Something Make-Believe

It’s pandering. To believe that no one would mind the ineffectual choices laid before them is almost insulting. To think that such cursory options are satisfactory is laughable. Living this way is enough to make one indignant, boiling over like a pot of unsalted pasta.

That, of course, is an overreaction. It’s an obscene knee-jerk to a rather inconsequential thing: choices in a linear video game. I say inconsequential because in pretty much any narrative game (or “digital media experience,” to broaden the scope and rope in some buzzword bullsh—err, fun times), the outcome is always predetermined. There may be multiple endings, but they are set in stone, like dropping a ball into a pachinko machine.

Those concrete possibilities are exactly what got the Mass Effect in such deep trouble. Three large, expansive, and mostly high quality games and we got a three-by-three, color-coordinated chart of nine possible outcomes. I still hold that the creative authorship is the key in that debacle, but I also agree the expectations—realistic or not—were absolutely set forth by the developers to believe or hope for something more…custom.

Sometimes games lean into that, though. The ending of The Last of Us (and the game as a whole) works as commentary on choice. BioShock Infinite is a bit more deliberate in that, utilizing it as a theme throughout its runtime, but the result is largely the same. And Spec Ops: The Line actually hangs wholly on the idea of agency. You end up contemplating what it means to make a choice in a video game, drawing metaphysical parallels and philosophical quandaries to real life choices.

But not every game can do that. For one, that is a pretty tough thing to pull off. Irrational Games and Naughty Dog are some of the best in the biz (or were the best in Irrational’s case). For two, that would get boring. Think about knowing precisely how and why a game is doing what it’s doing every single time. Consider how you feel knowing that every Hollywood comedy has to go through the fun -> crisis -> redemption loop. You slog through that middle part to get back to the laughs because you just know how that’s how it works.

The choices that I find more problematic are the ones that seem most superficial. Infamous: Second Son made me think about this when it gave me four options just before protagonist Delsin Rowe was about to deface a sizable DUP-controlled (the enemy organization) outpost. And I just had to wonder: why?

Besides the fact that the interface for it was not obvious at all despite taking up the entire screen (same goes for vest selection in the menus), it grinds the entire thing to a halt. And to do what? Choose between three mediocre graffiti textures and one good one? Paradox of Choice is a fine concept to implement, but when the act of choosing is more or less meaningless, the paradox becomes an annoyance of choice.

Not once when I saw that spray painted embellishment out in the wild again did I think, “Hey, that was something I chose!” It just got logged into my brain as a thing that exists in Delsin’s world, not a conduit (ha!) through which my agency as a player is portrayed in the game. I can’t tell if Sucker Punch intended it to be a point of pride in toppling part of the regime or a highlight that a user can point to and excitedly say that they did that, but nothing close to either of those happened.

I likened it during a conversation with another games journalist to the shaping mechanic in Shaun White Skateboarding. In that game, you can utilize your manifested creativity and freedom from oppression (the story got really weird) to extended real rails and ramps into Green Lantern-esque constructs of pure imagination. This allows you to really jack up your score and liberating influence in the drab, totalitarian world.

The problem is that every rail and ramp shaping sequence has a predefined ending just as they have a beginning. The ability to express your athletic creativity is actually more like a platforming puzzle that has one very obvious, not very fun solution. But the expectation to create as freely as you desire, free from the evil Ministry, is impressed upon you by the game. And that faux choice becomes a bit insulting.

Granted, Second Son‘s graffiti is a real smattering of options with discrete outcomes, but the sensation is the comparable bit: it’s grating. It’s wearisome. Aside from the world customization in Second Son, it purportedly has the legacy feature of a karmic dichotomy, though, as with the case the game picking a canonical ending anyways, your choices are sullied, made worthless.

That is where it becomes just enough to pick at your nerves and make you want to say something. It asks you go forth and give something of yourself, to deviate from a line drawn from point A to B, and then takes it, crumples it up, and throws it in the trash. At least you can choose to just stop playing, I guess.

Discovering The Moment

Chatting with friends, video games almost always come up. Given that they were such large parts of our lives back in the day and still a sizable portion my daily life now, it seems inevitable from the vantage point of Logic Peak. My friends still game, but to a much lesser degree. We still find common ground to stand on, though, and talk shop. Nostalgia is usually a popular topic, as are games that were new four to six months ago (they rarely buy anything unless it’s on sale).

I noticed something, though, in this temporal dichotomy. In fact, that alone may be a misnomer; time is not the only thing that separates our binary states of gaming. Our younger years are defined by something totally different from the present day. They are not even close to being comparable and almost seem to be at odds with one another. It’s the sense of discovery and the surgical precision of doctored moments.

As a child, I’m sure you felt the same way I did going outside: everything was an adventure. Every day, my domain reached just a little further, but it was never enough. I would charge to the frontier and just go. First it was the end of the street where there was the beginnings of a park. Then it was the middle of a wooded clearing. Then it was beyond the cultivated grass and into the trees beyond the neighborhood. Every step in unknown territory was a discovery, and every one before the uncharted was equally awe-inspiring.

It was how I felt when I played games at that age. When the sun went down or it was raining enough for my mom to glare at me every time I even thought about going outside with the subconscious goal of tracking mud on the freshly cleaned carpet, I would stay inside and play games, and it was as if I was still exploring the world. It was startlingly analogous. Mario’s World 1-1 was my door-to-curb. Kirby, whenever he would step through another door and enter a new realm, was every time I turned a corner in my neighborhood. Link used his hookshot and boomerang to navigate his puzzling environment while I resorted to fallen trees and running jumps to clear my obstacles.

I still remember playing The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time. It was the Christmas afternoon and I had played since I woke up extra, extra early to open up what I was sure to be The Best Present Ever and spend the rest of my life dedicated to unraveling its mysteries. I had just gained access to the castle and, being the dopey video game player I was, was dicking around. Rolling, jumping, swording. The only thing I didn’t want to do was nothing. And then I stumbled up a wall.

It was the mass of green that was supposed to represent some sort of insurmountable boundary—a visible invisible wall—but hemmed into the world as a landmark feature. And I had somehow gone up. Just a little, but it was enough. Slowly but surely, I spent the next hour exploring this one little corner of the world, poking and prodding to see where I could and couldn’t go. I’d fall through the world, I’d get stuck in the geometry, and I’d fall all the way down again, but nothing deterred me because the sense of exploring something was so strong in that instance. It was unknown, and I had to know.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve noticed myself exploring less and less. I’m still irresponsibly incapable of not looking down alternate paths to check for collectibles, but that’s not exploring; that’s hunting. The mere act of being somewhere new is no longer what interests me. When I encounter a glitch now, I’ll tinker with it for maybe a minute or two, and move on. Human nature dictates that my curiosity be piqued, but no longer does my childhood wonderment add fuel to the fire.

Nowadays, it’s the cultivated moment that defines my gaming experiences. That little moment of The Ocarina of Time will stick in my mind for the rest of my life (I can still recall every single second as if it had just happened), but the things that stick with me now are Moments. When the building collapses in Uncharted 2: Among Thieves or when you throw the knife at the end of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare or when the wound-up, tangled thread of Spec Ops: The Line is laid flat before you, those are the moments I remember now.

Even the most exploratory game of the modern generation couldn’t buck the trend. In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, when you first step out into the world from the underground caves, it’s not a sense of exploration but a very deliberate and predetermined effort at a moment. It’s the same as when you first step out of the vault in Fallout 3. These are giant worlds that are open to be explored and poked and prodded and yet the things I remember about those games are the two calculated moments of scale-inspired awe.

That change opens up some interesting questions, though. Or rather, one interesting question and a whole slew of implications: why?

Maybe it’s because I’m an old fart now and my imagination has gone the way of my baby teeth and former desire to throw bugs girls. Maybe it’s because game design has changed in the modern era from open-ended worlds to linearly guided experiences. Has cinematic flair made the full transfer to gaming? Or maybe I’m just Carl Fredricksen, waiting for my sense of adventure to find me again, for the walk down my driveway to feel like running across Hyrule. For everything to be new again.

I can see why Columbus did it.

The Kids’ Shows Of Video Games

“Triple-A games are the kids’ shows of the industry.”

That a fairly startling comparison someone imparted on me recently. It was somewhat out of the blue, so that had something to do with it, but also because I wasn’t entirely sure it made a whole lot of sense. Somewhere deep down inside, some part of me instinctively wanted to agree, but on what grounds? If I couldn’t articulate what made this a good metaphor, then surely that made it a bad one.

Or I’m just an idiot, which you can tell me repeatedly in the comments if you so choose.

Either way, let’s explore this together, and let’s start by breaking that statement into its component parts: triple-A games and kids’ shows. Children’s television programming has a long, storied history in American broadcasting. It goes all the way back to the nascent days of the entire medium, starting with Cap’n Tugg and Captain Kangaroo to Scooby-Doo and Bananas in Pyjamas.

You’ll notice, though, that this opens up more questions that need clarification before we proceed, such as which kind of children’s show are we talking about here; Mister Rogers and Yu-Gi-Oh are two vastly different creatures. For my part, though, when I hear the phrase “children’s programming,” I think of things like Power Rangers and Digimon. A little bit of VeggieTales, sure, but for the most part, it’s the mindless action stuff of Saturday mornings.

That’s not to put those down, though, as I know I sure watched the hell out of those when I was younger (and probably still would if I had it in me to wake up before 3pm on the weekend), but let’s face it: those are engineered experiences. They are warm up front but coldly calculating behind the scenes. They are the lowest common denominator. There are very few eight-year-old boys that wouldn’t want to watch giant robots fight giant space creatures.

In fact, there are few people of any age that wouldn’t want to see that, but that kind of proves my point in that shows like Bobby’s World and Animaniacs are specifically designed to appeal to the widest range of people and ages. If they can stretch it, producers will make sure each episode and every show will touch on what four-year-olds to eight-year-olds and even 12-year-olds want while watching TV and eating Fruity Pebbles.

Of course, that is just how network television works; they make beaucoup bucks. But the difference comes in the fact that children’s shows sow the seeds of inanity and still manage to harvest crops from ravaged fields. Your so-called “grownup” television at least makes attempts at complexity and growth. Or, at least they did until everyone realized reality television was a cash cow that never runs dry, but that’s beside the point.

Perhaps the bit about appealing to the widest set of consumers isn’t the part of the comparison that works. Most video games, after all, are picked up to be financed and published precisely because they are likely to be bought by the core of the American people. Mainstream games are focus tested and tweaked until they are the pill most easily swallowed. There are several factors that need to be a certain percentage of acceptance, and once they hit those numbers, they are out the door and onto shelves because, being that they are consumer products, they are made to be sold.

Then maybe it’s the mindlessness. This is not inherently a bad thing, but it is most definitely a thing. You’ll notice the first episode of Pokémon was fairly dramatic. It raised numerous questions of ethics and interpersonal relationships that, as a younger child, few picked up on. For instance, it seemed to point the show towards wanting to explore what it meant to use your freedom to exert control over another’s will. It wanted to talk to kids about what it meant to finally achieve your goals and grounding them before they got out of hand. It seemed to want to stretch a wide breadth of topics and go in-depth on all of them.

Then Team Rocket started blowing up at the end of each episode and Brock turned into a caricature of Looney Toons womanization. And Pokémon exploded into Worldwide Phenomenon status. Mindlessness.

Compare that to the annual gold mine that is Call of Duty. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare blew critical minds by killing the main character. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 sparked global controversy and asked everyone to reflect on what it means to be good or bad with No Russian. Call of Duty: Black Ops II had actually one of the most competently reactive player-controlled narratives of 2012. But did any of that matter when the majority of players put the disc in solely to play online multiplayer? Not as much as it should have.

So the oafishness might be it, but both of those are sweeping generalizations that blatantly turn a blind eye towards the counterexamples. The aforementioned Call of Duty moments aside, look at last year’s Spec Ops: The Line. It housed one of the most amazing and complex and subverting stories in video games in such a long time and it was most definitely a triple-A game. Then look at Saturday morning cartoons like Batman: The Animated Series and realize that it was a dark, macabre, and twisted look at what it’s like to be an emotionally isolated hero in a corrupt city.

Maybe it isn’t that. But what then? It’s not the polish; big title releases have a sheen of dusted tops and sanded corners that unapologetically green screened kids’ shows lack completely. It might be that both have unwieldy productions, turning both endeavors into ships too big to steer, but that is making a huge assumption about something we can’t possibly know.

In the end, truly and honestly, I’m not sure what makes the metaphor work for me, so maybe I am an idiot; I just know that I instinctively agree with it. Or maybe I was right all along and things like Spec Ops: The Line and Batman: The Animated Series are simply exceptions to the rule (they probably are, but even if they were, proving a tangentially related point doesn’t provide evidence upstream). Regardless, I think this is still a question worth discussing.

What do you think? Are triple-A games the kids’ shows of video games?

Curiosity Isn’t So Curious

There have been great experiments in modern gaming. MAG, for instance, is one I would consider a great experiment. It ultimately failed to fulfill on its original promise (still a pretty good game, though), but it was a great learning experience. Zipper Interactive made its hypothesis, created its tests, and ran them. The results were interesting and showed promise on paper, but by either flawed pseudo-scientific process or broken execution or what-have-you, MAG failed. But what an experiment.

Heavy Rain. Spec Ops: The Line. One Chance. All great experiments. The quality of the games may vary, but they are all undoubtedly products that stretch conventions to the breaking point, just to see what happens when they snap. They have that quality that all great experiments have: retrospect provides a veritable treasure trove of insight and revelations, perhaps overshadowing their worth as individual games. They find value as great experiments in gaming.

Here is what I would call a failed experiment: Curiosity, the first release from legendary game designer Peter Molyneux’s brand new studio 22Cans. To make sure we’re all on the same page, Curiosity is a game where the entire world is presented with a cube. At the center of the cube is—in Molyneux’s words—a “life-changingly important” secret. The entire cube is made up of thousands/millions/billions/who-knows-how-many of even smaller cubes that form onion-like layers around the center. Everyone around the world pokes at the tiny cubes to destroy them, working together in a Noby Noby Boy-esque fashion to uncover the secret. The catch is that only one person gets to see the video that lies within.

Molyneux, as most fans know, has a tendency to over-promise, his reach far exceeding his grasp. The string of false hopes surrounding the Fable series is probably the freshest in everyone’s mind, but you don’t even really have to look any further than the fake Peter Molydeux Twitter account to see that his ability to overreach is known far and wide. While you have to admire his ambition and drive, you’d like to see him finally hit his grand slam. Maybe Project Milo was it. We’ll never know. What we do know, though, is Curiosity is not so curious.

Right from the get-go, though, we encounter problems. Namely, server problems. Since the night of its stealth/early launch, I’ve only been able to connect intermittently and even then, spending coins has been kind of troublesome. A million or so simultaneous network connections basically turned 22Cans’ servers into metal and plastic goo. An experiment isn’t worth much if you can’t, you know, experiment with it.

That’s a fairly superficial and ultimately trifling complaint, though. My problems with it go much deeper down to a fundamental level.

The premise of Curiosity is really incredibly interesting and hopes to answer a potent and mostly vague question: something something curiosity? My interpretation is how do curiosity and competition work in concert when people must cooperate on a massive, worldwide scale to uncover a hidden treasure? I think that question, regardless of whether that is the one Molyneux intended to answer or not, is super fascinating.

Unfortunately, Curiosity distills the notion of actual curiosity too far. The mechanic of tapping on cubes is made slightly more complex with the coin economy but to what effect? In short, you gain coins for destroying blocks, but you can gain bonus coins for tapping intact cubes back-to-back and for clearing screens, both of which operate as incentives to not haphazardly slap around every available digit on your touchscreen device and to not draw dicks. You can then spend these coins on consumable powerups that help break cubes faster (most of which only cost in-game coins but one does cost $50,000 of real money).

It doesn’t mask, however, the fact that Molyneux has set a goal at the end of a stretch of road, and to reach the finish line, we collectively must click a certain number of times. Once a layer is revealed, you can mathematically derive (or just estimate) the least amount of taps that would most efficiently destroy it given bonuses that feed into coins that garner you powerups. It is so bare that the illusion of doing anything more than tapping away at a cubic monolith is completely shattered. I’m not sure it’s so much a question of curiosity but endurance and the ability to ignore the psychological pain of repeating such a mindless task.

But then not knowing just how deep the layers go simply compounds the problem. You then go from knowing how long this particular task will take (read: a long fucking time) to not knowing how many times you must repeat your Sisyphean role. To quote a moderately okay movie, you have to ask yourself if the juice worth the squeeze.

Molyneux is great at grand schemes. He can craft concepts so well and so easily that @PeterMolydeux and Molyjam are both more tribute that parody, honoring the fact that ideas simply flow from the man as naturally as water from a mountaintop, rhymes from Tupac, regret from mac and cheese bars. Molyneux is an idea man and Curiosity is a great idea. But an experiment? Something we’ll value long after someone unlocks the secret and immediately posts it to YouTube? A defense that the man can create as well as he can conceive? Not so much.

But then again, no one except Molyneux has seen what is at the center of the cube, so I could be totally wrong.

What Video Games Do

I wake up each day knowing that a certain portion of my time will go to just reading. Well, that may not be accurate. Consuming is more like it as sometimes it’s a video or a song or an infographic, but the point is that doing so is pretty much a guarantee. Each day, my Twitter feed will overflow with links and pictures and YouTube clips of things I never knew existed. My Facebook feed with become inundated with photos from the previous night’s outing and videos of an embarrassingly drunk karaoke night. It’s pretty easy to just glaze over with the incessant deluge of information and stimuli.

At this point, I usually only perk up when I see links from particular people or, more often, when I see the same link multiple times. As was the case yesterday, this Tumblr post made the rounds on multiple tweets and Facebook updates (yes, despite being over a month old in its original Tumblr form). It’s a series of GIFs that depict a bit from Irish stand-up comedian Dara Ó Briain‘s 2010 This is the Show DVD. Here’s the text if you’re clicking-averse (and here’s an extended clip from his Live at the Apollo set):

Video games do a thing that no other industry does. You cannot be bad at watching a movie. You cannot be bad at listening to an album. But you can be bad at playing a video game, and the video game will punish you and deny you access to the rest of the video game. No other art form does this! You’ve never been reading a book and three chapters in the book has gone, “what are the major themes of the book so far?” And you’ve gone, “well…I don’t know…,” and boom. “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” You’ve never been listening to an album and after four songs, the album has gone, “dance! Dance! Show me your dancing is good enough to merit this!” And you go, “is this good enough?” And the album goes, “no,” and stops.

Perhaps a bit overly dramatic, but he certainly gets the point across. Video games is one of the few (perhaps the only) art form where you can actually be bad at it and be commensurately punished for it. Regardless of your ability to critically analyze a song or dissect the scenes of a film, you can experience the product in its entirety on your first go-round. Even art in the form of paintings and statues and whatnot can be seen without lapse even if you have zero knowledge of abstract or modern styles. You may not be able to appreciate any of these things on a deeper level and wring meaning from where there may be none, but being a shoddy art critic never stops you from looking at the whole of the Mona Lisa.

Playing a video game, however, is a wholly gated experience. Each nugget of pleasure and pain must be forcibly mined with your own hands. Even exploratory titles which push the boundaries of the definition of “interactive” (such as Dear Esther and Datura) are dependent on your ability to navigate an open environment. Stumble on that block and you might as well not even play.

And that is necessarily true. Anything less in the realm of player-game response and you no longer have a video game; you have an animated movie. Video games are an interactive art form, and failing to interact with it is a failing as a player. This doesn’t make you bad at video games because you can’t complete it but instead makes you bad at it because you can’t do the one thing intrinsic to the art form. Watching a movie requires you to watch and listening to a song requires you to listen, so it’s not much of a stretch to say playing a game requires you to actually play.

Which, I guess, invites the question: do you need to play the entire game to appreciate it? Or, perhaps, what parts of a game are appreciable?

A game is made up of many different elements and is perhaps most similar to movies in this regard. A song is a song and a painting is a painting, but films—just like games—are comprised of songs and art and actors. Games, however, go beyond that and include gameplay mechanics, implements of computer science and artificial intelligence, and so much more. Each piece can be praised and derided separately (this is a good song, this voice actor is terrible, etc.), but only their gestalt can be the final product. The sum total is paramount.

It’s an interesting thought, to be sure, because then not only is tangible progress within the game restricted but also appreciation outside of the game. Your failing as a player extends to your failing as someone who can apply critical thought to the product and the art form as a whole. So video games are not just unique in that you can be bad at playing them but also bad at appraising their overall worth. Whether you understand a Terrence Malick film or can see past the swirling colors of a Pablo Picasso, your evaluation of either are comprehensive in your current state. Given guidance or some choice literature on the topics, you can expand your understanding, but that adds to your worth as a film and art critic.

There is no such shortcut in video games. You cannot intuit the overall value of a game from reading about it or from watching it. The interactivity—the literal motion of you pressing a button or moving a joystick—is integral to your understanding of it. It’s how the choices you are forced to make and actions you have to take in The Walking Dead shape up the story, predetermined or otherwise, in your hands that personalizes your experience. It’s how having the tangible execution of story beats in Spec Ops: The Line makes the hard turns in the late story hit all that much harder in the end.

It’s what makes games so difficult to penetrate, but also makes it so worthwhile.