Blips: The Real World House

Source: Creative Restriction and The New Realism
Author: Matthew Burns
Site: Magical Wasteland

Regardless of critiques and interpretations of Gone Home, the game seems to be a title worth playing. Though I haven't played it yet, I certainly intend to in the near future. Before then though, a flurry of interesting writing has surfaced on the game, and I was particularly drawn to Matthew Burns take on the game as an example of literary realism. From what I've seen of the game (about the first 20 minutes or so), the literary realist label seems to fit the bill. As Burns notes, the narrative devices are not in service of systems as is the case with most game stories, but instead characters. There's a grounded consistency to Gone Home as well. Desk drawers must be opened to see what's inside among other rudimentary actions, and your role as a character who's returning home after an extended hiatus parallel's the player's curiosity to explore an unfamiliar place.

I'm glad games like this can exist now, but I do wonder how much potential there is to take on literary realism a second, third, or fourth time. Any process repeated over time will begin to reveal it's systemic qualities which could dull the strength of a game like Gone Home's unique narrative devices. However, even if games that use literary realism lose the newness that comes with doing something totally original, there's always a place and an audience for games of that sort. Consider black and white portrait photography which occupies its own niche in the photography world. While people who've seen photographic portraits before aren't likely to be wowed by the concept of pictures of people's faces, the content of the images is what continues to draw interest. What stories are held the subject's raised eyebrow, their piercing eyes, or their inviting smile? Perhaps Gone Home's exact format of house exploration would be stale a second time around, but the method of storytelling seems primed for new tales.

Blips: Grunge Games

Source: Grunge, Grrrls and Video Games: Turning the dial for a more meaningful culture
Author: Leigh Alexander
Site: Gamasutra

"Gamer culture" is nothing if not off-putting, and I like video games, so I have to imagine there's not much incentive for those disinterested in the medium to want to join in. In a recent piece by Leigh Alexander, she states that the culture that surrounds video games needs to change if it's going to be a culture worth remembering. The parallel she draws is the grunge music counter-culture of the early 90s which was a reaction to the glam and excess of the 80s and hair bands in particular. Alexander speaks of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Rage Against The Machine, but also of Riot Grrrl bands like Sleater-Kinney and Bikini Kill, and how the spirit of that movement is carried on in the feminist DIY game scene: perhaps the medium's first true counter-culture.

Though grunge music and personal games have their share of differences, not the least of which is the change in environment from mainstream monoculture to the fragmented subsets of specialized niches we have now, there's an "against the grain" tone in both. I firmly agree with Alexander that this counter-culture is the most interesting thing happening in the games space right now, and it's disheartening the degree to which young people would rather in-fight over corporate loyalty than embrace the rebellious element.

In my opinion, this comes down to what's cool, and what's not. Grunge music was cool, but in a way that youth latched onto and adults largely repelled. For a long time, games in of themselves fulfilled the same purpose. Adults didn't understand them, and though they weren't cool in the high school clique sense, they were cool within the circle of people that appreciated them. Now, even though the grunge fad has passed, games haven't changed all that much, except for how they look and a refinement of mechanics. In games, instead of each new generation growing up with their own unique counter-culture like grunge, punk, goth, metal, or dare I say dubstep, they each get their own iteration of Mario Kart. In music, these movements are driven by youth and ambition, which stagnated in games around the time of grunge. There is an alternative scene in games right now though, and it's one worth championing.

Blips: Everybody Calm Down

Source: Plague of game dev harassment erodes industry, spurs support groups
Author: Brian Crecente
Site: Polygon

Brian Crecente has written up a great piece on the recent rise in game industry departures spurred in part by online harassment from fans, often including death threats. The article is flat-out depressing in its mini-profiles of several figures in the development community, and comes out at the end with a none-too-hopeful message. Will this problem become less of an issue over time or will it continue to get worse? Can anything really be done?

Pointing out the actions being taken by sites like Kotaku and IGN to moderate their comments and forums is a good start. Even if these are private websites, they're some of the largest game enthusiast communities, so if hate speech can be tamped down there, it sends a message about the image the gaming community is trying to project as positive.

Still, the one thing I found missing from the Polygon article was hearing from harassers. Maybe that would require a separate piece so as to not detract from the stories of the victims of this abuse, but I think getting insight into the minds of these knee-jerk hotheads would prove a helpful perspective to have. I can't fathom uttering threats like this at all, much less in the context of rebalancing a video games multiplayer mode. What triggers it? Top-down solutions are only going to get us so far. We have to sit down and speak to these *shudder* gamers. Otherwise we're just moving the class to another room and hoping the "problem kids" don't find us.

Why are the "problem kids" problematic to begin with? It might have something to do with games and the Internet, but tons of people, especially young people, engage in new media without these kinds of issues. How much of this outlandish behavior can be attributed to the nature of the medium, and how much is the result of outside factors like socioeconomic status, family/household environments, and mental health? How much is that young people have defined their own rules for online behavior because parents and other responsible adult parties don't have the experience of growing up with social media to teach proper behavior? I don't know, but I'm willing to bet that it's a factor.

Blips: Life is Short and Death is Cheap

Source: Playing With Death
Author: Rob Gallagher
Site: The New Inquiry

This piece by Rob Gallagher for The New Inquiry's Games issue is a thorough examination of how games are uniquely equipped to discuss the concept of death, yet much critical discourse on the topic is framed in literary or cinematic terms. Gallagher points out how games that use rouguelike mechanics are pushing players away from seeing life as precious, and instead as a means to some other end beyond simply staying alive. He uses Tokyo Jungle as an example, where keeping a single animal alive in the dangerous urban wasteland is futile, and the point of the game is about carrying on the bloodline. Failure to produce offspring is the ultimate death in the game, not the worldly death of a single creature.

This is an interesting point to make in light of the recent strand of "empathy games" that have popped up in the past couple years. Though admittedly a unfairly reductive term, empathy games keenly focus on the repetition and suffering of characters as they struggle to make ends meet or operate on a basic human level. The empathy game and the rouguelike aren't in direct conflict, but typically handle the death of the player character differently. XCOM: Enemy Unknown doesn't aspire for players to comprehend the personal struggles of your international collection of anti-alien mercenaries, yet players have been reported to feel tremendous remorse for the loss of combatants on the battlefield, where death is permanent and the game keeps moving forward. The attachment comes through gameplay, not the narrative of struggle.

I don't think one way of handling death is better than another here, and am glad there exists such a variety of options, but I think it's worth acknowledging how games can look at the way they inherently cheapen the reverent nature of life and death, yet understand and use those qualities to say something about the subject in ways that can't be done in other mediums.

Blips: Early Access

Source: The strange, sad anxiety of Jason Rohrer's The Castle Doctrine
Author: Leigh Alexander
Site: Gamasutra

Well, Jason Rohrer's home invasion/security game The Castle Doctrine is certainly proving to be quite the conversation starter, and it's not even out yet. The game, which centers around the titular Castle Doctrine, which is an American legal principle wherein individuals are justified in using lethal force against perceived threats inside their home puts players in the role of a paternal figure who must both fortify his home to protect his family, and break into other players' homes to steal from them. The concept of "perceived threat" is a politically charged issue with a great deal of visibility right now due to the Trayvon Martin court battle and the state of Florida's "stand your ground" law. However, Rohrer seems less interested in making public comment on this hot-button issue and instead focusing on his own personal experience as the de facto "defender" of the household.

In an enlightening profile in Gamasutra, Leigh Alexander discusses Rohrer's motivations for making The Castle Doctrine, as well as his reactions to the controversy stirred by media around his unreleased game. I feel the unreleased nature of this title is a huge caveat in the criticisms that have been leveled against the game so far. By the sound of it, players are supposed to learn to care about their family of characters though repetitive play, which is a concept that only exists and succeeds or fails in theory until we can actually play it. Likewise, Rohrer feels that critics of his game are misreading what the game is saying, and I'm inclined to refute that statement on the principle that meaning is not bound to the singular track of authorial intent, but if these critics are going off of interviews and small gameplay samples, they may indeed be misreading the work, because they're judging based on literal or conceptual fragments.

By all accounts, The Castle Doctrine seems like it'll be a pretty disturbing experience, and I'm curious to find out how prescient or out of touch it ends up being, once I can actually play it for myself.

Blips: Shhh! We're Playing Video Games

Source: At Libraries Across America, It's Game On
Author: Sami Yenigun
Site: NPR

In many libraries across the US, you can play video games as part of regular library services. In some, you can check out games to play in the library on public systems, but others allow you to old-school rent games (for free, of course) as if they were books or DVDs. This is a fascinating development and one that I hope continues to gain momentum. Video games are at a sort of crisis point as far as preservation and access to previous generations go. Having public repositories for games is a great first step. It helps to give games a historical physicality, though, from the NPR report I'm citing, libraries are mainly focusing on current hardware.

Some may object to libraries adopting games, claiming that they're just using them as a tool to bring young people to the library in hopes that they look at some books while they're there too, discounting the potential educational value of games. I don't think this is the case though, and have no problem with using games as a entry point to visiting the library. If anything, having both games and books available within the same facility then offers a more well-rounded curriculum for learning, particularly with multiplayer games or games that are played in a social context, something that the solo experience of reading rarely offers.

When I worked at the Hirshhorn Museum, this was a major goal of incorporating games into the teen center curriculum. I picked games for our collection that showed unique artistry, but also knew that just having 360 and PS3 setups on huge gorgeous screens was going to be a powerful attraction tool. The end goal was never to just get teens in the door, playing games though; that was just step one, a vital and recurring part of the process, and not simply a stepping stone. Still, we had a ton of other digital media tools that teens who would come for the games could then check out between matches and potentially, in a best case scenario, discover a passion that they never knew they had (also maybe visit the art museum proper). Our approach was to cultivate all-around new media literacy, and these forward-thinking libraries are definitely on the right track.

Blips: The Ludonarrative Dumpster

Source: Ludonarrative dissonance doesn't exist because it isn't dissonant and no one cares anyway.
Author: Robert Yang
Site: Radiator Blog

I'd highly suggest giving Robert Yang's new blog post discounting the relevance of the term "ludonarrative dissonance" a read. I provided a link above, fancy that. It's an at-times hilarious description of the dissonant nature of Bioshock Infinite that few who reviewed the game seemed to care about. Yang goes on to argue that critics and players at large don't seem bothered by ludonarrative dissonance at all anyway. We've adopted processes where we recognize "gameisms" (borrowing a term from Tom Bissell) as exceptions to the rules that would otherwise be labelled "dissonant."

One example Yang offers in Bioshock Infinite that stood out for me was the game's supposed commentary on the concept of poverty, yet as the protagonist you find money in trash cans all over the place. Now, I haven't played Infinite, so I can't comment directly on the game's execution here, but it's very effective at illustrating Yang's point. I'll be writing about the game Crypt Worlds soon, which tackles the subject of currency, including finding money in garbage bins, in an extremely thought-provoking way. In short, dumpster diving for cash isn't something most people do, but many video games make it seem normal. Crypt Worlds made me step back and consider that I was spending multiple "days" in in-game time exclusively making the rounds through town, searching garbage cans for money. I really felt like I was a scrounger in what is, in every way, a messed up place. Crypt Worlds didn't tell me it was thematically about poverty or financial systems (among other things), I perceived that through playing it.

And I think that's also part of the issue here. Games, particularly big-budget games with significant PR pushes, build up hype and preconceptions that are meant to sell the game, and these statements are given credence when it comes to critique. The "authorial intent" ingrains itself over time, even before the game is released. Games don't say, "this is about poverty," they say something about poverty, usually about the how it's unjust, conveyed by building empathetic relationships with impoverished characters. However, marketing says "this game is about poverty" in hopes that critics and players will look for it in the game. Again, I haven't played Bioshock Infinite, but I could rattle off half a dozen themes that the game supposedly wrestles with that will be impossible to unknow when/if I decide to play it someday.

I agree with Zolani Stewart's reaction in the comments that the division between "game" and "story" parts is wholly arbitrary and falsely frames critical discussion, and that the problem isn't that games need to rid themselves of dissonance or that dissonance in and of itself is enough to warrant damning critique, but if a game is, through whatever procedural means, presenting a thematic opinion that is undercut by other elements of the game, it's worth pointing out. By the sound of it, according to Yang, Bioshock Infinite undercuts itself constantly. If no one seems to notice, is it because dissonance doesn't matter or just that games and game media are proficient at drawing most players' attentions away from such discrepancies?