Considerably More Than 40oz With: Risen

As a general rule, I dislike boss battles. Mostly, I dislike them because they feel so disjointed from the rest of the game experience, and final, endgame-level encounters often seem to violate this more than standard bosses - especially if the game doesn’t have boss encounters in the traditional sense.

In some games, boss battles are great, and often serve as the pinnacle of the experience; what would the Megaman X and Zelda games be without boss battles? Arguably, the great joy of the games are in exploration and discovery, but in these cases, the boss at the end of a dungeon or level seems to provide a great capstone for the experience. I understand that some games, like Shadow of the Colossus, contain nothing but boss battles.

And then there are games like Risen, for whom boss encounters seem inevitable but somehow alien to the experience. Having just completed Risen, I found it to be one of the finer open-world RPG games I’ve played in awhile - and it was brutally difficult, often punishing a slight mistake with a player death. For me, that level of difficulty made the game engaging - for the majority of the game, I felt like I was the weakling shipwreck survivor that the plot told me I was. After tens of hours digging through ruins and working my way up the monster badass food chain, I eventually felt - both through getting damn good at sword play and attaining the sweet loot of the ancient world - that I could kill anything on the island.

It was at this final moment that the trouble with boss encounters began to plague Risen. The sweeping majority of the game is spent fighting beast-type monsters or humanoid-type monsters, with the latter carrying weapons and the former using tooth, claw, and brute force. Each of the variants demanded a different approach; wolves and stingrats require a shield to block, guys with swords quite effective parrying and lunging, and ashbeasts require well-timed dodging and precision strikes with large weapons, as shields are useless against them. For the most part, this system worked well - it required a flexibility on my behalf that wasn’t usually immediately obvious, and only trial and error could defeat various enemies.

Unfortunately, none of the lessons that I had learned as a castaway served as it became clear what was required to defeat the final encounter. It isn’t that the encounter was bad - I found it entertaining, if painfully easy and quick - so much as that it wasn’t like the rest of the game. As the thing did not lunge, I had no use for dodging. As the thing could not swing a weapon, I had no use for parrying. As the thing could not move, I had no use for the fancy footwork and swordplay I’d become so adept at. All that was required was holding up a shield and jumping over disappearing floor-bits, and striking the thing when I reflected his own fireball back at him. Once it became clear what was required to slay the thing, it was a simple matter of paying attention, and within moments, the encounter was over. Disappointing, disappointing.

It felt as though all of the work I’d put into the game was for naught, all of those deaths at the hands of giant sword-swingey types a pointless lesson. It strikes me that a final encounter really ought to be a culmination of every skill a player has acquired in the game, and in this, Risen is a miserable failure. Magic has no use, alchemy has no use, being clever and reading the opponent has no use. It’s a good thing that the rest of Risen was so damned good, as even though the final encounter was unrewarding, learning to effectively kill everything else was great fun.

Even the very first beast encountered - an evil, cruel-looking and overlarge sea-vulture - was initially challenging. Blind, over-aggressive swinging resulted in pecked-out eyes and blood on the sand. Wolves, when attempted without a shield, lead to being killed while trying desperately to parry. Hell, even gnomes - which look astonishingly creepy - were enormously difficult initially.

This difficulty level is only enhanced by the visuals and sound effects of the game; while neither are quite top-notch, they lend the game a grim and bleak atmosphere seldom done nearly so effectively as in Risen. Really, the entire experience of the game reminded me of the ruined and blasted feeling of being in Tristram in the first Diablo game. That somber, moody guitar-twanging is even present often in the music while exploring the island of Risen, and the generally-depressed and angry human citizens even further crystalize this feeling.

And they really are depressed and angry - the vast majority of interactable NPCs encountered are assholes, often cursing at you and occasionally picking fights with you. Their attitude never quite seems forced and never quite feels trite - often, it simply feels believable, which is quite a testament to the writers over at Piranha Bytes. Most people were believable with what seemed to be legitimate struggles. Surprisingly - mostly because it seems to happen so rarely - I never quite felt like somebody’s bitch when I was off running errands for them, and my taking up of their quests often seemed the best thing to do. Not just because of the potential for a reward, but rather because it sounded fun.

While there didn’t seem to be a great deal of optional, side-quest type stuff to Risen, the quests presented had just the right amount of variety, mood, and adventuring to keep me thoroughly engaged throughout. Often, I was more interested in questing for people more to see what they would do than how it would benefit me. Some were entirely social; solving a murder in the Volcano Monastery meant interrogating monks, digging up graveyards, and even becoming a drug dealer. One notably long quest required the befriending of a bar maid, an imprisoned lord, uncovering a smuggling operation and, finally, traipsing around the island with a treasure map, digging up the bodies of mutineers. Although these quests were ultimately of the “Go here, find item, bring it back” variety, my reasons for undergoing these quests were varied enough that it didn’t seem problematic or, more importantly, at all boring.

For all of the wonderment that Risen brings to bear on a narrative and thematic level, it only really falters from technical considerations; jumping is stuttery, movement is slow, and things often never quite seem to fit together correctly. Exploration - arguably the most important aspect of an open-world game like Risen - is hampered often. Risen also likes to force the player to endure unnecessarily long cut-scene type moments whenever a chest is opened or ore is mined. Fortunately, the actual combat mechanisms were great - sword and hammer-swinging felt real, with sequential swings flowing naturally from the first, and the weapons often struck each other realistically. That is, unless one tries to use magic spells in an encounter - attack spells are merely the shootey variety, and the delays encountered when readying one of these spells can often be fatal. Other spells - such as healing and levitation - are used by way of pre-made scrolls, which sometimes works well and sometimes does not.

There were also a few plot and item problems; I was never really at all clear on why the main plot device of the game - rising ruins - occured, nor why they were populated by the race of monsters that they were. Even the guy that proved to be the central player in the plot never made this clear when illuminating the other mysteries of the world. Although the player can mine, I never found much use for the raw quantity of ore acquired after making the initial items and jewelry; there weren’t many options at all. I also never figured out what in the world either the wisdom stat (which grew to ridiculous levels thanks to how it is raised) or the “Seal Magic” category on my character page was for; at the end of the game, it sat at a steady zero of four possible points. While Seal Magic clearly wasn’t necessary, it would have been nice to know what in the hell it was for. Maybe it’s time to load up an older save game.

Overall, Risen is a fine and glowing experience; short of a few problems, the game speaks volumes to what is still possible in the world of PC gaming. Not that Risen wouldn’t work just fine on a console - but rather, Risen is the traditional experience of the PC RPG, and it succeeds here on spades. Deep character interaction, compelling plot twists, and a fundamentally sound swordplay system that was fun to play make Risen exactly what the PC needed: a damn fine game.

Scoring:
Visual Representation: While not bleeding-edge by any means, Risen looks exactly as the them states it should: dark, moody, and morose during thunderstorms and evening hours, and bright, glowy, yet still desperate in sunlight hours, everything looks and feels just right. Monster design was some of the scariest and most intimidating I’ve seen in a game, and both the monsters and the weapons of humans delivered their attacks with a pleasantly convincing heftiness. Unfortunately, it was difficult to actually see the front of my character, and the armor I found myself wearing was as blocky as it was flowing. There was also very little variation in models once new ones were established; monsters weren’t recycled as much duplicated throughout, and I must have seen the same bearded man-face twenty times. Score: 1.7/2.0

Gameplay and Level of Immersion: Due to great music and dark visuals, Risen is a fundamentally immersive experience. That the player is weaker than almost everything around him at any given time furthers this. The in-combat gameplay, as mentioned, is mostly awesome when using a sword or other weapon, but falters when using magic or scrolls. Exploring was both a positive and a negative experience; getting killed easily by monsters forced me to come back later, but jumping around and finicky movement in general made me want to stand still more than move. Score: 1.7/2.0

Mechanics and Technical Considerations: The game only crashed twice in almost forty hours of play - a very high mark. FPS ran at consistently high-levels, even when many things were happening on-screen. Some tactics, such as the first charged swing when leveled sufficiently, guaranteed a damaging strike or an interrupt; unsure if this was intentional or accidental, but granting an unbeatable strategy made the game a bit easier than it should have been. The crystal magic system was unimaginative and ineffective in combat, and the scroll system, while forcing the player to plan ahead, was constricting; forcing me to dig through my bags mid-combat to cast a shield spell was an unnecessary pain. The inventory system was typically cluttered even though it sorted things by category. High marks, however, for forcing the player to learn the game on their own and not handing things to the player. Score: 1.5/2.0

Quality of Narrative: For most of Risen, the narrative is top-notch. Both by way of visual /audio cues, good voice acting, and a downright fantastically-written story and character dialogue trees, Risen aims to compel and it succeeds. Easily the best feature of the game - a high mark, considering that the player ends up more or less pigeonholed into a single path once initiated. That this path feels naturally the best choice grants Risen that much more believability. Unfortunately, confusing and unresolved plot elements towards the end of the game dissolve this, as does the ceasing of interaction with any given NPC once their only questline has been completed. Score: 1.9/2.

Connectivity: No multiplayer features, and the Risen official blog seems to contain no mention of upcoming downloadable content. Looking around the net digs up a few player-made mods in production, but it doesn’t look like anything is complete. As a result of this, I’m taking a pass on gauging Risen in the context of connectivity; I’ll amend this as I see what mods become available, and how flexible Risen is to being modded. I suspect that even a cursory attempt here on behalf of Piranha Bytes will push this to at least 1.0. Score: x/2.0

Note: Going to avoid factoring in Connectivity at all.

Final Score: 6.8/8.0
Final Score with Flex Points: 7.0/8.0
(Justification: Risen is one of those rare cases where the overall experience trumps the negatives of Mechanics and Technical Considerations, and deserves to be pushed up ever-so-slightly as a result.)


40oz with: FIFA 10

Sitting down to collect my thoughts on EA’s FIFA 10 on my couch with a 40 of Miller Lite at my side and my favorite Windir album on the stereo, I couldn’t help but think of how alien the situation sounded in the context of thinking about a predominantly European game/sport.

And then, immediately after, I realized that it wasn’t - at least, not in terms of what Arntor (that Windir album) does for the theme of the evening. Arntor is an album of dualities, and often ones of polar extremes. Among the most aggressive and screechy of [very] late-90’s black/folk metal, Arntor was nonetheless painted to a canvas of enormous complexity and artistry that can be as blunt as a sledgehammer and delicate as, well, the finesse with which my room mate can pull off a cross-pass scoring goal in FIFA 10. It is this artistry and finesse that I think unites the two and distinguishes it from more American music and past times, such as football and Slipknot.

(Okay, so Slipknot by no means defines any quality aspect of American metal, but it’s a fun gauntlet to throw.)

So: folk metal, 40oz, and FIFA 10 - they all go quite well together. Inseperably well together, as FIFA 10 is a game about isolated, beautiful moments of synchronization that are entirely amplified by the effects of the alcohol. The surprise interception followed by a fast-paced goal-scoring breakaway. The feeling of handling a complex passing situation flawlessly, and finding yourself balls-deep in the goal net with little opposition from the keeper. You know the sort of moments - those ones that memorialize the ridiculously awesome plays of a game’s history, the ones that every fan has seen in the form of some compilation or another. Generally, I am uninterested in these things, but somehow, inexplicably to me, FIFA 10 makes these moments shining and glorious for me. (Even though my room mate is almost always the one on the winning side of such encounters.)

A bit of disclosure, though: I’ve played FIFA 10 exclusively in LAN multiplayer mode with my room mate, so that will predictably color my thoughts on it. However, I’m a bit of the opinion that the function of any arena-based game like this - and any sports game is, by definition, an arena game when it migrates to vidscreen-and-controller status - is to facilitate competition between two (or more) human opponents. Sure, npc-type opponents can be present, but the focus ought always be on the humanoid. It is unlikely that this is an at all fair way to approach FIFA 10, however, as it was pretty clear to me that a fleshed-out LAN experience was not the intention of Electronic Arts. At least, I really hope it wasn’t.

For all of the successes of the actual gameplay of FIFA 10, such as seemingly faithful modeling the flow of a professional soccer game that my room mate is so fond of praising, essentially no framework exists in the LAN multiplayer that would make this experience a cohesive and fulfilling experience. While the single player game has options to create and edit plays, players, and teams as well as the actual behaviors of each of the these, the player in a LAN game is allowed to create a team and choose between home or away colors. Formations can’t even be changed in this mode; you’re permanently stuck with the formation that is defaulted to the team. Although I was not expecting stat-tracking for LAN games, it still would have been nice, although it does appear that these are collected when signed onto EA’s servers with the game.

It’s hard to tell why this happened; LAN functionality has never had the breadth that single-player and online experiences (in terms of stat-tracking, etc) have, and LAN is even being phased out in some contemporary games like Starcraft II. Clear evidence of FIFA 10 being a dirty bastard console port are found everywhere though, and even in LAN this is present - which is kind of funny to me because LAN has been the historical province of the PC. Mostly, this presence comes in the forms of controls; at certain points during game setup, mouse controls are disabled and keyboard inputs become the only method available. Confusing, confusing.

The controls of FIFA 10, at least with around 10 games played, remain confusing in and of themselves even - and perhaps most especially - during gameplay. Most of the jubilation of actually performing one of the miracle-type sort of plays is knowing that I somehow got the ball and the player to go exactly where I wanted them to, even though I’m never quite sure how I managed to. There are two bogeymen at fault here; the way the game determines the direction the ball will be kicked, and the way the game determines how hard you wanted to kick the ball.

Sometimes, and seemingly independent of the type of kick or pass you choose to execute, the ball will be sent squarely in the direction where the mouse cursor was pointed. Sometimes it simply would not, and would instead be kicked out of bounds or to the enemy. My room mate says that this is because the game is following a realistic model of where the controlled player could actually kick the ball. Although I’m inclined to agree with him on a theoretical basis, I’ve paid close attention to the body orientation of my players, and still cannot seem to find a consistent model to work from. Often, when I was passing upfield in the direction my player’s body was facing, it would send the ball to specifically the team mate I did not want the ball to go to, seemingly independent of which player was actually closer.

Determining shot strength is perhaps even more painfully delicate, and this mostly seems due to the fact that different measures are used for different sorts of kicks. For example, the level of force needed to execute an effective cross-pass is much higher than the level of force needed to shoot an effective shot on the goal from the same distance. Although this need for precision and multiple sets of power measures may suit some of the more hardcore fans out there, I found it an enormous turnoff.

These complaints aside - FIFA 10 is great fun, especially when played next to a friend and near a large bottle of beer. It’s quite easy to get caught up in the adrenaline-moments of the game and lose track of how loudly you shout when you finally pull off that elusive goal (sorry, Landlord Mary), as well as the intensity of your taunts to your room mate. A rather well-done instant replay features allows for the reliving of beautiful moments or vicious slide tackles, and provides a great capstone for an otherwise overly positive experience.

Scoring:
Visual Representation: FIFA 10 isn’t scoring any awards here; three or four different body sizes for players and about as many face/hairstyles across all of the teams drawn upon lackluster, although clear and crisp, graphics. The crowd looked to be made up of flat bitmaps, a small growth over the Playstation sports games I played in middle school. Even still, things come together nicely for instant replays, and really give the game a visceral edge. Score: 1.2/2.0

Gameplay and Level of Immersion: Again, the instant replay is the real winner here; it highlights great moments and makes the game come alive. The ebb and flow of the game mirror the real-life counterpart well, and the cheers of the crowds are convincing and encouraging as they change in pitch and fervor. Poorly implemented controls and a lack of any real level of pre-game strategizing hurt, though. Score: 1.8/2.0

Mechanics and Technical Considerations: As mentioned above, it’s often difficult to predict with any efficacy how effective the pass or shot one is about to undertake is going to be. The meter indicating the strength of shot is at the bottom of the screen and is small, forcing a diversion of the eyes from the action. When things work as you intend them to, FIFA 10 glows golden, and everything just works - but, again, it is difficult to initiate this due to unpredictability. Score: 1.1/2.0

Quality of Narrative: Lacking any system to establish consistency from LAN game to LAN game, FIFA 10 nonetheless provides ample rivalry opporunities; specific players, such as _________ on the German team _________, tend to get their names mentioned often - and thus become targets for retaliation. The instant replay feature really hammers home a great goal and makes the viciousness of a slide tackle from behind all the more brutal. Score: 1.6/2.0

Connectivity: The game rarely if ever stuttered, either in terms of FPS-lag or network latency. Connecting to actual games involved what felt to be an inordinately long pause before newly-hosted games could be seen by the joining player. Again, no real ability to plan any strategy, which seemed to be an exclusive negative to the LAN feature. Having played the game only via LAN, I’m not sure it would be fair to heavily dock the game here. Score: 1.5/2.0

Total: 1.2+1.8+1.1+1.6+1.5= 7.2/10

Sexual Acts, Sexual Objects

What I found most interesting - and perhaps most damning - about not only the articles and their breadth but the selection of the articles themselves - was the entire lack of commentary on sexism and the treatment of women in popular videogame culture. Almost suggesting that how videogames imagine women as a non-issue, their objectification was not only unexamined, but untouched upon.

I find this paricularly disturbing considering that the piece in What They Play addressed sex inside of videogame worlds and narratives, focusing directly on the act rather than the participants as if it were some sort of Roman arena game and the participants unworthy of notice by the spectators as being "people." Is the sexual act - both as an “unchanging” thing from game to game and the detail in which it is rendered - really the only thing worthy of exploration in a piece like this? I do not think so.

As I did not play Mass Effect long enough to develop a sexual relationship, and did not play the other games mentioned, I cannot comment on them directly - but I can comment on what I have experienced. To do this, I look to three games that have captured my attention in recent months, and the suggestions that they make about sexual relationships, those games being The Witcher, Risen, and Champions Online. (Note: Champions Online doesn’t seem to actually have sex acts inside of it, but I am interested in it as far as it portrays physical characteristics of women.)

To begin: The Witcher. A dark, brooding, and often difficult action-RPG game from the eastern side of Europe, The Witcher follows the path of Geralt, a monster hunter, in his quest to figure out what in the hell is going on with the world. While a rather great game on its own that I enjoyed immensely, its treatment of women as sexual objects is nothing less than childish. So childish, in fact, that when Geralt conquers a woman - often by way of showering her in gifts and complements without actually developing any sort of real relationship - a trading-card-style piece of artwork is shown of the woman in an often comprimising position. By comprimising, I mean draped in nothing but a sheet with a black cat centered directly over her crotch. By childish, well -

Although the actual sexual act is shown in blurry, hasty camera shots that reveal no actual details about the act, the process of getting to the act is perhaps more disturbing than anything the act itself could be. Encountering a woman in The Witcher is tantamount to initiating a mini-game; the first question tends to be, “Is she one of the NPC women that will fuck me?” followed by (assuming that the answer was ‘yes’), “How can I get her to fuck me?” The second question is relevant because each woman seemed to have a particular path that must be followed to convince them to engage in coitus; as mentioned above, some women seek gifts, like flowers or chocolate. Some require a topical, conversational relationship and can be rhetorically convinced to disrobe and engorge. Others require Geralt to undertake a quest of sorts, and reward him with fleshy trophies and a trading card.

My language concerning the first question asked when encountering a woman is important and intentional: “Is she one of the NPC women that will fuck me?” I feel the most crass language is necessary here, as the object here isn’t even getting to potentially see a naked lady: rather, it's a mission to collect a trophy. In a game genre dominated by item-collection, little more can be expected when the player is given a trading card for a sexual conquest.

In a similar vein as The Witcher, the recent Pirahna Bites’ game Risen treats women similarly, although doesn’t objectify them quite as literally. For example, as written about by Alec Meer on Rock, Paper, Shotgun (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/10/07/the-risen-report-first-night/), the first woman - and the first NPC the player encounters - is dressed in a bikini top and a long skirt. To quote Meer, “At this earliest of stages, I don’t have the foggiest what the game’s general attitude to women is – but the first example Risen gives of it is not a positive one[,]” and I found that upon finding myself in this situation that I absolutely agreed.

Things don’t get much better from there, however - almost every woman that I have now encountered in the game has been dressed almost identically, with supermodel/pornstar-esque breast measurements, and an ability to dance like any top-class stripper on the seedier side of Flint. Incidentally, the majority of all of the women I’ve seen in Risen, after playing for about twelve hours, are actually prostitutes. While presumably unintentional, it’s still disturbing; I’ve now concluded the first chapter of the game, explored the three major centers of civilization (two of which lacked women altogether with one notable exception), and found that women exist in quantity only in the whorehouse. Whether it was out of curiosity or chauvenism, I solicitied one of the prostitutes, paying her owner fifty gold pieces. Almost thankfully, the game neglected to provide me with even a cutscene, instead blacking the screen out and having my character deliver stereotypical lines about how he had places to be. Incidentally, she said I was the best that she’d ever had, and gave me a magical scroll as thanks. At least she didn’t give me a trading card.

The Witcher and Risen, in addition to being similar thematically and in terms of genre, are also direct narratives from the game writers to the player. This sort of relationship forces a certain responsibility on behalf of the game-maker to understand the messages that they are sending: similar to a novelist and a film maker, the views of the artist are often expressed by their characters, whether consciously or not. It’s pretty easy to play through The Witcher and Risen and have eye-roll (or disgust) moments and move on, chalking it up to male chauvinism and sexism at the developer level. They’re both pretty clearly games targeted at 20-something men, and should probably be viewed as such.

However, some games - like Champions Online - are perhaps even more subversive in their views on women than even games like The Witcher and Risen. In Champions Online, as with many other online and role-playing games, the player is allowed to customize the physical appearance of their character. This allows for a veil to be placed in front of the eyes of the player, shielding them from what might be sexist ideas that the game-makers may have: surely, if the player can create their own character, then if it is a false, media-driven idealized image of a woman, then it is the fault of the player.

But what if the player cannot help but create this “idealized woman”? I should probably explain what I mean by “idealized”; the purpose of Champions Online is to create a superhero-type character that can aspire to physical and mental perfection, flawless in physique and in mind. Unfortunately, the “idealized” woman of Cryptic’s otherwise pretty-decent MMORPG happens to be the “idealized” woman of American media; tall, long-legged, large-breasted, seductively-hipped.

Alright, so this speaks to what Cryptic views as the “ideal" woman - but what does that have to do with an excellent and staggeringly-flexible character-creation tool? Problematically, for all of the options allowed in character creation, small, reasonable breasts are simply not an option. Literally, not an option - see the screenshots below. Damningly, when creating a new character and enterting the “Custom Body” menu, the “Breasts” slide bar begins fully maxed-out. Further, it appears to be difficult (if not impossible) to create a more masculine-looking woman. One of the variants allowed in character generation is the posturing of the character; average, heroic, huge and beast for the men, and average, heroic, vixen and beast for the women. My favorite posture for male characters it that of the beast; hunched over, ready to lunge, ready to kill - but the beast posture for women is rather a girl leaning forward on one leg, which looks nowhere near as badass or aggressive.

The other stances are also troublingly sexual; even average, which for the males means standing with both feet firmly planted and not favoring either side (you know, standing normally and at-ease) .. but for females means flaring the fingers ever-so-slightly and ever-so-coyly, with one leg bent forward at the knee. In terms of posturing, hip and breast size, it is impossible to create a non-over-sexualized female character.

In The Witcher and in Risen, the player could choose not to progress down avenues of fucking women NPCs, and is actually fully-capable of treating women with respect and dignity in the course of their adventures. However, in Champions Online, the player is explicitly barred from playing anything but a full-hipped, skinny-but-long-legged, fully-breasted woman that carries an appearance of lustful detachment.

Although the quests are generic and boring and lacking and character and, thus, tend to avoid putting women into any sort of constricting role in the confines of their narrative, the female figures of Champions Online have nevertheless managed to be more chauvenist and objectified than any of those found in The Witcher and Risen. Many, many more games provide examples similar to these three in the ways in which women are viewed as sexual objects first and characters second, but I think you’d be hard-pressed to find another that managed to do this with its character creation system alone.

NGJ: Red Hands for a Red Planet

Funny thing about the sun from Mars; it’s white. It looks white from Earth, sure - but there’s a yellow tinge to it if you look close, a certain golden aura that emanates through the atmosphere and onto the land below. Sam tells me that it’s white here due to certain elements present in the Martian atmosphere that I won’t try and name - science was never my strong suit, and once I realized that her explanation was veering, as always, to the scientific, I stopped paying attention. Mostly, the shift in coloration is just .. different. Landscapes and structures don’t look how they should look, how they would look back on home. It’s funny, the things you miss.

But today, I am thankful for a white Sol. The incandescent beams shine through red clouds and red dirt and red hills, lending a certain, perhaps appropriate, clinical air to the Eos Administrative Building. Nothing on earth could look so pristine, so clean, so sterile - not even the most heavily-scrubbed and brightly-lit operating rooms in the hospitals back home looked so clean as do the EDF buildings on Mars. Sam tells me that this, again, is due to specific elements found in the atmosphere - but I think it’s something more.

Only wanton greed and overpowering capitalism could permit such a colorless structure, only men - creatures, really - obsessed with objectivism could allow for such lifeless objects to decorate their world. Decorate? Pah. Their buildings scar these red hills, they dominate the landscape even sitting so far below the towering mountains that dwarf them. As much as I may have once found Mars to be alien, Mars finds their ivory presence to be far moreso - and far more unwelcome than ever was I to Mars.

The EDF architects’ rejection of life only makes my work easier, makes it easier to justify what I’ve set out to do. Makes it easier to look to their soldiers as drones, as the Martians call them, make it easier to exterminate them like a swarm of robotic ants. It makes it easier to ignore that, underneath all of that powered armor, that they’re human - that back on Earth, most of them have wives, maybe families of their own. But it doesn’t matter. Here, they are white, bright white, and Mother Mars does not permit such ivoried atrocities to consider themselves men like you and I.

Soon, very soon now, I will detonate the triggered explosives rigged to the foundation of the EDF Administration Building. Sam is sitting this one out and remains incommunicado - “The civilians,” she said, “you’ll kill them just the same - they’re innocent. They’re Martians!” She wanted no part in this. I don’t blame her. Sam’s no soldier. She’s no bleeding-heart, either, usually. I’ve no doubt she’s killed by way of collateral damage her share of civilians, and I told her as much. “It wasn’t like this,” she said, “those couldn’t be avoided. You don’t even need to destroy this building, and most certainly not during the day, not when the bureaucrats will be there.”

Sam, I think, lacks the real will to win this war.

Which I find funny, as it was her and the captain that co-opted me into this fight. I wanted nothing to do with it - I only wanted to mine with my brother. Put some money back, buy my way back home, start a family maybe. I’d thought about buying a bit of land from the Terran government, getting a small farm going, just enough for myself. Then the world could just leave me the hell alone. Things didn’t turn out that way, though.

I don’t know why they pushed me - conscripted me, really - into their fight. They didn’t know me. My brother, Daniel, now he - he I understood. He was always a firebrand, fighting for some cause or another, never able to keep his damn head down. And now he was dead for it. Daniel, like most of the Red Faction, are hot steel. They glow red and bright and true with the justice of whatever cause they rally behind, but they’re malleable, pliable. Their emotions govern them, enslave them. One moment, they’re tearing into an EDF-held village, shooting at seemingly random until the EDF have been purged. The next moment, they’re weeping over the spilt milk of civilian deaths, especially the ones they cause, berating each other for not being careful enough in their death-dealings.

Me, I’m cold steel. Watching Daniel get gunned down for what seemed a minor indiscretion barely registered, and civilian casualties never bother me. Not that I didn’t care about my brother - nothing could be further from the truth - but I assumed that he had it coming, assumed that because I was new to Mars that they’d leave me alone. But then, firebrands almost always have it coming. I fought the EDF initially only because it was a matter of survival; the Red Faction was firing from one side and the EDF the other, and I was forced to choose. Poor decision making process or not, nobody can say that I’m not loyal - to memory, at least. It’s funny though, the way I’ve become acclimated to the white sun, to the red hills and dirt. I’ve never felt a greater loyalty to anything in my life than I do to Mother Mars at this very moment, and - here’s the funny part - I have no idea why. I’d have fought against the EDF in my own way regardless, but this .. this fervent dedication, this loyalty, this .. zealotry, this I do not understand.

Off in the distant west, the loud crack of a sniper rifle rings out, heralding the first EDF sentry kill of the morning. There will surely be more in the hours to come, as offensives are planned for multiple districts across the EDF-held territory. Me though, I’m alone - I prefer it this way. Gives me time to think, analyze, understand - lets me move at my own pace, make sure things get done correctly. I might be going crazy, and what’s damning is that I know it, but I’ll be thrice-damned if I don’t slip down that spiral on my own terms. On terms of well-timed explosives, shining gold in the white morning light.

Sam doesn’t understand what it means to go to war. Sam doesn’t understand that it isn’t merely the Red Faction vs. the EDF, like it was some sort of video game or early 21st century war. Sam doesn’t understand that for Mother Mars to survive, to breathe, to live, then the EDF and their holdings must be purged from the planet. Sam doesn’t understand what it means to bring total war upon an enemy.

But that’s why they’ve kept me around, I think - let the offworlder get his hands covered in blood, let the outsider stain his soul with Martian blood. That’s fine with me. Mother Mars asks this of me, and because she has promised to be good to me, for Mother Mars will I do this, and I will cry no regrets nor speak of bitterness.

When the explosives tear through the building, the orange flames licking the orange sky, not everyone inside will die. They never do. Some get lucky, and by chance place between themselves concrete or steel barriers and the focal points of explosions. Some, inexplicably, will be thrown from the high-rise glass windows to the red earth below and, inexplicably, will survive the impact. Some, simply, will have chosen an opportune time to take a lunch break on the nearby boulevard. I’ve begun to consider them the least fortunate and that it would have been better for them to have died, instantly, in the initial explosion, as they are the ones that will be the first among the survivors to die. They will be terribly aware that a great catastrophe has occured, and fear will grip them - but only until the moment I close the distance between us, and then they will know nothing. What Sam doesn’t know - what I won’t tell her - is that when the red dust begins to settle, I will always be standing amongst the survivors, steel-plated sledgehammer in hand.

I do not relish in the killing. I do not enjoy planting round after round into the spinal column of fleeing survivors, whom run as though I were a great devil, their face a contorted and twisted portrait of abject terror. I do not enjoy knowing that all of this - the execution of the crippled living by way of hammer, the smashing of skulls and spines and hands and legs - is recorded by EDF cameras, beaming the grim footage back to EDF Central Command. I do not enjoy staining the sacred red earth of Mother Mars with the foul and stinking red blood of humans. I do not enjoy that my actions have made me a sociopath.

But what I am is a realist, a believer, a soldier; a mechanic will full knowledge of the tools and machinations of making total war upon an enemy. Fear .. fear is one of the greatest of these tools. It is this tool that softens the enemy, makes them terrified, makes them give ground when they see the grim silhouette of Alec Mason sprinting towards them, sledgehammer clenched-in-fist. It is through this tool that I, and I alone, will not merely drive the EDF from Mother Mars, but beat it into the ground, annihilate it until their biological elements have mixxed into the red dirt of Mars, until the stain of greed and capitalism has been wiped clean from this red planet.

But before all of this, one thing remains: a button must first be pressed.

Graphics are Super-Important!

[[This is the text-only version of this piece. For one with screenshots and some comments from other readers, read the original at: http://www.40oz1game.com/2009/10/graphics-are-super-important/]]

Here, let me put my head on the chopping block: I think graphics are incredibly important in videogames.
Before the axe falls, however, let me explain my reasoning.

First and foremost, good graphics – even excellent, bar-raising ones – will not save a bad game from being a bad game. Gothic 3, I’m looking at you; it doesn’t matter how much you tart up a whore, she will still be a whore. Unless you tarted her up as a a maid or Lady Liberty or something and she actually became one of those and ceased in her whoring, then she’d be something different – but if the shifts in appearance are merely cosmetic, then she’s still a whore. Similarly, dressing up a terrible game in the trappings of an excellent game will not make it an excellent game.

Hell, games are even disparaged for succeeding on account of being attractive and not a whole lot else – because the worst thing in the world is something that is vile and terrible that’s pleasant to look at, isn’t it? There’s something incredibly offensive about the idea of Hitler having actually been a beautiful, elegant, but coyly attractive woman.

Further, it isn’t just the graphical implementations of a game that make it beautiful and stunning; there have been many games that, while attractive and easy on the eyes, are nonetheless visually awful. East India Company, I’m looking at you – you may have been optically charming, but boy, did your interface and overall design suck.
That last bit – the design part – is where the importance comes in, and is vastly more important to me than how realistically hair follicles sway about in the setting sun. Are those human-tendrils drifting about framed by golden rays, or are they just kind of hanging around attracting computerized ions? Do the hairs caress the face of the avatar, speaking to some higher purpose, or are they merely .. just there, popping around at random?

Crysis is an excellent example of a game that succeeds on all graphical measures – as well as gameplay ones. The twisted contortions of a North Korean’s (is it more PC to just say, “Korean”?) face as you strangle him show a weird, oxymoronic care and love to design, as well as the interface encasing your visual field. The explosions, even though developed years ago now, remain among the most realistic I’ve ever seen, demonstrate not only enormous technical accomplishment on behalf of Crytek but also of their understanding of aesthetics. From a design point of view, trucks and men under grenades do not just explode without purpose – each injection of fire-red and burning-flesh orange into the visual field bring balance with them, highlight something, or merely contrast the calm blue of the sea and verdant green of the jungle.

Crysis would still be a good game if the graphical slate was wiped clean and replaced with primary colors and black-and-white smoke from the explosions – but it wouldn’t be a great game. Nomad’s often-desperate leaps from cover object to cover object to unfortunate North Korean would still be thrilling, and that first battle with the nano-suited guys would still be harrowing and demanding of the player. But really, would it be so compelling if it didn’t look as .. well, as bloody real as it does?
I don’t think so. Fallout 3 is a pretty good example of a graphically excellent but blandly-designed game; repetitive, post-apocalypse-red-and-orange environments, generic hills, and childishly violent mutant-man-explosions are pretty for awhile, but certainly got boring. The HUD, Pip-Boy or whatever Bethesda called it, was a nightmare of utility; while the aesthetic matched that of the yesterday-technology so prevalent in the game and looked nice, it was a nightmarish bore to use and the ion-green-refresh stuff became more of a hindrance than a utility, distracting from the damn thing’s purpose: to read stuff about the game. Design aesthetics, then, are about more than just looking good: there should be an actual /purpose/ to each design choice, and this purpose should innately reflect itself in the game.

A game doesn’t need, by any means, to be on the cutting edge of graphics technology. World of Warcraft certainly wasn’t, but it used low polygon counts and a dated engine to its advantage – Blizzard built a game that would run on damn near any computer, and would almost always look at least “alright” while doing so. But WoW’s beauty wasn’t in its textures – its beauty resided, and even resides, in superb color choice and shape implementation. Every set piece and costume item accomplishes something; it draws attention to an important area, lightens a dark-and-evil Whenever playing WoW, it was almost always painfully apparent to me that the guys that designed the game managed to get way further through design school than I ever did.

That’s part of my problem, I think – I was a design student. It taught me a love for aesthetics, an adoration for stuff that looked good, and that often, simple things have the most visual appeal. Right now, I’m playing two games; Heroes of Newerth, and Champions Online. While both are elegantly attractive, I’ll return to why the latter is successful shortly. Heroes of Newerth, like World of Warcraft, makes use of a dated graphical engine. In fact, it looks, at best, like a souped-up version of Warcraft III. Given that WCIII is like, I don’t know, almost a decade old or something, it’s hardly surprising that S2 games managed this – but what /is/ impressive is that they managed to retain Blizzard-level design.

Each of the almost-60 characters has a unique profile and color set, similar to the classes of Team Fortress 2; great care has gone into ensuring that each look not only unique, but are immediately identifiable when viewed by an experienced player for a nanosecond. Even when two full teams of five converge and spells begin flying, the difficulty is never in figuring out which blob of polygons is which character, and this holds true for their skills, too. Rather, the difficulty comes in figuring out how the hell to survive and maybe just maybe kill the enemy motherfuckers – and really, shouldn’t that /always/ be the difficulty in a game? Sure, part of this is because each character has, on average, only two activated skills that need a graphical implementation – but still, that’s almost 120 fully differentiated bits that, at any given time, are immediately recognizable not merely as specific spells, but of also belonging to specific characters.

So – to present a question. Would Heroes of Newerth – or even Team Fortress 2 – be the game that they are without having had the benefit of incredibly talented design teams? I genuinely doubt it; one of TF2’s biggest selling points (at least for me) was the extraordinarily individualistic character design and even the amount of personality that went into each of the classes. It’s pretty much impossible to mistake the smug-bastard expression of the Scout – and even the smug-bastard way he swings his bat – to the belligerently maniacal laughter and minigun of the Heavy. These are the sorts of things that I mean by bits of design that actually /do/ something – every object in the TF2 world was developed to facilitate an ease of immediate comprehension that shames almost any other FPS-sort of game around.

I think a game that pretty much everybody in the world thought was awesome was Portal. Really, I’ve never seen a game sweep the gaming world in such a fashion – can any of us nerds hear “Still Alive” and not grin like a new father holding his newborn for the first time as if to say, “Look at how awesome this is!” Now – would Portal have even been able to /function/ without high-level design aesthetics? Would the heart cube have been half as charming if it was a mere cube, rendered grey-and-white with a heart? Would it have been nearly as panic-inducing had the final conveyor belt leading to the “cake” not looked and felt convincing? I do not think so.

Great design and well-executed visuals permit gamers to become more engrossed and, to use the buzz word, immersed in the game world. No longer are we required to imagine that we’re a chainsaw-swinging psychopath, because we can, through visual trickery and cleverness, actually be that chainsaw-wielding psychopath. This is not to say that things have to look real; Team Fortress 2 hardly looks like real-life – but just the same, everything meshes so well together that it feels like we really are a cartoon soldier rocket-jumping our way to victory.

To return: I’m playing Champions Online at the moment, and find myself compelled to continue playing, for more than any other reason, because everything looks so godamn wonderful. Nothing actually looks real, not the way Crysis’ Korean-jungle-valley-forests-at-sunset looked real – everything looks like a damn cartoon! But a wonderfully rendered and thoughtfully implemented cartoon, with just enough detail to be, inexplicably, immersive.

And it’s a weird feeling to feel immersed in a world of repressed-homosexuality supermen, fascist-fuck-half-man-soldiers, and cyborg-ninjas. The last, incidentally, is what my character is. One of the choices I found most initially jarring was this little black “horizon” line that appears on the exterior edge of most surfaces. It’s sort of like the kind of drawings us average dudes make – every object has a clear outline. This is why most of us can’t draw a nose or a hand for the life of us – these things are defined by their shadows, not their outlines.

Yet, somehow, the outlining in Champions Online works beautifully, drawing attention to game objects and making them stand out in contrast to one another, differentiating one building from the next, and even allowing giant lightbulbs to exist without looking like giant polygons. That, really, is the huge accomplishment of the system – the game doesn’t look, generally, like a computer game. It looks like a comic book! – and this is exactly why, on a visual level, the game succeeds so well. Cryptic knew exactly what aesthetic they wanted, and the designers followed up on this beautifully.

This – an actual /knowing/ of what the overall aesthetic of a game should be – is what makes or breaks a game for me. Knowing it alone isn’t nearly enough – the designers must also be able to determine if the design actually /works/, as often – like with Fallout 3 – I find that it does not. Heroes of Newerth, World of Warcraft, and Crysis have something in common – each game knows exactly how it wants to look, and knows that the idea works.

As said earlier, wonderful graphics cannot make a terrible game a great game – but they can make it an experience worth having. I’ve found that, over the years, far too many gaming writers just love to shit all over graphical considerations for games, stating the now-cliched idea of them not being important and don’t make up for bad gameplay. We know that. Everybody knows that. But to push them to auxiliary considerations so frequently is madness – if image quality isn’t important, why aren’t ‘Graphics-Aren’t-Important’ folks still using VHS? Fallacious argument, to be sure – but I feel it makes my point, if one assumes that all new films are available in VHS as well as DVD and whatever other new-fangled formats are out now.

What I will say is this: terrible graphics, design, and overall aesthetics will, to me, ruin an otherwise good game. I thought that the newly-released indie title AI Wars was a fascinating concept – but absolutely terrible visuals made the game such a chore to play that I just couldn’t get into it. Similarly, the still-in-beta Fallen Earth had such muddied and dated graphics that, even if the game was good (it was mediocre at best, alas) on all other counts, I just couldn’t have taken it seriously. Partially, this is because I spent a thousand fucking dollars a year ago, and I want to feel like I’m getting value out of that investment and pushing the old rig as far as she’ll go.

More than that, however, its because I feel that game developers that don’t hire talented designers simply do no respect gamers. If your interface is a chore to navigate and actually makes the game harder than intended, you’re doing something wrong. If a player cannot look on-screen and immediately identify everything he ought to be able to, you’re doing something wrong. If, at least once in awhile, a player does not stop and stare in wonder and awe at a clever bit of scenery, charming character design, or a humorous sign, then your game has aesthetically failed.
Good design is eternal, and can elevate games to legendary status. Poorly designed and implemented games are temporary and illusory, even if they sell well. Look back on your favorite games of times’ past, and ask yourself: how many of them are poorly designed? If you’re anything like me, then that number is very low indeed.

Review: Heroes of Newerth

Did you play DotA? Were you any good at it? If the answer to either of these questions is no, or you had to actually ask what “DotA” means (Defense of the Ancients - an incredibly popular Warcraft 3 add-on that gets more play today than Warcraft 3 itself), then Heroes of Newerth might not be the best fitting game for you. It certainly wasn’t for me.

Here’s the basic idea: each team has a well where they first spawn, and return after they die. At this well is an item shop, a giant tree/altar (depending on if you’re the good guys or the bad), a series of unit-producing structures that the players do not control in any way, and a few towers guarding everything. Outside of the bases, there are three “lanes.” Computer-controlled trees and demons will walk down these lanes, and then fight each other, and this is where the player comes in - by killing enemy monsters, they gain experience and gold, leading to more power and cashmoney. I see no reason to explain the need for cashmoney as, well, money is a goal unto itself, isn’t it? The ultimate goal here is to cross the lanes, kill enemy monsters, destroy the towers guarding the entryways into the enemy base, and then destroy their well. Each team, at default, gets five heroes, or players. Avatar control is exclusively through a point-to-move setup, more or less the same as Diablo-like games. It’s all very simple and makes a great deal of sense on the first playthrough - but that didn’t stop me from dying constantly.

Although I was familiar with DotA, I hadn’t played it much; the staggering quantity of characters and items, lack of a leaderboard system, and the lure of tower defense maps kept me far away from the game. It didn’t help that when I did try to play it, I failed miserably - just as I did repeatedly with Heroes of Newerth. Regardless of what character I chose, what items I selected, or how I went about fighting, I still died constantly and lost every game. After about 50 games, my kill-to-death ratio was an abysmal 0.1:1. But then, something happened: I picked the Scout, a character able to immediately exit combat and fade into an almost unattackable state, and the game changed for me.

For the first time since I began playing, my kill-to-death ratio (or ktd, as it’s referred to in-game) went up. Not to 0.2:1, not to 0.5:1, not even 1:1 - for each time I died in that game, I killed ten players. It wasn’t that I’d actually gotten any better at the game or had really even begun to understand it - it was that I had an escape move that I could use almost constantly, and I abused the hell out of it.

The moment that I first vanished and escaped a sure death was like an epiphany from God: I didn’t have to die everytime an enemy player came upon me. This lead, predictably, to several games of overwhelming cowardice - but it let me actually /watch/ the game, figure out how people survived and killed each other, understand how to win the game. It actually let me play the game for the first time.

What I’m trying to get at is that the single most important thing to understand about Heroes of Newerth is the difficulty curve. It’s painful and terrible, especially if you’re like me and never played much DotA. You know that rollercoaster in Cedar Point that actually curves inwards on its first descent? Learning to play the game is sort of like scaling that descent backwards, and is almost as foolish as thinking the tug of gravity will leave you alone as you ascend.

All of this sounds as though it would make for a ludicrously complicated ruleset, but it really doesn’t. There’s only one rule in Heroes of Newerth: do not die. It would seem that not dying would be a fairly straightforward matter; avoid big, muscular-looking things with sharp bits, don’t let wizard-y sorts see you with their bastard magic, and run like hell whenever something appears from the shadows to hit you with sticks. Avoiding death, however, is an incredible trial.

Avoiding death is so difficult initially due to the enormous volume of characters. As of today, there are 53, and new heroes are being implemented on an almost weekly basis (presumably until they hit 60). These heroes are split into three archetype categories, in addition to the binary choice of good and evil (titled Legion and Hellbourne). Strength, Intelligence, and Agility. Unsurprisingly, Strength heroes tend to have excellent health, armor, and physical attack. Generally, they also get some of the most useful crowd control-type abilities, like Pandamonium’s ability to grab an enemy in front of him and throw him over the back of his head, snaring him. Before I forget: it’s worth pointing out that Pandamonium is a karate panda that fights with a bamboo cane. Awesome. Okay so, moving along: Intelligence heroes are the spellcasty-sorts; low health and mediocre attack damage, but a host of highly-damaging spells or other utility-based mechanisms. Thunderbringer, for example, has the ability to cast a lightning bolt spell quite frequently. He also has a passive ability that causes damage to enemies nearby him whenever he casts a spell - which can be a pretty lethal combination, especially considering that his ultimate ability hits every enemy on the screen at once. Finally, agility heroes are the ninja-sorts; crappy health pools, generally bad crowd control options, but incredible damage output potential.

Each of the 53 heroes have entirely individualized skills, although there are some conceptual overlaps. Magebane can blink all over the screen, instantly teleporting from one location to another leaving no trail behind; Chronos, also an Agility character, can leap forward almost as far as Magebane can blink, but he leaves a trail behind him that slows enemy pursuers. To be truthful, most of the abilities are spins on tried-and-true action-RPG skills; there are whirlwind skills (via Swiftblade), hit-you-really-hard-from-afar spells (via Thunderbringer, Pyromancer, and several others); there are healy skills (via Jareziah and Nymhphora). Each hero receives a total of four skills; generally, two of them are passive, and two of them are activated abilities. One of these is the ‘ultimate’ of the character, an ability more powerful than most others, and also tending to have very long cooldown times. (Although not all of them are activate-skills; Nighthound receives permanent stealth when not attacking for his ultimate, and Armadon’s increases his stats every time he casts a spell.)

Part of the difficulty of learning how to avoid dying is learning what each of the characters do, and a tactical approach almost guaranteed to destroy the Dark Lady will falter and lead to a quick death against a character like Legionnaire. Further compounding the issue is the item shop, and not just because the organization of the shop leaves a lot to be desired. Counting just the “assembled” items - those items that require multiple other items to create - there are 59 items. 59! All of these add certain things to the heroes; a manadrain attack, an ability to create mirror-images of your character to fool the enemy, a giant mace to ignore enemy armor with, and so on. This, on its own, is enough to cause headaches - knowing what item will complement what hero is rather difficult.

Some items can dramatically change some characters. Indeed, some characters don’t really feel complete without certain items. One of my favorite strength heroes, Magmus, is one of these heroes. He has a slow attack speed, mediocre attack damage, and terrible health for a strength hero. Although he has a dash-type ability that stuns things and a stealth ability that causes area-effect damage, he still dies pretty quick; until he gets ahold of a Portal Key. The Key gives no bonuses of any kind except for the ability to teleport every 15 seconds. None of this is terribly important until looking at Magmus’ ultimate; he channels (or prepared the skill) for three seconds, and then tears the ground apart in a series of highly-damage waves. Now, Magmus cannot move while he channels this spell (although he can move while it is actually tearing the ground apart), so it’s pretty easy for the enemy to run away; why not skip a step and start channeling while hidden in some trees, teleporting in as the ground is ripped asunder?

Each character tends to have an item or two that can dramatically change not only the way that you play them, but also how they must be fought against; a spell-caster acquiring the Assassin’s Shroud, for example, can vanish into stealth at will. But there’s a counter to that; buy an Electric Eye, which reveals all stealth units in a large radius. But there’s a counter to that: kill the carrier of the eye, and they drop it on the ground. And so on - everything here has a counter, and to be perfectly honest, the game is no fun until you learn at least a number of these.

This is because of how quickly and easily one can die when unaware of what in the hell is going on; encounters of 2-4 players rarely last more than 15 seconds, and it can be tremendously difficult to understand why or how you died.

However, playing the Scout allowed me to begin to understand the clockwork mechanisms of Heroes of Newerth, and to see what it was that was killing people. On first glance, the melee and chaos of battle seems like indiscernible madness with random colors and swords being thrown all over the place. As I played more and more games, I began to be able to identiify /who/ threw that sword and from what mouth that orange beam came from. When I play Heroes of Newerth now, I can get a half-second glimpse at a battle and know not only which enemy heroes are involved, but also what skills they’ve used.

While this is a testament to the volumes of time I’ve put into the game, it is much more a testament to the design of Heroes of Newerth - although the interface needs work yet, the actual gameplay is quickly-identifiable and easily-read to the experienced player. Valkyrie’s winged-leap and javelin-throwing skills look radically different from anything Wildsoul or Pebbles or any other character could conjure. Although there are a couple skills that look similar (like almost all of the spells of Pyromancer and the Blacksmith), the sweeping majority of spells are differentiated enough that discerning them is no problem - but again, this holds true only with heavy time investment.

Character design is similarly and awesomely varied; considering that there are almost 60 characters and that none of them look the same, I’d say the dev team over at S2 Games have really outdone themselves. It’s reminiscent of the way that Valve handled the classes of Team Fortress 2; you can, at any given time, see only a silhouette of a player on either team for a split-second, and still be able to identify them. This isn’t to say that none of them are generic fantasy tropes; there are several of those. But they’re unique enough in the context of the other characters that it is a non-issue.

Finally compounding the problem is the player base at large. Although the matchmaking system is designed to keep players in approximate skill brackets, almost all of the players in any of the brackets tend to be giant assholes. The bewildering aspect of this comes in how games are titled and divided; I spend the vast majority of my time in the “Newbies Only” designation, and tend to play games catered towards mediocre players. Astonishingly, players get called “newbs” among other choice expletives for messing up and dying - even though it is a “Newbies Only” game! This really shouldn’t surprise me, but it does every time.

Although it sucks to die a lot when you first begin the game, it sucks a lot worse for your team; almost every time an enemy player gets a player kill, they gain a level and money - and the loser of the encounter loses money, and has to sit in a respawn queue for a period of time depending on their level. What this means is what several deaths early-on in a game will cause enemy heroes to become bloated with experience and gold, while the weaker player grows ever-weaker in comparison; being a new player in Heroes of Newerth is a vicious feedback cycle.

Underneath the absurdly complicated choices and variances in playstyle lie a wonderfully nuanced and tactical game. Certain character choices complement each other in such a fashion that, when skills are executed correctly and at the right time, they can wipe out an entire enemy team. Conversely, pretty much every character has a few characters that are a direct counter to them - Jareziah, the defensive-Paladin sort, laughs at Nighthound, a stealthy agility character, but the Nighthound is fully capable of annihilating many of the Intelligent-based heroes. Feinting, juking, hiding in trees, backdooring the enemy base in times of need, flanking, and simply executing a blitzkrieg all are viable and even required options at times. Playing sitting next to my room mate conferred an enormous advantage to the two of us, but it certainly doesn’t guarantee wins - as really, Heroes of Newerth is one of the most finely balanced games I’ve ever played, and defeat is never more than a few moments away.

Note that none of this speaks to the difficulty of actually managing to /kill/ someone ,and given the huge quantity of escape moves and tricky tactics of enemy players, this can be far more difficult than merely surviving. But I’m not going to detail that - you don’t expect me to give up the only edge I have in Heroes of Newerth, do you?


Leet-Beat Manifesto

I sat down, sighing, and peeled the remnants of the leet from my boot. Vile little things, leets; cute, but they scurry about like fucking ancient earth-rats - only without their systemic fear, so they tend to get trampled underfoot with alarming regularity. How they managed to evolve with such incredible stupidity and trust for giant mammalian creatures is bizarre; on Earth, they’d have never have made it. On Rubi-Ka, they never should have made it - but they did. Well, this one didn’t, and now I had an incidental meal.

It isn't that I tried to kill it - I'd been trying to avoid the thing. But they're everywhere, swarming about in leet packs like stupid, cute, and laughably armless little bodies. Swarms of blankly-staring beady eyes, judging me for killing the bureaucrat that the mission demanded. Well, fuck them. I had his head and the mission reward, and they came at me, damnit. I holstered my Sparkling Freedom Arms pistols, stood, and left, leaving a trail of leet blood behind me. Queue sunsets and happy clouds.

Johnny Robson Can Eat a Bag of Dicks

Kieron Gillen, almost as always, mirrored my initial reactions and later thoughts on over-much games writing;

“Me? I’m a big fan of the idea that specialist gaming continues its demographic splits, so different sorts of people looking for different sorts of writing go to different sorts of places. Even sorts of writing I personally despise. *Especially* sorts of writing I personally despise.” (http://www.snappygamer.com/2008/12/02/the-problem-with-games-journalism-part-one/ [comment from Dec. 2])

..and I really think that he’s on to something. I am particularly attracted to this idea of “specialist games writing,” as it follows the trend of contemporary games in the past few years. Games are no longer run/jump/shoot, necessarily; they’re no longer good/bad/buy/sell; they are no longer time-wasting mechanisms. Actually, they are unless you make, buy, or write about games, but the breadth of people buying those games is as broad as the forms needed to write about them - so the writing really ought to reflect that.

As I’ve said in class and written about a little bit, I find the /experience/ of the player as an individual to be the single most important aspect of games-writing. While I’ve characterized doing this as sort of a Hunter Thompson approach to the field, I’m not quite sure that entirely encapsulates the idea, because often, there is more going on than just “the player run jumps and shoots” vs. “i ran, jumped and shot.” Often, it’s about what things the game is trying to say, too. Take this example from Alec Meer’s playjournal of the new RPG from Pirahna Bites, Risen:

“A shame about her character model, which I can’t help but perceive a peurile intent behind. She’s all washboard-stomach and physically improbable bosom, wearing an outfit that’s somewhere between noblewoman and stripper. At this earliest of stages, I don’t have the foggiest what the game’s general attitude to women is – but the first example Risen gives of it is not a positive one.” (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/10/07/the-risen-report-first-night/)

The focus of this piece overall is most certainly not to explore the gender identification aspects of the game fully, but it points the way that there’s something to be looked into here; women are sex objects. Johnny Robson of Crispy Gamer might bemoan this as over-analyzing and looking a bit too much into a game; but if videogames are bits of media that are having a profound influence on people’s lives (if for no other reason than great amounts of time are spent on them), then it is important to look at them from perspectives like this - and what they are saying women should look like, and how we should treat them. If a game like Grand Theft Auto IV is selling millions of copies, isn’t it important to have some idea what sort-of subversive messages that it is sending (intentionally or not)?

If, for any other reason, I find huge fault with Robson simply for my own personal sake. I’ve been a fanboy of the NGJ-style since I came across it a couple of years ago, and know that the only gaming journalism I really tend to read with great interest is of that variety. If for no other reason, I want to see this overly-complex, hyper-intellectualized stuff on Gamasutra because I, as an individual, find it fascinating. Sure, I want to be a games journalist; but what I will be is the same as what I have always been: a gamer that loves reading games journalism, and demands that great varieties in style exist.

Games-as-Art

I do not like arguments and discussions that revolve around entirely subjective measures concerning definitions - and find that the Games-as-Art argument falls into exactly this problem. That’s because definitions of art change depending on who one asks, and their qualifications for artistic merit shift in accordance to the individual. I even further do not enjoy this argument because of those involved in it; on one side, there are the gamers, fervently dedicated to legitimizing their craft (as any pioneer is wont to do), and on the other side lie the traditionalists, whom are fervently dedicated to protecting the sanctity of their craft - and each side has fundamental misunderstandings, typically, of what “their craft” represents. Note here that I recognize these are perhaps gross oversimplifications; individuals in each of the two groups undergo a crossover, and my binary setup ignores that. However, as will be made clear later, I find that in debating the two fields individuals fall into either of the two categories.

Towards a Definition of Art

Here’s the thing with art and the definition of art: it’s illusory. Today, any given individual that said that Van Gogh’s work wasn’t art would be laughed at; he would be called a philistine or worse, and his views would not be accepted. Even further, if that same individual attempted to lay the same criticism against the impressionist movement as a whole, he would likely suffer a far worse fate. Sure, he might find acceptance in an underground, niche-level publication, but his words would not be considered suitable to a mainstream audience (or even a mainstream art audience). Van Gogh is, however, considered one of the pre-eminent artists of the impressionist movement, lifted on high with such lofty figures as Renoir and Monet.

Yet Van Gogh wasn’t considered as much during his lifetime; his work was seen as inferior to that of other impressionists and lacking of merit. Impressionism as a whole was barely seen as a viable form of art - and yet today, we recognize both as hugely important figures and movements, and would disparage any criticisms to the contrary as stupid and ignorant. It strikes me that, at the time, the most influential of artists and art critics not attached to impressionism had a vested interest in ensuring that the previous art forms held dominance, and that impressionism remained, at best, “low art,” as Roger Ebert would say. I gather that this is because they had invested an education and career into another form of art, and that to acknowledge a young upstart version of the craft would be contradictory to their previous efforts, undermining and devaluing them. Ensuring their own career viability, one might say.

Again - today, impressionism and Van Gogh are inseparable with terms like “high art,” and therein lies the problem: that generations following those of an original creation are those that determine the “art-ishness” of a given thing. What this illustrates is that it falls not to a contemporary group of critics to determine whether or not something is worthy of the mantle of “art,” but rather those that follow them.

So What Was That About Interactivity?

One of the major criticisms against the Games-as-Art movement seems to revolve around interactivity, and the shifting nature of videogames. By which I mean, the player - not the creator - has influence over how the work is perceived. Whether they are bad at the game, miss certain details as a result of pursuing other methods of interaction, or any number of other things that can happen in a video games, they all suggest the same thing; that they simply must /change/ the game, in some way, in order for it to function. Roger Ebert, speaking towards this idea, said that
“I believe art is created by an artist. If you change it, you become the artist.” (http:// blog.newsweek.com/blogs/levelup/archive/2007/07/30/croal- vs -ebert-vs- barker-on-whether-videogames-can-be-high-art- round-1.aspx)
But here’s the thing: art does not exist in a vacuum. Sure, some works do - for example, much of Van Gogh’s work can stand on its own in a museum and be understood. If I would have visited a museum and saw an original copy of Starry Night, it would appear much the same were I to visit it today. This is generally how art functions - but not all art. Installation art - artistic concepts designed around being placed somewhere that may or may not previously had art - has become a large movement in art communities, and is considered to be high art by most critics. (Worth pointing out: during its inception, it certainly was not considered high art - or even low art.)

However, if you were to visit an art installation of Heidi Hatry, you might find that her work somehow lacks the consistency normally associated with art - each time you were to visit a particular one of her many installations, it would change. This is because they are made out of untreated meat (http://bostonist.com/2009/02/17/heide-hatry-heads-tales-menard.php), and, well, meat rots. It changes on a day-to-day basis - it will not be the same for every viewer, and that is part of the point. She uses this changing effect, presumably, to illustrate a point that I will not attempt to define. Not only does her art change, but it requires the viewer to change - the viewer must walk around the exhibit, must experience the changing of perspective, must experience differences in perspective. They, simply by engaging and viewing the piece, must change the piece. They, simply by attending the exhibit when they do, must change the piece.

This idea - that the viewer changes the work of art simply by moving around and viewing it from different perspectives - is not new. It’s been around since the 15th century, and is known as anamorphosis, and the earliest known example of this was from Leonardo da Vinci. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamorphosis)

Although the viewer does not actually change the art piece itself, they are nonetheless required, in both Renaissance and modern art, to interact with it so that the art may effectively present itself. While it would seem that the viewer initially gives or contributes nothing to the piece, I disagree - the entire purpose behind these types of art movements is to /force/ the viewer to give something of themselves, even if that element is merely a change in perspective. Why that change cannot simply be a shift in perspective/position or, to cater to a more literal crowd, the burning of the calories required to move sufficiently, I do not know.
And yet, Ebert claims that only an artist can create art, and that the viewer must give nothing, change nothing, contribute nothing for the piece to remain art. Although I am no art critic and know little about Roger Ebert, it would seem that his knowledge of fine art - “high art,” as he might call it - is lacking in a variety of ways. But how does this apply to the games-as-art argument?

Interactive Art, Interactive Games

We’ve more or less established that interaction can be a core part of a piece of art, whether this come through a change in perspective or a shifting in time. But what about a shifting of input? Does this constitute a higher definition of interaction, a notion of a higher caliber than the alterations that are the tolls of the passage of time? I do not believe so. In fact, I believe that the decision of when to attend an exhibit, as with the rotting meat example, can have a greater impact on the piece than even the wildly varying controller inputs that a game can have.

That’s because the game, regardless of what the player may attempt to do, is entirely consistent with itself. (So long as he plays within the confines of the rules; ie, no exploiting or cheating. This is a fair point to make considering that an art viewer is assumed to not break the rules of viewership; ie, no touching the painting or burning down the gallery) No matter how far through any given player progresses through a game, or what vistas he perceives, or how many scores of orcs he may slay, the game is exactly the same. The disc or binary code that the game was delivered upon is not changed in any substantial way, unless saved game progress is considered “substantial.” The progression between one player to another through a game may vary, but the beginning and end points are the same, provided that they finish the game. The sound effects for each player, unless they have a faulty sound system, will remain consistent throughout the game.

Let’s compare these examples with the meat-art installation mentioned above. Although the code of the game may shift slightly to reflect a player’s progress through a game, so too will the meat installation shift with a viewer’s progress; they may attend the gallery multiple times, and each shift in time will reflect a shift in the state of rot of the meat. Any given player will progress through a non-linear RPG in a different way, but they will have the same approximate start and end patterns, similar to how the exhibit viewer will move through a gallery in a differing pattern from his compatriots, or, to return again to the question of time, will visit the gallery during different snapshots of decay. As each player of a game will have a slightly different audio/visual setup, they will perceive the game itself differently - but so too will the gallery viewer, depending on the time of day they visit or any physical disabilities that they may have.

If anything, it would seem that Hatry’s art is a more illusory and shifting thing than any video game could be. Afterall, she could not rely on a consistency of presentation even from day to day - whereas the gamer will find the introductory level of Contra to be identical in layout no matter how many times they play it or how many years have elapsed since their last play session.

Roger Ebert is a Bourgeois Fuck

I despise the difference in reception and understanding of “high” and “low” art. It strikes me that the primary difference between the two is the artist themselves; those artists that, during the Renaissance, had noble patronage and painted great works were considered to have made “high” art, whereas those lower-class artists that lacked noble patronage made “low” art. Although my difficulty with the terms were probably eluded to, both in the previous sentence and the title of this section, I feel nonetheless that it is important to write a bit more extensively on it.

“High” art, it would seem, is the art of the upper classes - that is to say, it is the art of the status quo. Generally and anecdotally speaking, “high” art forms are those that have been accepted by the community-at-large as being noble, goodly, and beautiful. It may or may not seek to challenge, to displace, to question - it merely serves the purpose of engaging those that already understand the form. This is not to say that “high” art is bad; as said earlier, Van Gogh is considered today to be “high” art, and I find his work to be bloody beautiful, the work of an elegant but twisted mind. Generally, “high” art also seems to be the art of the previous generation; it has been examined, studied, and criticized by many before, and has been deemed worthy of viewing by contemporary audiences.

“Low” art, on the other hand, is the art that challenges the status quo. Usually disparaged by contemporary critics as being “base” and “vulgar,” it is art that often attempts to challenge and question preconceived notions; “Must art be beautiful and hyper-realistic, like that of the Renaissance?” or, “Must art be accessible only to those whom have studied it extensively?” In the last three or four decades, an actual art movement has sprung up around the idea of “low” art - Lowbrow art.

The term “Lowbrow Art” was coined by Robert Williams, an artist that could not get his paintings displayed in any major or influential art galleries. He published a book, intentionally self-deprecating, called “The Lowbrow Art of Robt. Williams,” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowbrow_art) that contained art that Williams described as “cartoon-tainted abstract surrealism.” (from same source) Lowbrow Art is considered invalid by many art critics; the theory goes that an artform becomes legitimate when scholarly, internally-based criticism is done upon it, and since this is lacking, it is not “legitimate” art. However, this may be intentional - my room mate, a follower of the movement, characterized one of the struggles of the movement thusly; “It’s an attempt to create art that you don’t have to go to college and study to understand.” (thanks, Garrett) If the entire purpose of the form is to challenge “high” art, then why should the standards of “high” art - that of internal criticism - be held to it?

What I mean to do is to paint Ebert as an upper-class elitist that shares many similarities with art-elitists from generations past; he is unable to identify new and significant movements, he disparages attempts from new movements to legitimize themselves, and fails to understand that the contemporarily-held definition is illusory and will thus change over time. I involve this line of thinking for a specific reason; he said that “Anything can be art. Even a can of Campbell's soup. What I should have said is that games could not be high art, as I understand it.” (http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/levelup/archive/2007/07/30/croal-vs-ebert-vs-barker-on-whether-videogames-can-be-high-art-round-1.aspx)

This is problematic for many reasons; as I’ve tried to show, his definitions of art-in-general are weak and terribly flawed, demonstrating a lack of understanding of the field, and his accusation against games-as-art never being able to attain “high” art status merely signifies him as a member of the established art community - that same established art community that, time and time again, has failed to recognize new mediums and forms as being worthy of the term “art.”

So Are Videogames Art?

I do not know. As the term “art” is so politically and controversially charged, I don’t even like to use it. As a poet, I write what I believe I know sometimes and what I’d like to know often - but I’d rarely call it art. I despise being called an artist and the weird, counter-culture dirty-city-hippie connotations that it carries. But I’m pretty sure that games can be art - but not all of them.

Similar to cinema, some works are much more profound and important than others, and one does not require an in-depth understanding of the form to see as much. Films like The Fountain are beautiful expressions of specific mindsets, agonizing over the realities of life; others, like 300 are wonderfully bloody and carnage-filled carnivals of excess, and I find the term “art” to apply to them both for obviously different reasons. However, some films - like, say, Battle Royale, a Japanese film about middle schoolers killing each other, are probably not art. One of the definitions my room mate has given (that he does not necessarily cling to at all times) is the purpose of the work; was it created to forward a medium, to make a statement, to create something beautiful? Or was it created to make somebody a bunch of money? If the answer is the latter, then, probably, it is not art; if the former, then it is. This is clearly problematic in that to do just about anything in the United States it has to be something designed to make money (if you’re getting funding for the work) - so there are a great many blurry lines.

This is especially because most major videogames are enormous financial endeavours from parent companies; AAA titles are quickly turning into tens-of-millions of dollar affairs. This is why I instead turn to more indie-based games to look for art.

Passage is a very short game. It is also light on controls, with the player only being able to move up, down, or forward. In fact, it isn’t really much of a game - it’s much more of a statement about death, and the futility of life. You cannot win this game. No matter what the player does, he will die in the end. They can choose whether or not to fall in love with a woman, and although this increases your lifespan, it also makes it much more difficult to navigate the maze that is the game.

Sure, when I play the game I might walk ten steps forward, three up, and two down; but I will still die. When you play the game, you might befriend the woman, walk fifteen steps forward, two down, and one up - but you will still die, in love or not. I might even score more points than you - but if you cannot win the game and just die in the end, then what do they even matter? Passage takes care not to state much directly to you, instead letting the player figure things out for themselves - similar to the way an excellent poet need not state an emotion as much as paint it through words, or a director need not tell you the scene is sad as much as provide a series of evocative imagery.

In the case of Passage, I’m really not sure how this can be characterized as anything but “art.” Graphically, its reminiscent of the SNES games of yore; 256 colors, low resolution, smooth animations. It’s almost like an oil painting in this. What I am not sure of at all, however, is whether or not Passage is even a game.

You cannot win. There is no competition. There are no outcomes but death. No challenges lie within its confines. Are these things that break the definition of a game for Passage? I am, again, not at all sure - but just the same, I find it a captivating and stimulating - if depressing - experience, that I have returned to many times and probably will many more through my passage of life.

Like the anamorphosis paintings of da Vinci and the bizarrely-abstracted images of Van Gogh, Passage shows us something that has not been before; it is an experience that is unique to itself. Videogames are in a similar state; until the end of the 20th century, videogames could have barely even been conceived of. Under what absurd pretense is it that we, when viewing these things contemporarily, can come to attempt to define them as - or deny them as being - art? Holding games up to prior definitions of art is as silly as holding new art forms up to the definitions of old ones - it would be like trying to analyze the black folk-metal stylings of the Norwegian band Windir with the standards we apply to Brittney Spears, and wondering why it failed to conform to our standards. Undoubtedly, the vast majority of modern music critics would denounce Windir as being a terrible sort of burden, a catastrophe to inflict upon the ear drum. But .. didn’t contemporary critics of the Beatles say the same thing?

A Golden Dawn

At its most basic level, gaming journalism is heavily rooted in consumerism. The very purpose behind an in-depth examination of the features and shortcomings of a game are suggestion; a suggestion to play, or a suggestion to not play. Although systems exist in which the trade and playing of games is not done through capital, a system of review nonetheless remains focused on the suggestion of playing or not playing above and beyond any other consideration. That is not to say that games cannot be viewed from a non-suggestive perspective - academics and authors of other studies are (hopefully) immune to such considerations.

The justification for this thesis of suggestion is that most, if not all, of gaming journalism is centered around the consumer in a marketplace of video games. Whether or not they have financial incentive to look favorably on one game or another is not particularly relevant - the gaming journalist that strives towards creating a service for consumers is equally as centered on suggestion as the gaming journalist that is paid by a parent company.

With this in mind, I believe that gaming journalism ought to be done under different guidelines than those of other journalists.

Most journalists I have encountered would argue that a lynchpin of their method is objectivity, or to be as objective towards their subject matter as possible. Whether or not pure objectivity is possible is a difficult question - but one that is not relevant for a gaming journalist. This is because any given gaming experience is, at its core, an experience - from the perspective of a player, from the perspective of the writer, and from the perspective of a journalist. In order to effectively characterize a game and draw conclusions from material presented inside of it, this experience cannot be extracted from the writing process lest a critical piece of the game be lost.

Is any given game merely the sum of its working parts? Would, for example, World of Warcraft be the same game if individual components were removed, or graphical representations significantly altered? Is World of Warcraft its user interface and sound presentation? Yes, to all of these questions; its also player interaction, exploring, killing monsters and so on. But is it more than these individual components stacked on top of each other?

In my obviously anecdotal experience, gamers that I am in communication with that have played World of Warcraft all share one thing in common: their experiences. For one player, it might be an incredible experience - banding together with 39 other friends and killing giant dragons and evil eyeballs. For another, this predominant experience might have been terrible - being repeatedly “farmed,” for example, by an enemy player for hours.

To be “farmed,” by the way, is to be repeatedly killed by an enemy in such a fashion that it prevents the player-being-slayed to do anything but be repeatedly slain.

If either of these players were asked what they thought about World of Warcraft, they would likely respond in, respectively, positive and negative fashions - but they would probably both explain why. “World of Warcraft was awesome - the game let me slay huge monsters and acquire great-looking armor,” the former might reply. And the latter? “World of Warcraft sucked, man - too many gankers.”

A “ganker” is one that engages in farming against another player. They are also known as griefers, and have been playing online games since their inception in millennia past.

These experiences - although made up by me - are fairly generic and common ones found among players of World of Warcraft. Although each individual player will have an individual, personalized experience, they will, I believe, all share the act of having an experience-in-general in common.

So - does a gaming journalist writing about a specific game also have these experiences?

If they aren’t, then they’re doing something wrong - and are in the business for the wrong reasons. These are clearly opinions and will be in no way supported further, but just the same - if a gamer isn’t actually getting the full experience out of the game, then how can they write on it and have an effective opinion about it? I do not believe they can - but I also do not believe critics and journalists somehow miss these experiences.

Yet gaming journalism, outside of a few notable authors in recent years, have failed to successfully integrate these experiences with their professional opinion of a game. So, in a sense, since they are failing to effectively understand or convey a game, then they are failing the primary function of their position: suggestion.

It is with this in mind that I turn towards subjective journalism, almost in the vein of Hunter S. Thompson - ‘Gonzo Gaming,’ perhaps - to illustrate the potential of a game to a potential player of the game. By permitting the writer to shed the entrapments of objectivity, it allows him to fully embrace not merely the game, but his experience with the game - and how to convey that to a reader. There are most assuredly consuming gamers that prefer the nitty-gritty of facts and charts to determine their game selections; this style of games writing will not be tailored to them in the same sense that Thompson’s style alienated many people.

But for many people, his style brought his subjects to life in a way that no other writer in the field was capable of. So, too, can this occur with games - by sharing individual experiences with their readers, writers demonstrate to readers just what it is that a given game is capable of. Did it allow for the writer - and, by the extension of possibility, the reader - to slay a giant dragon with 39 other comrades? Did it allow him to farm an enemy mercilessly?

_________

I recently made a post on my primary blog (here: http://www.40oz1game.com/2009/10/405/) about what amounts to a staged event on behalf of the Something Awful Goons in the new MMO, Champions Online. One of the most-espoused features of Champions Online is the character creation system; an evolution of the system found in (__that other superhero mmo - ack!__), it further expanded on the possibilities of the sort of avatar one could play, and was widely-praised for being far more customizable than anything else on the market. Early previews of the game, and even reviews, were awash with a staggering variety of player avatar designs - giant claw-head things, huge eyes, meathook-hands, and so on. But it all lacked context - sure, it was cool that you could do that.

But what the Goons did actually made me want to play the game. They more or less recreated, on a huge scale, the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers of Saturday morning cartoon fame (or maybe after school, depending on your age). While I detest the Power Rangers and most Jpanese pop-culture remnants along the same aesthetic lines, the Goons - in their absurd rainbow of power ranger costumes - made me want to be a part of Champions Online.

That was because, for the first time, I was able to see what sorts of experiences could be had in Champions Online. Even if I signed up this evening and had the game running tomorrow morning and played instead of going to video game class, I still could not be one of the pseudo-Power Rangers - this is because this experience is unique to them. But I could slowly build a gang of hook-headed creatures to fight alongside me, or build the security arm of a left-wing militant group: the possibilities are endless.

And it is these possibilities that made me want to play Champions Online - not the composite of its aesthetic values, not the vivid, cartoony realism (haha) of the sound effects, nor the towering and sometimes-ominous city-skylines - but the possibility of creating my own, engaging, and unique experience.

It strikes me that the greatest service that a gaming writer can perform lies in charting out these experiences; admitedly anecdotal and unlikely to be recreated by the player, they instead show the player what they /could/ do. Instead of explaining to the player that Red Faction: Guerilla has a series of enemy installations that must be destroyed to make progress, a writer could instead chronicle the campaign of increasingly-brutal insurgent activities against a fascist state and the constant use of fellow insurgents as little more than fodder and distractionary tools. Instead of explaining the charcoal and sooty landscapes of the UT:2004 mod Red Orchestra that is occasionally brought to life with the beauty of the occasional flower, a writer could rather wax and wane the philosophic after he stumbles across a lone flower in a harsh landscape when looking through the iron sights of his machine gun (http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2009/09/done_column_battle_klaxon_on_r.php)

Of course, a gaming journalist must not only elaborate on more abstract notions like “experience” and “possibility” - they must also address the structural pillars of the game, too, like sound, graphical presentation, and so on. But why must these be the focus of most review and criticism? Gaming as a medium is fundamentally about experiences and play - not the elegant arches of gun barrels or the fractal beauty of a fireball spell. These things are certainly a key part of the experience, and should be treated as such - but they should not sit atop the pedestal they currently reside on. Slightly further, it also strikes me that relying on these pillars to support writing is an easy way out - following a formula of “graphics/sound/gameplay/story/replayability/etc” is as boring as a formulaic novel or film is.

It’s a bright future we’re heading into - gaming is still a relatively new field, and the criticism and writings of it are even further nouveau. But here’s the question: do you want your future to be made of the cold steel of numbers, graphics scores, and clothing selection commentary, or a golden dawn made from the tapestries of stories, heroic exploits, and nefarious deeds of a camping griefer? It is in these experiences that suggestion will be best characterized with.

Camping, by the way, is just another term for griefing.