I work a student job at Towson University that involves:
1. Sitting at a desk
2. Checking student ID's
3. Signing in students' guests
It's a decent job for an English major with too much assigned reading and not enough time to do it in, but during the summer, with no class, barely fifty students living in my building, and my inclination toward gaming, I'm sure you can guess how my shifts go.
Nights, however, are handled by non-students. These night workers are security guards who, despite usually having another job, don't usually have an extra dollar. Most mornings I happen upon these adults doing adult things - reading, listening to bad music, staring at the wall bored because they forgot a book or music, and listening to radio broadcasts from churches (on Sundays). So I was surprised to find last night's security guard on her laptop playing what looked to be a Bejeweled knock-off. This after just the night before last another security guard knew i was playing Words With Friends just from the sounds of the letters hitting the board. The one that was playing the Bejeweled-esque game seemed shockingly engaged - finishing a game, checking her score compared to what appeared to be built in high scores (as opposed to actual leader boards) and starting again. This is gamer behavior. I saw a gamer partake in said behavior last night. Except the player in question had just finished possibly the best 'new' old game of the year in 4 days and, upon finishing, immediately set out to be the best player in the room on a re-imagining of another classic.
If competition is the main draw for score-based and multiplayer gaming, the second most important aspect has to be the fact that the competition is against someone that matters. The appeal of Words With Friends is the exact same one that is exhibited by the Call of Duty series on Xbox 360 - because all of your friends play, you can, in theory, be better than all of your friends at something.
Many of my recent posts have focused on the game as a tool for expression. I acknowledge the shortcomings of Janet Murray's school of thought, but those shortcomings don't make it any less interesting to read about (even if the ludologists would say it's all a bunch of pretentious crap). But it's important to view games as simply games sometimes too. If the story-rich single player experience is the game as art, competitive multiplayer is the game as sport. If this is true, we start to understand why games like Call of Duty and Words With Friends are mainstream. They're not just for mainstream gamers, but even the non-gamer. What a task the industry has - getting that Bejeweled fan to pay for Puzzle Quest 2, or that guy that only has an Xbox for the latest CoD to give Alan Wake a try. I wish them luck.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Games are Everything
Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing.
If this is true (and I think we all know it isn't, but just for the introduction, bear with me), then video games offer us an accessible avenue to one of the great senses of euphoria available to the conscious mind inside the functioning human body. While winning may not be the only thing for most if not all of us, it still offers us something that is unattainable nearly anywhere else - a sense of accomplishment paired with a feeling of superiority. While it doesn't need to be stated again how unique the role of a game is, some of the ways in which a game operates need to be outlined. Ludologists seem content to search only for differences between games and the other arts. This line of reasoning will make their arguments invaluable in the future, when everyone can see games in the same way they might see literature or film. But currently games are seen my many (most importantly, all major media) as trivial time wasters. If comic books are unintellectual sub-literary stories for nerds (not the case, of course), then video games are some combination of that realm (now often of the 'choose-your-own-adventure' style) combined with sport... but still for nerds. It's no wonder their having such a hard time getting taken seriously aside from the money they generate. But games aren't about revenue, their about interaction, and often narrative (whether implied, overt, or whatever). If video games already interest you, you can look at them however you like, and read theories and articles covering a wide array of lenses through which to view games. To get non-gamers to care, we have to compare games with other forms of entertainment and art. Luckily there are already plenty of examples to help us prove the importance of games, even to someone with no interest in playing them.
Film
from Lost Highway -
Ed: Do you own a video camera?
Renee Madison: No. Fred hates them.
Fred Madison: I like to remember things my own way.
Ed: What do you mean by that?
Fred Madison: How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened.
Maybe the easiest connection to see is between modern games and film. From the extensive cut-scenes of Final Fantasy VII to the 'play an action movie' appeal of Uncharted 2, games have been working in as much film appeal as possible since technology allowed any similarities at all. With graphical supremacy being an easy path to increasing sales, visual aspects of games (or at least mainstream games) will always be at the forefront of innovation, much like the skyrocketing of special effects in the horror movies of the late 70s and early 80s.
A similar wave of innovation may currently be taking over the gaming industry, as Nolan North (Uncharted's Nathan Drake), Ikka Villi (Alan Wake), and Aaron Stanton (L.A. Noire's Cole Phelps) lead the way in contributing body, face, voice, or all three to game characters. My hope is that this style of motion- and facial- capture will become cheaper and more accessible with continual successful uses in games. If theater is dying, somebody needs to pick up the slack, and there's no reason every triple-A title can't utilize technology of this nature to enhance realism (which is what most of them are in an arms race toward anyway).
Certainly the visual appeal of games can work in the same way that films appeal to us, but often they are less appealing. Every gamer knows at least one person who routinely skips cut-scenes 'to get to the gameplay'. There's also the issue of length. More often than not, a game will take more than ten hours to complete, with some games stretching out to over one hundred. How can we be expected to keep everything straight? How can we remember the opening scenes of a game when we played them two months ago? And how can developers put any matters of great import into cut-scenes when they know players can skip them or simply won't pay attention to them?
Gamers don't want everything presented to them exactly as developers dictate (if we did, we'd be watching film, right?), we an opportunity to complete what's set out before us by developers, and create our own experience, narrative, and memories out of them. We want things the way we remember them, not necessarily how they happened. This, among other things, serves to link games to novels.
Literature
About a year ago (or two, I'm not sure) I read John Fante's Ask The Dust. The book is set in L.A. (maybe a good ten years or so before our man Cole Phelps was put on the LAPD payroll) and follows the misadventures of Fante's alter-ego, Arturo Bandini. If I remember correctly, and I may not, I read it in my spare time over the course of a two- or three- week period. That's how most books go - I read occasionally, every once in a while hitting a little spree of a few hours (usually one when the thing starts picking up, another as I near the finish), and I go on like this until the thing is done. My friend Daniel prefers to finish books as quickly as possible, reading all day as often as he can. It doesn't surprise me in the least that our gaming habits mirror our reading habits. My loves for gaming and reading were strengthened when I realized how similar the processes are. Here we can also find a link between the sense of accomplishment gained from reading and finishing of a novel and the one gained from playing and beating a game.
When I was young, I saw the first Harry Potter movie in a theater and fell asleep. The fact that films are, for the most part, designed to be viewed with strangers in theaters, and that they can and will go on without you if you stop paying attention or lose consciousness means that they're remarkably separated from the game-playing experience, and that lets us understand why gamers so often see it acceptable to skip cut-scenes. L.A. Noire occupies an odd spot that lets you skip gameplay as well as cut-scenes, even going out of its way to tell you that you can, while it hides the ability to skip cut-scenes. But other than this example, games very often reflect books. Books are read alone, at one's own pace. Books are too long to remember in entirety with perfect clarity, so we choose which parts to remember and which to forget.
The part of Ask The Dust that I remember most clearly is a scene in which Arturo finally kisses Camilla, a Mexican waitress he's been boyishly vying after the attention of. Their relationship is more like how I would interact with an ex-girlfriend than a current interest - immature, malicious. And so when Arturo finally kisses Camilla, she bites his lip, drawing blood. There's a lot of other stuff in there, but that's the one piece that rose above the rest. This is certainly because of the rocky relationship I had with the first girl I ever had sex with, who was born in Venezuela, and the lip-biting that took place between us.
In Ian Bogost's Unit Operations, he uses the example of the Bukowski poem, "A woman on the street." The poem is an example of 'the figure that fascinates' in literature. Fante is possibly the single largest influence on Bukowski and so like this woman on the street, Camilla is very much a figure that fascinates, but one which the protagonist spends some time with before they are forced to separate. Anyone that has played Ico will remember one scene without fail. Near the end of the game, Ico and Yorda cross a bridge that begins to collapse. Ico is further ahead and could easily keep running and escape the castle in which the game is set (or so it seems, as players that attempt this will fall to their death. Look, I've played this game three times, I had to try to break it eventually). However escape, the goal of the entire game, is put on the back-burner (or possibly taken off of the stove completely) as Ico turns around to run back to Yorda. Even this isn't enough, as players must complete a short Yorda-less section before being reunited, but at that point, the player knows everything will be alright. It's that short time, those few seconds on the bridge at which point I (and a small, but equally devoted group of other gamers) realized that I didn't want to go on without the girl. With her frail body and inability to help me with puzzles, she had made things difficult every step of the way. She didn't speak anything that I could understand, and even her subtitles were in a language made of foreign looking symbols. But I had to go back to her. She's the figure that fascinates, and given the choice to continue my journey with her or alone, there was only one real option.
It's in moments like these, among hours of other obstacles, be they puzzles, boss fights, or that 35-page section that does absolutely nothing to progress the plot, that games and novels operate in the same way. We go through it all to remember very little with any clarity, but those moments make the experience for us.
Experience is everything
What makes literature and film Art as well as entertainment, is the implied emotional experience that each suggests. I value bonding over Street Fighter as much as bonding over watching or playing football, but that comparison isn't as important, as I find most young sports fans are willing to add Call of Duty or Madden to their list of competitive activities. It's the intellectual crowd and the elitists that need to be won over - though I'm sure I can only hurt my chances calling them a "crowd" of "elitists." To win over the haters, the industry needs not only to show the ability of the medium to mirror film and literature, but its ability to mirror the right film and literature. It's an uphill battle when Gears of War outsells Alan Wake, but if Heavy Rain, Team Ico games, the Bioshock series, and Metal Gear Solid are any indicators, video games as a medium will eventually garner enough respect to move them up the ladder to industrial-art-entertainment.
If this is true (and I think we all know it isn't, but just for the introduction, bear with me), then video games offer us an accessible avenue to one of the great senses of euphoria available to the conscious mind inside the functioning human body. While winning may not be the only thing for most if not all of us, it still offers us something that is unattainable nearly anywhere else - a sense of accomplishment paired with a feeling of superiority. While it doesn't need to be stated again how unique the role of a game is, some of the ways in which a game operates need to be outlined. Ludologists seem content to search only for differences between games and the other arts. This line of reasoning will make their arguments invaluable in the future, when everyone can see games in the same way they might see literature or film. But currently games are seen my many (most importantly, all major media) as trivial time wasters. If comic books are unintellectual sub-literary stories for nerds (not the case, of course), then video games are some combination of that realm (now often of the 'choose-your-own-adventure' style) combined with sport... but still for nerds. It's no wonder their having such a hard time getting taken seriously aside from the money they generate. But games aren't about revenue, their about interaction, and often narrative (whether implied, overt, or whatever). If video games already interest you, you can look at them however you like, and read theories and articles covering a wide array of lenses through which to view games. To get non-gamers to care, we have to compare games with other forms of entertainment and art. Luckily there are already plenty of examples to help us prove the importance of games, even to someone with no interest in playing them.
Film
from Lost Highway -
Ed: Do you own a video camera?
Renee Madison: No. Fred hates them.
Fred Madison: I like to remember things my own way.
Ed: What do you mean by that?
Fred Madison: How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened.
Maybe the easiest connection to see is between modern games and film. From the extensive cut-scenes of Final Fantasy VII to the 'play an action movie' appeal of Uncharted 2, games have been working in as much film appeal as possible since technology allowed any similarities at all. With graphical supremacy being an easy path to increasing sales, visual aspects of games (or at least mainstream games) will always be at the forefront of innovation, much like the skyrocketing of special effects in the horror movies of the late 70s and early 80s.
A similar wave of innovation may currently be taking over the gaming industry, as Nolan North (Uncharted's Nathan Drake), Ikka Villi (Alan Wake), and Aaron Stanton (L.A. Noire's Cole Phelps) lead the way in contributing body, face, voice, or all three to game characters. My hope is that this style of motion- and facial- capture will become cheaper and more accessible with continual successful uses in games. If theater is dying, somebody needs to pick up the slack, and there's no reason every triple-A title can't utilize technology of this nature to enhance realism (which is what most of them are in an arms race toward anyway).
Certainly the visual appeal of games can work in the same way that films appeal to us, but often they are less appealing. Every gamer knows at least one person who routinely skips cut-scenes 'to get to the gameplay'. There's also the issue of length. More often than not, a game will take more than ten hours to complete, with some games stretching out to over one hundred. How can we be expected to keep everything straight? How can we remember the opening scenes of a game when we played them two months ago? And how can developers put any matters of great import into cut-scenes when they know players can skip them or simply won't pay attention to them?
Gamers don't want everything presented to them exactly as developers dictate (if we did, we'd be watching film, right?), we an opportunity to complete what's set out before us by developers, and create our own experience, narrative, and memories out of them. We want things the way we remember them, not necessarily how they happened. This, among other things, serves to link games to novels.
Literature
About a year ago (or two, I'm not sure) I read John Fante's Ask The Dust. The book is set in L.A. (maybe a good ten years or so before our man Cole Phelps was put on the LAPD payroll) and follows the misadventures of Fante's alter-ego, Arturo Bandini. If I remember correctly, and I may not, I read it in my spare time over the course of a two- or three- week period. That's how most books go - I read occasionally, every once in a while hitting a little spree of a few hours (usually one when the thing starts picking up, another as I near the finish), and I go on like this until the thing is done. My friend Daniel prefers to finish books as quickly as possible, reading all day as often as he can. It doesn't surprise me in the least that our gaming habits mirror our reading habits. My loves for gaming and reading were strengthened when I realized how similar the processes are. Here we can also find a link between the sense of accomplishment gained from reading and finishing of a novel and the one gained from playing and beating a game.
When I was young, I saw the first Harry Potter movie in a theater and fell asleep. The fact that films are, for the most part, designed to be viewed with strangers in theaters, and that they can and will go on without you if you stop paying attention or lose consciousness means that they're remarkably separated from the game-playing experience, and that lets us understand why gamers so often see it acceptable to skip cut-scenes. L.A. Noire occupies an odd spot that lets you skip gameplay as well as cut-scenes, even going out of its way to tell you that you can, while it hides the ability to skip cut-scenes. But other than this example, games very often reflect books. Books are read alone, at one's own pace. Books are too long to remember in entirety with perfect clarity, so we choose which parts to remember and which to forget.
The part of Ask The Dust that I remember most clearly is a scene in which Arturo finally kisses Camilla, a Mexican waitress he's been boyishly vying after the attention of. Their relationship is more like how I would interact with an ex-girlfriend than a current interest - immature, malicious. And so when Arturo finally kisses Camilla, she bites his lip, drawing blood. There's a lot of other stuff in there, but that's the one piece that rose above the rest. This is certainly because of the rocky relationship I had with the first girl I ever had sex with, who was born in Venezuela, and the lip-biting that took place between us.
In Ian Bogost's Unit Operations, he uses the example of the Bukowski poem, "A woman on the street." The poem is an example of 'the figure that fascinates' in literature. Fante is possibly the single largest influence on Bukowski and so like this woman on the street, Camilla is very much a figure that fascinates, but one which the protagonist spends some time with before they are forced to separate. Anyone that has played Ico will remember one scene without fail. Near the end of the game, Ico and Yorda cross a bridge that begins to collapse. Ico is further ahead and could easily keep running and escape the castle in which the game is set (or so it seems, as players that attempt this will fall to their death. Look, I've played this game three times, I had to try to break it eventually). However escape, the goal of the entire game, is put on the back-burner (or possibly taken off of the stove completely) as Ico turns around to run back to Yorda. Even this isn't enough, as players must complete a short Yorda-less section before being reunited, but at that point, the player knows everything will be alright. It's that short time, those few seconds on the bridge at which point I (and a small, but equally devoted group of other gamers) realized that I didn't want to go on without the girl. With her frail body and inability to help me with puzzles, she had made things difficult every step of the way. She didn't speak anything that I could understand, and even her subtitles were in a language made of foreign looking symbols. But I had to go back to her. She's the figure that fascinates, and given the choice to continue my journey with her or alone, there was only one real option.
It's in moments like these, among hours of other obstacles, be they puzzles, boss fights, or that 35-page section that does absolutely nothing to progress the plot, that games and novels operate in the same way. We go through it all to remember very little with any clarity, but those moments make the experience for us.
Experience is everything
What makes literature and film Art as well as entertainment, is the implied emotional experience that each suggests. I value bonding over Street Fighter as much as bonding over watching or playing football, but that comparison isn't as important, as I find most young sports fans are willing to add Call of Duty or Madden to their list of competitive activities. It's the intellectual crowd and the elitists that need to be won over - though I'm sure I can only hurt my chances calling them a "crowd" of "elitists." To win over the haters, the industry needs not only to show the ability of the medium to mirror film and literature, but its ability to mirror the right film and literature. It's an uphill battle when Gears of War outsells Alan Wake, but if Heavy Rain, Team Ico games, the Bioshock series, and Metal Gear Solid are any indicators, video games as a medium will eventually garner enough respect to move them up the ladder to industrial-art-entertainment.
Friday, June 3, 2011
The Return
Historically, I've been a quitter. Books - I didn't finish any non-required reading until college. Film - I fell asleep; okay, I still do half the time. Games - I'm known for starting them all (usually all at the same time), and finishing almost none. Shit, I thought I had nearly quit this blog. To the six of you I kept waiting, I apologize.
Times have changed. Recently I started finishing games consistently. I used to discard anything that didn't mesh nearly perfectly with me from the get-go. Recently I finished the excellent (?) L.A. Noire after a dreadfully irritating start. Next I plan to finish up the totally disappointing Bioshock 2, and (hopefully) finally finish a Pokemon game with Pokemon White. These games all have their ups and downs, but the downs used to be the kind that would turn me to quitting - control issues, inferiority to predecessor, caves…
All desire to quit has been washed away as of late though. I just want to finish - everything. While this is part of a very legitimate excuse for lack of posts, it also seems a good place to start for the resumption of regular posting. There's a lot I have to say (really, I've had ideas for three or four essays) about L.A. Noire. I also have some thoughts on the popularity of online competitive play, especially with the new multiplayer darling Words With Friends (and also how multiplayer gaming can recreate the accomplished feelings one gets when finishing a single-player experience). Then there’s the inevitable something that will come out of finishing Twin Peaks and playing Alan Wake again. For now, this is all you get.
Many go back to old games to relive the magic of childhood gaming (you know, Roller Coaster Tycoon, or Ocarina of Time for the sixth time) and others continue with classic, sometimes stale series years after their prime. I've stumbled upon my own way of reliving these experiences. It’s a method that many game nerds have been utilizing for quite some time to varying degrees of satisfaction. I stopped being so judgmental and just started playing.
Back in the golden days of the N64, young Ross would play anything, and for as long as he could in most cases. Not fun? Maybe it’ll get better. Too hard? Try again. Ready for bed? Just a little longer. People, in general, seem to have a soft spot for pretty much every game they played as a kid. It’s not just the typical, “A Link to the Past is awesome; VII was the best Final Fantasy,” business either. Once a friend brought up Chameleon Twist and I got excited. Chameleon Twist. I had to see numerous lists of all-time worst games to realize that maybe I wasn’t bad at Superman 64, but it was bad at itself…
The point is this – I’ve been playing games again, really playing games. I’ve been playing things just for the joy of interacting with digital interfaces, progressing through a story, and just to be able to say that I finished. I’ve wanted to post something for weeks, but I’ve been too busy playing games with damn near all my free time to do so.
So often people let reviews, friends, gameplay footage, and a slew of other things dissuade them from simply trying games. This wasn’t the case with me, but I had what might be a worse problem. An example: Let’s say I paid full price for a new game, but then hastily decided that I didn’t like it and trade it in at Gamestop only three days later. Now let’s say that that actually happened – and it did – with Red Dead Redemption. Imagine my surprise when I finished the (in every way) inferior L.A. Noire with a general sense of satisfaction.
This is the first post in a long while, and it may take me a couple weeks to get another one together. In the meantime I have homework for the readers (yes, the aforementioned six of them). Play a game that you quit, never tried before, didn’t have time for, or that you let yourself believe you didn’t like. Pick something on the shorter side and actually finish it. It’s really fun. I'm going back to grinding for levels in Pokemon now.
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