Mile Zero
No matter where you go, there you are
March 1, 2010
There's a moment early in Mass Effect 2 where your character, the resurrected Commander Shepherd, answers a series of questions about the events that occurred in the previous game. I think what they're trying to do is remind you about those plot points so you won't be taken quite so much by surprise when other characters mention them later on--or, if you're a new player, establish a little context so it won't seem completely random. But because the writing is a little awkward, it doesn't come across as an establishing infodump. Instead, in a surreal twist, it sounds like the characters are participating in a kind of retcon--letting the player's answers redefine their past actions. I love this idea, and wish it wasn't an accident.
A retcon, for the non-fandom crowd, is a portmanteau word for "retroactive continuity," and Wikipedia (unsurprisingly) has a fine list of examples, ranging from Nero Wolfe's birthplace to the altered appearance of Klingons in post-Kirk Star Trek. The retcon is a tradition as old as humanity, but it's rarely invoked in a planned fashion--in part, because it's usually so clumsy. Humans are good at maintaining continuity in our narratives, and we don't take kindly to authors who break their own fictional rules unless they can do so very, very elegantly.
But in video games, we have a sort of special case. Often here (and specifically in the Mass Effect games), the player is in control of continuity to a greater degree than other media. Is Commander Shepherd a woman of principle, or a ruthless pragmatist? The player chooses between these two, or even mixes them on a case-by-case basis. You don't know, necessarily, what kind of person she is until the player makes that decision: does this Commander Shepherd approve of the Genophage bioweapon, or find it deplorable? Does she believe in killing mutineers? What about the murder of treacherous former allies? And if those answers differ, it's up to the player to mentally reconcile them as a coherent character, offering up retconned justifications as necessary.
So why limit this to just the character arc, when a virtual world could offer so much more? ME2's dialog misfire offers a glimpse into a game mechanic where dialog doesn't just define a character, it can redefine the events that led up to the current moment, or the world around the player's avatar (cross a gap by insisting that you funded a bridge, perhaps, or clear out dangerous animals by bemoaning their extinction). If I had the time to spend on personal coding projects right now, that's something I'd explore: a game where you can redefine the state of play just by verbally disagreeing with it. I think it could even be an opinionated statement, not just about the way we adapt stories over time, but also the power of rhetoric to effect change, and the subjectivity of human history.
Or maybe I'm just describing a pretentious version of Scribblenauts. Either way, surely it's an opportunity missed.
December 9, 2009
I'm thrilled, personally, to see actual actors doing voice and motion work for video games, after years of Resident Evil-style butchery. Not to mention that it's nice to see Sam Witwer (Crashdown from BSG) getting work as the Apprentice in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, or Kristen Bell (Veronica Mars) taking a bit part for the Assassin's Creed games. But friends, I have to say: the weird, digital versions of these actors used onscreen are freaking me out.
We have truly reached the point of the uncanny valley in terms of real-time 3D, which is kind of impressive if you think about it. Or horrifying, if you try to play these games, and are interrupted at regular intervals by dialog from cartilage-lipped, empty-eyed mannequins. It's actually made worse by the fact that you know how these actors are supposed to look, giving rise to macabre, Lecter-esque theories to explain the discrepancies between their real-life and virtual appearance. Don't get me wrong--I'm glad that we've reached the point that such a high level of technical power is available. I'm just thinking it would be nice to be more selective about how it's used.
The problem reminds me of movie special effects after computer graphics really hit their stride--say, around the time I was in high school, and George Lucas decided to muck around with the look of the original Star Wars trilogy, perhaps concerned that they lacked the shiny, disjointed feel of the prequels. In one scene, for example, he added a computer-generated Jabba the Hutt getting sassed by Han Solo, even though it really added nothing to the film apart from a sense of floaty unreality.
The thing is, there wasn't anything wrong with the original effects in Star Wars. They've held up surprisingly well--better than Lucas's CG replacements. The same goes for films like Star Trek II or Alien or The Thing. Even though the effects aren't exactly what we'd call "realistic," they don't kill the suspension of disbelief--and they're surprisingly charming, in a way that today's effortless CG creations are not. Scale models and people in rubber suits have a weight to them that I, personally, miss greatly (the most recent Indiana Jones movie comes to mind). When the old techniques are used--Tarantino's Death Proof, for example, or Guillermo Del Toro's creaturescapes--the results have an urgency and honesty that's refreshing.
Back in videogameland, it amazes me that no-one looks at their cutscenes during development and asks themselves "is there a better way? Is the newest really the best?" At one point, right when CD-ROM became mainstream, it looked like composite video with real human actors might be the future, a la Wing Commander. Somehow, it didn't happen (fear of Mark Hamil, maybe? Psychological scarring from Sewer Shark?). But when you're watching robot Kristen Bell shudder through a cutscene in Assassin's Creed, it's hard not to wish that you could just watch the real Bell, even through a cheesy green screen.
Or, at the very least, it'd be nice if more developers would try alternatives instead of pushing ahead with a character look that they're just not pulling off. I have had harsh words for Mirror's Edge--I believe I compared it to a flammable kitchen appliance--but the developers' choice to create animated interstitial movies instead of realtime rendering was a bold and interesting choice, particularly since the game actually boasted very well-crafted and animated character models. In-engine cutscenes may have been a great bullet-point when we made the transition to hardware-based 3D, but now that novelty has passed. We've worked for years to get to the uncanny valley: it's time to find a way out.
December 1, 2009
At some point, every American television series does The Chinatown Episode. This is particularly true for cop shows, because crimes that take place in Chinatown are always exotic entryways into an inscrutable foreign culture, while those in immigrant neighborhoods of, say, Latino or European extraction are just garden variety crimes of a Real American nature. Sometimes the showrunners will substitute another nationality of origin--Koreatown, most likely. This is because someone has told them that Asia is not a single country.
So it was probably inevitable that Grand Theft Auto, a series whose main schtick is to recycle every possible variety of gangster movie into interactive form, would do its own version of The Chinatown Episode. The surprise is that it's actually pretty good so far (I'm about halfway through, I think). Despite the name, Chinatown Wars is not really based on the immigrant experience (or some screenwriter's shallow appropriation of it). Its roots are more in Hong Kong crime dramas like Infernal Affairs, even if its ambitions are markedly lower.
I've spent a fair amount of time here picking out faults in the race or gender politics of various games--enough, perhaps, to seem a bit like a scold at times. And I didn't expect much from Rockstar, frankly. So it was a nice surprise to find that Chinatown Wars acquits itself fairly well. Nobody speaks in a chop-socky accent, and hackneyed talk about honor or faux-Confucianisms are, when used, rightfully dismissed as shameless politicking and clearly-marked irony (these are low bars, but ones which are regularly uncleared in pop culture). When the dialog is funny (and this is a funny game, albeit in a typically crude way), it's because of the exaggerated character flaws of each individual (the head gangster's idiot son, for example, or the power-hungry lieutenant) and not at their expense. There's even a few jokes about stereotypes, like this (paraphrased) exchange between the main character, Huang, and a corrupt cop:
Cop: ...so we'll work to take down the Wonsu together.Huang: Yeah, that's great. One question: what's this Wonsu thing you keep talking about?
Cop: It's the name for the leaders of the Korean gang.
Huang: Right. Why would you assume I know that terminology? Racist idiot.
This is not to say, as I've continued to play through, that it's all sunshine and kittens. There's still a fair amount of sexism, a near-total lack of actual female characters (the most interesting of whom is killed about 30 seconds in), and some jokes that edge into homophobia. A lot of the material also probably falls under "satire," which I'm normally happy to engage with, but at some point in Rockstar's career the satire excuse has started to seem a little strained, particularly given their geographic location (the UK) and resulting distance from the material they're satirizing.
I haven't played a lot of GTA, for one reason or another, so from a purely mechanical perspective it's been interesting so far. The series is often described as being "sandbox" games, but I think that's a misnomer. They give you a big level to play in, sure, but it's less wide-open and more just non-linear--you don't have to jump on the main quest right away. At one point, maybe that was more revolutionary than it is now, I don't know, but with every game I play these days offering about a million collectibles and side missions, I'm not exactly suffering for choice. Besides, when I think of a sandbox game, I think about something that lets me build, like Simcity. There's not a lot of building or world-changing in Chinatown Wars.
The real genius of it, and maybe what leads people to use "sandbox" as a description, is the mechanic for the wanted meter. The rules for when the meter goes up or down are simple and easy to understand, and the cop AI is (intentionally) stupid and suffering from tunnel vision. You can raise the heat, wreak some havoc, and then clear out the meter and keep going, which is a nice way to blow off some steam. This is probably why every time I've seen someone play GTA in the past, they're usually going for a joyride in a tank and seeing how far they can get before the SWAT team takes them out.
This is something that was always frustrating about Assassin's Creed (the first one, the second is currently sitting outside my apartment door), because losing your pursuers was more complicated--more "realistic"--than it needed to be. There were places you could hide, which wouldn't always work, or you could run far enough away, depending on the size of the alarm, but it was never entirely cut-and-dried. The result was that you felt less like an invisible killer and more like a grade-schooler playing hide-and-seek. Realism, counter-intuitively, becomes the enemy of immersion. GTA's wanted level, like the combat system in Arkham Asylum, is all about taking skilled actions that are appropriate for the main character and making them fun and easy for the player to accomplish. Developers should simulate for the narrative feel, in other words, not for the nitty-gritty.
And seriously, let's make a promise: after this, no more Chinatown Episodes in games. There's only so much cliche a single medium can take.
November 5, 2009
Last week I got a used copy of Excite Truck in the mail as a trade, but life's been busy, so I didn't get around to popping it into the Wii for a few days. When I did, while I enjoyed the game itself, it was with the bittersweet realization that this is the first time I've turned Nintendo's little white box on in many, many months.
It's true that I'm gaming a little less at the moment than I normally would--breaking practice is taking up a lot of that time--but that doesn't explain it. It's not the graphical difference between the Wii and the XBox 360, since I could honestly care less. And it's not the network infrastructure, although Nintendo's take on multiplayer is still shamefully backwards. The explanation is simpler: there's nothing decent to play.
When the Wii has good titles, they're very good. Metroid Prime 3, No More Heroes, and Super Paper Mario all come to mind. I've played through all of those. And I own a Wii Fit board, so it's not like I haven't done the crazy lifestyle game thing too. But two years into owning the console, it seems to have hit a drought. I can name plenty of XBox or PC games, either recently released or on the horizon, that I'm anticipating. But I've only got two on Wii (NMH2 and Muramasa) for which I can really say the same. And I've played all the GameCube games that I wanted to play. At this point, what's left? Apart from Excite Truck, the only reason I turn the Wii on is if I left my smartphone in the other room and don't want to get up to watch YouTube or check an IMDB entry.
At its introduction, the Wii was meant to be a new paradigm for console gaming: family-friendly, cheap, innovative, and a bit silly. It lived up to some of those promises, and then just seems to have completely lost momentum. Was it too weird for third-party developers? Too difficult to write ports? Or just abandoned by the manufacturer? I don't regret the purchase, I'm just kind of saddened by the neglect. We've already got one Dreamcast, I can't keep collecting "wacky" consoles forever.
October 23, 2009
Tale of Tales' The Path tells an old story: a girl dressed in red walks through the woods to an elderly relative's house. The path through the forest begins at the edge of a paved road, with a large city off in the distance. It ends at a bridge crossing the moat-like lake around the grandmother's cottage. Your choice, as a player, is to either proceed directly to the end of the path, or to wander off into the woods in search of novelty (and, ultimately, The Wolf). In either case, a significant piece of the storytelling and gameplay takes place after the "end" has been reached--the denouement, as Corvus puts it in this month's Round Table.
The Path features a lot of really... interesting gameplay choices, but one that stands out for me is the control scheme. It's the essence of minimalism: the only keys are for turning and movement. To interact with a scene in the forest, you simply stop near it--the girl will move into position and begin the scene, but you can cancel by simply choosing to move again. Combined with the translucent, dreamlike fog, the effect is a feeling of inevitability. While the game warns you not to leave the path, the real story only happens when you abandon its purposeful motion for something interrupted and inconsistent--it only advances when you stop.
Where it gets interesting is when you finish the game, either by going straight to the end of the path or by finding the "Wolf" (metaphorically speaking--it's something different for each of the characters, but each time it deposits them outside the cottage in a state of visible pain, limping to shelter from the sudden downpour of rain). At that point, the girl opens the gate, crosses the bridge, and enters the house.
Now we're in the denouement. The view switches to a first-person view, and the controls don't seem to respond. After a few moments, you work it out: pressing any of the movement keys will move a single step along a predetermined path through the house while a wolf growls and barks somewhere out of view. Tapping a key repeatedly, your trip through the house takes detours into different rooms along the way, depending on the encounters found in the forest, and ends in an unsettling sequence of flashbacks related to each girl's Wolf. (If you didn't find the metaphorical Wolf in the forest, you'll end up in the grandmother's bedroom instead, with a literal beast staring at you from the corner. This is considered failure.)
Although it's tempting to stay in one place in the house and give yourself time to recover, remaining motionless causes the screen to darken and the wolf sounds to become louder and more aggressive--it's extremely unnerving, and I've never actually managed to stand still long enough to find out what happens after that. So now the dynamic has changed, even though the gameplay remains similar: elements from the forest are recontextualized inside the house, but now stopping is a source of dread and movement is... well, not rewarded, exactly. Less uncomfortable, I guess. It also mimics a kind of nightmare logic: no matter what direction you try to go, your viewpoint drifts grimly forward.
As a game, The Path is a distinct oddity, but I generally like it, and one of the reasons is this two-act, post-'victory' structure it's got going. In a way, the cottage tour is really nothing more than a twisted version of the Mega Happy Ending that concludes most JRPGs and Nintendo games, where they revisit each character and location encountered during the game as a form of wrap-up. But Tale of Tales uses a few audio cues and a simple gameplay change to turn a linear cutscene into something a little scary, with a lot more implied agency than actually exists. I'm not entirely sure what it means--I'm not sure I'm supposed to--I only know that the combination of structure and interaction makes for a pretty unforgettable experience.
September 10, 2009
OF COURSE we bought Beatles: Rock Band the day it came out. Belle is a full-fledged Beatlemaniac. Her calendar has eight days a week and when I say goodbye, she says hello--it makes our home life confusing, but you can't fault her taste.
The game was obviously created by equally-intense fans, which comes into play in interesting ways. Not being a real Beatles listener myself, a few things leapt out at me:
- If you lose a song, it just fades to black. Nobody's going to boo the lads from Liverpool off stage in this game.
- The whammy bar is disabled on guitar and bass. It still affects the note trail, and for all I can tell it still increases your score, but there's no audible effect. There will be no dive-bombing during "I Am The Walrus," no matter how much you want to.
- Especially since, in the more production-heavy songs from their studio days, the guitar controller is actually playing strings and synth parts.
- The songs are arranged chronologically, and have Harmonix's usual care with note placement (for the most part--"Birthday" and "Come Together" are going to bug anyone who's played them on a real instrument, but there's nothing they could do about that). This means it's a great process of discovery for someone who loves the band, but the difficulty level is all over the map. These are easily some of the most difficult Rock Band songs I've seen--not just in the Guitar Hero showers-of-notes sense, but because they're complex songs to begin with. The game provides a helpful "difficulty meter" when choosing a song: pay attention to it. They're not joking around.
- I love some of the achievements, particularly "Authenticity:" "Finish any song as a bassist with Lefty Mode turned on, hitting at least 50% of the notes." They should really make you sing at the same time--Sir Paul is a monster bass player.
We played for about three hours, and beat every stage but one last night, only stopping when my hands started to cramp up. I think Belle likes it.
September 8, 2009
Some three hours into Batman: Arkham Asylum, we are introduced to the Lunatic after someone opens all the cell doors on the island. The Lunatic is a shambling, almost-skeletal enemy dressed in a straitjacket. His attack entirely consists of leaping onto Batman's back and thrashing wildly until thrown to the ground and knocked out with a blow to the head. Because that's therapy, superhero-style: brutally beating the mentally-ill senseless with your heavy, armored fists.
I'm not the only person who has found this a little unsettling: Justin Keverne calls it "the intellectual and social equivalent of bumfighting," and Travis Megill follows up with a post discussing the stigmatization of mental illness perpetuated by the game, and recommends using it as a consciousness-raising opportunity. Both make some great points.
One of the things that I like about Batman as a character is how plainly ambiguous he has become. Other superheroes may be able to perpetuate the myth of vigilante justice, but after The Dark Knight Returns (a barely-disguised John Bircher fantasy styled after Red Dawn), The Dark Knight (the film, which bears little plot-wise resemblance to the comic but touches on many of the same themes), and (most importantly) Alan Moore's The Killing Joke, it's difficult to imagine an interpretation of the character that isn't a damaged, near-fascist personality locked in a feedback cycle with equally-psychotic "supervillains." Calling the modern Batman a hero is hilarious.
So while his treatment of the "Lunatic" enemy is unsettling, I could almost believe that it's purposefully so. Likewise the depiction of the asylum itself: while the game never explicitly comes out to say so, this is clearly not an enlightened institution (and never was, as the hidden story items make clear). The inmates are locked into tiny, solitary cells and effectively left to rot. The guards are vicious, unpleasant people, and the doctors are using their patients as experimental subjects. In Killer Croc's case, they've just dumped him into the sewers, dropping rotten meat to feed him. The warden is a political animal more concerned for his career than for those under his care. It's like something out of Nellie Bly's undercover reporting on the Blackwell's Island asylum. No doubt anyone sentenced to Arkham would emerge more damaged than when they entered, and many are sent there as much from a desire to remove the undesirables as to rehabilitate them.
Indeed, one thing I found interesting, particularly while listening to the "interview tapes" scattered through out the game, is the degree to which several of the inmates are not insane at all. Killer Croc, for example, is violent and dangerous, but he shows no signs of being disconnected from reality: the outside world really does see him as a monster, and Croc merely reacts accordingly. Poison Ivy has entirely valid reasons to identify more with plants than humans--she's half-plant herself. And the Joker, as voiced by Mark Hamill, has never seemed crazy to me--sociopathic, perhaps, but no more so than many mobsters and criminals. It did not surprise me to find out that Paul Dini, the writer for both The Animated Series and Arkham Asylum, has written a story titled "Case Study" that frames the Joker as an entirely sane criminal using a deranged persona to pursue a vendetta against Batman.
Regardless, I have two reactions to the Lunatic. First, as Megill points out, focusing on the individual inmates (such as the Lunatic) or the institution is to overlook the overarching message of the game's view on mental illness, which is firmly rooted in unsubtle stereotypes. In its universe, disorders aren't a continuum of mental function, but a strict sane/insane dichotomy. This isn't necessarily Arkham Asylum's fault--it's derived directly from the comics themselves, which have always treated insanity as a shortcut directly to wearing tights and planning crimes centered on random concepts. ("Calendar Man?" Really?) As counted among the offenses perpetuated in our pop cultural psyches by Marvel and DC, I rank this relatively low on the list, but it's good to see it noticed when it pops up.
Second, the game's unsympathetic portrayal of the asylum itself doesn't really excuse its dehumanized view of the patients themselves, or Batman's enforcement of the status quo (he beats the inmates, but frees the crooked administrators to return to their jobs). It's one thing to say that Bruce Wayne is an anti-hero at best, but another to watch him blithely ignore the conditions around him. This is where Batman sends people, remember, after he's caught them. And it's not like he doesn't know about Arkham's policies: he's on the island enough to have built a fully-equipped Batcave there. Talk about your bad neighborhoods. If that's not indicative of the unhealthy relationship the "Caped Crusader" has with his foes, I don't know what is.
August 21, 2009
I never played the original Castlevania on its original platform in its original era. I only got around to it when they released it on GBA. So I think my opinion's unclouded by nostalgia when I say that, with reservations but in general, I like it.
In the pantheon of retro classics, Castlevania slots in right next to Ninja Gaiden. Both are sidescrollers emphasizing close combat (as opposed to Mario-style hopping), with health bars and a rudimentary power-up system. Castlevania has better secondary weapons. Ninja Gaiden has better level design, and is probably the superior title overall--the flow of its levels is pure 8-bit choreography. Either way, they're simple games. Over the years, Ninja Gaiden has stayed fairly simple. Castlevania has not.
Which brings us to Order of Ecclesia, the most recent side-scrolling title in the series. It's not that OoE is a bad game, so much as it is way more complicated than it needs to be.
I'm giving up on the game about seven levels in, having gotten through the first four bosses or so. I'm doing so because the level design (which is awful, having largely abandoned the intricate "Metroid-vania" style of navigation) has begun throwing in enemies that completely wreck the difficulty curve (specifically, the demonic gravediggers). The options available seem to be either learning an attack pattern that's not particularly enjoyable, or improving my character. Since neither appeals, I'm ditching it.
"Improving my character"--what a fun turn of phrase that is, as if Castlevania were Emily Post and Buddhism mixed together. What it really means is going out and either leveling-up (a long, painful process left over from RPGs that I thought we had largely abandoned in the civilized world) or tediously killing the same enemies over and over again until they drop a more powerful weapon. It's all the worst parts of World of Warcraft, but without a sense of humor!
This complication doesn't have any particular justification for its existence. Its only point is to add a pseudo-cerebral tint to an otherwise fluffy and unredeemable arcade experience, something it has in common with the vapid plots that Konami insists on jamming in there, as if I really cared. "We're not just engaging your reflexes," OoE defensively protests, "we're engaging your mind!" Yeah: because making me constantly interrupt play to struggle through a poorly-designed menu system, all to find the collectible weapon that will harm this particular recycled sprite from the last seven Castlevania titles is certainly a challenge that will stretch my capacity for non-linear thinking, isn't it? Give me a break. These games are basically mental Diet Coke. The least they could do is have the dignity to act like it.
Let's make a deal, video games: you don't make me grind for a frakking sidescroller, and I won't sell you on eBay.
August 13, 2009
This was a submission for the 2009 Call for Writers at Gamers With Jobs. It wasn't a good match for them, but I still enjoy parts of it, so I'm posting it here.
The PC has been killed so many times, they put a revolving door on the coffin. It's been declared deceased so often, the death certificate has scorch marks from the copier. The tech community has buried it so deep, Australia's complaining about the tunnelling's environmental damage. And yet, somehow, it's still around. As someone who has long identified with the PC, I find this strangely comforting. When they start writing editorials about the great shape the industry's in, I'll start worrying.
Of course, the constant hum about its mortality masks the traditional role of the PC as a weathervane for gaming elsewhere. For example, Sean Sand's "Don't call it a comeback" points out that big-budget titles may make up a smaller portion of the platform's future library--what's that but XBLA and WiiWare writ large? Likewise, the shift to digital distribution over Steam, Impulse, and other services puts the PC at the forefront of an industry-wide trend away from physical media. It's the open nature of PC development--its generativity, as author Jonathan Zittrain would say--that lets it lead the pack this way.
But in another sense, PC gaming is changing on a more basic, demographic level. The platform itself is evolving, and gaming will have to evolve with it. I'm referring, of course, to the gradual rise of the laptop and netbook as computing platforms. Like it or not, both of these hardware configurations are increasingly common, carry serious implications for developers, and have already begun to influence this corner of the industry.
In 2007, desktop sales dropped by 4%, while laptop sales rose by 21%. The gap has no doubt risen since that time, in part due to the rise of the netbook niche--indeed, laptops outsold desktops in 2008 for the first time, ever. Those kinds of numbers aren't broken out by profession or use, unfortunately, so we don't know how many gamers specifically have moved to portable. But it's not outrageous to assume that it's true for the general gaming population, particularly as we gamers get older and want a computer to pull double-duty for work and play.
When the time came to replace my own aging, hand-built tower PC, I ended up going with a Lenovo Thinkpad. It has a discrete graphics card, putting it roughly in the midrange of portable rendering power between the poor suckers with integrated Intel chips and those city-block-sized, SLI-capable monsters from Asus and Alienware. For a two year-old business notebook, the Thinkpad is pretty good at gaming: it runs Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2 acceptably--if not extravagantly--well, which was my priority when I bought it. Fallout 3 also plays well enough that I can't complain about the graphics (the controls, on the other hand...). Not everything fares so well: Crysis was a slideshow (literally: "What I Did On My Summer Vacation--Visited Beautiful North Korea, Fought Aliens, and Choked People With My Terrifying Robot Fetish Suit"). But then, people with small nuclear reactors under their desks had trouble running Crysis when it first came out. I don't let it get me down.
The salient point is not that the hardware's a bit behind the cutting edge. It's that, as a laptop, it's mostly not upgradeable--at least, not in the parts that really count for 3D rendering, like the graphics card. My laptop will never run so-called AAA titles, no matter what I do. This doesn't mean that I've stopped gaming, or buying games. But it does mean that my purchasing dollars tend to go to companies that will support a somewhat more lenient range of hardware when it comes to their software. I end up buying from companies like Stardock or Valve--developers that still target graphics cards from a few generations back. Or I've found a new interest in the indie scene--games like World of Goo or Introversion's back catalog. When all else fails, I'm catching up on older titles I never played, like the original Fallout games. In a way, the laptop hardware lag has been a gift.
The PC gaming industry's become accustomed to being the top performer in the rendering game for a while now, and that will no doubt continue among the niche of hardcore enthusiasts. But anyone who wants to actually be profitable in this space would do well to keep us laptop gamers in mind. You think World of Warcraft's success isn't at least partly due to its generous system requirements? The shift might even be a blessing in disguise: notebooks, while still diverse compared to console hardware, are notably more standardized than desktop systems--a complaint that developers have against the platform for years.
It will be painful for a while, as publishers and developers adjust to the new reality of notebook gaming, but ultimately I think we'll be better for it. From constraint often comes inspiration. That's true in other media, and I think it will be true in gaming as well. So feel free to cheer for the end of PC gaming--after all, it's not going anywhere.
July 16, 2009
"You are crippled," says Fallout 3.
"Huh," says I. "That seems a little tone-deaf."
When you get shot in the leg, or you fall off a building, or a mole rat eats your hand (or all of the above) in Fallout 3, the damage gets broken out into one of six body zones. Take enough damage, and there's an appropriate penalty (loss of accuracy, slower movement, etc.) as well as an amusing pained expression on your in-game HUD. I'm okay with all that. But the word "crippled" took me aback. I'm not terribly savvy when it comes to persons with disabilities, but it strikes me as a particularly loaded term--I certainly would have avoided it when I was writing for the World Bank.
I'm not trying to cast Bethesda as insensitive bigots. The terminology (used in the classic RPG tradition of Capitalized Status Conditions like Confuse, Sleep, or Haste) appears to be a holdover from the older Fallout titles. They're using it as an adverb, and not as a noun ("You are crippled" instead of "You are a cripple"), which makes some difference. And it's not like they did something outrageously stupid, like putting Africans in grass skirts and wooden masks or something. Still, you'd think that while they were updating everything else about those previous games in the series, putting them on a new engine and everything, they must have thought about the language they were using. I wonder why they thought "crippled" was the best choice.
It's not even, from a writer's perspective, a particularly flavorful word. A thesaurus search finds several alternatives with more punch, including "wrecked," "maimed," and "mangled" ("vitiate" is also amusing, but probably too obscure). Individual terms for specific injuries would be even better: "You are hobbled." "You are concussed." "You are defenestrated." And here I've always taken such good care of my fenestrates.
In any case, it's easier to nitpick someone else's hard work than it is to figure out what it means, and I'm still not sure how I feel about Fallout's status condition. Is it significant? How does it relate to the game's subject, as well as its underlying mechanics? Can it tell us something about portrayals of disability and normality in media? Or is "crippled" just a writing decision that rubs me the wrong way?
