sci-fi, future-based environment, I feel that a woman can be partnered and yet also successful and respected.  Plus, the Commander was a renowned, accomplished hero in her own right before a partnership option entered her life.  She has a strong identity and can keep being herself, and the world in which she lives will support that.

Intellectually, I'm keenly aware that this Albion is not actually England in the dawn of the Industrial Age.  I know that it's a game in which I can make any choice the mechanics allow, and still reach one metric of success as a player.  I'll be able to complete the story regardless of the side-choices my Princess makes.  But in my gut, I still feel the pressure of a few centuries' worth of feminist issues.

Realistically, I don't actually think the mechanics of the game will enforce any kind of social penalties for marriage.  Based on what I've seen so far, the biggest impact on the overall story arc I can imagine is NPC gossip and chatter around me in towns.  But this unnamed Princess is right now forging her place in the world.  She's trying, very hard, to become a leader and to earn the loyalty of an entire kingdom through hard work and hard fighting.  She's aiming to place herself at the very head of a nation-wide rebellion to oust her lousy brother, who's a terrible king.  That's no small task!


And yet while I feel that a permanent partner (even with divorce easily available in-game) would hold this nameless lady back, I'm not at all averse to her having some sexual interludes for fun, if the right NPCs show up.  Somehow I don't feel that the Princess openly having gentlemen or lady visitors will set off any actual consequences with her people (though they may gossip); we'll consider this the "never existed" half of the culture.

Sex in games (and everywhere else) has a way of falling into a certain trap, though.  Alex Raymond wrote a really interesting piece a while back on how video games perpetuate the commodity model of sex:

To give an example: a guy I know once received a call from a couple of his friends, who asked if he wanted to go to a strip club. He said something like, “Why would I want to go to a shady bar and pay a random stranger to show me her boobs when I can have sex with my girlfriend?” And his oh-so-clever friends informed him that Hey! When you think about it, you are still just paying to see boobs! Except the payment is in dinners and dates and compliments, rather than dollar bills.

Ha. Ha. Get it? Because all women are prostitutes.  ...

So what does this have to do with video games? Well, some video games allow the player character to have sex with NPCs; even more allow the player to have romantic relationships with NPCs. What the vast majority of these games inevitably do is present relationship mechanics that distill the commodity model down to its essence–you talk to the NPC enough, and give them enough presents, and then they have sex with/marry you.

This design approach is extremely simplistic and perpetuates the commodity model of sex–the player wants sex, they go through certain motions, and they are “rewarded” with what they wanted (like a vending machine). Furthermore, when sex is included in a game, it is generally framed as the end result–the reward–of romance, rather than one aspect of an ongoing relationship/partnership. For example, one gamer commented that the romance in Mass Effect seemed like the romantic interest was really saying, “‘Keep talking to me and eventually we’ll have sex’”. The relationship is not the goal; the goal is the tasteful PG-13 sex scene. The NPC’s thoughts and desires aren’t relevant; what matters is the tactics you use to get what you want. This is a boring mechanic in games and dangerously dehumanizing behavior in real life.

Fable III is most certainly and emphatically guilty of what Alex describes; the mechanic of all relationships in the game is purely an item-exchange, level-up sort of thing.  And yet it actually feels more like a free choice than in most other games I've seen.  Although mysteriously my assumptions about marriage in-game are framed by a historical understanding of the 19th century, my assumptions about sex remain grounded firmly in the 21st: any number of adults can do whatever they all willingly and openly consent to, and should do so as safely as possible.

In pretty much every other game I've ever played, sex for a player character exists in one of two contexts: (1) within a romance arc (not necessarily leading to marriage), or (2) as a literal commodity, traded for money or information.  The avatars I've controlled have encountered a number of sex workers in their times and likewise my player characters have on occasion used seduction as a tool to advance.  But sex as a choice, with a willing partner, just because we're both there and it seems like fun?  Not so much.

This, then, is the paradox I find.  While sex in Fable III is to every pixel a tradeable, level-able commodity, it's also a free and open choice, presented without judgement.  If there is a "doing it right" to be found, I'm certain this game isn't it -- but it's also, in a strange way, closer.

With the recent release of Catherine, "how does game design approach actual sex and actual relationships?" is a question flying around criticism circles at the speed of the Internet.  In almost all cases, I think that answer is still, "badly," with a chaser of "inadequately."  Ultimately, all of our games still rely on sets of numerical mechanics and rules.  They're a series of unbreakable "if, then" statements and our heroes (and villains) can't decide to take a left turn to the established rules of reality the way a flesh-and-blood human can.

In this one small way, though, in this one tiny instance, my Princess can break the rules.  Maybe the next time I see "sex" as an in-game choice, it will be in a game where the NPCs are actually designed to be characters, rather than a half-dozen fixed sound bites and gestures.  Society's head might explode.

*If you hear Salt-N-Pepa singing in your head, congratulations: you, too, are an old.  Now dance!

On Gaming Death

Alyssa Rosenberg writes about a lot of new media and pop culture phenomena, but not very much about games.  In talking about Portal, she begins to address why:

I’ve been traveling a lot lately, so I’m playing through Portal much more slowly than I’d hoped, but as the levels have gotten harder and I’ve started negotiating around poison moats, I’ve figured out one of the things that kept me from playing games regularly for a long time: I find dying in-game incredibly stressful.

So far, nothing too terrible happens to Chell. If I screw up, I hit some brownish water, and I get a loading screen, and we start over again. But I’m invested enough in Chell, despite the fact that I am her and only rarely see her around corners and through portals, that I don’t have much sense of how she ended up at Aperture or why she — or me — has been left alive and alone. Thomas Bissell in his profile of video games voice actress Jennifer Hale ... talks about how effective she makes Commander Shepard’s death seem in Mass Effect, and the incentive that is to keep playing—you don’t want to leave her there, or leave on that note. My anxiety is about getting there in the first place: I get frozen up by the possibility of harm coming to my character.

I don't remember which one is Clyde, but I always blame him.

I got thinking about character death in gaming, after reading this.  Really, it's an odd concept, because it's a mixed bag of concepts.  We lump a whole bunch of different occurrences and design choices into this one idea.  Thirty years ago, avatar "death" or destruction made perfect sense as a design concept.  You need a mechanism in your game to tell the player that she has lost, or failed at her task.

Beyond just communicating failure to the player, avatar "death" used to be a mechanism that meant the kid behind you at the arcade would get a chance, eventually, to put his quarter in the machine and take his turn after you, or at least a mechanism by which you, yourself, would keep pumping in your change for one more chance at the challenge.  Simple, easy: a time and talent constraint built in.  The more you suck, the more quarters the machine will consume!

In the 1980s, though, the arcade famously went to our living rooms.  Throughout the NES era and into the SNES age, though, we had the convention of game "lives" built in.  By then it was just how we played, and 1-UP was part of the lexicon.  Trying and failing to cross a chasm or fight an enemy meant you "died," and you needed another guy.  (An aside: even if the player is controlling a female character or a completely non-human, non-gendered avatar of some kind, it's still "another guy."  Curious.)

I was always really glad for the collected 1-UPs by World 3.

As we all know, though, games have come a long way since the 1980s.  There was a time when they were all sets of arcade skills that sometimes had stories attached; now, we have a whole collection of stories that also have skill sections built in.

Unlike Alyssa, I don't get stressed when my first person player character "dies" in Portal.  Her death is impermanent; the player's respawn is nearly instantaneous and the game replaces puts the avatar pretty much right back at the site of the player's failure.  I no more stress out about launching myself into a turret (oops) than I do about laying a jigsaw puzzle piece in the wrong corner, or about missing a move in Tetris. Portal is ultimately about solving puzzles and although there's a great narrative framework going on, I don't feel personally affected by Chell's ceasing to be; I only feel frustration at my lack of talent or timing.

To infinity, and beyond!  Wait, what?

That said, there is indeed the frustration of bruised pride to contend with.  I don't feel any more attached to the persona of Chell or to her story in Portal 2, but I take more offense at dying because the game is easier.  It relies more on thinking puzzles through (which I can do, and well) rather than on reflex timing (which I can't do well at all).  When I fail at something that I could physically have done right, if only I had thought it through more clearly, I take personal offense at the failure.  That's part and parcel of the ego of the gamer, right there.  This puzzle -- this story -- must have a right answer, and so I must find it.  Otherwise, I, personally, have failed.

We very rarely have a limited number of second chances anymore.  Our games do still exist along the pass-fail, do-die dichotomies, but our stories, as a general rule, no longer continually penalize failure.  Rather than face a character death, we are instead taking a Mulligan on the last five minutes.  We get a rewind (sometimes literally, as in World of Goo) back to before that jump or that shot or that ambush in the corridor.

Sometimes, though... sometimes, it is still personal.  I got really ticked off on the very few occasions when my Commander Shepard died and I had to reload.  In her case, I did feel deeply invested in that character.  She was important, her story is important, and death didn't feel like taking a do-over on a game mission: it felt like a deeper kind of failure, the kind with some sort of betrayal or judgement attached.  The feeling only got worse in Mass Effect 2, where I had the ability to get other characters permanently killed off.  During the climactic mission of the game, I routinely let my fear of harming others send me into a kind of paralysis, during which I had to pause the game and pace around the room instead.

My indecision had nothing to do with this. By which I mean, had everything to do with this.

Of course, that's entirely by design.  When BioWare can make me pace around the room and ask my cat for opinions on who should lead a team (his response was to nibble on my arm), they've won.  Anyone designing a huge-budget, open-world, cinematic-style AAA game is invested in the player's investment.  That so many of us seem to have fangirled over this franchise is not an accident.

Not all games, though, are so large scale.  This summer's XBox indie darling Bastion has finally made the leap to PC, via Steam.  After watching all of the game criticism circles consistently lighting up about this title for a couple of months my curiosity had the better of me, and this week I did something I rarely do and jumped on a day-one purchase.  I had some time that evening to give it a whirl.

I kind of suck at Bastion.

It's not a game at which one can suck, exactly, and yet I manage to do so.  Still, I can tell that many of my woes are simply clumsiness: the mouse-and-keyboard combination isn't necessarily ideal for titles designed with an XBox 360 controller in mind, and I might need to remap a couple of keys for easier use.  Over time, I will adapt to this system and after a few days, having mapped my muscle memory to this particular set of mechanics and demands, I will cease sucking.

However, being terrible at Bastion for the time being has proven useful with insights on character death.  The gimmick of the game is narration: you hear what you're doing, what you've done, and what you're about to do, and you hear it with inflection and judgement.  Thus: the first time Kid plummets off the side of the path, to his doom, the narrator is patient and understanding.  The third or fourth time, the narrator's patience begins to wear thin.

On the plus side, there are plenty of jars and such to smash with my hammer while I fail to smash enemies.

The voice of the narrator is meant to be kindly and guiding, at least in these early segments of the game.  (I don't know if it will change or not; I've intentionally been avoiding spoilers and reviews.)  When he intones, "And so, Kid fell to his death," you get that brief moment of, "...awwwww."  But immediately -- before you can even feel sad that your inept steering threw this little artistically-drawn smashy guy into the abyss -- you hear, "Just kidding!" and respawn right where you were, right in the middle of what you're doing.

It's an interesting approach to character death.  No reloading of old saves (it's on a console-style autosave system) and not really even any thinking of how you could do it next time.  In a strange way, it's like a single-player zerging tactic: die, respawn in place, continue.

I don't know what to make of this kind of death mechanic in my game.  It's not an MMO, so I don't need to rely on anyone else's help to get up, nor do I owe anyone else an apology for my failure.  It's not the deeply branching story of a cinematic character to whom I become attached, so I don't lament his passing.  It's not a failed solution to a puzzle, and so I don't have to think about how to get it right the next time.

As far as I can tell, the narrator is the crux of it.  After all: he's going to keep telling the story no matter what.  That's what a storyteller does.  By framing Bastion in that way, it might genuinely be the most third-person game I've ever played.  The player doesn't really get a chance to put herself inside the head and body of the avatar she's controlling, the way we are habituated to doing.  There's an odd level of detachment that somehow makes character death entirely meaningless -- while also giving it sort of the aspect of a milliseconds-long mid-season cliffhanger.

I'm not sure what I think.  I'm barely even an hour into the game and that counts the section I had to play twice due to an unscheduled PC shutdown.  (In related news, my next case will have a cat-blocking door or panel over the power switch.)  My first hour, though, has made me feel that I care about Bastion's world very much and its player character not at all, which is an interesting and unusual combination.  But I want to know what happened, and I'm going to need that narrator to tell me, so play on I shall.