Category Archives: The Android’s Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

Meeting games halfway

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Remember when Grand Theft Auto IV came out? Remember the massive critical acclaim, followed by increasing backlash on the part of players who deemed it too negative, too dour, too boring? Well I’ve been playing it again and I’ve rethought some of that, which I had largely subscribed to.

Let me be clear, I think GTA4 is a masterpiece either way. It’s vast, brilliant, important, and though the humor is a bit less stark, still has plenty of laughs. Now, I appreciate that those who loved San Andreas (i.e. those who played San Andreas) would possibly miss the craziness which that game became, especially in the endgame. Understandably so: Stealing jetpacks and airplanes was hilarious, and the antics of CJ (Especially when he was terrifically obese and dressed as a truck driver) were just insanely enjoyable. I still think San Andreas is the better game, and I think given the iterative return to craziness in The Lost and Damned, and The Ballad of Gay Tony, that Rockstar listened to the reaction from the public.

I'll have a number nine, a number nine large, a number six with extra sauce, a number seven, two number forty-fives, one wit' cheese, and a large soda.

But in replaying GTA4 I’ve been playing along with what it asks. I’ve been using the subway to get around, taking cab rides, going on mandates with friends, all that jazz. And it works. It really does. When I got into the mindset it really started to all click into place in a way which it hadn’t before, however much I had enjoyed it. Last night I was doing the mission The Snow Storm, where an attempt to retrieve a ridiculous amount of coke goes very south. I had an epic, massive chase across Algonquin (The game’s stand-in for Manhattan) which ended with me disappearing into the subway to avoid the cops. And when I rode that train across to Bohan (The Bronx), with the sun coming up and the city bathed in dawn light, with barely any health left, the bag of coke slung over my shoulder… I really felt the game in a way I hadn’t done before.

So to give this post a point beyond my own reflections, have there been any games which you have really had to adopt a particular mindset to fully enjoy? Anything where you’ve gone back with a new approach that really meets what the developers had in mind, and found it better? Or am I all alone here?

The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

“Comfort Games”

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Ever had a “comfort food”? Something that you know will cheer you up when you’re feeling down? I have one. Ice cream. I LOVE ice cream. Actually, it really doesn’t matter what mood I’m in, I’ll eat it. So I suppose that sort of defeats the purpose of my intro. But!

I was thinking the other day and realized that I have such a thing as “comfort games”, which I tend to play more at certain points of my life than others. Let me give you a good example of what I mean:

Harvest Moon.

AKA the world's most addicting waifu simulator!

I love the Harvest Moon games and I’ve played them a lot through my life, but I can guarantee that I’ve played them most when I’m sick and stuck in bed. There’s something just relaxing enough about it, but still just addictive enough, that it can distract me from all but the worst sicknesses and keep me well occupied and entertained, without having to do too much heavy thinking.

Here’s another game that I frequently turn to when I’m sick:

SimCity DS.

Except I always pick the robot advisor. ALWAYS.

Like Harvest Moon, SimCity DS manages to offer juuuusst enough complexity to keep myself distracted from the disturbingly large pile of tissues beside my bed without stressing me out due to having to worry about a limited number of lives or an excruciatingly high difficulty level. As such, it falls nicely into the category of being one of my comfort games.

So those are the games I lean toward when I’m sick. What about when I’m feeling particularly scared or uneasy about something? Well, for a long time, that was when the RPGs and adventure games come out. The classics, usually. There’s something about stepping into the shoes of a stereotypically heroic character that can chase away fears. I’ve told stories before of the way Ocarina of Time and Final Fantasies IV and VI all did wonders for me when I was having a tough time. It’s completely true, and I’m not afraid to admit it.

Lately if I’m not feeling too optimistic about things, I’ll multiplayer something with a friend. Nothing like going on some sort of genocidal rampage in game to cheer you up, right? (Come on, admit it. You’ve done the same thing.)

Oh, and long car rides where I’m not driving?

There is one thing and one thing alone for those:

You know it.

So what about you guys? I can’t be the only one out there with “comfort games” that I always go back to!

The Android's Bunker (Strategy), The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

Why Hearts of Iron could be better.

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Fair warning: This post is going to deal with some unpleasant issues, such as the Holocaust, concentration camps, and so forth.

I’ve been playing plenty of Hearts of Iron 2 over the years, and as my last post said, I’ve been spending time with Darkest Hour over the weekend. It’s a lot of fun! And yet I am constantly reminded of what I regard as a significant shortfall in the game – the absence of atrocities. From Paradox’s own forum: Short version is No Anything Nasty, No Talking about why there’s Nothing Nasty.

Now, if you are hesitant, I can understand where you are coming from. Videogames are not exactly renowned as an especially thoughtful medium, certainly not one which is ready to tackle weighty issues like the most horrific crimes in human history. As an aside, I would question how they ever can become that if we don’t start taking some faltering steps in that direction. Nonetheless if there is hesitation or concern I am, as I say, understanding of this sentiment. We are the medium of grisly chainsaw deaths, where a gunshot to the gonads is rewarded with an amusing animation and as often as not some sort of bonus, a medium where very few games even conceive of avoiding violence, let alone using non-violence as a primary arbiter of solving problems.

And you thought it'd be a screenshot of Madworld or Gears of War!

So yes, I can see where the concern would come from. I have concerns myself. I’m not confident that too many developers could do something as unpleasant as World War 2, the real unpleasantness of it I mean, in a way that is anything other than an appeal to prurient sadism or rubbernecking. And, let’s be honest here, in other games how many of us really have acted like genocidal maniacs in games where it’s possible? I’ve blown up stars because it’s easier to do that than to mount a regular invasion of a solar system. When abstracted -or when not based in recent historical events – players are given leeway to commit acts so overwhelmingly evil that the inhabitants of the 40K Universe would balk. Allowing the player to engage in such actions will mean players engage in such actions.

But here’s the thing: Hearts of Iron deals with a very specific period of history, involving very specific actors, whose choices had wide-ranging effects. Nazi Germany was not a fighting power who happened to devote some effort to exterminating millions because it sounded like a good idea at the time – it was a core ideological conceit of the state and it had a significant impact on their conduct of the war effort itself. However insane their policies, however divorced from reality, they nevertheless existed and were consequential. When things began to go badly on the Eastern Front for the Third Reich, they still devoted an enormous effort of industry and infrastructure to the extermination of ‘untermenschen’. They shipped tools and talent to the camps rather than to the front. Imagine a Germany where antisemitism never escalated beyond the norm of 1930s Europe. The Jewish scientists never fled to England and America, and suddenly the Nazi regime didn’t kill or exile all the people responsible for developing the atomic bomb.

My point is this: You cannot separate World War Two from its atrocities. Well, you can if you have a narrow-focus view. An FPS through Operation Overlord isn’t going to turn up too much of the truly nasty stuff, because the truly nasty stuff wasn’t happening in Northern France, and that is a completely fair choice for developers to make. But a grand strategy game which avoids doing it is capitulating, both in terms of not including something vital for understanding what the war was and factors which influenced how it played out, but because it ends up making the Nazis (and the Empire of Japan) seem like, well, a bunch of invading Germans (Or Japanese). They are militaristic, nothing more, and nothing within the game indicates that they are functionally different from anyone else. I believe that this approach actually whitewashes the Nazis to some extent because it divorces them from their gravest crimes, which were far worse than simply waging wars.

Will Wright presents: The Holocaust

In Paradox’s defense, there are European governments who would pitch a hysterical fit about a game where you could click a little button that said “Exterminate the Jews” or you got a big spreadsheet of undesirable elements and could choose whether to exterminate, sterilize, herd in ghettos, levy additional taxes, and so on. Additionally you can drop nukes on people, and that certainly does have an effect on manpower, indirectly suggesting massive deaths. As I’ve said myself I’m not sure such a thing could be done in entirely good taste and, even if it was, many players would most probably approach it with less than noble intentions themselves. Nonetheless I feel it is even more tasteless to act as though it never happened, and that it is detrimental to anything attempting to simulate WW2 on a grand scale.

The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

Put the cat among the AIs.

Er, or the pigeons. Anyway. What I’m going to talk about in this post is something I expect will be a common theme for me because I find it rather fascinating. That is to say, how AIs act when direct human intervention is absent or minimized.

I’m not quite sure why this is, but I am fascinated by – have always been fascinated by – watching a game do its thing with a minimum of intervention on my part. I suppose this is something that many people do enjoy, given the success of The Sims franchise, but for me it extends into almost any genre you can think of. If there are AIs, I will want to watch them do their thing without me being involved, or watch them reacting to some particularly huge event I set in motion and then retreat from the scene, like some kind of nuke-delivering playwright.

Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with nukes

Here’s the thing: I know what the computer can do to me, generally speaking. I can figure out how it works and unless I set myself particular conditions (Which I admit I usually have trouble sticking to) I can exploit the AI’s inevitable weaknesses. When it’s AI against AI, I can oftentimes see a more level playing field which is consequently quite enjoyable to watch.

Sometimes though, it goes in a stranger direction still. Take Populous: The Beginning. Now, when I play that game, I really get into it. And when I visit disasters on a rival I really like to watch how they deal with it. I very commonly storm in, wipe out everything except any critical buildings and a couple of builders, then retreat and watch them rebuild. I do the same in various other strategy and RTS games. I love watching an AI country/state/tribe/etc. put itself back together, deal with the hardship I have inflicted. Now, I’ll concede, to some extent there is a streak of vicious sadism here. I flat out enjoy knowing that their puny civilization exists at my indulgence. But still, I enjoy watching it work as a system, as an ‘intelligence’ of whatever sort as well as a group of little computer people, a simulated society (However crude these simulations may be at this point notwithstanding).

With broader applications I think systems like this can be very powerful for immersion and enjoyment in games. Though I think GTAIV was a somewhat flawed game, the way it drew you into the world – in large part reliant on building a convincing city to inhabit – was quite astounding and unmatched. I guess what it boils down to is: Watching stuff happen without player involvement can be a critical thing in immersing the player. I’m eagerly awaiting the day when a game comes out where you are just one actor among many. Not in the MMO sense so much as… imagine Dynasty Warriors. Now imagine you’re a regular soldier on the battlefield, or at least the other generals and such run around as actively as you do. Conventional game design wisdom places the player as the primary actor, but also makes the player’s character the primary actor in-universe, and often enough the only one who has agency of any meaningful sort. I don’t agree entirely with this wisdom – I think being part of a larger system could not only serve as a strong method of immersion, but would also make the things the player does control that much more tangible and meaningful.

The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

The trouble with reviews

Right then, now that we’ve warmed up let’s launch straight into the pretentious overestimation of my own abilities and talk about videogame reviews and analyses, shall we?

There’s plenty to say about the business of reviews, but something I’ve been thinking about lately is how shallow they are. I don’t mean this in the most critical sense per se, but rather that they are oriented towards only the typical gameplay issues, graphics, that sort of thing. Rarely do they delve into the more complex things such as tracing a lineage of a genre and understanding the influences of things, or really picking apart what a game is saying, except in the examples where it cannot be avoided.

This is not difficult to understand. At the cynical end, it’s because reviews are about getting sales for the reviewing body (Or in this day and age, online advertising revenue) and keeping publishers happy. I think this is a factor but it does seem rather overstated. At the more generous end of the scale, it’s because reviewers are simply talking about whether a game is worth your money and time, which is a perfectly reasonable stance to take, and pursuing this concept means that criticism isn’t fair because different kinds of analyses are not within the reviewer’s mandate.

Are these things contradictory, though? Can you provide a review of a game as fun and at the same time consider its place within gaming, and impartially assess what the game is doing in a more abstract sense? After all, if we are thinking about games as a form of creative expression beyond simple entertainment, or at least with the potential to be, surely we need to investigate the bad and the mediocre with as much depth and critical thought as the greats? For my own part I don’t think these are contradictory goals. I do however think they diverge somewhat, and to expect a review to take both angles is to ask a reviewer to cover a very broad subject. In terms of games themselves, not everything has to try to be Casablanca. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a dumb shooter which exists solely for ridiculous fun; despite this, there are plenty of efforts at making the things more emotionally engaging, more narrative-oriented, &c. And some games are starting to make use of their unique possibilities to make points that cannot be made in other mediums (BioShock springs to mind here).

Games also present a relatively unique problem for this kind of thought. Unlike other mediums, which see very occasional shifts in their presentation and, with the exception of sound for movies, don’t generally endure particularly revolutionary advancements, gaming (like computing as a whole) is part of a very rapidly advancing field in purely technical terms. We’ve all seen it on consoles; games towards the end of the console’s life are much more impressive than those at the beginning. But then the next generation comes along and we’re so worked up (understandably so) over what the new tech can do that we don’t play such close attention to other factors. The new tech opens up new possibilities, of course. You simply couldn’t do Dead Rising on a pre-current tech and have it do the concept justice. I do suspect that it serves as a distraction both on the part of designers and on the part of those who think about games.

So there seems to be a dearth of the more analytical review, or perhaps essay, outside of a few select places. What I’m thinking of is really more an analysis of what a given game or series or genre is, how it has evolved, where it got its ideas from, that sort of thing. On there narrative side of things there are obvious parallels to other mediums; you can find more than a few things discussing what The Road means and symbolizes and so on. And games have plenty of scope for things like that; consider how much mileage you’d get out of thinking about the messages of the Metal Gear Solid series. But what is there about the clever use of things like game mechanics, outside of simply noting that there is a clever use of game mechanics?

I should say, I know there are people out there talking about that stuff, and I don’t want to diminish what they are saying by acting like it doesn’t exist. It absolutely does and is very much worth finding and reading. Nonetheless it seems to be quite plain that there is a lack of a coherent body of thought on game criticism, in comparison to the thoughts on film or literature. And I think that ultimately, this harms the whole medium. As entertainment, games have things figured out pretty well. As vessels for communication, they’re still falling rather short. Games are expensive to make, especially compared to a lone alcoholic takking out The Old Man and the Sea on a typewriter. It is understandable and forgivable that many are made with profit uppermost in mind. Nonetheless many of us in the gaming sphere are all too ready to dismiss things as “just games” – which they might be in some contexts, but it makes it hard for them to develop into anything more if we don’t credit them as something more and start thinking about how to evolve them.

Hopefully as time passes this will change. The best way to ensure change is, of course, to bring it about.