The Game Critique

Isn’t That Spatial? Every video game has certain benefits and constraints in the way it represents space. Interaction fiction, arcade titles, 2D side-scrollers, isometric RPGs, and first person shooters all have advantages and disadvantages to how they deal with space-some technical in nature, some design-based. This month’s topic invites you to explore the ways games have represented the spatial nature of their storyworlds and what this does for the audience experience. Is it possible to ignore the constancy of spatial relationships in a graphical game? What would such a game look like? Are there ways of representing spatial relationships that we haven’t explored? Do you have ideas for games that could intentionally twist the player’s perception of space, or do you want to write about a game that already has?

So, Blogs of the Round Table is back from its summer hiatus and we’re dealing with special relationships in video games. But at the present time it seems that spatial relationships are the only type that designers can get right at the moment. (Subtle social commentary.) In fact in almost any game you play, your relationship with the world your avatar inhabits is the most important you will have with the game.

Games are about interaction and video games are about interaction with the digital environment. Avatars have to exist in a world, whether it is just the simple one directional side-scrollers of Mario and Sonic or to the vast open worlds of Grand Theft Auto’s cityscapes. The highest interaction in a spatial environment we have right now is that of the open world sandbox games, the games advertised as go anywhere, do anything.

We humans, when we enter this world, immediately begin to learn about spatial relationships. We look around and being assessing our environment. We learn distances in such a way that we cannot explain how our minds know it. A physicist can calculate where a ball will be given the force and direction, but any competent person can catch the ball if they see it thrown. We learn how to do such things in the real world. We learn after traversing the same streets, walking the same blocks over and over again, where everything is. When starting at one place we can make our way to another easily.

It is the same in video games. In the open world sandbox games we understand how to get from one point to another and where things are in relation to one another. Also we learn how to fight in action/adventure games. We know how far we can be away from an enemy to be able to hit them. I know it’s possible to understand even the minutest visual distances between the pixels if Ikaruga players are any indication.

What does this mean in the whole scheme of things? Nothing much beyond a simple reminder of a human’s abilities. Video games continually present situations that are fantastical and that we cannot be apart of in our normal everyday lives, but they, for the most part, exist in a world that we can understand. An invisible wall may occasionally defy logic, but I’m making a point. The need to ground the player is not in story subjectivity or gameplay mechanics, but space and distances. The empty spaces between objects could be more important that the objects themselves. That non-rendered air is potential, the potential of play. We know that, because that’s what we’ve learned.

[bort]

I’ve been playing Battlefield 1943 a lot lately. It’s the first shooter I’ve played in a long time. I am usually a single player game kind of guy and usually shun multiplayer modes, unless the person is sitting right next to me. But I tried out the demo and I was hooked in the free half hour it gave me and immediately bought the unlocked game. Playing it lead me to a realization.

The game is great, I have to say it is the most intricate and detailed game of checkers I’ve ever played.

What I mean by that, if you read the title of the post, is that it is not a war game in feel or purpose, but really is a complex game of checkers where three interchangeable classes, literally if you find a fallen backpack, fight over five strategic points on a map. Dying is only a momentary annoyance, but it would be worse if it were anything else in a multiplayer game. I like the game don’t get me wrong, but that is all it is, a game.

Regardless of a few fleeting moments it ends up being a games of checkers and wack-a-mole. In fact I think I can extend that to any game purporting to be about war. As noted over at Experience Points, and HitSelfDestruct there is an absence in civilians that would engender certain consideration on a real battlefield. Beyond that I find that a majority of games with a war backdrop put you in the position of an Ubermench, a super soldier that would put Captain America to shame. You take over entire enemy bases, kill entire divisions and disrupt the manufacture of war machines that could turn the tide of battles.

For power fantasies like those that try to emulate 80s action films that’s fine and expected, but most of these games have their influence in real life conflicts (eg. World War II games) or base their fictional conflict on the machinations of real conflicts (eg. Killzone 2 being World War II in Space).

Medal of Honor: Frontline, a classic in the World War II shooter sub genre, hold to a realistic depiction of the war with the first few levels with the storming of the Normandy beaches and assault on the bunkers, but once that is over the game sends you on a number of solo missions to disrupt major military instillation behind enemy lines.

I wonder if it is possible to have a reasonable war game that puts you in the shoes of a real soldier. With the constraints that the player has to be able to succeed and for something to be happening on screen at all times that the player can have an effect on, it seems unlikely.

In narrative games, the player has to win. Any losses are experienced through cutscenes after the player has achieved victory in the game itself. The reason there is no game where you play a Nazi is less to do with the moral ambiguity of the premise and more to do with the fact that they LOST THE WAR. A player doesn’t play to lose, so they cannot play the losing side of a conflict unless you are going to allow them to play with the facts of history like some RTSs do or have that loss portrayed in an end of game cutscene to show despite all their efforts they still lost.

Also, the concept that the player has to have an effect on the game world is not an unreasonable one; it is the basis of the entire medium. In a firefight, for example, it is very reasonable to have the player shooting enemies, have an effect on the outcome of the firefight. But in a war game that tries to be about the conflict itself, it seems to translate that the individual player, a normal soldier, having an effect on the outcome of the war. I can understand how that might work in a strategy game where you are taking the role of a Commander or General, but it is far fetched to think that an individual private’s efforts will determine the outcome of the sociopolitical sphere of the western world.

Then there is the fact that in a medium about interaction. War, at first glance, seems like a great place to set the game, until you realize what war actually is. War is long bouts of boredom interrupted by a few moments of sheer terror.  Are you going to have long bouts of boredom in a video game? No. The game has to cherry pick the moments of action a soldier would feel and we understand that as the nature of the medium. Therefore it is about how those moments are portrayed. Unfortunately, with regularity, war video games are an extension of the power fantasy video games. They put military actions up on a pedestal and glorify war. The glory to be had isn’t even in the vein of the Homeric epic where it is in death and being immortalized that glory is gained, but in the vein of Hollywood bad asses where it is earned from victory and being able to laugh in the distance at their fallen foes.

To put it simplistically, war video games are more The Green Berets, than All Quiet on the Western Front or Platoon or Apocalypse Now. Hell I’d even take the Saving Private Ryan version of a war video game. I would like to see something that recognizes or acknowledges the horrors and realizations of war rather than glorifying it.

I put it to designers like this: a soldier has few tools and uses them as trained when deployed, it is up to intelligent men to deploy the soldier intelligently. Or to put it in terms of video games, the player has few tools and will use them and it is up to the designers to set the situation and tone of the game. The message can be delivered and like everything else in video games it is going to be from the presentation.

So, yes I will continue to play my game of virtual World War II checkers, but I don’t want to be one of the few people left that realize war is hell before going into battle. There is more anti-war media in every other medium for a reason. War is not pleasant, war is not fun and I worry that if video games don’t find a way to deal with it beyond mechanical interface that we will be left behind.

Gaming Made Me started with the crew over at RocksPaperShotgun and the various designers they asked, and then others in the middle circle have taken up the question of which video games have made them who they are. Michael McBride talked about how discussing such information will have your audience better understand who you are and where you’re coming from when they read your analysis. I’m willing to one step further and say it’s an excellent method of self-examination so you can understand yourself better, see any biases you might have and write better critique in the long run. I figured it was my turn after last post’s self-searching nature, plus it felt like a good exercise

So here we go.

Streets of Rage 2 – Sega Genesis – 1992

This was the first console title I ever owned for the first console I ever owned. It came packaged in and as soon as I opened it I plugged it in and immediately began playing. I remember on my first try though I picked Max, because he was the toughest and buffest looking character of the choices. I got the three-button control scheme pretty quickly and soon succumbed to a Game Over screen before I had even beaten the first section of the first level. My next major memory of the game was in co-op and how a friend and I learned the lesson of friendly fire and collateral damage. We divided up the screen; he would take the top and I would take the bottom. We also divided the health and money as evenly as the game would allow. We could never agree on weapons if there was only one. Finally my last major memory of that era was late one Sunday evening when I finally made it to the 8th stage again and after much effort and bad beats I finally finished off the last boss and got that stage clear. I cheered and hollered and jumped up and down. After the closing cut scenes and credits I was presented with the top scores board and then the Press Start to Play screen.

A while back I located, setup and plugged in that game and found none of it had left me. I still understood the tricks to beating certain bosses. I still remembered the timing to do infinite punches and most importantly I still remembered where most of the secret 1up items were. There are few games I know as well as I know Streets of Rage 2. Thanks to the Genesis collection I can play it whenever I want and in HD. I get excited whenever I hear the “dun dun duh duh de dun duhh eh eh” 80s style riff of the opening level.

In looking back what I find interesting was my initial reaction to the game. Or rather how I responded to what it presented me. The opening that sets the scene is done in showing a pixilated NYCish city in the background and a text scrawl that is the story ala Star Wars. It ends with an evil mastermind’s face and hands appearing like a puppet master over the city. I ignored the text. I ignored the story. I had no idea what was going on and who I was. All I knew I learned from the gameplay. I was the good guy and everyone else was the bad guy. That’s all you really need to know as the entire game plays out like an extended final fight scene in an 80s action movie with all the first and second acts that would take up screen time done in the opening crawl. Later play-throughs I would skip that text crawl section entirely, until I beat the game that first time. The next time I sat down to play I stopped and read the whole thing. I didn’t fully understand, I was 8, but I actually cared about the story after having seen the ending and wondering who that extra character was they rescued. I saw the resolution and then I wanted to know exactly what was resolved. Even as fantastical and unbelievable the story sometimes seemed to be getting, the details in setting forced the player to fill in the blanks about what was going on. More than any other game Streets of Rage 2 introduced me to the concept of video games as a narrative medium. I didn’t understand it like that back in, but from then on I always wanted to know why I could or was doing something rather than just what could I do.

Goldeneye – N64 – 1997

Arguably the best movie to video game adaptation ever made, this set the original standard for FPSs on the consoles and where nearly all of my video game hours during middle school went. I beat the game on easy and then spent years trying to beat the levels on the higher difficulties. I would use the train level as others use a stress ball after a bad day at school. However, that is not where most of my time went. Most of it went to the multiplayer. Because of its multiplayer this is probably the game I have sunk more hours into than any other. Three friends and myself would all sit in front of the same screen shooting the hell out of each other at my house, at a friend’s house or at the local youth center. I like many others got the N64 blister working that analog stick.

Many games have had same screen multiplayer. What did I gain from this one in particular? I could call it a version of emergent storytelling. The same four people would play over and over. Eventually we developed favorite levels and favorite weapon stocks.  Soon we found our favorite match: proximity mines in the Aztec Temple with no time or kill limit. Beyond that we began choosing the same avatars and for every kill some of us supplied our own catch phrases. “I spit on your corpse” and “I am the lion in the jungle” were two of them. We had our own personalities in these death matches. We never got bored of playing essentially the same match over and over, because it would never be the same match.

The moment that remains in my mind to this day is where the game had been going on for a long time; I’d like to say an hour or so. The entire map has been littered with mines and if the game had destructible environments it would not be standing anymore. I stocked up on proximity mines in the large upper hall, planted a few more around and then realized I could not move without dying. I couldn’t go forward because of the mines I just planted and I couldn’t go backwards because of mines planted by others maybe 20 minutes ago. I saw one of the doors open on the far side and silently said ‘no.’ He entered and was instantly killed by the explosion. That explosion was followed by another and another and another. He had set off a chain reaction that crossed the entire hall. Just before it hit me I tried to escape and died a fiery death. That sort of thing cannot be planned and have the same effect. We were amazed and then kept on playing.

Yes the game’s graphics don’t hold up that well, but it was a milestone and everything else about the game does. Last year my friends and I went back to the game and dumped a few more hours into it. We tried a few new modes and weapons. It was still as good and as fun as ever.

Baldur’s Gate – PC – 1998

This is the grand daddy of them all. This is my all-time favorite game. It is also the best video game RPG ever made. But this about influence not quality. I dumped a lot of hours into this game as well, the big difference being that I’ve never beaten it, nor even come close. The game has so much content that I had to go off the beaten path and explore every section into the farthest wiles and deepest depths of danger and death. I went to the absolute limits of the map boarders. I went through every nook and cranny exploring every part of every map. I would uncover dangers I could not handle, run away or reload and come back, when I was ready so I could continue. This is the first video game to create such a complete world, one that seems to live and breath with so many unique characters. Even the repeatable no name citizens seem to adequately fill the world. What I love is unlike so many others are that the story allows such exploration. There is no immanent end of the world. The story is epic, but it is very personal. People are after you and you have to hide from them/fight them. Only you and your party care and some of the party members don’t even care about you and are there just for their own agendas. No one else in this world is invested in you. They have their own problem and their own lives. There are also references to an even wider world that extends the very large boarders of the world to locals like Amn, Waterdeep and Neverwinter. I was pulled into this world like no other game before it.

In part I think it may have to do that the game is based of the Forgotten Realms campaign world. The Sword Coast was already heavily detailed and much of the history, culture, and important world building were already in place. The game took the license and did everything it could to it. Over the years I had to restart the game due to bad saving choices, computer changes and faulty installs. Each time I played those first few chapters I find even more details and content that somehow escaped me on those previous ventures. For example, in one instance you meet an inane half naked idiot talking and one of the responses is as follows:

“Ok, I’ve just about had my FILL of riddle asking, quest assigning, insult throwing, pun hurling, hostage taking, iron mongering, smart arsed fools, freaks, and felons that continually test my will, mettle, strength, intelligence, and most of all, patience! If you’ve got a straight answer ANYWHERE in that bent little head of yours, I want to hear it pretty damn quick or I’m going to take a large blunt object roughly the size of Elminster AND his hat, and stuff it lengthwise into a crevice of your being so seldom seen that even the denizens of the nine hells themselves wouldn’t touch it with a twenty-foot rusty halberd! Have I MADE myself perfectly CLEAR?!”

After reading that there was no way I could not choose it. It’s a line that I make a point to keep memorized. The old man’s response went along the lines of: “Well if that’s how you’re going to be.” He went on to give one last fact that made utterly no sense. Until I read some book on a random shelf and what he said clicked. It sent a chill through me. It is that kind of interconnectivity that you just don’t find just anywhere or I think even anywhere else. Nevermind that the dialogue choice is itself the best critique of the RPG and fantasy genres ever. I often find myself wondering why a game doesn’t try a morose and utterly depressing character choice? Why isn’t there a character who isn’t happy to see adventurers? Why isn’t there a quest that solves itself while you look on? Why does everyone have to know you are the hero and not some shulb? Or a quest where the quest giver doesn’t want you to complete it for non malevolent reason? And then each time I come up with something I stop and realize whatever example I was lamenting about had already been done in Baldur’s Gate. It was just so big and full in my eyes that despite any problems I felt like there was a world there I could live in if I could crawl into the screen.

I scoured my memories trying to figure out what games effected me in some way. The ones that influenced the way I react to them or even those that shaped my current tastes. I remember games lost to time. I remember games that probably wont show up anywhere on the internet if you do a search. I thought I knew what the first video game I played was, but going further and further back I realized how long video games have actually been apart of my life. I remember Win 95, I remember the autumn leaves wallpaper of Win 3.11 that I could only get to through a DOS command. I remember my Genesis, I remember my Game Gear, I remember my earliest electronic tutors and yes even my family’s Apple II in all its black and green glory. From King’s Quest VI to Myst to Doom to Wolfenstein 3D to Pixelart to Reading Rabbet. I remembered so many games I’d forgotten about and the time spent with them. It was wonderful sitting down to figure out which games stuck with me, which ones my mind thought deserved to be remembered and which ones Made Me.