Skyrim is Gonzo Pornography

After 70 hours or so of play, I finished the main quest line of Skyrim. By this point I had completed the Thieves' Guild quest line and a smattering of other quests from all over the map. I had discovered dozens of dungeons, slain many dragons, and finished more petty side-quests than I care to admit. When I decided to stop wandering the map and focus on finishing the central plot of the game, I was able to complete my remaining tasks in a couple hours, kept slow by my insistence on playing as a Bosmer archer instead of using any of the many methods of combat that render encounters trivially easy to complete. As the dragon-god Alduin evaporated in a shiny flash of elaborate death animations, I didn't feel like a hero. I wasn't even sure I had actually finished the main questline, there was so little fanfare. What I did feel like was that I had just finished a cheap porno, and that I should probably start playing something else before someone noticed me.

Why am I comparing a game that I enjoyed for 70 hours to grotesque sleazery? Essentially, I couldn't come up with a better comparison. The key features of an Elder Scrolls game, Skyrimin particular, seemed to match up quite closely to the most prominent qualities of gonzo pornography:

• Highly visually glamorized characters and scenery (It's Sexy!)
• Shallow details giving the illusion of coherence (It's Fantasy!)
• Self-paced and finely categorized consumption (It's Yours!)
• Exaggerated and unwavering mood (Hit Me Baby One More Time!)

I'll elaborate a bit on what I mean by each of these headings in their own heading.

Why Gonzo Pornography?

Pornography is a fascinating industry with an immense vocabulary of ludicrously specific jargon for things which most people would probably prefer never had names. In porn, the term 'gonzo' refers to a particular method of production that emphasizes first-person style camera work while eschewing such trappings as dialogue, costuming, plot, or other features common to virtually any genre of film. It's all about cutting right to the heart of what the consumer is looking for without any of the additional features one might search for to ameliorate one's guilt about consuming the thing. It doesn't pretend that you want to know that the man in question is a plumber or that there are quite believable reasons for him to be having a threesome with those sorority girl roommates; it's simply the rawest, most base form of a product that could otherwise be delivered with niceties to assuage the conscience of the viewer.

So. How is Skyrim like gonzo?

It's Sexy!

Twenty minutes of playing the game will leave you floored at the visual quality of  the presentation. Every flower is beautifully placed. Every stone is elaborately crafted to be geologically convincing and topographically novel. All the bodies in Skyrim are crafted to represent idealized hard-bodied northmen, hardy and lovely women, and anatomically improbably lithe elven folk. While the idealization of bodies is hardly unique to Skyrim, it's just one example of a broader maximalist aesthetic. Every element is designed to be as exaggeratedly beautiful as possible.The sheer pervasiveness of the same level of detail across the whole setting is just stunning.

In fact, it's so stunning, you eventually lose the sense of wonder at how gorgeous the whole thing is. Your aesthetic standard is almost polluted with beauty. Your innate need to have something unbeautiful to contrast it against starts nitpicking details the same way the gonzo consumer begins deconstructing his or her experience. The Skyrim player gets irritated at two people sitting at a table using the same shuffling animation, and the gonzo watcher becomes dissatisfied that the actress isn't wearing heels in this one. In Skyrim, every book full of unique stories rapidly becomes a vacant prop that is to be ignored; in gonzo, the actress from the aforementioned threesome becomes background noise once she becomes familiar to the viewer if she isn't the direct focus of attention. Simply due to direct and constant exposure, what can be a compelling and enthralling display rapidly becomes banal and insignificant by being presented as the normal and commonplace.

It's Fantasy!

Skyrim lets you do exactly what you want in a game world. Do you want to cook? Create potions? Hunt bears? Lounge in the library of the mages' college reading story books? Climb a mountain? Pick pockets? Save the world from a risen dragon-god bent on bringing about the end of the world as is his sworn duty? No matter what sort of high-fantasy activity you've dreamed of doing, Skyrim helps you do it in fine detail.

Compare to pornography consumption. Do you want one actress or three? Blondes or brunettes? Leather or lace? First person or third person? What positions and props? The menu of options is staggeringly huge and specific to a degree that makes your average movie categories seem woefully inept in comparison. Once you've made your selections, the details will be trotted out in the same form as any other gonzo piece. Posing, teasing, stripping, sex acts to match your specific order, and, finally, the ever important finishing shot.

In either case, the whole parade displays an astonishing degree of care and attention paid to the specific demands of the current audience. They don't really need to fit into anything larger than their existent focus, they exist as self-contained motes of perfectly-packaged experience to satisfy a highly-specific appetite. The alchemy table is strewn with arcane goods, and your character diligently grinds mysterious things with a mortar and pestle while combining their magical ingredients. The gonzo camera moves to the perfect angle to expose exactly the view of human flesh performing exactly the motion you desire in the colors requested.

Do the props really enhance the whole? Do you really find Skyrim more compelling because you can actually read every god damn book in the game? Do you really find the gonzo cheerleader more compelling because the actress threw some pom-poms away before otherwise occupying her hands?

I finished the game having cooked exactly once, for the sake of getting an achievement (a statement which, in itself, probably deserves an article). Every activity in the game exists because someone might want it, not because it enhances something bigger than itself. The pieces don't necessarily come into conflict with each other, but the fact that everything is optional in the game leads all the pieces to feel unimportant. Compare this to Arkham City, where every gadget you find adds a new dimension to combat, opens up new areas of the game world to explore, has unique puzzles that can only be solved by using that gadget, and is likely an essential piece of a unique and thrilling boss fight. Everything is necessary and everything has a purpose, yet you still have choices about how, when, and whether you accomplish them.

Am I wrong to think the Arkham City approach is better?

It's Yours!

An essential part of the Elder Scrolls experience is that you be rewarded for seeking out the specific subcategory of the game's options you want to pursue at that moment. Skyrim lets you do anything you want to attempt at any time. There's no need to prioritize. You control exactly what you want to focus on at any time, and you get the appropriate reward for what you choose to pursue at no detriment to any other goal you could be striving toward.

Compare to a gonzo porn: all the pieces you might want from it at any time are there, and can be accessed with no detriment to the whole piece. While it would be fruitless and confusing to skip halfway through any Hollywood blockbuster, gonzo doesn't care what you're there for. If you want to skip the striptease, or put a particular scene on loop, there's no integrity there for you to damage.

If I started listening to random clips of narration from Bastion, I would have no bleeding clue what was going on. There'd be no coherent plot, no drama, no tension, no mystery, no satisfaction when a hidden truth came to light. If I started jumping to random scenes from The Prestige, everything would be meaningless and confusing, and the delightful surprise revelation of the movie would be lost in a nonsensical jambalaya of film.

Structure for these experiences enhances their quality. Bastion has a superb array of decisions built into it, such as what weapon loadout you want to use, what upgrade paths to choose, and what order to complete the map in, but it nests all of these in challenges and narrative points that lend them all a beautiful poignance. Skyrim simply unzips its fly and says "Go nuts!'

Hit Me Baby, One More Time!

This last point is more of the aggregation of the above points. When your senses are assaulted constantly by something with hyper-glamorized visuals, highly specific content segregation, and no penalty or reward for jumping immediately to the portion most appetizing to your basest appetite, what does this make of the whole? A solid block of raw, homogenous stimulus, carefully engineered to over-stimulate your most fundamental lizard-brain pleasure centers.

Nothing in Skyrim is special. No one in gonzo is loved. Either one satisfies your immediate and specific appetites, but are you enriched by either? Or do you walk away from both feeling like you've consumed something that has altogether diminished not only you as an intellectual and moral being, but also reduced a potentially edifying activity to a degrading parody of something good? They satisfy your crudest desires but also mock genuinely enriching media by mimicking their trappings while failing to use them in any meaningful sense.

When my dragonborn was in Sovngarde, letting loose the arrow that slew the god-dragon, the experience held so little drama that I wasn't sure that was all the battle and story had to offer. The combat had taken maybe 80 seconds of plinking on a bow-string while Alduin munched casually on one of the three Nord warriors assisting me in the battle. Some wooden characters stood perfectly still around me and played sound bites about how I'd be celebrated as a hero in the mortal realm. When I got bored staring at the pretty aurora in Sovngarde, I was sent back to Skyrim and told by Arngeir, spokesman of the Greybeards, that I was now free to choose my destiny.

It was roughly as thrilling as watching someone ejaculate, albeit not quite as creepy. Alduin's death is supposed to be a climactic moment of intense emotional and dramatic release, but instead it ran together as just another shiny moment in a game full of sparkly objects.

Everyone Loves Porn

Pornography destroys a great deal of the experienced value of what it seeks to portray by exaggerating a stable of finely-tuned details to the greatest extreme possible. By focusing on breast size, noisy cries of pleasure, and colorful latex costumes, it focuses on extreme elements of experience to depict something that is larger than and wholly alien from the subject matter it supposedly depicts.

I don't want this to sound like I'm moralizing, or even claiming that this is a bad thing. People have appetites, and we wouldn't be playing Skyrim or watching "Butt Battalion 37" if there weren't some sort of desire or need we had as human beings. I'm not going to tell people what to do with their joysticks.

What I do want to say is that Skyrim is not Citizen Kane or a Michaelangelo sculpture. It's a phenomenal technical achievement. It's actually really fun, and it's very good at providing a large variety of game experiences. It just isn't very good art.

On Urgency

During a recent talk with one of my gamedev friends, I pass­ing­ly men­tioned that a game works much bet­ter as art when its game­play rein­forces its sense of nar­ra­tive urgen­cy. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but on fur­ther reflec­tion I think that it’s an impor­tant piece of the Plot vs. Fun puz­zle, and a use­ful lens for explor­ing games as art. I want­ed to explore it in fur­ther detail in hopes of address­ing some ques­tions that I raised pre­vi­ous­ly, and to add anoth­er term to the AAG’s lex­i­con of ana­lyt­i­cal con­cepts. Since the city of Warsaw requires me to warn peo­ple when I’m about to unload a wall of text, my dis­cus­sion will take place after the jump.

When I talk about urgen­cy, I mean a belief held by the play­er that they must under­go a par­tic­u­lar course of action with­in a speci­fic time­frame to achieve their goal. We see urgen­cy most direct­ly when we’re dodg­ing pat­terns in a bul­let hell game or floor­ing the gas pedal in a rac­ing title, but I want to use the term more broad­ly to include goals like mak­ing sure that I’ve swept every inch of a Zelda dun­geon for heart con­tain­ers before get­ting ready to con­front the boss. In this sense, urgen­cy is not nec­es­sar­i­ly about mak­ing the play­er feel pan­icked, but about inter­nal­iz­ing the imper­a­tive of the game. Jane McGonigal address­es this when she talks about using games as a model for gen­er­at­ing whole-hearted par­tic­i­pa­tion in activ­i­ties.

A Little History

Early video games such as Missile Command, Asteroids, Space Invaders, and Galaga all cre­at­ed a sense of urgen­cy by rapid­ly ramp­ing up the dif­fi­cul­ty of the game as you con­tin­ued to play. More tar­gets, faster ene­mies, and more com­plex tac­tics reward­ed skilled play with greater chal­lenges, which cre­ates a sense of accom­plish­ment while also avert­ing bore­dom. While this is born part­ly out of a need to force peo­ple to feed more quar­ters into the arcade cab­i­net, it was also excel­lent game design that cre­at­ed a sense of urgen­cy in the play­er to reach his or her goal.

In these early titles, there isn’t much nar­ra­tive to speak of. “Kill the aliens!” is enough story for quite a lot of video games, but for the first few gen­er­a­tions of gam­ing the exclu­sive focus was the game­play mechan­ics. Many of the arche­types of “mini-game” for­mats come from this era, and the game­play is good for a rea­son: it presents a goal, and increas­es the com­plex­i­ty or dif­fi­cul­ty of accom­plish­ing that goal at a rate cor­rel­a­tive with the player’s increase in skill. Among other rea­sons, they suc­ceed as games because the game­play rein­forces the sense of urgen­cy to accom­plish that goal.

As games have grown more com­plex and sto­ry­li­nes have become more elab­o­rate, we start fac­ing the Plot vs. Fun prob­lem: telling a good story requires seiz­ing the player’s sense of agen­cy, but end­less play­er free­dom is going to harm the story because you can’t con­trol the pac­ing or order­ing of events that lead up to them per­form­ing the right action to advance the story…

…unless they’ve inter­nal­ized the nar­ra­tive and have a sense of urgen­cy to ful­fill it.

Urgency Done Right

I’d like to elab­o­rate an exam­ple of how a game can match nar­ra­tive urgen­cy to game­play at mul­ti­ple paces with­in a sin­gle title. The AAG’s favorite dead horse to beat is Planescape: Torment, and I’m going to mer­ri­ly flog it fur­ther. While it’s not the explic­it struc­ture of the game, I want to break it up into three acts to talk about how each one uses a dif­fer­ent style of play to cre­ate an con­tex­tu­al­ly appro­pri­ate sense of urgen­cy.

In the first act, that level is zero. After wak­ing up in the mor­tu­ary with no mem­o­ries and dis­cov­er­ing that you can­not die, you are left to wan­der around the city of Sigil to learn about where you are, and your choic­es deter­mine your iden­ti­ty by chang­ing your moral align­ment, your class, and the atti­tudes and dia­logue choic­es you have with NPCs. There is no clear force out to get you, and the only objec­tive you have is the mes­sage carved on your back to seek out an object from a mys­te­ri­ous fig­ure named Pharod. The time it takes you to get your bear­ings and learn about the set­ting is designed to let you lux­u­ri­ate in the gor­geous design of the set­ting and swim around gen­uine­ly rich dia­logue.

Combats are most­ly option­al, you can explore any part of the city, and none of the NPCs give you the typ­i­cal “gath­er 5 mod­ron sprock­ets and bring them back to me” quests, save for one char­ac­ter that lamp­shades it heav­i­ly and embeds it in a ridicu­lous chain of fetch quests that are designed to irri­tate your char­ac­ter. As you explore the city and meet more peo­ple, you even­tu­al­ly find sev­er­al of your old jour­nals, and find your way to con­front Ravel Puzzlewell, the night hag who put you in this predica­ment.

The sec­ond act begins after Ravel tells you how your sit­u­a­tion arose, and the mys­te­ri­ous shad­ows that have begun to appear around you kill her before she can tell you where to find the solu­tion to your con­di­tion. At this point, the game shifts to a faster pace, as new areas are opened up for you to explore, and you sud­den­ly have a much clear­er goal: fol­low the trail the source of your con­di­tion, and put it to an end. This sends you trav­el­ing to pris­on worlds, extra-dimensional forges, and lay­ers of Hell itself look­ing for the secret to end­ing your tor­tur­ous cycle of rebirth. The scenery is just as rich, but the explic­it goal is clear­er and the forces stand­ing in your way are much more men­ac­ing. Rather than explor­ing for the sake of learn­ing your sur­round­ings, you are work­ing on locat­ing the small clues that add up to your find­ing the secret loca­tion of the source of your tor­ment.

The third part begins with the final stage of your hunt for the one who can tell you that loca­tion, and the final con­fronta­tion that decides your ulti­mate fate. This is an intense race through a col­laps­ing demi­plane on the edge of Hell, fight­ing end­less waves of pow­er­ful demons, and rac­ing to the fortress of the one who has been pro­long­ing your eter­nal tor­ture. The Fortress of Regret is not large, but the tremen­dous, des­per­ate efforts of your tor­menter kills your entire party, leav­ing you alone with your foe for a final con­flict that is bril­liant­ly writ­ten and which I have never seen topped. For the last hour of the game, you feel that the fate of some­thing truly immense rests on your actions. It’s grip­ping and heart-rending, and you absolute­ly can­not stop play­ing.

The urgen­cy of each act is com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent. When the game is meant to be explorato­ry and self-paced, noth­ing press­es you. When free-form explo­ration gets tire­some, you are given a focused goal with some flex­i­bil­i­ty around how you pur­sue it. Meaningful obsta­cles begin to push you toward your goal as the Shadows attack you when you spend too much time in areas you don’t need to revis­it. As the game draws to a cli­max, your path is short, direct, and astound­ing­ly intense. There is no chance to pause and col­lect your­self, and giv­ing you such a break would detract from the enor­mi­ty of your pur­suit.

Urgency Done Wrong

The con­verse sit­u­a­tion occurs when a game com­plete­ly fails to match the urgen­cy of your imper­a­tive with the game­play. I think the best exam­ple of this defi­cien­cy is in the Elder Scrolls titles, par­tic­u­lar­ly Oblivion. The gates of hell itself are rip­ping tremen­dous holes in the wall of real­i­ty, and Cyrodil will be flush with demons if a brave adven­tur­er doesn’t step forth to seal the breach. You are that adven­tur­er, and you can lit­er­al­ly spend years in-game col­lect­ing wild­flow­ers, with­out penal­ty, after the quest-relevant NPCs tell you that the world will sure­ly end if some­one doesn’t imme­di­ate­ly seal the Oblivion gates. There’s absolute­ly noth­ing dri­ving you to do any­thing. Ever.

The prob­lem with Oblivion is that all of your objec­tives, no mat­ter how triv­ial or dire, are of equal impor­tance. Nothing moti­vates you to com­plete any of them aside from tra­di­tion­al adventurer’s avarice. This is part of the appeal for many peo­ple, as you can sim­ply do what you want to do and explore a tremen­dous and beau­ti­ful world at your own pace, seek­ing as much com­bat or com­merce as tick­les your fancy. As much as I enjoy this, the plot states direct­ly that inac­tion will lead to hor­ri­fy­ing con­se­quences, and fails to deliv­er on that threat. If the game tells me the world will be flood­ed with demons unless I do some­thing, then it should bloody well flood the world with demons if I spend my time try­ing to steal every fork in the world.

This is not to say that I dis­like the Elder Scrolls games, as I adore play­ing Morrowind and Skyrim. I do, how­ev­er, think it harms them as art to have such a jar­ring dis­par­i­ty between the threats in the nar­ra­tion and the threats in the game. Morrowind worked slight­ly bet­ter by hav­ing a lurk­ing, loom­ing dread in Dagoth-Ur rather than an unstop­pable army con­stant­ly boil­ing forth from hell itself, and Skyrim at least drops a giant freak­ing drag­on on my head if I spend too long muck­ing about in the mid­dle of nowhere. Still, all of them have a rather absent sense of urgen­cy, as there is no reward or penal­ty for com­plet­ing objec­tives swift­ly or over the course of months in the game. The nar­ra­tive they are try­ing to build feels as impor­tant as the mean­ing­less copies of the Biography of Barenziah on the book­shelves of every last cit­i­zen of Tamriel.

The Continuum

As with most of my ideas, urgen­cy as a dimen­sion of games-as-art is a con­tin­u­um. Some games work at each end and every­where in between. Deus Ex plays won­der­ful­ly along that con­tin­u­um by alter­nat­ing between wide open city streets that you can explore at leisure to tense sce­nes of escap­ing from giant col­laps­ing build­ings. Some games stick firm­ly to the full-blown panic end of the spec­trum: bul­let hell titles and fight­ing games are short, intense bouts of fran­tic strug­gles to stay alive and defeat your oppo­nents. Titles like Civilization give you all the time in the world to plan and design what you want to see, never forc­ing you to end your turn pre­ma­ture­ly or set­ting dead­li­nes for your goals.

Urgency is a tool in the game designer’s kit, and good exe­cu­tion depends on match­ing the urgen­cy of the game­play to the nar­ra­tive goal you are try­ing to rein­force. Part of the rea­son that ran­dom com­bats in Final Fantasy titles irri­tate the liv­ing crap out of me is because they inter­rupt my desire to com­plete a goal; it feels like the game is need­less­ly obstruct­ing my desire to accom­plish the objec­tives it sets out for me. Planned encoun­ters are fine, as I am per­fect­ly will­ing to fight through a fiendish gauntlet of ene­mies if it makes sense for me to do so. Random encoun­ters like fight­ing yet-another-goddamn-goblin while trav­el­ing from point A to point B, how­ev­er, do very lit­tle to enhance my sense of pro­gress and achieve­ment, and some­times ham­per it by con­sum­ing pre­cious min­utes of game time imped­ing my pro­gress. Combat events may be intense and require action and strat­e­gy, but if they don’t build on my sense of pro­gress, then they are fail­ures. “Urgency” in the sense of “act now or die” doesn’t always com­ple­ment my use of the term.

What It All Means

My mis­sion here at the Analytically About Games is to take games seri­ous­ly as art. Sometimes this means explor­ing sin­gle titles like book reviews, exam­in­ing the details of a game as aes­thet­ic expe­ri­ences and offer­ing com­men­tary. More often, I try to artic­u­late what aspects a game can pos­sess that enhances its value as art, such as its sense of immer­sion and how its inter­face pro­vides an expe­ri­ence that can­not be had through a dif­fer­ent medi­um. A robust vocab­u­lary for dis­cussing games as art helps peo­ple under­stand why I love games so much, and why I think they can and should be taken seri­ous­ly as enrich­ing expe­ri­ences.

My thoughts above are offer­ing a term that may or may not wind up being use­ful in look­ing at other titles. The core themes that I’ve writ­ten about are immer­sion and inter­ac­tiv­i­ty, how they are not syn­ony­mous in games, and how they are essen­tial com­po­nents to under­stand­ing games qua games and games qua art. Urgency is anoth­er dimen­sion of both, and a good game will prob­a­bly lend itself to being dis­cussed in such terms. It may not stick, but it might inspire insights into other titles you’d like to share on our hum­ble blog.

You’re a Legend, Mr. Wayne

It’s Batman time.  Again. (Always).

Last time, I men­tioned that Arkham Asylum, (though real­ly neat), most­ly doesn’t exam­ine the Batman mythos with any real gran­u­lar­i­ty.  “You are Batman,” it says, “Now go punch peo­ple.”  By and large, Arkham Asylum is a game about how cool it is to dress up in tights and a cape, but there are a few moments when it stops to ask the play­er a few ques­tions about what it real­ly is to be Batman, and those are the sec­tions I want to talk about today.

The Scarecrow is an old Batman vil­lain who plays a rel­a­tive­ly small but mem­o­rable role in Arkham Asylum.  If you’re unfa­mil­iar with the Scarecrow, all you real­ly need to know is that he is an ex-psychologist who is obsessed with fear, and has invent­ed a pow­er­ful hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry fear gas which caus­es his vic­tims to relive their worst fears and night­mares.  The specifics of his place in the plot are not real­ly impor­tant, as the sec­tions which fea­ture him stand entire­ly (and some­what jar­ring­ly) on their own.  In any Scarecrow story, Batman is inevitably affect­ed by the fear gas, treat­ing the reader/viewer/player to an exam­i­na­tion of what Batman fears the most.  In the best Scarecrow sto­ries, these moments allow us to learn more about the human side of the Dark Knight.  In the worst, the story sim­ply gets trip­py and weird for a while before return­ing to nor­mal­cy.

Arkham Asylum infects Batman with the gas on three sep­a­rate occa­sions.  These three moments allow the game to put on its arty hat and dig a lit­tle deep­er into the psy­chol­o­gy of everyone’s favorite brood­ing vig­i­lante.

The Form

The Scarecrow sequences fol­low a pret­ty strict form: first, Batman will get infect­ed with fear gas, cough for a while, and then keep walk­ing with­out any obvi­ous dra­mat­ic shift.  As time goes by, things get pro­gres­sive­ly stranger and stranger as the toxin works through his sys­tem and Batman begins to hal­lu­ci­nate.  Eventually, these hal­lu­ci­na­tions cul­mi­nate in a com­plete depar­ture from real­i­ty where­in the play­er is required to play through a minigame with com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent rules from the main game.

In these minigame sec­tions, Batman is placed in a near­ly two-dimensional space com­posed of small pieces of the Asylum, float­ing in space.  In the cen­ter of this space stands a fifty-foot tall Scarecrow, slow­ly rotat­ing around and look­ing for Batman.  His gaze is rep­re­sent­ed by a halo of orange light, and the play­er must avoid this light by hid­ing behind walls and only duck­ing through exposed spaces when the Scarecrow is look­ing else­where.  If Batman stum­bles into the Scarecrow’s gaze, the play­er receives an instant game over as the giant looms over a cow­er­ing Batman.

After suc­cess­ful­ly dodg­ing the Scarecrow’s gaze and sur­mount­ing some straight­for­ward obsta­cles, the play­er will come upon a Bat-Signal.  Interacting with the Bat-Signal caus­es Batman to shine the light direct­ly onto the Scarecrow, who will cry out and van­ish.  At this point, the hal­lu­ci­na­tion ends, and Batman comes back to the real world, hav­ing com­plete­ly shrugged off the fear gas with­out any appar­ent lin­ger­ing side effects.

The Content

At first, these sec­tions read as Batman con­quer­ing his fears and there­by sur­viv­ing the tem­po­rary insan­i­ty pro­duced by the gas.  Batman endures the hal­lu­ci­na­tions and then comes out the other end by remind­ing all con­cerned that he’s Batman, dammit, and is there­fore immune to your stu­pid poi­sons.

The first time I played the game, I took these sec­tions at face value, and there­fore found them to be an enjoy­able enough change of pace, but didn’t feel like they lived up to their full poten­tial.  But as I thought about them later, I sud­den­ly real­ized they deserved a closer look.

What is the play­er actu­al­ly doing dur­ing the minigame sec­tions, the real moments of game­play?  The large Scarecrow in the mid­dle of the world is not the actu­al per­son, but a pro­jec­tion of Batman’s fears.  If the play­er runs out and tries to con­front the Scarecrow (and thus, Batman’s fears), direct­ly, he or she is greet­ed with a game-over screen.  The play­er must thus hide from Batman’s fears, must avoid com­ing into direct con­flict or con­tact with them.  Practically every other obsta­cle in the game is defeat­ed through the use of phys­i­cal force.  Batman does hide in the shad­ows when he is attack­ing a group of armed thugs, but he does so only until the play­er can iso­late them and beat them into sub­mis­sion.

But the play­er never actu­al­ly fights Batman’s fears.  Batman never punch­es the huge Scarecrow, never fights with him, never throws Batarangs at him.  Instead, he runs away from him.  He com­plete­ly avoids the Scarecrow’s gaze, and if he allows him­self to be bathed in the light of the Scarecrow’s eyes, to be caught and forced to reck­on with his deep­est fears, he goes com­plete­ly insane.

Batman is not fac­ing his fears and tri­umph­ing over them, he is run­ning away from them.  Each sec­tion forces Batman to inter­act with ele­ments of self-doubt– all of the hal­lu­ci­na­tions relate to Batman’s per­cep­tion of him­self.  Each time the Scarecrow poi­sons Batman, he forces him to take a long, hard look at him­self.

And how does Batman shake off the toxin?  Not by accept­ing the fears, or by con­fronting them, but by shin­ing the Bat-Signal on the image of the Scarecrow, lit­er­al­ly stamp­ing the Batman emblem on his fears.  This is an act of self-definition, of reassert­ing his iden­ti­ty in the face of the unpleas­ant intro­spec­tion the fear gas is mak­ing him under­go.  When Batman shi­nes the bat-signal on the Scarecrow, he is redefin­ing him­self as Batman, “tri­umph­ing” over his fears not by con­fronting them, but by remind­ing him­self who he is.  Batman is an idea more than he is a per­son, and by shin­ing the Bat-Signal on his fears, Bruce reasserts his iden­ti­ty as the leg­end.  He is not Bruce Wayne, he is the @#$%# Batman.

The fact that he shrugs off the effects of the gas all at once imme­di­ate­ly after this act of self-definition indi­cates that he is com­plete­ly repress­ing his fears and self-doubt, shunt­ing them out of his mind, con­quer­ing his fears not by fac­ing them and let­ting them pass through him, but by putting his fin­gers in his ears and shout­ing “I’m Batman and Batman is not afraid of things,” until they go away for a while.

So, what does the game think Batman is afraid of?  The three sec­tions boil down to two major fears.

1. Bruce Wayne

One of the most inter­est­ing parts about Batman is the inter­play between his two per­sonas– the inter­ac­tion and fre­quent dis­con­nect between the way he views him­self and behaves as he switch­es between Bruce Wayne and Batman.  The real ques­tion is one of def­i­n­i­tion: is this per­son real­ly Bruce Wayne, a bil­lion­aire play­boy who moon­lights by night as a cos­tumed vig­i­lante, or is he pri­mar­i­ly Batman, who pre­tends by day to be a wealthy exec­u­tive?  Some super­heroes are less con­fus­ing in this regard: Clark Kent isn’t a real per­son, he’s a mask for Superman.  Spider-Man, con­verse­ly, is an excuse for Peter Parker to do all the things he real­ly wants to do.  But Batman is less clear-cut.  Where does Batman stop and Bruce Wayne begin?

Arkham Asylum is most­ly uncon­cerned with this dynam­ic.  You play the game as Batman, and although Oracle calls you Bruce from time to time, the Bruce Wayne side of things is most­ly irrel­e­vant.  But the one time you do play as Bruce Wayne rather than Batman is telling: you don’t play Bruce Wayne the bil­lion­aire play­boy, you play Bruce Wayne the ter­ri­fied lit­tle child.

The sec­ond hal­lu­ci­na­tion sequence caus­es the player’s avatar to be replaced by a lit­tle boy in a tuxe­do, walk­ing down a rain­ing alley­way, and lis­ten­ing, in the dis­tance, to the sounds of his par­ents being mur­dered.  The alley­way seems to go on forever, stretch­ing on in per­ma­nent dark­ness, and the play­er can do absolute­ly noth­ing to stop the mur­der of Bruce’s par­ents.  Keeping the mur­der entire­ly audi­to­ry is actu­al­ly a stroke of bril­liance as it makes it all the more inex­orable.  You can’t see what’s hap­pen­ing, so you wouldn’t even begin to know how to stop it, but you can hear it, so you know it’s hap­pen­ing.  The game does not take con­trol of the avatar; it still allows the play­er to have con­trol over the char­ac­ter, in that the play­er can phys­i­cal­ly move the lit­tle boy around, but the play­er has no con­trol over the events that are unfold­ing in the game.

This is how Batman views Bruce Wayne: as a scared, pow­er­less lit­tle boy, per­pet­u­al­ly trapped in the dark alley where his par­ents were mur­dered.  In Arkham Asylum, at least, Batman asso­ciates the name “Bruce Wayne” with pow­er­less­ness, with weak­ness, and with loss.  He becomes Batman to escape from Bruce Wayne, to leave the lit­tle boy behind, and in this case, the reasser­tion of his iden­ti­ty through the Bat-Signal is a way of dis­tanc­ing him­self from this part of him­self.  “I am not Bruce Wayne,” he says, “I am not this pow­er­less lit­tle child who could not save his par­ents from being mur­dered.  I am Batman, and I can do any­thing.”

2. Illegitimacy

How is Batman dif­fer­ent from the cos­tumed lunatics and mur­der­ers he oppos­es?  Bruce Wayne, a grown man, spends his nights dress­ing up like a bat and beat­ing up crim­i­nals and lunatics, and calls it his life’s work, argu­ing that he’s sav­ing Gotham City.  But Bruce could unques­tion­ably accom­plish far more good as the multi-billionaire CEO of a major cor­po­ra­tion ded­i­cat­ed to res­cu­ing Gotham, and he would prob­a­bly get punched less.  Rather than per­son­al­ly beat­ing up rob­bers and rapists, Bruce could donate sev­er­al mil­lion dol­lars to reform­ing the entire Gotham Police Department, and then donate sev­er­al more mil­lions of dol­lars to the edu­ca­tion­al sys­tems and infra­struc­tures of the city so as to help peo­ple avoid becom­ing rob­bers and rapists in the first place.  In the real world, while Phoenix Jones may (or may not) do some good with his vig­i­lan­tism, it’s hard to argue that he does as much good for the world as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  Jones, of course, isn’t a bil­lion­aire, but Bruce Wayne is.

This is not to say that all future edi­tions of Batman comics ought to cen­ter around the day-to-day affairs of a bil­lion­aire phil­an­thropist, because, you know, yawn.  And to be fair, many of the Batman sto­ries do show him doing all man­ner of phil­an­thropy in the day­time in addi­tion to his night-time antics.  But if Bill Gates ran around in a bat cos­tume and punched peo­ple, even bad peo­ple, we would not cheer him on, we would call him crazy and lock him away.  In the real world, that kind of vig­i­lan­tism isn’t real­ly laud­able, it’s psy­chotic.

Batman, sadly, does not live in the real world, but any work of art which real­ly wants to engage with the Batman mythos is going to have to explore this prob­lem.  Arkham Asylum does so in the third hal­lu­ci­na­tion sequence, which takes the game’s open­ing cin­e­mat­ic and inverts the roles.  In the orig­i­nal cin­e­mat­ic, we watched as Batman drove a bound and gagged Joker to the Asylum and escort­ed him to his pris­on cell.  In the hal­lu­ci­na­tion, how­ev­er, the Joker takes a bound and gagged Batman to the Asylum while all of the other vil­lains watch and com­ment on how crazy Batman is.  What’s the dif­fer­ence, Batman’s psy­che asks, between these lunatics and your­self?  It ends with the hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry Joker killing Batman, and then cuts (after some fun fourth-wall break­age involv­ing a faux game-over screen) to Batman’s grave.  Batman then claws his way out of the grave and walks through a series of cells which each con­tain images of Batman behav­ing just like the lunatics in the asy­lum before descend­ing into the final minigame sec­tion.  Maybe Batman isn’t that dif­fer­ent from the Joker.  Maybe he should be caged.  Maybe he is a lunatic.  Maybe the Batman myth is dead.

Batman is almost com­plete­ly silent dur­ing these hal­lu­ci­na­tions.  He doesn’t engage with these legit­i­mate doubts and ques­tions, he avoids them, and this time, when he shi­nes the Bat-Signal and reasserts his iden­ti­ty, he is actu­al­ly reassert­ing the value of the entire leg­end.

The Bat-Signal is real­ly one of the sil­lier aspects of the Batman mythos.  While it inevitably shows up in all of the dark­er Batman sto­ries, it real­ly seems most at home in lighter ver­sions of the char­ac­ter.  It belongs with a Batman who is any­thing but dark and edgy and brood­ing, a Batman who is pure-hearted and good and maybe even a lit­tle goofy, who inhab­its a uni­verse com­plete­ly free of psy­chosis and real vio­lence.  Thus, using the Bat-Signal to reassert the valid­i­ty of the Batman leg­end may serve as a way for him to for­get all of the issues that undoubt­ed­ly under­lie his behav­ior and remind him­self of the leg­end.  No, he’s not a psy­chopath.  He’s dif­fer­ent from the Joker because he’s BATMAN.  The Batman leg­end seems dead for a moment, but Batman crawls his way out of the grave, again, not by actu­al­ly con­fronting the issue, but by reassert­ing his iden­ti­ty and his own self-made def­i­n­i­tions, ignor­ing what is prob­a­bly the truth of the mat­ter in favor of the myth.

Conclusion

The most telling part about this is that this inter­pre­ta­tion is not imme­di­ate­ly appar­ent.  Batman cer­tain­ly doesn’t think he’s run­ning away from any­thing.  Batman thinks he’s tri­umph­ing over Bruce Wayne’s piti­ful self-doubts and night­mares, and remind­ing him­self who he real­ly is.

Arkham Asylum is usu­al­ly any­thing but sub­tle: it cli­max­es in a bat­tle with a twelve-foot mani­ac clown.  But hid­den down beneath the broad strokes and nifty gad­gets is real com­men­tary about the sort of per­son Batman must be.  You have to dig down to find it, past the trap­pings of the sit­u­a­tion into the mechan­ics, the fun­da­men­tal level at which the play­er inter­acts with the game.

When Batman final­ly breaks out of his last hal­lu­ci­na­tion, he has the real Scarecrow by the throat.  Scarecrow astound­ed­ly yells that he has inject­ed Batman with enough toxin to drive ten men insane.  Batman has the willpow­er of ten men, the game seems to declare.  But maybe it’s not so much that Batman is stronger than the rest of us.  Maybe he just has a much greater capac­i­ty for self-deception.

I’m Batman

I just fin­ished play­ing Arkham Asylum for the first time, and, to my great sur­prise, I think it has helped me to fall back in love with video games.

Axiom VII of the Fundamental Axioms I came up with when I first start­ed this blog (axioms which could prob­a­bly do for some revi­sion right about now) states that “If your writ­ing is bad, I don’t care how fun your mechan­ics are.”  This, I find, is one of the defin­ing fac­tors of how I look at video games.  A game with bad writ­ing tends to be bad art, and, per­haps because I am a writer, I tend to find poor writ­ing and sto­ry­telling very dis­tract­ing.  I used to worry that I didn’t like video games at all.  After all, if what I real­ly want are good sto­ries and well-written dia­logue, maybe I should just stick to films and nov­els?  Nearly all of my favorite games pri­or­i­tize story and dia­logue over flashy graph­ics or game­play mechan­ics, to the extent that some of the ones I value most are actu­al­ly very clum­sy to play.  (I’m look­ing at you, Torment.)

I say all this because Arkham Asylum is not the best-written, best-acted, or best-plotted game I’ve ever played.  It’s prob­a­bly not even in the top ten.  The plot is real­ly very silly, (why would the Joker need super-soldiers?) the dia­logue is ser­vice­able but large­ly unre­mark­able, the voice act­ing is com­pe­tent but large­ly not par­tic­u­lar­ly inspir­ing, (Hamill and Conroy except­ed).  It ends ter­ri­bly.

Imagine my sur­prise when, upon fin­ish­ing the game, I real­ized I absolute­ly did not care.  Sure, the game would have been bet­ter if they had addressed some of these issues, but that absolute­ly doesn’t mat­ter.  So, why do I enjoy this game so much?

Because you get to be Batman.

No, Seriously.  Batman.

That’s not a flip­pant answer.  And I don’t just mean that the game’s avatar is shaped like Batman, or that he’s voiced by Kevin Conroy.  The sim­ple fact that one is play­ing a char­ac­ter named Batman in the game is not what sells it to me.  It works because the game’s mechan­ics, com­bat sys­tem and physics engine allow you to actu­al­ly be Batman.  When you move the analog stick, the char­ac­ter moves like Batman.  When you punch a crim­i­nal, the char­ac­ter punch­es like Batman.  When you grap­ple onto a gar­goyle and then swoop down onto an unsus­pect­ing mani­ac, leav­ing him dan­gling from your perch, scream­ing and soil­ing him­self in ter­ror, you do it like Batman.

It’s the game’s rhythm, the way it allows you to calm­ly walk into a pack of fif­teen felons with crow­bars and know that you’re going to come out vic­to­ri­ous, that makes the game work.  It’s no sur­prise that it may orig­i­nal­ly have been planned as a rhythm game prop­er.

I had heard all of this before, but it’s one thing to hear about how a game real­ly makes you feel like Batman, and anoth­er to actu­al­ly play that game.  (Which may ren­der this whole post moot, come to think of it.)  It wasn’t until I played the game and gig­gled like a first-grader for hours on end that I real­ized how truly unique it is.

See, about the fifth time I entered a room full of armed felons and qui­et­ly dis­patched each of them with­out tak­ing a bul­let, the truth of the mat­ter hit me: Arkham Asylum is exact­ly what a cer­tain kind of video game does well.  What Arkham Asylum does is some­thing that video games may do bet­ter than any other medi­um: it allows you to step into some­one else’s shoes, and learn some­thing about what it is like to be a dif­fer­ent per­son.

Namely, Batman.

And Batman is kind of a big deal.  Who do geeks revere more than Batman?  If, in any argu­ment, you can prove that Batman approves of a par­tic­u­lar point of view, you win.  “Appeal to Batman” is a respect­ed rhetor­i­cal tech­nique.  If you walk up to a geek and say “think about some­thing cool,” he or she will think about Batman.

Comic is Zach Weiner’s at SMBC.

Loss of Self

I wrote an article with the title “Better Storytelling Through Loss of Self,” and while I was pri­mar­i­ly inter­est­ed in the way a good GM can reduce dis­tance between play­er and PC in a table­top RPG, the idea struck a chord with me.  The best works of nar­ra­tive art coerce you into per­fect sym­pa­thy with the pro­tag­o­nist.  They cause you to feel what the char­ac­ter feels, see what he or she sees, and, think how he or she thinks.  A great work can make you inhab­it, if only for the briefest of moments, anoth­er person’s mind– can make you leave your­self behind and tem­porar­i­ly become some­one else.

This is the art that can change lives, the sort of art that alters world­views, and video games might be unique­ly suit­ed to this kind of rad­i­cal shift in per­spec­tive.  It is one thing to read about a person’s life, and quite anoth­er to actu­al­ly live it.  This is not to say that video games will nec­es­sar­i­ly eclipse all other art forms — I am not one of those so fond of video games that he will refer to them as the apoth­e­o­sis of all artis­tic endeav­or.  Even in the realm of “media about Batman,” The Dark Knight and The Killing Joke are bet­ter art than Arkham Asylum.  These other works, in addi­tion to telling great sto­ries, let me imag­ine what it might be like to be the Caped Crusader, give insight into Batman’s psy­chol­o­gy, the myth sur­round­ing him, and the uni­verse in which he oper­ates.  But in Arkham Asylum, I actu­al­ly get to be Batman.  The dif­fer­ence is cru­cial.

So, video games can allow you to expe­ri­ence what life is like through some­one else’s eyes.  That’s neat, but why talk about Arkham Asylum, when I could talk about Torment?  Because Arkham Asylum lets you expe­ri­ence what it’s like to be a very par­tic­u­lar per­son.

Some peo­ple ask “Would it be as good if it wasn’t about Batman?”  Of course not.  Would The Once and Future King be as good if it wasn’t about King Arthur?  Would The Last Temptation of Christ be inter­est­ing if it wasn’t about Jesus?  Like these other works, Arkham Asylum doesn’t just “hap­pen” to be about Batman.  It is entire­ly about what it is like to be Batman.  If it wasn’t about Batman, it wouldn’t exist.

The Dark Knight Rises

So why is this good or impor­tant?  Does it just allow young men and women to act out the ado­les­cent fan­ta­sy of dress­ing up like a bat and punch­ing peo­ple in the face?  Well, sure.  It does that.  Certainly part of the fun of the game is final­ly get­ting to appease the 10-year-old that ran around the back­yard in a blanket-cape and jumped off of trees.  And it’s impor­tant to note that there’s absolute­ly noth­ing wrong with that.

In all seri­ous­ness, Batman is a lot more than an ado­les­cent fan­ta­sy.  Batman is a leg­end.  Tom Bissell put it best when he said “Batman may have come to us through the comic book, but he belongs to American mythol­o­gy now, and it is as hard to imag­ine him hav­ing been cre­at­ed by Bob Kane as it is to imag­ine Jesus hav­ing been cre­at­ed by Mark.”  Batman is a Hero, with a cap­i­tal H– a leg­end, a sym­bol of jus­tice and pro­tec­tion and good­ness in a way that even Superman isn’t.  Batman always has an answer for every sit­u­a­tion, can always tough it out through what­ev­er any­one throws at him.  You can try to write him off as “a dude in a bat­suit,” but you would be wrong to do so, just as if you were to say Robin Hood is “a dude in tights,” or King Arthur is “a dude with a sword.”

Why do we all want to be Batman?  Because he’s bril­liant, tough and strong.  Because Batman always beats the badguy, and he always looks cool when he does it.  Because although he doesn’t play by the rules every­one else does, he is hon­or­able to a fault.  He will never kill the Joker, because he knows it would be wrong to do so.  Batman is self­less when we are self­ish.  Batman is strong when we are weak.  He can sur­vive any­thing and beat any­one, but he is just human and bro­ken enough to be believ­able.  Superman is untouch­able because he’s from anoth­er world.  No one of us could ever be Superman, and so the desire to be Superman is always thwart­ed, but Batman — you almost think you could be Batman.  He’s just bare­ly pos­si­ble.

Why else do we keep com­ing back to him, almost eighty years after his ini­tial debut?  The Dark Knight is a pow­er­ful arche­type, an inspir­ing leg­end, the sort of Hero that res­onates with every per­son.

The Adam West Batman still exists, and so, sadly, does the Clooney one, but Batman as an idea tran­scends all of that silli­ness.  Everyone who ever boot­ed up a copy of Arkham Asylum brought an idea of Batman to the table.  Every sin­gle per­son who plays the game knows who Batman is, and even where they might prefer Nolan to Miller, or dis­agree about the specifics, they agree about the fun­da­men­tals of the Batman mythos, and the fact is that Arkham Asylum sat­is­fies all of those dif­fer­ent pre­con­cep­tions.  When you play the game, you are step­ping into the shoes of a leg­end, and there’s some­thing pow­er­ful and beau­ti­ful about that.

I don’t wish to over­state this: Arkham Asylum, for all I’ve just said, is prob­a­bly not Great Art.  It’s a fun video game, and I rec­om­mend it whole­heart­ed­ly, but it didn’t give me any great epipha­nies about human nature.  But what it did is cause me to remem­ber one of the rea­sons I love video games and find them as utter­ly fas­ci­nat­ing as I do.  The great ones allow you to briefly aban­don your own expe­ri­ences and take up another’s, to re-enter the real world hav­ing lived for a while in a dif­fer­ent one, and to be bet­ter for it.  For a short time, I was Batman, and while I still eager­ly await a game which real­ly exam­i­nes the psy­chol­o­gy of the char­ac­ter in a more mature way, it was beau­ti­ful and fun, and com­plete­ly worth my time.

So, play Arkham Asylum.  It prob­a­bly won’t change your life.  It’s unlike­ly to make you rethink the nature of human­i­ty.  You’ll prob­a­bly spend most of the time gig­gling mani­a­cal­ly at the newest ridicu­lous­ly cool thing you just did.

But you know what?  It’s beau­ti­ful, and spe­cial.

And it lets you be Batman.

Buying In

Over at Grantland​.com, Tom Bissell had put up an inter­est­ing review of L.A. Noire that is worth check­ing out; you can do so here. He also brings up some inter­est­ing ideas that I want to talk about regard­ing the expe­ri­ence of games, specif­i­cal­ly the notion of “buy­ing in” to a game’s struc­ture, nar­ra­tive, and cen­tral con­ceits. I encour­age you to read the arti­cle, but it’s pret­ty lengthy, so I’m going to touch on the most impor­tant points that he brings up on the topic.

His intro­duc­tion to the topic is here:

The story of L.A. Noire con­cerns a psy­cho­pathic cop named Cole Phelps, a man who inap­pro­pri­ate­ly com­man­deers cars from civil­ians, steals out­right any car that is left unat­tend­ed, fre­quent­ly destroys pri­vate prop­er­ty, and enjoys run­ning over civil­ians. Despite his reck­less­ness, Phelps becomes the most speed­i­ly pro­mot­ed police offi­cer in con­stab­u­lary his­to­ry.

At least, that is what L.A. Noire’s story can be about, if the play­er allows it, which nice­ly nut­shells the prob­lem of open-world games that give play­ers a large amount of behav­ioral free­dom while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly try­ing to tell a coher­ent, lin­ear story.

Video games can do a lot of things other sto­ry­telling medi­ums can­not. Their penance, how­ev­er, is to have to deal with things for­eign to other sto­ry­telling medi­ums, one of which is a unique­ly dam­ag­ing form of audi­ence dis­rup­tion. Just about every sto­ry­telling game employs var­i­ous mask­ing sys­tems that attempt to antic­i­pate inter­nal­ly dis­rup­tive play­er behav­ior.

 […]

At first blush, L.A. Noire would have you believe that Phelps is not an anti­hero. He is a cop and a war hero — an all-around “good man.” How good? Phelps can­not shoot his gun out in the open, which is prob­a­bly the most sig­nif­i­cant safe­guard the game’s cre­ators have placed on play­ers deter­mined to let Phelps go psy­cho. It is not much of a safe­guard. But there is some­thing admirable about how lit­tle L.A. Noire’s mak­ers appear to have wor­ried about ass­hole play­ers. A lot of games go to such lengths to antic­i­pate ass­hole play­ers that they some­times feel like a pool that has been pre­emp­tive­ly over­chlo­ri­nat­ed to frus­trate the one kid deter­mined to pee in it. Well-conceived mask­ing sys­tems can be things of real beau­ty, but they also squan­der pre­cious devel­op­ment time that could be spent on other things, such as mak­ing more inter­est­ing games.

I even­tu­al­ly restart­ed the game once I had fooled around enough, but while play­ing through the rest of L.A. Noire the fol­low­ing ques­tion was never far from my mind: How big of a prob­lem is it that play­ers can effec­tive­ly screw up video-game sto­ries? It is a ques­tion that is never far from my mind when I am play­ing any game whose fic­tion works in tandem with my deci­sions to cre­ate some­thing the­mat­i­cal­ly uni­fied and dra­mat­i­cal­ly sat­is­fy­ing. So, how big of a prob­lem is it? One answer to this ques­tion is: There is no answer to this ques­tion. Another answer is: Strong inter­ac­tive fic­tion will com­pel play­ers to behave in ways rough­ly anal­o­gous to how the inter­ac­tive fiction’s author intends them to behave. Another answer is: The whole pur­pose of inter­ac­tive fic­tion is to encour­age this type of cri­sis. Another answer is: This is pre­cise­ly why the video-game medi­um is incom­pat­i­ble with authored forms of sto­ry­telling. In the past few years, I have thought about this ques­tion a lot — maybe more than any other ques­tion, in fact. None of the above answers sat­is­fies me.

Bissell iden­ti­fies the dif­fi­cul­ties that come with try­ing to tell a coher­ent, lin­ear story inside a video game with play­er free­dom, point­ing specif­i­cal­ly to L.A. Noire, where the player’s desires to run folks over with a vin­tage car might hijack the nar­ra­tive. This is an inter­est­ing point. Cole, as the nar­ra­tive presents him, would not go on a mur­der­ous vehic­u­lar ram­page, but the play­er, when he or she has con­trol of Cole’s behav­ior, can choose to do things that Cole would not do, gen­er­at­ing incon­sis­ten­cies and, Bissell thinks, harm­ing the expe­ri­ence.

Is this an actu­al prob­lem? Bissell’s ulti­mate con­clu­sion is that play­er free­dom makes a tra­di­tion­al nar­ra­tive an impos­si­ble choice for good video game art; nar­ra­tive con­sis­ten­cy is too vital to the enter­prise of tra­di­tion­al nar­ra­tives, he seems to argue. But I won­der if Bissell is under­selling the abil­i­ty of play­ers to smooth over such hic­cups on their own.

Game Masters have been deal­ing with this prob­lem since the begin­ning of role-playing games. Most every­body who has run a game has encoun­tered at least one trou­ble maker who fol­lows his or her whims instead of con­tribut­ing to the groups expe­ri­ence. Their Phelps might be a wan­ton mur­der­er of pedes­tri­ans, just as their sor­cer­er is like­ly to burn orphan­ages and steal the magistrate’s hat. And as any GM will tell you, if you’re try­ing to run a com­pelling, mean­ing­ful role-playing game, you kick that play­er out of your group or con­vince him or her to shape up. What you don’t do is spend time wor­ry­ing about their inane actions, and fig­ur­ing out ways to mit­i­gate or ratio­nal­ize their behav­ior. I’m not con­vinced that video games should waste effort on those ends, either, and Bissell does refer to Noire’s assump­tion that the play­er won’t mis­be­have as “admirable.” Masking, as Bissell points out, is used by design­ers to smooth over nar­ra­tive dis­crep­an­cies; you may be able to shoot your essen­tial ally, but you can­not kill her. This is a some­what flip­pant respon­se, though. The fact is that, since there is a think­ing organ­ism in the narrator’s seat, any and all of the player’s behav­iors can be ade­quate­ly respond­ed to, or stopped when the GM asks, “Are you sure you want to do that?”, “Is that what your char­ac­ter would do?”, or “No. Stop it or leave.”

Still, I am not con­vinced that pour­ing time into mask­ing sys­tems makes much sense. Though Bissell seems to think that they are, to some extent, nec­es­sary (and I might agree with him to a short extent), I don’t think that inabil­i­ty to mask a character’s fool­ish behav­ior is a dire prob­lem. And I think this for many rea­sons.

1. It’s a pri­vate encoun­ter with the work in ques­tion, and dis­counts the abil­i­ty to par­ti­tion an expe­ri­ence with a work of art.

In role-playing games, total­ly sub­vert­ing the tone of the game is a prob­lem because it harms the expe­ri­ence for every­body else at the table. In video games, the only expe­ri­ence you’re harm­ing is your own; and once the play­er real­izes that an unsup­port­ed behav­ior is not a part of the expe­ri­ence that the game offers, he or she can get right back to explor­ing the expe­ri­ence that the game is meant to offer.

Moreover, I think that Bissell fails to account for the abil­i­ty of a play­er to gen­er­ate their own inter­ludes with­in a piece of art. Just as some­body read­ing a novel might close the book to day­dream about where the book is head­ed, or imag­ine how a char­ac­ter might deal with a hypo­thet­i­cal sit­u­a­tion, or some­one watch­ing a film might pause it to tell her friend how excel­lent it would be if Captain America were ALSO in this film, and wouldn’t that be hilar­i­ous, I’m not con­vinced that the expe­ri­ence of a video game is nec­es­sar­i­ly harmed by a play­er tak­ing a break from the nar­ra­tive by doing things that the game’s nar­ra­tive might not sup­port. Perhaps the play­er is capa­ble of par­ti­tion­ing the expe­ri­ence of wan­ton mur­der, sep­a­rat­ing it from the story he or she is oth­er­wise quite involved with. In fact, the game’s fail­ure to respond to such behav­ior might even rein­force the notion that the player’s choic­es are out­side the intend­ed bound­aries of the expe­ri­ence the game intends.

2. Not all play­er approach­es need be sup­port­ed.

When a play­er comes to a game like L.A. Noire and imme­di­ate­ly wants to run ram­pant through the streets, then they are doing some­thing wrong. To a greater or lesser extent, L.A. Noire is designed to offer up a speci­fic expe­ri­ence. (That L.A. Noire also tries to offer up a more tra­di­tion­al Rockstar Games expe­ri­ence is a bit of a prob­lem, but that’s out­side the scope of this dis­cus­sion). L.A. Noire should not be fault­ed for fail­ing to ade­quate­ly sup­port expe­ri­ences out­side of what it intends. All pos­si­ble play­er actions need not be antic­i­pat­ed; only viable options. This does cut down on play­er choice in the mid­dle of a nar­ra­tive (specif­i­cal­ly by remov­ing the choice to go insane and start mur­der­ing folks, become a thief or busi­ness­man, etc. etc.), but to some extent these choic­es might not belong to the play­er at all, but rather to the char­ac­ter, both to keep that char­ac­ter con­sis­tent and to keep the nar­ra­tive focused on a par­tic­u­lar sort of expe­ri­ence.

I also think that it’s per­fect­ly alright to declare that there is a “right” way to play a game, so long as the devel­op­ers don’t pre­tend like alter­na­tive meth­ods of play are viable options. Some games are not good at this, and even L.A. Noire has issues in that it makes vague motions toward being an open-world game but offers rel­a­tive­ly lit­tle of inter­est in that mas­sive world. That the game indi­cates to the play­er that it is offer­ing a dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence than it ought to and does is prob­lem­at­ic, and for that L.A. Noire should be fault­ed, but I’m not con­vinced that a player’s choice to delib­er­ate­ly sab­o­tage the nar­ra­tive should be held again­st a game.

3. Art can demand that a participant/viewer approach and expe­ri­ence it a cer­tain way.

For a bit, I was won­der­ing whether it was okay for a game to demand that its audi­ence approach it in a cer­tain way (with a cer­tain mind­set, for instance) in order to expe­ri­ence it in the way that the design­ers intend­ed. I ini­tial­ly thought that such an approach might demand too much, or at least might be seen as demand­ing too much; a quick com­par­ison with visu­al art, or per­for­mance art, made it seem pre­sump­tu­ous on the part of the artist, to demand that a view­er engage with it in a speci­fic way.

But truly, most art demands a speci­fic sort of engage­ment, espe­cial­ly when art requires par­tic­i­pants, as games do. Paintings in a gallery require that you encoun­ter them from a dis­tance, and pre­dom­i­nant­ly through sight and not, say, touch. Plays offer a much bet­ter exam­ple; the script pro­vides a base-line, but gen­er­al­ly speak­ing the actor who is par­tic­i­pant with the writer of the script does not have com­plete­ly free reign to inter­pret those lines how­ev­er he may like, or deliv­er them how­ev­er he may like. And if he does exer­cise such gross free­dom with the script, then peo­ple will begin to ques­tion his mer­its as an actor and wish that it had been per­formed dif­fer­ent­ly.

Is there value in see­ing the player’s role in gam­ing as sim­i­lar to that of an actor’s in the per­for­mance of a play? Certainly, the work does not exist with­out the play­er giv­ing it life (in both cases). Is there also value, then, in a game pro­vid­ing some sort of direc­tion to play­ers, indi­cat­ing cer­tain tried-and-true meth­ods of inter­act­ing with an expe­ri­ence? Would it be use­ful for L.A. Noire to say, at the begin­ning, “We encour­age you to play Cole as a sane, sym­pa­thet­ic war-hero, as this will give you the best pos­si­ble expe­ri­ence”? That isn’t the best exam­ple, but per­haps in games that get a bit more com­pli­cat­ed, this might be a wor­thy cause. This need not be overt, of course; a game can qui­et­ly point the play­er toward play­ing a game a cer­tain way, of com­ing to it with a par­tic­u­lar mind-set. Especially in cases where a game just works bet­ter if the play­er approach­es it a cer­tain way, or as a cer­tain sort of game, this approach could be valu­able.

What do you think? Is there any value in delin­eat­ing the “prop­er” way to approach a game? Do you think devel­op­ers might ben­e­fit from think­ing of games in such a light? I’m most­ly just throw­ing this con­cept into the light; I’d love to hear your thoughts about it, read­ers.

Tensions in Bastion

About two weeks ago, I finally managed to sit down and play through Bastion, an excellent indie action RPG developed by seven-person studio Supergiant Games that was released in 2011. It's an excellent game, and if you haven't already played it, you should. It's now available on both Xbox Live and Steam for about $15, and is definitely worth the price.  It's certainly not perfect, but nothing ever is, and it is definitely good enough that it can be recommended wholly without disclaimers or qualification.  Fundamentally, it's very good, and you should play it.  It's almost certainly better than what you were going to be playing anyway.

Since I was struck by just how darn good Bastion was, both as an enjoyable game and as an excellent piece of interactive storytelling, I was seized by about a dozen different ideas for blog posts.

What I have settled on to write about today is one of the ways that Bastion manages to be as completely unique as it is.  Much of what makes the game interesting is the way in which it unifies various disparate elements which might, at first glance, seem to be irreconcilable, and then uses that tension to produce a better work of art than they would have made had they chosen more obviously-compatible elements. To help shed some light on how this works, I'm going to draw briefly some from the aesthetic theories of Alfred North Whitehead.

First, in case you're unfamiliar with Bastion, watch this trailer to get some idea what the game is about:

(A Small Part of ) Whitehead's Theory of Aesthetics

I've mentioned Whitehead before on this website, in a discussion of scope, but in case you don't remember that, in Whitehead's schema, aesthetic value is derived from taking disparate elements (concepts, characters, musical tones) and working them into harmony with one another. A given work of art has more value (i.e. is "better") the more harmony it produces, which stands in direct relation to either how many different pieces are harmonized, or how wildly different the pieces in question were.

There is a great deal more to Whitehead's theory than this, but I think it's an excellent starting point for a discussion of Bastion, as I think that much of the game's unique appeal stems from its excellence in doing just this. To help show this, I'm going to look at three separate sets of apparently-contradictory elements which Supergiant Games managed to weave into a harmony.

The Tone

The first and most obvious thing is the contradiction between the game's art style and the maturity of its tone. The art style conveys a sort of childlike, fairy-tale, storybook quality tone. The characters (even the one with the mustache) all manage to look sort of like children, with disproportionately-large heads and rounded features, and the game's color palette consists almost entirely of very bright, warm colors. 

The art is certainly beautiful, but it stands in sharp contrast to the game's tone. It would not be reasonable to refer to Bastion's story as “dark” or “gritty,” but it is certainly very mature. It is, fundamentally, a story about what to do after a great catastrophe, whether one that is literally apocalyptic or, in a metaphorical sense, more personally so.  Further, the game is full of parallels with such weighty real-world themes as colonialism, exploitation of natural resources, and even the use of nuclear weapons.

This is a pretty sharp contrast. If you had only seen screenshots for the game, you would probably assume the game's story to be fairly straightforward good versus evil, relatively black and white, to match its storybook art. Similarly, if I described to you a game which managed to touch on the treatment of indigenous peoples by imperialist powers as well as raise questions about the nature of regret, you would probably assume such a game would have a more traditionally “mature” art style.

It would be very possible to make a game which tried to be both of these things and failed miserably, but something in Bastion makes the contrast between the art style and the tone wonderful and not distracting. Some of it may, of course, be the exceptional quality of both sides.  One might be a lot more willing to put up with cognitive dissonance if all the pieces are at least well-done.

Nevertheless, I would suggest that the real reason these disparate elements come together in harmony is not any individual quality of either element, but rather a third element which bridges the gap between them. I suggest that it is the game's narrator who provides a sense of continuity between the storybook art and the mature themes and plot.

The narrator, an old man named Rucks, is ubiquitous throughout the game.  Hardly 30 seconds go by without Logan Cunningham's wonderfully raspy voice commenting on something the player has done or advancing the story, and it is both the writing behind the narration and Cunningham's excellent performance that bridges the gap between the art style and the themes.

The narrator tells the story, and never shies away from commenting on the serious implications of the city's past, but he does so in a way that fits right in with the art style.  The narrator's friendly, colloquial manner of speech endears him to you and reminds you of listening to your grandfather tell you stories before tucking you in at night, even as he talks of serious things.  His voice hardens and becomes somber at times, but it never loses that storytelling quality, thereby ensuring that the game's apparently contradictory styles are brought into perfect harmony, making the game far more interesting and unique than it would have been otherwise.

Bastion's soundtrack, written by composer Darren Korb, has received a great deal of acclaim, and rightly so.  You can listen to and purchase the soundtrack here, and I strongly encourage you to do both of those things.  Korb rather eccentrically described the soundtrack as "acoustic frontier trip-hop," and if that doesn't sound like fun to you, we probably shouldn't be friends.

It works because Korb knows when to use which elements: when to quietly strum at a banjo, when to raise the stakes with low bass beats and a driving rhythm, when to emphasize Eastern or Middle Eastern harmonies or instruments, and when to do all of the above at the same time.

The soundtrack is fantastic on its own, but it's particularly interesting to look at in the context of the game itself.  A good soundtrack isn't just composed of a bunch of good songs, it actually serves to make the game better by creating the right feel and tone, and it is here that Korb's soundtrack really shines.

Korb creates a unique feel for the game by marrying all the different styles together.  It creates a feeling of both familiarity and foreignness, and flows freely between them, ensuring that the player is never complacent, since he or she is never entirely sure what is going to happen next.  Since this is also what the game itself wants, the soundtrack helps to reinforce the game's overarching themes.

The Kid

The game's protagonist is only ever referred to as "the Kid," a title of affection given him by the narrator, who, despite learning the Kid's name halfway through the game, prefers to keep it secret from the player.

Rucks' reluctance to tell the player the Kid's name indicates that the title is important, and I am sure it partly exists to lessen the distance between player and protagonist by removing the obstacle of a proper name. That said, I think the interplay between Rucks' insistence upon referring to him as “The Kid,”when coupled with the increasingly-weighty and difficult tasks he asks of him, points to another set of contrasting themes.

There are any number of places one could go with this topic. One could talk about the differences between Rucks and the Kid in terms of old age and youth, or of how the Kid can symbolize renewal for lands shattered by the Calamity, but all I want to talk about right now is how the title is, at first glance, fairly inappropriate, and how that apparent tension helps any and all of these possible themes work.

Rucks points out towards the end of the game how strange it is that everyone is waiting on the actions of a kid, and he's right. It is the Kid that pushes forward most of the game's narrative, that has to make the really hard choices towards the end of the game and suffers the most personal trauma throughout. So, why do Rucks and the rest of the characters allow the Kid to do all the heavy lifting?

Because he may be the Kid, but he's not really a child. If the game explicitly states the Kid's age, I missed it, but Rucks mentions at one point that the Kid served five years on the Rippling Walls as a guard, so it's unlikely he's really a child any more. Even if the Caelondian military accepted recruits as young as the British Navy once did, it's unlikely he's less than 18 or so. He may even be older than that -- Jen Zee, the artist, rendered all the characters with round, child-like features and large eyes, so it's difficult to tell simply by looking at him what his age is. But even completely apart from his physical age, the Kid isn't a child because of the way he handles the Calamity. This is the true source of the tension in the protagonist -- he isn't a child, but he looks like a child, and the narrator calls him such.

So, why does this work? Is it simply sloppy writing or the traditional video game trope where the main character happens to be a little kid as a holdover from when games were primarily children's toys?

I don't think so, because that tension allows for a number of beautiful and interesting moments and opportunities for myth and/or symbolism in the game.  It could, for instance, be interpreted as a general comment that old idea-makers (Rucks) can never be anything without the young go-getters at the front of their movements.  It could be interpreted as primarily local and character-driven, and could thus be understood simply as Rucks patronizing (in a pleasant and gentle way, to be sure) the Kid and failing to realize that it is the Kid that is truly the most mature.

But I think the interpretation I like the best is this:  If Bastion can be understood at least partly as being about how to pick oneself up and move along after a horrible personal Calamity, then perhaps each of the characters can serve a metaphorical role in that journey.  Perhaps Bastion ends up showing that after some horrible catastrophe, even if you have an excellent ability to reason (Rucks), a good heart (Zia), and the best intentions in the world (Zulf), it is only if you can summon up enough dogged perseverance and sheer stubbornness, enough desperate, bullheaded will to survive, that you will make it.That infuriating, desperate refusal to give up is the Kid.  He may make mistakes, and certainly does a lot of damage to the world around in him in his push for survival, but he makes it.  He restores the Bastion to safety despite being the Kid, and does more for the survival of those around him than any of the others.

I have no idea what, exactly, Supergiant Games was trying to say when they named the protagonist.  What I do know is that in so doing, they created a good enough work of art to support all, some, or none of the above interpretations.

Conclusion

That's the sort of thing that the tension between Bastion's elements produces: it causes the player to dig down deeper into the game.  It makes him or her want to spend more and more time with the game, thinking about how it works and why the developers might have chosen to construct a game out of so many diverse elements.

Each time the player is confronted by a collection of elements that would sound jumbled and confused out of context, he or she is drawn deeper into Bastion's narrative and atmosphere.  Each element of tension serves to enhance Bastion's unique style and to provide a great deal of food for thought.

Whitehead would have been so very proud.