So, just a brief response to the most recent horrible, terrifying and particularly cowardly mass shooting in the U.S.
Originally, I wasn't going to write anything and keep my thoughts to myself, because my thoughts, honestly, didn't seem horrified enough (or so I felt). News of mass shootings in this country have become more or less commonplace over the last few years, and thanks to the way the human brain works (think of Anderson's critique of "imagined communities" and all the more science-y evidence since that's backed up his ideas), it's easy for me to be saddened by news of a faraway catastrophe involving others attached to me only by the loose label of "fellow Americans," but it's hard for me to summon up the outrage that I see all over the Facebooks and the Twitters. A tragedy that hits close to home is, in fact, a tragedy. A tragedy that hits somewhere else in your state or country is more often than not just an opportunity to use said tragedy to advance your own agenda (political, personal, what-have-you). Or at least that's how most people seem to want to treat it. And who can blame them? Thousands of miles away, we can be distantly horrified at the objective fact of the callous slaughter of innocent kids, but we can't really do anything about it, except to try to change the conditions of the part of the world that's geographically closer to us so that it can't happen again. It's a weird position to be in.
From that position, here's what I'm thinking. One of my colleagues wrote on Facebook today, in response to this massacre: "How can you be shocked?" I thought the same thing, and knowing that someone who I respect was of like mind made me able to move past my guilt and start investigating why it was that something like this could not be shocking. And I think it's actually quite simple (all political maneuvering and other such bullshit aside): we have agreed, as a country, that we will continue to allow civilian access to unnecessarily efficient and deadly weapons, and the price we necessarily pay for this is that someone uses those weapons in an unlawful way against innocent people. That's the nature of the trade-off we've agreed to (collectively). If it's no longer worth the price we're paying, then we can make access to these weapons illegal (and thus more difficult). It's that simple. Opponents of gun control tacitly insist that their right to own ridiculously powerful guns originally created for 20th century total warfare is more important than the lives of those who die unjustly as a result of the availability of those guns. I, always having been more of a socialist than a capitalist or a democracy-ist (really, what is the form of that word that I'm looking for?) would happily give up such a right in order to prevent such shootings from happening. I'm happy to live a little less free (though not a lot less free, mind you) to make society as a whole a bit safer. Many people aren't, and this is and will continue to be the result.
Dec 14, 2012
Some Statements Related To Video Gaming That I Take Issue With, Part Two
You know that I can't pass up the opportunity to comment on a story about video games featuring a huge picture of Oscar Wilde, right?
Obviously, "The game author is dead" is just a headline designed to make people angry, since that's sort of what Kill Screen does...but...IT FUCKING WORKED BECAUSE NOW I'M ANGRY.
I spent a good chunk of my dissertation chapter on Minecraft describing how gameworlds are co-constructed between the player and the developer, so obviously my opinion runs a bit counter to this piece...but, specifically, I have a problem with the conflation of video games as an expressive medium with older media (in this case, literature) that's implied here.
Now, I've spent an ungodly amount of time in English departments in the last decade and nearly-a-half, so I'm pretty familiar with the turn in literary criticism from the author-as-text-and-meaning-maker to the author-as-text-maker/audience-as-meaning-maker. To me, they're both true to an extent: an author creates something with a certain intent (why the hell would you write an entire book otherwise?) which the audience interprets any number of ways, projecting themselves and their experiences onto the text and maybe coming close to understanding the author's original intent, and maybe not.
Ultimately, it doesn't really matter how close you get to the creator's interpretation (though it might matter how close you get to your professor's interpretation, depending on how vindictive he/she is): they create a static work, put it out into the cultural stream (that sounds gross) and then you consume it (okay, that sounds grosser). The relationship is pretty one-way.
With games, though, things are a bit different. The creators (coders, developers, whatever you want to call them...the people who make the game) only do part of the work of creating the gameworld (I won't say "story" here because that would then open a different and much larger can of worms). There's a very fundamental difference between literature and games, which is that in the course of playing the game, you help create it. Sure, if not a single person reads a book when it is released (like my dissertation, for example), it doesn't perhaps reach its fullest potential as an expressive work, but it still fundamentally exists. Gameworlds really only, truly exist when there is someone moving through them (via an avatar or what-have-you), and, like some extra-dorky version of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, once you've begun observing the gameworld, your input becomes a part of its output.
Thought it might sound like I'm arguing that games are even less dependent on the author than literature here, the reality is that the creation of a gameworld is necessarily symbiotic (player + "author"). The only situation in which the game author can be dead is the hypothetical one in which we make our own game and play it ourselves and never let anyone else play it, and even that is still a sort of "player + author" situation.
Sure, arguing that the game author is dead is nice and provocative, but it's fundamentally impossible. The book author's intent might not matter once you start reading and latch on to your own particular interpretation. However, the game author creates the very system of rules from within which you form your opinion of his/her work, and thus seems, to me, to be pretty indispensible to the process of interpretation.
 |
| "Congratulations! You have destroyed the vile Red Falcon and saved the universe!" |
I spent a good chunk of my dissertation chapter on Minecraft describing how gameworlds are co-constructed between the player and the developer, so obviously my opinion runs a bit counter to this piece...but, specifically, I have a problem with the conflation of video games as an expressive medium with older media (in this case, literature) that's implied here.
Now, I've spent an ungodly amount of time in English departments in the last decade and nearly-a-half, so I'm pretty familiar with the turn in literary criticism from the author-as-text-and-meaning-maker to the author-as-text-maker/audience-as-meaning-maker. To me, they're both true to an extent: an author creates something with a certain intent (why the hell would you write an entire book otherwise?) which the audience interprets any number of ways, projecting themselves and their experiences onto the text and maybe coming close to understanding the author's original intent, and maybe not.
 |
| "I'm pretty sure it's about, like, construction workers, and, like...uhngugnkgalsgdlsa" |
With games, though, things are a bit different. The creators (coders, developers, whatever you want to call them...the people who make the game) only do part of the work of creating the gameworld (I won't say "story" here because that would then open a different and much larger can of worms). There's a very fundamental difference between literature and games, which is that in the course of playing the game, you help create it. Sure, if not a single person reads a book when it is released (like my dissertation, for example), it doesn't perhaps reach its fullest potential as an expressive work, but it still fundamentally exists. Gameworlds really only, truly exist when there is someone moving through them (via an avatar or what-have-you), and, like some extra-dorky version of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, once you've begun observing the gameworld, your input becomes a part of its output.
Thought it might sound like I'm arguing that games are even less dependent on the author than literature here, the reality is that the creation of a gameworld is necessarily symbiotic (player + "author"). The only situation in which the game author can be dead is the hypothetical one in which we make our own game and play it ourselves and never let anyone else play it, and even that is still a sort of "player + author" situation.
Sure, arguing that the game author is dead is nice and provocative, but it's fundamentally impossible. The book author's intent might not matter once you start reading and latch on to your own particular interpretation. However, the game author creates the very system of rules from within which you form your opinion of his/her work, and thus seems, to me, to be pretty indispensible to the process of interpretation.
Dec 13, 2012
Some Statements Related To Video Gaming That I Take Issue With, Part One
The ol' rage-o-meter just spiked, thanks to this video, or, more appropriately, the text that accompanies it. Apparently, RPG elements improve every game, and now the new Tomb Raider has them!
Why does this enrage me, you ask? Well, because I'm a middle class white American male! I've got to have something to get angry about! And today, "RPG elements" are that thing.
First of all, what the fuck are "RPG elements"? I've played a lot of RPGs in my time, and boy do they have a lot of elements, both collectively and individually. Said elements do in fact seem to be making their way into every single game on earth lately, and I'm not entirely sure that it's reasonable to say that they improve every single one of those games.
Short version: there's a reason that the RPG is a genre. Now, I'm all for genre cross-pollination (in games and also in books, music, movies, whatever), but I sincerely question the validity of needing to inseminate every other game genre with RPGs' fundamental DNA, which includes (often, though not always) leveling, classes, statistical categories, and other often number-based complexities (the things that I assume the IGN author means by "RPG elements").
Long version: Games are systems. They are also worlds. The system (the code) builds the world, and dictates how the player can and cannot interact with it. We're at a wonderful stage of genre cross-pollination right now with regard to games, but it seems like so often the result of the cross-pollination is simply to throw more systems at the player, under the assumption that if you gives him/her enough things to do, they'll walk away feeling like they got their money's worth. And to a degree, I think this works. Learning to master systems, overcoming obstacles, and then learning to turn the rules of the game to our advantage is inherently satisfying, whether we're talking about football or World of Goo.
However, just tossing more systems into the mix willy-nilly makes it difficult to maintain any sense of a coherent world. So yeah, when I play a game like the new Tomb Raider (which I obviously haven't played, but I have played a lot of similar adventure/FPS-type games with RPG elements grafted on to them), there is always some satisfaction in unlocking a new skill by accruing enough skill points, or XP, or whatever it's called in any given game. It's nice to feel like I earned that particular skill and that once I've earned enough points, I have a chance to choose how to spend those points in a way that will suit my play style. So it's accomplishment first, followed by the opportunity to personalize a character in a superficial way (which, for some reason, often gets conflated with "role playing"). The question I have in this situation is "Who buys Tomb Raider to role-play?" We don't. We buy Tomb Raider because Lara Croft is badass and we want to control her and use her powers of awesome to kick all the ass on earth. So while it's a momentary reward of sorts to unlock a new skill for Lara as a result of your awesomeness at ass-kicking, it feels strange to me in the larger context of the game. Why do I need to have a Lara who is a survivalist or a Lara who has better eyesight? Why can't I just have an awesome superhero with all kinds of neat powers and not feel like I need to play through the game 18 times in order to get to do all the cool things in it? Because RPG elements, that's why.
Maybe the best way to explain what the face-fuck I'm talking about is to talk about Deus Ex. Deus Ex is, nominally at least, an FPS with RPG elements. And yet, your manipulation of the game's skill system has dramatic consequences "on the ground," so to speak. If you create yourself to be a master hacker, you can hack your way through shit, but if things go south, you're not going to power your way out of trouble with your rocket launcher, because chances are your character's too weak to even lift and fire the damn thing. Deus Ex makes sure its RPG-style skill system makes sense in the larger context of the world and the way that the player survives and succeeds with in: the system has weight. In many RPG-inflected games since, that hasn't been the case. It's like the industry saw that a few games like Deus Ex successfully put fried onions in a burrito, and so now everything's got to have fried onions in it, even the goddamn carrot cake.
Sure, in a lot of these games (and I'm sorry for not providing an example right now, my brain is literally seeping out of someone else's eye sockets), you can customize things like Accuracy, Weapon Specialization and such fancy things, but all your choices really mean is that the game is slightly harder if you choose to create an physically weak, eagle-eyed sniper and then plow through while bludgeoning everything with a war hammer. Beyond that, there aren't any real consequences, because (presumably) developers want the player to eventually be able to work their way through the game however they want, so that they keep coming back happy.
Contrast this with, say, Baldur's Gate 2 (since that's what I'm playing now). If you create a Dwarf fighter who specializes in crossbows and axes, just try fighting a high-level enemy with a bow or a knife and see how far you get. At some point, your choices catch up to you, and within the game world, to succeed, you need to play as the character you've chosen to be. Those character-defining decisions carry weight. That's RPG elements for you.
Slapping a bunch of cool "bonus" skills together into a skill tree and requiring the player to kill a thousand bad guys to unlock them all has nothing to do with role-playing, and honestly I have a really hard time understanding how they "improve" anything. Sure, it gives you more stuff to do, but since when has gaming been about giving the player more things to do, just for the sake of doing them?
Why does this enrage me, you ask? Well, because I'm a middle class white American male! I've got to have something to get angry about! And today, "RPG elements" are that thing.
First of all, what the fuck are "RPG elements"? I've played a lot of RPGs in my time, and boy do they have a lot of elements, both collectively and individually. Said elements do in fact seem to be making their way into every single game on earth lately, and I'm not entirely sure that it's reasonable to say that they improve every single one of those games.
Short version: there's a reason that the RPG is a genre. Now, I'm all for genre cross-pollination (in games and also in books, music, movies, whatever), but I sincerely question the validity of needing to inseminate every other game genre with RPGs' fundamental DNA, which includes (often, though not always) leveling, classes, statistical categories, and other often number-based complexities (the things that I assume the IGN author means by "RPG elements").
Long version: Games are systems. They are also worlds. The system (the code) builds the world, and dictates how the player can and cannot interact with it. We're at a wonderful stage of genre cross-pollination right now with regard to games, but it seems like so often the result of the cross-pollination is simply to throw more systems at the player, under the assumption that if you gives him/her enough things to do, they'll walk away feeling like they got their money's worth. And to a degree, I think this works. Learning to master systems, overcoming obstacles, and then learning to turn the rules of the game to our advantage is inherently satisfying, whether we're talking about football or World of Goo.
 |
| Button hook on 3? |
Maybe the best way to explain what the face-fuck I'm talking about is to talk about Deus Ex. Deus Ex is, nominally at least, an FPS with RPG elements. And yet, your manipulation of the game's skill system has dramatic consequences "on the ground," so to speak. If you create yourself to be a master hacker, you can hack your way through shit, but if things go south, you're not going to power your way out of trouble with your rocket launcher, because chances are your character's too weak to even lift and fire the damn thing. Deus Ex makes sure its RPG-style skill system makes sense in the larger context of the world and the way that the player survives and succeeds with in: the system has weight. In many RPG-inflected games since, that hasn't been the case. It's like the industry saw that a few games like Deus Ex successfully put fried onions in a burrito, and so now everything's got to have fried onions in it, even the goddamn carrot cake.
 |
| Do you really want to hurt me? Do you really want to make me cry? |
Contrast this with, say, Baldur's Gate 2 (since that's what I'm playing now). If you create a Dwarf fighter who specializes in crossbows and axes, just try fighting a high-level enemy with a bow or a knife and see how far you get. At some point, your choices catch up to you, and within the game world, to succeed, you need to play as the character you've chosen to be. Those character-defining decisions carry weight. That's RPG elements for you.
Slapping a bunch of cool "bonus" skills together into a skill tree and requiring the player to kill a thousand bad guys to unlock them all has nothing to do with role-playing, and honestly I have a really hard time understanding how they "improve" anything. Sure, it gives you more stuff to do, but since when has gaming been about giving the player more things to do, just for the sake of doing them?
The best thing about Slaughterhouse-Five...
...is this passage right here: "They were without food or maps. Avoiding Germans, they were delivering themselves into rural silences ever more profound. They ate snow."
Oct 1, 2012
There are moths all over the walls of my living room.
It's been almost exactly five years since I've devoted any sustained thought to John Irving or any of his novels, but I can't seem to get him off my mind these last few days.
A little short of five years ago, a colleague of mine with whom I had become rather close friends moved away from Pullman after completing her graduate program. I, of course, stayed in Pullman because that's how all of my stories end, it seems (I'm not really complaining). I can't remember now if it was when she left town or when I drove to visit her later that summer that she gave me a stack of John Irving novels. There were three, I think, and I'll probably ruin my last chance to inject this story with any pathos by admitting that at the moment I can't even remember the titles, though I remember a decent amount of the content of each.
Anyway, I was eventually compelled to express interest in a romantic relationship, a proposal which she thankfully had the good sense to gently reject. Though this development was really the complete opposite of unexpected, it was also only yet another way in which I suddenly found myself at loose ends: I'd recently finished my graduate program as well, but failed to find a job. I had no money, nowhere to live, and no prospects for employment in academia until the next academic year began eleven or so months later. Example-colleague was the other half of the only really well-maintained and functional friendship that I had at the time (in spite of my good-natured but ill-considered attempts to upend even that) and after two straight years of 60- and 70-hour work weeks as a graduate student, I had completely lost any faith that younger me might have ever had in my ability to communicate with human beings that weren't related to me by blood and thus required to be understanding.
I spent a lot of that summer driving around the country, smoking American Spirits, playing a guitar, doing a little hiking, and mostly reading and re-reading those John Irving novels. There was something oddly captivating about them: a tone, a portrayal of the world as simultaneously merciless and stupefyingly beautiful in its illogic, the reaction of a character somehow more real than real...I don't know. As I read them stretched out in the back seat of my car, on beds in skanky trucker motels, by headlamp in my old, stupid, stupid bargain-basement tent, on friends' couches and eventually, at the stereotypical nadir of every graduate student's fall, on my childhood bed in my parents' house, they helped me fix something. When I started back at WSU the next fall as an instructor, my getting hired was certainly more luck-of-the-draw than anything else, but a lot of the reason that I came back as someone capable of doing that job with as much energy, enthusiasm, interest, and confidence than I'd had before graduation and the unraveling of everything in its aftermath is in those books somewhere. Even if I can't remember the titles or anything else about them right now except a sort-of Virginia Woolf analogue and a bear on a motorcycle.
They're on my mind again, now, I think, because I'm starting to feel like I'm in a similar position, with similar anxieties. But that's another post, for another night. If I've learned one thing in my last five or so years of relative complacence, happiness, and comfort, it's that you rarely actually solve your problems by sitting up all night staring into your computer screen when you've got to get up and start work at eight the next morning...
A little short of five years ago, a colleague of mine with whom I had become rather close friends moved away from Pullman after completing her graduate program. I, of course, stayed in Pullman because that's how all of my stories end, it seems (I'm not really complaining). I can't remember now if it was when she left town or when I drove to visit her later that summer that she gave me a stack of John Irving novels. There were three, I think, and I'll probably ruin my last chance to inject this story with any pathos by admitting that at the moment I can't even remember the titles, though I remember a decent amount of the content of each.
Anyway, I was eventually compelled to express interest in a romantic relationship, a proposal which she thankfully had the good sense to gently reject. Though this development was really the complete opposite of unexpected, it was also only yet another way in which I suddenly found myself at loose ends: I'd recently finished my graduate program as well, but failed to find a job. I had no money, nowhere to live, and no prospects for employment in academia until the next academic year began eleven or so months later. Example-colleague was the other half of the only really well-maintained and functional friendship that I had at the time (in spite of my good-natured but ill-considered attempts to upend even that) and after two straight years of 60- and 70-hour work weeks as a graduate student, I had completely lost any faith that younger me might have ever had in my ability to communicate with human beings that weren't related to me by blood and thus required to be understanding.
I spent a lot of that summer driving around the country, smoking American Spirits, playing a guitar, doing a little hiking, and mostly reading and re-reading those John Irving novels. There was something oddly captivating about them: a tone, a portrayal of the world as simultaneously merciless and stupefyingly beautiful in its illogic, the reaction of a character somehow more real than real...I don't know. As I read them stretched out in the back seat of my car, on beds in skanky trucker motels, by headlamp in my old, stupid, stupid bargain-basement tent, on friends' couches and eventually, at the stereotypical nadir of every graduate student's fall, on my childhood bed in my parents' house, they helped me fix something. When I started back at WSU the next fall as an instructor, my getting hired was certainly more luck-of-the-draw than anything else, but a lot of the reason that I came back as someone capable of doing that job with as much energy, enthusiasm, interest, and confidence than I'd had before graduation and the unraveling of everything in its aftermath is in those books somewhere. Even if I can't remember the titles or anything else about them right now except a sort-of Virginia Woolf analogue and a bear on a motorcycle.
They're on my mind again, now, I think, because I'm starting to feel like I'm in a similar position, with similar anxieties. But that's another post, for another night. If I've learned one thing in my last five or so years of relative complacence, happiness, and comfort, it's that you rarely actually solve your problems by sitting up all night staring into your computer screen when you've got to get up and start work at eight the next morning...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)