Tim Cain’s GDC 2012 Talk: Fallout

Posted on 04/09/2012 by kunzelman

I’m not sure who this post is for, really, but I think that someone might get some use out of it, so I am going to make it.

Tim Cain, one of the design and programming leads on one of the most important games of all time, Fallout, did a talk at GDC 2012 about the game and all of the events surrounding its development. You can watch the video and check out the powerpoint that he gave here.

Now, I know that some people don’t have time to watch an hour-long presentation about Fallout, so I watched the video and took notes. You will find the contents of the talk below in a readable format. Everything is in chronological order for the talk, so if you want to check something below against the tape, it should be fairly easy for you to do so. I’ve made the notes a little more readable in that I have constructed full sentences. Anything not quoted is a paraphrase from Cain’s original words.

So, without more text between you and Tim Cain’s presentation, here are my notes about Classic Game Postmortem: Fallout.

***

The development of Fallout began with nothing: no license, no engine, no budget, no staff besides Cain, and no real plan for what the game would be about or what it would look like.

There were lots of influences for the game. The biggest of those were from several different media:

1. Games – XCOM, Crusader, Wasteland, and the Ultima series
2. Tabletop Games – GURPS, WizWar, Gamma World
3. Books – A Canticle for Leibowitz, I Am Legend, On the Beach
4. Film – Road Warrior, A Boy and His Dog, The Day After, Forbidden Planet (art/robots), City of Lost Children (art), La Jetee

There were no resources for the game. For the first six months, it was just Tim Cain programming an engine. After those six months, a scripter and an artist were added. Since there was no setting yet, the artist just created grass and rocks while waiting. The team expanded to 15 in the second year and 30 in the third.

It was difficult explaining what the game was about to new team members and marketing people. Cain: “It didn’t seem like the game was going to be fun.” A vision statement was created, and that seemed to solidify the game for everyone. It became fun enough that QA people would come in on the weekends and work for free.

The setting was “very elusive.” It was intended as a fantasy game, but the market was saturated so that was abandoned. The new plot started in the modern world. The protagonist would travel back in time, kill the ape that evolved into humans, and would come back to a world controlled by intelligent dinosaurs. Then the protag was exiled to a fantasy planet where magic fixed the timeline; then you were able to save your girlfriend. That plot then evolved into one about alien invaders taking over the planet except for one city–it morphed into Fallout from there. The “one city” became the Vault. Then the team wanted to straight-up make Wasteland 2, but EA wouldn’t give up the license. Thus, Fallout.

Around this time, which seems to be 1994, Interplay got the licenses for Planescape and the Forgotten Realms. Fallout  was going to be cancelled. Interplay thought it would be too competitive with other D&D games. Tim Cain begged for a tiny budget, showed the work that had been done already, and Brian Fargo relented and kept the game afloat.

First person games, which are so-called “immersive” games, were popular at the time, but the team chose a 3rd person perspective. Fallout is actually not an isometric RPG, but rather a “cavalier oblique” one. The angle isn’t quite the harsh 45 degrees that isometric requires. Cavalier oblique was chosen because it made the math of the movement-to-mouse-click easier to do. The artists also liked it because it made the buildings look better. It also made distance calculation easier.

The game shipped with a timed quest to find a water chip. The entire team fought about it for months, and in the end there was a release-day patch that removed the quest. Cain says that if he could go back in time and do one thing on Fallout, it would be to remove that timed quest.

Humor: Everyone wanted their own personal jokes in the game. Cain was afraid that it would date the game, so he crafted one rule about jokes: “If the player doesn’t get them, they shouldn’t notice them.” Example: Gizmo is not named after the movie Gremlins, but is actually the name of a skunk Cain had as a child. There are lots of references like that in the game, and most are probably buried deep enough that only the original creator knows about them.

The game was originally supposed to be named “Vault 13,” and the batch file still creates vault13.exe. Marketing didn’t think the name conveyed a sense of what the game was about and suggested names like “Aftermath,” “Survivor,” and “Postnuclear Adventure.” Brian Fargo took it home one weekend and brought it back, saying “You should call this Fallout.” They did.

Naming game systems was popular at the time, so Cain wanted to name it after the attributes: ACELIPS. Someone else suggested SPECIAL, that worked better.

Then Diablo came out. It was everything that Fallout was not. Interplay wanted the game to have multiplayer and be in real time. Since the game was two years in, that wasn’t going to happen. Development slowed while the team did feasibility studies to add a network layer and real time to the game.

Technical Challenges:
If you really care about this, I suggest you watch the video, because whatever I tell you is going to be filtered through me, which means it isn’t going to make much sense. I am just going to paste the notes I took while I was listening to Cain’s talk–I don’t know what half of it means.

Linear memory model–made design simpler, but had to trash old code, couldn’t reuse Interplay code
256 colors, 640×480, art made with 16 bit color–all animations had to be reduced in color, needed color cycling, really 230 colors.
Every video card had a different way of doing aspect and colors, and had to design to the chipset for VGA. VESA comes out, standardized VGA, rewrote the code for that. The reason the game runs today.
Sprites – high detail, led to large memory footprint, polygons were just beginning to be popular, people argued that “polygons are a fad”
Talking heads by Boyarsky and Rodenhizer–clay head was created and scanner to create a 3D model. Each one took 8 weeks to fully create, 4 months to do the whole process including voice matching.

 Followers were not in the original design. The idea came up at the last minute, and the scripters said they could make it work. Dogmeat was first, followed by Ian. They were well-received, but several issues (like Ian shooting the player in the back) could never be solved because the game code had no access to the AI.

Interplay wanted the game to have Win95 certification. Fallout failed the certification process because it ran on Windows NT. That makes no sense, of course, and the qualification was that a game had to “fail gracefully” on NT and run on 95 to get Win95 certification. The team simply recoded the installer for Fallout to fail when a user tried to install on NT. Hand installation would still work.

There was one person who worked on making the game run on a Mac. Cain wanted saves to be interchangeable from OS to OS, and it made Tim Hume’s life hell. No one ever used that feature.

Legal challenges: Fallout was originally a GURPS game. The GURPS people didn’t like the violence of the game or the art style and GURPS pulled out at the last minute. Skill and combat were redesigned and recoded in two weeks. Everything except for perks was in the game and working in a two week time period.

Music: Cain chose The Ink Spots because of the 1940s/50s feel of the music. It was also his grandfather’s favorite group, and the first group his mother saw in concert at the age of 6. The team actually wanted “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire,” but that process moved too slowly and was too expensive, and so quickly substituted “Maybe” late in the game. Cain was happy with the choice and thought it fit the tone of the game better.

The team tried for a Teen rating for the game originally, but got a Mature. The game contained the possibility for killing children originally. Doing so meant that the player took a huge karma hit and people would hate her or him. Sometimes a burst shot would go wild and kill a child. Violence against children wasn’t allowed in the European version, so they simply removed kids altogether.

The game shipped in 1997 and Interplay saw it as a risk that paid off. The games that followed borrowed a number of concepts from Fallout.

It was one of the first open world, later called sandbox, games. The only limit to where the player could go was creature difficulty. It featured a nonlinear story based on character choices and the narrative unfolds based on those choices. There were three ways to do quests: fighting, talking, and sneaking. Each quest had to have at least two of the three to be considered “complete” by the design team.

The game tracked behavior and provided implications for both the world-at-large and the short-term. Some of the repercussions for player action were “pretty horrific.”

Cain didn’t like morality. Grey-area quests were more his style. He says: “I don’t mind if people play badly, I just want them to live with the consequences if they do.” Brian Fargo wanted more than skill raises in the game, so perks were created. Chris Taylor implemented them in a single day. Characters grew and became diverse, and perks were easy to code; win-win scenario.

Things Influenced by Fallout:
Fallout influenced 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons, Oblivion, Skyrim, and the talent trees in World of Warcraft. The called shot system allowed for instances of dark humor–almost all of the groin shots are jokes, including the robots, who can be shot in their “hydraulic activator.” Talking heads also allowed people to be more connected to the game, something that has been recreated in other games.

Music:
Ambient music was made as a score and encouraged players to listen. It was “something you missed if it wasn’t there.” It underscored the desolation. “Marketing said it was kind of depressing.”

The OS abstraction done for the game went beyond Fallout and was used in multiple Interplay games afterward. The movie player was also written in-house and then used in other games. The script engine was ripped from Starfleet Academy.

Branding:
Fallout was an experience from the moment you saw the game. The box was supposed to be a lunchbox. The manual was something that the Vault Dweller would read in-game. The interface was designed to be representative of tech from the game world. The splash screens are like that, too. Even the web page, made by the team, was supposed to look like “found art” from the game world.

The team was hard-working and egoless. Everyone focused on the same goals, and everyone wanted to make the same game.

There was a Q&A at the end. I suggest watching the video for this part, too, but I am going to post my notes for this section. I didn’t get everything, but the gist of everything is here.

QUESTIONS

1. The ending to Junktown morally ambiguous, did we change it?

Original, Junktown thrived under Gizmo, did poorly under Sheriff. Players felt bad that they did “good” things are were punished for it.

2. Today it is a given that a child can be killed means an automatic AO rating. Any threats from ESRB on that scale? Did Fallout push that?

Not that much drama. People saw it and said that was M. It was considered part of the genre. There had been a shooting in EU right before Fallout was rated, wouldn’t even consider it. Just took the kids out.

3. Team’s approach to player choice. Was there any systematic design?

Every main story quest where they couldnt make a character they couldnt finish the quest with. We would go and fix them. Side quests were more difficult, didn’t open them up as much.

4. Did you have a working name for Vault Boy? Was it created on a whim or was there iteration?

Liked the humor of the character. “Had that Fallout cheekiness.” It had that vibe of “we’re not taking this very seriously, so you should be happy.” Some people didn’t think it fit the game, had no idea it would be so popular.

5. Can you talk about writing process of creating the dark humor?

Scott Campbell laid out all areas of game, a lot of dialogue was written by artists after art was done. Everyone was on the same page, people would read and laugh, and some editing happened. There wasn’t a formal process and everyone collaborated and shared.

6. Thank you. Best memory is going back in time and breaking water chip.

7. Fallout 2 has harder quests. Production changes and testing or team?

Cain wasn’t there. Same engine–had a group of people with tools that weren’t evolving and had no bugs. F2 faster to make, didn’t see some of the cool ways to use the engine in F1.

Posted in Video Games | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Tim Cain’s GDC 2012 Talk: Fallout

Alan Moore Won An Award

Posted on 04/04/2012 by kunzelman

I am always filled with joy when people win awards for works that I really enjoyed. Alan Moore won the first-ever Bram Stoker Award in the category of “Superior Achievement in a Graphic Novel.” That’s a long and pretentious title, and what it really boils down to is the fact that Neonomicon (the work that won the award) was sufficiently fucking creepy to win. Neonomicon is the only work on the nomination list that I have actually read, and so I can’t say if I think that Moore won fairly or not (though I really want to get around to Anya’s Ghost).

The decision might disturb some readers of the comic. That’s fair. I have sat down to write about Neonomicon several times since the first issue came out a couple years ago. I can never make the words come out correctly. The comic’s extreme violence, particularly its sexual violence, always leaves me feeling incredibly uncomfortable; at the same time, I know there is something brilliant going on in it. I have a nagging feeling that it is Moore’s best writing about the form of comics since Watchmen, and more than that, it is smart commentary on horror fiction and comics.

In any case, Moore had a really clever acceptance speech. A little bit is excerpted below; click this link for the whole thing.

 The Bram Stoker is, to me, a priceless token of appreciation from a group of people for whom I have limitless respect and admiration, these being my fellow workers at this darkest of all coalfaces. The landscape of imagination, and especially it’s less hospitable far boundary, is perhaps the most important human territory of all, and so to feel acknowledged by a lineage of fine writers which extends from the Great Old Ones of the past to the still unrevealed giants yet to come means more to me than I can readily express.

Posted in Comics | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Two Kinds of Video Game Death

Posted on 04/03/2012 by kunzelman

There are two kinds of death in video games.

1. Halo death.

This death is characterized by out inability to understand it or perceive it as death. In reality, this is your standard FPS kind of death, a “bang bang you’re dead”-arcadey kind of existence. A death that makes you angry, frustrated, or more competitive. Team Fortress 2 is a Halo death game, but I prefer the more popular moniker. Jane McGonigal famously (or at least famously to me) claimed that the 10 billion collective alien kills by Halo 3 players was the proof that video games allow us to do things on a grand scale; it was “epic,” to use her language. Halo death is a death removed from the material conditions of death–it is ragdoll physics or gibbed bits flying everywhere; it is plastic. It is the game-as-a-toy, lacking any affective capability that doesn’t already exist in the same manner as it does in Space Invaders. It is a hermetic death–I can’t really comprehend that 136 billion virtual beings have been killed; It is a death that is sealed away from my ability to understand it.

2. Affective death.

I don’t have a snappy name for this one. It is merely a death that draws me, the player, in. It forces me to think through the implications of killing, and it should make me question the very notion of killing. Of course, the studies have been done. There isn’t any linkage between video game playing and gun readiness–people aren’t playing games and going off and murdering others by the boatload. But games like Sniper Elite V2 are certainly designed to lure the player into a sticky, ugly altercation with the reality of death by gunshot. Affective death is one that cannot be reduced to arcade figures emptying machine guns into one another. It is, to use Ranciere’s words, an image that must be acted on; it forces us into a political relationship with it.

Brian Crecente writes on Sniper Elite V2:

Sniper Elite V2 is an exercise in ending life, a game about taking a bullet, a single bullet and killing a human being, or perhaps, if the angle is right, two. Its over-the-top X-Ray kill cam is unapologetically graphic. It is meant to show what really happens when a person fires a bullet into another human being. Over the course of several hours with the game, and the people who make it, I saw bullets puncture kidneys, break arms, shatter pelvic bone, and extinguish the lives of enemy soldiers. The authenticity of what a bullet does to a human body during the act of killing it matches the level of authenticity that the team strives for in how that weapon is fired. But is it too much?

Posted in Video Games | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Two Kinds of Video Game Death

Video Games and Parochialism

Posted on 03/29/2012 by kunzelman

John H. Stevens has an article over at SF Signal titled “De-Parochializing SF Criticism: Is It Really Necessary? Or Even Possible?” The article is part of a larger column that he does weekly (?) about science fiction/fantasy and how those genres interrelate with various critical apparatuses. It is probably the smartest column on the internet about that kind of material, but now that I’ve gotten my slavering love out of the way, I want to give you a great big quote from the article.

Criticism as a social and intellectual practice is a valuable component of any literary field. No other field has the sociality nor the imaginative versatility that SF possesses, and both of these elements give SF the vitality that allows it to thrive and to function on multiple levels (from visceral entertainment to nigh-hallucinatory philosophical/metaphorical exercise). The fantastic field endures and transforms because it is embedded in both popular consciousness and an elaborate subculture, both of which utilize different modes of criticism to engage it. Criticism is not a distanced, objective assessment; it is an intimate part of the cultural and creative web of discourse and social relations. To quote Farah Mendlesohn, the field is “an ongoing discussion. Its texts are mutually referential, may be written by those active in criticism . . . and have often been generated from the same fan base which supports the market.” Criticism, in its entire range of forms, is an inherent part of the SF/Fantastika’s connectivity to those who create and enjoy it.

If we do successfully de-parochialize SF/Fantastika, what will we be turning it into? Bringing criticism more in-line with prevalent trends and perspectives seems like an exercise in making the literary field and its products more mainstream. Mainstreaming often washes out complexity and reinforces stereotypes and cliches, creating identifiable markers for more general audiences to recognize but shifting attention away from the multifarious potentials of the literature. What goal is achieved by treating SF/Fantastika like more realist or mainstream or mimetic or literary texts? Is there a degree to which at least some of the literature benefits from retaining its anchorage within the more circumscribed field? I’m not sure that is the best way to phrase the question, but I keep wondering why it seems so important to some observers and readers to unmoor fantastic literature from its historical, cultural, and even social linkages.

The bold bit is my own doing, of course, and you probably already understand why I wanted you to read that big quote. Video game criticism, and the community that the criticism feeds off of, has to do a lot of growing. In some ways, video games are at a disadvantage where criticism is concerned–coming of age as a medium during the poststructural, postmodern (I hate this word, I am just using it to generalize) period has actively prevented a lot of necessary critical discourse from happening around video games.

For example, SF has an entire period where second-wave feminism produced counter-SF that firmly critiqued the patriarchal, space libertarianism of the Golden Age and after. Comics books also existed during this time, which is why there is an awesome Gloria Steinem essay on Wonder Woman. But video games, being produced out of, and for, a particular social context, hasn’t had its moment of hard critique. Anna Anthropy is the best chance we have right now for that to happen.

So maybe video games need to be more parochial. I think the indie scene is doing a great job of proliferating hundreds of new games a year, making the community a little more insular. What we need are games that radically critique the methods, assumptions, and subjectivities of the players and designers.

 

Posted in Video Games | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Video Games and Parochialism

What Will We Simulate Next?

Posted on 03/28/2012 by kunzelman

Epic is licensing the Unreal 3 engine to the government. Read the press release here.

On face, this all looks like great stuff. A number of games that are being developed are designed around simulation that prepares specialists for difficult or problematic events; for example, Humansim is a game that is designed around helping doctors diagnose and perform procedures on patients. This makes sense, and it is probably a good replacement for the “test patient” system that currently exists in the medical training field.

But we’re gonna need a bigger boat for this, or at least a more critical response, and I think that reading between the lines a little bit is necessary in order to really tease out what is going on here between good old Researchin’ Uncle Sam and the video game industry.

First, the Unreal 3 engine is important. It is the most visually advanced engine that we can come up with right now, and there are moments when it skips right over the uncanny valley and puts us right into straight-up realism mode. This isn’t always, of course, and certainly not during normal gameplay. However, it is a sign that the military industrial complex is getting wise about something that video game designers have known for years: people respond well to visual stimulus.

Video games are already doing pretty well when it comes to the other senses. We are developing better haptic response interfaces, and sound is already on lock with games like Deep Sea producing profound, often traumatic, responses in people. No one is really attempting smell right now, but I can’t imagine that would be difficult. No, the visual is the problem. The humans on screen don’t look like real humans, and so the responses we have toward them are not authentic; we don’t panic when they are dying. We aren’t traumatized when they are gibbed by landmines (the difference in language there is telling; no one would say an American soldier was gibbed).

Bogost tells us, in the last bit of How to Do Things With Video Games, that you can do “drills” with video games. We can simulate the world and prepare for BAD THINGS and make sure to avoid them, but for these things to work, you have to take the game very seriously. The visual is important for this–the quicker you can make the player forget that the figure on screen is not alive, the more effective the simulation will be. A simulation is totally artificial and has few, if any, real-life consequences. If a person bleeds out on a table, the consequences are huge. Creating convincing human beings is the first step toward making sure that simulations become the educational tools they can be; nothing else matters as much as what you see.

Better simulation equates to better education. It also means better desensitization. The fact that Virtual Heroes, the developers of the recruitment tool called America’s Army, are getting ten million dollars in the deal is pretty scary. The video game soldier is an archetype for a dissertation, and I think the valorization of that, in super HD, is probably more than a little politically manipulative.

Let me quote Adi Robertson writing for The Verge

The Epic / Virtual Heroes team has also been awarded a $10 million contract with the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) to develop experimental games that help analysts detect cognitive biases in their work. Among other projects, Virtual Heroes has previously worked on America’s Army, a military recruiting tool that was built on an older version of the Unreal Engine. Combat or flight simulations have long been a part of military training, but a more widespread use of popular game engines could open up new ways to mimic real-life situations. It’s also possible that the needs of government agencies could spur future technical breakthroughs in the Unreal Engine.

So what the Unreal engine is really doing in this deal is allowing for better simulations of death. We need to better simulate symptoms of the dying animal in order to make doctors better. We need to simulate the deaths of friend and enemy soldiers, along with the AI responses to those deaths. “Better graphics” becomes shorthand for “better terror” in that it causes an immediate reactionary response for the player.

Or, alternately, I am wrong. I hope that I am. I hope that our movement toward virtual intelligences is not through advanced wargame simulations. I can only imagine this: a programmer, deep in the womb of a defense contractor, writing out long sections of code that determine the behaviors of a gut-shot child.

We will have to simulate it. It will be terrifying.

Posted in Video Games | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

A Thing We Do With Video Games

Posted on 03/27/2012 by kunzelman

I read Ian Bogost’s How To Do Things With Video Games on a plane last weekend. I think it is a really smart book that acts as a really great introduction to video game studies, and more particularly, I think it does a great job explaining how games work to do different things. I guess that makes sense, being that it is in the title, but I was still a little surprised that it worked so well.

I have a few things to say about the book, but I’m only going to highlight one thing in this post. In the section titled “Relaxation,” Bogost writes:

As so-called open world videogames have become more popular, so larger and more complex simulated environments are available for meandering. Grand Theft Auto and games of its ilk retain some of the nuisances of gameplay–police, rival gangs, and so forth–but their larger spaces also allow the player to hide from the game. One example is Jim Munroe’s My Trip to Liberty City, a machinima (a movie produced inside a game) travelogue of Munroe’s “walking tour” of GTAIII‘s urban landscape. (94) (emphasis mine)

Bogost also writes about Munroe’s walking tour of Liberty City in Unit Operations. The following quote comes from a much longer section about the complexity of simulation and how that interacts with ethical considerations of the world.

Even though Munroe chooses not to exact any violence by his own hand, his entire experience flows from his choices in relation to both peace and violence. Those who argue that one can “do anything” in Liberty City are mistaken: the game constantly structures freeform experience in relation to criminality. (157)

You can see the bold text in the first quotation is about a function that the player fulfills in the game world, and it is one that I am pretty fond of. The end of a game, like a novel or sex, is absolute completion. All experience moves toward a point where it no longer exists or is replaced by something else. Playing Tetris is as much about hiding from the end of the game as it is about stacking blocks. The act of playing a game is not merely progress; it is also the stabilization of a play space.

Maybe that is why I like games like Skyrim and GTA so much. They let me burrow down inside of them. I can invest myself fully in them, reveling in affective connection. When those games end for me, they end big; I don’t replay them. A second playthrough of Skyrim was abortive, at best–I really felt like I was betraying the “real” me, the original me that had hidden from progress in the mountains and dungeons before.

This could also be a reason that the the end of Mass Effect 3 didn’t bother me. I was Shepard. I was ready to make a sacrifice. It isn’t something that I am interested in doing again. I don’t think that is the popular feeling about games.

Posted in Video Games | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on A Thing We Do With Video Games

To Be Shepard

Posted on 03/23/2012 by kunzelman

This is one of those posts where I don’t make proscriptions about or critique a game. This is all about my experience with Mass Effect 3. There are spoilers about the game.

***

Mordin died singing.

That’s what has stuck with me all this time. I finished the game on Thursday or Friday (the days run together), and I keep thinking about an alien who died singing. A very model of a scientist salarian.

Sacrifice really gets me in games. I don’t know why. Animated beings dancing, literally puppets, voice acted by people whose voices don’t match up to their faces. Characters in video games are exquisite corpses that pull me in; patchwork people with digital skin and scripted emotions.

There’s nothing there to fall in love with, not in any real way–but I have an affective connection nonetheless. The assemblage that dances and sings and runs into certain death moves me. And what does it feel? Mordin, lines of code with programmed responses, doesn’t know what he is. He is a singing, dying marionette.

Sometimes I think that video games need a Grant Morrison.

I didn’t mind as much when Shepard died. He was me, of course. I only played the games through one time, so there was a singularity of Shepard. There was only one. He looks strange and made awful facial expressions. I could see myself reflected in them, and also in his confusion.

The world was too big, and I stepped into my imminent death gladly. I felt like a hero as my skin ashed and floated away from me. Pixels and wireframe. When I say “I,” I mean Shepard, of course. We’ve spent a lot of time together.

I was rarely able to make a “rebel” decision. Shepard couldn’t find it in himself to commit genocide or crush space feelings. It felt too real. I would draw down on people, and occasionally pulled a trigger; violence was necessary sometimes.

Shepard had friends, and as he burned, I like to think that he thought back on them. Not his romances or his pilot, but the small things. Letting his best friend win a game. Knowing that he was sending friends and companions into a suicide situation, losing a few. Saving the last of a species, again and again. Preserving life.

And becoming a legend, of course. I watched a child on a fertile moon ask an adult about “The Shepard” and cried a little. To be inspirational, not like Steve Jobs, but ontologically; to have a way of life that was so expansive as to incorporate all life, digital and organic.

And maybe that is games. Being outside, being a part of something bigger, and being able to die safely, content that I mattered. Seeing beyond the breach and knowing it all worked out.

Posted in Video Games | Tagged , , | Comments Off on To Be Shepard

More Thoughts About Video Game Pacifism

Posted on 03/21/2012 by kunzelman

Back when that guy was playing Skyrim as a pacifist monk, I wrote about it. In fact, I had lots of things to say, and the conclusion that I came to was this:

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.

A couple weeks ago, Drew Dixon wrote a similar article for Gamechurch (thanks to Critical Distance for the link).

We come to similar conclusions: violence is necessary in games, and eradicating violence is as problematic as indulging in it absolutely. But there are also some massive differences, and that is what I want to talk about here.

Dixon writes:

I saw the selfishness inherent to Mullin’s pacifism. Playing the game this way would require running from dragons while they ravaged Skyrim’s villages literally killing hundreds of people. It would involve regularly turning a blind eye to injustice and allowing bandits and ruffians to continue to terrorize the innocent when I could do something about it were it not for my “convictions” against violence.

Playing peacefully sounds interesting, challenging even. I can see why such a tactics appealed to a committed gamer like Mullins. However as the experience unfolded in my mind, playing as a peaceful monk served to further highlight what I was, in actuality, doing. If I played this way, I would be constantly reminded that I am merely playing a game. A game that can be exploited and one in which I can do whatever I want free from real life consequences. One that I could even reset if its consequences proved too unpleasant. But who cares if I flee the town when the dragon attacks using the villagers as bait so I can escape unnoticed? It’s just a game, it doesn’t count.

There are two things going on here:

1. Pacifism is selfish because the Dovahkiin can kill dragons who would otherwise kill people.
2. Pacifism destroys immersion.

This leads to Dixon making this assertion at the end of the article: “Pacifism in Skyrim is neither virtuous or immersive.” These two qualities don’t really show up in the text between the block quote above and the end of the writing, so I think that those two qualities come from the 1 and 2 points above. This is a lot of framing, so I’m going to stop now and actually get around to the point that I am making.

I cannot imagine a world, real or fictional, in which preferring to kill fewer beings could ever be less ethical than killing more beings in a game. Dixon asserts that performing in-game killings because you can, and because the game’s goals want you too, is virtuous is problematic for me; I am not sure that great responsibility actually comes with great power. The same logic that Dixon puts forward in his article is part of a long-historied logic of power that legitimizes the use of violence and colonial action against weaker beings. Obviously, that is the normal mode of video games. In games, we are all Nietzschean superpeople who are beyond good and evil simply because we are obliged to be–the game rules, the magical arrow, points us in a direction, and we know it is correct even if it doesn’t make sense to our personal ethical barometers.

Beyond this, I really don’t understand how immersion can be broken with pacifism any more than it is broken by every action in the game world. It is a choice made by the player. That choice is based on a knowledge of the game rules and how certain actions can be taken and are or are not supported. It is the same as if you wanted to play a pure mage–dealing with melee characters becomes a process of saving and reloading that looks very similar to the broken immersion that Dixon is talking about.

Maybe it comes down to this: the whole article seems to be an apology for the way that games treat violence. Dixon seems very comfortable with the idea that violence in games, by its very nature, is virtuous because the game demands it. I think we need to be critical of the ideological choices that make things virtuous.

Posted in Video Games | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Is Watchmen the Best Comic?

Posted on 03/20/2012 by kunzelman

I love the title up there. It reminds me of some of the greatest arguments that fanboys and third-graders have ever had, those beautiful “My ______ can beat up your _____” kinds of affairs. I prefer “my dad could beat up Batman,” but that might not really be true, even though my dad has the best goddamn superhero origin of all time.

Anyway, David Brothers and Sean Witzke went back and forth about Watchmen in a post over at 4thletter.

Brothers takes the opinion that Watchmen is not the best comic of all time, and that we should stop calling it that. He writes:

What I’m trying to say is that Watchmen is definitely a watershed moment, due mainly to the level of craft and approach that it brought to cape-based material, but it isn’t an unprecedented one, and I think that’s an important factor that we often leave out when we discuss Watchmen and its influence. If Watchmen never happened, I’d bet cash money that the ’90s, the ideal of the ’90s that most of us hold, would’ve still happened more or less as they did. The hallmarks of the ’90s, whether you’re talking pouches or grittiness or realism or whatever, were set in motion long before Watchmen happened.

The moral ambiguity, the physical and emotional trauma, the poison that hammered comics in the ’90s, all of that has its roots in the very beginning of the Marvel universe, when Stan and Jack and Steve and them were revolutionizing comics and making them cool again. They set comics down a road that inevitably leads to clones and crossovers and whatever else. There’s a logical progression from “Spider-Man screwed up, but now he tries harder” to “Spider-Man fails the love of his life and gets her killed” to “Spider-Man is a clone/crazy” to “Spider-Man is hardcore now.” It’s upping the ante on the flawed hero, bit by bit. The fallen hero and anti-hero are just another take on that same basic idea, which is itself another take on an even older idea.

Witzke responds:

Watchmen said that you could take this material (superheroes, alternate reality stories) and tell a finite, complete story with it. There could be intertextuality and generational narratives and have legitimate minor characters, and actual consequences and politics. Stories, stories that matter, they have ends. And Watchmen is the first story that was taken to the real world (whether or not it was the first really doesn’t matter, the revolution starts when people notice fires in the street not when the plans are drafted) and said “oh yeah this stuff can actually work as a novel, it’s not just endless soap opera/pulp/sitcom that you can walk in and out of at any time because its an endless middle”. Making more Watchmen comics, as Abhay said, actually say that people were always right its just a garbage dump of endless dudes punching dudes, there’s no finite quality to anything. (I actually think the way trilogies are now par for the course in mainstream hollywood, and 6 season tv shows are doing the same thing to how people watch film and television). You’re right about Gerber and Stan And Jack – and shit, Miller and Moore both said that American Flagg was the reason they manned up and did Watchmen/Ronin, because it introduced real sophistication in a way that Marvel comics never ever ever did. Of course they’d both done Marvelman and Daredevil at that point, and it becomes all a gray morass of what happened first.

Both of these block quotes are right, of course. I have argued many times that Moore and Gibbons’ comic should be dethroned as King Comic Book, if only for the reason that comic books need to avoid strict canonization for about a hundred more years. We need to open the world up, not close it off, and proclaiming a Best Comic Book doesn’t really make that position attainable for the self-publishing indie creator.

Brothers’ assertion that the 1990s would have happened anyway is specious, at best, simply because we can’t really talk about it. I think that Rorschach, and the way that people, even now, identify with his politics led directly to the kinds extreme comics that we had in the last gasp of the 20th century. At the same time, I have compassion for the argument; I think that Moore would say that The Comedian and Rorschach were predictive at best, merely forerunners of a political ideology that built through the 1990s and culminated in the response to the 9/11 attacks that opened the new millennium. Yeah, I think Watchmen works like that.

I especially like the argument going on in the subtext of the two quotes that I placed above. It is about the nature of comics, and the idea that it was revolutionary for comics to be finite, to close themselves off. Both of them are right–the fact that Watchmen has gone without sequels, prequels, or spinoffs for more than twenty years is, frankly, a fucking miracle. Superhero comics have a primordial need to proliferate, like myths or folktales.

Brothers is correct to say that the heart of crossover-heavy, grand continuity, Marvel Universe-style comics lies in the content that originally sprang out of the Bullpen in the 60s. We have to remember that this was a marketing decision, though, and that the creation of a comic universe is really just a more efficient way of making people buy comics. It is letting loose a horrible assemblage, a Lovecraftian beast that sucks in everything, milking it for use value, and holding it inside itself forever. Stan Lee and this monster have made  terrible children, and the comics industry right now is the direct result.

So it is a literal miracle that Watchmen has fought the superhero machine for so long. It has remained isolated, and hopefully we can sweep these prequels under the rug soon enough that no one ever remembers that they happened. Witzke, near the end of his bit, says the Big Takeaway from Watchmen, and I agree with it. He says:

We’ve got to keep tearing it down so it can be replaced, because its still too big an icon, which actually paradoxically says a ton about how good the comic is. Comics as a whole needs to be able to say “fuck Watchmen” in a way beyond Grant Morrison’s shitty sniping in JLA: Earth 2, and I don’t know if we’re really at that point yet as a medium. I think the way that people are talking about/reacting to Moore isn’t the same thing, and Watchmen 2 really isn’t the same thing either, it’s wallowing in it rather than surpassing it.

I am doing a horrible job here, so just read the entire thing over at 4thletter. It is smart, and my morning was better for having read it.

Posted in Comics | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Is Watchmen the Best Comic?

James Stanescu in Hypatia

Posted on 03/19/2012 by kunzelman

This is really just a short bit to say that James “Scu” Stanescu has a new article out in Hypatia named “Species Trouble: Judith Butler, Mourning, and the Precarious Lives of Animals.” It appears to be behind a pay wall if you are not on a university network, and I have heard that you can probably find it at this mediafire link if you wanted to.

I’m glad to see it finally printed, especially since MLA from Prodigies and Monsters and I both get shout-outs in the notes sections of the paper.

To help pull you in a bit, here is the introductory part of the paper, which is essentially about the phenomenology of the meat aisle.

This paper begins at perhaps a weird place: the grocery store. Imagine pushing your cart or carrying your basket as you have hundreds of times before. You end up at the back of the grocery store, near the meat counter. Displayed before you are all the wares of the butcher’s trade, all the prime cuts of meat. On the left are the T-bone steaks; to the right is all the ground beef. In front of you are some ribs; next to them are some chicken breasts. On the corner of the display is the lobster tank, where, out of the dozens in it, you can pick out your own lobster to take home. You look at this sight, with people picking their way through all these products, figuring out which will make the best dinner. And suddenly, the scene in front of you shifts. No longer are you seeing normal products of everyday existence. In front of you is the violent reality of animal flesh on display: the bones, fat, muscles, and tissue of beings who were once alive but who have been slaughtered for the parts of their body. This scene overtakes you, and suddenly you tear up. Grief, sadness, and shock overwhelms you, perhaps only for a second. And for a moment you mourn, you mourn for all the nameless animals in front of you. Those of us who value the lives of other animals live in a strange, parallel world to that of other people. Every day we are reminded of the fact that we care for the existence of beings whom other people manage to ignore, to unsee and unhear as if the only traces of the beings’ lives are the parts of their bodies rendered into food: flesh transformed into meat. To tear up, or to have trouble functioning, to feel that moment of utter suffocation of being in a hall of death is something rendered completely socially unintelligible. Most people’s response is that we need therapy, or that we can’t be sincere. So most of us work hard not to mourn. We refuse mourning in order to function, to get by. But that means most of us, even those of us who are absolutely committed to fighting for animals, regularly have to engage in disavowal. We will turn our attention very shortly to the work of Judith Butler. We will do this in order to begin to chart a queer and feminist animal studies—an animal studies that celebrates our shared embodied finitude. It will be at times strongly theoretical, but it begins and ends in the same place—mourning the unmournable, seeking after a thought strong enough to confront that display of flesh at our local grocery store, one that will not turn its head, one that will not just take a deep breath and keep pushing the cart away.

If that is even remotely interesting to you, I suggest reading the entire thing. I plan to use the paper when I eventually get around to doing the digital environments piece I have been thinking about, and maybe it can be helpful for you, too!

Posted in General Features | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment