Again, this will be spoilerific... perhaps more so than my Call of Duty 4 post.
So, before I begin, I will gladly admit that I am a BioWare fan... and dare I say it? Yes, I dare. I am a BioWare fanboy. While I'm not hardcore enough to have MDK... I have the two Baldur's Gate games, Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire and the recently released Mass Effect. In fact, I am probably one of 50 people in the world who would openly admit to being a David Gaider fan and while I hate displays of nationalistic pride when it comes to art or sports (USA! USA!), I am genuinely proud that BioWare is a Canadian company.
With all that preamble out of the way, I'll say that I have forgiven the game for many of its game breaking and technological problems. Some of the classes are just unbalanced for even normal difficulty while some of the classes are essentially invulnerable once you reach level 25. There's the classic loading problems (people ignored Portal's elevators, didn't they?), screen tearing and Unreal Engine 3 related texture pop-up problems. I also think Jennifer Hale is the best voice actress in the industry and I would pay her to read the back of cereal boxes, so having her be the voice of (female) Shepard didn't hurt either.
But, let's ignore all that reviewey stuff. At this point, you've either played the game or you've ignored it to play Halo 3 or Lost Odyssey. Mass Effect is the latest game in BioWare's opus of interactive ethics games. The twist this time is that the binary isn't good vs evil... it's good cop vs bad cop or Paragon vs Renegade. "Jack Bauer in space", as one of the designers put it. In many ways, the system has been greatly simplified from previous BioWare games. Being Paragon unlocks some Charm points and opens up more Charm slots to allocate points to, which in turn unlocks various dialogue options in the game and to make shopping at stores cheaper. But unlike KoTOR or JE, there are no specific gameplay advantages to being a full Paragon. The light side character in KoTOR has a special advantage when using light side powers and is penalized for using dark side powers. In ME, a rifle is a rifle... it doesn't matter if you're good or bad. The end result is that you are maxing out your Paragon slot in order to max out your Charm and to unlock new dialogue options and nothing more.
The huge problem here is that you are forced to choose a path one way or the other. There are no shades of gray here (in KoTOR, there was a specific item that you could only equip as a "gray" Jedi, and Jolee Bindo encouraged you to ride the line and not choose one or the other). If you want to unlock the "Charismatic" achievement where you "Use Charm or Intimidate to resolve an impossible situation", you must have 10-12 points in Charm or Intimidate. (This is when you convince Wrex to stand down on Virmire or convince Saren to commit suicide at the Citadel). The only way to do that in a single playthrough is to stick to a course and rack up as many Paragon or Renegade points as possible. The only advantage to this system is that unlike past BioWare games, there is no one single point where you choose your ending. In both KoTOR and JE, your previous actions had no bearing on the game ending... it came down to one specific choice you made near the end game. Here, your ending is based on your Paragon or Renegade values at the end of the game, even in spite of your decision to save or kill the Council.
Despite the simplified morality system, some of the complex emotions still exist. Just like many other gamers out there, I slowly grew more uncomfortable making Renegade choices. I felt horrible while my Shepard gleefully pushed the button that killed the Rachni queen. And Feros? That planet nearly broke me. Not only did I have to kill every colonist who was being controlled by the Thorian, an event which is horrible enough... but the aftermath of the battle with the Thorian? In case you haven't seen this part, after you kill the Thorian, the Asari is set free. She tells you everything she knows about the Conduit and in the end, you have to decide her fate. The Renegade choice here is to "make her pay for her crimes". But this isn't just a simple case of shooting her. She looks at you, agrees with your choice, turns around and kneels down so that you have a perfect shot at the back of her head. It was perhaps one of the most disturbing moments in the game for me.
The deeper question is why was this disturbing? For me, the answer is player agency. The mere fact that you personally choose to drive your character down this path makes you complicit in a way that you aren't when you read a novel or watch a film. Like the famous ending of Metal Gear Solid 3, you pulled the trigger... not the author of the text. This is something I've wanted to explore for the last three years, but I haven't found the right framework. Psychology? Sociology? Philosophy? Narratology? Or God forbid, Ludology? There are also a lot of questions, of course. Is this system of ethics culturally located? For the few Japanese players who have finished the game, did they have the same experience? Is it "wrong" if you do not feel guilty after making "bad" choices? Many players can, as with novels and film, separate themselves from the text. Even though they are personally making the decisions, to them it's "just a game". While I'm far, far away from contemplating my dissertation, I know that I will be answering these questions and more.
For a game of choices, there is also one moment in the game where player agency is constructed in a, as a Star Trek fan might put it, "Kobyashi Maru" scenario. On Virmire, near the end of the mission your team splits up and at some point, both members of your team are under attack. You have to make a choice to save either Kaidan or Ashley. Now, there is of course the larger meta-game at play here - if you are pursuing a romantic relationship with one of the characters, obviously you would want to save them. Also, if you need a strong Soldier or Sentinel in your party, that might inform your decision as well. But let's ignore that for a moment. Here you are presented with the illusion of choice, since either decision you make you are condemning one of your characters to death by nuclear explosion. This is a scene that replicates the "tough choice" that we see military officers make in various war films, only this time you are the one who is forced to make the choice and deal with the consequences. Indeed, if you choose to save your love interest, the character will wonder if you saved them because of that relationship, questioning your ability to make rational judgements (and perhaps reinforcing the idea that superior officers should not sleep with their subordinates). However you read it, narratologically, it is a moment of player agency that isn't agency at all. You choose who to save, but in an ideal game situation, you would be able to save both characters and still kick Saren's ass.
Peter Molyneux suggested that most game players simply could not accept negative outcomes as a natural property of video games. In Fable 2, when you are knocked out your character is permanently physically scarred. He pointed out that in testing, most players would simply turn of their consoles and restart the game rather than deal with the consequences of their failure. As a result, he was forced to remove that aspect from the game entirely. By building in failure right into the game narrative, Drew Karpyshyn (and his writing team) created a narrative where failure was inescapable and the player was complicit with that failure. While you can react to that failure with compassion or anger after the fact, this is an failure you must face whether you are a Paragon or Renegade player.
In a year where player agency was the new focus of major games - see Bioshock, Portal and The Darkness - this moment was as much a standout as the nuclear weapon going off in Call of Duty 4 and potentially says as much about the text itself and its underlying themes of leadership, command and ethics.
One final point. As someone who saw the anxiety over the series finale of The Sopranos, both in public discourse and within academia, the lack of narrative closure in Mass Effect did bother me. For all their successes, BioWare's writing teams seem to have a problem with denouements. KoTOR just ends, regardless of your choices. JE gives you an ending, but they are a series of text pages that perhaps foreshadow the ungainly reading that Sakaguchi put into Lost Odyssey. Mass Effect is no different. Yes, the game is the first in a trilogy... but does that mean that your characters can't take the time to mourn the death of Kaidan or Ashley? Or that your character can't take the time to help Tali find her way back to her fleet? Or perhaps help Wrex use Saren's research to save his people from extinction? Or have your character simply spend time with your love interest, if you chose one?
Maybe the sequel will address some of these unfinished plot threads... we can only hope.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
New Games Journalism
The phrase "New Games Journalism" is almost like a curse in the gaming press. Jeff Gerstmann, formerly of GameSpot and now of Giant Bomb, has totally resisted the phrase, suggesting that the game press shouldn't aim for the example of Edward R. Murrow or Pauline Kael. This is an opinion shared by many writers in the industry, including those at 1up.com, IGN.com and Future US.
While I certainly value Gerstmann's opinion as a long term veteran of the gaming press, I feel that this is extremely shortsighted. He advocates a "consumer reports" type approach to reviews. The facts and just the facts. What's good, what's bad, and why you should or should not buy the game. Unfortunately, I believe that this style of review is essentially impossible - Gerstmann's own Kane and Lynch review and the subsequent controversy would seem to disprove his position on the issue.
Shawn Elliot of the now defunct Games For Windows Magazine once called the press "professional enthusiasts" and recently referred to his occupation as a "game boner stoker", a not so subtle admission that the current state of games journalism is anything but journalism.
Not surprisingly, GFW Magazine and CGW Magazine was one of the few American game enthusiast magazines to print multi-page articles not tied to a new preview of Halo 5 or Final Fantasy 17 EX Crystalis or whatever the hot new game of the moment might be. Yes, they do the previews, but they've also featured articles examining Christian gaming and Islamic gaming, topics that are anathema in the gaming press. Freelancers such Lara Crigger and Evan Shamoon contributed articles to the magazine on peripheral issues related to gaming or on small games that would never make the cover of the magazine. I should stop before this turns into a full blown eulogy.
(I should note that I share the same opinion of Game Informer magazine. While other gaming press outlets were left wondering why Koreans like Starcraft, Game Informer sent someone to Korea to actually try to answer the question. The writer interviewed Koreans, went to PC Bangs, and did what journalists who want to answer a question usually do - investigate. The result was a 10+ page spread in a magazine usually devoted to console games... not on Starcraft 2 itself, but on the role of Starcraft in Korea.)
While the closure of the magazine would seem to indicate that people who play games do not want these types of articles, I believe in the contrary. N'Gai Croal and the MTV Multiplayer Blog prove that you can have more in depth articles that are not game previews or reviews. Indeed, Patrick Klepek's recent investigative article on the 360 remote would indicate that there is space for game journalists to actually be journalists and not be the mouth piece of large game companies.
Should the gaming press aspire to Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert or Edward R. Murrow? It's only games, right? Games aren't as serious as film or the news. But why not try your best? Why not aim to have your name added to that lexicon of journalists? What are games journalists and game players afraid of? It's time to grow up and I, for one, anticipate reading the work of the next Pauline Kael of games journalism.
While I certainly value Gerstmann's opinion as a long term veteran of the gaming press, I feel that this is extremely shortsighted. He advocates a "consumer reports" type approach to reviews. The facts and just the facts. What's good, what's bad, and why you should or should not buy the game. Unfortunately, I believe that this style of review is essentially impossible - Gerstmann's own Kane and Lynch review and the subsequent controversy would seem to disprove his position on the issue.
Shawn Elliot of the now defunct Games For Windows Magazine once called the press "professional enthusiasts" and recently referred to his occupation as a "game boner stoker", a not so subtle admission that the current state of games journalism is anything but journalism.
Not surprisingly, GFW Magazine and CGW Magazine was one of the few American game enthusiast magazines to print multi-page articles not tied to a new preview of Halo 5 or Final Fantasy 17 EX Crystalis or whatever the hot new game of the moment might be. Yes, they do the previews, but they've also featured articles examining Christian gaming and Islamic gaming, topics that are anathema in the gaming press. Freelancers such Lara Crigger and Evan Shamoon contributed articles to the magazine on peripheral issues related to gaming or on small games that would never make the cover of the magazine. I should stop before this turns into a full blown eulogy.
(I should note that I share the same opinion of Game Informer magazine. While other gaming press outlets were left wondering why Koreans like Starcraft, Game Informer sent someone to Korea to actually try to answer the question. The writer interviewed Koreans, went to PC Bangs, and did what journalists who want to answer a question usually do - investigate. The result was a 10+ page spread in a magazine usually devoted to console games... not on Starcraft 2 itself, but on the role of Starcraft in Korea.)
While the closure of the magazine would seem to indicate that people who play games do not want these types of articles, I believe in the contrary. N'Gai Croal and the MTV Multiplayer Blog prove that you can have more in depth articles that are not game previews or reviews. Indeed, Patrick Klepek's recent investigative article on the 360 remote would indicate that there is space for game journalists to actually be journalists and not be the mouth piece of large game companies.
Should the gaming press aspire to Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert or Edward R. Murrow? It's only games, right? Games aren't as serious as film or the news. But why not try your best? Why not aim to have your name added to that lexicon of journalists? What are games journalists and game players afraid of? It's time to grow up and I, for one, anticipate reading the work of the next Pauline Kael of games journalism.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Reading Call of Duty 4
Getting waylaid once again, this time I'm just going to work on short, brief posts.
There has been some question on whether games can be taken serious or should be taken seriously. The backlash against N'Gai Croal after his comments on the MTV Multiplayer Blog here sparked an outcry across the big gaming forums, claiming that Croal had been taking the Resident Evil 5 trailer too seriously.
That topic has been discussed to death and really, after the GFW Radio podcast from 04/18/2008, the PC editorial staff at 1up.com has covered most of the bases.
What I want to do here is show that games can be "read" in the same way that pretentious, out of touch academics "read" works of literature and film. Disclaimer: I am an PhD student in English Literature, so I'm one of "those" people.
So, why Call of Duty 4? It's one of the biggest games of 2007, tops the NPD monthly sales charts and tops the Xbox Live play charts. Launching the map packs a couple of weeks ago brought Live marketplace to a crawl, crippling it for at least a day. It's one of the few games that nearly everyone knows about and when people think games that can be read, people immediate point to Bioshock, not something mainstream like CoD4.
*spoiler alert*
Let's begin by looking at how the game starts. You take the role of Yasir Al-Fulani, president of an unnamed country that is obviously Saudi Arabia if you know how to use an atlas or Google Earth. You have extremely limited control at this point - in fact, you are basically a moving camera, forced to watch as your capital city is taken over by Khaled Al-Asad. Over the PA system, you are called an American collaborator who has grown wealthy working as an American puppet as the people of the country grow poor. See any parallels to the real world here?
Let's look at the fact that you are quite literally a puppet in this moment, being controlled by the game designers who decided that the game should begin this way. Here, you are complicit with Al-Fulani, a mere puppet for some greater power, forcibly complying with this greater power's wishes in order to get more. In Al-Fulani's case, maybe it was military support or money. In the player's case, it's a desire to progress the plot of the game.
Let's not go overboard here. Someone could keep going with this one scene and I think they should, but in the interest of brevity, let's move on.
Much has been said of the AC-130 gunship scene and I really don't need to cover it again here. If you don't see anything deeper in this scene than just blowing away Russians with a howitzer, maybe you need to watch the news or find some AC-130 footage on YouTube.
No, the big scene I really want to talk about is the end of Act 1. In fact, I would argue that this was the biggest moment in gaming and for gaming in 2007. To set the scene, you are in the capital city of this unnamed Middle Eastern country as part of an American invasion force. Through the course of this mission, a Cobra pilot is taken down by a RPG and your Lieutenant orders you to pull her out and save her life. After you do just that, a nuclear bomb detonates and you are knocked out. When you wake up, you see you are right in the middle of the aftermath of a nuclear attack - the huge mushroom cloud is right there in the distance. You can hear over loudspeakers or your radio that American forces are trying to save survivors... but your controller starts to rumble and you can hear a beating coming from your speakers. Seconds later, the screen turns to white and you are listed as KIA.
That's right. This is the first Call of Duty game, if not one of the first FPSes, where you really die. Maybe you can chalk Al-Fulani up as a throwaway character... but this is a US soldier, your true cipher into the game world. This game changing event even impressed Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation fame, and that's saying something if you're familiar with his reviews.
But what does this mean? It basically renders the entire first Act a "waste". Al-Asad used the coup as a distraction against the true threat in Russia and it worked, since thousands of American soldiers are dead and he's closer to getting to that Russian nuclear facility that appears in Act 2 and 3. Your personal victory of pulling out the injured Cobra pilot and dragging her back to your helicopter is rendered meaningless by her death, the death of your squad, the death of the thousands of other soldiers in the city and your death. It doesn't matter if you're the greatest CoD4 player in the world and you pulled that pilot out on Veteran difficulty while time to spare. That effort was pointless, because in the end, you still died.
If this moment isn't as thoughtful as a similar moment in Platoon or Full Metal Jacket, I don't know what is.
The game ends in the same way, with everyone in your SAS team getting wiped out. It's implied that you don't die, but you can't know that for sure. You save the United States from a nuclear attack, but at the cost of the lives of your friends. The ultimate price for answering the "call of duty".
Is CoD4 a fun game? Yeah, of course it is. Infinity Ward never disappoints... (well, except for spawn closets) But just because it's fun doesn't mean that it can have a deeper message or that it can be "read". I hope I've shown that here today.
There has been some question on whether games can be taken serious or should be taken seriously. The backlash against N'Gai Croal after his comments on the MTV Multiplayer Blog here sparked an outcry across the big gaming forums, claiming that Croal had been taking the Resident Evil 5 trailer too seriously.
That topic has been discussed to death and really, after the GFW Radio podcast from 04/18/2008, the PC editorial staff at 1up.com has covered most of the bases.
What I want to do here is show that games can be "read" in the same way that pretentious, out of touch academics "read" works of literature and film. Disclaimer: I am an PhD student in English Literature, so I'm one of "those" people.
So, why Call of Duty 4? It's one of the biggest games of 2007, tops the NPD monthly sales charts and tops the Xbox Live play charts. Launching the map packs a couple of weeks ago brought Live marketplace to a crawl, crippling it for at least a day. It's one of the few games that nearly everyone knows about and when people think games that can be read, people immediate point to Bioshock, not something mainstream like CoD4.
*spoiler alert*
Let's begin by looking at how the game starts. You take the role of Yasir Al-Fulani, president of an unnamed country that is obviously Saudi Arabia if you know how to use an atlas or Google Earth. You have extremely limited control at this point - in fact, you are basically a moving camera, forced to watch as your capital city is taken over by Khaled Al-Asad. Over the PA system, you are called an American collaborator who has grown wealthy working as an American puppet as the people of the country grow poor. See any parallels to the real world here?
Let's look at the fact that you are quite literally a puppet in this moment, being controlled by the game designers who decided that the game should begin this way. Here, you are complicit with Al-Fulani, a mere puppet for some greater power, forcibly complying with this greater power's wishes in order to get more. In Al-Fulani's case, maybe it was military support or money. In the player's case, it's a desire to progress the plot of the game.
Let's not go overboard here. Someone could keep going with this one scene and I think they should, but in the interest of brevity, let's move on.
Much has been said of the AC-130 gunship scene and I really don't need to cover it again here. If you don't see anything deeper in this scene than just blowing away Russians with a howitzer, maybe you need to watch the news or find some AC-130 footage on YouTube.
No, the big scene I really want to talk about is the end of Act 1. In fact, I would argue that this was the biggest moment in gaming and for gaming in 2007. To set the scene, you are in the capital city of this unnamed Middle Eastern country as part of an American invasion force. Through the course of this mission, a Cobra pilot is taken down by a RPG and your Lieutenant orders you to pull her out and save her life. After you do just that, a nuclear bomb detonates and you are knocked out. When you wake up, you see you are right in the middle of the aftermath of a nuclear attack - the huge mushroom cloud is right there in the distance. You can hear over loudspeakers or your radio that American forces are trying to save survivors... but your controller starts to rumble and you can hear a beating coming from your speakers. Seconds later, the screen turns to white and you are listed as KIA.
That's right. This is the first Call of Duty game, if not one of the first FPSes, where you really die. Maybe you can chalk Al-Fulani up as a throwaway character... but this is a US soldier, your true cipher into the game world. This game changing event even impressed Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation fame, and that's saying something if you're familiar with his reviews.
But what does this mean? It basically renders the entire first Act a "waste". Al-Asad used the coup as a distraction against the true threat in Russia and it worked, since thousands of American soldiers are dead and he's closer to getting to that Russian nuclear facility that appears in Act 2 and 3. Your personal victory of pulling out the injured Cobra pilot and dragging her back to your helicopter is rendered meaningless by her death, the death of your squad, the death of the thousands of other soldiers in the city and your death. It doesn't matter if you're the greatest CoD4 player in the world and you pulled that pilot out on Veteran difficulty while time to spare. That effort was pointless, because in the end, you still died.
If this moment isn't as thoughtful as a similar moment in Platoon or Full Metal Jacket, I don't know what is.
The game ends in the same way, with everyone in your SAS team getting wiped out. It's implied that you don't die, but you can't know that for sure. You save the United States from a nuclear attack, but at the cost of the lives of your friends. The ultimate price for answering the "call of duty".
Is CoD4 a fun game? Yeah, of course it is. Infinity Ward never disappoints... (well, except for spawn closets) But just because it's fun doesn't mean that it can have a deeper message or that it can be "read". I hope I've shown that here today.
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