Merely Players

Good Game Writing #2

This one is a look at Ico by L.B. Jeffries using his "Zarathustran Analytics," a set of analytical tools he came up with to critique, or maybe a better term is break down (more akin to analysis), games.

Basically, the piece is an application of a concept to the game to see how well two things happen: 1) how well the game lives up to the ideal laid out by the concept and 2) how well the concept helps us understand why the game is successful.

The concept he's working with is Jonathan Blow's notion of disingenuity, the idea that a game's story wants to suggest one thing while the gameplay does another. You can hear Blow talk about this idea here, and you can see a similar idea (with a different name, the mouthful "ludonarrative dissonance") used in Clint Hocking's piece on Bioshock.

L.B.'s main point is that the gameplay not only mirrors but actually intensifies the game's story. Everything from the controls to the particular aspects of the environment you have to worry about (and how little you have to worry about) help increase the sense of being a child, an abandoned child who doesn't quite understand his world, who is trying to take care of the one thing he loves in the only ways a child can understand. The emotional attachments you develop to your companion are deep, but also protective and limited, like a child's. It also creates a sense of "guilt" in the combat when you realize that you aren't really in danger from the "monsters," and that they, too, are abandoned children like you. Nonetheless, you're pit against them.

There's more, and the piece is worth reading whether you've played Ico or not. (It also makes you want L.B. to hurry up and write about Shadow of the Colossus.)

But the main thing that works here is using Blow's concept to guide the discussion. In essence, what we get is the judicious use of a methodology that already has plenty to go for it. Blow pointed out a real problem in games that, once you hear his lecture, can really kill the experience of a lot of games, or at least create some serious emotional distance. But L.B.'s analysis uses that same notion to show how Ico actually increases your emotional investment, even in ways you may not have been explicitly aware of when playing but which, on reflection, were obviously working on you.

Having a concept/methodology/*idea* to guide a critique like this is particularly useful because it clarifies what the writer is trying to say about the experience. It allows him, for example, not to fall into the "review" trap of having to talk about the graphics from a general "they look good" perspective, and, instead, can focus on what he's decided is the game's purpose: achieving an emotional effect. The game, instead, looks like an intellectual, emotional, and even artistic product because the concept with which he begins doesn't assume that the game is a piece of software first and foremost. Instead, "disingenuity" highlights the relation between emotion and gameplay, and everything gets judged from that perspective.

The real thing to learn from this (apart from a better appreciation of Ico) is that we (writers and players) should be on the lookout for these kind of perspective-orienting ideas, and use them to think about games. That seems like a common place idea, and it's essentially how professional literary criticism works...grad school is about giving you plenty of models of reading and then setting you free to practice them, test them, change them, etc. But since most game writing simply works out of reaction rather than perspectives (or even "theories" with reasonably well-defined perspectives for analyzing games), even the best game reviews seem like we simply got lucky that someone had a good insight.

L.B.'s piece is an exceptional example of how many great insights can be gained from the straightforward application of a concept to a game. If only there was more like it.

Introverted or Extroverted Game Writing?

Apart from being overwhelmed with work, one of the reasons I've had trouble getting this blog started on a regular basis is a problem I have about how to think about good game criticism. My problem: should good writing about games be about the game or about what the game shows beyond itself?

Think about it this way: we get interested in the best books because they make us think about something beyond just the experience of the book. But even some of the most interesting game writing still is focused on games as an interesting medium without much discussion of how that medium connects us to...anything beyond it.

Now of course I don't want to say that games have to "teach" a lesson, and some of the most pathetic game writing I've read has been various Metal Gear Solid fans talk about how MGS4 was a big "statement" against military industrial complexes or some other guff. I don't want games to be morality lessons, just like I don't want books to be "lessons in life." Or rather, if they are, they better be damn smart about it.

The point, though, in its simplest sense, is that good writing has themes. It's *about* something, even if it's only there to show how complicated an issue is or to point out an interesting perspective. Writing that is completely and solely self-reflexive, writing about writing, is ultimately only interesting to professionals, academics or writers, and it ends up becoming shop talk.

But so much of even good game writing focuses on games as games, not games as a medium. To be a medium, it's got to connect disparate subjects, whether it's the reader and some theme or the player and some experience. But there's so very little of that. That's why it seems like so much of game writing is introverted, really interested at the internal workings of various games, but hardly at all interested in connecting games to anything else in the culture. And when it does happen, it falls into the worst GTA violence cliches.

Maybe that's the fault of the games rather than the writers. Even with Bioshock...is Rand's Objectivism really a hot topic? Maybe among precocious adolescents for whom its their first introduction to philosophy. But for the rest of us?

Certainly games don't have "meaning" in the same way that author-centered writing has always been about the production of, discourse, and argument about meaning. But we haven't really figured out what to replace it with.

Put simply: a good book review can speak to someone who hasn't read the book and who may never read the book. But games writing is still aimed at gamers, not at a general reader who can find a reason to be interested in the game beyond the introverted world of the medium and its fans. So what would good extroverted game writing be? I'm still looking for great examples.

Good Game Writing #1

So what counts as good game writing? And by "good" I mean something that goes beyond a review, beyond listing the features, innovations, and all the other stuff that could easily fit on a detailed sales brochure. This is the first of a few posts where I want to point out what I think makes for thoughtful and insightful game writing.

 

Rather than stand on high and pronounce what good game writing should be, I think it's useful to point out pieces that I've found to be particularly effective. The one thing that all these examples have in common is that they either show me something I hadn't noticed or they articulate an experience in a way better than I had for myself. Here are the first three:

 

1) Centrality and distinctiveness of player experience: "Bow, nigger"

 

This piece by Ian Shanahan ("always black") has been cited many times as one of the first examples of what Kieron Gillen called New Games Journalism, which is a term borrowed from Tom Wolfe's "New Journalism" of the 60's. This is experience-based journalism which, in the extreme, is considered "gonzo" journalism, like Hunter S. Thompson's stuff, that doesn't focus so much on the facts but on the experience and (more often implied than stated) cultural significance of whatever is getting reported on.

 

"Bow, nigger" is successful because it shows a first person experience of online combat in Jedi Knights II: Jedi Outcast that emphasizes both the potential for informal, "honor"-based sportsmanship, but also the extreme crassness of anonymous competitive interaction.

 

The best part of the piece integrates a detailed discussion of the game's mechanics that also shows how those mechanics have been adapted in the game's "culture." But what's even better is that he does all this by narrating his own experience with an abusive opponent who wants him to "bow" before they fight. This is a long quote, but it's worth it:

 

First, though, there are the formalities. I crouch and duck my head, a 'bow'. Vulnerable.

 

Stupid? Yeah.

 

But you know what? I entered in to it willingly and 'why?' is a very interesting question.

 

I'm a big boy now and I don't want to be a Jedi Knight when I grow up. The Star Wars films are great, but they're also just that, films, a form of entertainment to be enjoyed during breaks from my very real and financially challenging life (mortgage, two cats, a broken gutter and a car that needs some attention. Cheers.)

 

So I didn't bow because I wanted to 'roleplay' the Jedi of the game. It was an act of defiance.

 

Duelling is not new. Any multiplayer game can leave you with one opponent on either side and I've played that scenario out in many games. The difference with lightsabre duelling, Outcast-style, is that it's so very personal. These aren't detached sniping matches across the width of the map or rocket-spamming blast-fests to see who can respawn the least. JKII duel is 'winner-stays-on' and you can be floating around for anything up to half-an-hour on a busy server waiting for a game. This makes your game 'life' actually worth something and it makes it worth fighting for.

 

Into this potent mix you can toss in the fact that while you're a ghosting spectator you have time to chat and actually get to know the people you're playing, even on that usually most impersonal of beasts, the public server. Even during actual fights, play can swing from bouts of thrust, slash and parry to more distanced, wary sizing-up, searching for an opening that will allow you to get a sucker-hit in before your opponent can counter, time to talk and taunt.

 

But perhaps most personal of all is the close proximity you have to come to damage your opponent. I'm an avoidant player at the best of times, but JKII lightsabre duels just don't allow you to hit and fade from range. You have to be right in there trying to give the other guy a laser enema if you're going to avoid watching the show for another six games.

 

So I bowed. Not because I was naive enough to think he'd give any significance to the gesture. Not because he was commanding me to from his pillar of arrogance. I bowed /despite/ his taunts. For all his goading I did 'the right thing', to show him I wasn't going to come and meet him down on his level.

Go read the rest for a  blow-by-blow account of what happened. To be honest, the rest is fun, but not as elegant as this analysis of what it's like to engage in online combat in a game that has a distinct "culture."

But what he does do well, even when he starts to sound a bit like a sportscaster, is to keep one vital idea in mind: In games, the experience of how it plays is always more important than a list of features, rules, and mechanics. And, especially in online games, the mechanics can often define the limits of how you're able to interact with other people, which, in turn, helps define the experience. This piece always filters information about the game and even that game's "culture" in terms of how it contributes to that experience. By letting experience frame the discussion, everything else about the game makes remarkably more sense.

 

Now I'm not convinced that "New Games Journalism" is the end-all, be-all of good games writing. In fact, I find that, even in compelling pieces, we can get so focused on one person's experience that it gets hard to pull back and look at the experience analytically. There's also the potential of being too enchanted by one person's experience that you can find it hard to develop your own. But what it gets right is the recognition that, as an interactive media, you have to say what's distinctive about this particular type of interactivity you're writing about. How is the experience of a lightsaber dueler different from a WWII shooter? What do those different experiences say about the options for conflict, for interactions within the game, etc.? Shanahan nails it on this one.

 

Here are some other examples of "New Games Journalism" picked by Shanahan and others.

Create New Character

So why another game blog? Why now?

 

The answers are personal and, I hope, timely, at least in terms of discussions about games.

 

The personal: My dissertation (English Renaissance prose/poetry romances) is almost done, and so I've got both a bit of time and the serious need for distraction. I'm adjuncting a light teaching load, and, to be honest, I've lost the thrill of writing about Spenser and Sidney. So a little intellectual exercise in the very different and very similar direction of game "criticism" may help interrupt the feeling of a mental "grind." (Plus, I just got an XBox and a much more powerful PC, so I have to justify playing with them. And then there's the not insignificant fact that I got sucked, both willingly and unwillingly, into Warhammer Online, so I'll need somewhere to decompress.)

The timely: Quite a few things have made me pay attention to both what's happening in game design lately, and, even better for an academic geek, on the game journalism side. Bioshock, GTA IV, Metal Gear Solid 4, and, especially, Braid have all made the question of what/how/if games "mean" anything even more insistent.

 

And, even better, there are some great people writing about games now and looking for more and better ways to talk about them that goes beyond reviews and "game journalism." Shawn Elliot (of GFW 1Up), Michael Abbot (The Brainy Gamer), Leigh Alexander, L.B. Jeffries, Ian Bogost, Jeff Howard, Roger Travis, great stuff at Gamasutra, The Escapist, GameSetWatch, First Person... just the ones off the top of my head. I get the feeling that game talk is on the edge of really starting to mature and push itself (and maybe even some developers) into a much more thoughtful register, and I want to get my two cents in.

 

So, a blog.

 

Besides, there are a couple of things I want to try, and why not here where I can hopefully get cheap and easy feedback?

 

1) Think carefully about Braid. I want to test out all my fancy lit'rary training on this wonderful little thing that bored and alienated at first and then surprised me by not letting go.

 

2) Read the books. A few books on game theory, design, and interpretation have caught my attention, and, since I doubt I'll find a local reading group interested in Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism or Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives (it even has a chapter on Spenser!), I'll start my own.

 

3) Puzzle the relation between games and fiction. The latter's become my job, the former's been a life-long obsession. It's time to introduce them to each other.

 

And there's my introduction. Oh, Come All Ye Commenters! I pray that the Miyamoto on high will grant me the wisdom to write something worthy of reading!