Faceless Bodies

I cracked open Halo 4 last night, confident that I'd have nothing useful to say about it. I'm usually a bit of a prima donna about starting series in the middle--note also my complete lack of posts concerning Mass Effect or the latter Assassin's Creed offerings--but Halo isn't the kind of game that usually falls under that somewhat neurotic edict. It's just never really been my game. It was popular enough in my social group, and like Super Smash Bros., Super Monkey Ball, and State of Emergency before it, Halo filled my suite with an astonishing variety and volume of profanity and inappropriate sexual comments. I'd clocked some field time with Doom on the PC and GoldenEye/Perfect Dark on the N64, but in general, I was better at single-player FPSs than multiplayer, and I wasn't very good at single-player. Aside from the occasional pickup game, the closest I ever got to Halo was Darkwatch, a vampire-themed knock-off that didn't require me to own an X-Box.

I've read loads about it since then, of course. The level design, the fan community, the marketing. Anything I could ever have wanted to know about Halo, there seemed to be an adequate number of people writing about it. So, like World of Warcraft in the early-oughts, it kind of fell off my radar. I was surprised, then, by how evocative I'm finding it, as a game and as a genre. Nothing feels quite like Halo, apparently, and it's bizarre how familiar it feels: that the bits and pieces I remember from ten years ago are definitive enough that I can remember them at a tactile level.

My most persistent point of frustration with the genre is the extent to which the gun erases the avatar: not in a narrative or philosophical sense, but in terms of control systems. Although both are technically true, it would be more accurate to say that the controller (or mouse and keyboard, he added in case those people are reading) is controlling the gun than to say that it's controlling the protagonist's body. The gun is primary, and drags the body with it, not vice versa.

The player doesn't see the world through an avatar's "eyes," the player sees the world from the view of the weapon. Imprecision is often added in after the fact, but in most FPSs, it's simply not possible to point the weapon anywhere except directly in the center of the player's visual field. With the possible exception of the skull gun, this is rather not how projectile weapons work.

One of the first things we learned to do, as we moved to the now-dominant keyboard+mouse/dual stick setup, was circle-strafe: that is, learning to fire precisely while sprinting in a circle around a target. If media effects were as dramatic as some would like to believe, our emergency rooms would be overflowing with twisted ankles.

Bodies simply do not move this way. Even if constant sprinting is ruled out, characters usually move through their environments at a stunning pace, especially considering the weight of the hardware they're carrying. People do not run backwards as quickly as they run forwards. They do not, as a rule, change between running forward and running backwards, while turning, to shoot in a different direction while maintaining their momentum. FPSs seem particularly adept at facilitating the uncanny in other genres: the feeling of momentum in Mirror's Edge struck me as marvelous until I stopped to wonder why it hadn't been in every first-person game I'd already played. It would be rather pointless to say that FPSs aren't "realistic," but it strikes me as odd that "legs" are an issue on which everyone's come down on the side of fantasy. I'm always a bit put off, even in my favorite multiplayer shooters, at the way FPS characters look from from a second-person perspective. They circle and bounce, not like bipeds, but like mobile gun platforms.

The first-person shooter genre is, and always has been, utterly dominated by Daleks.

Evacuate the Dance Floor.

I've noticed that traffic to this site is noticeably up since I joined Google+. Relatively speaking. A 65% increase over "I think my mom reads it" is a substantive increase.

I feel a bit piqued, however, that it happened shortly before the least productive chunk of my life. There are lots of big, blank spaces over there on the Archives tab, but even when nothing ended up here, I scratched out my share of academic publications, journal entries, emails, grocery lists, death threats, slash fiction, and rock operas.

Lately, there has been nothing.

When there is no writing, unsurprisingly, there is little to no gaming. Casual games, so I've read, are ideal for this sort of situation, when time and attention are limited resources, but casual games suffer a peculiar weakness that is little remarked upon: when played in a state of severe depression, a hardcore game is still something like a game. Even if you know every beat, and are playing it entirely from the autonomic portion of your skillset, it still moves at your pace, and responds to your whims. Not a story per se, but more like a satisfying walk taken many times before, as Espen Aarseth once suggested to me. Genre conventions, sufficiently codified, can allow this experience even in "new" texts. Casual games, on the other hand, when played under sufficient duress, cease to feel like anything at all.

The more-than-casual stuff usually holds up. Which is why I found it quite surprising, shortly after helping Kratos to pull--not cut, but pull--the head of Phoebus from his body, that I found myself too depressed to continue playing God of War III. It became clear, at this point, that I had no choice but to dance.

As Jane McGonigal wrote in Reality is Broken, dancing is a) a reliable source of happiness, b) an extraordinary display of vulnerability, which is why our brains so often refuse to consider a) sufficient reason to do it. Personally, I am overweight, uncoordinated, and self-conscious about both my appearance and my taste in music. So naturally I try to find opportunities to dance in public when they present themselves. Same reason scared-to-death undergrad me joined a theater group that would soon have me (diegetically) jerking off onstage. Eventually you just run out of shame. If you're going to feel afraid anyway, it feels better to act in such a way that being afraid is more reasonable.

Which is the confusing part about Dance Central, for me: the utter shamelessness involved in playing it takes the experience far out of the realm of game-playing as I usually experience it. I suppose, by Jesper Juul's criteria, the mimetic interface would classify it as a casual game; perhaps I don't think of it as such only because playing it requires preparation (moving furniture out of the way, tranq'ing the cat) that I recognize as the precise opposite of "casual." As a vocal proponent of non-stupid theory, I ought to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Simple, intuitive interface, pleasant fiction, short time commitment, juicy...it's a convincing case. But it's a bit more than that, as the activity required/depicted isn't changed significantly by the game's feedback. In fact, what Dance Central actually does is apply the tools of fixation--game-like apparatuses--to a fundamental expression of the joy of being embodied.

God of War is many things, but at a narrative level, it's compelling because of bodies. Impossible, inexhaustible, superhuman bodies, and the ways to break them. At one level, it's fun because it's fun to be Kratos. (At another level, it's fun because the game constantly reminds you that you're not Kratos, which is the post I was trying to write when I opened up blogger.) Without emotion, there is no meaning, and without narrative, there is no goal. What is admirable, what is exciting, what is interesting about Kratos is about the experience of being embodied.

When you don't want to be in your body, or any body, it's difficult to enjoy...anything. It shouldn't be surprising that this includes action/adventure games. I find that Dance Central helps me circumvent this problem by making enjoyment of the body the game itself.

I can't wait to see what happens when Harmonix decides to do a game about fucking.