Grand Schlep Auto

George Carlin used to say that there were things people just didn’t admit. People will readily admit to being bad at math, or clumsy, but nobody admitted they had a lousy sense of humour, or were a bad driver. In the spirit of the late Mr. Carlin, may I say:

I’m a bad driver.

I remember mentally preparing myself for that first G2 test I took years ago. After reading and re-reading the point sheet, I realized that the initial score was so high, and the demerits you received were so low, you’d have to literally break every rule in the book to get low enough to fail. The only other way was an automatic fail, which you got if you broke the law.E asy, I thought. I mean, it’s not like I was going to drive through any reds, right?

Humility, thy name is stale flashing yellow arrow.

Forget the old meanings. It is as if they never were.

This was the start of an illustrious career of not driving. As a person who is interested in projecting the fragile illusion of confidence in lieu of the real thing, I make a point of habit to avoid doing things I kind of fail at. To my mind, this means I spend more time doing things I am awesome at, which means there is more awesome in this world, less fail, and you all can sleep soundly at night with the knowledge that nobody is going to come careering through a stale flashing yellow arrow and ruin your Thursday afternoon.

Unfortunately for me, the things I am good at do not always coincide with the things I am negative good at. This leads to exchanges like this:

“Okay, so I’ve had a few. Can you take my car and drive it a block?”

“Um. Maybe. Or I could bake up some nice cannoli. I’m awesome at baking cannoli”

“Yeah, um. The car needs to be moved so people can get out.”

“I know. I’m working on it. Some nice cannoli will sober you right up.”

You laugh, but it will.

If I am bad at driving, let it be said that I am triple-bad at driving in videogames. This is because my own driving is fuelled by adrenaline – the sincere, earnest physiological terror of ruining anyone’s Thursday afternoon. Driving in videogames takes my already subpar motor skills and removes the white-knuckle terror of not wanting to die for realsies. And as we all know, when you remove the white-knuckle terror, you remove the fun.

So I pitched an article to The Escapist on Grand Theft Auto 4, which was accepted. Now, I had watched my fair share of Grand Theft Auto 4. I had read my fair share about Grand Theft Auto 4, and I had even played my fair share of Grand Theft Auto 4. What I hadn’t done was play my fair share of Grand Theft Auto 4 Without Exploding In Like Ten Seconds.

The last Grand Theft Auto game I exhibited a mastery over was Grand Theft Auto 2, known colloquially as “The Last Grand Theft Auto They Made Before They Started Making The Good Ones.” It’s this little rinky-dink top down games, where the cars look like Hot Wheels and the people look like little ants. It’s basically Pac-Man, which is good for me, because I am awesome at Pac-Man. This is a helpful yardstick. For years, I had been gauging my effectiveness at things based solely on how much they were, or were not like Pac-Man.

Oh, hello photorealistic replica of New York City. You’re nothing like Pac-Man.

Borrowing King’s trusty Xbox360, I sat down over the last few days to play through the game proper. It was a mixed bag. While the game is supposed to be rife with moral and ethical tensions concerning the possibility of free will in a corrupt world, my playthrough was rife with the moral and ethical tensions of whether the place I needed to go was in walking distance.

Shooting missions were no sweat. Whack a guy? I can whack a guy. Whack like ten guys? I can swing that. But if one of those guys makes it out the back, and hops a car, then all bets are off. It usually plays out like this:

I run to another car and hop in.

I notice ten better cars I could have stolen, but it’s TOO LATE NOW ISN’T IT.

I follow in hot pursuit.

By hot, I clearly mean “Hit enough things until I am on fire.”

Bail out. Roll. Get hit a little bit by another car.

Steal that car. Serves it right. Crash that car into a bike.

Oh yeah! Bikes!

Get out. Steal the bike.

Drive for two seconds before colliding with the slightest thing and flying like a million feet.

Oh yeah. Bikes.

Steal another car. Third time is clearly a charm.

All right, now my third car is on fire. WHAT is the DEAL with this FIRE?

But wait, isn’t that the guy I’m chasing?

Go up on a rail. Bail out. Burning car flips in a terrible arc, landing on the guy I’m chasing. It explodes. His car explodes. He explodes. EVERYTHING EXPLODES.

OH GOD THE WORLD IS AFIRE.

Am I alive? Is anyone alive? Can you even call this “living?”

Every cop ever arrives, drawn to the all-consuming plume of fire of my serial failure.

Cheese it.

The upside of all this is that I constantly feel like James Bond. Like an inept, kind-of-bad-at-his-job James Bond. So, nothing like James Bond at all, I guess. More like Maxwell Smart. All this has given me insight into all those action movie guys, walking away calmly while an enormous explosion erupts behind them. Sure, they look cool. Sure, they seem composed.

Really, they’re thinking “The apartment’s only seven blocks away, and my car’s on fire. I guess I’ll walk.”

- Rook

Signifying Violence, Part Three: Turtles in Time

In my last two posts, I looked at two factors that affect performances of violence in game-space: mediation and signification. In terms of the latter, I looked at the degree in which acts could be signified as violent or otherwise, and how these significations affected play experience. In case of the former, I looked at how the degree to which play was controlled, in terms of what a player could and could not do.

So now we have two major forces at work, shaping how violence is portrayed in video games. I think we all know what I have to do now.

I HAVE TO GRAPH IT.

This graph is funner than a skin graph, but less delicious than a pie graph.

I made this graph using the most cutting-edge software available to me: The paint program that comes with every computer. You might want to click on it to make it big, instead of "undersized the point of Clown Car hilarity."

Here are twenty games, plotted in relation to the degree in which their acts of violence are signified, and the degree in which these spaces are mediated. In placing these games along these two variables, a number of considerations were made regarding what constitutes highly signified violence, and how mediation should be understood in this context. After placing these games, a number of things stuck out:

1) The games that exhibited the highest signification of violence did so through very different means.

Fallout scans so highly because, in terms of representation and play factor, pains were taken to represent a space in which violent acts are real, and have consequences on a game-world. If you breeze into town and blow everyone away, it'll be a ghost town for the remainder of the game. There's no respawn, and no 'reset switch'.

State of Emergency, as a riot simulator, places graphic violence as chief thematic element and central play element: It makes even Grand Theft Auto seem restrained in comparison.

Finally, Super Columbine incorporates footage of actual event to distinguish their game as tied to the actual fact of violence, rather than something divorced from reality.

2) Though genres tensed to shake out along the horizontal axis, with puzzle and free-roam games tending left and more mediated play experiences like platformers and role-playing games tending right, a number of influences could cause a game to shift both in terms of mediation and signification.

When the Final Fantasy series, a highly mediated play experiences that contains moderately signified acts of violence (other figures are 'killed', within context, but this killing is not graphic or thematized') produced a "Tactics" spin-off, it significantly introduced a feature in which injured party members could 'die' permanently if not tended to on the battlefield. The result is a game where the constant RPG 'killing' is given consideration and resonance, bolstered as well by a darker, Machiavellian narrative of court intrigue.

Once in a public washroom I saw written "Machiavelli was naive."
Underneath it, someone else wrote "SO WAS YOUR MOM."

We can see a game like World of Warcraft make a similar shift in both mediation and signification when play moves from a player-versus-player to a player-versus-environment game setting. With the former allowing players greater opportunity to attack and hinder unwilling players in the vast no-man's land of contested territory, gameplay is both less mediated, and has a stronger signification of violence. Implementing one change, albeit a major one, can shift a game along both axes.

3) In most cases, the games that graphed lowest in terms of signified violence avoid such signification through abstraction, instruction of non-violent game mechanics. In the case of Puzzle Pirates, the ostensibly violent acts of attacking and plundering another shop on the high seas are reflected through simple and cheery mini-games. Abstraction plays a major part in the innocuousness of a game like SimCity, one in which you can level entire metropolises through fire, wind, earth and water.

In this scenario, the final element of 'heart' is replaced by 'monster'.

In a strictly denotative sense, these are acts of massacre, to rival the bombings of Hiroshima or Dresden. But because these acts are abstracted to the point of inoffensiveness, because you can 'hit a button' and restore your shattered burgs, because it is fundamentally a game thematically concerned with building, rather than destroying, these acts carry all of the freight of a someone knocking over a pile of blocks.

By plotting franchises, rather than individual games, there is of course room for imprecision. The recently-released Fallout 3 would scan slightly to the right than previous entries, and lower down, due to the game-designers decision to omit the ability to kill children, a move that has, incredibly, earned them some criticism.

On the other hand, the top-down, splat-cartoon vantage and tone of Grand Theft Auto 1 and 2 would scan a good deal lower, in that its homicidal bent is treated both at a distance, and with a dose of irreverent humour.

Finally, user-generated content like suicide booths and grave plots in games like Second Life offer a chance to inch both higher and further left, though these additions currently are purely cosmetic propositions.

In a week, I'll conclude with an examination of games that vary wildly in terms of mediation and signification of violence, including a few that attempt to subvert the long-established tropes of violence-as-progress and the function of conflict in game-space.

And then it'll be right back to the dick jokes and oatmeal recipes, I promise.

- Rook

Let's talk about sex, baby

You've probably heard about Grand Theft Auto's 'Hot Coffee' scandal, even if you don't follow games. It made news shows and headlines for months and still remains the go to poster child for why games are worse than rock and roll. There are two sides to the argument, and about a dozen sub-sides to each. From 'There's nothing wrong with it since the game was rated mature at the time anyway' to 'It wasn't actually part of the game, simply code on a disk', to 'Satan has made his most recent move to devour the souls of our youth'. But as I said, it's already been debated.

More recently 2008's Mass Effect was making the headlines after it converted the Xbox 360 into a 'Sexbox.' What I'm going to rant about today is the generality of sex in video games and how a game with a sex scene takes a much harder hit than a movie. Let's start with Subject A) the Mass Effect scene in question I now follow with Subject B) The love scene from Meet Joe Black. Now Meet Joe Black's scene is quite a bit longer and slightly more explicit, but I think you'll agree that they're fairly comparable.

Sadly, this Salarian doesn't get any play.

Mass Effect received an M rating from the ESRB for Blood, Language, Partial Nudity, Sexual Themes, and Violence. The ESRB rating of M is defined as follows: "Titles rated M (Mature) have content that may be suitable for persons ages 17 and older. Titles in this category may contain intense violence, blood and gore, sexual content and/or strong language." I would say that's fair. Meet Joe Black received a PG-13 rating from the MPAA "for an accident scene, some sexuality and brief strong language." Now the MPAA's description for what PG-13 Means is somewhat bulkier but the gist is that kids 13 and over can see it and kids under 13 can see it if it's cool with their parents. But let's keep in mind that nobody has ever in the history of mankind asked a kid if he's 13 when renting a PG-13 movie or buying a theatre ticket. If it's rated R then they do card you and SWAT teams drop from the ceiling and pistol whip you if you're lying, but that's neither here nor there.

The real Gem of the PG-13 rating is "More than brief nudity will require at least a PG-13 rating, but such nudity in a PG-13 rated motion picture generally will not be sexually oriented." Really? Because I'm pretty sure Brad Pitt just had an orgasm in that scene.

King and Rook is now officially PG-13

So why is it that games are held to a much stricter standard than movies? Because kids actually have input? It's not like they're tapping up and down rapidly to get their moves on (Except God of War, but that should have a higher rating than even it's M in my opinion). The only input the player of mass effect has on the sex scene is whether or not to have it. That's right, there is no sex scene unless you make an effort to pursue the romantic subplot. Meet Joe Black doesn't give you much choice. A dude gets bounced off a couple of cars when you're least expecting it and then comes back to life and bangs Claire Forlani. Unless you turn off the movie that stuff is going to happen.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that Mass Effect should have a lower rating. It shouldn't, It does in fact have scenes of violence and brief nudity. My problem is that parents, teachers and Baby Jesus think Mass effect shouldn't exist and that the game designers and publishers are a cult of devil worshipping heathens when any 10 year old can pay 5 bucks to watch Brad Pitt blow his wad (If he can sit through 2 and a half hours of Mr. Pitt being confused by Peanut Butter and Swimming Pools) It's a double standard and it shouldn't be.

While this may appear to be a jpg it's actually an embedded video
streaming 3/4's of the footage from Meet Joe Black

When it comes down to it there are about 30 games (not counting the slews of 18+ adult dating sims the Japanese pound out) that have sex scenes in them, and most of those simply have a screen fade to black to imply the act. Meanwhile, hundreds of movies below the R rating toss that stuff into every other scene.

So maybe before these parents get upset at what they're kids aren't supposed to be playing in the first place they should take a double look at the movies they rent for them. Iron Man, Pirates of the Caribbean, and a good many others.

Until next time, don't be afraid to sit your kids down and talk about sex,

-King