"Videogame" is one word

This is a short analytical essay I wrote for my Australian history class in Paris. I didn’t spend that much time on the assignment, but for some reason, after posting it to the online class forum, I just couldn’t stop editing. I spent at least an hour refining this piece, and I was pretty proud of the result. For me, it’s an example of what you can accomplish with a simple, concise style, and a relentless red pen.

“The Drover’s Wife” (1892) is a snapshot of a bushwoman’s daily struggles and, considering Henry Lawson’s other work, was another wake-up call for Australian artists like Banjo Patterson who romanticize the Bush and for the audience who buys into the myths. The titular character and her husband have no name, because this picture of their life applies just as well to any other Bush family.

Lawson does not judge the drover’s wife. He focuses on the facts, portraying all of her actions in stark detail without praise or condemnation. Lawson takes this tactic purposefully. When the bushwoman’s son Tommy springs to his mother’s aid against the bush-fire, Lawson describes him as “a little hero,” but in all her fearless and valiant deeds, the drover’s wife gets no such approval from the writer. Not to say that Lawson belittles her. In fact, he goes out of his way to preempt it. For instance, as she fortifies her home against the snake lurking below, the writer clarifies that the drover’s wife “is not a coward.” She takes such caution not because she is afraid, but because her brother-in-law’s son had recently lost his boy to a snake bite.

But the drover’s wife is heroic indeed. She fights all manner of natural disasters, from bush-fire to flood to lethal snake, and she defends her family and home from threatening scavengers, be they crows after her chickens or swagmen after her property. She is not inhuman; she tires like anyone else and cries frequently, but she accepts her lot and does not complain.

Once, the narrator seems to take a negative tone, in describing how the drover’s wife defeats the crow menace. However, the sarcastic commentary is more gentle teasing than outright mockery. Lawson speaks far more unfavorably about the Bush than the bushwoman. He writes of “the maddening sameness of the stunted trees” and “the monotony which makes a man long to break away and travel as far as trains can go, and sail as far as ship can sail.” It is a dreariness that only a bushwoman or -man could withstand.

In the end, the snake is dead and no one harmed, but “the sickly daylight break[ing] over the bush” tarnishes the happy ending. Tommy’s exclamation reveals Lawson’s message: “‘Mother, I won’t never go drovin’; blarst me if I do!’” Lawson never intended to cast judgment on the drover’s wife—he leaves the reader to form their own opinion—but to illustrate in dispassionate detail the dull yet dangerous life led by drover families, thereby ripping the romantic mystique to shreds.

I know I haven’t written in a while. Finals dominated April, and I’ve been preoccupied with a slew of activities this summer (more on this later). I just wanted to put this up before I forget.

This is a comment I wrote (with slight edits) on Chris Remo’s response to the question of Dante’s Inferno: essentially, whether it’s a “good thing,” “bad thing,” or neither.

It doesn’t have much to do with Remo’s take on Dante but, instead, was sparked by a small section of his post.

I know it’s not the duty of any individual game designer to ‘justify’ games to anyone who doesn’t play them, and it shouldn’t be, and obviously as a gamer I know full well that games are capable of more than this. But the reality is that most games DON’T have anything to say; most games DON’T communicate any meaningful thought; and most games DON’T deal with their subject matter in anything other than the basest, most ridiculous way. You could say the same for most fiction of any medium, but it’s certainly even more true for games.

My reply:

I’ve been listening to the Creative Screenwriting Magazine podcast¹ lately, in which the host, Senior Editor Jeff Goldsmith, interviews a different writer on each episode. You’d be surprised at how much thought goes into even the most explosion-riddled action flick.

Have you seen The Island? It’s standard Michael Bay fare, with a dystopian clone world as the backdrop for slow-mo action and over-the-top special effects. The movie was written by the same guys who did the new Star Trek’s screenplay, and during the Trek interview, they mentioned that they’d had loftier ideas for The Island, which weren’t quite realized once Bay and the studio got a hold of the script.

Even The Dark Knight—on the surface, a fairly standard adaptation of a classic superhero series, albeit with exceptional acting on the part of some of the players—had a ton of thought and care put into the themes and characters.²

I think the biggest problem with storytelling in games right now is that most developers don’t know how to craft a protagonist. Either they’re non-existent, as in most first-person games, or they’re absolutely flawless, with no room to grow and develop.

At their core, stories are about characters. If we can’t create compelling characters, we can’t tell compelling stories.

George Kokoris wrote an excellent post about the necessity of “personal inspiration” in game design, inspiration that needs to come from outside our own industry, he argues. He highlighted Dead Space: Extraction in this IGN interview with executive producer Steve Papoutsis as an example of what happens when a game is completely devoid of personal inspiration. Watch the interview.

George’s response:

“We have a variety of different mechanics that other games don’t have. We’ve got our zero-g, we’ve got branching paths, we’ve got camera control… And each weapon has an alternate fire mode, which a lot of other games don’t have.”

This is where the wheels started coming off for me. There is nothing in that sentence that helps me differentiate this product from any other 3D shooter. Plenty of games have those features, sometimes in exactly the same combination. But the unfortunate truth is that this really is what constitutes originality for a lot of developers. Extraction isn’t necessarily aiming all that high, so it may be an unfair judgment on my part, but I still feel it perfectly illustrates the limited scope of creativity in the game industry.

In a way, it’s unfair to judge the game and its dev team based on what the producer said in an IGN interview, since he’s basically been given a PR script to memorize.

On the other hand, as a PR person (whether he likes it or not, that is his role here), he hasn’t been given a very good script. One of the first things you learn in an intro marketing class is that you communicate benefits, not features. People don’t care that the car you’re trying to sell has built-in GPS with all this functionality, they care about the benefits of that feature: that they’ll never get lost. Or, in games, people don’t care that you’ve got 20 weapons and 10 maps in your multiplayer game, they care that they can play in diverse environments where no match will be the same as the last one.

Continue reading →

“I think my first reaction when I heard some news about [BioShock's] end was like, ‘People got to the end?’” said 2K Boston’s Ken Levine at a New York Comic-Con panel last month. Now, in what other storytelling medium would you ever hear that come out of a creator’s mouth?

An incomplete film or novel is an active decision. You walk out of a theater, turn off a DVD, or put down a book. On the other hand, videogames tend to just fade out of your top-level consciousness after a while. You’ve seen my list of shamefully underplayed games. It’s not an uncommon phenomenon. If you’re into videogames, chances are you’ve got more than a few lying around that you never finished yet always meant to revisit. But why does this happen? Why don’t we finish games?

Well, as you may have guessed, I have a theory.

It starts with a basic, general assumption: Game stories suck.

I just deleted a couple paragraphs full of examples, because I know you don’t need proof. It’s just a given. For every story delivered as elegantly as Portal’s, there are a thousand games full of derivative garbage with incoherent narratives and forgettable characters. There are a number of reasons why game stories suck, and we can go into them all another time, but what does it have to do with finishing games?

Continue reading →

More on what I’ve been playing.

Halo Wars

It’s probably best that this has some separation from the bit on Killzone 2. Sure, they’re not in the same genre, but we all know how crazy the Internet can be.

It’s hard to tell how much my enjoyment of the Halo Wars demo stems from my fondness for Halo, and how much from the actual gameplay. Ensemble really nailed the feel of the franchise, from the way the Warthog bounces and swerves to the use of the original assault rifle’s crosshairs for the selection reticule.

Continue reading →

My parents instilled in me a deep love of reading at a young age. So, naturally, I thought I wanted to be an author when I was a kid. That is, until I learned how few novelists actually “make it.” But I was still passionate about books and knew I had a knack for telling good writing from bad, so I adjusted my goals: Editor at a book publisher—different job, same skill set, right?

More recently, as my gaming hobby grew into a passion, I went through a similar cycle. First, the same thought that strikes every devoted gamer: “If I like playing games, wouldn’t it be great to make them?” I didn’t have much interest in art or programming, but I could write. Right? And considering the quality of most videogame stories, games writing looked like a pretty viable field for me. (Design and production seemed like appealing alternatives too.) That wasn’t the issue though.

Continue reading →

I’m still planning to write up my thoughts on why people don’t finish games, and why it matters, but this week is incredibly hectic for me. So, instead of leaving this page barren for almost two weeks, I’m going to bang out a quick article on what I’ve been playing (answer: mostly demos). I hope this gives you a sense of my perspective and taste in games.

Killzone 2

The first of two big demos dropped last week, and while the gushing reviews are rolling in, I can’t say I’m so impressed with the snippet we’ve received. Although, part of it could be that I can’t stand the DualShock 3 for first-person shooters. (The sticks are too loose and too close together.)

Aside from general complaints about the PS3 controller, it was the little things that disappointed me in Killzone 2. I’ve always liked it when your character reaches out a hand and turns a door knob or pushes a button rather than the object magically operating itself when you press X. It grounds you in the world. So, how can Guerrila nail that one aspect of immersion, but then completely neglect to give your character feet?

Continue reading →

As far as I know, the term “Pile of Shame” originated on an old 1UP Yours episode, spawning a brilliant, albeit short-lived, experiment. The concept was that the Yours crew would revisit an underrated title as the community played along and participated in the discussion via the message boards.

While 1UP Yours’ brief endeavor flared out before it even got started, the Squadron of Shame took up the torch (then, just a small group of like-minded gamers in one corner of 1UP’s forums), and they still carry it proudly today.

This spark of an idea stuck with the Squad, and was eventually revived by 1UP FM, because it fills a need. Not only do we find joy in digging up the gems that slipped through the cracks, but we all have games that we never played but meant to, games we bought but left in plastic, games we put aside for one reason or another, to which we always meant to return but never did. We’ve all got a Pile of Shame.

Here’s mine.

Continue reading →

I’m going to skip the formal, front-page introductions and jump into some real content. If you want to know who I am and what I’m doing here, check the next page over.