An Ode To The Reset Button

I remember the exact moment I realized that the things I did "counted."  It was the spring of 1996 and I was sitting in my 8th grade French class.  My teacher was describing my upcoming French final and reminded the class that, due to the peculiarities of New York State's education system, this was a High School Test and my grade would appear on my High School Transcript.  "Shit!" I thought, "If I fuck this up I won't get into college!"  I don't know why it hit me so hard.   For one thing, due to other New York peculiarities, the Math final I had taken the previous year had also been a High School Test and that grade already appeared on my High School Transcript.  That French test seemed important, though (I got a 98, by the way, sufficiently un-fucked up to permit my admission to a State University).  If my life ever became interesting enough to warrant a biography, the above would be a good opening scene.*  It also helps to explain my love of video games and why I hate competitive multiplayer.

My life exists within a cruel, indelible world; when I do something, it's done.  Same for you, of course.  I've enjoyed most of my choices so far.  I love my wife, I like being a lawyer, I've mostly enjoyed the places I've lived. But on my shoulder, someone is whispering "yes, but..."   Do I like my life?   Yes, but what if I was a writer, or a sociology professor?  What if I had gone to a different law school in a new, unfamiliar city?  What if I had tried out for football in 9th grade instead of doing cross county?  I probably would have become a famous Quarterback!  I'm not looking back with regret, but with curiosity.  My primary opportunity cost is lost information.  What could have happened?  That may not sound like a big deal, but I value information very highly.  I regularly go to wikipedia to figure out which year a particular song or movie came out, and then suddenly realize that two hours have passed and I'm looking at the entry for Macho Man Randy Savage.

Video games are great for someone like me.  The "yes, but" opportunities in newer, spawling, "choice-y" games like Fallout 3** or Mass Effect, or games with class or faction choice like Diablo II or Starcraft are pretty clear.  But I was getting the same thrills back when I was nine and playing Final Fantasy first with a balanced party, but then with all Fighters and then with all Mages or playing through Mega Man 2 using only the regular arm cannon. The benefit I got from all that was the opportunity to undo a choice. I get to do the same thing over again with different parameters and see what the new consequences are.  I don't need to play every game twice, but when I do play that second time, I want to be able to compare it to the first.  Repeating events without being able to change them, or being forced to deal with consequences of the actions I took in my last game when I play my next game is too close to real life to enjoy.  That's what prevents me from enjoying competitive multiplayer games.

I'll admit that any true and honest accounting of my disdain for competitive multiplayer would encompass more than just that, though.  First, X-Box Live is a cesspool.  I think the conditions there get slightly exagerated sometimes, but while I didn't hear someone (myself included) get called a black homosexual (I'm paraphrasing) every time I played Gears of War 2, it probably happened most times.  Beyond that, I'm simply not an elite player. I'll occasionally rack up a huge kill count, or something, but I'm never going to be among the best, and I'm often going to get matched with some man or woman I have no hope of competing with unless I practiced and got much better.

Here's the problem: I don't want to get better.  That's not because I don't like the games; I keep playing First Person Shooters and I generally enjoy them.  It's also not because I don't like competition or getting the better of someone; I am a lawyer, remember. No, it's because when I play multiplayer, everything I do counts.  I have a spot on a ladder, or a ranking, or a win-loss record.  To get "good" I'd have to play dozens or hundreds of rounds.  But every death-match, every captured flag, is a playthrough I'll never be able to duplicate and never be able to tinker with. They're coded messages that disappear before I can decipher them.  And I'm stuck the results, and my associated rank, when I load up the next match.  Becoming a headshot master who pwns noobs isn't a big enough reward to overcome all that. I'd still ask myself "what would have happened if only I had picked up the AK instead if the sniper rifle?" I'd never know, but my guess is that I probably would have become a famous Quarterback. 

*The title would be John Fanshawe: A Profile of Risk Aversion.

**Incidentally, what I liked best about the moral choice system in Fallout was how few differences there were between my Asshole and Awesome Guy playthroughs. I hope this subtle Machiavellian ethos was intentional, but, unfortunately, I kind of doubt it was.

Picture Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fatllama/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

GAMER WITH BOOOOBZ ALERT!!!!!!!!!!111

OMG!  Look there's some hot girl who plays video games!  And, like, you can see her boobs on the Internet!  But she's talking about LAN parties!  This is completely contrary to my expectations!  Plus, I love boobs!

I assume that was the reaction Kotaku was going for.  There certainly aren't any new ideas in the article, or even mention of any games released within the last five years.  I don't think "hey, try talking to people," is groundbreaking dating advice, and consider me unimpressed by the timely, salient, in-no-way-awkward Charles Kettering reference.  Maybe I'm a tough audience.

Kotaku is easy to pick on sometimes, but they produce some good stuff.  Totillo is great.  Leigh Alexander is great.  Crecente himself is usually really good.  Tim Rogers rubs some people the wrong way, but at the very least he's a unique voice.  The other writers there put out interesting things too, like the recent article about the obsessive achievement hunter.  Hell, even this celebrity thing they're doing isn't necessarily a terrible idea.  I thought the Chunk one was pretty funny.

That's why shit like Raven Alexis's Guide to Cliched Understanding Of Women and Gamers is so frustrating.  Kotaku gets so many page-views that the editors there have an opportunity to really change the discussion about video games.  A discussion, by the way, that has degraded to the degree that the first hit on a Google image search for "boobs" links you to GameTrailers.com (seriously, try it).  Kotaku seizes that opportunity sometimes, but then those articles get lost in a sea of rehashed press releases "improved" by the addition of pirate/boob/LOL-of-the-moment jokes, exhaustive outlines each and every instance of cleavage at each and every vaguely game related conference, and OMG LOOK BIKINI COSPLAY!!! 

I have nothing against boobs.  In fact, I think they're great.  But if games are really important, if they really are worth spending time thinking about, and if they're worth talking about, then they're worth talking about seriously.  "Comparing The Boobs and Butts of Bayonetta" is not serious talk.  It's weird and misogynous and ensures that video games will forever be considered the playthings of children.

There are plenty of women who write about video games, just look for them.  Reading Alex Raymond, led me happily to The Border House.  Leigh Alexander writes well about video games for more websites and publications than I can count.  Play Like A Girl is a great blog, and there are many others.  There are new voices straining to be heard everyday.  Most of them will say things that are far more interesting than "people at LAN parties often eat pizza and drink red bull."

Game Law

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootbearwdc/ / CC BY 2.0

Lawyers and judges must rely on precedent when making legal arguments and rendering legal decisions.  Once courts decide a law has a certain meaning, that law will always have the same meaning.  Courts may refine things around the edges as they go along, but there's a core idea that doesn't change.  This, I think, would be welcome news to Michael Abbott.

A while back, Mr. Abbott questioned whether critics pay too little attention to what he called "refined games."  Mr. Abbott suggests that examining a fully realized and refined vision can reveal insights about games and game-making that examining a less perfect game cannot, even if the less perfect game is more innovative or interesting.  This is intuitive and works with many other artistic media.  Hamlet's plot isn't particularly bold or innovative, but Shakespeare's execution is masterful.  Bach's chorales can be beautiful even though they are beholden to a very rigid framework.  Trying to analyze refined video games can be frustrating, though.

Think about Zelda games.  These seem like the kind of refined games that Mr. Abbott would love, and in fact, he has said as much.  Twilight Princess in particular seems like an Abbott special.  It is a triumph of iteration and refinement sports a metacritic score roughly equal to a healthy human's body temperature.  This sounds like a great game to learn lessons from.  But what can I say about it?  That is, what can I say about it that I couldn't have said about all or most other Zelda games?  The series may have added a hook shot, bottles, a horse, and z-targeting, but I still hacked up the same moblins and hunted the same triforce and defeated the same Gannon in Twilight Princess that I did in The Legend of Zelda.  (See also, Final Fantasy, Cid, Chocobo, airship, summons, etc.).  What new insight does the refinement offer us?

Mr. Abbott later talked about iteration.  He related iterartion to rehearsal noting that, "[r]ehearsal is a discovery process wherein doing something again reveals new ideas or information that can be useful in the creation of something we collaboratively build."  This is a very important insight.  It forces us to comprehend each sequel to a game as a draft.  In the first draft, Link has a flute.  Later on, someone realizes that it would be much better if Link could actually play the flute, so that gets added to the 5th draft.  Someone else realizes that while one hook shot is great, two hook shots would be even better, so that gets added to the 8th draft.  Now the similarity between Zeldas makes sense.  They're similar because they're reworkings of the same script.  But the rehearsal analogy does more than that.  It suggests that one way to find the meaning in games is to look at what game-makers are rehearsing.  That, in turn, suggests that video games are not artistically driven.

Saying that video games are not artistically driven is different from saying that they are not art (a strange semantic discussion that I have no desire to enter), or that they do not exhibit artistry.  But the best games do not draw their value from aesthetics.  The best games give you new and better things to do and new and better ways to do them.  That's what game designers are rehearsing and perfecting.  Video games are not created as art, they are created as pragmatism. 

Video games are collections of rules.  This, to finally explain my opening sentence, is exactly what written court opinions are.  No one would argue that court opinions are driven by artistry.  This is true even though some opinions contain excellent writing, and would be true even if each opinion were beautifully illustrated.  But a court opinion's meaning can still extend beyond the interpreted statute.  Court opinions can be political touchstones and can reflect beautiful or terrible things about society.  They do this simply by manipulating rules--by telling people what they can and cannot do.  And jurisprudence evolves in the same way games do.

Consider the right to counsel, everyone who's seen Law and Order even once knows about that right.  And, good news, we get explicit wording right in the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right...to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence."  First draft.  But in 1942, the Supreme Court decided that that only applied in Federal Courts.  If you're getting tried in a State Court, maybe you get counsel, maybe you don't.  Second draft.  In 1963 the Supreme Court changed it's mind: counsel must be provided in state court after all.  Third draft.  Oh, and once you get lawyer you always have the right to her presence, even in things like informal police questioning.  Fourth draft.  And we have to tell you about your rights to counsel.  Fifth draft.  That's a simplified history, of course, but it tracks the development of a series like Zelda pretty well, right down to a sequel no one really wants to talk about. 

The only prerequisite to this process is a good idea.  More specifically, it starts with an idea about actions people can undertake: explore an open world and smack monsters/defend themselves from accusations of the state.  The rehearsals refine the ways in which actors can accomplish those actions as old mechanisms get tested and replaced by new and better ones.  The goals do not change, I want to kill Gannon and get the Triforce; I want to stay out of jail.  But the tools I have at my disposal, and my access to those tools, changes dramatically.  Considering what I can do makes me compare what I should do to what I actually do.

Games can create meaning.  But they should do so by manipulating agency, not by clinging to narrative conventions of other media.  In a future installment, I'll talk about the lessons video games can take from the law on leveraging authority to create meaning.

* For all you law nerds out there:  Yes, I know that Miranda actually deals with the 5th amendment right to counsel and not the 6th amendment right to counsel considered in Gideon. 

Are You Not Entertained?

I know I'm weeks late to the No Russian party. But there's a good reason for it, I don't know where I belong.  Am I in the pro- or anti- camp?  I feel like I would be unwelcome in both.

To eliminate myself from the pro-No Russian camp, I just dont' think the scene was all that effective at accomplishing its overt goals.  Maybe I'm just a cold unfeeling sociopath, but shooting civilians (or watching them get shot) in the context of a video game is not that big a deal to me.  This, likely, is because I do things like that in video games all the time.  In Fallout 3, I blew up Megaton because I had already pissed off people in the town by breaking into the sherriff's house and stealing stuff from the town doctor.  In Red Alert, I mowed down civilians with Yak fire as part of a mission goal.  In Bioshock, I killed little girls because it made me marginally stronger in the short term.  In various GTA games, I did all manner of terrible things for no reason at all.  Then there's all the brutal genocide and ethnic cleansing from my hours and hours of playing Civilization.  The fidelity of the slaughter in MW2 was higher than in most of those examples, but that wasn't enough for me to feel significantly worse about it. 

I'm treading dangerously close to the "it's just a game" argument, but that's not my point.  It's not that Video Games cannot affect me emotionally because they're video games.  It's just that killing civilians is too close to what I do in every video game (killing stuff) to be titillating of it's own accord in a specific video game.  The No Russian scene was a particularly condensed dosage of amorality, but I felt like I had just read a book that stopped mid-sentence to repeat the word "rape" for 50 pages.  It's weird and unsettling to the extent that I don't like rape or slaughtering innocents and thinking about those things is unpleasant, but it's not affecting in any meaningful way. The problem is that there was little context and little sense of consequence.  No Russian's context is mitigated by both the pre-mission blather explaining it's all for the greater good and by the general weakness of MW2's story.  Narrative consequence is neutered entirely by the immediate death of your character, ensuring that we never see him struggle with or even consider the meaning of his actions.  And, because Russia launches a retaliatory war, which is not only well within the range of expected and just responses to a foreign national turning an airport into Hogan's Alley, but also a somewhat predictable event in a game that's about a war with Russia, the literal, if-A-then-B consequences we see are only the broadest, least nuanced, most boring ones possible.

This sounds a lot like I'm in the anti-No Russian camp.  But I don't think I am.  Saying a scene is ineffective is different that saying it's a bad idea.  I think the scene was a great idea.  The critical community that has sprung up around video games is always on the lookout for new twists on old formulas and games that do or try to do interesting things (I know that's an uncited "some say" type of argument so this would probably be the best place to start your counter argument).  And, wow, Infinity Ward did a risky and new thing here.   Modern Warfare 2 is a super-high exposure game that would have sold millions of copies had they taken no risks at all.  Further, we have a cultural environment that includes people who flipped out about the naked shoulders and implied sex of Mass Effect and municipalities that won't run bus ads for GTA IV.  The risk/reward balance does not favor provocative choices.  Nevertheless, Infinity Ward has the player actively engage in admittedly heinous terrorist actions, without coating him in the Noble Guerrilla trappings of a game like Red Faction.  They did so to establish an interesting scenario: Modern Warfare 2 is a game about a war where the player causes the war.  That's a pretty neat trick, especially for a medium that aspires to create meaning through action.  Every subsequent event is a result, if not always a direct result, of that one No Russian mission the Player did, that one mission that felt kind of dirty and wrong.  The bombed out Totally-Not-T.G.I.Fridays, wasted D.C., and hilarious, non sequitur dead astronaut are all your fault.  That's why the poor use of the scene is so frustrating.

I think that is where the failure ends, though.  So my opinion differs from Anthony Burch in that I think the mission could have been effective exactly as presented if the context around it changed.  Burch argues that the scene failed because it prevented him from shooting Makarov and his buddies, that Infinity Ward forced Burch into their narrative.  I think this is a non-starter, largely for reasons that Anthony himself cites in his piece.  Not every game is a sandbox and, as Burch mentions, Modern Warfare 2 is unabashedly linear.  But nor does every game strive to let players extensively role-define the playable character.  I've never heard anyone say that the time-limits in Super Mario 3, for example, were poor design choices "because my Mario is an explorer."  The playable characters in Modern Warfare are soldiers, actors within a framework where following orders is paramount.  That your specially selected, highly skilled, elite soldier follows his General's orders, even when those orders are unambiguously atrocious, enhances the verisimilitude.  No Russian's orders might make you uncomfortable.  I think they were supposed to.  Burch bemoans the lack of choice, but forcing the player to do something can be just as strong a tool for the interactive storyteller as letting the player do something.  The problem is that Infinity Ward did nothing to leverage their forced action.

With proper context, Infinity Ward could have raised some very interesting questions about rule-following, either in a general Milgrim/Bioshock way, or in a specific War/International Relations way.  What if  instead of shooting the player, Makarov dumps an impostor American body, the discovery of which leads to the same Russian-American war?  The player character, still alive, would be forced to deal with watching this consequence, knowing he helped cause it, hearing what the world was saying about his impostor stand-in, and still needing to work with Makarov and keep his cover.  What if Makarov shoots you, but you survive and end up in an international prison, struggling with whether to betray your mission and your commander, or to risk going down in history as the terrorist who caused World War III?  Maybe that wouldn't be feasible in Modern Warfare's bare-boned storytelling format.  But if that's the case, why did Infinity Ward knowingly include a scene like No Russian, which clearly needs nuanced development to be worth anything?

So, I guess, I come to bury No Russian, not to praise it.  For Infinity Ward was ambitious.  Too ambitious says Fox News, and Fox News is full of honorable men. 

You've Lost, Karma

When I was in elementary school, my teachers always went over the classroom rules on the first day. Every year, the rules were the same: prohibitions on chewing gum and wearing hats and entreaties to stay in my seat and to keep my hands to myself. Don’t punch anyone! In fifth grade, though, everything changed. Instead of presenting “rules,” the teachers presented “rights.” Most of these were silly, just the same rules rephrased in hopelessly vague ways. You have the right to a learning environment free from distraction. Don’t get punched by anyone! I couldn’t grasp the fine points of pedagogical theory that led to this new iteration of the old rules. It didn’t seem like a big deal to me; I wasn’t really given the opportunity to do anything new, even if the teachers told me otherwise. But I was pretty sure that the teachers and the administration could not imagine a school where everyone went around punching each other.

Morality systems in video games make me feel a lot like that fifth grader. Developers sell morality as an innovative new aspect of gaming but deliver something that is just a sloppy rewording of the most persistent rule of video games. It’s a rule that has existed since Space Invaders and has flourished since Doom: In this game, you will engage in combat with increasingly able enemies, so press the fire button until you win. Morality systems arbitrarily highlight some of that combat, but do little else. Several times during the game we will allow you to choose which of two people you’d like to punch or, maybe, whether or not to punch anyone at all! I’m left feeling pretty sure that game developers can only conceive of video games as experiences viewed down the barrel of a gun.

People exist within dozens of rule systems that dictate which behaviors they can engage in and the consequences for deviant behaviors. If I rob a bank, I will go to prison because I violated a rule of law. If I jump out of a plane without a parachute, the rules of physics will make me go splat. Video games are interesting because they can offer new sets of rules to explore and manipulate. That’s what separates video games from other entertainment media. That’s agency. True innovation is something that offers a new kind of agency or changes the way a player experiences an existing kind of agency. Innovation can be as simple as Wolfenstein’s first-person perspective, changing the rules from “shoot everyone before they can kill my guy,” to “shoot everyone before they can kill me,” but it has to be systemic. Morality systems in action games have not yet provided new agency, they have only superimposed themselves onto the same old game mechanics and rule sets. Whether or not these systems are well imagined, well implemented, or internally consistent will be irrelevant until they do something to change the kill-kill-kill rule set of those games.

Bioshock was at the forefront of the morality movement and is an example of why morality systems fail to deliver their promised innovation. Many critics discussed how compelling the Little Sister choice was (is choosing whether or not to kill a little girl really ethically gray?) or whether the developers hedged too much, making the consequences too similar no matter which option the player chose. But all that misses the point. Despite its presentation, the morality system asks the player the same question about Little Sisters that the rest of the gameplay asks about every other living thing you come across: Would you like to kill this? Consider Bioshock’s treatment of Big Daddies. The game structures Big Daddies identically to Little Sisters. Big Daddies are drones conditioned by Rapture’s bad-guys to do a particular job, just like the Little Sisters and even the player’s own character. They won’t attack unless provoked and you could simply skip them. And, hey, if you don’t kill a Big Daddy you won’t get any Adam at all. Now there’s a choice with consequences. Bioshock does not present Big Daddies as parts of the morality system. The decision to kill them is taken for granted. Should players care about the fate of Little Sisters more than the fate of Big Daddies because one looks like a cute little girl and one looks like a weird comic-book villain? Bioshock provides no better explanation. Subsequent morality systems have primarily addressed the same types of combat questions. Would you like to kill Wrex or not? Would you rather kill Ghouls or Tenpenny Tower residents? Would you like to kill all these bad guys and get cool electrical powers, or leave them alone and get different cool electrical powers?

The desire to innovate and to move video games towards cultural relevance is understandable and commendable. But the way to innovate is to take advantage of video games’ unique ability to manipulate rule sets. The Guitar Hero franchise created an entirely new rule set and sold millions of copies without ever asking me how virtuous a drummer I wanted to be. Morality systems that merely allow players to specify the manner and target of combat do not change the rules of action games, they reword them. That’s no more of a leap forward than the “fully destructible environment” was. There is literally nothing in this game that you cannot punch! Change the rules, young man. Change the rules.

Some Things About Me

This might be passe, but I think it's important for an audience to know who's speaking. What follows is an incomplete accounting of my background. Fanshawe is not my real name. I'm in my late 20s. I spend my days working as a lawyer for a very large company/organization. I will often discuss games here months after they come out. I describe myself as 50% tourist, 50% completionist, even though I realize that I like Geometry Wars 2 far too much for that to be true. I think you can tell a lot about a gamer by his or her reaction to Metal Gear Solid 2. I owned no consoles between SNES and PS2, and spent most of that era playing various iterations of Command & Conquer and Civilization. By now, I've played many "important" games from that period (MGS,  FF VII, Mario 64, Resident Evil, etc.) but I experienced them all in retrospect, knowing what games went on to accomplish.  I know absolutely nothing about programming, so expect me to make some gameplay suggestions that are impossible to successfully implement. The only comments I will delete are those from spambots and those that are blatently racist, sexist, homophobic, etc.

With that in mind, please enjoy the blog, and forgive me the first couple of voice-finding weeks when the posts will likely be highly derivative of Krpata, Abbott, et al.