I’m not a very big fan of the Street Fighter 4 series.

Jeez, where to begin? Hey, let’s try to beginning; what’s the deal with vanilla? Sagat with a free-juggle state (note that the best combos in this engine are juggles (also note that juggle ability is determinined ENTIRELY by Capcom (ANOTHER thing I don’t like about this game!)))? Sagat with a safe reversal? Hey, wait, EVERYONE with a dp has a safe reversal! What’s up with that? Who thought safe dp into blockstring was a good idea? FIRE THAT GUY.

And gosh, the balancing, it just makes no sense. Oh hey, let’s make defense good; that way scrubs don’t just lose the match super quick, and instead get super mad at losing it crazy slow. And hey, let’s make all the offense wakeup-mixup based! That’ll go well with our mashable, safe reversals! And yeah, option-selects; because NOTHING screams scrub friendly like OPTION-SELECTS! While they’re so busy trying to determine the best single action in a given situation, the master player has already chosen a SET of actions to take! GAME DESIGN!!!!

And so on and so forth, and endless travesty of design by committee. None of it adds up! Oh hey, we’re beginner friendly . . . only our combo engine assumes you’ve mastered an odd nuance to properly perform your links! Did we mention that we’re link heavy? Hope you like spending hours in training mode, not understanding what you’re doing wrong! And hey, you see those awesome new characters over there? Aren’t they awesome? Man, sure hope you have fantastic execution, because if you don’t, you really might as well not even be playing them! And even if you have godlike execution, even if you master their in’s and out’s, guess what? You’re still 4-6 against Akuma!

And the icing on the cake, the final fuck you in the message to the player, the last fart in the player’s face? Damn series isn’t even FUN. NO ONE actually enjoys the SF4 series. Every other series, from Darkstalkers to Guilty, to Melty, shit even FotNS has it’s defenders, it’s partisans . . . but not SF4!

And it’s no suprise . . . it’s such an empty little game, with nothing there save what the players bring with them.

And man, that’s just the dressing. The main course of the game? BRILLIANT! It’s basically CvS2 meets Marvel 2, with some Guilty thrown in for good measure. Marvel 2 brings everything except it’s tri-jumps and it’s balance, CvS2 brings a ratio-like system and an emphasis on spacing, and Guilty comes in with long, chunky hitstop, a strong varied cast, and robust aerial footsies.

And gosh, they hit all the notes, without any of the compromise! Who’d a thunk it? This game is fun to mash around in, and it’s fun to learn and master. The whole cast feels so powerful, so fun, like there’s endless possibility, and that possibility will only lead to the TOP TIERS. Logically speaking, the whole CAST can’t be A tier, but they sure as hell feel like they can; and man, we haven’t even factored in team composition! And DLC characters! It’s like the people who made it didn’t feel like they had to neuter every good idea they had! Man, that shit kray.

There are complaints, of course. Like hey, that Hornet Bomber is pretty dumb guys. And you’re really gonna make it so easy for Fortune to move her head like that? And ya know, forcing people to start their loops with a new normal every time will stop infinites, but it still gives us long ass loops, and that’s still pretty annoying. And hey, I can’t use multi-hit assists to start combo’s! IPS glitches out on them, giving them a burst before I even finish my chain! Wut up wit dat MikeZ?

And I’d love to get into things deeper, but I’m not sure what more there is to say; it’s just too early. It’ll take months before we can start being ‘good’ at this game, and years before people can talk with real authority about what this game is really about*******.But I know that I want to be there to find out what it is. And I’m going to love every second of it.

===

+ DISCLAIMER: I came into the scene with SF4.
++ 3s =    Twelve = :>  3s tourneys = :<
+++ WHOA THIS PIECE IS GOING UNCOMFORTABLE PLACES, BRING IT HOME ADAM – Adam’s Internal Editor
++++ NOT EVEN CLOSE TO HOME ADAM – Adam’s Internal Editor
+++++ I give up – Adam’s Internal Editor
++++++ Keep the #$%@ing Daniels cominnnnggg! – Adam’s Internal Editor
+++++++ Early signs say Marvel 2 with restands (HOLY SHIT RESTANDS ARE SUCH A GOOD IDEA OMG SO CRAZY). Expect resets into long combo’s, and strong zoning. We have a commando, we have a cable, we CAN MAKE THIS WORK.

Other parts of our day are usually far less predictable. Whether the spontaneity of a surprise phone call from an old friend or an email from a business client bears good or bad news, at the very least it colours our daily routines with the kind of random chance that makes life interesting (if not always enjoyable necessarily).

I play games — and I suspect a lot of people play games — because they also provide my days with that element of unpredictability. Taking part in an unfolding story or trying to win against a digital opponent makes for pretty engaging entertainment. Despite the fact that games, being constructs of cold hard programming, can only offer us a pre-set variety of outcomes (a variety that is always expanding as developers and technological engineers push the medium forward) they can give us a sense of being somewhere else, taking part in a world of chance — a world that can have more in common with the unpredictable parts of our days than the rote, habitual ones.

That isn’t always the case with Persona 3.

I found the game to be, while not really unpleasant, much like an endlessly repeating habit. At a certain point, I told myself that I would just push forward until something happened that made me understand it. I hoped that understanding would lead to enjoyment, but it didn’t. Ten hours into Persona 3 and I simply couldn’t stand the idea of plunging into Tartarus again and repeatedly fighting a limited cast of enemies using the same line-up of battle tactics as always while running through floors of identical looking levels. I told myself that I would try to minimize this part of the game because, like I mentioned in Part 1 of this thing, there was something kind of intriguing about the daily scheduling of social life, studying and work that the game requires. If I could stop using the evenings to explore Tartarus then maybe I’d be happy just to explore the city, chat with the characters and wait until the plot actually started to get going. It seemed like that approach might have worked.

Then I started to get “The RPG Fear.”

The Fear is when you begin to suspect that, by not tending to your character’s development adequately (whether through leveling up, buying and selling equipment or attending to other mundane tasks), you will eventually reach a point in the game where you are unable to progress any further. This is something that I had experienced as a kid, playing Final Fantasy VII and VIII and never being able to get to the end sequences because I hadn’t bulked up my characters well enough. I always thought it was a horrible thing to experience because, well, I just wanted to see out the conclusion of a story and the game had blocked me out — not because I wasn’t skilled enough, but because my characters’ numbers weren’t high enough to go up against a boss’. The solution to The Fear is, of course, to head into short bouts of combat, mindlessly enacting minor, effortless battles so those numbers could get bigger, making completing the game possible. The vaccine is grinding, really.

I suspect that a lot of the backlash against Japanese-developed role-playing games (JRPGs if you want to get weirdly nation-specific about your genres and pigeonhole conventions to a single country/culture rather than a set of aesthetic conventions) comes from this sort of reliance on repetition. Grind for long enough and nothing is beyond the player’s means. The idea that simply repeating a task over and over and over again will lead to a sense of empowerment is a strangely industrial ideal and one that, yeah, is certainly appealing in a robotic way. It is also dehumanizing, though, and dampens whatever part of our brains it is that gets a mini-orgasm from exercising skill and accomplishing a difficult task.

Just the same, many people like Persona 3, grinding and all.

After all, dedication is a great equalizer. The lady or lad who is very skilled at painting, but is a complete slacker should, by all rights, be outstripped by the less naturally talented, but more dedicated artist who commits all of their spare time to improving at their craft+. This may be how it should work in real life, but games aren’t real life (take that Crysis). They are, at very great moments, works of pure escapism that are capable of offering us reprieve from the less exciting parts of our daily lives.

This obviously isn’t universally agreed upon. Many, many people get a lot of pleasure out of the slow but steady, repetitive but continuous growth that JRPGs (and Massively Multiplayer RPGs also) promise. At one point, once I had learned enough to know that this was the way to get ahead in these kind of games, I liked it too. Now I don’t and Persona 3 is probably just not my cup of tea anymore — at least not at this point in my life. Maybe when I was in high school and my life was much more volatile there was a level of comfort in knowing that, yes, grinding up some numbers would always make my virtual dudes better at fighting. Maybe when I had regular homework I was more content to press a single button over and over again to get through grinding little battles while studying. Now, when so much of life is comprised of nine to five working, apartment owning, litter box emptying habit it just seems like spending time on videogames should feel less like, well, a chore.

Extra Thoughts

- a plot should get some hooks into an audience within ten hours.

- the dialogue in Persona 3 is snappy and fun. More games should be willing to be this breezy and unafraid of being ridiculous, especially when they’re so bloody long.

- I am willing to try this again when Persona 4 comes out on the Vita. Maybe, then, it’ll take..

===

+ Going much further down this rabbit hole is not a good way to ever end this article. Suffice it to say that there’s a whole lot of talking to be done about the practice vs. natural talent argument, its place in our sociopolitical systems and (oh god I’m just going to go ahead and write this) what game design says about both creators and players.

***

Reid McCarter is a writer, editor and musician living and working in Toronto. He has written for sites and magazines including Kill Screen, The Escapist and C&G Magazine. He maintains literature and music blog, Sasquatch Radio, and, more importantly, founded, writes and is editor-in-extremis for game site Digital Love Child. His Tweet-fu is strong @reidmccarter.

Killzone 2

War is hell, it says, and not just for our team.

During the game’s opening, when Sev, the player-controlled character, lingers to hear an exchange between Evelyn, the scientist, and Rico, the soldier, he takes in a conversation that reveals more about the game’s intensions than the following five to six hours of play will. Evelyn tells Rico that the actions of his soldiers will determine history, that it’s essential to capture the Helghast’s leader humanely so that peace terms can be discussed. Rico, the real villain of the piece, tells the scientist that he doesn’t care about history. He is a cog in a war machine with no regard for the greater impact of his actions and is manically focused entirely on the murder of his enemies.

This scene, despite the ham-fisted writing+ (and the fact that the player can conceivably just walk by the characters and miss the entire conversation), establishes more depth than the rest of the game seems to warrant. The overall story is simple enough, describing how the colonization of new planets by future human organizations lead to the formation of the ISA, who eventually dicked over the Helghast by cutting them out of their space United Nations (UP?) and forcing them to live on a crumby, inhospitable planet. The Helghast, understandably upset, start a war because they want the planets they colonized back from the jerks who took them++.

The Helghast aren’t great guys and gals by any means, but they aren’t clear-cut villains.

As much as they’re painted in with cultural colours that signify the past century’s greatest monsters (the rousing speeches of a charismatic leader to endless rows of black-clad soldiers, red-eyed helmets glowing like crimson arm bands), the Helghast are meant to evoke the cloudiness of considering any population or enemy in purely binary terms. These are people who are fighting for the freedom of their population, for the chance to improve their lives. The imperialism of the player character’s side, the ISA, has ruined your enemies and backed them into a corner where their ability to survive depends on fighting to take the territory that is rightfully (as rightfully as possessing any land ever really is) theirs.

In theory the game is asking you to remember that there’s rarely anything as simple as good or bad in war. In many, many cases of organized combat there are simply people trying to kill other people. Killzone 2 takes a far less conventional approach to warfare than so many other games that, even if the backstory is so minimal, it deserves some recognition for even having the idea of portraying its Russo-Nazis with any level of nuance.

Unfortunately, aside from probably a little less than 20 minutes of actual exposition, Killzone 2 is primarily made up of combat scenarios where the player is encouraged to think on nothing else but how to best advance through enemy lines or clear out a room full of hostiles. The fact of the matter is that you’re not ever really meant to dwell on the greater meaning associated with the trail of corpses your player leaves behind. The game encourages you to forget all about the complexities underlying every battle and just run, take cover and shoot shoot shoot your gun. Thrown into a fight for survival, never given more than the brief loading screens and their helpful story recaps to try to remember what the combat is all about, Killzone 2 consistently undermines its early efforts to be about something. While it’s admirable, in some ways, that it even tries to have a message beyond the usual FPS nonsense, it planting the seed of a bigger idea and abandoning it almost entirely (until it returns in half-assed fashion during the short ending cinematic) almost makes the lack of thematic consistency worse.

Like all modern shooters, Killzone 2 ends its brisk single-player campaign by dumping players back at the main menu where the only way to get more out of the game is to jump into multiplayer. Of course, just like the rest of the genre, there’s no attempt at furthering the fiction through this mode (why not, by the way? Just because there are other people around it doesn’t mean you can’t try to continue your story in multiplayer) and, instead, the lasting Killzone experience is one characterized by frantically jogging around maps shooting — and trying not to get shot by — other players.

So, what we have in the end is a title that opens up a conversation about why war is less cut and dry than most videogames would have the player believe that decides to drop this thread throughout the vast majority of the actual playing experience. Killzone 2 is, for this reason, kind of gross. It gives us the seed of an idea, asks us to think about the battle against the Helghast as if we’re like that scientist referenced above, then promptly places us into the same mindset as the psychopathically violent Rico and tells us that’s enough.

It isn’t!

Like it or not, many people are going to have their opinions on a great many subjects shaped by what they take away from videogames. They’re a massive medium, an enormous part of the entertainment industry and partial arbitrators of many formed or unformed moral and political opinions sifting through their audience’s minds. When I first started playing Killzone 2 I thought that it may have been a surprise, a game that took the usual conventions of the first-person shooter and attached a brain to an otherwise typical story. Instead it’s a “me too” kind of enterprise, content to show its audience some of humanity’s worst without giving more than a cursory nod to ways that we could think about armed combat outside of its value as virtual entertainment.

===

+ Killzone 2 has to have the worst dialogue I’ve encountered through a game in the last year or two. The battle growls are punctuated by “fuck” in the most overbearing, mindless and unnatural way and the frequent “mom jokes” complete a picture of the script’s creators as recent hires from a junior high creative writing class.

+I had to consult Wikipedia to piece together some of this. I probably mangled the details in the process of simplifying the Killzone games’ surprisingly detailed backstory, but think I got the gist of things right.

***

Reid McCarter is a writer, editor and musician living and working in Toronto. He has written for sites and magazines including Kill Screen, The Escapist and C&G Magazine. He maintains literature and music blog, Sasquatch Radio, and, more importantly, founded, writes and is editor-in-extremis for game site Digital Love Child. His Tweet-fu is strong @reidmccarter.

Now, a few hours in I’m willing to take a (self-inflicted gun)shot at trying to unpack just what it is that makes this game compelling to so many people.

A strange metatextual thing: my favourite aspect of Persona 3 so far has been the game’s use of time scheduling as a gameplay mechanic. The story centres around your player character, a teenager with the kind of astonishingly manicured hair that many 16 year-olds would give a limb to possess, moving into a dormitory and attending highschool while unravelling the mystery of The Dark Hour, a hidden time of night where select individuals maintain consciousness and fight Shadows (i.e. monsters) while the general populace slumbers on, none the wiser.

Since the main character (the portable version of Persona 3 lets you pick from a male or female protagonist, but advises newcomers like myself to choose the regular version’s boy, which I did) is just a regular kid, s/he has to balance the insane discovery of a hidden world with the everyday demands of the mundane. Throughout the week you must choose how to spend your free time. Hang out with friends, study, work shifts at a part-time job, get some extra rest or tucker yourself out combatting Shadows and, possibly, saving the world. This, aside from the extradimensional heroics, reflects an actual highschooler’s life pretty well.

How many of us had to choose whether to spend the night studying or playing videogames? Did you ever consider calling in sick to work so you could go and do nothing with your friends? Persona 3 is a game as much about beating back demons as it is about managing your time properly. That it encourages you to make constant sacrifices is to its benefit: being smart, having good relationships and earning cash all confer tangible gameplay benefits, each kind as worthy of attaining as another. But, of course, you can never have it all. Spend too long doing one type of thing and you lose out on the rewards that another activity would bring. That’s a whole lot like real life.

This ties in with my own concerns regarding the game, hence the idea of metatextuality mentioned above. A quick search on how long the game is gave me a pretty staggering return, suggesting that playing all the way through Persona 3 would suck up literal days of my life. Despite how engaging it has already been, being presented with the idea of spending 50+ hours exploring a single game is kind of terrifying. I haven’t balked at diving headfirst into long books like Infinite Jest before, but, still, every time an audience is asked to devote such a massive amount of free time experiencing one piece of art/entertainment, that book/game is making something of an intrinsic promise to exchange your willingness to participate with some kind of personal, intellectual growth. So far Persona 3 simply seems like a fun game with an okay story, not necessarily something that will leave me a different person by the time I’ve finished it.

So, do I spend extra time with friends, devote hours to picking up extra writing contracts, work on this goddamned novel edit or play more Persona 3? When it’s written out like that it’s easy to imagine how those choices — and the benefits they offer — would factor into my in-game decision making. Normally I might not think so much about this sort of thing, but Persona 3, with all of its time management focus, has sort of guided me toward it.

By creating a game where time management is always at the forefront of my mind, Persona 3 is also always reminding me that there’s something else I should be doing rather than playing a videogame. Whether this is good or bad is anyone’s guess. There’s nothing wrong with entertainment for entertainment’s sake, but the strange proposition of painstakingly guiding a virtual avatar through a schedule — picking and choosing how to maximise her/his time — when I’d probably be better served by applying the same type of management to my own life is somewhat troubling.

Nonetheless, I’ll probably pick away at the game some more, maybe slotting it into the EVENING block of time where options include:

Watching Luck

Staring at wall

Petting cat

Playing Persona 3

Extra Thoughts

- the sound of the characters running through the hallways of Tartarus (the perfect replication of six shoes pounding linoleum) is fantastic and encourages exploration

- I can’t decide if the JPop soundtrack is fantastic or the absolute worst

- the combat is really fun!

- I wish there was an option to have your character “play” Persona 3 within Persona 3 that made her/him level up faster, but also lose her/his mind

***

Reid McCarter is a writer, editor and musician living and working in Toronto. He has written for sites and magazines including Kill Screen, The Escapist and C&G Magazine. He maintains literature and music blog, Sasquatch Radio, and, more importantly, founded, writes and is editor-in-extremis for game site Digital Love Child. His Tweet-fu is strong @reidmccarter.

The next year it seemed a bit better. I knew these people, had grown more comfortable drinking my wine and sort of drifting out when the conversations turned to Polish. The Christmas after that I barely noticed a thing and now, all these years and several failed attempts to learn the language (it is goddamned impenetrable, but I’ll keep trying until I die) later, I find that I can follow the gist of my in-laws’ Polish dialogue despite only recognizing a handful of words. It is possible to intuit the rhythm of a sentence, to understand how changes in tone and volume communicate a joke or sarcastic remark without a proper understanding of the complexities of the language. This is, I think, a common phenomenon. In lieu of properly interpreting a language, those regularly surrounded by it will at least learn to “feel” how it works.

By the end of two hours with Journey a similar thing had happened.

All language is a formalization of abstract thoughts, a systemic method of organization that allows groups of people to communicate ideas without barriers of entry. Anyone who speaks English can speak English to someone else and, say, talk about the weather. With a good enough grasp of the language it’s possible to read literature or poetry that takes advantage of that common ground to express more difficult concepts. Instead of using our mutual ability to get access to one another’s thoughts to talk about boring shit we can, instead, try to dig around in the collective psyche to share our deepest thoughts and emotions — usually incommunicable stuff like intense sadness, happiness, frustration, etc. — with one another. Humanity, because we’re a pretty ingenious species at times, has systems in place that allow us to easily share personal concepts through unified constructs of expression.

Literature and poetry are almost like telepathy in this sense.

What’s probably more interesting, though, is how certain art can bypass the limitations of language entirely, offering the same type of exchange without requiring even shared words as prerequisite. When any of us listen to a piece of music like Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, regardless of our musical training, we immediately feel the melancholy of a man from a very different time and culture than our own. When we look at a painting like Picasso’s Guernica we are engulfed in the horror and chaos of war without requiring first-hand knowledge of combat or even familiarity of the historic bombing portrayed in his piece.

Great works of visual art and music move beyond the confines of the written word and hit us at our core. This is the main reason I’ve always been drawn to playing and listening to music. Written art accomplishes different objectives, requires that the audience comes to it equipped with specific tools (and usually a significant amount of patience) on hand and is, by definition, a more exclusionary medium. Until recently videogames have primarily followed that route, choosing to communicate complex ideas by following in the footsteps of literary and cinematic media.

It seems like a bit of a waste. This type of approach is completely valid, but offers a relatively limited way of interfacing with an (increasingly large) international audience. Games are such an immediately accessible medium — provided, of course, that an audience has access to a console or PC — that they can benefit enormously from the same type of abstract expression afforded by other audio or visual works. That they also encourage immediacy by the very fact of their interactivity makes an even stronger case for shrugging off the conventions of language-based media more often.

That’s where Journey comes in.

There is no established language in Journey, barring a handful of early game button prompts, and as much of the game’s experience is instinctively felt as it is logically understood. As players explore the game’s desert landscape they are presented with visual cues that are recognizable from any context: tombstones, altars, stone shelters. As they learn to slide down sand dunes and fly through the air for the first time the music soars along with them, reinforcing that, yes, this is a really joyous thing to do. These audiovisual cues continue in the short non-interactive “exposition” sequences — no words, just moving picture and sound — that mask loading screens. All of it is presented in a way that combines the power of universally understood symbols with intuitive elements of play. The end result is that every situation is invested with an even more intense feeling of dread, happiness and sadness than is possible in art that doesn’t force us to take an active role in experiencing it.

The abstraction of play, environment and narrative into intellectual neutrality continues with the game’s brilliant multiplayer. Another red cloaked figure (who looks exactly like the person the player controls) comes into view from out of nowhere. Press the controller’s circle button lightly to chirp once or press it several times to emit several sounds. The musicality of Journey‘s “language” means that it is easy to understand for any audience. It may seem like an arbitrary design choice at first, but by the time the player has encountered real danger and heard their partner’s rapid chirping they’ve understood that the game has provided a real tool. Frantic chirps from another player can’t represent anything but panic when both sides of the conversation are fleeing a menacing dragon-like creature in a dark cavern. Because both parties speak the same vague “language” it only takes one time experiencing a flurry of exclamations while soaring on an air current to realize that the other player is hammering on that circle button to express their joy. The inclusion of this language — completely abstract but completely capable of conveying human expression — shows a prodigious understanding of how to leverage artistic achievement with real interactivity. In short, Journey is the most fully realized and wholly universal videogame of any to date.

True art is capable of leading its audience to a sort of instinctual understanding, something that goes beyond the literal message of a song, a story or a game mechanic and resounds on a level just out of the reach of our critical minds. This kind of catharsis is why we are drawn to beautiful paintings, songs and poetry. We don’t have to be devoted to any of these forms of expression to be capable of taking something away from time in their presence. Fans, developers and critics of videogames seem to return to the question of whether games are art regularly. The end result is always a samsara style arrival back at the beginning of the conversation (or the return of the headache that caused you to start repeatedly smacking your forehead against the wall in the first place) and is, ultimately, completely banal.

When a videogame is able to invent a language all of its own — one that is accessible to anyone with a few fingers and two hours — there’s no need to argue about what it is and where it should be shelved on the sprawling library of global culture. It distills so much of what is alien and what is familiar in the human experience into a single piece of entertainment; it gives the impression that anyone experiencing it for the first time is sitting around a familiar dinner table hearing a conversation they both can and cannot understand; it is like viewing a prehistoric painting from a completely forgotten civilization that makes you feel sad in the same way that the far off creator felt sad when they made it. The fact that Journey communicates with us with on this level makes labelling it sort of besides the point. It is something new and it is a promise for the future of a medium.

***

Reid McCarter is a writer, editor and musician living and working in Toronto. He has written for sites and magazines including Kill Screen, The Escapist and C&G Magazine. He maintains literature and music blog, Sasquatch Radio, and, more importantly, founded, writes and is editor-in-extremis for game site Digital Love Child. His Tweet-fu is strong @reidmccarter.

In short, I’ve learned how to communicate with a videogame by speaking its own language.

The central conceit of Dragon Age: Origins — and games by its developer Bioware in general — is that the audience is able to play an instrumental part in foreign worlds by interacting with them based on the personality they choose to take on. At least, that’s what I’ve always thought. The player is meant to approach a strange new place — whether a pseudo-Dark Ages style fantasy nation or a humanity living in space far into the future — and hurl themselves headlong into its culture and politics. While, quite often, this type of interaction involves killing things, the Bioware approach also involves changing the world by talking to people. This is one of my favourite things about their releases: violently exploring an environment is often bookended by encounters with a cast of characters involved in the conflict. The player is asked to learn more by asking for information, sometimes customizing the beginning or end result of battles by taking sides on difficult moral issues or just showing off how much of a nice person/jerk/inappropriately sarcastic weiner they are.

The problem, though, is that conversations in Dragon Age do not, as much as we may want them to, resemble actual social interactions at all. The first time I played the game it was pretty disappointing to start talking to a character, come to a break in the conversation and then have to pick a fairly detailed line from a list of possible responses. My sense of agency was yanked away, replaced with a pre-set variety of responses that never quite encapsulated what I wanted my character to say. “Do you think that we should massacre this castle to make sure that anyone infected with this highly contagious evil disease doesn’t have a chance to spread it?” a big knight may ask. I’d like to suggest that we could avoid slaughter by, maybe, putting everyone in a quarantine and taking a bit of time to weed out the infectious. Instead, I’m allowed to respond from a list of choices like, “Kill them all. I want to bathe in their blood.” or “Let them all free! Not a single person will be hurt!” or “Tell me more.”

Well, what did I expect? I guess, really, it shouldn’t have been anything more than what I was given. After all, Bioware do a far better job than most developers in crafting role-playing games where some sort of role can actually be created and maintained by players. Just the same (and this hearkens back to the kind of problem I had with Skyrim), the closer a videogame gets to achieving something really great, the more apparent its flaws become. When nearly every aspect of a character can be developed and explored throughout a massive, open world full of interesting choices the onus is on the studios that make these games to flesh out some of the more human options.

We’re on a path forward, of course, and these conversation systems represent just one piece of the ever evolving videogame organism. And that makes me think, well, if I’m ready to criticize something then what would I suggest in its place?

The list (or, wheel) of choices offered by Bioware is far more substantial than most other games and that’s a great start (the greater the variety of options, the more subtle the nuances of a response’s implications), but, as far as I see it, the major issue is that each dialogue choice hints at a possible outcome. Just as you can be sure that killing a Little Sister in Bioshock will give you “evil points” and saving her “good points”, the same applies (in a less direct way) to Dragon Age: Origins conversations. When too much information is provided the after effects are telegraphed too far in advance. This is in direct opposition to so many real-life interactions. If a stranger approaches me on the street and asks me for my views on the continued deployment of Canadian troops in Afghanistan, I have no idea what the “correct” answer is. When a beleaguered City Elf in Dragon Age asks what I think about their struggle for freedom becoming violent, though, learning how to respond to the dictated context is much less dynamic.

This isn’t good! Games should, ideally, be approachable from any perspective. They shouldn’t come with prerequisites that ask players to know how their mechanics will track responses and shape the world. This, I think, is one of the reasons why communication is so broken in even the best conversation-focused videogames. Developers seem to approach every aspect of their design work with the kind of cause/effect mindset that is essential to creating titles that play well, but can also have the unfortunate side effect of systemic writing that is more robotic than it needs to be.

Alpha Protocol, while a bit of a mess in many respects, at least came closer to providing a good facsimile of conversation. The game’s timed responses mean that players have no time to carefully consider the desired effect of everything they say. Much like real life, when a person asks you a question in Alpha Protocol, you can’t spend time thinking about the exact ramifications of your response. You choose the kind of spy you’re playing and react appropriately given what you know and how you wish to portray yourself. The ultimate effect feels far more organic than anything else I’ve experienced. Sure, there are less options on the table at a given time, but the spontaneity that comes with a greater emphasis on natural communication ends up creating the impression of a real, dynamic conversation.

If this kind of system were implemented as a part of a game like Dragon Age: Origins, the end result would be fantastic. Dragon Age 2 and the Mass Effect series already showed that bringing player attitude to bear on responses leads to a more natural feel with their wheel communication system. Taking it a step further with time restrictions would help make conversations come off in an even more realistic manner. Sure, this kind of system wouldn’t solve every problem, but it at least offers something far better than the videogame communications we currently have.

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Reid McCarter is a writer, editor and musician living and working in Toronto. He has written for sites and magazines including Kill Screen, The Escapist and C&G Magazine. He maintains literature and music blog, Sasquatch Radio, and, more importantly, founded, writes and is editor-in-extremis for game site Digital Love Child. His Tweet-fu is strong @reidmccarter.

Ed: Credit to the Giant Bomb image archive for the Dragon Age: Origins screenshot.

My unexpected love of football video games did come with an equally unexpected hatred of virtual John Madden and my team coach+.This hatred grew in reaction to their constant yammering on about every god-damned decision I made in the game.  I understand that these messages are pre-recorded in such a way that they can apply to a variety of situations with any team you care to play for. I can forgive the game for having commentaries which give the gameplay a feeling similar to watching a live game on TV. What I can not forgive the game for is the smug cockitude with which its universally applicable voice-overs are delivered. Every god-damned play I make is reacted to without surprise and with one of maybe ten statements about the obvious nature of my decision to throw a ball one way or the other. Not once did this Madden guy say, “Well, it didn’t work out, but it was worth a shot,” or, “Look at how wrong I was when I said it wouldn’t work. I’m sorry, John, for doubting you.” Nothing even close to this. It’s all shoulda-known-betters and I-would’ve-done-the-sames, depending on my level of success++. As the anger grew inside me and the voices kept knowing it all, all I wanted to scream out at Mr. Madden was, “GET OUT OF MY TV, DAD!” I chose instead to turn the commentary off and re-examine my relationship with my parents.

It is worth noting that the kind of attitude a football commentator has is strikingly similar to that of an older generation speaking to a younger one. More often than not this comes from the self-important advice of our parents. What they are guilty of is using creeping determinism: the sense that develops in us after an event has taken place that the outcome was going to happen all along. It’s similar to hindsight, but with the addition of narcissism that suggests our understanding of the events in the world is so vast that we could predict a seemingly unpredictable outcome. It is the psychological trick someone plays in their own head right before saying, “I could have told you that,” when they couldn’t have. There is self-satisfaction in this mental trick which puts the speaker apart from his or her audience as the more intelligent one who, if only we had come to them first, could have told us exactly what needed to be done. There is authority unrightfully gained through creeping determinism, and it is authority parents (amongst others) feel the need to have.

The need for and love of this sense of absolute expertise on events in the world comes from having a position of authority. The authority figure senses a responsibility to know more than others. Creeping determinism allows people to convince others and themselves that they have an expertise, whatever their position might demand. They are responsible for their children; they are responsible for guiding their child along the right path. Or, maybe they are responsible for telling people about football, and they should know exactly where that pointy ball is going to go and the best way to get it there.

Where the frustration comes from, I think, is that the listeners are also humans who try to predict what may happen in the future, and we get it so wrong so often. Therefore, who the fuck are you, Mr. Madden? We know you’re not superhuman (though photos suggest you may be an alien creature). You are claiming a level of expertise which surpasses human capability, and you are doing it with such arrogance. It’s not unlike the playground tactics of saying, “I know the answer, but I’m not going to tell you.”

Of course, I’m not saying that my parents and football commentators are the only people who claim to know more than they do. Your parents do too. It’s a trait which has enraged children for centuries, and it is one that Papa Madden has made his trademark in these games. I think the whole tactic admits of a certain lack of confidence in the speaker: that they should always need to be right. Who wants to always be right about everything? I just want to wrap a blanket around John Madden and tell him it’s okay to not be able to predict the future. You’re good value, John. You know a whole bucket load about football. Now take your pre-recorded voice and teach it some god-damned humility.

===

Well, screw you too, and here are your articles.

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Rock Paper Shotgun’s John Walker has been talking with Double Fine’s Tim Schafer about the developerment studio’s recent Kickstarter success and, par for the site’s course, been doing a bang-up job of it.

Interview: Tim Schafer on Adventures, by John Walker via Rock Paper Shotgun

I previously wrote about the Double Fine campaign and the revival of adventure games on this very website and am happy to see answers to some of those questions answered in Walker’s interview. When Schafer talks about designing aspects of Full Throttle to have both an “action path” and a “puzzle path” it makes me really look forward to seeing what the Kickstarter game will be like. The only thing that makes me a bit wary is when, at the beginning, he also declares that the new game will “serve [fans of traditional adventure games] and not try to rope in [a different audience].” Here’s to hoping that dedication to the ways things used to be doesn’t get in the way of a more user-friendly brand of adventure.

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This week, pretty much everyone has been writing about the disgusting behaviour going on over at Cross Assault, a Capcom reality show featuring two teams of fighting game players duking it out for a share of $25,000. Probably the best write-up was provided by Ben Kuchera over at The PA Report (marking two weeks in a row of outstanding reporting) who gives a thorough summary of the main issues and highlights key points of the story.

Sexual harassment as ethical imperative: how Capcom’s fight game reality show turned ugly, by Ben Kuchera via The PA Report

This is the kind of thing that makes me want to bow out from talking about games at all. It seems like, regardless of the increase in quality discourse growing up around the medium, there are still a large number of players who refuse to, well, not be complete fucking idiots. Obviously Bakhtanians belongs to a specific subculture of creepy jerks, but this sort of thing negatively effects the entire medium. Who wants to take a chance on videogames when these are the kind of people contributing to the public face of it?

Ugh.

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Digital Love Child’s own Tom Auxier wrote a fantastic piece for Pixels or Death suggesting that sports and games fandom, despite seeming so different on the surface, have a lot in common.

Winning: Sports and Videogames, by Tom Auxier via Pixels or Death

It all ties in, to me at least, with the futility of subcultural labels. Why can’t someone be equally in love with sports and videogames? I nerd out as hard over books and music as games, but I would hesitate to call myself a “fan” of one to the exception of the others. Tom offers a compelling counter-argument to this type of phenomenon by showing that, in the end, the archetypal jock and the archetypal D&D nerd share a lot of the same traits.

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Lastly, brand new games site, Medium Difficulty debuted this week with a handful of articles. My favourite is a piece by Brendan Keogh, decrying the tendency of modern games criticism to discuss what games should be rather than analyze what they already are. Though I don’t agree with absolutely every point he makes, I do think a greater emphasis on textual (rather than purely theoretical) criticism is an important one to note. Critics should ask for better games, but doing so by working with what’s already available creates a much better framework than grasping at some utopian ideal.

Chasing Mirages: Turning Videogame Criticism Away from the Future, by Brendan Keogh via Medium Difficulty

Aside from the weight of Keogh’s argument for a more tangible games criticism, I’m also very, very happy to see the launch of another site that is more concerned with providing discourse on the medium rather than simply adding to the web’s already bloated offering of consumer reviews, previews and news. Very much looking forward to seeing how it shapes up in the future.

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Listen, I’m really sorry about what I said in the header. I overreacted. I didn’t mean it that way.

Just . . . just have a good weekend jerks.

The game is shit. The thoughts behind the game are shit. The talk about the game is shit. Passage is such shit, it is second only to the Wii in caking shit into the very fabric of the mildly noble art of videogames.

So how is it shit? It’s a game, so let’s start with the play+. There is none. There is no play. There’s no give. There’s not even any take. There’s no real system here. A game is at it’s best when it’s a living breathing thing. I don’t mean the ‘illusion’ of a living and breathing thing++. I mean actually being a living, breathing thing. I mean actually giving the player system-space to explore actual dynamism and emergence and exploration.

And Passage has none of that. What do you even do in this game? Walk to the right? Engage in purposeless exploration?+++ What kind of life is that; idle wandering through a meaningless maze, picking and choosing treasure to collect, except when your SIGNIFICANT OTHER gets in the way! Just wandering about, taking treasures as you find them; no goals, no purpose, just never-ending series of idle diversions. A poor life. A dead life.

You can wrap shitty mechanics in as much ‘meaning’ as you want. Doesn’t make either of them worth anything

We turn now to Passage’s other, and far worse sin; the damage it has done to the way we talk about games. Flaws within the game can be forgiven; ambition, reach for stars, go big or or go home, et cetera et cetera. But to not even fail in your goal, but to actively HINDER it’s broader achievment . . . it’s a terrible accusation, and not one I make lightly.

Passage has cemented the idea that ‘artgames’ don’t have to be good, cementing mediocrity as a noble aspiration. As long as they’re ‘trying’, as long as it’s pretentious enough, we can let it slide. Nay, not even let it slide, as long as it’s vain enough we can even CELEBRATE it, hold it up as this noble example of WHAT COULD BE, a REAL FUTURE for THE ART OF VIDEOGAMES™.

And what a future it is! A future of Museums, of art collectors, of fancy parties, cocktails and pianos and galleries and high society and all the shit that keeps art from meaning anything to anyone. A future of death and stagnation, where life is not lived, but submerged in formaldehyde for people to gawk at and IMAGINE. Could you IMAGINE that? Wow! While the jaded stand here, sipping their drinks, I BEHOLD and APPRECIATE. And they’re not thinking the same thing, no they’re all empty inside, but not ME. I have a RICH INNER LIFE.++++ I really understand this ART, and that makes me BETTER.

We have the potential to make a new world, a new (I’m gonna say it (someone stop me (lol))) ART and all we can think of is more of the same? Of contorting and brutalizing ourselves to fit the old model? Museums are nice to visit, but who wants to live there?

So there you have it. Passage is such shit, it’s poisoning the future of videogames, dragging us down into a cesspool of filth. Pretty impressive for a 256×33 screen game, with (shit) chiptune music.

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+ AKA The ‘Game – play’.
++ This focus on the ‘illusion’ of being living and breathing is honestly at the core of why most games are shit these days (SEE: Zelda, Mario, Passage, Bioshock, etc.).
+++ Meeting the chick makes certian exploration impossible. That’s so disturbing and self-centered. Fucking privilege bro.
++++ Slavoj Žižek does a wonderful takedown of the RICH INNER LIFE b.s. that people feed themselves in First as Tragedy, Then As Farce. Read it.+++++
+++++ Passage‘s only meaningful achievement: allowing me to mention in Slavoj Žižek in the context of videogames. ARTCHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED

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Adam Burch was put on this Earth to play God Hand and chew bubble gum . . . and HE’S ALL OUT OF BUBBLEGUM! He programs robots and videogames and is ruining esports. He wants to start a game studio one day, release a spiritual sequel to God Hand and live the rest of his days bitter that it didn’t make him filthy rich. Read his blog Thus Spoke Pi or follow him on Twitter @roughly22over7.

Thus, the debut of In Other Words.

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Vox Media launched their much-anticipated games website this week and the first run of features is solid. My favourite of the week was former Escapist Editor-in-Chief Russ Pitts’ look into the development of the grandly uneven Dead Island.

Dead Island: The Reckoning, by Russ Pits via Vox Gaming

Pitts’ insight into the challenges imposed on Dead Island‘s creator, Techland by both itself and the internet hype machine is valuable for critics, players and developers alike. As we all chase the next big thing or agitate for smarter game design it’s valuable to witness some part of a process where an extremely ambitious group of talented individuals had to whittle down their vision into something that was, ultimately, achieved only a fraction of what it set out to do.

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Another new website launch this week saw Penny Arcade expand its empire with The PA Report. Ben Kuchera, formerly of Ars Technica, now runs the news-focused offshoot of the webcomic and has already proven the strength of his chops to a new audience with a fantastic profile of Twisted Metal and God of War creator, David Jaffe.

David Jaffe wants to use game play to tell stories, and he isn’t afraid to fight the press, by Ben Kuchera via The PA Report

Kuchera’s audio recording of Jaffe giving Kotaku’s Editor-in-Chief Stephen Totilo hell is slightly terrifying and an appropriate reminder for all critics, journalists and editors to exercise caution when condemning a real person’s character. That kind of thing has consequences, after all, and if you can’t adequately back up your argument it can have pretty nasty results. I won’t take sides on the piece in question (it mostly comes off as a series of misunderstandings), but, suffice it to say that the handful of minutes where Jaffe lays the issue bare are as raw a response to editorial accusation as I’ve heard in some time.

Aside from this aspect, Kuchera’s piece is noteworthy, too, for doing what every good profile should: giving the reader an excellent portrayal of its subject.

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Patrick Klepek continues to test out non-news features at Giant Bomb with the second installment of Backtracking. The latest in a series where Klepek chats with developers about their favourite games sees Remedy Entertainment’s Aki Järvilehto talking through his affection for Diablo.

Backtracking: Remedy’s Aki Järvilehto Loves Diablo, by Patrick Klepek via Giant Bomb

Backtracking is a novel idea and one that gives readers a better peek into what influences the people who make the games we play. An Alan Wake creator talking Diablo is a fine proof of concept and the kind of unexpected combination of product and influence I’m sure we’ll see more of as the feature goes forward.

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And a last, shameless plug for my interview with Deepak Fights Robots designer, Tom Sennett for Kill Screen (it’s my site goddamit. Let me have this). Tom is a true original and a developer with a bright future full of batshit awesome games. What made the final, published edit is only a fraction of the topics we talked about, but gives a good idea of who he is and how he works. I want that Miyamoto game jam to happen.

One Up: Tom Sennett, by Reid McCarter via Kill Screen

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That’s all for now.