Talkin' X-COM Blues

About a week ago, I got bored with being scared and angry all the time, and I said to myself, "Self," I said, "#FuckEverything. Let's play X-COM for an entire week." I've had better weeks, to be sure. But I've had worse weeks as well, many of them recent.

I'm on the periphery of gamerness at the moment--amusingly, now that I'm the industry news guy at SFP--and I can barely be arsed to keep track of the new console news. Something feels very after about everything these days, and I can't remember ever being as indifferent to new developments as I am now.

Sometimes, dear reader, there are simply no more fucks to give. This is time for comfort food gaming. These days, I try to avoid the really obvious candidates: your Final Fantasy Tactics, your PS2-era actioners. Basically anything I've already played on the DS. When people ask what I've been doing all these years--or how I deal with the constant inflow of uncertainty and terror--I resist the urge to answer in list form. The block of my time from somewhere in 2008 to somewhere in 2012, I remember mostly as a series of DS games: Advance Wars, Fire Emblem, Dawn of Discovery, Populous. Final Fantasy Tactics is a gimme. Clash of Heroes, I could play for-fucking-ever. Ditto Dawn of Heroes, because apparently brilliant, genre-breaking puzzle-strategy games are wedded to the "of Heroes" concept. The World Ends With You, I restarted several times, going a little bit farther into the postgame collection each time. I avoid it now mostly out of concern for the health of my screen. (Seriously, "Scratch"?) The most recent was Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars, the 3D-but-not-really tactical strategy game from X-COM creator Julian Gollop. There's a lot to love about Shadow Wars, from the flexible level design, to the elevation of bodies-in-motion over of point-and-shoot, to a story so stupid you'd think Tom Clancy had written it himself. I avoid it these days because, at 98% completion, my options are to attack the 2% of the game that's so ridiculously difficult that even the FAQs have no real clues, or starting from scratch. Replaying an old game isn't quite like rereading a favorite novel or walking a beloved path, but even if there's authentic novelty to be had, it feels like an indulgence I can ill afford.

So I'm glad to have X-COM: Enemy Unknown. The Firaxis remake, not the 2K Australia FPS that's apparently never fucking coming out. (Also, there might not be any chicks in it.) Glad not only because I've wanted a viable way to play X-COM for years, but because comfort food gaming benefits dramatically from games that are old and new. The stuff that got lost along the way is minor, and the new tricks are, for the most part, improvements. But this is less about the game, and more about the way the game makes me feel, assuming they can be separated for the convenience of that sentence. We might not have to write so much stupid shit about "story" if we went full reader response and said that the way the game made us feel was the game, but then, there's something inherently repugnant in reader response theory, in the idea that we make the text in our own closed worlds. Primarily, I suspect, because it denies us the chance to bend our knee to Authority, and consequently exploit His power for our own purposes, but also because it raises the possibility that our understandings of a text only agree by coincidence: that two people use one word to describe two concepts, and mistakenly think that they've shared something.

The world ends with you, after all.

I have another one of those irritating "story" posts coming, and I shan't dwell there tonight. But tonight, we are not rational, and tonight, we are not light, and as I watch those brave little scientists and engineers and soldiers--the sheer moral weight of not only their mission, but of the mere scale of their cooperation--and I think, where am I in this bleak-but-meaningful world? Whither the humanities?

You know. Because I'm an asshole. (I also use hashtags in my internal monologue.)

But seriously. Whither cultural studies? Whither ethics, if you've already accepted that the descriptive and the normative differ only in the sound of one hand clapping? Whither history? Whither incest, water reclamation, a messy abortion read over a caesar salad?

I have some very convincing daylight answers for each one of these, of course: that the function of the liberal arts education is to help a republic maintain itself through educated citizenry; that the model was derived from methods for educating clerisy; that critical theory is born by accident, an unanticipated mutation of an attempt by English capitalists to ensure the allegiance of the middle class amid the waning power of the Anglican church. But at 3:25 AM, I throw in my lot with Crick: the fact of the question's existence answers it. "Why?" demands history. "What" demands semantics. "How" demands ethics.

How ought we live? (What was she fighting for?)

What ought we do? (What am I fighting for?)

What am I willing to do to survive? (What are you fighting for?)

What constitutes the lower limit of "survive"? (If we get through this, I'll tell you.)

Because I settled on a truth today, that's always going to be true. I would do anything for my friends. Which I think is how everyone in the world feels. Which finally makes me understand new games journalism.

Ultimate The Mortal Kombat Problem 3

Previously on Mortal Kombat:

Stryker? Seriously?

MK3 had done its business in arcades, and performed quite serviceably on the extant consoles as well, including the shiny new PlayStation, but the buzz was certainly nowhere near what it had been during the heyday of MK2. In an attempt to remedy this, Midway decided to emulate the most critically despised feature of its closest competitor: the non-sequel sequel, more commonly referred to as the upgrade.

Attempting to appear responsive to fans' griping that the third game hadn't been as groundbreaking as the second, the designers made it known that they were paying close attention to fan input on designing the inaccurately named Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Message boards swarmed. Magazines printed summaries. The results, unsurprisingly, were stupid.

Primarily this is because the fans wanted more MK2, and almost all of the suggestions boiled down to "make it more like MK2." So back came Scorpion, Reptile, Kitana, Jade, and Mileena, palette-swaps broken only by sex. The male portion of the palette-swapping duo, the mighty and stick-legged John Turk, also reprised two roles that had diegetically ceased to exist in the series continuity, "Classic" Sub-Zero and "Human" Smoke, along with Ermac, who was "created" as a hoax back in MK1. A few of the classic Outworld backgrounds returned as well, but really, now that we've had 3D backgrounds for a while, who gives a shit?

None of these characters added much to the game; most of their functionality had been rendered redundant by MK3 new cast, and in practice they were mostly interesting for people who didn't like or wouldn't learn any of the new affordances built into MK3's design. At any rate, UMK3 attempted to respond to accusations that the series wasn't as innovative as it used to be by explicitly recycling its own past.

In short, UMK3 was kind of a pointless "internet only" release of a game, appealing for diehard fans, but not particularly noteworthy from a design perspective. The rights to console adaptation of UMK3 were sold to Sega, who released it as an "exclusive" to their already faltering Saturn platform. Not willing to forgo the more lucrative PlayStation and Nintendo64 markets, Midway quickly came up with Mortal Kombat Trilogy, which was basically UMK3 with an additional level of recursion.

So the games built, in part, on what the fans wanted, ended up exacerbating all of the fans' complaints, because it turns out the fans aren't always the best designers. That's why they don't get paid to, y'know, design. But lo, respite on the horizon! The new, 3D Mortal Kombat 4 was to follow, cross-marketed with the series' first genre jump (the quirky but underrated MK Mythologies: Sub-Zero), and a brand new story that didn't involve Shao Kahn at all! Most importantly--this became a mantra for the fans--there would be no more silly, cartoonish fatalities (or babalities, or animalities...). No, MK4 was going to be a return to the dark and violent milieu of Mortal Kombat.

MK Mythologies bombed. MK4 added in some thoroughly disposable new features, including the most limited "3D" movement since Fatal Fury 2 did it with sprites, and left people generally unimpressed. Tekken was busily making the series irrelevant, and arcades were dying around both of them. The storyline, despite having the advantage of a very filmic paratext, was more vague than its predecessors: how Shinnok (the new villain) intends to take over the world through the not-officially-a-tournament tournament is rather unclear. In fact, diegetically, Shinnok seems to have no powers at all: humans can make him perform "impersonations"--a simplified form of Shang Tsung's morphing that wouldn't cause problems on CD-based consoles--but Shinnok the end boss ran around and threw rocks. As is, apparently, befitting a fallen elder god ruling over a desolate parody of the heavens in which he once served.

On the bright side, it was nice to be away from Kahn for a while, and once again the designers seemed determined to keep supplying us with fresh faces, despite the fairly large number of returning favorites befitting a series reboot. To that end, the (dead, it has been implied) Kung Lao has been replaced with the more interesting Fujin, the (dead, it is stated) Kano is replaced by the...well, not-that-different Jarek, Tanya points to the still tumultuous situation on Outworld, and Quan Chi makes his appearance as the only thing anyone will remember about this game. There's even a character added in v2.0 that's implied to be a weakened and pissed-off Shao Kahn, but turns out to be...well, nobody in particular.

Really, the only reason I bothered to spend more than a sentence on MK4 is the Feuding Ninja Paradox, which is not only an excellent name for a rock band, but a continuity clusterfuck more emphatic than even the Shao Kahn Shenanigans that preceded it.

Shamelessly plagiarizing one of the more long-winded and arrogant theorists, it bears repeating: For a sequel to take place, there must first be a coherent and reasonably specific decision as to which possible chain of events actually happened in the previous game. In the canonical conclusion of MK1, Liu Kang wins the tournament, an event that happens only in Liu Kang's ending. However, the events described in Cage's ending, aside from the victory itself, also take place: Cage has, in fact, made a movie called "Mortal Kombat." Likewise, Scorpion has killed Sub-Zero, as happened in his own ending, and as was explicitly contradicted in Sub-Zero's ending. The world is not swiftly brought to its end, as it is in Raiden and Kano's endings. The only element common to every ending, Tsung's defeat, is canonical. The rest seems to be a mishmash of all the endings, excluding only the events that explicitly contradict each other. This rule seems to apply throughout the series: Kung Lao dies in Liu Kang's MK3 ending, but also in his own, and so we aren't surprised not to see him in MK4.

In MK2, the recognition and reconciliation between Scorpion and Sub-Zero occurs in both characters' endings, and is nowhere else contradicted. It is the conclusion of Scorpion's character arc, and the reason for his absence in MK3. Midway went out of their way to reboot the Sub-Zero character, dramatically altering his trademark appearance, giving him new antagonists, and making him a white-hat rebel at war not only with the forces of Outworld, but with his former employers as well. Scorpion's UMK3 ending actually has him enlisted by Kahn to fight against the good guys, only to turn around and kill his master when the orders conflict with his spectral prime directive of "protect Sub-Zero."

Which is why it confused fans when Scorpion entered MK4 consumed with a desire to take vengeance on Sub-Zero, who murdered his family. The text very nearly provides a way to fanwank this problem, but gets caught up in the details. Clearly, this would require some sort of retcon, an official overwriting of an element of the canonical story. The lead designer went in a different direction, stating that all the games' endings were just hypotheticals, describing what would happen if that particular character had won the tournament. Since neither Scorpion or Sub-Zero won MK2, the reconciliation never occurred, and they were arch-nemeses again.

Conveniently, this logic undoes not only the Scorpion/Sub-Zero storyline of MK2 and UMK3, but also everything that has ever happened in the series past the conclusion of the first game. After all, the designers remind us that there hasn't been an "official" tournament since the first game, and they've decided on no winners since then, nor have they defined the consequences for any of the parties involved. While the fans were busy arguing out a canon, the authors helpfully reminded us that almost nothing in the entire series was canonical, and there need be no narrative connection from game to game.

Which is, I suppose, one way to solve the Problem: by stating it openly.

After MK4, it was announced that the follow-up would be a reboot to the series, a return to the dark and violent milieu of Mortal Kombat. The series picked up, eventually, with the console-only Deadly Alliance, which brought back some characters declared dead, killed some other characters, and brought in an entirely new, and quite brilliant, set of play mechanics. It broke the million-sold mark, but the diehard fans were furious for the game's severe dearth of the stupid bullshit they'd begged them to take out of previous iterations of the game. A sequel followed, Deception, finally attempting to paper over the giant story holes and answer some basic questions about the universe. Another sequel followed, Armageddon, in which the (hilarious) plot concerns the possibility that the ever-growing cast of the series will cause the universe to collapse under the weight of its own convoluted continuity. (It also, curiously, extended the tutorial "Konquest" mode into a full-length adventure game.)

Now, our eyes are drawn to 2011, two decades after the release of the first Mortal Kombat, and we have been promised that it will be a reboot, a return to the dark and violent milieu of Mortal Kombat. MK storylines are always best when stealing from other media, and I think the Star Trek reboot is a fine place to start. Warner Bros., the new owners of the franchise, are reputed to be interested in expanding the brand into the multimedia juggernaut that never quite came together under its previous stewards. The MK universe has all the raw materials for a pretty interesting fantasy world, which is why the fans have been so inclined to try to make sense of it, even when the authors couldn't be bothered to do so, even when the genre conventions worked against them. Here's hoping someone's actually paying attention this time.

The Mortal Kombat Problem 3

At around this time, the inevitable Mortal Kombat film adaptation was rolling around, and despite exquisitely high standards set by Van Damme's Street Fighter and Hopper's magical realist Super Mario Bros., it turned out...pretty ok, as popcorn flicks go. It's largely irrelevant to the topic, but two points are worth mentioning:

1. Shang Tsung's shapeshifting, a visual effect inspired by Midway's previous work in the Terminator 2 arcade game, functioned rather sensibly, as the storyline would have suggested. Which is to say, it functioned pretty much like the guy in Terminator 2.
2. Raiden, lord of thunder, war, and exposition, explains that tournament was designed to protect the aptly named Earthrealm from Outworld invasion. The rules dictate that if Team Outworld can win ten consecutive tournaments, they get a coupon that can be redeemed for one free invasion of Earthrealm. Goro, prince of the Shokan, ruler of Kuatan, and all-around jerkoff, has won the last nine.

There's no particular reason to think of a movie tie-in as a likely place to introduce canonical changes--or rather, if there is such a reason, the Freemasons are keeping a tight lid on it--which is why I find it bizarre that the "ten wins in a row" rule seems to have been leapt upon by fans eager to put the expanding story into some kind of cohesive order, and it comes up (without citation) on the "story" sections of most fansites. I don't know for certain that the rule emanates entirely from the movie, but I can't find anything in the games themselves or in contemporary paratexts that mentions it prior to 95. It's a particularly important rule, because it changes the apocalyptic loss condition from "give Tsung/Kahn too many powerful souls" to "lose too many times." This adds a specific, down-to-the-wire gravitas to the early entries in the series, mitigated somewhat by the fact that it makes no fucking sense at all.

First off, Goro has been champion for 500 years, having won nine consecutive tournaments. Assuming the tournaments are held at regular intervals--the tournament in Enter the Dragon was every three, and the MK movie says "every generation"--this would put the canonical tournaments on an interval of slightly over fifty-five years. Olympic hopefuls have difficulty being in prime shape for contests held every four years, mind you. Had be been born a decade or two earlier or later, Liu Kang might have had to compete when he was 11 years old, with options to try again at 66 and 121. On the bright side, Liu Kang's victory in MK1 guarantees the safety of Earthrealm for another 500 years, which is helpful because he'll be pushing 80 when next called upon to defend his title.

More to the point, this would seem to make MK2 an even more irrelevant display of puffery. Were it an "official" tournament--it's not, according to later canon rules--our heroes would be forfeiting a couple of human generations' worth of freedom for what is essentially an interdimensional gang war. There seems to be no actual victory to be had in the Outworld tournament: best case scenario, according to the "ten wins" rule, they've protected Earth for another three-hundred-sixty-five days or so. One supposes that killing Kahn would end the threat entirely, and since Kahn's defeat results in his body turning to stone and exploding, we'll have to assume that Earthrealm's warriors are hoping to kill the possibly immortal sorcerer-warlord in straight-up arena combat, in a tournament that has thus far failed to kill anyone of any importance at all. Statistically speaking, the Mortal Kombat tournament seems to be significantly safer than pro wrestling.

MK had never been a favorite of the gaming press, and the critical popularity of the Street Fighter provided no shortage of comparisons. By the time MK3 was approaching its arcade release, Capcom had released Super Street Fighter II Turbo, the fourth consecutive non-sequel upgrade to a brilliant game released four years earlier. While Street Fighter's narrative remained oddly frozen in time, and most of the new cast were widely despised, the gameplay had been finely tuned with an extraordinary eye to subtlety. Critics and players alike applauded the narrative trappings and secret content MK had successfully imported from adventure games, but the general stiffness of the gameplay was getting more and more apparent in light of the competition. It was in this context that the world, represented here by a thirteen-year-old boy living in Florida, got its first look at MK3, and discovered...

Well, it looked pretty much the same as the last one. In terms of gameplay, MK3 would respond to critics who harped on the lack of gameplay differentiation between characters, overreliance on palette-swaps, and an engine that disproportionately favored defensive tactics by implementing a series of changes that would halfheartedly address one of these problems, while actually making the other two worse. (Ultimate MK3 would go the extra mile by fucking up the palette-swap reduction as well.) To be fair, it was a much tighter engine in general, removing the sense that we were operating our avatars by remote controls with dying batteries, and Gathering-of-Developers bless their little hearts, the designers had been pretty ambitious in terms of character design. Five characters were dropped outright, and some of the new faces replacing them brought some legitimately new gameplay concepts with them. Additionally, these concepts were well mapped to narrative conceits. But that brings us to the story, which is actually what these interminable goddamn posts are about, in case you've forgotten.

Shao Kahn has invaded Earth. How? Well, it's unclear. The early press for the game said that he had won the Outworld tournament, which would suggest a double-or-nothing principle that makes the heroes' decision to participate even more insane, and which would seem to fly in the face of the soon-to-be-canonical "ten wins" trope. No, the story behind Kahn's invasion of our beloved realm is much more interesting than that:

For centuries Earth has used Mortal Kombat to defend itself against the Outworld's Emeperor Shao Kahn. But, Kahn becomes frustrated by failed attempts at taking Earth through tournament battle. He enacts a plan which began 10,000 years ago. During this time Kahn had a Queen. Her name was Sindel and her young death was unexpected. Kahn's Shadow priests, lead by Shang Tsung, make it so Sindel's spirit would someday be reborn: Not on the Outworld but on the Earth Realm itself. This unholy act gives Shao Kahn [sic] to step through the dimensional gates and reclaim his Queen. Thus enabling him to finally seize the Earth Realm.

Upon breaching the portal into Earth, Shao Kahn slowly transforms the planet into a part of the Outworld itself. Kahn strips the Earth of all human life: Claiming every soul as his own. But there are souls which Kahn cannot take. These souls belong to the warriors chosen to represent Earth in a new Mortal Kombat. The remaining humans are scattered through out the planet. Shao Kahn sends an army of fierce Outworld warriors to find and eliminate them.

So, the completion of Kahn's ancient lust for the domination of Earthrealm was attained by: an unrelated event having nothing whatsoever to do with the tournament for which the series is named. He could have cancelled the damn tournament before this Goro fellow even showed up and achieved precisely the same result. So, not that it matters now, but how did the Outworld tournament turn out?

We have no idea. The game doesn't actually mention it. If there weren't the odd mention of having "escaped" from Outworld, the game would have made no acknowledgment of MK2 having happened at all. So MK has now effectively (albeit temporarily) retconned out its most popular entry, in the process of rendering its origin and namesake largely irrelevant. Fans were, of course, free to imagine how the previous entry might have played out, safe in the knowledge that, according to the canonical story, no outcome of the Outworld tournament would have had any appreciable impact on anything at all.

By 1995, MK was ably bringing in money from a variety of revenue streams across multiple media, but the bulk of it was always adaptation to home consoles. Over in that neck of the market, the inauguration of what wikipedia helpfully denotes as the fifth generation was about to begin, and the wheeling and dealing over platform exclusivity would exert its own suck on the MK franchise. Some of it can be blamed on the Street Fighter trap, the tendency to advance a series' ludic elements while leaving narrative elements to stagnate, but mostly the black hole into which the series would soon sink can be blamed on a fateful decision to start taking design cues from the most unreliable, unimaginative, and thoroughly idiotic source imaginable: the series' fans.

The Mortal Kombat Problem II

Previously on Mortal Kombat:

500 years ago, Shang Tsung was banished to the Earth Realm. With the aid of Goro he was to unbalance the furies and doom the planet to a chaotic existence. By seizing control of the shaolin tournament he tried to tip the scales of order towards chaos. Only seven warriors survived the battles and Shang Tsung's scheme would come to a violent end at the hands of Liu Kang. Facing execution for his failure and the apparent death of Goro, Tsung convinces Shao Kahn to grant him a second chance... Shang Tsung's new plan is to lure his enemies to compete in the Outworld where they will meet certain death by Shao Kahn himself. Now, the Kombat kontinues...

So says the attract mode for Mortal Kombat II, an achievement of the human species so impressive that it ranks alongside indoor plumbing, individual rights and the discovery of the female orgasm in our collective accomplishments.

Any sequel not explicitly accounted for in its progenitor will necessarily entail un-finishing a seemingly finished story. Usually this is accomplished by building backwards as well as forwards, expanding the diachronic past to accommodate the synchronic present. This is world-building 101, and not technically a retcon, since there is yet no con to ret. Sometimes it can be clunky, but MK2 manages quite well overall. We find out that Tsung has a boss, a warlord from another dimension known as Outworld, and that there is a vague long-term plan to "unbalance the furies" (to borrow a phrase from a couple of MK1's endings), but otherwise it's basically a soul-sucking necromancer running a once-noble martial arts tournament, and a variety of people who want to kick his ass. Classicists among us will note that this is also the plot of Sense and Sensibility.

The attract mode also helpfully alludes to previous, non-surviving combatants we never met, which is nice, because as is noted quite eloquently here, the player's experience of Mortal Kombat does not much resemble an actual tournament. If there are a bunch of extras getting eliminated each round, that does theoretically allow a sensible arrangement, although one wonders if there are weeks between each fight, or if there are multiple stages of brutal violence operating at once, forcing spectators to pore over their programs and choose their favorites, like at Lilith Fair. One also wonders if the non-surviving combatants were put off by the fact that the tournament decorating committee saw fit to commission statues of Goro and exactly six other fighters, as if they knew in advance who was going to merit permanent display in the Warrior Shrine.

However, the structure of the sequel demands a second look. As has been noted at great length by theorists far more ludological than I, a videogame is not a straight narrative, but a possibility space in which narratives can be enacted. For a sequel to take place, there must first be a coherent and reasonably specific decision as to which possible chain of events actually happened in the previous game. We don't need to have every moment of time or pint of blood accounted for, but we need to know a) who won, b) who's dead.

Officially, and established at the outset of MK2, the answers are a) Liu Kang, and b) Sub-Zero. Strangely, this has not prevented Sub-Zero from competing. Scorpion, who could have sworn he murdered Sub-Zero before--imagine losing your car keys, but instead of your car keys, it's revenge, and also you're on fire all the time--is back to try to kill him again. The attract mode leaves us with the mystery; the two fighters' ending texts reveal that the new Sub-Zero is the dead one's younger brother, and Scorpion has decided to protect the younger to atone for incinerating the elder. It is unclear when this discovery is made, for we don't get a sense of the social scene between bouts. I assume it's a lot like the Olympic Village. At any rate, in the now non-canonical comic, both of them have hugged it out and made this arrangement before the tournament begins, which will become a relevant distinction in...three or four years. I don't know why I even brought it up.

The only niggling plot problems at this point concern the Outworld tournament itself. Though it's never explicitly established, one can't help but wonder whether the hopeful combatants, by and large, are aware of Tsung's infernal doings. If the Mortal Kombat tournament, once a noble and fine thing to do in a heroic neo-fascist sort of way, is still attracting idealistic kids who just want to win medals to pad their college applications, they might not realize that they risk having their souls eaten and used to fuel an invasion of our reality by an interdimensional warlord with a striking baritone. If everyone knows about Tsung, the sensible thing would be to simply boycott the tournament, like the U.S. hockey team in the Olympics. If Tsung needs the souls of great warriors to open a gateway into our reality, for God's sake don't let strong warriors sign up. If one such warrior was willing to risk feeding the beast for a chance to kill Tsung and/or take the tournament back to its roots, entry would be a sensible way to do it in a kung-fu double feature sort of way.

These concerns about the logic of taking part in the tournament are exacerbated in the Outworld tournament, in that it's unclear what kind of reward might be gained from winning. With Liu Kang's victory, the tournament ought to be back in the rightful hands of the Shaolin/White Lotus Society, although Tsung had the presence of mind to send mercenary monster-guy Baraka to murder them all. One is left to wonder how this will affect ticket sales, or what the stockholders will think. So Liu Kang, the white-hat hero, is entering a tournament in which he risks his life, and possibly ours, for...revenge? The rest of the cast follows suit with their own motives: Johnny Cage wants another hit, and figures interdimensional martial arts combat is cheaper than hiring a talented screenwriter; Sub-Zero is going to take another swipe at assassinating Tsung; Scorpion is going to take another swipe at assassinating Sub-Zero (sort of); Col. Jackson Briggs ("Jax" if you're nasty) is trying to rescue the aforementioned Sonya Blade, who is being held hostage, along with Kano, for no discernable reason. (Neither Kano nor Sonya are playable in MK2, creating great demand for two characters who were ironically removed because they were unpopular with players.) In addition, Kung Lao, a descendant of the guy famous for being killed by Goro, is there, raising questions about where he was last year when his fellow White Lotus frat brother Liu Kang was risking life and limb in Goro's lair. The rest are various assassins or handymen on Shao Kahn's payroll, who fight for their own reasons, but mostly give the heroes meaningful rivalries and/or punching bags.

Other highlights and problems-in-the-making: MK1 had a hidden character named Reptile, a palette-swap of Scorpion and Sub-Zero, because hey, yellow and blue makes green, right? That Scorpion's appearance is nearly identical to Sub-Zero's is adequately explained in the plot, but Reptile seems to be pretty much a character of convenience. His existence spawned the rumor of a fourth ninja, the orange-clad Ermac, but fortunately this was not the case, and we all had a good laugh at the idea of anything so stupid. In MK2, Reptile makes an appearance as a playable character, and his previous hidden-ness is worked into both his storyline and character design: a bodyguard with chameleonic skills, he stayed in the background on Earth guarding Tsung, and is now trying out a solo act.

They pull the palette-swap trick again with Kitana and Mileena, in blue and purple, showing a great deal of leg (digitization technology had not yet advanced far enough for more advanced concepts like cleavage). They are introduced to us as twin daughters of Shao Kahn, whom he employs as assassins. Scott Brown, you might want to take notes. Shortly before the tournament, however, Kitana (good sister) has discovered that Kahn has worked a mind control spell on her, that she's actually the daughter of the king of Edenia, whom Kahn deposed/murdered. In perverting the realm's magical energies, Kahn turned Edenia into Outworld, severely confusing Old Testament scribes in the process. Mileena (bad sister) is in fact a clone, albeit one with terrible teeth, who (in her ending text) ends up dating the equally fangy Baraka. Nothing serious; she's been hurt before. Total palette-swap count: five males (Sub-Zero, Scorpion, Reptile, and hiddens Smoke and Noob Saibot) and three females (Kitana, Mileena, and hidden Jade). Actors Daniel Pesina and Kaitlin Zamiar are now carrying a substantial portion of the cast themselves, and it's looking a bit odd.

So we have some fairly neat characters, and they have increasingly interesting interactions with each other, friends becoming enemies, enemies becoming friends, etc. We can imagine some interesting and dramatic arguments, conspiracies and alliances as they plot their respective paths to power. We haveto imagine them, in fact, because there aren't any conversations in the game. Where would you put them?

It is generally expected in games, as in film, that plot follows genre/mechanics. You write about a martial arts tournament because you want people doing martial arts. You write a war story because you want big battles. You write about vampires and werewolves because you want gunfights. Ok, scratch that last one, that would be stupid. But now, MK's plot has gotten a bit big for its genre, and nobody seems to be thinking of ways to address that problem.

It's not just the characters. Outworld itself is a gorgeous invention. Every background glistens with delightful creepiness, from the growling trees in the living forest to the dessicated skeletons in the wasteland to the inexplicable (and unexplained) guy who seems to be on fire in the distant background of the bridge over The Pit II. (I think there was some kind of copyright problem with "The Pit.") The world begs to be explored, but interaction with the backgrounds during fights is very nearly nonexistent, and it's not like digitized sprites are exactly ideal for detailed exploration of space.

But those are fairly minor problems for a brilliant game. The series' success grows and grows. Console ports of MK1 are flying off the shelves and annoying Joe Lieberman, who initiates a plan to ruin my life. Merchandising takes off. More comic spinoffs follow. A movie is in the works, along with a TV show. What began as an attempt to cash in on the glowing celebrity of Jean-Claude Van Damme has become the hottest game franchise around, with legitimate multimedia appeal.

Clearly, it was time to fuck it up.

The Mortal Kombat Problem I

Once, during in an enjoyably boring shift, I was called upon to explicate the conflict between Arianism and Trinitarianism. It was long, and convoluted, and required several detours to establish a frame in which the ideas being fought over made any sense at all. Afterwards, it was noted that it had been a lot like one of our friends' attempts to explain the divergent universes of Bishop and Cable in X-Men.

Mortal Kombat has taken up enough time, energy and thought in my life to qualify it as a religion of sorts, so it should be no surprise that it has its own incomprehensible and internally inconsistent cosmology. Or perhaps it should, because it was drafted by literate people who were protected by copyright law and under no direct threat from Roman authorities, and because the whole damn thing goes back only two decades. Nay, to establish a narrative clusterfuck of such utterly Shokan proportions, the designers and writers would have to have made terrible decisions at nearly every level of the world-making process.

Since this seems to be precisely what happened, I refer to these mistakes, collectively, as the Mortal Kombat problem.

Starting, as is in the fashion, at the beginning, the Boonverse is established in MK1 as thus: there is a secret martial arts tournament in which the world's best warriors fight to the death. Currently, the tournament is run by the immortal Shang Tsung, who took control of the tournament when his champion, a four-armed monster named Goro, defeated the previous tournament champion Kung Lao 500 years earlier. (MK1 is assumed to take place in the present or nearish future, so let's go ahead and put Kung Lao's defeat at the tail end of the 15th century.) People make their way to the tournament for various reasons: Liu Kang (intended at the outset to be the lone "good guy" in a roster of egoists, criminals, and psychopaths) seeks to put the Shaolin monks back in control of the tournament. Irritating movie star Johnny Cage wants more fame and money, Sub-Zero wants to assassinate Shang Tsung, Scorpion wants to assassinate Sub-Zero, Kano is in it for the money and the power, and leggy green beret Lt. Sonya Blade, captured trying to apprehend Kano, is just in it.

Of course, Mortal Kombat is a game about people beating each other into unconsciousness and then, for the bragging rights of the players, murdering each other. While comic book characters have long been able to have deep, soul-searching discussions of their lives and motives during fistfights, our beloved cast of misfits is not so lucky. The story is delineated initially by the "attract mode," a programmed series of images and (for lack of a better term) gameplay trailers that display while the machine in question is waiting for players to plunk in their not-money tokens. The attract mode gives us most of the playable characters' (potential protagonists') backstories, while each character's ending text, displayed as a reward upon beating the single-player mode, fills in any intentional gaps in the attract mode bios--why does Scorpion have it in for the Lin Kuei? Is Raiden really a god? These answers and more, tonight on Mortal Kombat--as well as a bit of epiloguing, describing what happens to the winning combatant, and the world, after the tournament's end.

The use of story as a reward isn't much talked about by theorists or understood by non-gamers, but it's both fairly prevalent in the medium and fairly effective in generating fan interest. In addition, the publisher produced a comic book companion that covered much of the game's storyline in a more traditional narrative fashion, although the comics were quickly decided to be extra-canonical when they became inconvenient. But the seeds of the canon wars are planted in MK2, and we ainnot there yet.

In fact, MK1 is pretty clean, as far as the storyline goes. It ought to be, since it's just dumping some Street Fighter aesthetics into Enter the Dragon. (And yes, sports fans, we're going to skip over the extent to which Street Fighter II borrowed so much of its je ne sais quoi from Enter the Dragon. I much prefer A Fistfull of Yen anyway.) The most interesting bit, really, is Shang Tsung, an apparently elderly man who can transform himself into any of the other tournament fighters. The story enacted in the comic and repeated in gaming mags was that he was a sorcerer who absorbed the souls of his defeated opponents, prolonging his unnatural life. This makes a great deal of sense, especially given the illustration (in the comic) of Tsung pulling a glowing ethereal mass out of a pile of human-shaped goo. He pulls in the soul, and with its owner's features, giving him the ability to "become" the defeated. This also gives him a nice motive for maintaining the tournament, as well as a reason that he needs to be killed. The tournament must be returned to its boring, sporting event equilibrium, just as any action flick must end with the hero once again rendering the world boring.

In the game's final battle (against Tsung, natch), the sorcerer "morphs" into all of the game's opponents, making Tsung a forerunner of the "clip-show villain" trope later typified by The First in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It is assumed, at this point, that Tsung has eaten the souls of all the warriors the player has thus defeated, raising two easily fankwankable questions: a) When did he do this? Can he still get a soul out of a corpse in which the heart has been separated from the body? How about decapitated? Or burned to bone and ash? b) That said, how the hell does he morph into the still living person he is fighting at that particular time? The second question addresses what has been largely decided to be a purely extra-diegetic phenomenon of allowing two players to select the same character in fighting games; MK at least lampshaded it with the "mirror match" concept, but it didn't help with the finale. The first question addresses a much more fundamental problem with the series: franchises survive by world-making more than any specific character, but characters do have to be carried over, and actual questions of gameplay preference can exert their own weight on a story. The result is that, in the martial arts tournament for which the series is named, the tournament that is literally synonymous with fighting to the death, nobody ever fucking dies.

I take care establishing these things primarily to help elucidate exactly how fucked up it's all going to get over the sequels, and with the sequels shall I continue.

More fun with criticism

Well. This week has absolutely sucked. When did I last update this thing?

Oh, right. Anyway.

The dirty little secret about the videogame medium is that it'd probably be more accurate to say the videogame media. Granted, no universally agreed-upon definition for medium/media exists--I seem to recall a good, functional one about communication technologies and the social protocols that surround them--and given that HoMM5 runs on the same physical hardware as Blogger, the way we think about them and use them certainly has to come into it. But the trouble with coming up with a definition of "videogame" is that the commonalities between, say, Resident Evil and Second Life are not all that much stronger than the connection between Resident Evil and, well, Blogger. Part of why it's important to be able to identify different texts as belonging to different media is that it allows for the construction of critical theories appropriate to the medium in general.

I wonder if Eagleton's tripartite division in pre-structuralist lit theory might be useful in helping us see some of these distinctions. Authorial intent is not a sexy concept, of course, and it's unclear where some of my own perspectives fall...to what extent does it make sense to say that a game "says" or "does" something? Are we talking about the author? Generally not. If we do talk about the author, it's usually because someone fucked up. Part of the thing that makes mediocre games so compelling as objects of study is looking at the pieces and not being able to resist coming up with explanations about how they were supposed to fit together, before the dev team ran out of time or money. Other games, like Black & White and Frasca's still-fictional Strikeman, more or less demand to be looked at in terms of authorial intent, at least in terms of vision. Even emergent systems would seem to have a vague intent of their own, if only an intent to allow players to play with these rules over here but not those over there. But art doesn't generally work out the way we plan, and the engine we see is the product of several different intentional actors, along with mistakes, quick fixes and changes in direction, even before our perspectives as players come into play.

That said, as we go into the realm of multiplayer and user-generated content, reception theory does seem like it'd be the closest analogue to what would be most effective. There's certainly a lot to be said about authorial intent in Second Life, just as fan cultures have done some interesting things with the thoroughly authorial and linear Resident Evil, but in general, certain theoretical approaches will work better for some genres, and pinning some of those down might be more important than coming to a complete understanding of what videogames are.

After all, the bar is pretty low here. According to Eagleton, nobody knows what the hell Literature is anymore.

A few words on reception theory.

Terry Eagleton is very funny. That's quite an accomplishment in his field. Most people can't write funny literary theory; it's rare enough to be able to write intelligible literary theory. And if you're outside that particular tribe and wonder what literary theory is all about, he lays it out for you in Literary Theory: An Introduction: literary theory is an ongoing argument about literature, an academic field created by the Victorians to compensate for the Anglican church's waning ability to control the masses. (Marxist critics have a knack for providing such inspiring explanations for historical processes.) In describing reception theory, Eagleton suggests that it can be seen as part of an ongoing process:

Indeed, one might very roughly periodize the history of modern literary theory in three stages: a preoccupation with the author (Romanticism and the nineteenth century); an exclusive concern with the text (New Criticism); and a marked shift of attention to the reader over recent years. The reader has always been the most underprivileged of this trio--strangely, since without him or her there would be no literary texts at all. Literary texts do not exist on bookshelves: they are processes of signification materialized only in the practice of reading. For literature to happen, the reader is quite as vital as the author.

As someone who has spent the last ten years or so thinking of himself primarily as a writer, all empirical evidence to the contrary, I've never been entirely keen on this primacy of the reader thing. First, it's hard to say the text doesn't exist because nobody's reading it; at the very least, the author read it, probably several times, sometimes before it got written down. "Reading" is not the only practice of signification that goes into writing, and I urge you to read and critique a blank sheet of paper sometime should you doubt this. The author is, of course, not a reader per se, because he (in this case, being me, the author is nominally male) has always "read" more than the archetypal reader. When I look at an old story of mine, I can't read the story the way a stranger can, because I can't un-remember the paratexts: when I read that story, I can't help but read the sentences I deleted, the scenes I decided not to write, the in-jokes I snuck into the exposition, or the books I was reading when I came up with the idea. But then, a friend of mine reading the story will have an experience not quite like either mine or the archetypal reader, so it might be a matter of degree. That said, the reader is clearly an important part of the process. In literature, that is. Eagleton continues:

What is involved in the act of reading? Let me take, almost literally at random, the first two sentences of a novel: "'What did you make of the new couple?' The Hanemas, Piet and Angela, were undressing." (John Updike, Couples.) What are we to make of this? We are puzzled for a moment, perhaps, by an apparent lack of connection between the two sentences, until we grasp that what is at work here is the literary convention by which we may attribute a piece of direct speech to a character even if the text does not explicitly do this itself. We gather that some character, probably Piet or Angela Hanema, makes the opening statement; but why do we presume this? The sentence in quotation marks may not be spoken at all: it may be a thought, or a question which someone else has asked, or a kind of epigraph placed at the opening of the novel. Perhaps it is addressed to Piet and Angela Hanema by somebody else, or by a sudden voice from the sky. One reason why the latter solution seems unlikely is that the question is a little colloquial for a voice from the sky, and we might know that Updike is in general a realist writer who does not usually go in for such devices; but a writer's texts do not necessarily form a consistent whole and it may be unwise to lean on this assumption too heavily. It is unlikely on realist grounds that the question is asked by a chorus of people speaking in unison, and slightly unlikely that it is asked by somebody other than Piet or Angela Hanema, since we learn the next moment that they are undressing, perhaps speculate that they are a married couple, and know that married couples, in our suburb of Birmingham at least, do not make a practice of undressing together before third parties, whatever they might do individually.

We have probably already made a whole set of inferences as we read these sentences. We may infer, for example, that the "couple" referred to is a man and woman, though there is nothing so far to tell us that they are not two women or tiger cubs. We assume that whoever poses the question cannot mind-read, as then there would be no need to ask. We may suspect that the questioner values the judgment of the addressee, though there is not sufficient context as yet for us to judge that the question is not taunting or aggressive. The phrase "The Hanemas," we imagine, is probably in grammatical opposition to the phrase "Piet and Angela," to indicate that this is their surname, which provides a significant piece of evidence for their being married. But we cannot rule out the possibility that there is some group of people called the Hanemas in addition to Piet and Angela, perhaps a whole tribe of them, and that they are all undressing together in some immense hall. The fact that Piet and Angela may share the same surname does not confirm that they are husband and wife: they may be a particularly liberated or incestuous brother and sister, father and daughter or mother and son. We have assumed, however, that they are undressing in sight of each other, whereas nothing has yet told us that the question is not shouted from one bedroom or beach-hut to another. Perhaps Piet and Angela Hanema are small children, though the relative sophistication of the question makes this unlikely. Most readers will by now probably have assumed that Piet and Angela Hanema are a married couple undressing together in their bedroom after some event, perhaps a party, at which a new married couple was present, but none of this is actually said.

What Eagleton describes here is the struggle to grok a rule system: to learn the underlying structures of the universe in order to piece together a useful, predictive understanding from incomplete information. It's about determining relationships, deciding which signs are relevant to which other signs, which narrative elements are epiphenomenal and which have deeper roots. Often this process relies (as it does in Eagleton's reading of Updike) in genre conventions, which are neither strictly textual nor the work of any particular author, but do form their own kind of tradition. Tradition is a loaded word in literary circles, one that's led to such unpleasantness as elitism, anti-semitism and The Waste Land, but it's worth wondering where we'd be as gamers without our own little tradition. Would anyone be able to make the slightest bit of sense out of Twilight Princess if it had been released one year after the original Legend of Zelda?

More on New Criticism, authorial issues, and the problem of intent later. For now, this post is already long enough for me. I need a break.