I found Ben Dutka’s “Edge Killzone 2 Review: A Disservice To Game Consumers” to be an incredibly entertaining piece, if only because of several of the devices that Dutka uses to sway his audience and establish his opinion as a dominant one. Logic, ethical considerations, and a lack of bias seem to have been almost intentionally purged from this explorative work; Dutka’s primary argument seems to continuously return to emotive and deeply personal ideas and reasons, but he manages to use these in such a way that they seem to be authoritative, definitive statements. He’s a sophist in the most negative use of the word, not seeming to be concerned with getting at any sort of truth as much as he is about propagating his own perspective as truth.
Dutka’s first mechanism concerns his establishment of himself as a non-authoritative voice in the field, spending almost 20% of his total word count explaining that no review can be “right” and that a breadth of opinions is required for a healthy critical field and for the consumer. Charmingly, this has the effect of actually lending credibility to Dutka; clearly, this is a writer that has some grasp of the purpose and structuring of a videogame review. We should then, therefore, take him seriously when he closes his introduction with his opening guns: “This being the case, we advise all of you to ignore the desperate-for-attention, we're-going-to-prove-our-elite-status so-called "review" from Edge that has the entire Internet talking.”
The assault on Edge’s review, at least in this sentence, manages two things: first, it makes the first of what will be many of the same argument that the Edge review of Killzone 2 is more or less garbage. It also demonstrates how different PSXextreme’s review was different by suggesting that it is all of those things which the Edge version is not; not-desperate-for-attention and not-seeking-of-elite-status. Dutka then further amplifies the reduction of credibility from Edge by “not linking to it” because “it doesn’t deserve to be linked to.” Generally speaking, there are only two reasons to refuse to provide a source to the original material, and Dutka seems to want ti invoke both of them; either its so offensive and corruptive or any other number of troubling things that it would almost be a crime to show it to your audience, or because you fear that allowing for a gateway to the original work will help to establish its legitimacy.
While Dutka returns to similar devices throughout the four paragraphs, he failed to make a genuinely compelling argument - at least, to anybody that understands how to see a fallacious argument. His early attempts to establish himself as a reasonable, rational critic are undermined by his logical fallacy of suggesting that he is an authority simply because he knows what a good review consists of - but he doesn’t actually demonstrate that his review, or his capacity as a writer, makes him a good critic. Dutka continues along this path; “...if you're scoring on a scale of 1 - 10, there's no way on earth KZ2 gets a 7 in direct comparison to the other products on store shelves. I'm sorry, it just doesn't.” I’m not sure that anyone capable of thought would consider “it just doesn’t” to be a valid argument for anything. Dutka also continuously strikes at this idea that the Edge writers are out to attain a sort of “elite cred,” which, from reading Dutka’s piece, seems to be achieved by deceiving consumers and arbitrarily placing low scores on excellent games. However, although he’s quite clear in positing his view of this cred, he never quite manages to demonstrate that they’re actually doing this - it’s great that he feels this way, but close-reading his work only demonstrates that he’s frothing at the mouth and barely creating coherent thoughts.
He even seems to succumb to this weird, shadowy temptation of all videogame critics to lie to their readers; “If it's your job to be faithful to your readers, you are not allowed to do things like this. You are not allowed to indulge your massive ego in an underhanded attempt at getting attention.” Given the nature of his prose and the suggestions he’s making, Dutka sounds to have a much more sinister and dominating hidden agenda than that of any critic. It hardly seems a service to fans to me to defend a beloved game without actually saying why the game should be praised.
Not that the Edge review shouldn’t have been criticized - it definitely should have. The writing was unclear and winded along uncertain paths, and seemed to assume that the reader had a familiarity with the Killzone world. (The irony there being that one of their complaints about the game itself was that it assumed a familiarity with Killzone.) It had many, many aspects that could have been attacked, and probably effectively - but Dutka didn’t bother to look into these, instead contenting himself with establishing him as a definitive authority (“Video game journalists aren't exactly treated with a ton of respect by other entertainment journalists (I know, I was one)”, and then using that authority alone to paint the Edge review as wrong.
edit: forgot to mention this - it's awesome that his almost fanatic, right-wing fundamentalist-style attacks were on a website called PSXextreme. I'm sure they don't mean it that way, but come on ..
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
And Then it Happened: Game-Changing Events and the Drugs That Induced Them
Here’s the thing with crystal meth-amphetamine: you don’t feel anything when you take it. Unless one is mainlining or taking it in vast quantities, there isn’t a high, there isn’t a rush, there isn’t really any tangible quality to it - except in your perception of the world. The world slows down, allowing you to receive and interpret data received by the senses with a speed that feels positively super-human. Even though it’s always clear that this is just a mere effect of a narcotic, it doesn’t matter, because you feel faster, quicker, and much more nimble than everything around you - it’s like getting a speed powerup in any given videogame. Crystal meth-amphetamine developed the street slang of speed for a reason.
I attribute my ultimate victory over the first Knights of the Old Republic directly to meth. I’d been trying to kill the final boss of the game - Darth Malak - for months, and simply could not do it. As will be further explained at later, I have a tendency to move through some games at a quicker pace than I imagine most other people do, and as a result - especially in roleplaying games - I find that my character(s) are often weaker than they should be and ill-prepared for major, endgame-level encounters. Due to choices made during the development of the primary character, whom is the only character useable in the final encounter, Seris was incredibly weak and almost broken. I had chosen initially the stealthy Scoundrel, and then later, the wizard equivalent of an evil Jedi - paths that, in a Dungeons and Dragons setting, would have brought me success, but did not in KoToR due to the inherent weakness and incompatibility of the two character development paths.
Darth Malak must have killed Seris more than fifty times before the winter of 2004 when I’d moved into a new area and acquired a more refined taste for narcotics. I’d certainly ingested, nasally, a certain volume of the chemical compound before that fateful evening, but I hadn’t done so while playing videogames - and as soon as I tried, I was embarrassed that I hadn’t attempted it earlier.
And then it happened: on a whim, I threw my KoToR disc into my Xbox and booted up my furthest save with my room mate as audience and a near-full pack of Camel’s as food - and proceeded to completely annihilate Darth Malak on my first attempt.
The encounter with Darth Malak revolves around executing his Jedi prisoners before he lifedrains them, which restores his life. I was aware of this in previous encounters, but couldn’t quite perfect a strategy for both damaging him and removing his ability to restore his life while keeping Seris alive. The drug didn’t induce an epiphany, it didn’t bring a golden, brilliant revelation of clarity, and it certainly didn’t, on an intrinsic level, explain to me how to kill Darth Malak. What it did do was make me set aside strategic considerations and focus purely on reacting to what Malak was doing, and this enhanced reaction time allowed me to pre-empt him every time, ultimately destroying him and saving the galaxy.
As I was an evil Jedi, the galaxy was not saved, but rather enslaved under a new tyrant - Darth Seris.
The culmination of the events and chemicals of that evening brought to me an awareness of the power of enhanced and altered gaming, and the lessons learned have stuck with since the passing of five years - and I suspect will never leave me. I’ve moved past meth - recognizing the physical danger posed and addiction possibility it represents - but continue to embrace altered and enhanced gaming, albeit in an (I hope) safer fashion, preferring to avoid illegal substances almost altogether.
Meth-amphetamine usage, in retrospect, seems to be an almost natural progression of habits I’d developed when I was younger. The first game that I ever spent a genuinely enormous amount of time playing was the second American release of a Final Fantasy game - and never was a play session begun until I knew I could count on several cans of Mountain Dew or some other highly caffeinated and sugared beverage. Food was and still is never involved, as sticky controllers and keyboards continue to be a personal bane that must be avoided at all costs. Similar to my experience with the nigh-unkillable Darth Malak, I had bashed my bruised and bloodied skull against the final boss of Final Fantasy II for months without making any real progress.
As I cannot recall this day - more than a decade and a half removed from present - with any clarity and thus cannot directly attribute caffeine to victory, I also cannot ignore the impact that I’m sure that it had. If nothing else, it granted me the chemically-induced focus and level of fanatic fervor for the game that proved necessary for victory. Again similar to my later experience with KoToR, my characters as a whole were underpowered and ill-suited for the final encounter, an alien-wizard thing named Zeromus. This was made painfully clear to me as I struggled to even survive for more than a few moments of the encounter, and indeed, I could only barely manage to get to Zeromus - he was situated about ten minutes away from the final save point at the end of a difficult dungeon, and my party could not effectively kill most of the enemies found within its glassy corridors.
If one has played any of the Final Fantasy games, particularly the second American release, then they are probably aware of the importance of the spell Meteo. The final spell for any black mage, it represents the culmination of arcane mastery and is the single highest-damaging attack in the game. It was received by Rydia - the black mage of the party - when she attains a certain level. My Rydia never attained this level - in fact, at the time, I’d just assumed that Rydia never even learned the spell. This level progression doesn’t merely determine the availability of spells one can cast, but also their strength and ability to withstand punishment - and Rydia’s failure to attain a reasonable level was a systemic problem throughout the party.
And then it happened - I sat down one afternoon after school and utterly annihilated Zeromus on my first attempt. To this day, I am unaware of exactly how this feat was accomplished - I have never met another person that can claim to have beaten Final Fantasy II without having the spell Meteo. I attribute this entirely to the enhanced reaction time created by caffeine and desperation. There were lessons learned from this victory, however, and the primary lesson was even demonstrated in the fight against Darth Malak - the hardest encounters are defeated not through repetition, but rather on the first attempt after an extended pause from the game.
Perhaps fittingly, within seconds of killing Zeromus, my mother insisted I remove myself from the basement to help her with something. By the time I returned, the ending sequence of the game had completed and the cartridge returned itself to the title screen. I have never seen, in person, the ending sequence of Final Fantasy II.
The game that had perhaps the strongest singular impact on me - and ultimately demanded the complete and total refinement of previously-learned lessons - was World of Warcraft. Although some eight million people played the game during its peak, I was something of a minority - I was one of those dorks that were made fun of for spending twelve or more hours each day within the confines of the game. Although I experienced many wonderful and frustrating moments in Azeroth, there is one event that I hold above all others: the tenth time that I killed the Lord of Blackrock, Nefarian.
The nine deaths of Nefarian had been witnessed, from me, during my tenure as a member of an elite raiding guild called Demolition. Demolition was the top guild on my server, and I wound up among its ranks due to cultivating a friendship and having a brother already inside of the guild. By the time I had joined, Demolition had killed every boss in Blackwing Lair - the dungeon that Nefarian ruled - except for the Lord of Blackrock himself. Although a relatively simple encounter when looked at in the context of today’s encounters, it was complex and challenging at the time, and it took Demolition several weeks of attemp ts to defeat him. While there was certainly great rejoicing both inside the guild and among the Horde community as a whole when he was killed - the first time for the Horde on my server - I was not terribly excited or surprised. This is because it seemed that slaying Nefarian was inevitable and required only time to be invested into it, as the nature of top-tier guilds in WoW is to defeat any encounter before them (note that pre-nerf C’thun of Ahn’Quiraj is perhaps one of the major exceptions to this, but obviously not the focus of this narrative).
As a result of changes in lifestyle, I was forced to leave Demolition - I could not meet the time requirements demanded, rightfully, by the guild. I returned instead to a group of players that had recently reformed that I had known since the opening months of Warcraft - a guild now called Order of Discord. When I joined, they were progressing - slowly - through Blackwing Lair. Not having the “hardcore raid” mentality of Demolition, the roster on any given evening was seemingly random. Some nights healers would be in abundance; others saw half the volume of required healers. Of the forty people that can be in the raid group, about 20 of them were present for each raid, myself included. This has the effect of lengthening the time it takes for a guild to defeat any given encounter, due to a disparity of armor/weapon quality and awareness of encounter mechanics. After two months of slogging through Blackwing Lair, Order of Discord finally stepped onto the balcony where Nefarian had built his throne.
It’s an imposing and intimidating place. The rough stone blocks that form the walls, railings and floor panels are a dirty, depressing red, and the sky has the look of a recently-erupted volcano. The balcony is perhaps 150 yards across, and at the opposite end of the balcony from the entrance lies a great throne upon which Lord Victor Nefarius, the Lord of Blackrock, rests in human form. He sits almost lazily, his crown tipped to one side, and laughs as his minions slay your friends. And when you’re stoned, as I usually was when raiding, it’s a pretty scary image.
By the time OoD reached this balcony for the first time, it had a core group of raiders that were excellent at their jobs - but there was also a certain casual element among them, which, frankly, slowed progression greatly. The focus of OoD, however, was not progression - it was to form a cohesive social structure of friends, and in this it succeeded greatly. This is why I was able to be lit when raiding with OoD - while the substance increased my overall damage output (I actually tracked it), I tended to miss critical details and die more often - which, obviously, can be bad. Just the same, I enjoyed playing high - I found it less intensive and myself more detached, able to simply play for fun while kicking ass and taking names.
With, presumably, everyone in the raid sober, it took Demolition a month or two to slay Nefarian, and OoD managed it in a little bit more time than that - but the learning curve was far more brutal and elongated for OoD. Whereas Demolition had 35 raiders at every raid, OoD had, again, about 20 - this forced the guild to teach and gear twice as many people. For the first month, it seemed that OoD would simply never kill Nefarian - we couldn’t even defeat the first of three phases. I suspect that more people in OoD also showed up to raids in altered mental states, and one of the rogues that I mentored - Thuglord - I know for a fact never once logged on sober.
And then it happened. Order of Discord blazed through the second half of Blackwing Lair, killing each boss on the first attempt, and we arrayed our forty members on Nefarian’s balcony and triggered the encounter. For the first time, OoD successfully completed the first phase of the encounter, in which hundreds of monsters, coming from two separate doors, flood the balcony and must be killed - and we did it, inexplicably, without a single casualty. When this was completed, Nefarian turned into a gigantic black dragon and began attacking our tank, Grachuus, who angered the dragon sufficiently and moved him to an ideal position. With rogues flanking and wizards fireballing, Order of Discord threw everything they had at the beast - and killed him. Just as with Final Fantasy II and KoToR, the defeat of a major, endgame-level encounter was achieved on the first attempt of a playsession.
Of course, by the time Order of Discord had slain Nefarian, a new dungeon - and a new endboss, C’thun, whom was actually a god - had been put into the game, and we were thus no longer truly endgame.
I am still unsure if marijuana actually has a positive impact on my level of gaming expertise, even though it remains my favorite mode of playing - in addition to good beer, but that’s a constant that needs no mention. I played a rogue in World of Warcraft and was among the highest of damage-dealers in the guild, with only my jerk friends Bokike - a fireball and pyroclasting mage - and Shuzzi - a troll knifeman - able to compete with me. Pushing to the highest levels of DPS - damage per second, the metric by which damage-dealing classes are measured - required an excellent sense of timing, and to this end marijuana aided me greatly. However, it lowers situational awareness, so I found myself more likely to miss critical details - like needing a healer to remove a nasty spell from me - fairly often. As an aside, I found playing a priest - a healing class - to be impossible while high in a raid environment due to the immense level of situational awareness required and the terrible toll mistakes exact as a healer.
My development as a writer, gamer, and embracer of certain chemicals have all gone hand-in-hand, and I’m not sure that I could successfully remove any of these without directly compromising the other two. Not that I need to be in an altered state to write or to game at this point - these things usually revolve around alcohol and tobacco, making me something of a nerdy cliche - but it certainly elucidates the process and makes it more enjoyable for me. The sweeping bulk of my ideas for poetry and prose come to me while either drinking or dozing off on a couch while high, and most of my favorite gaming experiences have occurred while under one influence or another. In fact, my metric for knowing “how much is too much” is the point at which I can no longer manipulate a mouse and keyboard in the confines of a game successfully - I use this metric even when removed from gaming and at a social event where I won’t even be gaming, simply because it has allowed me to understand my body well enough to know when I’m in a comfortable place.
And then it happened: I realized that, unfortunately, playing videogames while under an influence presents something of a problem for me professionally: I tend to enjoy all media, whether it be in the form of text, film or computing, more when I’ve ingested some chemical or another. This strikes me as a loss of objectivity, and the permitting of external influences to determine my final opinion of a game. As an individual attempting to pursue a career in game criticism and academics, this could be a rather large problem. I’ve begun separating gameplay time into categories - one for pleasure, and one for semi-professional reasons, but I find this distinction troublesome. For better or worse, there seems to be only one thing to be said about this necessary distinction: it’s life; it happens.
I attribute my ultimate victory over the first Knights of the Old Republic directly to meth. I’d been trying to kill the final boss of the game - Darth Malak - for months, and simply could not do it. As will be further explained at later, I have a tendency to move through some games at a quicker pace than I imagine most other people do, and as a result - especially in roleplaying games - I find that my character(s) are often weaker than they should be and ill-prepared for major, endgame-level encounters. Due to choices made during the development of the primary character, whom is the only character useable in the final encounter, Seris was incredibly weak and almost broken. I had chosen initially the stealthy Scoundrel, and then later, the wizard equivalent of an evil Jedi - paths that, in a Dungeons and Dragons setting, would have brought me success, but did not in KoToR due to the inherent weakness and incompatibility of the two character development paths.
Darth Malak must have killed Seris more than fifty times before the winter of 2004 when I’d moved into a new area and acquired a more refined taste for narcotics. I’d certainly ingested, nasally, a certain volume of the chemical compound before that fateful evening, but I hadn’t done so while playing videogames - and as soon as I tried, I was embarrassed that I hadn’t attempted it earlier.
And then it happened: on a whim, I threw my KoToR disc into my Xbox and booted up my furthest save with my room mate as audience and a near-full pack of Camel’s as food - and proceeded to completely annihilate Darth Malak on my first attempt.
The encounter with Darth Malak revolves around executing his Jedi prisoners before he lifedrains them, which restores his life. I was aware of this in previous encounters, but couldn’t quite perfect a strategy for both damaging him and removing his ability to restore his life while keeping Seris alive. The drug didn’t induce an epiphany, it didn’t bring a golden, brilliant revelation of clarity, and it certainly didn’t, on an intrinsic level, explain to me how to kill Darth Malak. What it did do was make me set aside strategic considerations and focus purely on reacting to what Malak was doing, and this enhanced reaction time allowed me to pre-empt him every time, ultimately destroying him and saving the galaxy.
As I was an evil Jedi, the galaxy was not saved, but rather enslaved under a new tyrant - Darth Seris.
The culmination of the events and chemicals of that evening brought to me an awareness of the power of enhanced and altered gaming, and the lessons learned have stuck with since the passing of five years - and I suspect will never leave me. I’ve moved past meth - recognizing the physical danger posed and addiction possibility it represents - but continue to embrace altered and enhanced gaming, albeit in an (I hope) safer fashion, preferring to avoid illegal substances almost altogether.
Meth-amphetamine usage, in retrospect, seems to be an almost natural progression of habits I’d developed when I was younger. The first game that I ever spent a genuinely enormous amount of time playing was the second American release of a Final Fantasy game - and never was a play session begun until I knew I could count on several cans of Mountain Dew or some other highly caffeinated and sugared beverage. Food was and still is never involved, as sticky controllers and keyboards continue to be a personal bane that must be avoided at all costs. Similar to my experience with the nigh-unkillable Darth Malak, I had bashed my bruised and bloodied skull against the final boss of Final Fantasy II for months without making any real progress.
As I cannot recall this day - more than a decade and a half removed from present - with any clarity and thus cannot directly attribute caffeine to victory, I also cannot ignore the impact that I’m sure that it had. If nothing else, it granted me the chemically-induced focus and level of fanatic fervor for the game that proved necessary for victory. Again similar to my later experience with KoToR, my characters as a whole were underpowered and ill-suited for the final encounter, an alien-wizard thing named Zeromus. This was made painfully clear to me as I struggled to even survive for more than a few moments of the encounter, and indeed, I could only barely manage to get to Zeromus - he was situated about ten minutes away from the final save point at the end of a difficult dungeon, and my party could not effectively kill most of the enemies found within its glassy corridors.
If one has played any of the Final Fantasy games, particularly the second American release, then they are probably aware of the importance of the spell Meteo. The final spell for any black mage, it represents the culmination of arcane mastery and is the single highest-damaging attack in the game. It was received by Rydia - the black mage of the party - when she attains a certain level. My Rydia never attained this level - in fact, at the time, I’d just assumed that Rydia never even learned the spell. This level progression doesn’t merely determine the availability of spells one can cast, but also their strength and ability to withstand punishment - and Rydia’s failure to attain a reasonable level was a systemic problem throughout the party.
And then it happened - I sat down one afternoon after school and utterly annihilated Zeromus on my first attempt. To this day, I am unaware of exactly how this feat was accomplished - I have never met another person that can claim to have beaten Final Fantasy II without having the spell Meteo. I attribute this entirely to the enhanced reaction time created by caffeine and desperation. There were lessons learned from this victory, however, and the primary lesson was even demonstrated in the fight against Darth Malak - the hardest encounters are defeated not through repetition, but rather on the first attempt after an extended pause from the game.
Perhaps fittingly, within seconds of killing Zeromus, my mother insisted I remove myself from the basement to help her with something. By the time I returned, the ending sequence of the game had completed and the cartridge returned itself to the title screen. I have never seen, in person, the ending sequence of Final Fantasy II.
The game that had perhaps the strongest singular impact on me - and ultimately demanded the complete and total refinement of previously-learned lessons - was World of Warcraft. Although some eight million people played the game during its peak, I was something of a minority - I was one of those dorks that were made fun of for spending twelve or more hours each day within the confines of the game. Although I experienced many wonderful and frustrating moments in Azeroth, there is one event that I hold above all others: the tenth time that I killed the Lord of Blackrock, Nefarian.
The nine deaths of Nefarian had been witnessed, from me, during my tenure as a member of an elite raiding guild called Demolition. Demolition was the top guild on my server, and I wound up among its ranks due to cultivating a friendship and having a brother already inside of the guild. By the time I had joined, Demolition had killed every boss in Blackwing Lair - the dungeon that Nefarian ruled - except for the Lord of Blackrock himself. Although a relatively simple encounter when looked at in the context of today’s encounters, it was complex and challenging at the time, and it took Demolition several weeks of attemp ts to defeat him. While there was certainly great rejoicing both inside the guild and among the Horde community as a whole when he was killed - the first time for the Horde on my server - I was not terribly excited or surprised. This is because it seemed that slaying Nefarian was inevitable and required only time to be invested into it, as the nature of top-tier guilds in WoW is to defeat any encounter before them (note that pre-nerf C’thun of Ahn’Quiraj is perhaps one of the major exceptions to this, but obviously not the focus of this narrative).
As a result of changes in lifestyle, I was forced to leave Demolition - I could not meet the time requirements demanded, rightfully, by the guild. I returned instead to a group of players that had recently reformed that I had known since the opening months of Warcraft - a guild now called Order of Discord. When I joined, they were progressing - slowly - through Blackwing Lair. Not having the “hardcore raid” mentality of Demolition, the roster on any given evening was seemingly random. Some nights healers would be in abundance; others saw half the volume of required healers. Of the forty people that can be in the raid group, about 20 of them were present for each raid, myself included. This has the effect of lengthening the time it takes for a guild to defeat any given encounter, due to a disparity of armor/weapon quality and awareness of encounter mechanics. After two months of slogging through Blackwing Lair, Order of Discord finally stepped onto the balcony where Nefarian had built his throne.
It’s an imposing and intimidating place. The rough stone blocks that form the walls, railings and floor panels are a dirty, depressing red, and the sky has the look of a recently-erupted volcano. The balcony is perhaps 150 yards across, and at the opposite end of the balcony from the entrance lies a great throne upon which Lord Victor Nefarius, the Lord of Blackrock, rests in human form. He sits almost lazily, his crown tipped to one side, and laughs as his minions slay your friends. And when you’re stoned, as I usually was when raiding, it’s a pretty scary image.
By the time OoD reached this balcony for the first time, it had a core group of raiders that were excellent at their jobs - but there was also a certain casual element among them, which, frankly, slowed progression greatly. The focus of OoD, however, was not progression - it was to form a cohesive social structure of friends, and in this it succeeded greatly. This is why I was able to be lit when raiding with OoD - while the substance increased my overall damage output (I actually tracked it), I tended to miss critical details and die more often - which, obviously, can be bad. Just the same, I enjoyed playing high - I found it less intensive and myself more detached, able to simply play for fun while kicking ass and taking names.
With, presumably, everyone in the raid sober, it took Demolition a month or two to slay Nefarian, and OoD managed it in a little bit more time than that - but the learning curve was far more brutal and elongated for OoD. Whereas Demolition had 35 raiders at every raid, OoD had, again, about 20 - this forced the guild to teach and gear twice as many people. For the first month, it seemed that OoD would simply never kill Nefarian - we couldn’t even defeat the first of three phases. I suspect that more people in OoD also showed up to raids in altered mental states, and one of the rogues that I mentored - Thuglord - I know for a fact never once logged on sober.
And then it happened. Order of Discord blazed through the second half of Blackwing Lair, killing each boss on the first attempt, and we arrayed our forty members on Nefarian’s balcony and triggered the encounter. For the first time, OoD successfully completed the first phase of the encounter, in which hundreds of monsters, coming from two separate doors, flood the balcony and must be killed - and we did it, inexplicably, without a single casualty. When this was completed, Nefarian turned into a gigantic black dragon and began attacking our tank, Grachuus, who angered the dragon sufficiently and moved him to an ideal position. With rogues flanking and wizards fireballing, Order of Discord threw everything they had at the beast - and killed him. Just as with Final Fantasy II and KoToR, the defeat of a major, endgame-level encounter was achieved on the first attempt of a playsession.
Of course, by the time Order of Discord had slain Nefarian, a new dungeon - and a new endboss, C’thun, whom was actually a god - had been put into the game, and we were thus no longer truly endgame.
I am still unsure if marijuana actually has a positive impact on my level of gaming expertise, even though it remains my favorite mode of playing - in addition to good beer, but that’s a constant that needs no mention. I played a rogue in World of Warcraft and was among the highest of damage-dealers in the guild, with only my jerk friends Bokike - a fireball and pyroclasting mage - and Shuzzi - a troll knifeman - able to compete with me. Pushing to the highest levels of DPS - damage per second, the metric by which damage-dealing classes are measured - required an excellent sense of timing, and to this end marijuana aided me greatly. However, it lowers situational awareness, so I found myself more likely to miss critical details - like needing a healer to remove a nasty spell from me - fairly often. As an aside, I found playing a priest - a healing class - to be impossible while high in a raid environment due to the immense level of situational awareness required and the terrible toll mistakes exact as a healer.
My development as a writer, gamer, and embracer of certain chemicals have all gone hand-in-hand, and I’m not sure that I could successfully remove any of these without directly compromising the other two. Not that I need to be in an altered state to write or to game at this point - these things usually revolve around alcohol and tobacco, making me something of a nerdy cliche - but it certainly elucidates the process and makes it more enjoyable for me. The sweeping bulk of my ideas for poetry and prose come to me while either drinking or dozing off on a couch while high, and most of my favorite gaming experiences have occurred while under one influence or another. In fact, my metric for knowing “how much is too much” is the point at which I can no longer manipulate a mouse and keyboard in the confines of a game successfully - I use this metric even when removed from gaming and at a social event where I won’t even be gaming, simply because it has allowed me to understand my body well enough to know when I’m in a comfortable place.
And then it happened: I realized that, unfortunately, playing videogames while under an influence presents something of a problem for me professionally: I tend to enjoy all media, whether it be in the form of text, film or computing, more when I’ve ingested some chemical or another. This strikes me as a loss of objectivity, and the permitting of external influences to determine my final opinion of a game. As an individual attempting to pursue a career in game criticism and academics, this could be a rather large problem. I’ve begun separating gameplay time into categories - one for pleasure, and one for semi-professional reasons, but I find this distinction troublesome. For better or worse, there seems to be only one thing to be said about this necessary distinction: it’s life; it happens.
To Play the Hated Thing
I hated fighting against warriors. More than warlocks with their infernal Fear spell and life-leeching abilities, and vastly more than mages, with their devious blinking and Flame-Blasting ways. Even more than coming up against the hunter, whom was arguably designed to be a direct counter to beloved Seris - my rogue in World of Warcraft. The hunter was able to launch a flare into the air, which could pull Seris out of stealth and more than likely lead to her death. The hunter could place a mark on Seris when he saw her, preventing her from slinking back into the shadows she called comfortable, allowing him to see her no matter where she went or how craftily she hid. The hunter even could even train and command an animal pet, beasts pulled from the foulest corners of Azeroth, and then send them to slay me while he disabled the abilities I relied on.
But none of them - whether it be another rogue, an implacable paladin, or even the dreaded hunter - could instill in me the raw, unrelenting hatred that seeing a warrior could.
Not just any warrior, but one armed with an axe. And not just any axe, no, but a terribly particular one - the Arcanite Reaper. For a time, the Arcanite Reaper was the penultimate weapon of the warrior class. It was, at the time, ludicrously expensive to craft, requiring not only a host of rare and exotic materials, but also access - and coin to pay - to a blacksmith that knew how to forge the beskulled weapon. Neither the materials nor the blacksmiths capable of forging the thing were easy to be had, yet every warrior quested, fought and killed relentlessly to procure one.
And I’m pretty sure that the warrior went through all of the work to get one specifically to kill my dear and fragile Seris.
Looking back on the item now, it doesn’t appear to be a terribly powerful weapon: 53.8 dps, +13 stamina, and +62 attack power. When viewed in light of the obscenely-powerful weapons found in Wrath of the Lich King dungeons, the Arcanite Reaper appears a paper clip with a rock stuck to it at best - but Azeroth was a much different place then. Due to a mechanic that was later changed, the speed of a weapon - 3.8, in the case of the Arcanite Reaper - influenced in an enormous way how hard a triggered ability could strike an enemy. Essentially, the slower a weapon was, the harder it could hit somebody - and the Arcanite Reaper was, and remains, among the very slowest of weapons in the game, with the total number of 3.8 speed weapons being easily countable on one hand. The other dominant factor in this calculation was the attack power of the warrior in question - but, generally speaking, if a warrior had the finances for an Arcanite Reaper, he probably also had the time and money to boost his other stats to Seris-killing proportions.
The warrior could not see Seris when she crouched in stealth. The warrior could not stop her from escaping into stealth. The warrior could not even stop the rogue from moving for long enough to kill them. But what the warrior could do was terrible indeed; even with relatively equal gear between an enemy warrior and I, he could kill me in as few as three swings of that axe - and both of us, no matter the warrior that I faced, always knew that. While I might manage to reduce the total health of the warrior by as much as half with luck, I knew that within ten seconds of leaving the comforting, black safety of stealth that I would be dead.
That’s why I decided to make a warrior.
The warrior most assuredly has weaknesses. If outnumbered, he has very limited escape possibilities. Against a skilled mage adept at manipulating the frozen forces, he had almost no defense and would die a slow, painful and very cold death. A paladin, while not able to put forth the raw damage output of a warrior, could slowly kill him while restoring his own health - something the warrior cannot effectively do. Besides, I didn’t want to play a warrior to be an all-around balanced fightery-sort, no - not at all. I wanted to play a warrior for one reason:
To kill the hell out of rogues.
I never did get Icthus - the warrior - to the highest level. He never did get an Arcanite Reaper - by the time I began heavily investing time into Icthus, Blizzard had changed the way that weapon speed influences damage, so it was no longer the end-all-be-all weapon. This was also because, as I said, I never made it to the level cap with Icthus; rather, I parked him at level 39 and fought with him in battlegrounds, which limit the teams - an enemy team and a team you were on - to ten players, each being in the level range of 30-39. Ironically, rogues wound up being perhaps my single most dangerous rival on the field of battle due to the way that high-level magical enhancements add to the class, but that’s a rather in-depth discussion poorly-placed here.
While I couldn’t necessarily kill rogues as easily as Seris had been killed, I was still fully capable of annihilating almost everything else in the battlegrounds. I was engaging in the practice known as “twinking,” which means that Icthus didn’t get any of his gear on his own - rather, my high-level characters got it for him, and then paid enormous sums of money to place magical enchantments on his gear to make him far more powerful than any level 39 character had a right to be. This had the result of making him vastly more powerful than any enemy found in the battlegrounds, barring those that were “twinking” themselves - and even then, none could compete with Icthus.
Except rogues.
This experience, and indeed set of experiences, I found to be among the most entertaining and adrenaline-inducing that I encountered in World of Warcraft. While my rogue had good gear and weapons, and ran with a pretty solid group of players, she never shined with the burning intensity that Icthus rather regularly did - and it never felt as though she shined as brightly. I believe that some measure of this was due only to my playing the warrior - that absolutely hated thing, that thing I’d been trained to despise, fear and hate since Seris was level 1 - that abominably powerful, bastard thing, the warrior.
But it wasn’t the warrior in and of itself; while a class able to dominate those around him, the warrior’s skillset, his appearance, his attitude - these weren’t the reasons would glow and burn with life while playing Icthus. That reason, I realized years later, was pretty simple: I was playing the hated thing.
I was the hated thing.
Recently, I’ve begun noticing that I often play classes, teams or factions based on similar reasons. While learning to play a new game, I inevitably learn to despise one or two of the class/factions/etc. Sometimes, it’s because they kill me repeatedly, and like Seris and the warrior, I simply cannot find an effective strategy and am thus forced to flee. (I did ultimately find one, but it required that the warrior and I be completely alone until I could bleed him to death with surgical precision - a very rare circumstance.) Sometimes, it’s because their skillset - when effectively utilized - enables them to be so slippery and quick that they are impossible to kill, and able to harry me until I die.
In Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, this Hated Thing came in the form of Choppas and Chosen. Due to how racial factions were designed in WAR, I was unable to play a Choppa or a Chosen - so instead, I played the Knight of the Blazing Sun, counterpart to Chosen, and the Slayer, the counterpart to the Choppa. Although both were axe-and-sword frontline fighters, they fell on opposite ends of the spectrum; Chosen/Knights were incredibly difficult to kill, and Slayers/Choppas were incredibly powerful.
Neither the Slayer nor the Knight were among my first, or even primary, characters - that honor fell to Bloodmoney the Warrior Priest. She was a healer, and died regularly to Slayers, and frustrated herself often trying to kill Chosen. While I enjoyed playing her, absolutely nothing I experienced in WAR brought me the raw, unrelenting joy that Othered Again - my Knight of the Blazing Sun - brought to me when he stood straddling the world like an unkillable titan, laughing as he deflected blows and spells with shield and sword.
Sure, Othered Again could take a lot of damage and hold a line and ensure his allies could annihilate his enemies from the safety of being behind him. Sure, Spacetiger Spaceslayer - the Slayer - could leap into a group of enemies, howl with rage and swing his two axes with a fervor only dwarves could muster, killing everything around him. But neither of these character-defining aspects were why I so thoroughly enjoyed Othered Again and Spacetiger Spaceslayer.
I adored them both because, as with Icthus, I was the Hated Thing.
But none of them - whether it be another rogue, an implacable paladin, or even the dreaded hunter - could instill in me the raw, unrelenting hatred that seeing a warrior could.
Not just any warrior, but one armed with an axe. And not just any axe, no, but a terribly particular one - the Arcanite Reaper. For a time, the Arcanite Reaper was the penultimate weapon of the warrior class. It was, at the time, ludicrously expensive to craft, requiring not only a host of rare and exotic materials, but also access - and coin to pay - to a blacksmith that knew how to forge the beskulled weapon. Neither the materials nor the blacksmiths capable of forging the thing were easy to be had, yet every warrior quested, fought and killed relentlessly to procure one.
And I’m pretty sure that the warrior went through all of the work to get one specifically to kill my dear and fragile Seris.
Looking back on the item now, it doesn’t appear to be a terribly powerful weapon: 53.8 dps, +13 stamina, and +62 attack power. When viewed in light of the obscenely-powerful weapons found in Wrath of the Lich King dungeons, the Arcanite Reaper appears a paper clip with a rock stuck to it at best - but Azeroth was a much different place then. Due to a mechanic that was later changed, the speed of a weapon - 3.8, in the case of the Arcanite Reaper - influenced in an enormous way how hard a triggered ability could strike an enemy. Essentially, the slower a weapon was, the harder it could hit somebody - and the Arcanite Reaper was, and remains, among the very slowest of weapons in the game, with the total number of 3.8 speed weapons being easily countable on one hand. The other dominant factor in this calculation was the attack power of the warrior in question - but, generally speaking, if a warrior had the finances for an Arcanite Reaper, he probably also had the time and money to boost his other stats to Seris-killing proportions.
The warrior could not see Seris when she crouched in stealth. The warrior could not stop her from escaping into stealth. The warrior could not even stop the rogue from moving for long enough to kill them. But what the warrior could do was terrible indeed; even with relatively equal gear between an enemy warrior and I, he could kill me in as few as three swings of that axe - and both of us, no matter the warrior that I faced, always knew that. While I might manage to reduce the total health of the warrior by as much as half with luck, I knew that within ten seconds of leaving the comforting, black safety of stealth that I would be dead.
That’s why I decided to make a warrior.
The warrior most assuredly has weaknesses. If outnumbered, he has very limited escape possibilities. Against a skilled mage adept at manipulating the frozen forces, he had almost no defense and would die a slow, painful and very cold death. A paladin, while not able to put forth the raw damage output of a warrior, could slowly kill him while restoring his own health - something the warrior cannot effectively do. Besides, I didn’t want to play a warrior to be an all-around balanced fightery-sort, no - not at all. I wanted to play a warrior for one reason:
To kill the hell out of rogues.
I never did get Icthus - the warrior - to the highest level. He never did get an Arcanite Reaper - by the time I began heavily investing time into Icthus, Blizzard had changed the way that weapon speed influences damage, so it was no longer the end-all-be-all weapon. This was also because, as I said, I never made it to the level cap with Icthus; rather, I parked him at level 39 and fought with him in battlegrounds, which limit the teams - an enemy team and a team you were on - to ten players, each being in the level range of 30-39. Ironically, rogues wound up being perhaps my single most dangerous rival on the field of battle due to the way that high-level magical enhancements add to the class, but that’s a rather in-depth discussion poorly-placed here.
While I couldn’t necessarily kill rogues as easily as Seris had been killed, I was still fully capable of annihilating almost everything else in the battlegrounds. I was engaging in the practice known as “twinking,” which means that Icthus didn’t get any of his gear on his own - rather, my high-level characters got it for him, and then paid enormous sums of money to place magical enchantments on his gear to make him far more powerful than any level 39 character had a right to be. This had the result of making him vastly more powerful than any enemy found in the battlegrounds, barring those that were “twinking” themselves - and even then, none could compete with Icthus.
Except rogues.
This experience, and indeed set of experiences, I found to be among the most entertaining and adrenaline-inducing that I encountered in World of Warcraft. While my rogue had good gear and weapons, and ran with a pretty solid group of players, she never shined with the burning intensity that Icthus rather regularly did - and it never felt as though she shined as brightly. I believe that some measure of this was due only to my playing the warrior - that absolutely hated thing, that thing I’d been trained to despise, fear and hate since Seris was level 1 - that abominably powerful, bastard thing, the warrior.
But it wasn’t the warrior in and of itself; while a class able to dominate those around him, the warrior’s skillset, his appearance, his attitude - these weren’t the reasons would glow and burn with life while playing Icthus. That reason, I realized years later, was pretty simple: I was playing the hated thing.
I was the hated thing.
Recently, I’ve begun noticing that I often play classes, teams or factions based on similar reasons. While learning to play a new game, I inevitably learn to despise one or two of the class/factions/etc. Sometimes, it’s because they kill me repeatedly, and like Seris and the warrior, I simply cannot find an effective strategy and am thus forced to flee. (I did ultimately find one, but it required that the warrior and I be completely alone until I could bleed him to death with surgical precision - a very rare circumstance.) Sometimes, it’s because their skillset - when effectively utilized - enables them to be so slippery and quick that they are impossible to kill, and able to harry me until I die.
In Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, this Hated Thing came in the form of Choppas and Chosen. Due to how racial factions were designed in WAR, I was unable to play a Choppa or a Chosen - so instead, I played the Knight of the Blazing Sun, counterpart to Chosen, and the Slayer, the counterpart to the Choppa. Although both were axe-and-sword frontline fighters, they fell on opposite ends of the spectrum; Chosen/Knights were incredibly difficult to kill, and Slayers/Choppas were incredibly powerful.
Neither the Slayer nor the Knight were among my first, or even primary, characters - that honor fell to Bloodmoney the Warrior Priest. She was a healer, and died regularly to Slayers, and frustrated herself often trying to kill Chosen. While I enjoyed playing her, absolutely nothing I experienced in WAR brought me the raw, unrelenting joy that Othered Again - my Knight of the Blazing Sun - brought to me when he stood straddling the world like an unkillable titan, laughing as he deflected blows and spells with shield and sword.
Sure, Othered Again could take a lot of damage and hold a line and ensure his allies could annihilate his enemies from the safety of being behind him. Sure, Spacetiger Spaceslayer - the Slayer - could leap into a group of enemies, howl with rage and swing his two axes with a fervor only dwarves could muster, killing everything around him. But neither of these character-defining aspects were why I so thoroughly enjoyed Othered Again and Spacetiger Spaceslayer.
I adored them both because, as with Icthus, I was the Hated Thing.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
A Pair of Quotes
Videogames are blamed today as much as television and telephones were blamed in the mid-20th century for the corruption of young peoples. To that, I like to turn to the following pair of quotes:
"The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for
authority, they show disrespect to their elders.... They no longer
rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their
legs, and are tyrants over their teachers."
and,
"The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have
no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all
restraint. They talk as if they alone knew everything and what passes
for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for girls, they are
forward, immodest and unwomanly in speech, behaviour and dress."
They're from Socrates.
"The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for
authority, they show disrespect to their elders.... They no longer
rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their
legs, and are tyrants over their teachers."
and,
"The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have
no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all
restraint. They talk as if they alone knew everything and what passes
for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for girls, they are
forward, immodest and unwomanly in speech, behaviour and dress."
They're from Socrates.
Speaking of Heads in C&C: Generals
Any given sentence contains within its confines a host of meanings; that of the topical definition of the sum of words, that of an intended idea implied both in and around the meanings established through topical definition and, often, as a consequence of this composite, a potentially unintended meaning. I personally hold that any given writer or speaker is responsible for the overall understanding of his words, whether intended or not. Generally, this holds up well enough in the day-to-day life of reading and hearing and understanding through transitions between media types do not prove difficult. With this in mind, I’ve chosen to look at a presumably unintended implication of a particular computer game: Command and Conquer: Generals.
In C&C:G, the player chooses from one of three different armies, each having different units and structures, and each with the intent of killing the hell out of whomever deigns to oppose them. This is pretty standard stuff as far as contemporary real-time strategy games go - since Starcraft, most major RTS releases have had, at minimum, three different factions/races that the player can choose from. What separates C&C:G from most other RTS games, however, is that it decided to incorporate real-world factions, and all of the weight that each culture brings.
Those three factions are the People’s Republic of China, the United States of America, and the GLA - the Global Liberation Army. As stated, each army has different units, although there are clear similarities amongst the three. For example, all three of the factions have a basic, rifle-armed soldier that is responsible for doing a great deal of the grunt work that their factions require of them. I am not particularly interested in the similarities of the three gun-toting grunt soldiers, but rather their differences - and even then, I’m interested only in the perceived and implied cultural differences among them as established by Electronic Arts, the game’s developers.
What I found to be the most interesting undertone in C&C:G are the voices of individual units. Similar again to Starcraft, each unit has a different set of speeches that issue forth depending on what you order them to do, or even if one merely selects the unit. The Ranger - the USA’s grunt soldier - says things like, “Always prepared,” “Ready for action,” and “We’ll lead the way.” These are pretty standard tropes for American troops to fall back on, boyscout-like in presentation and always spoken from a position of military dominance. Things get more interesting when one looks to the Chinese, however, whom say things like “We are the red guard,” “Defenders of peace,” and “China, do not forget me!”
The Chinese voice responses from units mostly revolve around China as a collective, communistic entity; the “we” invoked by the Chinese is entirely dissimilar to that of the American “we,” suggesting for the Chinese that they are part of a far larger organization that supersedes even the military conflict and harkening to the Red Army as a whole (and a key component of China), whereas the American “we” is simply “we” in the context of that particular military unit - the soldiers that are immediately present. These strings can be found throughout the unit voices for both armies, China continually emphasizing Communistic and collective ideas and the USA considering its military force to be the sole consideration.
More or less, the two ideas presented here are clear and aren’t particularly controversial - at least, when one extrapolates China and Communism a few decades into the future. What I do find to be particularly controversial, however, is the treatment of the third faction, the Global Liberation Army.
The GLA aren’t merely another player in a global war, but rather a similar extrapolation to that of China - only with various Muslim/terrorist groups found throughout the Middle East. I do not use ‘Muslim groups,’ or even ‘terrorist,’ lightly, as every image and voice presented by EA for the GLA are inarguably Islamic stereotypes and extrapolations of current images. Even the name of the basic grunt troop for the GLA - “Rebel” - is suggestive of something more sinister than anything either of the other two armies can provide. As with the China/USA paradigm, things grow more interesting when adding another faction.
Almost every member of the GLA is suicidal and fanatical, with such choice phrases as “No cost is too great!” and “The higher order shall reign.” The former hardly needs explanation; it’s a pretty clear image of a suicidal soldier fully-prepared to die for his cause. Not to say that the Americans and the Chinese aren’t willing to do the same, but neither of these factions actually voice it with the conviction - or even voice it at all - of the GLA. “The higher order shall reign” is also an almost-damning statement; although it doesn’t quite directly state it, when taken with consideration of the rest of the highlights of the GLA faction, it’s almost the same as saying, “Allah is the one true God” or even, “Islam will dominate everything!” A final GLA quote, “Our courage will be seen by all!” is even further different from anything the other two factions say; whereas the USA and the Chinese are focused on securing military objectives, defeating their enemies, and winning battles with their voice-overs, the GLA seems to, inexplicably, be terribly concerned with how their actions are perceived by “all.” “All” is another tricky term; do they mean the people of the world as a whole? Their brethren soldiers and the enemy? Just one of them? Regardless, it shifts the focus from the intent of their actions and their goals and into the realm of public opinion.
This is particularly troubling because, while China and the United States arguably have a national identity, at least militarily, that is effectively portrayed by C&C:G, EA decided to instead use stereotype and fear to paint the portrait of a generic, Islamic nation. Although in the course of the game it is stated that the GLA arises from no clear nationality and is made of a variety of groups, it nonetheless combines Wahabism with terrorism with absolutely no remorse, or even second thought. Why is it that this region of the world - culturally, philosophically, and politically - can be represented through such gross and inaccurate stereotypes while the far West and East are not? EA doesn’t say, and I would be remiss to put words in their collective mouths.
None of these ideas would be particularly relevant had the factions been based on fictional groups of people. There’s a certain power in creating almost-entirely fictional warring cultures, as it allows statements like those above to be made without actually suggesting anything about real-world counterparts; creative and poetic license can go a long way. But when groups are so clearly based from real-world groups, doesn’t that mean that anything said about them in the confines of the game are more or less also being said about them in real-life?
Not all Muslims - and certainly not all of the soldiers found in that part of the world - are fanatical, suicidal terrorist figures, and yet they are presented as such in C&C:G. Why is it that the American stereotype attributes - egotism, a sense of entitlement, and an absolute belief in their superiority - aren’t displayed in as damning of terms as that of the GLA? The same for Chinese collectivism; it’s looked down on in the game (especially when taken in consideration with the structures the Chinese have, like Propaganda Towers), but it isn’t given anywhere nearly the negative connotation that the GLA are.
Further emphasizing this disparity of tone and, indeed, likeability of the factions, are the units themselves; while I’ll not drag this post out even further by examining them, I’ll leave you with this: the auxiliary foot troop for the Americans is the medic, the auxiliary foot troop for the Chinese is the computer hacker, and the auxiliary foot troop for the GLA is, well, the terrorist - a suicide bomber that kills himself to do an amount of damage to an enemy unit or structure.
In C&C:G, the player chooses from one of three different armies, each having different units and structures, and each with the intent of killing the hell out of whomever deigns to oppose them. This is pretty standard stuff as far as contemporary real-time strategy games go - since Starcraft, most major RTS releases have had, at minimum, three different factions/races that the player can choose from. What separates C&C:G from most other RTS games, however, is that it decided to incorporate real-world factions, and all of the weight that each culture brings.
Those three factions are the People’s Republic of China, the United States of America, and the GLA - the Global Liberation Army. As stated, each army has different units, although there are clear similarities amongst the three. For example, all three of the factions have a basic, rifle-armed soldier that is responsible for doing a great deal of the grunt work that their factions require of them. I am not particularly interested in the similarities of the three gun-toting grunt soldiers, but rather their differences - and even then, I’m interested only in the perceived and implied cultural differences among them as established by Electronic Arts, the game’s developers.
What I found to be the most interesting undertone in C&C:G are the voices of individual units. Similar again to Starcraft, each unit has a different set of speeches that issue forth depending on what you order them to do, or even if one merely selects the unit. The Ranger - the USA’s grunt soldier - says things like, “Always prepared,” “Ready for action,” and “We’ll lead the way.” These are pretty standard tropes for American troops to fall back on, boyscout-like in presentation and always spoken from a position of military dominance. Things get more interesting when one looks to the Chinese, however, whom say things like “We are the red guard,” “Defenders of peace,” and “China, do not forget me!”
The Chinese voice responses from units mostly revolve around China as a collective, communistic entity; the “we” invoked by the Chinese is entirely dissimilar to that of the American “we,” suggesting for the Chinese that they are part of a far larger organization that supersedes even the military conflict and harkening to the Red Army as a whole (and a key component of China), whereas the American “we” is simply “we” in the context of that particular military unit - the soldiers that are immediately present. These strings can be found throughout the unit voices for both armies, China continually emphasizing Communistic and collective ideas and the USA considering its military force to be the sole consideration.
More or less, the two ideas presented here are clear and aren’t particularly controversial - at least, when one extrapolates China and Communism a few decades into the future. What I do find to be particularly controversial, however, is the treatment of the third faction, the Global Liberation Army.
The GLA aren’t merely another player in a global war, but rather a similar extrapolation to that of China - only with various Muslim/terrorist groups found throughout the Middle East. I do not use ‘Muslim groups,’ or even ‘terrorist,’ lightly, as every image and voice presented by EA for the GLA are inarguably Islamic stereotypes and extrapolations of current images. Even the name of the basic grunt troop for the GLA - “Rebel” - is suggestive of something more sinister than anything either of the other two armies can provide. As with the China/USA paradigm, things grow more interesting when adding another faction.
Almost every member of the GLA is suicidal and fanatical, with such choice phrases as “No cost is too great!” and “The higher order shall reign.” The former hardly needs explanation; it’s a pretty clear image of a suicidal soldier fully-prepared to die for his cause. Not to say that the Americans and the Chinese aren’t willing to do the same, but neither of these factions actually voice it with the conviction - or even voice it at all - of the GLA. “The higher order shall reign” is also an almost-damning statement; although it doesn’t quite directly state it, when taken with consideration of the rest of the highlights of the GLA faction, it’s almost the same as saying, “Allah is the one true God” or even, “Islam will dominate everything!” A final GLA quote, “Our courage will be seen by all!” is even further different from anything the other two factions say; whereas the USA and the Chinese are focused on securing military objectives, defeating their enemies, and winning battles with their voice-overs, the GLA seems to, inexplicably, be terribly concerned with how their actions are perceived by “all.” “All” is another tricky term; do they mean the people of the world as a whole? Their brethren soldiers and the enemy? Just one of them? Regardless, it shifts the focus from the intent of their actions and their goals and into the realm of public opinion.
This is particularly troubling because, while China and the United States arguably have a national identity, at least militarily, that is effectively portrayed by C&C:G, EA decided to instead use stereotype and fear to paint the portrait of a generic, Islamic nation. Although in the course of the game it is stated that the GLA arises from no clear nationality and is made of a variety of groups, it nonetheless combines Wahabism with terrorism with absolutely no remorse, or even second thought. Why is it that this region of the world - culturally, philosophically, and politically - can be represented through such gross and inaccurate stereotypes while the far West and East are not? EA doesn’t say, and I would be remiss to put words in their collective mouths.
None of these ideas would be particularly relevant had the factions been based on fictional groups of people. There’s a certain power in creating almost-entirely fictional warring cultures, as it allows statements like those above to be made without actually suggesting anything about real-world counterparts; creative and poetic license can go a long way. But when groups are so clearly based from real-world groups, doesn’t that mean that anything said about them in the confines of the game are more or less also being said about them in real-life?
Not all Muslims - and certainly not all of the soldiers found in that part of the world - are fanatical, suicidal terrorist figures, and yet they are presented as such in C&C:G. Why is it that the American stereotype attributes - egotism, a sense of entitlement, and an absolute belief in their superiority - aren’t displayed in as damning of terms as that of the GLA? The same for Chinese collectivism; it’s looked down on in the game (especially when taken in consideration with the structures the Chinese have, like Propaganda Towers), but it isn’t given anywhere nearly the negative connotation that the GLA are.
Further emphasizing this disparity of tone and, indeed, likeability of the factions, are the units themselves; while I’ll not drag this post out even further by examining them, I’ll leave you with this: the auxiliary foot troop for the Americans is the medic, the auxiliary foot troop for the Chinese is the computer hacker, and the auxiliary foot troop for the GLA is, well, the terrorist - a suicide bomber that kills himself to do an amount of damage to an enemy unit or structure.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Intro Post - Questions for Exploring
Introductory post for class - gone as soon as credit is received.
Here are some things that I want to explore over the semester:
1. Can narrative be an actual game mechanic? 1a: how, exactly, is a game mechanic defined? Is this a flexible or rigid definition, or has it even been solidly established yet?
2. How in the world to talk about a game like Achron (http://achrongame.com/), which permits two opposing players to move through a window of time on a real-time basis. For example, a structure that is capable of creating a new unit does so, and that unit travels backwards in time to before it was created - and it then destroys the building that created it, before it was created. I have a mental image in my mind of how exactly to /think/ of this, but expressing it in words proves difficult. Paradoxes are fun .. or something.
3. I take to the literary criticism school of thought that authorial intent is irrelevant, and that the only important detail in a work is what the author /does/ say, not what he tries to say. This becomes more important as the length of time elapsed between the work published and the author’s death (hah) grows longer; we can never ask Shakespeare exactly how we should interpret the character of Feste in Twelfth Night, for example, and are thus left to contextual evidence and our own interpretations for validity. Does this apply to video games, particularly when developer commentaries are so prevelant? Is it at all fair for looking at games based on what they /could/ have done, rather than what they did? I find the only relevant detail to be how the game exists in it’s current state - so how does that apply to game patches and downloadable content? Can you judge World of Warcraft at release in the same way that you can in it’s current state? As, ultimately, the patch is nothing more than the “author” trying to “get at what they really meant to do the first time.”
4. Should a game journalist/critic actually beat each game they examine, and if not, what percentage of a game should they complete before forming a solid opinion? Book critics certainly have to, and to effectively analyze a poem one might spend hours on fifteen lines of text. How does this apply to video games? 4a: I’m working with a theory that uses similar concepts to statistical polling; if one reads (samples) 33% of a book, can one draw reasonable conclusions about the book, as one could with populations of people? Surely, the conclusion of story arcs can merely be guessed at, but is it fair to use that 33% (or whatever other number you like) to draw conclusions about the mechanics, dialogue constructions/political messages and styles as one, I would argue, can do with a book?
Here are some things that I want to explore over the semester:
1. Can narrative be an actual game mechanic? 1a: how, exactly, is a game mechanic defined? Is this a flexible or rigid definition, or has it even been solidly established yet?
2. How in the world to talk about a game like Achron (http://achrongame.com/), which permits two opposing players to move through a window of time on a real-time basis. For example, a structure that is capable of creating a new unit does so, and that unit travels backwards in time to before it was created - and it then destroys the building that created it, before it was created. I have a mental image in my mind of how exactly to /think/ of this, but expressing it in words proves difficult. Paradoxes are fun .. or something.
3. I take to the literary criticism school of thought that authorial intent is irrelevant, and that the only important detail in a work is what the author /does/ say, not what he tries to say. This becomes more important as the length of time elapsed between the work published and the author’s death (hah) grows longer; we can never ask Shakespeare exactly how we should interpret the character of Feste in Twelfth Night, for example, and are thus left to contextual evidence and our own interpretations for validity. Does this apply to video games, particularly when developer commentaries are so prevelant? Is it at all fair for looking at games based on what they /could/ have done, rather than what they did? I find the only relevant detail to be how the game exists in it’s current state - so how does that apply to game patches and downloadable content? Can you judge World of Warcraft at release in the same way that you can in it’s current state? As, ultimately, the patch is nothing more than the “author” trying to “get at what they really meant to do the first time.”
4. Should a game journalist/critic actually beat each game they examine, and if not, what percentage of a game should they complete before forming a solid opinion? Book critics certainly have to, and to effectively analyze a poem one might spend hours on fifteen lines of text. How does this apply to video games? 4a: I’m working with a theory that uses similar concepts to statistical polling; if one reads (samples) 33% of a book, can one draw reasonable conclusions about the book, as one could with populations of people? Surely, the conclusion of story arcs can merely be guessed at, but is it fair to use that 33% (or whatever other number you like) to draw conclusions about the mechanics, dialogue constructions/political messages and styles as one, I would argue, can do with a book?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
