The Game Critique

Taking Games Seriously, Making Game Seriously: This month’s Round Table challenges you to design a game that deals with a social issue that personally troubles you. The recent months have seen controversy sweep through the video game industry. Whether people are objecting to the use of imagery widely considered to evoke racial stereotypes, or to the gameplay based on violent sexual crimes, or to the fact that anyone would complain about either topic-the discussion has been fierce. This month, contributors to the Round Table are invited to design a game that focuses on racism, rape, domestic violence, cruelty to animals, genocide, or any other serious, and potentially hot-button, topic.

IMPORTANT: Because I expect many of these posts will be difficult and/or disturbing for portions of the audience to read, I ask that you consider using a high level of language to describe the contents of your design. I also ask that you both rate your posts and include rating descriptors as laid out by the ESRB (http://www.esrb.org/ratings/ratings_guide.jsp).

As per request I rate this post M for Mature. The text may be T for Teen, but I never joke around with torture.

I will admit I’ve had difficulty with this topic. Not just because it is difficult to come up with a game concept, but the subject matter. This topic came along at a point when I was reading fiction that dealt with subject matter that I found disturbing and totally within the realm of the human condition. Betrayal, greed, objectivism, sin, violation, and the manner of corruption of truth and justice, I’ve been immersed in these themes for the past few months and the real trouble is these things make me physically ill to contemplate. Lately I’ve been trying to find something happy.

Instead of exploring any of these on an emotional level I’ve instead decided to look at one of these at an educational level. Given its prominence in the news lately, I’ve decided to look at the subject of torture. Tekno looked at it from the victim’s point of view here, I’m going to look at it from the point of view of the interrogator.

The game quickly sets up the situation, a situation that never occurs in real life, the ticking time bomb scenario. You are told there is a man in the next room that has information on a terrorist attack and you are charged with getting it by any means necessary. You are given little information and few details to work off of. In fact the only concrete detail you are given is that there will be an attack.

Then you are left to your own devices and are shown a screen with all manners of items you could normally find is a kitchen or garage. Knives, tongs, wire, car batteries, saran wrap, paper clips, pencils, etc. These are your tools. You can combine them and use them anyway you see fit. You can come back to this screen at anytime to restock or switch items. Once inside the room you can set the conditions for the session, the lighting, the temperature, the position of the subject. A faucet and bucket are in one corner and a drain in the middle of the room.

You get to work and at anytime can begin asking questions to the subject. Your questions at first are very vague since you don’t have any clues to pick apart. You pump him for as much information as you can get all the while doing what you will or you have the choice of doing nothing at all. You can stick with physical abuses, but psychological and verbal abuse options periodically make themselves available.

During this you will see a timer in the corner. You are given a liberal amount of time to complete your task, 48 hours. The timer, however, will keep running even if you are not in the game, even if it is turned off.

Throughout the game your superior officer will enter at several points to see what progress you are making. Each time you will have to inform him of what has been done and each time it isn’t enough to satisfy and each incident your superior will get increasingly agitated and angry with you as the clock runs down. In the end you will try more aggressive tactics and over time will get more specific responses. Though if closely examined each response is merely an extension or experimentation of the last one. The subject will also begin to look worse and reflect the torture that has been inflicted upon him so far. The damage during will be graphic. The subject is tied down for the entire procedure. This is the only aspect of the room you cannot change.

The game will end in one of two ways. One the clock runs down because you weren’t aggressive enough and you get a game over screen. No explanation or details will be given. You will just be asked if you want to play again. The other way is that subject breaks and will admit that there is an attack and to anything else you ask him. Should you ask for details he will confirm everything. You report what you’ve learned to your superior. Then you are treated to an epilogue screen that explains that there was no attack with the inserted details learned during the sessions.

The end is left ambiguous with the more obvious reading being that the subject lied in the end. Not just about the details, but about everything. The other reading for those who see it is that the torture leads to the prevention of the attack. Either way the game will ask you to play again in the menu screen.

[bort]

Shawn Elliot’s video game review symposium second part came out a few weeks ago and I’ve only recently managed to get through all 13,000+ words. The subject this time is on the matter of point of view in reviews. Do you want a fresh eye to a genre or a fan of it? What will give your audience the best perspective of a game? I’m not going to argue either way here. Instead I’m going to critique something that is related to both part one and two of the symposium.

Noby Noby Boy for those of you who don’t know is the recent downloadable game on the PSN by Keita Takahashi, the maker of Katamari Damacy. It costs five bucks and the prevalent opinion is that regardless of problems you may have with it, if you find it the least bit interesting, drop the five bucks on it and go for a ride. So it falls squarely under the Killer 7 argument. This was also the opinion of the following two reviews I’m going to deconstruct that it is worth the five dollars.

A problem often cited with metacritic and other score-aggregating site is that many sites do not use the 100-point scoring system and therefore their scores must be translated, which often doesn’t match the meaning behind the score. 3 out of 5 stars, for instance, come out to a 60%. The other problem is that one site’s 7 may not and often doesn’t equal another sites 7. It may mean good for one site and average to another. Knowing all this an interesting opportunity has arisen. IGN has recently reviewed Noby Noby Boy and gave it a 6.0. A few days earlier IGN UK released a review of the same exact code of the game awarding it a 9.0. On IGN 6.0 = Passable and 9.0 = Outstanding.

Let me reiterate the opportunity. Two reviews, using the same game, within 4 days of each other, using the same scoring method and same scoring scale gave two vastly different scores. The scores are not always alike, in fact, they very, very rarely are, but the difference is usually like a 7.6 to an 8.1. The scores are close if not even closer. The meanings are usually between really good to borderline great or whatever the specific scores might be for a game. But from ‘Passable’ to ‘Outstanding’ is a very different matter.

Looking over the reviews major differences appear. Many reviews describe the same game, but the evaluation of that description is different from site to site and magazine to magazine, e.g. Edge’s recent 7 out of 10 given to Killzone 2, caused an uproar from the fanboys, but their text described the same exact pluses and minuses that Eurogamer described who awarded it a 100 out of 100. With Noby Noby Boy, the two reviews were talking about the same game, but not quite describing the same game.

The US and UK reviews set their tone early and they are very different. The US review gets right into the mechanics of the game. Quickly listing what you can do with the buttons. The thing is it doesn’t leave that mode for the entire first page. Then half way down the page it makes the following observation:

“Now, after reading through my control description you might say to yourself, “Self, that sounds like a lot of functions assigned to the L2 and R2 buttons.” Well firstly, you should watch that sort of conversation in public as people will think you’re cookoo for Cocoa Puffs, but you’d also be right — especially with regards to L2.”

stone download

the the resident review

This isn’t a bad observation in and of itself, but it’s representative of the entire review. The first page consists of seven paragraphs of mechanical analysis. It does go into what you can do with Girl and the ability to get to other worlds, but still treats them from a mechanical point of view. Telling people about how the game plays is not a problem, its just it sacrifices so much space to do so and seemingly misses the larger point of the experience. It only gets to the venerable point of the game in the last paragraph before the Closing Comments. They do add a section called Another Take at the end to give a counter argument from a different staff writer, but it may be too little too late. Most people only look at the score of a game and using their search function to find it all I could see is a red 6.0 next to the game.

Then we have the UK review. By contrast the UK review spends only 3 paragraphs on game mechanics. The rest of the text is focused on the concept of the game and the experience of playing it. It’s mechanical rundown happens in the middle of the review. It begins instead with the thematic idea behind the game. “のびのび(nobinobi) in Japanese means, roughly, ‘hang loose’ – stretch out, procrastinate, be easy – and that’s all the game’s about. It’s a giant whimsical timesink.” A few paragraphs later it gets back to the concept of the game and begins explaining the player’s experience, by delving into a little silliness such as: “You’ll even make exciting new discoveries every once in a while, such as the world-changing realization that, by combining certain items, you can create flamingerinas or ghostguins.”

The UK reviewer calls Noby Noby boy an “emergent experience” with “subversive game design.” To me the UK reviewer understands the title better and adjusted his review to mach the idiosyncrasies of the game. The US review meanwhile stuck to the traditional method of reviewing, even though it doesn’t match the game. To the US reviewer the game is “a tech demo with a couple cool concepts to me, and nothing more.”

What is also interesting, given the latest symposium topic, is that both reviewers are virgins to this type of title. There is literally no game like it and is a unique experience. The UK’s closing comments explain it best.

“Noby Noby Boy is going to provoke arguments for months between people who claim to Get It and people who don’t, which is ridiculous because – in truth – there is nothing to get. Once you’ve accepted that, Noby Noby Boy becomes one of the most soothing, effortlessly playable things you’ve ever likely had the pleasure to experience. It’s a surreal and simple sandbox with no hidden subtleties or complex underlying system of progress and reward, no contrived meaning. Its appeal purely lies with its gentle, happy-go-lucky lunacy, and that’s what makes it so bafflingly absorbing.”

These two reviews drive to the heart of what reviews are supposed to be. Are they supposed to be a buyers guide explaining what you are getting in the most definitive of terms or are they a guide to explain the experience a given product will deliver?

For those of you who haven’t heard N’Gai Croal is leaving Newsweek effective the end of the week and becoming a consultant for the games’ industry. You can read his final post and farewell here. For those of you now asking “who is he or why should I care,” then I respond “why are you reading this site?” And for those of you legitimately ignorant, but would like to educate themselves I’m sure there are better places to understand him. This podcast comes to mind. I’m not sure I’d be correct in saying he started the games’ criticism movement that we now see in certain blog circles, but I he was definitely an important figure into getting things moving. What he was most famous for, or should I say infamous was his inflammatory’ remarks about racism in the Resident Evil 5 trailer.  But as to what he did overall I have to send you to Sexy Videogameland’s post.

He worked for a nationally recognized mainstream outlet and he spoke eloquently and critically about video games. And now he’s not. I think those two sentences sums up the transition best for those of us who are not N’Gai. He’s still going to post the same stuff on his new blog, ngaicroal.com, I hope. (Though it does mean I’ll have to fix the sidebar again.) But more importantly he’s going to get a voice into the industry. All the things we gaming public has been clamoring for on the outside, will now have a voice with the people who actually create them. That is a huge step forward for the medium. If a book ever gets written on how games rose to a new art form this will be more than a blurb, but now I’m just being starry eyed.

N’ Gai was a journalist, but he was more famous as a critic and commentator than a journalist. Really there are no games journalists. There are no investigative journalists at least. Most of them just print of the press releases or any tidbits about new games on the far distant horizon. Iroquois Pliskin at Versus CluClu Land had this to say on it. Here he does give two examples of people he think are doing it right, but I looked over some of the posts at The Cut Scene Blog and I wasn’t really impressed with what I saw. I don’t know how much of that is Ben Fritz being only held on retainer after losing his editorial position. And as for Gamasutra, years ago I followed them, but their e-mail updates were next to incomprehensible and were uninteresting. I went back lately and looked over some of their posts. Some of it is interesting, but other than the interviews I’m not sure I’d call what they do journalism either. Please send me links to prove me wrong. I like to be proven wrong when I’m all doom and gloom.

What’s my point in all of this? I’d say that to move forward in a medium you need two things: good criticism and good trade papers. Most of our focus for the past few months has been in trying to improve our criticism of video games. My opinion on this is the same as L.B. Jeffries, write the criticism first and we’ll see what works and what doesn’t. Either way we are getting the criticism thing down bit by bit, just look at my Game Critiquers sidebar or this blog list done by Alex Myers some time back. Neither is complete, but everyone on this list works hard at it. That’s a lot of people. But our trade papers consist of IGN, Gamespot and other like minded sites that give out reviews, press releases and odd features that correlate to lists in most cases. It was said, and I wish I could find where (the first thing I don’t have a link for), Game Journalism is like if Woodsworth and Bernstein were told to follow the money and they only wrote about the existence of the money.

Here’s an example. Ubiosft recently announced that Assassin’s Creed 2 is coming out this fiscal year, meaning sometime before March 31st 2010. I am excited by this information, I will not call it news, but that’s all we got. How about you dig for more information? Of course they aren’t going to give up any about the game, but how about what studio is developing it, or who is heading the design and what they’ve done previously. With Sexy VideogameDevloperLand and IGN’s top 100 Game Creators showing off many of the people behind the games in the industry it’s not inconceivable that this could be done. It would even present the opportunity to do analysis based on their previous work. If they aren’t giving up the goods, then put the onus on them and represent that you’ve asked. It’s just an idea.

Putting the Game Before the Book: What would your favorite piece of literature look like if it had been created as a game first? …rather than challenge you to imagine the conversion of your favorite literature into games, I challenge you to supersede the source literature and imagine a game that might have tried to communicate the same themes, the same message, to its audience.

Better late than never. I spend a while thinking this over and had a very difficult time about it. I think of myself as a storyteller, but this challenge isn’t to adapt a story, by just moving the plot to the video game medium, but to create the type of game that could have inspired an already written story. The subtle difference being that the theme and meaning have to be at the forefront of the work rather than an after thought from people like us.

I couldn’t think of anything and haven’t read much in the way of books lately on my own. Then I though over what I read for my various classes and something seemed to click when I thought of Theodore Dreiser’s 1900 Sister Carrie. My mind connected the book to a certain concept used in the games Indigo Prophecy and Evergrace. There you can change characters during the narrative. With Indigo Prophecy it is only at certain section of the game and with Evergrace it is really two narratives that you can switch between. Taking this basic concept and combining it with Theodore Dreiser’s masterwork is the basis for my idea.

The game will be a basic open world game taking place first in a mock Chicago then New York. It would be in the style of a thrid persion action game, but with focus on world interaction rather than violence. The player will perform missions for rewards and to press the story forward, which in told through the linearity of the missions, but through how the rewards of the self contained missions effect the characters’ status in the game world.

Following the basic story we follow the titular Sister Carrie and Mr. Hurstwood. The former is a girl from rural Wisconsin who just moved to the big city of Chicago trying to find her American dream and the later is a man of a respectable status and manager of a resort, but ultimately is dissatisfied with his lot. A major desire for everyone in the book is social standing and climbing of the ladder. Hurstwood’s wife is an avid social climber and is displaying her daughter out in high society to rise even higher. Hurstwood himself has reached a point where he no longer cares to climb as he feels he has made it, but still feels as if he is missing something. Carrie on the other hand is at the bottom of the pile; she pays rent to live with relatives and is having a very difficult time in finding work, mainly because she does not to appear as low as she is.

In this beginning portion of the game you would control Carrie and only Carrie through an introductory portion of the game where you learn about the world and how to work your way through it. You will follow her as she struggles to try and make a meager living and perform excursion (rather than call them missions) to find work, try and keep a job, deal with the Hanson’s, Carrie’s elder sister and husband, general disapproval and meet with Mr. Drouet, a traveling salesman she met on the train to Chicago. After some time you will be introduced to Mr. Hurstwood by Mr. Drouet and so the real game gets underway.

Once they have met and Mr. Drouet goes on a sales trip, the game will allow you to shift between the two characters. For most of the time the two characters wont be in contact with each other and will go about their normal day. They will go on excursions on his or her own under the player’s control. At this point Mr. Drouet is paying for an apartment for Carrie and Hurstwood is meeting her there. And this is where the mechanic comes in. The goal of the excursions is to raise their image in other character’s estimations or societies estimations. That or keep them high. However, the characters like those in the book are flawed. Time does not stop for one of the characters during the time that the player is with the other. While the player is raising the social standing of one of the characters the other is dropping. The player will not be informed of this and for a while it will not be obvious. Hurstwood’s wife will increasingly get more annoyed with him the less time the player spends with her and Carrie may fall to the stinging power of the neighbor’s gossip should the player not be there is quell such problems.

To even things and move them forward to the final stage of the game there will be less excursions with Hurstwood as his character becomes increasingly apathetic to his station, while Carrie will have more excursions as she works to improve her station in life. Eventually the two will be equals in social standing. When that happens Hurstwood will finally break down as he did in the game and embezzle from the Fitzgerald and Moy resort. Then he will run off with Carrie to New York, be hunted down by a private eye to take back the money he took, minus severance pay.

Once in New York, Carrie and Hurstwood are equals in social standing. The player can flip back and forth between them at will. The player will perform excursions, Carrie in talking with people keeping them in the societal eye, while Hurstwood tries to run a business to keep a steady income. Eventually the business will go bust if Hurstwood’s social ranking is neglected. Carrie will begin to become and old maid if she is neglected.

The changes in social ranking are in stratification. Earning or losing a few points with either character wont matter in the greater scheme of things, but with enough changing the character will enter a different stratification which will affect what excursions they can do. Also, while moving down a social stratification can happen with enough neglecting of a character, rising up will take money or esteem with those that have it.

As much as the player will switch back and forth between the characters, eventually he or she will have to make a choice of who to back. Should they back Carrie and follow her to becoming a successful actress, while maybe looking at the falling decrepit Mr. Hurstwood like in the book they will be treated to this ending. Mr. Hurstwood will die alone and in the cheapest room available off of begging money, he will have fallen to the lowest point. Carrie on the other hand will have rising as high as one can in society. The toast of Broadway, living in a luxury sweet at a fancy hotel only to find her unsatisfied with fame and money. Carrie will meet Bob Ames who will philosophize about life that there is a higher stratification, but that it cannot be reached with money or the other trapping that her American dream has been based upon until this point. The player will feel the same for there is no end screen, but the game will continue. They can go out on the same excursions over and over, play the mini games and talk to the same NPCs only to hear the same dialogue over and over. The game can go on, but there is no longer any point. While Hurstwood has reached the lowest point, death, Carrie has reached the highest only to find only longing.

Should the player choose to follow Hurstwood, they will see him oppress Carrie’s social climbing as he pulls himself together and creates a bigger business for himself. He will continue the cycle of social climbing that he once despised so that he can get back to the way of living he had become accustomed to. Carrie, meanwhile, will be the housewife and eventually be left behind as Hurstwood realizes that she will no longer help him regained what he lost. Carrie will be displaced and have none of the support she had in Chicago of her sister, who did disapprove of her fleeting ways did not want ill fortune to befall her. Nor can she co back to her rural home now much too far away. She will fall even further until she has fallen as far as she can into death or a house of ill repute for the rest of her days. Hurstwood will have learned nothing and end up right back where he started. Dissatisfied with his lot, yet leaching off the system of status to which he despises.

[bort]

For those of you not in the know, discussion on the nature of video game reviews has been taking place lately. So much so that Shawn Elliott has started a symposium to discuss the matter between about a dozen video game journalist, who I would more accurately describe as video game critics. He gathered a veritable who’s who of gaming critics, that I’m sure most outside of this interest have never heard of, to embark on the project. The idea itself had been festering in his mind for a while, but its timing spawned nicely from the Mirror’s Edge debates that had been going on all through November.

My first thoughts on this were “great, we’ll finally have a measure of conversation to which we can point to as evidence that our generation’s medium is worth talking about like any other.”

There were supporters out there, some of them taking part in the conversation and some self called “second tier people snipe from the sidelines.” (Which, incidentally, has been encouraged.) Others like Micheal Abbot, Mitch Krpata, and Micheal Walbridge.

Then came the detractors. There are always detractors for everything and are to be expected. Like this now almost infamous response. It’s fine. Healthy detractors keep the “self important bearded tossers” on our toes. However, it struck me as odd and with a minute sense of alarm and confusion, when critics like Pixelvixen707 and L.B. Jeffries, whom I really respect, when they came out unfavorably towards the symposium. I read their articles and in doing so I feel that I misunderstood or misread what they hoped to accomplish during the symposium. So I went back and reread the questions.

The questions are divided up into two parts. The first part is focused on the current state of game reviews and review scores. the problem of the preview culture that the Internet is privy and susceptible to. The second part is the part that interests me: Reviews vs. Criticism. The questions in this category try to determine the place that each has. It is that purpose that I think the dissenter’s latch on to.

Both Pixelvixen707 and L.B. Jeffries have their reservations. Pixelvixen is more about the way we write and Jeffries about the content. I think I’ve broken almost everyone of Pixelvixen’s rules of writing online criticism. L.B. Jeffries brings up a more important point though. That instead of talking about what game criticism should be or why there is so little of it, we should shut up and get to it. Or as he says, “Talk is cheap and in abundance on the internet, it’s actually doing something that’s in such short supply. ”

Along those lines I would have to agree. Many of us wanting to see criticism have to write it ourselves. I don’t think discussing will lead anywhere, not without examples and experience. We could look to other mediums that have learned the way of critique. We could look to Shelly, Kael or Bangs. The idea of this symposium is that criticism for video games must be different based upon the interactive nature of the medium. We can take the story construction from literature and visual nature  from movies, but there is no present criticism to account for the interactivity of video games. That should be the focus of the talks, because that’s what differentiates video games from other form of media.

The best way would be to dive right in and see where it leads us. Trial and error is going to be far more useful than talks about abstract concepts. I’ll do my part to keep throwing stuff at the wall until something sticks.

Of course that’s not saying I’m not going to lap up every word when they post the emails.