Category Archives: Passion

Well here we are again…

It’s always such a pleasure, being able to write about what’s fun and inspiring for me. But my time… is up. If I have not convinced anyone yet that a video game is a useful medium for conveying not only artistic messages, but also unique and fun experiences, then I doubt I ever will be able to. I’m not certain whether I wanted to convert everyone who read my blogs so that they’d become a gamer as well. Rather, I wanted to let people know that there’s more to it than meets the eye. Every medium lately has to undergo a long period before it’s accepted as a true art in the same style as painting or writing. Film made that journey, and I believe video games will too. After all, we already have those that purport to be video game critics popping up all over the internet. Maybe one day we’ll have our own Academy Awards.

One of the best games from the old reviews, I think.

One of the best games from the old reviews, I think.

While in the beginning of my blogs, as you who read them will know, I wanted to show he unique artistic achievements that I believe have really put interactive media on the track towards acceptance in artistic circles. The PathDear EstherPortal, they all have unique stories, and tell them in ways that only games ever could. The sounds, images, and now interactive feedback so coalesce that the experience becomes truly unique and memorable. With the current state of gaming, independent development has become easier and easier. While the AAA studios continue to pump out sequel after sequel, sticking to safe investments and guaranteed returns, the indie developers with their small budgets and basement studios are pushing their creative limits to give us the next big innovation.

One of the most well-known and best-selling indie games.

One of the most well-known and best-selling indie games.

Out of all the media I follow, gaming has got to be the one that has me the most optimistic and exciting. While, as an avid enthusiast of both, I’ll never renounce books or film, neither of those media benefit as much from the emergence of new technologies and innovations as gaming does. Any small group with enough talent and dedication can make a game that will amuse for hours on end, and cost less than a fast food meal at that. The pool of great games is growing, and whether you just dip your toe in to take a look, or dive straight in, you’ll surely be surprised what you find.

Bioshock

Games with hidden artistic messages may be uncommon, but even more uncommon are games with less subtle views when it comes to political issues. Bioshock, as one might expect given the introduction, belongs in the latter category.

bioshock-bioshock-33811889-1600-900Better late than never, huh Reilly? Bioshock is the spiritual successor to System Shock 2, an old 1999 PC game (one of the best ever made if you ask me). In that it’s a first-person shooter with elements from role-playing games (upgrades, leveling up, etc.), and takes place in a derelict, dark environment with lots of people who’ve lost control of their minds, it’s pretty much an identical game. However, the strength behind Bioshock is the unique narrative framing that it establishes. Instead of being trapped on an advanced space ship like in System Shock 2our main character starts off on an airplane, when the plane crashes and he is forced to take shelter in some strange man-made edifice located on a nearby island. Once he enters the massive, bronzed doors, he finds

Bioshock_2009-01-09_04-43-59-78Well, he finds Rapture. Rapture is an interesting place. In fact, it’s one of a kind, an underwater city. In the calming bathysphere ride on the way down, a fellow named Andrew Ryan explains to you that, since he could not find a place for himself, where man is entitled “to the sweat of his brow,” he decided to make his own. Rapture was a place “where the artist would not fear the censor; where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality; where the great would not be constrained by the small!” I think you see where this is going.

Rapture represented the ideal libertarian paradise, where no government restraint of any kind would hinder free enterprise of all kinds. You reap all the benefits of everything that you do, no matter what, so nobody’s there to stop you when you succeed, or help you when you fail. The system produced some wonderful innovations, including ADAM (and this is where it starts to sound a lot like a video game), a strange element taken from a sea slug that has the ability to rewrite a human’s genetic code. While you’d normally think of curing diseases, or living forever, or something reasonable, the people at Rapture thought differently. Want to lift things with your mind? Fine. Want to light a fire with the snap of your fingers? You got it. Want to throw lightning as the human embodiment of Zeus? Sure.

Now, when you combine these freakish abilities with a laissez-faire system with lax laws and law enforcement… well you have a bit of a problem. Plasmids, the syringes of ADAM that rewrite genetic codes, became an addiction, and the entire underwater nation became embroiled in civil war. The “every man for himself” went from an ideology to a practical reality, and the whole system fell apart. Where, you might ask, comes the political message? Well…

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Atlas Shrugged was a book I read a very long time ago, having little reason to think a game would ever draw inspiration from it. However, the “libertarian paradise” concept draws heavily on this book. There’s also the matter of the writer, Ayn Rand. Andrew Ryan, Ayn Rand, see the connection? Atlas Shrugged is a story about a successful railroad executive named Dagny Taggart, who bemoans the increasingly overbearing government regulations against her business practices. Eventually she is taken to a valley deep within the Rocky Mountains where business is free (and somehow every necessary natural resource can be found), which is essentially what Rapture is modeled after. Bioshock, however, takes a more pessimistic view of how this libertarian scenario would turn out (albeit a much more dramatic one).

X-COM: UFO Defense

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Just last week, I was surprised to find that I’d received a gift over Steam (Valve’s online PC gaming platform) of X-COM: Enemy Unknown, a re-imagination of one of my favorite old games, X-COM: UFO Defense. I took a liking to it right away, but I thought for the blog that I’d take a look back at why the original was so good.

X-COM: UFO Defense was released all the way back in 1994. Originally known as UFO: Enemy Unknown, the game received widespread critical and public success (yes, there was a time when that above image looked good). The game casts the player as commander of the newly founded X-COM project, humanity’s first line of defense against the impending alien invasion. It is your job to equip, train, and tactically coordinate your soldiers to respond to alien incursion, as well as allocate resources for researching the alien menace in an attempt to combat it.

xcom_geoscapeWhat you’re looking at now is the game’s main screen: the geoscape. This allows the player to do all the behind-the-scenes work behind the X-COM project: detect UFO activity, prioritize the research your scientists do, and dispatch forces to deal with alien threats. X-COM displays one of the greatest qualities unique to video games: it’s organic. No game of X-COM is exactly the same as any other. UFOs of random types appear in random places for random missions. Sometimes you can have multiple UFO missions in one day, and other times you’ll go weeks of in-game time without seeing one. Encounters themselves are also extremely varied, and differ depending on where in the world you are. It could be rural farmland, a major city, an arctic tundra, or a desert.

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X-COM is another game that manages to be challenging but also fun. You start off facing an enemy you don’t quite understand, with severely inferior weaponry and soldiers barely out of boot camp, but as you go along your force will become stronger. As you research new technology, your soldiers will start to get better, but so will the aliens’, who will also adjust both their strategies and tactics according to your weaknesses. The enemy is smart: if you start shooting down too many of their UFOs, they’ll try to find your base and destroy it. As you get stronger, they also get stronger, sending out more powerful aliens of all different kinds to face you, and using the terrain to their advantage more. X-COM can be a difficult battle, but it is nevertheless an extremely satisfying one.

Perhaps one of my favorite things about X-COM is the conversations I have with others who have played it. Since every scenario is unique, everyone will have stories about the time they used some clever tactic to outwit the enemy, or the time their soldiers just couldn’t hit a shot, or the time in which they first encountered the Chryssalids (you’re in for a surprise if you ever play the game). X-COM is great because the final result of the game is one uniquely your own, shaped by all the little choices you made throughout the course of the game. There’s a unique connection there that no other game can really match for me, and which lets me pick the game up again and again without getting bored. Check it out if you can, and if you’re a fan of strategy games.

Shadow of the Colossus

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To start, I’d like to apologize to Patrick for not having the time to look into the Sim City controversy for him, but we’ll be doing that next week for sure! Instead, let me distract you with some exceedingly calming images:

Now, we’ll leave the beating “games are art” drum out of this one, since I had all last semester to convince you of that. I’ll just say that Shadow of the Colossus is a pretty, pretty game. In that opening, I’d like you to note all the camera angles, ambient noises, and especially music that all came together to create the feeling of that opening. The world of Shadow of the Colossus is vast, radiant, and above all, desolate. Just in case you don’t have time to watch the opening video, there are a few things at play here. The plot is fairly simple: Your main character (The Wander) wishes to bring back the soul of a woman (what their relation is is never explained). To that end, he travels to a forbidden land to seek the help of the dark god Dormin. Dormin tells him that the feat may be possible, but only if he destroys all sixteen idols in its temple, by killing the Colossi in whose image they were created.

One of my favorite parts of this game is that it features almost not a word of spoken English. All dialogue takes place in a fictional language with a certain air of mystery about it. Dormin’s voice is done perfectly, composed of multiple voices of varying tone and pitch, perfectly conveying the strange mood the game is offering (and I hope I’m not alone in thinking that “We are the one known as Dormin” was a line both brilliantly written and delivered). But I digress, the real fun hasn’t yet begun.shadow-of-the-colossus-image

You hopefully haven’t forgotten by now that the title of the game is Shadow of the Colossus, and that’s what we’ll be talking about next: the Colossi. Each Colossus has its own unique form, like the bird pictured above. Others include a horse, a bull, a sand-worm, and a one-armed swordsman. How does something so small and insignificant kill beasts like these? The special sword the Wander carries empowers him to climb onto them and target their weak points. Getting onto them is the first step, staying on is the second, and getting to each of the weak points is the third. In a way, each colossus is like a puzzle: you have to outwit them with trickery and the exploitation of their unique environments and attack patterns. There are no traditional fights, only these colossi, and their difficulty scales from very simple to extremely complex and difficult. The final colossus (who I’ve taken to calling the Thunder God) deserves a mention for having both a tremendous buildup and an incredibly difficult battle.

To each his own, but to me Shadow of the Colossus is one of the best pieces of visual craft I’ve yet seen. It creates a world at the same time beautiful and dangerous, mysterious and splendid. The skill with which the music, visuals, and ambiance were tailored to create the mood the makers envisioned was fairly incredible for the time, and even deserving of an HD remake for the PS3 (the original was a PS2 release). While I can’t really recommend this game to anyone, if you’re a gamer who’s jaded by certain trends in modern games, Shadow is a game that is truly unique, and leaves a lasting, memorable experience.

Persona 3

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As we head toward Spring Break, I’d like to share with you one of my favorite games, and one I’m looking forward to playing in those long hours in which there’s nothing to do. Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 is a rather interesting specimen of a particular genre called the JRPG. For those of you who aren’t fully familiar with them, Japanese Role-Playing Games are often characterized by turn-based combat, non-customized main characters, and linear story lines (think Final Fantasy). Shin Megami Tensei (or “True Goddess Reincarnation”) is a series of games that focus on the machinations of people in an established universe.

Basically the idea is this: There is a 25th hour in each day, known as the Dark Hour. During the Dark Hour, most people are peacefully asleep within magically conjured coffins (just roll with it), but monsters lurk outside to try and disturb their dreams. That’s where your characters come in, because they remain aware during the Dark Hour, and can fight the monsters to keep everyone safe. How? Well, you use spectral entities that draw on portions of your personality, framed after the Arcana cards found in the average Tarot deck, and referred to as Personas.

Combat is centered around physical skills, and those that require your Personas, and this in turn leads to my favorite part of the game: the social element.

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Apart from the combat aspect is the social one, in which you have free time to go around and talk to various characters, each representing one of the Arcana symbols (the businessman above represents the Devil, go figure). Talking to them creates what the game labels as “Social Links,” which get stronger and level up as you get to know the characters better. Leveling up the social link  will make Personas that fall under the corresponding Arcana stronger. Take President Tanaka for example: His Arcana is the Devil, so if I were to use a Devil persona after leveling my social link with him, it would be stronger because of it.

The best comparison I think I could make would be to a more popular series: Pokemon. In Pokemon, you gather creatures to fight for you, and then use their unique abilities to defeat various enemies. Persona is along similar lines, but you have the extra layer of social links on top of it, which allow you to take a break from combat for a while and do something else. What makes it truly good, though, is how the two aspects are intermarried. Social links are worth it just to see the interesting characters, but they also serve a larger purpose in helping with the overall gameplay. Similarly, the Pokemon-style gameplay is fine with a game that you only pick up occasionally on a hand-held console and then put down again, but with a console game it could easily get repetitive. Persona avoids this problem by adding that extra dimension to the game, which keeps the combat feeling fresh and new because of the connections made between these two separate aspects.

Now, you may be reading this and thinking to yourself: “What is he talking about? That doesn’t sound like fun at all.” If so, I understand, but I’d say give it a try if you have a few dollars to spare, and a lot of time.

FTL: Faster Than Light

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I know you’ll all be disappointed, but this week we’re actually not going to be talking about much in the artistic direction. No, now I’m just going to use this blog to tell you all about a fun game that I’ve been playing a lot lately. As you’ve probably gathered by now, the game is FTL: Faster than Light, and above this paragraph is a picture of it.

Let’s start with the story: You are the captain of the Kestrel, the last hope for the fading Galactic Federation. The long arm of the Rebel fleet lurks behind you always, moving ever closer toward the last Federation base in existence. Your mission is simply this: survive long enough and travel far enough to relay the message.

What I think is unique about this game is that it’s very easy for you to develop your own style of play. Your ship starts out with just a bare minimum of equipment, but as you go along you can get more power, more weapons, more utilities, etc. Every sector you travel to is completely random, so no two games will ever be the same, and your ship and crew will always be different by the end. You also control every aspect of the ship: where your crew members stand, what they do, how much power you have and where it’s allocated, which weapons you’re using, what part of the enemy ship you want to target if you choose to fight, etc. etc. There are lots of interesting (and dangerous) things out there for you to see and experience, so you’ll be able to play this short game many times through before it gets stale.

The reason I chose this game for the blog, though, was to highlight one particular aspect of gaming in general. Games can be easy, moderately challenging, very difficult, or outright murderous. Unlike any other media, the game takes your skill and intelligence to finish, and there’s never anything quite like seeing that final confrontation take place, the thing all your hard work was building toward, when just one false step will mean having to start it all over again and things go absolutely down to the wire. FTL gave me one of the most satisfying gaming experiences that I’ve had in a long time, mostly because it is very difficult, and there’s a lot you need to learn before you can hope to reach (let alone complete) the final three-part boss fight. That being said, I consider my time with FTL well spent, and there are worse ways to spend $10.

Portal 2

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If you’ve been following my blog since the beginning, you no doubt remember my post about the first Portal game, and about how it’s one of the best interactive narratives I’ve ever seen. Its sequel, Portal 2, is possibly an even more comprehensive and interesting narrative experience. For those of you who are unfamiliar: Portal is essentially about a young girl named Chell, caught in a series of intelligence tests hosted by the company Aperture science, and run by an artificial intelligence called GlaDOS. It becomes increasingly clear throughout the first game that GlaDOS does not care much about Chell’s safety, and that the tests are a lot more lethal than is readily apparent. Eventually, Chell is able to get off the rails set before her and fight GlaDOS, causing the entire testing center to explode.

Portal 2 picks up several hundred years after the first game, starting with the same main character being effectively frozen in time as the ages pass by around her. When she wakes, she finds the entire testing center almost entirely destroyed, with only some small vestiges of the formerly massive complex remaining. Eventually, Chell’s adventures lead her deep below the testing center, into a long-abandoned section of Aperture Science. While there, she hears the story of one man…

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His name is Cave Johnson, CEO of Aperture Science. As you walk through these old testing chambers, he instructs you with pre-recorded messages, as if you were one of the original test subjects:

“Welcome, gentlemen, to Aperture Science: astronauts, Olympians, war heroes, you’re here because we want the best, and you are it. So, who’s ready to make some science? Now, you already met one another on the limo ride over, so let me introduce myself: I’m Cave Johnson, I own the place.”

But this original triumphant greeting slowly degenerates when you realize just what the testing center is all about. Apart from being an enormous wreck of its former self, the testing center’s original purpose wasn’t entirely benign, as this little number will attest to:

“For this next test, we put nano-particles in the gel. In layman’s terms, that’s a billion little gizmos that are gonna travel into your bloodstream and pump experimental genes and RNA molecules and so forth into your tumors. Now, maybe you don’t have any tumors. Well, don’t worry. If you sat on a folding chair in the lobby and weren’t wearing lead underpants, we’ve taken care of that too.”

Not so pretty, is it? Throughout the testing chambers, these prerecorded messages tell the tale of Aperture Science’s fall from grace. Where at first astronauts, Olympians, and war heroes were the test subjects, the company was forced to turn to the homeless, and eventually their own employees. Cave himself undergoes a similar deterioration, both physical and mental, mirroring the company around him.

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As you go along, his voice starts to become more faint, and he begins to cough. The sickness slowly pervades and gets worse. He goes from driven and cynical to borderline insane in a way that’s almost pitiable. His formerly taunting yet informative messages become indecipherable rants. Cave Johnson’s descent into madness is mirrored by the player’s journey through the crumbled empire he created. The story is told in a subtle, clever manner, hidden behind some sharp, pitch-black humor, all while you solve challenging physics-based puzzles.

Only in a game could this kind of experience occur. So many elements: level design, narration, music, gameplay, pacing, all work together to create a sense of atmosphere that hammers a story home in an extremely effective way. Given that so many tools go into making a game, it’s truly a sight to behold when all of them work together so harmoniously for a single purpose. And, might I add, this is only one small section in the entirety of Portal 2. If you choose to play it yourself, there’s a whole lot more to be discovered.

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Spec Ops: The Line

I’ll be honest: I was having doubts about whether or not I should continue the gaming topic for this semester. After all, I’d already exhausted a lot of the really, really good games by the end. It was during this period of doubt, over the holiday break, that I got my hands on Spec Ops: The Line.

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Now this is more like it. A game I can actually be proud of and point to to say: See, gaming is growing up after all! Why, you may ask? Well, as we all probably know, some of the best-selling and most well known game series are based on the concept of modern war. You play the righteous Anglo-Americans fighting against either Russians, Arabs, or both to save the world. But is war really so cut and dried? Is this really the way to live a glorious life? Spec Ops confronts us with these idiosyncrasies in the cleverest, most brutally honest fashion.

In Spec Ops: The Line, you play as Captain Walker, leader of a three-man Delta Force team sent into a storm-shattered near future version of Dubai to look for survivors from “The Damned 33rd,” a decorated infantry batallion that volunteered to aid the evacuation effort and mysteriously vanished months ago. Needless to say, you do find survivors, but they only serve to draw you farther and farther down the path to your own degeneration.

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The situation in Dubai, in short, is a mess. Constant fighting flares up between rogue soldiers of the 33rd and armed civilian looters backed by several CIA operatives. The looters attack because they believe you’re the 33rd come to take them away, and the 33rd attack because they believe you’re CIA goons come to kill them. In short, you really don’t have a side, or an objective. It turns from wounded American soldiers under fire from looters, to trapped civilians, to simple vengeance, with the insane Colonel Conrad leading you farther and farther into the heart of darkness.

Despite the atrocities they’re forced to commit, and the utter mental deterioration they suffer, the men keep going further and further into the pit they’ve dug for themselves. The difficult choices they need to make, combined with the stress of combat and the dissonance of killing one’s own countrymen slowly wears on the conscience of each member of the team. They start to fall apart as a unit, held together only by the sheer necessity of survival. Why do all this, you may ask, when their only mission is to find survivors? Well, why do we play military shooters?

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This, I believe, is the question Spec Ops wishes to ask. It takes a look at everyone playing military games in which the objective is to slaughter virtual images of their fellow man by the dozens in the most efficient way possible, and asks “What are you really doing?” As the game progresses, one starts to ponder whether the messages Conrad has for Walker aren’t really directed to the player instead. He asks why we couldn’t just stop, go home, stop the killing and senseless violence. Could it be that a game just asked us why we’re playing it in the first place?

Spec Ops summarizes the whole military shooter genre in that sentiment. Perhaps it’s right, and all us gamers who enjoy military shooters are just trying to fill some void in our personal accomplishments with some kind of hyper-masculine hero fantasy, killing thousands and thousands of artificial simulations of our fellow man for personal satisfaction. Spec Ops sees all this and asks a truly provocative question: “Do you feel like a hero yet?”

Why We Play

Since I know most of you who will be reading this are not yourself gamers, I think it might be beneficial to take yet another step back and talk about why we even bother in the first place. This is not intended to “convert” any non-gamers out there, merely my attempt to briefly explain what I, and perhaps others, see in gaming and interactive media.

I might have just said “‘Because it’s fun” and saved a lot of time, but it wouldn’t be all that informative, though fun is a large part of it. In both the competitive and cooperative senses, video games have evoked in me the same competitive energy and fulfillment I’ve ever felt playing any sport, without the exertion or physical risk (replaced in this case with carpal tunnel syndrome, eye strain, and temptations toward sedentary lifestyles). Further, all I need to do to have fun with friends from other colleges is connect to the internet and open a few programs. There are obvious benefits to this, but what is not so obvious is the potential for changes in the way stories are told.

Media has been evolving for quite some time, adding ever more dimensions. From just words on a page, to audio, to audio and video, and finally to audio, video, and interactive feedback. There is nothing wrong with what preceded it, and each medium has its own appeal, but there is certainly something unique about each one, and the newest is no exception. Instead of watching a story be acted out, or read about one, we can now take part in it, and make decisions about what will happen. We can imagine ourselves as guides to our game characters, as some piece of their internal consciousness, or even as them in their entirety.

There are many ways to tell a story, all differently suited depending on the story being told, and gaming is another way to do so. You may find, as I do, that creepy and foreboding atmospheres mean a lot more when you are really in them, that horrifying results caused by weapons of war have much more impact when you are the one who set them off, that final resolution is all the sweeter when it’s a result of your trials and triumphs. Simply put, gaming can be a very fulfilling experience, as well as fun and challenging. It has a certain special quality that makes it all the easier to get lost in it, as an avid reader might get lost in a good book, or a film connoisseur might get lost in Citizen Kane or Lawrence of Arabia. As it grows, we might find that this medium has more potential than we could have ever thought possible. We’ll just have to see.

The Game Continues…

Well here we are again, it’s always such a pleasure.

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It’s very nice to see all of you again! I hope you break was pleasant, because it’s back to video games for this blog. However, taking into account the various pieces of feedback I’ve received (I.E. “What are you talking about, Jeff?” “I’ve never played a game in my life.” “What am I doing here?” “Is it 9:55 yet?” and various others), I’ve decided to make things a little different this time around. Before, I took it upon myself to analyze a different game every week, acting as if I were making an argument to an audience already familiar with games; now I’ll go more in-depth about various aspects of games themselves, now realizing that my audience is less familiar than I would have previously expected.

Another contrast between the two styles is that previously I sought to convince everyone that games had just as much potential as, or could be just as in-depth as, other media, now I’ll be stressing what makes games unique and different. As I alluded to in my final passion blog from last semester, games (and video games are a subset of games) are an interactive medium, requiring active physical participation from the recipient to be made whole. The Sistine Chapel would look just the same if nobody had ever laid eyes on it after it was painted, but a game is different: every experience of every game is unique in more ways than ever before. More than just individual interpretation that one takes away from enjoying a medium, games add the extra dimension of direct transaction with their audience.

Rather than do a lengthy session on the theory behind video games, which would probably sound dry and boring even to me, I’ll keep choosing exemplary games to showcase the points I want to make, but try to tie them in a little more with the larger picture. I also feel that things need to be proofread a bit more extensively than before, so that everyone can understand the message that I am to put forward. Let me know what you think about this new approach to my blog! Next week we’ll get right into it with: Why Games?

Further, I’d like to ask everyone: What is your opinion about the video game genre?