The Game Critique

The day after Halloween I have a post up about a potential Halloween tradition in video games.

I personally have traditions every year for other holidays with family and friends as I’m sure most if not all of you do. And while Halloween is important for my friends and I we don’t have any set ritual. It’s different ever year. As I have a weekly obligation to talk about games and I’m smack dab in the middle of another project that takes a lot of time and leads to little results until it’s done I decided to go back to a short game from last year. Costume Quest, which recently when on Steam sale, is a game about Halloween as opposed to one associated with the holiday for being part of the horror genre. read more »

So, my weekly post is up at Nightmare Mode. It was suppose to go up Thursday and alack it is Monday. One of these days I’ll publish on the target day. One of these days.

Part of the reason it is late is that this needed far more editing than anything else I’ve published there to date. But what should I have expected. My target post deadline is Thursday and the only game I’ve played all week is Burnout: Paradise, a game in a genre I’ve literally have no experience in other than demos. And all those demos did was reinforce that I cannot play these games. Plus, racing games aren’t known for their deep thematic material, or their statements about much of anything. Searching for a grappling point was a challenge in of itself. read more »

I played Another World on Monday and Limbo on Tuesday and I wrote the post on Thursday. I had a post due and I missed the previous week pulling my hair out trying to get the follow up piece on Heavenly Sword written. It didn’t work out. It was quite fortuitous that I played these two games when I did and found a connection between them. read more »

This was supposed to go up last Thursday, but it was an absolute mess. It wasn’t until over the weekend did I realize the problem with the original draft. It was three essays worth of content in one. It was a mess to create a cohesive argument in all of that. Now the version that is up is only two essays in one. I managed to smooth things out so one essay in smack dab in the middle of the other and is necessary to make my argument. The thing is, both pieces are something I’ve wanted to write for a long time, some longer than others. read more »

So about a two weeks ago I was asked my Nightmare Mode‘s Editor-in-Chief Patricia Hernandez to join. It was right after and mostly because of my Existential Critical Crisis post that I was asked in the first place. I was a bit taken back. Here I was debating my self worth, or rather I was a few weeks ago, (The amount of time it took to edit that 10 page monstrosity was long enough I was feeling much better by the time it posted.) and here was someone asking me to join the revamping of a site. Well after much hand wringing and talk I got my first post out today.

It’s only a rewrite of my Enslaved post from many months ago, but I needed to get myself grounded first. I needed to learn the new system with something solid. The post is heavily rewritten and actually edited. Thanks to the system I got a number of new eyes to help fix it up. With that under my belt I am going to go ahead with original content.

With that said I’m going to rip out a page from Scott Juster and Jorge Albor’s book. When they began writing for PopMatters they changed their schedule around and on Thursdays’ when their post goes up they write a few supplemental comments on their own blog. I’m going to do the same. The essays I do over there are going to have to be even tighter than I’ve manged to make them here, so there are going to be some leftover thoughts.

However, for this week, since I’ve already posted it here, I’d just want to say my thasks and my appreciation. I have never had an editor focus in depth on an piece I wrote and work with me on it. I got quite a few eyes on this one. Thanks to you all over at Nightmare Mode. I’ll be writing there on Thursdays and if I don’t feel free to heckle me on twitter about that week.

Next week is a sequel post to my Enslaved piece that I never got around to writing for reasons that escape me at the moment. Where Enslaved failed, I want to talk about where Heavenly Sword succeeded. See you next week.

So I wrote a piece for Gameranx called Top 25 Horror Games of All Time. Not the most enthralling piece I’ve written, but then that isn’t the purpose of top x lists. I was given the assignment from my editor there and I managed to get it out in about 12 hours. It got lost in the shuffle so it was published about a month after I wrote it. But that is not why I mention it. I mention it because I wrote it, but I’m going to keep going on about it because when I was writing it, it brought to mind things I’d like to talk about. And since Gameranx is a more mainstream news/features publication the comment section isn’t a fit place to hash out these thoughts.

Of course it could be that I spend too much time and energy thinking about things that generally don’t deserve the amount or level of thought I put into them. On the other hand if that weren’t the case I would not be talking about video games at all.

Ignoring the supposed meaning of numerical ranks, I’m more interested in what I included and why. I could have just put 25 “scary” games in a list and left it at that. But I did research. I went out and found games that were left by the wayside in earlier generations and some I had outright never heard of. The research portion probably took more time than it did to write the thing multiple times over. The thing is, I was looking for games that were Horror games and not games with horror trappings. Games that scare and not startle as it were. (I hadn’t played everything on the list, but I think I can safely say that no top x list that calls itself of  “all time” that the writer has played them all.) So I measured what was unnerving through the writing of what others had to say and some video of gameplay. Of course I used my own judgment on those that I have played.

In the comments people, for the most part, only list games I missed. But it’s an odd conundrum that by adding one you have to take one away. There are a finite number of slots and no one ever says this game or the other doesn’t deserve to be on the list. Other function of the top X list is that it can reveal titles people might not have heard of before and expose them to a new experience they might not have otherwise had. Of course that may be me being too hopeful. Still if you recommend a game to add I feel it only further enlightening to a discussion to say which does not deserve to be there. Then you get into a discussion of relative merit between games and why one meets certain conditions better than the other.

As I wrote in the piece :

Many games have scary elements in them, but then there are the games whose sole purpose is send paralyzing shivers down your spine. The games that stick with you long after you’ve turned your console or computer off and when you do coat you with an inescapable dread.

I also tried to convey in the short space I had what made the games truly scary. I don’t feel I succeeded on that point completely. Of course I’m not happy with the list, but then it’s a list and it could never really be final.

Undying, Phantasmagoria, Gabriel Knight and Bioshock all got mentioned. Two with question marks. I didn’t find Bioshock to be that scary a game. It had scary moments in it, but they were points that made you jump and weren’t elements that stood out. As the game went on, those elements seemed to disappear and over time you got used to Rapture itself, so it didn’t scare you either. I feel this has to be mentioned, because I placed System Shock 2 so high on the list. I put it on the list for two reasons. One, there was only one other example of tech horror on the list and I felt it was an under represented genre. Second, there’s something about the loss of free will and an oppression so thorough that even your resistance is not only planned for, but dictated by your oppressor that I find terrifying. The idea that nothing you do matters. Bioshock has many of the same executable tropes as System Shock 2, but the philosophical focus is on something different even with the lose of free will in there as a plot point. In essence I find System Shock 2 scary and not Bioshock.

Undying was a game I considered, but ultimately it was gore and horror tropes, but not actually scary in its own right. That was the problem with a lot of games. I didn’t want to put Dead Space on the list at all for that reason, but I knew I’d hear it if I didn’t. But Dead Space did do something in the cannon of video games that is over looked when it comes to explaining it’s scariness. Undermining expectations in dangerous situations is a staple of the horror genre and now that it is a franchise it is lost on us, but the original undermined what 20 years of gaming had taught us about shooting enemies, to go for the headshot. Now we all know and understand that you have to shoot the limbs off to kill the necromorphs, but at the time undermining the convention took some getting used to and that combined with the other elements made the game horrific.

I had heard of Gabriel Knight, but knew nothing about it. I didn’t even know it was a horror title. And as for Phantasmagoria, I saw it and disregard it for some reason. Probably space constraints. Or maybe it sounded too silly to be really scary.

There were many games that pop up in top horror game lists that I don’t understand completely. Portal, while yes could be classified as tech horror isn’t scary to me. It’s a monster story and a straight up monster story isn’t that scary. Plus, I never felt in danger other than the stupid green water pits. Resident Evil 4 isn’t scary either. Yes it’s a well made, well polished game, but it isn’t horror. There is nothing scary about it. It is a grotesque action game with enemies that occasionally sprout strange appendages. It’s not so much the agency the game affords me, but that it’s too competent with the agency that the danger is changed from a survival focus to a competition against the computer. It’s setting is also far too bright. All three of the major locals are horror trope settings: the isolated village, the Gothic castle and the abandoned laboratory. But they were backdrops, they weren’t places.

I bring this up because two other games handle the same sort of idea towards agency and resource availability but are actually scary. Condemned: Criminal Origins and F.E.A.R. both manage to be scarier than Resident Evil 4 by a wide margin. Both games are darker and give a much scarier feel. The shadows and unknown are a big part of the uneasy feeling they reproduce and these are settings that are otherwise familiar and would not be scary under more normal circumstances. They don’t get the advantage of the unknown, of the other that we do not experience in our day to day lives. Everyone has been in an office building or a narrow alleyway or a house. Not everyone lives or works in a Gothic castle. Again I think it’s the undermining that works to their advantage. F.E.A.R. give you far more destructive power than Resident Evil 4 as a FPS and during normal gameplay this isn’t an issue, it’s when you enter the nightmare that all your abilities are for naught. When that scary little girl shows up and the walls start bleeding there’s not a whole lot you can do. Condemned gives us the first person perspective, but makes us use melee combat that is so visceral you can feel every blow you take and dish out. Also, it upends the familiar and sends shivers down your spine by presenting the unnatural and terrifying in a house like YOURS. If you play in the dark the doubles the terror once you pack it in for the night.

I also want to mention Rule of Rose and Haunting Grounds as two games that are terrifying not because of any supernatural or extranatural events and they’re only about people, not monsters or ghosts, being horrible to you. There is something I find profoundly disturbing. Were they more polished (and I don’t just mean graphics) that allowed them to be more detailed and exacting in their representations I think I would have regarded them much higher.

Most of the games have some fantastical element to them, either in the supernatural, technological or psychological. It seems to be a running theme. Another running theme was the use of amnesia in the main protagonist. It is a form of helplessness that grants the player and character the same amount of knowledge and lends a bit of vulnerability to them. But it was getting ridiculous by the time I got the top 5. Quite a few of the games were adventure titles and there were quite a few more that I didn’t include. Nearly half the top 10 were Lovecraft inspired. And Silent Hill got three nods for three entirely different reasons.

I know arguing about numbers and positions is pointless and a fruitless activity and I probably have put more thought into it than it deserves. (The above is only a smattering of my considerations when writing it.) But I’d like to be challenged on it here. Garner some debate as to what makes particular titles more successful at being true horror than others. Was there some skewing in my choices, in what I value in horror in the list? What do feel I left off the list and why? What would you take off to replace it? History and being the first at something didn’t matter as much to me in some cases, but should it? That’s a discussion I’d really like to have.

A few weeks back, Kris Ligman came to New Jersey to give a presentation at a conference about her research. Before she was to fly back to California she dropped by my home town to say hi and chat. During her brief stop before I took her to the airport she mentioned that the Moving Pixel crew would like to have me on for a podcast at some point. I said I’d love to join. A while later I was contacted and was asked if I’d still like to come on. Well of course I would but I would need to know what I’d be speaking about. It tends to work better that way. It was Critical Distance and its place in the critical blogosphere. Ever since the year end round up I’ve been asking permission with anything Critical Distance related. I mentioned this and G. Christopher Williams stated he felt dumb for nothing thinking of Ben in the first place. So we all got together a few weeks ago to have a chat about Critical Distance. It came out today and I didn’t come off as bad as I feared I  might of. At the end I said that I was in the works for editing CDC episode 8 and hoped it would be out before this podcast went live, well it was. By three days.

CDC podcast episode 8: A Very GDC Podcast” is up for download and your listening pleasure, both at the site and on iTunes. This one took a lot longer to do in every stage of working on it. I batted around a few ideas for what to do and with Ben we eventually settled on the idea of getting a bunch of people who went together and group them together based on their favorite panels they went to. I asked 16 people that I could get a hold of and had it all set up one weekend only for it to collapse at the last minute when I found I had gotten work hours during much of the podcast time. So I tried to set it up for next weekend only for a lot of scheduling conflicts to get in the way. But I got 8 people to sit down on two different days for two different discussions about the panels they went. Given how long it took for me to edit these two sessions and get them produced it’s probably to everyone’s benefit that I didn’t do more.

GDC was back in March and I didn’t get everyone together until April and it only got released in May. I defend this timeline with the fact the second word in the title is Distance. So even with GDC being some time ago it’s still nice to remember everything that went on and hear it straight from a person’s own mouth. You can’t type down Courtney’s excitement about the SWERY talk like you can hear it on the podcast.

Oh and yes I do put outtakes at the end of each podcast. I cut out 20 minutes worth of umms, errs, you knows, likes, pauses, stutters and pauses from the audio. I go above and beyond for quality. Hope you all enjoy.

It seems to be a theme for this year. I’ve done more on other people’s sites than I’ve done on my own. This continues to be true. Over a week ago I was invited to do the Chronoludic podcast with Chris Green, Mike Dunbar and Seb Wupper. The topic at hand was the question ‘what is a game worth?’ The focus of this particular question was the issue of economics and us as game purchasers. WE didn’t reach any ground breaking conclusions or earth shattering revelations. In fact it seems more of a review of the facts, but if anything it does show that these issues are not simple and that they are in fact many inter connected issues. From the personal, like present size of your wallet, what you want to buy, to the pile of shame on your table or on Steam to the corporate like how to make back your enormous production budget, fighting the used game beast, setting price in a competitive market and determining what market to go after.

Personally I think we’ve reached a point where companies don’t have to make every single game the big AAA blockbuster that has to sell multiple millions of copies to succeed. We see a few tentative steps being taken and thankfully being rewarded. There is a thriving indie scene with some mega successes like Braid and Minecraft. Double Fine and THQ are started what seems to be the indie department of a major studio like Miramax or Searchlight in the downloadable game market. We do see real changes being made, very very slowly and I think it’s that slowness of movement rather than stagnation that causes these conversations to come up. It’s frustration, hell I’m frustrated with what in my point of view seems like a very obvious way to come at the market that will reward the boldness and forthrightness of he approach. But then I’m a broke critic working at a third rate blog, not in charge of billions of dollars and thousands of jobs across multiple countries, so I really don’t have a right to dictate terms.

And then on the other hand we see the same corporations seem to make some head way and then pull their hand back sharply with only  the CEO yelling “psych” missing to complete the picture. Note, if you weren’t going to do it if you got a poor initial reaction from people that mostly don’t matter or something that had little to no purpose than you shouldn’t have done it in the first place. If you are going to try something new then you have to go in whole hog as the saying goes. An audience can always tell when the person on stage is only going so far that they can pull back if they have to, just in case. Those are the worst performers. It’s the one who jump in with both feet thinking they’re right and hoping the audience agrees that succeed. But EA, Ubisoft, Activision and the rest only seem willing to do it with the safe bets, safe bets that lose them money more often than not I’ve noticed. I’m rambling and we touch on most of this in the podcast and are at least somewhat entertaining.

You can find it here at Chronoludic’s website.

The other thing I did was last week’s TWIVGB. Ben is off at GDC again this year and asked for me to step into the writer/gather shoes. I took over when he went to GDC last year so that means I’ve been working on and off at Critical-Distance in a more or less official capacity for a year now. (Though in checking the dates, apparently GDC is a week earlier this year, so it will be next TWIVGB that will be the one year anniversary.) So, go me.  I’ve gotten better at it, but I think I’ve said than many times before and the only difference this week is that this last week is when I finally think I’ve reached my limit. My RSS feed has grown and with it how many posts I read. Well I think it’s finally at the size where it is unmanageable. I can only get it down to around 20-25 unread posts before I wake up the next day to find it’s jumped to around 50 or some number. There was a time where I could empty the whole damn thing and still have time to do something else. And that wasn’t too long ago. Hell I was able to do that back in October. Now I’m struggling to keep up. There is just so much being written and of course this is only my RSS feed. I still read links I get sent sent or are linked on twitter from around the web that aren’t in my feed and I read them too. I haven’t gamed, read the book that’s been staring at me since last summer to finish it, and I finally managed to watch a movie last weekend for the first time in weeks and came back to find my RSS feed had grown by another 15 or so.

Am I saying anything? No. I’m venting. Could I do as Ben suggest and just click set all as read? Yes I could, but then I’d be missing something, something good. I don’t rely on TWIVGB, because I’m often creating it. It’s the sysiphysian task of chosen and it’s just recently I can no longer get to the top before the bolder rolls back down. (Yes I know the myth and where that analogy goes off it.)

Anyway read last weekend’s TWIVGB here. And when I do this week’s I post the link to that one here. I’m not going to write another post just to say I did that one as well.

(Indie Game Spotlight is an irregular feature, trying to be a regular feature that I haven’t done for almost a year and finally got back to. I highlight and talk about an indie game as opposed to the AAA titles that usually dominate the critical conversation.)

One Chance is a flash game over at Newgrounds that you must play, but a note before you do. The title is more than that; it is a warning of what you are about to play. You have only one chance to play this game. There are no restarts or replays. Refreshing your browser does nothing. Keep that in mind when you make your choices.

It is a game of note, also because it is notoriously difficult to write about. I could soliloquize its themes and how it conveys them, but there is no challenge in that, nor would it enlighten anyone. It is an emotionally powerful game, I say powerful in the same way a sledgehammer is powerful: you can help but feel the impact.

Play it now.

Before you read on.

I find it difficult to talk about the game without entering into a state of gonzo criticism. I doubt I can even do that well. I gave the above warning, because I didn’t have it when I played the game and it was slightly unfortunate. The game hit me hard in my emotional gut and I didn’t want to start over because I felt I failed or because of curiosity in what other options presented. (Something that may have run counter to the point of the game.) I wanted to play the game again and again so I could ferret out the thematic commentary of the designer. There is something in here to say about time and how we spend it. Unfortunately it was only after I finished my play through that I found out that is all I got.

A secondary note, while it is admirable that the designer chose this method to make sure his player had one shot, I feel this is the strong-arm method. There is no subtly to the design. I wasn’t guided into not wanting to play again, I was flat out told I could not.  I said above that I didn’t feel like I failed, or at least not completely. I’m not sure if my path was optimal or not. The point is, were I not a critic, nor someone trained to nitpick and read closely I don’t think I would have wanted to play again. I would have the experience and I would be satisfied with it.

One Chance was satisfying unto itself and its delivery was comparable to a short story. (This is where I have further troubles talking about the game in an intelligible manner. I cannot play it again, so I cannot remember many of the details.) You play a man, a scientist, who has just discovered the cure for cancer. He goes into work and there is a celebration going on. You are offered by one of your female coworkers to go off somewhere. You are blocked off from the roof and the lab is open to continue your work. That is the first day. Subsequent days have the word turning darker and bleaker. We find that the cure has some very nasty side effects in that yes it kills cancer cells, but all other cells along with it. As the days tick down to total oblivion you make your choices to spend time with your daughter, taking her to the park, you see the fate of your co-workers as they kill themselves by jumping off the roof or in a more grizzly fashion and you can go to your lab to try and find a cure.

If I sound vague it’s because I have little choice. I have no reference material to see how these choices matter, or what specifically were choices, or effects. Things happen, but do they happen because of me, or were they going to happen anyway because of the situation. All I can be certain of is the end. That was the direct result of my actions. Every day I would go to work and enter the lab. Every day a large red X would appear on a computer terminal. The world was becoming a lonelier and emptier place, one night I came home to find my wife had slashed her wrists and left our daughter all alone. The next day she was so frightened she clung to me. I took her to work with me, over the corpses of my former coworkers, the message “Sorry” painted on the wall in someone’s blood. She plays in the corner of the lab as I see another red X. Finally the last day comes. Why I went home and not stay the lab seems a bit odd to me. I take my daughter with me again. Our skin is gray and the man moves slower than before. She is so tired I set her down in the lobby to close her eyes for a bit. I head into the lab and am greeted with a green check mark. I inject myself and then head into the hallway. I make it to my daughter, my own skin bright pink again and inject her. The final screen shows us both with pink skin sitting on a park bench. That is it. I have found the cure and saved both my daughter and myself to live in a lonely world.

That was my one chance and beyond the visceral emotional impact it had on me I have little else to say about it. Because the game only gives you one chance to play it makes it difficult to evaluate as a work or cultural artifact. I know how it makes me feel as a story would, but then this is merely the result of my actions. It’s like a choose-your-own-adventure book that would burn itself if you hit an end. A lot of the possible and authored content is lost. Any message therein doesn’t exist to the player and themes are muddled if not outright denied to us because we can’t play the game again.

It has been nearly a week since I’ve played One Chance and I’ve lived with the effect of that game. I’m sure it’s had an effect on at least one dream this week. But now it’s faded. I have a few mental screenshots, but like life memories they aren’t strong or concrete. It’s like I am missing some piece of the whole. As a piece of art I cannot double back to look or dig any deeper. It is a paradoxical work in that it presents itself as deep, possible is deep, but denies you from exploring it on any level but the surface.

Repeatedly at the beginning of each day I am told I have one chance to save the world and on the last day it changes the message to I had one chance. Of course that was the day I found the cure and saved my daughter and I. Was there some path I could not see? A single event that could avert catastrophe, or a series of choices from the first day onward in the game that I may or may not have had access to as the game went on? I ask these questions and wonder, as the designer wants us to. He wants us to think about what may have been or could have been in the face of total annihilation. We are supposed to be thinking these questions as we play, but I did not know the main rule of One Chance, the one hard coded into the game: you get only one chance, one play through. So I did not roleplay; or did I? I wont know now, can’t ever know now.

As an experience it is a sledgehammer, one that is still affecting me as I am still thinking about it. But without the ability to go back and relive the experience it will fade and be a one-time thing. No further inspection is available. Of course, by the time it really does fade from memory, maybe, just maybe my cache will have cycled this flash game from memory and I can live it again. This time knowing in this game my choices matter and this log can be left behind so that I may take the road not traveled.

This is not an essay by me. I’m sorry if you got that impression and clicked your way here. There are a few posts I’ve read recently that articulate the debate very well. As with most posts like this it’s really for me to have them at my fingertips should I ever need the link.

However, with the Supreme Court case coming up soon deciding whether or not video games are protected speech under the first amendment they are good articles to pass around. If you haven’t read them before, I thoroughly endorse them, if that means anything. If you have, well they are all good for a reread.

Why Your Loved Ones Hate Video Games by Micheal Drucker

Column: The Blue Key: The Aggressive Instinct Pt. 1, Violence in Video Games by Connor Cleary

Column: The Blue Key: The Aggressive Instinct Pt. 2, Addressing the Counterpoint by Connor Cleary