02/09/2012

To the Moon (part 2)

My previous post on To The Moon can be found here.

This is a slightly smaller, more game-oriented post about To The Moon. Play it.

The game does a number of things right, the most important being that it presents us with a multicultural player team. When I say that you play as those people, I mean exactly that–there is no preferred team member, and the player takes on the role of a white male character and a female woman of color interchangeably. They don’t have “special skills” and the two characters have exactly the same skills and abilities in-game. The game acts out the mythical egalitarian assertions that most games pretend to, and I think that’s good. It’s never mentioned, either. It is taken as a foregone conclusion that everyone with the same training as a specialist in their field are qualified to do the same things.

On one hand, it is all kinds of terrible that this is a revolutionary piece of game design. That said, it is a game in rare form, and I like it. This extends to the unnamed developmental disorder that River, the wife of the man who is going to the moon, has. There is a lot of dialogue that is spent explaining that developmental disorders are something that are difficult, but that the people who have them shouldn’t be treated any differently, and the game is openly critical of the “why can’t people just deal with their mental problems?” line of thinking:

“I really hate when you neurotypicals assume you know what’s best for others.” – Isabelle

And so that’s really all I have to say about how the game itself does things.

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02/08/2012

To The Moon

I woke up this past Saturday and started playing To The Moon. I’ve had it for a while, just sitting on my computer, and in a holiday haze of stormy bullets and biological shocks I kind of let it slip by, forgotten. Which is fine, it happens all the time, right? But I woke up and started playing it, and I’m glad that I did. It’s my favorite game that I’ve played in the past year, easily.

The basic plot of To The Moon is that, sometime in the future, we get the technology to edit people’s memories. A prime use for this technology is hacking into people’s brains on their death beds and fulfilling their big Wish. Whatever they wanted to do in life and didn’t do, these technicians make it happen. There’s a lot of theorycrafting and making sense of that idea, but for the purposes of this little write up, that’s all that matters. The plot is about two technicians who enter the mind of a dying man named John and begin to edit his memories. He wants to go to the moon, and he doesn’t know why.

I can’t really write anything else about the plot. It would literally ruin the point of the game. The review that IGN gave the game sort of sums it up for me, even though the rest of the review is the absolute nadir of “games journalism”:

To the Moon is a challenging game to write about because the only real reason to play it is the story. I could go deeper into the plot, but spoiling it would be a great disservice to any potential players.

And that is absolutely true. To The Moon is a love letter to the adventure gaming genre in all ways. The player is really just a conduit that makes the narrative move forward, and I was very comfortable with my role as a button-pusher during the game. I couldn’t wait to see what happened next, or before, rather; the game moves backward through time before it can go forward.

So why did I bother writing this post if I can’t talk about the damn game?

Rock, Paper, Shotgun, one of the few game websites I read, has a great review of To The Moon that gets near why I liked the game so much (though beware of reading the review, they spoil some of the plot). They write:

 But what’s perhaps best about this game’s story is how much is left for you to fathom for yourself. Not in that, “It’s for you to decide” bullshit way, that so many writers lazily fall back on. But rather, because in each memory all the participants but you have the prior knowledge, they speak in such a way that you’re left scrabbling to fill in the gaps. The further you get, the more is confirmed, but all the way through you’re left room for your own interpretations, sometimes later confirmed, sometimes left ambiguous. The result is a game that constantly feels like it’s respecting your intelligence, even though it later fills in the gap.

I like games that don’t automatically assume that I am the dumbest twelve year old in the world. I also like games that attempt to tell stories that are foreign to the genre. To The Moon is, for all its science fiction and future theory, a romance game. It is about how trauma shapes us, and about how affective connections with other people can overcome everything else in the world. It’s about how the pain of life can be alleviated. A large portion of the plot also thinks through the issues of being in a relationship with a partner who has a developmental disorder. Most games would ignore that, or at least subdue it in the plot, but it comes to the forefront several times during the game and really shaped the way that I thought of several characters. I’m not sure why I think this is so important, but I do, and I recognize that I do. At some level, I just like knowing that difference isn’t erased in the game, but is made apparent and palpable. It makes me feel something for the characters. More and more, I think this might be the most important characteristic of a game, the ability to generate affect.

Anyway, play To The Moon. You’ll be playing the best game of 2011 and supporting an indie developer. Do it.

For an extra-special bonus, check out this interview with the lead developer of the game, Kan Gao. The comment thread is especially interesting.

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02/07/2012

A Quick Note on Sloterdijk and the Bioshock Series

I’m reading the first volume of Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres series, titled Bubbles, which is essentially about how space is created. More particularly, it is about how psychological and communicatory practices are enveloped in a struggle that shapes and constitutes space and place.

In any case, people who have played Bioshock and its sequel should think about this quote:

The first, fixed ego, which contains everything in view around itself, and the second ego, the swinging one that allows itself to be contained fully by its cavity, are related in character insofar as both attempt to withdraw from the folded, interlaced, participatory structure of the real human space. Both have annulled the original dramatic difference between inside and outside by placing themselves, in a fantastic manner, in the middle of a homogeneous sphere not challenged by any real outside or unappropriated other. (86-7)

This is what Rapture is all about, and it extends as a way of thinking through the notion of video games on the whole. We construct space as something to be conquered, proliferated over, or as a womb, something that we can be held by. I can’t help thinking of John Locke in the former case and the notion that space doesn’t exist per se until it becomes marked as useful property. The notion of the unused asset in gaming is aligned along this way of thinking–it is space that is nowhere, communication that’s impossible without a little space hacking.

These are just some preliminary thoughts about this. I’m sure that I will come back to it.

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02/06/2012

The Bioshock Series So Far…

THIS POST HAS SUPER SPOILERS ABOUT THE BIOSHOCK GAMES

I played the first two Bioshock  games this month in the spirit of Bioshock Infinite coming out sometime in the future. I really liked the games, and I don’t have a lot of broad critique for the games. In fact, I just have some things to say about the way the games force you to play them. If you want to get into the deluge that is Bioshock internet commentary, I suggest this Critical Distance “critical compilation” post that really sums up the broad opinions about that game. There really isn’t that kind of thing for Bioshock 2, which makes sense, I guess, and I’ll talk about it below.

I liked both games. The second game gets a bad rap, and I honestly can’t tell you why–it is probably more fun than the first one, and it has a much smarter story. I suppose there’s something lost between the two, especially because Bioshock has the feel of an old school, hardcore game, where the second really doesn’t. With that in mind, I want to talk about the way the games approach their ideologies and how those ideologies become apparent in the way the player is treated in the game. That was an abrupt shift in the writing there, I don’t know what was up with that. Anyway.

"If you can't come in from the cold, then you gotta grow ice over your heart." The core ethic of Bioshock.

Bioshock forces you to play the game in an Objectivist/libertarian way. I know there is a lot of debate about it, but I think that it’s pretty clear that the game forces the player into a world of finite resources and that the player has to take, for herself exclusively, as many of those resources as possible. The idea of the opportunity cost, of the things lost based on the actions taken by the player, becomes a fiction–there is no such thing as opportunity cost in the world of Bioshock. Instead, the player exists as the only possible solution to the world; the effect of playing the game is a kind of “making whole” of the game world itself.

Well, maybe I’m lying a little bit. Opportunity cost does exist in Bioshock. It is player absence or player death. The elimination of the invading player is the only imaginable scenario where the player does not eat all the food in the game world, take all the ammunition, extract all the ADAM. So, by virtue of playing the game, the player is forced into this libertarian horrorshow. That might be the reason that the game was, and is, so well loved. When I spoke about the game being “hard core” above, what I really mean is that the game makes you feel a terror while playing it. During my playthrough, I was constantly assailed by questions of supply–I never had enough health or enough ammunition, and I died many, many times. There were no moments of plenty in the game. Everything was scraping by.

"A man chooses. A slave obeys." What does it mean when obeying is the only possibility?

So somewhere between that play experience and the gripping story is the reason that the game was so successful. It generates genuine affect through a combination of panic and fear and the desire to get revenge or escape Rapture. Of course, the twist of the game sort of kills all the theorizing we could do about what happens in the game. As players of the game know, the phrase “would you kindly” is used through the narrative to make the player character do things. It is a genetic mind control device, a clever twist, a whatever piece of game design. The player being a libertarian in order to survive in Rapture is transformed into a narrative about a character forced into being a libertarian through mind control. I think that really ruins the effect of the rhetoric on the gamer, but I’m sure others have covered this, so I’m not going to belabor the point.

Bioshock 2 is interesting because it sets out to do the opposite of what the first game did. From a story perspective, it makes a lot of sense. Where the first game assailed the player with “the self matters most” rhetoric, the second puts the community at the forefront. Lamb, the antagonist of 2, makes it quite plain that the desires of the NPC community of the game are invested into her and a communal understanding of the world. It is not about getting everything for yourself in Bioshock 2, but rather about everyone having enough.

"Remember...the enemy is alone. We are the Family."

And everyone does have enough, especially the player. The ratio of things that I left in the game world vs the things that I picked up was probably 2:1. There was just too much. Scarcity becomes an impossibility, and maybe that is why the second game didn’t garner the kinds of reactions that Bioshock did. It was too easy, too comforting. Beyond that, the ending of the game is disturbing. The blame for the player’s behavior in the first game can be displaced onto mind control (the narrative); the second game makes sure that they player understands that anything bad that happens is the product of his actions, his agency. The second game gives the player no way out.

Just another quick note: the first game presents the universe (Rapture) as zero sum, a total competition, and the player lives through that. If the player never showed up in Bioshock, the world would probably look the same. Not so in Bioshock 2. In all likelihood, Rapture would have been turned into an organic whole, a utopian paradise. We don’t know that for sure, and the source we have for that information is the antagonist, but the game never comes out and states that she is wrong. The player becomes disruption and interruption, a devil in the code, or in the details, that disrupts Lamb’s utopia. I felt kind of guilty about that.

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02/03/2012

Video Game Pacifism

I’ve been emailed this article by several people now, and I think that I should probably comment on it now.

The Wall Street Journal profiled a series of Skyrim videos about “Felix the Peaceful Monk.” The basic idea of the character is that he does not kill any enemies. He just wanders the world and calms the people who want to hurt him. I’m not really sure how the player makes it through some of the more tricky parts of the game, but I am sure it happens.

I often speak out against the damaging aspects of video games; I think that games, when done wrong, can put forth some ethics that are problematic. For example, the Call of Duty franchise is just silly war porn, but the main problem with those games isn’t the killing. It’s the justification for the killing.

So I don’t think that it’s particularly “radical” for a player to avoid killing in a game, and I also don’t think that it’s very novel. It should be noted that a number of games in the 1990s fully supported a noncombat approach to a game with combat; Fallout can be completed without ever drawing a weapon, if you so choose. It’s really hard, but it can be done, and the game is designed around that decision.

In any case, I don’t think that video game pacifism really means anything. I am much more interested in video games that allow the player room to think through their actions and, if need be, give a space for violent action. Violence, and violent tendencies, can be worked out in the safe space of the video game, and more than that, video game scenarios can be a testing ground for ethics. I would much rather a player commit a crime in a game, even a brutal murder, if the game makes the effort to make the player have a genuine affective response to that. My posts over the past few days about Grand Theft Auto IV reflect this; the simulation of murder created real emotions and regrets, which impacts my real world ethical relationships and feelings.

I think that the example of a teenager named Brock in the latter part of the article really sheds light on this kind of thinking.

Today, after wearing down his parents with wit and good grades, Brock has a PlayStation 3 that he plays on a denim beanbag chair in the basement. The double zeros in his online identity, BrockyBoi00, come from an old football jersey that hangs framed above the television. But Mr. and Mrs. Soicher still don’t want any violent titles in their suburban Denver home. Brock can’t have any game that has a rating above “T” (Teen). Recently, when Mrs. Soicher found a copy of a shooting game called “Kill Zone,” she laid it on the kitchen counter so Brock would know he’d been busted.

This overt and extreme policing of video games seems ridiculous to me. The elimination of the violent video game as a legitimate medium of expression is the same as the elimination of the violent novel, film, or any other kind of aggressive act. I worry for Brock. I wonder what kind of activities he’s investing his aggression into–is hitting another kid really hard on a football field any different than driving a virtual car or fighting a virtual war? Both scenarios are spaces for working through aggression, but turning another kid, a physical person, into an object to be injured could be problematic. Safety in simulation might be healthier in the long run.

In any case, the short of it is that I think violence in video games is fine. It offers reflection. Football or the War on Terror rarely does. That’s all I have to say.

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02/02/2012

My Niko Bellic

These are five moments that my Niko Bellic experienced in GTA IV.

1.  Niko Bellic walks out of the hospital. He touches his ribs. The giant green cross mounted on the side of the building gives everything  sick tint. Liberty City, slick with rain, radiation green. Niko touches his newly-broken, recently patched ribs. He calls Roman. No answer. He calls Playboy. No answer. He walks down the sidewalk and tries to flag a cab as it drives by. “Hey!” Niko calls, his arms in the air, his ribs aching. The cab turns on its blinker and swerves onto the sidewalk, knocking a telephone pole over in the process. The cab driver doesn’t seem to notice. Niko selects his destination.

2. Niko Bellic puts the dealer in his gun sight. He draws in breath. “Please, please don’t do this, you’re the boss man, you’re the boss,” the dealer says. This is the end of the line. A rooftop execution. Niko thinks back to the Balkans, to the Mediterranean. Niko Bellic thinks about an entire village torn in two and executed. The children had their backs to the wall. The dealer has his back to the sky. Niko Bellic draws in breath.

3. Niko Bellic takes an Irish girl out for dinner. They take a cab back to her apartment. He thinks about asking her if he can come in, but decides against it. They’re just friends. She says goodnight and walks away. Five steps from her door, she pauses, doesn’t move. Nico Bellic waits for her to turn around and invite him in. Secretly, he is happy, though it cannot be seen. She starts moving again and walks through the door. Niko Bellic throws his hands in the air. “Hey!” he yells, and a cab puts on its blinker, taking the sidewalk at speed.

4. Dwayne tells Niko Bellic that he is lonely. Niko thinks back to his own time in prison. The world has changed, Niko Bellic thinks, and a person must change with the world. Niko gets out of the cab and walks to the apartment building where Dwayne lives. He knocks on Dwayne’s door. There is no answer. Niko racks a round into the shotgun he is carrying and shoots the lock off the door.

5. Niko Bellic wakes up in his townhouse. The sun shines through his high windows as he turns off his beeping alarm. He puts on his suit and tie. His shoes do not match. His black sneakers, the first thing he bought after getting off the boat in America, have meaning for him. He gets a text message. He watches television. He goes downstairs. Outside he sees a man on a motorcycle. Niko Bellic knocks him off and takes the bike. Down the road there is a a plank sitting on the edge of industrial pipes. I wonder what will happen if I don’t hit the ramp in the right way? he thinks. He guns the engine and the violent buzz of the engine drowns out the rest of his thoughts. Niko Bellic, living the American dream, flies through the air.

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02/01/2012

On Grand Theft Auto IV

I originally bought GTA IV during the fall of my freshman year of college. Most stories that start this way have content like “and I played it until I failed out of five classes” or “it consumed my life.” None of that happened to me. The day I bought it my 360 fell over and scratched the disc. Eventually, I went to some local mom and pop video store to get the disc fixed. Sadly, my intolerable roommate played the game so much that the wait and my interminable annoyance with him combined made me kind of bench the game indefinitely.

But somehow it survived through multiple moves and game purges along the way. I knew that I wanted to play it, but I never made time. I recently read Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, and while I didn’t really learn why games matter, I did find a kind of beauty in what Bissell had to say about GTA IV. I’m about to quote a little of what he had to say, but remember this while you read it: Bissell admits that he was high on coke the entire time he was playing the game. He would kick the habits, both the game and the blow, and then would pick up both again in one fell swoop. There’s something to that, though I’m not sure what, and Bissell never does a good job of explaining how they’re related. Anyway, Bissell had this to say:

When a Liberty City guy in a suit unexpectedly pulls out a Glock and starts firing it at you, you are no longer playing a game but interacting with a tiny node of living unpredictability. The owner of one of the first vehicles I jacked in Liberty City tried to pull me out of the car, but I accelerated before she succeeded. She held onto the door handle for a few painful-looking moments before vanishing under my tires in a puff of bloody mist. With a nervous laugh I looked over at my girlfriend, who was watching me play. She was not laughing and, suddenly, neither was I. (171)

This is something that happened to me quite a few times while I was playing the game. I remember playing GTA III when it came out for the PS2 and laughing as I mowed down pedestrians on sidewalks. But those games never had any kind of realism to them–the pedestrians were colorful little figures that wandered aimlessly down streets. Sometimes they would curse at you as you walked by. The Liberty City of GTA IV, and the citizens that live in it, has a much more organic feeling, and I mean that in all possible ways. It feels thriving and connected, and most importantly, the people in the game feel alive. They react appropriately to horrible acts, by running away or attacking Niko, the protagonist character, head on.

And so I played GTA IV in a haze of wondering if things were right or wrong. Instead of jacking a car and driving everywhere, which I did in all of the previous games, I found myself taking a taxi to all of my meets and mission points. I didn’t want to be disruptive; I just wanted to get somewhere, just like everyone else in the game. And I felt like that really integrated me into the urban kind of existence that Niko Bellic was experiencing. I felt like I was a working stiff who had a hard job.

That extended into the moral decisions that the game forces you into. There are various points where the player is forced into choosing if you will kill or spare a life, usually at the end of a mission. It was always hard for me to choose, and I never had an easy choice to make. Sometimes I ended up killing the person, sometimes I didn’t, but I was always wracked by having to make the decision. Rarely did I feel like I had all the facts in the matter. But I had to make the decision, and in a beautiful way, the game perfectly mimicked the choices a hitman would have to make. It was rarely about money, because money was easy to come by; it was about if I thought it was right.

I have played so many games with moral systems, and all of them are terrible. Grand Theft Auto IV doesn’t play at that. When I made a decision, I didn’t get a “+5 Moral Points!” message. I just had a sinking feeling, knowing that I hadn’t made the best decision, and wishing I had made the other. I knew that there were different ways that the scenario could have played out, but they were gone for me.

I wish that more video games made the choice to not make a moral system a game in itself, but an internalized system, something that the player keeps track of.

In any case, I liked the game.

 

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01/31/2012

On Rise of the Planet of the Apes (part 2)

So I just finished Rise of the Planet of the Apes again, this time on glorious home video, and I have another couple thoughts to add to my original post on the film.

1. I got into a discussion about sovereignty and the control of the subject in the comments of the last post. This viewing really just solidified that for me. Not only is there the visual image of the fasces really important for the film, but also the short section before that where Caesar builds an army by providing “edible” food. He understands that the Sovereign needs subjects who invest their desires into it. In this case, the anger of slavery and the shame that comes with knowledge get invested in Caeser, who directs it into the revolution. There are even moments that show how that investment sometimes overflows any possible control–a number of apes visibly murder humans onscreen, despite the implicit and explicit intent that Caesar has to not kill humans. What I’m saying is that Caesar basically presents Revolution 101, and not the Ron Paul kind.

2. There are a couple points made about affect in the film that I find interesting. Franklin, the chimpanzee handler, objects to killing the test subject apes because they have relationships and connections. The apes’ ability to experience affective relationships between objects and subjects puts them into an ethical framework is essentially Franklin’s point, and I think that is something worth thinking through. The ability to experience affect and enter into complex assemblages with other beings and objects could be a place to start with ethics–I lean toward it, actually.

3. Continuing with ethical thinking in the film, I think there is a unique critique of Levinas to be had there. Caesar is set apart because of his eyes, and more than that, his CGI face; he resembles a human more than other apes, and that makes it possible for James Franco to treat him like a human (or, in other words, it makes James Franco actually think about the ethical implications of his actions on Caesar). This ultimately makes James Franco offer Caesar a space in the human world–a world that is based on fundamental exclusions of other beings (think of the “_____ is what makes us human” argument). Caesar enacts a politics that rejects his facial similarity, his resembling-human, in exchange for an absolute opacity. The humans cannot understand his language, his facial expressions become more strange, less emotive, less human. He embarks on a politics of animality that rejects any commonality of the face. The pull quote at the end of the film, “Caesar is home,” is all about an absolute divided domain, both of political activity and similarity.

4. My final point is that the turning point of the film, where Caesar says “No!”, is the ultimate ideal moment for animal advocates. The world could only be better if every being who wanted to say “no” could say it.

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01/28/2012

Some preliminary Dear Esther remarks

I am excited about Dear Esther coming out next month. It will be a day one purchase for me, and there aren’t a lot of games that hold that kind of weight for me.

So this is the trailer for the game. I know that probably no one actually watches the videos that I post, but really do yourself a favor and watch it:

The game is going to be profoundly sad, but I think that it will really be an amazing piece of art. I have a strong affective experience with the video, especially the voiceover; it made me weep uncontrollably for about two minutes. So there’s something there, and I have to play it.

Also, I tried to google around for a transcription of the words in the trailer, and I couldn’t find one, so here is the voiceover from the trailer for Dear Esther.

 I’ve begun my voyage in a paper boat without a bottom. I will fly to the moon in it. I’ve been folded along a crease in time, a weakness in the sheet of life. Now you’ve settled on the opposite side of the paper to me. You can see your traces in the ink that soaks through the fiber, the pulped vegetation. When we become waterlogged and the cage disintegrates, we will intermingle. When this paper airplane leaves the cliff edge and carves parallel paper trails in the dark, we will come together.

For my post about the game when it came out, look here.

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01/27/2012

On Bifo’s The Soul at Work

So I have started reading Franco Berardi’s (“Bifo’s”) book The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy, and it is amazing. While I’m not necessarily into the historical bits about Italian workerism, I am incredibly interested in the things that he has to say about media studies. More particularly, the second chapter of the book, titled “The Soul at Work,” is about the way that labor has transformed in the last bit of the 20th century and into the 21st.

Bifo coins a new term for the workers of the 21st century–the cognitariat. The cognitariat is defined by the way that they perform labor. They all have the same physical skillset–an ability to use computer systems, to click and type. They way they are specialized and atomised, or alienated, is in their mind–their mental labor is different from the others. There are architects and writers, IT professionals and technicians working for oil companies.

Berardi, though he doesn’t use this language, suggests that the real danger of this kind of work is the way that it begins to structure the life of the worker. No longer is it simply the factory floor and the eight hour clock that structures the worker’s life. It is the cell phone, always on, making the worker available as a resource for capital 100% of the time. Berardi says it fairly clearly here:

Digital labor manipulates absolute abstract signs, but its recombining function is more specific the more personalized it gets, therefore ever less interchangeable. Consequently, high tech workers tend to consider labor as the most essential part in their lives, the most specific and personalized. (76)

In other words, digital labor becomes a graft to the worker, defining the limits of life and turning into a second skin, a second set of totalizing obligations that have to be fulfilled.

Taking this a step further than Bifo–this enables fascism, in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense of the term, to the highest degree. Intellectual labor changes labor from a thing that has to be done to a thing that wants to be done. Work becomes desirable, not just because of enterprise, but because it fulfills some basic desires and needs of the worker. The intellectual worker becomes the happiest cog in the most ambivalent machine.

Certain arguments make a lot of sense in the framework that Berardi sets up, especially in the context of video games. Bifo writes:

But it is also true that the time apparently freed by technology is in fact transformed into cyber time, a time of mental processing absorbed into the infinite production processes of cyber space.

In Reality is Broken, Jane McGonigal writes about how video games become a way of reestablishing lost community in the digital age. Since we are separated by our jobs, the loss of communal communication, etc., we desire to be brought together in digital communion. We want to do things together–to perform actions collectively, or what McGonigal calls “epic” actions.

Instead, I think that we need to look at what Bifo proposes. The cognitariat is trained to use her mind all the time–to constantly produce digital labor. I think it is no shock or surprise that a huge chunk of World of Warcraft players come from the digital labor force. McGonigal argues that they are looking for communal experience; Berardi forces us to ask the question: Are they so used to producing cognitive labor that they cannot turn their productive capacity off?

MMORPGs are often described as jobs by both players and detractors alike, and I think there is something to that: the menial tasks of collection missions are drudgery to the maximum, much like coding or simple, but highly specialized, tech jobs.

Berardi quotes a radical journal from the 1970s called A/traverso: “The practice of happiness is subversive when it becomes collective.” I think that is both fundamentally true and also incredibly misleading, and Jane McGonigal takes us down the misled path. Berardi makes us question the things that make us happy, and more importantly, should make us cringe that we are constantly performing labor, even when playing games–a practice that some theorists attempt to place outside of time, narrative, and political practice.

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