Some Thoughts on 2010: Part One

Like most of you, I played quite a few games this year, and I've had one or two interesting thoughts about most of those games. I'm not very good at end-of-year lists or rankings, so instead I thought I might just write a couple of paragraphs about the games that I remember of 2010, something I found interesting about those games, and some good pieces of writing I read about them. This won't be an exhaustive list, nor is it in any order other than the order that the games came to mind. Feel free to add your own thoughts in the comments, or links to any other interesting articles from this year. Suggestions of games I have missed are also welcome, but you might want to wait until I finish the series!

Bioshock 2

Nearly every review of Bioshock 2 that I read called it "the perfect sequel to a game that didn't need a sequel". For my part, it was a delightful return and fleshing out of a world I never expected I would visit again. I was wary the game would ignore the themes of the first game (much as the second half of Bioshock ignores its own themes when you are asked to continue taking orders mindlessly after the encounter with Ryan), but Delta's mental conditioning and the way it affects his decisions is blatant from the start. As you go on your quest for Eleanor, you know exactly why you are doing it: because you have no choice.

Gameplay and mechanics wise, Bioshock 2 improves on the first game's already solid systems nicely. The more open-ended design adds new dimensions to the city of Rapture and combined with the various new weapons and plasmids adds a whole new layer of potential tactics.

Bioshock 2's greatest achievement for me was that I truly felt like a Big Daddy. I felt big and bulky and heavy. My feet clunked on the timber flooring, my drill crushed the skulls of splicers, my rivet gun recoiled as the rivets punched through the air.

Also interesting was how my choices affected gameplay. Instead of the number of little sisters I saved just affecting what cut-scene plays at the end, it instead affected the kind of person Eleanor became and the decisions she made. Towards the end of the game, choices are no longer yours to make and you must stand by helplessly as Eleanor makes up her own mind. Yet, it was your decisions earlier in the game that determined the kind of person she became. You stand by helplessly, knowing that the choices you made allowed this to happen.

Probably my favourite Bioshock 2 related writing this year was Justin Keverne's "Groping the Map" series on Pauper's Drop. Definitely still worth checking out.

Mass Effect 2

Mass Effect 2's cinematic trailer ranks as one of my all time favourite game trailers, just behind practically ever Grand Theft Auto IV trailer. It was good enough for me to finally play through Mass Effect so that I could play Mass Effect 2. Sadly, I found the game only a fraction as enjoyable as the trailer. After all of Mass Effect and more than enough hours of Dragon Age (by which I mean ten very dull hours) I am completely over Bioware's "gather a party and save the universe/middle-earth" plotline. 

Which is not to say I couldn't at least appreciate Mass Effect 2 is a good game, just one I didn't enjoy. Unlike Dragon Age, the universe is at least interesting and well thought-out (even if you only get to discover most of it in the 'codex' menu). And the symbiosis between player and character in Commander Shepard is done superbly.

Yet, the gameplay was disappointing, and I couldn't help but feel I had done it all before. I didn't 'quit' Mass Effect 2 so much as just stopped playing one day and never started again. I just didn't see the point.

Minecraft

Rarely will I classify a single game my Game Of The Year, but 2010 has a clear winner in Minecraft. Probably the only release this year that I sunk more than a hundred hours into, and I don't regret a single one. Minecraft means something different to each player. I never built more than a single-room hut, and I was never more than a tourist on the various multiplayer servers. For me, Minecraft was about the lonesome exploration of new worlds. I spent countless nights exploring the deep places of various worlds, filling chests with diamond and redstone, then moving on to another.

The game could evoke emotions unlike any other game. Distress, anger, exuberance, sorrow, disbelief--all from a procedurally generated world with no set goals. That every action is final and irreversible certainly had a say in this. The experiences and memories I have from my all-night sessions of Minecraft easily surpass any other gaming experience I had this year. Surprising, considering I am usually one for the authored narrative.

And then there is Towards Dawn. What started as a simple musing tweet of "I wonder what it would be like to play as a nomad?" has turned into a forty-day-and-counting adventure across strange and beautiful lands. Though, it has stalled the last few weeks over Christmas, I'm afraid.

Many people wrote many things about Minecraft. Experience Points had many a good post, as did Rock Paper Shotgun with their "Mine the Gap" series and their Game of the Year post. Meanwhile, at Binary Swan, Gerard Delaney was one of the first to unwrap, for me, just why Minecraft feels so good.

Sleep is Death

For the few days after Jason Rohrer's experimental title was released, my brother and I played nothing else. The stories we created were quick, nonsensical, and improvised, written on-the-fly as we hastily found default sprites to further the story. The potential of the game was massive, but sadly I feel few have realised it. I guess the community it required just wasn't there in the way it was for Minecraft. That, or I am just unaware of it.

The greatest element of the game was cooperation. I've seen too many 'player' players play the game as though they were in competition with the 'director' player, a competition where they must break the story that the director has planned. Of course, this is a competition they usually win as breaking the story is easy. This isn't fun for anyone. It's like going left from the start of 1-1 in Super Mario Brothers then complaining when you can't go anywhere. Rather, if you cooperate with the director, the game can be an amazing experience.

In one of my brother's and mine first game, when neither of us really knew what we were doing, I managed to paint an entire scene blue by accident. My brother played along by saying "Ah! Flood!" So we went with this. His family jumped onto the bed and sailed it out to sea, living on a diet of fish until they found an island. It was these experiences that made this game awesome. Sadly actually setting up a game was always difficult and I have thus not been motivated to put much more time into the game in recent months.

Halo Reach

The end of the Halo series, as far as I am concerned, and also the most complete Halo title to date. Bungie has taken the best of the first Halo, added the improvements of the sequels, and removed the ideas that never quit meshed. The story and pacing is adequately tragic, with the helplessness of Noble Team mounting gradually at first then exponentially later. It only suffered from a lack of subtitles informing the player of how much time passes between missions. Some were actually weeks apart, and the missions would have made more sense if I was aware of this at the time.

The juxtaposition between your initial setup of Your Very Own Spartan(TM)'s armour with the customised, individualised helmet of said Spartan smoldering in Reach's rubble was excellent. Many people would have spent many minutes perfecting their ideal Spartan, excited that they would be seeing that Spartan in single-player as well as multiplayer. And then, the second they start campaign, they know that that Spartan, their Spartan, will be dead. It worked stunningly well.

I found matchmaking far more enjoyable than Halo 3, too, but that is mostly because I seem to not such at Reach while I sucked quite incredible at Halo 3. Firefight, however, despite the myriad of new options, I found somewhat lackluster compared to ODST. I can't quite put my finder on why, though. Perhaps it is the map design. Reach firefight is excellent for a short game, but it can't put a light to the multi-hour marathon's I had on the open levels of ODST.

Roger Travis wrote a great post at his Living Epic blog that looks at Halo Reach in the framework of the classic epic which is a bit heavy going at times, but is well worth the effort.


And that will do for Part One of 2010. To be continued tomorrow!

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Dissidia Final Fantasy: Heroes of the Times

Dissidia Final Fantasy: Heroes of the Times is a Hero Arena map for Warcraft III: Frozen Throne. The game features characters from different Final Fantasy games and centers on a great conflict between Cosmos, goddess of harmony, and Chaos, the god of discord. The two summon multiple warriors to fight for their sides in their thirteenth war.

The map featured classic, quick paced Hero Arena playstyle with various voice clips each time your character using their abilities. As a team battle arena, you need to score points into certain number in order to win the game. AI is featured, so it's possible for you to play against computer.

Playable Characters
There are over 16 memorable characters from final fantasy franchise available to play, as well as 1 secret character to unlock. Play as the hero, or the villain from famous final fantasy franchise!
Warriors of Cosmos: Firion (FF II), Cecil (FF IV), Terra (FF VI), Cloud (FF VII), Squall (FF VIII), Zidane (FF IX) and Tidus (FF X)
Warriors of Chaos: Garland (FF I), Cloud of Darkness (FF III), Exdeath (FF V), Kefka (FF IV), Sephiroth (FF VII), Ultimecia (FF VIII), Kuja (FF IX), Jecht (FF X) and Gabranth (FF XII)

Arena Dungeon
To reduce boredom and make the game more enjoyable, player can also explore huge-optional dungeon area named Dimensional Castle of the Rift, inspired from final dungeon in original Final Fantasy V with it's original bosses Demons of the Rift included. 3 of them is available to be summoned into arena and fight as an arena boss, while the others are can be found inside the castle.

At the end of the Rift dungeon, you'll find a portal that acces to The Edge of Madness: A place where Chaos and it's manikins forces lies (with over 5 manikin from warrior of chaos). There is also another optional boss if Chaos doesn't challenging enough for you to defeat - it's Shinryu with his deadly Atomic Bomb signature attack! His lair could be acces on upper portal on the arena.

Preview Screenshot (Old and New)

Preview #1

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Preview #9

Preview #10

Latest Version
This map is still on BETA version and still far from finish, so I believe there is still many bugs, flaws and imbalance on this map. Any suggestion or idea to make this map more interesting to play would be appreciated.

Download the latest EX Edition
version here: Click Me!

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Here's Looking at You: Reexamining the Relationship of Player, Character, and Game

[Today I am heading out to QUT to attend "Games & HCI: A Long Romance", a workshop looking broadly at the topic of game interfaces as part of this year's OzCHI conference. I'm not sure if I will be talking there or not, but I'm looking forward to the discussions either way. For the workshop, I prepared the following academicish paper. 
As I have mentioned previously, I am interested in exploring the relationship between player and character next year when I begin writing my Honours dissertation (ed: which I have now written and you can find here!). Recently, I have started reading about Actor-Network Theory and have grown increasingly excited about how it may be useful for my studies. This paper, while very general and broad, gives a simplified account of how I am interesting in using Actor-Network Theory to look at this relationship. I feel I must stress that I am in no way an expert on Actor-Network Theory. I guess it is best read as a kind of hypothesis of what I believe I can show in the future, not of what I have already shown. Anyway, I am quite happy with how this has turned out, so hopefully you find it interesting.]

“In games more than any other medium often the problem is just you” – L.B. Jeffries.

When we discuss the ways in which players interact with games, in both everyday and academic discussion, it is not uncommon to discuss interactions in terms of ‘you’. In Grand Theft Auto IV ‘you’ explore Liberty City; in Mass Effect ‘you’ save the galaxy; in BioShock ‘you’ decide if the Little Sisters live or die. Text adventures and tabletop roleplaying games, meanwhile, use the second person construction explicitly: ‘you’ are in a dark room; there is a door to ‘your’ right; ‘you’ are likely to be eaten by a grue. ‘You’ is a necessary construct to talk about the hybridisation between player and game, but just what ‘you’ consists of has never been adequately accounted for. Who, or what, is ‘you’? The instinctive answer to this question is also the most problematic. ‘You’ is not the player. Or, more specifically, ‘you’ is not just the player.

Consider Hemisphere Games’s 2009 title Osmos. When the game first begins, the playable character, a single-cell organism called a mote, is in the centre of the screen above a line of text that addresses the player: ”This is you.” ‘You’ (that is, the mote controlled by the player) exists in a plane of other motes of various sizes. The player propels their mote around the screen, absorbing motes smaller than themselves to grow larger while avoiding being consumed by larger motes. In order to move, the player’s mote must expel mass that re-enters the level as more motes. Put simply, the mote controlled by the player—‘you’—is not just a single actor but a hybrid of many smaller connected actors. This simplest of examples shows that ‘you’ encompasses more than just the player. ‘You’ is a complex network of actors mediating and affecting the actions of each other through their own agency. One of these actors is the player.

Conflating the role of the player to the entire role of ‘you’ is problematic and prevents us from properly understanding the player’s relationship to the game and the interface through which they interact. Through the work of Bruno Latour and Actor-Network Theory, the full network of actors within ‘you’ may be rendered visible and the full cost of the player’s interaction with the game may be accounted for.

To assume that ‘you’ is the player conflates and privileges the role of the player’s agency within the game at the expense of hiding and dismissing a multitude of other agencies that are also present. This privileged understanding of player agency sees the other actors within ‘you’ as simple intermediary objects—mere tools—that transport the player’s input pure and unchanged into the game-world. The player says jump and the character, supposedly, does not even ask “How high?” This sees the relationship between player and character as not merely unproblematic and simple, but nonexistent—the character is the player, and the player is ‘you’. In Osmos, all the other motes consumed by you no loner exist. Such an understanding of you is useful to talk about the player and the game as two separate spheres, but is unable to demonstrate how the two relate and interact.  Such an understanding renders the game interface invisible and untraceable.

However, if the player’s agency is examined through the lens of Actor-Network Theory (abbreviated to ANT), the complex web of agencies, both human and nonhuman, actual and virtual, that are in play every time ‘you’ acts are exposed and able to be properly examined. ANT demonstrates how all objects mediate and alter action with their own agency, and shows that the relationship between player, character, and game is anything but straightforward and unproblematic. ANT is able to challenge the popular construction of ‘you’ as being equal to ‘the player’ and can expose the myriad actors who mediate and are mediated by the player’s agency, the actors that are forgotten in our haste to place the player on an all-powerful pedestal of agency. In Osmos, the agency of the mote controlled by the player is utterly dependent on the motes that it has absorbed and the motes that it expels. ‘You’s ability to act is directly connected to these other actors and their mediation of the playable mote’s actions and intentions.

This is more than an act of semantics. Removing the player from the privileged position of an actor ‘over’ the game and instead understanding the player as just one more mediator in the game renders the full network of actors and their relationships traceable. This is crucial if the game’s interface is to be properly located as the connections between these actors, the interactions between player and nonplayer actors are the game interface. If the game interface is to be properly situated, ‘you’ must be opened up and understood as neither player nor game but as a hybrid of player and game relating to each other. “Agency is continually redefined within the hybrid occupying the spatial environment of the game even as there is an overall meta-negotiation within the hybrid triumvirate comprising the player, the code and the hardware” (Veale 38).

As we are used to dealing with ‘the player’ and ‘the game’ as two distinct entities, this sounds counter-intuitive to the way we typically think about how we interact with games. Should not the aim of game studies be to strengthen the player’s agency and to further immerse the player in the game-world? Of course. Thus, should we not be focusing on how to equip the player with more freedom, with more meaningful choices? Again, of course. But then why would we want to tie the player down to all these other nonplayer objects? Because, as Latour says so beautifully, you do not free a puppet by cutting the strings. “The only way to liberate the puppet is for the puppeteer to be a good puppeteer […] The more strings the marionettes are allowed to have, the more articulated they become” (Latour, 2005 216). Just as the puppet’s freedom is in the quality of its connections to the puppeteer, so is the player’s freedom in the quality of their connections with the game. The agency of the player is dependent on the agency of other actors within the game and their ability to mediate and relate to each other. The player does not need to be set free from the game, but rather they must be better connected.

To do this, the role of other objects that would normally be ignored in such account must be acknowledged as mediating actors that translate and alter the player’s intentions. For ANT, no object is an intermediary, merely outputting the same effect input by an actor. Instead, all objects are mediators that transform, translate, distort, or otherwise modify the meaning they are supposed to carry (Latour, Reassembling 38). An action, then, is never ours alone, but a combination of ours and a myriad of other mediators that the action passes and is changed through. This translation of an action does not relate a human actor to a nonhuman intermediary, “but induces two mediators into coexisting” (Latour, Reassembling 108).

Instead of seeing the player’s agency as a linear, directed agency leading outwards from the player into the game via an intermediary interface that passes the action on unchanged, an ANT description reveals the network of actors expressing their own agency back and forth through mediated interactions. When the player says jump, the character does not only ask “How high?” but plays a part in determining how high. A game’s strength is not in the player’s ability to act, but to interact, and any given interaction “overflows with elements which are already in the situation coming from some other time, some other place, and generated by some other agency” (Latour, Reassembling 166; original emphasis).

At present, as ‘you’ is often treated not as a hybrid but simply as ‘the player’, all the actors interacting within ‘you’ are often not accounted for and we are unable to account for all the instability and dissonance within ‘you’. However, if these interactions are traced, if the price is paid for the translation of an action through all the mediating actors, ‘you’ is exposed for the actor-network that it is. “Stretch any given inter-action and, sure enough, it becomes an actor-network (Latour, Reassembling 202). If the full cost of translation is paid for, if all the actors within ‘you’ are accounted for, ‘you’ can be understood as existing as a hybrid where the spheres of ‘player’ and ‘game’ overlap.

Veale succinctly describes the concept of the hybrid with his example of the humancar hybrid:

Humans are not allowed on to the motorway on foot. Cars are not allowed to be parked on the motorway. A human in a car (humancar) is allowed on to the motorway. The human’ s agency is redefined by this association, in that the human is capable of actions which would not be otherwise possible, such as speed. On the other hand, the human’ s agency is at the same time constrained as the humancar, since the humancar cannot do things which humans can. For example, the humancar cannot explore sights of interest on a whim and must proceed at a set pace without slowing down to savour the view. During the exchange, the human and the car have effectively disappeared and will not return until the agency of the humancar is abandoned (Veale 11).

Similarly, ‘you’ is not a distinct player interacting with a distinct game, but a ‘playergame’ hybrid that exists where the two overlap. If we look at both player and game as existing in the one actor-network,  “we may be able to accommodate the hybrids and give them a place, a name, a home, a philosophy, an ontology” (Latour, Modern 51).

The player does not lose agency when they are connected to other actors, without connection to other actors the player has no agency. Rather, the player loses agency when they are connected badly. Just as the puppet’s agency is increased with more strings, so it can be held in bondage by the same strings connected poorly. If we wish to increase the agency of the player and create more immersive, more meaningful experiences, the solution is not to liberate the player from the game, but to pull them closer together with more connections, to increase the overlap between player and game that is the playergame hybrid. If we wish to truly locate the game interface and understand what it is doing to our interactions, we must account for the agency of other actors.

Jeffries, L.B. “On Design-Centric Game Criticism.” Popmatters. 2010. Web. 18 Nov. 2010.
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. Print.
Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Print.
Veale, Kevin. “The Amniotic Sac: Intersubjectivity and Affect in Computer Games” MArts Thesis. U of Auckland, 2005. ResearchSpace. Web. 18 Nov. 2010

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Wargames

While I don't think it aired here in Australia, I came across the following commercial for Call of Duty: Black Ops via several discussions of it online this week.



Over at Border House, they applaud the commercial for the diversity of the people portrayed: 

The commercial portrays a war in which a variety of people are the soldiers. The commercial includes people of color, men, women, people of various body types, and even a number of professions. All of these people are portrayed as equal soldiers in this war. This commercial implies that this first person shooter game welcomes adult players from a variety of backgrounds and is not simply a toy for men aged 18-25.

Meanwhile, writing over at The Atlantic, Sam Machkovech has a different take on the commercial:

I couldn't have asked for a more disappointing game-related ad. These aren't the video games I play. Even at their highest levels of action and violence, video games play like sophisticated games of Cops & Robbers. They're silly; they require colorful, funny-shaped controllers; they stay decidedly in the domain of detached fiction.

This ad equips people with real guns and simulates real-life, no-CGI combat. The thud of recoil, the screams of rockets, the dust of explosions... and the look of exasperation on that little, shotgun-wielding girl. The only things missing are the dead bodies on the receiving ends of each bullet and blast.

It really is a slick commercial, there is no arguing that, and I certainly agree with Border House that the diversity of the the people portrayed in the commercial is (probably) a good thing. However, I also can't help but agree with Machkovech that the commercial is ultimately problematic. To try to express why I feel it is problematic, i am going to compare it to an Xbox commercial that Microsoft opted not to air. Machkovech noted the same commercial in his article and my conclusions will be similar to his, but not identical.

 


Personally, I think this second commercial is absolutely fabulous. It shows the true beauty of games: playfulness and imagination. Violence is not something kids learn just from videogames; many games (videogames, boardgames, schoolyard games nursery games) are situated in re-enactments of violence, either real or pretend. This Xbox commercial simply shows a large group of strangers playing together. It is cute. It makes me smile. I would love this to happen in reality.

The Black Ops commercial is trying to tap into a similar theme, I feel. However, while the Xbox commercial brings war into the context of games, play, and fun, the Black Ops commercial takes games and players and fun and puts them into the context of war. The difference is nuanced, but it makes a huge difference.

Using war as the basis for entertainment is already a gray area ethically. It risks belittling real acts of violence, real lives, and real sacrifices (to use a potentially loaded word) into fictional, consumable action plots. Generally, though, if the line between the two is kept clear, then there is no problem. You can have a game, movie, or book based on war that is entertaining that also acknowledges that the real war was not entertaining at all. It is a thin line, but it is one that various media have managed to more-or-less maintain through the decades.

And that is where the Black Ops commercial falls down. By placing the game players not in a virtual game but in a real war, the distinction between the entertainment product and the real war is blurred--potentially to the benefit of the former, but certainly to the disrespect of the latter. When I play I war game, I  want to have fun, and I want to feel the gravitas of war. I do not want to feel that the two are the same thing, that real war is fun. That is when it stops being a game and starts being propaganda.

This line blurring is disconcerting from another aspect, also. I have written before (as have many others better than me, I don't doubt) about the blurring between 'real' war and 'virtual' war, as each looks more and more like the other. War videogames are becoming increasingly realistic while real wars are looking more like videogames with each leaked video appearing on YouTube. 

As Machkovech points out, the tag line of the commercial is "There's a soldier in all of us". Not a hero, a soldier. Not "everyone is capable of great sacrifice and fighting for a noble cause", but "everyone is capable of being conditioned to follow orders and to kill without question". These commercial puts these two ideas together (war is becoming more like a videogame; anyone can be conditioned to be a soldier) alongside a young girl (or boy) clearing a real room with a real shotgun in a commercial for a virtual videogame. When I watched that girl clear the room, I was not sure if I should be happy to see someone other than an '18-25-year-old male' enjoying videogames' or concerned that I was seeing a child be conditioned into a soldier. 

Which, as something of a side note, makes me skeptical of the true nature of the commercial's diversity. "There's a soldier in all of us". With the right technology and the right content, anyone can be conditioned to fight in a war, and not just any war, but a war as morally hazardous as Vietnam. Okay, perhaps that is a bit fatalistic, and I should just accept the one time the broader gaming industry does diversity right. But considering Activision's track record, I can't help but be skeptical.

So what are your opinions on the commercial? Are Machkovech and I the only people who have a problem with it?


Full disclosure: 1) I have been listening to The Rolling Stones all day thanks to the excellent use of music in the Black Ops commercial. 2) I have not yet played Black Ops and do not mean to comment on the game's content itself but rather the themes of the commercial and the content of war games generally.

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An Update (or lack thereof)

It has been some time since I have updated Critical Damage, and I apologise for that. The good news is that this is largely because I have been busy writing elsewhere. So until I finally finish off one of the three half-written posts that I am meaning to post here, I thought I would update you all on what I have actually been doing.

Firstly, and consuming the majority of my writing time, Towards Dawn is now up to Day Thirty-One and till going strong. I've had some crazy adventures and seen some amazing sights. I'm still unsure just how and when the saga will end, but when it does, I would very much like to compile the whole series as an e-book for people to download. 

Still Minecraft related, I am now a writer over at CraftHub. I'll be posting things as often as I find things worth posting about and have time to post them. I would also like to use the opportunity to perhaps write some more in-depths pieces on this game that has consumed so much of my gaming time this year. 

This past week has also seen my first two print articles published. Hyper 206 has my Minecraft guide "The Craft of Mining" in the Front End section, and Kill Screen #2 has a story I wrote called "Capture the School". I haven't received my copy of Kill Screen yet, but if the past two issues are anything to go by, it will be absolutely stunning and well worth your money--and less of your money than previously! Seriously, you will not find a better collection of game writing this side of the internet. As for Hyper, issue 206 is something of deputy editor Dylan's lovechild. He has put a lot of work into this issue and it really shows. If you are in Australia and walking by a news agency, go in and pick it up.

At the academic end, I am putting a paper together that I will hopefully get to submit for the OZCHI 'Games and HCI: A Long Romance' workshop later this month. The topic is going to be a furthering of an essay I wrote for a course this semester that looks at applying some Actor-Network Theory stuff to my interest int he relationship between player and character. The more ANT stuff I read (predominately just the work of Bruno Latour at the moment, I admit), the closer I feel I am getting to articulating what I actually am talking about when I talk about player privilege. I'm not sure on the copyright specifics of OZCHI papers, but assuming I am allowed, I will post the completed paper here after the workshop.

And that is where I currently am with my writing. I am also doing quite a bit of reading in preparation for Honours next year and my dissertation Similar to the above OZCHI thing, I will be looking at the player/character relationship through an ANT lens, which consequently will probably mean I will end up looking at the player/character/everything-else relationship if I am not careful. But more on that in the coming months.

As for games I have been playing, I sadly have not had much time to get too committed to any new games. I am still spending many hours in Minecraft, both in my nomad game and my more traditional games. I've also, quite recently, discovered the joy of multiplayer servers. I am not one for building towns, but just knowing that other people are in the same world certainly adds something to the experience. The joy of mining with a couple of comrades is also something I underestimated.

I have also been playing quite a lot of Super Meat Boy. The game is absolutely stunning and deserves all the praise it has received. The controls feel absolutely perfect. I love the way my entire body tenses as I realise that this is the run that will shave .02 seconds off my time if I can just clear this last jump. The game also acts as a sign of maturity of the medium of gaming. The multitude of intertextual references to other games is only possible because of the maturity of videogames as a medium. Somewhat related, I really enjoyed Michael Abbott's writeup of the game.

And apart from my nightly wind down in Audio-Surf, that is about all the gaming I have done. I dabbled in Red Dead Redemption's Undead Nightmare DLC (the subject of one of my unfinished posts for Critical Damage), and I still hit up Reach from time to time. I am yet to get Fallout: New Vegas; however, I think I may pick up a copy this week to keep me occupied after I get my wisdom teeth ripped out on Thursday. 

And that is my update. Hopefully it will not be so long until the next one, and hopefully it will be more interesting than this one. Oh, and one last thing! Along with several other handsome, game-writing gentlemen, I am growing (or attempting to grow) a mustache for Movember. If you want to help men with depression and prostrate cancer, or if you just like laughing at how foolish we all look, you should totally consider donating some coins to our team.

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Towards Dawn

Hello there.

Due to my study load and some other writing commitments, Critical Damage has been a bit quiet lately. I have a few deadlines coming up in the next week and after that I will finish off a few posts I have been working on and try to get them up. However, in the meantime, on something of a whim I seem to have started a side project that is turning out to be quite interesting. 

That project is Towards Dawn, and is simply a diary I am keeping of one specific Minecraft game where instead of setting up a 'home', I continuously walk east towards the dawn and note the new and exotic things I see.

In the earliest forming of the idea in my mind, all I was thinking was that playing Minecraft as a nomad could possibly be kind of a cool, alternative way of playing. The majority of players tend to have a 'home', not too far from where they initially spawn on the map. Sometimes this is a large castle; sometimes it is just the first room in the player's first cave. Typically this home contains vast riches that the player has mined and placed in chests for safekeeping. I thought it could be interesting to subvert this. In my Towards Dawn game, I only possess what I can carry with me. I have no home (though my spawn point far to the west still feels like home, interestingly). I leave as little a mark on the lands I pass through as possible.

I did not fully consider at first how this would in fact be something of a perma-death experiment, somewhat similar to Ben Abraham's Far Cry 2 experiment, or the many others that have already followed. I made no pact with myself to delete the game if I die, but if (when) I do, my nomad adventure will certainly be over. I will spawn back at 'home' and I  most certainly will not be tracing my steps for game-days on end to pick up the trail. 

Perma-death playthroughs are something I have been fascinated about for some time as they relate deeply with my interest in consequece (that the blog where Ben's initial perma-death experiment can be found is titled Sometimes Life Requires Consequence says it all). 

The extreme consequences faced in a perma-death playthrough of a game highlight, I think, how permanence adds to the significance of a story. The story is not weakened by the player dying and then rewinding time to tell the story a slightly different way--the player dies and the story ends and is complete authoritative. This isn't how the story 'could' be; this is the story.

This is not to say that for the sake of story all games should go so far as to delete the player's file when they die. Rather, that permanency in some fashion can go a long way towards strengthening the fiction of a game.

Minecraft already had this before I began my adventure, and I would argue that it is one of the reasons the game resonates so deeply to so many people. While death is not the end in Minecraft, its consequences are certainly real. Minutes after my first ever diamond discovery, I tripped and fell in lava, losing said diamond, along with over two hours worth of other resources. I respawned and the game continued, but that loot was lost forever. The feeling of loss and despair in my gut as I watched myself burn to death that night was one of the strongest emotional reactions I have ever felt towards a game. That is not an exaggeration.

This occurs simply because of how Minecraft saves the game. That is, the game is always being saved right now. You cannot simply load an old save and not get your items back. The second you died, your game saved again. 

This permanency, this fact that you can not go back, that you must keep moving forward, makes experiences in Minecraft more meaningful. At least I feel like they do for me. That existing energy is something that Towards Dawn is tapping into.

But that was quite a tangent! The point is that Towards Dawn is an accidental perma-death experiment, and I feel that is what makes it more interesting than if I were to simply blog as I begin to build a castle, die a couple of times, and finish building a castle.

But what is the point? What is Towards Dawn trying to prove? Well, I'm not too sure yet. I'm thinking that will become apparent as I continue to play. For now I am enjoying the new experiences my less grounded, less materialistic lifestyle is offering. When it ends (whenever that is), perhaps I will have something more profound to say about it. For the meantime, I hope you enjoy the journey.

You can follow Towards Dawn here, or start from the first post here. Also, I would really appreciate some feedback. Is it interesting? Boring? Is there anything you think should be changed in either the presentation or the playing? Let me know!

In other news, I am playing Halo: Reach. But this post has already gone on too long so that will have to wait for a future post.

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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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