More than Pac-Man with a Bow: Part 3

"He touched my breast!"

"I touched her breast? She doesn't have breasts! "

- The Wizard, 1987

Originally, nothing much was known about Samus Aran, the protagonist of Gunpei Yokoi's Metroid. The instruction booklet only states that Samus is a bounty hunter, shrouded in mystery. At the end of the game, having blasted through a horde of hostile aliens, that mysterious shroud is pulled away, with Samus' armor flickering and disappearing, revealing a long-haired woman.

Metroid's twist ending, which outed the calm and collected space marine as female, has long been touted as the emergence of the first empowered female character in gaming. But what is often ignored is the context in which Samus emerges: One of glorified, 8-bit peepshow.

With Metroid being a non-linear game, the time it took to complete could vary greatly as players became more accustomed to the layout. Depending on the time taken, the 'reveal' of the ending changed slightly. Take longer than five hours, and Samus merely raises her first in triumph. Take between three and five, and Samus' helmet disappears, revealing her long hair. Less than three hours nets you a shot of Samus in a leotard... and less than one hour rewards you with a shot of Samus in a bikini.

In space, no one can see your tan.

Samus, then, manages to be both hero and damsel, half space pirate and half space booty. In her bulky armor, devoid of female signs, Samus is functionally male - the instruction book even goes so far as to refer to her as a man. It is only when the game is finished, the threat is overcome, and control is passed over to the credits that Samus may safely emerge as female. This movement from Samus-player to Samus-object is explicitly one of orientation: As controlled during the game, the Samus is inhabited. During the credits, stripped to her skivvies, Samus is merely regarded.

The idea of Samus naked under her macho spacesuit is one that has remained with the Metroid series through its many incarnations, to the point in which it moved beyond tongue-in-cheek end gag to gameplay feature. In Metroid: Zero Mission, Samus is ambushed by space pirates and makes a crash landing... which, of course, damages her suit. Here we are re-introduced to Samus in her undergarments, a form-fitting bit of blue spandex aptly titled a "Zero Suit".. though perhaps "birthday suit" would be more appropriate given the circumstances.

I had that nightmare again where I went to school wearing my Zero Suit.

The difficulty in representing Samus as big, bad Space Marine is a problem of competing signification: As a figure "shrouded in mystery", Samus is free to operate outside the influence of explicitly female signs. But once revealed as female, she has endured a gradual aesthetisization and re-signification of gender: her armor has become more slender in the waist and wider in the bust and hips, her visor has gone from opaque to translucent to constantly display her face.

Where once Samus' gender was locked away within an androgynous suit, her femaleness has been tortured into a cloying, all-encompassing presence. Like many strip-games, it may have been exciting at first, but in the end everyone is left feeling silly, uncomfortable... and more than a little cold.


- Rook

Wuv the Power Gwuv

It is sooo baaddddddd.

More than Pac-Man with a Bow: Part 2

"Yeah, well, just keep your Power Gloves off her, pal."
- The Wizard, 1987

The character of Princess Peach originated as one of pure captivity: A literal damsel-in-distress, held captive by Donkey Kong, who must be saved by the heroic Jumpman. At the time, her name was simply "The Lady", and her long hair, pink dress, and frequent shouts of "HELP!" communicated all that you needed to know about her: That this was one long haired, pink-dressed lady in serious need of some HELP.

Re-christened as a princess in Super Mario Bros., a crown was added to the number of signs that communicated her character. But it wasn't until the North American port of Yume Kojo: Doki Doki Panic that she was given legs, so to speak.

While originally Yume Kojo contained characters from a Fuji TV television event, it was Marioified for a North American release as Super Mario Bros. 2. It was in this translation that the character of Lina, a young girl who could fly, was replaced by Princess Peach (or 'Toadstool' in the English version). Grouped alongside Mario, Luigi and Toad, each of these characters range in abilities such as their jump height and ability to lift objects.

The Princess' performance is on par with one might expect from a formerly-distressed-damsel: Peach has the most difficulty lifting objects and had the second-worst jump height, drawbacks that were mitigated through her ability to glide on her dress for short distances.

Though the end result is a playable character that still carries the signified femininity of a captured damsel, the messages that is conveyed treats women as both an exception and a burden: "Women can play games, too... it's just that they're weaker and slower." Even the benefit of being able to glide fits within this negative context. Jumping in the Mario Bros. games was difficult - so difficult that the original version of Super Mario Bros. 2 wasn't ported for fear that certain tricky jumps would frustrate novice North American gamers.

With such footwork an early badge of video game acumen, the idea of a female character - designed in part to appeal to female gamers - who could 'float past' the trickiest sections of the game serves only to re-iterate notions of handicap and inability.

It can be tough hiking up your skirt to make those jumps.

With Peach as a character serving the role of the perennial victim, and her victimhood dependant on notions of female paralysis, notions of gender and ability are inevitably linked. That is, her signified femininity defines not only the ways in which she is rendered incapable, but also sets the context through which she is playable. In Squaresoft's Mario RPG, Peach (as Toadstool) is armed with a wide variety of weapons including a parasol, a hand-fan, a frying pan, and, of course, good ol' fashioned slaps.

In the TOSE-developed Super Princess Peach, Peach is promoted to the role of protagonist, and navigates the game through the power of her emotions. In turns angry, happy, sad and calm, (calm?) each emotion changes music tempo and alters her ability set. Rather than discard the rudimentary signs of a hysterical female, these games extrapolate them to the point of caricature.

Peach, then, proceeds as a hyper-woman: Through femininity, weaponized.


- Rook

I Have 99 Problems But Navigating Procedurally-Generated Two-Dimensional Space Ain't One

Spelunky bitches. Spelunky.

This game has me addicted and I blame Rook. He introduced it to me during the Murder Mystery/Birthday party he and his wife hosted recently and I've barely stopped playing it since.

It's sort of a combination of Mario and a Roguelike which makes for a good time. Each time you step into the dungeon the map is randomly generated and fully destructible. The objective is to work your way from the top of the room to an exit at the bottom 16 times. Every 4 rooms the setting changes from cave, to underground jungle, to ice cavern, to evil temple and any given room can have a number of 'feels' like an undead infestation, or complete darkness. You must navigate these rooms initially with naught but a whip, 4 hearts, 4 bombs, 4 ropes, and 3 flares.

Hearts are your life just as in the days of yore however with the danger of the dungeon and your small supply they are all too frequently not enough. Luckily you can save Damsels. Bringing a damsel to the rooms exit grants you a single heart. Granted just getting the ladies often loses you a heart or two from traps or critters, but what's a spelunker to do?

My only regret is that I have but four hearts to give.

As for the equipment additional supplies can be found through the dungeon in crates, on mini-bosses, or in shops. The shops randomly have additional bombs and ropes, or other equipment such as parachutes, guns, jetpacks and teleporters which you can purchase with the gold and gems you collect or make an attempt to steal the goods out form under the shopkeepers nose, though beware his shotgun. Killing a shopkeeper causes you to be wanted for the rest of your run, and many runs you will have.

Right now my score reads 456 plays, 455 deaths and 1 win. And I'm actually good at the game. Rarely do I die because the game is too hard or too cheap, in fact the game is rather simple and easy in it's design. More often it's because I don't take my time or I do something stupid like jumping down a hole before taking a look to see what's down there, and landing on some spikes.

Help Wanted: Tomb Raider
Pays approx. 1 million dollars an hour, make your own schedule
Self-resurrection experience a plus.

But that's the idea of the game, to die until you don't. There's a few reasons this works, first off, because the game creates each room randomly every time you enter it so every restart is new. You never have to play the same level twice. Secondly failures are generally just as entertaining as successes if not more so and finally, because each time you die you get better at the game.

That's my favourite part too, Learning little things piece by piece that make each subsequent run easier or more informed “Oh, I can hit things with the backswing from my whip? Spiders just got easier to kill.” “There's always a jetpack if I bomb behind the Alien ship? Easy mode!” “Oh, I guess the Countdown Ghost is invincible and kills me in one hit...well then.”

Ghosts have been oppressing video game heroes for far too long.

Since the beginning of my gaming history I've been drawn to the idea that I can get better at a game, not just through the conventions of the game, such as leveling up or finding better equipment, or even from gaining increased skill at controlling the game through dexterity and a better understanding of the control scheme. What really floats my boat is beating a game through mind powers. In the original Mario I eventually became able to beat the first level with my eyes closed because I simply knew where and when to jump. We all know the knowledge of where magic flutes and other warps are can expediate and ease the completion of a game and this sort of thing is becoming more and more prevalent.

It seems some designers aren't trying to immerse you in the game like so many of the current generations game developers do. They're simply saying “This is a game, see what you can do with it.” and while I appreciate being fully immersed it's also fun to just play a game sometimes.

Until next time, keep hitting things with a whip.

-King

More than Pac-Man With a Bow: Part 1

"One is not born a woman, one becomes one."
- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

"Honey, don'cha know I'm more than Pac-Man with a bow?"
- Ms. Pac-Man, commercial for Ms. Pac-Man on the Atari 2800

In 1980, Midway purchased the rights to Crazy Otto, a popular hack of Pac-Man that featured added maps and improved random variability. They were faced with a problem: How could they re-market an update to their hit arcade game as an autonomous game in its own right? At the time, they were waiting impatiently for the Japanese company Namco to produce a direct sequel to Pac-Man, thus precluding the independent production of a "Pac-Man 2." How could they suggest difference, without operating in deliberate sequence? From this primordial marketing slop, Ms. Pac-Man was born.

Changing Pac-Man to Ms. Pac-Man was a relatively simple process. They simply added large eyelashes. And lipstick. And a big, bouffant bow. And a beauty mark. One wonders if they came inches away from adding a corset. In case this orgy of hypersexy signs wasn't enough of a clue, the advertisers weren't afraid to spell it right out for you: In an ad for the 1983 Atari 2800 port of the game, a glammed-up Ms. Pac-Man in a stole and high heels boogies about, breathlessly purring "Honey, don'cha know I'm more than Pac-Man with a bow?" while impressing us with her high-kicks. This burlesque show is for our benefit, insisting that rather than being a re-packaged and cynically re-branded product (despite that being exactly what it was), we were being introduced to something new and exciting.

For a character without legs, Ms. Pac-Man has a great set of legs.

Though the use of sex to sell a product is nothing new, what's interesting here is the spartan toolset that developers of the early 1980s had to work with to convey femininity: A splotch of pink could be female lips, or a bow, while a splotch of black could be eyelashes. (In a masterstroke, Ms. Pac-Man's beauty mark is a single pixel.) It's been discussed how many of the design choices behind iconic characters were either accidental or pragmatic - consider Mario's precursor, Jumpman, who wore a hat to avoid pixelated hair, whose overalls helped to distinguish his arms at his side, whose moustache served to separate his nose and lips.

This isn't to directly criticize the toolset available in these instances. A video game, especially in the early days of the medium, can only communicate within a finite set of fields: Between a colorful splat of pixels and a few words of sometimes poorly-translated text, any character representation must be both minimalist and iconic. But the transition from Pac-Man to Ms. Pac-Man is a good indicator of how freighted a gender discourse is bound to be in such an environment. Pac-Man is an androgynous non-anthromorph, but still, with an absence of gender signification, defaults to male. Ms. Pac-Man, thus, must become female... and to do that, she must be gussied up, a derivative Pac-"man in drag," rather than a unique entity.

But rather than being simply an embarrassing chapter in the history of gaming, many of these early females in games have come to set an iconic standard: No longer are they simple pixel formations, but 3d-rendered extrapolations of decades-old ideas. Video gaming technology has progressed at an exponential rate, yet this standard of signified gender continues in three major areas of negotiation: How female characters navigate game-space, how 'female' tropes are represented visually, and how sex, as a notion, is communicated.

In the posts to come I'll be taking a look at a few early female video game figures, to consider the ways in which these areas of negotiation affected their origins and how they continue to shape them today.

- Rook

King Watches the Watchmen

So I just watched it, Watchmen that is. It was suggested I arbitrarily compare it to a number on a scale of 1 to 10 and chose 7. The folks I saw it with gave it a "9" an "8" and an "8 or 8-and-a-half"

They changed some stuff, they kept some stuff the same. The music was weird. I liked the film.

I'll tell you more about it when it isn't 2:30 in the morning.

Till next week,

-King

The Whingemen: Update!

It would seem we're safe... for now. I keep peeking out the windows, but I haven't spotted any signs of frantic rioting in the streets. Watchmen was released, and the world hasn't ended.

So that's something.


But online, the crazy continues. I can't look away!

In the Toronto Star, Malin Akerman is interviewed in an article entitled "Watchmen star adds a feminine touch to kicking butt." where it is suggested that the film's sexism is countered by having ladies in it. As everyone knows, women are sexism's kryptonite. The author explains how the film's underlying hate on the the dames is alleviated by women in latex kicking things. Then, in an astounding flurry of doublethink, he demonstrates how totally-not-objectified she is by describing what she's wearing.

"Fortunately, Watchman film director Zack Snyder had no problem with women being women and looking that way, too.

And in the case of Akerman, who is dressed for an interview in a burgundy Prada dress and jeans, she's gorgeous both on and off the screen."

"I will fight you with my feminism!"

Elsewhere, Hitler is pretty upset that they left out his favorite part. I can relate... I liked the squid, too. And the guys over at Cracked have a great idea for an alternate, studio-friendly ending. I'd warn you that the second link contains spoilers, but, really, doesn't everything? I read somewhere that the human body is something like 83% spoiler.

The opinions are out there, coalescing. Will you have yours, when they come for you? There comes a time when every moviegoer must stare into the depths of their self, and ask a truly penetrating question:

Which of the Watchmen babies is your favorite?

- Rook

Some Muzaks

An old friend of mine recently returned from the British Columbias with a couple of new Folk-Rock stylings. Check out ScottGuitarOriginals. His last name is actually Guitar so you know it's gotta be good.

-King

Sweeeet Coraline, dah dah dah!

So I went to see Coraline the other day and was surprised to discover my ticket had smacked me for $15.50 instead of the usual $12.50. I was instantly excited that I would soon be learning all about the economy in university at which point this sort of bullshit would make sens- What. The. Fuck. I had just been handed 3D glasses.

I was shocked to say the least. I had come to see a magical children's story come to life on the big screen, not to dodge red and blue bat-dogs and button eyes flying off the screen into my face. Imagine my surprise then when I discovered what 3D movies were all about these days.

You could totally just wear these out to the mall.
Like, maybe with a nice hat?

Gone are the red and cyan cardboard glasses of days yore. Now they use Polarized glasses which create the illusion of 3d by limiting the amount of light that reaches each eye. The projector then projects two images, superimposed on each other, with opposite light levels and each lens of the glasses filters a different level of light tricking your brain into perceiving depth where there is none.

Science!

The result is a great effect. As the opening credits roll everything appears to be, for lack of a better analogy, in a fish tank. A mysterious pair of hands comprised of sewing needles is stitching together a rag doll. The hands appear to be occupying the space a fish would, the rag doll appearing just behind, the desk the doll is resting on would be the bank of the tank and the opening credit names look as though they were written directly onto the front of the tank.

We've come a long way.

What I'm trying to illustrate is that it's an extremely subtle effect which simply provides depth of picture. I can only recall two instances where something jumped out of the screen in an attempt to kill me. It is a testament to my awesome reflexes that I am here today to tell of it.

This new form of 3D is has also made it's way into video games with support from Nvidia, one of the major manufacturers of graphics cards. One of the things that easily fascilliatates games using polarized 3D is that they don't need to be designed with the feature in mind, it's relatively simple to add in later. And with other new discoveries in gaming technology who knows what the next generation of gaming, and movies could bring.

Until next time, may you see the sailboat

-King

The Second Coming: Who Watches the Watchmen watch Watchmen?

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer.

The end times are upon us. Have you seen the signs? Whispered omens flit across the internets like sparrows taking flight, spooked by some looming and inscrutable presence. They bespeak a dark hour, drawing ever nearer. The world ends tonight! Or, no it doesn't.


But either way, the Watchmen movie finally touches down. So that's something.

Much is being made of the imminent release of Watchmen. It could be argued that this film packs a larger pop culture cache than any in recent memory, a nerd syzygy of comics canon-meets-slick Hollywood blockbuster-meets 9/11-meets Billy Corgan-Meets Cute. During its time, the comic was a lurching step away from the exact modernism of comicdom towards an ambivalent and hyperstatic place, a clamorous "SOD OFF" to superhero geekdom that, somehow, managed to be canonized faster than Mother Theresa.

For those unaccustomed to the inclinations of such cultural currents, here is a handy barometer: Alan Moore's Watchmen was a bid to produce high art within low art, but was received so well as to become emulated, producing low art that has gained enough momentum to be adapted as boffo action flicks, which everyone knows are low art except the flicks themselves, which insist that they are high art and be taken super seriously.

Every single time a comic book adaption hits the right notes, people are eager to claim that they have finally uncovered that most precious of Rosetta Stones: The code that will finally allows us to craft that perfect pop homunculus, the SUPERHERO MOVIE. And then, like Sysyphus, things reset, so it can be done all over again. And now, here is Watchmen, with its hypernarrative plot lines and quantum mans to present what could be called a unified field theory of sorts.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

As to what it all means is, apparently, up for grabs. We have a Tom Shone review dug up over at Slate, which blasphemously dares to suggest that Watchmen is no Ulysses, and in fact is only pretty okay. (To be more accurate, he seems to argue that Watchmen is Ulysses, but that Ulysses sucks and is lame.)

We have film buffs like Bill Emerson seriously mulling over whether he should re-read the comic before he sees the film, or whether that would render him useless as a critic (because what is the book is better, guys?!)

We have film data sites reporting that Watchman may break records, and that everyone and their kid sister may go and see it or maybe not. It is a quantum event, you see, Watchmen the Biggest Hit Ever and Watchmen the Historic Flop co-existing in Schrodinger's Box, waiting to collapse into a single movie.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

Central to all of this is a peculiar fear - that if this Watchmen is not our Watchmen, or THE Watchmen, good, better, best, all Watchmen will suffer. The political Watchmen. The life-changing counter cultural Watchmen. The rollicking good read Watchmen. Our childhoods will suffer, and we will suffer. Such a task does not demand adaption, but transliteration.. best done by Gregorian scriveners in some arcane mountain retreat.

The boomers may have perfected nostalgia for childhood, but Gen X has one-upped them: We never got rid of our childhoods - they're safely tucked away, on eBay and Youtube and Wikipedia, still in mint condition, still in the original packaging. Yes, the only thing that can affect our collective pasts, coagulated together in a Jungian unconscious, is new stuff. Stuff that makes us pause, and say "Huh. Maybe.. maybe it wasn't so rad after all."



Perhaps it doesn't help that Mr. Moore himself is rushing about like a cultist fanatic, eager to spread the word that all that important stuff people drummed up about Watchmen was, in fact, all a dream. He has no plans to see the movie, you see, because it a perversion of his original vision. And if people had any sense at all, they would, of course, see that the message is clear: "Yes, Virginia, there ARE Superheroes. And they're nazi homo psycho punks." He helpfully explains that the sloppy, semi-literate teenage mouth-breather depicted in the book's final frames represents the reader, himself.

Par for the course for Mr. Moore, of course. But all the more reason that people are determined to take this so personally. They said it can't be filmed. They said it could never be adapted. Somehow, some way, they've got to be wrong... right?

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

If you are the sort who gives a tinker's damn about what critics think, then let the record show that at least one critic doesn't know what to think. Roger Ebert, most unflappable of film goers, writes here that he is positively flapped. Not boggled, or baffled, or gobsmacked - these imply speechlessness, which of course Rodge is not - but simply an absence of meaning. He suggest it is good. It may be great. But, by george, he doesn't know why.

Could anything be more ominous? Even seasoned professionals, faced with such a looming horror, can only report that they saw it... and that they will need to see it again before it will begin to make sense.



Fandom has worked its magic on Watchmen for two decades, busy turning it from a book into a vast psychic exercise. And here to ruin it all is this blasted moving-picture, about to turn all the groupthink into so much hot air.

Because the final horror of the ominous doppelganger that looms before us, is that, once Watchmen: The Best Movie Ever and Watchmen: The Worst Movie Ever come crashing together, all that quantum entanglement will be gone. All that will remain will be Watchmen: A Movie, Once. And for many of us, perhaps that can never be enough.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

There is that Warshow axiom, quoted endlessly, about how "A man goes to the movies. The critic must be willing to admit he is a man." Here is it turned on its head. A critic must be willing to admit he is going to a movie. Not a grand-mal-memestorm. Not a repudiation or validation of your entire cultural cache. A movie.

This may be the cure for these fever dreams. Take ten deep breaths. Click your heels together, for good measure. And repeat after me:

It is only a movie.

It is only a movie.

It is only a movie.



Now take a flipping chill pill.


- Rook

Geekonomics: A Blog on Bling

With massive-multiplayer games blooming to big business, and bringing in the big bucks, much more media attention has been bent towards understanding the economics of these behemoths.

Alliterative!

This attention only make sense. Once a successful business model has emerged from a volatile market, it's simply bad business not to know how the model works. For example, when I came over to Florida as a young but optimistic Cuban immigrant, and clawed my way to the top of the 1980's cocaine boom, everybody wanted to know how I did it. My secret? Don't get high on your own supply.

First I got the money. Then I got the power. Then I got the weeeeeeemon.

An exceptional amount of work has been devoted to understanding the real-world economics of such systems. Over at GigaOM, Wagner James Au breaks down the top earners in the market. A lot of the data he reports is not what you'd expect, much of it owing to the boom of Korean MMOs, which operate under the principle of Free-to-play-but-I-guess-you-can-pay-for-some-stuff-like-maybe-a-shirt?-why-don't you-go-get-your-mom's-credit-card-and-we'll-figure-it-out gaming. To be fair, it was a really nice shirt.

Fashionably black is the new black.

Things complicate, however, when you begin analyzing the internal economies of these games, and the ways in which virtual economies meet and affect real ones. Lines become blurry, and definitions become softer. Where some MMOs are designed with commerce in mind - Second Life operates through the continuous investiture and circulation of Lindenbucks, And EVE Online is based upon the very premise of a functioning in-game economy - not all MMOs are devoted to such a maintained system. Most operate under a “dealer” principle, which controls how money flows from, and back to the game. Consider the act of “grinding,” where monsters are killed repeatedly. Upon their bodies, gold or valuables are found.

This is pure van Helmont stuff happening here: The valuables didn’t ‘come’ from anywhere, so much as sprung into existence from the aether. This can approximate a rough time-to-money system well enough, but things get squirrely when trade between players in introduced.

Look at the difference: A player pays another player hundreds of gold for a valuable or rare item, and that money stays in circulation, and can be further invested. But if a player purchases an item from a non-player character vendor, that money vanishes - sometimes to the tune of thousands of gold for the most expensive articles.

Enter the goldsink: the various sites introduced to any functional MMO operating in this system, in which hundreds of thousands of virtual moolah vanish every day. In this way can the value of in-game currency be controlled, even manipulated towards inflation and deflation. People’s purses a little too light, and you can introduce new quest lines that provide players with faster ways to accrue goodies than ever before. If there’s too much money clogging down the system, the introduction of a few new vanity items can suck all that troublesome cash out of the system in a matter of weeks.

Pictured above: Troublesome Cash

This needn’t be done to simply manage the economy - it can also be done to maintain a play environment. As a case in point, consider Blizzard’s management of World of Warcraft in the months preceding their second expansion. Knowing that players of their game would have to be given new ways to occupy themselves in the doldrums between their first expansion and the next, a new location was introduced: One that contained, in addition to a new 5-player dungeon “instance” and a new 25-player “raid” dungeon, a plethora of daily quests that provided gobs of easy cash to players - far easier, in fact, than previous environments had allowed.

In addition to these additions, if players spent enough time grinding “reputation” with a factions associated with these new quests, they could invest their hard-earned virtual cash on.. a title. For one thousand gold, a player can be “NAME of the Shattered Sun.”

To be fair, that is pretty impressive-sounding. I wouldn’t even know how to begin to go about shattering suns.

So: To keep real customers from spending their real time elsewhere and thus stop forking over real money, Blizzard introduced a new virtual place where they could spend their virtual time, amassing virtual wealth to currying virtual favour with some virtual people, to the point that one is given the elite privilege of spending all that virtual money on something that has purely aesthetic value to impress other (real) folks in a virtual space.

Compare that to a virtual mount, which at least helps you cover virtual terrain, or virtual gear, which has direct applicability in interfacing with a virtual environment (read here: pwning). One thousand gold gets you a bunch of virtual letters, stapled to your virtual face, approximating Ozymandias-level posturing. “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Not this guy. But, close enough.

This may be the central difference between economies like those found in traditional MMOs and virtual trade experiments like Second Life and EVE. In the case of the former, at the end of the day, any changes applied to the system in place are may not be to facilitate commerce, but to keep people on the teat.


- Rook

Adventure! Excitement!

I have it on solid authority that the Jedi crave not these things. But boy hardy, I shore do.

Thus: I have been invited to present at a conference on horror video games.

It's organized by Ludicine, a research group with the University of Montreal. They are hoopy froods, who really know where their towels (collectively) are. The conference has its own theme song, so you know it's legitski.

Because do you know who else had a theme song? That's right: Batman.



I'll be blogging on my general topic in the weeks to come, in order to scare up some ideas, and to get me in the spirit of things, and also to Frankenstein's Monster.

Hmm. Looks like I plumb ran out of puns, there. Quick! To the Puncave, to recharge!


- Rook

Signifying Violence, Part Six: The Six Million Dollar Gear

I don't mean to suggest that the scripted plot points and boss fights in the Metal Gear Solid franchise undermine the "proper" form of the game, or that somehow these games are somehow in a more pure form when you're lurking about and garroting faceless thugs. A large portion of what makes these games memorable occur within boss environments: The grandiloquence of these cartoonish villains, the defiance of physics in no-holds-barred supernatural brouhahas, the sheer weirdness of it all.

Even admitting that Metal Gear is always pretty weird, these are the moments that crank the weirdness to eleven.

Well, it's one weirder, isn't it?

Being spaces that function with their own internal logic, the boss fights are often locations where new sorts of play rules are imposed. There is the player-referential fight with Psycho Mantis, where through mental manipulation the game is manipulated through psychic hoodoo. Mantis would make the screen blank out, as if resetting the game, activate the controller rumble, and would taunt the player based off of other Konami games on the save file. In MGS3, there are easter eggs like letting an antidiluvean sniper die of old age by leaving the game file alone for enough time. And then there is the gauntlet of metatextual weirdness that is the final chapter of MGS2, in which a simulated reality system breaks down, trying to convince the protagonist that he is, in fact, just a character in a video game.

Hideo Kojima has a keen understanding that at these moments the game exerts complete control over the play experience. Notions of play choice and option management, staples in a game like Metal Gear Solid, disappear completely in favour of a singular, cinematic viewpoint. This exercise of control is put to use several times, to various effects. However, there is one point in the series which deliberately brings together the experiences of both aspects of gameplay, to elaborate an experience of play violence

In the nearly final confrontation in Metal Gear Solid 3, you square off against your former mentor, appropriately titled "The Boss". Though you assume that she is a defector, after besting her, she admits that she has been working as a double agent. Throughout the game, the sub-bosses that she sent to kill you were sent, by her, to die - thus internalizing and repurposing the sensation that it is not the player who kills these figures, but the game - and now, in order to further maintain the secret of her affiliation, orders you to kill her.

This is done via cutscene, but as you are ordered, the camera pulls back, and everything stops. It is here that the player realizes that it is not the character of Naked Snake being ordered to kill "The Boss", but the player themselves. Here, rather than defer any emotional ascription of the act of killing to the cinematic impulses of the game, the player's play experience intrudes into the scene. In order to proceed, the player must hit the "shoot" button, shooting "The Boss" at point blank range in the head, killing her instantly.



As a play experience, it is painful and unpleasant. Kojima, who has attempted through the course of his games to draw attention to the player's complicit role in the experience of playing a characer, here forces the high signification of violence sphere of play atop the high mediation cut scene experience upon which the player has come to rely. Doing so not only kills "The Boss" as a boss, but as a character - and it is the same act that metaphorically kills Naked Snake, now destined to become a non-player character and seeming villain for the remainder of the series.

In the same way that No More Heroes is a game about video game violence, rather than simply a violent game, Metal Gear Solid 3, and to an extent the entirety of the series, are not just games in which the player lacks control, but games in which that lack of control is thematized and made central.

I don't mean to equate this level of manipulation to directly positive gaming experiences, only notably different ones. It's precisely this reason that Metal Gear Solid 2 stands in my mind as one of the most skull-smashingly bad experiences I have ever had playing a game. I would rather brush my teeth with a straight razor rather than sit through the whole thing again. I think it's fair to say that it fails as a game, but succeeds as an experience. As to what kind of experience, who can say? For me, it succeeded as an experience of hating, hating, hating it.

So that may be something.

- Rook

Signifying Violence, Part Five: Insert Number Based Movie Reference Here

Are we at the fifth installment of this digression already? How time has passed! I can remember, dimly, a time before all of this, when mediation and signification of violence in video games weren't graphed against each other and considered in turn. A simpler time. How we sung! How we danced!

BUT THERE'S NO GOING BACK NOW, PEOPLE. Because here we are, at number five. That may not sound like a large number by itself, but just consider: By the fifth Rocky movie, Rocky had brain damage. By the fifth Harry Potter movie, the child actors had aged to the point that they looked darn-near thirty. And by the fifth Saw movie, no one in their right mind cared anymore. On the other hand, "Five Easy Pieces" was the best one in the epic "Easy Pieces Pentalogy." So it's sort of a toss-up.

When last we left off, your humble narrator was outlining the degree to which certain games exhibited some dramatic shifts of both mediation and signification of violence. In Diablo 2, this happens when gameplay is moved from the standard mode to "Hardcore Mode" which introduces an element of permanent death. In No More Heroes, certain editions were heavily edited, and the result is a game environment that represents violence very differently. I illustrated this latter case by linking to a game clip including a man with weaponized nipples.

"Are those guns grafted to your vestigial man-mammaries, or are you just happy to see me?"

But in both these cases, the shift in how violence is mediated and signified occurs outside of a play environment, as either a shifting of game mode, or through a jump from one version to another. As a final example, I'd like to consider the degree in which a game can be said to move about these fields during play. So, once more I light the incense and begin the unholy chanting that will summon forth to this world... "The incredibly small chart."

BEHOLD IT, IN ITS SPLENDOR.




As you can see, though the first two examples tend mainly to the right side, being games with medium-to-high degrees of play mediation, The Metal Gear Solid Series' shifting draws it from a place of low-mediaton/high-violence-signification to one of extremely high-mediation/moderate-violence-signification. Where in the latter two cases small changes are made to play mediation that, in turn, reflect upon the signification of violence, the examples here reflect a dramatic shift along both axes.

While playing through the bulk of the game, your objective is to kill as little as possible, and be unseen. You are provided with the tools to remain undetected, and from a gameplay standpoint, every skirmish you do get into represents a failing on the player's part to avoid conflict. The result is a sandbox environment that weighs killing against nondetection, similar to the Grand Theft Auto games.

All these options laden your actions with significations of violence: Since you may choose to skip conflicts, it is an option you actively exercise, or are forced into. Since it typically occurs during moments of increased conflict and stress, your usual toolset is compromised and often the acts are represented as desperate ones. The bodies of slain men stick around, and must be lugged about so as not to draw attention. And, finally, the many realistic ways you can dispatch your foes only adds to the sensation that these are weighted acts of violence.

All this changes when play moves away from the chiefly play-oriented environment of the world to the highly narrative environment of boss conflicts. Gone are the sandbox elements of nondetection and combat evasion: In these circumstances you are confined to a usually small arena, and must fight until the boss is dead. Entire bodies of gameplay are abandoned in these places for a new bag of tricks involving efficient boss killing. It helps that Kojima's bosses aren't just your standard villains, but cartoonishly exaggerated uberbosses. They don't just chew the scenery: they devour it whole, then shoot flaming hunks of it back at you, all the while minging about their sad childhoods in Kurdistan, or outer space, or whatever.

It's one thing to hold up some nameless grunt, shake him down for information, then accidentally hit the wrong button, slitting his throat. It's quite another to go head-to-head with a man who spits BEES at you, while helpfully shouting "GO, MY BULLET BEEEEEES."

Trivia: In French, his name is "THE BREAD."

Though you might imagine that killing a character with a name and personality would increase the degree to which violence in signified, the opposite is true: These function as plot points. Since killing these figures is mandatory, the player is absolved of anything that they may do. No game highlights this better than Metal Gear Solid 3, in which if you do take the crafty route and tranquilize rather than kill the bosses outright, they will fall down, go through the same death-spiel, then EXPLODE ANYWAY.

The point is made that it isn't you killing these figures - it's the game. By forcing you out of the sandbox and into the gladiator's pit, by letting its villains rattle of their speeches beforehand and gargle out their dying breaths afterwards, most signification which would link your behavior to violence is scored away: Suddenly you aren't in a game. You're in a movie, one that is possessed of it's own tautological morality. James Bond can kill with impunity because he is JAMES BOND. For Solid Snake, killing is avoidable and stealth is preferable, except when they aren't. And when they aren't, it's okay... because he's not Solid Snake anymore.

He's JAMES BOND.


I mean, I know he has a license to kill... but does he have to be so darn smug about it?

- Rook

Signifying Violence, Part Four: THE GOBLET OF FIER

In the last three posts in this series I looked at the degree to which violence is signified in games, the degree to which play experience is mediated, and how these two factors may affect the experience of the game. Specifically, I've discussed:



- Violence in terms of "interactivity": How mediation affects what you can do in a game.
- Violence in terms of signification: How acts in games are signified or not signified as violent.
- The intersection of mediation and violence in video games: Complete with lame-o chart work!

Most recently I plotted a handful of games in terms of both play mediation and signification of violence. In some cases, a single change could affect a game's standing along both axes. I mentioned then that a game would likely not be a fixed pint, but could vary in its position according to the changing values of a game. Here are two examples of games that do just that.


Once again, my chart is freakishly small. Click on it to see it be freakishly medium-sized.

1. No More Heroes: US versus Japan and EU releases

It's uncommon to encounter a video game about violence... stranger still to come across one about violence in videogames. It follows a otaku-turned-assassin, who goes from idolizing wrestling and anime to living in a world of this sort of stylized violence. Like any good satire, No More Heroes isn't afraid to get its hands dirty. When the main character, Travis, kill an enemy, it spews both an impossible fountain of blood and a handful of coins.

The vicious gouts of blood are taken directly from anime drawn from seinen manga, who have been stylizing this types of hypergore for decades. The coins, of course, are pure video-game stock and trade... a coin of the realm, as it were. To have both erupt from a target is a surreal effect. As a game devoted to systematically killing through a swath of foes, it is decidedly two ways about its homicides. There is a high level of violence signification, on par with other games explicitly about violence. But in coaching the violence inside the signifiers of retro-gaming, it functions as a clear statement: "Forget what you have seen. This is what a violent video game looks like."

The irony is that since its thematic statement is predicated upon the excessive use of the exact same violent images that other games boast so carelessly, No More Heroes has, itself, been the target of censure. In the Japanese and European releases, the violent surges of blood were removed altogether. As well, corpses disappear quickly after being killed, rather than remaining on the ground.

A youtube poster, xserothx, has done an excellent job providing comparisons of the death scenes from both the US and censored versions.