You’ve probably all noticed that my blog updates have become somewhat infrequent, at least compared to the beginning, where I’d hammer out an entry a day. Don’t worry, this is just a momentary slump (I hope); things are somewhat stressful at the moment, and I don’t get to watch or read as much as I’d like. Even when I do find the time, I’m usually somewhat too tired to appreciate films, series and books as much as I’d want to.
That’s where gaming comes in. I can be as tired as I want, yet I can still get some enjoyment out of Guitar Hero (where I’ve graduated to Hard mode, meaning that I’ve now got five fretting buttons to contend with!) or Splinter Cell. Or I could be “enjoying” Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth.
CoC: DCotE (doncha love acronyms?) is one of the creepiest games I’ve played since… well, since Thief 3 and that Holy Grail of computer game horror, the Cradle. I’m not particularly informed when it comes to H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu mythos, but for those of you who know even less, Cthulhu is this cheerful fellow:
(Any similarities to a certain crustacean Doctor are purely coincidental.)
The game has a couple of easy scares (boo! decomposing corpse!), but by and large it works with more subtle techniques: half-glimpsed horrors and whispers in the dark. Slowly going insane is as much of a threat in this game as things that go bump in the night. The game starts with the protagonist cuts his stay at an insane asylum short by hanging himself – what follows essentially is a long, drawn-out flashback – an odd way to motivate players to progress: “Just one more level and I can hang myself! Yay!” For the first two, three hours of gameplay you don’t even have any weapons, which makes for an original twist on the genre: for once, the solution to all your problems isn’t unloading a gun in some gilled horror’s face.
And the game has what is possibly the best chase sequence I’ve ever seen or played. You’re woken up in the middle of the night as a couple of shady guys (with serious throat problems, from the sound of it) try to break into your room to turn you into chowder. Your only option is to run, bolting doors behind you or blocking them with wardrobes and the like. Then, a bracing escape via the rooftops while you’re being shot at… and don’t even look down, because otherwise you’ll find out just how Jimmy Stewart felt in that classic Hitchcock movie about a guy with vertigo. I think it was called… “The Man Who Was Afraid of Heights”.
Many gamers are looking for one semi-mythic, intangible quality in games: immersion. It’s basically the ineffable property of making you forget that you’re sitting in front of a computer screen or TV, grasping a gamepad or a mouse, and feel that you’re really there. But, let’s face it, even with the most immersive games you never feel like you’re a mute MIT graduate saving the world with a gun in one hand and a crowbar in the other, or a cyber-ninja special operative infiltrating terrorist strongholds or a Persian prince able to run along steep walls and turn back time. There are worlds between playing FIFA 08 and actually kicking a football – there’s little to no comparison between pressing X or O and propelling a leather ball towards the enemy goal with your foot. Possibly the only game that offers near-absolute immersion is computerised chess, because as if you’re, like, really playing chess!
Okay, enough sarcasm – what I’m getting at is this: there are few games that make you believe you’re really doing what your on-screen avatar is doing. Fair enough, really; there are limits to how much I’d want to believe I’m being shot at by alien armies while killer zombies are trying to chew my frontal lobe. And I definitely don’t want to believe I’m actually playing football at Wembley Stadium.
There is a game (or several games, by now) that gives you a fairly convincing illusion that you’re actually doing the thing you’re playing, and that game is called Guitar Hero. I’ve had it for a while, but I’ve only recently started to play it again. And it’s great fun. Looked at objectively, it should be a humiliating experience: you stand there holding a plastic toy shaped like a Gibson guitar, pressing colour buttons and strumming a white bar in sync with popular rock songs. You’re as close to rock stardom as Third French Lord in an amateur production of Henry V is from saying, “And I would like to thank the Academy…”
But, hell, if it isn’t fun… And it does a great job of making you feel like you’re playing complex solos, totally rocking the place, dude! The game mainly works because the rock songs used make for surprisingly good videogame levels. So far, I’ve only made it to the second of four difficulty levels with any success – I’m only using four of the five fret buttons, which means that my hands are in for some pretty bad strain. But the choice of songs is almost perfect: Guitar Hero has everything from ’70s glam rock to ’80s cheese rock (is that a term? it should be!) to 21st century alternative rock. And since I don’t really listen to the radio, it’s this game that has introduced me to the following eminently cool song:
However, there’s a further turn of the screw to my geek joy. I’m very much an old-school gamer – I played games on machines that are practically Etch-a-Sketches compared to a five-year old mobile phone. My first slice of nerd heaven was a Commodore 64, a name that still brings on a hush of awe in the right crowd. The C-64 has been defunct for decades, yet there are insane people still working with them… and this is where I don’t care just how nerdy and geeky I sound, but the following is just distilled nostalgic coolness:
Yesterday evening the internet conspired to conspire against me. Hotmail didn’t work, nor did WordPress. I wanted to write and post an update, knowing that the huddled masses were waiting for a few well-placed words of wisdom on movies or video games or something equally relevant to our daily lives. But no – technology decided that it’s Lent, so perhaps a techno-fast was in order.
Anyway, it’s working again now. Aren’t you all relieved? I know I am.
So, what have I been up to? Not much in terms of movies and TV. But I’ve started playing Bioshock, one of the best-reviewed titles of 2007. Can’t say I’ve played much of it so far, but I’m definitely intrigued by its thematic ambitiousness and its art deco aesthetics. And it’s got one of the best starting sequences I’ve ever played. More on Bioshock is likely to follow, but for now, enjoy this video clip:
Well, for once I won’t write about last night’s episode of Lost (titled “Catch-22”). Why? Because it wasn’t very interesting – but neither was it so horrible that I have to share my eye-gouging terror with the world (and the Keira Knightley fans who may want to eviscerate me after yesterday’s entry… Just kidding!).
So, instead let me regale you with my current PC gaming choices: Colin McRae DIRT (which I’ve mentioned here before) and Thief: Deadly Shadows. The latter is a game that I originally played when it came out, but now, two computers and three videocards later, it runs much, much smoother than it ever did. However, the game bears sad witness to who I really am: someone who gets a kick out of skulking in the shadows, waiting for people to pass, and then hit them over the head with a blackjack and rob them blind.
Yup, that’s me. I prefer crouching in the darkness and waiting, and then knocking out my enemies. With almost any shooter game, if I have the option to put my opponents to sleep, that’s what I’ll do. There are few things as satisfying in a game as a totally non-lethal headshot with a tranquiliser dart and then dragging the motionless body behind a wall or some rocks… and then waiting for the guy’s buddy to turn up, looking for his mate – and do it all over again.
Now, as far as DIRT is concerned… I’m not bad at it. Not totally bad, at least. But sometimes… well, sometimes my driving looks pretty much like this – and (moving) pictures say a lot more than words in this case:
No news on the game front, really; I’m still playing Stalker (pure nukular goodness!), Neverwinter Nights 2 (it’s okay, but I still don’t get the enthusiastic reviews), Anachronox (slowly getting to the end) – and a rallye game called Colin McRae DIRT, best proof that the streets are safer with me off them.
I also haven’t watched any new films (or rewatched old ones), so I’ll take this opportunity to write about films that I expected to like – but didn’t. Usually when that happens, it’s that I like the director’s previous work a lot, but then fail completely to connect with the film. Or it’s that a reviewer I like gives the film a glowing review that I fall for. By the way, I don’t share the dismissive arrogance many people have when it comes to reviewers – good critics don’t necessarily share my opinions 100%, but 1) they have to recognise what a film is trying to do and 2) I have to know where they’re coming from after reading the review. What I do hate is critics who pan a genre film, for instance, because it isn’t Truffaut, critics who mistake their dislike for a certain kind of story or storytelling for its inherent unworthiness. And with a good reviewer, it doesn’t really matter whether they liked a film or not – I will have a good idea from what they write and how they write it whether I’m likely to enjoy the film.
Before I get started on this in earnest, though, I’ll have to come up with a list of films that fit. I’ve got a few ideas: Punch Drunk Love, for one, and my own favourite, Russian Ark. (Okay, technically that latter one is a “Film that this blogger hated with a vengeance”, but more of that later.) So, tune back in very soon!
P.S.: Films that – ironically, predictably – didn’t click for anyone, part 1:
Nope, I haven’t handed in my nerd credentials and stopped playing computer games. As a matter of fact, I recently got a new graphics card, so I’ve been diligently playing those games that didn’t run that smoothly before the upgrade. One of the titles I’d most been looking forward to is Stalker – Shadows of Chernobyl. (Well, technically it’s called S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – Something of Doodah, but unless someone can tell me what the abbreviation is supposed to stand for, I refuse to use that wannabe leet name.)
There’s been a discussion about games as art for a while now. If we look at them as narrative art, then I’d agree that there are few games that tell a story that’s better, or even as good, as your average mainstreamy Hollywood genre piece. (There are exceptions, but that’s material for another entry.) What games can excel at, though, is atmosphere – and that’s what Stalker has in spades. It’s based, though loosely, on Andrei Tarkovsky’s enigmatic film of the same name (which I haven’t seen yet – shame on me!).
The game is set in the area around the radioactive wasteland surrounding the defunct nuclear reactor in Chernobyl. Stalker‘s version of the Zone is populated by lone adventurers, bandits, militia and mutated animals. It is dotted with anomalies that tend to mean your death if you wander into any one of them unawares. (There is grim fun to be had of watching packs of mutated dogs happen into an anomaly that pretty much spins them around like the cow in Twister – and then tears them apart.)
Stalker manages to be one of those games that’s greatly enjoyable but not a lot of fun, and that’s mainly down to its atmospheric setting. On my first day in the Zone, I happened across a camp that other Stalkers had made amidst rusty cars and a broken down Hind helicopter. Just as the sun set, a group of bandits attacked, and most of what I could make out were bursts of fire in the darkness and the flashlight’s circle of brightness illuminating burnt out Ladas and the occasional bandit aiming his semi-automatic at me.
In general, the nights in the Zone are tense and scary – mostly because they are actually dark. Walking towards distant lights, your flashlight barely illuminating the bushes in front of you, while you hear strange animal sounds, and suddenly a pack of dogs attacks, their eyes glinting in the dark… Definitely beats the hell (pun only semi-intended) out of Doom 3‘s predictable haunted house ride and its rubber zombies.
I’m not very far yet, but I’m looking forward to getting closer to the shut-down reactor and entering the parts of the Zone that used to be residential areas. Until then, I will continue being the bane of mutated dogs and hogs everywhere… until I run out of ammo. I run pretty fast (’till I stumble into one of those amusing anomalies and it proceeds to turn me inside out).
Okay, I have to warn you. This is not one of those “I like game/movie/book XYZ enough to bore you with the details” posts. It’s an opinion piece. And it’s about one of those boring topics that the media keep coming back to, usually in the most facile, over-the-top way possible. Especially in the German media, you often get the equation: video gamer = potential murderer and sadist.
Which ticks me off. But what ticks me off just as much are gamers who aren’t able to look at the issue with some critical distance. You can’t have a decent discussion with the likes of Jack Thompson, people who believe that games train you to kill and maim (the word “murder simulator” pops up in their rhetoric), but it’s just as impossible to have a decent discussion with people who don’t have any second thoughts about a game where you’re rewarded for stealthy behaviour with extra-gory executions, and that’s part of the fun. (Warning: the video, showing Manhunt, is quite explicit.)
The people who think that any depictions of violence in games are fair game usually bring up three arguments: 1) “Movies such as Saw or Hostel are just as violent, they’re more realistic than pixellated polygon carnage, and adults can watch them, so it’s hypocritical to want to censor games!” 2) “It’s just a game, and personally I can tell the difference between a game and reality. If you can’t, that says more about you…” 3) “Censorship is a restriction of free speech! And that’s un-American! Why don’t you go back to Russia, commie?”
1) “Many movies are just as violent, but you don’t see them being banned, do you?”
It’s definitely true that films such as Saw or Hostel are at least as violent. They’re also more realistic, because while games have advanced quite amazingly in terms of visual representation, you still wouldn’t mistake a game’s version of reality for the Real Thing(tm). (One point that’s often raised together with this one is that games aren’t kiddies stuff per se. I agree with that – just like not all animation is Disney fare but may be aimed at an adult audience, not every game is Super Mario World.) However, it’s silly to ignore the fact that games are interactive, whereas films aren’t. Quite often, game violence is inflicted by the player’s avatar, controlled by the player. It’s too simplistic to say that you, the gamer, are committing the violent acts, but there’s obviously a causal link between your actions and the on-screen violence.
I’m not saying that this automatically programs gamers to become murderers, or simply to become more violent and aggressive. Most of the studies I’ve seen that suggest such a correlation are questionable in terms of methodology – for instance, they measure an increase in aggressivity in ways that would apply to football or any other competitive sports as well. On the other hand, though, there aren’t that many good studies that show the violence in games to have no effect whatsoever. Until there’s more, and especially better, unbiased research, the argument simply doesn’t hold. And just because individual gamer X who’s been playing violent games since he was 12 hasn’t taken a knife to his parents yet (you gotta love anecdotal evidence!), that doesn’t mean that there might not be other, more subtle effects.
Does this mean we should prohibit all violence in video games? No – but it does suggest that we, critics as well as defenders, should keep a more open mind.
2) “It’s just a game, man! Ever heard of fiction? It’s this thing that isn’t reality!”
When Goethe published his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther which ends with the protagonist’s suicide (yeah, I’ve just spoiled the novel’s ending for you! deal with it!), there was a rash of copycat suicides. People cheer when bad guys get killed in movies. They cry when their favourite characters in a series die. Yes, the emotional reaction is safe to some extent because it’s based on fiction – but it is nevertheless an emotional reaction.
And while the relationship between fictional representations and the reality they represent is highly complex, would anyone really, honestly deny that there is a relationship? Horror movies scare – why else would people watch them? Romantic comedies make you all warm and fuzzy. How many people sit in their seats thinking “Yeah, right, but it’s not real, is it? That’s just an actor, that’s ketchup, and those are digital effects.” Much of the time we watch fiction in order to get lost in it. Fiction can have a real effect on us, so saying that when you put a virtual knife in some poor virtual henchman’s virtual eyesocket it’s just fiction strikes me as naive at best, and disingenuous at worst.
Again, this doesn’t mean that violence in games should be made illegal outright. It just means that the argument is becoming increasingly facile.
3) “Freedom of speech, yadda yadda yadda…!”
Okay, I’m going to out myself here. I don’t necessarily believe that absolute freedom of speech is such a great thing. In the best of all possible worlds it is. In a world filled with responsible, mature people who can look at themselves and their own actions with a minimum of critical distance, free speech would be one of the greatest goods.
In a world where people think that just because you’re allowed to say something it’s right to say it, and where people don’t think that every now and then it’s better not to say something… well, in such a world, I must say that I can live with restrictions to free speech. There is no such thing as absolutely free speech anyway – there are always limits imposed by others. Sometimes these limits are institutionalised (for instance when the government issues laws against hate speech), sometimes they’re internalised. (“You don’t say XYZ because…”.)
I often find that you can’t really talk to people who act on pure principles – because principles, if applied as purely as they’re usually argued, ignore context. And that’s what is woefully missing from this entire debate: people fight over examples of videogame violence, but they don’t really look at the individual contexts. Do I think it’s right that the BBFC denied Manhunt 2a certificate, in effect banning it in the UK? I don’t think it’s wrong, although I think this sort of thing should be applied only after a lot of consideration, and it should be open to appeal. I think it’s important to discuss whether “freedom of speech” means such games should be made and sold. I think it’s important that the in-game context of violence should be looked at critically. Who is the player character, what does the violence consist of? How is it integrated into a plot? Who is it committed against? Does the game reward violence, does it punish it, or does it simply show it? All of these are interesting, important questions that are so often ignored by both sides of the debate. The same act of violence may mean something vastly different depending on context.
If anything should go in games, because they’re fictional and because artistic freedom should be absolute (i.e. it should include such things as gamers being able to chainsaw their opponents in the throat and then dismember the corpses – it’s art, innit?), then there’s nothing wrong with rape games or concentration camp simulators. These games exist (they’re amateur productions), and they won’t stop existing if there’s legislation. But unless the defenders of videogame violence are willing to have an mature, differentiated debate about the issue, acknowledging its complexity, I can live with limits to what is acceptable in games.
Until a game is banned that I really like, and that’s when I’ll probably be shouting the loudest.
(Note: That last sentence is there to acknowledge the contradiction in me advertising GTA: San Andreas one day and ranting against violence in games the next. Hey, I’m a contrary bastard! Also, I’d rather continue the discussion in the Comments, if anyone’s interested. This issue should be debated, and not just in black/white terms.)
Okay, it’s “Plug an old game” time. Yesterday I finished my second or third playthrough of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. And it’s still one of the most versatile games I know – it’s probably the truest “sandbox game” that’s out there. For those of you who aren’t computer game nerds like myself, here’s a handy definition from Wikipedia:
A sandbox-style video game (or a video game with an optional sandbox mode) is a video game with an open-ended and non-linear style of gameplay, or a mode of gameplay within a game that is more often played in a goal-directed manner. The sandbox analogy is used to describe this style of gaming because, as with a physical sandbox, the user is simply allowed to do what he or she wishes (with the available game elements and within the limitations of the game engine — the metaphoric toys within, and boundaries of, the sandbox).
Now, what does that mean in concrete terms? San Andreas is a story-heavy game, it’s “played in a goal-directed manner”, but it gives you a lot of freedom in a) how you go about achieving the goal and b) how you spend your time in between missions. The game world is huge – you’re given three virtual cities/states to play around in: LA-inspired Los Santos, San Fierro (based on San Francisco) and Las Venturas, which is eerily similar to a certain desert city replete with casinos and organised crime. And while the story itself is enjoyable enough, some of the most fun can be had just boarding one of the many vehicles (cars, bikes, boats, planes) and zooming around. Personally, I get most of a kick out of navigating the hills of San Fierro on my trusty BMX bike, but here’s some of the fun’n’games that others came up with.
“The Enrichment Center is committed to the well-being of all participants. Cake and Grief Counseling will be available at the conclusion of the test. Thank you for helping us help you help us all.”
“Did you know you can donate one or all of your vital organs to the Aperture
Science Self Esteem Fund for Girls? It’s true!”
Portal is probably this year’s most written about game, even more so than Halo 3. And for good reason. It’s the first game I’ve every played (and I’ve been doing this since 1982, roughly) that I would call perfect. This weirdly wonderful offshoot of the Half-Life franchise, feeling like the movie Cube, if it had been written by Charlie Kaufman, doesn’t take a single wrong step. The brilliant idea that forms the premise of the game gets the usual Valve polish, but it’s the script that turns this into something special.
Which is also why I’d rather show than tell. So, here goes, courtesy of YouTube:
P.S.: Portal‘s AI GLaDOS, who gives good old SHODAN a run for her money, is brilliantly written. The funnier she gets, the more disturbing she gets. And the song at the end makes me want to cuddle and cuddle and cuddle this game.
I finally finished Augusten Burroughs’ Running With Scissors. And boy, am I glad.
By the time I got to the last chapter, I no longer hated it. I simply didn’t have the stamina for that. I simply found it boring and annoying – and boringly, annoyingly unfunny. There’s little structure in the novel, so the single episodes could all be jumbled up and re-ordered with little to no effect on the book. There’s barely any character development. I’m sure you can write enjoyable novels without character development or structure, but you have to be a hell of a lot better than Burroughs and your story has to be a hell of a lot more interesting. Up to the very end, I felt I was reading the self-indulgent, self-dramatising journal of a drama queen – admittedly one whose childhood and adolescence (as told) were quite horrible, but suffering in itself does not a good novel make.
Anyway, it’s over, and I’ve now started on Haruki Murakami’s short story collection Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. I recently read his Kafka on the Shore, which was okay but faltered a lot towards the end, and it suffered a lot from having come after The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which I think is what the Germans surreally call “ein grosser Wurf”. (Roughly translateable as “a great success”; literally, it means “a great throw”, which might make sense if the Germans played baseball.) I enjoyed a lot of Murakami’s earlier short fiction, perhaps mainly because his excursions from the main plot are always fascinating… and in a short story there’s less of a risk that he runs out of steam and the novel peters out. Murakami is a great writer, but endings aren’t his forte.
What else? I’ve played on in Anachronox, and it’s as delightfully inventive as I remember. I’ve just left Democratus, one of the great inventions of the game: a planet that makes Switzerland’s political system look positively efficient. On Democratus, every decision requires a vote. Every decision. And every decision has to be discussed in great detail, so that the planet’s High Council even fails to come to a decision about the 64 lethal missiles aimed its way by an aggressive insect race. But watch for yourselves:
Since few of you are likely to still find the game and play it, I’ll go ahead and spoil some of the further plot for you: after you save Democratus, the Council decides to reward you by having the planet shrunk and joining your party. As Wikipedia puts it, “the most annoying civilization in the universe shrinks their planet to five feet in diameter and begins following the team around.” And there’s little as boggling as the sight of that man-sized planet happily floating after you, squabbling about your every decision.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 