+1 Against Recessions

I mentioned yesterday how some coverage of E3 functioned as set-up - not as assessments in their own right, but as a lead-in to gloomy insights about the state of the industry.

Well, if that was the set-up, then this is the punchline.

Harold Goldberg at The Big Money is not buying it, and deigns to say what everyone else is thinking: That when it comes to questions of monay monay, E3 doth protest too much.


"By not mentioning the deep worldwide recession during these days in Los Angeles, it looks as through game makers are firmly ensconced in a video game fantasy of their own design, one that is carefully choreographed to show them all as great heroes and masters of the universe. In this world, they have drawn their swords and vanquished their foes, so much so that the economy needs never to be mentioned."

Oh, burn. ECONOMY burn. You got punk'd by a guy who uses the word 'ensconced,' which I think is when you're entranced by a scone.

As in: "Dude, I am totally ensconsed by that pastry."

Here's hoping we'll see a trend of these type of pieces, which blend economic critique with hackneyed video game metaphors.

"Well, up until now the video game industry has had a star and thus invincible, but recently it's taken a hit from a Recession Goomba and their profits have shrunk... just like MARIO! Now they will either need to get a super mushroom of infused capital, assemble the Triforce of Economic Solubility, or take that warp pipe which leads to the Water World. Of.. of money."

And everyone will be like: Okay, come on. That doesn't make any sense.

Mario doesn't have the Triforce.


- Rook

Free Thing of the Week: Well Played

Games studies can be a tricky fish to fry. Here is this gorgeous new medium with limitless potential to be poked, prodded and punctiliously ployed, but always, we must realize that what we are studying here is play. You may think it's 'srs business,' but to most other folks, it may well be 'just a game.'

Fun, here, may have some relation to Mark Twain's thinking on humour: "Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog: you understand it better, but the frog dies in the process."

Critics of the time were known to respond: "Yeah, well, your FACE is that!"

Observant readers will note that my analogy has shifted species. How do we get from fish to frog? Well, when a mommy fish and a daddy frog love each other very, very much...

Since games at the best of times need a light touch, it it my double delight when I find critical thought that keeps some life kindled in its subject - Inevitably, these tend to be not strictly endeavors of the mind, but labours of love. Play remains the subject, but it is not captive... it is allowed to roam, free-range.

Thus we have the FREE THING OF THE WEEK, which is not just free as in libre, but free as in gratis. Enter "Well Played 1.0, Video Game, Value and Meaning", a text which backflaps itself thusly:

"What makes a game good? or bad? or better?

Video games can be “well played” in two senses. On the one hand, well played is to games as well read is to books. On the other hand, well played as in well done.

This book is full of in-depth close readings of video games that parse out the various meanings to be found in the experience of playing a game. 22 contributors (developers, scholars, reviewers and bloggers) look at video games through both senses of “well played.”

The goal is to help develop and define a literacy of games as well as a sense of their value as an experience. Video games are a complex medium that merits careful interpretation and insightful analysis."

The plaintext is free on the internet. Free as in, why aren't you reading it right now? We have analyses of old standbys such as Super Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, considerations of cult favorites like Ico, Silent Hill 2 and Parappa the Rappa. You'll find work ranging the gamut from blockbuster games like Metal Gear Solid 4 and Half-Life 2 and indy gems such as Portal and World of Goo.

Oh, and Zork. So that's me in the bag.

Reading these essays, you may find much to disagree with - but everything is put forward so cheerfully, one can hardly protest. These people have found pleasure in these games, and as such they are a pleasure to read. Who was it that spoke of the importance of being earnest?

Oh right. It was this guy.

- Rook

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

Signifying Violence, Part Deux: Lost in New York

Why, if we've dispatched millions of goombas and koopa troopas in our gaming lifetimes, do some symbolic acts of violence come to matter, and others come to be dismissed?

In part, there is the matter of signification. In most early video games, death and violence serve as handy referents to the act of playing and progressing, but contain none of the symbolic weight of the actual acts. The earliest model of this is found in arcades, where 'lives' referred directly to play-time and performance: In playing against the clock, and your own dime, the notion of the "free man" evolves directly from Pinball's "free play": the literal notion of a free bit of playtime.


When games moves from arcades to consoles the system of "points" quickly went from being a chief arbiter of performance to a vestigial limb of earlier media, but the notion of playtime as finite and operating within a window of opportunity remained. Death in this context is a soft reset, a do-over: Fall a thousand feet onto rows upon rows of jagged spikes? Yikes. Well, just don't do it again.

Similarly, when you "kill" a sprite, it flickers for a moment, and disappears. Not disappears in a "Your soul will be dead before your body: fear nothing further", Nietzsche-type-deal. It's a time-out: according to the rules of the game, it's gone for a little while. Die and start over, and everything's back to status quo.


It's only when the signification of death and dying are brought to the fore that this transaction comes to have any type of moral weight. To suggest that all you are doing in Mario is "killing things" isn't just disingenuous, it's downright Froot Loops.

Pictured at down-right: Froot Loops

This isn't to say that the signification of violence and death are possible in a game-space where respawns and points-for-killing are the norm, only that an environment like this functions as a kind of null-space: You get what you give: Consider a game like Stainless Games' Carmageddon, a proto-GTA sandbox racer where the way you generate points is by hitting people with your car. Here is a game boating "motorized carnage", where the very goal of the game is to slaughter people. Here, people don't flicker and disappear when killed: They explode like blood sausages in a microwave.

As a caveat, blood sausage is actually quite delicious.

Though made in 1997, and boasting the graphical wizardry of the mesozoic, we have here a game capable of inciting widspread revulsion, to the point of moral rejection: For some time, the game as ported to countries like Germany changed the 'people' sprites to zombies, thus hammering home this basic pillar of ethics: It's okay to kill everyone, so long as they're already dead.


Of course, in either case, no act of violence is actually being committed: It's a matter of whether violence is being signified, or not. And it's here that we encounter the moralistic questions raised by individual playership: Do I want to be playing a game where you can kill people? Where you must? Which has the greater capability to offend: The game that insists we do something that offends our morals, or the game that simply offers it an option within a spectrum of action? Next week I hope to look at games that are conscious of this type of signification, and attempt to put it to use in one form or another.

- Rook

Jump, man, jump!

At the dank, cryptic arcade I frequented when I was young, there was one machine that towered above the rest: An original Donkey Kong. Set apart from the other games, it loomed monolithically, promising dark portents to any who dared plumb its depths. I’m talking real “hit a monkey with a bone” stuff, folks. Serious business.

"Huh.. it says 'insert quarter.'"

Despite my fascination, I never touched it. There was always a line of dull-eyed teenagers barring my way, menacingly clutching their cans of New Coke. Instead, I would gaze longingly at the art on the side of the machine, where a lumpy Mario-before-he-was-Mario was shown mid-spring. Underneath was a helpful protip, one as curious as a zen koan: “PRESS A TO MAKE JUMP MAN JUMP.”

It seems like we’ve been making Jump Man jump ever since. Since their inception, there have been video games about navigating space. Even pre-graphics classics like Adventure and Zork have a layout and a sense of motion - so much so that the ultimate threat is for your light to be extinguished, giving you no idea of where you are going. But with the platformer came the final ingredient to the recipe.

There is something supremely satisfying about jumping on a goomba. The way it remains squashed down, comic in defeat, while you spring upward and onward. It has a consistency: elastic, spongy, slightly al dente. (I have always suspected that they would be delicious in an omelet.) Though a lowly peon, one to be stomped with impunity, it has substance in a way the soulless blips of previous games never did.

The moment that physics are brought into the equation, the simple acts of running and jumping conjure a experience of the heft of the game: not simply the presence, but the experience of mass. In learning to move, we are not only learning to control a character but experiencing the scope of the world, the tactile sensations of bashing blocks and kicking about turtle shells. In coming to intuit how a character will jump, swim, fly, we encounter one of the first immersive experiences in gaming: the sensation of existing in a internally-consistent world.

Le saut-homme original.

In these cases the physics represent the grammar of these games, relating a language of motion. How Mario moves about the screen is not merely a character trait, but his essence. Compare to other 2D platform figures like Sonic the Hedgehog, Samus Aran, and Kirby: The way that the characters are defined relates directly to how they navigate their respective spaces.

King mentioned Cave Story in an earlier post, in tandem with Metroid. At first glance they seem to have nothing in common, due to their drastically different visual tones. But in beginning the game, the physical parallels are immediate and unmistakable. In both games you don’t so much jump as glide through the air, drifting in a way that is both crisp and surprisingly graceful. The connection is a kinetic one, as is the realization: “I have moved this way before.” They may not resemble each other, but they speak the same language.

So now we have a slew of 3D platformers, whose successes and failures have hinged upon how well they have provided navigable spaces. We have games like Portal, which translate first-person experiences into experiments with movement and space. We have Little Big Planet, which follows through on earlier experiences of tactile physics. We have Braid, which meta-textually examines this whole “jumping about from ledge to ledge” business we’ve busied ourselves with for decades.

So jump on, Jump Men and Jump Women. O’er pit of spikes, o’er lava deep, jump on. Jump on, Jump ever on, into the future. Because the one thing that we haven’t jumped yet?


THE SHARK.


- Rook

p.s. For an immediate and simple example of what I call heft, consider: Space Invaders don't got none. Asteroids does.

Indie Games and The Raiders of The Lost Art

I’m a hardcore gamer. I’ve tea-bagged Covenant Elite, Saw Manny and Meche all the way to the Ninth Underworld on the Double N, Caught 252 Pokemon on the Red, completed FF7 at level 28 without Materia and beaten Super Mario Bros 3 in 2 hours and 30 minutes.

Wait…what? Oh I know it can be beaten in less than 15 minutes, but why would I want to? Mario 3 is fun times and a speed run cuts out half of an extraordinary game. See I like playing video games, and I play them a lot, new ones and old, but eventually you run out of old. Or at least that was the case. These days some new games are…old? I’m talking Independent games here.

Remember this? Probably not since you skipped it with a flute you goomba.

Now granted not all indie games are of ‘the old-school’, the very excellent Mount and Blade comes to mind immediately, but most indie games seep old school charm from every pixilated pore and a select few do it better than their predecessors. Yes I’m looking at you Cave Story. The most incredible thing is that usually these are one or two man operations. I can barely draw a stick man and coding? I don’t want to talk about it. Most of these guys are doing the whole thing solo.

Bobble-headed robots are way sexier than chicks in robot suits

So where do they come from? How can we find them? Well it can be tough to track them down and you really have to keep your finger on the pulse to find these gems. Personally I read TIGsource and The Indiegames Blog daily. Sometimes though, when the stars align and the portents are auspicious, independent developers get a break. Introversion, the previously mentioned Cave Story by Pixel (Now being ported to the Wii!) Braid by Jonathon Blow and 2D Boy's World of Goo come to mind immediately.

Oh, you’ve heard of those last two? That’s probably because Microsoft and Nintendo put on some rubber boots and jumped into the ocean recently. The industry is finally recognizing that their target demographic grew up with games just like these and we, brace yourself, remember them fondly. So they’ve been putting in an effort to dish out some great Indy games though Xbox Live and WiiWare. This is good! Sort of!

Don’t worry true believers, I’m not going to give all the cred for mainstream indie games to the mega corps, things like Steam and Penny Arcade’s Greenhouse have been doing their part, not to mention organizations like the IGDA So try a couple of these, they’re usually free and the ones that aren’t are worth it. At the very least you’ll be supporting diversity in the market. But I guess WW2 Shooters are good too.

Until next time, may you be a bad enough dude to rescue the president.

-King