Since early 2012, it has functioned as the homepage for the videogame writing of Richard Goodness.

Due to a change in circumstances, SecondQuest.vg will no longer be updated.

Thank you.

I have not seen anyone defending her actions at stealthily editing her article in order to recharacterize herself. To claim that this is not a problem is ridiculous, and there’s a reason I don’t think we’ve seen anybody defending her ethical breach. I have not seen her attempt to justify the stealth change–while she has explained her reasons behind making the edit, that’s not the issue.

I am curious as to why she made that edit without disclosing it on re/Action.

I am curious as to how she had the access rights to change her own article without letting the editorial staff know.

I am curious as to whether any of her work on Rock Paper Shotgun, on her own site, on freeindiegam.es, on anywhere else she has or will work at, has or will be edited silently.

I am curious about why my problems with this, which were solely on the level of an ethical breach, have been interpreted as a sexist attack. It’s true: I dislike Porpentine’s work. I find it bigoted and hostile, and while I agree with her general aims, I don’t think she’s looking for equality and I don’t find much of what she says to be profound. That is my right. A quick look through my backlog will show that while I have been hostile to several female writers, I’ve done the same to several male writers. Frankly, the only time I’ve ever addressed Porpentine’s work, prior to this weekend, was a post about Richard Hofmeier’s promotion of howling dogs at the IGF. (Said piece mostly focused on Hofmeier, largely because I’d been meaning to write up something about Cart Life but could never find a particularly good angle prior to then.)

Porpentine’s credibility is key. She even mentions it herself in the very first paragraph of her article. And yet, for her to cry sexism when I write an article condemning her Orwellian edit of her piece–for her to call Konstantinos Dimopolous a suicide-enabling woman hater and, when asked to prove her malicious claims, to simply repeat herself–for her to focus on an imagined personal attack and not address the actual wrongs she’s committed–that’s for her to completely ruin her own credibility.

The role of women–all minorities–in the videogame scene is a liminal one. Having more women in the scene is a wonderful way to get more diverse voices in the scene. Porpentine is attempting to be a voice for women.  Whether or not Porpentine is a good one or not is not up to me to decide. I’m just here to point out that her claims are outlandish, her views often unsupportable, and her methods underhanded. The likes of Rock Paper Shotgun can do with that information whatever they see fit.

Brice wrote the following tweet as explanation:

Hi, seeing that @reActionZine isn’t a funded venture with many people staffing it, no one has been awake to deal with what’s brought up.

This brings up a very interesting question: If none of the editorial staff was awake, how were the changes made?
The obvious answer is that Porpentine has been given editorial access to the site. Seeing as it’s “Posted by Porpentine”, that seems the most likely: Second Quest is on a WordPress site, as is re/Action, and therefore she has been able to edit her own writing. In this case, she was able to edit her own writing to make herself look better. Since Shubert and Brice claim that this was not their editorial intent, one thing is clear: An ethical breach, by Porpentine, occurred under the noses of Shubert and Brice while they were sleeping. Had I not written my article, this would have gone unnoticed. One wonders what other breaches of integrity have been performed by re/Actions staffers.

re/Action positions itself as a certain community voice. It is a new publication; that such a scandal is plaguing it before it’s even been out two weeks speaks extremely badly for it. For re/Action to carry itself in this way is for it to be a complete joke. For Porpentine to commit this breach of ethics and integrity is to sully re/Action’s already questionable name. For Brice and Shubert to not censure Porpentine for this act–for going against their editorial wishes, for acting out of their control, for the misrepresentation of the IF community–is for them to condone it.

To this end, a simple couple of tweets and a vague note from the editors are not enough. In order for re/Action to make good with the community, I would ask a more extensive apology, on their site. I would also ask that “7 Thoughts on Women in Games” be the last published piece by Porpentine on this site.

re/Action is a Zinester arm. I have never found the Zinesters to have much worthwhile to say. I have not found their techniques to be professional or their thoughts cogent or meaningful. I applaud the re/Action staff for eventually getting to the correction; and yet, I would urge every one of us to think twice before trusting the site again. Much as the staff of re/Action might not like rules, might not like structure, might not like accountability, it must have that in order to give the public the perception that their words can be believed. As it were, Porpentine’s actions, and the lack of urgency on the part of the community around re/Action, must sour any relationship that we, the readers, have with re/Action, and we must treat them with the arms’-length distance they deserve until they learn the meaning of integrity.

re/Action is going to be asking us for money soon.

Decide for yourself whether or not the site’s writers deserve it.

We’re in the early stages of the Criticism Wars being open now, and I love that Porpentine is being called on her shit.

Here’s the story:

Mattie Brice’s latest endeavor–apparently her dream of making videos hasn’t been profitable either, somehow?–has been creating re/Action Zine–a reappropriation as clever and as witty as her infamous Livejournal Edition of Critical Distance. One of the first pieces was Porpentine’s “7 Thoughts On Women in Games“. As usual, it’s Porpentine’s usual exhausting persona shit–that she does not live in Williamsburg is possibly the only reason we’re not calling her a fucking hipster dipshit. Kathy Acker filtered through freshman year. Among other bits was one talking about her experience submitting howling dogs to the Interactive Fiction community. She tells us about all of the harrassing emails she received, calling her submission a “crime”. If Porpentine had a sense of history, she might have noticed that the community, particularly in competitions, is extremely hostile towards non-parser IF. It has nothing to do with being a woman–hell, “Porpentine” is an ambiguous enough name, after all. It’s a definitional argument. Whether that argument is right or not is another story–but as always, Porpentine frames it as an act of hatred because she’s a woman.

In her original formulation, Porpentine takes credit for integrating the IF community which has existed since she was a child:

It was natural for me to approach the circle of interactive fiction. I made games with words in them. But there was nothing for me. I was poor, not middle class. I was queer, not straight. I wrote experimental hypertext, not traditional parser. I was a woman, not a man, and there were many of them, and one of me.

It was intimidating.

Once I did participate, by submitting my Twine game howling dogs, I got harassing emails saying making howling dogs was a “crime”. The public reviews were often angry, condemning, moralistic, censuring.

So I covered Twine games on freeindiegames. I covered them on Rock Paper Shotgun. Others started covering them, making them, talking about them. We kept it up until it became normal to play, design, and enjoy Twine games.

Now interactive fiction is more welcoming to everyone, not just straight white men.

Emily Short is about as legendary a figure as you can get in the IF community. She has been making nontraditional works of IF for many years–one of her most famous works, Galatea, is essentially a long conversation with a living statue, and in fact that period of Short’s career features several “conversation games” which were unlike nothing IF had seen. The raw calibre of her work has led her to be one of its luminaries–she’s much loved for her technical innovations, the quality of her prose, and her personality within the community itself. When Emily Short talks, you listen.

And Emily Short, in a long post which is about the most dignified, elegant, and authoratative demolition of Porpentine’s persona that one could ever possibly read, wrote the following:

First, I do see participation from female and queer authors and from people of color, and not just because I am female myself. Though Porpentine’s perspective was that it was hard to see material by authors other than straight white men, I see work by Jenni Polodna, Lea Albaugh, Carolyn VanEseltine, Katherine Morayati, Emily Boegheim, and Deirdra Kiai, among others; I see Meg Jayanth and Yasmeen Khan writing for StoryNexus and Echo Bazaar/Fallen London, and Heather Albano and others for Choice of Games. I see Aaron Reed’s games, where gender and sexuality are often made a matter of player choice. I see Antifascista.

I remember that when I joined the community back in the late 90s, Suzanne Britton, Kathleen Fischer, Eileen Mullin, Papillon and other women were already prominent members of the community and already writing about female sexuality, self-image, and experiences of power, and that Ian Finley was already writing about gay relationships. Several of them reached out to me and made me feel welcome in the community.

Short was extremely careful not to dismiss Porpentine’s particular experience–and yet, Porpentine is attacking a community that Short has helped to create, and for Porpentine to mischaracterize the nature of that community does merit a response. In response to this, Porpentine significantly changed her article, one which wasn’t a complete, ungrateful slap in the face to Short and any of the many members of the community who loved Porpentine’s work and welcomed her:

It was natural for me to approach the circle of interactive fiction. I made games with words in them. But there was nothing for me. I was poor, not middle class. I was queer, not straight. I wrote experimental hypertext, not traditional parser. I was a woman, not a man, and there were many of them, and one of me.

It was intimidating.

Once I did participate, by submitting my Twine game howling dogs, I got harassing emails saying making howling dogs was a “crime”. Some public reviews were angry, condemning, moralistic, censuring. At the same time, people like Emily Short reached out to me, talked about my work in a different light. I found other reviews that left me teary-eyed, in a good way.

The reality was more complex, both negatively and positively, than my fears.

The point is that I almost didn’t participate at all.

We should think about how permeable we are to outsiders, not just physically but emotionally.

 It’s wonderful that, in the face of inescapable criticism, one that she could not fall back on her usual gender card to respond to, Porpentine revised her thoughts–and yet I have one massive, massive problem with this.

Other than a mention in the comments of Short’s blog, there is no notice that there has been a revision–no disclaimer. This is not a simple rephrase, a fixing of a link, or correction of a typo. This is a significant, significant change, one which takes Porpentine’s original offensively-self-aggrandizing (although what else are we to expect from a woman so interested in herself?) tone and whitewashes it.

If the New York Times were to make a similar change without letting us know, we would immediately be calling for the editor’s head. This is a massive breach of journalistic ethics, and much as Mattie Brice doesn’t want to follow rules, for her to not is to damn her little site from the beginning.

The Zinesters are very good at crying Privilege. They are very good at crying Misogyny, and Transphobia. A word that does not seem to be in their vocabulary is Responsibility. The Zinesters must not expect to be listened to if they’re so unwilling to tell the truth. Logic may be bullshit, but doesn’t it begin to seem that every word out of Porpentine’s mouth is as well?

Special thanks to Konstantinos Dimopoulos for his assistance with finding the cached version of the original article. Disclaimer: This link was added after the fact.

Both games could be played by Patty Duke in different wigs and slightly altered speech patterns. One’s got pixel art; one’s cartoony! One’s black and white; one is colorful! One features interactions between characters; one leaves you isolated and alone! One’s got a chiptune soundtrack; one features a single country song on repeat! One gives you a choice of three characters; one has a single avatar! One takes place over a finite period of time; one stretches endlessly! Pitch it to USA, Characters Welcome: Cart Life and Cargo Commander are the original Odd Couple.

But at the end of the day, the two of them like having each other around. They may fight, and they may say ugly things, and they may hurt each other, but sooner or later, schmaltzy music is going to play and they’re going to express their appreciation for each other. They’re reaching towards the same goals: Both Cart Life and Cargo Commander take almost opposite tactics to come to the same conclusions the ways in which we can escape drudgery and transcend the loneliness of existence.

Cart Life’s designer Richard Hofmeier subtitles Cart Life, simply, “A Retail Simulation for Windows”. Much ink has been spilled on whether or not that descriptor is accurate. In fact, this was much of the focus of Nick Fortugno’s Well Played talk at IndieCade East this year. Fortugno stated that the “retail simulation” label was a “dodge”–perhaps suggesting that it was simply latching onto the genre’s popularity? It’s true that Cart Life doesn’t really fit the “retail simulation” genre–one which appears to contain games as disparate as Fortugno’s own Diner Dash and other, older games like Lemonade Stand and Dope Wars–but, in a way, that’s exactly the point.

Line up every game that’s considered a “retail simulation”; five minutes with Cart Life will demonstrate that it’s the clear outlier. Its almost stubborn commitment to its own vision makes one almost wonder if the subtitle is less a sign that Cart Life wishes to fit into a certain genre and more a suggestion, by Hofmeier, that other games in the genre are shallow. Consider Diner Dash‘s story: Flo, a cute and perky businesswoman who decides to leave the rat race in order to fulfill her dream of owning a restaurant; it’s a lot of hard work, of course, but she’s not afraid to roll up her sleeves; she’s totally got this. Hell, Diner Dash is fun–it’s concerned with being a light casual puzzle game. Cart Life‘s minigames are optimized to be just uncomfortable enough that it’s never painful, but it’s very…tedious. At one point, Fortugno, smiling smugly, flashed a slide with the legend “Drudgery != fun”. The few people who have admitted to enjoying Cart Life‘s minigames themselves usually admit that they’re getting a perverse pleasure from it; I admit that my own love of Mass Effect 2‘s mining comes from a desire to be one of those weird people who likes Mass Effect 2‘s mining. Cart Life isn’t fun.

What Cart Life does is to take a look at Diner Dash and Lemonade Stand and find that genre is normally either so abstracted or rose-colored as to seem almost inhuman. Hofmeier creates a retail simulation which isn’t exactly pleasant to play; to that he has grafted an adventure game. And by giving the worker a distinct identity–family relationships, employment history, fears, etc.–the economics of the business intersect with the economics of life. One character smokes cigarettes in order to stave off hunger so he can concentrate enough to work a little bit longer in order to sell more newspapers so he doesn’t waste any money on unsold stock in order to increase his profits in order to afford cigarettes to calm his addiction for just a little while. The retail simulation, Hofmeier suggests, is incomplete: Your Lemonade Stander gets a hot meal from Mom in between turns; your Dope Warrior doesn’t have a dropping meter showing his intoxication level. Life in retail, when you get to it, is a nexus of needs and addictions and cost, and cart life leaves one fried and hollow.

And yet, the characters in Cart Life are able to attain a kind of dignity through their work. Success at the cart business represents something more for each character. For Melanie, it’s proof of independence and adulthood. For Andrus, it’s a new start in a new country. For Vinny, it’s a way to serve humanity in whatever way he can. Failure at their goals means failure at their dreams–at their lives. And yet there really isn’t a big deal made upon succeeding in any character’s scenario. Well, that’s Life. No one’s gonna throw you a party just because you remembered to pay the rent. Cart Life is less about achieving a “happy ending” for the characters than it is about getting these people into a sustainable lifestyle–one which may not be smooth sailing, but one where they can get the bills paid on time and maybe see a movie from time to time.

Less optimistic about the value of work is Cargo Commander, designed by Maarten Brouwer and Daniel Ernst. The premise is simple enough, and very different from Cart Life: You’re presented with a series of cargo containers, containing a selection of valuables and monsters, floating through space. The levels are procedurally-generated through whatever names you choose to give them, and the game tracks high scores for friendly competition. The goal of the game eventually becomes to scour sectors until you find one of every cargo type.

None of this is particularly innovative–Cargo Commander doesn’t really add any new elements to the table, although it balances its systems very well. There’s plenty to do, and enough secrets that it stays fresh, but while the game initially appears to have a steep learning curve, its structure becomes very quickly apparent and your morning routine develops. Wake up, grab a cup of coffee–feed that caffeine addiction!–check your upgrade bench, check your email, call the first wave of containers, explore and fight and collect, call another wave of containers, repeat until death or you get a pass to go to the next sector where you wake up, grab a cup of coffee–feed that caffeine addiction!–and so on.

This is Pac Man, this is Dig Dug, this is Asteroids. For a game to present itself as an unusual job–mining, or space defense, or whatever–is fairly standard, and so Cargo Commander‘s conceit–that you have a job in deep space doing salvage–isn’t unheard of. But like Cart Life, Cargo Commander is interested in the person you’re controlling. Cart Life takes a fully-realized character and drops him into a retail simulation; Cargo Commander takes a generic game character and wonders who he is.

Cart Life doesn’t need to go out of its way to justify why its characters are becoming cart jockeys–they’re all more or less at the end of their ropes financially, and carting appears, at least at first, to be the easiest way to stay afloat. It’s rough, and the deck may be stacked against you, but you can succeed at this job, and you can thrive. Cargo Commander makes no bones about the fact that cargo commanding is one of the worst jobs ever created. It’s lonely and isolated, it’s dangerous, you’re constantly fighting the mutated corpses of former cargo commanders, the pay isn’t great and the company doesn’t care if you live or die. One can’t really picture this existence being preferable to homelessness, and so the most logical solution is that he’s supporting a wife and a child back home.

And as the game progresses, you get emails from your wife talking about what life is like back home. And she warns you against eating canned food and urges you to eat fresh fruit and vegetables–which is strange, because the only food in the game is canned. You’re in deep space. And she talks about your promotion and hopes you’re not bored at the office–which is strange, because this is as far from an office job as you can get. And she jokingly–but not really jokingly, because she worries–hopes that you’re not flirting with your secretary–which is strange, because you’re all alone with only a single country song on endless repeat for company. And she mentions that she ran into someone who works at your company at the grocery store, and he wouldn’t look her in the eye–and you know, that makes perfect sense. Because the type of man who is willing to take a dangerous, horrible job to support his family isn’t going to be able to bear them worrying about him, and so he’s told them he’s a desk jockey working far away at Cargo Corp Headquarters, desperately hoping he doesn’t get killed and that, if he ever makes it back home, he’ll do his best to hide the trauma from them.

And then you get a notice that a package has been delivered to the headquarters–because that’s where you told your family you were working at, right?–and they’re happy to forward it on to you for a small fee, and so you sell some of your hard-found cargo in order to pay the fee, because what could it possibly be?, and it finally gets there after a couple of days, and inside is a crayon drawing, of you, from your son, with the note “FOR DAD” scrawled on it. And as the game goes on, you get more notices, and the fee gets greater and greater each time, and you know what, it doesn’t really matter, and you stick them up on the wall of your ship.

And then you notice that the drawings are tied into the achievement system–that when you earn certain ones, the drawing your son gives you is related somehow to it, although since he’s been told you’re an office guy you’re in a shirt and tie and surrounded by coworkers–and you begin to earn achievements just to get these little scraps from home. And then you notice that other achievements remind you about times with your wife, and then you notice that the descriptions of some of the cargo items give you other memories–you find a “serial killer sweater” which is not unlike the awful one you wore on your first date with the woman you eventually married, a pair of sexy heels that remind you of your honeymoon–and it becomes clear that this character views everything in terms of the wife he misses, the son he cannot watch grow up, the home he cannot live in, the family he cannot enjoy, and then suddenly Cargo Commander becomes a document of the extreme sacrifice that this guy is making. In a way, the man’s wife and child are held hostage by the company: Work harder, hard worker, or you’ll never see your family again.

Both Hofmeier and Ernst have real-life inspirations for their work. Hofmeier’s random curiosity about street vendors led to research and respect–in many ways, Cart Life is a Studs Terkel-esque work of creative journalism. The park has a statue of Ruby the Knish Man–it sounds like a lost Malamud or Singer story. He was a real New York City knish vendor. The whole game is, in a way, Hofmeier’s attempt to build a statue for an oft-ignored group of people whose stories he felt moved to share. Ernst based his game partially on memories of his father, who worked in a dangerous factory he was never allowed to see as a child, the deep space setting an exaggerated version of that life. In many ways, Cargo Commander represents an opportunity for Ernst to thank his father for the sacrifices he’s made for his family–but in translating the setting and not even naming the cargo commander, Ernst universalizes it. It has been the traditional role of men to place themselves in dangerous, life threatening situations so that women may enjoy the privilege of not having to. And we’ve all met at least one person who’s living in the US in order to earn money to send back home. Critiques of patriarchy from the point of view of the housewife–that her options are extremely limited–are all valid, and all necessary. And yet Cargo Commander shows us the flip side–both men and women are victims of a system which exploits its workers without caring about them. At one point, the computer sending you emails each time you go up a level breaks down; the traditional “Hello INSERT EMPLOYEE NAME HERE, your INSERT ACCOMPLISHMENT HERE has been recognized” joke is made, and it’s particularly cruel because you don’t even have the dignity of being able to pretend that a piece of boilerplate form text is an actual person.

And yet, much as people see Cart Life as a depression simulator, as dark and as cynical as Cargo Commander can be, in each is the hope of human connection. A job running a food cart is unsteady, unstable work which hurts the spine and fatigues the brain–and yet, a chat with a regular customer, a random good tip, someone finding something you made delicious–that makes it all worthwhile. And the Cargo Commander may be sacrificing everything for his family–but it wouldn’t be a sacrifice if it wasn’t awful, and you know what? He loves them enough that he doesn’t even really think about it. Both games take place inside inherently corrupt systems which give no safety net to its lowest members, and either game can make one receptive to arguments against capitalism. And yet, until change occurs, we’re living in a world of Work, and of Work which may not necessarily be fulfilling, or even necessary–I can think of no possible future that would employ someone to find ugly sweaters and bent forks. Human connection is what makes life in a world of drudgery bearable. And so, one leaves Cargo Commander and Cart Life, neighbors, enemies–and friends–with a strong impression of empathy, and of love.

The premise of the game is you’re this cargo salvage dude in deep space. Sectors get generated based on names you can type in–join sector Foxylvania and try to beat my high score–and feature waves of cargo containers that you bop around in, salvaging and fighting mutants.

Running through the game is the subtext that this is a poorly paid, shitty, extremely dangerous, lonely job. You’re by yourself in the middle of nowhere, with only email and an incessant country song on loop. The emails are often corporate bullshit about rules and regulations or requests from your wife for more money.The experience is of the immigrant who moves to the US to work in order to send money back home. We get a portrait of a character who is sacrificing life and limb in order to provide for the welfare of a family that he’s not even able to enjoy. It’s a heartwrenching concept to begin with, but Cargo Commander enjoys twisting the knife.

You realize quickly that your character has lied to his family about the nature of the job–you receive an email from your wife where she expresses the hope that your office job isn’t too boring. You’ve told them you’ve got a white-collar position far away in order to spare them from the additional suffering of worry.

Later, you get a notice that you’ve received a parcel; it’s been delivered to the corporate office, and for a nominal fee they’ll forward it to you. (I assume this will be a recurring element.) You can sell your hard-earned salvage in order to pay it. Eventually, after a while, the package arrives, and it’s the drawing above. Notice that your kid has drawn you as a white-collar worker.

Right in the middle of this semi-Roguelike, hop-and-bop, cartoony platformer, is this heartwrenching little story of familial separation and sacrifice.

I am MASSIVELY impressed.

I’m telling you all of this because I think it’s kind of necessary to explain how, for a few weird weeks in March of 2001, a Tamagotchi craze–an echo of the original one–broke out in the senior class of our high school.

The Tamagotchi was the first fad that I realized what it was. Magic the Gathering had come to my school just before it, and I’d gotten some cards but had not enjoyed playing it, so that may have set the stage. I did love the hell out of Pogs. Anyway everyone in my seventh grade class who was anyone had a fucking Tamagotchi, and so I sorta wanted one–but for one reason or other I didn’t. They were expensive, maybe, or they were hard to get, or whatever. But I remember one time I was home with my mom, and I was talking about them, and my mom said, through stress, “Do you want me to drive you to the store and see if we can get one?”, and it was–I know it’s not super popular to talk about your parents like they’re likeable people, but shit, my mom worked hard, and the last thing she wanted to do that day was buy me a fucking Tamagotchi, to drive and go to the mall and spend money on a stupid toy, but she would have. And I decided, no, I don’t really need one, and I never got one, and a couple weeks later everyone got bored with them and the world moved on, so it didn’t really matter.

But years later, Frankie Greco and I in our AP English class, to my heartbreak my teacher didn’t give a shit, and we’d finished class early and it was eighth period on a Friday so she kind of just gave us vague instructions to start on our weekend reading homework but really wanted to just not have to teach for a while and was okay so long as we weren’t screaming, and so we all just kind of chatted and bullshit, and we were reading The Grapes of Wrath, and I’d been spending most of high school getting slowly into Steinbeck–I would exit college having read every single one of his major works and most of his minor ones–and even though my teacher didn’t like Steinbeck and made no secret of that fact, I loved the book, and I was idly reading, and Frankie, who sat next to me, said, “Hey, you liking it?”

I looked up; we’d never really spoken before. “Yeah–” I said. “I like Steinbeck. How about you?”

“It’s pretty good”,” he said. We began to talk about music. “New Rocket album came out this week,” he said. “I’m gonna walk to the mall tonight and buy it.”

“Rocket?”

“From the Crypt. They’re fuckin’ awesome,” he said.

“Oh!” I was not a fan of the band–at least not at the time–but I could fake it, and I had credentials. “Actually, the first concert I ever went to, at Willy P, it was Foo Fighters and Rocket from the Crypt opened.”

“Holy shit!” Frankie smiled. This particular concert, I went to it because I loved The Colour and the Shape and because it was $15 and because my friend wanted to go and it was close; in adulthood I’ve realized how awesome of a lineup it genuinely was. “That’s awesome, man. Well their new album is out. You should get it.”

“Well,” I said, “I’ve got a car.” And that was how we ended up at the Willowbrook Mall like the true Jersey derelicts we were, and that was the day that I bought Exile in Guyville, and we went to Kay Bee because we were 17 and let us face it: We wanted to fucking be kids again. And in the bargain bin were a series of Tamagotchis.

I was eying them up with a mind towards buying when Frankie sidled up behind and said, “Hey, awesome, a Tamagotchi. I had one of these years ago.” He picked up a package. “Ten bucks? Sold.” And he bought it.

Monday came and Frankie had his Tamagotchi at school. Tuesday one or two of the other people in our class had bought one–they’d apparently asked where he’d gotten one, someone who worked at the mall stopped at Kay Bee on her break and picked one up. Wednesday a few more, and by the end of the week a good solid half of our class was cleaning up the shit of an imaginary animal.

I never hung out with Frankie ever again, and I never got a Tamagotchi, but Corn Zone is the next best thing. All of Skipmore’s games are bizarre in their own way, and free to boot, but Corn Zone is a game where you’re presented with an ear of corn on the cob and you need to swipe to eat the corn, sending out gems which increase your score. It’s one of the stupidest games I’ve ever played and it’s so relaxingly simple it’s fairly addictive. There’s not much to say about it.

But the game includes a mode called Corn Pup. Using corn that you gain from the main game, you can feed a little pet niblet which, if you love and care for him enough, will grow into different forms. It isn’t as detailed as a proper Tamagotchi–the only actions are “feed” and “pet”–but there’s different evolutionary paths you can take it on.

Taking care of Corn Pup is adorable at first, but eventually it gets into that irritating stage where your phone keeps popping notifications–FEED YOUR LITTLE CORN PUP HE NEEDS ATTENTION. This shit is the reason I gave up on Tiny Tower. I don’t like when games dictate when I need to play them. This is the reason I thought Farmville is bullshit. At the end of the day, I don’t like to take care of people and I don’t like other people to dictate my behavior. I’m gonna see if that little fucker can starve and then I’ll uninstall it. Corn Zone was a lot of fun and it gave me the opportunity to think about someone I haven’t thought about in a long time. It caused me to feel anger and resentment, which ordinarily would give me some negative points, but I like when games make me feel emotions, so I’m good with it. Also it’s free. 10/10

“Some people”, Pete offers, “aren’t very good at being happy.” He’s older by a few years, and done with college, and presumably wiser, so it falls to him to give the advice, make the observations. “Maybe,” he continues, “you’re just like that. I know I am.” And this is true: generally something navy-colored hangs out in the middle of Pete’s chest, where the ribs meet, and sometimes things like cigarettes or proximity to Tim help that, but sometimes, nowtimes, for example, they seem to deepen it.

“I just wish I’d cheer up,” Tim says, and looks to Pete for help. So Pete decides to do a little trick that he knows.

“As long as you can keep a secret,” Pete says, and Tim nods. So Pete goes off to the side, where there’s a helium tank and a bag of balloons that they blow up for children who come in.

“What, you’re gonna suck helium? Anyone can do that, I find it annoying.”

“Nothing so prosaic, kid. Wait, will you.”

So Tim waits while Pete inflates two balloons, ties them to two pieces of white ribbon, and ties the result to his arms, around the biceps. Tim laughs. “Is that the whole trick? Because it’s making me smile.”

“Asshole. I’m gonna do it, just wait. I mean, if you quit bugging me. If you keep bugging me, I’m not gonna do it.”

“Okay, Daddy, I’ll be a good boy.” The two smile at each other, and Pete takes a breath.

And Pete, in a fluent movement, crouches down, jumps about two feet in the air, and floats at that height. He makes two fists, holds each next to its respective shoulder, and flaps his arms like a chicken. And he rises a few more inches.

“This is one of my many little secrets,” Pete says. Tim smiles grandly and wholly at this, and Pete’s concentration falters for a second and he falls about a foot before catching himself. He lets himself down gently. Tim is all awe, and it’s a moment before he speaks.

“Teach me.”

This is not in Pete’s plan: he’d expected Tim to be impressed and repay him with kisses, perhaps, or at the very least a hug for the floating guy. “It’s not something I can teach, he mutters, you know? It’s just something I can do. Just something I figured out how to do at home. You know how everyone wishes they could fly? Well I figured out the right muscle to twitch.”

“What else can you do?”

“What do you mean?”

“You said you had a lot of secrets.”

“Oh!”  Pete laughs. “That’s more, you know, the personal shit everyone has.  Most of mine are sexual. But I’ll warn you, I don’t know the first thing about getting a woman off beyond not gagging from the smell. All of mine are techniques to use on boys. Now those I can teach you to do.” This is, of course, clumsy desperation talking, a hopeful wish that Tim would take him up on the offer. Pete wishes hopefully that Tim doesn’t notice and makes a note to remind himself later that he’s the biggest asshole in the world.

“Hey,” Tim says. “Even if you knew a good series of techniques to use on a girl, I still wouldn’t have anyone to use it on.”

“It’s a fucking shame,” Pete says, his eyes steely. “A guy like you, you’re a catch, any girl would be lucky to have you, it’d be hard to find a woman who deserved you.”

Tim blushes. “The fact remains. So you got no other powers?”

“It’s not a power. It’s a parlor trick.”

“It’s a talent.”

“Talent is only talent if it makes you money or gets you laid.”

“Well I think it’s impressive.”

A moment hangs between them until Pete realizes he still has the balloons tied to his arms. He takes out his boxcutter, suddenly self-conscious. Fact is, he didn’t need the balloons, or the flapping of the arms. That was simple Barnuming designed to cheer Tim up. He’s not sure if it worked or not.

Pete enters the store the next day, goes into the bathroom, has a very satisfactory urination experience, changes into his uniform shirt (loud and bright and slightly obnoxious, much like the store’s decor), puts on his nametag (a fake one, labeled “SCOTT K,” left by a former employee in a drawer years before, probably when Pete was still in college), and walks outside. He finds himself steered by Bill into the break room. “I haven’t punched in, Pete says.”

“Don’t worry about it. We’ll fix it later.” He ushers Pete in. Tim is sitting down; when the two come in, he stands. Tim and Pete look at each other. “Sit down, Pete.”

“Okay.” Pete does. “What’s going on?”

Tim looks at the floor, then straight in Pete’s eyes. He sits. Bill coughs. “Well,” he says. “Tim told me what happened in the back room last night.”

After work, Pete had come home and had, in his head, come up with a very different outcome for the conversation between him and Tim, one which would have necessitated a shower afterwards, and for a horrified moment Pete is worried and thrilled that he’s switched fantasy with reality, that he and Tim did do all those horribly wonderful things to each other. Bill has a smile on his face, and this only adds to Pete’s confusion: neither Pete nor Tim is in a position of power over the other and therefore, according to the Trader Joe’s employee handbook, are permitted to fraternize, and Bill would be happy for the both of them, and would be almost scandalously thrilled to hear of the slightly dirty romance between two of his favorite employees, one of whom, as far as anybody knew, was straight, and would be vicariously and pleasantly jealous, as things with Jennifer have been a bit rocky lately, but Bill is, at heart, a man of order and cleanliness, and the fact that all of these wonderful things had happened in his back room would be too much for him. But Pete reconsiders: certain parts of his body would be extremely sore and uncomfortable were last night’s fantasy to have come true, and that’s not the case. So, shit. He must have floated, in front of Tim, and then the two had simply chatted about meaningless things, the effect of the float seemingly diminished, neither of them happier than they’d been at the beginning of the night. He’s not sure whether he’s relieved or not. But let’s make sure: “What, exactly, did he tell you,” Pete asks.

Bill smiles. “Tim here seems to think you were able to float in the air. Said you came up about three feet. Was that some sort of trick? How’d you do it?”

“Um. I can just do it.”

“How high?”

“Um. Maybe four feet without concentrating, higher if I have no distractions.”

“Can you fly?”

“No. I’ve tried, but I can’t change my position. It’s simply up and down.” These are all lies: Pete can hit a good six feet without trying, can go up to ten feet if he concentrates, and has a personal record of about fifteen. And while he can’t fly in a Superman sense, he can do a minor bit of locomotion. It is easier the lower down he is, but he’s been practicing, and maybe someday he’ll be able to get by without owning a car. But he’s not going to tell Bill this, and he doesn’t think Tim deserves the information now. Maybe if the two kissed he’d change his mind, but he’d cross that bridge later.

“You can fly–float–at any time,” Bill asks.

“Yeah, I guess so. I mean I like to eat beforehand, it makes me queasy if I have an empty stomach.”

“Have you eaten today, then?”

“Bill, you’re not gonna ask me to float right now, are you?”

“Well it would be nice.”

Pete sighs. “Couldn’t you just, I don’t know, ask me to suck your cock like a normal manager? I can do that. I would rather do that. I’ll do that right now.” He gets down on his knees.

“Pete, come on. Tim said it was so cool, I want to see it.”

Pete stands up. “I also said to Tim I wanted this to be a secret.” He looks at Tim.

“Well. Um. Pete, I’m sorry, but I was doing a lot of thinking, and this is something you should be sharing. I mean, it’s a talent, I said that, and talents are meant to be shared.”

“I don’t want to share this one.”

“You shared it with me!”

“Come on, Pete,” Bill says. “Just a few inches.”

Pete rolls his eyes, flips both middle fingers up, jumps, and hovers three inches above the ground. Bill’s jaw drops, but he recovers enough to take out his camera and snap a photo. Pete immediately drops to the ground, stinging his feet slightly.

“Dude,’ Bill says. “That’s seriously–like some magic powers you have?  Like, it’s not mirrors or something?’

“No, it’s something I can do, and it’s something I can’t teach you, and I’ve shown you, and that’s it. I’m not doing it again.”
Bill stands. “Pete, come on. Tim’s right. You ought to share this with the world.  He and I have been thinking, and talking.”

“And what have you been thinking?’

Bill tells him.

“No,” Pete says. “I’m not doing that.”

“Come on, it’s such a great idea!”

“Bill’s right,” Tim says. “It’d be so awesome if you could do that. Just pretend you’re doing it just for me, like you did last night. And it’d just be one day.”

“So many people’d come,” Bill says. “It’d be great for the store. We’ll get the local papers to come. Maybe News 12 or something.”

“It’ll be fun,” Tim says. His eyes get that pleading look.

Pete sighs and turns to Bill. “I want a fucking raise. A huge one.”

Somehow, Tim has convinced Pete into a diner, and the two of them drink cup after cup of coffee. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you’d be upset if I told someone.”

“ Look, it’s okay. I just–I did it just for you, and I didn’t want you telling anyone.”

“But you said yourself, talent is only talent if it makes you rich, and if you keep it a secret you won’t get rich.”

“The three-dollar-an-hour raise was extravagant but I’d hardly call myself wealthy.”

“You’re thinking wrong, dude. Sponsorships. I’m sure dozens of places. Like, airplanes. ‘My name is Pete Lakeside, I’m the guy who can magically fly, and even I use Continental Airlines.’”

“Jesus fuck, dude. I’m a photographer and a cashier, not a corporate shill.”

“And you don’t think your new fame is gonna get you some pictures sold? You hate being a cashier, I don’t blame you. I hate being one too. I’ll be your manager. I’ll make you rich. Trust me. Just, let’s stick together. Okay? He adds cream and sugar, stirs.”

When he comes into work the next day, he sees a group of old women–his least favorite customers next to old men, children, middle-aged women, middle-aged men, teenagers, rich people, poor people, and people who buy more than five dollars’ worth of groceries–crowding around a sign in the entry. One of them turns around, looks at him, looks at the sign, looks at him again. “Is this you?”

“Is what me?” He pushes one of the women over to the side, and sees a sheet of posterboard that the store’s sign artist has decorated. It says:

COME SEE
THE FLYING MAN
SATURDAY JUNE 20 AT 10 AM
FREE BALLOONS AND FOOD!

There are drawings, in the artist’s cartoonish style, of airplanes and birds and balloons, and a drawing of the free food that is expected to be had, and in the midst of all of that is a large photograph of Pete which was taken at the store’s Christmas party. The picture features Pete with a goofy smile on his face, arms raised. It is intended to convey a message along the lines of, I’m so wacky and nonconformist, why, I may take off any second, that’s why I’ve got my arms outstretched, and I would love to be your friend. This appears to be the message the customers are taking from it. To Pete, who, unlike them, was actually there at the party, the photograph conveys a message which is more along the lines of, I’ve just made my way through most of a bottle of Jack, I’m having a swell time, and don’t tell anyone, but in about fifteen seconds I’m going to puke on the woman holding the camera. She had had a few herself, which is why she forgave him, and until now he’d simply assumed that the whole incident was politely fictioned out of existence. The photograph’s reappearance is one of several things which bother him. Others include, but are not limited to, the fact that Saturday is traditionally one of his days off; another is the simple fact of having to be awake and out of the house by ten o’clock.

“Excuse me,” he says, pushing the old woman back in her place. “I’ve got to punch in, I need to be doing work.” He walks into the store, finds Tim. “Hey, what the hell gives?”

Tim shrugs. “Hey, it was their idea. You know. They go kinda overboard with signs around here.” He smiles, and all is forgiven.

“But flying man? I mean, I don’t fly. Who came up with that?”

Tim blushes. “Actually, that was mine.”

“You know I don’t fly. You know I just float. Just up and down.”

“I know. But it sounded better than floating man. And besides–you ever play Earthbound? For the Super Nintendo?”

“No,” Pete says. “I never had one of those.”

“Well, there’s this one bit towards the end. You’re fighting alongside a few other party members for most of the game, but towards the end there’s a level where you’re by yourself. And you meet these little birdmen guys who can join your party temporarily, and they’re all named Flying Man. And they just go around with you and kind of protect you. And that’s what I think of when I think of you. You’re my Flying Man. You know?”

“No, I don’t.” Pete is starting to get a headache.

“It’s like, you’re like a big brother to me, I never had a big brother and that’s what I think you’re like, you know? Like, I can justtalk to you, when I’m having problems, girl trouble or whatever.” He looks at Pete squarely. “I mean, I love you, Pete, you know?” He claps Pete on the arm.

He arrives at nine and the place is already thronged with reporters and every single employee regardless of shift and customers and just curious passers-by.  He gets out of his car. It is a carnival, it is a mad scene. A manager is giving out bagels, another is giving out balloons. He sees that the sign artist has set up a little table and is selling T-shirts that she’s had printed. It’s a bad photoshop job: a stick figure of someone in a Superman-flying position, with Pete’s head–the picture from the party–attached, and today’s date on the bottom. People are talking, excited, and cynical, and bored.

He lights a cigarette. A few people notice, and turn around, and begin clapping. He makes his way through. People grab his hands, clap him on the back, wish him good luck, want his autograph, and he looks straight ahead, ignores them all. Reporters thrust microphones in his face, ask him how he learned to fly, how old he was when he first knew he could fly, how he likes working for Trader Joe’s, what Trader Joe himself is really like, ha ha, what the bells mean, what his favorite food there is, what the managers are like, what his coworkers are like, who his favorite pilots and stuntmen are.

He holds his cigarette high so it doesn’t get crushed. The temptation to rise above the crowd is certainly there, but he’s not going to bow to their level, and eventually he makes his way to the front, where the stands are. The sign artist makes a joke that she’s going to charge him for the t-shirt, but gives him one for free, and a bagel is put in his hand. “You need to eat,” Bill says. “Don’t want you yakking on the crowd from high up.” His coworkers snicker at him, but smile–he’s well-liked so they don’t hate him too much. He turns to one, asks if she can scare up some coffee for him, and the expression on his face tells her he’s looking for a friend, not a servant, so she’s more than happy to.

And suddenly there is Tim, with a pretty woman in her thirties. “Pete!” He hugs Pete theatrically, smiles at a reporter taking a picture.

“ I’m very excited about this,” the woman is saying. “Mr. Lakeside–can I call you Pete–have you ever thought about going into television?”

Pete has not.

“You would be a natural. I hear many good things about you. We could pitch a reality series. What it’s like for a young grocery store employee who’s directionless but happy, when he discovers he has superpowers.”

“I’m none of those things,” Pete says. “I’m not directionless and I’m not happy.”

“We’ll iron out the details later,” Tim says. And to the woman: “We’ll talk about this tomorrow. I’ve got to talk to Pete for a few.”

When she leaves, Tim grins. “I hope she makes me fuck her to solidify the deal.”

“I don’t want to do this,” Pete says.

“Pete. Consider this the pep talk. You’ve got to. All these people are so excited, all these people are here for this, you’re gonna make every one of those people–me especially–really happy. And maybe you’re not the only one. Maybe there are other people who can fly, you know, and they’re all scared to. You’re being brave–you’re gonna be a role model. They’ll see you and realize that it’s okay to fly, you know, that they’re as normal as you. You’ll have so much money you won’t know what to do with it. And look, you’ll be able to get any guy you want after this, you know that? You’ll just look at any guy and say, I like you, I pick you, and he’ll come follow. Your days of being single are over.”

And with that, it’s time.

Bill finishes his introduction. They’d constructed a tiny platform in the parking lot, and Pete finds himself on it. Someone takes a hoop and puts it over him to show that there are no wires. Pete motions for the microphone.

“Hey,” Pete says. “This isn’t a magic trick, not really. It’s something I can do.  But if I’m going to do this, you all need to be very quiet. I can’t have any of you talking. I don’t want to think while I’m doing this, I don’t want to be distracted.  Turn that fucking music off.” A few of the audience members widen a bit, and the music is silenced.

Tim comes forward with the balloons, but Pete waves them away. “I don’t need that shit.” He gives Tim the microphone.

And he jumps, and he’s floating two feet above the ground.

The audience gasps.

He floats a little up, and he’s four feet off the ground, and five feet, and six. This is as easy to him as blinking. A few members begin to applaud. Some stop when they see his expression, but some don’t, and that group seems to be getting bigger, so he makes a show of slipping down a foot or so, which stops them. He climbs back to six feet, then goes to seven. It’s not very difficult at all once he’s up there, so he goes to eight, and ten feet.

And what now? He was never briefed, never told how long to stay afloat.  Maybe I’ll give myself ten minutes, he thinks. Ten minutes should be fine.

He looks down, and he sees a few customers, regulars, some of whom he likes and some of whom he can’t stand, he sees the reporters, cameramen, people from local newspaper and television stations, photographers, people taking journalistic shots and people taking sentimental shots and a guy from his college that he knows slightly taking shots which make a statement on the human condition. And he sees the sign artist, and Bill, and the girl who brought him the coffee. And he sees Tim, and Tim smiles at him, and Pete smiles back.  And really, it’s easy when Tim is smiling at him. Why, it’s like he’s doing this just for him. And Pete decides to go higher and he floats to fifteen feet in one clip and it’s as natural as anything.

But let’s draw some Venn diagrams: A circle representing everyone. A smaller circle inside that representing men  A smaller circle inside that representing men who enjoy dating other men. A smaller circle inside that representing men who enjoy dating other men that he is physically attracted to. A smaller circle inside that representing men who enjoy dating other men that he is physically attracted to that are physically attracted to him. A smaller circle inside that representing men who enjoy dating other men that he is physically attracted to that are physically attracted to him that have personalities that he’s interested in. A smaller circle inside that representing men who enjoy dating other men that he is physically attracted to that are physically attracted to him that have personalities that he’s interested in that are interested in his personality. A smaller circle inside that representing men who enjoy dating other men that he is physically attracted to that are physically attracted to him that have personalities that he’s interested in that are interested in his personality that are also able to float or fly or whatever the fuck he’s able to do. He’s too demoralized now to think of any other restrictions, though there are probably dozens, hundreds, definitely more restrictions than men capable of passing through all of them, so he stops. Even if it were a sizable population that were left, and that’s doubtful, he’d still have to consider distance, still have to consider how to possibly meet these guys. He looks at Tim, and really, what did he expect? That by floating he’d somehow shatter the concentric circles, that that’d override the other obstacles? That Tim would be able to float too and that they really were a match?

He is fifteen feet up in the air and looking down on a throng of people as if he were a god, and he thinks, I’m really not like any of you, you know. I’m the only one in the world who can do this. And this doesn’t make me special. And he looks at Tim again, and he falters an inch or two, for real this time, so he looks away, looks forward, doesn’t think.
And really, at this point he could do anything. He’s sure that he could float up twenty, forty, a million feet if he wanted to, could

float into outer space. Or he could fly, he knows that if he wanted to it’d be in his power to fly anywhere. He could let himself just crash down too, he could just turn it off, or he could just stand there in the air, hang out, until everyone gets bored and leaves.

He’s not sure. He’ll give himself the ten minutes then he’ll make a decision.

Any of the blogs where I’ve seen Frog Fractions recommended have basically said the same thing: “Oh, just go play it, trust me.” The disclaimer is necessary: Frog Fractions initially appears to be a shitty edutainment game. We’ve played a billion of those–ones where what you’re doing only vaguely relates to the lesson they’re trying to teach you. Oregon Trail was a better videogame than a history class.

So for the first few minutes of Frog Fractions you’re a little frog gobbling up bugs, and randomly fractions are appearing, and they’re adding to your score, but nothing’s really happening with them–they don’t seem to be adding to anything coherent. And you begin to get upgrades. And some of them are standard, and then some get strange: One upgrade is for an electronic tracking chip to make catching bugs easier, and then another unlocks which lets you get the chip surgically removed. And then that unlocks another upgrade where you change your mind and put the chip back. And then you can decide that the natural way is best and remove it. And this goes back and forth until the description text for the upgrade turns into an argument where the two sides are arguing between themselves whether or not you should be using this upgrade, and ultimately that devolves into “nuh-uh”/”yeah-huh”-level grunting, until ultimately both sides agree to disagree and leave it to the player to decide whether or not to have the targeting cursor. You can upgrade the frog with a computer brain which turns the fractions into decimals and those weird numbers that have “+e” in them that no one really understands. And you can upgrade your lillypad to a turtle, and to a faster-moving dragon, and then you get a rocket engine and the dragon blasts off into space to face the bugs on their homeworld (Bug Mars), and suddenly it’s a shooter game. And that’s when the game slowly begins to reveal itself.

See, Frog Fractions isn’t really an edutainment game, of course, it’s–well, an art piece, I guess. Because at this point the game begins switching genres left and right. There’s a quiz in order to earn citizenship on Bug Mars, a text adventure portion, a maze, a lemonade-stand-type game involving pornography instead of good old wholesome lemonade–and the particular joy of the game comes in recognizing the genre the game is riffing on.

As a piece of comedy, the game works brilliantly. It plays itself straight for just long enough–you do have to play a few levels of the faux edutainment game before you get clued into the idea that something’s a little off here, and just when you think you’ve got the handle on it, it takes another turn. But as a piece of art, I think it’s kind of a failure.

See, Frog Fractions isn’t really about anything. There’s two games it reminds me of, both of which are shaggy dog stories in their own right. Steamshovel Harry is one: It initially appears to be a physics-based space adventure, which you begin by being given your briefing about how you have this mission that’s crucial to the safety of the galaxy, and just when you’re ready to play, the tutorial continues, giving you lectures on the physics complete with a song (“gravity is gonna kill you, Harry/ gravity is gonna shoot you in the head”), descriptions of all of the enemies you’re going to face, and then it’s time to sing the Earth Anthem with its glorification of Earth’s great Spider King (whose jaws can crush anything), and after all of that, you finally land on the planet, and a character’s attempt to explain the controls is interrupted by the bad guys’ bombs, since all of that dicking around in the tutorial gave the enemies time to mobilize their forces and make their final assault. Another is Upgrade Complete, which is a little shooter game that makes you upgrade pretty much everything in order to continue–the game even makes you upgrade in order to pre-load the game, to have menu buttons, even background music. I find it strangely satisfying to play, if only because the game has a feeling of constant progress, given that all of the available upgrades means you’re constantly progressing.

Both Steamshovel Harry and Upgrade Complete have Messages, if you will, and their purpose is to critique a single gameplay mechanic. Steamshovel Harry completely rips apart the idea of tutorials, placing them in a 100% diegetic realm, unusual for a tutorial, and not only points out that people would much rather play than stay around for an endless amount of time listening to a character drone on about backstory. Upgrade Complete takes the restriction of game features to a ludicrous degree–a criticism of games like Guitar Hero has long been that the game doesn’t let you have features you paid for right out of the box, and Upgrade Complete simply takes that to the logical and most elaborate conclusion.

Frog Fractions doesn’t seem to have anything like that as far as I’m concerned. There’s no grand message, no real unifying concept. It’s just a bunch of stuff that happens. You go from gameplay type to gameplay type until you’ve run out of them and then the game ends. There’s no punchline, no point. Is the game criticizing edutainment games as both non-educational and not fun to play? Is it making some kind of point about games which can’t figure out what genre they’re in? I don’t feel like the game is making a critique of anything, because the game gave me nothing but joy every time it switched to something unexpected. Even when I began to catch on to what the game was doing it still managed to find ways to come out of left field and surprise me. But I don’t think the game is entirely positive either, especially considering author Jim Crawford’s other games include Futilitris–the most depressingly Sisyphean Tetris game ever made–and other arty things which question the point of videogames. (And none of the individual scenes in Frog Fractions are particularly fun to play, so that’s another thing.)

Now, the individual scenes are wonderfully written–the quiz portion is particularly masterful, a series of questions about Bug Mars history with increasingly absurd choices of answers, all of which are considered correct (the bug giving you the quiz, in fact, gushes afterwards about how you’re the first person in Bug Mars history to get a perfect score). Taken as a whole, it’s just a geeky little postmodern void. No need for meaning or purpose, here’s a bunch of shit. It’s a great bunch of shit–I just wish it had more of a point.

Look, it’s a super simple game. You’re a miner, there’s a mine, and you’ve got to chip away at the dirt and get gems. You bring the gems to the surface and buy tools, which make digging down easier. The further you dig, the better gems you get, and the more you can sell them for. Eventually you make it to the bottom, you find the largest diamond in the world, and you can either start a new mine or continue bumming around getting more gems. The whole time, soothing guitar music plays–light, pleasant instrumental stuff seemingly made by one of the brothers with a copy of Garageband–and it’s got pleasant, colorful graphics. The worst thing that happens in the game is you get hit by a boulder or fall down too far, at which case you just reappear at the top of the mine having lost all the gems, maybe ten minutes of progress at most. It’s just a happy game.

But there’s a surprising amount of intricacy hidden in the game–it’s a much more carefully-crafted game than it first appears. Miner Dig Deep is essentially three sets of mechanics–economic, physical, and architectural–which influence each other. You spend a lot of time gathering gems to sell and buying equipment (economic). You navigate the mine by jumping around, light platformer style (physical). And you build the mine, essentially designing the levels (architectural). Changes to one affect the other. You buy better equipment (economic) which alters your abilities, allowing you to more easily navigate the mine (physical), which in turn lets you dig deeper and more efficiently (architectural), which lets you find more valuable gems that sell for higher prices (economic), which in turn lets you buy even better equipment…. The equipment list itself is well-thought-out–I could see a game giving into the temptation to give tons of gear, but Miner really only has a couple of basic types and spends most of its upgrades on stronger versions. This allows for an extremely tight design–essentially nothing is useless.

It feels almost churlish to point out the game’s flaws, given how they’re mostly cosmetic. The sound effect for the drill/grapple hook is annoying as hell. Descending to the bottom of the mine, in the latter stages, takes a little too long. Really and truly, for what the game is, that’s pretty much all I found wrong with it. There could be more to it. I could see the game refined into a sequel with more gem types, with different types of soil, maybe a bigger mine, different tools.

And that would be cool. But I’m not greedy. Miner Dig Deep took me a few days to play and I loved every moment of it. After the first day, I would sit on the couch, mute the TV, put some music on shuffle, and just zen out. AJ, commenting on his Arcadian Rhythms article, called the game “therapeutic”, and I completely agree with that. Let’s call it 7 hours I spent with Miner Dig Deep. In those seven hours, I did not murder a single person, did not spend a minute contemplating a convoluted story that turned out to not be worth it, and felt a deep connection to the environment I was exploring. Ken Levine could learn a very solid lesson from the Ribaux Brothers.

I asked him what he needed the Sharpie for and he pointed to the little sign that the Indiecade people had set up. The branding of all of the Indiecade materials was in this weird, garish, glitchy rainbow color scheme, which seemed to fit perfectly for what Indiecade East was–a gathering of New York Hipsters into games, a convention wonderfully, delightfully, olfactorily free of the awful geeks and nerds that populated PAX East when I accidentally went to it last year. Surrounding Cart Life by Richard Hofmeier was a border of the rainbow stuff. “I wanted to black it out,” he said. “I thought it would match the game better.”
Cart Life is, itself, a carcinogenic greyscale. It’s a gorgeous game, but Georgetown is a city of ash. Hofmeier himself was wearing a grey and black suit–I’ve seen his look described as “drunken 1930s reporter”, perhaps cosplaying as his own cameo in his game.

Cart Life pulled three wins at this year’s Independent Games Festival, bringing Hofmeier and Cart Life to many peoples’ attention. Almost overnight, Hofmeier turned into an indie game celebrity; if Indie Game: The Movie were in preproduction, Hofmeier would certainly be shortlisted for inclusion. (If Hofmeier were in Indie Game: The Movie, maybe it would have been interesting. That’s another article.) But Hofmeier overshadowed his own win by following through on his desire for vandalism: After winning, he decided to refuse further publicity and essentially torpedoed his own booth, changing the demo computer to play the game Howling Dogs by “Porpentine” and spraypainting over his own sign–in black, of course.

As would be hoped, this has sparked conversation about and interest in Howling Dogs and in Porpentine’s other work; it has also not hurt Hofmeier’s image any. Hofmeier is a deeply strange man. In public he presents as extremely anxious. When on stage for the Q&A after Nick Fortugno’s Well Played session on Cart Life at Indiecade, Hofmeier clutched at the microphone. He hid in the shadows until someone suggested he and Fortugno sat down, an option Hofmeier all but ran to take. His awkwardness, when accepting his IGF awards, was much commented about on Twitter. His quirks have almost universally been seen as endearing. It was in the cards that Hofmeier would eventually become a famous figure in the world of indie games; that he is genuinely humble and genuinely cares about people–that’s just icing on the cake.

Hofmeier’s last word, during the Q&A, was a wish for more female designers–for more diversity in gaming. And so his decision to choose Porpentine’s game is a little more significant than simply giving some airtime to a game he liked which otherwise would have gotten little attention. Porpentine is a somewhat controversial figure in the world of indie games, to say the least, if only for her strong opinions about the visibility of outsiders in gaming culture–her writing is often particularly concerned with the visibility of queer women–and the equally strong rhetoric that she uses to make her points. The quote bandied about Twitter, from Porpentine’s GDC talk, was “DESTROY EVERYTHING”. Hofmeier apparently took her exhortation seriously.

In 1913, a British suffragette named Emily Davison went to the Epsom Derby, entered the racetrack, stepped into the path of an oncoming horse owned by King George V, and died four days later as a result of her injuries.

While her motivations and purpose are unclear–some people believe that she had merely intended to tie a feminist flag or slogan to the horse’s tail, and others suggest she may have mistakenly believed all of the horses had already passed and was crossing the track for some other reason–history sees her as a martyr to the feminist cause. That she had a well-documented history of militantly violent/self-destructive behavior in the name of feminism–arson, hunger strikes, etc–seems to lend credence to the theory that she was performing a de facto act of self-immolation.

I think about this and I think about Richard Hofmeier. Asher Vollmer, commenting on the incident, called Hofmeier’s act an “uncouth move”; his objection was to what seems to be a perception that it’s somehow a slap in the face to the IGF. Vollmer’s comment is stupid–and yet the IGF did select Cart Life. The IGF did publicize their event as containing Cart Life. The IGF did set up space for him–and gave him $38,000 in prizes. It’s not quite an insulting act, and Hofmeier’s motivations are genuine and are correct ones…

…but they’re also extremely and wonderfully destructive.

Hofmeier is taking Porpentine’s command and applying it to his own game. To see no violence in his act is to miss the point of it entirely. I don’t know how such things work, but I’d be surprised if Hofmeier’s next game would win an award, because if the award people are at all savvy about anything, they’ll know that Hofmeier’s next logical step is to, on stage, publicly turn the award down in favor of whatever other game has caught his eye. The intensity of this act is much greater than it first appears to be. Hofmeier has sacrificed his position of privilege in order to put something greater than himself in the spotlight.

It has traditionally been the technique of minority voices in the gaming scene to meekly and patiently explain why Kotaku should be really really nice and be really great and swell guys who should be really nice and please let us in because we have these things we should tell and let me tell you a personal story about something which happened to me which was really bad and made me really sad and that would be really good if you would let us into the community because this community belongs to all of us and how dare you not let me in and that’s very sad and i can’t believe that people aren’t ready for my type of writing and I wish that would be the case but that’s not and it’s horrible how no one wants what I’m making and okay let’s just retreat back here because no one has handed me my career and things are hard. I am sick to death of the major mode of personal discourse in this community being self-pitying, self-absorbed, narcissistic, disingenuous, solipsistic, closed-minded bullshit that has passed for critical thought in the videogame scene because it accomplishes nothing but a cult of personality focused upon pitying the writer.

Hofmeier has made one of the most salient blows for feminist and queer visibility in the gaming scene in a long time. I wasn’t there. I don’t know if he and Porpentine acted together or independently or what–it doesn’t really matter. Their words and actions, in concert, have done more than a hundred confessional screeds self-martyring over saying “rape” in an online game. Destroy everything? I hope they will.

Because I want to dance the Tarantella on Bioshock Infinite’s fucking face because of how insulted I was by that game, I’m going to have to play it again–probably on easy mode and fuck the sidequests this time–and take copious notes. Having spent a week violently shooting hundreds of sane if ideologically-troubled people in the head, I kind of need a couple of days to lick my soul. IndieGameStand to the rescue; its current game is Waking Mars. I’m a sucker for shit with “Mars” in the title, particularly if it leads to Martians, and it’s IndieGameStand so I could pay what I want, so I gave One American Dollar to the game.

And yes, there is much to Waking Mars that is a very specific taste. The entire presentation reminds me of one of those mid-90s edutainment adventure games that–I’ll admit it, let’s all admit it because we’re smart people and we liked learning when we were kids, we don’t have to get all obnoxious geek pride about it but come on–I fucking loved. The inclusion of an extremely irritating AI sidekick that even the characters think is annoying but don’t realize is as annoying as it actually is–the multiculturalism of the cast (the main character is an Asian man, the support a black woman, both of which are astronauts on a mission to Mars and so with the capabilities that that implies, so wonderful to see a cast of non white dudes…and to not have the designers writing self-congratulatory essays about how edgy/superior they are for doing so like some Zinesters I know)–the digressions about geology (obviously one of the lessons this game is designed to teach)–in many ways it’s a 2013 update of that sort of thing. The story takes a bit to get going–the intro sequence is a little long–and it’s one of those which takes several thousand words more than necessary to say “Oh no! You’re trapped in the Mars Cave with weird alien life forms! Learn about them and escape!” Thanks, Levine, for inspiring games to be long-winded. The map is kind of awful, and it doesn’t need to be–it’s just poorly-drawn, poorly-designed, and poorly-implemented, and therefore it’s almost completely useless. I didn’t find there were enough landmarks in the caves to be able to navigate, so it’s a game that I’m lost in a lot. I don’t mind getting lost in games–I prefer it to having a giant arrow show me exactly where to go–and the game isn’t large or backtracky enough that I ever find it a problem.

But the main gimmick of the game–the ecology–is goddamn wonderful. Mars has life on it–Mars has fucking life on it!–and it’s described as this weird version that’s neither and/or both plant nor/and animal. They give off these “seeds”, and you spend the initial stages finding places to plant them. And then you learn that certain seeds affect other life–they can eat it or it waters them. And then they add more life forms to the mix. And soon you’re navigating an interconnected web of ecology. Everything has a very specific place in the ecosystem of the underground of Mars. It has a purpose–a main Thing It Does. But everything is affected by everything else–if it’s as simple as getting wet causes an animal to freak out and shake off the water, or as elaborate as how, if that same animal eats, it immediately parthogenically reproduces. The game is spent planting seeds and nudging the behavior of life and figuring out which ecosystem is the right one to help you accomplish your goals.

And yes, the game is about whether or not it’s right to fuck with an ecosystem in order to get your research done.

After Bioshock Infinite, I needed to play a game where the main verb was the opposite of “shoot”; and so, Waking Mars, whose main verb is “plant”. For a hiatus between weeks spent killing things, I felt I wanted to spend some time growing things.

Waking Mars is available, at this moment, on IndieGameStand; as of 10 AM EST on April 1 there are 14 hours left in order to get it on their pricing plan. (IGS is a great site anyway and you should check it out periodically!) It is $10 on Steam ordinarily and very much worth that–and fuck’s sake, it’s an indie game on Steam, it’ll go on sale and you know it. It did not cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make and it is not soulless.

Essentially, the game is Life or Death but dealing not with medical issues but with psychological issues in stuffed animals. Each of these li’l guys has some kind of deep-seated Freudian trauma and you’ve got to cure them by prescribing certain therapies. It’s adorable as hell, especially when you start to uncover what’s troubling them. They add new ones every so often–if I remember correctly when we started it was just a crock and a lamb and then they added the hippo; the roster has since doubled in size. 

I think this technically counts as an advergame because you can buy toys of all of the patients–we all would have bought one or two if they weren’t expensive as hell. I prefer to play Die Anstalt in its original German because it sounds super dour and hilarious. Freudian psychology is great fun on its own–applying it to stuffed toys that haven’t been hugged properly is great times.

But for fuck’s sake, please give me the “I want to quit for the evening” option. Fucking Dark Souls gave us the “I want to quit for the evening” option. I play videogames at night, usually while pretty stoned, and I’m a very explorey player. After I’ve finished a battle in Infinite, I want to poke around the corners and see what’s around. The game’s rewarding enough with that–it’s got enough stuff, both ludic and aesthetic, hidden in the crevices that it’s worth spending some time bumming around, but it’s finite and useful enough that you’re not dealing with the Skyrim problem of three billion containers with three billion items in three billion separate categories, half of which are completely useless. (Still: I’m tired of looting corpses, eating oranges, and other stuff like that in battle. I get that all health is an abstraction, but it’s really uncanny valley difficult  to reconcile the realism of the plot with the abstraction of looting corpses and applying bandaids in the middle of combat. I guess I’m saying that Gears of War style is actually kind of awesome?)  

It’s at this point, in the middle of dealing with all of these nooks and crannies, that I realize it’s past 11 and I’m passing out. I could explore this place for another ten minutes but I just want to brush my teeth and go to bed. If the game would let me “save and quit” at this point, I could just do that. But it doesn’t because fuck you that’s why. And so I either have to rush the exploration and try to get to the next checkpoint–and I’m sleepy enough that I’m probably gonna miss stuff–or I have to quit and do that whole fight again.
I have a 250 gig hard drive. Many people are playing this on PC. THERE IS NO FUCKING REASON TO LIMIT OUR SAVE GAMES. IT IS 2013.

–Also I can’t find the in-game clock so I know how long I’ve been playing. 10 hours is just a guess and I feel very bad for not necessarily having the right number! I know I’m wasting a lot of time on videogames; I don’t know why games are now hiding that fact from me.

–The anachronistic soundtrack has been at least partially explained, and I’m cool with it. It’s not a The Village situation. There’s a couple of really amazing covers of later songs done in a 1912 idiom, and they’re excellent. At the risk of it becoming a gimmick, I wish there were more of them. I really hope at some point the Vox Populi rouse me with a song about loading up on guns and bringing my friends.

–The game’s central–I don’t want to call it a “gimmick” because I feel like that term is slightly pejorative, and I intend to use it neutrally, but neither “conceit” nor “mechanic” seem to work; I guess it’s analogue of whatever concepts “sea slugs that secrete stems cells” in Bioshock or “nanobots” in Metal Gear Solid is–is slowly revealing itself. Spoilery as I am, I’m gonna wait a couple days before talking about this. It’s weird. I’m not the biggest fan of textual reads of games, but it’s putting Levine’s normal Shock themes into a slightly different light. I don’t know if I’ll be able to resist the urge to Keogh it up in this motherfucker.

–As I am playing Bioshock Infinite a phantom game is appearing alongside it. The game is largely excellent–it’s going to deserve nearly every accolade it will get if it keeps up this way. It will be a Very Excellent Videogame just as we knew it would be. But I’m seeing some–areas where if the game weren’t so concerned with being everyone’s GOTY and making up its ridiculous budget, where it could be a fucking horror to behold. I mean this is after Dark Souls. Pretty as Columbia is, Lordran was pretty and I can still navigate it months after I’ve last gone there. Lordran is a world, and Columbia is a Series of Videogame Levels. Sigh.

It’s not just that. There’s–a lot in the way of choice I could see coming into play. Everyone who plays Infinite will get the same basic experience because it’s a big budget videogame; but, and I am speaking coyly, the game suggests the existence of an INFINITE (lol) number of possibilities.

I guess…Bioshock (and Portal) questioned player choice and goals and all of that shit, and it was good–and then the next year a weird bunch of fucked up Russians released a game called The Void. This was the same weird bunch of fucked up Russians who, mistranslating “survival horror” as “existential angst”, made Pathologic. I’m going to be getting a support group together this summer to play The Void together–let me know if you’re interested!–but its handling of player goals and shit was to Bioshock and Portal…I’m a Jersey boy so please forgive this metaphor: Someone once told me a Springsteen story where Springsteen was helping his daughter move in to her dorm, and there was a 19-year-old hot shit kid trying to play guitar to impress some chicks, and The Boss sidled over and said, “Hey, Bro, I’m Bruce Springsteen, give me your guitar,” and the kid gave him his guitar–what the fuck else could he do?–and Bruce Springsteen performed an impromptu concert.

The Void is Bruce Springsteen to Bioshock’s freshman folk singer.

I want to see the game that Icepick Lodge makes in response to Bioshock Infinite.

–Yesterday I made a mention of a post about the beginning of Infinite but forgot to link to it. I’ve updated that article and include a link to it along with my apologies: Adrian Chimielarz’s Game Openings are Important, or The First 300 Seconds of Bioshock Infinite.

I’m one of those who LIKED Bioshock–but never saw why it was SO much of a deal. I felt the game’s initial promise of a terrifying experience–that bit in the bathysphere when the splicer is trying to cut it open is among one of the most defenseless moments I’ve ever had in a game and I love it–fell to just being a stylish pew pew game once you started gettign guns, and let’s face it, Big Daddies just got to be a chore after a while.

I ignore pretty much everything in the way of previews because, come on, I’ll play the fucking thing eventually and I don’t need to know everything about a game before I play it. Come on. So I went in knowing “Columbia”, “city in the sky”, “America”, and “there’s a chick”.

I’m about six hours in so far. Here’s what’s striking me:

–Let’s just get it out of the way: Bioshock Infinite is an extremely stupid title. Perhaps they’ll reveal a deeper meaning for it, but it’s still pretty half-assed. This series is another one with a weird pedigree and an odd naming convention. Ken Levine had nothing to do with System Shock. In fact, System Shock 2, as most people know, started off as an unrelated game Levine was working on that just happened to take place on a spaceship. When EA looked at the game, they noticed they had the rights to System Shock, and opted to produce Levine’s game so long as it was a sequel. System Shock 2 is one of those rare cash-cow sequels which happened to surpass its predecessor. Bioshock was so named to evoke “System Shock” and “biology”. Bioshock Infinite evokes “A game made by the same team as Bioshock, but moreso”. It feels like a working title that they never bothered to fix. I guess that’s what happens when you have a bunch of smelly nerds clinging to previews–they find a name, and it doesn’t matter because smelly nerds aren’t particularly creative, but they’re fuckin’ keepin’ that name.

–The beginning of Bioshock Infinite is incredibly, incredibly boring, mostly because it’s pretty much a shot-for-shot of the original Bioshock’s intro, which has earned its place as a particularly fine introduction. You go to a lighthouse, push a lever, and go in a capsule which shoots you to Columbia, just as you went into a bathysphere and descended into Rapture. I was extremely unimpressed with it–it felt like the same damn thing again.

–And then once you get to Columbia it’s completely different–for one, there’s a billion people walking around, and your first hour is pretty much spend bumming around a carnival. One of my biggest issues with Bioshock was how I just never really got a sense of what daily life in Rapture was like. By the time you make it there, pretty much everybody normal has died; the only citizens you meet are the equivalent of a violent mob of heroin addicts. Everything’s already happened.

Columbia, on the other hand, is at its peak when you arrive–while there’s some internal strife, certainly, and while it’s very clear that this is an unstable society, for the most part everything is running fairly smoothly according to its own deranged principles. The city is populated–there’s people all over the place, hanging out, visiting the park, or working, whatever they do in their daily lives. You’re not fighting Splicers but police and guards. (Let’s leave those ethical considerations aside for the second.) What I particularly love is that whenever you go into a new district, things are just going as normal and no one’s really noticing you. These areas only clear out after fighting has started. Civillians didn’t really exist in Rapture, but they exist here. Instead of viewing the shell of a living city, you’re visiting a living one. Columbia has not gone to hell…yet.

What’s starting to be clear, incidentally, is that the city is going to be gone to hell by the end of the game, and that probably my character is the catalyst for that.

–So I’m wondering if that whole “beginning Bioshock Infinite exactly like Bioshock began” is intentional. The beginning is really crappy. This post outlines a lot of the reasons why–though I’m a little more on the side of the game knowing what it’s doing. That introduction is more of a preface, really. The two figures are SUPPOSED to be mysterious and cryptic. Any time they show up there’s something very wrong with their presence–they never come off as quite human. There’s a LOT of stuff–a lot of weird cuts, brief hallucinations, odd lines of dialogue–which suggests that something MUCH stranger is going on here. I’m sure everyone else knows the plot twist here but I like to go into things blind. But I feel like the game, storywise, deserves the benefit of the doubt.

–As far as the gameplay? It’s a first-person shooter from the people who made Bioshock. It’s excellent, obviously. It’s still a first-person shooter. I disliked Killing is Harmless–its famous 50,000 word length comes mostly from Keogh’s interminable summarizing of scene after scene after scene like a sophomore year essay written a couple hours before class–and disagreed with one of its central propositions (that Killing in a Video Game is just like Killing in the Real World, and we must Be Aware of the Acts of Violence We Commit or something)…but Bioshock is a post-Spec Ops shooter, and I’m mowing down tons of people who may be fanatics but are otherwise human, and it’s not really commented on. Yet.

–I really only remember Tenenbaum and the existence of Ryan’s mistress in Bioshock (and, of course, the Little Sisters), but my recent play of System Shock 2 has made me very aware of all of the women running around the Von Braun. I haven’t done a look at the cast, but there are enough significant female characters (SHODAN?!) that–particularly for a game made in 1999–it’s kind of hilarious seeing developers today whining about how hard it is to write female characters.

I read a couple months ago some tips about writing women in a sci-fi/fantasy context. It was dealing particularly with how to create well-rounded female characters who are living in an oppressive society–it’s a consideration, particularly considering that most fantasy novels take place in a medieval pastiche where women did not enjoy the best status. There were two specific points which struck me. First is that it’s fantasy. Just because a given society that you’re basing yours on was misogynistic (or racist or homophobic) doesn’t mean that your fantasy setting has to be–after all, there weren’t really dragons or magicians in Medieval Europe and yet no one sees a problem with that. The bigotry isn’t the area to start getting historically accurate. The list went on to say that, of course, there are plenty of societies which are based on massive social inequalities, and you certainly can make an extremely interesting story in that world–and the most salient point made to that effect was a woman in an oppressive society is going to have thoughts about that. (Everyone is going to. I really wish I could find this article because it was awesome.)

Infinite manages, among other things, to do both techniques. Columbia is aesthetically and politically based on fundamentalist Protestant America at the turn of the century–no aspect of that is particularly female-friendly–and yet it’s a separatist state which has been developing its own culture. And that culture is extremely interesting because there are some noticeable undercurrents. The major Head Dystopia Scientist is a woman–and her work creating Columbia has led to her becoming extremely, unavoidably famous. A newsreel mentions that the city floats due to “quantum physics”, and the title card comments that as far as this reporter is concerned, it must be “women’s intuition”. It’s hilarious: This woman is so smart that the reporter can’t even begin to comprehend what she’s done; while she has not had much screen time so far, the bits I have seen are making it clear that she could not give less of a shit about women’s roles–she’s too smart and curious to worry about that. You find an audio letter from a little girl who idolizes the scientist (I forget her name), who mentions that her mother doesn’t think science is ladylike but immediately dismisses it, deciding that she’s coming from a motivation of jealousy. A female soldier has a log where she recounts her general complimenting her abilities, mentioning that he served with her father who always wanted a son, and then calling the father a fool if he wasn’t proud at what an excellent soldier his daughter is. Women, it must be said, aren’t equal in this society…but that’s mostly because the ruling generation feels that way. The younger generation sees some undeniably notable women and begins to get ideas. There’s a strong sense that the inferior role of women is slowly, slowly beginning to be seen as old-fashioned. In any case, it’s a Shock game. The writing quality of the audio logs makes it all but impossible for these characters to be anything but well-drawn.

And then there’s Elizabeth.

–Enough will be said about Elizabeth by other people so I’m not super interested in talking about her. She’s a marvel of technology and a marvel of writing. But if you’ve played Resident Evil 4, you know that the though of a game where you’re sent to rescue a girl kind of…leaves me nervous. Ashley was an irritating character who had a habit of running right into the arms of cultists, whose playable segments were disasters. She was a spoiled college student. That’s about all I can remember of her. One of the moments that everyone I’ve talked to realized they’d enjoy the game was the first segment after you rescue Elizabeth. The mission to find her takes only a few hours–it’s the first major task you do–and although you get separated from time to time for various reasons, so far she hangs out with you for most of the game. Right before combat begins, a message pops up–telling you you don’t have to worry about combat. “She can take care of herself,” the game says–and holy shit. A woman who can take care of herself. She’s a teenage girl and you’re a former Pinkerton guard, so yes, “taking care of herself” means “hiding, taking cover, running from bullets, and generally not getting killed”, but whenever she’s around she’s constantly tossing you ammo and health and money. She has a very different skillset from you, but nothing in that skillset involves “being helpless”. She’s been locked up in a tower since birth, and you quickly realize that she’s spent years on various escape attempts. It’s not impossible that another year or two would have seen her escape.

Plenty of games have you separated from the escorted character–usually because she gets grabbed–but the separations here are very different. Yes, she gets grabbed–and manages to escape after a brief struggle. At one point she leaves because even though you’ve technically rescued her, you’re a complete stranger who’s just killed a lot of cops in front of her and she doesn’t necessarily think you’re the best person to hang around. Later, after instantly realizing you’re lying to her and not going to take her to Paris like she wants, she whacks you unconscious with a wrench and leaves. When she finally rejoins you, she frames it in a way that’s not at all about rescue: She can’t trust you, and you’re an awful person, but you’re the closest thing to an escape route she has and so she doesn’t have any choice–and I mean I think it’s fairly clear that she’s just biding her time until she sees an opportunity to get the drop on you, because come on.

Look, maybe movies and books have done this better, but you know something? I was around in 2003-2005 when every goddamn game had an escort mission. I was around for Silent Hill 4 where the only way for the chick to not get killed was to disarm her–otherwise she insisted on whacking away invincible enemies with such weapons as purses and riding crops.

–God Only Knows–holy shit. Remember how I said there was some stuff that I thought could be more significant than it first seemed? It’s one thing to have an anachronism of a couple years, but 54 years? I’m calling it: It’s not really 1912. We’ve got a The Village situation going on here. Amazing version of it though.

But DmC is a reboot and I liked the demo and I have Gamefly so why not. My hope was to have the game on Friday–it was mailed out on Wednesday, sez Gamefly–and play it leisurely through the weekend, through Monday, through Tuesday if necessary, and then receive my copy of Bioshock Infinite and just play the shit out of that. But between the crack staff at the Bed Stuy Post Office and Gamefly’s own incompetence–I’m not particularly thrilled with their service–I didn’t get it till yesterday and only had about an hour of play time. I’ve been told the game is beatable in a few hours if I try hard enough–but I just don’t really feel like marathoning it. I’ve tried to and it just doesn’t seem to support that flow.

Fact is there’s a lot about the game that’s gorgeous–the environment designs and the terrain effects are seriously impressive. While the level design is nothing to write home about, the art direction–as you’re going through the city, it twists around you, bits of brick fly around, corridors pinch shut, demonic messages appear written on the walls. It isn’t well-designed enough to be a series of setpieces, as far as the gameplay is concerned, but something’s always happening to the environment. It’s got an extremely active terrain.

And yet, for all of that, it feels like a very inactive world. I’m not sure if this is intentional–the game is kind of muddy about its cosmology, you spend a lot of it in “limbo”, and so the timelessness may be intentional. But I think about the cyclic atemporality of games like Dark Souls or Majora’s Mask, how they give the sense of being a bubble of time cut off from everything, how that adds to the eeriness and the horror of those games, and DmC just feels very…lifeless. There are some platforming sections which are fine, but Dante doesn’t feel quite as graceful as he ought to, and the areas where you have to use your grapple are very clearly marked. I used to enjoy games like the 2008 Prince of Persia, which were basically obstacle courses that were laid out for you, all you had to do was time some obvious button presses, but after playing stuff like Dishonored, fuck that noise. The platforming sections feel very stiff and unfree.

It’s the same issues that Bayonetta had–and yet because I liked Bayonetta’s combat more, I gotta say that Bayonetta comes ahead. Vigrid never feels like a real place, just as wherever I’m in in DmC doesn’t feel like a real place–it feels like a Series of Videogame Levels. But I enjoy playing in Bayonetta’s Series of Videogame Levels more. Perhaps if we could get DmC’s environment people and Bayonetta’s combat people and have THEM make a game together?

But what plagues me about both those games and about brawly action games in general is how repetitive the combat really is. You’re fighting against waves and waves and waves of similar enemies, and since I’m not particularly loving DmC’s combat, it’s very boring. Every chapter they give me a new weapon and they want me to switch between them and combo more or I’ll get low points and it’s just kind of stressfully torpid. There are occasional times I get into the rhythm, and maybe there’ll be more of them, but it just doesn’t feel as *nice* as I like games to feel.

I must give the team credit for the storyline, mostly because when I was sixteen I saw Marilyn Manson on the Mechanical Animals tour and I fucking loved it, and there’s still a soft spot in me for this kind of shit. DmC’s storyline is, essentially, that Fox News and soda are demonic plots designed to control humanity–Monster energy drinks secreted, Slurm-like, from an actual monster. The soda is called Virility. When you’re in the factory, demonic words are written on the cases: OBESITY, CONSUME, POISON. It’s got such a Hot Topic aesthetic. Everyone swears angstily. The game, far as I can tell, commits to its aesthetic, and I appreciate that.

Still. I don’t feel like marathoning it. I’ll pick it up after Infinite is done.

The man who said that did not have the largest cock I’d personally seen up till that point–that honor went to a guy I hooked up with 12 years ago who cried afterwards, obnoxious, salty tears raining down on my chest as I tried to figure out the quickest way out of his apartment–but it was in the top five. I did not expect it. All of him was big–he stood about 6’4, at least a buck fifty heavier than I was–but for some reason I didn’t think his cock would match. Well, it was a nice surprise. That I was about to have a threeway was, for some reason, a surprise too. Stupid: It shouldn’t have been. But up until the moment his boyfriend–also a big guy, though not as big–hugged him from behind, reached his hand into the guy’s shorts, and pulled out this monstrosity, giving it a couple strokes, then asking me to help out, I thought, I dunno, maybe I’m just being invited here for a platonic smoke session. Stranger things have happened.

***

The release of a new Anna Anthropy game puts me in mind of a stock sitcom dad. It’s Father’s Day, and his kid has given him a long thin box. Pair of boots? Tennis racket? New car? It’s a tie. Last year it was a tie, the year before it was a tie, next year it will be a tie. It will be a fine tie. Maybe it’s one of those swank Donald Trump ties he saw at JC Penny’s, maybe a Jerry Garcia one, maybe one of those which looks like cocktail molecules. But it will be a tie because his kid has only had one idea in his life–DAD LIKES TIES. And so Anna Anthropy has presented us with a long thin box called Triad, and we may make speculations about what it might be, but we know it’s going to be yet another exploration of the vagaries of queer life. Anthropy, best known for her book Rise of the Videogame Zinesters–whose premise is that it’s fun and easy to make your own game about hot lesbian three-ways–”no longer [has] any tolerance for programming” and so has asked Leon Arnott to program the game for her. Liz Ryerson has done the music, and it’s wonderful.

Anthropy makes a point of involving her slut in everything she does, and this time, the incorrigible scamp has cleverly named Triad’s characters Riff-Raff, Boodles, and Snippet. For some goddamn reason, these queer ladies have decided they need to be sleeping together (this game does not take place in New York City, where the right answer to the “how do we all sleep together” question is “you don’t, you get a fucking cab”) and all of whom have awful needs and obnoxious sleeping habits. You need to fit them on the bed without Boodles falling off because she never learned to sleep like an adult; without Snippet kicking everyone, because she never bothered to learn bed courtesy–and either way, as a punchline, Riff-Raff snores and keeps everyone awake in the end. Sorry, spoiler alert.

Lesbian three-ways, the game suggests, are more trouble than they could possibly be worth.

***

In the interest of discretion, I’m going to appropriate Anthropy’s slut’s names as aliases for the participants in my most recent hot gay threeway–like any self-respecting queer I’ve got a few dozen under my belt–and I can only beg everyone’s indulgence that I, an interchangeable heterosexual cis white guy, have managed to perform such a misogynist act as this appropriation. It was July 4–not one of my favorite holidays–and everyone I knew was out of town or busy and I had nothing really to do, so I ended up spending the day smoking pot and cruising for sex.

Being gay in New York City in 2010–this was in 2010, although what I’m about to say applies to 2013, but probably not non-New York City places because I don’t understand them–is an interesting thing because you can hear how easy it is to get your cock sucked on a regular basis but you can’t really realize how easy easy really is until you’re there. Apps like Grindr and Scruff and Growlr are pretty much the Seamless of blowjobs; on a good night I’ll have a dude sucking away within 20 minutes. Give me 40 and I’ll have a sweet, tight, pink asshole in my face waiting for me to fuck it. Gimme 60 and I’ll have found one who has the good drugs. You talk about the hyperavailability of gay sex in the 1970s–read some Samuel Delany for some interesting thoughts on that–but they got nothing on technology. Fact is, the other day I was at the doctor’s for a strep test, and when he asked me about my sexual history recently, I mentioned that I’d blown two guys in the past couple days and would have kept an appointment with a third for that night if I wasn’t, you know, sick. It wasn’t even a busy week or a week that I’d made any particular effort to get laid–cocks just kind of show up in my face from time to time. (For the record, the doctor immediately swabbed me for the clap–unprotected oral sex can give you gonnorhea and chlamydia–which, fortunately for the boys in New York City, turned out to be negative.)

Actually now that I think about it, I didn’t even have an iPhone at the time and so I didn’t meet Boodles and Snippet through a “location-based dating service”–I think Grindr was the only major one at the time anyway. I met them through Bear411, a site whose layout seemingly hasn’t been updated since the late 1990s and whose membership has sadly declined in recent years–although you can still find dudes to sling some come with–but who, at the time, I could sign on and in a few minutes get messages from a half-dozen hairy, fat guys who desperately wanted me to fuck them. Boodles and Snippet had been dating for about six months and had a joint profile, and so I sent them a hello message. Within a few minutes, Boodles wrote back. Snippet was at a 4th of July party, but Boodles thought I was supercute, and anyway we were both equally into drugs. And we had a fun exchange where we noted that we both lived in Brooklyn, noted that we lived in the same neighborhood–the same train stop–the same side of McGuinness Boulevard, holy shit, this is getting kinda funny, the same fucking street, and holy shit, we’re literally neighbors. This called for a celebration, and so I brought over a fat spliff and Boodles and I ended up grabbing some sushi and getting massively stoned and sloshed on some excellently-made Cuba Libres while we waited for Snippet. Snippet had some more weed, and a few more spliffs and some more Cuba Libres and we decided to go into the bedroom to make things more comfortable.

And it was here that we switched to a pipe. And it was here that Boodles and Snippet kissed. And it was here that Snippet reached into Boodles’s shorts and pulled out that gigantic cock and it was here that Boodles asked me, “You wanna join us?” This is one of the single hottest moments in my life, and it’s one that I’ve masturbated to countless times since. I’m getting hard just thinking about it. Excuse me for a minute.

Hm. Now that I’m thinking about it, I don’t remember much of the sex. We’d had a lot of weed and Cuba Libres. Boodles had fucking amazing tits though. I like a guy with a nice rack, I’m a total chest man, and Boodles had super sensitive nipples. I do remember saying at one point, “Jesus, I remember when I was a kid I hated my chest”–I’d been overweight since I was a kid and had been made fun of for being a nine-year-old boy with boobs–”but how fucking hot is this?”–Boodles, Snippet, and I were all pretty top-heavy–and going to town on Boodles’s nipples, I’ve never understood the whole “Duh, why do men have nipples, they’re useless!” thing because nipples are fucking wonderful, and in fact Boodles and I hooked up a few times afterwards, being neighbors and all, one of us would text the other a picture of our cock and I’d go downstairs, two at a time, skip over to his place, and there was one time that I bit down on his tits so hard and sucked so furiously that he came just from the nipple stimulation at all, shooting surprised ropes of come all over my dick and my stomach, neither of us previously aware that such a thing could happen but we managed to repeat it a few weeks later so it must be a Thing. A couple weeks after our threeway, after about three or four times that Boodles and I sucked each other off, Boodles and Snippet broke up. I’ve fucked Boodles a couple times afterwards, asking him every time if Snippet would join us sometime–the two remained friends–but nothing doing. It’s a shame. I’ve wanted to fuck Snippet again.

***

Triad is well-designed and features excellent music and innovative programming. It’s a game made with a lot of care and I had fun with it. 10/10

And yet Pamela Paul, in her article “Reading, Writing and Video Games [sic]” attempts to do just that. May I be honest? Her arguments–about the effectiveness of educational games in classrooms, on the gamification of learning (one must laud Paul for seemingly being the only writer to address this topic without acknowledging the existence of Jane McGonigal, whose name is almost synonymous with the concept), on the place of technology in the classroom–they may all be valid, strong arguments, but her willful ignorance about what videogames are, what they can teach, and even what their titles are like all serve as red flags: This woman does not know what she’s talking about.

Normally, when I’m writing articles like this, I need to tease out points like this. I need to look at the subtext and do deconstruction. Paul, fortunately, makes it extremely easy for us: Her opening paragraph tells us about her experience with videogames, which appears to have peaked at the arcade-and-Atari scene of the late 1970s-early 1980s. She smugly says that her learning began and ended with aspects of the games themselves–of games which were never intended to and were not sophisticated enough to be educational. She attempts to take 30-year-old examples and uses it to characterize a 40-year-old medium. Susanna Cooper’s The Grey King, which won the Newberry Medal in 1976, may be a fantastic novel and may still be valuable today, but Paul would laugh at me if I used it to make a salient point about contemporary trends in children’s literature. Night Driver was released in 1976 and it’s one of about six games that Pamela Paul knows the name of.

Nowhere does she give the sense that she’s played any of the educational games that she discusses or that she understands what a videogame is today. The horrifying examples that she parades around–one where “letters dressed as farm animals dance on a screen”, one where “Tom Sawyer fights the Brontes”, and “digital puzzle games” which are apparently valueless–seem to be the typical half-assed attempts at educational software designed by well-meaning people who either understand videogames (and are making traditional vidogames with a literary dressing) or who understand education (and are attempting to put traditional lessons into a game without an understanding of what a good game is). Tom Sawyer vs. the Brontes doesn’t seem to have any educational value to me–but I can’t make a blanket judgment because I haven’t played it. But her examples are so cherry-picked and dismissive that it doesn’t come off as a serious criticism.

Even if Paul has not played a videogame since the 1980s, as her article implies, her ignorance of the history of educational videogames is astounding. True, it’s not her purpose to give a historical overview, but just as Paul seems to never have heard of Jane McGonigal, she’s never heard of a little company called Broderbund which was arguably at its peak in the 1980s–their Munchers series, Oregon Trail, Carmen Sandiego–just that one company alone was responsible for what are not only considered classic educational games but what are seen as unqualified masterpieces of the era. But that doesn’t fit with Paul’s point, so she either disregards it or doesn’t bother to research that.

Paul is trapped in an extremely myopic way of thinking about education. She appears to have a very simple understanding of what kids learn. The value of education, in her article, seems to be mastery of some isolated subjects. One’s letters. The multiplication tables. Penmanship. While Paul admits that an app can assist learning, she seems to think that’s no substitution for classroom education. Perhaps she’s right–but perhaps games have value in being something a little more than an animated textbook.

In her article, SimCity is mentioned. While, yes, SimCity has words and is exciting, there is a much different lesson to be learned from it. SimCity is a simulation, a system that one can poke around in. The goals of SimCity–and I use the term “goals” loosely, for reasons that anyone who’s played the game will immediately understand–include building the biggest or the most interesting city. Even beyond the creativity that the game features at its surface–at the end of the day, most simulation games with a building element are the digital equivalent of playing with blocks–reaching whatever goals one decides is dependent on understanding and mastering the intertwined systems that make up the game. And while Paul may see no value in “learning how to play SimCity”, she must see that the ability to open up the hood and poke around is a transferrable skill. Perhaps Paul prefers to learning about living, breathing systems by simply reading about them, but Howard Gardner would have a couple words to say about her inability to find value in others’ learning styles.

But that doesn’t matter to Paul. She thinks that SimCity is a “role-playing game”. It’s not the proper time to explain what genres are, but they’re not just abstract word salad ridiculousness like, for example, “Zap the Math in Outer Space”–her conception of what an educational game sounds like and please, if there are any designers reading this, I would love to play that game. Even allowing for how blended genres have gotten in the past decade or two, they do mean something. SimCity is more properly a simulation game–I have never seen a definition of “role playing” that would include SimCity. Nowhere in the article that Paul links to calls SimCity a “role playing game”. It seems that, along with all of the other information about videogames in her article, her research consisted of half-remembered terms drunkenly scribbled on cocktail napkins. Why bother getting things right? It’s just videogames.

What about the fact that she contrasts GarageBand to a school orchestra? She’s extremely remiss in putting GarageBand under the “videogame” umbrella–but she’s also making a condescending apples-to-oranges comparison. GarageBand is many things, but it’s not exactly an instrument. It’s recording software. It includes tools to make loops and include samples–and it requires a completely different set of skills to operate. Paul doesn’t realize that someone who knows how to use GarageBand could record that school orchestra. She doesn’t realize the technical know-how which goes into audio production. She doesn’t recognize the value in learning those technical skills. I’d personally much, much rather listen to, for example, Visions by Grimes (an album the singer composed, recorded, produced, and mixed entirely in GarageBand in her apartment). But perhaps Paul finds electronic music to be too new, too much of a fad. Orchestral music is gonna come back any day now. Well–it doesn’t matter that she makes this mistake. It’s just videogames.

Children’s books and their education don’t affect my life in the slightest. I leave the discussion of them to the experts, and if I need to know something about them, I do something called research. Pamela Paul, features and children’s book editor for the New York Times, doesn’t evince any knowledge of multiple intelligences, of technology, of videogames–and she has written an article about all of them. She seems to think that videogames have only surface-level education to offer. Technology, in all of its myriad forms, is a toy, a distraction from real things. And while it’s foolish to make a blanket statement about whether videogames are Good or Bad for education, it’s foolish to attempt to make any statement without a solid understanding of what one’s talking about. Playing a videogame or two may not have taught Paul how to read or write, but it would have imparted some educational benefits–namely, it would have given her a clue about her subject.

It’s with this in mind that I played Suda51′s 2012 game Lollipop Chainsaw, an action brawler in which you play a young cheerleader named Juliet who is having the craziest birthday ever. Juliet is your typical teenage girl–she loves her boyfriend, shopping, cheerleading, and her family; she worries about her weight and about her boyfriend finding out that–omigod–she’s a zombie hunter! And one day her school is overrun by zombies, and her boyfriend is bitten, and she performs a magical ritual so that way just his head survives, and it turns out that the local goth kid was made fun of and ignored so much that he opened up a rift in dimensions and called in demons and is attempting to destroy everything. I would have loved to have opened up a rift in dimensions. It would have been nice for all of my classmates to have turned into zombies and died. Assuming that that meant an eternity of suffering and torture. If they felt no pain or enjoyed it in any way, then no deal.

Juliet is played by Tara Strong. Tom Bissell has noted–and Brendan Keogh has echoed–that Spec Ops: The Line’s casting of Nolan North represents the Nolan North Character–the generic action game hero–going insane. Strong’s career is more or less at the same level as North–he could be described as videogames’s Mel Blanc to her June Foray–and the characterization of Juliet is very much a riff on the Tara Strong Character. It’s best exemplified by Bubbles from the Powerpuff Girls or Rikku from Final Fantasy X–an extremely perky, girlishly silly dynamo whose energy is channeled into bloodthirstiness. Juliet is an extreme version of this–her adventure is much more visceral than anything Rikku or Bubbles ever dealt with, and her exuberance colors the world to the extent that her enemies bleed rainbows and pink sparkles. (The Lisa Frank-styled gore is in-universe: Characters even comment on it.) She is, like Bayonetta, at face value a complete cheesecake character–she’s a ditzy cheerleader wearing skimpy clothing, and you can even get an Achievement for trying to look up her skirt–and yet we’re very much dealing with a Girls That Kick Ass narrative. Juliet tells us from the very beginning that her mother taught her daughter to “wear [her] vagina proudly”, and she and her two sisters are competent and badass. The title screen music is done by Joan Jett: we’re dealing with tough rocker chicks. What I find interesting is several reviews which stated that Juliet is stupid or unintelligent. While she’s silly and doesn’t have the greatest sense of priorities, that’s played up more as a facet of her youth and excitability than as a sign that she’s dumb. The game actually briefly mentions that her GPA is 3.4–my exact GPA in high school!–and later, after she comes up with an explains a plan to him, her master zombie hunter father erupts into unabashed tears of pride that his daughter is–his words–”a tactical genius”.

We have had this character before–Buffy the Vampire Slayer, of course, a little closer to the original film incarnation–but where the television Buffy was played for drama as much as comedy, was taken seriously, Lollipop Chainsaw is just interested in absurdity. (Of course, Buffy, as a whole, was funnier and scarier and more dramatic and more interesting than anything in Lollipop Chainsaw, but….)

The game’s script is typical Suda–it’s crass and vulgar and sexually suggestive…and yet as much as it earns its M rating, there are a lot of punches it pulls. Juliet’s boyfriend is just a head–and there’s only one oral sex joke I noticed. Juliet’s favorite food is a lollipop–it’s used to regenerate health–and yet we only see Juliet eat three over the course of the narrative. In every case, it’s not the erotic focus of the scene–she eats one almost as an idle tic. Bayonetta parodied the trope of the sexy lollipop suck by making its lollipops pathetically diminutive. Lollipop Chainsaw goes a step further and doesn’t seem to find the act suggestive whatsoever. In many ways, the game’s sexuality is more ribald and burlesque than it is exploitative. In many other ways, the game is actually a critique of exploitation: Her head boyfriend’s character arc leads him to get extremely infuriated with Juliet (and suicidal to boot!), believing–with evidence–that she considers him more of a fashion accessory than an equal. It’s an interesting role reversal.

I mentioned Joan Jett: The game has a wonderful music selection. One of the boss tracks is done by Jimmy Urine of Mindless Self Indulgence–the boss is voiced by him as well–and I have to say, they were totally a college band for me, they were totally a Hot Topic band, but the song, in context actually works. The soundtrack is very gimmicky, but it’s surprising. There’s a level where you mow down zombies on a combine tractor to the tune of “You Spin Me Round Like A Record” by Dead or Alive. Your limit break is done to the tune of “Mickey” by Toni Basil. At one point they play “Pac-Man Fever”.

It’s the kind of game where every level gives you something ridiculous, and then the next wants to give you something more ridiculous, and it succeeds. The boss fights are wonderful. It’s not a serious game by any means. It is high camp. But it is good camp.

It’s not the most elegant action game–it’s a button mashy beatemup. Everything’s fairly typical–for the most part you’re locked into a screen with a bunch of zombies until you defeat them. X throws a pom pom punch and Y attacks with your titular chainsaw. You can buy combos to string them together and–oh, you’ve played an action game before. If you’re interested in playing the game you’ll play it anyway and if you’re not, an instruction manual won’t change your mind. It’s not a great game. It’s a short game. You may or may not feel like doing its score attack modes. I got it from Gamefly, randomly, and even though it wasn’t my number one choice it was pleasantly surprising, and I had fun with it. It’s not a $60 game. It might not even be a $20 game.

But let’s say this: Like most people with depression, I have a standing appointment with a shotgun and a copy of Automatic for the People–at some point I will brutally kill myself in as messy and as spiteful a way as possible. This is something I have known since I was about nine years old and it is something I look forward to like I might a lover who is going to violently fuck the thoughts out of my head. But my suicide will be something that I want to choose, not an instinctual act through desperation. And so, I’m a heavy drug user–nothing, you know, needley or anything, but I spend more money on pot than you probably do on food.

And while I’m high, I like to do stuff that’s entertaining–because if I’m not entertained then I will shoot myself in the head with a shotgun, scattering pieces of my skull, brains, and other viscera around my apartment. (Perhaps a better and more interesting and, most importantly, more spiteful, way to do this would be to jump in front of a train somewhere around Wall Street–it’s an option I can consider.) And since I don’t want to just randomly kill myself at age 30–it’s something I picture myself doing in my 50s, really–I play a lot of videogames when I’m high because I need something to fill up the existential void that is in the back of my brain every day telling me that there’s really no point to sticking around. And I don’t like the cliche shit, Dyad and Super Hexagon and all of that–I hate that fucking cliche stoner shit because, I’m sorry, there’s nothing cute or romantic about being a drug addict with depression. Lollipop Chainsaw is a great game to play while you’re high because it has a lot of shiny colors and funny things happening and while I was playing it, my usual brain cycles spent figuring out how to get a shotgun, how to load it, the position to put it on the floor so I can pull the trigger with my toe, the music I would be listening to (perhaps I’ll just put on In Utero when I actually do it), the place I would sit, the last thoughts I would have, the feeling of uselessness and meaninglessness, which is not the feeling I want when I kill myself, rather I would like to kill myself with a feeling of Accomplishment, don’t worry I’ll wait till I either realize I’ve peaked or I’ve won the Nobel Prize–all of that receded from being my active thought into just a tiny hum at the back of my head while I was playing Lollipop Chainsaw because it was just so hilariously dumb that, even though it’s not a great game, I had a good time, and so the best thing I can say about Lollipop Chainsaw is it made me not want to commit suicide. 10/10.

Both of them have their points. I’m not the biggest fan of the Zinester aesthetic–or, rather, its pride in its lack thereof–or its economic thoughtlessness–no one seems to have realized that its focus on amateurism leads to a lack of support for professionalism–but its ideals of giving more platforms to different voices is an excellent one. Brice’s points about violence against transgender people are necessary ones to make, and the lack of sympathetic media must be alienating.

But Kyratzes does rightfully point out that in this particular article, she hijacks one subject to talk about another. Brice talks about war games, then dismisses their subject matter as irrelevant because they don’t speak to the particular form of violence that she encounters. War is an everyday reality for many people. Even if a game such as Spec Ops: The Line is flawed, its attempts at satire–at deconstructing the image of the Soldier–can help to give its audience an idea of the everyday violence involved at war. He warns against the hierarchization of oppressions and suggests that Brice is doing this.

Where Brice’s tone is, as usual for her work of late (is this the same person whose work, I wrote in 2011, was “generally well-written, well-researched, well-thought-out–and so academically ivory-tower as to be useless”?), in the register of that general Writing Workshop polished croon, Kyratzes is brutally academic, performing athletic deconstructions of her writing and pointing out hypocritical contradictions and using solid theory to back himself up. As noted, Brice’s earlier work was academic focused, and given that her essay does invoke strong political topics, an analysis of her underlying political philosophy is not inappropriate. If she is arguing for a particular point of view that Kyratzes feels is damaging, it’s reasonable to debate the topic. In an episode of the podcast Dialogue Tree, Kyratzes explicitly stated that sometimes you can’t convert your enemies–you have to defeat them. I don’t disagree that Brice may not be able to be converted.

And yet–I don’t think “enemy” is an appropriate term either. We have–as in the most passionate debates–two sides who generally believe the same things (the dignity of all people, taking a stand against oppression, rights for all, etc.) but who find very different methods of going about that.

One of the central questions is that of empathy. The focus on writing about games from a personal point of view may be a way to use a game to discuss a larger cultural issue–or it may be a solipsist’s inability to find meaning in anything that does not relate to him- or herself. Like any work, criticism can be well or poorly done. To look at any piece of criticism and take it as immediately gospel is extremely and obviously problematic. Particularly when one is dealing with sensitive political issues such as Brice and Kyratzes are, a critic must be held accountable for his or her opinions. Kyratzes challenged what he felt was a dangerous opinion; Kyratzes’s opinion can itself be challenged.

And in an extraordinarily blatant move of bad faith and card-playing, Kim Moss stepped up to challenge Kyratzes, writing the article “Monologue about Dialogue” in response to his piece–and, rather than engage his actual argument, accused him of being a misogynist and transphobe. To this end, she deliberately engaged in some of the very acts of oppression she and people such as Brice claim to fight against; she mischaracterized and misinterpreted his piece in order to invalidate his entire argument and deprive him of his right to criticize; her piece, in short, came from an place of misandry–look no further than the name of her Tumblr, probably named ironically but, like that friend who makes one too many racist jokes, a little uncomfortable nonetheless–and hatred, of a desire not to have varied voices in the community but a monolithic political philosophy.

Moss is best known for her involvement in Ruchgate. (To avoid criticisms that I’m beating a dead horse, I will point out that Moss herself bitterly invokes the controversy, ["Nightmare Mode didn’t often, at least as far as I saw, give platforms to pieces about why a previous piece was wrong, but here this piece was."]) Shortly after Patricia Hernandez relaunched her school project Nightmare Mode into a website for a larger audience–oh, Lord, I’m summarizing a controversy in the videogame community for the second time in a single article!–Moss published an article with the pithy title, “You Know What’s Gross? We Often Play Nice Guys(TM) in Games With Romance Options” in which she discussed some aspects of relationships in games. Writer Adam Ruch had a piece called “Romancing the Silicon Wafer” published at the same site, in which he criticized Moss’s piece.

And suddenly the fledgling site found itself in a firestorm of traffic-generating controversy. Furious responses, many immediately condemning Ruch for being a horrible mean man who was picking on an innocent girl for daring to speak, were written back and forth, comments fired back and forth, I don’t even know where it ended up and I just don’t have the heart to go to Critical Distance right now and see if there was any resolution. “Monologue about Dialogue”, again, takes the opinion that Kyratzes is criticizing Brice solely because of her particular identity and not because Brice may be arguing from an unsupportable position.

One of the major issues with Ruch’s article was his comment that he’d written on this subject before “in an academic conference paper in which I use words like ‘agon’ and ‘autotellic [sic]’ so is probably not something many people have actually read” and noting that his article would take a “back to basics” approach. This was considered to be an insult and a condescending remark–an implication that the site’s audience wasn’t smart enough to understand his paper. More likely, it was a self-deprecating joke–Ruch suggesting that his previous writing on the subject was–what was the phrase again?–”generally well-written, well-researched, well-thought-out–and so academically ivory-tower as to be useless”–that he recognized that this piece was not being written for a specialist academic audience but for a more general audience who may or may not have such specialist knowledge but in any case was coming to Nightmare Mode for something more engaging.

Even without the reminder to not condescend, Moss’s writing itself demonstrates an admirably high level of rhetorical skill. She’s keenly aware of how to write to her audience. Moss, from the very beginning, takes every step possible to dehumanize Kyratzes and devalue his work, for its very existence, while praising Brice’s work and obsequiously framing her as a friend of the reader’s.:

Mattie Brice wrote a thing! Awesome!

Some dude wrote a response arguing with her soon after! …okay.

Several things are going on here. Brice is introduced first as “Mattie Brice” and thereafter referred to as “Mattie”. She is not only implying her own friendship (and ideological kinship with) Brice, she’s drawing the reader into that same relationship. She does not append an occupation or a credential (such as referring to her as “writer and game designer Mattie Brice”), implying that she’s somebody who needs no introduction–she is intimately familiar to the audience already. (I’ve, incidentally, done the same. Let’s not kid ourselves, shall we? We all know who these people are. It’s a very small world we live in.)

Kyratzes, meanwhile, is only referred to as “some dude”. He is never once mentioned by name; he’s only referred to as “some dude” or “a man” or “some asshole”. This is a transparent case of Othering–one is surprised Moss does not go all the way and start referring to Kyratzes as “it”. Not only does this all but completely erase Kyratzes’s presence, it completely demolishes any reputation Kyraztes has. Even ignoring any reputation his games may have, Kyratzes himself has been published on Nightmare Mode. He’s not “some dude”. He’s a colleague. One wonders if mentioning Kyratzes by name would hurt her argument in the minds of her readers who have enjoyed his writing or games, and her solution was to simply avoid his name altogether.

Meanwhile, Brice gets acclaim for the simple act of writing “a thing”–it’s deemed “awesome”. Kyratzes’s response, which is “arguing with her”–not critiquing her piece but having an actual argument with Brice personally–is “…okay.” A flat tone of disapproval. We are two sentences in–Moss has linked the two articles she is writing about–and has already done a masterful job of characterizing Brice as someone we should cheer on, someone bullied by an anonymous nobody.

Moss then goes on to introduce the central conceit of her piece, one from which she derives her title:

Some people like to frame events like these as a “dialogue”. They are not. I even double-checked. A dialogue is a conversation between two or more people. These are two monologues side-by-side!

Let’s take this a bit further.

Monologues are very common to plays. So, let us imagine that Mattie’s monologue is taking place on a stage, as a play would. The stage in this instance is the internet as a platform. She delivers her piece, but then something unexpected happens. A man stands up in the audience, walks onto the stage, and delivers his own monologue. His monologue is all about why hers is wrong.

If this is actually written as a piece of the play, it’s a brilliant piece of fourth-wall breaking writing. However, in the real world, it’s just some asshole going onto the stage because he doesn’t like what she said. No brilliant writing to be found here. It’s just rude as fuck.

There are several issues with this metaphor. Perhaps the most obvious one is its provenance: Neither Brice nor Kyratzes frame their articles as a “dialogue”. I even double-checked. The concept is Moss’s. If Kyratzes had, indeed, included something in his article where he called it a dialogue, or a response, Moss would have a point. However, the metaphor is inappropriate and the conclusions that she goes on to derive from it are specious and borne more of smoke and mirrors than of anything tangible.

Crucial to Moss’s point is the notion that Kyratzes’s piece somehow interrupts or supercedes or takes over Brice’s piece. It’s a particular bizarre concept considering that it seems to misunderstand the very point of writing to an audience. As she continues:

As I mentioned earlier, the people who do this like to imagine they are contributing to a dialogue, but if they were interested in doing this they’d actually talk to the person they were responding to. Pieces like this ignore the original writer and talk solely to the audience. They don’t open up new conversations. They don’t contribute to any dialogue. They are nothing more than a man walking up on stage because a woman said something he didn’t like.

The issue is, while certainly Kyratzes would like for Brice to consider his opinions, but his article is not aimed at her and it’s not intended to be a next step in a dialogue. Brice, you must remember, approaches her articles from what Kyratzes feels is a solipsistic political philosophy. Brice has had her say, and her audience has tacitly accepted her viewpoint. Kyratzes is, indeed, speaking directly to the audience because he feels that there are some errors in her writing–just as Moss is speaking to Kyratzes’s audience and I am speaking to Moss’s. For Moss to feign surprise that Kyratzes did not quietly and deferentially approach Brice not only incorrectly treats a critique of writing as a personal issue between the two of them–which it is not–and also depends heavily on Brice responding to Kyratzes. Hands up everyone who’s had emails ignored or overlooked on them.

I won’t make Ruch’s mistake and assume that my readers–and Moss–are undereducated; I will assume they’re all extremely familiar with deconstructive criticism. And so it is even more disappointing that Moss, confronted with Kyratzes’s disclaimers that he is simply performing a thought experiment ["(Caution: the following sentence is a thought experiment, not my opinion.)...(I am not defending this person’s cowardly behaviour, but I am arguing against overgeneralization.)], simply lops them off and misinterprets his piece as being actively transphobic. What he is doing is not, as she accuses, saying that

making a cis person be seen in public with a trans woman they are dating would be horrible. He then says that it doesn’t matter that it’s not as bad as making a trans person pretend they’re someone they’re not, because it’s still bad.

What Kyratzes is actually doing is suggesting that the reality of transphobia may be more systemic and all-encompassing than Brice realizes. Remember, he has read her article and judged her to be extremely self-focused. For Brice to not see similarities in oppressions, to understand some of the more insidious ways in which power and discrimination are used, Kyraztes is saying, she has an incomplete view of the situation.

Moss concludes:

Had he pursued a dialogue with Mattie, an actual conversation, maybe he could have written something less disgusting and bigoted. Ideally he would have realized that when people who are oppressed are talking about their experiences, people like him should shut their fucking mouths.

So, if you’re a dude, the next time you read something from the experiences of a woman or a trans person or a person of color, and you disagree with them, please remind yourself of this and shut your fucking mouth.

There was never any argument here that Brice should not have the right to speak about her own experiences–in fact, she may even have a responsibility to. Were Kyratzes doing that, Moss’s points would be valid. It’s heartbreaking every time a particular personal narrative is questioned that this is interpreted as a suggestion that nobody should write personal narratives. Kyratzes was suggesting that, for this particular topic, her personal narrative actually trivializes violence rather than giving a different perspective about it. That Brice, normally so careful to argue for the legitimacy of different viewpoints, is arguing for the irrelevance of war as a topic of violence.

That, not Brice’s gender identity or sexuality or right to speak, is what Kyratzes is critiquing. For Moss to argue that Kyratzes is coming from a place of misogyny or transphobia, and to be unable to support that conclusion without resorting to misquoting and trickery–devalues everything she supposedly stands for. Kyratzes did not invalidate Brice’s article by pointing to any identifiers; Moss commits a betrayal of the respect every writer is owed by attributing his criticism to a place of bad faith and failing to demonstrate that bad faith, simply figuring that if she tells people to shut their fucking mouths enough times, that they will. To look at Kyratzes’s article and find that his conclusions are unsupportable or that his read of Brice’s work was in correct, that’s a way to defend against his work. That Moss does not makes one wonder if Moss cannot.

***

As I said: Tedious to summarize. I’m a slow writer: These events all happened almost a couple of weeks ago. Forever, if you’re one of those people who believes in Internet Time. The three articles–Brice’s, Kyratzes’s, and Moss’s–are mere steps in yet another one of those little flareups that happens from time to time. None of it is particularly interesting and, most likely, no lasting consequences will happen as a result. No one needs to have learned anything; Brice, who through Twitter claims to intend to write a followup, has not, as of the time of this writing, done so (she has, however, worked on a game called Destroy All Men–apparently she is learning her humor from that racist friend that I alluded to earlier.)

To bring up the name of a segment from my old podcast Cartridge Blowers: Why is this important?

The issues that the Zinesters and the Border House and anyone interested in identity politics–those are important issues. Sexism and homophobia and transphobia and racism–those are all elements that we would like to see fought out of our community. But to fight fire with fire, as Moss and Brice are doing, to use the master’s tools to attempt to destroy the master’s house–to declare that certain categories are privileged in order to overturn privileges is an extreme act of hypocrisy. For the Border House to feature Moss’s sad Twine autobiography while ignoring that she is wantonly attributing sexism and transphobia to someone for the mere act of critique is for the Border House to not actually want to end discrimination but to end certain types of discrimination.

I cannot pretend that certain categories–the cliched litany of “straight, white, cisgendered, male” that everyone seems to say as a swear word–have not historically and traditionally held more privilege than others. (And that word–privilege, it’s so overused that I’m losing all sense of its meaning; Moss’s use of the term is so broad that it seems to signify nothing beyond “a lifestyle different than hers”.) And yet to ascribe power and privilege as an inherent part of these certain categories–and to state that power and privilege only belong to those categories–is to hold an extremely unsophisticated and simplistic idea about the nature of power and privilege.

What Moss is attempting to do–and what Brice and the Border House and the Zinesters and everyone who sees no issues with Moss’s philosophies–is to take the concept of power and privilege and not broaden them, not give them to more people, but to create new categories of privilege and oppression. This is the exact opposite of the values she claims to have.

Look: Any disagreement between Brice’s and Kyraztes’s arguments is philosophical and academic in nature, and while it relates to certain deep categories of identity and the daily lives of actual people, it is a disagreement of competing philosophies and it has been conducted with the respect that such a disagreement deserves. Whether or not Kyratzes or Brice is “right”, has written the better piece, or better knows what they’re talking about, that’s extremely irrelevant. It’s up to the audience to judge whose argument is better. But to suggest that this argument should not exist because one of the participants fits into a different identity category than the other is to advocate for separatism. The tacit acceptance of Moss’s viewpoint is the tacit acceptance of the idea that some people, by simple virtue of who they are, have less of a right to speak than others.

Most of the criticism of Hernandez’s work comes, of course, from the comments fields that we as a society still deem necessary–a vox populi if you will, a way for writers to connect with the audience that they have such a deep relationship with–and all of that criticism is of the “how dare you waste my time”, “how dare you talk about these things” school of criticism–that one which has no salient points to make but simply destroys, given how it’s simply an arm of the Patriarchy or something. What criticism could one make of this piece? Certainly we can’t fault Hernandez’s insight or her need to tell her story or even her writing style–for really, what is style but something a bunch of white dudes got together and decided was the way everyone should write? Hernandez’s piece is fully her own Thing, and no criticism of her work has merit because what criticism can we make of such a pure expression of Soul? And yet I fear that the praise of her work has been similarly limited; it is sad that just as we have no developed critical language to talk about games, so is there no language for the videogame criticism community to interact with its own writing. We have no way of telling a good piece of criticism from a bad one because of the culture of fear that has surrounded it–that fear that one could easily be labeled misogynist or racist or homophobic by critiquing a piece–because, as we all know, a person is inextricable from the writing he or she does, they are a merged entity. All of the praise that other articles get certainly cheapens the praise that Hernandez’s article has gotten. I do not wish to slight these other articles, for I can point to many other articles written with the same level of skill and from the same place of intelligence; I feel almost guilty for placing her in the “hot seat”, as it were, and I can only humbly request that she not let all this attention go to her head and that, Dear Readers, you please take on the small task of applying the platitudes I am making today to these and any piece of videogame criticism–in fact, to any piece of writing–you may be inspired to encounter in the future. I can only hope I am not embarrassing Hernandez by focusing all of this time on her.

I am not so brave as Hernandez as to bare my soul so fully, to drag out every trauma I have faced. I do not have the confidence, the self-possession, the chutzpah to stand up and point to the parents that fed and clothed me and say here are the people who ruined me, to say you’re fools for believing the way you do, to say too bad you’re on your own–in short, I, too, have a complicated relationship with my parents, and I can only hope that Hernandez’s example might inspire me to, one day, become mature enough to realize that such issues should not remain in the privacy of a therapist’s office or kept in the context of a serious discussion between intimate friends. To know that I, too, am special.

Alas, that is not the place I am at in life. I am merely a coward who, on the rare occasions I’m able to silence that inconvenient inner critic, the one which perches on my (and every writer’s!) shoulder and screams, straight into my eardrum you faggot piece of motherfucking shit who the fuck do you think you are get the fucking pills and take ‘em like you’ve known for years you would you talentless motherfucker you piece of shit fucking kill yourself already who’d listen to you–a voice that Hernandez is undoubtedly able to ignore so easily that I’m almost tempted to ask her for her secrets–I remove as much Autobiography as possible, timidly thinking that the mundane habits of my day-to-day existence, the little traumas of my childhood, the big serious ones of my life in general, the ways in which I’m broken and the ways in which I’ll never be fixed, the ways in which I have collided with Society, the fallout that such a collision has strewn across the landscape, as it were, I remove all of that because, I say, people aren’t going to be interested in a stranger’s decades-old problems, they’re going to, hopefully, be interested in what that stranger has to say about this game, that the only people it’s appropriate to talk about that with are people you’ve developed a relationship with, because I feel (this is not the truth, remember, but a lie I tell to myself) that boundaries of privacy are important and go both ways–I won’t ask for more than you’re willing to give long as you don’t tell me more than I want to hear–but, really, because I’m a bitter, self-loathing man who doesn’t want to show himself to the world because he knows they’ll hate him as much as he hates himself.

And so I would not be able to write the article that Hernandez has written, because an article like this needs to be written deftly; it’s easy to fall into one of a dozen different pitfalls, any one of which can completely destroy an article. Falling into every single one, as I would have done, would have created an article which would be a laughingstock. Hernandez’s skill and talent have trumped me at every term; every mistake I would have made she avoids splendidly.

I would have avoided the portrait of the teacher. In my hands, the phrase “truth bombs” would have been an extremely poor choice, given how its unironic usage would paint me as callow and immature; spoken in my voice, it would clash regrettably with the fact that Fallout 2 is a game whose backstory involved one too many bombs, bombs that are not admittedly of the truth sort but whose impact was equally devastating. And yet, Hernandez the Virtuoso is weaving an explicit metaphor here, one which is lent weight by its association with the game. In the Fallout universe, nuclear bombs led to the destruction of most of the world. It is in the ashes of this world that the society that Hernandez describes can rise, in which a clever woman can get by with just her wits and a gun, one where America is no longer a destructive, dominant force. This teacher explodes Hernandez’s worldview with the force of a bomb; it is through this teacher’s influence that Hernandez is able to take the first steps towards dismantling her parents’ values. Fallout 2 may be the bone which flavors the delicious soup of Hernandez’s thoughts and opinions, but this teacher is the Delphic Oracle whose wisdom gives Hernandez a step-by-step guide towards becoming a mature, well-adjusted adult. I would not have been able to give this story such a powerful resonance. I would fumble, unable to fashion it into anything beyond a pointless anecdote about someone you’ve never met, into an admission that I wasn’t thinking for myself but merely parroting what a teacher, not much older than myself, had taught me.

I would not have so gleefully talked about wanting–and succeeding–to kill the temple guard. Hernandez’s joy at murdering a member of the opposite gender would have come across as violent misogyny if I had expressed it, and yet for her it’s seen as the righteous anger of the downtrodden coming up and destroying the oppressors; equality will not be won through dialogue or through writing but through blood and violence. It’s an extremely interesting notion, given that she has made the artistic decision to juxtapose this scene with a discussion of gender roles in her family.

As a white man, I feel that I almost have no right to discuss matters such as this or to have my own opinions on race or gender, so please understand that while I am talking about matters which may seem like stereotypes, I am completely using Hernandez’s own words as my source. Hernandez tells us that, in her family, men completely dominate women. (“Men work hard for the family, the argument went, and it’s the woman’s job to acquiesce to a man’s every whim.”) What they say goes. We must take that on faith because her father does not appear at all in the text. (Although it’s possible that his absence might be due to death, divorce, or another unfortunate circumstance, Hernandez uses the word “parents” several times, suggesting that he is alive and well.) Hernandez’s mother, in fact, is the incarnation of gender dominance in this piece. Hernandez’s father’s presence permeates the text through his very absence; he is an invisible ghost because patriarchal dominance is a likewise unseen force. Note the inner monologue Hernandez uses when describing her murder of the guard:

I didn’t realize how much resentment I held against those gender roles until I became obsessed with killing this guy standing in my way in Fallout 2. He told me that no, I had no choice but to go through the temple. And what if I didn’t want to, you bastard? Why should I listen to you? What if I put this spear through your skull? So I did that instead, and to my amusement, it worked.

Control of a temple is an old symbol for agency; in Lysistrata, for example, while the sex strike is the focus of the play, much is made of the fact that the women’s power is only backed by the fact that they’ve seized the Acropolis. Control of the temple–the way in which agency is meted out–is incarnated in this guard, who dictates how and when Fallout 2′s protagonist (female, in this case, although I assume that the dialogue is similar no matter what gender is chosen and therefore must remain not as an intended facet of the game but a legitimate reading by Hernandez nontheless) must enjoy said agency. This guard is the target of her rage and righteous violence in the game; he is a symbol of the guardian of Hernandez’s agency, agency which is free to prefer not to make six figures and is free to prefer not to give money to her family and is free to prefer not to sponsor them to become citizens.

This is the source of her rage. As her target she picks a guard, but given that power is incarnated in the men in her family and given that such power would assumedly rest with her father, Hernandez’s murder of the guard is a symbolic murder of her own father, a confession of her deep-seated desire to destroy him and, by extension, herself . The weapon used–a spear–is an obvious phallic symbol; this, coupled with her later proud assertion that giving her character armor to wear made her felt like “I wasn’t a woman. I was a force not unlike the [male] antagonist of Fallout 2, Frank Horrigan,” leads anyone with a basic understanding of Lacan to the natural conclusion that Hernandez is suggesting that the only way for women to gain any agency–and, simultaneously, the ends to which that agency is a mandate–is for them to claim the Phallus, to destroy men, and to replace them entirely.

It is a stirring portrait of self-loathing, internalized homophobia, internalized racism, internalized misogyny; in short, it is a wonderfully rich passage which, in my cracking voice, would have come off as a squeaky Oedipal rage against my dad, because he won’t let me do anything and because he’s gotta make me mow the lawn. I am merely the gay only child of an Italian Catholic family; I have had no meaningful struggles against high parental expectations, I do not know what it is like to live contrary to my family’s values.

I would have followed standard syntax conventions such as keeping my verb tenses straight and talking about texts in the present tense, but I am no wordsmith. This temporal confusion that Hernandez utilizes, however, leads us to consolidate past, present, and future into one eternal Now, and to merge that Now with Game Time, that is, the quantum interference pattern of all possible game decisions, all the choices that Hernandez (has made, will make, makes) in all of the times that she (has played/will play/has never played) this game. “Gaming Made Me: Fallout 2″ is almost a crystalline sculpture, a wrought object in which Hernandez and the game have become one, and this time there’s no reloads and no strategy guide. I would have stayed focused on one subject. I know it seems like Hernandez goes from story to story without any real order or structure but that has been okay because it will be an organic composition which was necessary to the objet d’analyse that she had been creating.

I worry that we have been too prodigal with our praise of this article. All great artists grow to resent their masterpiece: Nirvana loathed playing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” after all, quickly grew bored of having to talk about it in every interview, hated having to play it every night. The New Statesman, recently, has been the site of much discussion about the value of videogame criticism, with Helen Lewis and Ed Stern both writing (no sarcasm here I assure you) wonderful pieces about the subject. Lewis bemoaned the lack of any good videogame criticism, a statement which caused an army of Crit Kiddies to rise up and let her know the error of her ways, damning her for her foolish and uninformed opinion, pointing her to the likes of Nightmare Mode and Critical Distance. Ed Stern, in a move which suggested that Lewis had meant something entirely different by her article, clarified: While there is indeed criticism, it might not be very useful–and it might not be very good to read.

Many of The New Statesman’s readers wished to read some gaming criticism, so as to decide the issue for themselves, and so Lewis published a fairly comprehensive list compiled by Liz Ryerson. Ryerson, whose review of Indie Game: The Movie is (again, be assured, because I know you Internet people have trouble reading, that I am speaking sincerely and honestly) one of the finest pieces of games journalism I’ve ever read and a master class in damning with faint praise. She is both an adequate curator and an excellent producer of content, but I fear that her list included several missteps.

One piece is by Tim Rogers, whose reputation, like Ulysses or War and Peace, is based on them being so long that nobody’s ever actually finished them, praising them so as to not look uncultured–and an especially unfortunate comparison considering that the untrained reader might mistake the cursory discussion of videogames to be a simple excuse for Ordinary People-esque catharses of Mommy Issues. There’s a link to the book Rise of the Videogame Zinesters by Anna Anthropy, whose work is usually written from the hilarious persona of one intent on making every reader an amusingly unwilling accomplice to a sex life predicated on having an audience witnessing the shame that she is putting her “slut” through, a persona which might be mistaken for genuine by an outside audience unfamiliar with all of the literary theory needed to understand–but let’s not go through all of these, because who has the time! We’re here to talk about Hernandez, the jewel of this collection.

Each one of us has, upon reading Hernandez’s work, had a similar chain of thought that I have had, but Lewis and Stern are perhaps not as thorough as all of us, given that they have professed ignorance about our culture. I worry that seeing Hernandez’s article in there might cause them to dismiss it, and, by extension, given that her piece is among the best of the best, dismiss videogame criticism forever and ever.

I can only say so much about Derkson’s aims. He’s explicitly just writing an intro column–regular entries seem like they’re going to be discussions of metaphysics through the lens of videogames–but I find myself strangely offended by the whole philosophy behind it–the contrast between videogames as a medium of limitless imagination while the world is a strict net of rules. Not only is that troubling from a “go play outside” perspective, it’s also one that’s based on fallacy–a complete misinterpretation of the way that rules work in both videogames and real life.

Videogames are nothing but nexuses of rules.

Woven into the very fabric are grammars of what can and cannot be done. Every videogame ever made is composed of possible actions and sets of choices. Games can be severely constrained–something like Guitar Hero, where you’re simply graded on how closely you’re following the script the game is laying out for you–or extremely open–Nethack’s developers work hard to anticipate any possible player actions and are constantly updating the game based on player responses, in order to create an extremely flexible game. But either way, they do operate under constraints.

In part, this is due to the fact that time and resources are finite and that a game is limited to the skill and talent of the people creating it. No matter how broad a game is, reality is so rich and detailed and the possibilities so varied that they can never completely map onto a finite set of buttons. These things tend to work on a sliding scale: The more constrained a game is, the more able a developer will be able to anticipate an action; the fewer constraints, the more opportunities for a player to do something unforeseen. 

But that’s not a problem, because it is the navigation of rules that forms the very core of what we call games. In all forms, video or card or board or ball, games are challenges whose success or failure depends on adherence to a set of rules. Rules are the physics which underlie the possibilities in a game. And while it’s possible, sometimes, to break rules, we have a name for that: cheating. In nearly every case, a player cheating invalidates the game, rendering the win nonexistent.

I find myself so confused by these references to the “laws of the material world” which “impede our choices”. Is he talking about legislation or social codes? As a philosopher, Derkson should be well aware that one is always free to break these–although of course one must accept any related negative consequences. I think it’s a bit simpler than that: I think Kyle Derkson is upset about the fact that he can’t cast magic spells or whatever. That instead of viewing games as a comment on our world, or as a momentary distraction, he views it lamentable that out of all of the wonderful possible worlds, we got the boring one.

Derkson does say that he’s writing from a “Christian perspective” and attributes God an existence that is “outside the parameters of a merely material construction”. His assertion–”reality is less than videogames”–comes from a contradictory if not outright blasphemous place in this regard. Reality is necessarily lesser than a creator god, who stands separate from its creation both in substance and ability, assuming the traditional divine attributes of omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence.

It is the realm of Reality that has created videogames–their existence is a subset of reality. As with any creative medium, humanity’s relationship to videogames can be seen as almost an analogy of God to Reality; a game developer is the creator-god of a videogame. And while a developer is limited in his abilities in Reality, he enjoys relationships of omniscience (knowledge of all of the game events and rules), omnipotence (the ability to create any desired game universe), and omnipresence (the fact that videogames do not have an existence apart from both hardware and the player) to the realm of videogames. Logically, just as God by definition surpasses Reality, Reality by definition surpasses videogames.

Perhaps one of my biggest contentions with the geek community is its automatic and widespread acceptance of escapism. I guess it’s like any other addiction: Doing it recreationally is one thing, but it’s a problem when you use it as a substitute for reality. Derkson’s piece is written from the point of view of one who does not simply view videogames as a fun diversion–as an imaginative “what if” that may shed some light on but does not replace reality. It’s written from that viewpoint that I and nearly every gamer friend of mine wishes to disassociate from: The viewpoint of one so uninterested in reality that he’s unwilling to leave the fantasy world behind, so mundane is his life. What’s more troubling than that is his attempt to justify this viewpoint. What’s more troubling than that is that said attempt doesn’t even hold up to any logical scrutiny.

Look. I love videogames. And I certainly appreciate ones which allow me to transcend the limitations of real life–I’m extremely fond of ones which let me explore places that can’t exist. But it goes both ways: The constraints upon videogames allow me to appreciate the freedoms that I have in my life. That, yes, I’m limited by gravity and the fact that I don’t speak any foreign languages and the fact that I can’t shoot fireballs out of the tips of my fingers, but that the world provides a response for literally everything you put into it. Philosophy is useless unless it’s applicable to the world–unless it leads to understanding, or a system of ethics, or a sense of our place in the world. That Derkson is not using videogames as a way of understanding the world but is, rather, using his dissatisfaction with the world to justify withdrawal into videogames seems to me almost a betrayal of the entire point of philosophy.

We present this new podcast from Eric Brasure and Richard Goodness in this feed as a one-off. If you like it, please subscribe at one of the below feeds!

On this first episode of Trekabout, Richard Goodness reacquaints himself with the art of podcasting, Eric Brasure tries to explain what the hell this show is about, and they both discuss two classic episodes of Star Trek: “The Cage” and “Where No Man Has Gone Before”. Turns out, a lot of men has gone before, and how. Plus! Spock smiles.

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The only person who has to apologize for stories on Kotaku is me. It was my call to run the Sonic story…I had expected it to come off as funnier. That was an error of judgment. But, more significantly… I owe our readers an apology for okaying a story that implies all gamers are straight men. I should’ve caught that. It’s no small thing. I must also add that humor and writing about sex isn’t off-limits at Kotaku. We just have to do it right and not forget our own standards.

Stephen Totilo, via Twitter.

Stephen:

We’ve never met or spoken. If you know me at all it’s because you’ve briefly corresponded with my creative partner Eric Brasure, or because I’m that guy who keeps writing all of these articles about how you’re doing everything wrong. I’ve been chronicling your questionable decisions with the same disturbingly lusty glee that Perez Hilton writes about starlets with cocaine problems. I’m not even, you know, enjoying it any more. I’ve got other things I want to write about. I’m just kind of tired. I want to move on.

But I’m sitting, thinking about what to do for dinner, when I check my Twitter feed and notice a bunch of snarky tweets about some article that Kotaku published. This time–and maybe I should just write a generic Mad Libs-style template to break out every time this happens and save myself the effort–we’ve got an article by guest writer Kris Kail entitled “How I Achieved Greatness on a Sonic the Hedgehog-Themed Bed“. The article is your typical fratboy braggery about how some douchebag with Sonic bedsheets managed to find a girl to have actual penis-in-vagina sex on them. I tend to take a hard line about personal details, specifically a line which says I genuinely do not care about your personal life one bit. I dunno, maybe that’s one of those weird things about me: I’m completely, 100%, totally, filled to the brim with a lack of interest in the sex life of a crass stranger. I find Twitter isn’t that conservative–I tend to find checking my feed to be an exercise in oversharing TMI–but the general consensus is that this article was a bit misguided. Half of the criticism focused on the fact that the article seemed to define “gamer” as “straight male”, something which was found to be pretty marginalizing; the other half decided that the article, quite simply, was tasteless and rather unfunny.

The latter half of that is subjective. (Okay, it’s not–the article was tasteless and unfunny.) And I’m not even sure I even need to go into any detail on the first half. But I would like to address your apology, quoted above.

See…it’s shit like this that makes me think you might be really bad at your job.

Way back in last week you posted a pissy little rant to Reddit complaining about how people tend to focus on Kotaku’s mistakes and ignore its successes. I agree. It’s totally fucking unfair that people ignore it when you work hard on something you’re proud of and make a big deal about a tiny mistake you make. But–come on, man! You seem completely incapable of learning from your mistakes.

If this particular article were an anomaly, that would be one thing–a simple apology, regretting the oversight and promising to catch it in the future. But–come on, man! You have to have known that this was a bad idea. Pop quiz: What are some of the main criticisms leveled at Kotaku? Off the top of my head, most people dislike Kotaku for its reputation as a home of dudebro mouthbreather gamer culture, for its poorly-written articles, for its crassness, for its marginalization of women and sexual minorities, for its pointless stories that only have the most tangential relationship to games. I see you talking about how you reeeeeeeeeeeeeeally want Kotaku to be a great site and how you publish all these suuuuuuuuuuuuper good articles that are well-written and everything. I see you talk about how you want the work to speak for itself. But–come on, man! That’s exactly what’s happening! We’re seeing articles like this–articles which you publish despite the fact that they embody every single goddamn criticism anyone has ever made about your site–and you’re wondering why we aren’t paying attention to the good articles?

You can’t have it both ways.

It’s getting old. Not just you–I’m picking on you because you’re pretty much the easiest target around these days–but so many people write really questionable things and hope that an apology will fix everything. Far better to not fuck up in the first place. Mistakes? That’s fine. Ignorance? Unforgivable.

What is it? Do you not know what the criticisms of your own site are? Or do you just not care? You talk about how you’re trying to revamp Kotaku’s image–why aren’t you supersensitive to everything which gets published on the site? Kail is a guest writer. He’s not staff. Do you genuinely mean to tell me that you read this guy’s pitch, thought it was in line with your current editorial mission and standards, accepted the article, read the article, and still thought it was in line with your current editorial mission and standards?

You are expecting to be judged by an imaginary site that seems to exist only in your mind, and you get angry when we criticize the actual site.

Let’s look at a passage from Mark Twain’s last published story, “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven“:

The greatest military genius our world ever produced was a brick-layer from somewhere back of Boston…. You see, everybody knows that if he had had a chance he would have shown the world some generalship that would have made all generalship before look like child’s play and ’prentice work.  But he never got a chance….[E]verybody knows, now, what he would have been,—and so they flock by the million to get a glimpse of him whenever they hear he is going to be anywhere.

Twain’s vision of Heaven is one in which potential outweighs one’s actual accomplishments. It’s a nice idea–I’d much rather simply accept the Pulitzer than go through the process of actually writing the novel that merits it. And certainly our sense of justice and fairness leads us to wish for a world where circumstances don’t conspire against us, where we can do the work we want to without practical concerns. But that’s Heaven, not Earth. On Earth, in the real world, we may want to make a site which publishes all of these great articles and only great articles–but Stephen? You’re not a general. You may want to be a general, and that’s a fine ambition, but you’re a bricklayer. You will be judged as a bricklayer so long as you’re laying bricks.

Stephen, you are laying bricks and lamenting that we’re not celebrating your military genius.

We don’t live in Heaven. We’re judging your site by Earth’s rules. I think you need to begin to do that yourself.

–Richard Goodness

Reddit, Totilo asserted, was being unfair to Kotaku. That Kotaku wasn’t getting its due. Totilo pointed out a number of recent articles that he felt were of exceptionally high-quality. He was a bit put out that Reddit was concentrating on mistakes and not acknowledging any successes.

During the less-than-two-months that Totilo has been Editor-in-Chief, a lot of questionable decisions have been made–programming blocks, an odd change to reviews, Kotaku Core. This post, which was all-but-guaranteed to make its way to a broader audience, is just another step in Totilo’s pattern of poor choices. It feels almost like walking right up to the jocks’ table in high school and asking them, reasonably, to stop making fun of you. It wasn’t a good idea when I tried that in 1998 and it isn’t a good idea for Totilo now. It goes beyond the fact that Reddit already has no respect for the site–tactics like this come across as fairly unprofessional and not a little immature.

This specific incident started as a result of Ben Kuchera’s interview with Valve’s Gabe Newell in The Penny Arcade Report. Newell is a prominent and intelligent figure in the gaming industry, Kuchera is a skilled interviewer, and PAR is a newly-minted publication from one of the most influential videogaming sites; a certain high level of quality was to be expected. The interview is an interesting one, one which touches on wearable computers, DRM, and console development, among other things. Rightfully so, it was passed around and linked in a lot of places.

Kotaku was no exception, and crackerjack reporter Luke Plunkett took on this job. His article, entitled, “Breaking: Gabe Newell Grows Beard” is–well, the title kind of says it all, doesn’t it? Plunkett’s writeup does not mention that it’s an interview, does not talk about any of the interview subjects–just spends its time acting memetically geeky. It’s the traditional videogame culture style–why say something meaningful when you can make an unfunny joke?

The story was linked on Reddit with the description “The Penny Arcade Report launches with featured Gabe Newell interview; Kotaku takes photo of bearded Newell, removes the watermark and reduces a 5,000 word interview to a story about Gabe’s beard“. To explain the watermark bit: The Penny Arcade Report story features a photograph of Newell–who does indeed have a beard, at least no one can accuse Plunkett of lying. Plunkett used this exact image for his own article; when the article was originally published, the image did not feature PAR’s watermark. Reddit felt, naturally, that the removal of the watermark put Kotaku solidly in the wrong. So their complaint was essentially twofold: Kotaku did not properly credit the image, and they did not take the article seriously enough.

Plunkett responded on Kotaku. He explained the watermark issue as an accident–the image was inadvertently cropped due to a quirk of the system, and in fact as of the time of this writing the image has been fixed, the watermark prominently displayed. For the sake of argument, let’s accept his claim as genuine and that it was an unintentional error. But that does make me wonder. If Kotaku is such a prominent site, why does it need to use other sites’ photos? Doesn’t Kotaku have any photos of Newell that they own the rights to?

But let’s put that aside. What of the “reduction to beard” aspect of the article? Plunkett explained that while he sometimes does journalistic work, he considers himself more of a “content provider”. In his words,

I basically strive to spend my nine hours in front of a computer, five days a week, not just informing you, but trying to entertain you as well. Give you some news or opinion to chew on, sure, but also something to email to your friends and say “isn’t this fucking funny/stupid?”…[Videogames] can be serious, and emotional, and interesting, but they can also be vapid, stupid and funny. Just like my content.

We’ll ignore the fact that Plunkett is bragging about writing ditzy fluff. What Plunkett is doing is devaluing his own work. His role is not to create but to direct to the work of others. If Plunkett can link to someone else’s article, regurgitate a couple of beard-related cliches, and get paid for it, what’s the impetus to come up with something well-written and entertaining? From a site management point of view, it makes more sense to get as many articles written as quickly as possible. It’s easier to surf around and link to other peoples’ content than it is to come up with content on your own–it certainly takes less time. If people are still visiting the site, it’s in Gawker’s interest to encourage as many posts for as little effort in order to get better traffic to entice advertisers. And from the advertisers’ point of view, the content is almost irrelevant: All that matters is that people are around to see the ads.

I would like to point out the punchline inherent in the fact that finding interesting stuff to link to is most of the reason for Reddit’s existence. Reddit has an extremely active userbase, all of whom maintain the site for free. Its flexibility allows sub-communities to be created in order to attract a specific group of people, its voting system helps better content to rise to the top–while it’s certainly not perfect, it’s much more geared towards aggregation than Kotaku’s blog format allows–and the fact that it’s user-generated means there’s a lot more content on there. Is Plunkett saying that his goal is to be a less-efficient Reddit?

In any case, Stephen Totilo went directly to the Reddit thread on the topic and responded, apparently creating an account for the express purpose of doing so. He asserted that any failure to credit was done intentionally, and spent the rest of the time bashing Reddit for the way that Kotaku is treated. He lambasted the practice of “tak[ing] a single article here or there and hold[ing] it up as a sign of all that is wrong with game journalism”, noting that “It apparently is much harder to notice or remember the many pieces of quality games journalism that appear on Kotaku.” He mentioned–but curiously did not link to–several recent articles which he felt were of a particularly high quality…although I should make clear that it wasn’t so much a mention as a petulant “Did you see this? Did you see that? Huh? Huh?”

“I prefer to have the work speak for itself” Totilo says in his 500-word post. Totilo’s main complaint is that the image of Kotaku–a slightly-trashy, basement-dwelling geekfest–does not align with the current reality–a publication which does feature good, original reportage and does take games seriously and does publish well-written articles. Perhaps Kotaku’s former reputation is not undeserved. Maybe it historically was very low-quality and only within the past several months has started to get its act together. Maybe Totilo does have some excellent ideas that will need some time to bear fruit.

But even though Totilo acknowledges that he’s been EIC for a short period of time, there’s a strong sense of impatience behind his post. As if all of those ideas should have paid off by now. This is an uphill battle, and it seems that Totilo is clueless about what he’s up against. It will take a very long time for Kotaku’s image to change. The way to do that is not to go and bitch on the internet about how people don’t take you seriously. That does nothing to change peoples’ opinion if they already look down on you. His post is so antagonistic. Using well-written articles as a weapon to prove your point doesn’t exactly make people want to read them.

“I prefer to have the work speak for itself,” Totilo says–but he doesn’t seem to realize that the work is speaking for itself. Yes, it’s terrible and horrible that the internet is focusing on your mistakes rather than your successes–but why are things like “Breaking: Gabe Newell Grows Beard” even being published? Does Totilo not get that things like this reinforce an adolescent image? Even if you argue that Plunkett had to hit a certain number of posts that day and that he needed to publish something, there are enough ways to write “Here’s an excellent interview with Gabe Newell” that would take even less time than trying to think up beard jokes, and writing that sort of thing might even give off the impression that Plunkett had actually read the article in question.

I write about Kotaku so much because of its prominence. Because, like it or not, it does go a long way towards providing an image of gamers. Whether we like it or not, Kotaku represents at the very least a visible segment of the community. I understand why Totilo is making the decisions he’s making. I get why they’re going for more serious coverage. I know why there have been more discussions about identiy politics and some vague attempts at addressing minority audiences. Frankly, Kotaku has been starting to grow up lately. Maybe that happened later than it did for the rest of us, but that’s okay–we all go through this kind of thing at different rates and growing up is something we never really stop doing. It’s beginning to realize there’s more to coverage of videogames than tit shots and console fanboyism–and quite unfortunately it’s doing this all in the public eye.

There’s an amount of socially-sanctioned experimentation allowed when you’re a teenager–we’re all allowed to make some mistakes. But because of its status in the community–well, it’s kind of funny that Kotaku has become its own Gawker trainwreck story. I mean, hell, I’m reveling in it with the same relish that people followed Britney Spears’ decline, degradation, and triumphant return. The problem is that every mistake it makes will be scrutinized for a while.

Perhaps if Totilo weren’t so cocky there’d be less of a problem. He seems so sure of himself. It’s like a 16-year-old claiming to be an adult. It’s getting there…but it still makes some mistakes due to its youth and inexperience. It finds profundity in Tim Rogers and hilarity in Luke Plunkett and interest in Brian Ashcraft and it doesn’t really seem to acknowledge that there’s something misguided into doing certain things the way they’ve always been done.

I don’t envy Totilo his job. Changing a website’s image is an incredibly difficult thing to do, especially with a site as distinct and ingrained as Kotaku. I appreciate that he’s trying out a lot of different things–I assume he’ll be adding and dropping features as appropriate. That sort of thing is natural when shifting focus. But if Kotaku wants to be seen as a mature site that features high-quality writing, throwing a tantrum on Reddit is not exactly a good way of going about that.

One of the biggest criticisms people launch at Kotaku is its continued publication of stories that are only tangentially related to videogames. One of the biggest targets is Brian Ashcraft, whose articles are not-always-incorrectly stereotyped as being inappropriately obssed with Japanese schoolgirls (because most videogames come from Japan), but Kotaku also publishes things such as reviews of comics (because both games and comics are enjoyed by geeks) and crime reports (because the criminal in question stole an XBox game or something). Not all of the stories are as egregious as my favorite article of all time–Columbia School of Journalism Graduate Owen Good’s thoughts on credit card ownership–but the connections to the videogame world are tenuous at best, and both sides of the debate are fairly vehement. Kotaku built a community around a space where geeky interests can flourish, but those panty shots are not only alienating to people who simply want to get screenshots of upcoming videogames, but they don’t really make any strides towards shedding the stereotype of gamers as creepy basement dwellers.

So in January Kotaku Core was announced. Kotaku Core is, essentially, a subset of Kotaku stories that contains only content which is directly videogame-related. You can still get stories about comic books on the main Kotaku site, but if you’re just there for videogame news, Kotaku has made an RSS feed designed solely so you can ignore certain types of stories. This is an interesting compromise in that it acknowledges that certain content has nothing to do with the primary focus (the “core”) of the site, but doesn’t really solve the problem: It pushes it to the side.

Today, an even stranger decision was announced: Kotaku will now feature “programming blocks”. The post announcing this was extremely confusing: Totilo describes this change in the language of television–he uses, among others, the words and phrases “scheduled programming”, “listings”, “tune in”, and  “interrupt our regularly-scheduled programming”, which are all drawn from the world of television. Many people believed that these programming blocks meant that this specialty content would only be viewable during the designated times, a fairly bad idea for a website with a global audience. Totilo had to update to explain that these programming blocks would only affect which stories were published.

In other words: From 6-6:30 on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, Kotaku will change into the site “Sportaku”, where Owen Good will be covering developments in the world of sports games. Tuesdays from 3-4PM will feature coverage of comics. During these blocks, the visual design of the site will look different and only stories on these specialty topics will be published. But there won’t be any restrictions to what articles are accessible–you’ll be able to read videogame stories during these blocks and comics stories will be accessible at all times. So in practice, unless you’re refreshing the site or your RSS reader constantly, you’re not going to really notice any changes other than certain stories being clumped together. Even more perplexing is Totilo’s admission that Kotaku will still “run stories that could go in our new blocks outside of the new blocks. If a story is breaking and you need to know on Monday, we’re not going to sit on it until Wednesday.” I assume that the editorial team will have internal criteria to help determine which stories are significant enough to break outside of the programming block–but the fact that they need to reserve this right kind of lays bare one of the problems with the concept.

There are a lot of questions that are not addressed in the article. I don’t know what will happen during each block. Will the writers write and publish as many stories as they can during the block, or are they simply going to save up a backlog and publish every week? Will each block consist of a set number of articles and features, or will they just write as many as they feel like? But prime among the questions is this: What, exactly, is the point of this change, especially considering the existence of Kotaku Core? Totilo himself doesn’t even really list any concrete reasons, simply concentrating on a vague description on what the change is and mumbling about how new, different, and exciting this all is.

There’s a key point in an almost throwaway line, where Totilo states that the change “will make Kotaku‘s flavors more obvious, more easy to find (or avoid!), and more fun to sample.” (Italics mine.) Totilo may repeat the party line that Kotaku places just as much of an emphasis on the culture surrounding videogames as it does the games themselves…but look at what he’s just told us. One of the things about the new format that Kotaku’s Editor-In-Chief is bragging about is that it’s easier to ignore some of the content that the site publishes. I can’t picture any of the writers being terribly happy with that statement.

I almost wonder if Totilo is attempting a tricky maneuver here. See, Kotaku has a fairly specific community attached to it, one which dearly loves its articles about wacky Japanese trends and videogame thieves and busty cosplay galleries. Even if Kotaku’s editorial team wanted to scrap all of that extra content, it wouldn’t be able to easily do so without alienating a large number of readers. Creating programming blocks is an extremely unorthodox solution, one which seems almost designed to fail. It’s a convoluted way of wrangling New Media into the conventions of Old Media. Few sites have attempted something like this before–while certainly sites will schedule content, and certain livestreams have specific times when they’re broadcast, sites don’t really follow a programming block model because it’s not one which plays to the internet’s strengths.

So I’m wondering if Kotaku Core and the programming blocks are a way to self-sabotage some of Kotaku’s traffic. If enough people are reading solely Kotaku Core, those statistics could demonstrate that the large portion of the audience doesn’t want to read non-game-related content. The programming blocks might even be used to fine-tune the kind of content: If no one is visiting the site during Kirk Hamilton’s music hour, for example, I wonder if that might be an excuse for Kotaku to drop that kind of coverage.

Don’t get me wrong: I think programming blocks are an extremely stupid decision. They’re not going to really change the way people interact with the site or with blogs in general. While there are certainly problems with the blog format as a general rule, I don’t really think anybody’s ever complained that they don’t know what time they should be tuned into their computers to read new content on a site. But if this is Totilo’s attempt to show that non-gaming content just isn’t popular, then this is a diplomatically clever way of addressing some criticisms of the site that have been made for a long time.

Of course, it’s also quite possible that Totilo’s simply making a terrible decision based on a lack of understanding of how people interact with websites. Given how often I seem to find myself writing about the site, I’m not entirely sure that’s not the case.

You know what it makes me think of? That kid from high school, you know the one I’m talking about, he went to your school too. He was supremely unintelligent, ugly, unpleasant to be around but inexplicably popular. He’d put no effort into his schoolwork, convinced as he was that he’d be a football star when he grew up. Reading is boring, he’d say–something you took as almost a personal affront, given that you always had your nose in a book growing up, given that you were writing your first tentative short stories and giving serious thought to becoming a writer when you grew up. Whenever I see TL;DR, I picture this kid, staring, slack-jawed, at anything more than a sentence or two long, scratching his head. When I go into the comments of a Kotaku or a Destructoid, I picture a clone army of this kid, all of them batting at their keyboards in clumsy unison, calling me a fag.

One of the pleasures of growing up is being able to avoid a lot more people than you could growing up, and to that end Eric and I have almost completely broken with geek culture. That’s part of the reason I’ve always felt very strongly about review scores. I would be perfectly comfortable if review scores were abolished entirely, given that they attempt to force a nuanced opinion into an objective number. I don’t care if you think me elitist for expecting people to read a whole 1500 words–in one sitting!–without any pictures to break it up or a number and a couple of bullets to summarize the whole thing for you. The TL;DR crowd doesn’t often find its way to us, but if they were to complain, my response would be a genuine, Look, talk to me when you’ve grown a brain.

Today, Stephen Totilo announced that Kotaku reviews would be switching format. Traditionally, Kotaku’s reviews were indeed unscored–he quite explicitly states that the editorial team “worried that the number would undermine the review” by its pretense of objectivity and its lack of context; many of the reviews were also written in this weird question-and-answer format that almost seemed like the reviewer interviewing himself about playing the game.

So one of the major changes is that the reviewers will have much more leeway to determine format for themselves–Totilo mentions that in addition to traditional essays, writers might “review a game with a poem or a comic strip,” which gives me the sinking feeling we’ll be seeing more gems like Tracy Lien’s…thing about Tim Rogers’ ZiGGURAT. The attempt seems to me to be an attempt to create more diversity of voice among the writers, and I can’t say I have a problem with that. Because reviewers in general don’t seem to have distinct voices or points of view–it’s not something that’s really been encouraged in the community.

But that seems to fly in the face of one of the other changes, which is the addition of a three-tiered scale. All Kotaku reviews will now come with the label YES, for a must-purchase; NO, for a game you should never purchase (something Totilo doesn’t foresee many of them, because, gee, what is a bad game, after all, one man’s meat is another man’s poison, and, you know, yeah); and NOT YET, meaning wait till the price drops or it’s patched. That they feel the need to call this out from the meat of the review almost suggests that this will not feature in the review itself. Totlio states that this is a concession to readers who are “short on time and don’t have the patience for creative writing”.

I have a notoriously low tolerance for “creative writing” in game reviews–largely because so much of it is so bad–but I think this is a decision which undermines the attempt.

I might be oversimplifying, but what we generally call a “review” is one of two things–criticism, and buying guides. Criticism discusses the more theoretical implications of a game–its themes, its relation to its genre, its more interpretative elements–and buying guides tell us whether or not we should purchase it–is it entertaining, do the graphics look pretty, is it good to break out when you have friends over. Neither is better than the other, and often a review can feature the two in combination. But I think, in this case, in attempting to be both, Kotaku’s new reviews aren’t going to feature the benefits of either. I don’t think Totilo has assembled the talent or the audience in order to win over the Critique crowd, and the parts of its reviews that are not YES/NO/NOT YET aren’t going to be passed over by those just looking for whether or not to buy the game. The two reviews that are published under the new format–one of Final Fantasy XIII-2, by Mike Fahey, and one of Resident Evil: Revelations, by Totilo himself, are, in practice, more like long-winded product reviews that are trying too hard to be profound rather than anything particularly interesting.

Now, to be fair, I find the YES/NO/NOT YET system to be, in theory, a pretty good one, and maybe it’s a simple case of Kotaku’s writers needing to just get more familiar with the new style of reviews. But there are some curious things otherwise–such as the sidebar addition of made-up back-of-the-box quotes. This is a tweely cutesy, bizarre, and kind of stupid decision that seems less to give any useful information and more like…well, it just reminds me of being in grade school, when you’d draw your own covers for videogames you loved and you’d put made-up quotes in there, or when you’d pretend you were writing a review that got published in Nintendo Power. It feels extremely juvenile.

Perhaps the most controversial part of Totilo’s article is a tangent where he quotes Penny Arcade’s Mike Krahulik, commenting on Assassin’s Creed’s poor reception. The game was underrated not because of any flaws in it but simply because everyone who reviewed it was simply too busy to give it a proper try. Totilo agrees. As a result, Kotaku may delay some reviews. Now on principle, I’m fine with this. Some games genuinely do need some time to mull over. But there’s also a strangeness to that point–and the choice of Assassin’s Creed seems to hammer it home. I personally disliked Assassin’s Creed and couldn’t bring myself to finish it because of how boring it was–its missions were too repetitive, its conversations too long-winded, its plot too unfocused. That Totilo and Krahulik blame deadlines for the game’s poor reception rather than any flaws in the game–that almost implies that there is a definitive, objective opinion that one can arrive at.

Totilo mentions that reviews might be updated as opinions change or evolve–that with time, an opinion of a game may change and that the official review will be changed to reflect that. This I am against. Totilo is vague about it, but it seems that instead of publishing future reviews, the original review will be updated to match the reviewer’s changed opinion. If that’s where this is going, then I’m not crazy about this idea. I think it would be far more useful and interesting to write a completely new article explaining the reasons for the opinion change, rather than pretending that’s what they were thinking all along.

I think that Totilo’s heart is in the right place here, and I recognize that these ideas will evolve as writers and readers get better used to the limitations and benefits of the new format. But I think the whole thing sounds very half-baked. Reviews have never been Kotaku’s focus–it concentrates on news and issues (tangentially) related to videogame culture; its reviews have always come across as more of an afterthought, of something else to read while you’re there. Maybe these changes are Totilo’s way of getting the reviews to be more prominent. But without a clear focus, I don’t know if that’s going to happen. I think it’s just going to annoy the TL;DR crowd, and the heavy criticism crowd doesn’t like Kotaku anyway.

I’m advocating…the analysis of narrative using more critical language. Goodness claims that I’m veering too far into the land of optimism, calling my piece “a masterpiece of complacency,” but I would argue quite the opposite. My point is that we should be fighting for harsher criticism than “this is good” or “this is bad.” Those are not the questions we should be asking.

Schreier then goes on to suggest some possible questions–such as how the setting and theme reflect each other, how the game integrates interactivity into its story sequences, how well character motivations are drawn–that critics and reviewers can ask when evaluating a game’s narrative. These questions, and others like them, offer a good starting point for how to begin to develop deeper criticism of games.

Schreier is calling, ultimately, for a more qualified criticism, and I agree with him. The purpose of reviews vs. criticism is too complex of a subject to get into here, but I often get the sense that reviews lean towards absolutes. That’s what readers seem to want–on some sites, any opinion the reader disagrees with gets called out as bias, along with an exhortation for the writer to be more “objective”. The very concept of scoring games is itself a problem. We may want deeper and more insightful criticism, but we’re only paying lip service to that concept if we then distill the review into a number at the end.

Because that evaluative number ends up becoming the focal point. It–and maybe two representative sentences–becomes what people see on Metacritic. It–and not the reasons behind it–becomes the insult discussed on forums. Score numbers imply objectivity, that you can make that blanket statement about whether or not a game sucks–after all, a game that’s scored a 5 sucks compared to a perfect 10, does it not?

I hated The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, but I was more dismayed by the fact that most of the reviews I read of the game were so content-free. They spoke in absolutes–praised the game without saying much more than, “Welp, it’s a Zelda game, and those are always awesome.” That they were praising the game–and its storyline–as unqualifiedly Good was alienating–instead of pointing out something I missed, the reviews simply made me feel like I was missing some kind of in-joke. Michael Abbot’s post, “To dream again” was a much more interesting take–he evalutated the game’s appeal to a die-hard Zelda fan. While it didn’t change my opinion of the game, it helped me to at least understand why someone would enjoy playing it.

And his piece does not score the game. What kind of score could you even give? He explicitly states that the game is “Not the best game and certainly not the most innovative, but nevertheless the game that delighted me more than any other.” If you’re looking at the game in isolation, you almost have to give it a low score–but that ignores the Zelda fan who’s playing the newest installment of a series which never fails to speak to them. If you talk about the game as one which soothes your “yearn[ing] for the next great adventure,” then you might give it a perfect score–but that ignores those who simply don’t enjoy the Zelda experience. And so we can only engage with the critique–and that critique is able to be much more nuanced than it would if it were looking at a game as if it were–in Schreier’s terms–”a phone or a set of steak knives”.

So in that regard I agree–as critics, we can’t just go for a simple thumbs up or thumbs down. We should strive towards a more nuanced analysis. At the same time, criticism should have an evaluative element to it. As long as we’re able to explain our opinion, I think it’s perfectly reasonable for a critic to say that a game’s story sucks.

As critics, one of our jobs is to examine a work, applying our knowledge of the medium, and to place a judgment on the work in question. If we are faced with a story-heavy game, we must examine this storyline, determine whether or not the story serves its purpose, whether it overwhelms the gameplay, whether or not that’s a bad thing–we must make these judgments on the game’s narrative.

It’s in light of this that I take issue with Jason Schreier’s “Your Story Sucks“, in which he compels us not to make blanket judgments on a game’s storyline, partially because we must add qualifiers, but also because some people might like it. He’s specifically talking about people who throw out an unqualified “This game’s story sucks”, which I can appreciate–but it seems just as much like Schreier thinks a game’s storyline is ungradeable. “It’s too easy to act like stories can be measured on a scale from 1-10,” Schreier states. While I have major problems with scoring games in general–I don’t think an evaluation should be distilled into a number–in a very real way, we must metaphorically place our opinion of a game’s narrative on a scale. A critic can have an opinion based on bad faith–dismissing Mass Effect 2′s storyline because of a personal distaste for space opera, for example–but a justified opinion is what we come to critics for.

Schreier seems to think that trashing the plot of a JRPG is akin to “belittl[ing] the people who can empathize with love or revenge or betrayal….” I disagree with this interpretation because I believe it misinterprets the purpose of criticism. To adapt a maxim of Roger Ebert’s, it’s not what a videogame is about, but how it’s about it. In other words, a game can be about love and revenge and betrayal and you can like or dislike the game based on whether or not you connect to these themes, but we must evaluate. Final Fantasy XIII‘s storyline was bad not because of its subject matter but because its worldbuilding was faulty, its characters irritating, and its plot full of holes and rushed bits.

I find a lot of critics have a difficult time separating content from style. To The Moon might have a well-crafted storyline, but the focal characters are such insufferable patchworks of memes and tics and poorly-wrought dialogue that I find myself alienated from them. Dragon Age 2 may have some excellently-drawn supporting characters, but the plot they find themselves in doesn’t add up to much and actively seems to downplay player choices. Dead Space 2 has some scary setpieces, but its insistence on overconvoluting the plot, plus its complete lack of interest in its own setting, leaves the game feeling very slight. Metroid: Other M, a game which controls beautifully and is filled with meaningful, challenging combat, is constantly interrupted for a condescending, frayed storyline which may or may not be seriously misogynistic.

“Stories are not good. Nor are they bad. They’re just stories,” Schreier concludes, and I could not disagree more. There’s a weird sort of servile tone to his article, as he clucks his tongue at his fellow critics who dare to find fault with storylines. Why, people might like the stories of games you don’t like, and imagine how they must feel.

Look, I know the culture we’re in–videogame geekery is full of pissing matches and fanboyism, and it’s extremely common for people to make childish blanket statements about how something is bad and I don’t like the look and taste of it and therefore I don’t want to eat it so there. But I think Schreier leans too far in the other direction. It’s a masterpiece of complacency. Because we must admit that the majority of videogame storylines barely rise past the level of pulp. And certainly there are enough books and movies out there that are just prolefeed schlock, and there are many videogames which do achieve the status of Art. But books and films are better systems for delivering narrative than videogames are. Many developers are lazy and present their storyline by briefly turning into a book or a film, and those books and films aren’t often that great–and take the player out of the activity of play, an activity that they sought out by turning on their console. If the story overwhelms the gameplay, and isn’t all that good to begin with, I, as a critic, am perfectly comfortable saying that said story sucks.

Normally we have a fairly loose policy on spoilers here–all of my articles are written with the assumption that you’ve played the game in question and that you’re looking for some after-the-fact critical analysis. Given that this article is being written for Critical Distance’s Blogs of the Round Table–and will therefore reach outside of our normal audience–as well as the fact that the game under discussion has some particularly notable narrative pleasures if played unspoiled, I’m going to warn you. If you’ve never played Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, go and do so before reading. Trust me, even if you’re not a horror game fan, if you have even the slightest interest in games as a narrative medium, you want to play this game

My relationship to drugs and alcohol is, quite frankly, none of your fucking business, but the first time I played Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, I got the ending which revealed that Harry’s divorce was a result of his alcoholism. Shattered Memories isn’t unusual in that it tracks your decisions and actions throughout the game and then assigns you an ending based on that; and while it does so to a more elaborate degree than many games do, it’s not the first game to alter cutscenes or entire levels based on player choice. But it is unusual in how explicitly it discourages role-playing. From the very first moment, we’re told that the game is going to psychologically profile us, that we’re supposed to answer any questions it asks us honestly. The very first thing we’re tasked with doing in-game is the completion of a survey with such questions as “Having a drink helps me relax” and “I have enjoyed role-play during sex.”

I’ve written in detail about Shattered Memories before. I believe that most of the reason for the game’s poor reception, besides the fact that it’s a waggly Wii game, is due to fan myopia and a refusal to accept anything resembling change. But I’ve been pondering the question since I first played the game, and now I’m beginning to think it’s something slightly deeper. The game is a horror game not so much because it features scary monsters that jump out at you–although there are plenty of those. It’s terrifying because it’s based around a more sophisticated, more existential horror–the horror of the realization that the world does not center around you. That there are others out there that are affected by your actions.

Somehow, I think the traditional gamer is not at a stage of development where they’re able to deal with that revelation.

Shattered Memories’s biggest and best trick is one of misdirection–it’s one of the only games I can think of, outside perhaps of interactive fiction, with a second-person narrative voice. The game is divided into two distinct sections–a first-person section where you’re in a psychiatrist’s office answering personal questions; and a third-person section, one which takes up the bulk of the game, where you play a reimagining of the original Silent Hill story: Harry Mason travels through a hellish town in order to find his daughter Cheryl. Through a series of elisions and ambiguous remarks–both in-game and in developer interviews and promotional materials around the time of the game’s release–the player is led to believe that we’re playing Harry the entire time. That Harry went to Silent Hill, had this horrifying adventure, and is now at a therapist to deal with the resulting trauma.

The truth is far more subtle than that. In the endgame, Harry makes his way to the lighthouse–where he’s been told his daughter is–and finds himself in the psychiatrist’s office. The camera swings around, and shows us that it’s not Harry on the analyist’s couch–it’s Cheryl, not the little girl we’ve been looking for the entire time but a young, troubled woman. When she was a child, Harry and his wife divorced–the reasons vary, depending on your choices, from alcoholism to serial adultery to simply two people falling out of love–and shortly afterwards, Harry was killed in a car crash. This inability to deal with the loss of her father is a trauma that Cheryl has been unable to deal with, and the therapy is an attempt to get her to finally begin to heal.

Whether Harry’s journey through Silent Hill is “real” or not is very deliberately left open to interpretation–I prefer the interpretation that the entire game is an allegorization of the process of psychoanalysis, but there are plenty of people who think there’s something literally supernatural going on–but a few things are clear. Harry’s character flaws, the ones which led to his divorce, are not pre-existing but are rather developed through the choices we make as players. If Harry is an alcoholic, it’s because we steered him into that direction. More importantly, if we’re playing honestly and playing as ourselves, Harry’s flaws are reflections, exaggerations, and distortions of our own flaws. The game provides a minefield of vices for us to choose from and not only characterizes Harry based on them, it shows us, in Cheryl, how much these flaws can hurt other people. The game isn’t scary because of the things that go bump in the night, it’s scary because it forces us to empathize with other people.

I will point out that the game stresses that people aren’t monsters. One of the game’s major themes is that while our traumas and flaws are damaging, awareness of them is a major step towards healing. It doesn’t even entertain the thought that its characters are irredeemable, and I think it might not even acknowledge the existence of Evil. (A major break with the rest of the series!) Its concept of empathy is a tough one: Just as Harry must acknowledge that his actions hurt his daughter, his daughter can only take her first steps towards being Okay by recognizing that her father was a victim of his own demons.

This is a far cry from the Sephiroth school of villain design, which creates monster antagonists that have a dimension of likeability from the fact that they’re either misguided or too extremist or too traumatized by their pasts or simply too cool to completely hate. Because no matter what, we’re never required to identify with Sephiroth. We may understand him, we may think he’s a total badass, we may draw pictures of him in our notebooks, but at the end of the day, we’re still fully on the side of AVALANCHE, and Sephiroth must be destroyed. Shattered Memories is an uncomfortable game because of how completely it divorces itself from conventional videogame conflict dynamics. If we do not consider every character in the game worthy of redemption, empathy, and love, then there is something lacking in us.

There’s a more direct way that Shattered Memories allows us to play someone other than ourselves, and that’s through more traditional role-playing. While replaying the game to research this article, I decided to go for the sexy ending–the one where Harry’s divorce was precipitated by hot, hot three-way sex with women other than his wife. I picked this ending partially arbitrarily and partially because it was the least likely ending for me to get, uninterested as I am in naked ladies.

And so, I looked up a guide to learn the decisions and actions which would skew me towards the sex ending. Largely, this involves telling the psychiatrist that I’ve cheated, staring at women’s chests, and looking at the sexy posters throughout the game. I did everything the guide said to do; for other decisions, I made either whatever choice seemed natural, or did the opposite of what I did in the first playthrough. And there were a few genuinely odd moments. Early on, for example, when Harry is first looking for his daughter, panicked and terrified, there’s some graffiti in a bathroom detailing what a young woman named Cammy did to several guys (or, more accurately, what several guys did to Cammy). Looking at the graffiti prompts Harry to say, lustily, “Hmmm…Cammy…” with a tone that sounds kind of like he’s licking his lips at the thought. And immediately this–well let’s say I had a very strange reaction. What are you doing? I practically shouted at the screen. Your daughter is missing, Cammy is probably half your age, and you’re thinking about how you wish you were there for the act described–what are you, some kind of perve–

Oh, right.

And with that, Shattered Memories gave me a very weird, disturbing little glimpse of what sex addiction feels like. What was interesting was that I didn’t have as much cognitive dissonance during the first, alcoholic playthrough. Because it would be completely natural that Harry would want a drink. He’s in an ice-cold hell, his daughter is missing, no one seems to know who he is, and nothing is making any sense–of course he’d want something to take the edge off.

But a funny thing happened when I beat the game this time. Because even though I was making the sexy choices, apparently the other choices I made qualified Harry to still be a drunk. Maybe I’m so uninterested in girlie mags that I have a blind spot to them, or that I forget to look at women’s chests unless I’m constantly reminding myself to. Either way it’s strange the ways that we fall into the same patterns of behavior.

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is a scary game because it confronts us with the horror of the existence of others affected by our actions. But it’s also scary in another way: It just might confront us with those actions themselves.

This article was written for Critical Distance’s Blogs of the Round Table for January. For more articles on January’s theme of “Being Other”, visit their site, or select from the drop-down list below.

I’ve just been made aware of the upcoming site Medium Difficulty, a site which will be “centred around criticism and innovative writing about games”. I’ve seen more attempted sites like this than I can count at this point. There is a growing movement of people who wish for writing about games to be smarter–that’s one of the stated goals of Second Quest, and I applaud Medium Difficulty’s ambitions. But reading their submission guidelines–as of the time of this writing, the only published information on the site–I can’t help but see some issues which are emblematic of some of the issues plaguing game criticism as a whole. It’s falling into the same exact trap that critics often fall into–that gambler’s fallacy where one thinks that this time’ll be the winner. That we continue doing things the old way without realizing that the entire approach is flawed.

If you want to write about videogames, there are two major routes you can take–you can either go the journalism route or the academic route. A third category, one which straddles the two, is being created: That of the critic. Unlike a journalist, a critic is not required to be objective–in fact, the critic’s job is to use his or her experience and knowledge in order to guide interpretation. Rather than the simple product reviews that traditional games journalists write, a critic should be looking at games in relation to the larger culture, or to the medium as a whole. And unlike academics, a critic should not be speaking into an echo chamber of other critics–a critic should speak to the game’s audience.

There is a legitimate need for the role of the critic in the videogame community. Unfortunately, sites like Medium Difficulty and its ilk seem to misunderstand the role. One of the first sites that Medium Difficulty cites as an influence is Insert Credit. The most notable Insert Credit writer is Tim Rogers, and he and the site are considered extremely influential in the New Games Journalism movement.

In my opinion, New Games Journalism is the single worst thing to happen to games writing.

In theory, New Games Journalism was an attempt to advance writing about videogames from simple pulp product reviews to something more emotionally resonant. Many of the articles spend a lot of time talking about how playing a game feels, about the emotions a game stirs up when played, about the events which happened in the writer’s life when he first played the game. In practice, it’s extremely uncomfortable to read most of the articles associated with the movement, given that many of them are oversharing little rants which have more in common with a sensitive teenager’s diary than with anything resembling legitimate writing.

But my problems with New Game Journalism go beyond the simple fact that I genuinely do not care about the personal lives of videogame writers. The movement gets the purpose of the critic completely wrong. Rather than guiding readers towards an interpretation, New Games Journalism foregrounds the writer, sometimes to the degree that the games become almost incidental. I may have used Link’s Awakening as a way of coping with an illness in my family when I was 10, but not only is that story uninteresting to a reader who’s here to read about Zelda, it’s not an appropriate story for me to share with strangers. It’s too personal. New Games Journalism not only does not recognize Too Much Information, it’s a kind of a condescending little bait and switch: If we want to be edified by your insights, we’ve got to act as your therapist and give you some kind of emotional catharsis by acting as your therapist.

Other than listing a couple of other sites it takes influence from, Medium Difficult spends more time telling us what it does not want from us. Don’t use “unnecessary game references”. Don’t “declare” the fact that you play games. Don’t address the work specifically to hardcore gamers. They don’t tell us what they want to do, other than a vague implication of wanting to do something better.

I’m also genuinely offended at the way their simultaneous submission policy is worded–a simple “Don’t do it”. Medium Difficulty is coming out of nowhere, it does not have any names attached to it, it does not pay authors, it does not list a timeframe for how long it will take to consider submissions–all of this and it expects us to write exclusively for it! When we don’t know what the voice of the publication is! Its sentiment is offensive enough–that it’s written in such a snarky, dismissive tone makes it very easy for me to avoid sending them any simultaneous submissions.

New Games Journalism made its mark less because it has anything remotely worthwhile to offer and more because there’s not much out there that’s better. And superficially, its writings are attractive. It’s something certainly more vibrant than generic previews and reviews, and it’s not as daunting as pure academic writing. But it cannot further criticism because it does not understand criticism. And I do not see that understanding in Medium Difficulty, just as I did not see it in Games?, just as I will not see it in the next site to attempt to Fix This Thing We Call Game Criticism. Because we can’t solve the problem by creating another tiny site. Because we can’t keep up the echo chamber.

Game criticism has a lot in common with academic conferences. We are keeping with the model where someone presents their idea in a logical and well-organized manner, where people politely listen, and if the writer is lucky, someone approaches them afterwards for restrained and courteous light discussion. It is writers talking to each other and only sort of listening. Analysis does not filter down to the intended audience of the works–unless the works are specifically designed for an audience of critics.

By following this model, nothing will change. Games won’t become better because gamers will not realize that better games can be made. Gaming websites will stay the same because there won’t be a need for anything more than shoddily-cobbled-together product reviews and rewrites of press releases. A site will appear, will enjoy some popularity, and will disband, affecting nothing. That’s not because people don’t want smarter writing about games or because the writers aren’t talented, necessarily–it’s because the mission is never clear. Medium Difficulty is trying to be Yet Another Gaming Site. Time and time again we’ve seen that isn’t what’s going to fix the problem. If we want games writing to be better, we’re going to have to change our approach.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is probably the most incompetently awful game to come out in 2011, at least that I’ve played. It’s an ugly, boring slog through joyless puzzle solving and condescending handholding, all controlled through aimless Wiimote flailing which left my wrists aching and in pain. Skyward Sword is a terrible game made by a company which has refused to recognize that there have been any advancements in game design philosophy over the past 10-15 years, which doesn’t understand what audience it’s making games for anymore, and which is too busy resting on its laurels to care about making a quality product.

It’s also a game which, as of the time of this writing, has a 93 on Metacritic, has gotten near-universal praise from all of the mainstream sites, has gotten critics I respect saying it’s the best Zelda game since Ocarina of Time–many of whom said the same thing about Twilight Princess, incidentally–has received massive fan adoration. The site Venture Beat briefly achieved some fame a few weeks ago by publishing Sebastian Haley’s extremely negative review of the game. Its comments section was filled with accusations of writing the review solely to gain attention, snipes at how Haley isn’t a “true Zelda fan”, whatever that means, and jabs at the writer’s inability to be objective, because obviously Skyward Sword is certainly the best game ever made and how dare anyone ever think otherwise. Ben Croshaw wrote a typically scathing video and review, but other than that, I haven’t seen any other reviews which unequivocally state that the game is flat-out bad . (Tom McShea’s Gamestop review is probably the most mainstream negative review of the game I’ve seen. He was blasted for giving the game a 7.5 based largely on poor controls and the game’s sluggish beginning–and was more or less positive about things such as the dungeon design.)

And I’d be willing to consider the three of us–Croshaw, Haley, and myself–to be the inevitable outliers, people who have a specific agenda who are giving the game a negative review for some other reason. Croshaw built his reputation on snarky takedowns of videogames; Haley did receive a lot of attention for publishing one of the first unequivocally negative reviews of the game; I tend to hold games to an extremely high standard and am dismissive of any that don’t hit it. If the positive reviews of the game had some good points, I’d be willing to simply say that Skyward Sword isn’t for me and move on. But I haven’t read any positive reviews which tell me why I should be liking the game. There’s some handwaving about how the game is THE BEST ZELDA GAME SINCE OCARINA OF TIME and how YOU REALLY FEEL AN EMOTIONAL CONNECTION TO THESE CHARACTERS and how THE GAME LOOKS SO BEAUTIFUL and that’s about it.

That phrase, “best Zelda game since Ocarina of Time” comes up a lot, both in reviews and in general discussion about the series, and as a matter of fact I think it’s the key to this whole thing. Ocarina of Time came out in 1998 and is considered, by many critics, to be one of the finest games of all time. Even if you’re not a fan, it’s undeniably a historically-significant game. Much as Mario 64 did two years previously, Ocarina of Time refined the grammar of games in a 3D space. Where many franchises struggled with the transition from 2D to 3D, Ocarina of Time is generally considered to be not only true to the Zelda franchise’s concept, but also enough of a change to feel like a fresh, new experience.

The problem is that Ocarina of Time was the game which canonized the series, which gave it a significance no other series seems to have. More than Mario, more than Metroid, more than Final Fantasy–The Legend of Zelda has a sacred cow status as a direct result of the reputation of Ocarina of Time. You simply can’t insult it: It’s too precious to its fans. Look no further than Jeff Gerstmann’s infamous Twilight Princess review, which was largely positive, critiqued its similarities to Ocarina of Time, and scored the game an 8.8 out of 10. Such a “low” score was seen as pretty controversial, and even though his review came out before the game was available to the general public, internet flames immediately began going back and forth savaging Gerstmann for dating to find fault. The implication is that it’s impossible to pan a Zelda game without panning Zelda Games–that is, without panning Ocarina of Time.

And so we get the impression of the Hardcore Zelda Fan as one who is so entranced by the series as to not find any fault with it. All he or she wants is some dungeon puzzles, an even-more-involved retelling of the basic Zelda myth, in-joke references to earlier games in the franchise, calls forward to bits of plot that’ll happen later on–they want the same they’ve always had, except moreso. And Skyward Delivers this in spades. You can play a drinking game for every moment that the game all but mugs to you and says, “Eh? Eh? He just said ‘It’s a secret to everybody.’ Remember that classic Zelda moment? Wait, you’re never gonna believe this: Zelda’s father is named Gaepora–I KNOW! Wait till you see what we’re doing with the Master Sword!” The game is so cynically designed for fans to like it. It’s that secret club mentality–the density of references seems to almost be a series of shibboleths designed to separate the True Fans from everybody else.

It is because they are receiving what they want–Another Zelda Game–that these True Fans will overlook things such as the poor motion controls, the sluggish and poorly-written cutscenes, the repetitive dungeon design, the padding. In 1998, Ocarina of Time was considered fairly state-of-the-art, but much of it–its terrible camera controls, its empty and dull open world, its long and poorly-written cutscenes–comes off as dated, especially when the 13 years since its release have seen many games which experimented with refinements to all of those things and more. As a critic, I can look at Ocarina of Time and recognize areas where it can improve–but then I’m not one of those who considers it a masterpiece. If you do think Ocarina of Time is a perfect game, then you don’t see the flaws. Instead of recognizing that Ocarina of Time might have been excellent for its time and that it’s outdated in many ways, you begin to judge every other Zelda game in relation to how similar it is to Ocarina of Time. The series becomes a sort of echo chamber of fidelity to a game growing increasingly older and clumsier.

Skyward Sword felt like a waste of my time and money from its opening moments. I hated everything about it: How it places the player in a headlock while its insultingly bad storyline babbles at you. How it thinks telling us that Zelda is Link’s best friend and how much we love her is a substitute for actual character development. How its controls are made up of so much clumsy flailing. How it forces us to repeatedly fly through a vast, bleak, empty, uninteresting sky. How it pads itself with obnoxious fetch quests. How it has a character pop out every few minutes to explain exactly what to do, lest we have to go through the pain of thinking. How it repeatedly describes what the trinkets you collect are, even after you’ve collected twenty of them. Simply put, how it does nothing interesting, fun, or edifying in any way–and yet expects us to sit back and take it, and with a smile on our faces. It’s the ultimate in complacent games. It is a game full of mistakes and flaws and outdated design decisions–ones which should be obvious to anyone who knows the first thing about videogames–and yet, because Zelda has always been this way there’s no need or reason to change it.

I don’t know why the critics loved this game. I don’t know why it was reviewed like it was an actual, real game and not simply a masturbatory exercise in fanboyism. I don’t understand the love for the storyline (the poorly-written, clichéd storyline!), the characters (the one-dimensional, irritating characters!), the motion controls (the awkward, pointless motion controls!), the level design (the uninteresting, unmemorable level design!)–I don’t understand why the videogame community as a whole did not take a look at Skyward Sword, look at Nintendo, look back at Skyward Sword, and then finally throw it back, screaming, Are you fucking kidding me?

Because Skyward Sword is a terrible game! And maybe that’s why all of the positive reviews are so formless, why they don’t have many real reasons to score the game so highly. I genuinely think that anything resembling even tolerance for Skyward Sword is simply a combination of nostalgia for Ocarina of Time and a recognition of the series’ holier-than-thou status.

But you know what? It almost doesn’t matter that Skyward Sword is terrible. It is criticism-proof. All it needs to be is THE BEST ZELDA GAME SINCE OCARINA OF TIME and that’s enough to give it a perfect score. Because the game is designed for fans who do not demand more. For people who just want to see Link and Zelda in another adventure and don’t really care about the quality. So what’s the point to critique? The moment anyone dares to point out any flaws in it, they can be countered with a simple, Well, the game just isn’t for you. A food critic can go to a McDonald’s, point out the low quality of the meat, the flaws in the service, the lackluster presentation of the food–but at the end of the day, it’s going to make more money than the little bistro down the street. People don’t go to McDonald’s because they want a good meal–they just want something quick and cheap.

If there is a problem with videogame criticism, it is this: Our critics, the people who are paid to be educated about videogames, to have the knowledge to judge what is good or bad about a game, to evaluate these games’ merits–these people are not only telling us that a Big Mac is haute cuisine, they are so unsophisticated that they might actually believe that this is the case.

Eric’s list:

Cities in Motion

This won’t top anyone’s best-of lists, and in fact, you may not have even heard of it, but this public transport simulator was my most-played game of the year (currently 90 hours to Skyrim’s 60). The player takes control of a public transport company in a variety of European cities, designing bus and tram routes, constructing metro systems, and trying to keep traffic at bay. It’s a game with a very specific audience, but if you’re in that audience, you will absolutely get lost in it.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

One of the more daring games of the year, it’s an unapologetically old-school PC game in an era of designed-for-the-consoles. Strong writing and characterization combined with a fun but nearly nonsensical plot, but who cares about that? It’s super-powered James Bond, which was exactly what I needed this summer.

Dragon Age 2

Any Bioware game is going to have high expectations attached to it, and this game, a sequel to a “dark fantasy” RPG with a rabid fanbase, was going to be no exception. Bioware failed. The game is mostly incompetent, and when it’s not it’s strangely lifeless. The gameplay is generally atrocious, and worse, unimaginative. The writing, something Bioware is rightly lauded for, comes across as half-assed. I like interesting failures, but this is just a failure.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

One of the most puzzling games of the year. What is it, exactly? An open-world RPG? A narrative game with a strong focus on quest completion? A blacksmithing simulator? Really, Skyrim is whatever you want it to be, which is its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. It’s beautiful, compelling, engaging…maddening, boring, and lazy. In effect, it’s a videogame simulator. I don’t think this type of game will be made in 20 years.

Ghost Trick

I had high expectations surrounding this game, the follow-up to Shu Takumi’s Ace Attorney series, and they were met, and more. The art design, direction, writing, characterization, and gameplay are perfectly married, and the narrative and gameplay are directly linked and feed off of each other in the way that only videogames can. The action the player takes, and the path of the narrative, are strictly delinated, but the sense that you as the player are making all this happen never falters. Some of the puzzles can be a bit esoteric, but that’s a small complaint. The best game of the year.

Gray Matter

In a better and more just world, the release of this game would have been treated to lavish coverage. Instead, it was dumped onto the market in a back-alley deal with no publicity and no fanfare. A very old-fashioned game, it’s extremely well-written with engaging characters and a fantastic plot. The gameplay isn’t anything that will set the world on fire and the puzzles, by the standards of this very specific genre, are kind of shockingly easy, but I treasured every moment of it. I just hope it doesn’t take Jensen another twelve years to write a game.

LA Noire

When the best thing you can say about a game is “it has writing that can measure up to workmanlike film noir” you know you’re being charitable. LA Noire is one of those games that really makes me remember how defensive many gamers still are about the medium. It’s technical achievements are truly remarkable–I think that will be the game’s legacy–but as a game and as a piece of narrative fiction (for the two are completely separate, let’s face it) it fails almost completely. One of the worst and yet most interesting games of the year.

Portal 2

Following up on Portal would be a tough act for anyone, and it took Valve a while to get this game out. It’s really a super-sized Portal, with new mechanics, new characters, and an explicit narrative. This makes the game weaker than the original, slightly less enjoyable… and still one of the better games of the year. It’s like Ghostbusters II–pretty good, but an example of the adage that you can’t catch lightning in a bottle twice.

You Don’t Know Jack

In a lot of ways 2011 explored game genres and styles that fell out of favor years ago, and You Don’t Know Jack might be the perfect encapsulation of that trend. It’s the newest entry in a trivia game series last popular during the Clinton administration whose hook is a sarcastic emcee named Cookie and in which players are encouraged to “screw” each other while answering questions in categories like “Who’s the Dummy” and “Nocturnal Admissions with Cookie Masterson” (it’s that kind of game.) The new version is virtually unchanged from the prior incarnations of the late 1990s, and it’s still a ton of fun. Let’s just hope that full-motion video CD-ROM games stay dead.

Richard’s list:

Arkham City

Less a videogame than a pile of Batman-related activities, Arkham City is a lot of fun to play. It’s well-acted and competently-written, its objectives are varied and fun–it’s just a solid good time. A lot of the game does not hold up to analysis after the fact, and it’s not going to go down in history as one of the most memorable games of all time–but it doesn’t need to be. From time to time you just want to suit up and pretend to be a superhero. Arkham City lets you do just that.

Catherine

I’m still having trouble figuring Catherine out. It’s got a fine storyline that treads themes that videogames don’t normally cover, excellent graphics, well-drawn anime sequences, and some difficult puzzle solving. If you like interactive movies and sliding block puzzles, this game is good at being both. However, the block puzzles are a little too difficult–I ended up giving up about two levels before the end just because I couldn’t do it–and it’s a game you watch more than play. Still, it stands out from the other games that came out this year, and I’d say it’s worth a go.

Dark Souls

Unlike many games which treat their players as if they have sub-average intelligence, Dark Souls is the rare game that realizes that you’ve been playing videogames for 20-25 years and adjusts itself accordingly. The game features no map, no real tutorials other than some brief mentions of what a few buttons do, no real explanations of half of its mechanics. You’ve got to figure all of that out on your own. And you’ve got to do that while fighting through combat so difficult that, if you’re not paying attention the whole time, even minor enemies can outright slaughter you. But it’s given me some of the greatest pleasures this year. Realizing how the map is interconnected–finally figuring out how to beat an enemy who has given you trouble for hours–getting a rare treasure–everything you manage to accomplish is such a challenge that it’s an extremely rewarding game.

Dead Space 2

Sure, Dead Space 2 had some scary moments and some wonderful setpieces, but it’s so much of a lesser game than its predecessor. Dead Space 2 makes some extremely poor decisions–making the game more about its plot, voicing the main character, changing the environment from a detailed setting to a series of corridors. Still, its opening hours are some of the most intense I’ve played through this year.

Dragon Age 2

Dragon Age 2 was a major disappointment. It could have gone the high road–told an interesting story, given a deep examination of a single protagonist’s role in a political turmoil, given the player a series of meaningful moral choices–and instead it came off as an adolescent tits-and-blood fantasy where nothing you did really mattered and ended up having the audacity to reveal itself to be a simple prologue in the end. Its understanding of Reward meant that I played the game for several weeks, doing more or less every quest available to me, but I can’t help but regret that I didn’t get to play the sophisticated, intelligent game that was lost in the shuffle in Mike Laidlaw’s attempt to get a good metascore.

From Dust

It’s nice to see Eric Chahi working again! Chahi is best known for Out Of This World and several other “cinematic platformers” such as Heart of Darkness and Flashback. Unfortunately, From Dust is a Populus-esque puzzle game based on terraforming. On the one hand, the game has some interesting concepts, and it’s really pretty to look at–on the other hand, while I admire his willingness to experiment, Chahi is not playing to his strengths. Still–worth a download.

Ghost Trick

I’ve been down on story in games lately–I’m getting to the point where an excessive focus on story ends up souring my opinion on my game. Ghost Trick demonstrates that this might simply be because most videogame stories are terrible. Ghost Trick’s plot is VERY carefully wrought–what starts off as a simple mystery ends up getting more and more convoluted by the chapter, until the end when every single element falls into place. We’re left with a genuinely touching and involving story that’s helped by the game’s excellent character work. I enjoyed the game’s puzzles, but I know many people found them difficult. Feel free to use a walkthrough if you need to–the story is worth it.

Gray Matter

I’m of two minds about this game. It’s really great to see Jane Jensen designing an honest-to-Goodness adventure game, the kind I used to love to play in middle school. Most of the puzzles are logical and integrated into the story, and it’s got an interesting mystery plot. However, the final major area is extremely tedious–I used a walkthrough–and the last couple chapters of the game feel very rushed in a “we ran out of money” sense. It’s a shame–adventure gaming used to be so popular, and now it’s just a tiny niche.

LA Noire

I guess LA Noire features realistically-rendered people in a well-researched recreation of 1940s Los Angeles. It’s just the entire game feels so soulless. The game makes some extremely poor decisions, especially towards the end. It’s one of those games that gets tired of its own existence hours before the story wants to give up, and so you’ve got all of these slapped-together cutscenes and these rushed action sequences. LA Noire fails because it’s one of those 10-hour movies that justifies its running time by clinging onto some mediocre gameplay.

Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

Many people will tell you that Skyward Sword is one of the best games of 2011. That it’s a beautiful game that controls accurately and has emotional depth. These people are wrong. Skyward Sword is an awful, clumsy, ugly mess. As far as I’m concerned, Skyward Sword is the worst game I played this year.

Lost in Shadow

Lost in Shadow should have been a lot better than it was. Its central gimmick–instead of jumping on platforms, you jump on the shadows those platforms cast–is fairly interesting, but there’s a lot more they could have done with it, and after a while it just feels kind of tedious and sloggy. Its aesthetic is also directly ripped off from ICO, which just made me wish I was playing that instead.

Okamiden

Okami was a beautiful game with an interesting central mechanic. It was definitely an unabashed ripoff of the Zelda series, but its charm carried it a lot. Somehow, Okamiden is a lot less charming. It’s one of those games which holds your hand through its entirety, telling you exactly what to do to solve each puzzle. I don’t feel like I actually played any of it.

Pokemon Black

Pokemon came out when I was a sophomore in high school and uninterested games of that type. This entire Pokemon culture, the memes and imagery, has developed completely outside of my notice. Playing Pokemon Black, I felt like I was missing something–the game never really clicked for me. I’m not sure if this is just not my type of game–I don’t like monster collection mechanics–or if it’s something you just had to be there for since the beginning.

Portal 2

Portal was a scruffy game that kinda blindsided everyone–no one expected it to be as good as it was. Portal 2, while a fine, funny, beautiful, challenging game, somehow loses something in the expansion. It’s like when an indie releases its major label debut. Yeah, the budget is higher, it’s more polished and expansive, but somehow the same heart just isn’t quite there. Part of Portal’s charm is its eerie sense of mystery. In fleshing out the world of Aperture Science, Portal 2 ends up somehow feeling smaller.

Rock of Ages

Rock of Ages is made by the same studio that made Zeno Clash, a game with brilliant ideas and art direction that was hampered mostly because the studio is tiny and doesn’t have a high budget. I bought Rock of Ages largely to give the studio a few bucks, but I’m glad I did. It’s one of those really weird games that doesn’t play like anything else, and it’s absolutely hilarious. Not only are the between-level cutscenes funny, the actual gameplay–rolling a rock downhill in order to smash your opponent’s fortress–is done so absurdly that it’s worth a play. It gets a little too hard around the halfway point, which is why I stopped, but it’s cheap, so pick it up.

Tiny Tower

I got into Tiny Tower while I was laid up on crutches. It’s a maddeningly simple game, and yet for whatever reason it hit a specific addiction center in my brain. I obsessively built up my tower, checking it every couple of minutes in order to add more stores or stock products. I can’t say it’s fun, partially because it’s so simple, but I sunk a lot of time into it. I’d say it did what it intended to do.

You Don’t Know Jack

You Don’t Know Jack is always a great time when you want to hang out and play a trivia game with your friends. Eric and I had a lot of fun with this one, and there were more than a few questions that we had to pause the game during because we were laughing so hard. It’s nothing more than a simple quiz show game, but it’s a very well-done one.

Surprisingly, the 1k Heartless Battle, as it’s called, is one of the most memorable levels in the game. Partially, that’s because of its novelty, but mostly it’s because the level is genuinely fun. The level is fairly influential: While certain games have always thrown piles of enemies on the player, Kingdom Hearts 2 inspired developers to increase the amount of those piles to increasingly large sizes.

I’m in the last stages of Skyward Sword, and they’ve just pulled this exact same trick. And it’s a terrible level in the middle of a game FILLED with terrible levels. While Kingdom Hearts 2 has aged poorly, Skyward Sword feels outdated from its first few moments. I’ll be going into that in more detail when I review the game, but this one level can highlight a few basic things that Skyward Sword gets consistently wrong.

Combat in Kingdom Hearts 2 feels extremely fluid, especially for its time and especially for its genre—Action RPGs don’t always come with the tightest controls. While it’s since been outclassed by games like Bayonetta and Arkham Asylum, KH2 makes an attempt to feel acrobatic. You don’t need to put very much skill into the combat during the 1k Heartless battle. Most of the enemies, at this point of the game, are killable in one hit. So to kill individual enemies, you don’t have to struggle, you don’t have to use special techniques or anything—you can just rhythmically bash the enemies. You also have some special area attacks which will kill several enemies at once, so the enemies get mowed down quickly. Basically the experience boils down to a question of rhythm, allowing you to develop a state of flow very quickly.

Contrast this to Skyward Sword, which has the misfortune to believe that waggle is still the wave of the future. Many of the enemies in this horde will block your attacks if you don’t attack them right, and so I think there are points where Nintendo actually believes we want to fight each of these monsters individually. You can sort of get by by flailing, just as you’ve sort of been able to get by this way the entire game—but because of the jerking of the Wiimote necessary to swing your sword, it’s not relaxing. Moreover, every so often they’ll cordon off the path and make you fight some stronger enemies—ones which require actual strategy. So instead of an arena where you can freely perform enjoyable acrobatic combat, you end up having a gigantic pile of unpleasant fighting ahead of you.

That combat has next to no reward is a problem with Zelda in general, but sections like this help to explain why. Kingdom Hearts 2 has a standard XP-based leveling system, and you can gain levels in the middle of the fight. Because you’re fighting so many enemies, you’ll level up several times during the fight. So there’s a sense of character progression as well as story progression in this fight. It gives the player the perception that a series of rewards—the extra levels—are given for very little effort due to the easiness of the fight.

Skyward Sword does not give experience points and Link does not level up. Enemies give money if they’re defeated, but not during this level, and anyway by this point in the game money is nearly useless. The only thing these enemies drop are hearts which replenish the damage that they’ve just given you. So during this entire fight—again, during the entire game—your character does not progress at all.

Instead of a fun level or a challenge, this level is just stalling to pad out the game. I’m ready for it to be over. The main villain sends these enemies at you as a desperate attempt to hold Link back while he performs some kind of evil ritual. I can just as easily switch the villain with Nintendo itself, who for some reason does not want me to beat this game, who wants me stuck playing this forever. I don’t know what they’re thinking with this game. I don’t know why they thought this level would be a good idea, and I’m honestly not even sure they thought it through that far.

That’s the entirety of the characterization that the bird has received so far. It doesn’t even get a name.

Contrast this to Epona, the horse from Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess, who not only has a name, she has a leitmotif. A leitmotif that you have to play on your ocarina every single time you want a ride. (For the record, calling the bird just requires you to jump into the sky and hit down. The lack of thought you need to put into the action of calling helps it to feel more inconsequential.) The name and leitmotif, strange as it sounds, help you forge some minor emotional ties to the horse. It allows you to feel as if this horse is your horse.

Or the King of Red Lions from Wind Waker, who not only has some excellent character design, he has dialogue and takes a very active role in the plot–he’s a major character. This boat not only is your main conveyance from island to island–a big part of the game–he provides exposition and affects plot events. They turn it into an actual character.

I’m sure I’ll find out later on that this red bird is really a servant of the Goddess and is a sign that something or other or whatever, but I’m more than halfway through the game and I’ve barely given the thing a second thought. In light of how the main Zelda games have treated their steeds–as characters–the way they’ve treated this red bird is a major step back.

It’s really unfortunate about the combat. I totally get the concept. They wanted to make a very immersive game in which Link mirrors your actions perfectly. But even with the Wii Motion Plus, the controls are off. I’m finding that the swipes aren’t nearly accurate enough. When the enemies require you to strike them in a certain way or you receive damage, you need accuracy. It never feels natural. Any time a sword swing needs to be in a specific direction, I have to think about it—often missing the window for attack.

I’ve been playing for like 10-15 hours and it’s just starting to get adequate. That is unacceptable. If this had been a rental, I would have ducked out hours ago. I’m so tired of the pastoral calm “Wake up you’re late!” beginning. Not too long ago I played a spate of SNES RPGs, some of the more obscure ones. Every single one began that way.

The flying segments become more and more awful every time I play one of them. They are seemingly designed for the people who found the sailing segments in Wind Waker to be too action-packed. It’s ugly, and there’s really nothing interesting to discover. As you go through the main areas of the game, you find “goddess cubes” which you can attack and send to the sky. They become a treasure chest which is marked on your map. You slog through the tedium of going to that point, you collect the treasure—which more often than not is another damn rupee—and repeat. Wind Waker had all of these pokey little islands where you could find secrets—it was compelling to explore and to find out what was there. So far I haven’t found anything that’s particularly interesting—a couple of minigames, some treasure chests, that’s it.

The game does not feel like a cohesive world. It quite literally is not—the three major areas are separated by this sky, which is so formless that it does not feel like an environment—and as far as I can tell you can’t get to one from the other. The flying sequences feel like the world’s worst stage select in light of this. Yeah, Hyrule Field was always really empty—the Zelda team has a seeming inability to make travel seem compelling—but at least all of the areas were connected to each other.

One of the deliberate design decisions for this game was to make less of a distinction between the temples and the regular overworld sections. And while they succeed in their aim—the overworld segments are just as puzzley as thedungeons—it feels less like worlds to explore and more like a pile of puzzles that get handed to you one at a time.

[Actually this is making me realize that there are some vocabulary issues here. Normally, “overworld” in Zelda is used to refer to the Hyrule Field sections, and “dungeon” refers to the temples—at least when we’re talking about Ocarina of Time. Most of the games follow this formula. Because of Skyward Sword’s lack of distinction, I can’t properly call the forest sections “dungeon” or “overworld”—but I don’t want to call the sky areas the “overworld” either. I’m not sure. I’ll have to think about this when I write my review.]
It’s not like Zelda games have never navigated this issue before—Link’s Awakening, my favorite Zelda game, made you work just as hard in the overworld as in the dungeon. That overworld was packed with things. Secrets. Why does it seem that Nintendo has completely forgotten that Zelda is all about the secrets. About the mysteries. And about the creepiness that results from them. The truly great Zelda games always seem to have tons of things to discover each time you play—stuff you missed the first time around or overlooked or didn’t realize the significance of. Why do you think those Triforce rumors in Ocarina of Time persisted so long? There’s so much hiding in that game that it’s quite possible that there’s secrets buried so far that no one has found them. Skyward Sword won’t have that longevity.

It’s just such a lazy game that way. It’s so by-the-numbers Zelda that there’s no reason to it. It feels so phoned in.

I’ve visited the three areas once each. Apparently you need to visit them three times each, and all of the totally accurate and not-paid-for reviews I’ve read say that the environments change each time and that there’s new stuff to do. I’m not holding my breath.

What I like about “Why I Don’t Feel Welcome at Kotaku” is that it openly damns the community for the problem. This community is a big community, it says, and I’m tired of having to find my own community where I can be tolerated. There’s not much more I have to add–the article speaks for itself and does so very well, so give it a read.

One thing I find hilarious, however, is the implication that Joel Johnson thinks that the problem will be fixed by adding pics of naked dudes. In the middle of a bit of rhetoric on Brice’s part where she mentions that she “can’t find you bountiful resources of sexually liberated cosplayers not posing for straight guys”, Johnson interrupts with the inane note, “I had asked Mattie to help me find some sources of cosplay images more in line with what she would like to see on the site.” I cracked up upon reading that. I realize that yes, one of the problems is that so many images of scantily-clad ladies is a symptom of fratboy gamer culture, and that it’s a problem, but that’s not the angle to attack it. It’s not going to help the tenor of the comments. You think a gallery of dudes is going to engender positive, fun comments? It’ll be even more homophobic. Come on, Joel. You’re not a stupid man. Stop making that the biggest issue here.

The boss of the first temple…normally Zelda rightfully prides itself on its bosses. Usually you need the new toy that you picked up in the dungeon to defeat them, you figure out the little puzzle of how to damage them, and you defeat them once you figure out the trick. The first boss is all about sword combat. Very few if any Zelda bosses are about sword combat. You rarely have to do more than whack them around a couple of times once you’ve figured out how to stun them. Here, you’ve got to swing the sword in specific directions and hope that the motion controls follow your movements. The combat is not very well done and it’s not an interesting fight.

The temple itself was poorly designed–again, the maps are very confusing and the areas aren’t very easily laid out, so I didn’t feel like I was solving the temple. I felt like I was just blundering my way through. I know the Water Temple in Ocarina of Time is pretty infamous, but I loved that dungeon. Getting through the Water Temple involved you knowing how the temple was laid out, what different switches did, where you needed to go and what route you needed to go there–it required you to think. The best Zelda dungeons require that flash of insight. I didn’t see it at all during this game’s first temple and I miss that. Maybe the Fire Temple will provide that, but honestly, I’m way past the point where any flaws can be attributed to a weak beginning. I’m in the game proper at this point.

The entire game is just so joyless. I don’t enjoy all of the fetch quests to find all of thse parts of keys because the areas are laid out in a very unintuitive way. I can’t seem to get any of the levels in my head, and that seems due to poor design. I haven’t felt like I’ve done anything in the game, like I’ve solved anything. There haven’t been any flashes of insight–for the most part, every time I’ve solved a puzzle I’ve shrugged and said, okay, I suppose that’s what they wanted me to do. I should be congratulating myself for figuring it out.

Zelda has never been about plot to me. Given that they’re just retellings of the same piece of mythology, it doesn’t make sense for there to be a huge story focus. There’s always Link, always Zelda, always Ganondorf, stuck in some kind of eternal struggle between wisdom, courage, and power. By sticking to this formula, Nintendo could have been well primed to provide us with ever-increasingly-complex iterations of the same story–made more intricate dungeons, or added different twists. And they’ve done that in a lot of ways–the main mechanics of Ocarina of Time are different in Majora’s Mask, are different from The Wind Waker, are different from Twilight Princess. But they’ve also upped the focus of the story, leading to a very long beginning filled with several short cutscenes. I feel like I’m watching an insultingly bad children’s cartoon when I’m watching them. And I’ll take the argument that these games are targeted towards children in a large part, but Nintendo must know that it has a very large adult audience, one who grew up with the series. and in a lot of ways the storyline is targeted towards them. The game wants an audience who knows the implications in the fact that Zelda–not a princess this time that I can tell!–is the daughter–yes, we see Zelda’s father!–of a man named Gaebora or whatever–the same name as the owl from Ocarina of Time! Holy shit! Even if everything’s covered in skies or something, the ground below is in the same configuration that Hyrule always is!

So the game wants that hardcore audience, and it’s strange that there was no desire to write a script which was friendly to the younger audience but written in such a way as to entertain the adults. I’m bored during the story segments because there’s so little to glean from them beyond checking off the bits of Hyrule mythology that are touched upon, and as a result I don’t care about the story, as a final result I resent every single time the cutscenes take control over the game. And the cutscenes take control a lot..

The controls are bad. No two ways about it. The camera–while it’s not as unusable as Epic Mickey’s it’s still an indication that no one has ever really figured out how to make a good camera on the Wii. Swinging the Wiimote to swing your sword gets very tedious after a very short while, and I honestly don’t notice any improvements for having Wii Motion Plus. And while Zelda’s control scheme has needed some additions, a stamina bar was not one of them..

I’m coming off of playing Dark Souls–technically I’m taking a break to play something colorful, hence Skyward Sword–and so I have an almost unfair point of comparison, but there hasn’t been a single area so far that I’ve been able to keep a map of in my head. I don’t know what it is, a certain smudginess to the graphics, perhaps–by the way, the game looks ugly–or a lack of visible landmarks or something, I’m not sure. And the map seems singularly unhelpful–so I’ve spent most of the game just aimlessly wandering until I’ve stumbled upon something..

The game is at turns overcontrolling and aloof. There’ll be segments that walk you through down to each button press, and then it’ll become wilfully obtuse for a room, requiring an esoteric action you didn’t really think was helpful, and deadending until you figure out the puzzle..

Wind Waker’s sailing segments are widely and rightfully criticized, but the flying segments are not only confusing–there seem to be fewer landmarks in the sky than there were in Wind Waker’s ocean–but difficult to manage. You have to not only figure out proper timing for when to dive and climb, but you’ve got to do that while wrestling with the Wii controls, which are nowhere near as responsive as they should be..

I really don’t know where all of the praise is coming from. The game could turn into an excellent game later on–but that doesn’t excuse the beginning. I certainly don’t see how this game would ever merit a 10..

I’ve just entered the Forest Temple or whatever–I’m not paying enough attention to know what it’s called. I’ll probably be checking in at significant points. Again, it could pick up, I’m open to that. But the little I’ve seen of this dungeon isn’t very good. Traditionally the first dungeon isn’t the best, I’m aware of that, so I’m holding judgement for the moment–but I don’t have much hope.

While her motivations and purpose are unclear–some people believe that she had merely intended to tie a feminist flag or slogan to the horse’s tail, and others suggest she may have mistakenly believed all of the horses had already passed and was crossing the track for some other reason–history sees her as a martyr to the feminist cause. That she had a well-documented history of militantly violent/self-destructive behavior in the name of feminism–arson, hunger strikes, etc–seems to lend credence to the theory that she was performing a de facto act of self-immolation.

Lately there has been a lot of discussion–centering around Kotaku–about the role of traditionally-unrepresented gamers in the community. True, it’s not getting women the vote–but we need to figure out how to deal with certain unacceptable elements and attitudes in our community. We don’t need to do anything as dramatic as Davison did, but the response to Kotaku’s stance has been a pathetically childish please stop.

I’m speaking specifically about Mattie Brice’s Border House article  “An Open Letter to Kotaku’s Joel Johnson”. Her article is a response to Johnson’s own “The Equal Opportunity Perversion of Kotaku”. The latter article was the epitome of the clueless straight boy totally, dumbly perplexed by his own privilege; the former, a wishy-washy attempt at Dialogue with someone who will likely never respond.

For all of its faults, Brice’s article does do a good job of outlining the problems with Johnson’s article. What galls me the most about it is the sense of confused blame that Johnson places on the voiceless within his community. “we sort of have to work with what we’ve got, which trends towards normative T&A” he says, implying that the sole reason there aren’t more pictures of shirtless guys on Kotaku is because, well, no guys are taking off their shirts. It’s the fault of those who are marginalized for feeling that way–that the community would totally welcome female- and queer-focused comment if they could only find it!

I find Brice’s work to be generally well-written, well-researched, well-thought-out–and so academically ivory-tower as to be useless. (“The Fantasy Cyborg: Reading Passing Narratives in Dragon Age” is an excellent example.) My problem with “An Open Letter” isn’t so much with its content–which, as I’ve said, gives a very good rundown of what’s wrong with Johnson’s article–as with its tone. Brice is taking the tone of a parent who crouches down next to their child when he’s in the middle of a tantrum, lowers her voice, and calmly explains that there are other people around who are bothered when he screams and cries and please think about the other people that he bothers when he does that and wouldn’t it be a great world if we would all be quiet and happy. Who wonders why that child continues his tantrum.

There’s no teeth to her letter, and that’s what bothers me the most. “I don’t want to tag you with responsibility you didn’t agree to,” she says, as though a community which attempts to free itself of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. is a rare privilege, a treat, instead of something that we should demand. Taking this responsibility would make him a “decent person”–he should take this step because of how nice we’d all think he is. She demands no real action but a simple conversation–”involve as many as you can” she states–and maybe, if we had that conversation, she’d be so happy she’d subscribe to Kotaku again.

All of this is well and good–I’m all for having a conversation–but she has not outlined anything which will lead to anything remotely resembling change. Kotaku’s commenters will continue to spout the same crap they always have, Johnson will continue to think that there’s nothing wrong with the “Oh, Those Wacky Japaneses!” column, The Border House will be pleased with itself for being such an open-minded, progressive, nice community, and fighting games will still star women whose breasts are anatomically unsustainable.

Feminism and other inclusivity movements have always had a very tenuous presence in the gaming community. Rather than demanding a place at the table, sites like GayGamer and Women Gamers and The Border House have been content to stay at the sidelines. And while it is important and necessary to have specialized groups dedicated towards discussing particular issues, these sites have remained very niche. There are the big sites, the boys’ clubs, and then there are the tiny, more-enlightened sites. It’s a disservice both to the minority communities and to the mainstream ones to continue in this way.

But why is feminism in the gaming community so feeble? A comment on Johnson’s article suggests the reason:

All I have to say is, be careful how far you go. There’s a fine line between promoting gender equality and being a puppet of the feminist machine. I respect the former, hell I expect the former, but not the latter.
–Tony Danza (Assumedly not the actor — ed.)

One of the easiest ways to derail feminism is to mischaracterize it. Instead of focusing on the “gender equality” side of the spectrum, you throw the word “Feminazi” around, talk about how our poor language is being policed by these PC liberals, and complain about how we have to walk on eggshells. And it’s for this reason that I think the Mattie Brices of the videogame community don’t feel that they have the right to demand change. I’ve said it many times: This is our community. It’s not a secret club that we’re trying to pass an initiation into, causing us to suck up to the members in hopes we’ll be let in–we’re already there. We are doing nothing wrong by demanding that realization.

I’d overlooked the opening paragraph in Leigh Alexander’s “I’m Tired Of Being A ‘Woman In Games’ — I’m A Person” when I first read it–I guess I found it to be an empty piece of rhetoric. But the more I think about it, the more I’m coming to agree with it:

Sexism in games remains an unsolved problem, it’s clear. Some of you will be nodding along, and some of you will hear the s-word and roll your eyes and go, “oh, this again?” You guys can piss off-–go click on some new screenshots or a trailer consisting of a release date slowly fading into view. You’re hopeless.

Sorry, do I sound a little hostile?

Several of the comments to her article took issue with her sarcasm:

How are we supposed to take someone seriously who starts off an article by telling a number of potential readers to ‘piss off’ and that they’re ‘hopeless’, and then has the audacity to post that comment? She is the sociopathic internet rager.
–cobrausn

And while her opening is seemingly designed to elicit that kind of reaction–well, that’s kind of the point, and I find myself thinking that perhaps that’s the attitude we should take. Because the time for dialogue and calm explanations has passed. We need to stop trying to explain why these attitudes are wrong and bad and mean and we need to disengage from them completely.  When I was a child and I threw a tantrum in public, my parents would immediately grab me and take me home, where I’d be punished. And that’s what we need to do.

I don’t think that Johnson’s a bad person and I think that Brice’s heart is in the right place. But I’m tired of letting this go by without any steps being made. The motto of the Women’s Social and Political Union, the militant feminist organization that Emily Davison was a member of, was “Deeds Not Words”. We need to do more than hope that the mainstream sites will listen and will let us have representation on their sites. We need to demand that representation. We need to create a culture in which sexism and homophobia and racism and all of those things are deemed unacceptable.

In short, we need to tell more people to piss off.

It’s strange. Many independent experimental games–usually termed “Art games” for their ambitions to be something more than simple entertainment–are lauded by critics simply for that ambition without any consideration of the content of the actual game. People have cried over Jason Rohrer’s awful mess Passage. I’ve seen Rod Humble’s bewildering The Marriage gushed about as proof that videogames are capital-A Art. Rez is a lame if somewhat stylish shooter, but the way people talk about it, it’s the Second Coming.

All the time, I see games like this get near-universal praise. We seem to want Meaning so badly. Deep down, I think there’s a genuine feeling of shame over videogames–a feeling that’s only voiced in hushed tones, a feeling that, Hey, maybe all of this genre stuff is kind of puerile. Sometimes we want to play games for simple escapism, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But we don’t always interact with media for escapism–sometimes we want a book or a movie or a videogame which has something to say about life, about the world around us, about something other than its own mechanics.

I understand the impulse. I believe that any medium should aspire to be Art–whatever your definition of the term is–and that, while fun relaxing genre exercises will always have a place and will always be welcome, I don’t want to spend every videogame simply shootin’ stuff. The desire to find and promote meaningful games should be, as critics, one of our goals. The goal becomes problematic when we do not exercise our critical facilities, when we see something which has the pretense of meaning without examining it to see if it indeed follows up on that promise.

Sword and Sworcery, from the very beginning, oozes a desire to say something more. I first became interested in the game from watching its trailer, which seemed to depict a Legend of Zelda game as directed by David Lynch. That blend is a fairly accurate description of what the game looks like–add in some basic Jungian symbolism and you’ve got the majority of the motifs on which the game relies.

And it was at this face value that nearly every review I’ve seen has based its judgment. Sword and Sworcery is many things–it is a stylish mashup of some elements that aren’t often put in context together–and if you judge it solely on its ability to be those things, then maybe it’s interesting. But when I see IGN’s Levi Buchanan describe the game as a “near-perfect polyamorous marriage of brilliant 8-bit visuals, clever puzzle-solving, and an unforgettable soundtrack” and then go on to sputter out how speechless the game’s made him; when I see Destructoid’s Sean Carey call it “a game that takes real chances to stretch the gaming medium without sacrificing the joy of play and discovery that makes the medium great“; when Rob Dubbin, writing for Kill Screen, actually thinks the phrase “a transportive, cunningly woven adventure game that oozes confident work from every pixelated crenellation” is not only an apt description of the game but also a pile of words that’s fit for human consumption, I have to wonder–are we so desperate for intellectual stimulation in the medium that we’ll cling to anything that looks like it might remotely have some substance to it?

Sword and Sworcery is a mashup. It is–as I mentioned before–equal parts Legend of Zelda, David Lynch, Carl Jung, indie rock, retro pixel art, and social media, all put into a blender and swirled around a bit. Someone more cynical than I might even suggest that all of these elements were carefully assembled together to appeal to the sensibilities of a certain type of gamer in order to manufacture an instant indie game hit. I think of Jaron Lanier, writing in You Are Not A Gadget:

Even the most seemingly radical online enthusiasts seem to always flock to retro references. The sort of “Fresh radical culture” you expect to see celebrated in the online world these days is a petty mashup of preweb culture. (131)

That sounds a lot like Sword and Sworcery to me. The game has nothing new to say about any of its elements, is nothing new, can only be interpreted in light of its various parts, all of which come from somewhere else. It’s the kind of game which hopes its referential cleverness will be mistaken for profundity. I’ve rarely seen a game court critics this blatantly. Its allusions are intended as in-jokes. It doesn’t make references to Legend of Zelda, doesn’t quote Twin Peaks, doesn’t throw out bits of Jungian philosophy in order to make a point of these things–it makes these references so its audience can see them and feel smart for recognizing them, so its audience can feel like they’re a part of a special, elite community of those smart enough to catch all the namedrops.

On the surface level, Sword and Sworcery has it completely right. It understands the Hero’s Journey. It has at least an undergraduate-level familiarity with Jung. It’s creepy in some places. The pixel art is gorgeous. The music–one of the main focuses of the game, as the title implies–is beautiful and well-done. While the writing style comes off as grating and overly-forced, it’s definitely distinct. The game has a genuinely palpable atmosphere. The game’s sound design is better than most high-budget titles. Some of the battles–I’m thinking the Trigon Fights in particular–are genuinely intense, based on a masterful combination of color, sound, music. They feel like the end of the world–they need to feel this way.

It’s very clear that the team behind the game knows the how–they know how to combine these elements in a skillful way in order to get a message across. The problem is that they’re not exactly sure what message to convey. The Superbrothers manifesto “Less Talk More Rock” advocates immediate action over endless discussion and talking. Any of us who are in a heavy corporate environment where any project is subject to endless meetings and approvals can get behind this sentiment. Even in more creative fields, it’s a welcome message–sometimes you need to just stop dwelling and make art. But Sword and Sworcery is an example of a pitfall that this kind of thinking can fall into–what they’ve created is a very surfacey piece.

And this is my problem with the game: The various resonances between aspects don’t seem to add up to anything. Making the adventure game Lynchian doesn’t provide a new perspective on the Hero’s Journey. Having an awareness of Jung doesn’t add anything–the narrator is called The Archetype but doesn’t appear to be an archetype of anything in particular, the characters don’t map onto any of the major Jungian archetypes, the unconscious realm does not appear to be collective, etc. That the characters’ thoughts are encountered on a screen which represents a Twitter feed–we are reminded throughout the game that we should be tweeting the in-game text, all of which is short enough to fit in a tweet along with the #sworcery tag–comes closest to something, implying that such instant and immediate communication is akin to telepathy, but does so little with the idea that it’s likely such resonances are accidental–the only reason for that interface seems to be because it’s easy to tweet from the same device that you’re playing the game on. (A more cynical critic would suggest that the only reason the social networking feature exists is to provide free advertisement for the game.)

I’ve been sitting for the past week or so since I finished the game wondering what, exactly, I experienced. What the ultimate Point of it is. Art is, of course, subjective, and we could debate the subject for years without coming to a conclusion–we’ve been doing just that since the beginning of civilization and we’re no closer to a final answer–but I firmly believe that, in order for a work to have anything resembling soul, it needs to have some intent, some Message that the artist is trying to convey. I don’t require a Moral at the end, a pithy sentence summing up What I Should Have Learned–I’m fine with a work simply being a meditation upon a certain topic or series of topics. But if a work doesn’t go deeper, if a work isn’t sure what it’s trying to say, and frankly doesn’t care about anything more than the surface–then I can’t tell why I should be interacting with it.

There’s a term work a work which may be technically well-executed, which may have an immediate appeal to the senses, but doesn’t say anything deeper, doesn’t touch the soul: Kitsch.

So as a holistic piece of art, Sword and Sworcery fails–but do the parts stack up? I’ve thought about the game as a sort of art gallery–perhaps the whole point of the game is simply to provide a framework to hang some admittedly gorgeous pixel art and music on. Given that Superbrothers has described the game as “an album you can hang out in”, I’m not able to discount the possibility. This is not without precedent: Particularly in the mid-90s, when CD-ROM technology first became popular (and cheap enough that developers could take a chance on experimental works), several artists, including Primus, Laurie Anderson, and The Residents, released essentially interactive albums. Sword and Sworcery could fit comfortably into this category.

When all of the elements–the Trigon Fights in particular–come together, they do come together brilliantly. The music becomes intricately linked with the emotions and the tension of the scene. In these moments, Sword and Sworcery contains Meaning, and its status as a videogame does help to carry its intentions across. But for every moment like that, there are bits where you’re wandering aimlessly through silence, trying to figure out where to go, or you’re struggling with a pixel-hunting puzzle, or waiting for the character to complete the painfully slow walk from point A to point B. If Sword and Sworcery is an album, then these bits are like the skits on a rap album, the songs that drummers write, the irritating novelty singles, or the quickly-written phoned-in performances included just to up the running time–in short, it’s filler.

Where Sword and Sworcery fails is in its gamic bits. Most of its fights are repetitive exercises in simple pattern matching–tedious enough on their own, absolutely mind-numbing in the later stages when you have to fight the same enemy over and over on pretty much every screen. Its puzzles are pixel hunts crossed with a Simon-type pattern recognition, where in an attempt to pretend to be challenging, it doesn’t tell you the pattern beforehand, so you must click on an object in the hope that it’s the first step in the pattern, and if it is you click on another object in the hope that it’s the next step, and so on until you’ve completed the puzzle, starting over if you make a mistake. Its plot is a warmed-over Hero’s Journey that puts you through the usual adventure game paces–collect some macguffins, fight a dude, the end–while making snide, oh-so-cleverly-written asides about how lame it is that we’ve, like, got all of these fetch quests and how tiring the whole thing is, amirite? Protip for the Superbrothers: The typical Hero’s Journey exists for a reason, it has existed for thousands of years across cultures and societies–I’m fairly sure it won’t go away any time soon, no matter how ironically you treat the subject. Rather than adding anything, it comes off as complaining. If you find it as cliché as your tone implies, then try to come up with a new plot structure. Embodying something in such an insincere, winking manner feels like a freshman-level creative writing assignment. If you aren’t able to take your game seriously, why should we?

My ultimate problem with both Sword and Sworcery and with its reception is that it all feels so complacently self-congratulatory. It’s almost a feedback loop of mediocrity. Superbrothers makes a game that isn’t Enough because the blogs will consider it a work of unparalleled brilliance. The blogs consider it such because Sword and Sworcery is, for the most part, the best we usually get. No one is asking for anything more because no one is creating it; no one is creating it because no one is asking for it. We all deserve better.

I do appreciate Sword and Sworcery’s ambitions. I agree with Richard Clark, writing for Paste Magazine, who states that “Sword & Sworcery EP could have been somewhat of a life-altering experience, if only we were allowed to invest ourselves in it without the forced irony, the constant winks, the iPad-awareness and the social network anxiety“. Ultimately, I believe that Sword and Sworcery isn’t enough–that it’s a triumph of style over substance–and I’m disappointed that most critics seem to be taken in by it. I think the team genuinely does have a game in them that’s interesting and creative–a game that’s meaningful, important, something more than a shallow bit of pulp. But at the end of the day, the product that we have hedges its bets. It seems almost afraid of itself–that any time it approaches genuine, sincere meaning, it recoils at what it’s about to do and covers up its vulnerability with a quip. Sword and Sworcery does exemplify the cooler-than-thou, ironic, unserious, insincere hipster aesthetic. If Superbrothers want to create a work which has meaning behind it, they need to stop being ashamed and allow themselves the vulnerability needed to truly express what they want. Otherwise, we get a tedious, confusing mess. Otherwise, we get Sword and Sworcery.

I am not offended. I am not angry. But I’m disappointed. For all that we want gaming as a whole to grow up, it seems that, when it comes to incidents like this, that developers are content to still think of us as all white, straight, adolescent males, high on testosterone and alienation. Blizzard–and other developers–should feel shame for the way they view us.

In the time that has passed since the writing of that article, Blizzard has accepted responsibility and given an honest apology; Denis Farr and Leigh Alexander have both written excellent articles dealing with, respectively, homophobia and sexism; and some commenters at Kotaku have made me look like a naive idiot by basically showing that developers may be kind of justified in viewing us this way.

Because I am a grown man who recognizes that the world is populated by people of different sexes, ethnicities, orientations, etc., I’m not the audience for either piece. Farr’s focuses on some of his personal experiences with homophobia, discrimination, and sexual abuse in an attempt to provide a concrete depiction of the victims of homophobic language; Alexander’s discusses her ambivalence about the fact that she’s called a “female games journalist”, with particular emphasis on the first word. Well, duh, was my knee-jerk reaction to both articles, and that’s not just because I’m a gay man who’s had his own experiences with homophobia, or because I’ve talked to enough female gamer friends to know that such a status brings with it some extremely complex issues. It’s because, well, like I said–I live in the world. Hang out here long enough and you’ll realize that everyone’s got their own unique makeup and that focusing on categories like “gay” or “black” or whatever is reductive and ultimately useless. That shrugging smugly, singing a chorus of “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” from Avenue Q–and how happy am I that we as a society are more or less over that fucking play!–and doing nothing to curb one’s prejudices isn’t enough.

But based on the reaction of the commenters at Kotaku, these articles are necessary. Because both received a fairly extreme backlash, one which implies that Kotaku’s readership, if it is aware that the identity of “gamer” is a multifaceted one, is openly hostile to that diversity.

In the day or so following the publication of his post, Farr was fairly active on his Twitter account mentioning different hateful comments his article received. One tweet in particular stuck in my head:

Sigh, while approving five of those comments, had to delete one that was just FAG written seventy five times (not sure why I counted).

And my first instinct is to laugh at this–to think of the poor overweight acne’d virgin who reads Farr’s article from the darkness of his mom’s basement, seethes, thinks how dare he try to take away my God-given right to use that word, this’ll show him, and copies and pastes FAG over and over as many times as the comment box will allow, and sits back and laughs about how he utterly destroyed a writer he does not know and will likely never meet.

But that’s the old stereotype, isn’t it, the pale nerd, wired on Mountain Dew and Cheetos–the one hilariously depicted in the World of Warcraft episode of South Park. I have no way of knowing the commenter’s motivation or lifestyle. The commenter might even be George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher himself on a break between WoW sessions. Trolling depends on anonymity, after all. Particularly when it’s a quick cut-and-paste job as this is, it’s done as a way of getting a cheap laugh out of hurting someone, as a small burst of sadism. And yes, when these comments come in volume, particularly in response to something as searingly personal as Farr’s article, it can be distressing. Stereotyping the commenter is kind of a defense mechanism–a way of attributing it to someone so pathetically powerless as to be harmless. But ultimately, trolling comments like these are done just to upset and get a rise out of someone–the kind of stuff that got old when we were in high school. With time and a good support network of friends and family, we can develop the emotional resources to dismiss them as either people who are 14 years old–or who have the mindset of one.

What truly bothers me are comments like the following, written in response to Alexander’s piece:

Is that our fault? Like fuck it is. It’s your fault. Not you personally, but you as in females. If more of you played more games, took a bigger interest in games, then more games would be tailored to females, and more games would feature female characters that are not necessarily modeled to appeal to the male gamer with the big tits and round ass.
–xsbs

The amount of ignorance displayed in this comment is astounding–so much so that I had to read it several times to make sure it wasn’t intended ironically. He doesn’t understand that the boys’ club nature of games helps to ensure that many women simply don’t want to join in. Women, by and large, will not want to flock to a medium which is filled with adolescent male power fantasies, where male characters are hyperaggressive and female ones are unrealistically-proportioned submissive sex objects. Why would they? These images literally tell women this isn’t for you. And one seriously doubts that, if his proposed solution of women demanding, for example, realistic character designs, that he’d be particularly happy with the change. Let’s face it: This comment was written in response to an article written with the theme, Treat me with the same respect you’d treat anyone else.

Or in response to Farr:

You brought it all on yourself. Nobody forced you to proclaim your sexuality from the rooftops. I’m pretty sure if I started telling people I have a fetish for looking at crudely drawn pornography depicting animals from My Little Pony being raped I’d be persecuted till the cows come home. But guess what? I’m not an attention whoring douche and I dont tell anyone. Quality of life significantly improved.
–EUAN1337

This goes beyond homophobia. This is a wish to have queerness completely erased from existence. It’s an inability to handle the concept that there are people out there who are different. It is a conspiracy of silencing. These are themes I see over and over in the comments. Shut up. Get out of my community. Because, in the eyes of people like this, women and gays simply don’t belong. These commenters see Kotaku as a boys’ club. I find it bitterly ironic that another theme which keeps getting repeated is bashing Farr and Alexander for being offended. Because that’s really what these commenters are feeling–offense. They feel offended at the notion that they have to change their language or their attitudes. That there’s anything wrong with their behavior. Another common theme is, what does this have to do with videogames. Because, somehow, a gamer describing his experiences with discrimination in an attempt to explain to gamers why homophobic language at a games industry event is a bad thing is somehow less relevant than, to pick a random example, an unfocused ramble by Owen Good, a man with a degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, about what it’s like to have a credit card.

I could catalogue all day. I would love to catalogue all of the negative comments. To display them prominently. What a pity that they’re all under usernames! That we don’t see their real names, that we can’t shame them. Because they should feel ashamed.

But in going through the comments to do so, I noticed some other themes. Take this comment in response to Farr’s piece:

Thank you, Dennis Farr, for this. Thank you for standing up. Thank you for signing your name to this. Thank you for giving me a page to favorite, and thank you for helping me to reconsider how I deal with those that use “Gay” as an insult.
–MarcianTobay

Or this, to Alexander’s:

There’s no reason why gender should be a thing in the games industry, or why we need to act like a boys club. We don’t even need to APPEAL to women to get their respect, really. Just stop actively offending them all the time. I see more and more women who want to be designers, or artists, and who just love playing games. Why it needs to be a novelty is beyond me….
Why can’t we all just be excellent to each other and leave it at that?
–jkaste06

I’m not of the mindset that attitudes like these last two comments are uncommon or hopelessly naive–going through the comments of both articles, you’ll find plenty of support for these writers. There are enough people who say, well, what are you gonna do, that’s just how XBox Live is, of course it’s going to be filled with horny dudes who objectify women and make fun of gay people. But while that may be the way it is, there is such a thing as agency in this world.

In the negative comments I see an element of fear. For every whine about how faggot doesn’t reeeeeally mean gay and how it’s a generic insult and how dare you tell me differently, I detect terror over the responsibility of empathy towards others, of the realization that the world is not made for you. For every joke that of course there’s no problem with reducing women in any games industry position to a pair of tits I notice a worry that, perhaps, women aren’t simply easily-obtainable objects but actual people with agency and the capacity to reject. There is a palpable resistance to change. That the videogame community is the one place where they can relax and say anything sexist or homophobic or racist or whatever, anything that comes into their heads, and that the presence of figures like Farr and Alexander is a threat to that safe space.

I do not wish to reassure them.

Gaming is changing. The Wii, casual games, the internet, smartphones–all of these are taking gaming from the confines of a small contingent of dedicated nerds into everyone’s hands, and we have to evolve with the times. We have to recognize that, just as the world is a diverse place, gaming is as well. And that while I am fully in support of freedom of speech, it must be tempered with responsibility.

I want these commenters scared. I want them to mourn their glory days when they could say anything they pleased without fear of reprisal. For the days when women were just a set of tits they could ogle.

I want them to grow the fuck up or get the hell out of our community. Because let’s face it. It’s not theirs anymore. The identity of “gamer” belongs to anyone who holds a controller and loves the medium. Not to any particular gender, ethnicity, orientation, or any other category.

It’s time these people caught up to the rest of the world.

This has since changed. Mike Morhaime, President of Blizzard and one of the members of the band, has issued an apology. His apology acknowledges that the slurs used in the video was unacceptable–was “counter to the standards we try to maintain in our forums and in our games”. He praises the diversity in the Blizzard community and regrets the offense that was caused.

This is an excellent apology–unlike the original apology from the band, Morhaime is apologizing for what he actually needs to apologize for. That he takes responsibility for what went on at the event shows that he recognizes that the entirety of the event is part of Blizzard’s branding. I am inclined to accept this apology.

This all being said, Blizzard now has the responsibility of learning from its mistakes. It must use this “error in judgment” to better conduct itself in the future. If anything good comes out of this incident, it is a message to the games industry that their customers are a diverse crowd, filled with people of different ages, genders, sexual orientation, races, etc. And that it must avoid excluding any of these groups. Not only is it morally wrong, it’s just bad business.

I would generally consider this to be one of the least interesting pieces of videogaming news of all time–its main features (“convention”, “Blizzard”, “World of Warcraft”, “metal band”, and “Cannibal Corpse”) are all things I’m not at all into. However, before the performance, they played a brief clip of an interview with Fisher, in which he spoke passionately about his love for World of Warcraft and how he plays Horde.

Because, as he says, he’s not one of the “emo cocksuckers” on the “homo Alliance” side, of course.

Conventions, particularly ones like BlizzCon that are run by one company, are part PR stunt, part social gathering.  At a convention like E3, companies need to follow the rules and guidelines of the convention, and must compete with other developers. At a convention like BlizzCon, however the entirety of the event is under Blizzard’s control. All of the events, all of the speakers, every presentation–it’s all endorsed by them.

Not only is Fisher’s appearance at BlizzCon an endorsement of the band, Blizzard has acknowledged his fandom in-game, naming an NPC (Gorge the Corpsegrinder) after him. This isn’t uncommon–one of Blizzard’s advertising campaigns featured celebrities such as Ozzy Osbourne and Mr. T. Fisher is merely yet another celebrity player. But since he and Blizzard’s employees are fans of each other, he was invited to do some guest vocals for the “in-house band” called–well, I’ll let Wikipedia explain it because I don’t have the heart to paraphrase this: “The Artist Formerly Known as Level 80 Elite Tauren Chieftains (TAFKL80ETC), who changed their name mid concert to Level 90 Elite Tauren Chieftains (L90ETC).” As the former lead singer for the bands Talizma, The Great Oatmeal Cooky Paradox, King Chef, and Crimes Against Toast, I can find about six things wrong with both band names. But that’s beside the point.

L90ETC’s performance was fine for what it was–a plodding fist-pumping anthem sung with vein-popping intensity by grown men who enjoy pretending to be orcs. It was a song which fans who played Horde could  enjoy and Alliance players could grumble about–I have no problems with that. The video, however, that’s the unnecessary part. The language behind the video is questionable. Problematic. Obviously so. The clip–about 30-45 seconds in length–comes from a longer interview with Fisher in which he goes on for about three full minutes about his love for the Horde. Watching the video, which starts off being funny and through its sheer length becomes extremely disturbing, marries the awkwardness of listening to someone talk a little too long about his hobby with the uncomfortableness of talking to someone who swears just a little too much. (As a man who has recorded 4.2 days worth of podcasts, all of which are labeled “explicit” on iTunes, I know what I’m talking about.) I’ve heard it argued that a lot of the problems with the interview come from the fact that the controversy has inspired people to seek out and watch the original, uncensored clip. They have a minor point. The point where Fisher tells people to “cry in the river and tell me how you’re gonna slit your writs, you Night Elf faggot” wasn’t played at BlizzCon. And the official video of the event that’s going around has the more egregious bits of the interview bleeped out (roughly every other word). There are conflicting reports on whether or not the interview itself was bleeped during the event. If it wasn’t, then the problems with this are obvious. If it was, then they knew full well that what they were doing was wrong even as they were doing it.

I’ve never been interested in the metal subculture–particularly not the death metal subculture that Cannibal Corpse is a member of. The music doesn’t do it for me, I find the culture of violence surrounding it to be distasteful, and I find it to be largely the provenance of young heterosexual white men who are fetishizing their own (perceived or actual) Otherness. (There’s a lot of academic theory floating around that agrees with me–I’m not just making this up.) I don’t feel the need to join the metal community, and the metal community has no need to embrace me–I have no relationship with it. Most people feel the same way–and normally that’s fine. A metal show is, usually, a closed system–only fans of the band, who have made the decision to accept any expressions of violence, homophobia, sexism, racism, etc. that a band may make. The nature of fandom in this case would weed out anyone who would be offended or bothered.

But the nature of BlizzCon and the circumstances surrounding this concert mean that this concert was accessible and available for a general audience. I said earlier that conventions are part social event. Seth Schiesel, writing for the New York Times, agrees. His coverage of the event, which doesn’t even mention Fisher’s presence, concentrates on the variety of people who attended and the social connections that they’ve fostered both through the game and at the convention. He talks about fashion wholesalers and Iraq veterans and social workers–people from all walks of life who bond over their experience with the game. Blizzard itself has made a point of marketing to nontraditional gamers–women in particular–and between all of this and some first-person accounts I’ve read, it’s clear that there’s as diverse a population at BlizzCon as are wandering around Azeroth at any given moment. Combine this with the fact that Blizzard employees go to the convention to enjoy themselves and socialize with the fans, and it’s not unlikely that many fans would have attended the concert solely to support a band comprised of people who worked on something they love.

There’s also the fact that the band was not the main event of the concert. Blizzard holds a concert to conclude the festivities every year, and the headlining band of BlizzCon ’11 was Foo Fighters–one of the most commercially and critically successful bands recording today. Their fanbase varies in age–from people who followed them from the beginning when Dave Grohl started the project after Kurt Cobain’s death to people who are getting into them now. Level 90 Elite Tauren Shaman was not performing in an isolated show full of death metal fans who understand the culture. They were opening for a band with a much different image. Foo Fighters has a general alternative rock image–not one full of the violence and misanthropy that’s accepted within the metal community.

Look. You don’t get to be a 28-year-old gay man without letting some of this stuff roll off your back. If I got offended by every single time that I heard someone throw around “fag” and “homo” and “cocksucker”, I’d either get nothing done or have a career at The Bilerico Project. And I recognize that bands in the metal community, particularly death metal bands such as Cannibal Corpse, uphold an image of toughness and aggression and violence as part of their schtick. Fisher is well-respected in the metal community–even Chris Barnes, who Fisher replaced as Cannibal Corpse’s vocalist, once called Fisher a “real nice guy”–and I know the language is more based out of a sense of performative machismo than it is any real antipathy. If asked, I’m sure that Fisher would state that he didn’t mean any homophobia by the remarks, that he was merely recontextualizing the term “homo” as a generic insult, one divorced from any context of sexuality or hatred–or, as Sarah Silverman so succinctly put it, “I didn’t mean gay like homosexual, I meant gay like retarded.”

But a heterosexual man does not get the right to recontextualize homophobic language any more than he has the right to recontextualize a racial epithet used towards someone of a different ethnicity. And I am sick and tired of people not realizing this. I am sick and tired of the videogame community hiding behind ignorance and moaning about political correctness. I’m sick of society at large doing this, but the videogame community is the one that I have ties to. So knock it the fuck off. It’s not enough to blithely and clumsily go through life and apologize when getting caught because–well, grow up already.

Speaking of apologies, as of the time of this writing, Blizzard has issued no official apology. Level 90 Elite Tauren Chieftan has. Here it is in its entirety:

Hey guys, we read and heard all the feedback from BlizzCon this year. The Corpsegrinder bit was never intended to be taken seriously. We are sorry that we offended anyone; everything at our shows is just meant in fun. Thank you all for speaking up. We’ll definitely keep this in mind for future shows.

Our humblest apologies,

Level 90 Elite Tauren Chieftain

This is a pathetic apology. And it is not enough. Again, I seriously doubt that anyone in the band or at Blizzard feels genuine hatred of homosexuals or anything like that. But it’s the fact that they didn’t think. The fact that they considered this an acceptable clip to show. That no one at Blizzard thought that, with the game’s diverse fanbase, that perhaps these comments weren’t the best ones to represent their brand. That they foresaw no problem means that not only are they ignorant themselves, but that this is what they think gamers are–the type of people who either passively accept or actively endorse displays of homophobia. And that anyone who would be possibly sensitive to these issues has no place in the community. I’ve read enough people who have suggested that Blizzard thinks that the problem has to do with riling up of Alliance vs. Horde rivalry. I don’t know the WoW community well enough to know if that’s truly the general feeling, but I know that the real issue here is that Blizzard endorsed and promoted a video that featured some examples of traditionally-homophobic speech.

I am not offended. I am not angry. But I’m disappointed. For all that we want gaming as a whole to grow up, it seems that, when it comes to incidents like this, that developers are content to still think of us as all white, straight, adolescent males, high on testosterone and alienation. Blizzard–and other developers–should feel shame for the way they view us.

Leave it to Kotaku to ruin a good thing.

I’m speaking of Katie Williams’s fawning and oh-so-mysterious profile in Kotaku Australia. I’ve read it three times just to make sure that it’s intended to be read at face value, and I’m pretty sure it is. Chief among the article’s flaws is the fact that it’s written as a profile of the creator–a man who explicitly states that he wishes to remain anonymous. (“…so as not to distract readers from the character he has created,” Williams insists.) It makes everything fairly wishy-washy. The article can’t decide if it’s a profile about someone who does not want a profile written about him, a profile of a fictional character, or–and here is the weakest element of it all–a serious analysis of a joke.

The main theme of Williams’s article is, essentially, that while Molydeux may be a joke, there’s a kernel of truth to it–the sense that maybe Molydeux has some good ideas. She talks about Molydeux’s thousands of fans who want to have competitions where people make games based on the ideas on the Twitter account. At least one game–Goodbye, My Love–has been made about it. Williams is interested in his game design ideas because they somehow resonate, or because they bring to mind some genuine innovations. After all, some people have taken Molydeux’s ideas seriously, not realizing that it’s satire. (Williams, in her blog entry where she posted an extended version of her interview, admits that when she first saw the Twitter account, she “did initially believe him to be the real thing, despite it saying otherwise right there in the bio.”) (Italics in original.)

Goodbye, My Love’s concept is taken from the following tweet: “Game where an asteroid is about to hit earth, the aim is not to stop it but to say goodbye to every family member. You have 120 of them.” The game is exactly that–each round, there’s a bunch of crudely-drawn people, some are pointed out as family members, and you have to touch them to say “goodbye”. If you manage to do it quickly, you move to the next round, otherwise the asteroid hits earth, game over. Williams and Molydeux’s mysterious creator think that the game asks “what is innovation in gaming, anyway?” As the creator puts it, the idea–which seems to warrant an experimental, unusual game–inspired a repetitive, dated game.

But there’s a really obvious thing that is missed here–because, for all that Williams gushes about the account, there isn’t really a sense that she understands that it’s intended to be funny. That, not only did she not originally get that the account is a joke, she might not even get the joke to begin with. Why is the tweet that inspired Goodbye, My Love funny? For one, this is such a cliche videogame plot–”save the earth from a threat from Outer Space” (literally, the plot of Asteroids), but it’s subverted by the fact that the focus of the game isn’t on the world-changing event but on the adventures of some schmuck tearfully saying goodbye to his parents. But more importantly, and something everyone seems to be missing, is the final punchline: “There are 120 of them”. This is a comically large number–we picture the amount of divorces and step-parents, brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, second cousins twice removed to make 120 family members possible. We think of the kind of person who would remember every single one of his 120 family members and cherish every single one enough to make a point of saying goodbye. And we realize that, while the intent of this theoretical game would be to put an emotional, personal spin on a global event, by the very nature of having so many characters that goal is impossible–every one would have to be extremely shallowly drawn, interchangeable. But this is a videogame! And videogames are about collecting stuff! The more the better! The huge amount of family members turns them from people into general collectums, into general goals. That 120 is the number of stars in Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Galaxy isn’t coincidental, I don’t think.

Williams does not address this at all in her article. She’s too focused on the faux brilliance of the ideas behind the tweets to recognize how bad these ideas are. How unplayable Molydeux’s games would be. Remember, the real Molyneux populates his games with hundreds and hundreds of characters, but such a large number means that any emotional resonance is diluted so strongly as to be meaningless. In Fable III, you can romance any of the numerous townsfolk you see–people who don’t say anything before a few repeated stock phrases and grunts. People whose personality is reduced to a couple of adjectives. They’re interchangeable. There is no emotion to be had here. The tweet that inspired Goodbye, My Love does not bring up interesting theories about possible games to be created as it makes fun of a game that’s already been made. It points out that, no matter what Molyneux’s ambitions are, his bombast and his excesses actually ruin immersion and a personal connection to the games he makes.

There’s a Japanese comedic concept called chindogu which is basically the art of useless inventions. Essentially the goal is to create a product designed to fit a need or solve a problem, but the joke is based on the fact that the invention itself is so unwieldy or awkward or embarrassing that it’s actually worse than the original problem, while making you look silly in the process. To combat the problem faced while shopping in the rain–how do you hold multiple shopping bags AND an umbrella while not getting your purchases wet–there’s an umbrella which has hooks on the inside from which you can hang your shopping. To help women who are unsteady when wearing high heels, there’s a set of training wheels which are on either side of the heel and help balance. A t-shirt with a Battleship-esque grid designed to help when someone’s scratching your back. In all of these cases, while the invention theoretically is a legitimate solution to the problem, it solves it so poorly as to necessitate a trip back to the drawing board. I should add that I’ve never seen a piece of chindogu which solves an actual problem–they’re all designed to address minor inconveniences of everyday life, things most of us don’t really find all that problematic.

The joke is obvious. We tend to shy away from any inconvenience and we believe that if we can find the right product, that it’ll solve all of our problems. If chindogu has a point beyond simple absurd silliness, it’s that we don’t need this solution–it’s that technology doesn’t automatically make our lives easier. Molydeux’s pronouncements are the chindogu of the videogame world. While his tweets address issues such as emotional resonance and a desire to make games that are deeper than simple space shooters–concerns that not only the real Molyenux but many other designers share–they address them in such a poor and flawed manner. “There are 206 bones in the human body? Imagine, just imagine a 206 multiplayer game where each person controls a bone?” is an innovative way of doing multiplayer games, it’s one that forces co-operation and social connections, and gives a definite nontraditional gaming setting–and also is useless because such a huge crowd of people will make detailed communication and coordination nearly impossible, will make it difficult to foster social connections, and last time I checked, most of the bones in our body weren’t particularly active agents. The idea undermines itself.

There’s one tweet that I think is the key to Molydeux’s message, and this is a tweet that’s surprisingly out of character given the rest of the bombastic pronouncements: “In the Shigeru Miyamoto classic, SMBros, why are there tortoises that throw hammers? No Reason. Sometimes, ‘No reason’ is just ‘fun’.” Molydeux doesn’t ask us to consider what innovation really is, or that some of his ideas might have a grain of interest to them. The account is, essentially, an attack on designing games by Theory. I’ve said that playing Fable III made me feel like there was an excellent game underneath MOLYNEUX’S INNOVATIONS–that if the game had toned itself down, made less of a point about its menus, less of a point about how you can have shallow interactions with everyone, it would have been a much stronger, much more interesting story. One of Molydeux’s favorite targets is CliffyB and Gears of War–he makes fun of the series any chance he gets. And yet, while I’m not a particular fan of that series, I’d say they’re better games than Fable, because they’re not trying to be as grandiose. Fable attempts to do more, but it fails at it. Gears of War succeeds at being a much simpler game. Essentially, Molydeux is a warning to developers what they sound like when they try to put too much Theory in the forefront, when they forget to keep in mind what makes a good game.

I had a job where someone had forwarded an email to the effect of, “10 Real Wacky Japanese Inventions”. It was a top ten of pictures of some chindogu. “I can’t believe that they actually invented that,” someone said, showing me a feather duster with an attached cocktail shaker, designed to mix up martinis as you dusted.

Always the spoilsport, I said, “You know that’s not real, right, like it’s done as a joke?”

She looked at me, then back at the screen, and shrugged. “Here’s a fan you attach to your chopsticks to cool down your noodles.” She wasn’t interested in knowing that this was all done as a joke–she was too stuck at “Those wacky Japanese.”

And that’s where I find Katie Williams’s article to be. It’s unaware of why Molydeux is funny and it’s only vaguely aware that it even is funny. In a way, the article itself exposes its own flaws. When you can’t reveal who you’re profiling, when you’re not sure what the focus of your article is, when you don’t understand what you’re writing about–you’re not going to have a particularly good read.

(For the record, this week has proven that Telltale games are not bad because the genre is dated. Telltale games are bad because THEY DO NOT MAKE GOOD GAMES.)

I’m working on Broken Sword: Director’s Cut because it’s free at the moment because Good Old Games sold like a billion copies or something. I’ve never played it–I played a bit of the PSX version of the sequel, and the less said about that the better. So far it’s pretty good–I’m in the prologue chapter still, only about 20 minutes in. But look at that image up there. There’s two of these puzzle locks I’ve got to solve to continue. They’re tough–I’m normally pretty good at spatial puzzles like this so I’m not worried, I just need to play with it a little more, but what I find hilarious? The game keeps popping up hints for the puzzle, ones which seem to imply that the reason I haven’t solved the puzzle yet is because I can’t figure out what to do. That’s fairly obvious, isn’t it? It’s getting there that’s the problem.

I love how secret vaults are always locked with an intricate puzzle lock that anyone who’s played an adventure game could solve, though. That people who want to keep secrets hide their stuff behind locks of this type, or write messages in easily-deciphered code, or whatever, that implies that this is a world without adventure games. Given my complex feelings towards the genre, I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing.

Anyway, it’s free, and you should be supporting GOG anyway, so pick it up and get something else while you’re at it!

I played for several hours yesterday and–I am not exaggerating–literally all day today, from about 8 in the morning when the dog woke me up until it was time to watch Breaking Bad. I took a couple breaks here and there, for naps, for food, but yeah–I’ve been grinding.

I’m not that familiar with the world of MMOs. I played a few minutes of World of Warcraft once and HATED it. As a couple recent blog posts have shown, I’ve been playing a little bit of Final Fantasy XI–I don’t really have a handle on it at all, I’m gonna play some with Eric during the week and hopefully I’ll figure it out. Mostly it’s the fact that I find MMORPG combat to be EXTREMELY dull, especially at the beginning when you have no skills. It’s a game of, I’m going to hit “attack” and then watch as my dude whacks the rats with his club when he feels like it. It’s boring. Rusty Hearts is not an RPG–it’s a straight-up action brawler arcadey thing. It’s a button masher, by and large. I’m a fan of that sort of thing–I like being able to actually do something in a game. It’s not as graceful as Bayonetta or as brutal as Lords of Shadow, but for a free game? Awesome.

Actually mentioning Lords of Shadow is funny cause Rusty Hearts feels very much like Castlevania: The MMO. The game takes place in a generic European village, you’re fighting Dracula (or Lord Vlad, as the game calls him, but it’s Dracula), you’re fighting baddies in different regions of a castle–it’s not one of the Metroidvania installments, but it feels very similar. Anime-style as well. The plot is…well, you’re a member of a group of warriors who are putting together a mission to storm the castle and defeat Dra–Lord Vlad once and for all, and you’re scouting doing random missions–reconnaissance type stuff–for the few days before in preparation. It’s fairly story-heavy–I’m not familiar with how MMOs go, but i don’t think they’re this plot-based. You actually don’t create your own character–you pick from one of three (soon to be four) pre-made characters, each with different skill trees. The only customization is in getting different hats and outfits, which I really don’t care about–that’s one of the main things you can spend your money on if you want to pay. It’s somewhat amusing, the fact that in the hub world there’s multiple copies of three different characters all running around. I could probably make a point about diegesis in gaming, but I haven’t thought it through enough.

What I like about the levels is how short they are–I’m averaging about five minutes for each run through it. You go through the levels a LOT of times. A dozen or more, if you’re doing all the quests, and that’s not counting runs you go through to just grind. There’s some story quests which make you visit a location multiple times, but there’s enough generic fetch quests that’ll make you go in there. The quests are all fairly standard, Kill X amount of enemy, Bring me X amount of random drops type things. Given that the levels are short, and given that the gameplay is actually fun–I get a Zenlike calm from repetitive beating stuff up action–it doesn’t feel bad.

In a lot of ways, the game is as good as it is because it understands carrots and sticks. There haven’t been any quests that have taken THAT much effort to get, so it’s one of those game’s that’s a constant feedback loop of giving you something to do, letting you do it, and then patting you on the back and smiling grandly. The rewards aren’t even that great–I’ve got more gold than I know what to do with, already, your inventory is woefully small and I just end up selling everything I get, and I hate inventory management in general so I don’t really bother keeping my equipment that perfect. It’s just the constant set of “GOOD JOB” for doing things that are easy–but not TOO easy–that works. It’s a total Lab Rat game and one which hits just right. That’s not always a compliment–Dragon Age II is one of the worst games I’ve ever played and yet I completed every single quest that game had to offer because of how well it played on my psyche. We’re not talking about Mass Effect 2 here, where I completed every single quest because I had emotional involvement in them. It’s just total reptile brain stuff. But as a way to relax and kill some time, I could do far worse.

I don’t like how slow you move in Warcraft and in FFXI–to go from one area to the other requires traipsing through a large play area, unless you grind to Epic Mounts or whatever. Here, there’s a smallish hub–about the size of a typical RPG town, I’d say, with your quest givers and stores tucked away–and you go through one of a series of portals to the different dungeons. You don’t spend any time traveling at all, which is wonderful–traveling, once you’ve seen the scenery and oohed and aahed, if appropriate, is boring. All you do in the hub is get quests, prepare, and form parties, things like that. It’s a very practical game in that it recognizes that you want to, you know, play it.

I’m liking the party system very much. You can create or search for a party based on what dungeon you need to be exploring, what level you want (the dungeons have a few unlockable difficulty levels and some quests only exist in one or another), etc, and people pop in as necessary. I’m finding it to be very ad-hoc and VERY polite. It’s early days, so the servers haven’t been flooded with trolls yet, and everyone’s still just learning how to play, so people are being pretty helpful in the chat. (The chat interface is terrible–I can never seem to click in the window and have to do some jerry-rigging every single time, so, developers, take note.) Things become very chaotic especially when you get a four-person party, especially when–as is likely–multiple people are playing the same character–so it devolves into a really fucking fun chaos. It reminds me of playing the Simpsons arcade game at Skater’s World back in the day–I used to go there all the time for punk shows, and sometimes–because going to Punk Shows isn’t always about the music, it’s about the scene, it’s about the people, it’s about having a good time and being 16 and being away from your parents doing cool shit for a while–I’d hang out in the arcade and I and three random people would gravitate to the Simpsons arcade game and we’d just play it until the end, pumping in extra quarters if we wanted or leaving and having someone else replace until the game ended, and the group, which had shifted over the course of the game, would smile at the accomplishment and then disband. That’s what it feels like.

Needless to say, for a crappy anime-styled game that’s unfunny (the game has, as its solitary joke, that weird very Asian sense of humor where every single character is inappropriately buffoonish and that’s as far as they take it, like, ha ha, look, this girl is supposed to be a combat specialist but she’s forgetful–it’s kind of irritating) and has an unremarkable story, I’m really enjoying it. And hey, it’s free. Worst that happens is it sucks and you’ve just lost the time spent downloading it. I play as Frantz on the West server, my character is named Yagharek, and I’m usually in the Gorgon server. Say hi if you see me.

(Hey, they don’t all have to be trenchant bits of academic analysis. This game does not merit it in any way. It is delicious, delicious junk entertainment.)

I’ve made it to Level 10, which I think is fairly good considering I haven’t upgraded any of my equipment because I can’t really figure out how. Nothing in the game is easy or comprehensible–it’s like they went out of their way to hide how to do anything. I’m playing with my laptop connected to my TV, because my TV is about five times the size of the laptop screen, but the font is so small it’s hard to read. Everything’s just a blur. But one thing I’m doing well is clubbing the rabbits. I’ve bought a couple of spells somehow and now not only am I clubbing rabbits, I’m throwing magical stones at them, blinding them, subjecting them to tornados, and splashing them with water.

Some lady told me to make my way to a place in the south and kill an enemy. It doesn’t matter which one, she’s just happy so long as I’m killing something. Along the way I found a Wild Sheep. The Wild Sheep, after proving itself to be wooly and tough, chased me for a mile, kicking me as it went, and finally killing me.

I am very perplexed by this experience. I have been playing videogames for about 25 years and I’m still not really sure what’s going on. And yet…I find clubbing rabbits to be an extraordinarily soothing activity. I’m beginning to wonder about myself. I no longer know whether I am enjoying myself or not. I totally understand why people develop addictions to this kind of thing. It’s just the right amount of lack-of-work vs frequency-of-awards that’s designed to cause a habit.

In any case, Eric, who once showed me the amount of time he’s played the game over the course of the past several years–it added up to something like 62 DAYS of play–is going to show me some of the things that I can do in the game and maybe actually get me started on the storyline. If .hack, Otherland, Ready Player One, and basically any other work involving a virtual world is any indication, we’re going to stumble upon a real-world mystery that I’m going to have to race against time to solve. Again, I’m unemployed, so I’m looking forward to having something constructive to do. I’m prepared for the possibility that Eric’s character may be killed in-game, causing him to go into a coma in the real world, and that I’m going to have to search for a cure. I’m totally cool with this. I wouldn’t mind having the apartment to myself for a few weeks.

Question for those of you who play: Any time I pass a Tarutaru, I have the impulse to pat it on the head and go HEY LI’L GUY. Is this bad form?

I’m desperately trying to create a character at the moment. There aren’t that many customization options, are there? Still, one of the default Hume options looks like me, and that’s what I like in a character. All I know is that if those “trapped in a virtual world” books wanted to be accurate, they’d include a 200-page chapter towards the beginning where the characters try to create a username, only to repeatedly find that their choices have been already used.

If I ever start playing, I’ll let you guys know what I think.

Predictably, the comments of the article are a cesspool of “That’s how it was back then and it’s okay that the game is that way!” I don’t begrudge the comments that–comments sections on internet articles are where you go if you want to lose faith in humanity. (I especially love the comment which states “who wrote this article? – a women [sic]”, as if the writer’s gender completely invalidates her entire argument–in fact many of these comments have a creepy “get back in the kitchen, bitch” vibe to them). But I found out about this piece from Ben Paddon’s blog, and while around here we’re not remotely his biggest fans, he really should know better.

“As, unfortunately, was the case in the US circa 1947. Honestly, it’s almost as if these people ask stupid questions without putting in any forethought, nor bothering to do any actual research!” is Paddon’s take on the piece. I find this fairly ironic because the quote he pulls comes from a paragraph a quarter of the way into the article–when the author is just finishing her introduction–just before she begins to discuss her research. Boyes’s article isn’t the most hard-hitting piece of journalism I’ve ever read, certainly, it’s a quick opinion piece, but she isn’t simply navel gazing, and Paddon’s shrill comment implies that he didn’t read the full article.

But more than that is the implication that because a work is set in a particular time period, it must therefore espouse all of the values of that particular time period. That is an extremely incorrect assumption because the writers of LA Noire do not live in 1947–they live today. To take Paddon’s argument to its logical conclusion, if I were to write a novel taking place in Mississippi in 1850, that novel would have to wholeheartedly embrace a pro-slavery agenda. Certainly the pro-slavery viewpoint would be depicted–I can’t deny that the climate existed–but a work which even tacitly accepted the system of slavery would be irresponsible because I view slavery as morally reprehensible. (We all should. Please never visit this site again if you don’t.)

LA Noire not only depicts a world where women are more peripheral, it doesn’t question this status. Women genuinely are relegated to the background. I guess what made this the most obvious to me was the Homicide arc, where every single victim is a woman, and every single death is sexualized. The women are naked, raped, beaten, violently killed. One rape/murder is an aberration, a violent crime which must be brought to justice. I don’t mind a gritty detective story which features that as a case. However, when every single case features the same MO, it gets a little…unnerving. After I examined the third body of a mutilated woman, I began to suspect that the game possibly had some agenda against women. After the fifth, I was sure of it.

Ultimately the game decides that all of the homicide cases are connected, and that the murderer of the Black Dahlia is responsible. The Black Dahlia is kind of the Jack the Ripper of LA in the 40s–a Holy Grail of an unsolvable crime. The game gives an in-universe explanation of why the crime remains unsolved in real life, it allows you to bring the killer to justice–but there’s something unseemly about the whole thing. I guess it’s a question of choice. The developers chose to take the real-life rape and murder of a woman and turn it into a random lashing-out by a violent cat-and-mouse cliche of a serial killing. And the developers chose to drop the bodies of five women created solely that they could be signposts on the way to this confrontation. And all throughout the game there’s the implication, only vaguely acknowledged by the game itself, that you’re solving these cases not out of any sense of justice or duty or desire to avenge the fallen, but because the Homicide desk is a stepping stone in your career. It’s another level to be completed.

I think about the novels of James Ellroy, stories that LA Noire unabashedly takes inspiration from, a man who himself treated the story of the Black Dahlia in a novel. The main characters in The Black Dahlia are tortured by the thought of this crime, are horrified by how Elizabeth Short died, and obsess over its solution. She is not one anonymous body out of a half-dozen, a psychopath’s random leaving, but an actual woman who was murdered–someone with a history and a family. Solving the crime in this case involves not a simple treasure-hunt of clues–with a background character popping up at the end and gloating HA HA IT WAS ME, THE LEAST LIKELY SUSPECT, THE WHOLE TIME! and getting off scot-free due to a hastily-explained handwave, but a deep, intimate understanding of who all of the major players are.

Or LA Confidential, which is more of a direct influence. Boyes does acknowledge that the women are “relegated to the role of prostitutes”, but I do disagree that this is all they are, particularly in the novel. The character of Lynn Bracken, who is indeed a prostitute, refuses to be limited to that role–who explicitly acknowledges, in the film, that she loves one of the characters because he “treats me like Lynn Bracken and not some Veronica Lake look-alike who fucks for money”. Or the novel-only character of Inez Soto, a double minority–a Mexican woman–who is all-too-aware of her place in society and is savvy enough to use that status in order to manipulate other characters for her own ends. Ellroy depicts a society which has marginalized women–but he refuses to accept that society’s values. He is writing with the values of a man who lives in a society that takes the equality of the sexes for granted.

Or something even more contemporary–the show Mad Men, which takes place at a time when these attitudes towards women were just beginning to shift. Particularly in the early seasons, the male characters are rampantly sexist. They objectify women left and right, treating their wives as accessories and status symbols akin to fancy cars and big houses. This was accurate for the time. However, the writers and creators are very aware of the fact that such attitudes are unacceptable in this day and age. And so the female characters are well-rounded. They bristle against the way they’re treated. It shows sexism and objectification occurring in a historically-accurate way, but through a modern lens of condemnation. Any time a woman is treated as a piece of meat and nothing more, is treated as having the capacity of being a secretary or housewife and nothing more, it’s with the intent of eliciting an uncomfortable reaction. It is a work set in the early 1960s but one that does not espouse traditional values–it is one which is made with a decidedly modern sensibility.

I guess my point is that yes, Los Angeles in 1947 may not have been a paradise of feminism, that women and men were not equal. However, we’re not in 1947. We’re in 2011. We’ve gone through several waves of the feminist movement. We cannot create a work which ignores this. Paddon and the commenters seem to think that depiction is enough. They’re wrong. In its passive acceptance of the roles of women, LA Noire is a morally irresponsible work.

A random glance through the Gamestop flyer told me that the game was on sale, new, for $13, and so on Friday I stopped by the Manhattan Mall Gamestop–the BEST Gamestop ever and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise–and picked it up. $13 is the perfect price for this game. Any more expensive and I’d have felt ripped off, but spending so little–it’s easier to overlook the flaws.

The flaws are mostly with the voice acting and plot. The plot is your typical “evil takes over the kingdom and you’ve got to stop it”, but the game thinks it’s giving a fresh take on it. It’s really not, and while the cutscenes aren’t offensive per se, there’s a lot of them, particularly at the beginning. The game opens up and lets you breathe after a little while, but it’s your typical Japanese game narrative style–don’t let the player figure anything out for himself when you could give an infodump.

The basic gimmick of the game is that you’re a dude who’s trying to save the kingdom, and you team up with this giant creature thing called the Majin. It reminds me of a Team ICO game in this way, that it’s based on your relationship. But where Team ICO games are elegant and understated, the Majin is…

…well, for one he won’t goddamn shut up. Recording the voice acting for the Majin apparently consisted of grabbing an intern and having him do his best attempt at a “lovable oafish troll” voice (IMDB claims that the Majin was voiced by an actual actor who played, among other things, Xemnas from Kingdom Hearts and Vicious from Cowboy Bebop, but I can’t believe that listening to his performance here). He’s constantly throwing out stuff like “ME HUNGRY” and “YOU LOOK HURT” and, every time–EVERY time–you solve a puzzle, “YAY! THAT GREAT”. He’s supposed to be childish and endearing and silly, and it’s–

–well, I’m normally the last person to have a problem with “kiddy”–but there’s a difference between childlike whimsy and insulting, and Majin falls VERY much into the latter. The Mario games are a pretty textbook example of how to do it right–there’s bright colors and wacky things going on, for children to enjoy, and there’s tough platforming and lasting character designs for older folks. When there’s dialogue between the main character and the Majin, I almost want to mute the TV. I realize they’re not going for elegant and minimalist, that they want to make a broad comedy, but the game’s based on the relationship between the main character and the Majin–it’s hard to take when I want to punch the Majin in his stupid face every time he speaks. Movies like The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth and The Neverending Story have included characters like this, and I think that’s what the team was going for when they created the Majin, but it doesn’t exactly work. There’s a very dark undercurrent throughout the game, and while there’s nothing outright violent or non-child-friendly in it, I don’t think kids were the primary audience (the game got a T rating in the US). Maybe it’s poor translation, I don’t know–all I know is I don’t find the character to be a lovable oaf.

And worse is your animal helpers. You have the ability to talk to animals–mice and birds mostly–and their actors are–it’s some of the absolute goddamn WORST voice acting I’ve heard in years. It’s embarrassing to listen to. I really wish that they’d done something simple like had a sound clip of the animal chittering away while subtitles showed a “translation”–that would have been less irritating.

It’s also one of those games that takes control of the camera every few minutes to show you stuff you’re supposed to notice. If there’s a puzzle, it’ll basically grab your head and turn it so you’re looking in the right spot. If there’s enemies, it’ll cut to their positions on the field. At one point, I was looking for an alternate entrance around a door. I noticed a ledge I could climb on at the end of a hallway and began to go there, feeling clever for figuring it out. The game then cut to a shot of the ledge with some kind of narration to the effect of, “Maybe I could climb up there”. Every time you flip a lever or blow up a wall, you get a tiny cutscene showing the effects of your action–it’s one of THOSE. I just got off of playing Portal 2, where sometimes actions you performed affected other areas of the level. There was nothing forcing you to watch–if you were curious as to what door was opening, you had to look around and figure it out. The respect that afforded to the player, the assumption that players were capable of figuring it out on their own, was really refreshing. One of the reasons I hate Zelda games is because of how it treats you like someone who can’t solve simple puzzles–Majin falls squarely into that trap.

As far as gameplay goes, Majin is pretty much a Zelda clone. You’ve got a series of ruins, you’ve got to collect stuff, fight dudes, solve puzzles, make your way around a map. I’m not far enough along to be able to tell for sure, but it seems like it’s set up like a small Metroidvania–so far the map appears pretty contiguous. And here’s where the game’s pretty good actually. The game basically sets you down and has you explore and figure out where to go. Occasionally you’ll break a seal in one area that unlocks a door in another, and it’ll point out where the door is, but other than that, there’s no flashing arrow pointing out where to go. It’s a fairly relaxed pace–you make your way from area to area, solving puzzles as you go, and eventually you’ll stumble on the right place.

So basically, what we have here is a ruin exploration game punctuated with some light combat and puzzle solving. It’s a slightly more acrobatic Zelda game, or a clumsier Prince of Persia. I’m a total sucker for games like these–I appreciate that it’s focused on exploring a little world, that most of the game is based on navigating a physical space, and that the graphics aren’t bad doesn’t hurt. It’s not the prettiest set of ruins I’ve ever seen, but it’s colorful and I like colorful games. The creature design, however, IS a delight, and the one thing that keeps the Majin from being a horrible character is that his design is awesome. He’s an endearing-looking stone golem thing, but he’s got grass and moss and these weird plants growing out of him–he’s a total creature of nature and I love his design. The monsters too, they’re some typical shadow monsters but they just look alien and creepy.

All in all, Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom reminds me of a random budget PS2 game in a lot of ways, one of those dozens of obscure titles that no one remembers that you may have played by chance. When I first got my PS2, I got a rental pass from Blockbuster and systematically began to rent every game the store had. There’s tons of games like Dual Hearts and Dark Cloud and Okage Shadow King, none of which changed the world and some of which may have been terrible, but whose existence I appreciate nontheless. It seems a lot of times that games are either AAA titles or shovelware, and there’s not that much room for “little” games. I fully admit that the very low price has helped me appreciate Majin a bit more–I’m able to overlook its flaws and appreciate it for what it is. It does have a certain charm to it, and I’m having fun with it so far.

I have not played multiplayer mode, but the fact that I’m looking forward to it–I have a half-dozen friends who want to play co-op, plus I really should do a few rounds with Eric for podcast purposes, so it’s less a question of finding someone to play with as it is deciding who gets first honors–is probably indicative of how much I liked the game. Want a more explicit indicator of my feelings? I want to play the game again with developer commentary on. I’m really looking forward to seeing some of those scenes and playing some rooms again.

I think I don’t need to tell you this will be very spoiler-heavy.

–The original game is strikingly minimalist in its puzzle elements–there’s boxes, levers, buttons, energy pellets, turrets, and not much else. The new game adds a lot of new pieces-three types of gel that have different effects, lasers, teleporter funnel things, light bridges. It doesn’t feel like any of them are gratuitous, and it’s actually really interesting how giving them such distinct and evocative names–Thermal Discouragement Beams, Aerial Faith Plates, Excursion Funnels–almost helps to characterize them. All of them seem like recognizable and important parts of the world in which they live, which helps it feel much more “alive”. We’re not just playing with abstract pieces–we’re testing out technologies.

However, while they try out a lot of what the different elements can do, because of the game’s length I don’t feel like they’ve explored every angle–clever level designers could figure out more. Given that they’re apparently going to release DLC challenge packs, that’s not a bad thing.

–Actually, depending on how the DLC goes, they might be doing something very interesting with the difficulty. See, every single puzzle made me feel smart after solving it–like I’d looked through the environment, tested out some theories, and ultimately come up with a solution all on my own–I didn’t use a guide at all because of how solvable the game was. Many chambers, I entered and found myself too overwhelmed to continue or just couldn’t figure it out, and I usually took that as a sign to take a break for a bit and do something else. Invariably, when I restarted the game, the solution jumped out at me within five minutes. That’s great.

While the game starts off pretty easy and gets harder as it goes along, I think, in the grand scheme of things, that the difficulty tops out somewhere around “medium/hard”. There’s a lot more difficult it could be. I approve of this decision–it means that beating the game is not just for a Chosen Elect, and they can save the really tough ones for the DLC. I hope, though, that they put in some huge puzzles with all of the different elements–I wanted to see more Chaos to make order out of.

–Portal is also very minimalist in its plot and characters. There’s obviously no dialogue–your character is mute–and the entirety of the script is GLaDOS talking to you. (There’s some incidental speech from the turrets and the cores, but they seem to take more of the form of sound effects than actual speaking.) The plot is very simple–you’re in a facility, there’s a rogue AI, go escape.

Portal 2 adds a few characters–Wheatley the endearingly dim core who goes on to take over the place, Cave Johnson the founder of Aperture Science, GLaDOS herself–some of whom interact with each other. I was worried this would change the paranoid, alone atmosphere, but they manage to avoid that pitfall. Since your character doesn’t speak, it largely stays characters monologuing at you, the bits with dialogue are not extended (and are all excellently written), and they help it feel like more of a world. Cave Johnson himself is dead–he’s only encountered through recordings–so that’s helpful.

–The characterization, particularly of Wheatley and GLaDOS, is extremely complex, and I’m impressed with how deftly it was handled. Wheatley is designed to be an intelligence dampener–he’s literally created to be dumb–and in his initial stages he comes off as clumsy, silly, hilarious, and well-meaning. He may not be able to do anything well, but he’s trying his best. When he’s plugged into GLaDOS’s mainframe, he turns evil and takes over the facility. But rather than a complete personality overhaul, he’s the same ditz as before–he’s just turned murderous. God love ‘im, he attempts evil quips and dangerous deathtraps, but he’s still not very good at it, he’s not smart enough to be. At one point, when you’re faced with an easily-avoidable trap, he resorts to begging you to step into it, reasoning that he’s totally going to kill you later and it’s somehow better for you and will spoil his careful preparations if you voluntarily kill yourself. GLaDOS’s big plan to destroy him is to confront him with a logical paradox–he’s too stupid to understand and it doesn’t work on him.

It’s interesting, because when he starts to take over, that scene is pretty chilling. That he’s a total incompetent does not change the fact that he’s very, very murderous and is trying desperately to make you dead. In a way, it actually adds to his scariness. The facility is actually in more danger due to his inaction and obliviousness–he hasn’t tended to the reactor and it’s about to blow in the last stages of the game–than to anything he actively does. That makes for a fearsome antagonist indeed.

–But GLaDOS’s characterization is much more interesting. In the first game, she was a mad AI who went even further mad and attempted to kill you for standard homicidal AI reasons. In this game, she’s been reliving her death at your hands thousands of times, which has unhinged you further. The section where she’s testing you, she’s making it very clear that she’s using the tests as a form of torture, and she’s speculating on the ways she’s going to hurt you. Her techniques are hilariously wide-ranging and bizarre: At one point she resorts to making fun of your weight, as if that’s the lowest blow she can strike. In another section, she keeps talking up a “surprise” she’s going to show you, giving broader and broader hints that you’re finally going to meet your parents, only to have her simply throw confetti at you and admit she was just trying to mess with your head. (It worked in my case.) She started off insane–your death finally sent her over the edge.

B ut the characterization doesn’t stop there; after Wheatley takes over, she’s attached to a potato battery and you end up carrying her around for most of the latter half of the game. She starts off accompanying you reluctantly–you’ve both got a common enemy and you’re each others’ only hope–but as the game continues, she begins to…soften towards you. It’s revealed–or at least VERY broadly hinted–that her personality comes from Cave Johnson’s assistant (and assumed lover) Caroline. When GLaDOS starts to figure this out, she screams out, “What the hell is going on?!” Given that this is the only instance of anything resembling profanity in the game (other than Wheatley describing certain defective turrets as “crap”), it’s actually one of the most disturbing parts–coupled with an amazing voice performance that embodies absolute terror. (Do I need to mention that the game features the best voice acting I’ve ever heard?) A very interesting thing is happening–GLaDOS is being humanized. We begin to pity her, to feel bad for her–some of her speeches even indicate that she’s starting to feel feelings of affections towards Chell, that the two women are starting to become friends.

This is a very interesting direction for the game to take.

–The end also manages to straddle a line that could have faltered miserably–they hit it precisely. See, there are a lot of factors which should affect GLaDOS’s ultimate fate. We don’t want her to get away scot-free–this is GLaDOS we’re talking about, a homicidal AI who released a deadly neurotoxin for no particular reason, who puts you through torturous tests, who wants you to die and is doing everything in her power to do so. But, her backstory reveals that she was originally a human woman who was likely turned into an AI against her will, she’s been subjected to a series of dampeners and restrictions, she genuinely believes in the value of science and does what she does for that cause, and in-game she’s tortured, placed onto a potato, pecked apart by birds–we pity her, and rightly so. When Wheatley takes over the facility, she’s alone and scared, and her growing feelings of warmth towards Chell aren’t undeserved–Chell quite literally saves her greatest enemy’s life. GLaDOS can’t get away with killing Chell because of that. Chell can’t kill GLaDOS after we’ve seen her hit bottom. We can’t necessarily allow GLaDOS to completely win because she has to atone for her crimes. More importantly, we do like GLaDOS’s “psychotic AI” personality–she wouldn’t be considered one of gaming’s greatest villains if she weren’t such a strongly-defined character. Frankly, we don’t want her changing too much.

The game deals with this dillemma in the best way possible. GLaDOS acknowledges her newly-found humanity (atonement)…and then promptly deletes that part of her personality (reverting back to the “psychotic AI”). She then tells Chell she’s going to let her go (absolving both from the burden of having to kill each other)…because it’s too much work. She tells Chell that she’s not going to bother trying to kill her any more, not because she doesn’t want to kill Chell any more, but because Chell is too stubborn and killing her is simply not worth GLaDOS’s time. Her tone at the end–even though she’s giving Chell what she wants, it feels like a rejection. We can’t wholly say that Chell wins because GLaDOS concedes defeat so sarcastically that it’s meaningless. There’s one final trick–the elevators open up on an array of turrets, which instead of shooting begin singing a little song–and then Chell is outside. After a moment, the Companion Cube from the first game is tossed out the door–a parting gift?–and we have the inevitable JoCo song. There’s a touch of regret and bittersweetness to the lyrics–it’s sung from the perspective of gloating over having gotten rid of her enemy while missing her at the same time. Essentially, all of this allows GLaDOS to publically retain her dignity of being a cold, evil machine who only concedes defeat on her own terms while privately acknowledging her rediscovered humanity, even if she isn’t ready to come to terms with it yet.

The relationship between enemies is always an extremely complex one–as an examinatino of that dynamic, Portal 2 is excellent.

–While the script is hilarious, I also appreciate that there’s a lot of comedy that comes from the controls themselves. The beginning tutorial section, which casts looking up and looking down as “gymnastics”, is great, as are the sections where Wheatly asks you to speak. The game flashes a message telling you to hit SPACE in order to answer him–SPACE is, of course, the jump button–because Chell is a mute protagonist, there literally is no button for speech. The verb does not exist. He repeats his request again, and the game insists that hitting the spacebar will let you say “apple”, but again, you jump.

Or Wheatley’s first test, which literally consists of pushing a button as the only required action. (Apparently this is a commentary on bad community level designers.) After all the buildup he gives, after all of the buildup the game gives, to see a puzzle that’s even easier than the beginning puzzles of the first game, that’s really funny–this is the hardest puzzle he can think of and it’s insultingly simple. As a hat trick, Wheatley decides he doesn’t have it in him to design any other puzzles, and you have to solve it again. The thought that the rest of the game might consist of repeating this one level over and over and over again–I cracked up.

The funniest thing? Wheatley dramatically announces, “This is the part where I kill you!”, a chapter heading called “The Part Where He Kills You” flashes on screen, and you get an achievement labeled “The Part Where He Kills You” (description: “This is that part.”) The comedy is achieved through several levels, most only viewable to the player. It’s a lot deeper than simply having robots throwing witty banter back and forth–although that’s certainly there–the script considers every angle that they could pour comedy into.

I guess, at the end of the day, I’m having a hard time finding a fault with the game. There could stand to be more, and different levels–but it’s a sound principle of entertainment that you always leave ‘em laughing, always leave ‘em wanting more, because if you give them too much, they’ll get bored eventually and they won’t come back for the sequel. Its puzzles are challenging and fun to solve, and the difficult is neither so easy that they’re insulting nor too difficult that they’re impossible. Its plot is entertaining but not so complex that you have to take notes. Its script and voice acting are masterpieces, and it also knows to shut up during most of the puzzles as to avoid annoying the player. In short, it’s a game which had high expectations and which had to balance very carefully to avoid failure. I find many games aren’t very good at that sort of balance–Dead Space 2 and Dragon Age 2 definitely weren’t–and I am in awe at how well they managed it.

So yes, while I realize there are different circumstances here, different developers and publishers–interesting to note that Dead Space and Dragon Age are both EA games–I was wary about playing Portal 2. I have really good memories of playing the first, which is outstanding as far as writing and gameplay are concerned, and didn’t want to ruin them. What swayed me was first that a few friends whose opinons I trust told me in no uncertain terms that I need to play the game as soon as I can, and that Gamestop did a very sudden price drop to $30. I’m trying to save some money, but $30 is a fine price.

I played for a little under two hours last night–I quit at the very beginning of Chapter 3–and I’m having a hell of a time so far. Here are some of my thoughts on what I’ve done.

–It’s great to notice the amount of care that was put into the writing. Again, it’s sad that most videogame writing is an afterthought and is unnoticeable. Portal (and its sequel) features so many quotable lines because nearly every line is a winner. Apparently, as is obvious, when you get a talented writer on staff, you’re going to have excellent dialogue. The writers obviously care about their setting and their characters, and while the new characters have some great lines, it’s clear that they’ve been spending the past few years gleefully coming up with some of the most sadistically passive-aggressive lines for GLaDOS to say. Meanwhile every character so far sounds different–different speech patterns, cadences, vocabulary. Other companies, let’s all get to this point, shall we?

–The entire introduction is one of the most well-done intros I’ve played in a while. The beginning tutorial is hilarious. When shit starts to go down, it’s terrifying. When they detach the room from the rest of the building and you get to see a tiny bit of the outside word, it places the room in space in a way that the original Portal never did. When the room starts to crash into the building, it’s nerve-wracking. The introduction, in short, manages to impart a sense of place, a sense of the place changing, and characterization while whiplashing you between several conflicting emotions and bringing up some questions all in the space of maybe ten minutes’ time.

–Portal has a very interesting way off treating its Place. For the most part, the game takes place in a series of sterile white rooms. While there’s a very specific atmosphere, it’s very unclear–it’s designed to be unclear–what the layout of the complex is. I’ve read theories which suggest that maybe there’s only a couple of actual rooms and they’re simply shifting around every time you enter a new test chamber. Because the setting is so featureless, you don’t pay much attention to it–you only start to realize the environment you’re in when you go through the underbelly, the unfinished areas of the complex. What originally starts off as bland, generic, and unnoticeable ends up turning very oppressive after that part. It helps the atmosphere of paranoia–because you’re torn between bright lights that are unsuitable for humans to live in, and an industrial atmosphere you feel you’re not really supposed to be exploring. That you have to squeeze behind things in order to see some of the side rooms helps to impart the sense that the developers didn’t even really intend for you to go there, that you’re actually tricking the game itself.

So Portal 2 begins in what looks like a generic hotel room, the kind of place you’ve stayed in a dozen times, down to the generic art on the wall. When you wake up and the room has decayed over assumedly hundreds of years, that’s pulling the rug of the familiar out from under you–again, an effect they accomplish in only a few minutes. When you go through the decaying, automatic test chambers, there’s the contrast between the antiseptic and the dangerous industral that’s embodied in the same room. And when GLADoS awakens…

…well it does bolster the theory that theres’ only a handful of test chambers because you see the chambers setting themselves up as you walk into them–platforms realign, walls form, lasers turn on. It makes the environments feel so much more dynamic than they did in the first, and helps the game feel more intense. You’re not going through a lazy course that’s been set up for years. GLADoS is thinking up this stuff and throwing it at you as fast as she can. You two are racing against each other.

–For that matter, going through the few chambers for the second time, especially GLADoS’s room–well I’m a sucker for when games repeat areas but change them somehow. Certainly movie and book sequels revisit locations, but since games have a much more inherent sense of exploration–since they’re literally worlds you inhabit–altering a location can have a much more dramatic effect. Going through GLADoS’s chamber, you have the opportunity to examine exactly how much damage you yourself caused.

–I’ve often said that I love videogames when they make me feel like I’m flying. In one level, one of the new pieces–the Aperture Science Aerial Faith Plate–is introduced; basically it’s a catapult. In this particular level, there are two set up at opposite ends of a large pool of water–each flings you to the other side. I spent literally five minutes jumping from one end to the other and repeating the process, and it was only because it was late and I wanted to get to a chapter break before stopping that I went to the next room. There’s a feeling of freedom and motion–the feeling of experiencing something which is impossible in real life–that the best videogames impart, and it’s definitely imparted here.

So, the PSN Debacle.

Any time the phrase “The Hackers” comes out I tend to roll my eyes a little bit–I guess Hollywood’s done its job by making them come across as super-lame. I mean we all saw Hackers, The Matrix, The Net–they were cheesy good times and they did a great job of making hackers in general come across as cartoonish, either godlike geniuses or moustache-twirling villains who won’t give you your life back unless you give them the disk.

But now we’ve got an actual issue, and as of the time of this writing it’s taken over a week–a full week!–and Sony’s still not really sure of the extent of the damage that’s been done, or if they are, they’re not saying.

The FAQ on Sony’s site states that they learned about the security breach “between April 17 and April 19″. They remained vague about it until the 22nd, when they finally admitted there was an external breach. The next few days had several similar vague announcements–we’re trying to figure it out, we’re looking into it.

On the 25th, Sony’s forensic analysts determined that there was indeed a breach and that user data was indeed compromised–a post from Patrick Seybold explained that they waited until they were sure about the extent of the breach to communicate about it. Why they waited an extra day until the 26th to finally confirm things, I haven’t found any information on.

While The Hackers may have dealt the initial blow–ruining the PSN’s security and causing all of this downtime–Sony’s done nothing but shoot themselves in the foot. Do they not have an emergency communications team? If they don’t, there are consultative firms who specialize in this sort of thing. The second–the second!–that Sony realized that there had been an intrusion they should have been on the phone to both security and emergency communications firms, both who would have advised the action that Sony took–shutting down the network.

A statement should then have been immediately released, mentioning the possibility of an external intrusion, that the network was being shut down as a protective measure, and that an investigation to determine the scope of the breach was underway. Sony should have been releasing press releases every few hours, even if no new information existed, detailing what was going on in the investigation. They should have immediately cautioned users about possible fraudulent emails, suggested monitoring of credit card accounts, etc. They shouldn’t have gone for the better part of a week without giving any concrete information, and they CERTAINLY shouldn’t have sat on the news of compromised date for a day.

Compare this to the 1982 Tylenol poisonings which are nearly universally considered to be an exemplary model of how to handle crisis PR. The reason you’re able to buy a bottle of Tylenol today is because of how well Johnson and Johnson handled it–when the incidents initially happened, many analysts believed that the brand would be too tainted to be commercially viable.

In the fall of ’82, several people took Tylenol and died within a few hours. The connection was discovered quickly and it was determined that the pills had contained something in the neighborhood of ten thousand times the lethal dose of cyanide. They determined that the poison did not get into the capsules at the manufacturing plants, that several different manufacturing lots were involved, and that the pills were purchased from five different stores. While it seemed that the incidents were isolated to the Chicago area, Johnson and Johnson considered it a national crisis–for obvious reasons, people across the country were avoiding the brand.

Johnson and Johnson immediately offered to work with the FDA, the FBI, and the local police to assist with the investigation. Even though it was determined that the deaths were the responsibility of a random poisoner who was unconnected with the company, J&J made it their duty to pull advertising and warn the public. They instituted a nationwide recall of all Tylenol products. I remember my mother telling me that when it happened, there was a spokesperson constantly on the news updating people about what steps the company was taking. Instead of distancing themselves from what was happening–again, given that it wasn’t directly their fault, they could have, and most companies at the time would have taken that option–they took an active role in the public’s safety and were rightly praised for the demonstration of care for their customers.

Within six weeks, Tylenol reappeared on shelves with new seals on its packaging–that’s why today when you buy most over-the-counter medication you have to go through the cotton and the plastic seal and the box. They heavily discounted the price of the medication and launched a completely new advertising campaign. All told, Johnson and Johnson lost millions in the short term between the recall and the pulling of advertising and the new campaign and the discounts, but they not only preserved but even improved their reputation by their handling of the crisis. The corporate philosophy placed its customers first–the company felt a sense of responsibility towards the well-being of those who were using its products and believed that their welfare was more important than the company’s. That they did everything in their power to help customers feel safe and communicate transparently what was going on demonstrated this, and customers responded very well.

The PSN outage does not directly threaten anyone’s life, but financial and residency information is threatened. It’s not directly Sony’s fault that there was an intrusion–but it’s Sony’s responsibility to make its customers feel safe. Sony’s corporate philosophy is clear–it places itself above its customers. It should be admitting its problems and letting us know what steps it’s taking to fix it–to beef up security, to investigate the extent of the damage. Instead, it reminds me of a kid who accidentally breaks a vase and, fearful of getting punished, stacks the pieces together and hopes no one will notice.

The quality of writing is very different as well–where ICO featured cryptic, often one-sided dialogue, and only at crucial junctures, this features you collecting little “memories”–one-or-two sentence fragments which basically amount to “Boy, being a shadow is weird and scary!” I just came upon a little cutscene monologue–I have no idea who’s supposed to be saying it, what it’s referring to, or what the point of it is, because I’m not playing this one for the story, but it’s…poorly written. I don’t really get the sense that the team paid much attention to the storyline themselves–they were more concerned with creating levels and things, which is fine, but why include it at all in this case? Videogames must have a storyline, seems to be the thinking, so let’s include one. Fact is, they could have simply presented us with completely plotless levels and it would be a lot stronger–the game is just an examination of concepts of light and shadow, the end.

But I guess the biggest issue is–okay, here it comes up again–Sense of Place. ICO is…well, again, I could probably find my way out of that castle if I found myself in there. The logic behind its design is not my logic, and yet there’s a sense of consistency and purpose guiding it all. I have no idea what all of the (largely empty) rooms are for…but whoever designed the castle certainly did. The place is very well-laid-out–all of the rooms fit together. Some of the best parts of the game involve seeing a tower from one part of the castle and then actually traveling there later. You’re presented with an actual physical space to explore–the setting is a character in its own right, and I love that game for it.

Lost in Shadow takes place inside a tower that you have to ascend. There’s no real rhyme or reason to any of it. To give a very specific example, I’m on the 25th floor–the block of floors I’m in is the Reservoir. Floor 25 is called the Sewage Treatment.

WHAT IS A SEWAGE TREATMENT PLANT DOING ON THE 25TH FLOOR. THERE IS NO REASON FOR IT TO BE ON THE 25TH FLOOR. IT SHOULD BE IN THE BASEMENT WHERE IT BELONGS.

Levels are more laid out based on what would provide a platforming challenge rather than by what would make logical sense. Now, I’m all for design based on challenge–my apartment building, for example, would not make a remotely interesting videogame level–but I don’t see why one should be sacrificed for the other. The goal isn’t to directly model the real world, but rather to create a world in its own right. When a game takes place in a single confined space, when you place a focus on setting, you need to make that setting feel real. Let’s face it–the mansion from Resident Evil wouldn’t work as a functional house in real life, but that game characterizes the setting well enough (especially for its time) that you feel like you’re there. That Lost in Shadow just kind of slaps its levels together is part of where it fails. If they hadn’t tried to make the story and setting feel like they mattered, it might have succeeded much better.

It’s odd–I think I’m suggesting that the game’s biggest failure is that it tried to be more than it is.

The plot, too, seems like a riff on ICO–you’re a dude who’s in a castle and you’ve been brought there to be sacrificed or something. You fight shadow enemies. At one point you get a sword. Yes, yes, that all happens in other games–but it seems like not only were they not trying to hide their influence, they’re almost blatantly flaunting the homage.

But, you know, you could do a lot worse than imitate ICO, and let’s face it, that’s one of the reasons I bought the game in the first place–the screenshots and videos I’d seen of it hit that part of my brain that remembers that ICO is, indeed, my favorite game, and that it’s been grey and rainy outside for what feels like weeks and I could use some sunlight.

Lost in Shadow is a platformer–general “climb and jump around” and “bop things with your sword” and “find stuff to get to the next level”, but the twist, and what saves the game from being completely unoriginal, is that you play a shadow and the platforms are the shadows of the elements in the world. It’s…strange, in practice. The entire game takes place in the background, really–pillars and platforms and pipes are in the foreground and you have to pay attention to what’s projected on the wall. But there’s kind of a dual-layer gameplay going on. Many of the puzzles are based on manipulating the physical realm in order to change the shadows. So you’ll move an object to change its shadow, or shift the light source around so it casts the shadows from a different angle, or shift the view to change around the platforms.

I’m early on, and as a result I’m not particularly sure if, in practice, it’s any different from any other platformer. I’m thinking, at the end of the day, it’s going to be fairly simple and ultimately not worthy of much consideration or contemplation. I guess I’ll weigh in when I’m finished. I’ve lately been very interested in games which examine their concept in exhaustive detail–which give a relatively simple premise and put the engine through all possible paces. (Ghost Trick is a good example–nearly the entire game is based on “move here/make objects do something”, and yet by the end those two basic verbs have combined in a lot of novel ways.) With luck, this’ll turn out to be one of those.

This isn’t always entirely the writers’ fault. Someone needs to edit the article. Whether it’s rewriting sentences that don’t flow as well as the writer intended, correcting factual errors, or pointing out areas which should be developed further, all formal pieces of writing need that editorial pass–all writing is bad until it’s been fixed by a good editor. That most videogame journalism is bad indicates that most of its editors don’t really do anything–or that they certainly don’t do it well.

Owen Good’s April 10, 2011 Kotaku article “Promoter Sues Microsoft Over Kinect Launch Event” commits nearly all of those sins I mentioned earlier–there are several sentence-level errors, it’s essentially a direct rewrite of an article from AdWeek, and Good does not do any additional research or probe any deeper. Good is Kotaku’s weekend editor, but it doesn’t seem as if he took that role seriously for his own article. A read-through of the piece makes it very clear that there’s a lot more work that needed to be done. Let’s edit.

(Original text of the post in italics. My comments in bold.)

Remember the Times Square launch event for Kinect last fall? [Beginning with a yes/ no question is a very lazy way to start an article. In addition, I--and many of your readers--don't remember the launch event. Who was there? What happened? When was it? While you should have looked up some first-hand accounts of the event, your single source--the AdWeek article, which isn’t a first-hand account--includes a summary of what occurred.] It took some begging, pleading, and cold hard cash just to happen, when the cops made the a last-minute discovery: a The full- blown concert didn’t have the requisite permits. [This entire opening is unclear. You seem to use the word “event” to refer to both the whole event--demos, performances, sales--and to just the concert. As a result, I can’t tell from your description what exactly the police wanted to shut down.] The promoter who made all the bad stuff go away [Don’t try to be cute] says Microsoft owes him $63,000 for it. [Misleading. The lawsuit is against three parties--Microsoft, the ad agency Mother, and Microsoft executive Craig McNary. The three parties combined allegedly owe the promoter roughly $63,000.]

When Ne-Yo [pictured] [Notice how AdWeek first refers to him as "R&B singer Ne-Yo". Don't assume that your readership, which is international, knows that Ne-Yo is an American singer] showed up to serenade the crowd waiting to buy the first Kinect [Were they only selling one?] sold in North America, the gathering became something a little more complex than what police had been told to expect. [It didn't become more complex. The police allegedly weren’t given all the information.] The event coordinator, the agency P.R.omotion!, “sweet-talked the NYPD and promised to pay $45,000 in fines,” if they let it continue, reports AdWeek.

Now the company has sued Microsoft, a New York ad agency, [The AdWeek article names the ad agency--Mother. Why did you leave it out of your article?] and the Microsoft Xbox executive Craig McNary, for stiffing them on the back end. P.R.omotion [The company has an exclamation point in the name (P.R.omotion!). Be consistent and use their correct name.] says the three parties should pay the $63,150 it absorbed in fines, legal fees and other costs associated with fixing everything. [Much of the lawsuit hinges on whose responsibility it was to file the permits. The implication is that the defendants were in charge of completing the proper paperwork and paying the appropriate fees, and that, for whatever reason, they did not do this. P.R.omotion! negotiated with the authorities and paid the fines so that the concert could continue; its case is based on its belief that the fault lies with Microsoft, Mother, and McNary and, therefore, it is their responsibility to pay the fines. But who does the fault lie with, exactly? Do some research here: Did P.R.omotion! make a mistake, did Microsoft/McNary, or did Mother?]

“I’ve never had to do this, ever, and my clients are the biggest in the country,” Tom Hennigan, P.R.omotion’s [“P.R.omotion!’s”] owner, told AdWeek. “It’s unfortunate that this happened.” [What function does this quote serve? Why did you include it? It serves no purpose in your article.]

Hennigan says he warned everyone that New York authorities didn’t like surprises. [I realize you're trying to avoid plagiarism and so you simply paraphrased the AdWeek article's sentence "Hennigan’s company claims in its suit that it stressed to Microsoft and Mother that the city was highly adverse to changes", but that's slightly different from what seems to have happened. They didn't simply "surprise" the city of New York--they didn’t file the required permits.] Thirty minutes before the first Kinect was sold, police threatened to shut the whole thing down because no one said Ne-Yo would be there. [Phrased this way, it seems almost like the issue had something to do with the police not being fans of Ne-Yo. I'd assume that Ne-Yo's performance classified the event as an outdoor concert, and that outdoor concert permits had not been filed--but finding this out is your job.] Says P.R.omotion’s [“P.R.omotion!’s”] lawsuit, McNary directed the planner to “negotiate with the city to ensure that the event would proceed.”

Microsoft and the other ad agency named both declined comment to AdWeek. [Not only should Kotaku have sources at Microsoft to whom you could talk, this sentence is factually untrue. While AdWeek was indeed unable to get a quote from Microsoft, they did speak to someone at Mother. The final paragraph of the AdWeek article reads, in part: “‘We asked P.R.omotion! to provide back up invoices or receipts for said fine and he was unable to provide them,’ said Tom Webster, a partner at Mother. ‘This is something we'd prefer to handle out of court.’"]

At the end of the day, we’re left with one important question: What, exactly, is the point of this article? We see this all the time at sites like Kotaku: An article which consists of a paraphrased press release, of a rewritten interview, of another writer’s reportage–with no added original content. Owen Good’s writeup adds nothing to the AdWeek article. AdWeek concentrates on the story from a public relations and marketing perspective. Kotaku’s readers and writers are interested in videogame culture. And yet, this treatment of the story does not add anything from that perspective. In fact, Good’s article also seems directed towards advertising professionals rather than videogame fans. There is literally nothing to this rewrite that could not have been accomplished with a brief summary and a link to the AdWeek article. The time spent writing this article was time wasted–it is a poorly written article with no reason to exist.

One of the stock excuses employed by the likes of Ben Paddon and Jim Sterling is: I’m not a journalist, I’m a blogger/pundit/commentator. The rigor of journalistic ethics, of the research process, of editing, does not apply to them. Since they’re not doing straight reportage, they’re allowed to slap together any old thing and should not be held accountable for any errors. They simply don’t need to be held to any particular standard. We, of course, do not agree with this opinion–but a depressingly large number of readers don’t seem to mind.

Good’s article, however, is straight reportage. To his credit, he has written an article which is free from commentary and which lays out the unembellished facts. It’s sad that this makes his article notable. However, his article asks no questions, contains no new content, and features no additional insight–it is simply a clumsy paraphrase of another reporter’s work. There is no excuse for this. Good cannot hide behind “punditry”: This is a news article and must be judged as such. Good has failed to perform the basic research necessary for writing an article like this. The editorship of Kotaku has failed to demand more of him, has failed to clean up his writing. Kotaku’s readership has failed to realize that this is not the best that news writing can be. And the graduate school of journalism at Columbia University, which, according to Good’s LinkedIn profile, awarded him a Master’s of Science in Journalism in 2000, has failed to impress upon him that articles like this are, quite simply, not enough.

Want more Let’s Edit? We’ve got it!

I may have avoided as many previews as humanly possible for Dragon Age II, but one thing that I did learn was that they were hyping the amount of player choice and agency that the game contained. You would truly be the Champion of Kirkwall: You, the player, would get to decide the story’s outcome.

It’s a pity that that didn’t actually happen.

I’m thinking of a few things in particular. Like the fact that no matter what you do, you’re going to have to fight the same bosses. That you’re not going to be able to find a peaceful solution to the Qunari problem. That the ending always boils down to “then everybody with the possible exception of your love interest left and Hawke disappeared.”

But most importantly I’m thinking about the fact that you can’t stop Anders from blowing up the chantry.

Anders was my love interest for several reasons. I prefer to play gay if I have the option. The other male love interest, Fenris, didn’t appeal to me. A friend of mine who had Awakenings but did not buy Dragon Age II had a crush on Anders and I wanted to pursue this romance in his honor. Finally, my character was a mage–it seemed somehow right.

In one late-game quest, Anders asks Hawke for help gathering ingredients for a potion–ostensibly to separate him from the spirit that he’s possessed by. He needs to do something in the Chantry, and requests that Hawke not ask questions. I was role-playing: This was my character’s love, the man he’d been sharing a bed with for years, the man who comforted him after his mother’s unavoidable-no-matter-what-the-player-decides death, the one who had been there for me. If he needed a favor from me, he got it.

In the climactic scene, Anders revealed he’d set up a bomb and he blew up the Chantry. He had lied to me. The ramifications for our relationship were interesting and we dealt with it best we could–we made up, if you’re interested–but what I liked about this was the fact that this was my doing. Well, partially–I enabled it. Without me, Anders would not have been able to create the bomb.

Except…no matter what you decide, whether you help him or not, whether you even begin the quest or not, Anders will always blow up the Chantry.

For a game based on player choice, Dragon Age II manages to make player choice not matter.

The events of the game are set in stone. Bartrand is always going to betray Varric. The Qunari are always going to attack. Anders is always going to blow up the Chantry. There’s a term for this in tabletop role playing circles–it’s called “railroading”. It’s not a compliment.

Not only does this lack of choice make the player feel like what he does is irrelevant–for all the difference of make I could have just picked dialogue options at random–it also takes away the notion of compromise, of diplomacy, of peaceable solutions. The world of Dragon Age II is a world of inevitable violence where one is voiceless. We are told, over and over again, that Hawke is an important person in the world of Dragon Age, in the city of Kirkwall. As Champion of Kirkwall, he’s a notable figure.

He is trumped by the designers. They may have intended for Hawke to shape the world around it. I’m not sure if it was laziness, incompetence, or a simple lack of creativity–but for whatever reason, they don’t really seem to want to let him.

Anyway, I’m going to eventually be reviewing it, but I’ve got a lot of random things I might want to address. So I’m going to be making a series of blog posts about different aspects of the game, and they’re going to be very spoilery. If you don’t want to be spoiled, finish the game then come back here!

The first major arc of Dragon Age 2 concludes with an expedition to the Deep Roads. One of the things you find in there is an idol made of pure lyrium–lyrium being Dragon Age’s macguffin that has mystical magical properties. This idol, the game makes clear very quickly, is Very Bad News. The guy who ends up owning it goes completely insane–performing atrocities and dark magic in his mansion. The game–perhaps rightly so–views the idol as unequivocally evil.

For all of the supernatural bad juju that the idol provides, however, the rest of the game deals with relatively more mundane matters–in fact, in practice the idol bits are more of a subplot. The meat of the game is dedicated to political conflicts, culminating in a huge battle between mages and templars. Being a mage, in the Dragon Age world, is a dangerous thing. One of the big temptations mages face is blood magic, which is your basic dark evil demon summoning magic (available to DA2 mages by simply spending a specialization point). Blood mages, like the idol, are Always Evil, and you fight several of them (and their associated demons) throughout the game. Magic does have its uses, however, and so to oversee the mages and make sure they’re not using blood magic, there’s a group of knights called the Templars.

The Templars vs. Mages conflict is Dragon Age 2′s major focus, and time and time again you’ll come up against different expressions of it. You’re constantly asked the question “Mages or Templars?” and the context in which that question is asked changes every time. You see templars relentlessly chasing mages even though they’re innocent–mages or templars? You see mages casting blood spells and summoning demons into the world–mages or templars? Characters point out that the entire reason the mages rebel is because they’re being dominated–mages or templars? Your character’s mother is murdered by a necromancer–mages or templars? In practice, it’s your typical almost cliche post-9/11 terrorism allegory: Do we give the government too much power in order to control the violent elements of the world, or do we allow more freedom even though it might make us more vulnerable? It’s not the most original treatment of the theme, but it’s nice to be able to make up your own mind and pick your own sides, and I appreciate that the game actively goes out of its way to avoid damning either side–it makes it very clear that both sides are equally right and wrong and your take on the conflict is a question of perspective rather than morality.

Except, in the ending it throws away all of that nuance for something a lot more straightforward. The head mage, in a move which contradicts every single speech he makes over the course of the game where he insists that only Really Bad Mages use blood magic and that not every mage will do that as their last resort, decides to use blood magic as a last resort and so you’ve got to fight him. (This entire sequence, by the way, is such an extreme bit of body horror and blood that I legitimately thought that I was in Dead Space 2–too bad I didn’t have the right stats to wear the DLC armor you get from registering DS2.) The head templar unsheaths her sword, and it’s been forged from the lyrium idol you found in the Deep Roads. (Somehow they’ve managed to increase the metal’s mass because the sword is much much bigger.) Her ruthless crusade against the mages is due to the corruption and insanity that she contracted from being around the artifact.

This is bullshit.

The game, for all it encourages you to, is careful to not choose a side. Except for the last hour or so of play, it’s impossible to tell how the designers would answer “mages or templars?” because they don’t have an answer. They see the strengths and shortcomings of each position. This is how it should rightfully be: It undermines the player if one side or the other is favored. And so, all of the game’s quests that ask the question divorce the question from morality. This is not a case where all of the “Nice” dialogue options are for the mages and the “Aggressive” ones for the templars, for example. It places these decisions in context, each time, so the “good” answers could favor either side. The game encourages you, rather than playing “saintly”, “evil”, or “neutral”, to pick a faction–mages or templars?–and to go with them for the rest of the game.

Where the game fails is in the ending. We’re constantly told that both sides are not only justified in their beliefs, but both even understand the other’s point of view–until the end, where both sides are shown to be morally unjustifiable. We’re allowed to side with the mages because their spokesman insists that blood magic is not magic’s inevitable result–and in the end, their spokesman turns to blood magic. We’re allowed to side with the templars because their decisions are based in a desire to help the greater good and to protect the populace–until we find out that their representative’s grabs to power were the result of possession by an evil sword spilling out bad juju. And so we really can’t follow the mages, because to support the mages is to accept a demonic influence. To support the templars is to condone the seductive murmurs of madness.

I almost wonder if they’re going for a “power corrupts” type of stance here…except again, nothing in the game seems to justify that. One of the characters in your party is a blood mage…and while her actions can (and, in my playthrough, did) leave some people in a worse state than they would have been in without her, that’s more due to her misguided naivete than it is a slippery slope of power. (I believe player actions have something to do with it–I ended up encouraging her to follow her instincts, which turned out to be completely wrong–it’s possible if I’d chastised her she could have had a happier ending.) And, I mean, I played a mage (who picked blood magic as a specialization) who attempted to do the right thing and used his power for the good of the city and in order to protect people to the extent that the game allowed me to. There’s no indication that my Hawke is going to turn into a demon at any point. The head templar even admits as much in one conversation–even though she’s aware that this Hawke is an apostate mage, he’s demonstrated by his service to the city that he’s not going to use his power for ill. (That he’s a local hero and his arrest would lead to immediate riots is another reason, of course.) The possibility of remaining uncorrupted exists and is available for anyone with strong convictions and with enough moral fortitude–traits that the head mage and head templar both share.

The scene where the head mage transforms into an abomination is intended to be shocking. It’s very dramatic and the resulting creature is fairly horrifying (it seems that Bioware borrowed one of Visceral’s monster designers for this–it looks straight out of Dead Space). The mage makes a big speech about how the Templars drove him to this–which is one of the arguments that’s been thrown around for most of the game. This particular character espouses this worldview! For him to suddenly resort to blood magic contracts his entire character. Rather than showing us depths that we didn’t expect him to have, it shows him to be extremely unprincipled–that he can’t live up to the morality he’s set up. I sided with this character because I believed him when he said that not all mages were like that. Having him change his mind in the end is a nasty little bait and switch.

The same is with the templars–when the head of the templars takes out her sword and we realize it’s been made of pure lyrium and Evil, it’s supposed to be a major reveal–So she was possessed the whole time!¬ Number one, the timing of this is suspect. Her persecution of mages starts from the beginning, and while it intensifies throughout the course of the game, it’s treated as a natural consequence of a vicious cycle–her and the mages stepping up their game in order to outsmart each other. You can’t say that the sword is the cause of her madness–storylinewise, it’s impossible for it to have passed into her hands until somewhere in between the second and third acts. The sword is unnecessary–it’s redundant. She would have started war between the mages and the templars with or without it.

And so making the mages and the templars Secretly Evil is a copout, a way for the game to end while disavowing any of the moral questions it has asked throughout. That the whole thing was caused by a Sword of Evil, that all mages are influenced by demons, that gets both mages and templars off the hook for their worldviews. Neither side is culpable for their abuses of power–it’s the fault of Evil Magic. Bioware doesn’t seem to realize that attributing everything to Evil Magic also undermines both sides. The mages can’t complain about being oppressed when the templars are justified in wanting to protect people from the inevitable blood magic. The templars can’t justify locking up mages when their orders come from a woman influenced by magic into sadism. Mages or templars? It doesn’t much matter. They’re all evil and you end up fighting both of them anyway.

Jim Sterling is, to say the least, a polarizing figure in the videogame community. When freelancing, he can speak articulately, even intelligently, about videogame culture; however, in his day job at Destructoid, he tends towards a much cruder style. He and the site are fairly strongly associated with each other, and Destructoid’s community is swarming with fans of The Sterling Persona–a persona prone to rants and profanity and kneejerk unresearched reactions to minor news events and questionable headlines suggesting that a certain game will “scare the foreskin off you” or that you ought to “stuff these Dynasty Warriors 7 screens down your urethra”. His sense of humor is fairly boorish and scatological. He’ll make references to both male and female genitalia with wild abandon. While Thoughtful Intelligent Jim Sterling does exist, the bulk of his output sees him writing from the perspective of a loutish fratboy, and that’s the general view of him.

Games journalists often treat women questionably–many of the articles you’ll read on Kotaku seem to be written from the perspective of a five year old who’s suddenly realized the difference between girls and boys. Sterling has that same infantile fascination, and in fact he’s sort of gotten himself in trouble a few times because of this. (I say “sort of” because there usually aren’t any repercussions for his behavior–a bit of clucking in certain corners of the internet is usually all, and it amounts to nothing but fuel for The Legend.) Most recently, there was some sort of kerfuffle on Twitter between him and a woman (username “daphaknee”) who sent him some sexually suggestive fanart (link not worksafe) of Sterling and God of War director David Jaffe. Sterling called her a “cunt”, among other things, and seemed surprised when the spat exploded and people accused him of hating women. Sterling defended himself, essentially stating that he was using those words to get out of her the same reaction she was intending on provoking in him. I personally believe it was simply a case of two trolls who are too good at their jobs, but that’s not the point. It doesn’t matter whether or not Sterling intended the remarks misogynistically–although it’s fairly difficult to use a historically misogynistic term in a non-misogynistic way–he should have responded to this incident by treading carefully when it comes to the subject of women. Toning things down would be a good course of action–would bolster his admittedly questionable claim that he meant it in good faith. Sterling, however, proved that he’s no slave to PR by writing a series of articles about a psychiatrist who holds a different view of videogame violence than he does. It’s probably not a good idea to write articles that include rape jokes shortly after finding yourself on the receiving end of accusations that you hate women. Let’s edit.

(Original text of the post in italics. My comments in bold.)

Psychologist: Videogames to blame for rape attacks [While this was a minor point in the Fox News article, it was far from the only thing mentioned, and she wasn’t the only person quoted. From the very beginning it seems you have a vendetta against her. Why is this?]

Sexual assault is on the rise, and videogames are to blame! In asking the question, “Is Bulletstorm the worst game video game in the world?” [The actual title is “Is Bulletstorm the Worst Video Game in the World”], FOX [sic] News (who else?) has assembled the world’s leading experts to find out just how damaging games can be — or they found some maniac who thinks games cause rape. [This is an extremely inelegant construction. Nearly every word you wrote is dripping with sarcasm--and your phrasing is particularly tortured in order to get this viewpoint across. Counter the article by pointing out and contradicting its inaccuracies, not by making fun of it.]

“The increase in rapes can be attributed in large part to the playing out of [sexual] scenes in video games,” said psychologist Carol [sic] Lieberman. If you’re expecting her to back that up, don’t hold your breath — that is literally all she had to offer. [Rather, that is the only quote that Fox News printed. Look at the physical quote itself--the word "sexual" is written in brackets, meaning that this wasn't the exact quote she said. Usually, brackets are used in this way if the original quote simply included a pronoun which refers to an earlier statement. This quote was fairly obviously taken from a longer conversation with Lieberman. As a writer, you should have realized this. Incidentally, it would have been a fairly easy matter to contradict her comments with an authoritative source. Five minutes of searching brought up a study from the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics, which suggests that the rate of reported rape is indeed decreasing. Nowhere in your article do you show any evidence that you thought to search for any statistics--your reaction is a kneejerk one made without any critical thought. You happen to be right--but that's sheer coincidence, not any accomplishment on your part.]

Clinical psychologist Dr. Jerry Weichman had a little more: “Violent video games like Bulletstorm have the potential to send the message that violence and insults with sexual innuendos are the way to handle disputes and problems.” [You include this quote with no real commentary on it. I'm glad you did--it will put one of your later comments in a very interesting light.]

Looks like FOX [sic] News is gearing up to inadvertently promote the game [Odd choice of link--it leads to one of your own previews of the game; the implication is that it would lead to something on Fox News’s site], which releases [Using this verb intransitively is a mistake--you should phrase it as “which will be released”] on February 22. The full article is a highly entertaining read, especially if you’re over 65, stupid, and you think the Moon [sic] is held up in the sky by fairy magic. [Is this the best way you're able to critique the article--by creating a bizarre strawman? Surely, if your opinion on it is unassailable, you'd be able to come up with a better way of critiquing it. The article is very broad and contains several weak areas you could have picked at in order to discredit the entirety. It's not a very good article and yet it proves its points better than you prove yours.]

Now if you’ll excuse me, there are some vaginas that have not been raped yet [While your intent is to be jocular, you’re not only being too flippant, you’re making an incredibly tasteless joke, especially considering the subject matter under discussion], and Kirby told me I need to “get on dat sh*t!” [I'm not aware of the provenance of this in-joke. Neither are the vast majority of your readers. Find a better ending.]

In and of itself, this article is relatively innocuous. It’s certainly not any good, of course–it’s not fleshed out enough to be a legitimate opinion piece, it’s not objective enough to function as a news piece, it tells us nothing more than Sterling’s negative views about Fox News, and it’s poorly written, but other than the ending, there’s nothing particularly horrible about it. It’s his subsequent treatments of the subject where he moves from being a simple poor writer to one who has a questionable and genuinely damaging viewpoint. As a result of Lieberman’s comments, a spate of negative reviews appeared on Amazon for her book Bad Girls: Why Men Love Them & How Good Girls Can Learn Their Secrets. Sterling followed up his first piece with a post about these reviews, one written in a nasty tone:

“Games cause rape’”psychologist’s book gets raped [We could really stop here. The tastelessness of this headline encapsulates everything that’s wrong with these articles, with your persona, with the site you write for, with the more unsavory elements of the videogame community in general.]

Carol [sic] Lieberman, the psychologist and author who claimed that videogames encourage young men to go out and rape has been hit with swift Internet justice. [What is the value of internet justice, incidentally? This could be a good opportunity to question whether fake Amazon reviews are an effective method of debate.] In a move that mirrors the way in which Cooper Lawrence was punished [I don't like the use of the word "punished"--it gives a very unseemly atmosphere. While Lawrence's interview was certainly questionable, there are some disturbingly misogynistic elements to this statement. The word “punish” has connotations of the schoolroom and of parental discipline. Cooper Lawrence and Carole Lieberman are naughty girls who did a bad thing by daring to have an opinion, and Daddy has to give her a spanking.] for telling lies about Mass Effect, [“Telling lies” is not how you would describe Lawrence’s admittedly egregious errors--it’s something you’d accuse a little girl of doing.] Lieberman’s latest book has been mauled in Amazon’s user reviews section. [Dr. Jerry Weichman, who was quoted in the previous article, also has a book available on Amazon. As of the time of this writing, he has four reviews, all from people who actually read the book and have nothing but good things to say about it. Why didn’t you check to see if his book had been hit? If there are no misogynistic undertones to this whole scenario, why is it that two women have been “punished” while this man has not?]

Yesterday, Bad Girls only had six reviews and a five-star user rating. Today, it has thirty-seven, with a two-star rating. A childish recourse, yes, [So why glorify it?] but it actually worked against Lawrence [How, exactly? You should back this up with statistics which show that sales genuinely dropped, and show a definite connection between reviews and lowered sales. Otherwise this statement seems simply mythological and self-serving], and maybe it will teach Lieberman that spouting off ignorant bullshit for the salivation of FOX [sic] readers does have repercussions. [Again, what are these repercussions? This article is written from the perspective that writing nasty low-scored reviews is a form of "winning". How is this the case?]

“I have it on high authority that people reading books with sexy leg outlines tends to lead to a rise in rape victims,” reads one review. “Most of these victims never even saw it coming. They were casually in a store aisle questioning what millions see in Twilight when all the sudden, rape happens. Not even the fancy romantic rape, with months and months of stalking. Nope, just pure sudden rape. Must be those videogames.” [Remember how Weichman made that statement in the first article about how videogames influence people to think that "insults with sexual innuendos are the way to handle disputes and problems"? This review, which you're proudly listing as a just blow against hysterical moral guardians, is exactly that. You are proving him right.]

Another review called the book “Mein Kampf meets Playboy.” [You've quoted exactly two reviews--how representative of a sample are these?] It would appear that, while videogames do not cause rape, slagging videogames off without evidence or logic can lead to you getting forcefully f*cked in the ass. [And here's where you've exactly proven Lieberman's point. You have set up a scenario in which a woman has done something wrong, deserves to be punished, and is indeed given retribution--and your description of this retribution is wholly in the language of sexual violence. Not only has Lieberman been metaphorically raped (in reality a bunch of people have simply given poor reviews to a book she wrote), you’ve cast it as anal rape, and you're standing back and cheering this assault. A likely argument is that you're simply making a joke and using this particular language because of the subject at hand. Any sane person would agree that gang rape is an extremely traumatic torture, a horrifying event that irrevocably scars its victims. You've pronounced a symbolic gang rape upon her as just deserts. That you've managed to do so as lightly as you have implies that you're unable to feel any empathy for rape victims--just schadenfreude. If that doesn't demonstrate that you've become desensitized to rape, I don't know what does.]

I can’t help but think about professionalism and image when I read these articles. I definitely find the Fox News article to be a masterpiece of obvious cherrypicking, out-of-context quotes, and questionable research. It’s a poorly-written article and its premise is unsupportable–but at least it appears to have been written by an adult. Sterling’s piece, by contrast, is written in the guise of an infantile, smirking fratboy who is pointing and laughing at a woman who got slapped down for speaking. What do you tell a pop psychiatrist with 37 bad Amazon reviews? Nothing, you already told her 37 times.

As the Twitter debacle demonstrated, Sterling does not always respond well to his critics–he’s happy to let fly a series of names and insults that aren’t exactly defendable. For all his protestations that he’s not a misogynist, he’s certainly comfortable with the use of misogynistic language, which to me indicates that he’s either lying or that he’s unaware what words mean.

The videogame news site GamePolitics gave Lieberman the opportunity to expand upon and explain the remark that Fox News quoted. (That’s right–instead of rampantly speculating on something which may or may not have been taken out of context, they did some real work and went to the source!) She defends herself well in the interview–she explains her points while still sticking to her original statements. Given the choice between how she presents herself and how Sterling words his response, I find myself almost siding with her–but let’s see how Sterling covered this story:

“Games cause rape” psychologist says even more dumb crap [Rather than giving us a chance to read her comments and attempt to understand where she’s coming from, you’ve made up our minds for us before we even come to the story itself. The phrase is “poisoning the well”.]

Ignorant psychologist [There's bias, and then there's this. You seem to think you can prove your points by putting labels on people and hoping that does the work for you. Critique her statements. Don't make a judgment on her--that weakens your argument] Carole Lieberman has quickly made a name for herself among gamers after claiming that games like Bulletstorm can be blamed for increasing sexual assault cases. Fortunately, she has decided to come forth and qualify her statements … by saying even more backwards shite. [Again. Let her words speak for themselves. If she's so obviously in the wrong, then her statements should be easy to refute. Your attacks on her seem like you're reaching at straws.]

“My FoxNews.com statements were taken out of context and made to sound more inflammatory than they were meant,” she stated. [You don't make it clear that this is GamePolitics's interview. The way you've written this article, it implies that you've spoken to her. Unless someone clicks the link to the original source, it's a fairly logical, if mistaken, conclusion to assume that this is a Destructoid interview.] “Nonetheless, I stand behind my view that media violence, and particularly videogame violence is harmful. Thousands of studies have shown that the more violent media a person consumes, the more desensitized to violence and the more aggressive they become.

“When this violence is sexualized it is even more stimulating. And rape is a violent crime. Furthermore, research has shown that, not only do people become more aggressive in a general sense, but they also act out copycat violence in response to behaviors seen in movies, TV shows, and video games.”

Lieberman, in trying to contextualize her statements, has only made herself look like a liar. [How?] There’s not even one thousand studies backing up her claims, let alone several thousand, and those studies that do exist are questionable at best. [Why? What do they say? How are they questionable?] Just read Grand Theft Childhood for examples of the kind of crap [Again, don't editorialize in such a blatant way] she’s talking about. [What exactly is Grand Theft Childhood? A book? A website? What sort of things does it say? Don’t make the reader do your work for you.]

Lieberman also described her background, but again, she did nothing to really justify her claims.

“Since the FoxNews.com article didn’t describe my background, it made it seem as though I was simply making a flippant remark,” she argued. “Actually, I have  been a researcher in media violence for over twenty years and, as such, have testified before Congress several times, been the head of the National Coalition on TV Violence, and have stopped the ‘Schwarzenegger rocket’ (a NASA rocket that had planned to have an ad for Last Action Hero on its exterior). I was also invited to contribute an essay to Larry King’s book Beyond A Reasonable Doubt, about video game violence.” [Actually, this goes a long way towards justifying her claims. Her expertise and knowledge are being called into question. She's listed some of the highlights of her CV, all of which show her to be a nationally-recognized expert on media violence, one who has been keeping up with the latest studies. She has spoken to government and popular audiences. How does any statement in this paragraph show her to not know what she's talking about?]

Admittedly, that’s a lot of years researching the stuff, but if she’s been doing it for such a long time, she should know that there are just as many studies arguing against her claims as there are ones backing her up. [I have several problems with this statement, not the least of which is your earlier dismissal of the number of studies as well as their quality. You need to make it clear why one set of studies is better or more accurate than the other. Along those lines, it's likely that she's aware of these studies and disagrees with them based on her own research.] She’d have heard about the Byron Report, which says that no conclusive videogame violence test exists, and in the case of children, such a test would be impossible, ethically. In declaring her years of research, she has only betrayed her ignorance and prejudice in favor of the weak studies that back her up. [Again, what makes the Byron Report more accurate than any of the of the studies she's mentioned? Can you demonstrate that it's undoubtedly stronger and more accurate? If not, you're betraying your own ignorance and prejudice.]

Finally, she addressed the negative reviews of her book on Amazon, saying that they “prove” her claims that games make people aggressive. Because, of course, it is the fault of videogames that people decided to give her a taste of her own ignorant medicine. [She accuses these reviews of having an aggressive attitude, and you proudly defend them--”the bitch deserved it” is the upshot of this.]

“I have received an onslaught of abusive emails, phone calls, and angry comments from gamers to the point of harassment… What has been most disturbing is the Amazon-bombing that gamers have done, regarding a book that has nothing whatsoever to do with video games. I wrote Bad Girls: Why Men Love Them & How Good Girls Can Learn Their Secrets in an effort to help men and women find the love they deserve. The so-called reviews have served to prove that video games do make people more aggressive, indeed.” [In this quote, she portrays herself as an innocent victim. It’s strange that you include it without comment.]

I can play that game, too: [What game? Is the goal of your piece to debunk her arguments, or to "win" while holding your hand out for high-fives?]

The so-called reviews have served to prove that FOX [sic] news ["News" should be capitalized] articles do make people more aggressive, indeed. [First off, you seem to be confusing Fox News with Carole Lieberman. She was simply quoted in the article. Second, I realize what you're trying to do, but you're not going to debunk Lieberman's questionable cause fallacy by committing your own.]

It’s just that fucking easy to back up your ludicrous opinions with vague correlation. [You should know best--these articles have been nothing but a series of incoherent points which barely disguise that their purpose is to set Lieberman up as a pinata.] Which is how those “thousands” of studies are made, indeed. [Your understanding of the methodology of the construction of these studies is inaccurate. While groups often cast statistics in a light that favors their thesis, you seem to imply they’re made up completely. You’re accusing Lieberman of serious ethical breaches--have you done anything resembling the necessary research in order to prove this?]

This has been, perhaps, one of the hardest articles I’ve ever had to write. Sterling’s articles in general come from a very disturbing place; if he’s writing from a persona, it’s a loathsome, disgusting one, full of venomous scatology, a mocking distaste for sexuality, a reduction of people to crude exaggerated Sheela-na-Gigs of genitalia. In the world of Sterling, we are wholly our bodies, and our bodies are abominations. There is no beauty in being human. The sex act is one of filth. This is a worldview that is pathological. What we have here is not humor. Sterling is a wretched figure who has managed to get a fair share of notoriety–I wouldn’t call it “fame”–for airing out his neuroses; what I find particularly dismaying is that he’s managed to find an audience that isn’t immediately turned off by his degrading writing—rather, they identify with it.

Destructoid is not a support group for those with a phobia of the body. It is one of the most prominent and influential videogame news sites. Articles like this are irresponsible at best and actively harmful at worst. Fox News can, legitimately and accurately, quote Sterling’s articles. This is not a private conversation or a joke between friends–these are public statements. Sterling traditionally attempts to mitigate his own offensiveness by saying that he’s not a journalist and that he ought not to be held to journalistic standards. There is nothing on the site or in his articles that makes this clear, however; to the eye of anyone who does not follow the site, his articles look like poorly-written news. That the top of the blog section on the main page entreats gamers to email or start their own blog if they “Got News” does nothing to dissuade this perception. Neither does Destructoid’s own About page, which boasts that it publishes “40-60 pieces of video game industry news and commentary” every day. It doesn’t make a clear differentiation between the two, and Sterling cloaks his opinions in the guise of news.

Perception and reputation are everything. Sterling can deny claims of misogyny all he wants, and perhaps in his daily life he genuinely has neutral or even warm feelings towards women. And yet–his regular use of misogynistic language trumps his protests. We can’t point out any differences between Sterling’s writings and the writings of an actual misogynist, unless the only exception is that Sterling’s articles are equally misandryst. He is not a good representative for the gaming community. His is a face that does not represent us, any of our friends, and–if the comments we’ve received over time are any indication–the vast majority of our listeners and readers. In short, Jim Sterling is an affront to every intelligent, thoughtful, and adult gamer.

And as such it is equally irresponsible for Destructoid to keep him in their employ. It is irresponsible for sites like The Escapist to publish his writings even when they contain no actively offensive content because it means they’re condoning his larger viewpoint. It is irresponsible to view his posts. His very career is a stain on all of our reputations.

The purpose of Let’s Edit is to point out areas where writers have misstepped–where there hasn’t been enough research done, where press releases have been treated as gospel, where inaccurate information has been left uncorrected. In truth, those are the easy articles to write. While they may represent games journalists as undereducated, undertalented, and underedited, the ultimate lesson that I take from them is that we’re so close. We have a press that is populated largely by enthusiasts–if that enthusiasm could be married to some better technical skills and an understanding of journalistic standards and ethics, we’d be on our way to having an extremely strong press. But I find Sterling’s writing to be irredeemable. He has made a mockery of our community, of our hobby, and of us as individuals. He drives all of our names through the fecal cesspool where his worldview dwells. We have jobs, or we’re pursuing educations, we have families, and friends, and active social lives, and are well-adjusted people who are making our own ways through the world. We have an active interest in portraying ourselves as the adults that we are. Acceptance of Jim Sterling and his ilk goes directly contrary to every rational and sane aspect of our lives. To allow him a presence in our community is to assume, however tenuous, the mantle of the mouth-breathing obsessive terrified of corporeality, of sexuality, of women, of maturity. I do not agree with Carole Lieberman–my views are closer to Sterling’s when it comes to the matter of videogame violence. But the damage done by Sterling–and by associating with the quislings who allow him a space in our community–-is much more insidious than anything Fox News could ever do. They don’t need to break out statistics and experts in order to bring censure on the videogame community. All they need to do is link to Destructoid.

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[Update: It didn't click until last night, but Dr. Lieberman is actually a psychiatrist, not a psychologist. The error is Sterling's--Fox News accurately refers to her as a psychiatrist in their article--but we ought to have double-checked before publication. (For the record, Dr. Weichman is indeed a psychologist.) We have fixed our inaccurate use of the term but have, of course, left it untouched in Sterling's article. Consider this a blanket comment which covers his confusion over her title, and apologies to Dr. Lieberman for the oversight.]

(Original text of the post in italics. My comments in bold.)

Uncharted 3 plans ‘brilliant’ fire effects [This is an inaccurate headline. Uncharted 3 is not planning the fire effects. Naughty Dog, the developer, is planning them. “Naughty Dog plans ‘brilliant’ fire effects for Uncharted 3” is how you should write the headline.]

Having mastered ice, water and snow in previous Uncharted games [I wasn't aware that Uncharted was considered the gold standard for these. Write more neutrally--others may be able to point to games which handled these things better] , Naughty Dog has set its sights on groundbreaking fire effects in the forthcoming PlayStation 3 threequel. [Avoid cutesy neologisms--this is a news piece.]

Speaking in an interview with the PlayStation Blog, Naughty Dog mouthpiece Arne Meyer explained that the game would feature realistic flames that slowly reduce the environment to ashes. [This is phrased too vaguely. Saying that the game will "feature realistic flames" imposes a subjective evaluation on something which has not yet been released; this statement cannot be said with any authority. And the assurance that the flames will "reduce the environment to ashes" doesn't make it clear whether you're speaking truthfully or if this is exaggeration for effect.]

“We’re always on the lookout for new technical challenges and we’re really happy with what we’re achieving with our fire effects,” he boasted. [Remove this sentence. It tells us nothing beyond the fact that the development team is pleased with itself. You may hope that the members of development teams enjoy their work and are content with their progress, but don’t conflate that with a promise of quality.]

“It’s not just a static asset – the fire deteriorates the wood realistically and there are blowback effects, like you would expect. The smoke is looking much better this time around.” [What is the smoke “looking much better” than--Uncharted 2? Other games coming out this year? CG fire in general? Follow up on this one.]

Referencing a level, trailered below, in which you have to escape a burning mansion, Meyer added that, in theory, you’ll be able to stand still and watch the building burn down before your eyes. [Here’s an area where you could get into some very interesting issues--while water and ice are difficult to program, they don’t have as dynamic an effect on the environment as fire does. How do you build an environment around the fact that it can be burnt to the ground? How do you reconcile the inherently chaotic nature of fire with the constructed obstacle course of a videogame level? What tricks is the team planning to avoid burning levels in such a way as to make them accidentally unwinnable? Do the graphics or performance deteriorate in any way because of this added factor? One of the reasons truly realistic procedural fire has not been implemented well is because of these and many other issues--how is the team handling them?]

“You could sit down and watch the chateau burn around you, if you sit there long enough,” he claimed. [The word "claimed" is a fairly loaded one--it literally serves the function of reproducing a statement while calling attention to the fact that said statement has not or cannot be proven. Why didn't you follow up to find out whether the chateau does indeed burn to the ground? How long does it take? How does this affect gameplay?]

“However, we want the player to proceed through the game at a decent pace so that’s not going to happen. Even in this demo, you can see beams deteriorating as they burn, and you can even take cover behind them when they give way and fall to the floor, only for that cover to disappear when the beam has burned away completely. [This paragraph does not contradict my questions from earlier and in fact leaves me with more questions. How do they ensure that the player will not simply stand around and let the mansion burn around them? Merely being told that "beams deteriorat[e] as they burn” doesn’t sound impressive if you consider that they could achieve the same effect through a scripted event. How does the procedural programming of fire change things?]

“Procedural fire is a pretty difficult technical challenge, especially on top of everything else you’re trying to get in the game, but it produces some brilliant effects, like the corners of the wallpaper starting to roll and then igniting, and then the embers flickering in the air. [It is true that realistic fire is one of the great programming challenges--there are so many variables involved that it requires very deep knowledge of the game's engine as well as of the physics of fire. I'd be interested in how the team researched this topic. Did they spend a few weeks burning things and filming the results before they started programming? Does anyone on the team have a background as a physicist? What were some of the big challenges here--what did they need to implement? They will of course want to keep some aspects of the engine to themselves as a proprietary secret, but again, the fact that you did no followup research gives off the impression that you are extremely incurious.]

“Essentially, we’re programming oxygen and then having the fire follow it around the environment,” he explained. [This tells us something, but not much.]

Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception, the too-hot-to-handle [Avoid puns] follow-up to [the] awesome [This is a news post. Stay neutral in your tone and do not editorialize about the quality of games] 2009 adventure, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, will be out on 4th November. [Do not state release dates as set-in-stone facts. Uncharted 3 is planned for release on November 4. Any number of things could happen to delay it.]

I said earlier that there is no need to write this type of article because it generally adds nothing to the conversation and the full interview is much more complete. This article is particularly egregious, however. The original interview by James Gallagher on the Playstation blog is a fairly breezy overview of the upcoming game–it briefly covers a few new gameplay mechanics, motion capture, and the fire effects. Let’s do a quick comparison, however. Gallagher’s article quotes 191 words from Naughty Dog’s Arne Meyer on the subject of procedural fire. Dutton’s article quotes the same exact 191 words–he quite literally copies the entire conversation about fire verbatim. To look at it from another angle, 62% of his 306-word article is lifted directly–Gallagher could probably get away with saying “plagiarized”–from the original interview.

Gallagher’s article is not especially hard-hitting or relevatory, but it’s a preview and gamers interested in scraps of news might find it entertaining. Besides, the Playstation blog is an official channel, and Naughty Dog is owned by Sony. It’s fairly clear that this article is little more than an arm of Sony’s marketing division. Dutton is taking PR-speak at face value. Gallagher does not have the license to probe any deeper; Dutton does his site and his readers a disservice by actively refusing to.

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And so of course I was excited about Dead Space 2. My hope was that it would tread that line that a successful sequel needs to: Enough of the same that it would feel familiar, but different enough that it would be a novel and fresh experience. I make a point of deliberately avoiding previews, so I went into the game knowing exactly one thing: The game’s setting, rather than a single spaceship, would be expanded to cover an entire city called The Sprawl. Much of the pleasure of horror games comes from learning about an environment after it’s been destroyed–the larger and more detailed, the better. I was looking forward to The Sprawl because I assumed it would cover more territory with that same attention to detail.

I shouldn’t have hyped myself up. While I enjoyed Dead Space 2 while I was playing it, and in fact found myself so frightened during a couple segments that I was almost too scared to continue–there was something somehow toothless about the whole experience. Over the course of the month since I’ve played Dead Space 2, my initially eager feelings about it have cooled into disappointment.

So why the dissonance? The designers did not seem to be interested in putting the same effort into The Sprawl as they did the Ishimura. The former feels more like a collection of videogame levels than an actual environment. The sense of timing and pacing are still good–things jump out at exactly the right time, and I did yelp and whimper while playing–but ultimately, suspending disbelief isn’t as easy when I could almost see the hand of a designer looking at an environment and placing enemies and rooms and items with little regard for how realistic the placement is. Dead Space may be structured like a traditional haunted house, but its sense of architecture and attention to detail help that haunted house feel more realistic and more frightening. Dead Space 2, instead of taking the player through an actual city, simply slaps together a few rooms, populates them with enemies that jump out and scream “boo” at you, and hopes for the best.

An old trick that game designers often use to make their world seem bigger than it is is the judicious use of locked doors. Proper use of this technique allows designers to imply the interiors of unseen rooms or buildings without spending the resources to render them–the world is a lot bigger than the one you actually see, but these areas are simply unimportant to the plot. And so Dead Space 2 locks a few doors and hopes that you’ll infer that they lead to other parts of the city. This worked in Dead Space–by the time you’re finished, you get a working knowledge of the bulk of the ship’s layout, enough to allow you to figure out the general areas that are missing and what they might include. We only see a fraction of The Sprawl, however; there do not appear to be enough doors to imply the full city, and I never got the sense that the developers know a single thing about the areas that are not covered in-game.

In addition, it’s fairly impossible to map the city, and the game doesn’t encourage you to think about how far you’ve traveled or where any building is in relation to another. When traveling between sections of the Ishimura, you go by tram, and as you do you see a map of the ship which highlights your route. That goes a long way towards making the Ishimura feel real–you can fairly accurately see the layout of the ship. No map of The Sprawl exists in the game as far as I can find. The developers don’t seem to think it’s important. Most of the game is based on forward motion; aside from a few exceptions, I remember the path through the game as “the next room” and “a side room where you get a powerup”. You get occasional glimpses of the cityscape, but they’re fairly useless from an orienteering standpoint. You can’t point to any one building and recognize it as one you were just in.

There may be more variety to the areas, but most of them simply feel like new skins on the same types of twisting corridors. The mall is the claustrophobic maze with the storefronts. The school is the claustrophobic maze with the pasted-up drawings. The Unitologist church–the prettiest of the lot–is the claustrophobic maze with the impressive statue and blue glass ceiling. There is no understanding that the architecture of these places would all be different; it feels maddeningly consistent and, as a result, dull.

While playing through Dead Space 2, I wondered if perhaps my fondness for the Ishimura were due to a faulty memory or a haze of nostalgia. A late game chapter demonstrated that this was not the case: In one of the game’s most effective sequences, you reenter the Ishimura, which has been moved to the Sprawl for study. Most of the walls have been covered with tarps and it’s been cleaned up a bit, but it’s recognizable. Your route through is much more direct this time–but it takes you through several very significant rooms. You visit the bridge several times through the course of the first game, and each time something more and more horrible happens. When I entered the bridge this time around, I froze for a second. What happened there has burned itself into my brain. Simply being in this room was enough to scare me. That’s how you create a place. Frankly, I think the Ishimura’s presence dulls a lot of the impact of The Sprawl, which stands meekly and embarrassed around this much-better-realized environment.

I did find myself scared during many of Dead Space 2’s sections, but they’re not scares that stuck with me. There was none of the sense of dread that I felt during the first game, where it seemed that I could be attacked and killed at any time. I was able to suspend my disbelief easily during Dead Space–I was unable do to so as strongly in the sequel. It doesn’t feel like a world. And if the world doesn’t feel real, it’ll remind me that I’m sitting in my apartment with a controller in my hand–it’ll be enough to break down the illusion and make me feel safe–which is the last thing I look for in a horror game. Dead Space was an enjoyably traumatic experience. Dead Space 2 is a fun videogame. Dead Space doesn’t really give us any opportunity to mitigate its terror by saying “It’s only a videogame”. Dead Space 2 could only feel safer if it flashed that mantra in the corner of the screen at all times.

Well, whatever the case may be, I can say this much: In the first five minutes, in the first room of Dead Space 2, I died twice, not because the room is particularly challenging but because I was whimpering, crying, and panicking too much to play properly. Several times afterwards I needed to stop and take a breath because everything that had happened was bad and everything that would happen next would be bad and I couldn’t handle this. All this and I’m about one hour in.

Chapter 1 is devoted to the best tutorial I’ve seen in a while–I’m actually considering writing up a scene-by-scene breakdown of it, so I won’t go into too much detail, but they manage to address both fans of the first game who know the controls backwards and forwards and want to get to actual gameplay as fast as possible as well as people who are playing their first Dead Space game and need to have abilities parceled out so they get their bearings. I don’t normally count Isaac Clarke as one of the iconic heroes in gaming–he’s a mute Everyman in the first game–but, okay. You spend the first roughly half hour out of the RIG–the armored suit with the matching helmet pictured on the cover–and when you finally get it, when you emerge from the vending machine with the suit on and the helmet unfolds from it and seals shut over your face–well theres something so right about that moment: This is Visceral Games declaring, yes, he belongs in the pantheon and giving us a scene which earns that distinction.

One of the things which mildly surprises me is the lack of chapter names–when you enter a new chapter, the simple text CHAPTER 1 appearssuperimpose over the corner of the screen; both Dead Space and Extraction gave formal names to each chapter. As an extra bonus, the first letters of each chapter name form an acronym which gives away a somewhat significant plot development (“NICOLE IS DEAD” in the first game and “THIS GAME SUCKS” in Extraction). It works because the games are not very heavily plot based (as far as I’m concerned, the plot of Dead Space is simply “escape from a ship filled with monsters” and everything else is just explanatory noise), because it’s a clever novelty I’ve never seen any other game do, and because those who figured it out without being told got to feel very smart. But by this point, I think everyone knows about the acronyms–I know I started to look carefully for the chapter names because I wanted to figure it out this time–and they were unwilling to make it a cliche.

The chapter breaks area bit more organic this time. The bulk of the first game takes place on a single ship that’s divided into distinct regions; similar to Bioshock, you’ll finish a level and then take a tram to the next. (You revisit a few areas over the course of the game.) If I remember correctly, just about every single chapter ends with Isaac reaching the tram, and then a formal screen appears congratulating you for completing the chapter and asking you if you’d like to save. Again, I’m only on Chapter 3 and I won’t be shocked if they change the formula, but so far everything’s been about forward motion–which makes sense as you’re in a citylike space station this time. The different chapters seem to be different areas or neighborhoods of the city. So while it’s somewhat obvious when you’ve finished one chapter–there’s a big battle or a setpiece and the environment then changes–they aren’t sharply-defined breaks. I could go either way on this one–it feels much more contiguous than episodic this time around, but episodic can often be a good thing. For one, explicit chapter breaks give you a natural place to stop for the night and attempt to go to sleep.

So far, the game is a fairly literal Part 2 in that there’s not much more that it brings to the table–it’s just like Dead Space, but more. It’s scarier, there are more setpieces, the enemies are harder and faster than I remember, and things seem like they’re going to be a lot more brutal this time around. But I haven’t seen any new enemy types, I’ve only got one new weapon, and the new environment is still made up of dark, claustrophobic industral metal corridors. However, I think I said that even if Dead Space 2 was just More Of The Same, I’d be pleased with it–and I very much am. It’s a lot like Mario Galaxy 2 in that respect–the first game was very well-done, but there was still more to do with the elements of it. And so it doesn’t matter, because it’s very clear that Visceral has spent the past couple of years figuring out how to please their hardcore fans while still keeping them scared. If things continue along these lines, they’ll definitely do that.

And who knows what I have in store for me? After all, I’m only an hour in.

So while I consider Dead Space to be one of my favorite horror games, I don’t have nearly that charitable an opinion of any of the spinoffs. The motion comics were–well, I mean, I’m sure it’s very difficult to get art that’s worth looking at, but at least, you know, color it in and finish it. The motion comics looked like half-assed sketches. I’ve already written about Dead Space Extraction–let’s just say that while I’m sure it’s POSSIBLE that someone might one day make an interesting and engaging rail shooter that doesn’t feel like a hyperactive kid who keeps grabbing the controller because you’re not playing in the way he’d like you to, this game is not that. I haven’t bothered with the movie because why.

A lot of it has to do, I think, with the fact that the narrative of survival horror has three distinct phases: Before Shit Went Down, While Shit Went Down, and After Shit Went Down. In the first, we’ve got the day-to-day life of an environment; in the second, that environment is invaded by an occult presence, and in the last, our protagonist fights and usually defeats that presence.

For somewhat obvious reasons, the first phase is the least interesting, and I’d like to switch topics for a moment to demonstrate why. If you’ve played a lot of RPGs, especially SNES ones, there’s an opening that most of us by now should be exempt from. Your character wakes up in his sleepy little village–often after a prophetic dream–and is told that he’s late for school/the town festival/lunch with his girlfriend/his audience with the king. You’re encouraged to talk to all of the villagers–bonus points if the game mandates this–who all give pleasant permutations on on the theme of Gee, isn’t it swell to live in this sleepy little town where no monsters are, although I hear that there’s some sort of gathering darkness that hopefully won’t unseal itself sometime in the next hour of gameplay that you’ll have to fight, but what are the odds of that happening? Indeed, after an hour of this, the evil will unseal itself and destroy your hometown, rendering the entire prologue a waste of time. There’s rarely any significance to establishing the routine of this town–generally “sleepy” is all you can glean from the town, although occasionally games will make forays into “pastoral”, and the repetitive nature of this introduction rarely leaves anything to differentiate it from any one of a hundred other games. It’s something you sit through because you know that at some point, plot is going to happen.

And so the opening chapter of Dead Space Ignition features two characters whose names I didn’t catch and about whom I didn’t notice anything beyond the fact that one is black and one is a woman. (The series rarely gets credit for this–it boasts one of the most race- and gender-blind casts of any game I’ve ever seen; given the lack of diversity that’s often found even in Western games, Visceral deserves some kudos.) I think he’s an engineer–even though the tutorial are of his supervisor explaining how to do his job–and I think she’s a cop, and either they’ve dated or they want to date or they’ve hooked up or they’re just pulling some generic sexual tension on us. And they’re going through their routine of fixing, I dunno, doors or something. We’re supposed to be getting some idea of what Daily Life on this space station is like, but this fails for a few reasons. Number one, the dialogue…let’s just say that Visceral didn’t put their best writers on this one, because everything they say falls pretty flat. It’s pedestrian at best and rarely boils down to anything more than “Okay, now we have to go here to fix this thing,” and “Oh, boy, it sure is dull being a maintenance man on a space station where nothing interesting ever happens.” I want to get to monsters.

Part Two, While Shit Went Down, is at least marginally more interesting because at this point there’s actually a plot. It’s at this point that the monsters or the ghosts or the zombies or the vampires or the aliens attack. By necessity, this phase must end with nearly all of the population of the enclosed world killed. If most of the people don’t die, then not only is the threat not credible, but you’re going to have a large cast cheering you on; horror is usually at its most effective when you’re alone. If you can address the threat as it happens, it’ll also not feel very threatening–let’s face it, we won’t be scared by monsters so ineffective they can’t kill a few dozen people before you defeat it. Normally your character isn’t even on the scene during this stage, which makes sense. Your character must be believable able to grapple with the threat and win in order to make the rest of the game work; there’s usually no legitimate reason for him or her to stand by and let the game’s monsters take over.

Horror games almost always begin in the After Shit Went Down phase, where your character happens upon the environment in question, explores, discovers that something very wrong occurred, and begins to set things right and stop the menace. The first two phases are usually relegated to backstory. A well-made survival horror game will dole out its backstory in a manner that’s akin to the well-known writing rule of “show, don’t tell”–but a much subtler version. We don’t know what day-to-day life is like in the Ishimura because we’ve witnessed it–we know what it’s like because we’ve seen the wreckage, rummaged through the scraps, and pieced it together ourselves.

Dead Space Ignition is a poor game narratively because the introductory segments are extremely banal–watch some characters you don’t care about doing repair work!–and once Necromorphs attack, we know the conclusion is fairly foregone–we won’t be able to completely stop them in this game, we can only watch as they attack and hope that our characters survive. We know that this is a prequel to Dead Space 2, which is going to feature the station overrun, and know that the best possible situation is getting out alive. There’s no catharsis in being able to defeat the enemies.

And there’s no physical catharsis either in that the game is not based on combat. At least Dead Space Extraction, for all of its many faults, lets you actually shoot enemies. Dead Space Ignition is best described as an animated comic choose-your-own adventure with a few setpiece puzzles that pop up. There’s no exploration, no control over character–just cutscenes interspersed with occasional choices. (At least they waited until the artists had actually completed the art this time.) If you’re not invested in the story–and again, the poor writing doesn’t do much to invest you in it–then you’ll find yourself bored.

And the puzzles? Look. I generally like puzzle games. But one of the puzzle types is irritating–it’s essentially an autoscrolling maze where you have to avoid the walls and get there within a certain amount of time; one is confusing–a mirror reflection puzzle whose graphics are extremely busy yet uninformative–and one is so convoluted and weird that I can’t even describe it, yet alone solve it. They’re not fun–and let’s face it. I’m into Dead Space because, again, it gives a well-designed environment to explore and populates it with some seriously frightening enemies to survive. Not because of the romantic comedy and the hacking minigames.

If the intent of Ignition was to drum up excitement for Dead Space 2, they’ve failed–I’m actually nervous now. I’m hoping that they got the backstory out of their system and are concentrating on creating that environment and those enemies this time. I’m going to assume–going to hope, going to pray!–that this will be the case: They’d be foolish to change the structure that greatly. I just know that out of all of the Dead Space-related media that I’ve experienced, I’ve liked exactly one piece. To be fair, that’s the main one, and everything else is all spinoffs. Perhaps it won’t be bad–again, maybe all of the spinoffs are cheaply-made potboilers designed to appeal to the story hounds, and therefore the actual meat can be in the main game. If that is the case, then I’ll be happy, and it honestly will be a good way of handling the narrative–make it almost completely optional.

Besides the fact that the game is free with a pre-order, the other reason I was playing Dead Space Ignition was because you apparently get some sort of bonus for completing it. During my time playing, I found myself so bored by the puzzles I attempted to look up a walkthrough. In my search, I found out that the bonuses you unlock–it looks like some extra audio logs, some credits and stuff, and a suit–actually get unlocked after completing the first puzzle. I (correctly, according to a plot summary I found) assumed that the game would more or less end with the station taken over by monsters and the introduction of Isaac Clarke who would go to save the day. Since he’s the one whose game hopefully has actual gameplay and actual scares, I can wait the week to enter the world of the game for real. There was no more reason to play Dead Space Ignition and I didn’t want to play it any more so I stopped playing it. And then I wrote this review, and then I had dinner. And that is the story of the 20 minutes that I spent playing Dead Space Ignition.


The Metroid series has traditionally been one where plot is largely irrelevant. The first game in the series, Metroid, while featuring innovative gameplay, followed the standards of its day for its storyline: The plot and characterization boiled down to a couple of short paragraphs in the manual setting up atmosphere and justifying the adventure ahead. The closest thing to characterization is the ending’s reveal that the main character–assumed to be male–is actually a woman. This has been the case for nearly the entirety of the series: We know some light backstory that mainly serves to justify her skills (she’s an orphan who was raised and trained by aliens), but otherwise, Samus’s sex is the only real thing we know about her. And the plots are never convoluted affairs–they almost all boil down to “here’s a planet filled with aliens, fight them and escape”–I’d even say that is Metroid at its best, since the games privilege atmosphere and exploration. As is the case with most videogame series, however, plot has crept in over time with varying degrees of success. The most sophisticated methods of storytelling were employed in Metroid Prime, which took a cue from survival horror by telling its story through logs and other scannable documents. Metroid Prime 2 added dialogue-based cutscenes, which was troubling, given that its predecessor told its story through total integration with the environment, but it wasn’t as bad as Metroid Prime 3, which included fully-voiced dialogue (excluding Samus, who remained mute) and long elaborate story sequences. I hated it when I first played it for the way it diminished the sense of eerie loneliness that the Metroid series does so well.

The newest title in the series, Metroid: Other M privileges its story over its gameplay, twisting the flow of the game in order to suit the plot, and it ultimately throws so many threads at us that it comes across as an unorganized mess. Rather than a framework used to justify the quest and amuse the player between levels, Metroid: Other M forces our attention on what it thinks is a brilliant script with solid acting. Gameplay is what we must slog through in order to be considered worthy of experiencing the next part of a story which is poorly written, confusing, clumsily acted, and–above all–offensive: It is one of the most misogynistic games I’ve ever played.

Metroid: Other M begins, after an exhausting tutorial, fairly normally: Samus receives a distress call from a research station known as the Bottle Ship and decides to investigate. She very quickly meets up with a group of soldiers who are also responding to the distress call. Leading this group is a man named Adam, who was Samus’s CO back when she was a Federation soldier. This prompts, throughout the game, a series of excruciating cutscenes in which Samus monologues about exactly what she was feeling at the time and how Adam is her father figure and how it’s all confusing now that she’s hanging around him again. She becomes an unofficial part of the unit and explores the ship. As she goes along, she finds out that the Federation is performing illegal biological research, there’s a malevolent AI running around, people are not who they say they are, Adam might be behind the whole thing, there’s a traitor in the unit sneaking around and killing its members, an infant form of her archnemesis Ridley is on the ship–it’s a lot of plot. In the hands of a competent writing team, it might be interesting, but Metroid; Other M‘s developers don’t seem to be able to juggle these threads particularly well. (The assassin plot, for example, gets dropped about halfway through.) With every cutscene–and there are many of them–things become just that much more convoluted. Not only is a complex storyline unnecessary in a Metroid game, this one in particular seems designed to humiliate the character of Samus–while the intent seems to be to give her some more depth, it actually turns her from a capable, competent woman to a frightened little girl.

Every Metroid game is based around powers and abilities that Samus collects throughout the game, abilities which allow her to access deeper and deeper areas of the game’s environment. The games usually have Samus starting off from scratch without any of the abilities collected in the previous game–most of the powerups recur throughout the series. The progression of abilities and the gradual unlocking and expansion of the game world provide a solid structure and help the world to be much more dynamic.

A couple of entries attempt to justify starting from zero. Early on in Metroid Prime, Samus barely survives an attack from Ridley, and this attack disables or destroys most of her suit’s functions, leaving her to find replacements throughout the game. Metroid: Other M, in one of the game’s many ridiculous decisions, starts Samus off with a full compliment of accessories–except for a couple of items like energy tanks which are collected in out-of-the-way places as normal–and instead locks them away and hands Adam the keys.

This is Adam’s mission, as he makes clear at the beginning, and if Samus is going to work with him, she’s got to play by his rules. He specifically points out one item, the Super Bomb, as too powerful and dangerous to use (It, incidentally, proves not to be when you get access to it near the end of the game), but otherwise the ability to use her powers comes at his discretion. And so the game follows a structure of Samus getting into a scrape and finding out that her weapons aren’t enough; after a few moments of attempted survival (or, in one notable case, after several minutes in an area whose heat is sapping away her life while she’s not allowed to turn on the system which would protect her), Adam calls her and graciously allows her to use her life-saving weapon. It is curious. Samus is inarguably the most powerful member of the squad, due to a combination of skill and weaponry. Such a powerful woman would be nothing but an asset at her full strength. Adam is very deliberately limiting her.

Some games do feature a sort of educational motif around the way powers are unlocked. A mentor will give the character an ability or item, send the protagonist through a level, consider this to be training, and then move on to the next ability. In these cases, we have a clear and justified teacher/student relationship. The teacher is legitimately more skilled than the student, and the action of the story is to bring the student up to his level. Adam insinuates himself into this kind of relationship with Samus–but here, it’s a wholly inappropriate one. Samus has proven herself by this point in the series. She does not have much to learn from Adam. That he positions himself as her superior, only allowing her agency when he has decided she should have it, is a condescending slap in the face. That here we have a man controlling a woman whose competence need not be questioned at this point in her life is, of course, misogyny at its finest. That neither the game nor Samus questions or criticizes this–the only time she does anything without Adam’s explicit permission is when he’s presumed or actually dead–is shocking, to say the least.

Adam sacrifices himself towards the end of the game. The Bottle Ship, it is revealed, is designed to be an ersatz replica of Zebes (the planet from both Metroid and Super Metroid), designed to raise Metroids and other biological weapons in an environment just like the one where they originally grew up. There is a sector of the ship which is explicitly stated to be a recreation of Tourian–the final area in the original Metroid. As a long-time fan of the series, this reveal sent a chill up my spine. The game does not shy away from delivering a dose of nostalgia–a few of the bosses are remakes of fights from some of the 2D entries in the series. Metroid: Other M, it seems, might even be a pastiche of earlier Metroid games, converted to a new engine. The introductory cutscene, for that matter, is a recreation of the end battle of Super Metroid, which takes place in Tourian. For a moment, I even thought that the whole purpose of showing that would be to set up the payoff of actually participating in that fight. And for this I was excited. Tourian was eerie enough the first time around, the end battle of Super Metroid intense. Here, it could be terrifying.

The game lets you go as far as the door to the new Tourian before the story takes over and Adam rushes past Samus, ignores her offer to go in and fight, and detaches and blows up the section. This is supposed to be a callback to an earlier scene, a flashback to Samus’s military days where nearly the same exact thing happens–but the callback doesn’t work here. This is a videogame: Story callbacks are not as interesting as gameplay callbacks. Dangling a beloved, challenging, and interesting area in my face and then snatching it away–I felt betrayed.

After the ending cutscene, which goes on for far too long and features characters who have died turning into stars and a long, soul-searching monologue from Samus about something that I was too busy having a stroke to pay attention to, we get to go back to the ship. Samus lets us know that there’s Something Important left there and that even though the Federation is about to destroy the ship, she needs to go back. And it’s here that you get to sidequest–the majority of the game ferries you from Section A to Section B to Section C, even closing off elevators and routes to deny you some sequence breaking pleasure. (Metroid fans love sequence breaking and speed runs, incidentally, and spend months finding creative ways to do so. The attempt to discourage it here seems to be another indication that the developers are petulantly trying to prevent us from seeing their cinematic masterpiece.) In this post-game portion, the map is entirely open–you can collect as many powerups as you please. You eventually make your way to a room and fight a gigantic and awesome boss–the bosses are all, without exception, excellent fights, I must say–and then you collect what you risked your life for: Adam’s helmet.

Another stroke, and let’s add a third: As she grabs the helmet, her suit disappears (it can seemingly phase in and out of existence in the game, or something, I didn’t care enough to pay attention to see if they explained it). Underneath is what’s known as the Zero Suit–a somewhat shocking shade of powder blue, the color of the archetypal leisure suit, but it’s basically a catsuit, and she’s lovingly rendered in it. And then there’s an announcement that the ship is going to be obliterated in a few minutes, and you book. And here’s a typical Metroid end-game escape sequence–things crash down around you, you’ve got to find an alternate path through a couple rooms that have now been altered, and the last few enemies try to stop you. Without her suit, however, playing as Samus is miserable. Control is slower, jumps are lower and unaugmented, and the weaponry is now degraded to the level of “pea shooter”. This sequence took me several tries–but the entire time I kept thinking, I’d be out of here in half the time if I had the suit. It’s certainly more of a challenge, but there’s no logical reason for it. It’s not justified by the narrative at all why she’s not wearing her suit.

The first game to feature a sequence where Samus loses her suit was Metroid: Zero Mission, the remake of the first game in the series. At one point, her ship is attacked and she crashes, her suit damaged. And now she must manage to face the evil Space Pirates while looking for a replacement suit. The game changes drastically at this point–it actually becomes a light stealth game. Your physical skills are reduced, certainly–again, you can’t jump as far or fight as well, and all your gun does is stun an enemy for a couple of seconds. You’ve got to find ways to sneak around. Eventually you get the final version of your suit, and the leap in power gives a final rush of joy which stayed with me until I finished the game. But that’s not to say that the Zero Suit sequence isn’t enjoyable–in fact, it’s one of the standout parts of the entire series. Samus out of her suit is, most importantly, still a threat–just a very different kind. Prior to this game, the relationship between Samus and her suit was ambiguous: Is her strength and capability something unique to her, or could anyone with this fancy equipment do what she does? Zero Mission lets us know that the suit is, essentially, a tool. It gives her superhuman strength and abilities, but when she’s stripped of it, she’s still capable of infiltrating an enemy base and destroying it from the inside. One leaves the game praising her resourcefulness.

Not so in Metroid: Other M, where she’s significantly weaker. It makes sense on a symbolic level that she would lose her power immediately upon grabbing Adam’s helmet. Just about every interaction she has with him involves authority acknowledged, Samus’s requests and questions denied, and Adam’s status as her superior affirmed. His existence serves to rob Samus of agency and strength. Is it any wonder that even his helmet is so tainted by his presence that simply holding it causes Samus to get all weak? I can’t even accept the possible argument that perhaps the story is about A Woman Triumphing Against Adversity, because even though Adam has limited her the whole time, she’s still able to save the day–simply because she mourns him. She can’t have a feminist awakening and without realizing that her CO very nearly got her killed a few times.

Samus’s suit disappears during one other sequence, and this scene is perhaps the most controversial in the game. There is a fight with Ridley at one point–I believe there are exactly three games in the series where he does not appear, so this is not surprising. Chronologically–the series usually jumps around in time between installments–this is the fifth time she’s faced him in battle. And yet, when he appears, Samus panics to the degree that she’s unable to move. He grabs her and her suit disappears. And while she is busy flashing back to her childhood–the scene quick-cuts between the present and to the attack on her colony when she was a little girl, quite neatly infantilizing her with the juxtaposition–Ridley tosses a man into a pit of lava. Her terror and trembling lead to the death of a friend of hers. It’s not her finest moment. People have made many attempts to justify this sequence, arguing that Ridley is her lifelong enemy (apparently he’s the one who led the attack on her colony, so says the manga), he was presumed dead by the end of her previous mission, and she’s in a weakened emotional state–but I’m not buying it. Samus has never reacted like this to any enemy.

We have seen Samus freeze up when she’s about to fight a boss before. In most of the Prime boss intro cutscenes (Ridley’s included), she steps back and watches the enemy for a moment while it pirouettes around the room. This is mostly for the player’s benefit–it gives you the full view of the boss’s usually creative design and signals you to get ready because a major battle is about to happen. The worst case scenario is that she’s momentarily startled–which would happen to anyone–just mild surprise rather than outright fear. More likely, she is sizing up the situation, looking for any weaknesses the enemy might have, and deciding how she wants this creature to die. And that’s how Samus seems to react to all of the other boss fights in Metroid: Other M. Rather than giving her a rival who may be a true threat but is not the stuff of her nightmares, they give us the bogeyman in Ridley. One wonders if her previous fights against him were won through sheer luck and frightened flailing.

This treatment of Samus–under men’s control, childlike, docile, submissive, scared–might be a cultural thing. A lone badass hot female bounty hunter feels like an Hollywood cliche, the stuff of fantasy–and let’s not forget that Metroid takes some inspiration from the Alien series. This game seems to take its characterization from anime archetypes. In a lot of the discussions I’ve read on Metroid: Other M, the term “moe” has come up a lot. As I understand it, those who are fans of moe are attracted to sad, pathetic, sobbing messes of girls who need a strong man–YOU–to wipe away her tears and protect her from the big bad monsters that are around the world. I am a gay man and I am a feminist. When I am playing as or interacting with a female character, I want that character to be capable, confident, self-relying–I’m not saying that I need everyone “on” all the time, or that someone can’t show emotion, or feel doubtful–but if the main reaction you want a character to elicit is feelings of paternal protection, you’re going to lose me. I find that entire viewpoint to be extremely creepy. It reeks of Purity Balls and chastity belts and women as property. (Superstar anime director Hayao Miyazaki has gone even further in his analysis–he believes that the aesthetic treats women like pets.) The decision to bring elements of this into Samus’s character–who, whether accurately or not, has always been viewed as a feminist icon–is a big slap in the face to not just gay men and women but also straight guys who understand that they are living in an age where intelligence and capability come standard in females. A man’s desire to see a woman falter in this way is a sign that his ideas about women are unenlightened at best and that his self-esteem is so low that he can only attract a woman who’s so broken and so low that she’s the only creature below him. Metroid: Other M condones this worldview. It is explicitly made under the old-fashioned assumption that only a heterosexual male will be playing it. It does not invite us to identify with Samus; rather, it invites us to guide her through.

But I want to make it clear that it is more than my offense which caused me to dislike Metroid: Other M. A good story would not have made this into a good game. I have avoided talk of the gameplay mostly because there’s not that much to say about it. It feels like a Metroid game, even though they’ve drastically changed the controls, and, as I’ve mentioned, the bosses are particularly fantastic. Even non-boss battles are exciting and intense: The game sets most of the enemies up as setpieces rather than random creatures lurking around and so remain challenging. The problem is that this game keeps getting interrupted by its story. Mostly this is done through long cutscenes, but they do try to put in some scripted exploration and exposition sequences. Unfortunately, they drastically slow down Samus’s walking speed and they also feature pixel hunts. The game, which minutes ago was filled with acrobatic jumps and fights, grinds to a halt until you get the next chunk of plot. It’s what you have to slog through to get to the good stuff.

This is inexcusable in this day and age. Even worse is the fact that, even though nowadays developers have learned that players expect the option, you cannot skip the cutscenes. You can’t pause them either–and you can’t even go to the Wii’s Home menu! This is sheer arrogance on the part of the developers. It implies that we are only happy to sit in front of our televisions with slackjawed concentration while their opus spins out in front of us. There is, however, the option to watch each cutscene edited together as a movie after completing the game, saving us from all that pesky gameplay. I’m surprised it wasn’t available from the start. If they so desperately wanted to tell this story, why not simply make it a movie to begin with?

There has been speculation that Nintendo might never be able to recover from the damage done to the series by this game. We may never be able to take Samus seriously as a strong female character ever again, and Nintendo will need to work hard to convince its audience that this game was a one-time error in judgment when the next game comes around. As I’ve said–every fight is fantastic, and there are times where it’s fun to play–but Metroid: Other M is under a delusion. It only thinks it’s a game; in reality, it’s a incoherent misogynistic anime which seems to think that the storyline is the reward for suffering through the gameplay instead of the other way around.

Historically, the Chupacabra, for those who aren’t up on their Hispanic folklore, is one of those awesome Latin American legendary creatures. It’s never been my favorite–I’m more interested in El Sombreron and La Llorona (while I understand why the first is rarely seen, as he’s kind of an obscure one the latter is quite popular and why has she never been a boss in anything?)–but it’s still a cool one, and the traditional depiction is pretty creepy. Basically what they do is kill and drain the blood of livestock. They look like a fanged spiny creature–any drawing I’ve ever seen is fairly terrifying.

In Lords of Shadow, however, they’re depicted as a little hooded gremlin troll looking thing, and instead of being a predator, they’re more of a prankster/trickster figure. At certain points throughout the game, you’ll wander into an innocent area, and a Chupacabra will teleport in, zap you with a ray, and disappear. When you’re zapped, all of your magic and special abilities are taken away and you’ve got to chase down the creature to get it back.

These levels are structured so that the way forward is blocked by an obstacle that you can only get past using your abilities. So there’s a little side area, designed to be traversed ability-less, that you need to go through, and once you clear it you catch the little bastard and get everything back and you can continue. It seems intended to play the role of the levels in Mario Sunshine where Shadow Mario takes away FLUDD, but instead of being interesting challenges or a slight genre shift, it’s more an annoyance.

See, the thing about Mario Sunshine’s naked levels is that they’re some of the most challenging in the game–the entire game is designed around the water pack, and while these levels are completely beatable solely through the power of jumping, there’s always the thought in the back of your mind that things would be a lot easier if you could hover. Here, you don’t notice a difference. The monsters aren’t particularly difficult and neither are the jumps, so you don’t need your magic and you don’t need your special jumping abilities. It comes across as padding. Given the game’s linear nature and the way it’s designed, you don’t feel that much less powerful when you’re without your abilities.

And what’s worse is the fact that the Chupacabras *talk*. Most of the voice acting in the game is fairly excellent–they sprung for a good cast, but whoever does the Chupacabra voice….okay. They’re going for a sort of Yoda thing in that their dialogue is grammatically bizarre (“Glasses, you need!” is one of their taunts) and they’re trying to go for a similar voice. They should have just sprung for Frank Oz–I mean they had the budget to get Patrick Stewart, they could have recorded that voice in an afternoon. I’ve read that part of Hideo Kojima’s involvement was voicing the Chupacabra in the Japanese version–while I rarely play with Japanese voices, I would have enjoyed if they’d kept that in. (I think he speaks English, actually, so why not just record for both languages? It’s only a couple of lines, so it’s not like it would be a grueling studio session.) It’s just extremely irritating and adds nothing to the game.

The hell of it is the game itself seems to realize that it’s a bad idea. Throughout the game, you find little journals on some of the bodies you come across, and one of them complains about the Chupacabras–how they’re annoying and distracting from the real mission and how the Church should go on a campaign to exterminate them. I hope in between the ending of this game and the sequel that this campaign occurs. I honestly found this note to be the worst part of it, mainly because it’s the game saying, “Yeah, we know this is a terrible idea, but we kept it in anyway.” Part of me wonders, considering Kojima’s voice acting, whether this was one of his ideas and the team didn’t feel like they could override it–and so put the note in as a way of subtly rebelling.

Again, though, it’s not a fatal flaw, mostly because it’s only a mildly occurring element–I’m in chapter 9 and I’ve encountered exactly three of them–and because the levels are quick. After you beat a level you can go back and do a challenge–the Chupacabra levels have challenges to the effect of, “Get your stuff back from the Chupacabra in a minute and a half.” The times seem to be all less than 5 minutes, and even your first time through it’s a short little diversion, but it’s not a pleasant or fun one. It gets lost in the rest of the game, so again, more of an academic complaint than anything, but seriously, guys, you should have taken it out.

Seriously–did I mention that the game is gorgeous? Because it is. Again, I don’t like Castlevania’s aesthetic normally–I don’t know, everything just looks so samey after a while. I can’t tell from screenshots what game I’m playing–they all look the same to me. While Lords of Shadow is going for fairly standard Violent Videogame Realism–it’s not really stylized or anything–everything is just so wonderfully done.

It’s the light, really. I’m a total sucker for games that take place during sunlight–not sure if it’s due to ICO’s influence, or if I was attracted to ICO because of it, but anyway. Surprising for a horror game, most of it takes place in broad daylight. The very first level takes place at night, but then you’re in daylight until about chapter 6 when you enter a vampire castle. It’s a very surprising decision for a gothic horror-themed game, and one I applaud. For the most part you are exploring ruins and forests and cliffsides, and everything is bright and colorful. I’m so glad we’re out of that period of time where everything was brown and muddy–it made for some very very ugly games.

It does lead to a very odd dichotomy though. Because the game has a particular flow, you’re interested in making it to the next part–to the next combat or puzzle or climbing course. But because the game is so pretty, you also want to just hang around and look at stuff. There have been several areas where I’ve stopped just to take in a bit of scenery.

Unfortunately, they did not include a controllable camera. I’m not sure why, and it’s probably the biggest mistake the game makes. Games like this, in many ways, are in a way guided tours or amusement parks. They remind me of the lines at Disneyworld, which rather than being a straightforward velvet rope path are twisting journeys through an environment. If you’re on line for the Tower of Terror and you’re not looking at all the random *stuff* they decorated the place with, you’re doing it wrong–it’s just as much a part of the experience as the ride. So I may be in an elegantly-rendered castle with all this stuff around, but I’m not able to take a look at it at an angle that I want. Dante’s Inferno had the same exact problem–that was my biggest problem with that game too. Fortunately, the camera here is actually pretty decent. You’ve got your “cinematic” angles and your camera placement designed to give the best screenshot, but unlike Resident Evil, they don’t do this at the expense of the player. For the most part, the camera angles *do* give the prettiest view, and they don’t hinder you from playing well. There are a couple of areas where it’s slightly less than optional, but I haven’t had any serious difficulties–this is a case where it genuinely feels that the developers actually do know where to put the camera better than I would.

The storyline is…well, there’s a storyline, I suppose. I have no real idea what’s going on in it, but I haven’t minded its existence. I’ve been taking the cutscenes as a cue to breathe, check an IM, eat a cookie, and just kind of paying half-attention to the plot. Given the game’s linear structure, that doesn’t matter–each area is somewhat self-contained, so as long as you make it through each, you’ll have no problems. I was genuinely nervous, given that Kojima had a hand in it, but so far they’ve been of an okay length.

I do like the way the difficulty seems to work. The game is HARD when it first starts, then you learn the basics of the controls, and it’s easy for a few minutes, then they give you some new abilities, and then it gets REALLY hard, and then you master them, and it’s easy for a while, and then the difficulty just spikes. I am finding this to be an extremely pleasurable structure. I like games that have challenge to them, of course, but I don’t want that challenge to be overwhelming. And I want to feel like I’ve accomplished something from time to time–if the entire game was an uphill battle, it might get frustrating. Here, the game draws a line and forces me to get good enough to cross it; once I do, it draws another line and forces me to work even harder, and it continues that way for a long time, hopefully to the end.

One of the big complaints I’m hearing is framerate issues–people are bitching and moaning that it’s not at 60 fps and that it crawls at times. I haven’t noticed anything–the game does that staccato timing when you kill enemies or do a particularly good hit, where it kind of pauses or slomos for a second before returning to regular speed–I don’t know if they’re just referring to that or what. I’m not a video guy so I would not notice if something dropped a couple of frames per second; some people have said that there are times where the game becomes unplayably slow. I haven’t noticed that; I am wondering if it is just fanboys suck. It could be!

I can’t say the game is perfect–it’s flawed as hell in a lot of ways, the camera, the storyline, there are a couple of levels which go on slightly longer than they should and I have the feeling I’m going to think the whole thing could be cut by a couple of hours–but so far it feels almost silly to point them out because I am having such a genuinely great time with the game. None of the cons have been gamebreakers for me–I’ve just given it a mild, “Well, no game but ICO is perfect”, and have moved on because there’s something else to kill.

I know it’s kind of declasse to praise a game’s graphics, but Lords of Shadow is beautiful. I’ve played through the first chapter which takes place over I think 5 levels. The first takes place at night during a storm; the rest takes place during the daytime and there’s light everywhere–I love games that make good use of light. You’re in forests and canyons and the sun is shining and everything’s just so colorful. Several of the cutscenes, their entire purpose appears to be simply forcing you to look at something that’s particularly proud of. One cave has a waterfall and the nicest-looking rainbow I’ve ever seen in a game.

The voice acting is mostly good too–which is what happens when your narrator is played by Patrick Stewart. Every level begins with a bit of text being read out of a book, and while they let you skip past it after a few moments of loading–you can read the text yourself because it’s apready appeared on the page, I have listened to every one. He’s hamming it up, of course–it’s Patrick
Stewart in full Over The Top Shakespeare Mode, but that voice…man.

The game is a blatant pastiche of almost every action game you’ve played in the past 10 years, and there is nothing at all wrong with that. I finished up the night by playing a boss that was taken right out of Shadow of the Colossus–you even have to hold down the trigger to grip onto parts of it, you have to stab glowing marks on its body, it’s dozens of times bigger than you–and I’m told that this type of boss recurs. The sense I get is of the development team saying, “Yeah, we loved Shadow of the Colossus, too, and we’d like to do our own version.” It feels much less like the ripoff that the internet is claiming it is and much more like a band covering another artist’s song, putting their own spin on it. After all, while it takes SoC’s basic mechanic, it does so to a very different end. The fights in LoS are much more action-based, much less like puzzles, and instead of being the only life in an isolated world, they’re “simply” particularly-impressive enemies.

The bulk of the game is an architectural platform brawler along the lines of Prince of Persia, God of War, Assassin’s Creed, etc. It feels almost on rails in the sense that the 2008 Prince of Persia did–there’s an obstacle course, and there’s really only one way through, and the challenge is based less on figuring out where to go than it is figuring out the timing. I’m beginning to do some thinking about this style as it relates to Quick Time Events. There’s no real difference between a movie which makes you press a button at a certain point to continue and a section in which you can only jump in one specific way towards one specific platform–but the latter feels so much more in your control, mostly due to the fact that nothing changes, nothing announces that THIS IS A MOVIE OH TRICKED YOU YOU HAD TO PUSH A BUTTON. Because, after all, the whole point of a Quick Time Event is to force the player to keep holding on to his controller. Much as I dislike those moments where I have to Stop Playing, I always felt like that was slightly disingenuous–it feels cheap, almost. But that’s as far as my thoughts have gone on this particular issue–I’ll come back with more when I have something.

Hideo Kojima had some sort of hand in this, the degree to which is ambiguous. He had an consultive/advisory role on the project; the only thing I’ve confirmed that he worked on was the character design. Normally they made the main character one of those wussy fey ugly LOOK AT ME I AM PRETTY AND I HAVE WHITE HAIR AND I AM BEAUTIFUL EVEN THOUGH I AM A MAN bishonen horrors that are so popular in anime-styled games. Kojima convinced the team to make him look like, you know, someone with a penis. The result is–oh God, I know what I’m about to sound like but I’ll say it anyway–one of the hottest male videogame characters of all time. He’s up there with Solid Snake, Nathan Drake, and the 2008 Prince of Persia. Good job.

I’m not sure to what degree Kojima’s influence has affected the cutscenes. It’s somewhat custsceney so far. Most of these–and remember, I’m only a chapter in and there are 12 total–are Good Cutscenes in that they aren’t just two people standing and talking. They’re either flashes of the scenery, closeups of scary monsters, or somewhat elaborate action bits. And it’s not the Square method of “you go down a corridor and there is a cutscene, and then you go down a corridor and there is a cutscene”–it’s the thing where you’ve finished a particularly hard section and the game decides you need a minute to take a breath, which I appreciate.

I’m really hoping the game doesn’t start sucking–a cursory glance on Gamefaqs has shown me that a lot of people are confused about the ending, which is never a good sign–but I’m hopeful. Again, so far I’ve enjoyed my time with it, and I am looking forward to playing more.

As a rule, if you want to know what the essence of a Japanese role-playing game is, you need look no further than the Dragon Quest series. Other series have expanded upon the formula–telling intricate stories, experimenting with the battle system, mixing it up with other genres–but Dragon Quest has always stayed very true to its roots. Even the recently-released Dragon Quest IX plays very similar to the original incarnation. It’s one of my favorite series, but I’m left strangely cold by this latest installment.

When Dragon Quest VIII was released in 2005, Japanese RPGs were a fairly strong genre. However, the climate has shifted a bit. The fact that Final Fantasy XIII‘s reception was largely chilly seems to be a symptom of a sea change. For one, people are beginning to get bored with stories told through barrages of cutscenes. For another, the West has emerged as a major and equal if not dominant development force. The linearity and baroque storytelling of Final Fantasy seems immature and trite compared to the mutability and openness of Dragon Age or Mass Effect 2. Finally, the RPG as a distinct genre might even be on its way out. Many games feature hit points and determine outcomes not just through skill but a combination of skill and statistics. In many ways, classic JRPGs have little more to their gameplay than manipulation of numbers. Why passively select commands from a menu when you can have a visceral action game which also runs on statistical depth?

And so the past few years have seen many attempts to redesign the JRPG with varying degrees of success. Persona 3 and 4, for example, marry JRPG conventions to dating sims; Final Fantasy XIII less successfully presents us with a battle system based less on tactics than on twitchy speed, and while it confines itself to corridors for many of its chapters, it opens up agoraphobically towards the end for some open-world questing. Dragon Quest, by contrast, is an extremely conservative series–each game adds only tiny, incremental changes–but it’s attempting to get into the modern spirit.

Dragon Quest IX was marketed on several aspects which purport to open up the game, make it more nonlinear, and take advantage of some multiplayer features–aspects which seem more at home in Western RPGs or in completely different genres altogether. I don’t have a problem with switching things up, and make no mistake–I’m not criticizing this from the standpoint of an old man who dislikes change. Rather, it’s how halfhearted these attempts all seem. Far from revitalizing the series, they come off as concessions, marketing gimmicks–and possible admissions that the developers know that Dragon Quest is getting stale and that they have no idea how to fix it. Rather than making major structural changes, it feels more like they’re slapping a few things on to the basic mechanics and hoping for the best. The sidequests and social interaction are poorly-integrated, add nothing to the experience, and seem to highlight just how outdated the genre might be.

Dragon Quest has never been known for its optional content. While a couple of the installments have featured minor sidequests, it’s usually a straight shot from beginning to end. You complete dungeons as they are presented to you, you fight the final boss, and then you win. Dragon Quest IX however, has a quest system. Certain NPCs, instead of simply saying their line of dialogue, give you a request when you talk to them. I’m not opposed to the idea of a quest system per se–it can certainly extend the life of a game, give new ways of interacting with the world and characters, and provide access to some snazzy bonuses. However, the vast majority are simple “Bring me X amount of Y ” quests. You get these items either in the field–hidden in pots and chests, or around the world map–or as random drops from enemies. But there’s no joy to be gleaned from fighting the same monsters over and over and over again in the hopes that maybe this time they’ll give you the object you need. The game does give the concession of letting you know what items a monster may drop, so you can pretty easily tell what you need to fight, and you do get experience and gold from all fights anyway…but I hate leaving things to chance.

Yuji Horii, the series’ main scenario writer, is famous for his love of gambling. Many of the games–oddly enough, not this one–feature casino minigames, and many interpretations of the series view it in terms of a risk/reward mechanic: One must determine whether or not the characters are up for exploring the next dungeon. If you make it through, you’ll gain a wealth of experience points and treasure, but if you aren’t strong enough, you’ll be kicked back to the last save point with half your gold missing. I personally find this interpretation to be a little too on the nose, and a little too generic–the same can be said of any RPG, really, and the fact that Dragon Quest does not give you a game over for dying tends to mitigate any severity of loss–but it’s in full force with the random drops here.

I, however, am no gambler. Given the choice between stalling progress in the hopes that I’ll be able to collect the items I need for a quest and actually, you know, playing the game, I’ll take the latter. Not every single quest is like this, to be fair. Some of the quests required to unlock advanced character classes are actually somewhat interesting–they involve defeating enemies using some esoteric combination of skills, indicating that you’ve mastered the primary class. But I was expecting something more–perhaps some bonus dungeons, some actual sidequests. Instead, what I got was World of Warcraft with Akira Toriyama graphics. And I hate World of Warcraft.

There are some optional secret dungeons hidden throughout the game–tons of them, if my information is correct. I’m unsure if they’re randomly or procedurally generated–I’ve only found one and have only attempted it once because these bonus dungeons are extremely tough. The problem is, you don’t find these dungeons just by walking around and exploring. You can collect maps, which lead you to them. Getting these maps is the issue–I’ve only found the one. I assume others are given by completing quests, but as I’ve said–I’m not interested in that.

The most-hyped feature of the game, and oddly enough the one I paid the least attention to, is the multiplayer. I cannot review this feature because I haven’t used it at all, in fact–none of my friends have the game, and I play mostly on the subway in any case. As I understand it, you can switch out your party members for your friends’ and all explore a dungeon together. I don’t feel left out by this–the game stands on its own as a single-player experience well enough–and given that JRPGs are traditionally a solitary experience, it’s kind of an odd choice to make.

The problem is that Dragon Quest IX hedges its bets. A game composed mostly out of optional sidequests is one thing–Mass Effect 2 is a prime example of that done right–but Dragon Quest IX‘s sidequests are uninteresting to play and reveal nothing about the world or the characters that populate it. Bonus dungeons can extend the life of a game, but if they’re hidden too well or too hard to get to, they may as well not exist. Multiplayer is a good idea, but it should be both widespread and provide an experience that single player cannot.

And most importantly, strip out all of the gimmicks and you are left with a Dragon Quest game just like any other. The fact that I can even conceive of the game without these additional mechanics shows how poorly-integrated they are. They add nothing; they change nothing. Loath as I am to admit it, the series is getting stale. Adding optional and uninteresting features is a bandaid. Dragon Quest IX comes off as a decent game, but one that does not soar to the heights that the name promises. And given that Dragon Quest is the prototypical JRPG, one is left wondering if the genre might not be able to be saved.

Nier is one of the most maddeningly subtle games I’ve ever played. I’ve rarely encountered a game which places so much of the burden of interpretation on the player. With Nier, we are left with more questions than answers after the first playthrough–there is no explanation of what just happened. The closest we get is a handful of cryptic documents given to the protagonist–and more or less ignored–which introduce some odd terminology and, at first glance, don’t explain much at all. This is intentional: Each one of the game’s four endings leaves the characters clueless about what they’ve just done or about the meaning behind the quest they’ve just undertaken.

Spending much of a game in a state of confusion is not an uncommon thing, and in fact is the default mode of storytelling in a JRPG. We may not, for the majority of Final Fantasy VII, know what Sephiroth’s plans are, what Jenova is, or what the nature of the connection between Aeris and the planet is, but by the end we’ve seen several revelatory and unavoidable cutscenes which answer all of those questions. Suda51′s games come closer to what Nier does, but they tend to give more than necessary, as a distraction from the true story. They are usually a mess of red herrings and confusion designed to place the player in a torpor–the glut of information we’re given requires the player to sift through everything he has seen, weighing through the massive amount of inessential scenes, in order to come to a final conclusion about what exactly is going on. Revelatory scenes also appear in Suda’s games, but they are often infamous for how much they subvert exposition. Knowing the metaphysics behind the Killer7, the truth about No More Heroes‘ assassin tournament, or the reason behind Flower Sun and Rain‘s Groundhog Day-esque structure doesn’t really clarify matters–it leads to more questions.

Nier‘s story, initially, seems pretty straightforward. We play a man, canonically named Nier, although you’re allowed and encouraged to rename him, who lives in a rural village with his daughter. She’s sick with a mysterious and possibly mystical plague. During his trips to earn money for her treatment, he meets up with a talking book and the two venture to find a cure. At one point she’s kidnapped and his journey then becomes a rescue mission to bring her back from the clutches of a figure known as the Shadowlord. There’s an incredibly dark undercurrent just below the surface, however–we realize that something more is going on, but exactly what is never explained. The Shadowlord has no bombastic speech detailing his motivations, the exact cause of the plague is never discussed, and the nature of the antagonists is never outright determined.

Some hints are given to the player, but again, they’re no more than intimations. In the second and all subsequent playthroughs, the guttural roars of the enemies are translated with subtitles. Other games have done this, but none to such dramatic effect. These creatures–Shades, as they’re called, shadowy black and gold figures, humanoid in varying degrees–appear as straightforward enemies in the first playthrough. After learning what they’re saying, they come off as much more sympathetic–in their eyes, they’re the good guys.

Games, particularly RPGs, don’t normally shy away from shades of grey, but normally this is achieved by giving villains noble or understandable motivations. Many people find Sephiroth to be likeable or at least pitiable: Created as a scientific experiment, lied to his whole life, hurting and in pain–it’s no wonder why he’s considered one of the best villains in the Final Fantasy series. But no matter his motivations or charisma, few people would agree that his actions–cold-blooded murder, attempted planeticide–are morally justifiable. That’s the normal technique to create villains–give us someone we like and have a group of characters attempt to stop him from doing something unambiguously wrong. Nier is more sophisticated about it: Reading the enemies’ translations makes it clear that we’re actually dealing with two sides, unable to communicate with each other, and unable to realize that they might even be working towards the same goals.

Take a late-game sequence in which a city is being menaced by a group of wolves led by a Shade. The citizens, unwilling to suffer the wolves’ attacks any longer, band together for a final assault. Upon delivering the final blow, the king angrily asks the Shade why they couldn’t just live in peace. The first time through, it’s a valid question–as far as we know, the wolves are a chaotic evil bent on destruction.

But in the second playthrough, we see the Shade talking to the wolves. He laments the environmental destruction that the city has caused, he mourns the wolves that the people have killed and he decides to lead the wolves on their own final attack. And when he’s asked, as the final blow is struck, why they couldn’t live together, he shouts, in frustration, that that’s what the wolves wanted all along: Simple coexistence.

The character Nier’s motivations, throughout the game, are noble: He simply wants to save his daughter. That he might be slaughtering innocents on the way to his goal, and that he may even be destroying the world is never explicitly addressed by the narrative. He’s given incomplete information, but it is in fact left ambiguous as to whether or not he’d even care. Nier has some tragic flaws, and his single-mindedness is his biggest.

It’s slightly frustrating because, when he meets up with some people in the final area who know everything about what’s going on, his first instinct is to initiate a boss battle. My initial instinct was to angrily rue the game’s linearity. I’ve been playing a lot of games lately which have allowed protagonists to make moral choices and which occasionally leave room for non-violent solutions, and the lack of a “let’s sit and talk this over” button seems pretty frustrating. But perhaps this is the point of the game–that a lack of communication is a bad thing. Nier treats his situation as any RPG protagonist would–as a problem to conquer through violence–and in doing so finds that the sword is a pretty poor method to earn a happy ending.

Consider this: Many of the between-level loading screens are excerpts from Nier’s daughter’s diary. She come across in these pages as a very lonely girl. Many of the game’s sidequests are explicitly described as errands that Nier runs in order to earn money to take care of her. In-game, he’s actually by her side very little–either he’s on a fetch quest for the financial reward or he’s completing the game’s main quest, which is the collection of a series of MacGuffins which may or may not lead to a cure. Her diary reveals the depths of her loneliness and her wish that her dad would simply spend more time with her. She sends him letters and wants him to write to her more often–and it’s not insignificant that the game’s save points take the form of mailboxes. Because he is always away on adventures, she is left alone and bored. She might be happier if he just stayed home.

Nier’s actions aren’t fruitless, because they do lead to major ramifications for the world, but they don’t really seem to benefit anyone in the slightest. The game’s now-defunct developer Cavia seemed very interested in examining the personality of a typical RPG hero. One of their other most notable games, Drakengard, also examined the bloodthirsty nature of RPG characters. Final Fantasy VII, for example, never addresses the irony of a group of environmentally-motivated heroes who gain levels by entering various biosystems and mowing down the local wildlife. Normally, the number of kills that you rack up isn’t commented on. Drakengard‘s characters, however, do–Caim, the hero, kills enemy soldiers hundredfold, and rather than that being accepted as a convention, it’s mentioned as a sign that Caim is mentally disturbed, and terrifying even to his friends and loved ones. Nier questions fighting in a similar way. In its first playthrough, we view the Shades as simple enemies, targets to be destroyed. Every other time we play it, the game hammers home the point that they’re not simple sources of gold and experience but sentient beings that you are murdering.

Ultimately, Nier plays out as a condemnation of videogame protagonists. The best-case scenario is that Nier is acting based on a combination of misguidedness and misinformation. The worst case is that he’s just as bloodthirsty as Caim and that his taste for violence and glory outweighs his ability to make rational decisions.

Playing Nier, then, requires a level of comfort with ambiguity that’s not often prized in gaming. To make one final reference to Final Fantasy VII, that game’s ending leaves us with the burning question of whether or not humanity was destroyed by the Planet. It was a masterful piece of unsettled business which was ultimately ruined by its own overexplanation and by the movie Advent Children, which answered the question once and for all. Nier never clarifies its characters’ motivations and never explains its backstory fully–and while it gives hints to the player, it never gives the characters the same courtesy. Likely they themselves never learn exactly what they’ve done or why they’ve done it. To play Nier, one only needs a basic understanding of how to play an action RPG. However, to understand the game, one needs to work to connect disparate pieces of information. And perhaps this is one of the reasons for its poor reception. Because, like Nier, we all want to feel like heroes. We play RPGs because we want to conquer strange worlds and solve mysteries–because we do not want to simply accept our situation for all of its faults. What we take home from Nier is the implication that these instincts might be very dark ones indeed.

Dead Space: Extraction can basically be described as a booby prize to Wii owners who don’t own an XBox 360 or PS3.

I knew going in that I wasn’t a fan of lightgun games, but it wasn’t until I started up Extraction that I realized exactly why. I thought it had something to do with the shooting gallery nature of it–that every lightgun game is essentially a reskin of Duck Hunt (and as unengaging as the same), but it’s a little more complex than that. Extraction just feels so…condescending. So authoritative.

See, I’ve mentioned exploration–look at any game I absolutely love and there’ll be a major element of setting-as-character there. I play videogames partially because I enjoy visiting places that are either fictional or not feasable to get to–I like travelogue games. Dead Space definitely was one. Over the course of that game, you get to know the Ishimura very well. Playing Extraction, which covers a lot of the same ground, I found myself remembering these rooms–having reactions similar to a Vietnam flashback. There had been battles there. I can guarantee that anyone playing Extraction first won’t have that kind of reaction–perhaps some recognition, but it won’t be so visceral.

A lightgun shooter looks like an FPS, superficially, but the major difference is the fact that the character’s head and legs are not controllable–you see what he wants to look at, you go where he wants to go. I dislike this loss of control greatly. Number one, from a pure gameplay perspective, it’s frustrating: If there’s an item you want to collect, and you miss it or get distracted, and the character turns his head so it’s just out of sight, well tough luck. There are some other similarly annoying things–you want to search the lockers, but your character thinks it’s more interesting to dick around and turn his head. There’s other bits that are just silly–okay, so it’s programmed so that you fight a group of enemies, and then the character will shuffle to the next stopping point, fine. There are some enemies which, if shot a certain way, will expel a bunch of tiny enemies. On more than one occasion, I killed all of the enemies except for one of the tiny ones. Due to the camera angle, I couldn’t even find the enemy for a while–it was hiding behind something, skittering around. In the dark. I squeezed off several rounds firing at nothing, hoping to hit it, until I finally did. There are tons of places where it would make sense for a character to move to a different location, to get a better angle, but because the game is uncontrollable, you can’t.

Making matters worse is the few brief moments where Extraction actually lets the player control the game are insulting. On a couple of occasions, you get a choice between all of two different paths. There doesn’t seem to be much difference between them–a couple led to side areas with some items, but I haven’t felt the need to see what choices I could have made. In other areas, the game actually gives you a free camera for a couple of seconds, letting you look around to your heart’s content while a timer audibly ticks down until the game gets bored with letting you play it and wrests control away again.

I’m an only child, but friends with older siblings tell me that playing videogames with their older brothers wasn’t the most engaging of experiences. Their role mostly consisted of watching their brother play and pointing out the rare things he might have missed noticing. If the brother was feeling magnanimous, he’d pass the controller for maybe as much as a whole level. My friends always told me this felt awesome–their cool older brother was letting them actually play. They always felt responsible, like they knew they’d anger him if they died or didn’t get an extra life or anything like that, but it was still a great feeling, they’d relish those times.

Dead Space Extraction is like that. It knows what it wants the game experience to be, it’s older and is smarter than you, and it knows that if it lets you pick pesky things like camera angles and pace of exploration that you’ll fuck it up, and it can’t have that. It’ll handle all of that–you just sit back and shoot and stuff, and maybe if you’re good, you’ll be handed the controller for a moment and be able to actually decide what to do, under very limited circumstances. Unfortunately for Extraction, the game is not my older brother, and there are plenty of games which actually let me play them. Soon as I post this article, I am running to the mailbox to return this control freak of a Wii game.

Love,

Richard

The story is pretty straightforward–a VI has been rampaging across a Cerberus base. You find out that it’s made from a human fused to a computer or something–and I’ve said this before but crossing technology with biology is a theme that almost always disturbs me. While the story is slight, it’s pretty serviceable nonetheless.

But the main problem is it’s all wandering and combat. I liked Mass Effect 2 as much as I did because the missions were extremely varied. The combat ones were some of the duller missions in the game, frankly–the memorable ones were more based on exploration, on a lonely ship in the snow, at a fancy party, on a craft perched on a canyon. Here it’s just a couple of bases, similar corridors and Geth. There’s also a few hovercraft missions–which is at least handleable this game, but the original pack of DLC levels for the Hammerhead were interesting and fun to play through. These are not.

Actually now that I’m thinking on it, Overlord reminds me a lot about the original Mass Effect. Interesting and compelling concept that’s maybe not explored in enough detail, repetitive shooting in bases, clumsy vehicle levels, no enemies beyond Geth? Now that I’m thinking of it in these terms I’m genuinely disappointed.

The game was touted to have connections to the next Mass Effect game. Obviously it does not take place after ME2′s ending (which, for those who haven’t played, I’ll simply say it’s an extreme cliffhanger and I can’t think of a single way they can begin Mass Effect 3 without beginning immediately after). Rogue VIs have popped up here and there in the series and are part of the major backstory of the Geth, so unless there are any direct consequences, it’s just another example of that motif. A place called Grissom Academy is mentioned at the end–was that where Jack was “trained”?–so maybe that’s the connection. It’s described as the sort of place where people with strange powers are treated and taught to control them, so I’ll be excited to visit it in the next one.

But all in all I wouldn’t go out of my way to play it if I had it to do over again It doesn’t have any of the ethical issues or tough choices that most of the missions have–it’s too straightforward and uninteresting to recommend. If you just want to kill a few hours or you’re that desperate for anything ME, well I won’t stop you.

Love,

Richard