Uncharted: The Musical, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Murder

I got a PS4 over the holidays.  It seemed like a good time to get in on the new generation.  While the trickle of games has been slow, each system finally has a good enough back catalog to justify a purchase.  Well, maybe.  Your mileage likely varies and there's probably an entire post in that very topic, but that's not what I want to talk about today.  I want to talk about the game that happened to come packaged with my console.

It was this or Battlefront, and ehhh....

I'd never played an Uncharted game before, but I'd heard a lot about the series.  I'd heard that it was super cinematic, that the traversal elements set the standard for an entire generation...and that the protagonist is a mass-murdering sociopath.

Yeah, I don't know why it is that this game series got singled out so hard, but I feel like it frequently gets brought up as an example of tonal dissonance in game combat.  Basically, it's come to serve as a stand-in for every game where your protagonist is a one-man army mowing through hundreds of throwaway goons on the way from Point A to Point B.  If I had to guess why Uncharted is the go-to, I'd say it's because Nathan Drake really straddles the line of likability at the best of times, at least from what I've seen so far.  He's a smug bastard, so I guess I can understand the reflexive instinct to take his little power-trip down a peg.  Still, something seemed off...

So as I started playing Uncharted, I decided to pay special attention to the combat and see if it really did bother me or take me out of the experience.  But...no.  As I played the game, nothing really terrible jumped out at me.  It pretty much felt like every other shooter.  You had your cutscenes where the actual story happened, then your fight scenes where Armed Thugs #122-#145 roll in the door to exchange bullets with you.  Pretty standard.  Intellectually, I understood that what I was doing was completely unrealistic, and yet nothing was really taking me out of the experience in a visceral way.

I did a lot of thinking about this, coming at it from a very different angle than a lot of thinkpieces I'd been seeing on the subject of game combat.  I wanted to figure out just why I, and presumably many others, so readily accept such unrealistic combat structures, and why they seemingly don't detract from the story being told.  And...I came up with a solution.  I warn you, this analogy might change the way you look at game combat forever, but I think I found the cover-shooter's closest cousin among all other media.

Okay, here's my theory:  Combat sequences in action games are like musical numbers in musicals.

Some games make this analogy easier than others.

I want you to think about musicals for a second.  In some musicals, songs are meant to exist definitively in-universe.  When characters are singing, they are literally singing.  Maybe it's part of a show-within-a-show or just a jam session between the leads, but it's supposed to be actual singing like people would do in real life.  But, that's not most musicals.

In most musicals, musical numbers are just kind of a...thing...that happens.  At a certain moment, the band kicks in, the lights go down and suddenly the characters have started to express themselves through song rather than words.  And when it's over?  No explanation.  Reality just goes back to normal, or however normal the baseline of the show is.  No one stops to ask why everyone started singing or how everyone knew the words, and when they do it's more of a self-aware nod to the audience than an actual reflection on the reality of the fiction.

Musical numbers in musicals are an abstraction.  They're a point at which the reality of the fiction becomes less real in service of the fiction being what it is.  Every form of media and storytelling has its own unique sets of abstractions that serve this purpose.  It's the reason you never ask to see the fourth wall of a sit-com family's house.  It's the reason you don't notice when movie conversations aren't filled with all the pauses, corrections and stutters of normal human speech.  It's the reason you accept sound effects in space battles and pulsing soundtracks when there's no physical band visible behind the hero.  In many little ways, every form of media presents an abstracted, adjusted and cropped version of reality, and they do so to allow for what their medium is capable of doing.

In a musical, when a character is singing, what you're seeing is an abstract version of absolute reality.  The emotions of the moment have taken over the physical space you're seeing.  If you want to dig into the "reality," you could say that what you're seeing is an artistic heightening of what is actually a very flat conversation between the characters or of thoughts within a character's mind.  Now, obviously it's boring to think about musical numbers in these terms, which is why most of us don't.  Many of us just accept the musical numbers as being there because...well...that's what musicals are.  Hell, that's what you came to see.  It's suspension of disbelief!

I would argue that combat sequence in games, especially as games like Uncharted do it, are very similar.  For the purpose of the story, all that ever matters in these moments is "A fight happened."  The specific body count and number of bullets lodged in Nathan Drake's abdomen over the course of the battle don't matter, because those are all a gameplay abstraction of what the game is communicating to you.  Really examine the dialogue and the storytelling being done in these moments.  Attention is always pulled towards the general rather than the specific.  Nathan Drake might throw out a quip like "Man, these guys just keep coming," but never "I've killed twenty men just now.  How many more must die?"  That's the dialogue signposting where the story ends and the abstractions for the purpose of gameplay begin.

If you asked most people why shooters have shooting sequences in them, the response you'd get is probably "Well, it wouldn't be a shooter without them."  That may sound like a cop-out in the moment, but think about it in the musical context.  That's basically the exact same justification one would give for musical numbers in most musicals.  It's just...not a musical without them!  Musicals have music so people can engage with the story while hearing music.  Shooters have shooting so players can be part of the action through the interactive loop of shooting.

And furthermore, that's fine.  Games need to be allowed to be abstract for the purpose of being interactive.  Why?  Because the alternative is a goddamn nightmare.

Yeah, laugh it up, but let's think about this.

I can't tell you how many times I've heard the complaint "Oh, it totally takes me out of the game whenever they mention the controls."  To this, I really wonder what the alternative is.  Would you rather the game simply not tell you the controls?  Because it's really one or the other, and the only third option would be to limit yourself to games in which the physical controls are somehow an in-universe construct.  Like, say...it could maybe be a space-shooter where spaceship's control panel is literally a replica of the controller in your hand?  Then, it wouldn't be abstract.  But, that's really damn limiting.  If I'm playing as a teenage lesbian in 1960s London who's coming to terms with her father's drinking problem, there is no context in which the phrase "Press A to Interact" isn't going to highlight the abstraction of the game a bit...but I'd still prefer knowing how to interact with stuff.

Limiting yourself to stories that are free of abstraction is limiting your self to way too few stories.

"So hold up, Alex, did we go through all this just so you could tell people to suspend their disbelief?"

No.  At least, not quite.  My point here is not to invalidate the criticisms people have leveled against Uncharted or any other games of that type.  If the rampant shootiness really does break the fiction for you, that's a valid way to receive the game.  It's obviously not my personal interpretation, but hey, you do you.

No, what I wanted to do was unpack why these elements aren't a problem for so many other people.  See, fiction as an abstraction of reality is always kind of a tricky thing to justify because...well...it's irrational.  On a purely intellectual level, yes, the amount of gunmurder in the Uncharted series is absurd bordering on harrowing.  However, appreciating it as abstraction taps into something a little more subconscious.  I imagine for most people, expressing in words why these sequences do work for them would be difficult.  You'd probably get something like "It's just a game," or the aforementioned "It wouldn't be a game without it."  But when you really examine them, these statements are deceptively deep, or at least imperfectly hint at a deeper truth about storytelling in games.  It's abstraction for the purpose of interaction.  It's "fight" expressed as "shooting gallery."

So really...no, I don't see anything wrong with those sequences.  Uncharted is telling a story interactively and giving the player points of interaction at which to contribute.  It's not realistic, but it's not trying to be reality.  It's trying to gamify these situations into something with which the player can simply and intuitively interact.  It's something we should be embracing as a unique facet of how games communicate moments through interactive actions, rather than forcing these moments to be 1:1 with reality in an effort to put them in-line with more non-interactive storytelling.  It's the identity of games.  It's what, in a very real way, makes them a unique form of art.  It's...beautiful.

...But all that being said, Uncharted's combat kind of sucks, too.

Undertale: Looking for LOVE in all the wrong places

Undertale is a great game, and worth playing.  It has some of the funniest, most inventive and most heartwarming moments you'll experience in a game this year.  The mechanics are fairly solid to boot, especially given that the game was largely a one-dev operation.  You can read more detailed reviews elsewhere, but needless to say, this game is well worth all the praise it's received from every corner of the internet.

But on reflection, I have a problem with Undertale.  It's a rather serious problem.  I almost hate to bring it up given how much people seem to love this game to death, but it's something that needs to be talked about.  It has to do with the moral choice system at the core of the game.  Simply put...I don't think it communicates quite what it's trying to communicate.

I'll try to keep this post relatively free of spoilers, but there will be some.  I recommend experiencing the game for yourself, first.  It's pretty cheap on Steam.

Okay, so one of the core mechanics of Undertale is that you can either kill or "spare" any monster you encounter.  In order to spare a monster, you spend your turn selecting non-violent actions until you hit on the action or combination of actions that makes the monster willing to accept your "mercy."  Then you spare them and they disappear from the battle, leaving you gold but no EXP.  Every monster in the game can be spared, though some are more difficult than others, and likewise any monster can be killed.  This forms the central moral choice system of the game.  Will you play the game as a standard RPG murdertank or will you take a more thoughtful approach and do your best to befriend every monster in the underworld?

From the very beginning of the game, though, something bugged me about this dynamic.  It was hard for me to put my finger on exactly, but something about it felt...off.  At first I thought it was just the harshness of the way the game treats your decisions.  I accidentally killed a couple monster early on in the game, trying to weaken them (as the game explains that some monsters need to be at low health to accept being spared.)  At every turn, the game never let me forget it, bringing up time after time that yes, I had blood on my hands.  While it felt harsh, I also understood what the game was going for.  A life is a life, after all, from the lowliest frog monster to the scariest boss.

For spoilers' sake, I won't explain the exact moment that tipped me over to understanding why I had a problem with this system.  If you've played the game, it's probably not any of the moments you expect.  Rather, it was a non-combat exchange that made me reflect on how the game had handled combat up to that point.  So, I'll skip right to the revelation that made me realize this moral system doesn't quite work.

The monsters are still jumping, hurting and killing you.  You're judged for killing them, but they're never judged for killing you, or even causing you pain.

These monsters mistreat you.  They burn you, crush you, stab you and...airplane you, but you're repeatedly told that the way to be a good person is not to fight back and defend yourself, but to reason with the monsters and become their friends.  There's a nobility to the idea, but the harshness with which the game reacts to you taking just one life even though you've been killed countless times trying to talk monsters down eventually takes on a grim subtext.

In talking about this on Twitter, I felt a bit harsh when I described Undertale as "Nerd Social Fallacy: The Game," but hours later I can't think of a better summary of my problem with the game's moral choice system.  Your only goal (as a "good" person) is to befriend people.  No matter how much they hurt or mistreat you, no matter how much they lie to you or humiliate you or extort money from you, just be the bigger person, reason with them and become their friend.  Endure it all for their sake, even if it means you literally die in the process.  Repeatedly.

Here's an example.

Trying hard to avoid spoilers, there was a boss about midway through the game that I just couldn't figure out how to spare.  I tried all the dialogue options.  I tried whittling its health down.  I tried just standing still and spamming "Spare."  Every time, the boss seemed on the verge of giving up, but never quite did it.  The battles would go on for upwards of fifteen minutes, just dodging and enduring the boss's attacks as long as I could, trying everything I could think of to keep from resorting to murder.  Once, I even walked all the way back to town and spent money on more healing items, just so I could endure more attacks and find a way to get into this creature's heart.

But I couldn't.  In the end, I killed the boss.  I felt horrible about it, and the game was quick to make me feel even more horrible about it afterwards.

However, once I really thought about the moral choice system in the game, I thought back on that fight.  Why did I go through all that?  Why did I try so hard to show mercy to someone who didn't show an inch of mercy to me?  Someone who, despite all my pleading and refusing to fight, continued heartily shoving sharp bits through my body until I died?  Why did I want to be this person's friend?

Because the game told me that's what a good person does.

Okay...

Those of you who know me know that I'm not really the type to complain about my personal problems.  So...what I'm about to say might come as a surprise to some of you, but...what really soured me on this system was realizing that boss fight was a perfect metaphor for a number of relationships I've had over the course of my life, especially recent ones.  I do everything in my power to be the good guy and be people's friend no matter how many times they hurt me.  I make sacrifices for them when they won't lift a finger for me.  I endure their attacks with a smile and try my hardest to calm them down.  When I get hurt, I think it's my fault for not choosing the correct option, or not choosing it in time.  And when the time comes to fight back, to "Attack," I always feel terrible afterwards.  No matter how many times they hurt me, hurting them once sticks with me.

It's not great, is what I'm saying.

When I look at what's signposted as the "moral" path in Undertale, I instead see the worst part of myself.  It's the side that endures, placates and tries to be everybody's friend.  It's the side of me that doesn't care what happens to myself as long as everyone else is happy.  It's the side of me that stays up nights after I've kicked an actively abusive person out of my life, wondering if they're okay.  It's the side of me I've had to try actively over the past year to shake myself of.

It's the kind of morality that only adds up if you have no sense of personal value.  That's the core of "Nerd Social Fallacies."  You put the virtue of ~HAVING FRIENDS~ above basic self-care.

And in the typical fashion of hurtful people, every boss and most of the monsters comes with a baked-in excuse for why they have to make you bleed.  Some claim it isn't their fault, some claim it's for the greater good and some bosses even make you sit through whole monologues about why they have to kill you...as they kill you.  And when the battle ends, if you did fight back, the game will likely waste no time telling you why this makes you the bad guy.

Think about it.  When you die in Undertale, do you blame the monster or do you blame yourself?

I could go on with more spoilery specifics, but that's basically my point.  Despite all I've said, I still like Undertale a great deal, and I absolutely don't think the creator (who's pretty rad) intended any of this.  In fact, I like the idea of a kill/spare mechanic as the central moral choice in an RPG, but I would have liked to see it handled with a bit more nuance.

Or hey, maybe this was the intended reading and this was all an elaborate (if, anecdotally, failed) attempt to get nerds to self-reflect on this kind of all-too-common behavior.

I'm going to do a new playthrough of Undertale, and this time if anyone takes a swing at me, I'm swingin' back.

There But For the Grace of Gex...

"That's a weird way to spell Yume Ni-.." 
Shut up.  
"So is the Yume Nikki article just canceled now or...?"
It's still coming.  I thought this was just a little more important, okay?

I'd like to revisit a previous topic for a moment.  A few articles back I tried to untangle just what makes feminist game criticism so terrifying to some gamers.  The conclusion I came to was that it's primarily a fear of the unknown, of not knowing what shape games would take if the issues raised by feminist game critics were addressed, but I realize now that I was somewhat remiss.  I didn't actually do anything to allay that fear.  I did exactly what the critics I was criticizing do and pointed out a problem without actually working out a meaningful solution.  So let's dig a little deeper, here.

As I said in that previous article, it's overwhelmingly clear that a change needs to take place.  Game stories have grown too reliant on lazy, sexist stereotypes in characterizing female characters, and they're finding it harder and harder to get away with it.  However, I think the reality of what this means is a lot less severe than people might be picturing.   It gets built up as this massive sea change that's going to completely reverse what we think about game narrative...but it really isn't.  How do I know?  Because this has happened before!  Games evolve to reflect changing societal values all the time.  It's nothing new.  And if you don't believe me, just ask Gex.

 (Insert any line from any Austin Powers movie here)

If you've never heard of Gex, you're actually my target audience here because it probably means you're too young to remember him.  Gex the Gecko rose to B-List gaming popularity in an era when mascot platformers were the hot genre.  Every company wanted to make a Mario or Sonic of their own, but Gex was a little different.  Gex didn't just have "attitude," he was cynical.  He was ironic.  His games took the form of movie and television genre parodies, which he'd bounce and slurp his way through while making snarky comments in the vein of Mystery Sci-...eh...Rifftrax.  (Gotta remember the audience, here.)  Today, the idea of a character speaking and cracking jokes during gameplay is taken as a matter of course, but it was fairly revolutionary when Gex did it all the way back in 1996.

The reason I bring up Gex is that I was thinking about Gex 2 last night, as I do approximately every 45 minutes, and I remembered something a little...off about that game, so I went to YouTube to pull up some gameplay footage and jog my memory.

Here's what I found.  (If your browser doesn't allow timestamp links, it starts at about 36:15.)

I don't even...

I want you to drink this level in.  Just drink it.  Chug it so hard it sprays down your face and neck.  This is a real thing that got sold for money in stores.  What you're seeing here is apparently supposed to be a parody of Kung-fu movies, but instead it's just jokes about Chinese food, samurai (!?), and laundromats.  Also you're collecting kabuki masks as you fight...Chinese...dragons...and...Good lord!  I barely even know what to say.  This was actually considered an acceptable thing to make as recently as 1998. 

And the thing is, this isn't an isolated incident, either.  Late-90s video games had this weird obsession with using absurdly racist caricatures of Asian people for...comedy?  I'm not even talking about vague politics of cultural appropriation here.  Some of this was straight-up war propaganda levels of Not Okay.  Seriously, I feel like I should put one of those Looney Tunes racism warnings in front of this entire blog post now.

"What you're about to see was not okay then

and it's not okay now."

But the point of this post is not to just gawk in horror at all this nonsense.  (Okay, it partly is, because JESUS CHRIST!)  My point is that I want you to compare this with games today.  Do you see anything like this in modern games?

"Yes."

...

...Okay, yes, but not as much and not as flagrantly is the point I'm trying to make.  Society evolved and we realized this kind of thing was just lazy and gross, and so games changed with it.  But ask yourself, are games any different?  Are games any less for not indulging in these gross, lazy stereotypes and instead writing interesting and unique Asian characters who are legitimately awesome?  No!  Of course not!  Awesome things are great and now we have more of them!

My ultimate point is that the abandonment of sexist tropes and gender stereotyping in video game storytelling could be just as painless.  Games are better for having originality and creating deep and interesting characters.  Games are better for not being...the things I've posted above.  Games are better for not being allowed to rely on stereotypes to create their cast and world.

I love Gex 2, but if it ever got a remake I'd like to see that kung-fu level get a face-lift.  Drop the lazy stereotype humor and make it an actual, honest-to-god parody of kung-fu flicks like its supposed to be in the first place!  The game would be better.  The joke would work better.  WHY ARE YOU COLLECTING KABUKI MASKS IN A CHINESE-THEMED ST-....

 "We get it."

Okay, I'm sorry.

Look, some day we're going to look back on modern games' treatment of women the same way we look back on that Gex 2 stage today.  It's not a look of hatred or even derision, just a look of relief that we finally got over that cultural barrier.  And the games we'll have then will be even more rad than the games we have today, and we won't feel like we've lost anything in the transition.  Hell, most of us won't even realize there was a transition.  All we'll have seen was a slow progression of games improving, and leaving old hangups by the wayside as a natural extension of that growth.

So yeah, that's the future we're looking at.  That's the future people have been so afraid of.  Doesn't sound so scary to me.

Your Mistake Was to Underestimate My Power

This was going to be about Yume Nikki, but then something happened.  I played the demo for Bayonetta 2, and then other people played the demo for Bayonetta 2.  From there a discussion began, fueled by incoming reviews, and now it seems like a lot of people want to talk about Bayonetta.  I also want to talk about Bayonetta.

So let's talk about Bayonetta.

A Modern Witch

Oh!  If you don't know who Bayonetta is, go play Bayonetta.  Depending on when you're reading this, there may be a shiny new version out for Wii U that's getting rave reviews.  And honestly, I couldn't give her a good summary if I wanted to.  The reasons for this will become clear as we go, but for now, seriously just play Bayonetta.  It's an incredible game and well worth your money.

We all on the same page now?  Good.

Anyway, as I was about to say, there are a lot of divisive characters across the medium of video games.  "Love 'em or hate 'em" types you see as the subject of massive debates on forums.  Recently the topic has turned to Bayonetta, and how people feel about her.  Is she simply an empty shell of indulgent eye-candy pandering to the basest hormonal reactions of a traditionally male audience, or does her aggressively-open sexuality represent something more liberating, even empowering?  I obviously can't speak to whether or not she's empowering for female gamers, but I want to throw my hat in and say that I do consider her a progressive figure.

So yeah, let's talk about that Polygon review that's had Bayonetta fans up in arms lately.  In it, Mr. Arthur Gies gives Bayonetta 2 a scathing...um...7.5.  Okay, that on its own isn't terrible, except for the fact that the review itself implies almost the entire missing 2.5 is on account of Bayonetta's portrayal.  It's more or less what you'd expect.  She wears a skin-tight outfit, her clothes fly off when she attacks, the camera does a lot of loving pans across her body, etc etc.  And the thing is...yes, these are all true.  However, I can't help but feel this is an incredibly surface-level reading.  I don't blame Mr. Gies.  It's rare that a game character comes along with enough nuance that they have a point to miss, but yeah, he missed the point.  He missed the point so hard he triggered Witch Time.

There's a fine line between fighting against the objectification of women and simply demonizing female sexuality.   It's not a solid line, either.  A lot of debate when it comes to feminist theory centers around what makes a sexual portrayal of a woman "okay."  Setting aside how depressing it is that this is even something we need to debate in detail, in cases like Bayonetta's the question usually comes down to agency.  Does she have agency?  Is she in control of her sexuality?  Is what she's doing deliberate?  Is she audience seeing her as she wants to be seen?

And this, right here, is what makes Bayonetta interesting.  Unlike so many video game heroines who've grabbed at the eye from box covers across the ages, Bayonetta displays full agency over her own sexuality.  She teases deliberately.  She moves with purpose, aware of both the audience and the NPCs watching her.

You want an example?  Of course you do.

Take a look at how the demo to Bayonetta 2 opens.  One of the first shots we see is a tight close-up on Bayonetta's ass.  I'll admit, when I first saw this, I actually rolled my eyes a bit.  I'd gone through the first Bayonetta seeing the character as a queen of personal agency, and here the game was throwing me a gratuitous ass-shot out of nowhere with no context.

But pay attention to this shot.

Yes, please PAY CLOSE ATTENTION to this shot.

Within half a second, Bayonetta's hands appear at her sides.  They move slowly, deliberately up her body and the camera follows them.  Her hands disappear into her outfit for a second and then...POP!  Handguns!  Now, did you see what happened, there?  Bayonetta's hands guided the camera up.  She was in control of the camera the entire time.

"That's a hell of a stretch."

Not really.  Bayonetta gives winks and asides to the camera all the time in the first game.  Several of her special moves involve her grabbing control of the camera and striking a pose.  If she's not directly controlling the camera, you at least get the sense that the camera and her have made an arrangement, and you're not seeing anything she doesn't explicitly want you to see.

For reference, let's look at an example from the opposite...xtreme.

Yeah, I'm going there.

Dead or Alive Xtreme is a sad, pandering mess where a bunch of ladies in bikinis roll around in various locales for no reason and sometimes play terrible minigames.  This series is bad and we all know it's bad.  It's gross and we all know it's gross.   But what's the real issue here?  What separates this from Bayonetta?  (Aside from one having actual gameplay depth, I mean.)

The difference is that the sexiness of DoAX is apropos of nothing.  These ladies aren't trying to seduce or tease anyone.  They're not even ostensibly trying to be sexy at all.  Nearly all the shots are of them alone, simply lounging, and the player takes on a voyeur perspective as the ladies proceed to...do things while wearing bikinis.

 

Uguu~

These women aren't in control of their sexuality.  They seem barely aware of their sexuality.  They seem barely aware of anything, actually!  They literally just roll around and the player is given full control of the camera to ogle them.  Having watched some gameplay, not once did I get the sense that any of the characters were actually trying to seduce anyone.  This is just...their natural state I guess.  Ironically, if they'd taken it a step further and literally turned it into the lesbian dating sim it kinda half-pretends to be at times, it would actually be much more progressive.  At least the sexuality would be active and inspired by the women themselves.

Eugh!  Get me out of here.

Ah, much better.

So yeah, if DoAX is the standard model of sexualizing women in games (or an absurdly extreme example of same), Bayonetta represents a new model.  She's active, deliberate, and in-control.  She's sexy by her own design, and what the audience sees of her, she wants them to see.  Is Bayonetta pitch-perfect about this the entire way through?  Of course not, and I doubt Bayonetta 2 is either, but the tone of the work is so overwhelmingly positive.  I honestly can't think of another female character in a video game who portrays sexuality in such a refreshingly power-retaining way.  For her uniqueness alone, I think Bayonetta's a valuable and incredibly progressive character.

"But, if a player is controlling her, how does she have agency?"

There's actually a fascinating answer to that.  I don't have a link handy and it may well no longer exist, but for a while Hideki Kamiya, the director of the first Bayonetta, was doing a series of Let's Play videos wherein he played his own game and discussed some design decisions.  The whole thing was great and really enlightening on the thought process that goes into designing a character-action game, but what caught my attention was when he pointed out what happens if you make Bayonetta shoot a wall.

If you stand still and have Bayonetta fire full-auto at a wall, any wall, she'll start to draw little symbols with the bullet holes.  She'll draw hearts, butterflies, and even her own initial "B."  Kamiya said that this was to express that every action Bayonetta makes is deliberate, even if the player isn't acting deliberately.  Think about that for a second.  Even when the player is uselessly firing at a wall, Bayonetta isn't.  That she "has a plan for every bullet she fires" is along the lines of how Kamiya described it.

Sexual politics aside, if that's not the raddest thing you've heard today, I don't know what to tell you.  But yeah, she has agency independent of the player built right into the mechanics of the game.  Fucking awesome.

"You know, it's funny you bring up Kamiya, because if you think about it..."

Oh, no.

"...she's just a fictional character, so..."

Please, not this argument.

"...Bayonetta has no real agency.  She's always under the control of her author, right?  A man is still dictating her actions."

Okay, I hear this a lot and I really, really hate this line of logic for a whole host of reasons.  First and foremost, it pretty much invalidates 90% of character analysis.  If we can't view characters as people and judge their actions by the logic of the world they inhabit...what's even the point of fiction?  It's a hard-reverse of the standard "Death of the Author," making the intent of the artist the most important thing.  Only, it's not even really authorial intent, but perceived authorial intent based on things like the gender of the person creating the work.  This is the reason prioritizing authorial intent doesn't even work, because outside of very rare circumstances you kind of have to guess.  Most artists don't even understand their own work, after all.

Beyond that, if you take this reasoning much further you start getting into really gross arguments about who's "allowed" to write certain things, and who's allowed to decide who's allowed and who's allowed to decide who's allowed to decide who's allowed.  Yes, societal privilege is a thing and there need to be checks and balances in place to keep authors from getting too complacent in vomiting stereotypes willy-nilly, but this is entirely the wrong angle to come at that problem.

"Also, Bayonetta's character designer was a woman."

You know, I didn't even want to mention that, because it shouldn't matter.  But yes, it's true, Bayonetta's costume and design were created by a woman. 

 If anything, the modeling team made her 

proportions more reasonable.

What I will say is that this is what makes authorial intent particularly impossible to discern in something as collaborative as a AAA video game.  Bayonetta is a character "created by a man," but what about the woman who designed her look?  What about the woman who provided her voice?  What about the woman who did her motion capture?  What about the men and women who created her world?  How much authorship do they have?  Bayonetta didn't spring from Hideki Kamiya's forehead fully-formed, after all.

So yeah, that's the long and the short of my feelings on Bayonetta.  She's a character unlike just about any other in video games, so I'm not surprised so many people seem torn on what to make of her.  As that Polygon review shows, she doesn't work if you reduce her to a series of bullet points.  She wears a skin-tight outfit.  She gyrates.  She teases the camera.  On paper, she's the worst female protagonist you could imagine for a modern game, but through care and clever craft, she comes out as one of the best.

Look, I'd love to see more female protagonists in games that aren't sexualized at all, irregardless of agency.  I don't think the world needs (nor deserves) another Bayonetta, but I'm happy for the one we have and wouldn't trade her for anything else.

And so, Witch Time has ended.  Barring any further interruptions, I should be on-track to covering Yume Nikki next.  So stay tuned to see what topic distracts me next!

Talking Walking

Today I'm going to talk about the most divisive game genre in all of video gaming.

"Free-to-play?"

Okay, second-most.  I'm referring to "Walking Simulators," and that in and of itself is a rather loaded statement.  The term "Walking Simulator" has been applied as an insulting brand to a number of low-interactivity, story-based game experiences.  People being people, it has also since been "reclaimed" by game developers all too proud to advertise the story focus of their game.  Because, you know, once the insults start flying this has to become a massive war and we can't just step back for a second and realize there's actually a common point to what's going on here.

At the core of this controversy has been Gone Home, a story-based indie title about a young woman returning home from college to find her family mysteriously missing.  As she explores the empty house, she finds it covered in passive-aggressive notes they decided to write to each other instead of simply talking about their problems like normal people.  So begins her quest to piece together what happened.  No puzzles, no enemies, just a slow reconstruction of past events by completing the YA novella that is her sister's diary.  Yeah, in case you couldn't tell from the summary, Gone Home didn't really hook me, and it wasn't just me.  It was one of the most divisive games of last year, with some people absolutely swearing it was a landmark storytelling achievement for video games, and others going so far to say that it wasn't a game at all.

So why was Gone Home so divisive?  How to people manage to feel so wildly different about these "Walking Simulator" games?

Okay, first let's unpack the idea of "Walking Simulators" and define what they are.  This is tricky, because it tends to get thrown around quite a bit, often as a way to discredit games which people feel are overly lacking in meaningful interaction, but I would argue there is a workable definition we can pull from all this.

The way I see it, Walking Simulators are games that lack a core "loop" to their interactivity.  The reason a lack of combat is so noticeable to most people is that combat is a loop that is often employed to drive people through a game.  Simply put, the loop is the satisfying, tactile form of engagement that keeps you playing.  In a racing game, the loop is doing races, and you continue to play because you enjoy the races and want to race more.  In a game like Bioshock, the combat and collection elements are loops that keep you moving from area to area.

In most games, the loop is the carrot on a stick that leads you through the story.  Gone Home does things a little differently.  In Gone Home, the story itself is meant to lead you through the house.  The desire to learn more, find more pieces and understand what happened is the core of the experience.  Basically, the game does nothing to "trick" you into caring about the story.  Instead, the experience is predicated on you caring about the story enough to continue, more similar to a television show or a book.

And this, right here, is why Walking Simulators are divisive.  Simply put, if the story the game is telling doesn't hook you...there's nothing else in there to do so.  The game doesn't employ anything else as a vector for engagement outside the story being told.  If the story bores you or, hell, just isn't something you can relate to, the whole thing feels like a waste of time and there's nothing to keep you there.  On some level, it's easy to see why some people might have trouble classifying it as a "game" at all.  Interactivity has commonly been understood as the primary engagement vector for games.  It's not that Gone Home lacks interactivity, (because you do absolutely interact with it,) it's that the interactivity isn't the thing holding you there.  The interactivity is an excuse or conceit to deliver the story, rather than the other way around.

TANGENT:  It's interesting, when you think about it.  Games are kinda the only form of media that can pull you all the way through the experience on the merits of something other than the story being told.  A game can have an absolutely awful storyline, yet still send you away satisfied if the gameplay was solid enough.  I don't say this as a knock against the medium, but at the same time, is there really any mystery as to why we continue to put up with bad storytelling in games?  Maybe John Romero wasn't too off the mark when he said the story in a game is like the story in a porno.  I mean, that is the only other media I can think of where it's commonly something other than the story keeping your attention.

On the flip side, it makes sense that people defend Gone Home so strongly from critique.  If the game does engage you, that means the story resonates with you.  I've seen plenty of articles praising Gone Home that boil down to "I was also a punk-rock suburban lesbian teenager in the 80s!"  Okay, that's a bit extreme, but my point is that if you got into the game that means you either identified with the characters or could just empathize with their situation enough that the desire to learn more about them drove you forward.  In a Walking Simulator, the primary mode of engagement is, very directly, your emotions.  Therefore, it becomes easy to conflate a dismissal of the game with a dismissal of one's own feelings.  And that's when things get ugly.

"So who's right?"

No one.

"Eugh.  How did I know you'd say that?"

Look, the fact of the matter is that story-based games like this are going to inherently be divisive.  To appreciate a Gone Home or a Machine for Pigs, you absolutely have to be picking up what the game is laying down in terms of story.  It can't be helped that the Walking Simulator you adore is probably only going to appeal to a fraction of the greater gaming populace, no matter what it is or what it's about.  What we can do is recognize that this is a fact of the genre.  Don't hate on people for thinking Gone Home is a masterpiece and don't hate on people for thinking it's a boring waste of time.  Because, at the end of the day, it's both of those things...depending on who you are.  It's your personal experience with the game that matters, regardless of how it was received by anyone else.

"Wait, one more thing before we go.  In games where the focus is on interactivity, isn't the player telling his or her own story?"

Yeah.  That's a good and, perhaps, more charitable way of looking at it.  In a game like Skyrim the story you're really engaged with is the one you're telling by running your massive orc through a bandit camp with a flaming battle axe and no pants, not whatever those dragons and wizards are blabbing about whenever they grab your face and talk at you.  It should be no surprise that popular Let's Play channels tend to be so heavily personality-driven, when the player is the primary storyteller in most games, whether its explicit about that or not.

This is another way Walking Simulators potentially alienate those not on board with the story being told.  They represent a removal of story agency from the player.  Even if the protagonist is technically "doing things," it's all at the behest of the author and not the player.  Lowering interactivity lowers the potential for emergence and all that.

"Okay, now for balance's sake, say a nice thing about Walking Simulators to close us out."

What if I told you a Walking Simulator was one of my favorite games of all time?

There's a reason I picked the Halloween season to discuss this topic.  Coming up next, I'm going to talk about a game that's very near and dear to my heart, Yume Nikki.

Until then, pleasant dreams.

"What Are You Afraid Of?"

So a lot of really reprehensible things have happened in the space of video game fan-ness over the last couple weeks.  I'm not gonna summarize, mostly because I don't have the stomach to research it all in the detail that would be required for a summary.  Suffice to say a lot of women, particularly in the space of video game journalism and critique, have been the targets of systematic harassment over the last two weeks because...Wait, why again?

No, really, that's what I want to talk about.  As so many of us sit back and just watch in befuddled horror as this all unfolds before us, the question I see on everyone's lips is "Why?"  Why the hell are people doing this?  What do they want?  What's their endgame?  I see a lot of people say "sexism" or "misogyny," and these are decent enough shorthand for how these things are allowed to continue, but those aren't really explanation of what motivates the harassers into the blind fury they seem to be displaying.

So what drives these people?  I don't think it's anger or prejudice or a fear of change.  Instead, I think it's a fear of the unknown.

"Unknown?  What the hell's there not to know?"

Let's face it, video games need to change.  That's a big part of what Tropes vs. Women has been about.  They're mired in regressive ways of thinking, outdated ways of telling stories and they're killing themselves by alienating so many possible players by sticking to stupid traditions.  Every critique I see of gender, race or whatever in video games focuses on the fact that games need to change...but not always how they need to change.

So this is where I admit I haven't actually watched Tropes vs. Women yet.  I mean...what can I say?  It's Feminism 101.  I see the summary when each episode comes out and I'm like "Yep, already made aware of that one years ago." So, I can't actually comment on that show specifically, but I can comment on a lot of the criticism of representation I do see on Twitter and Gamasutra and wherever people are belching out opinions.  A lot of the things I see fall into the category of "raising awareness" and "signal boosting."  Basically, making sure as many people are aware of a bad thing as possible.  Often these things are presented without much comment, other than the person confirming "Yes, this is fucked up.  Look at it."  Now, while I think it's very important that stuff like this be made public and absolutely feel we need to talk about it...I honestly don't think this signal-boosting model is very effective at inspiring change.

I call it "Drop-the-Mic Criticism."  You point at a problem, say "This is a problem," drop the mic and walk away.

If you follow me on Twitter, you'll notice that every time I critique something, it's always through the lens of how that thing could be improved.  "This character would be better if they expanded her backstory," "Having more female protagonists would increase the range of stories that could be told," etc etc.  This is deliberate, because I want to stress to people that I'm trying to make the thing better for everyone.  I always focus on the ways that better representation improves the experience for everyone that plays games and makes video games better than they are today.  I do this to head-off the vitrolic response that criticizing games and game storytelling usually generates.

"Okay, hang on.  You're saying that people need to be able to suggest improvements before they can criticize something?"

No, I don't think criticism is something that needs to be "formalized."  The rantiest, most profanity-laden YouTube comment might still have a decent point to it.  It's just...not making its point effectively, and is more likely to provoke a knee-jerk negative response than inspire the change the poster is looking for.  There's no "right" or "wrong" way to make a point, but it's important to consider how effective your tactics really are vs. the people you're ostensibly trying to convince.

My main point here is that drop-the-mic criticism is terrifying if you're a person who happened to like the thing being criticized as it is.  It's terrifying because it makes it 100% clear change needs to happen, but 0% clear what that change will be or what that thing you like will look like when that change is over.  Progress is always a two-step process of identifying problems and then solving them, but when all you do is identify problems, you give the subconscious impression that you don't care what the solution is.

Lemme put it this way: A lot of people accuse feminist critics of video games of calling for "censorship."  This is ridiculous.  No one wants censorship.  No one wants games to be pulled from the shelves.  Censorship is the absolute worst-case solution to the issue of sexism in games...but it is a solution.  And if you, as the critic, give the indication that you don't care what the solution is so long as the problem goes away, a non-zero number of people are going to leap to the worst-case scenario, be it out of anxiety, a lack of creativity or both.

I hate to do call-outs, but if you want an egregious example...I get really frustrated by Fuck No Video Games.  It's basically an entire feed of drop-the-mic tweets, just stamping a big red "X" on every problematic bit of every video game (and fanbase thereof) out there.  I get the point and I get the value of it, but this is a really ineffective model of criticism.  No matter who you are, reading through that feed is just a frustrating experience.  It doesn't inspire you to want change or improve the space.  It just makes you want it to fucking stop!  But like...you can't do anything, because it's not suggesting any solutions.  It's just showing you problems with things you likely have little to no control over.  Spend any amount of time binging on that feed and you won't be able to see any solutions beyond setting the entire planet on fire and starting again...and that's not very useful for anybody.

"Look, not everyone's a storyteller or a game designer.  You can't expect everyone to be able to imagine solutions to these problems."

Well, maybe you don't need to imagine!

Another thing I take care to do consistently on my Twitter feed is consistently praise good examples of representation in video games.  For my part, I will sing the praises of Saints Row 3 and 4 forever.  They don't get everything right, but those games have some of the most level-headed and progressive handling of race, gender and sexuality I've ever seen in a video game and I encourage everyone reading this to play both of them if they haven't so far.  And the best part?  Saints Row 3 and 4 kick...ass!  They're incredible video games.  They're a go-to example of how a truly feminist game can appeal to absolutely everyone.

And has the games media given those games their due for their incredibly deft writing and handling of character?

...

...

"...That's the game with the dickbats, right?"

Sigh.  Anyone mind if I have a little tangent, here?

TANGENT

So when Nintendo showed Splatoon at E3, feminist-type-people like me got absolutely hype.  Here was shooter with a focus on the female cast!  And the squidgirls were (immediate fanart notwithstanding) totally awesome-looking and non-sexualized.  Talk about something different and new!  What a bold direction for Nintendo.  This could easily signal a shift in the industry, if a major player like Nintendo is able to make a move like this as though it were nothing.  Game changer!

Then, after E3, this little infographic surfaced...

Guess what game is most conspicuously absent from that list!  If you said "Project Giant Robot," you're right, but also where the hell is Splatoon!? Anyone feel like writing an article about the most progressive surprise of the entire show?  Anyone have anything to say about that?  No, instead ~2,300 articles were written about some dumb thing some dumb guy making a dumb assassin game said about how modeling a female character would be too hard even though I'm pretty sure he actually meant making a second animation set would be too hard which was the reason Crackdown didn't have a female playable agent because all the male agents were basically palette-swaps and AAAAARGH!!!

Look, if you only ever promote bad examples of things, that means people only ever see bad examples of things, and that means they can only ever imitate or draw from bad examples of things because creativity is a myth and everyone just remixes stuff they've already seen in new ways whether they're conscious of it or not.  I would argue that it is infinitely more useful to promote good examples of things than to condemn bad versions of things.  Good versions give people a roadmap.  They tell the world what it is you want to see more of.  You don't need to imagine it!  It's right there!

I could get into a tangent-tangent about why ~2,300 people decided it was a better use of their time to all independently confirm some dude was being dumb than to bring something progressive to light, but I think that truly does deserve its own post so I'm going to wrap up the tangent here.

END TANGENT

So this has been long and rambly, but I hope I'm getting my point across.  The reason the pending changes coming to the game-space are so terrifying to many gamers is that there's a real lack of clarity as to what that future will look like.  The focus of the conversation hasn't been about how this future will be better for everyone, and lead to more kick-ass games like Saints Row 3 that everyone can enjoy and get something out of.  Even if there is no call for censorship (and there isn't), when the call is for "(fill in the blank)," I find it hard to blame people for filling in the worst-case scenario.

So I hope this gives people a new way of thinking about this controversy.

"Yeah, great going, jackass."

Huh?

"You spent this entire post criticizing the VICTIMS in this conflict.  You're blaming THEM for arguing incorrectly or not talking about sunshine and rainbows or whatever.  Don't you have anything to say to the AGGRESSORS?  Y'know, the people sending the death threats and the harassing messages?"

Um, yes.   All of the above, actually.  Everything I've said is actually directed more at them than anyone else.

"...Go on."

Look, I said above that I don't think criticism is something that should be formalized, and I mean it.  There's no "right" or "wrong" way to argue something, and just because a mode of criticism is less effective doesn't make the points its raising any less important or valid.  What Anna Sarkeesian is going, what Fuck No Video Games is doing and what drop-the-mic feminist gaming advocates all over the world are doing is not the problem and it never was.  It's good and important work, and acknowledging these problems is a vital step towards making games better.

What I'm saying is that I understand why this...vile response happens, and why this kind of criticism stirs up such visceral feelings of fear and anger in some people.  Yes there are ways to mitigate it, (and as someone with an aversion to conflict, I chose to walk that path as closely as possible,) but in the end I think it falls on the people who experience those feelings to come to grips with them.  It's not always easy to understand why your emotions drive you to do the things you do.  If it was, we'd have no need for psychology as a science.  I don't think most dudes who get viscerally upset whenever a new Tropes vs. Women makes the news actually understand where that gut-punch is coming from.  That's why all the arguments surrounding it devolve into goalpost-moving and silencing techniques.  People don't know why they're mad, just that they're mad, and fuck you for saying they shouldn't be!

I hope that, no matter who you are or where you fall on these issues, I've said something that makes you think.  I'm just one person, and I don't claim to be an expert on any of this.  What I want more than anything is for there to be an honest discussion, without malice or hesitation, where we show our true feelings and realize we ultimately all want the same thing, which is more awesome video games.

Thinking Inside the Box

The word "innovation" gets thrown around a lot in the gaming community. "We want innovation," people will cry, "We want new experiences and fresh gameplay concepts!" And, contrasted with this, people will lament the procession of samey first-person shooters and motion-controlled minigame extravaganzas which flood today's marketplace. The assertion that innovation in dead in big-budget game development is, if hyperbolic, increasingly common even by industry analysts.

So what's the problem? Are the cries for innovation really falling on deaf ears? Is there really no way to get high-profile game developers out of this rut they're in? I say "No!" on both counts. The real problem here is that, for all the ranting and raving done on the subject, a lot of people don't seem to put much thought into what innovation actually is or, more importantly, how it comes about. If you ask me, the sameness of modern video games comes from the fact that modern game designers have too much freedom to do what they want as opposed to too little. Innovation comes about when you have restrictions to work around and sacrifices to make.

Imagine for a second that you had a magical pantry. (Just...just go with me, here.) In this pantry, you could get any kind of ingredient you wanted and thus make any kind of food imaginable. On the surface, you might believe that this would allow you to create new and innovative dishes every night, but think about it for a second. If you had access to every ingredient on Earth, why would you ever choose low-quality goods? Why would you ever bother with ingredients you don't like? If you hate eggplant, why would you use eggplant when you have so many other options you do like?

Now imagine a second magical pantry. This pantry also contains any ingredient imaginable, but only a few of them at a time. Every night the contents are randomized, so you might have a bunch of ingredients you like or you might not. And that, my friends, is when innovation really kicks in. One night you might have eggplant as your only available vegetable, so you'd have to really think about how to make it work. Maybe you could try cooking it a different way than normal or maybe you try covering it in a really rich sauce, but the fact that you're restricted in what you can use is forcing you to be creative.

Modern, big budget game designers are a lot like the first scenario. Between the massiveness of their budgets and the beefiness of modern hardware, they have all the resources they could possibly want when designing a game. And, as such, they just continue to make the same "comfort food" they like the best almost every time. Oh sure, some days they may feel a little adventurous and cook up something new, but they've no real reason to.

However, things weren't always like this. Going back to the NES, Super Nintendo and even Playstation eras, game design was more like the second scenario. Game designers had to fight against the upper limits of the hardware every time they created a game, and this forced them to think of innovative ways to do more with less. If you think back on all the old "classic" games, there wasn't a whole lot to them. In Super Mario Bros. you run, you jump, you duck and you occasionally find one of three power-ups. It's a simple but very elegant core of gameplay which the designers could iterate outward into a million different challenges, all pulling from the same relatively small set of tiles and enemies. The developers surmounted the limitations of the hardware by focusing on making core mechanics that were fun and versatile enough to stand the test of time.

Another example of innovation through limitations would be the first Silent Hill game. In many games of the Playstation and Nintendo 64 era, the problem of "draw distance" was tricky. The hardware being what it was, the system just couldn't render that big an area at once, so the player always had to deal with a sort of "fog" blocking their view of far-away objects. When faced with this, Silent Hill's developers made a brilliant move and turned a hardware limitation into a core of the game's atmosphere. In the haunted town of Silent Hill, the ever-present fog became a big part of gameplay, and the concern that a mutilated beast could come charging out of it at any moment kept the player on edge.

This process of "innovation through limitation" is also the reason you see so much creativity in small, independently-produced games. In the case of these indies, the limiting factor isn't the hardware, but rather the money. Indie start-ups only have so much money and time they can pour into a game, so they need to put a lot of thought into how to get the most bang for their meager buck. Just like in the old days, this means building an engaging (and usually unique) core to your gameplay which you can iterate out any number of ways. This is why you see indies taking advantage of things like procedurally-generated content and abstract or retro-stylization in their games. These elements which may be considered too strange or bland for big-budget studios are, like the eggplant, the ingredients with which indies are forced to work to get results.

"So that's a nice theory and all," you might be saying, "but I thought you said innovation isn't dead in big-budget studios. If just yelling at them to innovate won't work, what should we yell at them to do?" I'll admit it does sound pessimistic to say that the very freedoms game developers have is stifling their creativity, but I think that innovation through limitation can still drive the industry forward. It's all about following one simple rule...

DEMAND QUALITY!

Just think for a second how much the gaming community lets developers get away with. We have games that are glitched, to the point of unplayability, at launch and are only fixed by patches down the line. We have games where human character models get loaded onto birds, ragdoll physics bug out for no reason and...I don't even know....yet we don't seem to care. We don't complain about getting obviously-unfinished and untested games. We just let developers kinda do...whatever, and this is exactly the problem. As it is, a lot of modern games (particularly "open world" ones) feature a crushing amount of seemingly half-done content which feels like they just took every single idea the brainstorming room threw out and tried to cram it in there. The result tends to be a gigantic, schizophrenic mess that really illustrates the "Less is more" concept. Once upon a time, it was a lot easier to accept a game being buggy or feeling unfinished. The hardware was newer and the developers were smaller, some of them working with budgets no higher than the indies of today. But now, with the sheer amount of money and manpower going into AAA titles, there's no longer an excuse, and developers need to start being held more accountable for what they sell.

If we, as consumers, demanded games with actual polish to them it would once-again force developers to seriously consider what to put in and what to leave out. Developers would need to concentrate on having a core set of fun and engaging features (which are easier to playtest) rather than a zillion conflicting, stupid features which no testing team in the world could do justice.

Now that hardware has reached a point where just about anything is possible, it's up to us the audience to set the limitations which will drive the industry forward. Simply put, it's time for developers to once-again start thinking inside the box.