Blips: Second Son, Once Removed

Source: Missing Representation and Infamous: Second Son
Author: Reid McCarter
Site: Digital Love Child

Video games are capable of rendering some pretty realistic worlds, to the point where transposing the real world literally into a virtual one is taken as an assumed goal. If you can do it, why not? But this is a school of thought that ignores all of the other ways that games can be visually designed and the possibilities for riffing on or reworking real world environments to some end beyond the literal. But when certain aspects of games shoot for 1-to-1 realism, and others don't, it raises questions as to why the line was drawn where it was.

Case in point is Infamous Second Son, the third game in the Infamous series, and the first to boast a real world setting: Seattle. While Infamous has more in common with comic books than documentary film, its virtual Seattle is meant to stand-in for the real thing, as a literal translation, more than an interpretation. Reid McCarter over at Digital Love Child brings up an interesting point then: why isn't the main character Delsin, who is shown to be of Native American heritage, also presented as a member of an actual Pacific Northwest tribe instead one made up for the game?

I'm on board with McCarter that ultimately, this is a missed opportunity. By attributing Delsin to a fictional tribe, there is no cultural backstory beyond what is presented in the game. But of course Seattle does have such a history, and it's one that is intertwined with the Native American tribes in the Pacific Northwest. I understand that if you're trying to tell a comic book story set in a real place, there has to be components that are on the side of fiction or on the side of literal representation, but short-shrifting the realistic setting's ethnic make-up actually renders that setting less convincingly, and denies an opportunity to cast Duwamish or Suquamish (or another local tribe) people in very visible roles.

Blips: My Shape

Source: What the Next Generation of Health and Fitness Software Can Learn from Wii Fit
Author: Michael Thomsen
Site: Forbes

OK, I'm not back on normal posting schedule yet, but I'm recovering from surgery, so give me a break. Anyway, perhaps appropriately as I lie here considering my own bodily existence, I've also read this piece my Michael Thomsen on Wii Fit, Wii Fit U, and electronic fitness monitoring systems. I'd never really paid the original Wii Fit much mind, which is crazy considering how popular it was, but Thomsen's description of the way it pushes you to elaborate on simple instructions with subtle body movements is really profound notion. This especially in light of how most games ask very little of the human body but perform complex feats of virtual athleticism on screen, as Thomsen explains. This is before even getting into the angle of who has time for these kinds of tracking devices (hint: not the people who can't afford to shop at Whole Foods).

I have used video games as a fitness tool myself. In college I began playing Dance Dance Revolution PS2 games on a regular basis with the intention of lowering my heart rate. I played a lot, and burned through a couple sets of dance pads and a handful of DDR sequels, and achieved my fitness goal. Also, I got pretty good at DDR; not competition good, but still. However, one thing I liked about this was that I didn't have to guilt myself into playing, and the game never tried to shame or motivate me from a fitness perspective. I'm pretty sure there were "calorie burner" modes in some of those games, but I never touched them. DDR was a fun game to play with physical health side benefits, but I did adopt a regular workout regimen with the game, aided by the social context of a friend in college that would play along side me. It was a perfect confluence of factors to make me feel happy and healthy, one that I haven't experienced since.

Nowadays it seems like "games as fitness tools" is its own industry, so any electronic device that involves exercise is designed with the "workout session" in mind. DDR predates this, and to me, makes it more approachable. Who knows, maybe DDR is a poor exercise tool, maybe it's bad for your knees or bad for your eyes since you have to stare so hard at a screen. I'm probably better off just going out for a run, but running sucks (I've trained for and run a half-marathon in my post-college years) and, for me, requires the external motivation of training for a race. In the end, it's not just what the tools at your disposal are capable of, but how they make you feel about yourself and how they fit into your life. From my experience, physical fitness has everything to do with circumstance, and the factors that play into that aren't tracked in a calorie counter.

Blips: Approaching Critical Mass

Source: Critical Proximity

OK, I'm getting back on the horse this week, and I'd like to begin by highlighting last week's Critical Proximity conference. I'm still digging through all of the material presented during the series of talks, but it's an amazing collection of game critics speaking passionately about their practice. On the Critical Proximity website, you can watch the archived livestream of the entire day or click on individual talks to watch video presentations and read full-text transcripts. The video quality on the livestream is too low to follow along with presenters' slideshows, but the audio is plenty functional. As for the talks themselves, I was afraid going in that this series would end up being mostly critics sounding off on their well-worn platforms of choice, but instead I've been quite surprised at the diversity and originality of thought from every talk I've taken in. Conference organizer Zoya Street led things off with a charge for game criticism to be more of a conversation and less of a solitary endeavor, which set the precedent for the bevy of speakers to follow. There are too many great ones to list them all, but Zolani Stewart's presentation on the importance of weird games and the necessity of being critical of the video game industry's capitalist underpinnings, resonated pretty strongly with me. Hopefully we'll see another round of talks next year, and some forward progress on the topics at hand in the meantime.

I'm also happy to report that the weekly game crit curation website Critical Distance has reached its monthly Patreon goal. Senior Curator Kris Ligman gave a talk at the Critical Proximity as well about the process of composing the site's weekly round-ups and what goes into the decision-making process of whose writing gets highlighted and whose doesn't. Best of luck to Kris going forward; Critical Distance is an incredible resource.

:image source:

Blips: Surplus Reading

Source: Marginalia 8
Author: Joel Goodwin
Site: Electron Dance

PSA: there will not be any new Low Cutoff posts next week. Sad, I know, but I have to take the week off for personal reasons. Luckily for you, dear reader, GDC is also happening next week, so most of the game community will be focused on that. To that effect, today I wanted to point you in the direction of some reading to fill the void until Low Cutoff's triumphant return. Joel Goodwin periodically compiles these Marginalia posts over at Electron Dance as collections of links, curated from various game developers and critics. This time around, he's enlisted Amanda Lange, Ben Serviss, Raph Koster, Tale of Tales, and Miguel Sicart (whom I just wrote about on Wednesday). Topics are all over the place, ranging from video game violence to user-generated levels, to TSA procedures. Yeah, that TSA. I'm sure you'll find at least a few of the articles interesting. Anyway, that's all for me; Low Cutoff will return on the 24th.

Blips: Conference Chic

Source: How to Be Visibly Femme in the Games Industry
Author: Maddy Myers
Site: Paste

So there's a big video game conference coming up –what are you going to wear? There aren't great official standards place for many of these sorts of events (for better or worse), so it's up to you to figure this out for yourself. Maddy Myers just posted an article on Paste where she recounts what it's like to attend these types of events as a woman in an overwhelmingly male-dominated environment and how clothing selection plays such a profound role in how seriously you're taken by your peers. Jeans and t-shirts are considered "professional" attire (or "professionally casual," really), a notion that feels unique to the game industry –a concept born of the programmer man-cave perhaps. In contrast, to appear "cute" is to be disempowered, and unfortunately there's a lot of truth in that, which, as Myers explains, makes for an uphill battle for a woman of short stature in a crowd of dudes. Myers story is deeply personal and touching. She talks about how she's felt pressured to dress like "one of the guys," despite more recent inclinations to don more femme attire. Please give the whole story a read; you might even learn a bit about certain fashion trends along the way (I did).

Blips: Playful Katamari

Source: Katamari Damacy and the return of “play” in videogames
Author: David Shimomura
Site: Kill Screen

The subject of what constitutes "play" is a frequent one around these parts, and judging by his recent piece over on Kill Screen, David Shimomura and I probably have a lot we agree on here. Shimomura attended the latest Indiecade East conference and tracked down game design professor Miquel Sicart, who seems to think games are losing their sense of playfulness. He cites games like Katamari Damacy and LocoRoco as playful games that encourage a more freeform sense of play in their mechanics, even when they outline objectives for players to complete. Luckily, it seems like upcoming games such as Hohokum may be ushering in a new generation of playful games.

I have strong feelings for the Katamari games, particularly the first two. When I went to college the PS2 was in full swing, but I found myself dedicating less and less time to playing games, and while I still kept up a general interest in them, I was really only playing multiplayer games in social situations. Katamari brought me back into the fold though by offering something different than the same old formulas I'd played a dozen times over. To play is to venture into the unknown to some degree, and so a game that presents me with unforeseen circumstances has the potential for a more genuine sense of play, which Katamari delivers in spades. It helps with the playfulness that Katamari is so funny and whimsical, though those components are not necessarily essential for a game to be playful. You just have to not know what you're getting yourself into.

Blips: The Hard, Flappy Truth

Source: The Flight of the Birdman: Flappy Bird creator Dong Nguyen speaks out
Author: David Kushner
Site: Rolling Stone

I'm surprised I didn't see more people talking about this expose in Rolling Stone about Flappy Bird creator Dong Nguyen. In the piece, Nguyen basically answers the question of why he removed the game from the App Store: according to a bunch of letters he received, the game seemed to be having an unhealthy effect on a number of players, and he wanted to put a stop to it. Now, one could make the argument that Nguyen didn't really have any cause to feel guilty or responsible here as his game is devoid of the exploitive business practices found in many iPhone games, but regardless, these messages seemed to have a personal impact on him. Flappy Bird's removal from the store didn't delete it from phones that already downloaded it, but it did cease production at the hype factory, which in turn saw the game slip from public consciousness faster than if it had lingered in the store in perpetuity.

In a crazy twist of irony, there are ads currently running within Flappy Bird for Flappy Bird knockoff games. I know this because I've continued to dabble in Flappy Bird over the past few weeks. It remains a fun little game, and I am sincerely confounded by the vitriol against it and Nguyen. To me it sounds like the same argument that gets leveled against many contemporary artists: that just because the average person could have made a couple lines on a canvas just as well as any famous artist means that that artist's work is devalued. But here's the thing, if you're one of those people who says this, you didn't make it. And even if you replicated the work after the fact, it's not the same because your version is being brought into a world where the original artist's work already exists. We can debate the merits of post-modern practices as they relate to the subjects at hand, but I see little indication that the anti-Flappy Bird contingency is thinking beyond their own jealousy.

:image credit Maika Elan:

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.

Blips: Try Your Luck

Source: Rage Against the Machines
Author: Ian Bogost
Site: The Baffler

Listen, if you're up on your Ian Bogost, the professor's new essay in The Baffler covers relatively familiar territory. He asserts that free-to-play games follow in the tradition of coin-op arcade games, built with the specific intent of continuously extracting money from players' wallets. Not only that, many F2P games include social hooks that encourage you to spread the games' cultural capital in exchange for virtual goods. It's still a very interesting essay, even if you're already sold on the idea that many game executives in the F2P sector are basically swindlers. Bogost calls out Zynga and King specifically; both claims that are difficult to contest. If you're looking for a quick abstract of what the piece is all about, I'd suggest the second-to-last paragraph, which comes after a declaration that Silicon Valley operates as a kind of mafia.

"And in this sense, free-to-play games are a kind of classic racket. They create a surge of interest by virtue of their easy access, followed by a tidal wave of improbable revenue that the games coerce out of players on terms that weren’t disclosed at the outset. The game knows more than you could ever hope to about the stakes it presents, and it uses the logic of its own immersive environment to continue generating reasons for you to pursue its skewed stakes. The creators use your attention to build collective value that they cash in before anyone can see inside the machine that produced it. Like free digital services more broadly, the real purpose of the videogame business—and, indeed, of American business writ large—is not to provide search or social or entertainment features, but to create rapidly accelerating value as quickly as possible so as to convert that aggregated value into wealth. Bingo!"

Yep.

Blips: Living Under a Rock

Source: The Rust Diaries: Letting go of structure in video games
Author: Kris Graft
Site: Gamasutra (blog)

This new post by Kris Graft over on Gamasutra has made me significantly more interested in Rust. That said, I doubt I'll get into the game since it seems a bit daunting to go in alone, but my mind has been shifted as it pertains to Rust's status as an Early Access title. Graft reflects, diary-style, on his time with the game and how individual happenings could be viewed as "missing" features in most "complete" games. Where Rust ultimately ends up, if it's even going to be something that's considered "finished," is a mystery, but the point of it, at least for now, seems to be the experience of playing within such an unsure space.

As the saying goes, "it's the journey, not the destination," which is a phrase that seems quite appropriate for Rust. But it's not just the Early Access status of the game that makes the phrase so fitting, but the freeflowing, open ended nature of Rust's world and the constant string of "win some, lose some" confrontations. The game doesn't track your moral decisions or help you find friends; that's entirely up to you and how you choose to play. Also, you could be killed at any moment and lose everything on your person. Material wealth in Rust can make you feel powerful, but also a target, Graft notes. It's Graft's conclusion that really hits home though, which asks "what's it all for?" given how easy it is to lose "progress." Graft's answer is that games never really give you anything tangible, only the hopefully engaging experience of playing them. Perhaps the games that shower players with virtual trinkets and compliments are the game that we should really be scrutinizing, since those games are more about accomplishment than play.

Blips: Untrue Detective

Source: Out of Focus: Dismantling Detective Mode
Author: Stephen Beirne
Site: Paste

That title might be an easy pun, but I thought it appropriate given the subject of today's post. Stephen Beirne has written a great piece over on Paste (spiffy new site redesign over there too) about how games that use detective modes rob their players of the chance to use their observational skills. While this is certainly true in games with explicit detective modes like Batman: Arkham Asylum, it's a pervasive trend across games of all sorts, done in the name of accessibility, yet often used to circumvent design problems. I'm referring to the gleam that shimmers across objects that you can interact with, which accomplishes a very similar task; it prevents you from fumbling around looking for that narrative-progressing lever, and it heads off potential disappointment in the inability to interact with certain elements of the level architecture because the designer has removed the possibility of their interactivity from the equation.

That said, in Batman's case, I do think there's an argument for detective mode as is, and it's that Batman is just a rich guy with fancy gadgets that do everything for him. Sorry to Batman fans, but as someone who couldn't care less about accurate comic book lore, this is my layman's perception of the Caped Crusader. Why is detective mode sort of a demystifying drag? Well, maybe it's because Batman himself doesn't need to exercise much in the way of observational prowess when his computers can do all the work for him. I see detective mode in the Arkham games as a chance to role play as Batman as he truly is. Overpowered? You bet.

Blips: Together on the Island

Source: Counterweight 11: Miasmata
Author: Joel Goodwin
Site: Electron Dance

Hmm, another article about Miasmata, you say? Well, here you go. There's a new podcast up on Electron Dance where Joel Goodwin and Eric Brasure speak for an hour exclusively about the game, which Brasure finished just recently. Not only is it great to see people talking about Miasmata (sometimes it feels like Goodwin and I are the only ones), but the discussion itself is a great piece of video game criticism. The two podcasters trade stories about their encounters with the Creature, they're frustrations with certain mechanical systems, and their adoration for Miasmata's open-ended structure. Play Miasmata. Do it!

I appreciated this honest discussion because it's easy to put on my blinders when thinking about a game that I enjoyed so much. Goodwin and Brasure don't pull any punches about Miasmata's shortcomings though. I really latched onto Brasue's point about how he'd have preferred less contextual storytelling, and more general mystery. There are ruins scattered throughout the island that are never really addressed in the game; they're simply ancient structures, looming as totems of an unknown civilization. What if the scientists cottages were given that same treatment instead of dotting them with journal entries and chalkboard scrawlings? To be honest though, I got a kick out of that stuff, and the fact that it might have been a little campy didn't take away from the experience at all. In fact, that was my big takeaway from Goodwin and Brasures podcast: Miasmata is a great, unique game with some flaws, but none that detract from the core essence of the experience.

Blips: A Moment in Time

Source: Dead Sea (Chrono Cross)
Author: Alice Kojiro
Site: Gaming Symmetry

I've noticed some recent chatter about PS1 classic Chrono Cross on Twitter recently, and nothing pleases me more. If you put me to the question, I might even say the game is my all-time favorite. So, not only have I been bathing in this praise for something I love, but Alice Kojiro over at Gaming Symmetry has written at length about the most memorable area of Chrono Cross: the Dead Sea. How validating it is to know that someone else has recognized the profundity of the Dead Sea section of Chrono Cross. There is nothing else like the Dead Sea. Kojiro's piece is part of a series of articles about taking on the role of an embedded explorer recounting their journey. It's lovely work, and gets at the heart of what makes the Dead Sea special. Please check it out.

As for my take, well, traversing the Dead Sea's frozen-in-time, city-engulfing tidal waves is perhaps the most formative gaming experience I've had. Apologies for the hyperbole; I wouldn't expect it to have the same effect on someone else, especially if they were to play it for the first time in 2014 after hearing me gush about it. But for me, in the time of my life when I played Chrono Cross (late high school), it was a revelation. The game, as a whole, is gorgeous. I'm not sure there's another game that's used the full spectrum of the color pallet in such subtle, effective ways. And the Yasonori Mitsuda's original score bests all contenders. There's an emotional range in Chrono Cross that is presented through character dialogue, but the music and prerendered backgrounds really provide the weight and ambiance for everything to work together. The Dead Sea simultaneously represents awe and loss. Unlike blockbuster disaster movies and apocalyptic game sequences, the Dead Sea's "impact" is both halted and never-ending. It's quiet, contemplative, and cold, and I'll never forget it.