On On Games Criticism Criticism

[In an email, Frederik Van den Bosch asked me how I felt about Warren Spector's GamesIndustry op-ed about games criticism. I wrote a sprawling, rambling reply because I find "Why don't we have any games criticism??" op-eds really interesting for a whole range of conflicting reasons. Anyway, I already wrote some rough thoughts out on the topic on Twitter when it happened but here are my conflicted, cyclical thoughts on the topic written no less roughly but in more words!]  

It's the kind of piece that has been appearing every few months lately and will keep appearing more and more regularly into the future. Game criticism is becoming a 'thing'. That is, it's been around for ages, but it's very gradually and steadily snowballing and more people are realising it exists and, more importantly, that it should exist. That a healthy and diverse critical discourse is an essential component for any maturing medium, and one that videogames desperately needs. So people like Warren Spector or Helen Lewis realise that games criticism matters because they've started to see it around and then, with fully good intentions, go and write op-eds about why game criticism is important.

So, on the surface, that is great! And I agree with the sentiment. But then, they tend to miss that people have been writing games criticism for years now. Decades even! I started blogging in 2009 and there had already been a vibrant critical culture online for years. Yes, it was mostly on blogs and a few games journalism outlets, but in the years since it has spread outwards and now you can find games criticism on The Guardian, Crikey, New Statesman, ABC Arts, Boston Phoenix (before it died), New Yorker, New York Times, etc. So my issue with articles like Spector's is they don't acknowledge all the work that has already been done to make a space for game criticism over, at the very least, the past decade.

BUT THEN. People not 'inside' games criticism can certainly be forgiven for not knowing it already exists. Game culture is insular enough as it is. Game criticism culture is insular a niche medium of writing that wants to expand but finds itself trapped within an insular subculture. People don't know it is there and I totally understand that. So when Helen Lewis wrote her piece last year, i responded with where the good writing is instead of an angry rebuttal. Because I get that people don't know it is out there and that it is, in part, on us to make the case that we matter. (Though it is also on commissioning editors, too, really). 

BUT THEN! If you are going to write an op-ed about a subject, maybe do a bit of research to make sure that when you say something doesn't exist, it actually doesn't exist? But I don't know how you would actually find game criticism without knowing where to look for it (again, hence my New Statesman piece). I dunno. I'm frustrated that they don't seem to realise we exist, but I also totally get why they don't know so I struggle to get angry about it. Like, some people on twitter seemed amazed that he called for books about videogames without acknowledging Killing is Harmless. But I just Bing'ed "book about a video game" (Bing is good for neutral searches to counter your own google search history bias) and got no articles about Killing is Harmless so, again, I get it. (Though a bing search for 'videogame criticism' does seem to turn up a bunch of good results on the very first page, including one of my own blog posts, and this great exchange between Simon Ferrari and Tom Bissell at Paste.)

(but then I'm conflating 'real journalism' with googling so... yeah.)

I guess, ultimately, the responsibility is on people like me who want to become known as game critics (in the "critics who write about games" sense) to make people realise a) why we matter; and b) that we are already here. And I guess we are already doing that, and that is why op-eds like Spector's saying we need more game criticism are starting to appear. We're clearly getting into their heads. They just don't quite realise that we're in there yet!

Also, as someone who reads and writes academically a lot, I know that "no one is writing X" often accidentally comes to stand for "I want more people to write X". 

And then there's also issues with his claims to 'normal people' and which are problematic and normative. Though, I totally get that he means 'people beyond the super niche, hobbyist gamer culture', and I totally agree that that is a border we should be transgressing/space we should be evacuating. But yeah, 'normal people' is hella :-/. 

Oh also [this isn't the email I wrote anymore but I just thought of this]. People got uppity about Spector's constant drawing parallels between games and film. I can't say that bothered me at all. No, videogames aren't films, but I'm getting pretty frustrated with people completely dismissing the overlaps between two mediums that largely depend on moving images presented on a screen. And the comparisons of the growth/maturation of a critical body of work around an emerging popular medium seem completely justified. I think I preferred when videogames had an inferiority complex to cinema much more than this current superiority complex but that is way off topic now. 

Anyway. I could talk in circles about the topic of mainstream acceptance of videogame criticism for ever because I have super conflicted thoughts about it, as you can probably tell. So, in short: it's great to see more people acknowledge that games criticism is a necessary component of the medium, but it's disappointing to see the same people not acknowledge all the great writing that has already been done to make this possible, but it's totally understandable why they don't.

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Animal Crossing: My First Days

A few weeks ago when I bought a friend's old, secondhand 3DS, someone asked me if I was excited about New Leaf, to which I responded: "What is New Leaf?". Nintendo generally and the 3DS in particular have been a blindspot in my knowledge of what is going on in videogames for many years now and I had not even heard of the new Animal Crossing game—nor had I ever played an Animal Crossing before! Over the following weeks, my Twitter feed was slowly taken over by people playing it and, as I learned more about the game, I got pretty excited for it myself. When it was finally released here in Australia on Friday night, I downloaded it and started playing.

I don't know exactly what this blog post is. This games seems like something that is going unfold incredibly slowly and gradually and might not fit a post-play reflective kind of 'Notes' post. Instead, I guess it is an exploration of my first days of Animal Crossing as told through my inconsistent use of the 3DS screenshot function. If you, like me, have absolutely no prior experience with the series, maybe this will give you some insights.

It was about 10pm when I arrived in the town of Biddyton. 'Biddyton' because I asked my girlfriend to "think of a word that implies 'cute'" because I understood that Animal Crossing is pretty cute. She thought of Biddy the hedgehog and that was that.

I normally play a woman in any game where I can choose my own gender. There's a whole heap of reasons for this. But Animal Crossing seemed like one of those individualistic games about you so I went with a guy. It seems incredibly weird and more than a little bit problematic than in such an individualistic game you have no choice but to be white, however.

I wandered around the late night of Biddyton for a while. Everyone was walking around and chilling out, probably excited by the hustle and bustle of their new mayor.

I found the Re-tail store. Then I went out again, picked a whole heap of cherries, then went back and bought myself a bed.

There wasn't a whole heap to do since everywhere was already closed, but I really wanted to play this game so I just walked around a whole heap. It was my undoing:

An hour later even Re-Tail had closed, but some of my peeps were still just out and about One of them gave me a striped shirt to wear. Then I made a pretty terrible hat.

Eventually, I accepted there really wasn't anything for me to do.

The real-time gameplay is really interesting. I have experienced it in other game in the need to wait for certain lengths of real time for a task to be completed (like in Tiny Tower) but this coupling of the game world to the real-world time is really interesting. On one hand, Animal Crossing is the kind of game you can play for as little as a few minutes a day. On the other hand, it demands you play at certain times to actually do things. It's somehow more flexible and more demanding than a typical game.

I already have a habit of returning to my house when I stop playing. So I walked back to my tent, laid down on my new bed, and closed the 3DS.

On Saturday I got a new parasol, apparently. I... have no memory of this happening.

Now that the shops were open, I was able to put the downpayment on my house. My character was really happy about this.

Also on Saturday I participated in the Bug Off, where I had to catch a good bug before 6pm. Again, the  coupling to real-time is super interesting. By 6pm of the actual day, the competition would be over. Then I would have to attend the ceremony before 9pm. Stressful! I ended up taking my 3DS with me in a coat pocket out to a birthday party in a bar. Even then, I only came third as I hadn't had time to chase bugs from about 3pm. Animal Crossing is more punishing to people with actual lives than even a typical game!

On Saturday night I checked my station and saw I could visit Brandon's town, and so went on my first inter-town travel. He gave me some oranges and I felt bad for not having brought any cherries with me. Apparently fruit can be sold for different amounts in different towns. Supply and demand. I also felt awkward about not knowing proper etiquette for being in someone else's town. Multiplayer stresses me out.

On Sunday my house was completed and I moved out of my tent!

On Sunday morning I briefly visited Hammond, but then his friend came for brunch and I had to go home again.

After I posted the above photo on Twitter, Daphny commented on my "Morpheus glasses" and I lamented on my lack of cool fashion. She invited me to her town, Farrrrrt, and I went over and grabbed some cool new clothes. Her amazing town flag had me in high hopes that I would head back to Biddyton decked out in some pretty trendy clothes. 

She met me at the station!

We went and saw the hedgehog ladies who sell clothes and she let me take whatever designs I wanted. I was still nervous about multiplayer etiquette and I wasn't sure if I was stealing things but it seemed like I could take designs and also leave designs there. I don't really understand how clothes work so far. I have clothes items but I also seem to be able to just apply materials to my character. Regardless, I got a cool Ghost Bro shirt.

I also went to her shop and, after asking permission, was able to buy a fishing rod to take home!

Daphny scared me with a Zelda mask and then I said I would go home. These two events were unrelated!

Back home, I used my new fishing rod to test out fishing. Then I just walked around my town in my new clothes and spoke to my peeps.

Oh yeah I almost got a new hat.

One of my peeps, Tutu I think her name is, wanted to see my house. She came over and I went to bed.

Then I ran down to the beach and spent the rest of the afternoon fishing.

So that is my first few days of Animal Crossing: New Leaf. I had nothing to do because it was too late, then I got stressed out by time constraints, then I chilled out with some friends and did nothing. So far it is a lovely, mundane, and slow moving game. The kind of game I would describe with the word 'nice' and actually mean it.

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Notes on Max Payne 3 (or, Brendan Tries To Explain Why Max Payne 3 Is The Best Game He Has Played This Year)

1. Max Payne 3 is the most pleasurable videogame I've played all year. 'Pleasurable' in the sense that I hate using the word 'fun' as a qualifier for a good videogame but don't really have a choice here. Max Payne 3 is just a pleasure to play. I played it for the first time earlier this year when Xbox Live was selling the digital copy for $5. Just this week I decided to play through a second time. Not on a harder difficulty. Not to unlock or complete more side quests or achievements or anything. I just wanted to go through the motions a second time, to experience it a second time, watch Max's body in its world a second time.

2. Max's body. I could talk forever about Max's body. Rockstar get that a third-person game character's body is as much a spectacle to be looked at as a vehicle to control. They know how to give that body weight. Max controls well and, importantly, he looks good as you control him. He is meaty. He is heavy. He is not just a model with a dot-point list of moves; he is a body that exists in and reacts to a world. He is a presence. It's in the way he tenses and breathes out as a cut scene bleeds into gameplay. It's in the way he holds his two-handed gun by the barrel in his other hand while firing his pistol, in the way he has to drop that gun if he wants to hold two pistols, in the way he wedges that gun under his shoulder while reloading the pistol. It's in the constant changing of his body as the game progresses—in both injuries and clothes. It's in the way you have pull yourself off the ground after a dive. It's in the way he screams "God damn it!" at a locked door at the end of the penultimate level. It is a pleasure to watch yourself control Max.

3. Max Payne 3 is a cinematic game. It is a game that is about the pleasure of moving images as much as it is about control. It is a game about making things look cool.

4. The pornographic fixation on gore and violence is gratuitous but unlike in, say, Bioshock: Infinite, doesn't feel out of place. It feels like it belongs here, for better or worse. I don't think I really need to follow the last bullet from my gun to the final dude's face and out the other side, but there's something undeniably and ashamedly attractive about it all the same. The dynamism. The slow-mo gratuitous deaths are rendered more... bearable because they 'actually' happen in the world. If you keep pulling the trigger to pump more slow-mo bullets into that corpse you will be wasting real bullets.

5. The use of slow-mo and bullet time generally means the world is rendered in immaculate detail. Countless little props waiting to be knocked over by stray bullets. Every skirmish leaves an incidental mess in its wake. A mess that is ironically satisfying to stop and stare at once the fight is done. "I did that."

6. Not being able to go straight from prone (after diving through the air) to in cover is a pain. Having to stand fully erect between the two animations is a huge irritation, and the only time the game reminds me that Max is indeed just a character model with a finite number of moves and not a fluid, existing body.

7. Why do I love some shooters but despise others? It's all in how well the game does what it tries to do. So many games want to be 'about' something else and just use generic shooting gameplay to fill in the gaps because they don't know what else to put there. Max Payne 3 is a game about shooting. It knows it is a shooter and it focuses all its energy on being a good shooter in the way Die Hard spends all its energy on being a good action film (yes, I just called Max Payne 3 the Die Hard of videogames).  For all of Max's waxing poetic and moping, it's all within the self-referential frame of game about a guy who shoots a bunch of people. "I'm a dumb move kind of guy," max says towards the end. He knows exactly what he is.

8. Related, Max Payne 3 is a videogame that isn't ashamed to be a videogame. Videogames present so many tropes that players use to stitch together a reality. We know that a medkit 'represents' a character recovering from their injuries. All those individual bullets that our character shrugged off 'represent' near misses that we can make sense in our head. When we play videogames we use our imagination to fill in the gaps of what 'really' happened. We don't suspend disbelief so much as we actively make the game make sense. Which is why I find Max Payne 3 so fascinating because it is less concerned with the player making the world make sense but in Max as a character ignoring the things the player usually has to ignore. The most obvious example is the use of painkillers instead of a medkit. Max doesn't get better from his injuries. He ignores them. He suppresses the pain. In the next cut scene his clothes are still red from where actual bullets passed through his body. But fuck it. He is a playable character. That's what playable characters go through. he just pushes on.
But it also shines through more subtly throughout the game. It's in the way Max acknowledges the simply bizarre number of enemies running at him. In the way he makes explicitly thoughtless decisions to keep getting in a mess. In a way, Max Payne 3 is about the curse that is being the playable character in a AAA game: you are going to do some nasty shit and you going to be a not very good person. It doesn't make sense. Just take some pain killers and push through.

9. I say in Killing is Harmless, I think, that what Spec Ops: The Line changed for me was not that I would no longer play shooters, but that I could no longer accept that the character in a shooter is a good guy. Max is not a good guy. He is the kind of guy that the main character of a shooter would have to be. He is the kind of guy that shoots first then realises maybe he shouldn't have shot the gangster's kid later but damn it felt good so whatever.

10. Also on Spec Ops, Max Payne 3 is the kind of game I really enjoy but can totally see why others might hate it, and I couldn't fault them for it.

11. Max Payne 3 has a conflicted core when it comes to the depiction of poverty. It acknowledges in passing the socioeconomic reasons why kids (well, at least boys) will join gangs in Sao Paulo. it acknowledges that systems of capitalism mean the rich get richer and the poor get desperate. Max snidely comments on a rooftop party of rich people drinking cocktails looking down over the favelas as  a trickle down economy. Yet, despite the occasional quips, the game is still happy to play into the same tropes for the majority of the game where you shoot a whole bunch of dark-skinned gangsters. Max himself acknowledges this is problematic, but the game doesn't.
Though, I do like that it is ultimately the rich people that are at fault, that Max feels some kind of allegiance with the people of the favela. I like that Serrano is allowed to walk away. I like that when Passos says "How many are there??" at one point, Max replies flatly, "How many kids want new sneakers?" I like that when Max walks into the favela, there is the only non-violent sequence in the whole game, that the game makes us stop and tells us, hey, this is a generic and cool place for an action game or film to have skirmishes, but also real people live here, okay? Max and the player are made to feel like outsiders before they shoot up the favela like every other American action hero in South America. But for all its acknowledgements of social issues, you still spend a lot of the game shooting evil poor people.

12. Women aren't treated any better. Max Payne 3 found itself in the second episode of "Tropes vs Women in Videogames", and rightly so. I enjoy the game's story and Max's development over it greatly, but there is no denying that it heavily relies on the damsel trope. Women are reduced to objects against which masculinity can be commented on. Discussing heterosexual, masculine identities through relationships isn't a problem, but it is when it is such a dominant, commonly repeated trope at the expense of fleshed our representations of other identities. There are no women in Max Payne 3 who are no victims of violence waiting for Max to try to save them. Yes, that is Max's schtick: reacting against women being beaten/killed/kidnapped. But the fact that is his schtick is hugely problematic.

13. Rockstar are often commended on the sheer size of their worlds, but it is their attention to minute detail that I fall for. Any single square foot of space in any Max Payne 3 level will be busy with litter, rubble, signs, rust, shelves, props. The dilapidated hotel is alive with rubble. The favela is a sprawling mess of dead ends and chicken coops and buildings stacked impossibly on buildings. There is one bit where some old plastic chairs are atop a corrugated iron roof in a makeshift balcony. So much excruciating detail that brings the world to life.

14. I didn't notice the game's music for my entire first play of the game until TEARS started playing on the final level in the airport. Max has walked into this airport giving no fucks, storming into the passenger terminal. It is the first and only time in the game that he is doing something on his own accord. No more blindly trying to rescue someone else. No more just going where De Silva points him. He is here because he wants to kill a man, and he is pissed off. You move through the terminal and the vocals emerge just as you start to gain ground over the UFE. It just fits.
For the rest of the game, Health's soundtrack is flat and dull, but always in a good way. It perfectly mirrors Max's drug-softened senses. Like the music of a much livelier action game being played two houses away. Even as action picks up, the music hardly does. Maybe adding a drum beat or a guitar to the drone. Always slightly disinterested and not quite there. Just like Max.

15. Ah. The airport. I love how pathetic Max feels by that point. He always knew he was pathetic but that self-loathing just made him even more pathetic and by the final stages he has finally realised it. Marching into that police station (well, marching out of it) is a good start, but Max is still doing what he is told to do, and he still doesn't get his pay off at the end. The rage with which he yells "God damn it" at that door is equal parts frightening and therapeutic because your character finally has some emotional release (watching Max go off at the organ harvesting doctor is up there, too). But it is when he just walks into that airport that Max is on the front foot. It's like, right, this character has had a real mess of a life and he is not a good person but here he can finally just do what he wants to do. And he does. He kills everyone in the airport, picks up a grenade launcher, chases down the main bad guy, and breaks his legs. It's not 'good' by any stretch, but Max getting his way, just this once, is a good place to end things. As he walks off into the sunset, there is no more voice over narration. There's nothing more to say. He got his way.

16. I have a thing for non-diegetic writing. I like words splashed on my screen in a stylistic matter utterly disinterested in 'immersion'. I loved it in Splinter Cell Conviction, in the way it was like a projector splashing Fisher's thoughts and memories on every surface like the game is an exploration of a conflicted mind. Max Payne 3 doesn't try to put its words 'in' the world; it just splashes them on top of it. I think perhaps they could've been more restrained with the approach. Some of the words they highlight as not as clever as they think they are. But I like the idea and, for the most part, I love the execution. I guess I just like words.

17. Max Payne 3 is the first game I've played for a very, very long time that I will concede, yes, probably is better on a PC. The pixel-wide crosshair demands pinpoint accuracy. The need in places to shoot grenades out of midair is near impossible on a controller without aim-assist.
But the aim-assist is great and makes the game perfectly playable, to be sure—except when it decides to lock on to that guy behind the pillar instead of the three in plain sight. The lock-on-to-torso and need to manually aim for the head is a good compromise of Max looking like a badass and the player feeling like a badass. I also was not too concerned with pinpoint accuracy, and was far more interested in creating an interesting, chaotic mess of a gunfight, much like in Tomb Raider. But another run of the game on a harder difficulty with only free-aim is not something I will be doing with a controller.

18. I liked finding the bits of golden guns but Christ I hate having to carry golden guns around. I liked the extra story elements of the clues on each level.

19. It is hard to over-estimate the sheer polish of the presentation. The way all the things I've already talked about come together to create this seamless experience from start to end. The care in modelling a different Max for nearly every level. The blood on his t-shirt from when he got punched in the face on the previous level, still lingering. The care paid to the world. The care paid to the music. Max Payne 3 is one of those cinematic blockbuster games where it all just comes together to be a work that—for the most part—is a joy to just sit back and have wash over you.

20. So many games over the past two years have turned me off with unnecessary boss battles. With maybe two exceptions, all of Max Payne 3's notable bad guys are given insignificant cut scene deaths, or have 'boss battles' that simply ask you to kill all the dudes around them. No glory. Just dead and move on. I loved the ambivalence.

21. QTEs where I have all the time in the world to press the button. That is how you do QTEs that I don't hate.

22. There is a character in the game that, on my play, I hated. The retired American cop that you first meet locked up in the nightclub then again working at a charity organisation down in the favela. Max asks him to help shoot the gangsters in the club but he refuses, having retired. In the favela, he is just some chummy, baffoonish man who is more interested in smalltalk about his family than anything else. But on my second game, I realised that this character wasn't some throwaway sketch. This is exactly the man that Max wants to be but never can. The cop who had a normal family life, then retired to do charity work. The ex-cop who refuses to get in a gun fight because he is retired. That isn't Max. The fact you meet him for the second time right at the end of the nonviolent sequence, when Max goes for his longest time without shooting anyone, speaks volumes. I love how much the game doesn't linger on this. Max doesn't have some smart one liner to compare himself to the other ex-cop. He probably doesn't even notice the irony. He just moves on and shoots up a stripjoint.

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Notes on Badland

1. Think: the dark humour of Lemmings meets the aesthetics of Limbo meets the controls of Jetpack Joyride.

2. Badland is a simple creation. Your creator is on the lefthand side of the screen. It's like a hairless doll's head (like the spider thing in Toy Story) with little bat wings that are far too weak to carry it competently. Holding to fly upwards; release to fall downwards. Forward momentum is automatic. Your only goal is to get to the end of the level before the auto-scrolling screen leaves you behind.

3. Holding the screen to fly up feels counterintuitive when the action you are performing is flapping wings. It feels like you should be tapping repetitively. I'm clearly not the only person who feels like this. After struggling with the first few levels, I went to the in-game help where it explicitly tells you that you shouldn't be tapping—like the creators knew that is what the player would naturally do. Which begs the question: why didn't they just do what feels natural?

4. There are puzzles, in a sense, but hardly any. There are 'points', in a sense, but they don't really matter in any meaningful way. Badland is one of those precious few iPhone games which simply exists to be experienced, to just get to the end, to just see it happen. Forget high scores or challenging puzzles.

5. As you move through each world there are pickups. Some make you faster, some slower. Some make your doll-head-bat character grow in size; some make it shrink. Some, significantly, create clones of your character. Some create a lot of clones. The closest the game has to points is the number of clones that make it safely to the end of the level.

6. The thing is, you can't control the clones. Or, rather, you can, but they are all controlled by the same input, but they are not all in the same space. So safely guiding this creature around boulders means those other ten are going to fly directly into a buzzsaw. You can't save everyone.

7. Sometimes the sheer number of clones are their own downfall. A scene: there are five clones flapping flaccid across the screen. You accidentally pick up a series of powerups that make each of them grow as the passageway narrows. Suddenly, you have five oversized dollheads all jammed into a small tunnel, and none of them can move. You tap and they just flap and their eyes open wide and then they are eaten by the side of the screen.

8. In Badland, your character is pathetic. They are so pathetic. They flap and fall and rise because their wings are too small. They bang into pipes and thud into boulders. The splat themselves on buzzsaws and squish themselves in tunnels. They are stupid, like lemmings. It's a dark, sadistic game, where most of the satisfaction of playing is just in trying to move this bloated, pathetic little creature through this bad land that hates him.

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Notes on Tomb Raider

1. Just like Uncharted did a good job of riffing off Tomb Raider without just copying Tomb Raider, Tomb Raider does a good job of riffing off Uncharted without just copying Uncharted. It is very much inspired by that character-driven, action/platforming model, but it feels like its own game with its own vibe, not just a reskin.

2. I love how Lara moves. I love watching her even as I enact her. I love feeling like I am acting. I love the way the animations change to shift the tones of my inputs. The way she will run when we are alone but then cower and creep with the same weight put on the thumbstick when enemies are around. She is a tremendously well animated model and it is such a pleasure to just be her.

3. I am a big fan of sticky-cover shooters, but after playing Tomb Raider I am left wondering why I ever had to push a button to stick to cover. The way Lara just naturally hides behind a wall, just organically sticks to it, is so fluid and intuitive.

4. Is it a problem that Tomb Raider is, first and foremost, a cover shooter? Two answers: yes; no. I enjoyed the cover shooting. It felt gritty. The guns felt messy. The enemies felt as amateur and confused and unprofessional as Lara. As far as a cover shooter trying to portray a sense of gritty survival, I think it did that well.

5. But, there was certainly too much cover shooting for the story it was trying to tell and the scene it was trying to set. Excuse me while I go armchair developer for a moment, but I found myself at multiple times wishing the game had taken a Splinter Cell: Conviction approach. That is: pseudo-messy-stealth until you inevitably screw up and then have to use loud guns. A few scenes do embrace that, where Lara sneaks around and uses silent arrows for a few kills before she is spotted. It creates this great, Far Cry 2-esque in control/out of control seesaw. But too often Tomb Raider just has waves of men running right at you from the start. I don't mind that I spent most of Tomb Raider killing dudes, but I wish I had spent that time killing less dudes with more consideration.

6. On the dudes: the game made some interesting attempts to make them clearly not elite soldiers, but just stranded survivors who actually have a disadvantage to Lara (they are not 'Crofts'). Most of them had bows because they are not an army decked out with unlimited firearms. A lot of them were as scared of Lara as they were angry. A few overheard conversations later in the game really humanise them. You heard them talk about how they are grouped into squads on the island based on which ship they were on that crashed. One group jokes and teases another group in some kind of tribal rivalry. For the most part, it didn't feel 'unbelievable' (which is different from unrealistic) that Lara was holding her own against these men, because these men were not elite soldiers. I liked that. The only problem was the game did not commit to this. It made allusions to the amateur status of your enemies, but never really committed to it long-term over the entire game. So, too often, it just became 'shooting bros' again and again. Fun 'just shooting bros', but 'just shooting bros' all the same.

7. Tomb Raider's biggest improvement over Uncharted is that the act-three enemies did not break the game.

8. The limit of weaponry was excellent. When I got the machine gun and the game went all Modern Warfare Slow Motion so I could use it to wipe out a room of dudes, I distinctly remember saying, "URGH." Then I vowed I would play the entire game just the pistol and bow. But then I got the shotgun and that was enjoyably messy and loud. So I only used those three weapons (and the machine gun when I really had to). I like having a character with a quantifiable, knowable amount of gear. I like knowing exactly what is on my character's body. It adds to the survival sense the game is going for. I liked that I wasn't just picking up new guns every thirty seconds. Though, that worked for Uncharted. Uncharted gave me a sense of desperation, of clawing for a new gun frantically. Tomb Raider gives me a sense of possessive aggression, of refusing to let go of any of my gear. Both work in their own way.

9. The game has an unhealthy obsession with gore. I think it wanted to shock me, with the mass graves of random messy meaty bits. But it was equal parts terrible and laughable. It was beyond believable that this many corpses could possibly be on this island. Several small countries would have to have been depopulated to make this many corpses. Unless the game was trying to make me laugh, it utterly failed to do whatever it was trying to do with all those corpses.

10. One of my favourite things is characters wearing permanent scars throughout a game. Martin Walker. Max Payne. John McClane (not a game, but same deal). I'm not sure if I mentioned in my Bioshock Infinite notes how much I liked that Booker's hand stayed bandaged for the entire game after it was stabbed. The permanence of experience inscribed on the body is a nice touch. For the most part, Tomb Raider did this well. It's a risky thing, mutilating a woman's body for the camera. There is a lot of ways that can go wrong, can seem like exploitation, can actually be exploitation. It very much was exploitation in the marketing material leading up to Tomb Raider's release: here is a girl panting and sighing as she is injured. The opening scenes of Tomb Raider are pretty bad, too. She takes a pretty dramatic, unnecessary beating before I have even done anything. I guess they wanted to throw her in the deep end and see if she could swim. It made me uncomfortable at the start of the game, but as the blood and mud from those opening cut scenes faded and were replaced with scars and injuries from Lara's and my joint experiences, it was better. It didn't feel like (to me, at least) that they were just mutilating some woman's body for no reason. It felt like she was earning scars to be proud of in a way usually only allowed of male bodies.

Edit 10b. Lara's overly gory deaths were terrible and exploitative and cringe-worthy for totally the wrong reasons. Watching her get punctured by tree branches or smashed agains the same aquatic rock no matter where abouts on the island she falls into the water was super gross. It didn't add anything. It was just, "Hey, watch this woman get beat up before you get back to the action."

11. With the exception of Lara's girlfriend, Sam, I have no idea who any of the other 'good guy' characters were meant to be. Apparently Roth meant a whole heap to Lara, but I have no idea who he actually was. For the first part of the game where everyone was separated, names were appearing in the subtitles and over the radio and I had no faces to connect them to. I did not care for any of these characters the way Lara seemed to. Also, they were all terrible. White geek dude who looks like Harry Potter (and who gets to sacrifice himself to save Lara in a weirdly symbolic way). Tribal islander who Lara turns to for support whenever she just 'feels' something in a spiritual way (he is Tribal so he will totally get her, you know?). Angry Irish man who is from Glasgow, in case you missed him telling you five times. I cared about Sam. The rest of the characters were just filler for plot points.

12. Apparently these characters are fleshed out by the diary entries they left scattered all over the island before they crashed onto the island (yep). I wouldn't know because I didn't pay attention to any of these. How to do a good in-game diary: record the character speaking it so I can listen to it even as I continue to play the game. How to do a tolerable in-game diary: have a paragraph of text for me to quickly read before I return to play the game. How to do a totally frustrating in-game diary: force me to look at the wall of text while the character reads it. If the character has recorded voice over of this text, why am I being forced to look at it while they read it?

13. So Tomb Raider's story is ridiculous, prevented from falling in on itself only by the strength of Lara's character (I really liked Lara as a character). But it was so much more enjoyable than Bioshock Infinite. Why? I've been thinking about this for some time. I think, ultimately, Tomb Raider never tried to be anything it wasn't. It never tried to not be a game about shooting a bunch of dudes to get off an island. It was honest. Bioshock: Infinite pretended to be about racism and nationalism and parallel universes when it was actually just about shooting dudes. It was dishonesty. Tomb Raider set up my expectations adequately for the game I was going to play; Bioshock: Infinite did not. I spend a lot of time comparing different games and my reactions to them.

14. Lots of little things made Tomb Raider's platforming really nice. Just a few extra button presses demanded of the player to couple you to whatever flimsy structure Lara is hanging onto just that bit more intimately. When Lara makes a wide jump and only manages to grab with one hand, you have to tap X to get the other hand to grab. When you jump at a wall that Lara needs to use her pick to hold onto, you have to tap X as you sail past it to latch on. To scamper up high walls, you need to tap A a second time for Lara to kind of wall-jump and get a bit extra height. It helped make the platforming feel a bit more intimiate than just finding the path for Lara to stick to. It felt more perilous.

15. My god. The split-second insta-fail quick time events. How are these actually still appearing in games?

16. At the very end of the game, just before the credits, the screen goes white and the line "A SURVIVOR IS BORN" splashes across the screen. It is pretty terrible. It would be like if at the end of Romeo & Juliet someone just yelled out: "TWO LOVERS JUST DIED." It served no purpose other than to turn the entire game into a ten-hour trailer for the inevitable sequel. It also just totally belittles all of Lara's later achievements in the previous games. Lara is much more than a survivor. We know that. We've seen what she goes on to do. By labelling her as just a survivor makes her too reactionary, too much on the back foot. That isn't Lara. Lara is headstrong and determined. She doesn't go on to just survive. She goes on to live.

17. The camera work is exceptional. Someone went through this game with a fine comb, tweaking the exact placement of the camera in every scene to be in an optimal, cinematic position. I don't think it ever crossed the line, as far as I recall, and always felt organic even as it was clearly staged. Throughout the game, you often perform the same action, like climbing a wall, but with the camera positioned differently, and it breathes new life into the same old actions.

18. 50 Shades of Brown.

19. It is really, really refreshing to just be a woman in a game. Or, perhaps more accurately, to not be some well-built white dude yet again. It's not for me to say if Lara is or isn't sexist, but I felt like the game walked a fine line where she was very much a woman (not just a man with breasts) without being reduced to an object. It was just really nice to be a woman for once.

20. Tomb Raider is the kind of disposable genre game I would play again just because it feels good to play and it is fun to watch myself play.

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March and April Writing

With GDC at the end of March, I never got around to writing a summary of that month's writing, and then as I tried to catch up on all my GDC writing in April, I never got around to writing a summary of that month's writing! So here is a summary of the things I did write in March and April.

My "You Know What I Love?" column is still going strong at Games On Net. I wrote about unreliable narrators, first-person bodies, audio-diaries, simulated physics, and acting.

At GDC, I had the opportunity to sit down and chat with Walt Williams, the lead writer of Spec Ops: The Line. He is a great guy! I was hoping to turn the interview into a 'People' column for Edge, but they had done a studio profile of Yager just a month before so that wasn't going to happen. Instead, Stu at Unwinnable gave me the opportunity to post the entire, sprawling discussion as one long essay. That right there is pretty much why I love Unwinnable so much.

Early in March I wrote for Bit Creature for the first time. I wrote two essays that are kind of meant as companions to each other about Dark Souls. The first is about how the game's level design and layout and ambience communicates a sense of passive-aggressiveness to the player, a sense that you're not suppose to be here. But then, both thanks to and in spite of this design, the game encourages a far closer sense of camaraderie between players than nearly any other game. I'm really happy with both these essays, and I really like how they work together.

Australian NGO Right Now asked me late last year if I would write something for them about videogame violence and human rights. I wrote an essay that tries to strike the middle road of the whole debate between calls for censorship and calls for utterly uncritical engagements with videogame violence.

And just on this blog, I wrote out some notes about Bioshock: Infinite after I finished playing it, and also some further thoughts about how the game is incredibly, accidentally racist. And my partner, Helen Berents, wrote a guess essay about how Ni No Kuni depicts childhood.

I think that is actually all I have written over the past two months! I do have some very exciting, massive features all written up and forthcoming, but more on them when they are actually published! I've also been working on a few different academic articles/chapters, which I'll be sure to share when they're available, but they might not be interesting to too many people. Other exciting projects are starting to gain momentum, too! But that is all on the down low for now. But they are exciting, I promise!

I did also appear on a few podcasts over the last couple of months. Michael Abbott's Brainy Gamer podcast is probably my favourite podcast ever, and the only podcast whose episodes I will lap up as soon as they come out. So I was incredibly humbled to appear on it back in March alongside Leigh Alexander. I can think of few people writing about videogames that respect more than Michael and Leigh, so that was a little bit intimidating, but also a lot of fun. I also recommend listening to the other three parts of that podcast where Michael talks to a wide range of intelligent people.

Also, during GDC, Giant Bomb's Patrick Klepek spoke to me about Killing is Harmless, and why and how I went about writing it.

And speaking of Killing is Harmless, if you are yet to buy it (or even if you have!), you might be interested in the Story Bundle, which is selling a bunch of books about videogames for super cheap, including Killing is Harmless. The bundle has already more than doubled the number of copies of Killing is Harmless that have been sold, so that is incredibly exciting!

As for May's writing. Well, this happened:

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Unsettled childhood of Ni No Kuni

[My girlfriend, Helen Berents, is a Peace Studies academic whose research is all about how young people affected by conflict are engaged with. Recently, she finished playing Ni No Kuni and had all sorts of opinions about how it depicts and treats children. I invited her to write out her thoughts in a proper post, and she did! So here it is. If you find the things she says interesting, she also has her own blog for her own academic musings here. There will be spoilers.]

Childhood in Ni No Kuni is a contradiction. On one hand, 13-year-old Oliver is a complex, compelling protagonist with real depth and nuance, a noble child-hero. On the other hand, other representations of children in the game are so fraught with stereotypes and problematic encounters that I’m left wondering if their presence contributes anything to the game at all or if it ultimately harms it.

The notion of childhood in Ni No Kuni is unsettled, and it unsettles me. Conceived, as it is, within a frame of a child’s quest to save his mother in a magical land only he can access with the help of his fairy friend (Oliver’s sidekick Drippy (so-called Lord of the Fairies)), the game immediately poses questions about the stability of the land of Ni No Kuni (quite literally ‘Another World’). With a Studio Ghibli aesthetic (more on Studio Ghibli in a moment), the player is already asked to suspend belief, to have an adventure. The narrative is a classic: boy saves mother, saves world, with help from magical friends and a few fetch quests to get magical items that are requisite for success.

Yet once Oliver is in the land of Ni No Kuni, his childhood is rarely invoked. Characters question his preparedness to fight Shadar the Dark Djinn, and offer him all sorts of assistance from spells to advice to items. However, particularly once he is out of his ‘ordinary’ clothes (pants and a shirt with braces) and into his cape, he becomes a children-hero. Oliver sits uneasily between his own desires as a child to have his mother back, and the desires of an entire world that see him as the saving hero.  

The danger of hero narratives about children is that it presents a decontextualised image of young people affected by conflict. It’s an issue that many academics who study children and conflict have raised[1]. This is less of a problem in a videogame in which you expect there to be a protagonist, and you expect the narrative to be tidy. As the player, you take on a heroic role, and in this case it is a young boy you are journeying with.  In fact, the very fact that Oliver is 13 would be almost entirely unremarkable (even to someone attuned to these things) if it wasn’t for several questionable occurrences involving young people through the game. But first, where I think the game succeeds in negotiating representations of children.


An Active Imagination and Kids with Agency

The potential pitfalls of a child protagonist are eased by Ni No Kuni’s connection to Studio Ghibli. The joys of Studio Ghibli films are their ability to take seriously the adventures, experiences, emotions and beliefs of their (usually) young protagonists. The perils children face in Ghibli films are real and not superficial—the threat of a mother’s death, the loss of parents, growing up—and moreover they don’t infantilise the children, but rather highlight a resilience or strength which can just as easily come from imagination and belief as real world encounters. The tendency of Studio Ghibli to feature female protagonists with feminist convictions has also always endeared me to the films.

Indeed, Oliver isn’t the only young person in the party. Relatively early in the game you meet Esther (in Al Mamoon), whose father is Rashaad, one of the Great Sages (who previously failed to defear Shadar). With her father’s permission—which is worth noting in a discussion of children’s agency—and once cured of a broken-heart by Oliver, she joins Oliver and Drippy on their quest[2].

I recognise that Miyazaki did not have anything to do with the creation of Ni No Kuni, but the art style is pure Ghibli, and music comes from Joe Hisaishi who has scored many of Ghibli’s films over recent decades. These evocations ask the player to accept the conventions we have come to accept from Ghibli films, as we step into another world and embark on a grand adventure. Moreover, they reassure us that the heroic young person we are traveling with is intelligent, caring, imaginative and valuable.


“I’m not a child!”

While Oliver is the ‘heroic figure’, from the moment you meet Pea the game wants you to believe she is some kind of mystical, yet innocent, idealized child. You meet Pea very early in the game, before you’ve even left Motorville for the other world for the first time, and she is a puzzle and a mystery only Oliver can see throughout most of the game. She is a very young looking girl with bright green hair, a propensity to giggle, to disappear mid-conversation and to reappear with new worries. It is once you’ve defeated Shadar and your gang catches on that there is something bigger going on in the world of Ni No Kuni in relation to the White Witch, the Council, and some disaster from times long past, that Pea becomes more important to the story.

Essentially Pea is the pure and goodhearted aspect of the imaginings of Casseopeia, the White Witch (of the title), similar in existence, but diametrically opposed to the Council who seems to be the negative and harmful aspect of Casseopeia’s imagination. These real-but-not-real imaginings are a result of the lonliness Casseopeia has endured for milenia. So Pea is part of Casseopeia, but this isn’t revealed until the end of the game. For most of the game she is just a mysterious young girl with conveniently ridiculous powers. This leads several of the older members of the gang to question her inclusion and usefulness:

“…the three kingdoms are rife with horrors. We cannot send her into their midst. She is only a child” Macassin declares at one point. Pea responds “I’m not a child!”, which is largely ignored by the others, as Swaine notes “…have you seen who you’re traveling with? This lot aren’t exactly grown-ups”.

Tied up neatly in this exchange (and exemplified again later when Pea again restates her objection to being called a child) are many of the tropes associated with children, both broadly, and within the game. Pea is seen to be innocent, young, a potential victim and consequently unable to act. Yet Pea is quick to negate that reading and demonstrate that they cannot succeed without her. While Macassin remains dubious of her ability, and of the others’ abilities to apparently protect her, Oliver claims his place as the child-hero when he names her friend and declares he will defend her. 


Take Heart:Consent, respect and the failure of Ni No Kuni and childhood

With the aesthetic granted by Studio Ghibli’s art, and an easy to follow story, I enjoyed playing through the game, exploring new areas (particularly once you meet the sky pirates and Tengri the dragon, who will fly you almost anywhere on the map), setting out on side quests and meeting new characters.

Part of the premise, and progression, of the game is that Shadar the Dark Djinn has been stealing people’s hearts. As you move through the game one subset of side quests consist of meeting people who are broken-hearted and restoring their heart to them—missing ‘heart’ includes a range of virtues from ‘enthusiasm’ to ‘courage’ or ‘kindness’. This includes, at one point for example restoring enthusiasm to a wife who just wants to go home and sleep rather than working:

Similarly to this pieceby Ana Mardoll, I was surprised and enthused that the game was emphasizing consent. Particularly for a core activity that was so bound up with people’s emotions. As Ana said:

…to see [Ni No Kuni] unexpectedly and unabashedly assert to the gamer community that Consent Matters -- that, indeed, it matters so much that it's literally the difference between a Good magician and a Bad magician -- is amazing to me. And very much appreciated.

As someone interested in and invested in more complex portrayals of young people, and in recognizing their contribution and participation in society, I was pretty excited to discover that the young people in Ni No Kuni often have quests for Oliver and his team to complete, and they also sometimes have the virtues needed for other quests. How fabulous, I thought, that children would get to be an active part of this process which recognizes consent, which is built on moral choices and a benevolent aim of, at the most basic, making people happy!

Sadly, no.

Instead where Oliver needs to obtain a virtue from a child he acts with deceit, condescension and a worrying disregard for the child concerned. In this first example the young girl in Perdida says she’d be glad to help with a favor. Oliver responds “Swell! Would be mind closing your eyes for just a couple of seconds”… I’m sorry. What? If anything Oliver should spend more time explaining what will happen to a child than to an adult. As someone who has had to fill in (piles of) ethics forms for research with children, this exchange violates about every premise. Trust me. If Oliver doesn’t think the girl understands what he wants to do, he should either try and explain another way or find an adult guardian to speak to about progressing the activity. And yes, I understand complex ethics procedures probably don’t have to be written into a JRPG, but why the infantalising and almost creepy exchanges between children and Oliver (who, if you remember is also only 13)? If the game wants to include children but isn’t sure what to do in conversations, just treat them like adults! I could even cope with some awkward ‘tee hee’-ing from the children NPCs, if only they were treated with any kind of respect. 

The exchange Oliver has with a young boy in Castaway Cove is even more bizarre. After a reasonably witty (for the game at least) and adorable exchange about the young boy wanting to be a pirate when he is older—a ‘Future Pirate King of Justice’ no less, Oliver notes he is clearly full of ambition. The young boy asks “Ambition? What do you mean?”. Does Oliver explain? No. Oliver stumbles like a creepy uncle and responds “Oh! Uh…It’s nothing. Don’t worry”. After some more banter in which Oliver makes nothing any clearer for the young boy, Oliver casts Take Heart. Contrasted with Oliver’s heartlessness (oh yes, pun), the young boy still invites Oliver to be part of his crew.

Shame on you Ni No Kuni! You were doing so well with your practicing consent, and your dodgy humour, a complex young protagonist hero, and even some feminist undertones. But then you willfully threw it away at the expense of these young people and missed a fantastic opportunity to extend the nuanced, interesting exploration of childhood via Oliver’s story into other parts of the game. Instead Ni No Kuni seems to freak out, not understanding how to interact with young people. 

As an aside, I can't speak about childhood in Ni No Kuni and not speak about the truly bizarre, neo-colonial, weirdly-sexualised quest, "An Artist's Muse", where an artist in Al Mamoon decides he needs one of the forest dwellers, a young girl "as wild as the hills", with a necklace for his painting. Around the world are hidden 'forest dwellings' within collections of trees whose inhabitants are caricatures of indigenous people; wearing skins, with face paint, and unable to speak in complete sentences. So you head off to collect her, she comes back with you and the artist is grateful. To me, the undertones of that exercise are problematic enough (noble savage anyone?), but then they young girl starts striking a series of sexualised poses 

 She's still there winking and posing if you leave and come back later. I felt protective of her like I hadn't with any of the other children in the game; if this is how Ni No Kuni would treat children as-if they were adults, as I hoped for above, then I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to how I'd prefer children to be represented (more like Oliver and Esther, perhaps?).


So, How Then Should We Think About Children in Videogames?

Games have a complex relationship with children. I understand this. I understand why. It would not only be deeply unsettling to shoot children in an FPS, it probably wouldn’t pass a classification board. And I’m a peace studies academic for goodness sake! I don’t really want to shoot anyone, particularly not children! So often game worlds, which are otherwise richly developed, beautifully looking, and complex places either have no children in them at all, or treat them essentially as part of the wallpaper, where your crosshair/cursor refuses to recognizes them as something to be interacted with.

Lest I be misunderstood, I don’t want children that can be shot at added to my videogames!  But if your game is going to include children as members of the world you are moving through, can we at least treat them with the same ethical and moral consideration as the adults? Why do adults receive the courtesy of an explanation before they have a spell cast upon them, while children are either asked just to close their eyes or not even asked at all?

It has a lot to do with how we think of children and young people. “Don’t act so childishly”, “grow up”, “you were behaving like a child”; common place comments which reinforce a view of children as incomplete, as passive, as unable to participate in a ‘proper’ adult world. In academic work these kinds of assumptions are said to operate in frameworks that are ‘adultist’, which privilege adult competency and re-inscribe incompetence and incompleteness upon children. This growing critique of these views, argues instead that children can make sense of their world, they can and do participate and contribute to family life, to communities, to their everyday lives[3].

Of course, Pea both is and isn’t a child. And in many ways the better parts of Ni No Kuni’s engagement with the themes and issues of childhood are encapsulated in that statement. On one hand the game gives a lot of credit to children and their practical and imaginative capabilities, their resiliency, and their capacity to respond to the world around them. It is just a shame that at particular points the game seems entirely unable to sensitively engage with children and reduces them to the equivalent of a magical chests in which Oliver and his friends find convenient aids scattered throughout the land.

The game gives us an opportunity to reflect on how we speak about children, both in gameworlds and in real life, how we engage with them, how we perceive them. Yet it continues to rely on harmful and dehumanizing narratives about who or what children are.  Ni No Kuni is a fantasy, an escape; both as a videogame, and as Another World for Oliver to conquer his fear and sadness. I loved the sensitivity with which the main story is told, and the wonder and sense of exploration Oliver has. I’m only sad it had to come at the expense of more nuanced understandings of other children in his ‘other world’.

[1]In an excellent academic study of former child soldiers in Sierra Leone, Myriam Denov argues that children in conflict are frequently constructed through “the logics of extremes”: “extreme victims, extreme perpetrators or extreme heroes”, or in another way “dangerous and disorderly, the hapless victim and the heroic figure”. The critique of these neat (and flat) representations here is that the messy, difficult aspects of living amongst conflict (or even day-to-day in relatively peaceful societies) as a young person is erased by a logic that speaks before the reality of life can be explored.

[2]As an aside, it is worth commenting on the gendered implications of Esther, both within the game, and more broadly in a discussion of children and conflict. Esther (like so many other women in JRPGs before her) is the healer of the party, with low defenses and limited attack potential. In academic discussions girls’ invisibility has been increasingly recognized. While girls are actively involved in combat roles in many armed groups (Colombia, CAR, Cote d’Ivoire, Uganda, Nepal…) frequently they are seen only as silent victims, particularly as ‘wives’ of commanders, as victims of sexual slavery, and in support roles (cooks, cleaners). While this gendered portrayal speaks to the experiences of some girls, it comes to characterize all girls in this way, and highlights their victimization rather than their agency.

[3]In the field of peace and conflict studies there are some fabulous works on this topic including the volume edited by Siobahn McEvoy-Levy “Troublemakers orPeacemakers” and Lesley Pruitt’s recently released “Youth Peacebuilding: Music,Gender and Change”. Ethnographic/anthropological work by Alcinda Honwana, Myriam Denov, and Carolyn Nordstrom are also making fascinating contributions to this field.

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