Ignis Fatuus

Penny Arcade's "Extra Credit"

2011-12-03T11:30:00.000-08:00

As a slight deviation of form, this post is not about a specific game but about another group of gamers and their analyses about games in general.

To start off for those of you who are unfamiliar with Penny-Arcade: PA is essentially a web comic created by two gamers in the late 90's. They'd basically comment on video game culture and joke about it. Since its conception, the Penny Arcade team (franchise?) has evolved into a company that's perhaps best known for its Penny-Arcade Expo, which chances are you've heard about since it's been in Boston before, and for the Child's Play charity, which is basically just a charity to buy sick kids video games to play with while they're stuck in a hospital.

Among the things PA has done, one that cropped up is called PATV. Initially it seems this was just a kind of "reality show" look into the workings of the team. It has since expanded and one of the shows they feature is what I'd like to show you today. I recently discovered "Extra Credit," and I noticed that this group focuses on topics that I was trying to raise in a much more developed and intelligent way than I do with this blog.

Extra Credit is basically three people: James Portnow is the writer, Daniel Floyd is the editor/narrator, and Allison Theus provides the art. It's a minimalist show, the art is just stick figures and representations of the topics discussed. The meat is in what and how the topics are discussed. A small example is that Deus Ex post I dropped toward the beginning. I noticed that these team did a very similar show on Deus Ex and how it's concepts relate to the real world, though I think they did a better and more succinct job at it than I.

If you're curious, the episode can be found here: http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/deus-ex-human-revolution

The topics this team discusses are great. They range from gaming-specific topics, such as specific games, female roles in games, design choices, and so on. But they can also cover topics more accessible to those who aren't as immersed in gaming as the Extra Credit team, such as: how marketing works (with regard to games), general psychology (with regard to games), and addiction (with, you guessed it, regard to games).

The link for all three seasons of the show is: http://penny-arcade.com/patv/show/extra-credits

If that's too broad, a couple of cool topics I recently watched are:

The Singularity (if you don't know what this is, they explain it in the show), http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/the-singularity

Where Did Survival Horror Go? http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/where-did-survival-horror-go

Zombies! http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/zombies

Metro 2033

2011-12-01T11:42:00.000-08:00

Today's post is a bit of a cop-out, I'll admit. Someone wrote a fantastic article covering the points I briefly touched on, so I'll just throw it up here.

The article I'm talking about is written by Lee Kelly. I don't recall how I found this article and I don't know who this author is, but he did a great job. A quick overview of Metro 2033: it's basically a post-apocalyptic story based on a best selling Russian novel. In the distant future there will be a nuclear war, and the audience is taken to Moscow's metro tunnels where the Moscovite survivors now eke out a living. Metro 2033's deeper storyline is a bit of a mystery, the setting itself being simultaneously explicit and implicit in explaining what happened. Therefore, I won't dive into it in any detail, in case any of you gentle readers decide to try it out. Likewise, if you're one of those people, it's probably best if you just stop reading here.

For the others, here's the conclusion to Lee Kelly's awesome post. He basically sums up everything I wanted to point out, just from a slightly different perspective, so I'll swipe his stuff and expose you all to it:

"Some people imagine that videogames are all about scoring points and ascending levels. This vision was defined by arcade games of the eighties and nineties along with their homebound counterparts. For commercial and technological reasons, these games were almost exclusively about challenging the player to complete objectives of increasing difficulty. Gamers still talk about "beating" a game, as though its only purpose was to pose a challenge for them to overcome.

Many games really are all about finishing top of a leaderboard, but those like Metro 2033 strive to be something else. Calling it a "videogame" is really a misnomer, because it's certainly not a video and it's not really a game, but it's futile to fight linguistic conventions on the matter.

After finishing Metro 2033, I strolled into another room where my wife had been working. She turned and asked, 'Did you win?' It's a question she often asked when I was done playing videogames, but never had it seemed more preposterous than at that moment. Had I won? I had finished the game, but it had felt nothing like winning. Would she ask me that same question had I just finished reading a book or watching a movie? I hadn't won anything, but neither had I lost. The question had presumed I was just playing a game, when I was really playing a videogame.

I didn't know how to answer my wife at the time, but maybe, after writing all this, I finally can: 'No darling, I didn't win, but I might have learned a little something about myself. Perhaps that's better than winning.'"

Lee Kelly's full article can be found here:
http://ambientchallenge.blogspot.com/2011/10/learning-russian.html

Frame Narratives

2011-11-20T08:52:00.000-08:00

Today's topic is frame narratives. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, the simplest explanation is the concept of a "story within a story." So, when the old hermit in the story of "The Knight and the Hermit" tells the knight a tale of savagery and madness, that's a framed narrative. The reason I bring this up is because it's often used in games, and has been for a fair amount of time. Likewise, some of the new stories are surprisingly good.

Probably the easiest to spot and disregard are the literal side stories found in games. If it's a game set in the real world, you can find excerpts of Richard III, fake TIME magazine articles, and so on. Space adventures sometimes have alien publications, while medieval themed games have a variety of books and stories, some which have nothing to do with the game itself.

The next aspect of frame narration is where the game developers use it as a tool to minimize the suspension of disbelief in the player. For example, running through a game tutorial tends to break the fourth wall a bit, but if you can cloak this tutorial in some sort of side story, it fits within the world and becomes more fluid. One interesting example of this furthered aspect is Bioware's early 2011 release, Dragon Age 2. The game's literal story is pretty boring: some dwarven storyteller is being interrogated by an interrogator. And that's it, even when the end of the game hits.

The real story though, is in what the dwarf tells the interrogators, which is of course, your characters story molded through your actions. It's a fun take on the framed narrative, but not one without pitfalls. If you're even more curious about it, there's a sweet article over at Destructoid: http://www.destructoid.com/dragon-age-ii-s-frame-narrative-explained-194942.phtml

The final aspect I'll talk about is probably my favorite. In many games, you'll find stories in one form or another (could be a book, or a TV show). But when the side story is an allusion to the story of the game itself, it becomes way more entertaining. A quick example: thinking back to the original Deus Ex, there were a bunch of excerpts scattered around from the book, "The Man Who Was Thursday." It's a real book, published in 1908 and written by G. K. Chesterton. Essentially, it's set in Edwardian Britain, the story revolving around a group of anti-Anarchist detectives. Though worlds apart, it's a bit fun to be running around this cyberpunk world, finding random bits of a similar fight against conspiracy and authority placed in old school Britain.

The much longer example is probably my favorite framed narrative found in a game. The original Max Payne, released in 2001, made waves for being the first game released that featured the slow-mo action you'll commonly find in games these days. Running around as a hard boiled detective in snowy New York City, you'll come across a TV left on, playing this weird show called Address Unknown. Though you only see it once, it's in the sequel that the story totally gets fleshed out. Found across a bunch of random TVs, the story of a man running around New York, being chased by a variety of people and eventually succumbing to his own madness is a super fun play on the Max Payne storyline. If you're curious, someone uploaded its entirety onto youtube:

LIMBO

2011-10-07T10:10:00.000-07:00

Next up is LIMBO. Developed by Playdead and published by Microsoft, it is a 2D "arcade game," by which I mean it was originally available via Xbox Live's Arcade. Simpler games are usually available via arcade, other examples include Geometry Wars or old SEGA games re-released digitally. Thus, LIMBO is a fairly short, 2D puzzle-adventure game. "2D" means that you can move up, left, right, and down. Ohterwise, the gameplay itself consists of moving around boxes or performing jump puzzles, all the while controlling a voiceless protagonist.

Similar to my previous entry, I'll try not to go into the story of LIMBO, but try to talk about the method the story is told. Additionally, there's almost no plot in LIMBO. There's the little boy -- our protagonist -- and this foul, creepy world of black, white and grey.

Perhaps the most striking feature of LIMBO is the setting. The world is mainly white and black, with shades of grey between. The word "bleak" springs to mind, but barely manages to cover it. The setting also abruptly changes, a forest becoming an iron mill becoming a city becoming a cave. This is an immensely dangerous world. Nearly everything found within either dangerous or outright hostile. Dead bodies are common, as are monsters. A very weird place for a little boy to wake up to.

There is an eventual point of the game's story, but Playdead has left it incredibly ambiguous, allowing the player to determine what is going on and why. It's almost too easy to do this by the time you complete the game, and the curiosity of this insane world keeps you going.

Just as an aside -- I suppose -- is how similar the game's style is to shadow theater. Shadow theater -- or a shadow play, or shadow puppets -- is what it sounds like, a story told via shadows. There's a real cool Wikipedia article on it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_play). It goes into it's an ancient method of telling stories.

Unfortunately, there isn't much more to say about LIMBO, because of how ambiguous and minimal the story is. Suffice to say that it's a big mystery, where very little makes sense, and everything has a dream/nightmare quality about it.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

2011-09-26T12:28:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd begin with Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Released on August 23, Deus Ex: HR is published by Square-Enix and developed by Eidos. A quick reference: Square-Enix is the company that developed the ever popular Final Fantasy series, while Eidos might be familiar as the creators of the Tomb Raider brand.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is the third game in a trilogy, but it acts as a prequel. The setting is the year 2027, and the player character's name is Adam Jensen, head security officer of Sarif Industries. An over-arching theme running through all three games is the concept of augmentation. The term "augmentation" essentially means a man-made change or addition to a person's body. In the case of the games, it means replacing eyes, legs or arms with mechanical equivalents, with all the advantage that may bring. Originally, it was imagined that augmentations would be helpful for amputees or other disabled individuals. Unfortunately, the human body will not accept mechanical augmentations without the drug Neuropozyne, which is administered in weekly doses.

Human Revolution itself is a convoluted story of conspiracy, action and mystery -- none of which I'll go into much, if at all. My big focus is the concept of augmentation as an ethical question. In the year 2027, augmentation has become cheap and easy enough that many healthy people replace their healthy limbs with mechanical equivalents, with their reasons for doing so being particularly varied: because they wish to improve themselves, or because augmentations are in fashion, or for other, non-health related reasons.

Curiously -- at least to me -- a wide movement across the globe reacts to these augmentations, often with extreme hostility. The game itself even features certain areas and street signs asking "augmented individuals, please enter from rear door." Initially, I thought it odd that people would react to augmentations in a hostile fashion, and that it was invented as a story device to give the player natural antagonists. Eventually, I began to look at other aspects people tend to split over -- race, gender, sexuality and abortion being four quick and easy analogies -- and it seemed possible for something like what the game presents to be accurate. Socially, I wondered if people could "get over" certain contemporary questions, would we simply create new ones to argue about?

Human Revolution takes this question to the next step, by having the idea of government conspiracy to control populations via their mechanical augmentations, among other exciting but extraordinarily far-fetched devices. Still, I believe the developers used facts to craft their fiction, and it's interesting to see the link between the two.

Here are a couple of videos I thought would be helpful:

The first is from Sarif Industries, proponents of mechanical augmentations and the benefit they could bring.

Get More: GameTrailers.com, Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Sarif Industries Trailer, PC Games, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360

The second trailer is from an organization named Purity First, which opposes willful augmentations.

Get More: GameTrailers.com, Deus Ex: Human Revolution - SDCC 11: Purity First Propaganda Trailer, PC Games, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360

This final video is perhaps the most interesting. It was apparently made with the help of Square-Enix, but it features a variety of modern-day "augmentations." There's nothing as dramatic as the previous two trailers, but it's interesting to see how far current replacements for limbs and body parts have come.

Ignis Fatuus Introduction

2011-09-26T11:50:00.000-07:00

Hello all!

Just a quick introduction of the general direction I thought I'd take this blog: I love video games. So, I've decided to essentially blog about them. The things I figure I'd try to focus on are things that are somewhat relevant to our day-to-day world. For instance, some games extrapolate social issues from current, real life examples, and I think it would be somewhat interesting to take a look at those things that can be easily missed.

I'll do my best to be broad in terms of description, but I'll also try to avoid plot and settings details that would ruin a game's story. That way, basically anybody can understand what's going on.