libel the dead

So I just got off a nearly 13 hour plane flight, so naturally I watched a bunch of movies on the plane. Not entirely unexpectedly I had some thoughts on them.

Up In The Air (Somewhere over the pacific a fair way north of New Zealand)

George Clooney plays a convincingly detached middle aged man who spends all his time flying. So much in fact that he’s accrued 10 million miles, joining an elite cadre of ultra frequent fliers.

Quite a good film, and quite a sad one too, but I’m going to suggest that it should never be shown on planes. Quite simply, the lie that is Ryan Bingham’s ‘enjoyment’ of doing so much commercial flying is shown up most vividly when the plane on the screen and it’s smooth, quiet, and spacious trip is compared to the noisy, cramped situation that is your real and present environs. It kind of ruins the illusion also when an outside shot shows all of Clooney’s upper torso and head, when the window next to your own seat barely accommodates your entire face when it’s squished right up against it.

The Blind Side (Indeterminate location over the pacific)

A film about a black American near-homeless boy and his adoption by a white family when he gets into a private Christian school on something like a football scholarship. Early overtones of a misguided white effort at atoning for wider social ills through personal action would undoubtedly appeal to ‘down to earth’ folksy types. However too much viewing of The Wire has left me extremely critical of any such simple solutions as simply taking the boy into your own home. Why just one boy, why not 2 or 10, and so on.

Also curious is the game’s seeming inattention to the specifics of actual football playing. For a film that starts with a football play, broken down and narrated second by second by Sandra Bullock’s character, the rest of the film really shows very little actual football being played. Just seemed weird, y’know? Clearly aimed at the Republican heartland.

The Invention of Lying (Indeterminate location over the pacific slightly closer to San Francisco)

I heard from one of my best friends that this “wasn’t that good” but I quite enjoyed it. It’s really an allegorical treatment of religion, and not really about lying at all. Ricky Gervais’ character invents lying in a world completely devoid of deception, and eventually resorts to fabricating the comforting lie that there is an afterlife of paradise when faced with his scared, dying mother.

It’s about life, it’s about death and religion and Gervais paints a picture of religion as convenient lying that is meant to reassure us about the great unknown that is death. An interesting film, even if you don’t necessarily agree with it’s overarching thesis.

For some reason I’ve been watching an above average number of films this week. I’m no film critic, but here are some brief notes and observations from them in order of appearance:

Zombieland (Sunday night/Monday morning)

Zombieland was great. It was so great, actually, that instead of going to sleep at a reasonable time like I was meant to on Sunday, I stayed up far later than I should have, even as as I needed to get up early the following morning. I got about four and a half hours sleep.

The main character reminded me of a slightly older Michael Cera and it is obvious the film was obviously targeting a young-adult male audience (hey – it is a zombie movie after all). The story is pretty much wish fulfilment for every young boy – when everyone else is dead you can enjoy the best the world has to offer – but there’s also a boy meets girl plot, and Emma Stone becomes the object of male desire. Yeah, little bit of a celebrity crush right there.

A cool visual effect that ran throughout the whole film places bits of text (the protagonists ‘rules’ for surviving Zombieland) inside the world. Only the audience sees it and it serves to underscore the points being made by the continuous narration provided by the main protagonist. How he is speaking to us, or from where, is never really specified, but it gives the film a sort of ‘documentary’ feel and as an abstract layer it helps keeps the film’s tone light. In this capacity, the narration forms an integral part of keeping the audience distracted and not-too-worried about the logical inconsistencies in the world of Zombieland. For instance, why did no one respond to the zombie threat when it became apparent what was happening? Why also is the power still on in so many places apparently bereft of anyone living?

The answer is of course ‘who cares!’ and it maintains this assertion proudly and deliberately. Never is this more evident than in the scenes where Bill Murray makes a cameo. Murray’s accidental death (he was pretending to be a zombie) is visible from miles ahead but it’s easy to accept because we acknowledge that it is just the end of his cameo. Even Murray himself makes light his own death as it’s happening and Emma Stone’s character struggles to keep a straight face at his passing antics.

There Will Be Blood (Monday night/Tuesday night)

I knew I wasn’t going to get through all of TWBB when I put it on late on Monday night, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. Falling asleep as I was, I didn’t think I’d get more than five or ten minutes into it before succumbing to sleep. I was quite wrong, however, as very quickly the musical score (by Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead fame, no less) and the introduction completely devoid of dialogue captured my attention and brought me a renewed sense of wakefulness.

I stopped a bit shy of the half-way mark, right at the point where the son, HW Plainview, gets a blast full of gas and has his hearing destroyed. It was fitting because so much of the film is about the main character, Daniel Plainview and his relationship with his (adopted) son HW. The movie is deeply unsettling, on many levels, with the oftentimes abusive nature of the father/son relationship becoming truly heartbreaking. Daniel Plainviews dealings with the religious fanatic Eli Sunday was also personally confronting as it brought up memories of certain experiences of my own past that, in the cold clear view of hindsight are just as disturbing. Daniel Plainview often manages to turn the rhetoric of the ecstatic preacher Eli back against him, showing off the persuasive power of passionate fervour and the desperate disillusionment of Plainview himself.

Superbad (Tuesday night)

What compelled me to watch Superbad of all possible films? I think after the heavy There Will Be Blood I needed something of a palette cleanser, and while it certainly wasn’t cleansing in any other sense of the word, it certainly did lighten the tone.

Superbad also featured both Michael Cera (hello, a connection!) and Emma Stone, who played only a small part, but a part nonetheless (hello another connection). She has very sexy eyes – I think that’s what I like about her. It’s funny, when the guys finally read the party I kind of assumed that Cera would end up with Stone’s character and the drunk friend, played by Jonah Hill, would end up with Cera’s initial love interest, who was also horribly drunk and only interested in performing sex acts. But they decided that was not to be and the get together scene was left till the last in the mall. Oh well, you weren’t really expecting complexity were you?

While Superbad was full of questionable jokes of varying vulgarity there was one scene that seemed… well… borderline racist, is about the only way to describe it. I’m not sure whether we were supposed to be laughing at, or with the idiotic white male police as they struggled to ask the black female cashier who had just been robbed whether the assailant was African American or Caucasian. Continual depictions of the ineptitude and corruption of the two police officers also proved mildly surprising – I wondered how they got away with it, until I remembered that this was an unrated version of the film and considered that might have an impact.

I’m finished.

In the very first issue of the online Game Studies journal back in 2001, Markku Eskelinen noted that [here's a cached version if game studies is still down],

In narratives and many other kinds of fiction it is acceptable and sometimes even preferable that users are misled by being given wrong instructions. But in games the deliberate frustration of action seems clearly to be an intolerable option. One might think of unreliable maps giving false and incorrect information about the location of the player or of the objects he’s seeking – that’s something almost every writer would like to do, and almost every player and game designer to avoid…

That may have been the situation in 2001 however in 2010 it could be viewed as a sign of maturity that there are now many games that have attempted, some even quite successfully, to trick the player by employing unreliability, and specifically an unreliable narrator.

The first example that comes to mind is Bioshock (2007). David Carlton notes in his piece on the game from December “[when] you meet Tenenbaum for the first time; she makes a case that “rescuing” the little sisters is good for them, but does so in a context that paints her as an unreliable narrator.” A commenter by the name of Julian also notes on Mitch Krpata’s Games of the Decade post on Bioshock that “Atlas is practically the definition of an unreliable narrator.”

Ken Levine admitted in an interview with ShackNews that he considered and deliberately employed this technique in Bioshock. Of course, Bioshock wasn’t the first game in the ‘shock series to use an unreliable narrator, System Shock 2 (1999) had a notoriously unreliable narrator in the form of Shodan pretended to be a completely different person for large sections of the game. Kieron Gillen’s ‘The Girl Who Wanted To Be God’ is an excellent treatment and discussion of the routinely untrustworthy Shodan. You may have noticed the fact that System Shock 2’s release predates Eskilenen’s quote from Game Studies. This can be forgiven, however, for the dual reasons of the lengthy process of peer reviewed academic publishing and the fact that SS2 was, according to Giant Bomb, more of a ‘cult hit’ than commercial success.

No such excuse, however, exists for the failure to consider Final Fantasy VII (1997) and its remarkably unreliable and often disjointed narrator Cloud who is also the main player controlled character. Kurt Kalata references FFVII & Cloud’s mental delusion/confusion in the middle of a mammoth 20 page history of the Japanese role-playing game (JRPG). Kalta claims it was as one of the first implementations of an unreliable narrator in a JRPG.

Speaking of the Final Fantasy series, a reading of Final Fantasy VIII (1999) that interprets the vast majority of the game as a delusional dream occurring as the protagonist Squall dies could also be considered an implementation of an unreliable narrator.

Gregory Weir has noted that “Many games have unreliable narrators, especially in survival horror games where the player character is being affected by mental influences.” To preserve the brevity of this essay I’m going to list some of the other recent games and link to where it has been suggested they employ ambiguous or unreliable narrators; Braid (2008) in more than just the one place; The Half-Life 2 (2004) modification ‘Dear Esther‘ (2009); Emily Short posits that it is often used in Interactive Fiction works; Trent Polack has discussed unreliable narrators for Gamasutra and a commenter mentioned Portal (2007) as being another; engaging with almost any ARG ever made also involves some level of player questioning of facts presented to them (See Chris Dahlen’s “They’re here. They’re fake. Get used to it” for a great discussion of ARG’s) and if that seems like a bit of a stretch: when an ARG becomes a videogame blog and people as cluey as Michael Abbott and Simon Carless are fooled I’m willing to say that we’re dealing with some kind of an unreliable narrator.

It would not be entirely wrong to criticise my line of reasoning so far by suggesting that it has not quite addressed the specific issue Eskelinen raises. Judging from the rest of his article, Eskelinen is generally referring to games qua rules & systems and not their interpreted or perceived narrative meaning. With his mentioning of “unreliable maps giving false and incorrect information about the location of the player or of the objects he’s seeking” it’s clear that Eskelinen is talking about the seeming impossibility (or at least that it’s something “almost every player and game designer [would like] to avoid”) that mechanics, even the very geography of the game, could ever be ‘unreliable’.

STALKER: Call of Pipyat (2010) is less the unreliable narrator than it is unreliable geographer. Two key features of the game make it so – the first is the mutable nature of the location of dangerous anomalies in the zone. Whenever an emission happens the dangerous anomalies (predominantly invisible except to a specialised scanner) rearrange themselves in new patterns, theoretically ruining any safe routes previously learned. In practice, however, the anomalies are still confined to specific areas of anomalous activity limiting their potential for geographic ‘unreliability’ and one hardly ever ventures into such an area without a scanner anyway.

The second feature of the game is one particular section of underground geography that literally defies the laws of physics. Entering through a concrete door in the side of a hill, the player enters a bunker connected to a series of traversable ventilation shafts. Successfully navigating these poorly illuminated shafts (often populated with small, fast moving enemies) leads to an eerily deserted room with an open ceiling grate overhead, above which fly the games ever present crows. After exploring the empty room the player can continue on to the next, only to be faced with an identical and similarly empty room. The player continues, finding empty room after empty room, all identical, one after the other. The player consults her map, notices that she hasn’t gone very far from the entry in the side of the hill in spite of having passed through several large empty rooms…

And then the penny drops. The player turns back rather than pressing on and instead of passing through several identical rooms finds herself immediately back at the ventilation shafts. Suspicions confirmed, she tests moving forwards again this time watching the mini-map. It is the only giveaway that the player ever makes a jump through space – back to the entry point of the room she has just left. Otherwise it is visually identical and completely connected but in the games (virtual) reality she is translocated every time she attempts to pass a certain spot.

I can only speak for myself and my own experience of this area but the revelation was certainly not one that I would want “to avoid” but instead wanted to cherish and share with friends. It was an exciting personal discovery and made perfect sense in accordance with the strange paranormal logics of the STALKER universe.

To conclude, there are clearly a myriad of games from before and since Eskilenen’s article that address or deploy unreliable narrators and considering it’s desirability in writing it’s no small wonder that there are so many. However it would seem that it is much rarer to find one that is geographically unreliable, or to find one willing to explore space in such a deliberately and strategically disorienting manner. It’s seems indicative of a highly advanced gaming audience that is able to make and a similarly accomplished developer to create this kind of unreliability, even if it is in such a limited quantity. Regardless of other factors, the fact that such a game even exists is a positive sign.

For all the things Stalker: Call of Pripyat improves on it’s predecessors, achieving a consistently excellent standard of voice acting is not one of them. That might be a little unfair, actually, as on-balance the quality is satisfactory, there are still the occasional poor performances that stand head and shoulders above the rest. The one I have embedded below left me giggling with it’s sheer inanity.

The incongruity of the acknowledgment ”okay” needs to be underscored – the doctor had been missing, presumed dead, in the middle of an extremely hostile part of the already dangerous ‘Zone’, and rather than respond with the appropriate level of gravitas this strangely chipper soldier shrugs it off as if were nothing extraordinary. Quite and amusing juxtaposition.

I very nearly forgot to mention this, but on the same day as I went bowling and was conned into a $2.75 slushy I didn’t really want I also played Laser Skirmish.

In the first of the two games played I started well before losing my momentum. Getting shot frequently in the latter stages sent my peak score of 800-and-something back down to a boring 700-ish, a very mediocre score considering some were getting well over 1,000. I’m pretty good at laser tag games. I’m supposed to be pretty good at games. (I blame the previous night’s intoxication and attendant dehydration, as right after the first game I started getting cramping in my legs and had trouble walking.)

Given my condition, for the second game I obviously had to change up my tactic and I decided to draw upon the skills untold hours of videogame play had brought me. I decided to camp.

I happened upon possibly the perfect spot for it too; at a small corner before a relatively open space there was a box placed on a corner wall to further extend it out a slight way. But there was a gap underneath, and from a prone position on the ground I had both excellent cover (the box and being flat obscured both my front and back targets) and a great field of view.

I camped for about half the second game and took unsuspecting people out in quick succession, often the same people coming back to try again. Some people were ‘dead’ before they even noticed me, I was in such an unorthodox and unexpected position. My camping spot was too good. It took a guy bigger than me to physically walk up, playfully push me into a corner and fire his gun straight into one of my target point blank until he got a shot off before I gave up my position.

I rocketed to the top of my team’s score with a little more than 1,900 points. I beat all but three members of the other team, but best of all I, beat the limitations of my own body.

And people say videogames don’t teach kids anything useful.

$5.50 sounds like a lot for approximately 600ml’s of coke flavoured slushy, or at least it does where I live. But how about $5.50 for the same coke flavoured slushy with unlimited refills? Suddenly, the psychological price of the slushy becomes hyperbolic and the cost rapidly approaches zero.

That is, only as long as you intend to actually consume an unlimited number of the chilly ice and cola mix. Which in reality is a difficult proposition – I only had two of them while I was at the bowling alley tonight, and I don’t think I even finished my second one. A friend had 4, and by the end of it he was on a dead-set screaming sugar high. I kid you not; the dude was practically drunk on the sugar and caffeine.

As a result of my own more modest consumption, in effect I paid $2.75 for two slushies, the second of which I struggled to finish and didn’t even enjoy all that much. A regular, non-icy 600ml coke at the same place would realistically cost between $2.50 and $3. If I were buying a non-frozen, non-slushied coke I would never have bought a second one – I am certain that given the limit of a single bottle and the familiar, standardised portion sizing of a bottle I would never have felt the need to approximately consume 1.2 litres of coke in the equivalent time that I tried to consume the same amount of (practically free!) slushies.

Put most simply, I fell victim to the real-world equivalent of a Steam sale; except the latter is never going to give me type-2 diabetes.

Good news everyone! A game called PAX BRITANNICA has just been released on the TigSource forums. It’s a game by the No Fun Games team, who through Matthew Gallant, graciously asked me to score their game for them.

Pax Britannica was created for the GammaIV competition which exhibits every year at GDC (and who were seeking donations to cover the costs this year – but they’ve reached their target)(Edit: Michel Mcbride informs me that GammaIV actually exhibited at Montreal rather than GDC previously). Unfortunately my entry won’t be there for me to see and play when I get to GDC in March, but that’s okay because now everyone gets to benefit from playing the game right now.

The theme that the No Fun team were going for with their game was ’20K leagues under the sea’ and so I, in my infinite wisdom, decided to create a soundscape piece that intimated the noises of an underwater, steam-driven submarine. The visuals and the music work really well to create a fun and atmospheric game, but don’t just take it from me - TigSource forum-goer ‘Newton64′ said,

“the sfx and soundtrack are great. Very good mood-setting to match the pace of the motherships.”

That’s a boxquote right there! A boxquote about my own music. How exciting.

click for full size

Around mid-December of last year I was approached independetly by two magazines that wanted to do a couple of short interview/features in their publications about Permanent Death. I have now very kindly recieved a copy of each and I’ve scanned in the relevant pages for your perusal.

The first comes from German games magazine GEE Mag, and my answers to the interviewers questions have, naturally, been translated into German. I guess if you really need to know what I have to say about why I chose Far Cry 2 for permadeath, etc, you could ask either of Denis Farr or Sebastian Wuepper to translate for you (I’m sure there are others).

The second is part of a longer piece about Permanent Death as well as Robin Burkinshaw’s exceptional ‘Alice and Kev‘ blog-form machinima tale. It’s from the UK publication GamesTM, and it’s quite a cool feature.

Justin Keverne told me that also in the March issues of GamesTM is a big interview with CLINT HOCKING, which, as Justin pointed out, is very fitting.

Thanks to Oliver Klatt and Chris McMahon for the interest in Permanent Death and for being such nice interviewers. (Read more for the English mag pages…)

Read more

So I just got finished writing my final post for SLRC, it’ll be up by the time anybody reads this.

And here’s the thing, I wanted to say something about videogame journalism after Michael Walbridge’s recent post “So You Want To be A Games Writer: Don’t”. But I don’t really have anything to add except a resigned sort of agreement with Walbridge.

It’s a tough gig, this we know, but until very recently (think, since Crispy Gamer went down) the prevailing narrative has generally been along the lines of “If you’re good enough, try hard enough, for long enough, you’ll make it into something eventually”. This prevailing narrative is now highly suspect at best, an outright fabrication at worst. After reading Walbridge’s post and linking it on Twitter, N’Gai Croal noticed it and spread it around a bit more before linking to this post by a guy in pretty much the same position as Walbridge, but who has been at it for a lot longer – waiting ten years to ‘make it’ as a games journalist is a long, long time.

Then in the Sunday Papers I think someone (or perhaps Gillen himself) linked to a World of Stuart blog post looking at videogame magazine numbers and their meteoric plummet into obscurity and irrelevance. As I said in my final post at SLRC – blogs are to blame! No really, think about it – if we’re giving it away for free (and there are so many people that are) why is anyone going to pay? It’s an economic reality acknowledged by so many of the professional journalists that come out of the woodwork to comment on Walbridge’s piece.

But we’re not going to stop blogging are we? And even if ‘we’ did, no one else would, so other economic or social or technological model needs to be devised. Enter, Rock Paper Shotgun.

On his personal site, Jim Rossignol writes about how the four horsemen of RPS have worked to create the RPS community and how it really has payed dividends. Heck, I love what the site is doing so much that even I’m a subscriber. It’s interesting to me, however, that even as a community site RPS has to police its comment threads. Again, that decision has payed dividends by elevating the community and the quality of discussion. RPS comment threads can be counted on to be some of the best out there on the net (as long as neither piracy nor DRM gets a mention – which is itself such a well known fact amongst readers that it’s become a running gag and another testament to the sense of community the site has engendered).

One last cool thought by Mister Rossignol, “Online readers begin to regard certain sites as bases from which to head out onto the web from.” Facebook, Twitter, and (for PC game enthusiasts) Rock Paper Shotgun. The holy trinity.

The following is an edited conversation I had via instant message with one of my oldest friends, two days after christmas ’09.

Guy-mitchell: X’s family does this thing where everyone buy s $20 present then they all get wrapped up and put in the center, one person’s name is drawn, and they choose and unwrap a present.

Ben: Isn’t it amazing what everyone else does for Christmas?

Guy-mitchell: The next person to have their name drawn can either unwrap another one or ‘steal’ one that’s been opened.

Ben: That’s awesome!

Guy-mitchell: If yours gets ‘stolen’ you can steal someone elses, or unwrap a new one. It’s fricken’ awesome.

Ben: haha

Guy-mitchell: One of the key rules is that if something’s been stolen from you, you can’t steal that item again thus being in a couple becomes a strategic advantage.

Guy-mitchell: At one point, I stole the gift my wife’s Grandma had and then it was stolen another 5 times after that… hectic.

Ben: Must have been a really good item!

Guy-mitchell: The key is to find something to bring that lots of people will want, thus causing the most chaos. This year it was a sham wow kit and a set of golf balls.