Mass Effect 3 and Gaming’s Reagan Moment

While watching and trying vainly to constructively participate in the widening fracture within the gaming community precipitated by Mass Effect 3, Ronald Reagan’s oft-quoted response to the question of why he left the Democratic Party has come to mind: “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. It left me.” I hear loud echoes of this sentiment in many of the angry responses to BioWare, and to a great extent I feel that sentiment is correct. While I don’t think Mass Effect 3 was the start of the fracture, it may be the straw that broke the camel’s back, with the gaming community changed drastically as a result, no matter what lessons the games industry learns from it.

I don’t want this post to become my defense of the ending, but I think a summary of my view of Mass Effect is necessary for the broader point, so bear with me. For many people, the original Mass Effect was an fantastic experience. For some, almost ecstatic. For me, it was a waste of $20. A steaming pile of sci-fi cliches, corny dialog, and paint-by-numbers drama in a secondary world with pretensions to a much higher ranking on the Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness than its writers seemed willing or able to deliver on. To say I hated it would be going too far, but I planned on ignoring any future sequels. When I eventually did get it at a deep discount, Mass Effect 2 was a transformative event. It set what I thought was a piece of junk into a different context that made it not-junk. It made sense of the first game as the start of a story of growth and maturity. Maturity for Shepard as he (Stephen Shepard is a guy) encounters what he does, and comes to grips with the fact that there is only so much he can do as one man in a hurricane. Growth and maturity for the human race as it learns to live in the galaxy instead of just a planet. Growth and maturity for the other races as they are forced to deal with their own histories and come to terms with these ambitious and relentless hairless apes. Growth and maturity for galactic civilization as it is forced to accept the fact that they haven’t achieved nearly as much as they though they had, and that even their most advanced members were just children in the greater arc of history beyond their notice. It was a magicians show, nothing being what it seemed, and even the reveals misdirected you. Layers of meaning, with layers of the truth peeled away like onion skin. All of this made important because of the interpersonal relationships that develop across the series with your crew and the other characters you encounter. This is where good old Saint Ronnie’s quote enters the picture. Mass Effect 3 happened, and it fit well into the narrative arc I not only saw, but embraced. It turned out that the writers wanted to go where I wanted them to go. Clumsily in many places, yes, but it all broadly fit what I was looking for. However, for many people, they adamantly didn’t want to go there. They were perfectly fine where they were. They hadn’t left BioWare. BioWare had left them.

Before Mass Effect 3 was even released, I had begun thinking about whether RPGs had changed, or I had. The first electronic game I ever played was Infocom’s classic interactive fiction proto-RPG, Zork, on my father’s Digital Rainbow. We wasted reams of dot-matrix paper printing out every move we made and arguing over it as a family, plotting our next run. The same feeling of exploring some other, fantastic world carried me through RPGs, tabletop and electronic, as well as the myriad new worlds of fantasy and science fiction film and literature. For quite a long time, as far as electronic games were concerned, RPGs were the only reliable place to be for that kind of experience, the limitations of pure interactive fiction and the classical adventure game feeling much too…limiting. As other types of game changed, what role-playing games had been providing was spreading out. Thief: The Dark Project was the first game that caused me to really question my definition of RPG. I most certainly was playing a role in Garret that was far more intimate than I had ever felt playing any other game. I vividly remember catching myself moving my head to try and look around an in-game wall, as if my monitor was literally a window into another world. At that point, I felt that if the term “role-playing game” was going to have any meaning, that a game like Thief needed to be included, and my personal definition of the role-playing experience has followed along similar lines since that time, despite the fact that very few people agree with me on this.

As the comments on Rowan Kaiser’s excellent piece in anticipation of Mass Effect 3 show, whether a game is a role-playing game or not is important for lots of people, and if a game doesn’t fit their definition, many don’t want to play it. Many thought the first Mass Effect was awesome for the exact reasons I thought it worthless. As BioWare changed the Mass Effect series (and Dragon Age series, probably not coincidentally), a studio so intimately linked with the role-playing form was deliberately walking away from cherished specifics of that genre to a new kind of form, with stories and narrative arcs that don’t fit the definition. The kind of game on offer was changing fairly drastically away from the kind of game they wanted to play. While Mass Effect may be a “science fiction story” first and foremost to me, it was a “role-playing game” first and foremost to many.

Since the release of Mass Effect 3 I have read often (in many phrasings) that “this isn’t a game story,” “you can’t do that in a game,” or some such. That either because of the length of time required to experience the whole arc, some poorly articulated quality of the medium, a lack of closure, or an assertion that game stories are supposed to be simpler. These reasons are utterly bogus from my point of view, but they resonate for a large, or at least vocal, number of people. Enough to have made BioWare’s gambits with the Mass Effect series a risky enterprise. On the other hand, there has been an incredible critical reaction to the game, and there are plenty enough fans that either agree with that, or don’t believe the flaws add up to all that much in the end (unless, of course, you believe that all the favorable critical reviews indexed on Metacritic were bought, which some apparently do). At this point, if BioWare drastically retconned the current ending (or implemented the “indocrination theory”) I would be just as pissed, and would probably write off BioWare, and I would not be alone in this.  

It's impossible to deny that storytelling in games has not, as a rule, included the subversion of an entire entry in a series into irony, and a bitter irony at that. The second and third installments recast the first game as a story of a naive soldier in a naive galaxy, setting up hopes and dreams for the future that can never be realized because of what lurks unseen in their midst. It's rare enough in books and films, but I can't think of another developer that has done it in a game. While they are generally filled with interesting characters, dialog, and situations, BioWare games rarely deviate greatly from bog standard of the genre they are set in. Pyrrhic victories are rare in sci-fi and fantasy film and literature, extremely rare in video games, and all-but nonexistant in RPGs where rousing triumph against impossible odds is often argued to me as the point of RPGs in the first place. The end of the Mass Effect series is nearly the dictionary definition of a pyrrhic victory: “a victory with such a devastating cost to the victor that it carries the implication that another such victory will ultimately cause defeat.” Plutarch wrote of King Pyrrhus of Epirus after his victory over Rome at Asculum: “The armies separated; and, it is said, Pyrrhus replied to one that gave him joy of his victory that one more such victory would utterly undo him. For he had lost a great part of the forces he brought with him, and almost all his particular friends and principal commanders; there were no others there to make recruits, and he found the confederates in Italy backward.” Pyrrhic victories are not fun, even when, like at the end of Mass Effect 3, they turn out to be enough to win the war. In print or in film their depictions rarely sell zillions of copies, tickets, or what have you. Similarly, lack of resolution or closure is a controversial device regardless of the medium it's in. Some people just hate it and think it should never exist. Some people enjoy games because they so rarely have to deal with it. Some people just plain wanted a conventional ending and they got that snatched away from them. They have every right to be angry, and to express their displeasure.

The question is how does the games industry reacts to the situation. It’s possible that the games industry suddenly does a hard right turn and goes back to the “good old days,” and at least some of the industry is likely to do just that. It's not likely to be universal, though. The medium is moving on, changing, and the people who make the games are changing. If there was zero critical acclaim, maybe this would be more prevalent, but I'm not the only guy out there that enjoyed it. People like me are a market too. Some have no interest in moving on, and that’s fine. Like Reagan, they are staying put, and there will be no shortage of people willing to come to them. Just as Double Fine’s mega-Kickstarter made clear that a real market for the classic adventure game form exists, there is such a market for the classic RPG form. How big that market is isn’t super clear, but the Kickstarter project page for Wasteland 2 has raised just under $1.7 million, and there are 18 days left before the project is funded. It will not likely be the last, and there are many indies that cater to the classical western RPG archetypes. GOG.com has sold a hell of a lot of copies of classic RPGs to people that may have bought them several times before (like me). These secondary avenues, outside of the “industry” model that has come to dominate, may very well come to reshape things like the vibrant independent film industry has shaken up the movie business, and ebooks and podcast audiobooks have shaken book publishing to its foundation. If that process accellerates as a result of Mass Effect 3 then, well, I'd count that as a win no matter what you thought of the end.

Rage Against....What Exactly?

John Carmack once said: "Story in a video game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important." Since the release of Wolfenstein 3D, Carmack and id Software have released games that delivered on that philosophy, mostly with huge success. Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake have premises instead of stories. The Nazis, demons, or aliens are invading, and it's your job to stop them. Rage is the first game that id has developed where that lack of care for story significantly hurt the game made.

Rage, despite having a thoroughly meaningless title, begins with a promising premise. The asteroid Apophis is on a collision course with Earth, and the people of Earth have responded by developing high-tech cocoons called Arks, small armored pods holding eight people each, in which presumably the best and brightest have been put into hibernation to repopulate the Earth after the asteroid impact. The parallel to Fallout's Vaults is obvious, though thankfully not exact. It's an interesting concept and reflects a much more modern crack at the problem of surviving a worldwide holocaust.

You play one of the Ark survivors, in fact the only survivor of your damaged Ark, which you leave at the beginning of the game. The landscape you are thrust into is one of the best designed post-apocalyptic worlds I have ever seen in a game. The megatexture technology that is one of the headline features of id Tech 5 means that there is little repetition in the world. While there is only so much artist time available to create unique snowflakes, I never once had the feeling that I had walked through the same corridor 20 times in the last hour as is hard to avoid in most modern FPSes. The painted-on static sky is a jarring distraction, but the rest of the environment work is first rate, and id’s art department deserves praise for it.

The art direction and conceptual work is worth lauding as well. The patched together vehicles are straight from The Road Warrior, though little thought appears to be given to what fuels them. Some thought is put into the spaces where the more civilized of the Earth's remaining inhabitants live. Interior spaces are (largely) cleaned out, repairs made, and new construction started, as opposed to Fallout where even rooms in New Vegas luxury hotels look no more maintained than any random abandoned house. You encounter a gang which makes its living maintaining an old power station that has mostly survived the asteroid impact. Your first base is in the process of expanding, with broadcasts warning residents about demolition in preparation for expansion. The second is in the ruins of an old subway station, with jackhammer-wielding workers working on expanding it. The acknowledgment of humanity's drive to rebuild after disaster is appreciated after so many post-apocalyptic games seem to ignore it.

Unfortunately, the good prep work and potential was wasted. Instead of exploring the consequences of after-the-asteroid Earth, id dug up a plot from a Mystery Science Theater 3000 experiment (Warrior of the Lost World, to be precise). Rage cares little for character motivations, or believable reasons for...well…anything anyone does. You're sent to wipe out entire gangs of raiders based on simple assertion that it needs doing. The person who gives you this job apparently forgot that you were totally helpless against just one of those raiders when he saved you 5 minutes ago. Think of the most boring RPG quests you've ever played and you’ve got every mission in Rage, side or main. Everyone trusts your character with important things because they are supposed to, and you're not allowed to be untrustworthy. New and important things you risk your life to find are thrown away, ignored by the characters and the plot. The stick figures that populate the towns exist to say their few lines of dialog, and when they are done, to stand there and be background like some ancient Greek chorus.

The Authority is the most bland dictatorship I’ve ever encountered in fiction of any medium. You are supposed to hate and fear it, but it is so incompetent and its soldiers are so easily dispatched that it’s hard to care. Its leader is named, but you never encounter him in any way. Even in your final fight through the Authority’s home base you never even hear from the person whose rule you are trying to end. Like every other plot point in the game, it’s mentioned and almost immediately discarded. While playing the game, I wished for a moment that I had bought the PC version so I could surgically replace the game audio, ala Woody Allen in What’s Up Tiger Lily, with a plot worthy of the setting and premise that had been crafted for it.

Structurally, Rage operates along similar lines to Borderlands; incorporating RPG questing, item collection, and a semi-open world into the basic FPS model; but the result makes it clear that id doesn’t quite have a handle on what made Borderlands work. There are different items and weapons to use, with special ammo for each weapon, but aside from gimmicks where particular equipment is mandated there's no obvious reason to use any but the most powerful. While many specialized ammo types are interesting, some are so overwhelmingly powerful or easy to accumulate that most of your arsenal will sit unused in your inventory.

Adding problems is an unclear weapon damage model. In id’s older games, shooting a demon or Strogg in the foot was as good as shooting them in the face. In the years since then the FPS has moved on and modeled limb damage has become the standard. Rage sort of reverts to the older way of doing things. I say “sort of,” because by the end of my run through the game I still was not sure if there was not at least some attempt to model limb damage. One might go down with two pistol shots to the head, the next of the same type might take an entire clip and keep shooting at me. There may be reasons, but the amount of punishment the opponents could take felt random, and that’s a problem in a game. This isn’t to say that mechanics must be in plain sight, but it should be possible to figure them out. Mastery of systems is, after all, part of the allure of video games.

Vehicles are used primarily for travel between missions, but there are races which reward the special currency needed for vehicle upgrades. Vehicle combat is boring, boiling down to upgrading armor and buying enough homing rockets and shields. The controls feel like Borderlands, and while it has pretensions at being superior it ends up being distinctive without substantive difference.

All of this contributes to Rage being a bit of an empty suit. It’s an impeccably tailored suit, to be sure, but nothing is wearing it except the hangers. I would rather interact with characters in suits than just the suits themselves, and playing Rage is like trying to shake a hand and finding yourself holding a sleeve. The failure of the story leaves me with a game that is worse than it would have been if they hadn’t tried. Since they are now part of Bethesda, perhaps their next outing will be better with the new writing talent they can draw upon, but if they can’t get a handle on story in video games they should abandon the pretense next time.

Intentional Jerk: Why Being Obvious About How Mean You Are In Games Is A Good Thing

I originally posted this as a comment at Your Critic's place in response to an article she wrote about how reputation systems in video games had made her feel unable to make a dialogue choice in a game that had no obvious clues, such as in Mass Effect, where the Paragon and Renegade answers are put into predefined areas, so you always know which is which. This most certainly could have been a much longer article all on its own, and I cut myself short because it felt like I was writing nearly a longer piece than the article I was commenting on, so I decided I was going to just do that here.

There are some issues with hiding the reputational consequences of your answers in games such as Mass Effect, Fallout, Dragon Age, and other games (mostly classified as role-playing games) where character interaction is governed with dialogue trees, and there's a morality system of some kind. Firstly (generally) when we interact with others we know what we're trying to do with what we say. We compose our thoughts in a different manner if we want to say something in an insulting manner than a complimentary one. We know (again, generally) what that entails. If I want to be insulting to someone, I'll use language that is not just appropriately insulting, but appropriately insulting in my own cultural context. This is why translation errors are often both hilarious and horrifying. 

Chances are that you, gentle reader, did not grow up in the Nevada Wasteland. Therefore, unless you happen to be a Fallout nerd, you don't know how you're supposed to act in the Wasteland. In the previous games in the series, that fact was worked into the game. In Fallout and Fallout 3, the player is ejected from the Vault into a totally new and strange world. In Fallout 2, the player's avatar has lived in a small, isolated tribe their entire life. The Courier from Fallout: New Vegas is not newborn into this world or a hick from the sticks. He or she has lived through this world, holding down a job even, for some time. The Courier would know that Caesar's Legion would hate it if he helped out the NCR, what Super Mutants even are, and what the hell everyone is running around with bottle caps for. Joe Fallout-Fan would know too. Random game player doesn't. Making things obvious with reputation and warnings of Karmic loss or gain helps integrate our thinking into this new world we find ourselves in, not unlike the social training given to kids with Asperger's syndrome (which is a whole other rabbit warren I'm not going to enter here, but for someone with psychology training might be a fruitful area of study). The same principle goes for Mass Effect, and the placement of the Paragon options at the top of the conversation wheel, and the renegade options at the bottom, as well as the UI showing your relative Paragon and Renegade levels. Yes, once we're well versed in the game and the world, it might be nice to play without that (and it might be nice to have the option to turn off all those notifications in the hardcore mode) but for most players, it's an important tool to be able to appreciate what's happening around their avatar. 

And another issue is that these reputation systems are all, in fact, systems. They're not real humanity, and these systems will be picked apart by the jackals soon enough in strategy guides on the Internet, so why not just cut to the chase? Fallout: New Vegas is the best I've found in this regard. Fallout 3 let you trivialize Speech checks, to the point where you never actually needed to put any points into Speech to win every Speech check. Just save before you talk to someone, and reload if the d100 didn't come up lucky this time. Not that this isn't a hellaciously boring way to go through the game (because it most certainly is) but it let you get your way with everyone for hardly any investment. New Vegas; in presenting the required skill level for a particular Speech, Science, Medicine, or whatever check; avoids that kind of dodge. How much do you want to get the "good choice" here, with this thing? Well, that's going to require some investment on your part. Letting people know what that investment is up front makes it less arbitrary for the player. New Vegas even goes a (much appreciated) step further, letting you try and fail to use the relevant skill, presenting an obviously incompetent answer you can give. The fact that we can't write our own text for this stuff and have the game respond in a contextually correct manner means that the writers are going to get it wrong for many people. On my latest playthrough of Mass Effect 2, on the Archangel recruitment mission when his identity is revealed, the choice designated as "Renegade" didn't seem particularly mean, selfish, or...renegade-y. It's got to be something, though, and it at least let me know how the game viewed the choice. 

What would be a better thing for these games to do is make the responses of individual characters to those things be different. Too often in Mass Effect, Paragon and Renegade are two sides of the same coin: getting your way with everyone you meet. Fallout: New Vegas deals with this particularly well, because it's utterly impossible to get your way with everyone. If you've helped the NCR, Caesar's Legion is going to try to put a bullet in your brain and vice-versa. If you try to take over New Vegas yourself, both of them are not going to be especially happy with you. Helping the Powder Gangers isn't going to endear you to the fine people of Goodsprings, and no amount of charm and good deeds to other people is going to get them to see you as anything but a monster. Seeing this kind of thought process would, I think, make it a lot easier to accept the obviousness of some of the choices. Knowing you want to present your avatar as a thug is a good thing, since it gives agency to the character. Not knowing how the npcs will respond to thuggish behavior makes things a lot more interesting than simply "do what I want you to do." Until computer language comprehension gets a lot better, we're going to be dealing with dialogue trees in games for quite some time, so making the results less predictable is a much better line of development than making your choices less clear.

Aside: I Think I Figured Out Why Mass Effect 2 Is Better Than Mass Effect 1

I've been recently inspired to play through the Mass Effect games again, starting with the first game, and actually bothering to edit the appearance of my Shepherd (male this time) to actually look more like me (except I don't yet have the dangerously nasty scar down the left side of my face). Surprisingly enough, this minor change alone has improved the experience somewhat, but that's not what this post is really about.  What it's about is that, after ripping through in record time, I think I figured out why the first game isn't as good as the second. Spoiler warning, just sayin'.

Reading Theater: How We Process Narrative Gaming, Part 1: What the Hell Do You Mean By Reading Theater?

In writing this post, I feel a little bit like the rookie relief pitcher that gets shoved out onto the mound in an important game, except that I'm pretty sure that my career will not be made by writing this well, or broken if I've got this all wrong, and nobody asked me to do this.  So...not at all like a rookie relief pitcher...well that's a load off!

I do realize that the statement "games are theater that you read" is a pretty bold statement, and one that appears to be counter-intuition for its own sake. I also realize that it's all on me to make the case that I'm not just spewing hot air, and that thinking about games in this way is important and useful, but I think that I'm ready to begin tackling that case.

I'll just pick a book off my shelf here, one that I haven't read yet. How about Market Forces by Richard K. Morgan.  I'll sit back down at my desk, and put it down. Get myself situated, and open the book. Promo blurbs, legal mumbo-jumbo, don't care about that, flip some pages. Here we go, page one. Finding the start of the page, I start to scan the lines of text. I get to the end of each page, and I have to ask myself whether I want to continue. I might need to stop because the cat is on fire, or want to because what I've read so far has been so thought provoking. I might have skimmed the text too fast and lost the thread and need to back up a few pages and reread. Perhaps the writing is so dense I needed to go back over it to try and wrap my head around it again. That may have been an amazing page of text that I want to experience further with a deeper, and more thoughtful reading. I could skip ahead, flip to the back of the book to see whodunnit, possibly ruining the story for me, but I may just not care. Or maybe I've decided that it's just bad (this is theoretical here, I'm not saying Market Forces is bad) and I don't want to waste my time anymore and close the book.

I've now decided that I want to put Market Forces down for whatever reason. I feel like reading something I've already read, and know I like. What should I read? How about my one volume Lord of the Rings. Good book. Flip past the Notes, the Prologue, all the extra stuff I don't want to bother with this time, until I see "Book One." Ahh, here I am. This is, of course, a book I've read many times before, so my eyes slide over the familiar lines faster than they might otherwise, and I don't necessarily read every word that Tolkien wrote, but that's not a problem. I know what's there by now, on my umpteenth trip from the Shire to Mordor and back again. After travelling through a few pages, I get the urge to jump forward to my favorite section of The Fellowship of the Ring, the Mines of Moria. I love that section so much, and I can always come back to this bit again, so to hell with it, I'm going there now. I stop reading and start flipping (or, if I didn't know this volume so well, I could go to the table of contents and head for that page) until I recognize the part of the story I want to read. I really like this part, so I take my time reading every word, and not letting my memory fill it in. In doing so I run across new things. Little details I missed the last time. A connection or turn of phrase I hadn't noticed. It takes me a lot longer to get through this bit, but it's a much deeper and iterative experience.

Now, let's say that I'm gripped by Lord of the Rings fever, and it just so happens that someone is running an all-day marathon of the directors cuts of all three of the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings films at the local art house theater. "Bleeping awesome," I say, and I head out, buy my ticket and a jumbo plate of nachos, a drink, and a tub of popcorn and I'm so ready for this. And there I sit until the first movie is over, or I need to run to the bathroom because I bought way too much Coke and drank it way too fast. If I do, the movie isn't going to stop for me. The performance happens, and I'm either there to experience it or not. Home video technology (and audio for that matter, see also: the podcasted radio show) has made it possible to take theater and treat it like a book. We can rewind, fast forward, skip ahead, replay slow down, freeze frame and more. Just about everyone does it, but hardly any video is designed around that capability. They're designed, like live theater, to be experienced from start to finish (or to intermission, with longer, older films such as Lawrence of Arabia, Seven Samurai, Red Beard, etc.). Films, live theater, concerts, and book readings all have running times. They may be loose (as in live theater, it's not always exactly the same for all kinds of little reasons) or tight (as with a film), and there may be mechanisms to artificially extend the real-time length of your experience (pause on a DVD player) but they all have them.

Books don't. Even on your first encounter with a book, you can read it slow and carefully. You can run through fast. I am an incredibly fast reader. When I first read the Watchmen graphic novel, it took me only a few hours. I bought it on the way home from work one day, and I had finished it before I went to bed. My girlfriend took days to finish it. I hasten to note, that this does not mean she's stupid! (Don't kill me, hon, please!) I just read fast, and have a tendency to get sucked into books in that "Hey, what time is it? 3 AM? Crap, maybe I should get to bed" sense and in that zone I flip pages like crazy. I don't even notice that I'm doing it. My girlfriend is a far more deliberate reader. Stuff that I might miss until the second or third time through a book, she's noticed the first time. If we sat down on the couch and put in the Watchmen movie, it starts and ends at the same time for both of us.

Some of you reading this are probably ahead of this article in where I'm going, but I'm going to keep going there for the moment.

So say I get home after the Lord of the Rings film marathon, and feel like playing a game. How about Half Life 2? Great game, a classic. When I start it up, I get the splash screens with the Valve logo, and the copyright legalese. Some games let you flip ahead past this stuff, but not here. Since I'm playing the Orange Box version on my Xbox 360, I've got to pick which specific game I want to play, so I'll choose the main Half Life 2 game. Then I can choose to play a new game or load a save. One of the things that makes Half Life 2 a great example, and any of the rest of the narrative games in the Orange Box, is that Valve will let you start a new game from any chapter in the story you want. Since I've finished the game, I can start anywhere I feel like, and skip the parts I don't like so much (That's the way to Ravenholm...I don't go there anymore) just like I can do in The Lord of the Rings. One I've chose a chapter (let's say I start at the beginning) and my personal Gordon Freeman has been deposited in a train car arriving at City 17 after the creepy background lecture from the G-Man, I have control. In fact, I have a hell of a lot of control. Much more than most people think they have when they play heavily scripted narrative games such as Half Life 2. Sure, I can't change the plot, and the world has been designed so that I can't take Gordon outside the bounds his developers have set for him and me. I can, however, do nothing. In fact, as I write this I'm doing nothing in Half Life 2. The train arrived at the City 17 train station about an hour ago, and I remain right where the G-Man put me.

Now, the game is still happening as I sit there. Remember, we're reading theater, and the digital actors have their parts to play, lines to say, and cues to follow. Gordon's fellow passengers have long since gotten off the train, and I presume are waiting in line to be processed by the Combine troops, though I've never waited this long, so I'm not quite sure about what's happened outside the carriage I'm in. One of the Combine camera bots eventually found me and has been hovering there for the last half hour. It's little different than if I had opened Moby Dick, read "Call me Ishmael," then got up and walked away with the book still open on my desk. This is very different from pausing the game, which allows me to avoid missing some specific bit of theater if I have to run to the bathroom, put out a grease fire, throw the cat across the room, or any other important event that intrudes on the game.

After about two hours of letting the game run, I decided to do something in the game, so I took Gordon out of the train. His fellow passengers had apparently moved on, so I moved him down to the end of the platform and see one of the people that was on the train up against a cart full of luggage, like he's being patted down, with a Combine trooper standing there. The other passenger is nowhere to be seen, taken off to the fenced off area at the right, if I remember correctly, where there is a votigaunt I had never noticed before, wearing some kind of restraining collar, sweeping the area with one of those big, wooden brooms. Apparently this is as far as the play has gone, and they're waiting for some other cue from me, or this is it for them. I stop and take a look at the scenery. There's a door in the chain link fence, back by the carriage Gordon arrived in that I can't open. I study the scenery back there, just to see what might be there. Nothing particularly interesting, but I didn't really consider the fact that there was anything there before just now. I take Gordon back down the platform and look at the posters on the wall. On the way the scene has changed a bit. The passenger is still up against the wall for a patdown, but the guard has taken my wandering as a cue to do his own. The posters are mostly Combine propaganda, or at least what appears to be Combine propaganda. One a black and yellow portrait of Dr. Breen. That one looks like it has been plastered over posters with pieces of text in English, Cyrillic, and what I think is Turkish script, which is new. There's a lot of Cyrillic text in this game, and some English, but the Turkish I hadn't noticed before. Nice touch. Then I realize that Dr. Breen's speech on the alien Jumbotron isn't still repeating. There's just an alien test pattern there now.

I could go on, but I'm not trying to do a public close reading of Half Life 2 here. The point is to establish that I am, in fact, doing a close reading here, even if what I am reading is not printed text, but a theatrical text. I could have skimmed this, moving Gordon through as fast as the engine would allow me to, hearing the sounds and seeing the images that I cannot avoid to get the gist of the story, but not going any deeper. While not unique in the annals of gaming, Valve is one of the very few companies to structure their games in a way that facilitates exploring their games in this way. Not that it's impossible to do so. With dedication, some outside record keeping, and a decent saved game system, you can build a similar tree of saved game states to mimic this, allowing you to jump to any point in any game's story that you could wish after you've completed it. It is an extremely difficult task, however, requiring a spreadsheet, some other kind of database, or a really good memory.

Another reason why Half Life 2 is a great example, is that there are several games that use the exact same engine, and have the exact same interface that are totally non-narrative. The game environments are there, you play with the toys that are provided, and when you put them down it's over. In Counter Strike you move your avatar, choose weapons, interact with objects, and have objectives to be completed in the exact same mechanical forms as in Half Life 2, but there's no story, no plot. It's a virtual game of paintball where Half Life 2 is so very much more than a paintball game.

Not that this means Counter Strike is bad, because it isn't. What it does do is highlight some concrete reasons why despite complex mechanical and visual similarities, the games could hardly be more different. Counter Strike can only be played because there's no story in there to read any more than there is inherent story in the game of baseball. We can write stories about baseball games, or about how the game began and evolved, what baseball says about those who play it, but the game itself has no story or meaning. It just has rules. Rules are all games like Counter Strike, Tetris, Meteos, Team Fortress 2 or Civilization have. I'll telegraph a bit of my thinking by asking here: What does comparing those games to games like Half Life 2, Portal, Mass Effect, Red Dead Redemption, or Fallout 3 get us? Is the fact that Portal and Counter Strike both put the player in a first person perspective a good enough reason for critics and players to keep thinking about them as the same kind of game?

I could go on, but I think I want to stop here and hopefully get some feedback while I work on expanding on what I think this particular perspective I've constructed of "narrative games as reading material" should mean for how we judge the games we play, both from a more academic game criticism perspective, and how I think it can help everyday gamers to better quantify what a "good game" is for them, and how to break down other games so they can find more. I'm probably going to go through some other narrative games and try to deconstruct exactly how various broad types are read, and maybe think of better ways that developers can structure the game to make it easier for players to read their games.

Changed the template

Little easier on my eyes. Probably on other peoples' as well.

Musings on Story and Setting in Video Games, Prologue

One piece of common wisdom I've absorbed over the years, is that if you want to get something done, give it to someone who's busy. To that end, since I moved back to Massachusetts, I've tried to manufacture my own state of preoccupation through giving myself little projects. To a large extent, that didn't work, and I kept on keeping on, not actually accomplishing much of anything.

When the Global Financial Crisis hit in full stride after Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, I gave myself a bigger project: figuring out what the hell just happened, and why. To that end, I went to my long-neglected local library (neglected by me that is, not by the city) and started reading every book I could find on the financial crisis, economics, credit default swaps, and sundry. As a result of that, I started wondering what would happen if, hundreds of years in the future, something like the Great Recession hit some future space faring, planet colonizing humanity. So, in February 2009, sitting in a church basement waiting to find out whether I would be called for jury duty, and armed with a brand new spiral bound notebook and a fresh pen, I started my next big project, writing the future history of the galaxy before the Great Galactic Depression.

Another piece of common wisdom that I took to heart in starting that project, was that writers often spend as much of their time reading as writing, so I got to it, devouring books and recorded lectures on history, anthropology, sociology, and political science to try and come up with an educated guess of where we might end up in another thousand years or so. For inspiration, I returned to the meticulously developed worlds that I grew up loving, such as Tolkien's Middle Earth, and the incredibly detailed future history of Frank Herbert's Dune series (lets not talk about the sequels his son and Kevin Anderson wrote), and discovered new ones such as Iain M. Banks' Culture universe, and Neal Stephenson's Arbre from Anathem, Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space and many more it could take an entire post to go over.

This continuing process of reading and building, has given me a deep appreciation for the craft of building a world to place a story in. Building a space that is internally consistent, where people, organizations, and societies act and react to the world they live in, the situations, people, and things they encounter in a manner that feels organic instead of merely ripped from the headlines is an incredibly difficult task. When it's done well, it can spawn amazing, provocative and important art and entertainment. When it's done badly, you would probably have been better off not bothering.

Not that a massive initial effort to detail the political and social networks, plus a long and definitive history of the universe is necessary if you want to create a working secondary world, and in fact many of the more detailed literary secondary worlds were built piecemeal, with elements added as the writer needed it, including Tolkien's Middle Earth. While it may appear that he is picking a single tale from a world he had exhaustively described long ago Middle Earth in fact underwent radical changes while he was writing the various books. The Nazgul appeared in an "unpremeditated turn" from a passage originally intended as a description of Gandalf during the early stages of writing The Fellowship of the Ring. The character of Strider was originally a scruffy hobbit named Trotter. Tolkien actually retconned The Hobbit, drastically changing the role and personality of Gollum in a second edition once he realized that the character he had written was no longer the character that he had in front of him while he was writing the Lord of the Rings. He even developed a fictional meta-narrative, explaining the change as having found a corrected version of the story, edited presumably by Sam Gamgee, to correct the story Bilbo had written under the subtle influence of the One Ring.

The medium of video games (at least those driven by a story, Tetris is pretty irrelevant to this particular discussion) requires a much greater initial investment in the architecture of the world in which they are set, because the writers, art and sound designers, and programmers must fill in so many more of those details of a world that make it feel alive, because the medium demands their presentation, where in a book they can more effectively be filled in by the reader. This is one of the main ways that video games are closer to film than other mediums, but they're seperated from film in an important way other than the ability of the player to interact with the creation. The teams that build games don't just have to write the story, or cast the actors and dress the sets. They have to build the basic physics of their universe from scratch (or buy a license from someone who's done that). They also are experienced in a way that's much more different from film than is generally realized. Broadly, I'd describe the difference in this way: Story driven games are theater that is read rather than watched.

Reading is a proactive activity. You have to turn the page to move on in the story. There's nothing stopping you from skipping a few pages ahead to see what's happening, go back a few pages, skip a whole chapter, stop for awhile, or reread a particular passage or chapter. Before the invention of recorded audio, this type of interaction with theater was utterly impossible. Even now, with computer based audio and video playback, the experience is intended to be passive. Films, albums, plays, concerts, all have running times. Books and video games don't. In (probably) my next post, I will be making my argument on this topic.

On this blog, as my next big project to keep myself busy, I'd like to try and explore how stories in video games tick in practice, classify the different types of story structures that games have been given, figure out what the effect on the story is of those structures and whether any of them are good or bad in and of themselves. I also want to talk about settings in video games, and how important I think they are, and how badly I think they are often done. Of course, since it's a blog, I'll probably be jumping around and onto other topics as well, so fair warning...