I don’t remember how I found the Princess’ Slide secret level in Mario 64. It’s something like seventeen and a half years since I did. I don’t remember specifically my first time going down the slide, either, but only because the thousands of rides I took all blur together a bit. I can’t quite remember every twitch of the way down anymore, but I rode that slide a lot.
On Marble Blast Gold, years later, there were two levels that started you off on a steep slope, and carried on straight down. Stopping was not possible. I played those levels a lot, too. There, there was the added advantage of an odd physics simulation that meant that at high speed, if you clipped an edge you went bouncing all over the place, faster than the eye could track.
There’s something similar in some of the set pieces in the 2D Sonic games, preprepared paths that move you fast enough to leave the camera trailing behind, that let you move in a way that feels effective but still chaotic. It’s like moshing – you can’t control where you go, but you have to do something, you have to be active, to participate.
In fact, the closest experience I’ve had in real life to the experience I’m poking at here was on a dance floor, back in the days when I wasn’t so elbow-conscious. Something loud and embarrassingly teenage, probably by Linkin Park or Disturbed, came on along with the strobe and suddenly the whole dancefloor was an indistinct mess of limbs. It was too dark to tell which way was up, or where anyone was coming from. There was movement and a sense of urgency, without any room for analysis or anxiety.
I feel like that hasn’t been available so much in more recent video games. Even when games are about movement, they tend to be about movement as mastery of a space, with the penalty for bad movement being death. You see this in games like Super Meat Boy, Escape Goat 2 and even something as simple as Geometry Dash. Staying in control is essential; these games won’t do anything for you the way Sonic used to, and their tracks don’t have walls like that Mario slide.
These are games that you practice. They reward the development of a particular skill on a very even curve. They’re a manifestation of what Austin Walker called ‘the new power fantasy’, mastery not by cheat or shortcut but mastery earned as a benefit of a just world. Harsh as the games often seem, they come with an idea of fairness that’s completely at odds with reality, completely artificial.
It’s a fairness we’d like to believe in[1]. It’s also an idea that flatters our egos as players and manipulates our behaviour as consumers[2]. And I would argue that it harms us directly, as well as manipulating us and squashing our experiences. Hegemonic culture – toxic masculinity, white supremacy, gender binarism and ableism – is built centrally on an idea of mastery. It is the idea that one should be master of oneself in a particular repressive way.
I’ve written at length before on the harm this has done to me, and I’m much more a perpetrator than a victim. Hegemonic culture thrives on the idea that everything that cannot be quantified must be controlled and suppressed, which slides quickly into the totalising idea that every weakness, no matter how transient, is failure.
And those of us who enact and sustain hegemonic culture are fragile for this reason. When something challenges our conception of ourselves as masters, as paragons, we descend quickly through snappish retort and into outright violence, both in rhetoric and often physically. The mere hint of a failing is enough to crack us open and let bursts of toxicity splatter everything we touch.
None of which is new, all of which has been articulated better by cleverer people than me. But the more I think about it in the context of my relationship to video games, the more troubled I become by the latter. Games seldom tolerate failure; it is the bookend of the experience, not a phenomenon to be investigated in and of itself.
Failure is bound up with ideas of blame and responsibility. So, too, is conventional thought about moral choice – but not in video games. In games, we think of choice and action as things without responsibility, their consequences sealed away within the magic circle of the virtual. In video games, failure is about frustration and fairness, and (in at least my case) the occasional flight of a controller across a room.
There is a disconnect there. I say this not to make a moral or sociological claim about games – though I realise I’ve flirted with both. I say it to define an area of interest, to make a statement of intent. I want to make games that address responsibility, that create and explore failure without frustration, that do away with concerns of fairness altogether[3].
There’s an element of meditation in this, too, or maybe self-directed therapy. The problem with fragility is that it makes us dangerous to those who step up to shake us out of our obliviousness. We need to find ways to address our own blind spots before we can open up enough to others to be safe for them to even try to help.
Social relationships are the epitome of what cannot be mastered. You can’t, in the sense I’m talking about here, perfect your control of another human. There are no speed runs for people, no perfects, no Big Boss Ranks. Intimacy requires something that might be called cooperation, or concession, or submission – I’m not sure what the best term is, it’s something I’m very bad at.
I don’t want to blame games for that, though I think they may not have helped. I want to believe they can help, though.
I am starting with a game of falling. This is not a subtle subversion – if a quintessential moment in video games is Mario jumping over a pit, where jump and pit are precisely calibrated to match, falling down the pit is a quintessential failure.
So my game is called After Icarus:
It’s going to be another month or two before I can release
(depending when I’m able to get some music recorded), but it should be ready by
winter. In the meantime, please follow @everaftericarus and I’ll try to provide
at least occasional updates (of course, if I fail I guess I can at least claim
thematic consistency…).
[1] Please support Jackson
[2] Please support Lana Polansky
[3] Which is not to say that I want to make unfair games. ‘Fairness’ is neither a neutral nor an objective concept. The rhetoric of fairness in games often serves the most toxic elements of the community, those who demand inaccessibility and pour scorn on those denied access by it. I want to make games that no-one even tries to assess the fairness of.
Showing posts with label gaming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gaming. Show all posts
Tuesday, 18 August 2015
Thursday, 9 April 2015
To Walk a Turning World
About a month ago, Austin C. Howe was firing some shots at Final Fantasy XII on Twitter, and I responded with this somewhat ambitious declaration:
More seriously, I do think Howe's wrong that "There's nothing to say" about FFXII. I certainly didn't find it "Boring to engage with" (as my 500+ hours in-game across multiple playthroughs will testify), nor do I personally think it has a "Bad story." It's certainly a divisive, much-maligned game, but I love it and want to offer a few thoughts in its defence.
I love FFXII, first and foremost, because I love travelling through its world. As the first banner Final Fantasy title to present its entire world at a single scale[1], spaces that would previously have been very abstract are now robust, tangible and teeming with life. They're also much less, for want of a better term, cartographical – there are dramatic contours where previously there would have been only the fine lines of insubstantial cliffs.
And the game's biggest, most controversial innovations all serve to draw attention to this world. Combat no longer happens in a separate, distinct space. The gambit system has the direct consequence of minimising the role of combat altogether, reducing ordinary combat choices to a matter of how you move through the space of each zone. The random chests challenge and frustrate the idea that the goal of exploring a world is tangible or ludic reward.
FFXII is a game about travel – movement not just through space but through time as well. Where ludic elements intrude on this journey, it is to add labour and slow 'progress'. Monsters punctuate their zones, some barely dangerous enough to slow you a step, some that must be navigated carefully around (there's probably a whole essay just in the placement of the toxic marlboros and lethal elementals).
Time, and the sense of its passage, are vital to the scale of the story. FFXII's story is about being a small boat on grand, historical tides. Even your princess represents a kingdom swamped by its much larger neighbour – she is a pawn much as her domain is[2]. The story moves at the speed of monolithic empires, and if your journey was deprived of its temporal extension the game would feel fast-forwarded.
Where the plot does touch the lives of the characters, it's mostly to devalue the destination or motivation for the journey. Roughly speaking, we can identify five journeys in the narrative:
-Across the Yensan Sandsea to Raithwall's Tomb, a journey invalidated at conclusion when the Imperial Navy fly effortlessly over the same ground and capture you, in a scene that could not belabour the theme of 'you are very small and we are very big' more heavily if it tried.
-South to the sacred Mt. Bur-Omisace, where on arrival you discover that the political situation in the Empire has changed and made your trek irrelevant (bonus points here for the return to Bur-Omisace after the Stillshrine of Miriam where the Empire has been and gone in your absence, symbolically destroying the authority to which you had appealed).
-North to Archades, the Imperial Capital; here, in theory, the Empire can't trivialise your journey by effortlessly catching up because, y'know, they're already there. Instead, when you finally reach the Draklor laboratory, someone else – Reddas – is there ahead of you and already causing trouble.
-South again to Giruvegan in pursuit of Cid, who turns out not to have gone there. Giruvegan is the closest you get to a journey that is rewarded, but at best it's rewarded with a gift from the ambiguous Occuria – and the discovery that one of their number, the renegade Venat, has been supporting Vayne and Cid all along.
-Finally, the ascent of the isolated Pharos lighthouse is long enough to arguably constitute a journey in its own right, and sure enough, it gets doubly trivialised – not only is Judge Gabranth waiting at the top, but once you beat him Cid turns up out of nowhere to mess with you.
The journey, always, is what matters, what allows the world to turn; that turn serves always to extend the journey. If the ending of FFXII feels weak (and to me it felt almost irrelevant), it's because the limit of the disk means the journey can't be meaningfully extended again. The last level is short, tacked-on, isolated. It breaks away from this game's mould to fit the genre's expectations of a dramatic final confrontation.
This is a game with a profound contempt for classical notions of player engagement and reward. Its story denies the power fantasy of being the hero who shapes the world (the villains, Vayne and Cid, both use the slogan of 'the reins of history back in the hands of man'); its combat is designed to minimise any sense of environmental mastery on the player's part by detaching combat power from player input.
One of the most rewarding experiences I ever had in-game was when, needing to do some grinding to tackle some of the more daunting side-content, I decided to try walking from one end of the world to the other. It took about half an hour, I think, and I really got to feel the geographical, especially topographical, qualities of the world – down out of the Paramina Mountains, across plains and deserts that rise into the Mosphora, back down along the coast of Archadia and up again across highlands to Balfonheim.
I played it as a walking simulator, basically (maybe a hiking simulator?). And I think the game liked it.
---
[1] Yes, there's a case to be made for FFX, but I'd argue the ambiguous scale of the Calm Lands (as well as possibly the Thunder Plains and Bikanel Desert) counts against it.
[2] It's not my place to launch into gender critique, but I'll acknowledge there's no way the devs would have ever done that with a prince – they even kill both prince and king off at the start of the story to avoid doing so.
More seriously, I do think Howe's wrong that "There's nothing to say" about FFXII. I certainly didn't find it "Boring to engage with" (as my 500+ hours in-game across multiple playthroughs will testify), nor do I personally think it has a "Bad story." It's certainly a divisive, much-maligned game, but I love it and want to offer a few thoughts in its defence.
 |
| Not helping, Vaan. (image from) |
And the game's biggest, most controversial innovations all serve to draw attention to this world. Combat no longer happens in a separate, distinct space. The gambit system has the direct consequence of minimising the role of combat altogether, reducing ordinary combat choices to a matter of how you move through the space of each zone. The random chests challenge and frustrate the idea that the goal of exploring a world is tangible or ludic reward.
FFXII is a game about travel – movement not just through space but through time as well. Where ludic elements intrude on this journey, it is to add labour and slow 'progress'. Monsters punctuate their zones, some barely dangerous enough to slow you a step, some that must be navigated carefully around (there's probably a whole essay just in the placement of the toxic marlboros and lethal elementals).
Time, and the sense of its passage, are vital to the scale of the story. FFXII's story is about being a small boat on grand, historical tides. Even your princess represents a kingdom swamped by its much larger neighbour – she is a pawn much as her domain is[2]. The story moves at the speed of monolithic empires, and if your journey was deprived of its temporal extension the game would feel fast-forwarded.
Where the plot does touch the lives of the characters, it's mostly to devalue the destination or motivation for the journey. Roughly speaking, we can identify five journeys in the narrative:
-Across the Yensan Sandsea to Raithwall's Tomb, a journey invalidated at conclusion when the Imperial Navy fly effortlessly over the same ground and capture you, in a scene that could not belabour the theme of 'you are very small and we are very big' more heavily if it tried.
-South to the sacred Mt. Bur-Omisace, where on arrival you discover that the political situation in the Empire has changed and made your trek irrelevant (bonus points here for the return to Bur-Omisace after the Stillshrine of Miriam where the Empire has been and gone in your absence, symbolically destroying the authority to which you had appealed).
-North to Archades, the Imperial Capital; here, in theory, the Empire can't trivialise your journey by effortlessly catching up because, y'know, they're already there. Instead, when you finally reach the Draklor laboratory, someone else – Reddas – is there ahead of you and already causing trouble.
-South again to Giruvegan in pursuit of Cid, who turns out not to have gone there. Giruvegan is the closest you get to a journey that is rewarded, but at best it's rewarded with a gift from the ambiguous Occuria – and the discovery that one of their number, the renegade Venat, has been supporting Vayne and Cid all along.
-Finally, the ascent of the isolated Pharos lighthouse is long enough to arguably constitute a journey in its own right, and sure enough, it gets doubly trivialised – not only is Judge Gabranth waiting at the top, but once you beat him Cid turns up out of nowhere to mess with you.
The journey, always, is what matters, what allows the world to turn; that turn serves always to extend the journey. If the ending of FFXII feels weak (and to me it felt almost irrelevant), it's because the limit of the disk means the journey can't be meaningfully extended again. The last level is short, tacked-on, isolated. It breaks away from this game's mould to fit the genre's expectations of a dramatic final confrontation.
This is a game with a profound contempt for classical notions of player engagement and reward. Its story denies the power fantasy of being the hero who shapes the world (the villains, Vayne and Cid, both use the slogan of 'the reins of history back in the hands of man'); its combat is designed to minimise any sense of environmental mastery on the player's part by detaching combat power from player input.
One of the most rewarding experiences I ever had in-game was when, needing to do some grinding to tackle some of the more daunting side-content, I decided to try walking from one end of the world to the other. It took about half an hour, I think, and I really got to feel the geographical, especially topographical, qualities of the world – down out of the Paramina Mountains, across plains and deserts that rise into the Mosphora, back down along the coast of Archadia and up again across highlands to Balfonheim.
I played it as a walking simulator, basically (maybe a hiking simulator?). And I think the game liked it.
---
[1] Yes, there's a case to be made for FFX, but I'd argue the ambiguous scale of the Calm Lands (as well as possibly the Thunder Plains and Bikanel Desert) counts against it.
[2] It's not my place to launch into gender critique, but I'll acknowledge there's no way the devs would have ever done that with a prince – they even kill both prince and king off at the start of the story to avoid doing so.
Wednesday, 25 March 2015
Setting Out My Stall
Hi. My name is Becky, I'm a lecturer in philosophy, and I'm part of a project within my university to launch a course in video game studies. To that end, I'd like to ask for some feedback on our plans and their potential pitfalls.
Above all else, and the reason I'm doing this so early in the process, I want to create a course which doesn’t contribute further to the marginalisation of anyone. Since we're talking entrenched British academia on my end, that's a big ask. What I want is to teach a course that works against the gamergate mentality, the mainstream, product-oriented, privileging focus of so much of the cultural space given over to games. Here's our very tentative plan so far:
The project, for now at least, is happening within our School of the Arts, which comprises Philosophy (my department), Architecture, English, Music and Communication Studies. We hope to have collaboration from Computer Science eventually, and possibly also Psychology and Sociology, but for now this is specifically an Arts project (not necessarily a fine arts project).
Our initial offering is not intended to be a full degree in its own right – we're going to offer a minor and a 50% course. The minor will be cross-taught between the various departments, and the idea is to round it out to 50% with subject-specific modules. So, for example, the music department already has a practical 'sound design for video games' module in the works (they're a bit ahead of the curve because their head of department is our project leader).
Things are still at a very early stage with the specifics, so all of what follows is subject to change (and open to debate), but the first thing we've got to do is plan out the four modules we'll need to offer at the start of the program (which we're aiming to roll out in September 2016). Currently, those modules are:
'Histories, Cultures and Contexts' – this was my pitch, my aim being to cover both the development of 'video games' and of the study of games and gaming. Fundamentally, what I want to do with this is bring out the relationships between digital games and all the other forms of art they draw on – to challenge the exceptionalism that has motivated at least some recent commentary on the form (he said, eyes pointed firmly to one side).
'Gaming Genres' – which I'm a bit wary of, since it's a short hop from classification to prescription, but I know that a critical look at genre within film studies can be helpful, so there should be at least some use here. I don't know of much established work in this field, though, besides what's covered in this Extra Credits video, so any suggestions are welcome.
'Creative Principles in Game Design' – we don't want to create a course that is purely theoretical. I think this module is intended to take some of the theoretical material from the first two and look at how to use it in practice. I imagine this will primarily be the domain of music and architecture (who are already talking about what 3D modelling software to use), but there may be some room to cover themes like decentralising the player.
'Analysing Games' – this is to be a module in close readings. We haven't had any discussion yet of what games to look at, though it was suggested that we're looking for about 4. I'd welcome suggestions, obviously, but I'm also interested in what sort of balance of games would be appropriate – we're likely to have to look at at least a couple of AAA games, but I'd really like to push some less mainstream stuff as well.
That's what we're planning to develop, and there are specific pitfalls in at least some of those fields. There are also some general pitfalls. First and most problematically, the entire core team at the moment is white and male (though our Head of School is a woman, and we are reaching out to a couple of our female colleagues about possible contributions). Over the long term, I hope we can address this with some proactive recruiting, but we have no money for hiring at the moment (I'm not even sure if I'll be employed past June yet).
Student recruitment with diversity in mind is an equally difficult challenge. Access to higher education is contracting severely in the UK, and the institutional average is pretty terrible, but even matching the institutional average for such a male-coded field will take deliberate, careful effort.
The other big issue I worry about is how to relate what we're doing to established games academia. We have to cover that set of models and theories, and do so critically, but I know there are some sensitive egos in that part of the world and academic disputes can get pretty ugly (hence Sayre's law).
As I said above, this is all primarily concerned with teaching content rather than research. I'm aware that there's a problem of academics adopting and then claiming credit for ideas originally developed outside the academy, and I will try to oppose this, but any kind of centrally-organised research within our project is further down the line.
I hope I'm not asking you to do my work for me. As a relative newcomer, it's my responsibility to study the field of gaming scrupulously, and particularly when it comes to altgames and marginalised groups I'm aware of the problem of privileged, ignorant folks demanding to be taught. Any feedback you are willing to offer, though, is extremely welcome as a guide and check-rein. Comments are open below (I'll be moderating heavily, at least if it proves necessary), or you can poke me on Twitter for email contact.
A little bit about me, for background: my philosophical specialisms are idealism and the metaphysics of space, and I also teach logic. Besides gaming, I write occasional fantasy novels and I'm a musician (a thorough google search will probably turn up my rather lacklustre recorded efforts, but I'm not going to make it easy for you).
Above all else, and the reason I'm doing this so early in the process, I want to create a course which doesn’t contribute further to the marginalisation of anyone. Since we're talking entrenched British academia on my end, that's a big ask. What I want is to teach a course that works against the gamergate mentality, the mainstream, product-oriented, privileging focus of so much of the cultural space given over to games. Here's our very tentative plan so far:
The project, for now at least, is happening within our School of the Arts, which comprises Philosophy (my department), Architecture, English, Music and Communication Studies. We hope to have collaboration from Computer Science eventually, and possibly also Psychology and Sociology, but for now this is specifically an Arts project (not necessarily a fine arts project).
Our initial offering is not intended to be a full degree in its own right – we're going to offer a minor and a 50% course. The minor will be cross-taught between the various departments, and the idea is to round it out to 50% with subject-specific modules. So, for example, the music department already has a practical 'sound design for video games' module in the works (they're a bit ahead of the curve because their head of department is our project leader).
Things are still at a very early stage with the specifics, so all of what follows is subject to change (and open to debate), but the first thing we've got to do is plan out the four modules we'll need to offer at the start of the program (which we're aiming to roll out in September 2016). Currently, those modules are:
'Histories, Cultures and Contexts' – this was my pitch, my aim being to cover both the development of 'video games' and of the study of games and gaming. Fundamentally, what I want to do with this is bring out the relationships between digital games and all the other forms of art they draw on – to challenge the exceptionalism that has motivated at least some recent commentary on the form (he said, eyes pointed firmly to one side).
'Gaming Genres' – which I'm a bit wary of, since it's a short hop from classification to prescription, but I know that a critical look at genre within film studies can be helpful, so there should be at least some use here. I don't know of much established work in this field, though, besides what's covered in this Extra Credits video, so any suggestions are welcome.
'Creative Principles in Game Design' – we don't want to create a course that is purely theoretical. I think this module is intended to take some of the theoretical material from the first two and look at how to use it in practice. I imagine this will primarily be the domain of music and architecture (who are already talking about what 3D modelling software to use), but there may be some room to cover themes like decentralising the player.
'Analysing Games' – this is to be a module in close readings. We haven't had any discussion yet of what games to look at, though it was suggested that we're looking for about 4. I'd welcome suggestions, obviously, but I'm also interested in what sort of balance of games would be appropriate – we're likely to have to look at at least a couple of AAA games, but I'd really like to push some less mainstream stuff as well.
That's what we're planning to develop, and there are specific pitfalls in at least some of those fields. There are also some general pitfalls. First and most problematically, the entire core team at the moment is white and male (though our Head of School is a woman, and we are reaching out to a couple of our female colleagues about possible contributions). Over the long term, I hope we can address this with some proactive recruiting, but we have no money for hiring at the moment (I'm not even sure if I'll be employed past June yet).
Student recruitment with diversity in mind is an equally difficult challenge. Access to higher education is contracting severely in the UK, and the institutional average is pretty terrible, but even matching the institutional average for such a male-coded field will take deliberate, careful effort.
The other big issue I worry about is how to relate what we're doing to established games academia. We have to cover that set of models and theories, and do so critically, but I know there are some sensitive egos in that part of the world and academic disputes can get pretty ugly (hence Sayre's law).
As I said above, this is all primarily concerned with teaching content rather than research. I'm aware that there's a problem of academics adopting and then claiming credit for ideas originally developed outside the academy, and I will try to oppose this, but any kind of centrally-organised research within our project is further down the line.
I hope I'm not asking you to do my work for me. As a relative newcomer, it's my responsibility to study the field of gaming scrupulously, and particularly when it comes to altgames and marginalised groups I'm aware of the problem of privileged, ignorant folks demanding to be taught. Any feedback you are willing to offer, though, is extremely welcome as a guide and check-rein. Comments are open below (I'll be moderating heavily, at least if it proves necessary), or you can poke me on Twitter for email contact.
A little bit about me, for background: my philosophical specialisms are idealism and the metaphysics of space, and I also teach logic. Besides gaming, I write occasional fantasy novels and I'm a musician (a thorough google search will probably turn up my rather lacklustre recorded efforts, but I'm not going to make it easy for you).
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