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Fallout 4 and the end of history

I forgot to post up my fave bit of writing published by the lovely people at First Person Scholar in Canada on Fallout 4′s inability to imagine a fundamentally different world.

FPS is full of well researched that engage theoretically with VG’s  http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/fallout-4-and-the-end-of-history/

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Kane and Lynch 2 and the death of the brown shooter

There’s been a fair amount of Kane and Lynch 2 revisionism recently, and whilst the game was nearly universally panned on release I thought it worthwhile to revisit it and see why it keeps finding its way back into the discourse. Kane and Lynch was released in 2010 which was near the end of the glory days of the ‘brown shooter’. Between Gears of War (2006) and Spec Ops: The Line (2012) there was a deluge of games with a  dour near monochrome palette of which had become shorthand for gritty and adult.

This aesthetic probably grew out of the relative immaturity of dynamic lighting effects in the preceding years. If you can barely see the textures on the screen, that can begin to disguise the low polygon count and the static light on the surfaces, successfully exhibited in Deus Ex’s nighttime New York and Paris levels. 

But even as the technology matured, allowing for graphics that could be considered more or less modern (Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare came out in 2007) studios were still in thrall to the idea that gritty textures were synonymous with gritty realism. It took Spec Ops’ thorough deconstruction of the genre to more or less put it to bed but not before we were presented with a near endless supply of these games, which brings us to Kane and Lynch 2.

The game begins with the titular protagonists being tortured and the player viewing the scene through a camcorder which will become the lens through which the rest of the game is viewed, fuzzing and crackling as you take damage. We are taken two days back in time to see the boys in Shanghai (the game technically begins with a message telling us the game isn’t racist) seemingly intentionally murder the daughter of a local crime lord, for reasons that the player is spared from, setting off the chain of events leading to their capture.

This is a game that revels in its seediness, gunning down naked women, pushing an enemies face into a frying pan and a liberal use of human shields. Where GTA V more or less hits the same notes, Kane and Lynch has no interest in making the player feel good about whatever violence they’ve committed; GTA tries to pass off you rapidly clicking the mouse to rip out a man’s teeth as satire while Kane and Lynch immediately regret every decision they make in the game. There are no moments to savour victory only a further descent into the alleyways and backrooms of Shanghai. They sit down for a meal between levels and manage about ten seconds of silence before the restaurant erupts into gunfire and the killing resumes.

Ten seconds is the most down time you can expect at any point in the game before you run into another pack of mobsters or cops to be gunned down. Whereas most games will break up sections with long cut scenes and exposition here you are subjected to an unending pulse of violence punctuated only with kicking down the doors connecting one shooting gallery to the next. In one very brief lull between killing Kane asks Lynch if he thinks the cops are in the pocket of the local crime lord. “Maybe” responds Lynch as they proceed to mow down yet another group of them.

The lighting throughout the game is unsurprisingly dim with only the occasional harsh bloom from a neon sign punishing you for emerging into the outdoors before the current of bullets pushes you back into the dark. The only real brightness comes from harsh fluorescent lights. The music is entirely consistent with the sombre visuals. There is no soundtrack to speak of only the occasional sombre few notes from a piano under the sound of Lynch screaming in panic or talking to himself to get through the encounter. Between firefights, discordant drones and wailing animalistic noises nearly drown out the sound of Kane and Lynch arguing. Even moving through the game feels unpleasant. Sprinting causes the camera to jog up and down as if being held by a running spectator and remaining still makes it zoom up close on Lynch’s stained vest and greasy hair.

Most games try to make the guns feel powerful to act as the manifestation of the players will. For at least the first couple of levels of the game you are offered only weak and wildly inaccurate weapons forcing you to leave cover to move directly into the space of your enemy with the camera shaking and becoming covered with blood as you rapidly click in the hope that they die before you do.

It isn’t surprising that this game received such a negative reception as it is unrelentingly exhausting and never enjoyable to play. However, with most games it’s rarely a difficult task to ask what they have tried to achieve and how they have fallen short. Kane and Lynch is indifferent to the player, nothing in the game suggests it is meant to be enjoyed. One of the developers of Spec Ops said that the game’s true ending was to become disgusted and turn it off but for me Kane and Lynch managed this even more successfully. Whereas Spec Ops’ examination of the contradictions inherent to military shooters was equivalent to someone using your own arguments against you, Kane and Lynch is your parents making you smoke a whole pack of cigarettes to teach you how poisonous they are.

Kane and Lynch is in many ways the ur-brown shooter. It takes all the tropes of the genre and rather than subvert them, pushes them to their extremes and in doing so exposes just how horrible they really are.

In this regard Kane and Lynch is the most notable game of its type. The unwavering commitment to its grim aesthetic and its willingness to subsume its mechanics to the demands of its theme is commendable. If then, it is a game that can be regarded as successful, relative to what it sets out to achieve, this begs the question as to whether there was anything worthwhile in attempting it. The best I can offer here is to suggest that Kane and Lynch serves as a cautionary tale and a condemnation of the ideology and production values that spawned it.

After almost a decade of stagnation, shooters are having a renaissance with DOOM and Titanfall being about the joy that comes from fluidly moving through a space and Wolfenstein managing to salvage the notion that shooters can effectively tell moving stories.

Kane and Lynch is a reminder that there is little virtuous in grittiness as an end in itself and the brown-shooter is a genre worth remembering but never reviving.

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Election Night Video Playlist

This election has introduced all kinds of exciting new ideas to the discourse like: ‘maybe fascism is good’ and ‘there is no such thing as being unelectably corrupt’. Having followed it for so long now that I think I’ve heard every take under the sun ranging from Islamic State propaganda (both funny and original) to Labour party special advisers (both tedious and incoherent). However the most effective take of the election is: what if everything bad, is actually good?  With that in mind I present the most good content of the most good election in living memory. The RNC Part corporate networking event, part fascist rally, the RNC had it all. You want Donald Trumps son doing his best impression of Will Ferrell’s character’s brother in Step Brothers? Done. You want a room of people booing Ted Cruz? You’re covered. But the best speech of the week (if you don’t have time for D-Truth himself’s hour long speech that lest we forget was called a pitch to the centre) was America’s Mayor Rudy Giuliani somehow out Mussolini-ing Donald himself in his demand for The Real America to return.

The DNC

The Dems were smart enough to take over half of Philly and put the protesters as far away from the convention hall as possible along with partnering with famously workers right centred business Uber to exclusively provide the transport, leaving crowds of delegates and journalists melting in the heat. It wasn’t just the organisers who didn’t give a shit about workers rights, in this DNC highlight an evidently still horny Bill Clinton ">describes how his first date with HRC involved them crossing a picket line in classic aw shucks Clinton form. However, the best content to come of the DNC was the officially commissioned ‘Fight Song’ which it took me 4 attempts to watch in its entirety (watch it in its entirety, trust me).

Advertising There were some strong ads across the board with Trumps platform somehow sounding even less coherent when read out by someone else but the gems are best found down ticket where candidates aren’t burdened with having to appeal to anyone outside of their own state and calling for an armed insurrection is par for course.

Ben Carson

If there’s anyone I want to see making a comeback in 2020 its Dr. Ben Carson with his rambling speeches full of biblical passages and suggestions that Hillary is somehow in league with the devil. This is the kind of man who thinks bible Joseph made the pyramids to store grain. He is also the kind of man who has a plaque with a misspelt biblical quotation but best of all he is the kind of man who has a painting of him hanging with Jesus.

Jeb!

18 months ago I was so close to putting money on low energy Jeb! winning the primaries. How the might have fallen. If anyone has captured the geist of the season it is Vic Berger and his debate edits which chronicle the heartbreaking destruction of Jeb! by Donald. Whilst the extent of his destruction and depth of his humiliation has probably ruled out another presidential run Jeb! will live forever in my heart.

Hillary Although she is definitely dying she does have the best merch. That and she speaks to me in a language I can understand and that is why #imwithher.

Trump

Inevitably Hillary got all the best celebrity endorsements so I am doubly #withher but Donald Trump got the best impersonation done of him (lets not write off his HRC impression though). It is by my good friend Will.i.am who is always there to make me feel better. This is the best video ever made. It made me cry. It is about Trump. It is perfection.

Whoever wins tomorrow, let’s remember all the good times we had. Has there ever been a better time for content? I think not.

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1979 Revolution: Black Friday, the perils of narrative design

1979 Revolution is a Telltale-like (I think this is a subgenre now) narrative dialogue driven game set during the Iranian revolution and the immediate aftermath in the Islamic Republic. In order to explore the narrative design of the game it will be necessary to compare and contrast it to the work of Dontnod (creators of Life is Strange) and most clearly Telltale (The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones) whose shadow looms large over this game.

You are placed in the shoes of Reza, a young Iranian photographer who is detained in Evin prison and made to recount his role in the revolution across a series of flashbacks that make up the game. In a game where agency is manifested nearly exclusively (we’ll pretend there aren’t quick time events) by dialogue choices the decision to make extensive use of flashbacks is a significant one. In Telltale’s Tales from the Borderlands flashbacks were used to demonstrate that the accounts of the game’s two narrators were in conflict but also to make it quite clear that whatever choices you made would lead to a predetermined point. The effectiveness of this was in liberating the player to make bolder decisions than they might make otherwise without fear that a character might die as a result. In Revolution 1979 flashbacks confirm that you inhabit a historically deterministic universe. You aren’t going to be able to side with the Shah or usher in a communist regime regardless of your choices. The adherence of Revolution 1979 to the Telltale model is further confirmed when ‘Bobak will remember this’ popped up at the top corner of the screen. This feature is used to give weight to your choices. Explicitly connecting a later event to this choice then confirms your agency within the narrative and gives the plot a set of beats to pace the story with. However in Revolution 1979, tracing the connection between cause and effect was, at least for myself, not possible which only serves to cast doubt on the requirement for this game to have a player. 

The game is split into seventeen parts unlike both Telltale and Life is Strange’s adherence to the five chapter structure. The advantage to splitting the game into discrete chunks is that the chapter end points serve as nodes for the story to be written around. At the end of a chapter of Life is Strange you are presented with each of the decisions you have made and which of these will carry on into the next game is signposted. Having a tiered set of choices is useful as it allows for even the smallest choices to seemingly have weight even if they have no bearing on later chapters and the player is made aware of which decisions will roll over to the next chapter, even if the outcome is unclear. That’s all very well, you may argue, but such signposting is ‘gamey’ and such artificiality could serve to trivialise the game’s subject matter. Whilst it is certainly conceivable that these systems could be done away with it should then be necessary to establish a clear chain of causality. During one lengthy scene where Reza’s family argue about the revolution it soon becomes clear that every NPC response could have been written for each of the dialogue choices your character makes. Without signposting or explicit causality the role of the player is continually marginalised, an unforgivable sin in a game which promises that your decisions will affect a revolution.

In interviews with the developers it was made clear that historical accuracy was a key priority for the design. The inclusion of speeches by Khomeini in exile and photographs taken at the time serve this end elegantly, but aside from the fact that the revolution happened there is little to be learnt about it in this game. It’s worth noting that this is a game made by a team that is based in the US. This probably informs the fact that the communist and Islamist faction members of the revolution are consistently portrayed as mindless thugs while only the secular characters or those whose motivations are kept quiet are allowed any kind of depth or development. Surely the strength of an interactive narrative is to allow the player to more directly empathise with the plight of its characters. The problem here is that there is no opportunity to understand the motivation of the cast, who including Mujahadeen and communists could have examined the motivations behind revolutionary struggle and the ideology of its actors. Instead we are presented with a cardboard cast of characters whose inclination towards violence with little room to justify it presents the pre-revolutionary secular regime as essentially superior to the Islamic one that replaced it. Whilst this may well be the view for the developers, by viewing the game through a largely unchallenged secular and western lens the prevailing ideologies of the players will be left unchallenged and the role of the western states that enabled the previous regime is diminished.

Revolution 1979 is certainly competent and by no means unenjoyable. If I am so harsh here it is on account of what a wasted opportunity this game was. With such an exciting theme this could have been a blueprint for historical drama that could spawn a lineage of games that thoughtfully examine complex political themes. Instead it is a game that recycles elements from elsewhere without stopping to understand why they were effective in the first place and is blind to its own unchallenged ideology.

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Too many screenshots Q1

This year I have played all of the games. The Witness: Thekla, Inc As one of the early beneficiaries of the 2008 indie boom Jonathan Blow is now a very rich man. Supposedly he reinvested all his millions into the seven year development of first person puzzler The Witness. At first glance it might not be obvious where this expenditure has gone although it was probably to give him and his studio the time to ensure that every last inch of The Witness is refined and purposeful with the visual design and the mechanical design both feeding into one another. This means that the complex boundary condition fulfilment problems of the game bleeds into the lavish environmental art such that each aspect of the game is subtly intertwined in a way that unfolds as you begin to peel back the game’s many layers.   

Firewatch: Campo Santo/ Panic Inc Another title that puts a premium on environmental art is Firewatch; a game about a lookout living in the Wyoming wilderness. Jane Ng and Olly Moss’s environmental art team created a truly beautiful world using both a consistent commitment to tone and a number of subtle sleights of hand giving an essentially linear game a feeling of expansiveness. The plot loses focus after the first couple of hours moving from a poignant story of loss and escape to a rather conventional mystery but the wilderness is front and centre throughout. It’s worth noting the focus of the palette where oranges and reds take precedence and the game takes every opportunity to have you encounter sunrises and sunsets as you explore the forests and mountains.

SUPERHOT: SUPERHOT Team The first person shooter genre is seeing some much needed innovation this year after a flood of games that conflated narrative design with the man goes mad having murdered thousands of people trope.  SUPERHOT’s narrative is essentially disposable, treading waters familiar to anyone who encountered the but why are YOU murdering thousands of people trope in Bioshock but its in the games pure ludic focus that it shines. SUPERHOT’s brilliance is in it’s rule that time moves faster when the player moves which allows for spectacularly stacked odds but with enough time given to the player to plan and execute precise manoeuvres turning it into, at its core, a puzzle game. The visual language is simple where the only none washed out assets are the ones to be interacted with and enemies shatter like glass after taking damage. The consequence of this is as the intensity ramps up there is a constant sound of shattering as you are surrounded by glass sculptures slowly collapsing into red shards.

Devil Daggers: Sorath Another thoroughly modern first person shooter is Devil Daggers. This is perhaps the polar opposite of SUPERHOT in that games rarely last more than a minute and the emphasis is on frenzied survival rather than tactical precision. Devil Daggers sees you face off against never ending waves of demonic monsters spawning from every point on the map meaning that the only way to make sure nothing is coming up from behind you when you need to be firing forwards is the sound of the enemy. Each creature has a distinctive sound from the screams of the skull monsters to the scuttling of spiders that makes the audio quickly become overwhelming. The sound design here is simple and effective elevating what is an otherwise unremarkable shooter into something rather special. I did an absolutely lousy job of photographing this game as every time I hesitated to take a screenshot I was immediately and unceremoniously killed. A look at the playthrough of the current world record will give you a better impression of what its all about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Pl7y5BDEEs.  

That Dragon, Cancer: Numinous Games This is a eulogy for the child of the developers who died of cancer at the age of five. It’s a game I really wanted to like but for every masterful design choice (of which there are many) there is one which undermines its own focus or one which leaves the player unsure of whether an input is required in order to advance. The problem here is the player is left to constantly interrogate the design to work out what is expected of them. This is all very well in a puzzle game but here it means that otherwise poignant sequences end up being frustrating. I will say that as a boring atheist with no confidence in his epistemology it was very refreshing playing a game that is so overtly and confidently Christian. It is impossible to separate this game from its creators religion which makes it as much an exploration of faith as it is a eulogy. It also succeeds with a distinctive visual design that despite its brief run time explores a variety of styles consistent with its core aesthetic.

Oxenfree: Night School Studio

I've written at greater length about Oxenfree here but to summarise its a game with a beautiful art style that embraces a more hand drawn look than many of its contemporaries. It is disciplined in limiting its palette within different locations providing it not just with a distinctive tone but a well communicated visual language.

Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc:  Spike Chunsoft Co. Ltd./  Abstraction Games

The premise is essentially Battle Royale set inside a school for ‘Ultimate Students’ run by an evil robot bear. This means the cast ranges from the ultimate fashionista to the ultimate biker gang leader. Students have to murder another student and get away with it in order to escape the school and each murder culminates in a Phoenix Wright style court battle where the player looks for inconsistencies in statements and deploys evidence to undermine alibis. Despite the novel premise this is a disastrous rambling travesty of a game. In twelve hours I have only taken part in two trials whilst the rest of the indulgent runtime consists of tedious visual novel tropes written in the verbose Japanese style with a terrible translation. At least it’s pretty.

Californium:  Darjeeling , Nova Production/ ARTE France, Neko Entertainment

In Californium you are a writer who becoming increasingly paranoid is finding his surroundings are warping in and our of other temporal realities. At its heart this is a hidden object game and a tedious one at that. However communicating the paranoia through the dreamy audio and the creepy NPCs who always rotate to face you straight on is handled perfectly. The star of the show once again is the art style which is worth the price of admission alone.

This has been a year so far that is best characterised by its attention to environmental art and an obsession with making everything Trump levels of orange. With the amount of money sloshing around and the proliferation of powerful new design technologies, the line between indie and AAA is becoming increasingly blurred meaning there are plenty more ambitious and beautiful games scheduled for release this year to look forward to.

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Oxenfree Review

Oxenfree, the first game from Night School Studio, casts you in the role of a teenage girl called Alex who is taking her new stepbrother to a party on an island with her classmates. However, they find to their annoyance that this is one of those haunted islands and the teens must regroup and find a way off the island before they suffer the spooky consequences. The game is spent exploring the island in an essentially linear fashion as Alex and her friends awkwardly converse, as teens do, between locations. To explore the island is to wander through a series of landscape paintings in perpetual twilight. Each area has a distinctive but consistent visual identity, from the rich greens and blues of the forest to the oranges and yellows of the cliffs with small patches of artificial lighting to draw attention and communicate the path ahead.

During paranormal encounters the rich palette is overcome with red and black drawing an explicit dividing line between these moments and the majority of the game. 

The perspective is always out of control of the player but having for most of the game a single path to follow allows for almost an obsessive attention to detail with regard to the framing as your field of view zooms and pans across the living painting you inhabit, ensuring that each frame is beautiful. The sound design is likewise considered with the babbling of a brook heralding its approach and the at once eerie and calming strings of the soundtrack make for a minimal but welcome presence. Alex interfaces with the paranormal world by use of an analogue radio which also picks up bursts of music that you can have accompany you on your walks along with snippets of dialogue that fade in and out with the turning of the dial.

The island is an immensely pleasant place to be but unfortunately the distinct visual contrast between the paranormal and the earthly means the majority of the time is spent without suspense as the game’s visual language is quick to communicate any surprises ahead of time. The problem of the lack of peril is pervasive. The group are separated having spent hardly any time together, much of which is spent antagonising one another so I really struggled to care if Alex’s childhood best friend was being murdered by ghosts while I took some time out to sit on a bench and take in the scenery. Contrast this with fellow teenagers go to party in remote spooky locale narrative game Until Dawn which had me terrified through most of its considerable run time and was bold enough to spend the first couple of hours of the game giving the characters plenty of space to breathe so combining this with the constant spectre of death means that even the most reprehensible character’s fate is of far more interest than that of Oxenfree’s cast.

The primary way the player interacts aside from movement is by conversational choices where everything Alex says is chosen by the player rather than just the meaningful decisions.The benefit of this is that the conversations are as much a game unto themselves as they are in day to day life but the downside is that Alex’s responses (always from an option of two or threealong with the choice to say nothing) don’t allow you much opportunity to develop a particularly interesting character. The option to be sassy with the paranormal being threatening to murder all of your friends by calling bullshit or simply talking over them is a bit of a mood killer and once you’ve told a spooky entity to shut up without consequence it’s harder to then proceed to be unnerved by them. The timing of making your comments in a conversation seems nearly impossible to gauge. Alex will usually say her part by just interrupting whoever is talking rather than the Telltale approach (a number of the developers are Telltale alumni) of segmenting the dialogue to allow for speech to come after natural pauses. Perhaps this a more naturalistic approach to representing conversation but I was constantly mortified by Alex’s etiquette failures. There is also a bit of a disconnect between the dialogue and the surroundings. Alex will frequently engage in a long conversation while on a very short path meaning that you will reach the edge of a location long before she has finished chatting so I often found myself waiting at the end of an area waiting for the conversation to finish in order not to miss any of it. For a game full of dialogue it unfortunately doesn’t have a whole lot to say. Until Dawn justified using such a hackneyed setting by both being both absolutely terrifying and using the audiences familiarity with its tropes to allow it undertake a quite considerable experiment in narrative design. In fairness, Oxenfree does return to the theme of coming to terms with death throughout but never fully commits to it or allows itself the space to explore it. Whilst the teenage speech is less jarring than last years wonderful Life is Strange could be, its seeming disinterest in its supporting cast also makes it feel far less sincere.

The artwork along with the visual and sound design is thoroughly compelling throughout all of its five hour run time and represents a considerable achievement in of itself and the M Night Shyamalan style climax actually manages to feel bold despite the otherwise weightless build-up. Despite being a dialogue driven game with entirely uninspired dialogue I actually rather enjoyed my time playing it and would happily spend more time in its world just to explore its forests and enjoy its vistas. Its success is a testament to the importance of having a clear and artfully executed aesthetic and whilst its writing wouldn’t hold up on the page; as a mostly unobtrusive background to a pleasant hike it’s harmless enough.

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2015 in games

2015 was arguably the best year gaming has seen thus far with it regularly being the case that in any given week there were far more interesting games being released than anyone might have the chance of making time to play. There were so many titles this year that questioned previously held assumptions about the ways games could function and probed at the edges of our understanding of the medium. Without further ado I present my favourite 12 games released in 2015.

12. Sorcery! (inkle/inkle)

An update on Steve Jackson’s Fantasy Flight choose-your-own-adventure book of the same name bringing the same artwork and writing onto iOS and Android. My teenage bedroom was strewn with dozens of the green spined adventure books that hinted at a grandiosity and scope that was beyond the monetary and technical possibilities of games of its time. Instead of simply transplanting the same mechanical style of the original book into hypertext, Inkle have transformed it into something better resembling an open world game; breathing new life into a classic adventure that scopes out fertile ground for the interactive fiction genre.

11. Sunless Sea (Failbetter Games/Failbetter Games)

Failbetter are best known for the excellent interactive fiction RPG Fallen London which is set in the same narrative universe as Sunless Sea. This is a game about setting out on voyages into dangerous waters featuring strange beasts and unknowable gothic horrors. You are just as likely to fail a game by having your crew driven mad and mutinying as you are running out of food and being forced to eat them. The game excels in the writing set on the many islands that dot the sea that feature strange branching short stories written by both Failbetter’s writers and guest writers such as Meg Jayanth and Emily Short giving each island its own distinct voice. Make no mistake that despite the real time nautical combat and RPG trappings this is at its heart interactive fiction but one that abandons the expected tropes of the genre and instead utilises the form to create a novel narrative experience.

10. Titan Souls (Acid Nerve/Devolver)

Perhaps best described as Dark Souls meets Shadow of the Colossus, Titan Souls is a fast paced unforgiving game that sets you against a series of giant monsters that you tackle one by one. The twist is that both you and your adversary can be killed in a single hit and you are armed with just a bow and a single (retrievable) arrow. This results in a tense and intricate series of encounters that reward patience and planning. Titan Souls abandons the well worn tropes of fantasy games abandoning dragons and wizards in favour of teleporting treasure chests and hallucinogen spewing mushrooms that keeps the game being as visually exciting as it is mechanically.

9. Tales from the Borderlands (Telltale Games/Telltale Games)

Telltale’s distinctive and a little formulaic brand of decision based episodic stories has fallen out of favour in recent years as it became more obvious that the many decisions you make that make up the core mechanic of the game might be less narratively meaningful than the writers would have you believe. On top of that the consist themes of death, loss and futility that undergird almost their entire modern catalogue starting with Walking Dead going through to this year’s Game of Thrones have meant that their games are always emotionally compelling but could rarely be described as fun.

Tales from the Borderlands abandons all but the core mechanic of their previous games and instead opts to make a game that is ostensibly a comedy played out by two unreliable narrators discussing the events leading up to their capture, immediately abandoning any notion the choices you make will radically affect the story's outcome.

This liberates the player from the constant fear of death of a favourite character that hangs over Telltales other offerings and instead places you in the role of director making the characters make bad decision after bad decision in order to find the most amusing outcome.

The writing and animation serves to make Tales one of the most amusing games of recent years and hints at the possibility of a wider style of stories that can be made in the episodic game form.

8. Else Heart.Break() (Erik Svedäng et al./Self-Published)

Else Heat.Break() is a game that takes me back to the first open world games before the tropes and limits were well-established and the possibility space they inhabited was an exciting and unknown quantity. This is a game set in a small open world where violence is rare and most human encounters are dialogue driven and sociable. The premise sees you in a PS1 looking world starting a job in a new town and in the process you get to know the towns characters partying with them in an abandoned mine or going to see them DJ in a bar. However it soon becomes apparent that the town’s corporations have a mysterious agenda that you and your friends must uncover. One of the great innovations of this game aside from the considerable one of making an open world game full of people to meet rather than people to kill is that every object in the game can be hacked using a very simple programming language developed for the game. Everything from doorways to the recreational drugs can be taken apart and reprogrammed allowing for some novel problem solving but more importantly a whole new way of being able to connect with your environment.  

7. Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes (Steel Crate Games/Steel Crate Games)

A party game for any number of people with a very simple premise. One player disarms a bomb on their computer than only they are allowed to look at whilst the other players each have a pdf copy of the bomb defusal manual and must give instructions on how to disarm the bomb based  on the descriptions given by the defuser. The design of the game is such that the bomb is broken up into a series of modules that must each be dealt with each comprising its own sort of mini game requiring collaboration between the players. However it is made in such a way that breakdowns and ambiguities in communication become inevitable leading to plenty of hilarity and shouting after a few drinks. Easily one of the most novel and hilarious party games of recent years.

6. Undertale (tobyfox/tobyfox)

Undertale came seemingly out of nowhere this year to be met with almost universally rapturous acclaim and a huge dedicated following. Visually it resembles a NES-era JRPG and uses this as a foundation to subvert and repurpose the tropes of the genre. Undertales twist is that the enemies can be overcome both by killing them or instead by understanding them and working out what they want in order to placate or befriend them. In between rounds you must dodge their attacks in a bullet hell like environment for several seconds giving the combat a dynamism that is absent from most games of the genre. Its true brilliance is manifested in its writing that is both funny and tragic in equal measure building up a world full of insecure and believable creatures who more than anything want to make a connection and feel listened to. The game has a meta plot that plays out across multiple sessions and isn’t afraid to reach out and speak to the player via its mechanics.

For me the game ended after being thwarted by a bastard flower causing the player character to die and the game to close. I had assumed that this was the end of the game but returning months later for another playthrough I found a radically different game in front of me following on from the conclusion of my first session. This is a game that is both inventive and bold and justifies its wildly unorthodox style.

5. Life is Strange (DONTNOD Entertainment/Square Enix) An episodic narrative driven game, Life is Strange is unusual not just in its outer ludic form but in that it’s a fundamentally well written story about two young women’s relationship which is something you would be hard pressed to find in many other games. The story itself becomes increasingly urgent, building from something a little on the twee side to something much darker. I’ve written my much longer thoughts on the game and the clever way that it uses time travel to reshape the moral landscape of the game which you can read here.

4. Her Story (Sam Barlow/Self-Published)

Navigated using a database of video clips in a Windows 3.1 like environment, Her Story is set during the 1990’s and tasks you with solving a murder by looking at a series of police interviews with a woman (filmed rather than animated) given over a number of years. Each video is transcribed and split into many different chunks that can be accessed by typing a word into a search engine which returns the first five clips that contain that word. The nature of this design means that the narrative plays out non-linearly so that despite Barlow using keywords to lead the player down any number of rabbit holes every player will see the narrative unfold in a different order leading to many different interpretations of the story. This is a radical approach to storytelling and perhaps this year’s most innovative game.

3. The Beginner’s Guide (Everything Unlimited Ltd./Everything Unlimited Ltd.)

This is a game about journeying into the mind of a creator and being made to experience his anxieties and insecurities in an incredibly intimate and uncomfortable 80 minutes. It is no coincidence that something so short is also so intense and perhaps signals that gaming’s obsession with length and replayability means that we lose something in the process. I’ve written previously about my feeling towards Davey Wreden’s game here.

2. 80 Days (inkle/inkle)

Technically this came out in 2013 but not only did I come very late to the party but it only had its PC release in 2015 and it felt criminal not to include a game that I’ve enjoyed so much. A steampunk (made by people who don’t like steampunk) adventure loosely based on Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in 80 Days written by the exceptional writer and narrative designer Meg Jayanth is the arguably the first game that brought interactive fiction into the mainstream. The size of this game makes it massively replayable taking you on adventures with European air pirates, African balloonists and Indian robots with each playthrough revealing maybe 8% of the content by the writers estimate. You are the valet to English Gentleman Phileas Fogg and you are to help him win a wager to go around the world in 80 days. However, on your way you hear of adventures to be had in far-flung cities and before long your wager becomes the less pressing priority next to you deciding which route around the world sounds the most fun. This is a game primarily about the spirit of discovery in a world that has only just become possible to circumnavigate and the brilliance of the writing builds up a vibrant vivid world. This is easily one of the best written games ever made and its experimental narrative design elevates it to being a game that will no doubt have a profound impact on the landscape of game design.

1. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (CD PROJEKT RED/CD PROJEKT RED)

It had no right being this good. Previous iterations in the series had collectible cards you got from bedding the games women, often in extremely coercive situations. That’s a pretty low standard to have to beat.

On the surface The Witcher 3 is a rather conservative game. It is medieval fantasy set in a relatively generic looking world of rolling fields and stone cities populated with monsters and bandits. However it doesn’t take long though for The Witcher to reveal itself as being something quite singular. The game’s protagonist Geralt is a detective/monster slayer for hire who travels a low fantasy world solving its inhabitants problems that range from arson to roaming beats. These encounters time and time again surprise you in the raw humanity that is presented and the genuine moral ambiguity in Geralt’s choices in how to resolve them. This is a game with consistent internal logic and attention to detail. In the south there is an invading army and in the north there are refugee camps and bands of deserters. In the cities the internal tensions are manifesting themselves via state sponsored violence and ethnic cleansing.

You are never allowed to forget you are just one man in a world of many. The problems plaguing the games world have complicated political, ethnic and religious roots and you are mocked for thinking that you are capable of solving or even understanding them.

The extent of the success of The Witcher 3 cannot be overstated. Every other big budget release I played this year felt dated in comparison. The patience and the maturity of the writing and the characterisation reveals something as gamers that we have had to take for granted or pretend doesn’t exist, that being how terrible modern game writing is. If this game has an impact on the environment of big budget development it will most likely be years until it can be fully felt due to the length of time it takes to produce something of this scale but even if it doesn’t this is a game that represents the apex of the modern AAA game space and is undoubtedly an uncompromising masterpiece.

[editorialdefenestration]

The Structural Indeterminism of Life Is Strange

Spoilers for episode 5 of Life Is Strange follow:

Life Is Strange (LIS) is a narratively driven episodic adventure game that recently released its fifth and final episode. Set in a small, sleepy American town, it draws as much from the tropes of teen fiction as it does from other games of its genre like Telltale’s The Walking Dead series.

LIS’s core mechanic is making decisions during the conversations that guide its narrative making the main manifestation of player agency one of social interaction.

LIS’s twist is that its protagonist, Max, upon witnessing the murder of her estranged childhood friend, Chloe, discovers that she has the ability to rewind time. This twist is what ends up allowing LIS to become one of the most conceptually bold games of recent years. In other games of this genre the player is rarely asked to question the way that they make the moral choices that make up the punctuating moments; only to consider and make the choice itself. In allowing you to rewind time you are able to respond to each choice but then having witnessed the decision go back and try it differently and assess each of the different outcomes before committing to the one that yields the preferred outcome.

What makes this so interesting is that it incentivises the player to base their moral judgements on a known and definite outcome such that one is trained to make all their decisions from a consequentialist perspective. In doing this the inherent moral worth of a decision recedes from view. Having versed the player in this paradigm for decision making the final act of LIS pulls the rug from under them. The finale sees Max sedated and held prisoner at the hands of the character that has murdered Chloe, now too far in the future to directly rewind time to change the outcome of the event. However Max can also move through time by looking at photos of herself and in doing so is able to escape into the past and try to set events in motion that will save both her and her friend in the present. Max, then by looking at photographs rapidly moves between different temporal possibilities changing things almost at random in order to create a future where Chloe is still alive. What this serves to do is completely deconstruct the whole premise that the game is based on; one where the player is able to know what the consequences of their decisions will be.

Each trip to the present effectively sees all the decisions made there erased as Max travels back into the past and introduces more chaos into the order of the existing narrative. At the end of each episode LIS shows you all the decisions you made and what proportion of other players also made that choice making your decisions feel personal to you and therefore more meaningful. What LIS does is lure the player into consequentialism but then mocks them for doing so by removing the consequences of each previous event by changing the past so that the event will never happen. The entire metaphysical underpinning for moral action is subverted and instead any choice that is made must be made under a new set of assumptions. In one version of the present, the town is being destroyed by a cataclysmic event and the player is able to use their time rewinding abilities to save individual characters from being killed. However based on the previous motivation for decision making there is no point in saving anyone as you will again and again go back in time erasing the current reality until the the present is one that Max can live with, so each consequence is transient.

This now requires one to consider the inherent moral worth of a decision with the consequences being entirely irrelevant. This notion of deconstructing the entire underpinning of a game’s systems is a fascinating one and it is worth considering what questions this asks about the concept of player agency.

One of the innovations of structuralist thinking is to consider the world organised and defined by pairs of binary oppositions: male/female, alive/dead, true/false etc. Binary opposition thus makes choice possible by differentiating option from option, each in a determinate state of chosen or unchosen. The Life Is Strange style of choice based games is one of the most obvious manifestations of this idea where choices are typically organised into explicit binary oppositions and the act of making a choice is a conscious decision of one option over another.

However what Life Is Strange does is remove any notion of determinism by calling into question the very existence of the current state of affairs as you travel into the past and overwrite it. If binary opposition makes choice possible then what happens when every choice is in a state of both existence and non existence. This makes the manifestation of player agency not about choice, which Life Is Strange erases from the entire past of the game, but about restoring order to the idea of making a choice in the first place.

The game’s ending asks us if the notion of choice rests on either/or, what if the comfort of order is not restored?

For that reason Life Is Strange is a bravely post-structuralist game, which isn’t something you get to say everyday.

[editorialdefenestration]

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

The prologue of what is expected to be Kojima’s last game in the MGS series is perhaps the  most gloriously weird opening to a game I can recall. A giant flaming whale destroys a helicopter, there is a horseback chase sequence and you subdue a burning man with strategic deployment of sprinklers. The long expository cutscene that begins the prologue is all par for course as far as the series goes but is more interesting for how it is presented than its actual content.

From the get go the player is given control of the frame during all of the sequences many cutscenes allowing you to choose the visual emphasis and retaining a modicum of control even when the content of a scene is scripted and movement is prohibited. The prologue sees you escaping from a hospital whilst everyone else in the building is being murdered, forcing you to hide amongst piles of bodies, spending your time mostly unarmed and defenceless, at the mercy of the director, moving through a series of highly scripted encounters. This is almost the only time in the game where player agency is limited in support of the narrative so it is telling that this is the only time where during cutscenes the player is handed control of the camera. Once the prologue is finished you are left in an open world environment free to proceed in whatever style you choose. The voice of authorship recedes into the background and near total ludic agency is bequeathed to the player. So too does the prevalence of the narrative; from here on almost exclusively confined to audio recordings that can be listened to or ignored at the your own whim.

The way that combat can be approached is also in your hands. The extreme ease of the bulk of the game allows for any number of valid approaches. From a non-lethal stealth approach, to calling in aerial bombardments and even simply running through a base punching out enemies as you encounter them, experimentation is always rewarded. The customer is always right.

From a purely mechanical point of view MGSV is essentially peerless. The Fox Engine which powers the game is always able to serve the will of the player and whereas playing a game typically involves probing the edges of the game space, determining what is and isn’t allowed, here the game is entirely subservient and willing. If then I am given a world that exists solely to please me why is it that I spent most of the runtime wanting to leave it. I think it is quite possible that this points towards the problem of the modern AAA game. Being able to do anything and being able to do nothing are two sides of the same coin. It requires an act of discipline not falling into the habit of repeating oneself while playing. The fact that any approach is valid means that there is no need to adapt to changing challenges. Whilst a game with a similar event loop like Farcry 3 and 4 that requires capturing outposts is about trying to control an environment that is constantly threatening to tip over into chaos, MGSV is about choosing how much chaos you would like to respond to, if any. The responsibility is with you to make your session interesting. This responsibility is then pressing when much of the game requires you completing the same scenarios over and over again. The same locations are recycled, often many times over forcing you to rescue the same prisoner from the same room in the same fort again and again.

Now that we live in a world where a game like The Witcher 3 showed that there is no conflict in having a violent narrative but then allowing the repercussions of that narrative to be demonstrated in the environment; it is disappointing that MGSV game world is a static and clearly transparent network of systems that is only able to tell but never to show. The beautifully rendered jungles and deserts of MGSV are home to conflicts but these conflicts are without collateral. We are told that the Soviet army has enacted a scorched earth campaign against the Afghan people who formerly occupied the game space but there is no evidence that this is a place where people once lived. The environment is blatantly and unapologetically a system for enabling player agency via hiding spots and vantage points not one in support of narrative. Cracks like these in the games initially beautiful sheen become ever more present as the game progresses. The second chapter of the game that begins after the plot is more or less wrapped up consists of just a few short disparate missions interspersed with harder variations on previous missions and a story that simply stops without any fanfare or closure. I had to check online that I had indeed finished the game and that the last few missions were indeed just repeats of earlier ones. It’s a shame that a game that essentially asks you to buy it twice (in the form of the brief and excellent prelude mission Ground Zeroes) and contains unwelcome microtransactions is blatantly unfinished showing cutscenes announcing features that don’t make their way into the game and plenty of content that was promised but never included.

This is yet another way that MGSV showcases the problems afflicting the industry. As games are becoming an arms race to include more and more content complete with massive run times, budgets are also spiralling out of control requiring every game be a multi million selling hit or instead seeing studios being closed. Kojima productions is just another casualty in the content race. Despite being a hit by anyone’s standards, the studio is being shuttered in favour of Konami focusing on lower cost development for mobile platforms. Whilst I struggled with a game that steps back and asks you to make your own fun, the near universally rapturous response MGSV has thus far received suggests that for most people this won’t be a problem, and the seeming lack of authorial intent throughout most of the moment to moment experiences is simply a price to be paid in putting control in the hands of the audience. This is what we, as an audience asked for and it is indeed what we were given.

[editorialdefenestration]

The Beginners Guide critique

Back in August I attended an exhibition on video games at the V&A. Dotted throughout the venue were games being played alongside some of the most highly regarded works of art that exist today. Seeing Hearthstone being played along rows of tables, the backs of the players hunched over laptops facing Raphael’s cartoons was perhaps indicative of the place that gaming finds itself today. In one room standing across from Michelangelo's sculpture ‘David’ was William Pugh, one half of the team that made 2013’s existentialist nightmare The Stanley Parable. A quite fitting location considering the impact made by the game and its perceived position in the ‘games as art’ none debate. Pugh announced to a packed room that he would be showcasing the work of an underappreciated artist he had met who went by the name of Kevin Patterson. Pugh played a series of videos made by Patterson that took place in art galleries looking at single words on white canvases and orbs of light that made the noises elicited by art (along the lines of ‘yes...I see’, ‘um’ and ’ah’). Pugh asked me to come behind a screen and play a game made by Patterson consisting of a series of lights and artsy words appearing on the screen upon which Pugh lead the audience in applauding me. Of course there was no Patterson, simply Pugh satirising the discussions surrounding ‘game as art’ in response to the overwhelming response to The Stanley Parable which took its creators by surprise. If Pugh is using a pseudonym to satirise the ‘games as art’ discussion then his co-creator Davey Wreden, the developer behind The Beginners Guide, is using one to explore ideas surrounding the notion of artistry in the creation of games and the act of creation itself. Spoilers abound from here on: The Beginners Guide consists of a series of short fragments of games made by a character called Coda and these games are played with Wreden, playing himself, providing a running commentary on each of the games.

Perhaps the most overt theme explored by the game is that of the imposition of a narrative onto a person. In discussing this it may be useful to discuss Wreden himself and in the context of the message the game sends I may well be having my cake and eating it but shamefully I will continue regardless. Wreden famously had a difficult time coping with the enormous success of The Stanley Parable and it is apparent that this experience informs The Beginners Guides narrative. The game addresses the conflict that can arise between the artist and those who in trying to understand that art craft a narrative relating it back to the artist who made it.

When Wreden discusses the recurring motifs that dot the game’s world he uses them as a way of tracking the emotional state of the developer explaining how each game represents the change in his mental state and his relationship to Coda. The revelation that the lamp posts which appear throughout the game had been added by Wreden against the wishes of Coda provides a real gut punch of a moment as the destructive relationship between Coda and Wreden becomes so devastatingly apparent. In imposing his own meaning onto the work of Coda he had in a way taken ownership of something that Coda held to be private and personal. This can and perhaps should be read as a criticism of the dependency the artist is forced to be subjected to by their audience and many others have raised the point that the act of exploiting one's emotions for the experience of another is very often an unhealthy act. However, I understood Wreden’s prognosis to exist entirely in the negative offering no suggestion as to what the alternative to this should be. This left me feeling a genuine sense of guilt and disorientation as Wreden dismantles the assumed artist/audience paradigm and in assuming the voice of the player, i.e you, is able to make you complicit in the betrayal of Coda and thus by extension, as the developer, Wreden himself.

It is hard to reconcile the notion that in projecting one’s own thoughts onto a work you can be harming its creator with the need to try to place art within the context of its creation. If Wreden poses no positive vision it is perhaps signalling that the danger in releasing your creations into the world is inherent.

The part of the game that had the most profound affect on me was a section of the game where the player is surrounded by walls covered in statements you yourself have made previously clearly in the role of Coda in his own game talking about how much the creative process is destroying him. In order to proceed you must choose to say positive statements declaring your love for your work and the artistic process. Coda makes himself deny his own feelings in order to proceed. If he cannot tell himself that he wants to finish making the game he cannot finish it. He overrides his id in order to try to move forward in his life, sacrificing honesty in order to be able to continue living with himself.

This act of violence directed inward is perhaps the most distressing moment I’ve encountered in a game thus far and has stayed with me in the form of an acute sense of unease ever since. The game is brimming with moments like this. I was especially fond of parts where my own interpretation of a section is at odds with your narrator. A variation in a long series of levels about a prison where Wreden dismisses one that builds itself infinitely into the distance as weird for weirdness sake I found it no stretch to consider this to be the most profound one there.

Anyone with an interest in the ways that games are being used to explore complex and emotive topics will find much to appreciate in this portrait of the artist and would do well to experience The Beginners Guide first hand.