Here’s a game I’ve been playing a lot over the last week or so. Sleeping Dogs began as True Crime: Hong Kong, which wasn’t tremendously promising because True Crime was never a very good series in my eyes. But after much kerfuffle, being dropped by Activision and then picked up by Squenix, and being renamed to Sleeping Dogs, it managed to come out. Anyone familiar with vaporware and the like will know that commendation must be given just for getting a working game out the door after that; what’s all the more surprising is that this game is damned good.
You are Wei Shen, a cop on loan from the San Francisco PD to the HKPD in order to go undercover and infiltrate the Sun On Yee, a large and powerful branch of the Triads. You do this through basically being a far greater threat to stability, the innocent, or the police than the Sun On Yee ever could. It’s great! The game features fairly typical free-roam gameplay on the surface, but it has a lot of polish and features inspired by other games. For example melee combat, which is by far the mainstay of combat in this game, with guns and shootouts being somewhat rarer than is common in the genre is similar to the Batman: Arkham games, whilst there’s a lightweight implementation of freerunning that, when done properly by you, makes getting around on foot through Hong Kong’s dense urban maze a good dear smoother and quicker. If this sounds derivative or shallow then I’m here to reassure you, because the game may take inspiration from other places and it may not implement any one thing with the same depth as its inspirations, but everything works together so well that you’re going to be enjoying yourself pretty much no matter what part of the game you’re partaking of.
The story – so far at least – is surprisingly well-realized, with some great characters who you grow rather attached to before terrible things happen to them. The voice acting is especially brilliant, with a mix of Cantonese and English that is quite unique and fascinating. On that note I’ve never been to HK but this game really sells the atmosphere like few others do; the look, the sound, the music, everything is pitch-perfect and makes you feel like you’re there, even if you’ve never been. (And I’ve seen people who have been there say it’s a pretty striking representation.) The only real downside of the game is that the city is fairly small, but the extent to which it feels small varies considerably. They used a lot of tricks to make it seem bigger than it really is, and for me it works great because I’ve never yet felt at all confined. And what is there, generally speaking, is absurdly detailed.
Pic entirely unrelated, we just find it hilarious here at The Android’s Closet.
The music deserves a special mention. There are some absolutely great tunes in this game, and it definitely features the best (and best-named) classical station I have ever heard in any such game, Boosey & Hawkes. Tell me that’s not the best possible name for a radio station. And rolling through a nightclub, screaming people everywhere, having a shootout while Hudson Mohawke’s FUSE is blaring out? Baller as all hell.
So if you’re looking for an open-world crime game you could do a lot worse than Sleeping Dogs. It’s not just a game that escaped from development issues to be released; it’s a game that did that, then both shed a rather ropy pair of predecessors, and then came out to be seriously impressive. I challenge anyone who plays it to refrain from starting to use Chinese words.
And in closing, Activision can eat all of the shit.
Fillies and gentlecolts, we’ve got something we need to talk about. There’s a game on the horizon known as Endless Space, a 4X game that I had previously heard of but only kept half an eye on. Well as it turns out it was very recently put up on Steam and pre-ordering, as is becoming something of a norm for games from non-major publishers, gives you alpha access.
To bluntly not put too fine a point upon it, the alpha is as good as most gold iterations of other games. It is incredibly smooth, clean, and lovely to use. It obviously still needs work, but even as a late alpha game it seems to be entirely playable and thoroughly enjoyable so far, and I’ve been playing it for a couple of hours solidly now. As regular readers will know by now both Pike and myself are ardent fans of the 4X genre, playing stupid amounts of Civilization for example. Pike rates Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri as the single best game ever, and I rate it in my top three. And on the SMAC note, Endless Space has a very pleasing quasi-homage to SMAC in the tech tree icons.
There is ONE game Pike would consider better...
Endless Space hits the usual list of items that a 4X should, the whole 4X part of it that is, but it’s doing so in a way that is clear and making a lot of sense, providing a sense of rapid, but controllable buildup as you discover new technologies, unlock new buildings, and acquire new resources. In many ways it also takes after MoO2, for example in letting you colonize planets within a system once you’ve got one colony in it, without the need for new colony ships. Building your infrastructure is also a curious affair; you choose an area for each individual planet to focus on, like enhancing farming or being a trading hub, whilst you build your more typical improvements on a system-wide basis. It’s an interesting hybrid as a solution to the problem of the appropriate scale on which to handle this side of the 4X genre and so far I have to say it’s a fairly effective one; systems are the main basis of your empire, but your planets are still more than just completely interchangeable or indeed entirely invisible subunits; they have their own character and you can influence this.
Combat is the part of the game I’m not yet 100% sold on, though I’m not sure how much remains to be done there I hope there’s a little tweaking. It plays out as a video, rather like GalCiv 2’s combat scenes, but in ES you have the ability to choose actions for each of the three phases of combat; for example you can choose to deploy nanobots to repair your ships, to divert all spare power to weapons for a risky offensive, and the like. It’s a sound idea and could be a great halfway point between the full control of, say, Homeworld and the completely hands-off nature of GC2, but I think a few more options are needed in the early game to really ensure this works, and combat needs to be a bit more… I’m not sure exactly, visceral? It feels a bit like it lacks in impact. Still, it’s a commendable effort that is, as with everything in this game, very well presented.
Yayyy overviews of space!
There is also the standard 4X element of ship design, and this seems like a very good effort with a wide and increasing array of options as you progress through the tech trees; there’s not a huge amount to say except that there are no complaints whatsoever from me.
The thing that’s really getting me into this game, however, is the sheer level of polish that is present. As I’ve said it’s an alpha, but it acts nothing like one in most regards. Everything is fast, clean, smooth, obvious, and I actually turned the tutorial off because the screens and their tooltips provide more than enough information anyway. The music is atmospheric and suitably grand as well. Never underestimate the power of a good interface and a solid atmosphere – it’s the difference between a good game and a classic one, and it can make even a mediocre game enjoyable.
I shall warn you now: This is going to be a long post, and it is also going to contain an overabundance of spoilers, not only for the very end of ME3 but plot points throughout the series. Therefore if you are not interested in having it spoilt for you, do not read beyond this point!
Now we’ve all seen the great hullabaloo surrounding the ending of Mass Effect 3 – RPS provides a good summation of the current state of affairs – and that lets us launch into one of the core points that needs to be made explicit right from the beginning. People are invested in this game, this series, and deeply so. Mass Effect has been going for five years now, encompasses three vast games, and a number of other media like books and comics. A core concept of creative endeavor is that the creator and the consumer of it are engaged in a compact – at the very simplest level this compact is that the reader/player/watching agrees to suspend disbelief, while the creator agrees to deliver a satisfying story. The suspension of disbelief is vital. When you find the story coherent and internally consistent, you’ve got yourself a stew going. When you encounter something that is obviously nonsensical, contradictory, or the like, your ability to suspend disbelief is harmed, perhaps even shattered, and that makes your ability to enjoy the tale weaker. You can read a fairly excellent summation of this whole concept here, although the last bulletpoint may not apply!
In short this does matter. It’s not just the ending of a game, it’s the ending of something that people have invested in. Invested their money, their time, and their emotions. If anything the outrage is a testament to BioWare. Nobody gets too worked up about something they don’t care much about, but when we do get attached to things we naturally have expectations.
This honestly has nothing to do with anything, we just needed a picture to break up the text.
The problem, therefore, is not that the ending was anything in particular. It’s not that it was sad or happy or bitter-sweet or anything in-between. There’s nothing wrong with any particular ending, but it does have to have thematic ties, foreshadowing, and when it purports to be the ending of a series, it needs to provide satisfaction. Mass Effect 3 only succeeds on the first two in a very shaky fashion, and falls down on the third entirely.
The three choices given at the end of the game, by Magical Star Child von Ex Machina III, are roughly as follows – you can choose to either Destroy the Reapers, to Control the Reapers, or to merge all organic and synthetic life in the galaxy. The first of these options is fine – you’ve been trying to do that all game. The second is problematic. You’ve been specifically trying to stop the Illusive Man from figuring out how to control them throughout the game, and it’s pretty much outright stated that it’s not possible to control them. It turns out they can be, but you’re never given much reason to think it’s a good idea. In previous ME games choices like that were always given context and meaning. In the original game at the end you are presented with a choice of whether to charge in to save the Galactic Council, or hang back as it will help you fight more effectively. Sacrificing them has another purpose however – throughout the game you’ve seen humanity’s place in the galaxy, and how they are not given the due they feel they deserve. Failing to save the Council would propel your species to a position of power, as the new Council would be built around the people who saved the Citadel itself.
Conversely, although the possibility is raised in ME3 of controlling the Reapers, it’s never highlighted as a serious proposition. It’s something a madman is doing, something that the Reapers themselves have suggested to him in order to divide humanity’s efforts.
But at least that has some measure of foreshadowing, hamfisted as it is. The third option, “Synthesis”, comes right out of left field. Now, let’s be clear, I am an ardent transhumanist in the real world and fully desire ascension to becoming cybernetic. However, in this game it is completely insane to think Shep would choose that in the state he reaches the end in. He’s seen synthesis – it’s how the Reapers get their ground forces. There would need to be a HELL of a lot more in the way of setting this up beforehand for it to be remotely palatable.
The third problem with the choices given is that Shepard is not the kind of person who just accepts the choices given. The series is about defying the inevitable fate others have prescribed, and it doesn’t just come through in the big picture. A lot of small quests throughout the game can have an alternative option that Shepard figures out where nobody else could. At this point he should absolutely be able to say “Fuck you, we’re done playing by your rules.” as a Renegade, and “But look at the evidence” as a Paragon. And then what you have done in the series to date has an effect on what happens next.
How you have played should totally influence how the endings work out. Here’s how I envision things: You have brought peace to the Geth and Quarian, and present this to the Catalyst as evidence. It responds by saying “Yes, temporary peace has been achieved. Only through our presence. We have seen this in preceding cycles.” and they give you a long list where it has occurred. Then you can offer “EDI and Joker are in love.” as evidence, and the Catalyst says something like “Interesting. We do not have enough reference points to determine the outcome of this eventuality.” and then you have speech checks to convince the Catalyst to at least give the galaxy a chance to see if it can work. Alternatively you can choose to fight on, and then the battle just plays out. The outcome is determined by your War Assets – you should entirely be able to lose everything here! That would be a really great bad ending that made sense. And either of this would put things in the player’s hands, and made the choices over the game and series fundamentally matter. You could have three tiers of outcome – victory, a close defeat that is a Pyrrhic Victory for the Reapers and gives hope that the remaining galactic powers might be able to muster enough force to survive (or at least that the next cycle will), and total, crushing defeat.
So much for the choices. Let’s move on to the consequences. The choices of the ending are bad, but the outcomes are if anything even worse. Very little makes sense here. You see almost nothing except a few dying repears or whatever, and then the Mass Relays start blowing up (Seriously all it took was ONE LINE from Hackett earlier about how the Crucible’s effects seem to be propagated through the Relay system) while Joker is escaping through one. Why is he running when Shepard isn’t confirmed dead, and indeed the Citadel just opened, so Shep is probably not dead? How did Ashley and Liara get back aboard the Normandy? Who knows! Anyway the advertised multiple endings just plain don’t exist. You get a couple different colors of explosions, and you get a few minor scene changes, and that is that.
Gamers want choices. And we want choices that matter – choices and consequences used to be the watchwords of the RPG genre, and it is something we have sadly come to almost totally lack. One of the reasons Mass Effect was always so exciting was that it promised to oppose this trend – but it hasn’t done anything of the kind. It presented a total copout, in fact. Now, take my suggestions above, and you can see just how disappointing it is. I’ve not been spending forever drafting ideas, I pretty much plucked them out of thin air in the course of a few minutes. And though I’m not going to say I should be writing for videogame (I should totally be writing for videogames) it demonstrates that it would be easy to have come up with alternative endings that made sense. Endings that, as I’ve said but must hammer home, synthesize the gameplay and narrative choices over the course of the series to adjust your final options and their outcomes. This is surely the Holy Grail of games that purport to give the player significant choice – we all make gameplay choices constantly. Who to shoot in which order with which weapons, etc. etc., and how a battle plays out is the consequence thereof. In ME we make narrative choices regularly as well. Combine the two and baby, you’ve got a stew going!
Of course, this entire post rests on the concept that companies aren't evil bastards who destroy the best things ever.
Finally, when it comes to consequences, whatever the outcome we should have seen a lot more about your allies. Mass Effect is really about your other party members and how you interact with them. To see nothing except that they are stranded on an alien world is completely unsatisfying. Fair enough if you had a bad ending where Joker fled the battle once it was totally lost, I suppose, but otherwise just what. Assuming a good ending, like one where you convince the Reapers to leave or your superweapon works as advertised, you should see vignettes of where your comrades are five or ten years down the line. Liara excavating the ruins of Tuchanka. Javik is with her if you convinced him to become a bro, and they are working together to search for other Prothean ruins and perhaps other Protheans who survive in stasis. Garrus is a highup on Palaven helping to organize rebuilding. Wrex is doing the same on Tuchanka, keeping the tribes in line and working to create a new krogan identity. You see others as well, if they’re still alive. And finally you come to a scene maybe thirty years on, where you are older now, and your comrades too, and everyone who survived the series has gathered at the opening of a new Normandy Memorial Museum or something, a definitive and permanent memorial to the Reaper War and its heroes. You see a wall of the lost, as on the Normandy, you listen to your comrades make brief speeches about you, and you get to make a final one yourself about where the galaxy should go now.
That’s only one possibility of course. I understand that we all have our ideas about how everything should be different, too. I’m not trying to say I have all the answers and my ideas are best, but I am hoping to point out that not only is the current situation a bad one, it’s doubly bad because a better ending would not have been difficult to come up with, and given the money invested in the series, it wouldn’t have been an undue strain on resources to implement more.
Fundamentally it’s not disappointing just because of choices ignored, or consequences ignored, but because both are ignored in combination. Add a bit of nonsense and there we are. It’s disappointing not just as series fans, not just as paying customers, but as people who love the medium – because it could have been so much more, with so little extra effort. Maybe even enough to have a very clear way to demonstrate to Ebert that an experience can be enhanced by player agency and control, not diminished.
In videogames, difficulty is a difficult thing to get right. It’s one of the reasons multiplayer is so popular after all; to date we’ve not come up with an AI that comes close to a human opponent, outside of chess at least. Now, it’s not hard to just make an enemy hit harder, have more health, or shoot with greater accuracy. Those things aren’t difficulty in a meaningful sense, but they do make the game harder.
Still, there’s not a lot original to say about this tendency to take the easy route and bump up the enemy’s pure abilities rather than their intelligence. What I want to talk about is a different aspect of AIs, which is something I’ve not seen often addressed, but which will ultimately be core in creating convincing enemies who are challenging, but can be defeated.
That aspect is making mistakes. Making believable mistakes, based on oversight, or failure to account for something by accident, and so on and so forth, rather than the result of glitches or the programmer’s failure to account for something. This may not seem like a huge concern while we’ve still got to figure out a way to be outwitted by the AI, but as we do get better at that this sort of thing is going to be crucial to correct for it in order to keep the game both fun and engaging.
A lot of victories in real conflicts are borne from taking advantage of mistakes the enemy makes. Sometimes this is a tactical error, sometimes strategic, and sometimes it’s more deeply rooted and occurs in the years before the war breaks out, when someone’s guess about the important factors of the next war prove to be incorrect. Oftentimes these things will be corrected over the course of the conflict, but sometimes not. In any event the point is that for the player to remain engaged and interested there can’t be an optimum strategy in all situations, which a ‘good’ AI would seemingly be prone towards, and which would thus force the same degree of efficiency from the player.
Of course in the real world there are all kinds of factors that are very hard to emulate. The Confederacy’s best option was probably a Fabian strategy – ceding land for time, and winning by attrition. But the political nature of the CSA meant that border states could not be sacrificed in such a fashion, and they had to be fought for (Well, except when McClellan was in charge of the Army of the Potomac, then not much of anything needed to be done by the Confederates). You can, to some extent, work with this in a game through mechanics like supply lines, dissent, and partisans, but it really has trouble with the nuances of the situation.
Had Lee had this little filly on his side, things would have been different.
Now, getting games to that stage would be a tall order of course. Nevertheless I think we could stand to start thinking about how AIs might make believable, varied mistakes. Things that an astute player can see and exploit, but which the AI might realize and fix very quickly as well. This isn’t a completely untried concept of course, Galactic Civilizations 2 is the obvious example of an AI being designed to do this sort of thing, and it’s a commendable attempt, especially because the AI is actually pretty darned smart without cheating. Halo likewise had some clever foes, for its day, and their dynamic nature meant mistakes on their part could emerge pretty naturally and an observant, smart player could exploit those very well.
What do you all think about this idea? Am I getting too far ahead of our current, braindead AIs, or is this something we should look towards?
Having finally bothered to set aside some time to play through Batman: Arkham City, I have to say it’s a fantastic game whose story (Or rather the last fifth of the story) is a little bit of a letdown, but that doesn’t bother me because holy. Christ. This game has one of the best boss fights I can ever remember enjoying.
Also dat voice HNNNNNGGGGGG
The fight with Mister Freeze is superb. It is brilliant. It is genius. I’m almost tempted to leave it there because saying almost anything could begin to spoil things, but that would make for a rather short blog post so I’ll take that risk. The core of the fight is that Freeze’s suit is a giant-ass super-awesome thing that even Batman can’t damage directly, because if he tries Freeze will just shoot him with his ice gun or something. (I want an ice gun.)
So you need to figure out how to attack him. Only here’s the thing; everything you do he will adapt to. You cannot use a single tactic more than once, because he will sabotage anything you could use to repeat it. This is not a gimmick or anything, it is brilliantly executed and it genuinely felt like I was in a battle of wits to try and figure out new tactics to try against him, whilst he was hunting me down and I was trying to avoid him. It took me several goes to win the fight, and I did not mind one bit. In fact I loved every second of it. It is, for my money, a quintessential example of how to stage a boss fight. He is entirely unique in the game, requires a wide array of Batman’s abilities, and engages the player completely. Every other developer should take notes on how this whole thing is conceived and formulated.
So I’d like to throw the question out there to y’all about this topic. What are some bosses you’ve found particularly enjoyable and engaging in your gaming?
In my recent overdose of space 4x fun I’ve been given the chance to compare one of the aspects that isn’t an X, but is very much a standby of the genre and which few space 4xes, at least, seem to do without these days. Even the most indie, one-man-team of them have the ability to design your own ships.
This is awesome, because designing your own stuff is half the fun of these games, and I thought I’d take a minute to look at some different ones to see how they operate and which I like the most.
One of those likely to be better-known, simply because the game itself is a relative success by 4X standards, is GalCiv 2’s ship design. GC2 is a pretty damned solid game all-around, so it may be surprising to hear that I think the Shipyard is the weakest aspect of it. This isn’t because the thing itself is lacking but rather more fundamental design decisions; you have three weapon-armor pairs; Mass Drivers-Armor; Missiles-Point Defense; Beams-Shields; so each armor is strong against its paired weapon but much less so against the others. The problem is that there is little distinction in each thing itself. A gun works pretty much the same as a laser, and though it’s certainly pretty gripping to try and second-guess the AI and figure out what you need to research, and there is certainly a fair amount of needing to trade between weapons, armor, engines, and support structures, I can never help but feel that GC2’s shipyard is very thin in terms of grognardy ship design, though it’s absolutely peerless in visual terms.
Star Ruler, which I’ve not yet spent too much time with unfortunately, has an interesting little system. Visually you seem to be able to change almost nothing at all, but you place all your desired components into a circle and the ship is built based on what you’ve included. One of the interesting things is that there is no upper limit to ship size. You can quite literally build something the size of a galaxy if you have the time and resources. Within that you choose component sizes which automatically scale to your ship’s size, so a size 2 Railgun on a size 12 ship will be the same as a size 1 Railgun on a size 24 ship. It’s a little unwieldy at first, but actually rather intuitive once you get the hang of it, and it definitely gives a sense that you are designing something of your own where your choices have a significant impact.
This is far from the most complex example of ship design. Remember Aurora?
Somewhat similar to Star Ruler is the ‘list’ system used in games like Space Empires IV and Distant Worlds. You don’t place components on a visual representation of a ship, but simply choose them from a list and they get added to the list of what is currently aboard your ship. This system tends to really let you customize things to a high degree, and you can make some pretty specialized ships with a long long list of components to choose from. But best of all, I think, is the Space Empires V ship design.
Now, in reality SEV is another addition to the “list” model. Your choices, aside from the ship hull itself and little graphical effects from weapons and shielding and such, have no impact in any visual sense. What you choose affects the ships stats and you are basically making a list of components that a given ship is equipped with. However, it’s presented in a very clear manner where almost everything you want to know is obvious, and because it gives a visual representation (however crude) rather than only a list of stuff, it’s a lot easier to get your head around and to make sense of it all. And that, in turn, helps you feel connected to your ships, stations, and so on. It’s taking the best of the list model in extensive customization and adding to it just a dash of the visualization for flavor. Star Ruler does likewise, but I feel SEV does it best.
Fortunately, organic ship design is the same as normal ships.
What other examples can you guys think of when it comes to designing your own units? Has anything ever topped Warzone 2100?
So Pike found an article online with the amusing and attention-getting title The Fascist Politics of the Infinite Respawn and, because I am not doing anything better with my copious qualifications, I thought I would take a look at it and provide a critique. I shall forewarn you, this is certain to be a long post and liable to be nothing more than masturbatory self-importance and a bunch of political jargon that has little use outside demonstrating that I know what political jargon is.
Maybe some Latin, too!
Fiat equus, et pereat mundus
Now, the article isn’t without some merit. Indeed for a medium to be considered an art, saying meaningful things is part and parcel of the deal. If we look at, say, movies, it’s very easy to find a very wide range of movies that have commented very seriously on a very wide range of political and social issues, from all kinds of angles. And we can find plenty of writing about what movies which don’t avowedly take a political torch up are saying as well; whether that be a feminist perspective on why strong women always get killed or a political examination of what hyper-macho 80’s action movies are all about.
I should state that I tend to shy away from overly analyzing every single movie/book/game etc. that comes along. Yes lots have things to say, and many more betray prejudice (conscious or simply not cared about) on the parts of their creators, but sometimes a big dumb action movie is just a big dumb action movie and trying to read more into it is silly. Still, the article I linked to is one which talks about an entire swathe of game mechanics and their implications, rather than any particular game, so I feel it’s worth engaging with. The argument, essentially, is that the mechanics of your typical modern FPS are ultimately “fascist” in nature, because they simultaneously represent A) The immovable and perfect State, in the form of the player character, and B) The numberless and overwhelming Enemies, in the form of… well, the numberless and overwhelming enemies.
A word about fascism itself. Fascism is a political philosophy with a single concept at its core: That the People and Polity should be the same thing, indeed must be, and that any other scenario is quite literally against the natural order of things and will by definition lead to the destruction of “Us”. It is important to note that Fascism does not consider this the consequence of living in a chaotic world or a lack of understanding on anyone’s part – it is a deliberate and concerted effort on the part of “Them” to destroy “Us”. “We” is fairly easy to define; “We” as a Nation (the only legitimate political unit for Fascism) are the natural owners of This Land who speak This Language and have This Culture. We have existed in this form since the mythical time immemorial (cf. just about any national origin myth you care to mention) and only in recent years, usually due to internal treason, are we being undone by alien influences of some nature. I reiterate that these aliens are acting very deliberately, with full knowledge of what they are doing and it’s consequences.
This leads itself to a whole host of interesting issues for the Fascist. We can see one of the most relevant if we take a look at Eco’s writings on the matter (You will generally find yourself enlightened if you ready Eco’s writings on any matter), most specifically the following quote:
When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers of Ur-Fascism must also be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.
Eco goes to one of Fascism’s absolute core contradictions here; the Enemy (and Fascism MUST have an Enemy because it is defined entirely in terms of “Us” and “Them” and cannot exist without both) are both cockroaches and masterminds; we are both superhumanly glorious as a people and fundamentally threatened by the enemies. Both parties are simultaneously incredibly strong and completely vulnerable. This is necessary for the Fascist; the Enemy must be strong enough to necessitate the Fascist’s proposed solutions (Obviously if They were actually a bunch of feckless layabouts with barely the mental ability to read, We would never be in any danger from Them), but We must be strong because the foundation on which Fascism is built shows and requires this to be fact. We are at risk of being overwhelmed despite the fact that we are almost divine in our nature and the greatest of all nations, and the fact that our enemies are “rats” and “cockroaches” and – a perennial favorite of the Fascist – “germs”.
The Fascist narrative is a clever one however; they shift the rhetorical focus, but they can do so damned well by simultaneously appealing to an actual or imagined historical Golden Age and current actual or perceived difficulties, or usually a mix of both in both cases, coupled with identifying an Enemy. The Enemy which is identified is only one part of the true foe of the Fascist, which is essentially anything that dilutes the power of the Race and Nation. This is why they object to homosexuality. Homosexuals do not reproduce and they do not fulfill the ‘natural’ roles of men and women in their roles as breadwinners and reproducers. Here we see how Fascism uses the mythologized past as well; the past was an agricultural idyll where men did honest work on the land and women did honest work creating and raising the young. Enemies are conflated in part due to this. To use a classic example, Jews not only must own the media because they are insidious and have influence everywhere, but the media must be owned by Jews because the media is a fancy, “not real” entity which does little honest work. The contradiction of using the media for propaganda purposes need not be addressed. There is a good reason Orwell’s 1984 has Doublethink as a central conceit.
So how does all this tie into the article linked, and into videogames? The article apprehends a lot of things quite well, in my eyes, but there are a handful of fundamental issues that it overlooks, or at least fails to properly address.
Yes, games do tend to provide an endless stream of undifferentiated enemies for the player to destroy and, yes, they do tend to do so in a fashion which gives little to no insight into them as people. But this is a necessity. First, games are fast-paced and involve large numbers. It would be very impractical to give every single person you kill in your average CoD a background and some characteristics, and I sorely doubt that it would be remotely enjoyable to play. Second, and similarly, games are made on a timeline and a budget. I dearly wish there were more games which offered the player more options with greatly diverging consequences, but that’s simply not the path that was taken, a failure of the art and medium certainly but far from inherently political in any way except, perhaps, love of the dollar.
Still, whilst I feel there is merit in criticizing how games present the enemies, I find the argument that the Player represents the Fascist State/Nation to be a rather shaky one. Indeed the player’s avatar is generally a superhuman force who performs impossible feats of endurance at the very least, but what is the alternative? There are games out there where the player is a very vulnerable figure, even manshooters (ARMA II being the obvious example), and they certainly have their place but I sincerely doubt that “realism” would serve CoD very well (No matter how much they might want to proclaim themselves a realistic military shooter).
It’s my opinion that the article has things backwards. Games use an arguably fascistic attitude in order to serve their ends, and thus they must have elements of fascism in them. My interpretation approaches it from the other direction – games make use of “fascistic” elements not because they are fascistic, but because they happen to share propagandistic tools. We see exactly the same tools employed by all manner of people, from state ideologues in fascist dictatorships to comic book writers in countries where free speech is sacrosanct. That the fascists happen to make use of such rhetorical tools does not ipso facto mean that using such tools makes one a fascist, nor that the tools themselves are fascist. We can use another example brought up by the article, that of zombies, to expand on this point.
The article states,
The zombie genre, in its various media incarnations, has been using the unstoppable mindlessness of its enemies as a justification for brutality for years. There’s a definite streak of fascist thought in the vanilla concept of zombies, although it’s usually complicated and subverted by the now-cliché “We Are The Real Monsters” subtext.
Now, despite the caveat, I take considerable issue with this assessment. The zombie genre is not a pro-fascist one (Overtly or subconsciously or otherwise), but one which generally opposes the “mass” against the “individual”. The enemies are by their nature a mindless undifferentiated mass of bodies; the survivors are by their nature the ones we can identify with, if only by virtue of the fact that they can, you know, speak and otherwise emote. But again we are seeing things conflated when they shouldn’t be. The survivors in any zombie fiction are by definition individuals when measured against their foes. This is often read as a critique of unthinking capitalism, as indeed it very much was in such movies as Dawn of the Dead, but could just as easily be read as a caution of communism (A horde of creatures acting in instinctive unison to exterminate the handful of individuals still alive by either devouring or infecting them). The critiques provided by zombies are thus not inherently fascist, but rather they are inherently individualist. It is true that the Fascist at times has recourse to utilize such imagery, especially in the Anglo world with our extremely strong emphasis on individualism. For the American demographic even more so the zombie doesn’t have a fascist narrative but a survivalist, libertarian one, which emphases self-reliance, individuality, and generally a rejection of whatever structures may exist to help. There are those on the American right who have a very similar set of talking points to this, but it’s due to a similarity of perceived past and as a means of capitalization on current discontent, not necessarily an actual confluence of either goals or attitudes.
Similarly all polities utilize a mythologized past and concoct a present and national identity to some degree. These things are not natural, they hinge on collective agreed-upon beliefs about the past. Individuals may differ and disagree but the overarching narrative of any body politic has to be held to be generally true by a fair proportion of the population if said politic is to be effective. This does not necessarily have to be fictional, but human history is an ugly business and few, if any, can lay claim to a bloodless history. Still the fact that fascists utilize something everyone else utilizes does not make everyone fascist, any more than David Duke drinking milk makes all milk-drinkers Grand Wizards of the KKK.
The same thing applies, then, in their assessment of games as vehicles of fascist ideology or rhetoric. We have things that we might identify as Fascist in nature but only if we take the attitude that “Fascists do X, games do X, games = fascist”. We see in the article that the case is very clearly laid out; “I don’t mean to imply that the developers of these games are full-on fascists. In my opinion, however, their design decisions are a clear demonstration of fascist ideology expressed through the video game form.” This statement only works if my above one is held to be true, for if the game makers are not fascist, and the games don’t share fascist characteristics, the point has nothing to stand on.
None of this is to suggest that games should not strive to have more nuanced, deeper narratives, that they should not seek to humanize the other (Sometimes – but as I said, sometimes a big dumb action movie is just that and I don’t WANT Saints Row Goes Forth to have some huge thing about everyone you run over). These are very valuable things that games absolutely should be pursuing in order to grow and to begin saying more. I just think that the article in question is ascribing rather more to the current situation than it can justifiably be saddled with. Games may lack imagination and depth at the moment, but that is due to risk-aversion on the part of publishers long before it is due to fascist ideology, consciously implemented or otherwise.
In case you’ve been living under a rock on Mars with your fingers in your ears, Skyrim came out today. Skyrim is the latest in the ever-more-popular Elder Scrolls series, whose most basic principle is to present you with an open world and set you loose to do mostly as you please. I never played the first two, but the third one – Morrowind – because a game I love fiercely and which is deeply ingrained in my memory as an all-time classic. It wasn’t actually tremendously good in pure gameplay terms. It was just so vast, so expansive, so atmospheric and alien, so unapologetically ambitious, that its flaws were irrelevant, indeed they became charms at times.
TES IV, Oblivion, was another matter. The fighting was much improved, true, but everything else just seemed to be lacking. The better graphics were only applied to a very generic fantasy world; the portals to Oblivion were impressive at first but quickly became repetitive and tedious to explore, and presented anyway no sense of danger to the world. It was just a hollow game, and even with mods (barring Nehrim) it never became something I spent a huge amount of time with.
Here, then, is Skyrim. At first I was leery of what they were saying about it. Better AI? Better questing? Hah, okay, and I’m the Pope (Outside of Europa Universalis III, I mean). Only… that stuff does seem to be true, so far. Melee combat is much as it was in Oblivion, if a good bit more polished, but the alternatives, namely magic and archery, are truly brilliant. The interface, on the 360 at least, is slick and polished. I hear bad things about the PC’s UI though. I was worried about the simplification of skills, such as removing acrobatics and athletics (And I do still dislike that) but what is there is great, primarily because of the new perk system. Every level you get one point that you can put into getting some significant bonus in a given skill tree. I first chose, for instance, to halve the cost of my novice-level Destruction spells, and this made a tremendous difference to how I was going about fights.
What I’m finding is that I want to tell you not just about how I came upon some bandits, killed one, resurrected her as a zombie, and let her fight her former comrades while I burnt them from afar; I also want to tell you about how I found a treasure map on one of their bodies, and it was just the right amount of detail to show me where to look without being too easy. I want to tell you about how I walked into a store during an argument, asked about it, said I could help retrieve something, and this was reacted to in a natural way – they kept arguing, but the topic shifted slightly. I want to tell you about how I scarfed down a whole load of random ingredients to learn their alchemical effects, only to find I had crippled my stamina for a moment. I don’t just want to explain fighting mechanics, I want to relate stories to you, stories that I experienced in this world. And it is a world, and that is the magic of it. I ascended a fairly small mountain and as it grew stormier and snowier, I felt physically colder in my room. That’s when I decided I had enough to make a preliminary blog post on the game.
All this from two hours of play.
Over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Alec Meer not only called Skyrim GOTY, but said “I’m sorry Morrowind – I love you, but I don’t need you anymore. I think, at last, there is a new Best Elder Scrolls Ever.” This is high praise indeed.
It’s very early for me to make any serious judgment on this game. But he might be right.
Also, Saul Tigh voices one of the characters. I am MORE than okay with this. Will someone turn off that DAMN MUSIC?
Here’s a thing that bugs me about videogames that take place over a long period of time; They run on the assumption that what held true in our world will hold true in that way. Absolute monarchy and aristocracy begin, and these are gradually or violently reduced in favor of either constitutional monarchy or republicanism. Divine Right gives way to consent of the governed. Religion begins as a dominant force for the entire planet, and gradually declines in importance. It’s true that most games allow you through some means or other to maintain your previous status quo, but the assumptions are always the same – later technologies unlock new governments and these are superior to previous ones. You can run a theocratic state in Civ but if your rivals are a police state or democracy, they’re likely to outproduce you by some measure due to the bonuses they get compared to yours.
Now, in the first instance, I understand that even making these value judgments can be a pretty tricky task if you’re making a game which offers a number of governmental forms, and every single thing you add to that can complicate it considerably. Let’s take Communism as a working example. Superficially it’s easy to see why a Communist state would get a bonus to industry – Stalin forced the USSR from peasant serfdom to industrial superpower within a couple of decades, and Mao attempted the same in China (Though it was Deng Xiaoping’s free-market oriented reforms which have unleashed the Middle Kingdom’s current surge in wealth). Hoxha’s Albania and the DPRK regime both put military production before any other consideration. Our real-world historical examples of it are industry-centered, militaristic, and vary from merely autocratic to incomparably vicious.
If it was like this, we'd all be Red.
The question is, does this demonstrate what Communism has to be? Or is this how it is perceived because that’s how it worked out in our world? I would argue no, that much as I am opposed to it as a system, it wasn’t a fait accompli that it would turn out as it did. Had it taken hold in a heavily industrialized country such as the UK, France, Germany, or the USA, had the Mensheviks taken power in 1917, had the CNT-FAI won in Spain and resisted Stalinist control, we might well have a very different image of what Communism is.
My point isn’t to defend Communism. I’m merely using it because it’s an excellent example for what I am talking about, which is that game makers rely overly on preconceptions rooted in our reality’s experience to inform them of how things work in their games. More interesting, I feel, would be a more gradual, evolving system, where you didn’t choose your form of government so much as evolve it over the course of the game by reacting to events and conditions. The closest example to this I am aware of is Victoria II, where different political groups have various objectives, and different ones are allowed to do different things (So the reds can build factories all over the place, whilst radical liberals can’t fund any, for example) but even so, it feels somewhat thin, perhaps because it takes place over a relatively short time period.
I would, in any event, love to see a game on the timescale of Civ or even Spore where the development of not only your country, but its ideologies and most of all, what those ideologies actually entail, changes over the course of the game. For another example, consider that during the Renaissance and Enlightenment it was argued by many (very pious) people that to understand the universe in a scientific manner was not only in accordance with being a good Christian, but indeed a form of worship in itself. The argument (Grossly oversimplified; I’m no theologian) was that as God had created everything, everything was holy, and thus understanding anything had to be an act of worship in itself. What if such a perspective had taken hold even more strongly and become as universal an attitude towards Christianity as the doctrine that Christ died on the Cross? I doubt the current perspective that religion is dogmatic and myopic whilst secularism is the route to a more accurate understanding of the world would be as deeply entrenched by any means. So yes, what I'm saying is that no current game is spergy enough for me.
The problem is, of course, that this is an immensely complicated field. Even working on the experiences of our actual history, we have a huge amount of different experiences to draw on. When you implement “Democracy” in Civilization, is it the democracy of Athens? Is it a democracy where only the landed elite can vote? Is it constrained by constitutional checks and balances? How do you model a unicameral vs. a bicameral system? Is the President the Head of State only (As in the Irish Republic) or the Head of State and Head of Government, as in the USA? And what influence does this have on how the respective countries are run? These are all just individual factors of a single potential form of government. How they all interact, how they might all evolve over the course of centuries, is certainly a daunting thing to tackle in even the densest academic text, nevermind a videogame.
But ultimately, isn’t that what more ponderous strategy games are about? You’re not just drawing your lines on the map, you’re creating a country, wrestling with competing concerns, trying to do five things with the resources to do three of them properly, listening to the concerns of different groups in your society and deciding how to react? I admit it might be something of a niche game, but I think there would be room for something that really went into the evolution of political systems, religions, and social ideas in videogames.
