The first of many posts on Mortal Kombat

So, yesterday I picked up Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, because, come on. The first ad was a movie of Sub-Zero fighting Batman. Beating each other up in mid-air. I rest my case.

Anyway. The good: it's an old-school MK game. Not like Deadly Alliance, Deception or Armageddon. Not even like MK4 or the MK3 clusterfuck. It feels like MK2. Well, no. It feels like a version of MK2 designed by Capcom or Namco, a team more competent than ambitious. It's MK3 and 4 with all the gimmicks well implemented and balanced. It's simpler than any of the last generation MKs, easy to pick up, and a blast to play. The DC characters are well designed and narratively consistent (aside from the obvious Superman Problem, the graphics are gorgeous, and--let me say it again--Batman can fight Sub-Zero.

The story mode pretty much plays the MK universe as a superhero comic, in a way that actually helps iron out some of the narrative oddities of Boon and Tobias' little world. The comic association also makes it easier to swallow that MK has, over eight "main" games and two spinoffs, played incredibly fast and loose with its own continuity. The complete failure of MK's narrative is a multi-level train wreck I refer to as "The Mortal Kombat problem," a case study in how not to run a fighting game franchise, and it could easily fill several blog posts. And it will. Because, seriously, have you seen my output on this thing lately? It's not like the D&D, God of War and Jane Austen posts are writing themselves. If I don't pick up the pace soon I'm going to have to outsource this thing to grad students in unpaid internships, and even my supply of those has been threatened by recent events.

There isn't much bad to be had, aside from the lack of big New Features. Then again, after the run button, vs. screen "kodes," clumsy weapons and the most truly boring use of 3D movement yet seen in a fighting game, I hope we can agree that the MK team ought to have stopped bothering with New Features somewhere around 1993.

The one thing I will say in this post: this whole fatality business. Fatalities, as a gameplay device, only make sense in the context of arcades. They should have been radically revamped as soon as MK went console-only. And while that hasn't happened yet, a curious thing happened with MK vs. DC. Due to DC's stranglehold over portrayals of their IP, there were initially rumors that the game would have no fatalities, or that the DC characters would have no fatalities. Fine; whatever. It's not like anyone actually ever dies in either universe, anyway. They settled on the DC villains having fatalities, and the whole MK cast, but not the heroes. Instead, they have..."heroic brutalities."

Read that again.

Heroic. Brutality.

I appreciate the effort, but really, guys, you need to hire a lit major. Someone who could tell you that, unless we're openly embracing fascism, those concepts are antithetical.

While we're on the subject of violence, a parting shot--supposedly the Joker's famed gun fatality has been edited for the American release, but remains in the European release. I haven't tested it myself, but here's what amuses me. In America, it was edited so the game could get a Teen rating, and avoid legal hoopla. In the UK, where people beating the crap out of each other is, in and of itself, enough to be considered graphic violence, it got by with a 16+, which apparently presents no such hurdles.

So, in short, America gets the less violent version of the game because we are more tolerant of violent media.

Go figure.

(PS--I like that Liu Kang has something resembling a Chinese accent, but why does Kitana sound like the actress actually recorded her dialogue while wearing a mask?)

Ok, so this thing's been dead for a while.

We're working on that. I was, um, abducted by aliens. They've been helping me figure out this MTEL thing.

At any rate, I haven't abandoned this thing, so all of you who are reading this. Which, based on demographic data, consists of you, whoever is reading this sentence. Right now, the person reading this sentence is me, but eventually it'll probably be someone else.

Incidentally, while I am typing this right now, I will likely not be when you're reading it. So try to use your best judgment on this and related matters.

More shit about rules and fiction.

So, last night I was depressed, and my partner and I rented Alien vs. Predator: Requiem. These two things may not seem like they complement each other to most people, but we are a strange breed. The clerks were split on whether this was a good choice, but agreed that it worked fine as a retaliation for my recently having been forced to watch A Chorus Line. The retaliation theory doesn't really work, in that she enjoyed the first AvP more than I did, partially because she thought the lead predator was adorable. So, he said, there's that.

The new one is, well, what you see is what you get. Aliens blown apart by bullets. Aliens ripped apart by glaives. Humans decapitated by shoulder cannons. But AvP isn't really ideal for narrative media anyway; I have some of the old comics somewhere, and perhaps I'm wrong and the whole predator homeworld thing added something really vital to the mythos, something greater than the sum of its parts. But as far as I can see, it's piggybacking on the established tropes of two sci-fi/horror series of wildly varying respectability. All it adds is fighting. The appeal of AvP is more kinetic than narrative. Which means that it probably ought to have been a videogame in the first place.

There've been quite a few AvP games over the years, of course. The one for the Jaguar has been largely forgotten, which is a shame, because it represents an era of gaming culture that is, frankly, hilarious. The later PC release is the one most of us remember, I suspect, and aside from somewhat clunky multiplayer, it was a thoroughly brilliant FPS. When everyone talks about System Shock, I bring up AvP. What I remember about the game is mostly its use of darkness, and how each species relied on different methods to cope with it, but my fondest memories involve the weapons. The presence of three species allowed developers to build two contradictory weapon sets into the human and predator armories. Most importantly, these weapons were narratively consistent with what we knew from the films: the shoulder cannon fires in a straight line, and aliens are too fast for it, so that's for humans. The prox pistol lobs a ball of energy that safely and quickly kills aliens with its splash damage, but if you miss and hit one with the initial shot, they'll explode and bathe you in acid. It's too short range to be useful against something that's not running toward you, so that's for aliens. And the invisibility, conveniently, fails when coupled with any of the weapons designed for aliens, who don't need to see you anyway.

The sequel, the aptly titled AvP2, improved on the first in virtually every way. Still, it took me a long time to warm up to it, because it was narratively inconsistent with both the films and the previous game. The shoulder cannon became a tracking weapon for fast-moving prey, and became incompatible with invisibility. The new weapons, like the netgun, seemed awfully human-like, complete with ammo pickups. In fact, the line between human and predator seemed to be getting smaller.

On further play, I realized what I had been missing. Despite the increased emphasis on story in the three single-player campaigns, the game had been optimized for multiplayer, specifically a class-based multiplayer that divided all three species into four specialized classes. Every piece of weaponry, every alien mutation, now made perfect sense from a design perspective, and had the single-player campaign used a similar structure--back in the days of dial-up, I can be forgiven for reliably playing the single-player campaign first--I would have grasped the reason for the changes immediately, and acknowledged that they did, in fact, lead to a better game. But even for a better game, the narrative inconsistency might have been a little tough to swallow. Different people value texts for different reasons, of course; does this mean I'm a narratologist?

One, two, three

Let's start with three.

One is a point, two is a line, three is a shape. The Greeks were big on three and its multiples, at least partially for that reason, and this might be why we in Western civ have such a rough time not thinking in terms of threes. It certainly seems intuitive, from the perspective of the reality our language constructs: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Once you have a thing, it's an intuitive leap to its opposite or absence, and an intuitive leap from there to the integration of the two. We see other arrangements as well: paper-rock-scissors is another one, appearing in Eternal Darkness as flesh-mind-spirit, the warrior, the alchemist and the wizard. Father, Son and Holy Spirit is the big one, of course, the one we can't unthink even if we want to. Metropolis refashions the trinity as head, hands and heart--suggesting a relationship between the three largely consistent with C.S. Lewis' description of the trinity itself. That which begets, that which is begotten, and the love between them, an animating force that is, itself, a person. The mind that conceives, the word that is spoken into being, and the breath that constitutes the connection between the two.

How does this relate to videogames? Mostly via a simple assertion: binaries are fucking boring. It's easier to make interesting relationships between three signs, characters, or factions than between two. And consequently, most modern RPGs and many adventure games are based around three primary stats or paths. Generally, it breaks down in terms of physical, mental/magical, and...other. Often it's agility, which is associated with stealth and thievery; agility essentially being an intuitive connection between mind and body that automates certain precise processes. The venerable Kingdom of Loathing uses "moxie" to much the same ends. Eternal Darkness splits mental/magical into two categories. Diablo begins with three playable characters, each based around strength, intelligence or agility; Phantasy Star Online reproduced the meme and split each class into three characters, divided among three races that related to each other as the classes did. In multiplayer games, a fourth entity sometimes appears in the form of the healer--most MMORPGs these days seem to be built around the interaction of a melee fighter, a non-specific ranger/thief support fighter, a healer and a nuker. Dungeons & Dragons, I'm told had the cleric before the rogue, but then, the cleric in D&D isn't much like the clerisy in any other RPG. And we're talking about three for now.

In RPGs that allow variable morality, it's generally a secondary stat, one that changes as a result of your decisions rather than leveling up. Arcanum uses a single good/bad axis, like the hilariously simple Jedi Knight and the highly confusing Darkwatch. Occasionally, these simple systems are used for things that aren't quite moral in nature, but function for the player much the same way, such as the professionalism meter in Reservoir Dogs or the trust bars in Splinter Cell: Double Agent. D&D did something a bit more complex by adding a lawful/chaotic axis perpendicular to the good/evil one, but its application in games is a bit odd, as it was really designed for tabletop games with actual humans improvising shit and then fighting about it.

So, what if we looked at morality instead as a primary stat, the heart that mediates between head and hands, the breath of life between the mind and the word...the spirit, the soul, that which is third? How would morality function as an ability stat?

There are a few options. As grace, favor of the gods, etc., morality could function as a luck stat. But a quick look at how the world functions shows this to be a fairly stupid and untenable idea. Besides, most good stories require at least a little bit of bad things happening to good people. Conversely, it could function as a kind of anti-luck, a demonic shit-magnet, but that would have to be offset with some positive to make it make sense. Protection from certain kinds of evil is a possibility, as is immunity to certain effects, such as fear or supernatural curses. Experience growth would be interesting, associating moral living with the life force. Virtue ethics might provide a useful template for ideas, as might the Christian cardinal/theological virtues. All of these, of course, hinge on free will.

So we borrow a page from Kant, and to some extent, Zoroaster, and associate the morality stat with free will. What does this mean? Well, first of all, it sets up morality as a matter of presence vs. absence; morality opposing amorality, not immorality. A character with a low morality stat is, functionally, an animal, operating largely on stimulus-response, i.e. the avatar spends some of its time on autopilot. This character pursues self-interest--its rationality is debatable, and might be linked with the mind stat--and thus might or might not be thought of as an egoist, but, y'know, moving on. At any rate, this sad avatar of low morals is ruled by avarice and fear. (An aside: I think lust ought to be here, but that's a very hypothetical area I'll not deal with in this post, because any game that purports to be about morality, sex, and violence is going to need--need--to deal with rape. And not superficially.) (S)he identifies all opposing players as enemies, and can't converse or exchange items with them. Teams and clans, therefore, cannot be joined; those of low morals are doomed to solo. This connects our oversimplified, somewhat childish, yet still kind of interesting morality signifier with the realm of the interpersonal. More to the point, it penalizes mindless (automated) aggression, and makes not doing things as important as doing them--more, since not doing things is effectively a reward for increased abilties. (This principle will need to be applied at a few layers, but, whatever.)

As for immorality, the perversion of substantive good, well, there's a couple of paths for that, fodder for future posts. In the meantime, what does the ruleset I've vaguely outlined above say? That the evil are fearsome, and more powerful individually than the good, but their power is limited and redounds upon itself by their lack of self-control. Finally, this ruleset would seem to give griefers their own class, although one wonders if they'd prefer to play as moral characters to as to fuck up other players more effectively.

...and another gratuitous link-post.

Talkin' bout Splinter Cell over at Valuable Games.

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.