The Game Critique

Heroes of Might and Magic II is an old game when they were still getting a handle on new design. As great as it is, it isn’t a game that grew up within a critical atmosphere where such things are considered, even if only tangentially nowadays. Which is a long way of saying there is not a whole lot the game has to say. Still I do have one last thing thought the game brought to mind. One that I think is extra important given the upcoming Black Friday. (Though I may be too late to get anyone to read this.)

It is a strategy game, which means you are buying things. Buildings to make monsters to bring into battle, recruiting the monsters, building other miscellaneous structures, or heroes to lead your army. In other words, you will be spending a lot of gold (and crystal, mercury, sulfur, gems, ore, wood). You do earn resources, 1000 gold a day from each castle, and there are mines and other resources gathering facilities. If you need more of a specific resource, you can build a market in your castle or find one in the over world. If you have multiple markets and visit one in the over world you can drop trade prices with each market. It is a basic economic model without complexity. Unlike some strategy games now, there is no credit system in the economy.

I know a lot of strategy games of old and now still employ this, but HOMM2 was the game I was playing when these thoughts came to me. In these games you cannot spend more than you have. If you do not have the resources then the purchase is simply unavailable. It sounds so basic why would I have to say it? Well its because apparently no one knows this nugget of common sense if the credit crisis and banking failures are any indication. When said out loud this piece of advice makes perfect sense, but we never put into practice. We are never taught to do so.

Kids nowadays whenever they get money, spend it. (Don’t hound me if you are the exception, I’m one too.) They don’t save for a rainy day or in this case, a nation credit failure. So when they grow up they do not have the tendencies to do so as adults. The United States government is not saving either. Any surplus, of which we haven’t had for 9 years, went straight out of any account it’s in into paying off the debt, as it should. I’m not going to get into specifics, but sufficed to say this economic model is not sustainable. This is a problem, especially when not having money is no longer a barrier to buying things.

In Heroes of Might and Magic II there is, it’s a red circle with a line through it over a symbol of gold. If you can’t afford it, you can’t buy it. Even beyond that is the concept, if you want to win, sometimes you go turns without buying anything, saving up for a bigger, more expensive and more strategically relevant structure that you can afford next turn, or two turns from now or hell a whole week.

If you spend all the money you have whenever you want you will find yourself at a great disadvantage. After a while you will find yourself incapable of doing anything at all and lagging behind your opponents.

My point from all this, is why can’t games teach us this. Yes there are learning simulation games that are boring where that is their entire purpose. But even with games like HOMM2, it can teach, by application. Not everyone will learn, but a system like that can teach a person the idea that if they don’t have money than they should spend it. Or even better, given the advent of easy credit, that if they keep spending they will be in dire straights without any savings or resources.

The connection of such simple ideas, that have no pretension about them, and real life is not new. It is the purpose of art (lower case a) to mirror or reveal the real world in some way. Despite Heroes of Might and Magic II, being on another world with fantasy monsters and magic, it still can connect to our everyday lives in a meaningful way. The way we spend our money. I know it would never come about, but if everyone or even just most of us followed the two simple economic ideas in HOMM2, then we wouldn’t be where we are today.

Video games can teach us something by the act of participation. They don’t teach us how to aim and fire guns, how to launch a guerrilla campaign, or how set up a drug dealing syndicate. What they teach us are ideas, concepts, like any other medium.

What did Heroes of Might and Magic II teach me? The basis of smart money management.

The game was made for Casual Gameplay’s design contest #6 with the parameters to incorporate the this content’s theme: Explore. Were I to judge in the contest I would look to how well it incorporated the theme, as a critic I am looking at what that means within the game. I recommend playing it here before continue reading.

Small Worlds is a simple game. It has three buttons: left, right and jump. And that’s all the game needs. You are in an environment that you cannot see until you begin to move around and explore. The more area you cover the more black pixels disappear and the camera pulls back so you can see everything at once. From the initial hub world you travel through four portals to four different worlds where you start the process again in revealing the new environment. You only go back to the hub world when you find a glowing square that is then taken back with you to the space station/ship.

That is the entire game. There are no enemies, there are no obstacles beyond the basic platforming and there is no fail state. The game’s entire focus is on the worlds around you. The five worlds are very different in setting, but evoke the same basic premise and overarching theme. I’ll go world by world.

The hub world is a derelict station or ship; it is never made clear exactly what it is. All we know is that it is heavily damaged, with collapsed ceilings, a broken glass dome and flickering lights. We also know that it is in space somewhere. It is meant to evoke the emotions and sense of danger reminiscent of Dead Space and Alien. Something terrible happened here, but we don’t know what and will never definitively find out. All we know is the facility is wrecked; possibly beyond salvage and we are alone. The more we explore the more that is made apparent. The only places we can go are through the four teleporters.

In the white world we begin in a place of caves and snow. It is someplace in the wilderness among evergreen trees and endless snowfall. We travel through a system of caves, covered in both dirt and ice, moving underground. We soon find man-made structures, large shafts made of metal stand, but appear to have to purpose for being there. Some of the ceiling has caved-in. As you travel through to the other side of the local you come upon a screen with a map on it with several yellow dots blinking. You keep going and find more shafts, two of them this time still occupied by missiles. Suddenly you realize it is not a normal winter outside, but nuclear winter and the glowing dots were the targets hit, their number corresponding to the number of empty missile shafts.

The blue world transports us to the middle of a cityscape with water streaming down endless waterfalls. The water falls and flows over a number of platforms and we once again travel downward into an underground reservoir where we see a stream of green ooze flowing and mixing into the blue water. Traveling further down you find a water elevator that will take you to the top of the world where you find this contraption is bringing the water to the top so it can once again flow down back into the reservoir in an endless cycle. Going the other way at the top we find the gears that run the system and more carved out underground shelters. The environmental poison having taken all life.

The green world is less obvious than the others. All we can see is a bunch of floating rocks on a green background. As we move around you continue to find floating rocks spread out in every direction. This time we start at the bottom and have to make our way upward. The higher we travel the more rocks we find, bigger than the ones below. The green background fades into bright white and then back into green. The white light is a white sphere exploding with all the smaller rocks around the rim and the larger rocks in the center. We are witnessing the destruction of a planet. The white light is the explosion and the rocks the shattered ruminants. This world no longer exists.

Finally the red world changes things up by having the background being a plain black. Now we are unsure at certain points if we are pushing back the veil of pixels or not. The path is narrow and creates a spiral pattern. The walls are purple and we have no idea what we are in until we hit a white rib. We are traveling through the innards of some large monstrous space creature. It’s dead now.

All five worlds evoke the dead. Each world is dead each in its own way. Which paradoxically goes against the opening line of the game “There is too much noise…” The only noise in the whole game is the ambient music and single sound effect of reaching the glowing box. The character makes no noise, and neither do the worlds.

From this I have two theories about what happened in the game and what its meaning is.

First, we have a man alone on a space ship looking for life. The noise is all in his head. He is alone in the void of space, everything he knew and loved destroyed. It has driven him mad and he wants to relieve the pain and anguish. Traveling from world to world he finds the same thing everywhere in different forms. Nuclear winter, toxic environmental disaster, an exploding planet, and a creature’s corpse. Death and destruction follows him everywhere as does the silence of worlds. He gathers the power sources to activate the pod and releases it, with himself inside, into the sun. “Silence” the ending screen tells us. In death he finds silence; he finds peace from his own madness. Maybe he was the cause that destroyed his ship, perhaps he went mad and killed everybody, or maybe he was just a survivor of the disaster and cannot bear to be alone.

Heroes of Might and Magic II, for those of you not in the know, it a turn based fantasy strategy game built around resource gathering and army on army combat. For a more detailed explanation, check here.

The campaign starts off with a cutscene explaining the premise of The Succession War the game is subtitled for. The old king that had united the continent under his rule has died and left two heirs: Roland the good guy and Archibald the not so good guy. Normally the royal seer would choose, but several ‘accidents’ happened and Archibald accuses Roland of killing and conspiring to take the crown. Roland runs off, fearing for his life and Archibald ‘influences’ the new seer and gets crowned king. Roland doesn’t like that and the two end up going to war. You are then given the choice of which lord to serve, nothing too complicated. The rest of the campaign is a series of missions set up by intermediate cutscenes that give an over arching flow to the campaign.

The game came out back in 1996, long before the industries present fixation on moral choice. Heroes of Might and Magic II starts off with a choice. The implications between the two men are rather clear in deed and imagery. One man offers a clean conscience and a place in the kingdom and the other monetary reward and a place in the kingdom. This is the truest sense of a moral choice, because yes there is an offer of reward, but it doesn’t happen within the mechanics of the game. The choice has no connection to ludic elements whatsoever. The only real difference between the two campaigns is which of the six castle types and therefore which troops you have access to. Each side gets three, an early martial based castle, a midlevel castle and hard hitting late game castle. The choice is between which man you are going to work for and given they offer the same thing it really is about which man are you going to help rule the kingdom.

Roland’s campaign has you starting out in the far corner of the continent with limited money to fight with so you have to gather allies by subduing the local lords, saving the Dwarven kingdom, and gathering resource rich areas before moving on to engage Archibald’s forces. A few extra missions to gather the additional forces and magic for the final assault against the capital where you’ve forced Archibald to hole up in.

Archibald’s campaign is directly opposite in tone, but mirrors the strategy. He forces any reluctant lords to accept his rule and crushes those that will not submit like the Dwarven kingdom. He then engages Roland’s forces and puts down any opposition he faces. A few extra mission as he gathers up additional forces and items before the final assault on Roland’s forces at his summer palace in the remote regions of the continent.

The campaigns mirror each other. The gameplay within the missions of gather gold and resources, build and recruit monsters is the same in both campaigns, so where is the moral choice? What exactly makes working for Roland different from working for Archibald once you’ve started? In this I think Heroes of Might and Magic does it better than Bioshock, inFamous, or KotOR.

The moral choice is in the context. For those who bother to pay attention and see the context the campaigns have set up you will see what your use of the game’s mechanics actually mean within the game world. Nothing is different mechanically, but the means is very different between the two campaigns. In fact, some of the missions themselves mirror each other. In Roland’s campaign you are give some forces to protect a number of Dwarven villages under siege that cannot be upgraded scattered across the map, while in Archibald’s campaign you are given a castle and more resources to go and conquer the Dwarven kingdom.

In Roland’s missions you never feel uneasy about the goal you are given, because the context never make you question what you are doing. You are courting allies, not subduing them. You are gathering resources, not taking them. And most importantly, you are defeating enemies, not destroying them.

In Archibald’s campaign you are working for the bad guy. Sometimes it’s cheesy, but it is never hidden right down to the maniacal laughing and the chained up Dragon king next to his throne. The mission that stands out most to me is the one where you have to put down a peasant revolt and are told to make an example of them. There are groups of peasant of wandering monsters armies that number in the thousands. They are the weakest creature in the game, but are powerful in such numbers. The only real strategy to defeating them is to build up some archers and keep your distance as they try to cross the field and cut them down. Then your hero’s necromancy ability comes into play after the battle by turning a third of those you killed into skeleton soldiers. Halfway through the mission I felt sick, realizing what I was doing in the context of the world. I was slaughtering thousands and then desecrating their corpses by having them fight their comrades who were fighting a totalitarian king. Yet there was nothing really different in my actions from when I played Roland’s campaign.

The title to the post refers to the Aesop fable “The Farmer and the Stork.” In it a farmer want to stop the cranes from destroying his crops and so sets up a number of nets to catch them. When he goes to check the traps he find along with the cranes, a noble stork. The stork asks to be released for he is not a crane, nor there to harm his crops. The farmer responds that the stork is as bad as the crane for being with them. The moral of the story is “choose your friends wisely.”

The story highlights another interesting point in that you are not playing as either Roland or Archibald, but a general who chooses to follow either one or the other. In this manner you are not good or evil, but are only a tactician ordering troops and working on strategy. There are only two moral choices in the whole game. The one at the beginning and one about halfway through before the fifth mission, aptly named ‘Turning Point’ for both the point in the war and your own choice. In both campaigns after you are given your orders from the lord you are following you are given the opportunity to change sides. Roland will appeal to your sense of decency and Archibald will appeal to your greed and sense of self-preservation. Should you change sides you are sent a message from your former commander, one of rage and threats by Archibald or one of profound disappointment from Roland.

Beyond those two decisions the only other choices you make are tactical. You are just doing your job. Like the stork caught by the farmer with the cranes you are judged by the company you keep. You are good or evil not by what you do, but by your association with Roland or Archibald.

There may not be more of a message about morality in Heroes II, but the game sets up a structure for examining ones own actions. Looking at your actions in the context given is what morality is about and trying to emphasize that in game is a better way to seek a message about morality than an arbitrary dichotomy within the game.

For those of you following me on twitter, which I suppose is all of you given my repeat audience, you will know of my present troubles. Two weeks ago I had midterms, which took up a lot of my time. The week after that I got a horrible case of the flu that my only condolence was that it happened after midterms. The unfortunate downside being that I missed a good deal of classes and did not write the essays that were due due to the fact my brain could not function properly. Then last Sunday, almost a week after I first became ill my computer corrupted itself. I had it fully reformatted by IT specialist and it seemed to be all clean and new. Then when I went to reinstall programs, it was a no go near the end. The whole system started to go down once again. Then earlier this evening when the whole machine crapped out and could not function. It doesn’t even recognize there being an OS on it anymore. The present theory is that the hard drive itself is corrupted, as in physically there is something wrong with the disk. Tomorrow I plan to purchase a new one and get it installed, then skip over Vista entirely and try out a free copy of Windows 7 a friend has and then get all my data and files back on. Hopefully that will be done by tomorrow night. I will then have all of Sunday to get myself caught up on the two weeks of school work I’m missed.

As of right now, I’m standing in the front hall of my dorm typing this out at a computer station as they vacuum the floor behind me.

That is my reason for not working on anything here. This is unfortunate, especially since this is the busiest and most important time of the year for a video game critic. Though I console myself with Q1 of 2010 is going to be the same or even more so.

Also I want to get one last word on this Citizen Kane of Video Games. This is a cry to the mainstream as anyone in the critical community, brainysphere or not, is pissed off at this subject for more than a few reasons. But as I was walking home from a friend’s apartment my mind wandered to it and I have to write it. Skip it if you want.

Most people decry “when are we going to get our Citizen Kane?” What they really are asking, “when are we going to get a sufficient enough example to point to when people give us that snobbish look whenever we get caught talking about them?” They want to have something where they can just say the title and have the other person nod and move on, because they will just know what they are talking about, even if they have not played it themselves. Just like Citizen Kane is that title even though most people have not seen it, but it became the emblem of film as art. Watchman did this for comic books.

In reality the Citizen Kane of video games has nothing to do with cultural relevance, or artistic viability, but with gamer’s own insecure egos. Our own predisposition fears of being cast as the outsider, while at the same time, hypocritically decrying anything that interferes with our own geek hierarchy when regular people come into the scene. We are a strange bunch, but personally I separate myself from that portion of the community. I like to think of myself as a geek with the ability to step back and recognize there is a larger world and have enough humility to realize I am not the end all be all.

I say that of course, without a hint of irony, as THEGameCritique.

Finally, when I do start writing again, it wont be anything recent. I have two essays for Heroes of Might and Magic II and then I’m probably going to move on to Silent Hill and/or King Kong. Unless I can get Dragon Age running of course. Also I plan to continue my Indie Game Spotlight over at Creativefluff.com and get more literary type criticism done over here. I also plan to start a new series looking at the form of video games. Rather than specific design choices of mechanics, I mean as Scott McCloud describes the six layers of art, Form is number two. I plan to start a series of posts, also at Creativefluff.com, of using example video games to explore the form of the medium. So look forward to that and see you on the other side.