Social Gaming

We talk so much about how gaming alienates us. We talk about how we separate ourselves from family and friends, even general society, by playing games. We even make divides between other games: Casual and hardcore, Sony and Microsoft,  Nintendo and Sega. But games don't separate us, they bring us together. Why? Because games, at their core, are experiences. They are something that we literally live through. They're also mechanics and visuals and everything else, but those things come together to create an experience. And experiences, by their nature, can be shared. Don't you feel an instant kinship with someone who likes games, particularly the ones you like? If you meet another person who is into Minecraft or Skyrim or The Sims or whatever, don't you instantly start swapping stories and showing off scars? Single player games create stories, and stories can be told. Have you ever rekindled a friendship because you both happened to be on Xbox Live at the same time? Multiplayer games are a shared experience. They're something that we do together. We briefly become artists. We craft and shape an experience for each other. Whether that crafting is driven by competition or fun or a genuine desire to make an experience better for other people it is something we create. Even playing games is a kind of social interaction. Games are something that people make, something that they can pore their soul into. When we play games, we are getting to know people. So, what's the point of this? What does this knowledge give us? First, a defense against those who claim games are anti-social and cause loneliness. Yes, there are people who are anti-social and/or lonely that play games, but games do not cause either of those things. I suppose they could feed into those emotions in the proper context, but that is a big shift from causation. Secondly, a warning of responsibility. If someone feels alienated from games, it's our fault. Games are inherently social, but that potential community, that space of play, is created by us. We make it what it is. So let's make it something great.

Why I Love Video Games

A Couple Brief Thoughts About the ME3 Ending Controversy(No Spoilers)

I know, I know this (http://youtu.be/MjoMQJf5vKI) is what I'm doing. But I had a couple thoughts about the controversy that I just need to express. So, if you don't want to hear about this ever again, that's totally cool, just don't read it. I won't be mad.

First of all, I'm not here to comment on the quality of the ending. I'm not interested in getting into whether it was good or bad or not. Plenty of better writers than I have fallen on both sides, I not really interested in that kind of review. That being said, I am going to address some of the arguments people had against the ending. However, it's going to be in a way that doesn't address the quality of the ending itself. You'll see what I mean. ONWARD.

Alright, one of the thoughts people had about the ending was that Bioware must be trolling. This pisses me off so much I'm practically red in the face. The fact is, no matter how many hours you've put into the series, the employees at Bioware are more invested in it than you, in every possible way. Casey Hudson, the primary director behind all three games, has spent most of his waking hours for the past 10 years on this series. For the creators, these games are their babies. No reasonable human being would troll an audience with something that feels so much like a passion project. If you didn't like the ending than you have to address that dislike with the fact that this ending had pure intentions. There were people who thought you would like it.

This may be a point about syntax more than the validity of the point itself, but whatever. Many have said that ultimately their choices didn't matter. Now, this may or may not be true depending on your point of view. However, that phrase "my choices didn't matter" sticks in my throat. Whether or not they mattered in terms of the ending, they still mattered. If you paused and thought a minute when confronted a choice, it mattered. If it made you think differently about a issue, or made you reexamine your own beliefs, it mattered. The ending may or may not have expressed those choices very well, but those choices still mattered if they affected you. I know they affected me.

That's it. That wasn't so bad, right? To be honest, I don't really care what you thought about the ending, as long as you could back it up. I just think the debacle was a opportunity to have a conversation. About video game narrative, about choices, about the illusion of choice. What we ended up with was a bunch of people yelling at each other and creating white noise. That makes me sad. So please, those of you about to comment, don't make me sad.

The Samus Complex

Why isn’t there a stronger female presence in the video game industry? Well before we can address this vital question, we must discuss the inherent problem in this essay. If there is any group that is over-represented in the video game industry it is straight, white men. So having me write about the lack of women within the industry is both presumptuous and a little bit unhelpful. A woman actually in the game industry would easily be the best person for the job. While I don’t personally know anyone who fit that description, I am readily familiar with someone who was in a similar position, Virginia Woolf. Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own” carefully reveals the reasons for the lack of woman’s presence in literature. Her voice will certainly be helpful here.

The title of Woolf’s essay is “A Room of One’s Own”, which elegantly introduces her central thesis: in order to write, a woman must have the means, the time, and the space to create. I don’t really need to tell you that all those things have become more readily available for women. Since women receive the same educational opportunities as men (at least they are supposed to), they are more easily able to discover and cultivate these interests and talents. Woolf tells the story of a theoretical sister of Shakespeare, who is just as brillent, but because of the culture she exists in, is never able to discover her talent. She could thrive in the modern world. So, with all this in mind, why isn’t there a stronger female presence in the video game industry? It primarily has to do with two things, scale and culture. Writing literary work is mostly accomplished by one person. Video games, especially the AAA games that gain the most public and media attention, take teams of hundreds with millions of dollars on the line. There are significant exceptions. The smash hit platformer Super Meat Boy was made entirely by two people. So was the enigmatic puzzler Braid. (Hellman, Indie Game: The Movie) But even those games require money, investors, and publishers to allow the game to reach the public. A room of one’s own, and enough money to provide for one’s self may be enough to make a certain scale of games, but it is not enough to make those games reach the public. Even worse, it is not enough to make the scale of games that reach mass audiences. Books are relatively inexpensive things to create, but games usually take at least a few hundred thousand dollars. Which brings us to the second problem, culture.

When Virginia Woolf went to the British museum to find the truth about women and literature she found a immense sea of writing about women. If Woolf were to go to a Gamestop today, she find almost nothing about women, however the games she would find would be just as sexist as much of what she read. However, it would be in a profoundly different sense. Women act primarily, with a fair amount of exceptions, as two things in games, objectives and player characters. In Super Mario, Peach doesn’t really have a personality, or wants, or goals. She essentially acts as an excuse to move the player through the game. She is something you get when you win. As terrible as that sounds, it is for all intents and purposes true. This trope shows up everywhere, from Legend of Zelda to Super Meat Boy. Player characters are where things get more divisive. When the player is a women in the game she may be, and usually is, just as physically powerful as any of the men. The problem comes in that they are women designed to be played by men. Many of these characters are hyper-sexualized, and that alone is their defining characteristic. Characters such as Ivy from Soul Caliber, or Morrigan from Darkstalkers are good examples. A more recent example is Catwoman from Batman: Arkham City. In terms of ability to fight enemies, she is mechanically the same as Batman. However, she is dressed is a skintight suit with a deep neckline and is almost always referred to in sexual terms throughout the game. While the seductive bit is an important part of Selina Kyle's character, in Arkham City, that is the only thing she is defined by. We have a gaming culture that rarely create great female characters for a potentially female audience. 

That isn’t to say that things haven’t gotten better, they have. Games like Mass Effect allow the player to be either a man or a woman and have strong, engaging female characters outside the player to boot. Bioshock Infinite offers an engaging twist on the traditional “Rescue woman A from location B” plot, and creates one of the most amazingly crafted characters (not just female) in gaming today. The now classic, universally acclaimed game Portal has a female lead. One of the most beloved characters in gaming history is Samus, a strong female character. The most recent Tomb Raider game was a solid hit. However, the lack of triple A titles focused toward women is astounding. Mass Effect put most of its marketing muscle behind the male main character. Bioshock Infinite removed the female lead from the box art, opting for a cover showing the player character, a white, grizzled man holding a shotgun. According to a study done by EEDAR, in a survey of around 600 games, only 24 were found to have female protagonists alone, and less than half of them gave you a choice. In fact, according to the same study those games with female protagonists alone were given less than half the marketing budget of games with only male protagonists (Kuchera). At least Woolf had a series of classic female authors she could list off at the beginning of the essay. We don’t have the good fortune to name game designers.

The portrayal of female heroes is troubling, but even more disturbing is the “boy’s club” mentality of the industry. In November of last year, a simple question, why aren’t there more women in game development?, caused a flood of responses on Twitter, under the hashtag #1reasonwhy. The women in the game industry reported stories of sexism, put under the thin guise of “good fun”. Stories of being mistaken for assistants. Stories of people expressing doubt at the very idea of women playing games. Stories of being sexually harassed at conventions. It is that culture you are walking into when you want to create games (Plunkett). Woolf’s concept of the “room of one’s own” is relevant in that women were being robbed of the opportunity to create. Woolf creates a vivid and uncomfortably familiar picture of that culture in this passage “...it is fairly evident that even in the nineteenth century a woman was not encouraged to be an artist. On the contrary, she was snubbed, slapped, lectured and exhorted. Her mind must have been strained and her vitality lower by the need of opposing this of disproving that.” There is a remarkable sense of discouragement along the lines Woolf illuminates. I believe it is that culture, combined with the scale of production needed to create video games, that has caused the lack of both female protagonists and female designers and developers. There are very few places to go outside the main studio system, and when that system is as toxic as it seems to be, it is understandable that women creators wouldn’t want to be a part of it. The lack of female protagonists feeds this as well. If I want to introduce my little sister to games, she will have to really look for female characters she wants to play as. Much less ones to inspire her to become a great game designer.

The problem is not so much that women don’t have the space or time to make games, but that the industry pretends not to have the space for them. Woolf acknowledges a similar problem, and offers a clear solution. However, with the video game industry being as massive as it is, it is hard to find such elegant answer. I will deposit this, that the people losing the most by not hiring women are the same people who are lowering marketing budgets for games with female protagonists. David Gaider, a head writer at Bioware (the creators of Mass Effect), had an experience that illustrates this perfectly. The team of writers were going over scripts for an upcoming Bioware title. The scene in question was a sex scene. The criticism, analysis and praise was continuing as normal until one of many female writers pointed out that a specific moment in the game’s script could be construed as a rape scene. Once this was pointed out, the author realized this was true, and was horrified. They quickly changed the scene. Gaider argues that if their hadn’t been any female writers there, this incredibly offensive moment could have made it into the final game. This is a voice we need within the game industry, for reasons practical as well as artistic.

Works Cited

Kuchera, Ben. “Games with Exclusively Female Heroes don’t Sell (because publishers don’t support them ” penny-arcade.com. Penny Arcade Report, November 21, 2012

Gaider, David. “Female Perspective in Game Development” A Personal Blog

Hellmen, David Hellman.net

Indie Game: The Movie. Pajot, Lisanne, James Swirkney Blinkworks Media. 2012. Netflix. Web.

Wiedner, David. “Drones Over Wall Street” wsj.com. Wall Street Journal, March 13, 2013

Plunkett, Luke. “Here’s a Devestating Account of the Crap Women Have to Deal With. In  2012” kotaku.com Kotaku, November 27, 2012

Woolf, Virginia “A Room of One’s Own” 

Action Game Level Design

Today, I'm going to talk to you about Half-Life 2 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Both are action games with the same basic mechanic, shooting things in a first person perceptive, and some similar overall goals, such as making the player feel empowered. However, both these represent entirely different approaches to both level and game design, Modern Warfare 3(hereafter referred to as MW3) has a simply incredible misunderstanding of what makes games compelling, and Half-Life 2(hereafter referred to as HL2) is a nearly pitch perfect game, both a pinnacle of its genre and a incredibly admirable piece of game narrative. Let's break down every element of the games, and talk what makes one superior to the other.

Presentation: MW3's engine may be a little old, but it's put to great use. The sense of detail that went into every scene of mass destruction is insane. The scope and scale of the levels is really remarkable, and the fact that the game handles it without any jerks or frame-rate issues is impressive. It clips along at 60 frames a second. Now, if the MW3 engine is old, HL2's is ancient. While cutting edge at the time, the graphics now look blurry and occasionally muddled. However, art direction and technique more than make up for aged polygons. The facial animations and voice acting are both solid and add a real life to characters that are already well written. The various enemies are all distinct and interesting in visual design. It has a unique aesthetic awash in industrial metal, dystopian suburbs and disturbingly slick sci-fi buildings. MW3 does keep things somewhat visually interesting with its globe hopping schtick, but mostly has fights in grey or brown urban areas. While MW3 is more impressive technically, it doesn't match the artistry of HL2.

Gunplay: First of all, both games control very well. Call of Duty's slick, accessible controls are a large part of why the franchise is so popular. The game handles different elements with astonishing ease. Your character moves at a nice pace and everything feels really satisfying. HL2's controls, while not as viscerally appealing as MW3, have a nice flow and movement to them. HL2's combat has a great emphasize on traversal  and thus it's easy and fast to get around, while still slow enough to let you absorb the game's world. However, the gunplay itself falls far in HL2's favor. First of all, HL2 has various distinct enemy types. You have your traditional soldiers, but also giant man eating insects, three different kinds of alien zombies, giant walker aliens, and helicopters. All of the enemies have distinctly different purposes. Slow zombies are lumbering and dumb, but difficult to deal with in large numbers. They act a misdirection for the fast zombies, who force you to pay attention to your surroundings and think fast so you won't suffer a painful death. The zombies also have a nice little trick to them. They carry alien creatures on their heads -- known as headcrabs -- that control them. If you aim for the head, you will kill both the zombie and the headcrab, but if you shoot the body, the head crab can survive and attack you. Thus lends itself to more interesting shooting mechanics because every shot has a more profound consequence, which is further accented by the limited ammo. I could probably spend a while talking about the design of each enemy, but then we would be here all day. MW3 has one enemy type. Maybe two if you count snipers. Maybe that's a little unfair, but you essentially handle the groups of common enemies in the exact same way. If there are distinct differences between the groups of soliders you fight, they are never made explicit and so it has little to no impact on the game experience. This creates a sense of repetition and staleness to the whole game. While HL2 is constantly evolving with new weapons and enemies, MW3 often feels stuck. There is no sense of progression.

The guns themselves control very well in both games. However, the ability to carry several guns at once gives the combat in HL2 a depth that MW3 doesn't really manage. It allows to to pick and choose guns for every situation, adding a deeper level of strategy to each encounter. Adding a limited ammo supply, you've got a deep engaging meta system at work. When you get a new gun in HL2, it's a big deal. It's something that changes the game entirely. MW3 utterly fails this potentially interesting aspect. In MW3 you can only carry two guns at once, although you can pick up weapons off of enemies or just found around the environment. Halo does this and it works well. However, Halo's weapons are very distinct, and many are self explanatory. MW3, under the pretense of realism, has actual weapons. While everyone playing probably knows what a AK-47 is, very few would know what a PKP PECHENEG or a MSR are, much less the difference between those and other guns of the same type. This combined with the lack of ammo in the weapons enemies carry and the extraordinary amount of ammo the designers give your starting gun, the game actively discourages you from experimenting with the game mechanics. Particularly since the multiplayer puts a strong emphasis on creating your own play style, this is a huge loss of engagement for the game and one that could have been fixed very easily.

Level Design: This is the basic thing that MW3 does poorly. The visual design is muddy. The enemies look like environment and look like your allies, leading to a tremendous amount of visual confusion. This coupled with you being constantly shot at from every angle, this to a game that feels cheap and frustrating. Half-Life 2 is always visually clear, and because it doesn't have a regenerating health system, the game doesn't need to throw enemies at you from all directions. The information the game presents to you is helpful, clean and classy. HL2 steadily and carefully introduces new elements to its core gameplay making the game design feel expansive and constantly growing. MW3 does throw new elements at its player often, but then drops them at the tip of a hat, so little to no depth is ever able to be cultivated out of those elements. You're given new toys, but they are only used once in any meaningful way. The sub-mechanics of HL2, such as driving cars, are given entire levels to grow and change. The car-boat-thing in the early part of the game is really good example. It starts out with you trying to avoid simple obstacles, then avoiding obstacles while fighting bad guys, then dodging obstacles while avoiding a helicopter. Is as a simple and clear progression that both escalates the difficulty, and makes the player feel like they are growing stronger, because the game is progressively teaching the player how to play. The vehicle segments in MW3 are brief and are mostly an excuse to show you spectacle. They have no weight as game mechanics. This illustrates the tremendous problem at the heart of MW3's level design; it doesn't respect the player. It tries to create excitement by forcing control out of the player's hands, and constantly orders you around. The levels are essentially corridors and the game still feels the need to place markers to show you where to go. The game is more a roller coaster than a true interactive experience. I don't know if that can be really called a bad thing, but I know this: Games can be so much more. Action movies will always create funner set pieces than games. So, it feels like a very pointless exercise to try and recreate something that can be done better in another medium. As something of a counter point, Half-Life 2 does have moments that feel very much like this. However, most of them are grounded in the mechanics. Even if the game is linear, it still feels as though you are making decisions, as if you are driving the action. The game gives the mechanics space to breath and grow and gives the player room to discover and enjoy the game. MW3 is so concerned with showing off how cool it is that it totally loses what actually makes games engaging.

Narrative:  MW3 has such a mind boggling misunderstanding of modern war, that it has two nuclear armed nations actively fighting against each other, without any threat of nuclear war. Well, ALRIGHT. HL2 on the other hand, has a much better understanding of the cost of war. While both games totally demonize their villains, the war in HL2 has victims. It has a cost. Part of what makes the finale so cathartic, is the incredible odds you see your comrades facing in the previous level. You have squad mates that are dying around you. So when you become incredibly powerful, easily able kill dozens of enemies, it packs a much bigger punch than any of the heroics in MW3.

In conclusion, Half-life 2 is really good. A masterpiece. Modern Warface 3 is, well it's bad. It was clearly made of some really talented artists and programmers, but it all is put to very little use. It just shows a little thought about the medium you are operating in goes a long way in creating a great experience. At least the multiplayer is pretty fun.