Subterranean Hashtag Blues

Intel has resumed advertising on Gamasutra, bringing an end to the first and only time most people who aren't involved with videogames at an academic or professional level have given a shit about Gamasutra, advertising, or Intel. Within minutes of the announcement, cognitive dissonance--which was one of the Weekly Words not long before--set in, and an entirely plausible theory has been developed that Intel is not actually paying for ad space on Gamasutra anymore, since apparently it is common for ad-funded websites to post advertising for free.

Once again, people are happily declaring #GamberGoat dead. It's not entirely inaccurate; the mainstream coverage of #GillyGoop, for all the centrist bias our media demands, has been uniformly negative. The lone exception, Breitbart, is named for a man whose name is literally synonymous with politically motivated libel. There have been no victories to speak of, so anyone "joining" #GlimmerGong now--in the sense of taking up their iconography and collective identity--is essentially volunteering for ridicule and contempt. Mostly ridicule.

But this doesn't mean they're actually going away. They're the LaRouche Democrats of gaming: occasionally amusing, varying degrees of racist, and prone to fits of whimsy in their attempts at graphic design. They'll be around, putting Hitler mustaches on Anita Sarkeesian for the foreseeable future. Their ability to recruit has been severely compromised, but the dead-enders really do have nothing better to do. To say nothing of the neo-nazis, rape apologists, and actual honest-to-god terrorists that made up #GappaGoob before it had a name; they'll scatter when someone gets arrested, but they'll be back in some form or another. They've never not been here.

What people aren't talking about anymore is changing the hashtag. The argument for the change was that it would enable the conversation to focus on its stated purpose--ethics in games journalism--without legitimizing or tolerating its toxic origins. The argument against the change was that it would rob the group of momentum, which they needed for whatever the hell they were doing.

As with most things #GrizzleGoom, it's hard to tell whether this is ignorance or dishonesty, especially since the two can crossbreed in interesting ways where issues of identity politics are involved. The actual reason there can be no new hashtag, no separation from the hate campaign, is that the "legitimate" face of the movement is wholly dependent on the hate campaign. It's not just that the latter created the former; the former is built on a foundation laid down by the latter.

Back when it was still called the Quinnspiracy, it wasn't all doxxing and death threats and stalking and slut-shaming. It was a crowdsourced disinformation campaign, and the "legitimate" movement is predicated on uncritically accepting those lies. The scandal for which #GombaGum was named--and it's frankly bizarre that so many people seem to think they can just gloss over this part--simply never happened. It's bullshit, it's obvious bullshit, and the press said as much once they'd realized it wasn't going to blow over and they had to address it. The accusations of censorship began with several websites deciding they didn't want to provide a platform for an obviously unstable individual's transparent attempts to ruin a woman's life, and continued with other websites' decisions not to publish the ensuing cover story for the entirely unfair reason that it was obviously, demonstrably untrue. The specific journalistic question raised by #GlammaGrrl concerned whether or not gaming websites were obligated to publish slander based on hearsay. (They are not.)

But it's not about that anymore, right? The ensuing accusations followed the same pattern: unadulterated horseshit, easily disproven, and widely distributed. #GanderGibb's rhetorical strategy has been to tell so many lies that people will uncritically accept at least a few of them. Jenn Frank's malfeasance? Lies. The attacks on TFYC? Lies. "Gamers are dead?" Well...

I'm not sure quite how to characterize this argument. Leaving aside the claim that a dozen articles on the same subject constitutes a conspiracy--see also the thousands of news sites who all started talking about the 2014 election results at the same time--and leaving aside that only one of those actually contained the phrase "gamers are dead," and it wasn't the famous one, you'd still have to laughably misread them to come up with anything like the preposterous, genocidal screeds #GuppyGatt claim to have been offended by. You'd have to not know that "gamer" has been a contentious term for years specifically because it denotes a large, varied, fun-loving audience but connotes a hostile, exclusionary hive of anxious masculinity. You'd have to ignore that Leigh Alexander spent much of the iconic "gamers are dead" post lamenting how embarrassing this shit is, and how the assorted anti-feminists and crypto-fascists who kicked off this "consumer revolt" are representative of a wider problem of arrested development and toxic masculinity, a pissed-off, chronically insecure clique who don't realize that Chuck Palahniuk is making fun of them. You'd have to imagine that it contained the phrase "gamers are dead," and read it as...I don't even fucking know.

Reading it literally would seem to be out of the question, because being dead is not, traditionally, a morally loaded thing. Short of a relapse of Cotard delusion, it's hard to imagine how this could be applied literally, yet the gators assert their physical alive-ness with seemingly no awareness of how ridiculous they sound. Some people seem to have read it as a threat, an interpretation it's difficult to believe is being offered in good faith. But the weirdest part isn't so explicit. The canonical #GabbaGone response to discussion of cultural conflicts within gaming culture was to act as if they were being attacked from outside, from people with contempt for a rather important part of this particular techno-cultural moment. You'd have to believe that the people who've devoted their lives to videogames--building them, experiencing them, taking them apart, putting them back together, and sharing their experiences with the world--hate the technology and culture they've helped build. You'd have to believe that Alexander, who commemorated a successful no-kill run in Metal Gear Solid 3 by permanently inscribing the Pigeon icon onto her goddamn body, hates videogames and wished everyone would just give up and get really into puppet theater or something.

You'd have to believe a lot of really stupid shit. And so they do. So do lots of people; sooner or later, I'll run into the LaRouche Democrats in Harvard Square again. Sooner or later, there'll be another manufactured scandal. Sooner or later, we'll have to do all this bullshit again.

But the conventional wisdom on this particular outburst has been set down, and it's not changing. They lost. They'll probably lose next time, too.

Screengrab courtesy of @SJWIlluminati

Gamers are alive.

Kill the gamers.

Memento Morghulis

Hey, kids. How're yez? Been workin' on some stuff.

Convergence of Masculinities in Gamer Culture

Masculinity Without Men: The Sontarans and Relational Gender in Doctor Who

Going through the backlog, might get some more stuff up soon. Need to set up a general purpose "bunch of shit I wrote" page.

In the meantime, zombie zoo, zombie zoo, who let them zombies out of the zombie zoo?

Albert, Somme

Roger Ebert is dead, and were I to be called upon to spend another minute talking about whether or not videogames will ever be "art," I'd prefer to join him. A few weeks back, I made a mental note to reread John Walker's recent RockPaperShotgun editorial on the relationship between games and stories, so I could explore some of its unexamined conceits. Not a rebuttal, exactly, or even a critique--Walker seems to have handled that responsibility himself--but a vague thought on vocabulary, and what imprecision can conceal.

Story is a revered word among gamers, even if some critics aren't so enthusiastic. We're used to that. If you've spent any time reading games criticism, you're as bored with the yes/no of games and story, and have hopefully moved onto the how. What I find interesting, though, is not the idea that story is a desirable thing for a game to "have," but the assumption that story is the essential aspect of other narrative media.

[w]hat exactly is it we’re holding aloft as an example of storytelling done right? There are games whose stories I’ve enjoyed a great deal. I immediately reach for The Longest Journey, Deus Ex, Planescape Torment… um… and then I start to struggle. And the most recent of those was 2000 – thirteen years ago. [...] But of these, which do I hold up as great examples of literature? Honestly? None. That’s not to demean the best of them – stories from games have genuinely changed my life, moved me enormously, altered my thinking in significant ways. But if gaming’s ultimate goal, from both technology and development, is this spurious notion of “storytelling”, then it’s doing a pretty poor job.

 "Literature" is an interesting place to go here. The written word remains our most highbrow massively reproducible medium; as Supernatural has reminded us recently, men of letters are not to be trifled with. And as Eagleton reminds us in Literary Theory: An Introduction, "literature" is far from a stable subject. "Literature" is often employed as a synonym for "classic," or "art," or "good." People who study literature do not employ it this way, because for litnerds, literature is a descriptive term, not an evaluative one. It's a thing, not an admiring way to describe that thing. Ceci n'est pas un stick, after all.

Description is an important concept to keep in mind, given the next two uses of "literature":

My thought is whether this matters at all. Perhaps it’s time for us all to just accept that games aren’t ever going to be home to classic works of literature – it’s not what they’re for, and it’s not what they’re ever going to achieve.

And:

For years I’ve lamented this, decried the failure of this medium to mature to a point where it can match literature and cinema in terms of intelligence in design. (And to be clearly, yes, most books and movies are terrible – we’re talking about comparing the very best.) When is gaming, I would ask, going to find its great stories? I believe I was wrong to ask.

Here we see references to "classic works of literature" (emphasis mine, obvs.) and "literature and cinema," which rules out such pedestrian fare as books and movies, or even novels and film. I don't know exactly what Walker means by these terms, beyond entities in particular media that are better than most others. But I wonder how he would describe some of these works. When people talk about "story" in videogames--especially when they talk about it derisively--they go to examples, and something gets tricksy. Yes, a prose summary of a game's plot, even one of the best plots, is going to sound pretty silly, but plots invariably sound silly when you alienate content from form. As children, we're taught to use "plot" and "story" interchangeably, primarily in an evaluative sense: "story" is what movies with a lot of CGI must necessarily lack; "plot" is why grown-up movies about mediocre people fucking are better than kids' movies about exceptional people killing. I'll not dwell on the technical definitions, because the comprehensive definition is one of the most beloved lies we tell to schoolchildren. Suffice to say that a description of a story is not that story, a plot summary is not a plot. If games are not a narrative medium, then "story" is an element extricable from the rest of the experience, identical to its own summary. If games are a narrative medium, the story isn't a thing that the player is drawn into, nor is it a thing the player creates by interpreting the text, but the experience itself. The decisions you made, and the ones you were forced to make, and the ones they pretended to let you make, and the way you felt about the experience. Granted, those distinctions might still be useful to make, as they are in other media, and that's a conversation I'd be quite interested in having. But we have to start with the text, the thing. If you want a story that's easily communicable in text, you're going to have the experience and then write about it afterwords.

That's right; videogames are just as depressing as real life.

Oh, bee tee dubs, if you opened up the first Walker article, I advise you to break the first rule of the internet and read the comments.

Nonary for the People

Whenever Roger Ebert pops up into the news, my little corner of the social imaginary grumbles anew about his failure to acknowledge videogames as an art form, which is apparently an important thing. In the midst of the grousing, examples are inevitably put forth, and the irritating people--in the past, we'd have called them "ludologists"--point out that the examples don't count, because they're notable for plot elements that rely on narrative (i.e. non-ludic) conventions. In short, movies are art, whereas videogames may not be, because the examples of arty videogames are actually short films. Which are art. Or they're not. I dunno.

Anyway, it's refreshing to see games that openly embrace the syncretic, and 9/9/9 identifies itself quite openly as being a mystery novel with graphic adventure "escape" scenes. It takes some getting used to, and I certainly ground my teeth a bit during the stretch between the opening escape and the four/five dilemma, but in time, and with the help of several extra-literary devices, it works very well.

Initially, the seeming sluggishness induces an odd sense of displacement, which is actually pretty appropriate, all things considered. As a player, I never seemed to see what I expected to see when I was reading about it, and the displacement faded only when I accepted that 9/9/9 really wasn't going for film as its fallback medium, but the novel. Just like it said in the damn manual.

So, it's mostly reading. The visuals are haunting, but more a series of illustrations than anything else, more for style and mood than action. As for said action, the prose is competent, and at times loving: never before have I read such a thorough description of what would happen to a human body should an explosive be detonated in his or her small intestine.

Which brings us to the plot, which is, well, spoilery, really. The genre kind of demands a lack of info. For our current purposes, it's worth mentioning the end structure. 9/9/9 has six categories of endings, if the save screen is to be believed, and when the game is completed, the player may restart with the (heaven-sent) option to speed-scroll through text already read, and with the choices already made highlighted for easy reference. The result is a system that encourages players to rapidly replay similar events, an area in which games happen to excel.

One of the few entirely unique affordances of the videogame medium is the ability to conceal rules from the player: the first goal of the game is to figure out the second goal, etc. The repetition of plot elements fits into the game's narrative very well (think Eternal Darkness), and it's genuinely unnerving when a character you find sympathetic and vulnerable kills you with an ax. It casts a strange light on your next time through the game, with the future ax-memory breeding with the previous one. And while any non-linear text of this type allows for differing futures, I'm personally unclear on whether even the past is stable: if something is true in the 5-7-1 path, can we be certain it's similarly true in 4-8-6? Even if it happened before any of us showed up on this damn boat?

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.

Because I Could Not Stop For Neo-Geo

How's this, gods of AP English: knowledge brings sorrow in the sense that knowledge is the conscious awareness of change, and therefore time, and therefore death. Righto, let's get this show on the road.

My partner came down with a mild case of brain cloud recently, and I spent a great deal of time lying around keeping her company and reassuring her that she retained basic language skills. Because you can only watch so much prime-time-in-the-daytime without going insane--we will, of course, make exceptions for Smile Time, Microscopic Disease Ninja, or anything pertaining to Rose McGowan--I spent a great deal of time on my DS. In the waning days of the illness, desperate for new content, I booted up my long-dormant Wii to see what demos were available for download.

Not much, in turns out, which is why I ended up wandering into Virtual Console. For those unWii'd among my readership--one, two...excuse me, sir? Are you reading, or just passing through? What's that? You're just a janitor mopping this part of the internet? Sorry to have bothered you, carry on--Virtual Console is basically a big collection of emulated games from previous, long and not-so-long extinct systems. The big sellers are predictable: Zelda, Mario, etc. The rest of the list is more interesting.

Hello, TurboGrafx? They bought the rights to TurboGrafx games? Because I'm pretty sure they only sold three of those things in the states, to me and two other kids from Boca Raton. (Oh, and Harold, Robbo, if you're reading? Fuck you.) And they have Y's I & II. You all remember that, right? A port of two PC games, way too big for the dominant storage medium of the day, let alone those pathetic HuCard things. A game so epic, it could only run on a strange technology believed to have been reverse engineered from a crashed spaceship, something called a "Compact Disc Read-Only Memory," or CD-ROM for short. Seriously future shit.

And now, just shy of two decades later, I have a Wii. The Wii is a casual system, at the bottom of the price ladder, and its wireless internet isn't great. And I don't have the strongest signal on the bottom floor. So it might take a couple of minutes for Nintendo to beam me a copy of Y's I & II from outer space.

Because, hey. We live in the future.

Toejam & Earl, nice. Ecco the Dolphin! Memories of being a Genesis fanboy flood my sensory perception apparatuses. Samurai Shodown, kickass! It only took me sixteen years to get access to a decent version of that game! Cybernator? Hrm...M, Me...fuck, no Metal Warriors. Goddamn socialists. And hey, M.U.S.H.A.

Wait, M.U.S.H.A.?

I never played that game. Never really wanted to. I saw a review of it in a gaming magazine I read eighteen years ago.

And I read about Romance of the Three Kingdoms, too. And Clay Fighter. And...shit, all of these.

And I am a child, disaffected, misanthropic, snobbishly disobedient, and spoiled rotten, looking through gaming magazines, a world of fan cultures (we didn't call them that then) and semiotic systems (nope, not them either) that still seems small enough to be kind of manageable. On the consoles, at least.

Those systems are gone, of course; I still have some of them, but at this point they're retro kitsch and not an object of serious veneration. What fills me with a quiet sadness I cannot easily identify, let alone explain, is not the realization of how old these memories are, or the mere shock at their resilience in the face of more pertinent data, such as my blood type, or why my girlfriend was angry at me the previous morning. What slows my breath and chills my bones is the memory of a trite story, of childish pride. I remember, suddenly, how very, very important this all was.

And it's important to me now, of course. The descendants, anyway. But not like that. I wonder sometimes if I'll spend the rest of my life seeking, consciously or not, that sense of mastery-belonging-comfort.

I was a gamer kid. Weird, and shy, and defiantly ungrateful, but not a bad kid at that. And then I went to college, where I discovered drama and, appropriately, acted like a dick for a while. And now I'm here (wherever here might be today), looking for work, looking for angles, looking for hope, and I'm not sure what the hell I am, and whether or not I'd be better served by selling all this shit off, cutting my losses at three published articles, and getting a job with a drill.

The good news, however, is that Samurai Shodown, even after sixteen years, is fucking amazing.

In lieu of actual new content...

...someone published me again. Follow the link, gentle readers.

The Sarah Problem and the gendering of genre

Hat tip to August J. Pollack for finding this. It's tempting to think of this sort of thing as mere ham-handed marketing with nothing more than the profit motive behind it, a desperate attempt to bring women into a consumer group perceived to be hostile to said women via tired stereotypes. It's easy because, well, it's largely true, but to dwell on that would be to miss the fact that this kind of thinking is surprisingly pervasive at all levels of the gaming community, from the players to the press, and even, to some extent, to the academics.

Richard Cobbett covered this territory more effectively than I ever could with "Writing A 'Girls In Games' Article", an essay that ought to be required reading for anyone attempting to discuss gender and games. Girl Gamer seems to flow from several lines of thought critiqued by Cobbett, specifically points 3, 4, 8 and 9, with the greatest emphasis on point 4.

Thing is, the idea that women, when expressed as as an arithmetic mean, prefer certain genres, modes and features was not arbitrarily pulled from the ether. Statistically, it has some support, and even for those of us who feel that the American faith in statistics is more often religious than scientific in nature, that support is hard to ignore. But even at their best, statistics are only empirical, prone to methodological error, and are not, in and of themselves, predictive. (That's where "theory" comes in. Creationists beware.) Group identities are useful things, but they are ultimately fictions. I like fiction; fiction can be compelling and useful, and you don't have to be a mystic to understand that things that exist subjectively can and often do affect things that exist objectively. To riff a bit on a quote from a dead conservative/libertarian humorist whose name I cannot, at this moment, find, women are only available in units of one. Out here in the really real world, they're not actually a hive mind.

Which brings me to the Sarah Problem. Sarah is not an average or a composite, but an actual human being, made mostly of water, and capable of reflecting on her own existence. While I haven't verified it directly, her name, physical appearance, and the image she projects suggest that she has two X chromosomes. She is, in short, a woman. And the rules we apply to women in the context of their relationship to videogames do not seem to apply to her. She's not big into The Sims or casual games. She isn't turned off by brutal violence or highly sexualized female avatars. (And yes, sports fans, she's straight. That should save a couple of comment writers a minute or two.) She bought her PS2 before I bought mine, and nearly every time I get into a bloodbath like Devil May Cry, God of War or Resistance, she's already bought, played, and usually beaten it.

This would seem to make her something of a statistical outlier, but I can't sign on to the assumption, implicit in many discussions of gender and videogames, that this makes her experience as a gamer or as a woman less valid. Because, well, she exists. She's a friend of mine. And her experience ought to be part of the discussion. Individual experiences matter. In addition, in a large enough sample group--say, people who play videogames--outliers can be comprised of rather large groups, and sometimes the exceptions to the rule are among the most interesting and important.

The need to create a "feminine space" in videogames, however worthwhile that goal might be, has led to an irritating phenomenon I refer to as the gendering of genre: Halo is for boys, The Sims is for girls. Boys like speed, competition and violence, girls like story, personalization and collaboration. And, if you were to take a poll, that's certainly true for some of them. But things like story, personalization and collaboration are important in and of themselves, not because they might be marginally more likely to appeal to women. We're seeing a great expansion in paidia play in nearly all videogame genres now, due to a combination of market demands and the new creative options available due to advancing technology. The development of new genres is a good thing, period. Will these new genres help developers and publishers expand their consumer base? Who cares? Electronic Arts' bottom line really isn't my problem.

The problem with gendering these aspects of gameplay is that actual flesh-and-blood women do occasionally fall on the "masculine" side of the spectrum, and this creates a conflict in our construction of the topic. If violent, ludus-heavy action games are masculine, then Sarah is something of a ludic transvestite. Whereas before she might have been thought of as unfeminine for playing videogames, now she can look forward to being thought of as unfeminine for playing the "wrong" videogames.

More to the point, treating Sarah's play experience as being "masculine," in the sense of being equivalent to the experience of a male playing the same games, collapses her into a group to which she does not belong. That meatsuit she wears influences her consciousness, her sense of identity, and the way she's treated by others, just as my (marginally different) meatsuit does for me. Her experience might very well be different from that of the "usual" gamer, and for research purposes that seems like it might be kind of important. Yes, it's always interesting to think about what games non-gamers might like to play, and a lot of those non-gamers happen to be women. But if there is some social good to be gained from having more women playing videogames (a question I'll not attempt here), it seems like women who already play and like games in multiple well-established, commercially successful genres would be worth listening to as well.

In Arcanum, female avatars are given a +1 bonus to Constitution and a -1 penalty to Strength. Even in a world of elves and dwarves, default status is issued to human males--white ones, judging by the available character portraits. The discussion of the "female problem" in the videogame industry does not have to function along similar lines. So let's all grasp a firm hold of our undergraduate understanding of the difference between "sex" and "gender," and remember that we don't know much about biology, culture and causality, and that demographic data that's true right now might not be for very long. To pretend otherwise, to reify what might be fairly arbitrary taste issues, would be stupid.

Raziel is a scab.

I first heard of Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain via a preview in Diehard GameFan magazine. The emphasis, unsurprisingly, was on the game's graphic and aesthetic qualities; it was an early PlayStation game (released in late 1996), and the thrill of (then) high-quality full-motion video (FMV) hadn't yet worn off. In addition, the media hysteria over Mortal Kombat and Night Trap had only recently worn off, and violent game--games that would likely arouse controversy and thus validate the reviewers' occupations--were always in high demand at the thoroughly contrarian GameFan. An interview with the creators followed the preview, and the conversation took a curious turn: the creator began talking about the game's plot, and the psychological profile they had tried to construct for the protagonist.

I was out of school at the time, after 7th grade and before college, and the always significant role of videogames in my life was growing. My interest in storytelling in general was growing as well, and much of the time I didn't spend on games was focused on creative writing in the form of prose and screenplays. I had begun to understand games as stories integrated within tests of strategy and reflexes (a whole lot simpler than what I believe now, but not exactly a bad view of the medium), and I purchased the game not long after it came out, expecting just this: a good little morality tale with some exploration and a few boss fights thrown in.

In my first time through the game, my expectations were fulfilled, but not exceeded. The gameplay itself was mediocre, a 2D, 3/4 overhead view Zelda knock-off showing some of the same gimmicks (real-time scaling) and problems (oppressive load times) as other early PS games, as well as inconsistent collision detection that would have seemed out of place in a 16-bit game. The strategies I (as the player) was called upon to learn were rather simple, and challenging only in that they were well outside the strategies usually employed in the genre. The story, and the presentation, were something else altogether. The actual plot is perhaps too convoluted to describe here, but can be summarized thus: Kain of Coorhagen, an arrogant nobleman, is set upon by brigands and murdered. Offered a chance for vengeance by the necromancer Mortanius, Kain eagerly accepts the offer without asking the consequences. He is returned to earth as a vampire, a living corpse despised by his own class and his inferiors alike. After killing his assassins, he finds himself lured into a quest to end the malaise that has so corrupted the land of Nosgoth by killing the nine guardians of the land, who have been perverted by a darkness that manifests as insanity in some and moral collapse in others. These nine are referred to as the Circle of Nine, and each is linked to one of the Pillars of Nosgoth, nine columns representing the magical elements that control the land: Mind, Conflict, Nature, Energy, Time, Dimension, States, Death, and Balance.

Incidentally, do you see why your college lit professors told you not to do plot summary in your writings? It's fucking awful to read. I wrote that crap paragraph above this one, and am now so bored I'll probably end up spending an hour looking at political blogs and porn just to get the taste of plot synopsis out of my mouth.

Anyway, the story is arranged, toward the game's beginning, in a standard fashion for the genre: nine powerful wizards must be tracked to their opulent lairs and slain. The genre conventions, however, do not hold throughout the game. The wizards in question do not, as they had in all previous incarnations of this game design, simply wait for the “hero” to slowly grow in power until he bursts in and kills them; they behave, for lack of a better term, realistically. One flees from his pursuer, knowing he stands no chance. Another cannot be defeated, and the player must escape and seek assistance from a third party. Three form an alliance to protect themselves. Two attempt to kill each other. Members of the Circle, far from bit players, are active participants in the story even when Kain (and, by extension, the player) can't see them. The player's perspective is mostly fixed to Kain, and as such the player seldom knows more than the avatar; most of the story is revealed to players only through Kain's discoveries. At the end of the game, with the Circle annihilated, the final truth is revealed. Kain has been selected, through his actions, to become the new guardian of Balance, but his own body is an abomination, regardless of what good he has managed to do with it. As the lone remaining power in Nosgoth, he can rule it as a king overseeing its continuing slow death, or sacrifice himself and restore balance, bringing salvation to a land damned hundreds of years before his birth.

The device is a fairly common one: a good ending and a bad one. It is easy enough, by loading a saved game near the end, to see both. Nonetheless, the game does offer the player the choice, and players are thus allowed to engage in an activity that is both role-playing and literary criticism: what, given what is known about Kain's character, would he do?

It is here that the ambitiousness of Kain's design becomes most apparent. There is no onscreen text in Blood Omen, aside from file management and one puzzle involving runes; all information, even that not directly related to the story (such as descriptions of items or spells), is carried to the player by Kain in short oral narratives. It is in these moments, seemingly extraneous, that we learn much of Kain's character. Kain is a vicious, bloodthirsty sadist, and it seems from his comments that this was true even when he was alive. He enjoys the kill, but resents that he must do it to survive. He is a bad person by any stretch of the imagination, consumed by hatred at every turn, but in his hatred lies his redemption. He hates the state Nosgoth is in, the corruption that runs through every plant and animal in the land. He hates being a vampire, even if he enjoys the power it gives him. His hatred sets him in his way, and amid his blood-soaked journey, he begins to change. He begins his quest looking for vengeance, continues it looking to restore his own life, and at some point, simply forgets about the trappings of power with which he seemed so concerned both before and after his perverted resurrection, going so far as to ignore a chance to travel back in time and prevent his own death. Kain's own power, and his own vengeance, slip by the wayside as he increasingly fights on behalf of Nosgoth itself, and neither Kain nor the player is called upon to notice this change in priorities until the choice that ends the game.

In the GameFan interview, the creator says that Kain is a character of moral transformation: a thing of darkness that can think only evil, yet ultimately finds himself trying to save the world. My own reading of the text confirmed this claim: Kain was not an anti-hero, as semi-literate game reviewers have always been fond of calling him, but a hero.

I enjoyed the game greatly, and awaited the sequel I presumed was coming—most games don't have both a main title and a subtitle unless a series is intended, after all. Two years later, I saw a feature on the GameFan website of the upcoming Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver. I was initially confused that the subtitle had become the series title, and that the Soul Reaver, a minor plot point in the first game, would be featured so prominently. Upon reading more of the preview, I became even more confused. Kain had chosen his own survival over the well-being of Nosgoth, said the preview, and now ruled of the dying remnants of the land with six lieutenants, vampires he had created. Moreover, the Soul Reaver storyline contradicted the Blood Omen storyline, specifically its physics/metaphysics, in several ways. It was still possible, of course, that the designers had changed their minds, or that I had just happened to stumble upon a radical, possibly unsupportable interpretation of the text. Nonetheless, if any designers were to assert that a game had a meaning bound up in the text itself--that “readers” could not pick and choose the elements they felt valid to support what future storylines made sense--it would be those at Silicon Knights. Some time later, I read a minor story on the same site that Crystal Dynamics, Blood Omen's distributor, was being sued by Silicon Knights. Not much in the way of detail was given.

I did some digging, and soon found that Soul Reaver was being developed in-house at Crystal Dynamics, not at Silicon Knights. At the time, I was working (in the sense of doing work, not in the sense of being paid) for an amateur game review site. My main job was to go on professional sites and grab screenshots for games, which I'd send to our graphics department (a woman named Katie), who would open a graphic editing program and place our site's logo directly over the watermarks on the screenshots I'd grabbed. I'm not sure if that was, strictly speaking, legal, and won't be repeating the process here. That said, I soon started writing reviews, and thus my participation in the site was sufficient to write to people and imply that I was a member of the press. I wrote an article about the games (now lost to the ages) for the now-defunct site, and sent drafts to Crystal Dynamics and Silicon Knights, in case they preferred to correct any errors or argue any judgments before its publication. Crystal Dynamics sent no response, but my email to Silicon Knights was answered by the lead designer, Denis Dyack. Although legally prohibited from discussing the terms of the settlement with Crystal Dynamics, he did discuss the team's plans for the series and issues with the story path chosen by the sequel's designers.

Crystal Dynamics' Kain series, which now has four published entires (including one that purports to be the sequel to the original Blood Omen), did eventually develop quite a fan following of its incredibly convoluted storyline, even if it ended up being more like an extended spy movie than the classical tragedy to which Blood Omen aspired, and aside from the glaring, unresolved inconsistencies with Blood Omen, the new series has been pretty consistent with itself. Perhaps more importantly, the storyline was matched with a more modern gameplay system (swiped from the 3D Zelda games and Tomb Raider) and exponentially better graphics. A modest success in the hands of Silicon Knights, Crystal Dynamics made a highly lucrative franchise out of Nosgoth.

The experience as a whole made me think long and hard about the nature of authorship, and how the concept had not yet been fully developed in games. The videogame industry does produce its share of superstar designers—Wil Wright, John Carmack, Sid Meier—but they're usually valued for general game design principles, nothing so pedestrian as character creation or story. It made me think about how the non-interactive elements of what is so often presumed to be an interactive medium were so important to my overall experience of the game, and what that meant for the future of games as a storytelling medium. It made me wonder why the press didn't seem to think the legal theft of the Blood Omen series, renamed as the Legacy of Kain series, warranted any print, and it made me wonder to what extent players would have cared if it did. It made me think about rules of interpretation, and brought forth ideas for which I wouldn't find words until I studied literature in college, years later. In short, the treatment of Blood Omen by the distributor, by the press and by the players pissed me off, and I ended up channeling that anger into my academic work.

Though the ideas are obviously still in development, what I learned from Blood Omen and its subsequent sequels still informs a great deal of my work. First, despite all the griping about videogames being a “dumb” medium fundamentally incapable of storytelling, deep, throught-provoking games exist; they just don't often become famous, because the gaming press often can't be bothered to notice. Second, active gameplay does not entirely divorce games from rules of non-ergodic narrative. The drama in playing Blood Omen comes not only from the ergodic elements, or from the voiceovers and cut-scenes, but from the tension between the two: not control, but illusion of control. This illusion of control makes this particular form of game design (one that seems to be receiving fairly little critical interest when compared to the ludic playgrounds of Grand Theft Auto or The Sims) particularly well-suited to tragedy. Finally, if the industry is going to prosper, creators' rights must be respected, and when they are not, the media have to cry foul, or give players the information needed to do so themselves. It isn't a lack of creativity that slows down artistic progress in videogames, it's a lack of critical involvement by those that play them.

The BioShock effect.

In the February 2008 issue of Game Informer--yes, it's probably available somewhere online, and no, I'm not going to track down a link for you--Matt Miller raises the radical idea that videogames can be meaningful texts. After dipping briefly into Nietzsche to remind us of the Conventional Wisdom About Videogames (escapism, power fantasy, etc.), he suggests that "recent releases seem desperate to strive for some more subtle and powerful thematic visions, and the trend has only recently begun to hit its stride."

Unsurprisingly, he's talking about BioShock. Everyone was talking about BioShock, as the adorably solipsistic Game of the Year ritual was hitting its peak toward the end of the year. BioShock is, by all accounts, a bloody awesome game, and it seems to have succeeded admirably in using narrative elements to emotionally involve the player in what is fundamentally a rule system that involves pointing a cursor at moving things and clicking until they stop moving. "As that sprawling undersea metropolis opens up to players," writes Miller, "it's hard to avoid the cultural commentary." "Hard to avoid" is an interesting phrase, and hints at what I consider to be the central problem of the piece. We have heard so much about BioShock partially because it's a fun game built on impressive technology, and partially because its storyline deals with Big Important Themes. But plenty of games, good and bad, have dealt (or attempted to deal) with Big Important Themes over the years, with varying commercial and critical success. Miller acknowledges as much: "For years, we've had a smattering of titles that seamlessly blend fun and exciting gameplay with deeper and more complex thematic issues, from Oddworld's environmental commentary to the wasteland motifs of Fallout."

As someone who thinks of videogames as a medium with narrative potentialities we've not seen before, it's frustrating to me whenever an interesting title goes unnoticed. Miller, perhaps, feels the same way. But this begs the question, why? Why do players in a saturated marketplace in which a large number of developers compete for finite amounts of money and attention often miss out on ambitious games that experiment with ways to use the affordances of the videogame medium to enact meaningful stories in a completely new way? Who could have been helping to raise public awareness of these games that the public might have greatly enjoyed had they been aware that there was more going on in videogame design than Doom and Mortal Kombat? Do you have any idea, Matt Miller of Game Informer magazine?

Some of the most interesting texts slip under most players' radar, but that's true of popular film, literature, etc. BioShock falls into the category of the Oscar bait film--a work that's to obviously and overtly Big and Important that you can't possibly miss it. In film and literature, most of the heavy lifting is done by academic wonks, but even lay reviewers are expected to pay some attention to what a book or movie seems to say, in addition to cataloging its its raw components. And despite the confusion over exactly how story works in games, as the academics work through the collapse of the imaginary ludology/narratology binary, there's a lot of interesting work going on that could very easily filter into popular consumption were the mainstream gaming press to step up to the plate.

Granted, I don't read a lot of mainstream gaming press anymore; I used to obsessively pick up every issue of GamePro, Electronic Gaming Monthly and DieHard GameFan when I was a kid, a habit I was happy to leave behind once internet access let me cut out the middlemen. I get Game Informer for free these days, and generally flip through it once or twice, become depressed at all the cool games I won't have time to play, and ponder selling all my possessions and wandering the earth like Kwai Chang Caine from Kung Fu. It's possible that the gaming press is doing a bang-up job these days and I'm missing out on it. Still, beyond the occasional nod to the academic community ("Look! It's Henry Jenkins! We're legitimate!"), I don't see much in the magazines and websites I do consume. In the next post, I'll talk a bit about my own experiences with the gaming press, my early experiences trying to parse out meaningful ideas in games, and why I'll probably never have screenshots on this blog.