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

Kicking it old school

This weekend Rook and intend to relive some glory days.

A couple years ago, while his wife was away, we decided to play through and beat Dead Rising and we decided to do it in high debaucherous style. I arrived late Friday night and we immediately plugged in the game swearing that we would beat it that weekend. Now, Dead Rising is a game where you play a veteran photojournalist, Frank West, locked in a mall with zombies.

Part John Maclean, part Angsty teenager, all douchebag.

The game takes place in the Willamette mall, which is located in the sleepy town of Willamette, pop. 53,000. The story tells the story of what Frank gets up to while locked in this zombie infested shopping emporium for 3 days until his helicopter arrives to extract him. What Rook and I didn’t know was that the game clock is real time. We had sworn to beat a game which takes 72 hours to beat and we only had 72 hours to beat it before his wife came home and I returned to my private estate. Screw sleep, we could do it in shifts if we had to. We were undaunted.
About 2 hours in we realized we would need sustenance. We placed an order for 3 extra large pizzas and 20 minutes later, leaving Frank in the secure mall office while we made our food sortie. The plan was that these 3 pizzas would be our sustenance for the next 3 days. Sunday was kinda gross. That weekend we smoked enough cigars to give 5 people cancer. As I said, debauchery.

Needless to say, we beat that mother f-er and swore we would do it again sometime. That sometime is now.

One of these guys is a Daddy, the other is sterile. You guess.

Rook and I have 3 days once again, but this time the stakes are higher. We plan to beat both Bioshock and Metal Gear Solid 4. I know we’re looking at two 30+ hour games and it would be doable except that we aren’t starting until tomorrow. Tonight we’re going to a birthday party and, post party, plan to play through at least one Left 4 Dead Scenario. Also, Rook needs to play Braid.

Maybe we can’t do this, but by God we need to try.

-King

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

A Wretched Hive Of Scum And Villainy

"Each film is only as good as its villain. Since the heroes and the gimmicks tend to repeat from film to film, only a great villain can transform a good try into a triumph." – Roger Ebert

There’s something about a memorable villain that gets the blood boiling, that pulls you into the story of a game emotionally. It takes a good villain to change the story of a game from being about stopping a meteor from destroying the planet to being about stopping the villain from summoning a meteor to destroy the planet. Those villains, they’re special.

Some villains aren’t all that special though, if you think about the Pac-Man Ghosts, well they’re just friggin’ ghosts. But they make the game, I mean, it could be said they’re more important than Pac-Man. The game would not be enjoyable if all you did was wander through a bunch of hallways eating glowing dots unopposed. Personality-wise the ghosts don’t have a lot going for them though. Their names are Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde, now granted Clyde is obviously some sort of Maverick, but other than that we can only rely on the campfire tales and dream-stories told by mysterious gypsies to learn more about their nefarious purpose and dark history. To the average Pac-Man player however, it’s enough that they just want to eat you because they are ghosts.

Ghost Faced Killer

If ghosts lacking personality can have that much impact then it’s easy to understand how a villain with goals, character, and personality can not only increase the drama of the tale but often single-handedly introduce theme and conflict into the story. They only show up every so often, starting off just like any other villain in that first moment where you see them and go “Oh, that’s the guy ima have to fight” But as you move ever closer to your goals you discover that this isn’t an ordinary villain. This villain has chutzpah.

Chutzpah.

These villains are not only your adversary and obstacle but also your opposite. All of your weaknesses are their strengths, and so the smaller the hero the bigger the villain which generally makes the victory all the more triumphant. The thing that really drives it home though is when the villains actions seem as though they’re the gratification of some symbolic desire causing you to identify more with the villain than the hero so that in the final confrontation you know you’ve got to save the world, but maybe it’s too bad you have to kill this guy to do it.

All Captain James Hook ever wanted was a mother… and to kill Pan.

One of the major things about games to me is the story, the sense that I’m accomplishing something. The story doesn’t have to be epic, or even particularly good, I just need a reason to be doing what I’m doing. Sometimes I am sneaking into a terrorist base trying to destroy a giant bipedal tank, but other times I am trying to eat a bunch of yellow dots. These things don’t do much for me on their own, its overcoming the obstacles on the way to the completion of the story that’s enjoyable and there’s no obstacle quite like a good villain to make a game memorable.

Until next time may you Omnislash your own one-winged angel,

-King