Tougher than diamonds, rich like cream

I mentioned earlier that I thought that Pokémon, especially in its newest incarnation, was an excellent game. Now I find I have to qualify that: In many ways it is an average game.

You schlep forth, in true RPG fashion, armed only with your hopes, your dreams, and a dude in a little red ball. You force this dude to fight against other dudes – progressively bigger and badder dudes – sometimes besting them by using moves, but other times simply by hitting them until they stop moving. Ultimately you best the baddest dude yet. Congratulations! Now you’re a bad enough dude to rescue the president!

Oh yes. A thousand times yes.

After your victory, you’re treated to a speech about why you were able to climb to such monumental heights. It’s explained that your power is powered by the most powerful power of all – the power of love. Not the love between a man and a woman, or indeed, like the love between a man and a fine Cuban cigar. No, the love between a man and the vicious critters he’s trained to fight. Nowhere is it mentioned that hitting your opponents until they stopped moving might also have been a deciding factor. Your victory, you are told, is all about the love.

Yes, this is the plot of every Pokémon game, but to be fair, it’s also the plot of roughly every shonen fighting manga ever conceived. All you have to do is replace the little red balls with tremendous swords or tremendous hair or even tremendous flavours, and you’re set. Considered in a vacuum, Pokémon is just another iteration of the same game people have been sleepwalking through over and over. This doesn’t make it bad. This makes it perfectly fine – just nothing to blog home about.

The rub, of course, is that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. So, Pokémon may be an average game. But it is an excellent metagame.

A while back, I had mentioned I would be looking at the various ways in which games fold back upon themselves, or draw from some essential element of play. It strikes me that Pokémon is a perfect place to start, if only because a decade’s worth of popularity has transformed it from a simple game into a play phenomenon in its own right … a huking juggernaut of funtimes.


I’m interested in the ways in which our attitudes about games and gaming directly impact how we might navigate a game like Pokémon, and the ways in which these various styles of play intersect. Within a game so widely played, fueled by merchandizing blitzes, major promotional events, and a robust tournament scene, there may not be one sphere of metaplay, but several.

To wit: Pokémon is large. It contains multitudes.

Thank you, Walt Whitman, for your contentious poems about fighting electric mice.

I'll be looking at the instances of metaplay in the next few posts... hopefully without getting all meta on you. I'm not really inclined to just hit it with theory until it stops moving. Mostly, it'll be a labour of love. And as we all know, love is powerful, with a power more powerful than other powers. But what powers that power?




THE POWER OF LOVE.

- Rook

The Immerser Report

During my visit to Montreal for Ludicine’s Thinking After Dark conference, I had the opportunity to speak on formations of avatar in horror video games. Specifically, I spoke on immersion - specifically, the sensation of feeling ‘inside’ games during play.

If there are two things that need clarification about these ideas, they are that immersion is both more specific and more simple than common usage suggests. Being part of a grab-bag of about a dozen words people use to describe videogame play, it often does double-duty as a catch-all term that describes any merit of any game.

Is your gameworld sprawling and expansive? Immersive. Do you care about your characters? Immersive! Do you spend the greater portion of your game actually immersed in some fluid? You better believe that’s immersive.

"The Wettening" was a great game. But I could never defeat Wa-wa Wawinski.

Ultimately things begin to stretch out thee limited elasticity of the term. If everything is immersive, nothing is: It begins to mean nothing more than ‘good.’ Thus an ‘incredibly immersive experience’ is doubleplusgood.

Actually, there’s a simple trick to using the term with clarity and purpose. Immersion is always physical. Thus a kid bobbing and weaving while playing a game is an example of immersion. Being sad that your dad is the dream of a ghost’s memory, or whatever, is not.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly: Immersion is easy. Forget suiting up like Tron. You don’t need any Captain N shenanigans to obtain the experience that you’re ‘in a game.’ Often it’s as simple as hitting a button.

There’s a reason for this, and that reason is locked away deep in your brain. Now, my more… penetrating experiments in the catacombs beneath Bedlam Hospital have revealed to me mysteries dark and glorious, but apparently neuroscience knows a thing or two about your thinker as well. Very well. I shall have my day yet!

Here’s a great, if enthusiastic, piece on the current research that’s being done in the field. Elsewhere on these selfsame tubes, neuroscientist Steve Novella explains the phenomenon in detail: The experience of being in one’s body is not automatic – it is a deliberate function of the mind, some feat of evolution, and can be meddled with through any number of tricks and sleights of hand.

I find this to be incredibly revealing, and one reason that games may affect us the way that they do, operating at the some physiological level. Just as this sense of posited self is more complex that flinching from negative stimuli, so too we may navigate games with a more complex presence of mind than “spikes bad, coins good.”


Though, I do think it bears repeating: Spikes baaaaaaaaaaaaad.


- Rook

Wuv the Power Gwuv

It is sooo baaddddddd.