The Game Critique

(This is late. This was meant to come out over a week ago. It’s ironic that it was so difficult a piece of criticism to write in that it deals with criticism itself.  I still don’t think it’s quite right, but it’s got to come out sometime.)

I said on twitter last week in response to the bad Freeplay panel that I would…hang on; let me see if I can find it. … Here it is:

Well I’ve done a bit of that so far from one perspective and another, but here is the big enchilada. As a critic, I believe one has to examine at one’s own work from time to time as a matter of course to make sure one stays on course.

The Search

Two years ago I wrote a post entitled “What Do I Do Here.” That is still an apt question that I haven’t yet answered. Oh, I gave some broad minded answers that at the time addressed things that needed to be addressed as it was a time in video game criticism where it was weakly defined if defined at all with the critical spectrum. It hasn’t been formally addressed and it never need be. We’ve come so far as a community and both entrenched and new comers that I don’t think proper categorization need ever be a necessity beyond “that is an Eric Swain piece.” (Substitute your own name in that place for my point.) This idea also has problems, after all who the hell am I?

Last year around this time I was desperately doing everything in my power to graduate by throwing myself into that final class I needed. I have my diploma. It was mailed to me. I didn’t attend any ceremony, to which my parents are more disappointed in that than I am. But my despair at the time did highlight that I still don’t know what I’m doing. Though I didn’t write and by the time I could the relief of passing over shadowed anything else. Which brings me to now.

As much as my friends may say to dissuade me of some of my beliefs, this is one I don’t think is wrong. I am a third rate video game blogger. That I dare call myself a critic in some circumstance is by virtue that critic is the blanket term for any deep thinker not attributable to any other definition. It comes down that my ideas and projects (not to mention prospects) have been dismal as of late. (Not the least of which can be traced to my ongoing unemployablity, which as more time goes by becomes truer and truer.) It’s great that I have wide categories to which I can fit my intellectual prospects into. That doesn’t make it any better that I am no closer to the minutia of criticism, or better yet to say the actual physical form my body of work and thought could take. That would be nice to know. The closest I can gather is that I’m at my best when truly pissed off.

That is not a healthy mind state to be in.

Let us go back to the concept of me being a third rate critic. People try to dissuade me with thoughts of ‘your writing is excellent’ (sometimes it is), ‘you have great ides and concepts’ (most of which remain lazily half written in outline form), ‘traffic doesn’t matter, that doesn’t make it quality’ (it’s a numbers game). The last one is true, just because you get a click doesn’t mean you are read or are engaged with. Popular does not equal good. But it is still a numbers game. The only time I get mentioned is when I’m told my blog is among those listed as dead. I have no intellectual impact and if the internet is anything to go by I apparently can’t piss anyone off enough to be worth the effort of trolling.

Did I really just complain that I don’t get trolls? Ok, bad example, but it highlights my point. I exist in an aether unconnected to anything. I was pretty okay until That Freeplay panel. Sure attacking criticism, especially the type of criticism I constantly engage with and more importantly write deemed as basically pointless is hurtful enough. (I will ignore for this post the rage of being told by a panel of “experts” that many of my friends are invisible.) The worst of anything is always self-induced. How does one protect oneself against what one does to oneself?

During the twitter storm, something difficult to keep up with while watching a live Let’s Play, I did some quick research. What makes it even worse I now realize was that the Google searches I was conducting were biased in my favor, because I was logged in and Google now adjust searches for the individual based on what sites you already go to. Criticism’s visibility came up during the tweets (again in regards to woman writers) but I expanded it to all real criticism writers and I came up with zilch.

Pages of unrelated articles or worst of all, years out of date posts asking in one form or another where the thoughtful game critics were. The first page results for many basic search terms gave the impression nothing is out there. We really are screaming into a void.

I highlighted in my comics piece, which was two months work and is more fortuitous in timing that anything else, that comic book criticism is basically invisible, if it exists as an individual thing or as a community at all. I really have no idea. Now I find a similar fate with video games. Critical-Distance showed up at the bottom of the page for “Game Criticism.” On a biased search, a site I am heavily affiliated with comes up at the bottom of the page over articles I’ve never read or read years ago and dismissed as unhelpful back then. The big dogs aren’t known. They aren’t seen. Their existence is hidden; BrainyGamer, Experience-Points, The Boarder House etc aren’t showing up.

When I started I thought I was onto something. I thought I could define a trail for myself that no one else was walking or at least talking about openly. Ah, how young and naive, but who could blame me, it’s not like I saw it being talked about anywhere. I found everyone by pure accident; a link at youtube to an article, which linked a post that mentioned BrainyGamer. I’m not the only one to walk this path of cluelessness. Over the last couple of months I’ve become the go to guy for people wanting to find more critics, blogs or sites. Why? Because I overcompensate, from nothing I gathered everything I could. I amassed an RSS list that approaches the singularity, and my RSS reader is small in comparison to others. I read everything posted though. If I don’t have time for it now, I save it for later. I don’t know how much of an accomplishment that is or how proud I should be of it.

The Writing

I said before that two years ago I wrote about what I was doing on my site and what I was doing here. I write criticism on games. It’s in the name. Yeah, real clever Eric. How? That’s the important question and two years later and I still don’t know. I have a basic manifest on what broad swashes of uncharted land I should trek, but that doesn’t help me build a road or set up a gas station along the way.

By nature I am a storyteller, so I tell a story. The more posts I look at the more I realize more of them begin with me telling you the reader not what the post is about or why I’m writing it, but what random set of events lead for the idea of this post to pop into my head. In fact, these posts in their entirety can be looked upon as me telling the story of the journey through my thought process. Hell, look at the top of this post. I started with the Freeplay panel debacle and that I wrote a tweet during it and this is the end result of the promise in that tweet. Does anyone care about that tweet? I can’t imagine, but it’s the only way to begin the post, because that’s what caused it to be.

I’ve also gotten into the habit of asides and parenthetical to augments a point. The flow is similar to how I talk if you let me go on long enough. The flow of thoughts from one topic to the next reinforces the idea that I’m telling you a story of how I came to these thoughts. But again, these are big concepts and taking broad strokes towards my style. It doesn’t help identify anything or work towards any conclusion of the problems faced when looking at the minutia.

I’ve always been an idea person, always focused on concepts rather than their execution. I’ve got tons of ideas in my head, but I have little ability in being able to express them properly. I’m bogged down into a very direct sort of writing, which only works so far. That’s all right for blog posts dictating analysis of a work or theory.

My best writing is not when I think a game is great or when I think a game is terrible. This is for very different reasons. When I like it I can’t write about it for the reasons I list above. I do not have the honed skill set to craft sentences that are frankly good enough to convey my pleasure about a game. And I can’t write about my hatred of something, because it would become a screed, something no one wants to read. I am best when a game is okay, but disappointing. It allows me to step back and do what I find I am best at, being analytical in a step-by-step process. I work my way down like a list explaining each issue and then wrap it up. For what better way is there to express something orderly talk about something than to give point-by-point complaints on it. If it’s good they are nit picks and not complaints and if it’s bad what’s the point.

What I find intolerable about my own writing is that as a reflection of who I am, as most writing it, I find the person I see staring back at me is not a flattering image to mine own eyes. (Which does a hell of a number on my paranoia.) I see a third rate blogger trying to pass himself off as something better. I act like I now what I’m talking about, because I think I know what I’m talking about, but in the end I feel a very large gap between my ambition and ability. Maybe realizing that puts me a step ahead, but that doesn’t change the output.

Which gets right down to the main problem. I can’t write.

Writing is a conveyance of thought using words and in looking at what thoughts I convey I talk about structure and broad concepts. Which means I can construct a stable paragraph and even create a decent flow from one to the next, maybe even use it to some effect if I’m feeling inventive, but paragraphs, sentences, punctuation and all the other stuff is not writing. Writing is crafting words. It’s the minutia of stringing varying definitions one after the other in a process of connecting concepts into a greater whole. This I cannot do at a high consistent level. I am workman like in my prose. I describe things as they are, and it is boring to read. Little inventiveness, little artistry and I can’t imagine much point. My outlines would do the job as efficiently. I’m surprised people put up with my “wall of words” enough to read them.

So why do I bother? Because every once in a while I surprise even myself with an ability to mine a sentence of superb quality out of nowhere, so much so that it a step out of place among the other sentences. Which might actually highlight another problem: my sentences aren’t that good, but I only think that because of what is around them. For a critic supposedly brought up to analyze the written word, that’s a pretty poor. And yet I criticize.

The Responses

Two pieces popped up recently that somewhat coincide with me thinking about criticism. First is G. Christopher Williams’ column entitled: “Why Video Games Might Not Be Art.” The title is baiting, but I want to answer his query in the piece. He says that the ‘games are art’ people dismiss a “legitimate issue” the detractors have when it comes to games as being art, the issue of interactivity. We all agree that interactivity is essential to the nature of being a game, but not of art. He claims we either use circular logic to defend our point, by saying games are art and have interactivity therefore art has interactivity, or brush off the notion that games as art can be questioned. I thought it was understood, but I will respond.

There are multiple ways to explain why interactivity does not inherently disqualify games as capable of being art. I came up with four.

First, despite games being interactive, games have fluctuating narratives where it can change depending on the player’s choice, the Roger Ebert uses to disregard games as art, the thing is, there is something there that isn’t changed, the game itself. The rule set, the boundaries, the area of play within which the player can effect change is unaffected by any action of the player. The narrative may be mutable, the minute-to-minute actions up to the player, but what they cannot change while in game is what they are capable of doing. There is a hard line of what a player is capable of in game and what they aren’t. The Stanley Parable is a perfect example of this lesson in motion. You can defy the narrator, you can disregard the story to different degrees, but you will get one of 6 endings that have been prescribed by the designer for you. You are expected to play it multiple times and expected to defy the narrator at some point. It was planned for and the game works with that. Yes there is interaction, but there is a solid text that cannot be changed. Even cheat codes had to be programmed in ahead of time for player use. You are thinking too narrowly in understanding a new medium. You are using older rational and definition of ‘text’ when looking at a games. You think ‘story’ or ‘plot,’ when really the core is ‘idea.’ Plot and narrative are mere tools to convey ideas to the audience, in games that is the role of the rules and mechanics.

Which brings me to the second counter-argument. Previous mediums have, for the most part, looked at such a narrow delivery system that we fail to understand the conceptual interaction that exist between audience and work. We look at an object, a text as is, and that is the art. Of course it comes with the philosophical conundrum, can a book be any good if no one reads it. Quantum physics state that it is and isn’t at the same time, but art doesn’t work like that. It is from the experience between the work and the audience that the art can form and then transferred into the work itself. Often in criticism in previous mediums we skip that initial step. With books, plays, film and painting the experience, while it varied in the techniques unique to each medium’s form, remained pretty much the same. A work is there and is observed, physically passive by an audience. The ideal was to shift the consciousness of the audience in such a way as to not to remove the barrier between the work and the audience, but to transition the material in such a way that it would make them forget that barrier was there. Games offer a different approach the work/audience dichotomy due to their interactive nature that to understand where they take it we must first take a step back and see first that all art is an experience in and of itself that is designed to manipulate emotional or intellectual resonance of something it is physically not. Before the prerogative has been to remove the perception of the barrier between audience and work. That has been the traditional model. With games’ inherent interactivity, that is not an option and for the medium a new paradigm must be understood.

Which brings up another bugbear of Williams’ argument, the concept of tradition and the subject of my third counter-argument. Tradition is a good grounding, but we as a society should not be slaves to it. I can name a few other things that are fairly recent developments that once went against tradition (and incidentally all had been claimed would destroy society and civilization at the time), but are now the standard. Mandatory education for all social classes, a living wage, the novel, the car, the moving picture, theater, and not dropping dead from dysentery in one’s mid-30s. Yes, cars, medical innovation and even the novel were said to be capable of destroying society. Adhering to tradition can be quite backwards. (Incidentally there are people out there still railing against each and every one of these.) Saying this is how art is done or this is what art is because it was always like that, again seems a little backwards. Writing was not considered art, because storytelling was an oral tradition and could not be art without the poet there in front of his audience. Painting of non-heavenly things could not be art because it was an affront to take time and spend so much effort portraying anything lesser than God’s domain. Theater was not art because it was a medium of the masses and anything for the masses could not be art for they could never appreciate or comprehend it. Novels were not art because they didn’t have the delicacy or lyricism of poetry and would rot the brains of its readers instead. Moving Pictures could not be art because they were shown in carnivals and curiosity, a sideshow attraction and not worthy of any greater interest. A urinal could not be art, because an artist didn’t make it and seems more to be a joke at the audience’s expense. Chess and Go cannot be art because…hang on! Both were considered art in the courtly palaces of both Europe and the Orient way back in the day. People who could play really well played before kings, not as a performance to give a show, but the performance of actual competition with such described as one of the highest pursuits of courtly life alongside painting, calligraphy, poetry etc. Yes it was the performance that was great art, but like in all other mediums we transfer that experience to the work itself, why not with games?

Which subtly slides into my fourth counter-argument. Games are somehow other from artistic mediums based on ‘interactivity.’ Williams seems to assert that interactivity is a unique feature of games, it isn’t. For decades art historians and experts have acknowledged the use of interactivity in works as legitimate in the traditional mediums. In the 1960s there were entire galleries and shows based on the idea of audience participation with a work to achieve the meaning of the piece. Having a large canvas with a box of nails next to it with the audience having to nail a nail into it wherever they wanted to become part of the piece. Or writing something so tiny and placing it on the ceiling that to appreciate it you had climb a ladder to get close enough to see it. Or the performance art of “Cut Piece” where the artist would wear a gown and the audience one by one was inviting to come on stage to cut off a piece of the gown until they were naked. A more modern example in theater would be “See No More” which is less of a stage play and more of a complex of rooms (sets) where things happen and there is no preordained way to experience the performance. You can stay in one room the whole time and see what transpires there or travel throughout the rooms however you wish. Sometimes the actors will remove your audience mask and pull you into the performance. This is interactivity in art. You are not simply a passive observer.

Williams talks about the importance of distance between audience and work is the tradition of aesthetics. Again I fear that is a quite modern conception placed on old mediums. The gap was much narrower in the old days. People would shout to events and characters on stage and even throwing food if they were really displeased. Sometimes the script would be changed on the spot to accommodate a particular audience’s taste. They wouldn’t wait until they got home to complain on their blog, the response and reaction were almost immediate. Go back even further to the time of Ancient Greece and you have the oral storyteller evaluating their audiences’ reaction and adjusting their story to fit the their needs with emphasis where it was appreciated. Roger Travis can go into further details of this result in his theory of practomime. At that time few people mastered social debate just as the rules of a competitive eSports are today. Socrates grokked the system so well the other players put him to death.

Williams highlights this passage from Roger Ebert:

One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. [Kellee] Santiago might cite a [sic] immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.

This somehow disregards that you can and if fact do experience a game. Everything is an experience. In fact people who dismiss it as “just a game” are often the same that say it isn’t a real experience. That’s false. It is a real experience. You are having the experience of playing a game where specific things are happening to affect you via your projection into the mechanics and rules.

The artificial stimuli to evoke the emotional and intellectual state of something that is not really happening is the goal of all other mediums, but somehow video games must be held to higher standard than that to count as art. Sorry no. I have never seen a definition of art that excludes games, when looked at closely, that does not include the phrase “except games.”

The other piece was a direct response to the freeplay panel by Brendan Keogh at his blog CritDamage. If we could go back to my point about experiential projection towards a work, Brendan plays pretty heavily into that point. So much so, that I have a small quibble with his ideas regarding criticism. Yes, New Games Journalism is indeed an important branch of any critical sphere, but to hold it up as the only thing criticism can be is a bit narrow minded. There is a physical object, as much as 1s and 0s can be a physical object, to be examined as well. Also, writing about your experiences is good and all, but if you don’t connect it to something other than, ‘this happened to me, look at me’ it’s an anecdote and not criticism. The story won’t stimulate without a point beyond the story’s existence. I bring this up not to discredit Brendan’s assertions, but rather to temper them. He cites “Bow Nigger” as a great example of NGJ and it is. But it is more than a story. The way it is set up and was it is told is played off against the knowledge it is a duel in a Star Wars video game that create its synthesis of meaning. In the piece he states that this wasn’t a duel between good and evil and that the fiction faded away in this bout. For him this is true, but for the reading audience and his next opponent that watched the fight, the themes in the fiction are only further highlighted. He may have been concentrating so hard on his battle that the good/evil dichotomy vanished, but for us it was emphasizes. (It can even read about a commentary to all good/evil battles in fiction and in real life, at the momment of conflict there is no good and evil to the combatants.) All of us have seen jerks on the internet and this was one getting his karmic just desserts. We can all cheer for that. It’s a piece that says something about people and the game or maybe the Star Wars universe as a whole.

There is one last person I wish to critically respond to and again it is Dan Cook (Danc). In the comments of Brendan’s piece he states that criticism is not important to the acceptance of a medium as a whole. He brings up that if you change video game with sport in Brendan’s assertion it falls apart. Yes it does, but not for the reason Dan thinks. Criticism wasn’t necessary for cultural acceptance, because they found cultural acceptance through other means. Sporting events were originally political exercises. They quite literally took the place of war by asserting the physical dominance of one city-state over another in an ever-shifting balance of power. It was propaganda and people of their city wanted their athletes to win so they could gain a political and therefore economic edge over other city-states. The mentality hasn’t altered much, though the end results have. People still want their city’s team to win to show they are better than other cities, though it doesn’t come quite with the political or direct economic effects it once did.

However, I’d use another medium to examine the effect a lack of criticism caused: comic books. In the 1950s there was little unified support or public discussion to help them at the time during the congressional hearings. There was no internet and independent publication was an expensive and prohibitive venture at the time. There wasn’t any ‘comic book criticism’ that could mount a defense of comics at the time and a since proven liar managed to convince congress into establishing effective censorship on an entire medium effectively ghettoizing it ever since. We’ve jumped that hurdle a few times, but the cultural conscious can still judge against the medium’s higher aspirations. We are already as a niche culture building ourselves into a corner. Criticism as intelligent discussion, understanding and eventually education about what we know to others is the only out I see for games as an artistic medium.

Then there is “the umbrella of ‘video game criticism’ focuses on a surprisingly narrow definition of games and player experiences. It predominantly deals with core retail titles.” There is a reason for this. Criticism as focused on exploring games as an artistic medium, focuses on these titles because they are 1. played by those writing for more frequently and 2. have something worth focusing on. Why do we not focus on board games, social games or iPhone apps? Well board games are covered quite extensively, just not by us. I don’t play board games, but those that do certainly go into depth about them. I’m sure Julian Murdock or Rob Zachy could point you to one or two sites. And as for social game and iPhone gaming, well there’s nothing to sink one’s proverbial teeth into. I’ve heard them called the cheeseburger of the gaming industry, made for the broadest possible audience with little nutritional value. I disagree. Call of Duty is a cheeseburger. Farmville and the like are lettuce. It has no taste, leaves no impression beyond its consumption and cannot be adequately talked about. There are interesting things to be said with regards to company culture that made the game or the analysis of the statistic regarding the behavior of players in the game, but that isn’t the game. (Incidentally both company culture and statistical analysis happens all the time for social and mobile gaming.) That is the periphery of the game. We don’t say anything about Farmville and its ilk, because quite frankly there’s nothing to say about Farmville.

But one very important thing Brendan’s post brings up is point number 4: The Possibility That Pretentiousness Actually Exists.

What if us videogame critics have indeed built an ivory tower for ourselves? Or, rather, what if we have somehow managed to convince everyone on the ‘outside’ that such an ivory tower exists? I for one think it doesn’t exist. I quite literally blogged my way into videogame writing and I believe that if you are a good writer who has something interesting to say about videogames, you will be heard.

But are we more cut off from the world than we (or at least I) believe? Not even just non-gaming culture, but gaming culture, too? No one on this panel seemed to be aware of the broader videogame criticism out there. Is this an actual problem? Are we too self-absorbed. Are we even a we? I hope we aren’t a “we,” because I think we are just the players. All of them. All the people who have a stake in having real, actual experiences of these games and those experiences are worth recording and worth remembering and worth sharing. So I don’t know. I hope ‘we’ are an open community and that anyone who wants to write about games does write about games and, further, I hope we are reaching or can reach the broader gaming community of players and developers alike.

I too hope we are not a “we” or are perceived that way. I am as open as can be and will read anything and submit anything I think worthwhile. But like economics and art, perception is everything. Nothing we do matters if it is not seen. We can have the most open arms possible, but if the random Google searcher sees a bunch of people standing in a circle with their back to them (metaphorically of course), well that’s the ballgame. Pack it up, call it on a account of rain. But all of this is based on the assumption someone is looking for it at all. There is so much differing psychology and presuppositions going on in different demographics heads all disregarding the concept or idea of criticism in the first place. At the very least they act as barriers for one to perform the Google search in the first place, let alone the problems once they have done so. Are people looking for criticism, if they are looking for it, do they know what to call it or it is only a simple unidentifiable yearning for something else that in the end is ill answered from a state of diminishing returns.

So that is where we are. On the one hand we may, and if my recent delving into the visibility of criticism is any indication, probably are trapped in an ivory tower for subset of a subset of a subset of gamers and any potential to branch out into the biggest games out there is met with nothing actually to say. The broader culture sees games as time wasters because the only games they play are time wasters. And should there ever come the broad crossover of games played and worth talking about we are hampered by the ideas and preconceptions that inhibit games from being talked about with any intellectual means. We are thrice screwed.

I’ve gone around in circles trying to identify anyway out of this rattrap. I’m not even sure what the point of all this was. I have a limited audience, my fellow critics have a limited audience and criticism as a whole seems to have a limited audience. How many out there even knew Freeplay was happening? I pretty sure nearly everyone who reads this will say ‘yes I knew’ yeah, but that’s my audience. There was an uproar, but by people who already care about such things. I haven’t seen any mention or talk about it at all outside our “niche,” let alone uproar. Maybe it’s because it happened in Australia and American focused outlets could care less about our brethren down under?

Then I think of all the mediums that came before us. Why their criticism was held up or at least remembered nowadays. Back in the day, with a country or a culture desperate for any scrap of information about their medium, criticism was read, with judicial restraint in what was published to make it worth people’s time and money to read. That somehow the combination of limits on what was said along with demand for a conversation about books, movies, rock and roll etc. and limited places it could be had. Imagine as I do, a kid somewhere in small town nowhere, USA sometime in the 60s or 70s, listening to rock and roll and thinking how awesome it is and then he sees some essay written by some guy called Lester Bangs explaining why rock and roll is so awesome with words he both can relate to and admire. That this new music demonized by the majority as noise or not worthwhile was now being described not with the fans’ “awesome dude” sorry “groovy man” affectation but the intellectual stripe that can counter the authority that says it is junk. Now I think to today with the ease of access, the huge variety, the next to no cost, the massive choice and the desire to get anything one can. Suddenly, it’s all noise. One thing strings into another and ease of comprehension becomes the name of the game to getting the clicks. You want people to choose your site over everyone else’s and so you broaden your base, simplify your prose and write unchallenging ideas or things that will bring the vile and are rewarded for it. Everything else can become successful, but will always be pushed to the sidelines. More noise comes in and everyone now has to be louder to be heard. More people hear and come in trying to be heard themselves in this new thing that must be important because everyone is yelling. So they are louder and say more outrageous things until all that can be heard is nothing worth listening to.

And here I am on the periphery, speaking quietly to myself hoping someone will stop to smell the roses.

The Void

Years ago I called myself “the dumbest person in the smart room” I may not be the dumbest anymore, but I’m certainly down there. I’m always behind in thought and ideas. Many of my bigger projects get the response, “why?” They are long an intensive that so far few have seen the light of day and the more time passes the more an anachronism my work becomes.

My priorities have changed since those early days of the blogosphere, before I made my grand entrance and discovered giants had come before my inconsequential ant of a being. I was too late even to be a follower. My formal training was and is rather useless. My real education started only after I graduated college. My interests are too wide and varied to be any more than a jack-of-all-trades and yet master none, such that my most impressive feat is the breadth of my sight.

I sometimes wonder if I’m too smart not to notice how dumb I am or too dumb to truly comprehend anything of intelligence. I learn by debate, but there is no debate to be had in areas where I need to learn. People who’ve long since stopped caring have already had them. I have discovered no games, but have become the sole, fierce advocate for only one. A game no one remembers. Any positions or ideas I have sound like I am quoting from a consensus to my own ears, that if anyone disagrees, I don’t hear it only because they can’t be bothered.

‘I learned books, maybe I should critique books and I try my hand at a few reviews and find connections to our present medium.’ The act is limited and feels more like a work of stagnation than anything else. So I try a different medium, comic books, only to learn little but fear for a path my own medium of choice will fall into. I advocate, somewhat, thematic readings and critical examinations of video games, but again the more I say it and the more I listen to such talk I can only think, “yeah and…” should be the reply.

Come to think of it, to say that my priorities changed from the early days is a bit of an understatement. From delusions of being the first and/or the grandest towards an infantile medium, I now cling to a little dream. One day in the far future, when the history of video game criticism is being written for some obscure publisher for a quick sale and maybe some legitimacy, in chapter 6 or perhaps somewhere on page 115 I’d like to be an incidental footnote. It’s a small dream, but it is mine. That is my limit. I’ve accepted that and will be happy should I some day achieve it.

Well that was a nice little stroll down mindfuck lane. I enjoy writing when I do and I suppose seeing the relative failure of my output is disheartening and that’s what the last 10 and half pages come down to. Is there anything to be learned here? Was there any point in trying to figure out what it’s all for? Beyond my responses, that probably should have gone into the comments section of their respective posts, no. Save maybe this lesson: you shouldn’t look to closely or bore too deeply for you’ll find only the blackness between things.

Well Ben Abraham was away from the internet last week, something to do with spelunking I think, and asked me to step in as writer of the This Week In Video Game Blogging feature again. I don’t know what it is, but every time I take up the task the internet decides that this is the week to get super prolific. So we I ended up writing what I believe to be the second longest TWIVGB…so far. It didn’t help that my list of links doubled about an hour before I should have written the damn thing.

You can read it here.

While I wading through the mass of writing and trying to figure out what was worth spreading around I noticed thematic trends floating around this week’s work. That and I while reading one post I began applying the thoughts of other posts to it, even if they weren’t on the same thing. The most pronounced of these were the posts examining Inception and the connection they seemed to have with examination of the self that many writers were doing via examining RPGs. So instead of simply grouping all of the related material together and calling it a day, I tried to do something new. I tried to connect them thematically in the post the same way they were connecting thematically in my own mind.

It was an experiment and so far I’ve gotten really positive feedback.  I would still like to hear how well the connection style worked, was it sloppy, did I not do enough, did I do too much. Like all writers I’m insecure about my own work and my ego has to be stroked/validated or crushed/criticized. Doesn’t matter which, either will do as long as I know why.

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]

I talked about how the story structure in Prince of Persia didn’t work for me and how the various villains fit in the game’s thematic consistency. Now I’m going to combine the two ideas. This may come off as a little dictating from on high, but oh well.

Spoiler Warning

2nd Warning: This is an experiment.

To understand any story is to understand the arc that the plot and characters take. I know that is a gross overgeneralization, but work with me here. Prince of Persia had three acts. The first act concerns itself with introducing the characters, the situation and the mechanics of the game. By the time you leave the canyon you pretty much have the idea for what is going on for the rest of the game. The third act contains the climatic battle with Ahriman, the denouement and the cliffhanger ending. The second act is where a majority of the action takes place. Here we have the four vignettes I detailed earlier and the ‘you can choose the order of the story’ gameplay. It is in this second act I’m going to focus my attention.

First a little overview of the four vignettes and the four enemies they are focused upon. Just a little boiling down of where they stand in their thematic relevance.

The Hunter – an embodiment of selfish desire and hubris and little else

The Alchemist – a traitorous enactor of crimes against humanity

The Concubine – a small amoral woman that is turned into a larger corruption

The Warrior – a tragic figure whose desire to save causes destruction

Now assuming each vignette is played to completion before moving on to the next we have 24 different possible combinations that could make up the second act. I bring this up to attempt something. I have contended twice already that Prince of Persia would have the story told much better as a linear narrative. I also have stated that all of this could have been accomplished without changing any of the middle action, merely structuring it. Well, I’m going to put my money where my mouth is.

The story arc of the game is simple. The Prince comes in as a solo artist on life, meets Eleka, gets dragged (willfully goes) into trouble, contends with enemies, seals evil god, breaks free evil god to save Eleka, to be continued. The ‘contends with enemies’ part is where the arc happens. The Prince has to undergo a change. Not just an attachment, but also a philosophical change of character to be capable of setting Ahriman free. That gives us two arcs to contend with, the thematic arc or Prince’s story, and the relationship arc or Eleka’s story. This would be if it were a long movie. However, due to the interactive nature of video games we also have a third arc to contend with, the gameplay arc or player’s story.

I’ll do my best to explain myself.

Each arc focuses on a different part of the information delivered to the player. The relationship comes from the interaction between the Prince and Eleka, not just in conversation, but also within the scripted actions during their ordeal against the corrupted. The thematic arc would focus on the representations the corrupted have with the Prince’s state between his beginning the adventure and concluding it. Here the final vignette will color the Prince’s motive the most. Finally we have the gameplay arc in which we have the play incrementally more challenges from the enemies.

In looking directly at the four corrupted there are certain similarities you can see between them. Both the Alchemist and Hunter are based in rationality, while the Concubine and Warrior have their character based in emotion. Additionally, one could describe the Alchemist and Concubine as soft characters, since they are not really combat based as their counterparts the Hunter and the Warrior whom I would attach the descriptor of brute. Given this and their abilities I would tentatively give the order for the gameplay arc: Alchemist, Concubine, Hunter, Warrior.

Turning to the thematic arc of the story I look to the Prince at the beginning. His best line up is with the Hunter. Both are out for themselves and give little regard for others. The difference between them being the ‘put their heads on the spike’ part. Following the Prince’s attitude towards the other corrupted we find him thinking, but unconvinced by the Warrior’s actions of self-sacrifice. Moving onwards we see his almost confusion and later outrage towards the traitor and finally we see what makes the Prince the Prince. The Concubine reveals information about him that he won’t elaborate on, but the conflict there ends up being more of who he is than what he can do. My tentative thematic arc listing is: Hunter, Warrior, Alchemist, Concubine.

Then we have the relationship between the Prince and Eleka. To me the most touching moment between the two, in fact one of the few moments where I could believe that they could love each other, was the Prince’s trust in her when he jumped off the top of the tower. That type of trust has to develop and be nurtured through the rest of the game. In the city, the dialogue between Eleka and the Prince is very utilitarian and a sort of detachment between the characters as there was in the citadel. It could be that it was merely the locations, where Eleka had little to say, where as she had a few stories of her time in the palace she was willing to talk about. However, I would also contend that the end locations against the Hunter and Warrior were not as moving towards their characters solidifying a relationship, but laying groundwork. The Warrior vignette especially offered the Prince a conflict of opinion in Eleka’s interpretation of the Warrior’s actions to pull his interest further along. As for the Alchemist, I keep coming back to the image of the two of them relaxing on the platform after having defeated him and just laugh while looking up at the sky. I get a real sense of companionship out of that image, both of them relaxing in a quiet moment together. Tentative listing for the relationship arc: Warrior, Hunter, Alchemist, Concubine.

The three arcs of the story give us three vastly different preliminary orders. Working from this and to further examine other order possibilities I am going to see how we can make the different arcs work together in pairs of two.

The thematic arc and the gameplay arc are about building towards something. The thematic arc is there to set up a rational behind the Prince’s final choice and the gameplay arc is about upping dramatic tension in the interactive moments of the game until the climax against Ahriman. From this perspective we can see that there has to be a change within the Prince for him to make this choice, so you have to start him with an opponent that can mirror this, while offering an opponent who is not a powerful combatant. Following that you follow the vignettes of increasing the prowess of the combat, while keeping in mind what each corrupted represents. The toughest opponent who ratchets up the tension in combat is the Warrior, who also offers a meaningful mirror to the future decision of the Prince. My suggested order here would be: Alchemist, Hunter, Concubine, Warrior.

The relationship arc and the gameplay arc also see a rising action focused on increasing the tension in the story. While I wouldn’t suggest it as the best way to grow the relationship between Eleka and the Prince, Ubisoft went the sexual tension route, among moments of serious caring in regards to getting the characters together. While what I said above about the opponents needing start off easier or at least more straight forward still apply a need to modify it in regard to how each vignette deal with the relationship, especially in regard to Eleka’s desires and reactions. A more straightforward vignette at the beginning would facilitate their relationship’s arc of from rocky ground to deep trust. The Concubine could be argued as a better final encounter as it takes place in a section very close to her heart and is more telling of her history than anything else. But also it offers a hint of the Prince’s past in the final confrontation. It presents a kind of what might have been between the characters, the palace that they can never share. Here I suggest: Hunter, Alchemist, Warrior, Concubine.

Finally we have the close-knit combination of the Prince’s thematic arc and the characters’ relationship arc.  The Prince’s own arc is a reflection off of the decision that ultimately is tied to the relationship he has with Eleka and his desire to continue it in the face of death and destruction. In just looking at these two arcs the focus would be on them rather than the player. In both arc you have to start them out as strangers, something that would keep the characters at a distance, but bring them in towards a common goal. Then you would have to further break the ice between them, while having the Prince being offer contrary evidence to what he believed in. Then you’d have to both cement their feelings towards one another and present corrupted that could act as a mirror to his choice and desire. My suggestion here would be: Hunter, Warrior, Alchemist, Concubine.

So after all that theorizing I come down to combing the essence of what the three story arcs are trying to accomplish in a single linear choice. I looked it over and tried to find an order that would satisfy the relationship in growth and meaning, satisfy the thematic requirements of the Prince’s change and mental state, and satisfy the need to have an increasing opposition structure to the player. There isn’t one.

That is until I remembered a mantra of design. That you can only notch up the threat and power so high in a linear fashion before it looses the feeling of danger. It’s called power creep where things get too powerful that it breaks the game, or in this case the player loses interest. It is not fun to keep fighting a slightly stronger brute each time. You have to mix it up a little. A closer look at the different attack styles led me to the following order: Hunter, Alchemist, Concubine, Warrior.

As I have expressed before it is the perfect stating point for their relationship as it they keep their distance from each other through this vignette in comparison to the others and it mirrors the Prince in his beginning mental state. His is selfish and out for his own desires. It is in the conflict between the two that the Prince begins to differentiate himself from the other corrupted in that he can place the fate of the world above his desires. The gameplay offers a basic combatant whose tricks are more about getting to the Hunter rather than the actual battle with him.

Second is Alchemist, because it has Eleka open up a little to the Prince as she expresses her disgust with the machinery of the Alchemist and her loathing of the traitor himself. At the end of the battle on the highest platform they find themselves laughing about it and relaxing, as they get more comfortable with the other’s presence. Theme wise we later learn that the Prince himself could also been seen as a traitor as he turned his back on his royal heritage and abdicated all responsibility for his actions. We see the Prince moving further away from that identity. Gameplay wise it changes things up a little, with a more cautious combatant, who is more likely to use long-range attacks and is better at dodging the Prince’s own attacks. The Alchemist also displays a little of his power by infecting the Prince in one area, which adds a nice sense of variety giving the player a countdown clock to heal the fertile ground.

Thirdly is the Concubine. This is where the relationship bonds really begin to form. We have Eleka revealing more about her past to the Prince. In the opener to that section she is telling stories of her time there, watching performances and dreaming of far off lands, almost wistfully. She talks of her mother and the wounds that it left in her family. The Prince becomes more than a random savior, he becomes her confidant. The Prince reciprocates the trust when he leaps to his death expecting Eleka to be there and catch him. The Concubine represents the wish for power, but also is an agent of lust versus love. She uses men to further her own ends using her feminine wiles. She tempts the Prince as such, but he rejects her advances and turns to Eleka as his grounding agent. Selfish desires are becoming less and less a driving factor in his character. This vignette more than any other is the turning point of his character. The player gets a slightly different challenge as well. The Concubine is an illusionist and will put multiple copies of herself on the battlefield to distract and disorient. She is far more agile than the other corrupted and faster too. But the most defining characteristic is the fact that for a time she removes Eleka from the battle by entangling her in corrupted. The Player has lost a button. Also she casts a spell on the Prince at times to reverse his movements of what the player input is. It switches up an otherwise beefing up of the boss.

Finally we come to the Warrior. I’ve explained before why he makes a good endgame thematically. The Warrior more than any other is the mirror of the Prince at the end of the game. The Prince becomes the fallen hero, a hero pulled down by his own good intention. Eleka here really tries to focus on that fact here. The further you progress in the Warrior’s territory the more her dialogue focuses on factual things, like how to proceed. The Prince asks her jokingly if he could have the city and she agrees. In part it is foreshadowing to the task she knows she must do, but also it is an effort to distract the Prince and distance herself. It is to no avail, as the Prince seems to be closer to her than ever as he carries her out of the Warrior’s fortress bridal style. She talks about his noble sacrifice, the kind that she will soon have to make, but the Prince rejects that concept, a possible indication of what he himself will do. As a combatant, none is stronger or more powerful than the Warrior. You can’t hurt him with any attack and you can’t even use the gauntlet attack on him. Blocking is almost a futile effort. Your only option is push him off the ledge, tower, or lock him in a cage. In the final battle after you drop him into a pit of lava he comes back and only then does he begin to lose health, but all you can do is run and dodge. This is not a battle of skill, but one of attrition. Beyond the final battle with Ahriman there is no more climatic battle in the game. It is a perfect ending to the 2nd act. At the end of the Warrior’s vignette the mood is somber as it should be. A good man gave his life and soul so that they may continue and now they must do just that.

I examined the different vignettes and looked at 7 different vignette orders. During the examination of each order I revised my opinion of certain details. In my final assessment, for example, I see a different meaning behind Eleka’s utilitarian dialogue than I did at first. I only changed my mind about certain details of the story; overall the game still disappoints me.

Were Prince of Persia made into a linear game this is how I would have constructed the vignettes with the given material. As it is this is my opinion on the order you should play the areas in to receive the most out of the story arcs.