Bastion: A Review and Some Further Thoughts on Choice and Inevitability

Firstly, I wrote a review of Bastion for Paste Magazine. You can read it here, and perhaps you should before you read the rest of this post so I don't have to repeat myself. But if you don't feel like it, here is a run down: Bastion is an utterly beautiful and melancholy game that makes you care for a world that no longer exists. There. That should be all you need for the rest of this post. Also, the rest of this post will contain spoilers for both Bastion and Grand Theft Auto IV so perhaps don't read on if you are yet to complete Bastion at least once.

At the end of Bastion you have to make a couple of choices. The first one is potentially heartbreaking, but not relevant to what I want to say here so I won't go into any details. The second one is what I am concerned with here. At the end of Bastion you can choose to do two things: either rewind time to before the Calamity ripped the world to shreds, or use the Bastion as some kind of airship to fly off and find new lands. However, both have consequences. If you rewind time and 'unbreak' the world, 'you' will cease to exist anymore. The Kid, Rucks, and Zia will have no memory of the post-Calamity world--something that would be hard enough to give up if Zia did not admit right towards the end that she has only ever known happiness since the Calamity. Further, there is no guarantee that people will not make the same mistake and simply cause the Calamity all over again. The consequences of continuing on, of using the Bastion as an airship to fly off into the sunset is two-fold: firstly, obviously, it means the Calamity will never be undone. Ever. Secondly (and more vaguely), the world around you will be irreversibly damaged as you take off. Or something. The game is not overly clear on this point but it seems to me that all the beasts and Ura in the vicinity will be destroyed by you choosing to fly off on the Bastion to find new lands. Perhaps I misread this, though.

It was a hard choice to make and, ultimately, I did not feel as though I had 'completed' the game until I played through it twice and made each choice. The first time I decided to turn back time. At that point, it was the obvious choice. Having heard so many stories about the pre-Calamity world from Rucks's tales, I needed to save it--or rather, to give it a second chance to save itself.

The second time through, when I played "New Game Plus" (which is essentially a new game where you keep you experience and weapons and the enemies get more difficult to reflect this), it was clear that this was not a distinct, 'other' game. The continuation of my character as well as some slight, clever changes in the narration made it clear to me that the Calamity had happened again. So on this playthrough, it made sense to make the other choice, to move forward into the future and not to stagnate in the past. It was bittersweet, of course, as it meant saying goodbye to the world I had wanted to visit for two generations of myself now, but it was filled with a sense of hope and optimism. There was me, Zia, and Rucks, and we were going to explore a brave new world.

The beauty of this was the the utter gravity of my choice to say goodbye to the pre-Calamity world was painfully apparent largely due to my previous playthrough. Because of that playthrough, I knew that turning back time yet again was inevitable. We often say that videogame narratives are about being able to answer the "what if" question. "What if I did this, not that." Bastion answers the question brutally by making you see that what happens is not pretty and then asking you to choose again.

Of course, the flaw of this is that not everyone makes the choice in the order I made them. I feel as though the game is attempting to set up the choices to be made in that order by trying to tie you down to the world with Rucks's sweet, sweet voice, but some players will certainly choose the future their first time through. This, then, destabilises the meta-narrative that, for me, ran through both playthroughs. It's a weakness of the story that i feel Bastion was trying to tell but one that is in no way new to videogames: the player will rarely do what the storyteller wants them to do.

Only one other game felt as incomplete until I played it twice and made the different choice: Grand Theft Auto IV. Rockstar's games always have that inevitability streak, but never has it hit me so hard as it did in Grand Theft Auto IV. Towards the end of the game, Niko makes the choice to either work for a man that previously betrayed him (and make a lot of money) or to kill the man for vengeance (and make no money). His cousin, Roman, wants him to take the money. His girlfriend, Kate... well, she doesn't want him to get revenge, but she doesn't want him to take the money, either. Either way, Niko has promised himself, his cousin, and Kate that this is it, that he will get himself out of this sink-pit of crime once he does this One Last Thing.

So the player makes the choice. Long story short, if you take the money (what Roman wanted you to do), then Roman gets shot dead at his wedding; if you take revenge (what Kate kind of wanted but not really) then Kate gets shot dead at Roman's wedding. The way the narrative progresses, both endings make sense based on the choices you made, and both leave Niko devastated at the end of the game's narrative.

The first time through the game you think "what if". What if you had just taken the money? Kate would still be alive. What if you had walked away? Roman would still be alive. So you play again; you make the other choice; and Niko simply loses someone else he loves. It kind of makes Niko Bellic one of gaming's few tragic characters. The utter helplessness of the situation he gets himself in becomes all the more apparent when you make a different choice and end up at a similarly dark conclusion--if you can call an aimless existence in a foreign city with the specter of a loved one haunting you a conclusion.

Neither of these games do this inevitability-through-choice perfectly. Bastion's hinges on makes choices in a certain order for the full impact to hit the player. Meanwhile, many people had enough trouble getting through one complete game of Grand Theft Auto IV, let alone two. But it is something I would like to see games exploit more often.

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A Draft of a Thesis Abstract

[This year I am completing a Communication and Cultural Studies Honours as both a capstone of my undergraduate studies and, most probably, a stepping stone into several more years of postgraduate study. In addition to some coursework, Honours largely consists of writing a 15,000 word dissertation by the end of Semester 2 (late October). As such, I will be doing less freelance writing and even less blogging this year as I work on my thesis. However, to make up for this, I might try to update here with my thesis-in-progress, both to keep the blog alive and to get some valuable feedback. While the academics in my school (in particularly my supervisor) are able to give me excellent structural and theoretical advice, few of them play videogames and even fewer engage with videogame academia. By placing my work-in-progress here, perhaps my arguments will become a little more watertight.

For now, here is an early draft of an abstract of my thesis. It gives a decent oversight about what I plan to write about this year. Needless to say, there is a very high chance that this will change in the coming months as I do more research, get more feedback, and actually start writing. But for now, this is my topic as it currently stands:]

 Partners in Crime: The Mediating Effects of the Playable Character on the Videogame Player

Through a textual analysis of Grand Theft Auto IV (Rockstar North 2007), this thesis aims to complicate and complement videogame studies’ current understanding of the playable character’s role in shaping the player’s experience. Just as the player may define certain actions and characteristics of the character, so too do the character’s actions and characteristics helps to shape the player’s experience.

The videogame player interacts with the videogame text as a hybrid of navigable spaces: a procedural space defined by processes that the player must comprehend; a possibility space defined by affordances that the player must act within the confines of; a fictional space defined as an audiovisual world that the player must interpret and exist in. While most videogame scholars acknowledge the role of the playable character as a vessel through which the player navigates these spaces, rarely is its mediating effect on the player fully recognised. Many texts will use the terms ‘player’ and ‘character’ interchangeably when discussing the agent that acts within the videogame space. This uncertainty as to just who is acting highlights a gap in the existing literature on playable characters and their role in mediating the player’s experience.

Engaging with actor-network theory and cyborg theory to account for the existence of the playable character’s nonhuman agency independent of the player, this thesis explores how the agencies of both actors—player and character—intertwine and mediate each other to form a hybrid actor, the player-character, which is the actual actor that navigates the videogame space.

Grand Theft Auto IV and its episodic expansions “The Lost and the Damned” and “The Ballad of Gay Tony” engage the player with three distinct playable characters while the game’s spaces and mechanics remain more-or-less unchanged. An analysis of these titles will thus allow this thesis to explore the effects of the playable character’s agency on the player-character hybrid and, subsequently, on the player’s experience.

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Liberty Cities

Crossing back-and-forth across Liberty City as Niko Bellic, I pass the same districts and landmarks many times every hours. I visit the same Burger Shot a block from Middle Park to restore my health as I once again cross the same bridge and exit on the same highway. However, there are city blocks, mere metres from my regular commute, that I may only glimpse once every ten hours. Other locales may go upwards of twenty, fifty, even a hundred hours without Niko laying eyes on them. When I do eventually stumble across these spaces (usually while hunting down a criminal or an elusive pigeon) I marvel that such spaces could have existed all this time without me knowing.

Something similar happens in real life. In Brisbane, I live near a fairly major road. Not a freeway or anything, but a major thoroughfare from the CBD to the western suburbs nonetheless. I live on the southern side of this road, and my bus travels up and down it everyday when I commute into the city. The northern side of the road is really not that different from the southern side. Yet, for me, the road has become some kind of imaginary border. I have little reason to ever travel north of the road; the streets beyond it have become this abstract, foreign land whose topography is nonsensical to me simply because I rarely go there.

The other week, my girlfriend and I drove into this strange land to visit an old friend. I was dumbfounded. What was this place? Were we even in the same city anymore? How could such a place exist so near to my home for so long without me ever seeing it? Yet, there were houses here. And cars. And shops. Clearly, people lived here. People not unlike me. For someone living in these suburbs, there would be absolutely nothing strange about The Area North Of The Road at all. Perhaps for them, the southern side of the road is the bizarre, exotic land.

Two people in the same city can see the same places in completely different ways. This in itself is not a particularly revolutionary idea. Clearly, individual circumstances such as social standing, means of transportation, physical capability, income, and class (just to name a few) are all going to affect how we interact with our environment. What I find fascinating is that this implies we never truly, objectively understand a space—we only ever perceive it subjectively, based on our own circumstances.

What does this mean for game spaces? What circumstances are in play that affect how we comprehend the worlds games present us? Or, more pertinently, whose circumstances? There are several elements worth noting, but in this post I want to highlight the significance of the playable character’s circumstances in filtering our understanding of the game world.

That’s right. The character. Within the game’s fiction and mechanics, the character that we control in the game world has individual circumstances such as social standing, means of transportation, income, physical capability, etc. These circumstances affect the character’s understanding of their place and role in the world, and this in turns affects how the player perceives and navigates the game space.

Placing the same player in the shoes of three vastly different characters within the same game space, Grand Theft Auto IV and its two DLCs are perfectly situated to demonstrate this. My understanding of Liberty City—both as a fictional world and a navigable game space—changed based on the character I was experiencing it through. While Niko, fresh off the boat, rarely travelled to Alderney, Broker may as well be a foreign country to The Lost and the Damned’s Johnny Klebitz. Meanwhile, The Ballad of Gay Tony’s Luis Lopez lives between the glitzy high-rises of downtown Algonquin and the projects of North Holland, rarely concerned with the other islands. The blatant difference in circumstance between the three characters both in regards to the game’s fiction (e.g. the characters’ differing personalities) and the game’s design (e.g. the different positioning of safe house, access to different weapons), trickled down to affect the ways I perceived and navigated Liberty City in very subtle ways.

The roadmap that had been inscribed in my mind as Niko (shop at this store; sleep in this borough; use this major road to get to that suburb) is formatted and cleared when I jump on Johnny’s bike. Alleyways, courtyards, and burger joints that I pass without a second glance as Niko, I suddenly notice as Johnny. This was not simply a case of not being thorough in my initial playthrough—by the time I first played The Lost and the Damned, I had spent well over a hundred hours in Liberty City as Niko.

At the time, it seemed impossible to me that I could still stumble across areas that I had never before seen. Once or twice I actually reloaded my original game just to check these places were actually there in the original story. Sure enough, they were; me-as-Niko had just never noticed them. Then, several months later, I discovered even more locations when I stepped into the shoes of Gay Tony’s right-hand man, Luis.

So what changed? I was exploring the exact same city with the exact same controls with what were more-or-less the exact same models with different textures on top. Simply, the difference is perspective. Niko, Johnny, and Luis all look at Liberty City through a different lens (as a fresh start, as a corrupt cesspit, as a mine of drunk socialites) and I as the player could not help but be influenced by this.

Each character looked at the city from a different angle. While Niko looks west to Liberty City’s trademark skyline from the docks he arrived in, Johnny gazes east at a mirror-image city from the safety of his clubhouse, and Luis (to appropriate a cliché) can’t see the city for the skyscrapers. It is inevitable that the three would see three different Liberty Cities, and that the player, looking through the character, would see each city slightly differently.

This is not something unique to Grand Theft Auto IV, or even to open-world games. I would argue that our understanding and perception of all game worlds are influenced by the circumstance of the character we experience it through.

Often this is depicted literally as part of the game’s mechanics. Optimal drainpipes and ledges don’t actually glow red in the world of Mirror’s Edge, that is just how Faith (and by extension the player) sees her world. Left 4 Dead’s survivors see each level as a path to a safe house while the special infected see a playground of ledges and blind spots. Killzone 2’s invading force sees an evil dictatorship and faceless soldiers with glowing red eyes, not a viciously patriotic people defending their home planet.

All of this is not to say that the character is the only element that influences the player’s navigation of a space. Certainly, game levels are designed in a way that the space asks to be used in very explicit ways, and the character we are asked to play is arguably a small subset of this.

It is also worth noting that how the character sees their world depends on how the player sees the character. I sympathised with Niko as a broken, tragic character trapped in a cycle of violence he desperately wanted to get out of but only ever made worse. A different player, though, could just as understandably see Niko as a crazed madman not worth a moment’s pity. That player’s Liberty City is still filtered through a Niko Bellic, just not the same Niko Bellic as my Liberty City.

The character is a lens through which our understanding of the game world will always be filtered. We can never see the world as it ‘is’, just as it looks from our own point-of-view.

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In Defence of the Cut-scene

A lot can (and has) been argued against the use of cut-scenes in games [1]. They are broadly seen as an archaic film mechanic that stumbled into gaming convention in an age when games were too young and naïve to put forward any other alternative. I agree wholeheartedly that instead of relying on the storytelling mechanics of a pre-existing, passive medium, game designers should focus on exploring the unique, interactive ways videogames can present stories spatially and dynamically. However, I feel that games have held on to cut-scenes for decades now for reasons other than a lack of knowing any other way to do things. In this piece, I do not want to defend the games that depend on filmic techniques to jam a linear story into independent gameplay, but rather defend the games that harness cut-scenes as one of many expressive tools unique to our medium.

These are some arguments commonly levelled at cut-scenes:

1. Games are fundamentally participatory and active; films are fundamentally authored and passive. Taking away the player’s agency to tell them a story directly contradicts what a game is.
2. Rewarding the player for completing an interactive challenge with a non-interactive scene makes no sense. It isn’t a reward, it is a punishment. As Eskelinen says, “If I throw a ball at you, I don’t expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories.”
3. The world depicted in a game’s cut-scenes often contradicts the world depicted in a game’s gameplay, creating ludonarrative dissonance between the story and game. This should be avoided at all costs.

Again, I have to stress that I agree with all of these as issues in games that rely overtly on cut-scenes, and I could list plenty of games guilty of all three of these because they are too dependent on telling stories in preauthored fashions. However, I do not believe all cut-scenes should be frowned upon for these reasons. Allow me to counter the above arguments with the following justifications for when cut-scenes are viable:

1. Cut-scenes pause player agency temporarily to allow the character to exert their own agency and to contribute to the player/character relationship.
2. If a player’s emotive involvement in the game’s story has been sufficiently heightened during gameplay, a cut-scene can indeed be a reward by taking advantage of that emotive involvement in a way an entirely passive film never could.
3. Ludonarrative dissonance, to an extent, does not matter. The game as played by the player does not have to be in perfect sync with the story as presented about the character.

Okay. Now that I have put that out there, allow me to clarify what I mean by each of these before I get flamed.

1. Cut-scenes allow a space for characters to exert their agency.

I am currently working on a paper about the relationship between the player and the character in adventure videogames where I argue that adventure videogames don’t exclusively rely on player agency so much as they rely upon a symbiotic agency contributed to by both player and character. Both the player and the character exert agency in unique ways and only through a cooperation between the two can the story be enacted. In Uncharted 2, for example, the player has agency over Drake’s aiming, jumping, and running; but Drake himself has agency over how skilled he is at these abilities as well as the decision to be a treasure hunter in the first place.

The cut-scene allows a space where the player steps back and lets the character have their agency. This is why, in extreme examples, some characters only ever speak in cut-scenes while remaining mute during gameplay (such as the playable character of Killzone 2). The games these characters belong to draw a clear (perhaps too clear) line between who is leading the player/character relationship and when.

Let’s look at Grand Theft Auto IV. The player has agency to decide how they navigate the city, which order they attempt missions, what crimes they partake in. But once the player begins a mission, the character takes the lead in conversation and their relationships with other, non-playable characters.

Of course, a bad game that is too reliant on cut-scenes will take this too far and will only be capable of progressing the story in cut-scenes when the gameplay is halted. A good game, though, does not draw such distinct lines but instead blends the player and character’s agency through the gameplay and the cut-scenes. This is seen in the long drives between missions in Grand Theft Auto IV (praised and slammed in equal measure across the internet and reviews for being “nothing but glorified cut-scenes”) where Nico converses with other characters, or in Drake’s constant chatter in Uncharted 2. Rather than splitting the player’s agency and the character’s agency, cut-scenes used well emphasise the player’s relationship and co-dependency with the character. We can play Niko Bellic as a sociopathic maniac in our gameplay if we desire, but it is in the cut-scenes that we learn to care about him and his relationships.

2. Cut-scenes can harness the player’s emotive investment

A cut-scene in a game, viewed by a player who has just spent two hours of active involvement with the world and characters, will be more emotively powerful than an identical scene viewed as part of two hours of passively watched film. Several cut-scenes exist throughout the Halo series that I found particularly memorable—more so that the same scenes would have in a movie. For instance, the conclusion of Halo 2 where the rings almost fire, and the activation of the forerunner artefact beneath New Mombasa in Halo 3 to name a couple. These scenes, while dramatic in their own right, would not have had nearly the same effect on me if I had not been involved in the world and its events for the preceding hours. The rings activating would not just affect the characters, it would affect me and my stake in the game’s world.

Cut-scenes, then, should not be used as a prescriptive film mechanic forced onto the game, but as a tool wholly reliant on the game’s interactive nature and the player’s consequential engagement in order to invoke the desired response. As a movie, Halo would be dumb and cliché; but as a game it is able to take advantage of my connection to the fictional world to extract illicit and specific emotional responses.

If I throw a ball at you, I don’t expect you to stop and tell me a story. But if you caught it like this, I would expect you to revel in the feat you just achieved before throwing it back to me.

3. Ludonarrative dissonance does not matter… not all the time, at least.

A dissonance between the world of the game and the world of the cut-scene can jar the player’s experience when the dissonance is an inconsistency in the fiction. Why should a grenade critically injure a character in a cut-scene when we have seen countless grenades explode futilely at their feet during gameplay? If Solid Snake is holding a silenced pistol in a cut-scene, it is fair to assume he will have one when the cut-scene is over. This dissonance that does jar is due to a contradiction of the character’s abilities during gameplay and the character’s abilities during a cut-scene, and it is certainly a bad kind of ludonarrative dissonance that should be avoided at all costs.

However, the dissonance between how the player plays the character during gameplay and how the character behaves during cut-scenes, I would argue, is not jarring. Or rather, if the player does find it jarring, it is partially the player’s own fault. If the player wishes to actively engage in a game’s story, the player has a responsibility to engage in a certain way. If you feel Grand Theft Auto IV’s story makes no sense because Nico acts like a sociopath between missions, then don’t act like a sociopath between missions! Player’s cannot expect to have an active role in a game’s story without also taking some responsibility for that story.

Though, the player may certainly play the game however they desire and ignore the story completely, in which case the dissonance between gameplay and cut-scenes is insignificant because the player is not playing for the story’s sake. The player should be able to cause ludonarrative dissonance because they should be free to play the game however they want. This is true even of games that do not have cut-scenes, such as any player of Half-life who gunned down every scientist and security guard they stumbled across during their escape from Black Mesa.

If the dissonance is internal to the character, that is bad and a sure case of a game depending on cut-scenes to tell a story. If the dissonance is caused by the player’s behaviour, it does not matter because it is the player that is choosing to cause it and at the end of the day, the player is free to do whatever they desire… as long as they take responsibility for the consequences. The cut-scenes of Grand Theft Auto IV do not jar my experience of the game, but rather hint at how I should enact my role as Niko Bellic if I wish to contribute to a meaningful story.

  *    *    *

Some of the best games I have ever played have no cut-scenes and would not be made any better with cut-scenes. But at the same time, some of my most memorable gaming moments were not interactive but were memorable solely because of the interactive context they were situated in (Bioshock and Heavy Rain being key examples, for me at least). At the end of the day, videogames are interactive and need to develop their own unique, interactive way of present stories for the player to enact independent of pre-existing linear mediums. However, just as videogames are able to use written text without prescribing to a purely novelist mode of storytelling, videogames are also able to use linearly acted cinematic cut-scenes without prescribing to a purely filmic mode of storytelling. Has any cut-scene in any Halo game been as memorable as my mad dash to the Longbow with only twelve seconds before the ring self-destructed? Certainly not! But that does not mean the cut-scenes did not contribute to my overall Halo experience.

Cut-scenes should not be used to jam a story into gameplay that does not need it, nor should the duration of a game’s cut-scenes ever outnumber the hours of actual gameplay. But as one of many tools available to the interactive story-creator, the cut-scene should not be thrown away just yet. 

Notes:

1. Most recently I read the slides for Trent Polack's talk titled "The Cut Scene Crunch" and I think they put forward a very simple, very concise argument. Strongly recommend everyone checking them out.
2. This post has since been republished on Kotaku and has received a lot of interesting comments both agreeing and disagreeing with it. 

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Metro 2033 on Kotaku Australia

Kotaku Australia saw fit to publish my reader review of Metro 2033 that I submitted. Cool!

I am aware that I have not posted a real article here for over a week now. Between a large university paper (which I will probably post here at the end of the semester if I cannot get it published in a journal or something), work, and Red Dead Redemption, I have been a tad busy. I do have three pieces in the works that you can expect soon, though. One is going to explore how the three characters we play across Grand Theft Auto IV and its DLCs influences the way we view and use the city; another is going to discuss the various heroes of Metro 2033 and why I love them. I am also going to be writing my second 'Moments' column about a memorable Red Dead Redemption free-roam match that began with a two-day battle (two game days) between our posse and the green posse for possession of a stagecoach, and ended in a vicious battle for the Mexico border.

In the meantime, read this excellent little tale over at The Brainy Gamer about the writer's repeated run-ins with Armadillo's anti-Semite shopkeeper.

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Game Diary 02: 16 May 2010

[Game Diary is a semi-regular column reflecting on the games I am currently playing, articles I have recently read, and work I am currently writing.]

Games I Played

I've moved on from every game I was playing in my previous post. I completed Pixeljunk: Shooter (though, I still have more scientists to save); I am stuck on the same boss on Dishwasher; and my veteran-difficulty attempt of Call of Duty 4 has stalled about 1.5 levels from the end. Instead, in the past ten days I have bgan exploring yet another apocalypse in Metro 2033; returned to Liberty City and Nico Bellic in Grand Theft Auto 4; I was lured back to Borderlands by some unresolved achievements; and I belatedly discovered the LittleBigPlanet water update.

Metro 2033. I entered the Moscow Metro with trepidation. I had read such positive things about the game's storytelling ambitions, but such poor things about the gameplay. Overall, though, my fears were for naught. The gunplay is nothing to write home about, and the generic mutated monsters are nothing exciting, but the snapshot of humanity clutching onto survival like it has no right to is beautifully captured. Every little detail expresses a society adapted to this existence. The most enjoyable moments of gameplay have been simply walking through the stations (or sneaking through the hostile stations). The characters look and act beautifully, and the comradeship with npcs is heartfelt. The game is far from perfect, but the overall sense of atmosphere and place is great.

Key Moment: Crossing the front line of a war between communist and Nazi stations. Just as in Fallout 3, it is depressing to see that even the apocalypse won't stop us from killing ourselves, but witnessing the fantastical ways in which war might be adapted to play out between two subway stations feels like something out of a Neil Gaiman or China Meiville story--horrible and beautiful in equal measure.


Grand Theft Auto IV. A paper I am currently writing for uni about the relationship between player and character has been focusing greatly on Nico Bellic, and has lured back to my third playthrough of GTAIV. This is my first playthrough since completing The Ballad of Gay Tony, and I am really appreciating the coherence of the fiction. It's the little things, like when Ray's man, while driving the garbage truck to pick up the diamond stash, says, "Ray got the bikers to steal the diamonds off some nightclub owner." I had always known the DLCs would tie in closely to the original story, but that the original story ties into toe DLCs is great. How many other stories are criss-crossing Liberty City?

Key Moment: So, so many. But just from recent play, seeing Luis Lopez interrupt the diamond deal, and this time knowing exactly where he came from this time.


Borderlands. I thought I was done with Borderlands. I hadn't finished my second playthrough, but I was more powerful than anything Pandora was throwing at me so the challenge was gone. However, after a spontaneous motivation to get the few achievements I was missing (or rather, an apathy towards all my other games), I decided to wrap up my original character, for tidiness sake. This only took a couple of hours, but then I discovered how utterly powerful every enemy became afterwards. I was no longer the most powerful being on Pandora. This could not be. So forgetting any promises I had made to myself on the contrary, I purchased The Secret Armory of General Knoxx solely for the raised level cap. The new levels and enemies of the DLC are nothing special so far--just a lot more driving, but driving itself is no more fun. So Borderlands has its teeth into me again, and probably won't let go until I am once again the most powerful mercenary on the planet.

Key Moment: Borderlands doesn't have moments. It is just one long, long grind.


LittleBigPlanet. On account of being in French-Canada at the time, I completely missed LBP's water update. I knew it was coming eventually, but up until this week, I was still (somewhat embarrassingly) still eagerly anticipating its release. My girlfriend had the genius idea of googling its release date, and we discovered it was part of the Pirates of the Caribbean DLC, months ago. So we spent a good night working through the awesome new levels and squeeing as we watched the cute little sackboy and sackgirl gasp for air as they broke the water's surface. And then we were lured back to the level editor and made a giant, bizarre, crossdressing-sackboy paddle-steamer.

Key Moment: Water!


Honorable Mention: The Humble Indie Bundle. So I grabbed the Humble Indie Bundle, as everyone should, but am yet to really explore it. Penumbra is interesting, but strains my poor, old laptop. Waking up two days after purchasing it to discover I now also had Samorost 2 was a delightful surprise, too.


Articles I Read.

"Who Killed The High Score?" (Part One and Part Two) at RedKingsDream. Fraser Allison's two-part, thought-provoking article addresses a question I have only every asked rhetorically, one that is repeated in Part One's comments: "Why can’t you do it for yourself and not because someone simply slapped some numbers down on the bottom of the screen?" It turns out, this is actually a question it is seriously worth asking. While we may feel that games have 'transcended' the need for numeric scores, they are still in fact everywhere, and we as players still rely on them to gauge our experience.

"Why Won't You Let Me Be Stupid?" at EDGE. Chris Dahlen's piece is an excellently written criticism on the tendency of modern games to not let the player figure things out themselves.

"Characters: The Building Blocks of Your Reality" at GameSetWatch. Christian Nutt's piece relates very closely with my current work on the shared agency between player and character. This article demonstrates why blank-slate characters can only exist in blank-slate worlds. If you want your game-world to be meaningful to the player, then the character must have a meaningful existence.

"Reflections of a Five Year Vet" by Manveer Heir. Manveer's blog, Design Rampage, has been hibernating for some time, yet I never removed it from my RSS feed. Now I know why. This massive, heartfelt, at time rambling piece provides a rollercoaster montage of Manveer's first five years in the industry. It makes me feel regret and relief that I gave up on my own interactive entertainment major when I did.


What I Wrote.

I wrote two pieces in Critical Damage this past week. I started another semi-regular column called Moments where I am trying to use my creative writing a little bit more and record some of moments of my gaming that have stuck with me. This week I looked at a highlight of my Far Cry 2 days. I also wrote a piece about disempowered play in Call of Duty 4 that I am less pleased with. I don't think it could decide if it was academic or personal. Either way, it tries to figure out why I enjoyed the game's story so much when by any right it was not really a story worth enjoying.



And that is what I have been up to. By the time I write another Game Diary, I imagine my time will have been taken up almost completely by Red Dead Redemption, but Mod Nation Racers might get in there as well. Time will tell!

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