We live in a world defined by the heterosexual masculine viewpoint. That is, the vast majority of our world is constructed with reference to the position of a heterosexual man (usually white in the West). This is institutionalized sexism on the level of unconsciousness for most, and a terrible thing for those who don't fall into that categorization because they are forced to privilege others' viewpoints, but it's also a terrible thing for those who do fall into that categorization because they aren't. (Yes, it's a very different terrible, and obviously less damaging, but I think it's worth mentioning nonetheless.)

Sotomayor's controversial statement about a woman's experience was fundamentally correct precisely because of this paradigm. Precisely because we live in a straight man's world, and anyone who isn't a straight man is forced to learn what it means to be a straight man, think from the position of a straight man, in addition to their own. Women (mostly) are very aware of their status as (sexual) objects to straight men; they are indoctrinated from brith into their own objectification, and those who oppose it are nonetheless very familiar with. Straight men, on the other hand, have no such forced perspectives. They know their own and no other. Even if they try to seek out alternatives, it is very difficult to find anything, because the world is so dominated by their positional paradigm.

Or simply, everyone would be better off in a more open world.

I wrote this paper for a class on postmodern fiction last year. I'm not sure how interesting it will actually be to anyone else--it references the class fairly significantly, and it's not a particularly unique or new analysis of Bioshock, but I thought I'd put it up here anyway. Massive spoilers for all of Bioshock, so be warned.

The first video games were developed in the 1950s, but it was not until the 1970s that they became a commercial enterprise and not until the past decade that they have begun to receive critical recognition. It is perhaps not coincidental that postmodernism—both the literary genre and cultural phenomenon—arose at the same time; at the very least it can be said that postmodernism and video games influenced and were influenced by each other, even if many involved with either field were not cognizant of the influence at the time. Postmodernism is, after all, deeply connected with the rise of computers and later network technology; and video games are from one perspective simply the narrative entertainment aspect of those technologies—the natural development from books and movies into the new realm of computers. Video games are of course much more than just movies on a computer, and the difference between the two is what makes video games arguably the most postmodern medium yet in existence: consider that if postmodernism is a preoccupation with the culture of the “easy edit”, the ability to change anything and everything at the click of a mouse button, then video games—narratives in which people are not passive readers or viewers but active players who interact with, change, edit the narrative as it occurs—are postmodern in their very bones.

This, at least, has been the argument of many academics in the fledgling field of game studies, if not in so many words: while they rarely connect their work to postmodernism, such academics frequently declare the power of video games to be their capacity for choice, in opposition to the locked linear narratives of almost all other artistic mediums (barring niche aberrations like the infamous Choose Your Own Adventure series of children's books). Yet one of the first video games to generate substantial critical discourse—2K Games' Bioshock, the magnum opus of designer Ken Levine published in 2007—is a game that deliberately, methodically, brutally deconstructs the myth of choice in video games. Bioshock's narrative and ludic climax revolves around a demonstration of the total lack of agency the player has, a demonstration of how everything the player has done in the game has been carefully orchestrated and choreographed, with the much-vaunted choices being nothing more than crude illusions.

Bioshock, a title near the pinnacle of both blockbuster action games—Bioshock sold over two million copies in its first year—and artistic and intellectual games, is a supremely postmodern video game. It is a video game in which body modification, addiction and compulsion, resistance to meta-narratives, self-referentiality, ontology, conspiracies, and nearly every other trope or trend of postmodern fiction appears in some way or another with a significant impact on either the gameplay or at least the narrative. It is a video game that combines an absurd, 1940s adventure serial-esque plot and over-the-top characters, setting, and art style with intensely serious points about human nature and the nature (and danger) of narrative. It is a video game whose first two acts build to arguably the most important comment in video games on video games yet made and then collapses in its final act into cliché and stereotypes, unable to overcome the problems it worked so hard to point out. It is a postmodern artifact both in the sense that it is concerned with postmodern concerns and in that it is itself deeply postmodern.

Bioshock is a first-person shooter, a video game played from a first-person perspective and in which the primary gameplay involves shooting enemies with a variety of weapons—the same genre as the infamously less cerebral Doom and Halo. After surviving a plane crash in the middle of the Atlantic, the player explores the underwater city of Rapture, an objectivist utopia built at the height of the Cold War that has since collapsed into anarchy. Early on the protagonist injects himself with a “plasmid”, a genetic modification device that allows him to use supernatural powers like shooting lightning from his fingertips; the various types of plasmids, along with more conventional firearms, form the basis of the player's arsenal. The player follows the instructions of Atlas, a man who speaks to him over a radio, as he gradually learns the story behind Rapture, founded by ex-Soviet industrialist Andrew Ryan and eventually brought down by the discovery of ADAM, the material that powers plasmids; the power struggle to control ADAM between Ryan and gangster Frank Fontaine, combined with the delirious effects of prolonged plasmid use, leads to the collapse of civilized society in Rapture and leaves the city occupied almost solely by “splicers”, citizens of Rapture gone mad with plasmid use and their own traumatic circumstances. Unlike everyone else in the game, the player cannot die: when “killed”, the player simply reappears in the nearest “Vita-Chamber”, a resurrection device that obscure audio logs in the game reveal to now be keyed only to Ryan's genetic code.

At the game's climax two-thirds of the way through, the player finally confronts Andrew Ryan, whom the player has been sent to kill by Atlas. Ryan reveals that the player is actually the genetic son of Ryan himself and a prostitute hired by Fontaine; Fontaine took the baby, had one of Rapture's geneticists accelerate its growth and implant it with false memories and mind control conditioning, then transported it to the continental United States until Fontaine called it back. The phrase Atlas uses to “suggest” directions to the player—“Would you kindly . . .”—is the code phrase that initiates the mind control protocol; Atlas is in fact Fontaine. The remainder of the game concerns the struggle of the player, now under the instruction of a Doctor Tenenbaum, to defeat Fontaine and escape Rapture.

Bioshock's plot would not be out of place in a movie commented on by Mystery Science Theater 3000, yet it aims (and arguably succeeds to a significant extent) at intellectual and artistic achievement far beyond such works. One of the hallmarks of postmodernism is the blurring of the distinction between “high brow” culture of art and “low brow” culture of entertainment (Et Tu, Babe's combination of hyperbolic ego humor and cultural commentary; Motherless Brooklyn's combination of detective genre tropes and a realistic depiction of Tourette's syndrome; Choke's combination of sex and sex addiction); Bioshock is near the apex of the tradition. It is after all first and foremost a video game, a medium until the past decade almost never discussed as anything but the lowest brow of culture, that nonetheless strives for a higher intellectual consideration. It is of a genre habitually described as “mindlesss” and its setting and plot are so obviously deliberately ridiculous and over-the-top that it seems difficult to take anything in the game seriously. Yet for every aspect of the game that exists purely for entertainment, there is a counterpart that has little value beyond the artistic: the splicers that the player guns down throughout the game (entertainment) speak with crazed speech that suggests they are not monsters but merely men and women driven mad by the terrible circumstances of Rapture (art); the struggle witnessed and fought throughout the game between Ryan and Atlas/Fontaine, which is both a classic dual between over-the-top villains and an honest commentary on idealism and nihilism; and of course the mind control, both an absurd device and the linchpin for the game's commentary on video games and the illusion of choice. Bioshock moves between the realms of entertainment and art, primeval and intellectual, high brow and low brow constantly and easily, almost daring a commentator to attempt and fail to draw a line between what is worth analyzing critically and what is not. Like postmodernism, Bishock defies categorization.

Early previews of Bioshock, which discussed an underground Nazi laboratory, reveal that only one aspect of the game remained from original conception to publication: body modification. Literally in the name—“shock” being a reference to the game's spiritual predecessors System Shock and System Shock 2 but “bio” being indisputably short for “biological”—the most notable deviation from traditional first-person shooter game mechanics is the plasmids, the biological weapons that the player collects and upgrades throughout the game. The narrative of course is consumed by the story of plasmids: it is plasmids that lead to the struggle between Ryan and Fontaine that brings Rapture down and it is plasmids that spawn the splicers that hunt the player the entirety of the game. Even the first major “boss” of the game is a plastic surgeon who decided after plasmids and ADAM allowed him to shape a person's body to any possible appearance—after perfection became an attainable goal—that he would become the Picasso of the body and free his patients from the tyranny of “symmetry”.

But more than this, Bioshock's gameplay is consumed by plasmids: the choice of which plasmids to keep in the limited available slots for genetic modification is one of the most important tactical decisions in the game and significantly changes how the player proceeds. Certain plasmids are better at fighting certain enemies or achieving certain effects, and always some option must be sacrificed; in this way even players who pay no attention to the narrative—a significant number—are forced to deal with Bioshock's emphasis on body modification. The choice is not just mechanical but also visual; the appearance of the player's hands (the only part of the protagonist's body visible from the game's first-person perspective) changes radically depending on which plasmid is equipped. Postmodernism is of course obsessed with body modification, perhaps most notably in Et Tu, Babe, with Mark Leyner's geriatric cyborg bodyguards and his own drug-addled physique; Bioshock takes this obsession as far as it can go, and perhaps a little farther.

The plasmids and their effects on Rapture's citizens hit upon another postmodern obsession: addiction. Et Tu, Babe, Infinite Jest, Choke: all are concerned majorly with addiction and addicts. In Bioshock addiction manifests in the splicers, the former normal people of Rapture who have become consumed by their use of plasmids and transformed into vicious killers that stalk the ruined structures of the city. The game's finale is an extended battle with Fontaine after he has injected himself with an overdose of ADAM, gone mad, and transformed into a physical incarnation of the mythological Atlas he previously impersonated. And while the player experiences no gameplay mechanics of addiction, the player is “addicted” to the instructions of Atlas/Fontaine, compelled just as an addict is to take drugs to follow any directions preceded by “Would you kindly . . .”. Bioshock's mind control is of course rather a form of compulsion, the larger theme that includes addiction and which nearly every work of postmodernism touches on in some way or another. For Bioshock compulsion and control is at the heart of its argument and commentary, the centerpiece of its skewering of the illusion of choice in video games that has spawned so much critical analysis.

The narrative of mind control and the struggle between Ryan and Fontaine is a narrative of conspiracy, a topic that recurs over and over in postmodern fiction. From Et Tu, Babe to Infinite Jest to Motherless Brooklyn to The Intuitionist, conspiracies dominate postmodernism, likely because they are a narrative trope that relates to so many more intellectual concerns of postmodernism: conspiracies, secrets, plots within plots mean resistance to meta-narratives, as Lyotard defined postmodernism, and ontology, the question of “what world is this?”. These concerns are at the heart of Bioshock as well, not just in its conspiracies but in every aspect of the narrative and game.

Before Bioshock was released its conception of a failed objectivist utopia raised the ire of some and the cheers of others, all expecting a satire of Ayn Rand's infamous philosophy; the final product, however, is not so neat in its consideration. Those players interested in the objectivist aspect of the game who explore enough to find the various audio logs detailing the city's fall learn that Rapture fell not because of some inherent failure of objectivism (or despite some inherent success of objectivism) but simply due to the human flaws of Ryan. In fact Bioshock is not so much a satire of objectivism as it is a more subtle commentary on the space between idealism and nihilism. Ryan is portrayed not as a deluded objectivist megalomaniac but as a supreme idealist brought down by his own humanity; at the other end of the spectrum is Fontaine, who at first appears as nothing more than a criminal in search of power and money but gradually reveals himself to be a supreme nihilist whose only concern is the destruction of Rapture and the downfall of Ryan. Yet in both cases Bioshock's position is not one of condemnation or approval but simply a dedication to the idea that Ryan and Fontaine are not ideas but men, not symbols of some grand over-arching narrative that explains everything but simply characters with human motivations and emotions that drive them to take the actions they do and leave Rapture in the state that it lies in.

Beyond the characters and conspiracies of Ryan and Fontaine lies a larger postmodern question: “what world is this?” Bioshock's opening text declares that the game takes place in the North Atlantic, 1960, but clearly this is not a historical 1960: while Ryan may be a Soviet emigrant and he may be worried about CIA and KGB spies, Rapture is filled with technologies on the level of science-fiction. Moreso, such ontological questioning demands, especially in a video game, the question of the narrator: whose perspective is this narrative being told? “Whose world is this?” Bioshock's answer, of course, lies at the heart of its narrative: the revelation of the protagonist's identity not as a random plane crash survivor but as a carefully manipulated instrument in a grand scheme to overthrow Ryan is the climax of the game and dominates its final third.

Bioshock's climax is in fact perhaps its most postmodern element. The move is not just a narrative but a mechanical removal of control: unlike the entirety of the first two-thirds of the game, control is taken away from the player and the events unfold in cinematics for the first time. The scene is deliberately muted, then brutal in a way that ascertains no player can ignore it: the protagonist finally meets Andrew Ryan, who appears not as a megalomaniacal monster but as the most sane person the player has yet seen in Rapture, a tidy man in a business suit putting at one of the office golf sets so often seen in movies. Ryan explains how the player has been deceived, demonstrates the conditioning—“Would you kindly . . . run?” he says, and the player runs—then hands the player the club and solemnly declares, “A man chooses. A slave obeys. Would you kindly . . . kill?” The player watches helplessly as his virtual hands raise the club and bring it down violently against Ryan's face, over and over, as Ryan repeats himself, until finally the top of the club breaks off and remains impaled in Ryan's skull. The scene is shocking not just for its narrative content but for the visceral feeling of inescapability it forces on the player: there is absolutely nothing they can do to stop this. But the move is not to create a jarring juxtaposition from the player's previous freedom, it is to demonstrate the fundamental equality with the player's previous experience. The player character has followed Atlas' instructions due to the mind control conditioning; the player has followed Atlas' instructions because Bioshock is a video game and they understand that he is to follow such instructions in a video game. Players do not have a choice, Bioshock says, as much as they would like to: their experience in a video game is just as directed, just as controlled, just as linear, as that of any other medium. Video games merely present the illusion of freedom and choice.

The concept of video games as narratives with choice is of course simply another meta-narrative that Bioshock postmodernly refutes, but it is more than that: it is a supremely self-referential commentary in that most obvious aspect of postmodernism. Like fiction about fiction and movies about movies, Bioshock becomes, in this moment, a video game about video games, a commentary (and in some ways an attack) on its own medium, in a way that no other medium could. It is ironic that Bioshock's most famous and powerful commentary is achieved through a cinematic—essentially, through an in-game movie—but it is so successful precisely because it nonetheless could not be achieved in anything other than a video game.

This afternoon, after some tedious work getting all the updates working, I finally started playing my recently purchased copy of The Witcher, an eastern European RPG from 2007 based on a Polish series of fantasy novels. I've just completed the prologue/tutorial so far, but I'd like to share a story.

After a lengthy opening pre-rendered cutscene (which unfortunately didn't have any sound due to a bug, I assume), the game opens with . . . a very long in-engine cutscene, beginning with the protagonist, Geralt, being carred unconscious on a wagon back to the mountain fortress of the witchers, an infamous group of mutants who hunt monsters, according to the game's omniscient narration. All swell, until Geralt opens his mouth: "I don't remember anything."

Well, if there's anything to create a negative first impression, especially in an RPG, it's amnesia. I know of two games that dealt with it well (Torment, where the basic mystery of it is done away with fairly quickly, and Sanitarium, where it's the entire point of the game), and already it feels tacked on considering that the game has made very clear who the main character is--Geralt of Riveria, the White Wolf, one of the most famous of the surviving witchers.

I realize soon enough that the device is a necessary evil for the game to equally behave as a traditional RPG and allow the player to control Geralt. Amnesia allows the game to introduce the narrative and mechanical aspects of the world as if they were new to the character as well as the player, which is of course the usual reason for its inclusion in RPGs, and also to have the player start with a first-level character, as opposed to the great monster slayer that Geralt is already. (Which seems a bit disingenuous to me. What's the point of playing a famous hero if you don't start super powerful?)

Anyway, the cutscene finally (and I do mean finally, it is damned long) gives way to the combat tutorial as a band of hilariously incompetent bandits attack the castle. But as the prologue goes on, involving Geralt, his sorceress girlfriend Triss, and four other witchers (well, three witchers and a trainee) defending the castle against what they discover is a much more calculated and dangerous incursion, a number of strange things begin to strike my mind.

The first is as I'm sent to sound some bells in a high tower to damage a giant monster vulnerable to loud noises. In a cutscene (arg!), the stairs, which circle a bit that falls to open ground rather than a stone floor, begin collapsing. Geralt gets to the top but the bandits pursuing him are left behind as I watch agape and wonder, how does an inhabited castle have collapsing stairs? The next time Geralt meets up with the other witchers their leader apologizes and comments that one of the others was supposed to fix it, to which the witcher in question McCoys that he's not a mason.

For the rest of the sequence I'm too concerned with stopping a powerful sorcerer, regaining some magic powers, and getting upset over the trainee's death at the hands of an assassin awesomely called "The Professor" to notice other odd things, but once combat is over and I'm sent to collect the ingredients for a healing potion for Triss, things get stranger. As the witcher leader warns me that there are still some stragglers about the castle--bandits they didn't kill--I begin to question the narrative integrity of this game.

Would they really let any of the bandits get away? It seems ridiculous except as a device to provide more combat during this fetch quest. And where are the rest of the witchers, anyway? The opening cutscene showed a huge castle, yet all I've seen are five other people here. Shouldn't the rest of the castle been helping to defend against the attack? That would have made it too easy, of course. And would there really be no significant defenses against an incursion into the witchers' most secret sanctuary, the laboratory they never allowed even Triss to enter?

As I explore the castle, I'm confused by its appearance more as a ruin than an active fortress. There are huge cracks in the walls, more collapsed staircases, a flooded basement, and many rooms that are either empty or hold only a few random pieces of junk--a dusty, broken chest, a twisted metal bedframe. Beyond the central area the witchers stay in with the wounded Triss and a few select rooms--a library, Triss' bedroom at the top of a tower--the castle is an abandoned relic.

I begin to question my cynical analysis of the game, and slowly I realize the story behind all of this. The four witchers and Triss are the only people left in the fortress, they alone maintaining a glimmer of whatever former glory the witchers might have once possessed. And they're not enough to maintain a massive castle, of course, and so they maintain a few areas they use and leave the rest to rot. The bell tower was seldom used, and the witchers aren't masons, and so the stairs had never been repaired. The stragglers were left to roam the castle because the witchers didn't have enough men to confidently root them out and still defend their central living area. The laboratory was undefended because everyone in the castle was already fighting.

At first I'm not sure if this is the truth or just me coming up with an explanation that gives the game more credit than it's worth, but when I return with the potion ingredients and speak to the witcher leader, one of the optional dialogues leads to him telling the story of an attack on the castle some twenty years earlier, in which the then twenty-four witchers and several dozen trainees were all murdered, save for himself, who survived by hiding among the corpses. (I assume he simply fails to mention the numerous servants that must have kept the castle running, but in fariness, he probably wouldn't mention them, being beneath the consideration of such a powerful man.)

There's another fact that emerges from this dialogue, too: there will be no more witchers. While the laboratory contained the tools necessary for the brutal process of chemical and magical mutation that produces them (which is itself an interestingly scientific position in a fantasy setting), they didn't have a mage powerful enough to perform the necessary rituals, and it's unclear whether the witcher leader even knew said rituals, himself being quite young when the rest of the order was slaughtered.

And thus my respect for the game shoots up immensely. Perhaps they could have done a better job introducing the status of the witchers and their castle, but once it becomes clear, the story is tragic and touching. And it lends a fatalistic quality to (at least the start of) the game's main quest, which is to find the mysterious sorcerer who led the attack. The witchers split up for the four corners of the world in search of clues not hoping to stop some great evil or save the world but simply looking to avenge their fallen comrade and retrieve their stolen potions that are of no use to them. Even if they succeed, it's likely that more of them will perish in the quest, and they'll have gained nothing for it. But they can't gain anything anyway--they are the last of the witchers, and they know it.

Which, despite everything else, is a great way to start to game.

She tells us from the beginning: it's about flow.

Mirror's Edge is a fascinating game in many respects. It's a first-person platformer, which is unique enough, but it's through its mechanical and narrative focus on replicating parkour/free running that the game truly shines as something new and interesting.

The problem with platformers is that they too often devolve into frustrating puzzles where players calculate and repeatedly attempt a series of jumps and other special moves, failing and iterating their technique until they find the intended solution and reach their goal. (Perhaps it's thus fitting that platformers are often referred to as "adventure games" on consoles, leading to genre confusion/ignorance.) But while true adventure games are often predicated on the satisfaction of solving a puzzle after much mental anguish, platformers are usually intended as much more visceral, continuous experiences. Games with flow.


It's the same problem that has plagued shooters and led to the introduction of health regeneration in Halo and others, and in platformers of the time rewind mechanic of The Sands of Time and the ultimate quickload in the latest Prince of Persia. And yet many of these games still have a natural rhythm of starting and stopping, still have a pace that lulls and rises. I don't know of any game that has demanded a constant pace and flow as Mirror's Edge--a game that knows nothing of the above devices.

Mirror's Edge is game so focused on the constant adrenaline rush--so focused on keeping players running that even the protagonist's title is "runner"--that players never have the opportunity to stop and contemplate their options, analyze their surroundings and figure out the best method of jumps and climbs and wall runs to get to where they're trying to go. Almost any time you stop in Mirror's Edge, the "blues" (antagonistic police) show up quickly, forcing you to keep running (or engage in the game's feeble combat system, which is both poor and out-of-place, although the guns are suitably lethal that if you are willing to use them combat is at least laughably easy).

This isn't intrinsically a bad thing. In fact it's an interesting scenario, putting players in an unfamiliar situation where they're on the run, not the bad guys. Most gamers are used to being gods compared to their enemies, who are only dangerous in mass numbers; Mirror's Edge manages to make players truly feel hunted, as if they need to run in order to survive, which is certainly an accomplishment to be applauded.

The problem is that the game's spaces don't take this into account. They're designed like most platformer spaces, with lots of red herrings and only one or a few routes to the goal. It's extremely easy to miscalculate a jump and fall to your death, and even if you make it's hard to be sure you're going the right way. And you don't have any time to think, because the blues are coming. You have to run and run, and you don't know where you're going, or what you're supposed to do. And so the game becomes simply frustrating instead of tense.


Part of the problem is the game's art direction. Its minimalism is brilliant but I can't help but wish the game's art director had learned a bit from Valve and Half-Life, the masters of subtly drawing players' attention. Throughout Mirror's Edge their are voice overs that theoretically point you towards your goal--some distant building, usually--but frequently the building blends in with its surroundings (despite the saturated and limited color scheme allowing for strong definition, as the runner's sight mechanic demonstrates), and even if you can locate it the route is usually so opaque and roundabout that sighting your eventual goal is next to worthless.

This, I assume, was the genesis of the "runner's sight", the mechanic whereby helpful ramps, bars, walls, etc. turn strongly red as the player approaches, explained as the protagonist's runner intuition. It feels like a cheat (and indeed the hardest difficulty mandates turning it off), a way to guide players because the developers' couldn't figure out a better way. It's such a blatant way of directing players, putting up a giant glowing sign saying Go Here!, that I sometimes felt offended, like I was being treated as a child. But most of the time I didn't, because most of the time I needed those clues because there weren't any others in the game. And sometimes even when I had those clues I still didn't know where to go.

But ultimately I think it's a problem of unfocused goals. It seems the developers just weren't sure what kind of game they were trying to make, how their game was that different from most platformers, and what other changes they needed to make to make those differences work. When you know where to go, Mirror's Edge approaches brilliance, the experience reaching towards the exhilaration and terror the game seems to be aiming for. But every time you screw up, the experience is ruined; and you screw up a lot.


At times while I was playing it I almost wished the game was something that might be termed a rail platformer, a platforming version of arcade rail shooters like House of the Dead, whereby instead of shooting the zombies at each screen you simply jumped at the right time, or made simple choices to go left or right, etc., at various points. A node-based platformer, in which the mechanics of actually getting a jump right were left behind. Because that seemed the easiest way to actually accomplish the experience Mirror's Edge aims and fails to achieve.

But that speculation got me thinking about a much greater problem I have with Mirror's Edge, one that gnawed away at me as I played the game at a place low enough it didn't even register consciously for some time. And that's the fact that in a game about free running, it seems to forget about the free.

Something clicked for me this morning. It's something that I've known a long time, really, in disparate forms, but never really brought together, connected to form the obvious truth. And so I find myself writing a post about what I said I wouldn't write about for a long time, and certainly this isn't the end of those thoughts, just a beginning. So here we go.

Popular wisdom has it that you can't get something for nothing. To get it out of the way, this is not true. Humans are awesome in that we can give something for nothing, via love and grace. But we live in a world where love and grace are thought weaknesses and wrongs. We live in a world defined by economics, where every action must produce a benefit for ourselves, lest it be deemed a failure. The world doesn't have to be this way (Another World Is Possible), but that's the world most of us do live in, to a greater or lesser degree, that mainstream culture tells us to embrace and act upon, and that we are hippies or idealists or naive children if we act otherwise.

Anyway. There is a curious bit of contradiction, though, in that while we are taught never to do something for nothing, we are also taught that we can get something for nothing, or for less than it is worth. We can get free t-shirts, we can get cheap newspapers, we can get cheap fast food and cheap junk at Wal-Mart.

Partly this is due to horrendous human rights violations where many of those items are produced. Workers are treated horribly, paid next to nothing, with next to nothing spent on ensuring their safety and security, so that we can buy things cheaper. And that's obviously horrible and disgusting and something to work against, but that's not what this post is about.

You could say that with regards to that, what you are paying instead of money is human suffering. Not your own, but perhaps then you are paying in your own moral degradation, but that's getting a bit silly and farther than I want to go. But the point is you are paying something. There is an exchange. You are not getting a free ride, and your actions have consequences.

On to the other part of how we get things cheap, which is: advertising. The simplest example of this, one of my old standbys of hate, is free t-shirts. When we arrived at college nearly everyone was given a t-shirt emblazoned with the logo of the credit union that's made a deal with the university. I'm a bit infamous for my very limited and specific selection of t-shirts--most feature animals, almost none feature logos. This is because I am very conscious that everything I wear makes a statement.

Those who know me may find that an odd declaration, as I often seem the kind of person who doesn't give a damn about "style" and such; and that's true. But I do care about what I promote, what I support, what I advertise, through my clothing. Those students wearing the credit union t-shirts didn't pay money for them, but they are advertising the credit union every time they wear those shirts. They may not be saying, Go Here! I Like These People!, but they are spreading recognition of the logo and name. And in an information-saturated world, recognition is the first and greatest hurdle for any marketing endeavor.

T-shirts are cheap to produce en masse. Name recognition is harder. For the credit union, it's a positive economic gain. For the students, well, they get a t-shirt? Ultimately, however, it's hard to really fault people who accept such things. They may be helping companies they may not necessarily actually support, but there isn't any real harm being done. Spreading recognition of a name is not a bad thing.

The same processes, however, do cause real damage. The principle example of this is that great pincushion of criticism that is mainstream media. News coverage is almost endlessly criticized for biases of one way or another, but especially (and most truthfully) of being a tool of corporate intent. Mainstream news are carefully articulated tools designed to influence the public towards particular cultural positions that economically benefit the megacorporations that fund them, with little regard for the ethical consequences of such actions.

But most critics stop there, call out the corporations on being unethical and caring only about money and frown a lot. And there definitely is something wrong, obviously, with a culture entirely based on economics. But the situation is our own fault. The public's. Because we believe we can get something for nothing.

Corporations exist to produce money; that is their function. As much as we may like to, we will not change that position anytime soon. But what we can change is how they produce money. The main source of news outlets' profits is from advertising. As newspaper subscriptions have plumetted in the Internet age, more and more money has come from advertising, with more and more advertisements taking up space in newspapers as a result. And as for television news, of course--nearly all of their profits come from advertising.

We pay nothing for basic television, a minimum for basic cable, monetarily. Economically. We celebrate because we've gotten something for nothing, and then complain when the source of that something--the advertisers that keep television news on the air--acts as if it has the right to dictate the nature of that something. As if it should have the right to decide what airs just because it's paid for it, and not us, who haven't done anything for it. We get what we pay for.

News outlets will care about what their readers think, will care about telling the truth, when their readers who care about the truth are the ones making sure they stay in business, and not advertisers who will leave them if they start telling the truth. I say a lot that our culture shouldn't be based on economics, and obviously I believe that, but the first lie we must correct is that in our culture of economics we can get something for nothing. Once we accept that we pay for everything, somehow, we can begin to work towards changing that paradigm.

McDonald's* is putting Beanie Babies in Happy Meals again. This is an extremely odd event to me (it brings back memories of the mad Beanie Baby craze, which my family took some part in and which I tried to explain to my ignorant 8-year-old sister) but for this post I'm just making a short comment on the tag of the one my sister got, a hamster named Fluffball. The inside poem reads:

Running on my hamster wheel
Such fun it almost makes me squeal
But what would make a good thing better ?
A friend so we could run together !

What a brilliant piece of marketing. I'd like to meet the writer of this, though I'm not sure whether I'd want to shake their hand or slap them. Most marketing aimed at kids demonstrates a disgusting lack of subtlety (because "subtlety" is only valuable to marketing when it aids the inherent economic motive, and kids generally are too innocent to recognize the crassness of advertising), but this is elegantly sinister. What would make this toy better? Another toy!

Advertising/marketing is one of my push-button issues. I despise it and am liable to get very, very angry over it, or rather, its position as the definer of mass culture and its lack of loyalty to any ethic beyond economics. Someday I'll write a lengthy manifesto on the market culture and a proposal for an alternative, ethical culture . . . but that's a long way off, I think. It's just such a vast issue, and I don't have enough of a grasp on it to even begin to write what I want to write on it.

In that spirit, though, how about a run down of upcoming posts? This is as much to incite me to get them done as anything else.

• "Flow in Mirror's Edge", on the failure of the game's mechanics to recreate the sensation of parkour/free running
• "Freedom in Mirror's Edge", on the ethical contradictions embedded within the mechanics, narrative, and themes of the game
• "Freedom of information in Children of Earth", on how Torchwood almost finally did something right
• "With Keven Spacey as the voice of Gerty", on the association of actors with characters
• And a few posts wrapping-up my summer D&D
  

*How sad is it that McDonald's is in Firefox's spell check dictionary?

There's a conventional wisdom among some game developers and enthusiasts that in order for the player to have fun, the fun way has to be the easiest way. That is, players don't care about how they're "supposed" to play the game if they can find an easier way of doing it, even if that easier way is boring, dull, repetitive, etc.--and they'll then get bored with the game quickly and blame the developer for having failed at making a fun game.

And there are certainly many players for whom this wisdom holds true. Those who played Left 4 Dead by simply hiding in a corner and meleeing their way through a horde of zombies (and thus prompted the melee fatigue patch), to name a recent example.

And there is nothing wrong with such players, at least in their playing style. (Blaming the developer when they don't enjoy the game seems a bit much, though.) For many such players, they wouldn't blame the developer because they aren't looking for a game to be "fun"; or rather, fun has a different meaning to them than other players. For them, it simply means accomplishment, overcoming the challenge presented by the game by any means possible. These are the compulsive gamers, who strive for every achievement, the highest level, the fastest solution, etc. (And those that don't complain are publishers' wet dreams: they consume games with very little regard for their quality.)

But I'm more interested in the games that could be said to actively defy this play style. That is, all such players will generally end up doing things in a game unintended by the developer (which is absolutely right and good, all players should) and more importantly things that make the game arguably less interesting, but there are some games where such players will miss the entire point of the game. Which brings me to the Hitman series.

Hitman's protagonist is a genetically-engineered super-assassin known as Forty-Seven. While fragile compared to some FPS protagonists, he's far stronger than any human or any enemy in the games: he can take a shotgun blast to the chest and keep on going. (Two, however, starts to push it, and there's no way of regaining health during a mission.) On most missions, Forty-Seven could easily get to his target by simply cutting down everyone with a gun. Enemies in Hitman are fragile: a bullet to the head is instant death, it only takes a few more shots to the chest with a pistol, and a heavy weapon buts down anyone with a single burst anywhere.

But the game's design is based around stealth. It's a game about sneaking in, knocking out a lone guard, taking his uniform, hiding his body, infiltrating a compound without rousing suspicion, silently assassinating the target, and then getting out before anyone is the wiser. It's a game in which an FPS-style massacre means you've screwed up. Yet there is little in-game penalty for such action, and it's certainly easier than the stealth approach. Unlike some stealth games--like the Thief series, where stealth is a requirement because almost any enemy will easily dispatch you in one-on-one combat, or the Splinter Cell series, where stealth is a requirement because you fail most missions if anyone "raises an alarm"--Hitman is perfectly content to allow you to complete a mission through mass murder.



from The Amateur
There are a few drawbacks--the later games rate your performance on each mission based on your stealthiness, with the highest rating offering some unlockable bonuses, and the first and fourth game, which allow you to purchase your own equipment, penalize you monetarily ("clean-up" expenses deducted from your payment). But by and large, you can ignore nearly every major mechanic of the game and simply shoot your way through if you want. The game will play like an extremely easy and short third-person shooter.

So why is Hitman one of the more well-regarded franchises on the PC, especially the fourth game, which garnered nearly universal praise? Because most players understand what's fun about the game. Because most players understand that survival is not the challenge in Hitman. Completing the mission is not the challenge in Hitman. Just because the game allows you to advance on those conditions alone, they are not victory.

Well, that's not exactly true, of course. As soon as you try to define "victory" or the "challenge" of a game as anything other than reaching the end screen, you're in subjective territory. (Not than anything is truly objective, but you get the idea, I hope.) But what we're talking about is just that--players defining their own victory conditions. Players deciding that merely advancing in the game is not good enough for them.

(As a side note, an interesting thought just occured to me that in essence, Hitman is a game that allows you to fail. Because the game is so easy in terms of simply finishing the missions, you don't see a game over screen or are otherwise forced to reload a saved game very often. Most of the time when you restart a mission or load a save, it's by your own choice--you failed your own conditions, not the game's, and you could have continued if you had wanted to. And that's a very interesting and powerful thing, to me, the option to fail and go on, though I won't be exploring it in this post.)

There are a couple things that are very interesting to me about this. The first is the meta aspect: because Forty-Seven can easily dispatch everyone in a given mission, the fact that he (canonically) doesn't and instead pursues stealthy execution means that he is, in some way, playing a game with his targets. Forty-Seven, unlike most shooter protagonists, isn't in this for survival. That's easy. He's in it for invisibility. He's in it about satisfying his own chosen conditions. He's playing a game, just like the players.

There's often a disconnect between the abilities of a player and the supposed abilities of a game's protagonist. Half-Life, for example, is often mocked for its MIT graduate lab assistant who manages to slaughter Marines and stop an alien invasion, while on the other side, many games with military protagonists are forced to treat players like ignorant civilians (like they are) rather than well-trained soldiers. Hitman, to me, is one of the few games that evades this problem. There are a few moments in cutscenes when the player may know more than Forty-Seven (he is ignorant of a lot of human culture due to his upbringing), but for the most part the story's treatment of the character matches up with players' abilities.


The second interesting thing to me is that by making the game's conditions of advancement easy to satisfy, it encourages players to make their own rules. I started this post talking about players who don't do what game developers intend them to--and I pointed out that, in general, this is a great thing and something all players should do and all developers should encourage. And this is what I meant.

The difference between the players I described at the start of this post and Hitman players isn't some slavish adherence to how the game is "supposed" to be played. That's a bullshit idea. Hitman doesn't have a "right" way to play it any more than any other game. The difference with Hitman players is that they aren't to make the game as easy as possible. They're out to make the game as challenging as possible. Players impose their own restrictions on themselves, set their own goals, and consider themselves defeated when they fail those goals, not when the game tells them they've been defeated.

One of the most important bits of game theory I've ever heard was from Will Wright, creator of Sim City. In a talk on stories in games, Wright commented than whenever he talked to someone who'd played Grand Theft Auto, for example, and asked about the game, he never heard anything about the game's linear narrative. Instead he heard stories about getting six stars, using rocket launchers to destroy tanks, crashing cars and creating massive pile-ups, and so on. And these, he explained, are all stories, too--and stories that are more important and more meaningful to players than the ones authored by game developers, because even if they aren't as detailed or as complex or as artistic or whatever, the players created them, not the developer, and that makes them more meaningful to them than anything someone who's never met them could create.


Wright is also famous for describing his own creations--Sim City, The Sims, etc.--as toys rather than games because they don't have set victory conditions.

I think there's an obvious correlation here. In Sim City, so long as the player doesn't go bankrupt, the game never ends. There is no "winning" Sim City. Thus players have to decide for themselves what they're aiming to accomplish, what kind of city they want to build. They define their own victory conditions. In Hitman, "winning" is easy, in the sense of actually reaching the end of the game. But it's that ease that allows players to play with the game. When advancement is trivial and the game's space is nonetheless diverse, players are allowed and encouraged to decide for themselves what they're aiming to accomplish, what kind of hitman they want to be. They define their own victory conditions. And they can change their minds, try out different techniques and goals, vent steam when they're frustrated by actually just slaughtering everyone, and so on.

What we're talking about is the difference between a game of chess and a Lego set. Chess is a very strictly defined game--all of your options are set from the beginning. There is a limited number of variables with limited possible values and a strict victory condition. Thus winning is simply a matter of calculation--that's why computers are the best chess players. There is such thing as the perfect chess algorithm, the perfect chess game, even if it hasn't been created yet.


A Lego set is just a child's toy rather than the province of grandmasters. Nobody sets computers on building the best Lego set. And you know why? Because they can't. Legos are building blocks for our own imagination. They're tools to aid us in developing our own creativity. They can teach problem solving just as much as chess can--we can define our own goals, our own victory conditions, and figure out the best way to solve them, or set a computer to do it for us. But those victory conditions must always be decided first by the player.

And, of course, chess was the same way once. Someone decided the victory conditions of chess, the rules of chess. And those rules changed over time, when people didn't just play the game but played with the game, toyed with it, experimented. It's just that at some point people decided not to anymore. That toying was wrong, that chess was only worthwhile if the rules were always the same, that accomplishment only had value when it could be compared numerically against someone else's accomplishment and one could be declared objectively (hah!) superior. When people decided that there had to be a best way to play chess.

In other words, what we're talking about is the difference between a game player and a game creator. The person who follows the rules and the person who makes the rules. The computer and the programmer.


Who do you want to be?