On Breasts and Biceps

First of all, an arti­cle on IGN on a tra­di­tional prob­lem in video games crit­i­cism, here.

As a quick TL/DR sum­mary: basi­cally it’s another look at the oft-discussed fact that women are often treated as sex­ual objects in games.  Kolan men­tions a few exam­ples he thinks of as par­tic­u­larly egre­gious, includ­ing Ivy from Soul Calibur IV (def­i­nitely) and Miranda Lawson from Mass Effect 2 (who, while cer­tainly sexy and maybe even over­sex­u­al­ized, is not, I think, as good an exam­ple as he might like).  He then con­cludes with a quick look at some female char­ac­ters he thinks are much less over­sex­u­al­ized and con­cludes with a ques­tion about why devel­op­ers insist on hav­ing female char­ac­ters wear not enough cloth­ing over their colos­sal endow­ments.

The Catalyst

This column may be a lit­tle more ram­bling than I usu­ally am (if that’s pos­si­ble), but I think it’s worth dis­cussing.  The line that got me think­ing is one of the ones towards the end of Kolan’s arti­cle, and it’s a fairly com­mon thought when the over­sex­u­al­iza­tion of women in video games is dis­cussed:

“The female gamer, who pub­lish­ers are so vig­or­ously court­ing, might be more likely to pick up a game if she doesn’t have to feel inad­e­quate next to the char­ac­ter she plays as.”

This line stems from the rea­son­able enough assump­tion that the aver­age woman does not, in fact, look like this:

Pictured: Trip from Enslaved.

It then assumes, how­ever, that since this aver­age woman is prob­a­bly not quite as attrac­tive as the aver­age video game char­ac­ter, our hypo­thet­i­cal female player will be unwill­ing to play games fea­tur­ing such attrac­tive and well-endowed women because said dig­i­tal women will make her feel self-conscious and “inad­e­quate.”  This bor­rows from the “all women must have self-esteem issues forever” clause that is such an impor­tant part of our social nar­ra­tive these days, and while pre­sum­ably intend­ing to be egal­i­tar­ian and all that jazz, it actu­ally ends up sound­ing more than a lit­tle sex­ist.

Why?  Because you know what?  The aver­age man does not look much like this, either:

Pictured: Monkey from Enslaved.

And yet male gamers seem to play video games just fine.  And while it’s not as much a part of our social nar­ra­tive that men have crip­pling self-esteem issues as it is for women, I think the aver­age nerd would kill to look like Monkey.

This is an incred­i­bly broad topic and I could go a lot of places from here: I could go talk about how video games are far from unique in their over­sex­u­al­iza­tion of women, I could talk about still-present sex­ism in arti­cles like the above, I could exam­ine the nature of a strong female char­ac­ter, or any num­ber of other pos­si­ble top­ics.  The over­sex­u­al­iza­tion of women in games (and movies and books and music and…) is a tremen­dous prob­lem and I don’t mean to down­play the fact that women are over­sex­u­al­ized in games.  This is a very big prob­lem with games as art.  But it’s also a prob­lem which is very often dis­cussed on the Internet, and there’s really not much to be said about it that hasn’t already been said.

So, real quick: women are not just sex­ual objects, games which por­tray them as such are misog­y­nist.  This is bad.

With that out of the way, what I want to instead dis­cuss is why, exactly, game char­ac­ters tend to have breasts or biceps the size of their heads, and talk about how the root of this prob­lem isn’t exactly sex­ism or a predilec­tion for unrea­son­able mus­cu­la­ture, but rather a love for what I will call “epit­o­miza­tion.”

Epitomization

Most peo­ple (right or wrong), will tell you that games are aimed at men, and, specif­i­cally, young men, and as it is a pretty safe bet that the aver­age young (straight) man likes breasts and would love to be able to stran­gle a lion with his bare hands, game design­ers often build their char­ac­ters accord­ingly, let­ting them play out their fan­tasies in the game.

This is a process I am going to call “epit­o­miza­tion,” when a writer or game devel­oper takes the fan­tasies of a given per­son or per­sons and designs char­ac­ters around those fan­tasies.  This is taken to its most extreme in some games where instead of char­ac­ters, we get liv­ing epit­o­miza­tions of a cer­tain kind of fan­tasy: in this case, the “male power fan­tasy” so often ascribed to the 15-year-old male.  Kratos, Marcus Fenix, and War aren’t char­ac­ters, they are gigan­tic incar­na­tions (dig­i­ti­za­tions? never mind) of an angry, sex-obsessed 15-year-old’s ide­al­ized pic­ture of mas­culin­ity.

(As a quick note, in this here arti­cle, when I use the word “fan­tasy,” I refer not to the genre that has swords and shields and magic and uni­corns and what­not, but the type of men­tal process that has some­one “fan­ta­siz­ing” about some­thing, like a day­dream.)

Now, not all games are remotely this ridicu­lous, but even games with well-realized char­ac­ters will often at least por­tray their char­ac­ters’ bod­ies in such a way as to appeal to this demo­graphic.  By all accounts, Enslaved does a very good job of char­ac­ter­iz­ing Trip and Monkey, and their rela­tion­ship is appar­ently in many ways the best part of the game.  Appearance-wise, how­ever, they still fit right in with Kratos, GoW’s Aphrodite, and War.

So, it’s a pretty stan­dard truth in video games that women are attrac­tive (and usu­ally busty) and men are ripped.  Even in usu­ally classy games, this is almost always a truth  In Dragon Age: Origins, there is no option that does not leave your male char­ac­ter with a rip­pling six-pack of abs, no mat­ter what his strength score, and there are no options in Mass Effect for a female Shepard that don’t involve some aero­dy­namic (if, at least, phys­i­cally pos­si­ble) curves.

Some folks will say this sort of fan­tasy epit­o­miza­tion of at least phys­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics is bad because of the par­tic­u­lar fan­tasy it epit­o­mizes: the “male power fan­tasy.”  That might well be true, but I sub­mit to you that char­ac­ters lose their believ­abil­ity or artis­tic worth when they become epit­o­miza­tions of any kind of fan­tasy, rather than actual char­ac­ters.

So, what I want to talk about is that par­tic­u­lar kind of game that is built almost entirely on epit­o­miza­tion, and explain why such things are bad art (at least with regard to their char­ac­ters and plot).

Definition of Terms

I want to make a quick dis­tinc­tion here between three terms: art, enter­tain­ment, and escapism.  These are not wholly unique enti­ties, and there is plenty of over­lap between the three, but I feel there is nev­er­the­less some dis­tinc­tion between them.

Art is pretty darn hard to define, exactly, but seems to try to do more than just enter­tain the observer– to teach him or her some­thing, or at least to make him or her expe­ri­ence some­thing beau­ti­ful.  This is not to say all art should be didac­tic or moral­is­tic, but there is usu­ally some­thing in art intended to make the observer stop for a moment and say, “Whoa,” if noth­ing else.

Entertainment is not a bad thing, and, as men­tioned before, often over­laps with art, but it’s designed around “fun,” and a “good time.”  Most come­dies (though not all) are really much more enter­tain­ment than art– they are sup­posed to make you laugh and have a good time, and if you leave any richer a per­son, that’s fine, but it’s hardly the point.  Many games and movies are also pri­mar­ily enter­tain­ment– as I’ve also men­tioned before, Gears of War 2 is a heck of a lot of fun, but fails spec­tac­u­larly as soon as it tries to be art.

Escapism is a dif­fer­ent thing from either of those, and may be pri­mar­ily a func­tion of the observer, rather than the art itself.  Anything that pur­ports to help you “escape,” or “get away” from your day-to-day life, and live out fan­tasies or some such, counts as escapism.  The per­son who plays D&D because there he can be a six-foot-tall, 18/00-strength bar­bar­ian, whereas in real life he is a scrawny weak­ling, is engaged in escapism.  He may well also be engaged in art or enter­tain­ment, but that’s not all he’s doing.

On Escapism

These “epit­o­mized” games, like God of War, Gears of War and Darksiders (a game star­ring a char­ac­ter named “War,” just for the record) serve pri­mar­ily as escapism, what­ever artis­tic or enter­tain­ing qual­ity they may also have.  Why is it fun to be Kratos?  Because Kratos is unrea­son­ably vio­lent, can do what­ever he wants, lis­tens to no one, screws all the hottest chicks, and just gen­er­ally appeals to that part of most (if not all) men that “just wants to watch the world burn.”  God of War and its com­pa­tri­ots are thus not par­tic­u­larly artis­ti­cally valid because they serve pri­mar­ily as escapism, and not art at all.

This is not unique to video games at all, and nei­ther is it unique to andro-centric fan­tasies.  Who is Edward Cullen if not the epit­o­miza­tion of a cer­tain kind of stereo­typ­i­cal 15-year-old female fan­tasy?  A woman can lose her­self in Bella and enjoy her fan­tasy of becom­ing the be-all and end-all of some attrac­tive man’s life in the same way that a man can lose him­self in Kratos and enjoy his fan­tasy of mur­der­ing every­thing that looks at him cross­wise and hav­ing mean­ing­less sex with porn star-shaped women when­ever he pleases.  This is not at all to say that all women enjoy the Twilight fan­tasy or all men, God of War, but both fran­chises have sold mil­lions upon mil­lions of copies of their work, so, you know, there’s clearly some­thing in this that peo­ple like.

In Conclusion: Game Characters, or the Lack Thereof

I sup­pose it’s not nec­es­sar­ily bad, as such, for some­thing to be escapism, or to allow a per­son to enact his or her fan­tasies.  But such things don’t seem to have much in the way of artis­tic qual­i­ties.  “Characters” like Kratos and War serve as the most extreme exam­ple of a gen­er­ally unpleas­ant fact about video games as a whole: a ten­dency to com­pletely ignore char­ac­ter and char­ac­ter devel­op­ment in favor of visu­als, mechan­ics, and/or plot.

Introducing “Distance”

I was pretty depressed this week, so writing anything was really, really difficult. But I managed somehow and am unwill­ing to mince time, so let’s leap right into the meat of my next con­tri­bu­tion: a dis­cus­sion of avatar and player. Oh, and as usual, spoil­ers are nigh.

Two Very Different Games

Since I’ve been on break, I’ve had the chance to play through a num­ber of games I’ve been hop­ing to get around to, includ­ing Enslaved: Journey to the West, but also Call of Duty: Black Ops. If you know any­thing about these titles, you also know that they have lit­tle to noth­ing in com­mon other than their shared nature as video game, at least on the sur­face. Both games also present a nar­ra­tive (value of said nar­ra­tive aside), voice-acted char­ac­ters, and (for the most part) a sin­gle avatar for the player to con­trol and expe­ri­ence the events of the game through.

I would argue that Enslaved offers the best nar­ra­tive of the the two. The adven­ture game has incred­i­ble mer­its as a story. Its main char­ac­ters are intrigu­ing, lik­able, and the player’s avatar char­ac­ter, Monkey, goes through an inter­est­ing and believ­able growth arc through the events of the game. Those char­ac­ters have qual­ity voice actors, their lines are very well-written, and the stel­lar facial ani­ma­tion at play in the game allows for act­ing to occur out­side the dia­logue, which is some­thing attempted in many games, but rarely to appre­cia­ble qual­ity. You can see a bit of that here. The game­play is good, but is not nec­es­sar­ily the thing that sets the game apart; sim­i­lar sys­tems have been exe­cuted more expertly in other games. What’s ulti­mately impor­tant about the rest of the game is that it stays out of the way of the char­ac­ters, the story, and the gor­geous, over-grown vision of recov­er­ing post-apocalyptic America. The game offers an expe­ri­ence of par with the best of sim­i­lar styles of movies, and con­tains sim­i­lar pro­duc­tion value. It is a good exam­ple of game-as-art because of the worth of the tale it presents.

Call of Duty: Black Ops has a less refined story, poorer dia­logue, and is less visu­ally appeal­ing. However, it also tack­les indi­vid­ual expe­ri­ences in a way that no other medium can; one can­not envi­sion the expe­ri­ence as any­thing other than game. This is a trait that Enslaved can­not boast, except maybe in an argu­ment for the game’s pac­ing. Enslaved could have been just as effec­tive as a movie, and aspires to noth­ing more. In other words, at no time do you feel like you’re any­thing but an observer in the story (which, again, is admit­tedly fan­tas­tic).

Important Disclaimer

Before I go any far­ther, I want to make clear that this isn’t a bad thing. Enslaved is still a phe­nom­e­nal and fun expe­ri­ence, a qual­ity game that I have no qualms about rec­om­mend­ing; I have encoun­tered few sto­ries in a game that were as well-executed. However, it does not cap­i­tal­ize on the traits that sep­a­rate video games from the rest of art.

Inhabiting the Avatar

Black Ops is an inter­est­ing case. Its nar­ra­tive never becomes excep­tion­ally engag­ing, and its char­ac­ters are true to type, but never truly inter­est­ing. That said, in nearly every mis­sion it seeks to trans­port the player into their avatar’s body at least once. For instance, here’s a scene where Mason is forced to play Russian Roulette with a com­rade after being cap­tured by the Vietcong, though it has a sur­prise end­ing. It’s obvi­ously NSFW, though its worth not­ing that it has plenty of naughty lan­guage in it. It’s a decent scene, but notable because of where it places the player: in a spot so tight that you empathize more read­ily with your avatar.

Another, bet­ter exam­ple of this is the end­ing to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. There’s no way you can’t empathize with Soap here, even if just a lit­tle bit. Ultimately, your com­mands are respon­si­ble for his vengeance. Perhaps there alter­na­tive meth­ods of attain­ing equal or greater empa­thy with the char­ac­ter, but this method (allow­ing a player’s actions to cor­re­spond to a character’s actions in a dra­mat­i­cally impor­tant sequence) is com­pletely unique to video games, and can result in a qual­i­ta­tively dif­fer­ent empa­thy than that pro­duced by film or text. Other exam­ples include the whole of the stel­lar Breakdown and the end­ing of Halo: Reach, which I’d hate to spoil here, so go expe­ri­ence it for your­self.

These sequences dis­play the defin­ing qual­ity of video game art, albeit in their own gory and mas­cu­line fash­ion. They allow the audi­ence to play a role in the pre­sented nar­ra­tive. Black Ops is dis­tinct from Enslaved in that it offers play­ers some degree of con­trol in dra­mat­i­cally impor­tant moments, whereas in Enslaved there are clear bound­aries between the meat of the story, told in cutscenes wherein play­ers have no con­trol, and actu­ally “play­ing the game”, in which the char­ac­ters may speak to each other, but the character’s con­trolled actions have no dra­matic rel­e­vance. Thus, there is greater dis­tance in empathiz­ing with Monkey of Enslaved than with Alex Mason in Black Ops. This doesn’t change the fact that, ulti­mately, the player is much more likely to empathize with Monkey, but that’s because Monkey is a fan­tas­tic and fully real­ized char­ac­ter. Mason, even with the aid of shared action in impor­tant dra­matic moments, never becomes any­thing more than another sol­dier.

Distance

I think that “dis­tance” may be an effec­tive term for describ­ing the degree to which a player occu­pies a character’s place in a nar­ra­tive. Distance is unique to the game. In Mass Effect, there is less­ened dis­tance between the per­son­al­ity of Shepard and the per­son­al­ity of the player than there is in a game with fixed dia­logue, and this allows for the player to exert con­trol over the char­ac­ter, and thus the nar­ra­tive. However, even in games where the player does not con­trol the character’s deci­sions in a nar­ra­tive, dis­tance can still be reduced by immers­ing the player in the phys­i­cal or men­tal real­i­ties of the char­ac­ter and by allow­ing for a greater degree of con­trol within dra­matic events. Quick-time events are the least sophis­ti­cated expres­sion of this sort of dis­tance, but the Call of Duty exam­ple is much more effec­tive because there is closer cor­re­la­tion to the player’s actions and the character’s actions.

So, what are your thoughts? Do you think that dis­tance is an effec­tive con­cept in dis­cussing games-as-art? Does motion-based game­play, such as with the Kinect, cre­ate oppor­tu­ni­ties to lessen dis­tance?

The n00b and the 1337, Pt. 2: Skill and Education

Introduction

A week ago, I wrote the first part of this two-part series, so if you haven’t already read that, this col­umn will prob­a­bly make more sense if you go ahead and do that. I’ll wait here.

Oh good, you’re back. Anyway, as I men­tioned then, this week’s post is about the other half of the equa­tion: skill and edu­ca­tion.

The Unskilled Player

Not too long ago, my cousin picked up a copy of BioShock for the PC, a game which, though it is cer­tainly full of flaws, is prob­a­bly one of the best argu­ments for games-as-art from the first decade of XXI century. I rec­om­mended it to him on the grounds of its philosophically-rich con­cept, excel­lent atmos­phere, and also because it is just gen­er­ally a great deal of fun. I also rec­om­mend it to any of you who haven’t played it for the same rea­sons.

My cousin has been play­ing video games with me since I was five years old, and while I do not think he would clas­sify him­self as a “gamer,” he is quite fond of Starcraft, Civilization IV, Final Fantasy Tactics, Resident Evil 4, and sev­eral other games. As you might have deduced from above, cousin’s inter­ests so far have pri­mar­ily grav­i­tated towards strat­egy games, and pre­vi­ous to play­ing BioShock, his only real expe­ri­ence with a shooter (as far as I know) is Resident Evil 4 for the PS2/Gamecube, which is a sub­stan­tially dif­fer­ent kind of game.

As a result, though he was (and is, as far as I know), quite open to enjoy­ing the heck out of BioShock, he has found him­self in a some­what awk­ward posi­tion– hav­ing little-to-no expe­ri­ence with the FPS genre, he has a cer­tain degree of dif­fi­culty with some of the basic skills nec­es­sary to play BioShock: mov­ing around in three-dimensional space with the use of a mouse and key­board, for instance. This some­what ham­pers his abil­ity to enjoy the game or appre­ci­ate its rel­a­tively sophis­ti­cated nar­ra­tive.

This may sound like I’m mak­ing fun of my cousin, but I’m really not– there is noth­ing excep­tion­ally intu­itive about the con­trol schemes and fun­da­men­tals of video games that have risen to promi­nence in the video game world. Because most of us who clas­sify our­selves as “gamers” have been play­ing video games since child­hood, we learned the basics of these con­trol schemes and fun­da­men­tal con­ceits a long time ago, and can thus some­times be frus­trated when con­fronted with a rel­a­tive beginner’s attempts to do things we have long since stopped think­ing of as chal­leng­ing.

Any gamer who has ever tried to teach a new­comer how to play a shooter or plat­former can under­stand what I mean– watch­ing some­one else get hung up on pieces of scenery, repeat­edly for­get which but­ton is the “shoot” but­ton, con­sis­tently miss sim­ple jumps, and dra­mat­i­cally shoot past the ene­mies can be a try­ing expe­ri­ence. We become frus­trated, because these skills and con­cepts have been ingrained in us for a very long time– it’s anal­o­gous to lis­ten­ing to a rookie vio­lin­ist, or watch­ing a tod­dler try to climb a flight of stairs.

But it’s not a result of any par­tic­u­lar fail­ing on the newcomer’s part that he or she has trou­ble with any of these games. There is noth­ing inher­ent in every­day human expe­ri­ence which pre­pares a per­son to be able to move an avatar in three-dimensional space with two thumb­sticks, or to map spe­cific actions to par­tic­u­lar motions of the thumbs. In real life, the badguys do not have “weak points” which require par­tic­u­lar sequences of actions to defeat, and rarely “tele­graph” their attacks. The only way to gain these skills and under­stand these con­ceits is to play a lot of video games.

As a result, it is dif­fi­cult to imag­ine some­one who lacks these basic skills and knowl­edge really enjoy­ing or appre­ci­at­ing the artis­tic qual­i­ties found in many of these games, and it is indeed under­stand­able that many such peo­ple might be a bit skep­ti­cal that said artis­tic qual­ity even exists. Thus, the fact that video games often require some mea­sure of skill to appre­ci­ate serves as a bar­rier to both appre­ci­a­tion of a spe­cific work, and to appre­ci­a­tion of the entire medium.

Education and Skill in Other Arts

I am not sug­gest­ing that all video games should become eas­ier, because this is not a prob­lem unique to video games, though it is per­haps more true of video games than of most other media. Most great art requires some mea­sure of skill to under­stand and appre­ci­ate. Literature, obvi­ously, requires the abil­ity to read a par­tic­u­lar lan­guage, which is prob­a­bly a more dif­fi­cult skill than any found in video games. Most of the great­est works of lit­er­a­ture require not only pro­fi­ciency in read­ing, but a great deal of mas­tery– how many peo­ple have found Shakespeare or Tolkien bor­ing and unin­ter­est­ing sim­ply because they couldn’t read well enough to under­stand it? To fol­low a com­pli­cated and twisty polit­i­cal thriller requires some skill in keep­ing track of char­ac­ters and moti­va­tions, and a great deal of the best music in the world sounds only like noise to an une­d­u­cated ear.

We gen­er­ally under­stand that some (or maybe even most) works of art are inac­ces­si­ble with­out a cer­tain amount of edu­ca­tion. One would not hand a five-year-old child a copy of Hamlet and expect him or her to truly appre­ci­ate its depth of emo­tion and mas­tery of lan­guage, or a non-Russian speaker an untrans­lated copy of Crime and Punishment and then become offended when it can­not hold his or her atten­tion for even a moment. Similarly, one should prob­a­bly not direct some­one who has never played an FPS to BioShock, so, sorry, cousin.

But while it’s true that most art requires some skill and edu­ca­tion, there’s some­thing about video games as a medium that involves more “active” skill. It’s not exactly fair to char­ac­ter­ize read­ing a dif­fi­cult book, lis­ten­ing to com­plex music, etc, as “pas­sive,” (espe­cially in some instances), but there’s a way in which the rela­tion­ship between artist and audi­ence is gen­er­ally more one-sided than it is with video games.

This causes me to won­der if a bet­ter ana­logue for the rela­tion­ship between game design team and player might be the rela­tion­ship between com­poser and musi­cian than between author and reader. There is obvi­ously a major dif­fer­ence in that in music, there’s usu­ally an audi­ence as well as a musi­cian, and usu­ally, in video games, the musician-role, the player, is also the audi­ence. This is espe­cially true in the “dance-like” games I men­tioned last time (though that starts to dan­ger­ously mix my metaphors).

In music, the “art” seems to be from two sources: the musi­cal ideas writ­ten by the com­poser, which is then inter­preted by the musi­cian. As such, we can refer to two dis­tinct artis­tic enti­ties: the Bach unac­com­pa­nied cello suites, and Pablo Casals’ per­for­mance of said cello suites. Bach’s cello suites are beau­ti­ful works of art of their own accord, but they are more obvi­ously so when per­formed by Casals than by Smith. Similarly, a “dance-like” game like Prince of Persia is a pretty decent (in my esti­ma­tion) work of art, but more so when per­formed by a skilled player than by an unskilled player.

This is less true of non “dance-like” games, where the player’s skill does not nec­es­sar­ily cre­ate art, but there’s still some truth to it, I think. Mass Effect is much more artis­ti­cally inter­est­ing when its player selects dia­logue options which por­tray Shepard as a con­sis­tent per­son­al­ity than if he or she wavers schiz­o­phreni­cally between Renegade and Paragon options with no con­sis­tency or ratio­nal­ity, and in order to appre­ci­ate BioShock’s moral dilem­mas and atmos­phere, as men­tioned last time, the player has to be skilled enough that he or she can, in fact, defeat the Big Daddies and numer­ous splicers wan­der­ing through Rapture, rather than sim­ply avoid­ing them or being mur­dered by them.

Critics of Games-as-art

One area where this prob­lem of “skill” really raises its head is when defend­ers of games-as-art attempt to get crit­ics of the same to play some of gaming’s great­est artis­tic moments. After Ebert’s var­i­ous famous denounce­ments of games-as-art, many peo­ple responded by telling him to play Shadow of the Colossus. Yahtzee Croshaw’s response to said sug­ges­tion was “…whoa, for a first timer? Don’t book your­self on the London marathon before you can walk.”

Since pre­sum­ably most crit­ics of games-as-art have not played many video games in the last decade or so (or, I sug­gest, per­haps rather face­tiously, they would not be crit­ics), it is dif­fi­cult to imag­ine that they would have very many of the skills and vocab­u­lary nec­es­sary to really enjoy and expe­ri­ence most of the great video games. Most of those games are aimed at estab­lished gamers and, as such, don’t make much allowance for peo­ple still learn­ing the basics.

This seems like a prob­lem, but I’m not sure that it really is, in prac­tice. As men­tioned above, most artis­tic media have sim­i­lar barriers-to-entry, and I don’t think video games need to apol­o­gize for theirs. The like­li­hood that Roger Ebert is ever actu­ally going to lis­ten to the sug­ges­tions of the gam­ing com­mu­nity and pick up an Xbox is slim, and sim­i­larly, I expect most crit­ics of games-as-art will not be very inter­ested in play­ing games in the first place.

Frankly, that’s fine. We in the gam­ing com­mu­nity should prob­a­bly quit try­ing to get var­i­ous older crit­ics of other media to pay atten­tion to ours. I doubt that new authors par­tic­u­larly care what Roger Ebert thinks, or that film­mak­ers pay much atten­tion to what a book reviewer might say of their work. The fact is that any­one who cat­e­gor­i­cally denies video games any artis­tic worth and also refuses to play them is sim­ply not worth our time. These folks are not likely to change their minds any time soon, and it’s not worth beat­ing a dead horse to try to get them to. They just don’t know what they’re talk­ing about.

New Players or Less Vitriolic Critics

But in the case of peo­ple like my cousin, newer, rel­a­tively unskilled play­ers who would still like to play these games, there is a prob­lem. Furthermore, one can imag­ine that not all crit­ics of games-as-art are quite as cer­tain or vit­ri­olic as Ebert has usu­ally been. What sort of games should adult non-gamers play if they wish to become gamers, and to learn the basic skills and vocab­u­lary nec­es­sary in gam­ing? And what sort of games should we use to show crit­ics who are nev­er­the­less will­ing to pos­si­bly engage in dis­cus­sion? For my own two cents, I rec­om­mend coop­er­a­tive games that place the new­comer on the same side as more vet­eran play­ers, thereby enabling the new­comer to learn from more expe­ri­enced play­ers, as well as pro­vid­ing a lit­er­ally “safer” way to learn, as, pre­sum­ably, the newcomer’s every mis­take will not be pun­ished by death as it would be in a com­pet­i­tive sit­u­a­tion or in many single-player expe­ri­ences.

Specifically, for the bud­ding shooter enthu­si­ast, I would rec­om­mend Left 4 Dead, for a myr­iad of rea­sons, includ­ing its rel­a­tive sim­plic­ity, coop­er­a­tive bent, end­less replaya­bil­ity, and bite-sized dura­tion. It’s also just gen­er­ally an excel­lent game, and so will pre­sum­ably help sell the new player on video games both as enter­tain­ment and art.

In Conclusion

Over the course of the last two posts, I have talked about two sides of the same coin: the prob­lem of dif­fi­culty, and the neces­sity of skill. Games need to have some sem­blance of dif­fi­culty, or they become unin­ter­est­ing, incon­sis­tent or unre­lat­able, and play­ers will, accord­ingly, need to have some degree of skill or they will be, at best, sim­ply unable to engage with the game and expe­ri­ence what­ever it might have to offer.

This is a prob­lem for games devel­op­ers, as they have to decide how hard to make their games, and what audi­ence a game will be acces­si­ble to. It is worth keep­ing in mind as play­ers, as well– espe­cially when inter­act­ing with less-experienced play­ers. Not every­one has sunk hun­dreds or thou­sands (if not hun­dreds of thou­sands) of hours into video games as many of us have– and will there­fore have a harder time under­stand­ing why BioShock or Shadow of the Colossus is really all that excit­ing.

A Question

Having men­tioned above that most games are a lit­tle inac­ces­si­ble to the bud­ding gamer or rea­son­able but inex­pe­ri­enced critic, I ask you, the Audience of the Analytically About Games, to give me some sug­ges­tions for five games that might be help­ful to a new player. These games should be rel­a­tively easy but still pos­sess some artis­tic worth (so not just Super Mario Bros, prob­a­bly). They should be inter­est­ing to play but have a rel­a­tively easy dif­fi­culty curve, and should in some way show off what video games can do, whether in graph­ics, sound, writ­ing, char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, or any num­ber of other qual­i­ties.

Please com­ment below with your sug­ges­tions.

The n00b and the 1337, Pt. 1: Difficulty

In my last post, I sug­gested that some games require skill in order to really access their artis­tic value. This, nat­u­rally, got me to think­ing about skill and dif­fi­culty in games, and so I had ini­tially intended to write a sin­gle arti­cle about both of these top­ics. Instead, the more I worked at them, the more I real­ized that, as they are really two sides to the same coin, they deserved two sep­a­rate but related arti­cles.

So, today, we are going to talk about dif­fi­culty in games: the impor­tance that a game gen­er­ally not be too easy or too hard, and how this bal­ance is impor­tant not only to be an enjoy­able game or to hold a player’s inter­est, but also for artis­tic rea­sons. Specifically, I am going to explain how dif­fi­culty is an inte­gral part of atmos­phere, con­sis­tency, and what I will term “sym­pa­thy”; by “sym­pa­thy” I mean the player’s abil­ity to con­nect to the point-of-view char­ac­ter and sym­pa­thize with his or her sit­u­a­tion and feel­ings.

But first,

A Couple of Notes About Difficulty

First, in other media, dif­fi­culty is not gen­er­ally a good thing in and of itself. It is some­times nec­es­sary in order to prop­erly tell a story or explore an idea, but a work does not gen­er­ally derive its artis­tic value from its dif­fi­culty (though there are excep­tions). Inception does not gain its worth from its dif­fi­culty, its dif­fi­culty is sim­ply nec­es­sary in order to really explore its ideas. (Indeed, one might argue that, in an effort to avoid alien­at­ing audi­ences by being “too dif­fi­cult,” it avoided deal­ing with some of the inter­est­ing impli­ca­tions of its the­o­ries).

In fact, gen­er­ally, I would sug­gest that in most cases, a work should strive to be as clear as it can be with­out doing dam­age to its con­ceit. Some works sim­ply have to be com­pli­cated and dif­fi­cult, or they feel like they are under­es­ti­mat­ing their audi­ence and afraid of really tack­ling the idea head-on. I think it is gen­er­ally under­stood that need­less obfus­ca­tion is a lit­er­ary sin: it usu­ally serves to obscure a lack of con­tent, inflate the artist’s ego, or need­lessly exclude most peo­ple from engag­ing with the art­work.

This is not, how­ever, nec­es­sar­ily the case with video games. A game’s “ideal” dif­fi­culty cer­tainly depends on what the game is try­ing to be– not just its “tar­get audi­ence,” but what sort of artis­tic state­ment it is try­ing to make, if any. I Wanna Be the Guy, as a “sar­donic lovelet­ter to the hal­cyon days of early American videogam­ing,” should be mind-numbingly dif­fi­cult. It would not func­tion very well as a satire of NES-era pun­ish­ing dif­fi­culty if it wasn’t, well, dif­fi­cult. But most games should not be nearly that dif­fi­cult. Conversely, one could argue that as Prince of Persia, is, as men­tioned before, “all about flow,” and as the Prince’s side­kick Elika is strongly implied to be backed by the local deity, it makes some sense that it’s impos­si­ble for the player char­ac­ter to per­ma­nently fail.

But that said, a game needs to be dif­fi­cult enough to be hold a player’s inter­est, and as such, “as sim­ple as pos­si­ble” is not a good idea with video games, for rea­sons which I hope will be explained in the rest of this arti­cle. I would sug­gest that this notion, that some mea­sure of dif­fi­culty might almost be an end-in-itself, is one unique to video games. It is dif­fi­cult to think of any other medium where the answer to “how dif­fi­cult should it be to expe­ri­ence” is any­thing other than “as easy as pos­si­ble with­out need­lessly repeat­ing expla­na­tions or avoid­ing dif­fi­cult issues.” In video games, the answer is “easy enough for most pro­fi­cient play­ers to be able to play it with­out too much frus­tra­tion, but hard enough to hold their inter­est and main­tain atmos­phere, con­sis­tency, and sym­pa­thy.”

Second, the fol­low­ing con­cerns are pre­sum­ably why many games imple­ment dif­fi­culty set­tings, so that vet­eran play­ers can still expe­ri­ence the nec­es­sary chal­lenge with­out ren­der­ing the game unplayable by new­com­ers. But for some kinds of games (plat­form­ers, in par­tic­u­lar), “dif­fi­culty set­tings” aren’t really fea­si­ble. It’s easy enough in a shooter to change the amount of dam­age an enemy can take or the fre­quency of ammu­ni­tion, but with­out going through and redesign­ing every sin­gle level, a plat­former can’t really change its dif­fi­culty very much. Thus, many games require more than sim­ple dif­fi­culty set­tings to try to make sure the game is acces­si­ble to the right audi­ence.

Third, I want to draw a dis­tinc­tion between two kinds of dif­fi­culty in a game, what I’ll call micro-difficulty and macro-difficulty. Micro-difficulty refers to the dif­fi­culty of a par­tic­u­lar enemy or sit­u­a­tion in a game, whereas macro-difficulty refers to the dif­fi­culty of the game as a whole. A game might have a low macro-difficulty, with moments of high micro-difficulty: plenty of games are not excep­tion­ally dif­fi­cult in the macro sense, but have moments of sheer hair-pulling frus­tra­tion, either in the form of bad game design, optional bosses, or just strange spikes in the dif­fi­culty curve

So, with those points made, let’s get to the meat of the mat­ter by look­ing at a few games and gen­res.

BioShock: Atmosphere and Sympathy

Among the ele­ments most critically-applauded in 2007’s excel­lent BioShock were the huge, lum­ber­ing ene­mies known as Big Daddies. These behe­moths wan­der about the streets of Rapture pro­tect­ing the “Little Sisters,” lit­tle girls infused with a pow­er­ful, strength-enhancing sub­stances, from any and all acts of aggres­sion. Periodically through­out Jack’s trav­els in Rapture, he will encounter Big Daddies wan­der­ing about, chatty Little Sisters in tow, on some unknown mis­sion. But what makes the sit­u­a­tion inter­est­ing is that, unless pro­voked, Big Daddies will in no way harm Jack. It is only if the player chooses to assault the girl or her guardian that the Big Daddy will attack. The player can thus choose whether or not to engage with the Big Daddies, and must do some basic risk-reward analy­sis.

These Big Daddies are gen­er­ally quite hard to defeat, but not impos­si­ble, and it is this care­ful plac­ing on the dif­fi­culty curve that makes them work. Were they too easy, there would be no deter­rent to attack­ing them and res­cu­ing or har­vest­ing the Little Sisters, and were they too dif­fi­cult, the dilemma would sim­ply be a false choice: if it’s impos­si­ble for me to kill the Big Daddies, I have no choice but to let them on their way. But by ensur­ing that Big Daddies remain a sub­stan­tial chal­lenge, but not an impos­si­ble one, BioShock ensures that the player is kept in sym­pa­thy with Jack and behaves more like a rea­son­able human being would in the sit­u­a­tion– only attack­ing the Big Daddies with prepa­ra­tion and trep­i­da­tion.

Furthermore, BioShock’s much-lauded atmos­phere is heav­ily reliant on the Big Daddies, and would also fall to pieces with­out the care­ful plac­ing of their dif­fi­culty. Few things make you feel more like you’re in Rapture than wan­der­ing through a quiet tun­nel, observ­ing the beau­ti­ful scenery, and not far in the dis­tance, hear­ing the whale-like moans of a Big Daddy and hear­ing his tromp­ing feet some­where nearby. You feel as though you’re in the pres­ence of some­thing both dan­ger­ous and harm­less, and, in the best moments, it makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. This is only pos­si­ble because you know that, if pro­voked, that Big Daddy will not hes­i­tate to mur­der your stu­pid self. You find your­self care­fully mea­sur­ing your steps, and being very care­ful with your gun­fire as you fight lesser ene­mies. You don’t want to anger him acci­den­tally. If you must attack him, you want to be very well pre­pared.

Horror Games: Atmosphere

In this case, sym­pa­thy and atmos­phere are very closely related. Presumably, in a sur­vival hor­ror game (or any other kind of hor­ror game for that mat­ter), the goal of the game design­ers is, at least in part, to scare the player. This can only be done if the atmos­phere of the sit­u­a­tion is right.

Horror games may be the only instance where almost uni­ver­sally the macro-difficulty should be higher than in most games. The fun of a hor­ror game is in hav­ing to be Very Careful, lest the mon­sters sneak up behind you or pop up from in front of you and devour you whole. This does not work if the mon­sters are pushovers. A prob­lem with both Dead Space and Resident Evil 4 is that, even on high dif­fi­cul­ties, towards the end of the game, one’s guns have been upgraded to the point where most vil­lains pro­vide little-to-no chal­lenge. The games sim­ply quit being scary. Conversely, the game quits being scary and starts just being frus­trat­ing if the dif­fi­culty is too high. We want to play the terrified-but-heroic char­ac­ter who escapes in the end, not one of the myr­iad goons that dies along the way.

Several of the most fright­en­ing crea­tures in games are announced by loud sounds that can be heard from a long way away, much like the Big Daddy above. Left 4 Dead’s Witches and Resident Evil 4’s Regenerators, to use two exam­ples, are quite vocal about their pres­ence in an area. Witches sob loudly, and Regenerators con­stantly breathe this ter­ri­ble, hack­ing wheeze. It’s very unlikely you’re going to stum­ble over one with absolutely no warn­ing. But what makes the sob­bing or the wheez­ing ter­ri­fy­ing is not the noise itself (though that might well be a bit unset­tling), but rather what it sig­ni­fies– that one of the hard­est indi­vid­ual mon­sters in the game is wait­ing around a dark cor­ner some­where close, and, if you’re not care­ful, you’ll trip right into it and get eaten and/or clawed to death. Witches quit being scary when one fig­ures out that, on lower dif­fi­cul­ties, it only takes a shot­gun blast or two to the head to quiet that obnox­ious sob­bing, and Regenerators are no longer fright­en­ing on your twelfth playthrough with a fully-upgraded Hand Cannon.

As an inter­est­ing side note, Dead Space offers an answer to the “dif­fi­culty set­tings” ques­tion by employ­ing a game mechanic which, while allow­ing for dif­fi­culty set­tings to pro­vide greater and lesser degrees of dif­fi­culty, still ensures that the game is never too easy. Unlike most shoot­ers, Dead Space’s necro­morphs are most vul­ner­a­ble in their limbs, such that in order to con­serve ammu­ni­tion and kill them more quickly, one has to not aim for the monster’s cen­ter of mass, but rather its arms and legs. This is made more dif­fi­cult by the fact that said limbs are usu­ally flail­ing errat­i­cally try­ing to cut poor Isaac into rib­bons. This helps ensure that even on the eas­i­est dif­fi­culty, sim­ply point­ing at the Slasher and hold­ing down they fire key is not a rea­son­able course of action– you will quickly run out of ammu­ni­tion and end up try­ing to beat the mon­sters to death with your bare hands, a frus­trat­ing and nearly-impossible task.

Dragon Age: Awakening: Consistency

My final exam­ple for the day con­cerns one of the most dis­ap­point­ing games I’ve ever played. The expan­sion pack to one of my favorite games of all time, Dragon Age: Awakening has a num­ber of flaws, but one of the most egre­gious is that the game is absurdly easy, even on higher dif­fi­culty lev­els. This is a prob­lem for sev­eral rea­sons. (As a few notes: I played on Hard with an Orlesian dual-wielding Rogue who spe­cial­ized in Assassin/Duelist/Legionnaire Scout. I did not par­tic­u­larly power game beyond that– I was still using basic runes and only mod­er­ately decent equip­ment).

First, and prob­a­bly most detri­men­tal to the game’s enjoy­a­bil­ity is that the game’s lack of dif­fi­culty means that the game requires lit­tle to no thought, and its com­bat is not inter­est­ing. I quite lit­er­ally walked through all of Kal’Hirol sim­ply by push­ing the thumb­stick for­ward and mash­ing the A but­ton, and that would be bad even in a beat-em-up. In a tac­ti­cal role­play­ing game, it’s just a sign of bad game design. (It could, the­o­ret­i­cally, also be a sign that I’m just very good at Dragon Age, but see above for why I don’t think that’s so. There are, I am sure, dozens of bet­ter builds for the Warden-Commander than that one.)

But more impor­tantly for our pur­poses, it makes the game’s cen­tral con­flict seem silly. We are repeat­edly told that the Mother’s dark­spawn are a ter­ri­fy­ing threat capa­ble of anni­hi­lat­ing all of Amaranthine. The game begins with said dark­spawn sack­ing the Grey Wardens’ strong­hold, killing tens of trained Wardens and Lord knows how many reg­u­lar guards. But this, cou­pled with the fact that in-game, such vil­lains are rarely, beyond the ini­tial hour or so, remotely a threat to any remotely com­pe­tent player, just ends up imply­ing that every other Grey Warden in Ferelden is incom­pe­tent.

Furthermore, in the end of the game, one has to split one’s party between two locales, both of which will fall under assault by Darkspawn hordes. If one has not prop­erly equipped Amaranthine’s army, inspired the other half of the party, and so forth, one runs a seri­ous risk of los­ing that half of the party not under your con­trol to the dark­spawn inva­sion. On the face of it, this makes sense: a small group of war­riors being over­whelmed by hordes of vil­lains, if their sup­port­ing army is not appro­pri­ately equipped, is pretty sen­si­ble. But the fact is that, in-engine, when those four or five char­ac­ters are under your con­trol, they can anni­hi­late a more or less unlim­ited num­ber of dark­spawn.

It ends up sug­gest­ing that your NPCs fight at some­thing like one-tenth their nor­mal effec­tive­ness when you’re not with them, which, though per­haps intended to be a flat­ter­ing indi­ca­tion of the Warden-Commander’s lead­er­ship, just ends up look­ing silly. If such threats are to be taken seri­ously, and not seem arbi­trary, and if the world itself is to seem rea­son­able and con­sis­tent, the game just flat needs to be harder.

In Conclusion

On the face of it, the fact that games need to be chal­leng­ing with­out being impos­si­ble seems sim­ple, and I am not sug­gest­ing that these thoughts are rev­o­lu­tion­ary– rather, I sim­ply hope that I have illus­trated the point. Furthermore, I intend to use this point as foun­da­tion for next week’s arti­cle (already mostly writ­ten), about skill in games, and how, if games need to be at least a lit­tle bit chal­leng­ing in order to be artis­ti­cally valu­able, then a cer­tain amount of skill on the part of the player is going to be nec­es­sary in order to unlock that artis­tic value. Next week, I will dis­cuss what that means for the skep­tic and the new­comer, and how this fact may not be as unique to video games as you might think.