Meph analytically about games: stycznia 2017

niedziela, 29 stycznia 2017

Trenched Warfare

War film has been hugely popular since the beginnings of the medium, and that style has definitely influenced the first-person shooter genre in video games. A great deal (half or more, I’d reckon) of first-person shooter games feature a war of some sort; only the rare shooter, such as the non-side-scrolling Metroid games, feature a story that has a sole protagonist up against an unorganized, non-military foe who isn’t involved in some large campaign or plot. Instead, most modern shooters are war tales in some way or another, and the actions your protagonist takes throughout the game are situated as part of a larger effort. You’re not aiming to kill ‘em all or get a MacGuffin for its own sake; instead, you’re hitting supply lines, halting offensives, watching your allies die horribly or heroically sacrifice themselves, shutting down (or launching) nuclear strikes, or seeking out a MacGuffin to turn the tide of the war. This is admittedly more realistic than the one-man-army style of story, but it also has its own set of tropes that FPS games (and 3rd-person shooters that focus on war, though they seem less likely to focus on the topic) have had little luck subverting or avoiding, resulting in stale and predictable narratives and characters.

I’ll be piggy-backing off of my earlier article on the hero narrative in this discussion, because I think the outlines of the hero narrative are partially what makes the war stories portrayed in video games so stale and uninteresting. If you’d prefer not to re-read the article, the salient point is this: the hero narrative of most video games, featuring a protagonist who overcomes all failures and who is the most important man in the room, has nearly been exhausted. In fact, such a protagonist rarely suits a war story.

War… War Never Changes

Well, it’s not exactly that simple, Mr. Perlman. War stories are fundamentally interesting to us and, outside of video games, they contain diverse themes and structures. Compare Schindler’s List, Inglourious Basterds, Saving Private Ryan, Glory, Apocalypse Now, and All Quiet on the Western Front. Each film contains radically different themes, characters, and tone. They investigate disparate aspects of war with varied amounts of reverence and black humor, and show us a wide range of who the soldier is, and what he (or she) can become.

You would be hard-pressed to find such range in video game portrayals of war. The typical model ignores the complexities of war for a surprisingly black-and-white portrayal that does not lend itself to the exploration of mature themes; you are almost always a defender of justice and virtue against the heartless (or duped) foes of your nation, and “massacre fatigue” is a well-documented problem in many FPSgames. When you kill a man in most war games, you’re unlikely to feel anything other than a small sense of victory. While I don’t think that this is at all responsible for any social ills or the actions of unstable individuals, that games inspire only such underwhelming responses is unfortunate.

Few war games actually engage with the difficulties of war; supporting characters are much, much more likely to cheer and quip when you blow another human’s skull open than to express disgust, sorrow, or simply not comment. Admittedly, I’ve never been in a war, so that may be the way it happens, but I sort of doubt it. In most (quality) war films, such behavior would qualify the character as a Jerk Ass, if not a Complete Monster, and is generally there to illustrate either how war can change an individual or how war can let certain people be just as misanthropic as they always were. This does not apply to campy and/or gore-fest films, but I’d hesitate to call them war films since they’re not actually investigating war as a concept but rather using it as a vehicle for simpler thrills. But in most video games, a squad will more often than not have at least one person who displays anti-social and/or psychopathic behavior, perhaps only when viewed outside the actual game narrative, since it is exceptionally unlikely that such a character will be called out for their blood-thirst. It’s actually a little more than not being challenged in that attitude, actually; the game world doesn’t respond to their behavior, thus implying that it is a fine response to war.

A powerful contributor to this problem is the black-and-white quality of the narrative; those on the other side are either evil or signed up on evil’s side, so there’s no sense in regarding them as human (or sentient things with feelings, if we’ve got aliens). Personally, I think the proliferation of that character archetype is amazing. War movies have presented that archetype to great effect before, either as a foil or as a way to show just how dark and terrifying the world can be, but video games have adopted it for different reasons entirely. I think that there is a fundamental difference of goals and content in most films about war versus most games about war.

In most games about war, the action is the point: most of the play experience will be made up of running, gunning, and taking cover as enemy fire zips overhead. Between eighty (at the very least) to ninety-five percent of the play-time will consist of heated firefights, or moving into a position to have a heated firefight, since that is the part of war that is adrenaline-fueled and is most obviously dramatic, since the stakes become life-and-death. But it’s a mistake to assume that those stakes make a game dramatic, especially when your own character’s repeated deaths and even the deaths of your allies passes by without a hint of emotional resonance. Intense battle scenes are so engaging in films and books partially because we don’t know whether the characters that we care about will survive them; this is true in any story with serious stakes, but it is especially true of war stories, in which the threat of sudden death is a very important theme. That tension, and thus that theme, cannot exist in a war game. Even if an ally becomes cherished by the player, when that ally dies, it will be in a cut-scene, and will probably be slightly removed from the core experience. What’s more, all personal responsibility on the part of the player will be negligible. The player will not think, “I got my friend killed,” or “I wasn’t good enough,”; the player will instead think, “Wouldn’t have happened if I was playing in that moment.”

Because control of the character is taken from the player at the most dramatic moment, when the supporting character’s life is in the balance, the player is more likely to chalk it up to the ineptitude of the main character or supporting character instead of internalizing or rationalizing the death of the ally, which is essential to accessing the experience of the grieving soldier. For the most part, though, the “dramatic” fight scenes are devoid of actual drama, because named allies are almost always invincible, and every ally who might die is a nameless mook, and is utterly unimportant to the player. This means that, for all the excitement that firefights bring, they can actually get in the way of an engaging narrative and prevent a game from addressing the themes it otherwise might.

However, I think that an even bigger problem exists between the conceits of the typical hero narrative and those of most war narratives.

Spartans ‘R’ Us

The super-soldier is hardly a new idea, but it has never been as prolific as it is in war games. It’s achieved a near-100% saturation rate. This is the notion that the protagonist is the most important soldier on the battlefield. He (or she, but given the form, “he” is really the safe bet) is wherever important things are going down; he turns the tides in every major battle; he cannot die; if he is not some sort of leadership who mixes it up on the front lines anyway, then his military decisions turn out to be better than his own inept sergeant’s decisions; he often decides the fate of the war by his timely action and his unbelievable defense/capture of the MacGuffin despite overwhelming odds of failure. This should sound like just about every war game you’ve ever played. It should also sound very dissimilar to any quality war film or book you’ve ever read. There’s a number of reasons why the hero narrative does not prepare a proper environment for investigating the themes of war.

1.There is a central protagonist, and he is a bad-ass.

The focus is not on soldiers, and how the common man deals with war. It’s on the gruff dude with an attitude and one-liners to spare. It’s on the veteran who is already awesome and battle-hardened. It is on the individual who is the minority in most actual wars, and who is not actively changing before our eyes in response to alarming war stimuli. Look to the Master Chief, Marcus Fenix, any Call of Duty protagonist, Tomas Sevchenko, or Nathan Hale. They are super-human, either in the way that the universe treats them or because they’re actually super-human, in the case of the Chief and Hale. The player encounters the war through the eyes of this bad-ass killer. Fear has no place in the minds of these individuals, and death cannot touch them. They are immune to all of the things that make war interesting, on the psychological front. And if other characters behave like a normal person might (with fear, trembling, and panic), they seem weak or pathetic by comparison, and any emotional link that might transmit that “war is horrible” to the player fails instantly.

Quite simply, from a narrative standpoint, war is interesting because of what it does to people; if the character the player is inhabiting is already used to war, and receives no new revelations through the course of the game, then the player will have a difficult time receiving any sort of experience from the virtual war. Likewise, this means that the cast of the game isn’t an ensemble, which could show us how war affects multiple characters. Thus, perhaps war games might be better off with multiple protagonists/main characters.

2. The hero must be incredibly vital to the war effort.

Which isn’t exactly how real war works at all, and the best war films make this clear: war is an insanely communal effort. Occasionally large events will happen that change the course of a theater of war, but these are in the minority. Usually, however, in video game tales, the hero narrative demands that the hero be in exactly the most important place at a given moment, right in place to steal the nuclear codes or some other Item of Essential Value that will allow the allies to win the war for good. This makes the game obviously dramatic, and obviously interesting, but it also destroys more subtle possibilities, like a focus on character relationships and issues, while also ignoring the predominant experience of war. What’s more, since nearly every war game has such a large scope, this means that a large-scope game only has so many interesting narrative devices it can employ without feeling tired and over-done.

3. The enemies are never right.

I mentioned this earlier, but it bears repeating. A heroic narrative cannot invoke sympathy for the villains, and honestly, if it humanizes them at all the narrative starts to break down. The player cannot be wondering whether the soldier he just killed had a wife and child, and so the designers of war games tend to keep things exceptionally black-and-white. This is a potential problem in every story, but it is a grievous error in war stories. Addressing this theme is one of the best things that war stories can accomplish, and it’s unfortunate that the game will probably have no qualms about painting your foes in the broadest of strokes just to keep your enjoyment of the experience as guilt-free as possible. Making you think is not the goal of such games; addictive shooting game-play is. Obviously, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that decision… it just tends to generate bad art.

It’s A Game, Dude

So what if a game doesn’t actually reflect any real war experience? That’s not a problem, right?

Well, it is if we want games that seriously deal with the concept of war, and if we want games that address the themes of war artfully and with maturity. What’s more, there’s a great deal of experience in war that is intriguing, interesting, and ripe for gaming; it’s just not getting any play because of the stubbornness of the hero narrative and the success of the high-stakes plot model. There are plenty of other stories worth telling.

Have you played any war games that actually reveal a more typical war experience, or that have made you think about the nature of war, or how war affects individuals? Let me know! I’d love to play them, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

niedziela, 15 stycznia 2017

The Sandbox

I have already written a post on the meaningful game, and that might be important to read before you step into this one, because I’m going to investigate two specific traits that I list in that post. The specific traits I am interested in discussing are: 1. The Meaningful Game does not allow the player’s choices or possible actions to derail the game or contradict its characters, and 2. The Meaningful Game does not contain side-quests. These two points are most commonly bungled in games that reflect the “sandbox,” “free-roaming,” or “open-world” style of design, and so I’d like to investigate the narrative challenges that appear when building such a game, and address the apparent sliding scale between depth and width, or freedom and consistency. But I’ll start by defining what I mean by “sandbox” and “open-world,” and addressing why such models are popular.

Absolute Freedom, Mostly

As has been previously noted in various posts, one of the distinctive qualities of games (both video and role-playing) is the interactivity of a game, or the control that the player has over a character, country, and/or narrative. Games express this freedom in a variety of ways, but it’s hard to argue that the greatest expression of character freedom can be found in games that fit the sandbox model.

Now, open-world games are slightly different than sandbox games, but they reflect a similar desire and have similar aims. Open-world games are an answer to the “levels” of early gaming, which offered linear environments experienced in a pre-determined sequence. These games more closely resembled the style of art and entertainment that came before (mimicking novels or films), since the only real freedom that players could exert was often through the physical behavior of their avatar character, and potential ends were either “Success,” if the player bested the challenges of the game, or “Failure,” if the player did not perform adequately. Even games that did not have a defined order to levels, such as Mega Man, placed similar structure before the character. An open-world game seeks to break down the artificial barriers between discrete elements of a game’s environment, instead including it all in one “world.” However, it is important to note that there are always limits to a game world; all of it must be programmed, and there will always be walls enclosing the player, whether they are invisible, illusory, a level-wrap (think Pac-Man), or enforced by a character’s refusal to leave the area of narrative importance. So open-world games are defined more explicitly by their refusal to draw boundaries between sections of the game and the ability to freely explore those sections.

Sandbox games are often synonymous with open-world games because they essentially do to narrative constraints what open-world games do to environments, and it’s easier for that narrative freedom to be expressed in an open-world than a level-based game. Sandbox games will occasionally do away with the notion of a main plot, but for the most part the plot is available as one option among many, and sometimes the player can ignore the main plot (and thus the whole notion of “completing” the game) to instead pursue other tasks in the game-world. Thus, sandbox games often feature prolific and prodigious side-quests, if they are not composed entirely of small missions that avoid a main plot completely. Sandbox games encounter the same internal paradox as open-world games, namely that there is a limit to what the game can offer. Just as there must be artificial constraints regarding the size of the world, there remain artificial constraints in the narrative (or non-narrative) structure of sandbox games, such that eventually the player will simply run out of things to do or run into situations where the world cannot be interacted with in a specific way. So just as open-world games are defined by their refusal to draw boundaries between “levels,” sandbox games are defined by their refusal to draw boundaries between “right task” or “plot task” and “other game actions.” In other ways, it does not proscribe how the player should play the game beyond the natural constraints that programming only a certain number of ways that the player’s avatar can interact with the world generates.

This style of game is so popular precisely because it gives a great deal of a certain type of freedom to the player. The player may tackle tasks that the player is most invested in, and in the order that the player wishes. It also allows the player to set his or her own pace in the game, which could be a good or a bad thing; I’ll address this in a bit. Essentially, these games offer thousands of nuggets of experience, and the player is allowed to pick and choose which nuggets he or she will “consume”, and in which order. The game is a gateway to a large buffet of potential experiences. However, I think that this proclaimed freedom can be a trap for the player as much as a boon, and I also think it’s worth evaluating whether the pursuit of more freedom in-game is a worthy task, and especially whether this pursuit generates better art, or at least allows the player to either better access good experiences in a game, or access better experiences within a game. I’d also like to investigate whether this model of game better lends itself to certain sorts of narrative; after all, structure and mechanics may benefit one type of story, and render another less enjoyable or completely inaccessible. By the end of the article, I hope to identify what sorts of stories the sandbox style best serve, and what types of stories sandbox games should avoid.

The Cost of Freedom

In Polishing the Diamond, Enlightening the Mind, Jae Woong Kim writes “Absolute freedom is loneliness.” I think that this describes my average experience with sandbox games. Take Oblivion as our first example. In order to give the player maximum freedom in the production of this character, the player starts the game by generating a character of any race and with any set of favored abilities (or ways to interact with the game), regardless of whether these choices are intelligent decisions or not. The choice of race does have some small influence on your abilities (sometimes a big influence), but it has very, very small narrative repercussions. Your abilities can determine what narratives you have access to in-game, but the choice itself has no impact on the narrative.

In almost all ways, your character is a blank slate; moreover, the tools that the game give you to flesh out that character’s personality are not very diverse, nor does the game as a whole take much notice. In the pursuit of giving the player absolute freedom in his or her environment, the depth of distinct narratives (that contain specific main characters, a unified theme, and a cohesive “plot”) tends to be shallow, short, and emotionally stunted. It is hard to lay this failure at the feet of the writers; after all, they’re responsible for thousands of non-player characters. In an attempt to give as wide an experience as possible, and to provide such a diverse range of experiences (including radically divergent systems of mechanics within a single game, such as a stealth system, magic system, melee combat system, ranged combat system, leveled systems for everything from alchemy to armor, and the attempted unification of these systems) and narrative support for each experience means that the game is spread thin. If more focus is given to any one portion of the game, then whole systems might have gotten the axe… probably including the “Axe” skill.

The player never has a dearth of options in Oblivion, but unfortunately every option provides a narrative about as fulfilling as any other game’s side-quest. Oblivion falls short of being a Meaningful Game simply because the player rarely, if ever, feels that anything meaningful is going on, and his player character is meaningful and interesting only because the player inhabits him or her. This would be less of a problem if interesting characters populated the world, but they don’t.

If you’re unfamiliar with Oblivion and games like it, here is an example of a single quest. The game is absolutely full of situations like these, and it displays the level of depth that all but a few characters in the game display. I am fairly certain that the designers of Oblivion were more interested in creating the broad experience of “There is a whole world out there waiting for me to interact with it in minor ways” than the experience of “I am a person doing meaningful things.” This is generally true of most sandbox games; the veneer of freedom and option comes at the sacrifice of depth, emotionality and meaning.

Oblivion lends credence to the depth vs. width scale, that if a game grows wider in options and content, then that content will be less deep and reactive. While this scale isn’t a given, it is useful in expressing why the events of the game are not often compelling or engaging, at least when assessed as a narrative. While player freedom is what makes video games a unique art form, if that freedom is viewed as an end (high freedom equals a good game) instead of a means (player choice is a vehicle through which we can tell a compelling story suited to the medium), then it will not produce a Meaningful Game.

The fact is that it is difficult to create a video game with a compelling narrative or, perhaps more accurately, few video games succeed at presenting a compelling narrative. I also believe that, for a game to be meaningful (and quality art), its elements must be quality. If such a game has a narrative, then it must be a quality narrative. It’s my opinion, then, that if a sandbox game presents a single, “main” narrative, then the entire sandbox must exist within the narrative in order for the game to be meaningful, and probably in order for the game to be quality art. There are also alternatives to a single main narrative, which I’ll get to in the next section.

Oblivion is indicative of most sandbox experiences in that, while it is the product of a great deal of work and effort, and is certainly admirable in many respects, it fails to be meaningful due to its shallowness and the derivative quality of its content. In other words, for all their scope, and arguably because of their scope, sandbox games tend to be bad art.

Paper Beats Rock, Sandbox Beats Story

The sandbox is popular for a reason: there are a lot of things to like about the sandbox. Player freedom IS interesting, and the ability to set your own pace and access the content that you find interesting sooner rather than later can be a good thing. Moreover, I don’t think that the narrative failings of most sandboxes are a trait of the sandbox, but it does seem to indicate that simultaneously creating a central narrative and a sandbox is a self-defeating route. The typical narrative formula seen in most games clashes with the notion of absolute player freedom, either generating massive inconsistencies in character or plot, or simply forcing the character or plot to be so empty that they merely serve as a rough motivator for the events of the game (or the plot that’s there because they said we needed a plot), which both generate bad art.

In some tales, the sandbox style simply does not make sense. In any narrative in which there is an important central narrative and the side-events detract from pursuing a larger, more pressing issue, a sandbox does not suit the narrative. The first article on the meaningful game spoke on side-quests, and the points that I made regarding them holds just as true for the way that sandboxes interact with central narratives, so I won’t tread over that ground again. For the most part, then, I will argue that sandbox games should not attempt to follow any sort of linear narrative; they simply aren’t suited to that type of story. Infamous, Fallout 3, Grand Theft Auto… these games are all fun, but they all have a central narrative that falls flat because of its location in a sandbox, and because the developers decided that having a sandbox was more important than making the story worthwhile and compelling.

Assassin’s Creed (the first one; the second begins to lose this trait) is an example of a game that successfully builds a central narrative into a sandbox style game. This is because the narrative is in no way sacrificed to player freedom, because Altair’s goals are always paramount and are the source of all his actions, because even “filler” activities often use the opportunity to further characterize Altair and the world he lives in, and because there is very little in the game that isn’t designed to belong within the “central” experience and narrative. Hunting down flags and random templar begins to feel a little game-like, but the game predominantly rewards actions that drive the game along, thus maintaining a proper pace, and, more importantly, never interrupting the distance between the player and Altair. Most sandbox games do not feature so stellar an implementation; Assassin’s Creed’s focus on story and consistency is the exception.

Therefore, I argue that in order for the sandbox to be meaningful, the developers must avoid simply slapping a typical, straightforward, novel- or blockbuster-style narrative onto a sandbox and expecting it to be successful. Different forms often demand a change in convention and structure, and the sandbox rarely receives proper treatment in this regard; instead, if a narrative exists, it is a typical, straightforward affair strung like a thin thread through the middle of the sandbox, and its quality is usually poor or, at best, roughly equal to the quality of the narrative in the rest of the game.

But It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way

Sandbox games could become much more meaningful if they followed Assassin’s Creed’s example, but the truth is that the traditional narrative model doesn’t function as well in a sandbox (even AC has regular slip-ups, becoming derivative here and there). Luckily, there are many kinds of story, and many ways to incorporate story into a sandbox.

Right now, the most obvious model of heroic story-telling is what we see in novels and action/adventure films. These are long-form stories with high stakes, and they typically feature a consistent build in tension and conflict until the “final confrontation,” in which the hero vanquishes the villain that has tormented him or her for so long. It is this model, the single, uninterrupted, building hero narrative, that is most commonly seen in games, and sandbox games often wind up with this sort of narrative simply because games today need narratives, and sticking to the mold is either the obvious choice, the only perceived option, or the choice that seems likely to sell best, since it has worked so well in nearly every other game.

But if we step outside of video games for a moment, we can see that there are many ways to tell a hero narrative; heroes don’t just exist in novels and feature-length films. The models exhibited by television shows (i.e Buffy, Star Trek, Veronica Mars) and collections of short stories (i.e Elric and Conan) offer a powerful alternative to the feature-length narrative, and even contain methods of breaking up a central narrative or doing away with the central narrative altogether. Conan stories are strung together by the character, nothing more; Star Trek: The Next Generation is a continuous tale because it deals with the same characters, but for the most part each episode is a reset. There is some sense of “whole story,” in that the individual tales are linked, but the tales can be accessed individually, and there is no design for a grand narrative that builds to a huge pay-off.

In my opinion, the tropes and models of these short-form stories provide a much better rubric for sandbox games than do central narratives. Instead of declaring one particular series of events the “main” story and making everything else filler, this model would realize that a sandbox game is really trying to tell a whole host of stories, but would remove the temptation to let the narrative’s quality slide. I expect that, in order for the average sandbox game to be a meaningful game, the developers will have to take cues from television shows and short stories, and so seek to tell tales of limited scope and, hopefully, with a consistently high value of emotional content and meaning.

I’m curious to know what you think about this idea. I suspect that a paradigm shift is what’s required for sandbox games to become meaningful and manageable; do you agree? Or do you think that the problem lies elsewhere?

niedziela, 1 stycznia 2017

A Rose By Any Other Name

What Are We On About Today

What I want to do today is to talk about genres and classification, and to do so primarily by evaluating two claims: the first, that Portal 2 is a puzzle game, and the second, that Dragon Age 2 is not an epic. I intend to look at what these two sentences really mean, why they have been said, and what sort of attitudes are revealed in their utterance. Hopefully, by the end of this article, we’ll have a better understanding of what a genre or classification is, and how and when it should be used. Specifically, I hope to try to show why genres and classifications are immensely helpful for describing works to other people, and can frequently offer treasure troves of good ideas to draw from in the creation of new works. Genres and classifications became dangerous, however, when they became proscriptive, when a work is criticized for failing to adhere to established conventions.

On Portals and Puzzles

My opinion of Valve’s Portal 2 is already a matter of public record. I think it’s the best complete game I’ve played in years. Most of the Internet seems to agree with me, but shortly after I played the game, I found myself confronted by a recurring criticism. Namely, people would accuse Portal 2 of not being enough of a puzzle game, usually with a sentence something like “Portal 2 is a puzzle game, therefore it should/should not have done X.”

In other words, people would become irritated at various things the game did or did not do, all because of its genre, the classification in which the game was placed. These various things (too many sprawling environments, too much of an emphasis on narrative, too easy, etc.) ostensibly contradict its class, and make it less of a puzzle game and more about other things.

On one level, this makes some sense. If I sign up to go see a cello recital, and halfway through the cellist puts down his cello, picks up an electric guitar and starts flailing away at a rendition of Purple Haze, I suppose I might have some right to be a bit put out (I mean, I wouldn’t be, but that’s more a function of my love for Jimi Hendrix than anything normative). Even if the Hendrix cover was truly fantastic, it probably didn’t have any place in a cello recital, and if the recital was labeled “cello recital” and not “miscellaneous music recital,” I might have some right to be irritated. If the musician in question wanted to play both the cello and the guitar, he should probably have said so to begin with.

Similarly, it might make sense that if Portal 2 is fundamentally a puzzle game, but frequently does non-puzzly things that take away from its effectiveness as a puzzle game, it might deserve criticism.

The problem is that I’m not really sure it makes that much sense to strictly refer to Portal 2 as a puzzle game, and, more to the point, I’m not certain that that label exists anywhere except in our own heads.

See, rather than sit down and try to hammer out what, exactly, defines the category of “puzzle game” and whether or not Portal 2 really fits those qualifications, I think it makes more sense to analyze where that category came from, and whether or not it actually makes any sense to criticize Portal 2 for failing to live up to its standards.

If you asked me to describe Portal 2 to you, I would probably begin by saying “It’s a puzzle game,” or something similar, because that category is helpful for communicating a series of things about the game, and there are few other commonly-used categories that fit it better. It’s certainly more of a puzzle game than it is a role-playing game or a first person shooter (though it is played from the first person with a gun that shoots things). But if I stopped describing either Portal game at “puzzle game,” I would not be communicating a very accurate picture of the game.

Bejeweled is pure “puzzle game,” but both Portals, and the second in particular, are also strongly characterized by a wicked sense of humor and very, very strong (if subtle) narrative. Portal without GLaDOS, cake, and the Weighted Companion Cube is not Portal at all, whereas Bejeweled might still be identifiably itself with just a different art style or soundtrack. These other, non-puzzle elements make up a substantial portion of both Portal games’ appeal and aesthetic value. Even though the first game has less of an emphasis on narrative and character than the second, it would not be nearly as interesting or worthwhile if the narrative was removed. The brilliant humor is a substantial portion of why the franchise caught on in the first place, and the creeping feeling of dreadful realization that the voice over the loudspeaker is not merely a quirky recording but is, in fact, an unfriendly and unpredictable consciousness that has it out for you is an important part of the game.

This is doubly true for the second game. If one simply removed Wheatley and GLaDOS and Cave Johnson, and, instead, had only a series of intriguing portal puzzles, one would be missing out on a great portion of Portal 2. The game is found in the merging of both the gameplay and the narrative.

I can think of no more appropriate part of Portal 2 to illustrate this point than in the oft-discussed moments in the game when it leads you to believe you are about to solve a puzzle and then quickly shunts you aside for a narrative sequence. Yahtzee’s review makes note of this when he talks about these “two separate occasions within it when a puzzle is interrupted by a story section.” Admittedly, he then does go on to state that Portal 2 is not really a puzzle game, but I think there’s something curious about that sentiment.

It seems to suggest that there did, in fact, exist a puzzle which the story interrupted, as though the two things were separate elements, as though if the story would just go away for a few moments, there exist another two puzzles in the game that you could solve.

This is not true. The puzzle was not interrupted by the story, although that’s certainly how Chell might feel. There never was a puzzle to interrupt. There was the illusion of a puzzle created entirely for the purpose of interruption, so that the story could continue. Further, the story and the puzzles are not really entirely separate elements. The story is frequently expressed through the puzzles, the puzzles advance the story, and the puzzles gain value and interest from their contextualization in the story. It does not really make sense to talk about the “story” interrupting the “puzzle,” because they aren’t really separate elements. There is just the game, which communicates with the player in a multitude of different ways, including story elements and puzzle elements.

In this way, I hope you see why simply describing Portal 2 as a “puzzle game” doesn’t do it justice, and why it’s really very silly to evaluate it against that category. A pure puzzle game is, indeed, something like Bejeweled, or Plants Vs. Zombies or Tetris. In this context, “puzzle game” is a useful descriptor, a useful shorthand way of describing several of the game’s elements, but it far from tells the whole story. There is no problem with referring to Portal 2 as a puzzle game in casual conversation or at the beginning of a recommendation. The problem comes when one attempts to judge it against that category rather than on its own merits.

The Epic Jar

Dragon Age 2 was a weird thing for a number of reasons, many of which I have already discussed at length. But perhaps the biggest reason why it’s interesting from a sociological standpoint is the way the backlash against it tended to focus on its fundamental design choices, rather than on its frequent lapses in execution. A discussion of these points formed the backbone of my article on the Problem of Expectation, but there is one specific subset of those criticisms that I only briefly mentioned before, and which is particularly relevant to this discussion.

The criticism is that Dragon Age 2 was not an epic, which is an accurate enough statement. It’s not. I don’t take issue with the factual accuracy of the point. The problem is that people will bandy that statement about as though it was a criticism instead of a simple statement of fact.

The word “epic,” my friends, is a statement of genre. Some things are epics, and some things are not, and this has absolutely nothing to do with their respective quality. The Lord of the Rings is an epic, and it is fantastic. Lolita is not an epic, and it is also fantastic. Conversely, (and switching media), Avatar is an epic, and it is awful, and When in Rome is not an epic, and is also awful.

To describe something as an epic is to make a statement about its scope, not its quality. It is a classification, a way of pointing out the differences between a movie like Gone With The Wind and one like The Maltese Falcon.

If this is true, there is no shame in not being an epic. This hasn’t stopped people from criticizing Dragon Age 2 for its reduced scope, however. I couldn’t figure out why this was such a problem until I watched Yahtzee’s review of the game, wherein he states that “The only point anything resembling a world-threatening fantasy adventure story occurs is right at the end, for the sequel hook.”

That made me understand. Fantasy games are usually epics. Fantasy anythings are usually epics, because most authors want to show off the massive world they have created. They usually involve world or at least country-threatening events, massive adventures across colorful and exotic places. Thus, when people learned that DA2 was a fantasy game, they automatically assumed it was an epic, and were thus disappointed by a game which is fundamentally about one person’s rise to power.

But this kind of massive scope is not necessary for a good fantasy story: try Neverwhere for an excellent small-scope fantasy novel, or Planescape: Torment for an excellent small-scope fantasy game. The fact that The Lord of the Rings was epic in scope does not carry as a corollary the fact that all other fantasy things must be similarly huge. DA2 contains a myriad of problems, large and small, but among them is not its scope.

So Why Is This A Problem?

At this point, you may be wondering why this all matters. Sure, maybe people were mad at Dragon Age 2 for the wrong reasons, or criticize Portal 2 for silly reasons. So what? Further, it’s not exactly news that people like to compartmentalize things.

I’m bringing this up not just because I’m enough of a pedant to get mad at people for being wrong (though, admittedly, that’s probably part of it.) There are two big reasons why this focus on genre convention is bad:

1. By holding an incorrect picture of what a game is in your head, you can miss its value. I’ve mentioned before that the first time I tried to play Assassin’s Creed I insisted on trying to play it as though it was a straight stealth game. This wasn’t wrong because of the category mistake alone, or simply because it might hurt some developer’s feelings somewhere, but because I missed the fun and value of the game by doing so. Once I quit letting my preconceptions get in the way of what it was, I enjoyed myself immensely. Similarly, someone who insists Portal 2 ought to be a pure puzzle game might miss the value of the wonderful narrative and characters while he or she is grousing. It’s thus important not to get too hung up on genre because doing so leads to the Problem of Expectation.

2. More importantly, using genres and classifications as prescriptive rather than descriptive stagnates the medium. One should not criticize a game for deviating from genre convention unless it is explicitly trying to be a pure example of a given genre. You undoubtedly remember reading about or hearing about the sorts of stuffy folks that were mad at Beethoven or Hemingway or Picasso or any of a billion other people for breaking the rules, right? This is no better. Whining at Portal 2 for not fitting neatly into the classifications we have in mind for “puzzle games” is the same sort of thing as whining at Beethoven’s Fifth for not fitting neatly into the pre-existing structure of a symphony.

If developers are continually stymied by this kind of pointless criticism, they are likely to be more hesitant to try again. It isn't surprising that Dragon Age 3 is much larger in scope than its predecessor, and it may be a while before EA considers publishing a fantasy game with smaller stakes than the whole world. Video games are preposterously expensive to make, and if we keep telling publishers that we don’t want to play games that challenge us or push out of our established genres, they will listen.

So remember, folks: genres are useful as descriptors, as ways of telling your friends what kind of game you’re playing. But as soon as they become proscriptive or normative, they lose their usefulness and instead become actively harmful.