Blips: Intercapital Dilemma

Source: Big E versus Little e
Author: Josh Ling
Site: Medium

In December I wrote up a list of horrible video game buzzwords and "eSports" was included, in part because of its try-hard intercaps. That said, any hate I had was mostly due to the term, not necessarily what it stands for. Still, I found it pretty interesting to read this article by Josh Ling wherein he researches the etymology of "eSports" and why it's written so many different ways. The principal contenders are "eSports" and "esports," but there are plenty of others involving hyphens and spaces and creative capitalization. Thinking about "esports" as on a similar terminological path as "email," made me a lot more comfortable just ditching all of the caps for just simply "esports." I mean, Ling's Wikipedia link writes it that way, so it must be correct, right?

Actually, it's not a right or wrong issue, but, as Ling explains, a signifier of how long a game or organization has been in the electronic sports scene. Older groups tend to go with "eSports" while newer ones choose "esports," which falls in line once again with the "email" timeline. It's clear that branding has a lot to do with which designation is chosen as it's an instance where a decision has to be made for the sake of messaging consistency. Ling wrote his article after the company he works for made the choice too. I think this is part of what makes some outsiders reluctant to get in on esports though; the perception being that esports is about people trying to make money while a bunch of players fight for attention on their platforms. I'm not all the way on the cynical bandwagon, but I can't fault people for thinking that and seeing "eSports" as a callous cash-in. However, at the same time as the term's evolution to drop the intercaps, esports has outgrown those initial fly-by-night operations to become something much more established. I don't know, I'm still looking at this from the outside, but for what it's worth, that's the view from here.

Blips: Charged Imagery

Source: Being Black and Nerdy
Author: Sidney Fussell
Site: Medium

There's a lot of denial about the influence of racial politics in popular media, including games. Hopefully at this point we can at least agree that there's no such thing as an apolitical game, and that the pertinent question asks what a game's politics are, not whether it has any. Writer Sidney Fussell has published a very personal account of his relationship with the racial politics of video games, reflecting both on the images depicted in games and those projected by the medium as a whole. Check it out via the "Source" link above, but in summary, it's about growing up black in a racially divided Midwestern city where games are both an escape and a curse of sorts. It's a story about the perceived whiteness of games and how that racial label impacted Fussell's feelings of conflicted inclusivity among members of his own race as well as among his white magnet school classmates. And there's more to it than just that, so please give Fussell's article a look as it's an honest account of the power and influence games wield.

Though it is part of a critic's job to read and interpret media, it's the responsibility of creators of all media to thoroughly consider the politics of their creation before releasing it to the world. Case in point is the header image for this post, an actual promotional screenshot for Ubisoft's upcoming open-world cyber-crime game Watch Dogs. Another white male protagonist of vigilante justice (now also armed with a smartphone!) and another gang of angry black street thugs. Of course Ubisoft has the right to create and publicize these sorts of images (no one stopped them, after all), but it's also entirely within their power to produce imagery that rejects this status quo or at the very least frames their game in a less problematic context. Now, that would have potential to be a refreshing exercise in free speech. Everything in games is a design choice, and as Sidney Fussell's essay details, sometimes those choices have real world consequences.

Blips: Filmic Layers

Source: What does it mean when we call videogames cinematic?
Author: Chris Priestman
Site: Kill Screen

The word "cinematic" is tossed around a lot with games, but what does that label really entail? Well, since it's often coming from a marketing department, "cinematic" is somewhat of an empty phrase in games, taking for granted that people like movies and hoping that they'll enjoy this other medium if it seems similar. I believe a lot of the use of "cinematic" in games writing is derivative of marketing speech too, which has been allowed to inform and shape the perception of the medium. If I look at the games that are called cinematic, I see a couple things: film-like cinematography (at least in the cutscenes shown in, you guessed it, commercials), realistic looking/sounding characters performance-captured by movie actors, and a 3-act narrative arc to the game's central plotline. Of course there's more to film than just these elements, so it's worth considering other games that offer cinematic experiences, but aren't generally considered as much.

That's the premise of a recent piece by Chris Priestman for Kill Screen wherein he argues that a game like Papers, Please uses cinematic split-screen visuals as a means of dividing player attention. In the end, no one medium stands totally alone, and as Priestman admits, even split-screen itself isn't born of film, and the visual style we typically associate with cinema in games often owes as much to painting, theater, and photography as its moving pictures cousin. And as far as I can tell, David Cage is already making "interactive movies" as much as something like that can exist, which is likely not wholly a game or a film, but something somewhere in between. Now he just needs to use that interesting middle-ground to tell an equally interesting story.

Blips: Idle Chatter

Source: Small Talk
Author:Aevee Bee
Site: ZEAL (on Medium)

If you're not following Aevee Bee's ZEAL project, you're missing out on some great games criticism, like this essay on small talk in Deadly Premonition. While many games contain idle chatter, usually it just shows up in fleeting moments to cover load times or fill out a dialogue tree. In Deadly Premonition, you spend a lot of time driving from one location to another, and during that time you also listen to the game's protagonist conversing with his fellow passengers or with himself. There are no decisions for the player to make to alter the direction of the conversation, and the subjects discussed typically have little or nothing to do with the plot points in the game. Mostly it's talk about movies, which clues players in to the film-going preferences of the characters, which again, is not important information to help you beat the game, but it does flesh out the characters and the world they inhabit.

Aevee Bee mentions the elevator conversations in Mass Effect as being of a similar ilk, despite their load screen cover-up status. Having just completed the first Mass Effect game, I'm on board with this, and would have loved to see these personable interactions occur at other times in the game. There's so much dialogue in Mass Effect, but most of it is just Shepard pumping people for information. On the one hand, I get why this is the case, I mean, fail as it does, there's supposed to be a sense of urgency in the game that keeps Shepard's tone militaristic and focused. However, I think it contributed to making the romantic subplot extremely tone-deaf and devoid of real chemistry. Shepard seemed more likely to issue a passport to her love interest than start a free-wheeling fling. If nothing else, I'm curious to see how this aspect of the game changes in subsequent entries in the series.

Retro Blips: Critical Void

Source: The Lester Bangs of Video Games
Author: Chuck Klosterman
Site: Esquire

As a companion to yesterday's article on the fabled Roger Ebert of video games, I saw this 2006 piece by Chuck Klosterman floating around wherein he laments the lack of video game criticism on the level of music critic Lester Bangs, in the press, and even in game enthusiast publications. I read plenty of video game magazines and websites at the time, and in 2006, Klosterman was absolutely right. In the major publications and outlets there really wasn't in-depth criticism being written that  took into account the new language of video games, but instead writers picked apart games by commercially evaluative elements in the service of consumer advice. As much as we continue to need purchase recommendations, there was an absence of criticism.

While it's telling that many in the video game community still feel a lack of mainstream cultural acceptance for games, the criticism side of things has certainly come a long way. No longer is real game criticism bound to the academic world, but personal blogs and columns have picked up the slack that hadn't been widely produced before. Heck, there's even criticism happening on big-time sites like Gamespot on a regular basis, and the New York Times publishes Kotaku reviews every so often. In many cases these reviews serve dual purposes: offering a critical approach to the meaning expressed by a game, while also explicitly letting readers know if the critic think a game is worth playing via some kind of scoring system. It's not a perfect system, but it is an improved one.

The reason Warren Spector's recent piece felt out of touch to me is because it reads like it was written in 2006, when such critique would have been more accurate to the situation at the time. There is great criticism being written in 2013, and a relatively decent amount at that. It is still underexposed, but the tides seem to be slowly turning in its favor. It's great that The New Inquiry has published a Games issue, but the next step is the have games criticism show up as a part of general cultural criticism more frequently instead of being cordoned off into a game category.

Sadly, it's also quite difficult to make a living writing about games, and especially so for writing criticism. I sincerely hope re/Action reaches its crowd-funding goal (please consider donating), but at this point they have a lot of ground to make up in the closing weeks. Klosterman closed out his piece speculating that is a Lester Bangs figure would emerge in the video game criticism space, that person would likely strike it rich. Well, maybe no one has truly met those aspirations yet, but at this point the whole "get rich" part of the equation seems more like a fantasy.

Blips: The ______ (name) of ______ (medium).

Source: Chasing the Dragon
Author: John Teti
Site: The Gameological Society

It's great that the gaming press is as reflective as they are, consistently examining aspects of their practice and coming up with new ways forward. Sometimes this works out for the best as with recent changes to comment moderation policies on both Kotaku and IGN, at least partly spurred by Samantha Allen's open letter about issues in gaming forums and comments. Other times we end up with Warren Spector pushing for a Roger Ebert of video games. John Teti dismantles Spector's remarks in a thorough essay for Gameological that claims video games don't need their own Roger Ebert.

The crux of Teti's argument centers around the fact that Spector is looking to the past for answers without acknowledging how technological shifts have fundamentally altered the landscape for publishing criticism. Spector wants game criticism in general interest print magazines and newspapers where, in a best case scenario, folks who don't normally read about games can see stories and gradually warm up to them. At the very least, Spector's stance is that having games writing visibly present on newsstands and magazine racks along with other "culturally accepted" media like movies and books, that more people will begin to view games in a similar light. As Teti makes clear, this is a backwards perspective. He notes how TV criticism has found a newly resonant form in online episode breakdowns, posted within 24 hours of the original airing. It's debatable whether this is ultimately the best form for TV criticism to take, but it has undoubtedly found an audience that was not satisfied with the old ways.

It's worth noting that Ebert has a pervasive body of film criticism outside of newsprint too, having written numerous books, produced and starred in his own TV show, and published numerous writings online, including his work for the Chicago Sun-Times. In fact, it's his work outside of newsprint that made Ebert a household name.

Tet's strongest point may be in examining how "cultural acceptance" is measured through old media standards like award shows and film festivals. It's not just that technology has pushed criticism to evolve into new forms, it's that "mainstream culture" does not exist that way it used to. To appeal to the mainstream is to appeal to whom exactly? That Spector cites French New Wave cinephile journal Cahiers du Cinema as an example of a magazine that would be mainstream critique is beyond absurd. There used to be a ton of videogame magazines in the 90s, if that's what you're looking for. For the record, I'm not opposed to seeing more games criticism in print mags and newspapers; I think it would have a positive impact, but would in no way produce game crit's Roger Ebert.

John Teti's full essay is worth checking out. I know I'll definitely think twice about writing the words "cultural acceptance" from now on.

Blips: Gimme Game-y Games

Source: Systems vs. Stories
Author: Dan Whitehead
Site: Eurogamer

It's not a new argument that video games should be developed around their systems, not as vehicles of cinematic storytelling. That's the crux of Dan Whitehead's stance in a new piece for Eurogamer, but his point is more salient with the comparison between two recent games that use a zombie apocalypse as a premise: The Last of Us and State of Decay. Sure there are new zombie games every week (sigh), but here Whitehead explains why he thinks State of Decay is a better "game" than the critically lauded The Last of Us, and it all boils down to story presentation. In The Last of Us, Whitehead felt like he was just keeping the main characters alive in between cutscenes where the story was told. In State of Decay, he claims that you're almost always playing the game to push the story forward, to the point where there's not even an explicit plot in the traditional sense.

Though I haven't played either of these games, I can see where Whitehead is coming from, and can hop on board except where he gets superlative with his claims in ways that restrict the narrative possibilities of various media. The topper is his closing line that refers to games as "the only truly new creative medium of the last 100 years." Cutting it pretty close to the invention of film, but I guess I can let that slide. However, let's not forget that games have existed prior to video games, and are founded on the same principles. Games in fact predate film and photography by hundreds, if not thousands of years. Furthermore, I don't have a problem with cinematic games with minimal interactivity, so long as the parts where I play aren't just there as boring filler to meet a "game" requirement.

If there's a problem it's how we lump all games under the same set of expectations. The kinds of interactivity should be what we use to classify games because they let the player know what kind of experience they're in for. If I know a game is going to be little more than a visual novel where I press a button to turn the page, so be it. I might be in a mood for that kind of game. If the story is interesting, that game could still be great. The interactivity might not get in the way and involves the player in the story just enough to be meaningful. I haven't played Asura's Wrath either, but isn't that the basic idea there? The real issue with most story-based games isn't interactivity, it's second-rate writing. By the sound of it, The Last of Us actually makes great strides on that front.

Blips: The Other Side of the Story

Source(s): Maybe Games Just Aren't For Telling Great Stories? and Games Are The Ideal Place For Telling Great Stories
Author: John Walker
Site: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

What to make of John Walker's dueling editorials on the competence of video games as a medium for telling great stories? The two pieces represent opposite viewpoints much like talking heads on cable news shows –each saying their piece without ever actually debating topics. The difference here is that since both articles were written by the same person, they represent internal conflict, one that seems unresolved.

However, certain arguments in the pro-game stories article seem to trump claims to the contrary in the other piece. Namely there's a part where Walker breaks down three kinds of narrative approaches in games, and when he gets to the third one, open-ended narratives where players, not designers, make the stories, he really makes his strongest point. In the anti-game stories editorial, Walker lists three games that he remembers having great stories in a more literary sense of the term, but makes no mention of the open-ended narrative in Minecraft and EVE Online that he cites in the other piece. Sure, bringing those games up would have strongly refuted the points he was making, but it also paints this pair of editorials as clever for cleverness' sake.

The issue isn't that game stories are doomed to be poor; there are plenty that aren't, and quite a bit of what makes others miss the mark could be corrected with a higher level of craft on the writing and performance front (a complicated issue, I'm aware). While I don't have an inherent problem with linear narratives in games, the ones that resonate most strongly are the ones that primarily use the game's mechanics to tell the story. These stories can still make use of smart writing, elegant performance capture, and fancy graphics, but treading to closely on the tropes of cinema or literature will just make players wonder why the game isn't just one of those instead.