Swap Adjacent Soldiers to Make WAR
You’ve got to hand it to Capybara: they released two of the best “smaller” videogames of 2009 within a few months of each other, and both happen to belong to a genre that I for one had been totally through with. You know a game type has officially reached saturation when Kotex makes their own clone, but Capybara proves that match-3 still has some life left in it after all. Critter Crunch combined the descending action of Space Invaders with a novel “food chain” matching mechanic to great effect. Clash of Heroes, on the other hand, tries its hand at providing an alternative to the Puzzle Quest-style match-3 RPG. This is a game created for everyone who, like me, devoured Gyromancer and Galactrix last year but were left feeling cold.
Clash of Heroes is a DS title, so you wouldn’t expect it to match Critter Crunch’s pristine HD visuals. But you also wouldn’t expect this game’s crude sprite art to satisfy as much as it does. It would be interesting to see how much money was spent on producing these two games, because it seems entirely possible that Critter Crunch (which costs roughly one-forth the price of CoH at retail) was the more expensive of the two projects. I wouldn’t say the look here is charming; it’s basically a bunch of low-pixel soldiers and demons who can only face one direction even while walking. Graphics hounds will be somewhat non-plussed during the opening scenes, but once they start strategizing they’ll quickly cease to really care how the game looks at all.
The game is divided up into independent vignettes following the tribulations of one of five young warriors whose parents have been slaughtered by a demonic horde; therefore, there are five types of armies: elven, knight, undead, demon, and “mage” (think Aladdin’s Jafar, not Gandalf). Each arc follows the same basic pattern: slowly build up your army, make your way through a short quest supplemented by bounty hunting missions on the side, and wrap things up with an incredibly well-designed boss fight. Just when you’re sick of using the same units and scanning the rote dialogue of one spiky-haired anime-type, the sequence ends.
You can read the rest of the review here at Sleeper Hit.
Art History of Games Recap
I’m posting this piece even though the conference has been well-covered elsewhere (and in a much more timely manner), because somebody asked me to do it. I took the time out of my thesis-writing schedule to do this for them, and because I took an extra day they got somebody else to do it.
Two weeks ago, the Georgia Institute of Technology Digital Media program co-hosted the Art History of Games symposium with SCAD-Atlanta. The event opened with a panel by its three co-coordinators, Michael Nitsche and Ian Bogost of Tech and John Sharp of SCAD. They began with a number of provocative questions about where the art of games might come from: is it found in their visual elements, in their virtual worlds, in the creative exploitation of technology, in their design and programming, or in the activity of their players?
John Romero, famous for his work at id Software on early FPS games such as Doom and Quake, delivered a reflective opening keynote on some of the pioneers of digital games. He reminded us about the amount of work lost over time from Mozart’s oeuvre, cautioning the game industry to remember vital contributions from the many designers and programmers who have already begun to fade from popular memory. Later in the conference, he explained his thought process during the transition from false to true 3D engines. Another attending industry designer, Richard Lemarchand of Naughty Dog, inquired in a hushed voice, “Did you have any idea what your work would mean to us now?”
In their lectures, Celia Pearce and John Sharp both covered the representation of games throughout art history proper. Sharp focused on famous paintings that captured games as they were played by aristocrats. He highlighted the importance of swinging and guessing games in the sexual lives of young Europeans, contrasting this with the academic place of Go in Japan. Pearce primarily discussed how the Dada and Fluxus movements produced games alongside their experiments in performance and readymades. She also ran through a short history of independent game developers who strive to make art, asserting that “if you make something, and you call it art, then it’s art.” Marcel Duchamp factored heavily in both discussions, becoming something of a “patron saint” of the symposium
Digital Media PhD candidate Brian Schrank and his graduate advisor, Professor Jay Bolter, presented a model for the avant-garde in games, distinguishing between the formal and the political avant-garde in art history. The formal avant-garde questions the assumptions of mainstream art, while the political avant-garde confronts the place of art in society. Schrank holds the mods of Jodi, an art collective known for deconstructing famous games until they are unrecognizable, as the ideal of formal avant-garde games that manipulate the player’s flow state. The political avant-garde in gaming is represented by virtual world griefers and alternate-reality games, which call into question the magic circle that divides the “real” world from the games we play.
Jesper Juul of the NYU Game Center discussed competing efforts to arrive at the essence of games, dividing thinkers and designers across a spectrum between “purity” and (for lack of a better word) “subterfuge.” He associates purity with the procedural focus of designer Chris Crawford and the ludologists. Antagonistic to this are those who strive for immersion, or “those who want to hide the gaminess of games.” The scholarly impulse for this comes from Janet Murray’s ideal of the holodeck, while designers Chris Hecker and Clint Hocking manifest the approach through their respective focuses on the ludic contract and hyper-realism. Juul chose no explicit champion here, instead encouraging us to keep making theories and proving ourselves wrong.
Area/Code founder Frank Lantz managed to explain the mindset of a brilliant game designer without really talking much about games at all. He discussed the passions of Nabokov for butterfly collecting and of Wittgenstein for architecture, hobbies seemingly unrelated to the work they’re remembered for, that show us something about the way they understood and dealt with the world. It was an argument against the codification of games into art or even into a series of stock design patterns. Lantz explains that avoiding the “domestication” of games requires looking outside of the field for inspiration, embracing things that are messy, wild, and inexplicable.
Henry Lowood, a professor and archivist at Stanford University, chided academics for not taking a close enough look at the creative output of players. He controversially asked, “Who is the artist, James Naismith (the designer of basketball) or Michael Jordan?” He then compared Dr. J’s virtuoso around-the-backboard layup versus Kareem Adbul-Jabar to a famous Warcraft 3 match where the underdog, 4K.Grubby, won by using a defensive spell in an unexpected way. The “are games art” question holds little interest for Lowood, who reflected that over the course of the past century most people have come to distrust art while relying more and more on games in their daily lives.
Michael Samyn and Auriea Harvey of Tale of Tales, the enigmatic indie developer of The Path and The Graveyard, announced the formation of a “Not Games” movement with four messages emblazoned across the screen:
GAMES ARE NOT ART
ART IS DEAD
VIDEO GAMES ARE NOT GAMES
MAKE LOVE NOT GAMES
Tale of Tales explained the initial disillusionment with the high art world that led them to express themselves on the web and through games. Unfortunately, their experience with games has left them somewhat jaded, because the mainstream industry fails to exploit so much of the potential interactions afforded by the medium. “We want you to know: we’re just as evil as you are. We’re just evil in a different way,” Samyn clarified.
The closing keynote came from Christiane Paul of the Whitney, who explained the difficulty of her work trying to get videogames and other interactive media into a gallery setting. She explained why technically significant, critically celebrated videogames often fail to make the “fine art” cut. Her work is a careful balancing act, attempting to introduce traditional museum patrons to the medium without going completely over their heads. Paul’s fear is that, without the archival support of museums, many important games will eventually be lost to history.
Accompanying the talks were a collection of commissioned games on display at the Kai Lin gallery. Eric Zimmerman and Nathalie Pozzi combined their design and architecture backgrounds to produce Sixteen Tons—a game of tactical peg maneuvering with an added mini-economic dimension, played with heavy iron pieces and encircled by a beautiful paper wall. Their presentation raised the question: is the essence of Sixteen Tons in the design of its ruleset, in its architectural elements, or in the content of its social message about indentured servitude?
Jason Rohrer brought his new Sleep is Death, an uneven networked game with one player filling the role of an “actor” and another that of a “director.” This design mirrored his talk about the pipe dream of the singleplayer immersive, interactive narrative. Following an earlier argument by Michael Mateas, Rohrer argued that we should focus on interactive drama rather than a classical narrative arc. Tale of Tales unveiled their new non-game, Vanitas, in an installation crowned by a beautiful bell jar filled with the fragments of a shattered iPhone and a swarm of ladybugs.
Perhaps as a counterpoint to their argument, but really more close to exactly what Tale of Tales wants to see from the game industry, Brenda Brathwaite stole the show for many when she stood up and declared, “I’m an artist, and I’m sensitive about my shit.” Her Train was on display along the commissioned works at Kai Lin, and her speech covered her own mental processes while working on her “The Mechanic is the Message” series of games. Brathwaite shared details on her newest project, called One Falls For Each Of Us, about the Trail of Tears. One aspect of the design stood out as particularly memorable: in this game about displacing an entire people, you’re going to have to move one game piece for each of them.
That’s right: Brathwaite is currently hard at work painting 50,000 game pieces. She’s an artist, and she’s sensitive about her shit.
Are games art? Where is the art in games? Does it matter? None of these questions were answered conclusively. In fact, the presentations and commissioned works only served to muddy the waters. Which, as Juul and Lantz argued quite convincingly, is exactly what these events are supposed to do. At the end of the day, the field is better for all our confusion, wild energy, and playful theorization. We study and makes games, after all.
I should say that, all of the lectures aside, the most fulfilling experience I had was in meeting people I’d known online for some time but had never gotten the chance to talk with in person: Charles Pratt, Frank Lantz, and Mike Treanor (to name a few). At the climax of the conference, a group of people descended upon my apartment to play Space Giraffe and make fun of Demon’s Souls. Those people were: Kirk Battle (LB Jeffries), Mike Treanor, Charles Pratt, Frank Lantz, Eric Zimmerman of GameLab, Jason Rohrer, and Richard Lemarchand of Naughty Dog. A good time was had by all, except maybe Zimmerman because I kept spitting on him and saying stupid things because I’m his biggest fan ever. Then a few hours later I got the AHoG stomach bug and threw up for the first time in over five years.
Colorbind and the ideal of direct manipulation
Colorbind is one of those rare iPhone games that would be completely uninteresting with any other interface, yet is an absolute wonder when you start sliding your fingers across the screen. I would recommend watching a child play with construction paper just before starting to play Colorbind, because you’ll instantly be able to feel how close the tactile sensation is to the real thing. It’s kind of like videogame ports of boardgames: you get all the fun of weaving multicolored paper ribbons together without the cleanup or the papercuts.
The mechanics are simple: grab the end of a piece of paper and drag it toward a node; if you need to turn, simply pull the paper tab sideways to fold. A few rules of weaving make the game challenging right off the bat: if a paper strand of a one color, say red, is crossing the node of another, say blue, then the blue strand will have to cross that node vertically to properly eliminate it. Also, one strand can’t fold on top of another, and a strand can’t weave through another that’s been tightly twisted. The puzzle is complete once every node is eliminated.
The closest iPhone game I can think of to this is Chaim Gingold’s MinMe, which is one of the few casual timefillers that I return to again and again whenever I’m on a bus or cannot sleep. Colorbind definitely knocks the king out of his throne, so to speak, because of its many improvements over the “slide to eliminate nodes of like color” formula. In MinMe there is basically always one correct “answer” to the puzzle, while in Colorbind there are usually quite a few different ways to match everything properly. What’s astounding is that, no matter how you solve a puzzle in Colorbind, your solution will always be beautiful. This is positive feedback on the level of chaining a massive combination in Bejeweled or Puzzle Fighter.
Play itself is somewhat contemplative, because the difficulty ramps up rather quickly even on Easy (there are three difficulty levels, by the way). Colorbind will have you twisting your phone or pod around in circles, mirroring your mental struggle to understand how you must twist a particular strand of paper to allow room for another to slide through in the proper way. In this way, the game’s pace is close to my other favorite iPhone game: Zen Bound, with which Colorbind also shares a sparse, almost melancholy soundscape (all you really hear is the sound of crinkling paper).
Finally, the way you progress through the game is incredibly open: as you complete one level, the next level to the right AND to the bottom become accessible. This is how one of the better indies of last year, A Reckless Disregard for Gravity, unlocked levels, and the feeling of freedom and customizability this affordance adds is nothing to take lightly. If you can’t beat a level, you’ll almost always see that there are four or five others that you can try instead. Your literacy with how the paper twists and wraps grows quickly, and within a few minutes you’ll be able to go back to that level and see the answer immediately.
Colorbind makes you feel like an artist, albeit an artist back in elementary school. When you’ve finished a particularly difficult puzzle, please: take a screen cap and send it to your adoring mum and dad.
Disclosure: App purchased by the reviewer. On sale for $.99 until February 25th.
Matt Hazard: Blood, Bath, and Beyond
When I finished Matt Hazard: Blood, Bath, and Beyond to sit down and write this, I was the 12th ranked Matt Hazard: Blood, Bath, and Beyond player in the world. This does not bode well for Matt Hazard: Blood, Bath, and Beyond. The game begins with a joke about how you can find the first Matt Hazard game in a bargain bin near you. I remember, around a month after that game came out, printing a coupon to purchase it at Best Buy for under ten dollars. The coupon remained on my desk for a week before I threw it away.
Blood, Bath, and Beyond has been out for a few weeks now, and from the leaderboards it looks like less than four hundred people have beaten it. When I was sent a review code for the game, it had already been redeemed by someone else. I’ve talked with another game critic who had the same experience. The PR person distributing these codes is a very nice person. When she sent it, she enthusiastically told me to be sure I checked out that I can steal a partner’s life in co-op and that there is a difficulty setting called “Fuck This Shit.” These are decidedly inconsequential features (what game of its type doesn’t let you steal a partner’s life?). Matt Hazard: Blood, Bath, and Beyond is a game that knows it’s got two feet planted firmly in the grave, shouting this fact from its narrative, to its design, to its publicity.
The only thing strange about all of this is that, for the two hours that it lasts, Matt Hazard: Blood, Bath, and Beyond is a solid run-and-gun shooter. Two summers ago, the XBLA catalogue hadn’t really picked up steam yet. One of the best games available on the service at the time was a crappy port of Super Contra. I played it every day for around a month, even though the amount of fun you’ll have on any given playthrough is determined within the first few seconds: did you grab the scatter shot, or did you miss it? Blood, Bath, and Beyond isn’t nearly as difficult as Super Contra, and it doesn’t have the benefit of nostalgia going for it. But if you’re a fan of Super C with a hankering for the old bird, who remembers that your twitch isn’t quite as honed as it used to be, Blood, Bath, and Beyond might just be the perfect thing to scratch the itch.
You can read the rest of the review at Sleeper Hit here.
Divinity II: Ego Draconis
2 Corinthians 6:14, Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? And what communion hath light with darkness?
Divinity II: Ego Draconis is what happens when two unequally yoked ludic partners get drunk, throw their focus on factions to the ground like so much discarded clothing, and make a baby. From Morrowind we get compelling characters, an impetus toward unlocking the inner divine, and a strikingly vertical level design. And from Two Worldscome the tedious hacking-and-slashing, rambling trajectory through quests, and a bevy of technical issues. It’s a thirty hour-long game that hides its innovations behind fifteen hours of CRPG schlock and loading screens that tease you about the thrilling mechanics you don’t have access to yet, and when everything finally falls into place you may find yourself feeling that the best of the experience came too little, too late.
This game exists within the middle of an unfinished trilogy. Divine Divinity, the first entry in the series, holds a special place in the hearts of some, but I haven’t played it. This didn’t present a major obstruction to my ability to understand what was going on. The creators of this fictional universe were Dragons, and for centuries they enlisted human stewards of their goodwill by passing on a bit of their draconic essence. Somewhere along the line, a rogue organization called the Black Ring corrupted the son of a prominent Dragon Knight. Another organization, called the Dragon Slayers, rose in power to combat what they mistakenly identified as the evil impulse in the world: dragons. You begin the game as a Slayer, but I’m not spoiling anything by telling you that within a few hours you find yourself becoming the last living Dragon Knight.
You can read the rest of this review over at Sleeper Hit here.
300 Word Review – Bayonetta (Normal, Durga/Kilgore & Shuruba/Onyx Rose)
Bayonetta is a Cent mille milliards de poèmes game. Its innovation is singular: providing a combat system that is not only fluid, which is to be expected, but also combinatory. The titular heroine holds two weapons at a time, one in her hands and one on her feet. There are eight weapons in total, many of which can be wielded on either hand or foot. The peak of her witchy powers is that she can instantly swap between two loadouts in the middle of a combo, moving from one matching of weapons to another. The potential number of combinations is boggling, but I’m innumerate.
Bayonetta is a game that wants to be played repeatedly. Your first playthrough will be rife with thrilling victories swiftly followed by disappointing defeat in the face of a poorly-designed QTE. The backtracking of the first third of the game reminds one of a less obnoxious Devil May Cry 4. Although the enemy variety leaves much to be desired, it follows the same basic principle of the game’s combat: it’s not about how many different kinds of enemies there are, but how they can be arranged within a unique set piece.
Bayonetta is a Cutie Honey game. When Bayonetta summons a demon, her clothes retract into her skin to be replaced by a one-piece bathing-suit of hair. Like the Moon Prism Power Makeup and Honey Flash before it, this transformation reflects a changing cultural role for women in Japan. As in the best anime, the male gaze finds itself embodied in a buffoonish foil. His profession as a journalist chasing folk tales adds to the game’s critique of scopophilia. His lifelong, hopeless pursuit reflects exactly the age-old questions we the players ask: “Does ‘feminine sexual power’ exist? What is it?”
Dedicated to the analytic style of Charles Pratt, who specializes in 300-word reviews on mastery.
My Top Ten Films of the 2000s
These are my favorite films of the 2000s. Please note that I say “favorite” here, because I no longer feel qualified to declare which are the “best” or “most important.” That said, these at least are in rough order by what I discern as their importance (which I’ll try to explain). The only thing I think is really missing is an Iranian film, but in my estimation the best Iranian films were made in the late 90s. Most of my readers probably already know this, but I was a film studies person for five years before transitioning to game studies. I don’t personally think it gets in the way of my understanding games as a unique medium or cultural form, perhaps because I interact daily with Ian. I may be wrong, of course.
In any case, you’ll notice that these skew toward the beginning of the decade. That’s because I started studying games in 2007 and stopped keeping up with what was winning at film festivals. During my five years of study, I purchased over 300 DVDs (mostly contemporary) and watched between 2-4 films a day. My specialization was in East Asian genre film, but I also spent a summer researching at the Irish Film Archive and familiarized myself with the classics of most historical eras and movements. My problem with most such lists by other Americans is that they’re Anglo-centric. I’m obviously biased here, but I hope I’ve presented a decent mix. I’d like to give special thanks for my years of study to Professor Richard Neupert of UGA, an expert on French New Wave and animation—one of the best mentors I’ve had the privilege to study under.
Film of the Decade: Yi Yi
This one, I believe, belongs in most “ten greatest films of all time” lists, knocking one of the Kurosawas, Ozus, or Kubricks out of contention if you’ve got two on there (typically, Rashomon and/or Seven Samurai appear in the second half of most of those lists… Rashomon obviously stays). If you look at Cannes winners, it quickly becomes obvious that the 2000s were the decade of international social realism cinema. Yi Yi, by the late Taiwanese director Edward Yang, certainly falls into this trend. The reason that it emerges on the top of the heap is that it also engages with the clash in East Asia between tradition and westernization, morality and technology, youth and age. About the disintegration and reconciliation of a sprawling family, Yi Yi is one of the few films I’ve seen that takes videogames seriously—maybe because Yang was a brilliant computer engineer before becoming a director. Its cinematography is finely-tuned, with entire conversations caught in reflections on glass surfaces, long takes, and incredible depth of field. It is funny, heartbreaking, perfect.
In the Mood for Love
Wong Kar Wai is the reason I started studying asian film, and In the Mood for Love is the reason I was exclusively attracted to Chinese females for a period of three years. It’s a period piece about the 50s and 60s in Hong Kong, so popular (despite being an art film) that it spawned a craze for cheongsams throughout China. Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung play neighbors whose spouses are cheating on them with each other. The conceit is simple: “we’ll roleplay to figure out how this happened.” Neither the faces of the spouses nor any possible sexual interaction between the protagonists are ever caught on camera. There are more slow pans across alleys while rain is falling than you would ever want to see in real life, all edited to the same melancholy string instrumental. I have a tattoo of Maggie Cheung from this film on my left arm.
Dancer in the Dark
I don’t like Lars von Trier. I don’t mind that he made a trilogy about the United States without ever visiting it, because that’s not important. What I do mind is that he calls this trilogy the “America trilogy” when it would be more accurately named the “People trilogy.” The main lesson of all these films is that people, especially when they’ve got no money, do horrible things to each other. Bjork plays an immigrant working in a factory in Nowhere, USA. She’s going blind, but she’s been saving up money so that her son might have a chance at a better life. Everything goes wrong. This is a musical about factories and trainyards. Some scenes are captured by one hundred handheld video cameras shooting simultaneously, an example of kinonarrative dissonance with a purpose. Within the same moment, it both exemplifies and defies everything set forth in the Dogme 95 manifesto. Vinterberg’s Festen is the better Dogme film, but this is the superior film.
Head-On
When I was in high school, we had a German exchange student. One night, while we were driving around shooting off fireworks, he said this: “In Germany, we don’t have Mexicans. We’ve got Turks. They’re like rats.” Fatih Akin, the director of Head-On, was born of Turkish decent in Germany. Many of his films are about the cultural and economic struggles of Turks living in Germany. Head-On is the story of an aging Turkish man with no love for his culture who marries a beautiful, young woman so that she can leave her family home to sleep with non-Turkish men. They fall in love. Did I mention that they meet in a suicide ward? Everything goes wrong. Main sequences of the film are segmented by these strange interludes with a traditional Turkish musical performance. The pacing is incredibly good, which is something I can’t say about his later Edge of Heaven.
American Splendor
I know all the better hipsters in the audience were reading graphic novels before this film came out. Well I wasn’t, because I was busy watching movies all day. Directed by two documentarians, Shari Berman and Robert Pulcini, American Splendor mixes interview footage, traditional non-fiction narrative, and animated segments to great effect. The star of the show is comics writer Harvey Pekar, played alternately by himself and Paul Giamatii (before that Sideways crapfest and villain roles in bad action films). Pekar’s life story and gradual development into an indie comics icon is totally blue-collar and totally real. Hope Davis and Judah Friedlander also crafted memorable depictions of rather cartoonish human beings. It deals with cancer survival, artistic inspiration, child-rearing, and Dave Letterman—what more could you ask for?
Joint Security Area
I like Park Chan-wook’s “Vengeance trilogy.” There were a couple years when Oldboy was my favorite film. I’d watch it twice a week and force all of my friends to sit through it when they came over for a beer. Kind of like when I watched Fight Club every day when I was fourteen. You get over it eventually. JSA came out before the vengeance trilogy, and it’s about a clandestine friendship that develops between North and South Korean soldiers stationed on the border between the two countries. When I visited South Korea, I was astounded by the naive optimism of many that the North would capitulate “any day now” and accept the marvels of capitalism. JSA takes this naivete and twists it, making the conflict about people rather than ideology. The ensuing tragedy is handled in a much less melodramatic way than any other film on the subject (I’m lookin’ at you, Taeguki). Fairly brutal critique of UN peacekeeping, too, I might add. Honorable mention: Kim Ki Duk’s 3 Iron.
Spirited Away
Miyazaki is good; you don’t need me to tell you that. Along with a few other anime directors and one or two from France (Michel Ocelot), he pretty much makes western animation completely obsolete for me: he uses computers to enhance cel-filmography rather than replace it. His colors are vibrant, his environments dynamic. I don’t know if Spirited Away is better than Princess Mononoke, but I think it strikes the perfect balance between engaging both adults and children without insulting or boring either. In a country whose animation is dominated by male power fantasies (sometimes subverted) and demon sex, Miyazaki makes coming-of-age films about young women warriors. They’re sensitive, funny, and immersed in that same struggle between tradition and modernity that I loved in Yi Yi. Honorable mention: Ocelot’s Kirikou and the Sorceress.
Mulholland Drive
If this were a list from the 80s or 90s, this position would be in heated contention between Cronenberg and Lynch—that is when both of the dark, postmodern directors created their best work. We are by no means settling with our pick of Mulholland Drive, though. Every hipster you know has his or her “perfect” “solution” to the “puzzle” the film presents (actually my friend Max has the best one). What do you need to know? It’s a critique of Hollywood from someone who’s seen the worst of it. It’s got dream logic, symbolism, Illuminati, and imagery-for-imagery’s-sake. Lynch always uses that stilted, awkward acting… so what happens when he breaks down his personal fourth wall for the scene where Naomi Watts is auditioning for a soap opera? It gets hot. Honorable mention: Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises.
Children of Men
Science fiction is my favorite genre, narrowly beating out gangster film. That said, I can’t think of many innovative science fiction films from the 2000s. They remain, for the most part, neoliberal escapist fantasy. Also, the 2000s were dominated by zombie films—third-rate zombie films. Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men came along just before the recent rash of post-apocalyptic media. First: its cinematography is grainy and frenetic. The long takes during the assault on the car and the escape from the farm house are more tense than most action films. There’s a healthy dose of intrigue, mixed with advocacy for marijuana in a world where half our population is medicated, mixed with a critique of British and American treatment of illegal immigrants. Unlike many notable science fiction films of the decade, it knows how to splice its final, insane glimmer of hope with the tragic loss of its protagonist. Remember, this is the guy who did Y Tu Mama Tambien and a Harry Potter flick (talk about range). Honorable mention: Soderbergh’s remake of Solaris.
Talk to Her
What do you want out of a Pedro Almodovar film? You want a flamboyantly gay, Spanish David Lynch film. My favorite of his is definitely 1999’s All About My Mother. My dad was raised Catholic, so nothing really beats sitting down with him to watch a film about prostitutes, an absent father, and a pregnant nun with AIDS. Talk to Her, on the other hand, is much more restrained. It’s about two women locked in comas and how the men in their lives deal with it. One of them was a female matador, a core icon for the director. It runs a gamut of sexual perversion from rape (with a question mark) to shrinking men who live inside vaginas (with an exclamation point), but this kinkiness is matched with Almodovar’s deep compassion and the pinnacle of his pacing abilities. One of my least favorite films of the decade? Almodovar’s Volver.
———
The takeaway, for my friends who study games, is this: it’s time for social realism to fall out of favor in the cinema, and it’s time for social realism to dominate the videogame industry. Thanks for reading, and I hope I named some good ones you hadn’t heard of to look up on Netflix. Please feel free to engage me in dialogue about the choices or my somewhat vague explanations in the comments—I wanted to keep the main body short for casual readers.
Link Dump & My GOTY
Hey friends. So the other day my blog hit its highest single-day traffic of all time. Thanks to everyone who has RSS’d me in the past few months and those who linked my AC2 piece for making that happen. I have about 50 regular readers now, which is 25 times what I had at the beginning of the year. My blogroll has ballooned in size, each with a mutual link between another blogger who I’ve made the acquaintance of over course of the past year. It’s kind of hard to remember what life was like without 130 friends on Twitter ready to indulge my every desire to nerd out about one game or another.
I’ve finished my lists for my top ten films and videogames of the past decade, but I’m still polishing up the explanations on those. I would like to note a few things about 2009 in particular first.
GOTY 2009: Shatter
Charles Pratt posted this cute quote a few months ago; one of his friends (maybe his girlfriend?) said of him that, “he’s so hardcore that he only plays casual games now.” In a way, I feel like that sort of describes me as well. This year, I played in excess of fifty “small” games on top of the sixty or so AAA games that I completed. I had, by far, a much more enjoyable time with the smaller titles. They’re singular in their expressive goals, and they tend to represent the efforts of a small group of designers hoping to break into the industry. Of course, I wouldn’t describe my experience with them as “casual”—most I ravenously devoured within a sitting or two. Up there on the list would have to be Panzer General, PixelJunk Shooter, Critter Crunch, and Trine, all of which I had the great honor to review (for free) at my newish gig as associate editor and go-to-guy for downloadable games at Sleeper Hit.
But my game of the year, by a long shot, is Shatter. This game was quietly released one night on PSN at a bargain price, something like seven or eight dollars. It’s an Arkanoid or Brick-Break or Breakout clone, whichever you like to recognize as your first of the kind. Shatter is different. It’s a game about breathing.
Supplementing the somewhat rote action of knocking a Pong-like ball into a wall of individually-breakable blocks is a mechanic for blowing air out and sucking it back in. By calculating your inhalation or exhalation, you can arc the ball in any direction you wish. It’s highly user-friendly, with a little arrow showing you where the ball is currently headed. You don’t even have to use the paddle most of the time if you don’t want to, choosing instead to constantly exhale. On top of this novel mechanic are the added benefits of a shield, special ball-types, and an overpower assault. Each of the ten levels has a unique boss that remind me of R-Type in many ways. I completed the game in the course of three hours, using only one continue, that first night it came out, and I haven’t picked it up since. Yet, it’s stuck with me—one of the only games this year that was perfect from start to finish.
My favorite consumer reviewer of the year: Simon Parkin of Eurogamer.
My favorite unsung videogame blogger of the year: Gatmog of Tales of a Scorched Earth.
My videogame review archnemesis: Brad Gallaway of GameCritics.
Links to my other recent work around the Internets:
The Humble Crickler – Excerpt by Ian from our upcoming book on newsgames, supplemented with some added analysis by me, about the crickler—a form of interactive online crossword puzzle (News Games).
Gotham Gazette’s NYC Election Games – Analysis of a suite of editorial games produced by the Gotham Gazette, funded by the Knight Foundation, to critique the 2004 NYC electoral process. An example of lightly-skinning classic games to great effect. Also, heavy use of the rhetoric of a “broken” game representing a broken real-word system (News Games).
QIXX++ – This Taito remake has nothing to do with Jeff Minter, despite the somewhat neon visuals and “++” epithet. Stay the hell away from it (Sleeper Hit).
Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising – I have no idea how this made its way into my hands. I think our staff is pretty down on the tactical shooter genre, and I was the only person willing to make an honest go at it. In contrast to many games in the genre, this one doesn’t take place in the dusty city streets of Somewhere, The Middle East… so that’s a plus (Sleeper Hit).
LostWinds 2: Winter of the Melodias – Awesome short-form narrative, family game for the WiiWare. My only complaint was that my hand hurt from how jumping works (hold A and swipe the controller). Beautiful art style, cool contrasts between elemental energies that I considered really incredible until I played PJ Shooter the very next week (Sleeper Hit).
Rainbow Islands: Towering Advenure – Another half-assed Taito remake that was actually the first bad game I had to review. I don’t really know what else to say, except that I’m still waiting for someone to tell me whether or not it’s redeemable as camp (Sleeper Hit).
Dragon Age: Origins – My editor made me write this consumer review after I’d already written my NGJ-style post about the relationships in the game. Mostly I complain about how bad the combat system is (Sleeper Hit).
Panzer General XBLA - Chronicling my attempt to learn how tabletop wargaming works and my thrilling online victory over Owen420Canada (Sleeper Hit).
Assassin’s Creed 2: 0 out of 5 stars
Assassin’s Creed 2 teaches its player one thing: there is no problem that can’t be solved by throwing hookers at it. Spoilers follow.
Assassin’s Creed had some problems with repetition; however, it remained a fairly competent system for the purposes of climbing and assassinating. In contrast, Assassin’s Creed 2 has a problem with heaviness. The climbing and hidden-blading remain, but they’re weighed down by the choices of a design team who brainstormed for their sequel and literally threw none of their half-formed ideas out.
This heaviness is reflected in the character design differences between Altair and Ezio. The former was lithe and competent, and we bought it when he bowed his head to disguise himself as a passing monk; the latter is a bulky, slovenly mess. One killed swiftly and silently, while the other employs brute force as his primary modus operandi.
There are two things people mention when they need to explain what’s “better” about this game after noting that the problem of repetition remains: Leonardo’s Flying Machine and the Assassin’s Tomb explorations. We’ll get to the tombs later. There are two missions involving new vehicles in this game, both tied to Leonardo. These are the ludic equivalent of McBay explosion scenes: labor wasted on short set pieces rather than on balancing and playtesting core mechanics.
The first is a carriage chase through the Appenines, which I have to admit was the most fun I had with the game. You’ve got three obstacles: soldiers pursuing you on horseback, roadblocks, and archers shooting flaming arrows. The physics on the cart are quite complex, and you’ll spend most of your time sending it careening from side to side in an effort to emulate Andre the Giant’s strategy against Wesley in the Princess Bride: you’ve got to crush these fools against rocks. If the carriage had less health, then the roadblocks and archer flames would be more of a challenge; as it stands, you’ve got to dodge roughly half of them. Still, the experience is thrilling while it lasts.
The flying machine sequence, on the other hand, is patently ridiculous. This takes place in the context of needing to rush into San Marco to save the Doge from being poisoned. Time is of the essence, so, naturally, you waste the entire day climbing towers with your friend Antonio the thief. He shows you how to ascend to the top of the structure via a construction site, which you already knew how to do if you were thorough about clearing the Assassin’s Tombs.
Then… oh no! There’s a fence! Only a flying machine could get over that! You waste even more time killing pockets of guards so your thief friends can build pyres to keep Leonardo’s flying machine in the air. Finally, as night falls, you’re allowed to partake of the set piece that was advertised so heavily in AC2 promotional material. It lasts all of 45 seconds. You hit one hot air pocket, kick a few guards in the face (by double-clicking the left trigger instead of hitting X, which is a breathtaking usability failure), and fly toward San Marco for a cutscene. This raises two new points: cutscenes and the fact that Batman can fly.
I can’t remember whether or not Assassin’s Creed was cutscene-heavy. AC2, on the other hand, is. A new addition to the formula is everybody’s favorite ludic abortion: the quicktime event. Ubisoft’s Anvil engine presumably can’t handle subtle physical expressions, so things like hugging need to take place in cutscenes. Near the beginning of the game, the player pointlessly presses a few buttons to allow Ezio to have casual sex with… drum roll… Amerigo Vespucci’s sister. Amerigo was a pornographer, get it? We never see her again; nor do we see Caterina Sforza, whose family was later tied to the Borgias through marriage, after “saving” her from being somehow stranded on an island and engaging in some extramarital flirting. More about the women in this game later.
Other QTEs cover such things as shaking hands, double-hidden-blading captors in the throat, and the choice to hug Leonardo or not. What’s the idea there? This hug is the only QTE that the player can actually “miss” in the game, and the window of opportunity is quite small. Is this some kind of knock against Leonardo for being a homosexual? You’re in an involved conversation about either the Codex or a new gadget, and all of a sudden the game prompts you to hit the B button. My controller was on the floor, so I missed the opportunity. Leonardo pretends he wasn’t really trying to hug you and says, “Ah well.” Explain this for me, please, because I love Leonardo more than I do Amerigo Vespucci’s sister.
Moving onto combat and Batman now: this game shows how quickly a combat system becomes outdated when competition enters your niche. Freeflow in Arkham Asylum is both fluid and brutal. If you’re good you can rack up combos of over one hundred hits, all the while flinging yourself through the air and pummeling heads into the floor. Batman doesn’t need a QTE to execute a beautiful beatdown. Contrast this with AC2, where there’s always one solution to felling each enemy archetype.
In the first Ninja Gaiden reboot, countering was somewhat overpowered. You could make it through three quarters of the game doing nothing but blocking and counter-killing. Team Ninja fixed this problem with Ninja Gaiden 2, adding enemies fairly early on that can break your blocks, punishing you for sticking to dominant strategies.
In AC2, there’s never a reason not to turtle into a defensive stance: no matter how rapidly you upgrade to the best weapons currently available, direct attacks do nothing. Lightly-armored enemies will always fall to a single counter. Heavy guards can be dispatched with a single disarm move, and their larger weapons can then be used to one-shot counter any other enemy archetype. Oddly, medium soldiers are the most difficult to crack: you’ve got to dodge them and take cheap shots at their sides in order to whittle their health away for a killing blow. The final gambit is a “special move” for each weapon type that you’ve got to pay an arm and a leg for just to learn that their animations take too long to be useful. This is boring, tedious stuff that, once you’ve got the money for it, you’ll probably avoid completely by spamming escape gas.
You know what was fun in Assassin’s Creed? Running along rooftops and dispatching archers with throwing knives. Now I’ve a limited amount of knives on hand and three times the archers shouting at me to get off the roof before I hurt myself. Is everybody in Italy rich enough to hire an archer to stand on top of their goddamn houses? I’m not into immersion, but you can consider it broken at this point. If I do kill the louts, it’s only going to increase my notoriety level. That would mean wasting roughly one minute out of ten tearing posters off the wall. So, parkour is ruined for me.
All of the preceding were minor complaints; on to the fatal flaws.
The Assassin’s Tombs are not “a breath of fresh air.” They’re environmental “puzzles” with poor camera scripting and a single solution. Whenever you pull a lever to start a timed segment, the game refuses to return to your prior camera angle while disengaging your right trigger button (which I hold down almost constantly). So you begin each of these segments spinning around in slow motion, like a drunkard. When you approach key jumps and see what you have to do, the camera will swing to the right or left at the last minute to screw up your aim. I suppose this was designed to help people who were tip-toeing toward the jumps. If that were the case, then they should have added a line of code to disable the camera movement if the player were moving at a given speed when she passed the triggering zone.
If a tomb puzzle is triggered by a pressure plate, then you can reset it in the event of fumbling over the first jump and wasting precious seconds. But if the trigger is a lever, you’ve got to wait for the allotted time to run out before you can restart it. They already had the code and the animations in place to create this allowance, but they ignored it.
The tomb chase sequences, on the other hand, are symptomatic of the core problem with Assassin’s Creed 2: they’re fake. Your prey is designed to always run fast enough to remain within sight yet out of reach. The only way to actually kill him is to gain higher ground through parkour and execute an aerial assassination. What they’ve done here is forced a cathartic climax, the one solution they’ve allowed. Janet Murray calls it “scripting the interactor.” This isn’t ludic; it’s cinematic.
This general fakery adds to the heaviness problem I mentioned earlier. You get a bunch of new weapons, including poison and a gun. You never need to use the gun unless you’re bored, and the poison can only be used in situations where your hidden blade would accomplish the same thing: once you’re spotted by a guard, you can’t even select it for use. The double blade is nice, because you can now kill two oblivious AI at once, but it’s clearly just there to look bad-ass. It actually got me into trouble quite a few times, when I was trying to kill a Borgia courier who was right in front of me and it triggered double kills against innocent bystanders instead.
Platforming also has two new additions: fling jumps and pivots. The fling jump is only useful for reaching the tops of three map synchronization towers and two pointless little parapets in the game’s final chapter. It looks great to grab a pivot and swing around the side of a building, but none of them are in key segments of the map. There’s also never a guard on the other side of the pivot to kick in the face.
One thing Assassin’s Creed had down pat were the main assassination missions. The Assassin’s Guild was scattered throughout the city, and I had to scope everything out in order to earn the right to take the Templar scum out. You didn’t know where they were hiding, because nobody can be everywhere at the same time. There was a nice little ritual involving dipping a feather in some blood. Most of all, the targets had personality. There was a doctor who-may-or-may-not be experimenting on his patients, and a gluttonous merchant who-may-or-may-not be a repressed homosexual. The player was rewarded for killing these men with tact.
In Assassin’s Creed 2, the target is almost always either running from you or waiting in one specific location surrounded by guards. You run up to him and stick a blade in him, then you kill the remaining guards and go home. I know who some of these men are, because I studied European history eight years ago. The player sees history pass by, but she’s unable to engage with it. The Borgias were a brutal family, the Medicis patrons of the arts… and all they could dig from this was some stabbing and poisoning?
I haven’t mentioned how bad the meta-narrative is, because it’s too easy to nitpick. I actually enjoyed the change of pace the Desmond and Lucy story provided in the first game, because it gave me an opportunity to learn about this world Ubisoft was crafting. Here we just get an annoying, mean British guy and some inane rambling about how every major catastrophe in human history was caused by the Templars and the pieces of Eden. Oh, and a bunch of spinning tile puzzles.
If you read reviews and check forums, only children find this stuff compelling: “Dont u get it? The Roman gods knew that 1 day ppl would invent memory machines, so tey left hidden msgs for Desmond!” The only question remaining is, “How much money did they pay Corey May and Dooma Wendschuh to churn out such tripe?” That’s right, Ubisoft has been employing the crack team responsible for Terminator Salvation: The Game for more than five years now.
Generally, I don’t care about a game’s narrative—especially if it’s about Illuminati and the Bible post-Da Vinci Code. All I want it to do is stay the hell out of my way, but Assassin’s Creed 2 insists on rubbing its poor narrative design in my face. There are a number of times when I have the chance to assassinate three or four of my main targets at a time. I’m literally standing ten feet from them. Instead, the game enters a cutscene and the targets inexplicably disappear. There are also pacing problems here, like a bad season of Battlestar Galactica stuffed with filler episodes. I’m approaching a climactic battle, but I’ve got to spend ten minutes dispatching a random thug guilty of cuttin’ up, or otherwise harming, a whore (that’s a Clint Eastwood line).
Now we return to my opening line. It doesn’t take an expert feminist analysis to see that there’s something deeply wrong about how this game treats women. You can flirt with a Sforza and couple with a Vespucci, but they’re never heard from again. Two of the strong female characters are brothel-owners, one with the ridiculous notion that prostitution is a form of religious worship. The third is a thief who Ezio must carry like a baby through the city after she gets wounded by an arrow.
And I repeat: every problem can be solved by throwing hookers at it. Is there a room containing a Codex entry surrounded by guards? Send the courtesans to distract them. How about a festival party filled with guards searching for you? Hire some courtesans and “blend in” with them to hide. Do you need to progress through a heavily-guarded sequence of bridges? Flit from one group of courtesans to another to ensure success. You can also hire thieves and mercenaries, but why would you?
What do you like about this game? Building up your estate? Why don’t you play a Sim game instead? Why should I have to return to my estate constantly to collect my 20-minute tithe? The Borgias have couriers for that sort of thing, don’t they? If Our Creators couldn’t stop a solar flare with the pieces of Eden, why would Desmond be able to? Why would they care about the fate of humans, their traitorous enemies? Why design 22+ weapons when they never provide an advantage, only a way to keep your attacks from being constantly deflected? Why do I need a flashback telling me that Altair made a baby on top of a tower that one time? I’m his ancestor, aren’t I? Why are there only two types of vantage point towers for each city? Why would I ever complete a side mission? Why does the game come to a complete standstill so I can try to win an invitation to the Doge’s Carnivale party? If all the people I help throughout the game are Assassins, why are they all such ineffectual morons? Why do these idiots keep coming outside when they know I’m trying to kill them?
What the hell, Niccolo Machiavelli? Really?
How does a game about killing people, the Old Testament, and the Borgias completely bore an Italian Jew?
Crawling toward Jules et Jim
———A progression of spoilers occurs at each picture break.———
Dragon Age: Origins is a game about a relationship. Your core goal is to develop as many alliances as possible: an invading army of darkspawn necessitates the use of the Grey Warden treaties. These four tattered pieces of parchment, signed by the long-dead leaders of every nation, bind their descendants to the service of the greater good in perpetuity. This conceit relies on the “go to four places” trope of BioWare games, but its focus on army-building brings it closer to the spirit of real-time strategy games and the recent Brutal Legend. Choices made by the player via discrete “moral” decision points determine which factions fulfill their eternal promise to the Wardens.
These binaries are more ethically ambiguous than those of previous BioWare games: the player is constantly drawn away from her desire to roleplay either a “good” or “evil” character and into a pragmatic calculus. It helps that healing and destructive powers aren’t tied to a moral compass such as Jedi/Sith or Open Palm/Closed Fist. Another difference from previous titles is that party members can be abandoned at will; in some cases, if a particular party member has a vested interest in the outcome of one of the main quests, they may choose to side with your enemy during a boss fight. You can even kill a few of them before they have the chance to join your team, though the game never presents you with a particularly good reason to do so.
Although your decision to fill your ranks with former assassins and dark magi may give you pause, the game never betrays your trust in them. These relationships stand on a higher order than the alliances you make in the war against the darkspawn: your team members have meters that display their affinity to you, and increasing them unlocks new stories, quests, and latent abilities. You will come to care for some of these people—really care about them—in contrast to the emotionally- and motivationally-static citizenry that you’re attempting to spare from destruction. You will probably even despise some of them, depending on how the choices you make affect their interactions with you.
But the relationship that matters is a love triangle, forged by how you interact with two of the four party members the game has arbitrarily decided to establish as worthy of sexual engagement. In the case of my playthrough (as a straight, male, elven mage), the relationship that mattered was between Morrigan, Leliana, and myself.
Morrigan and Alistair are with you from the beginning of your adventure; they’re also essential to how the endgame plays out. These two characters are the most developed of all Dragon Age’s NPCs, which is only problematic when you consider that BioWare essentially makes a rule that the two heterosexual companions are the most important. Zevran and Leliana join your party during the first quarter of your playthrough; any player can make love to them, regardless of gender, because they’re designated as bisexual. There are no purely homosexual characters: Lel and Zev make it clear to you that their free sexual orientation arose from former occupations as spies and contract killers—a westernization of the Japanese “geisha assassin” trope.
It is also possible, though I cannot confirm it, that in the transition to consoles (which has been documented and critiqued by sites such as Eurogamer) BioWare preserved the integrity of the Alistair and Morrigan models and animations while compressing those of Zevran and Leliana (I observed a number of jagged edges and hard lines around Leliana’s features, a stark contrast to the warm, rounded faces of Alistair and Morrigan).
I began my playthrough of Dragon Age intending to be an evil blood mage. In my magi “origin story,” I betrayed a man named Jowan to the First Enchanter and doomed his relationship with a loving priestess. Certain later events made me realize that my decision didn’t make much of an impact here, but my intent to cause harm to someone established as my first friend remained. When I met Alistair, I found immediate distaste for his chivalrous demeanor. On the other hand, Morrigan was a godsend: a cynical, dispassionate “witch of the wild” to engage in conversation about the frailty of human emotion.
Cupping with Morrigan was easy. I proceeded through her dialogue tree on the stairwell leading to the first village the player encounters (Lothering). I sent Alistair and my dog away to kiss her. Within five minutes, I was back in the party’s camp ready to spend the night in her tent. When she asked me about my opinion of love, I told her that it was a farce. This is what she wanted to hear. Morrigan only goes to bed with you when she feels like it; if you press her, she’ll become angered and criticize your need for companionship. Both the feminist and the malevolent mage in me cherished her casual sexuality and freedom of choice. Once you achieve full alignment with Morrigan and begin your sexual relationship, she laughs at you whenever you begin a conversation with her.
The sex scene with all characters is roughly the same. Clad in underwear, you and your mate caress each other, kiss, and then engage in a number of your favorite positions (missionary and cowgirl included) until sated. Ridiculous, Enya-inspired music swells with the rising flames of a nearby campfire. After the achievement for being taken by Morrigan popped, I proceeded with my mission. That’s when I met Leliana.
Players encounter Leliana in a bar. She’s a priestess, fresh from the confines of a nearby Chantry nunnery, attempting to reason with a number of rowdy soldiers. I was still roleplaying “evil” at this point, so I slaughtered these men before even attempting to persuade them to leave peaceably through dialogue. Afterward, Leliana introduces herself to you and offers to join your party. I didn’t want another Chantry member tagging along—least of all one who receives visions from God—but I acquiesced because I knew there was another achievement for cupping her. Over the course of the next few hours, the things Leliana said made me decide that neither love nor the Chantry were things to abhor while playing Dragon Age.
I’ve never actually been involved in a love triangle or casual sexual encounter in real life, so I can’t confirm whether this is how these things actually play out; however, my relationships with Morrigan, Leliana, and Alistair began to feel true. I was no longer seeking to have sex with all my party members simply to ding achievements and increase their alignment. Leliana makes the transition easy for you: unlike Morrigan, she has both a French accent and an appreciation for tenderness. She was also slightly more difficult to court. Although I proceeded to the point where I could kiss Leliana rather quickly, the chance to make love with her didn’t arise until after I’d dealt with an enemy from her past.
One night, sitting around the campfire, I used my superior persuasion skills to convince Leliana that nothing was going on between myself and Morrigan. That same evening, I confided in Alistair the fact that I was close with both women. This both disturbed and titillated him: although Alistair fears Morrigan, it is obvious that he holds a perverse, virgin’s desire to see what making love to someone so dark and free would be like. I’ve read in forums that it is possible to maintain a sexual relationship with multiple party members at the same time; this was not the case for me, perhaps because I was honest with Alistair that night. That conversation with him reveals something often neglected in videogames: good, old-fashioned, Greek off-stage action. He reveals the fact that everyone else gossips about you behind your back; therefore, you no longer feel confident in the secrecy of your machinations and lies.
Before I was given the chance to engage Leliana sexually, she made me choose between her and Morrigan. I must have reloaded my game ten times, in vain, trying to find a course through the dialogue tree that would allow me to lie to her again. Eventually I chose to break things off with Morrigan. I didn’t think she’d mind, because she had been so insistent on keeping love out of the equation. She was simultaneously displeased and courteous, explaining that her man was hers and hers alone; this led to the loss of fifteen alignment points with her and a future of curt replies whenever I began a conversation. Now Leliana didn’t press me about visiting Morrigan’s tent at night. We made love in a scene nearly identical to that with Morrigan (they even wear the same underwear), and the next morning I awoke to her gazing at me adoringly. Achievement unlocked.
After beginning your monogamous relationship with Leliana, she always greets you with an, “aren’t you sweet and attentive?” Yes, in fact I am; I am in love with you. You, the only bard that matters, tell the stock Dragon Age story about Andraste better than anyone else in the world. I keep you in my combat party despite your lack of battle prowess, because you can unlock any chest and door. You’re perfect. After leaving camp and returning once more, Morrigan chides you for being so keen on Leliana. What can you say, other than that Leliana offers something she cannot? At this point, I’m fully on board with indulging priests in their lectures about the Chant of Light and the glory of God. I help every pitiful NPC in need that I come across. I never accept kisses as rewards or visit the brothel in Denerim. I make love to Leliana every time I return to camp: unlike Morrigan, she never denies my sexual appetite.
I maximized my potential awkwardness by maintaining a constant combat party composition of Alistair, Morrigan, and Leliana. I never managed to reach full alignment with Alistair, and much later in the game I was able to take revenge against him for betraying my trust. Every once and awhile I would stop to ask Leliana what she knew about our current locale, kissing her to make Morrigan jealous. Whenever Leliana or Alistair disagreed with my decisions, I would change them at the last minute. When this chafed against Morrigan’s tastes, I told her to keep her mouth shut. This situation remained the same for roughly half of my play experience.
———Magi Circle mission completion spoilers follow.———
Dragon Age complicates things after you visit the Circle of Magi, the core quest fragment that I completed last. In the office of the First Enchanter, you find a Black Grimoire that was somehow confiscated from Flemeth (the adoptive mother of Morrigan). When you present the tome to the cold witch, she is immediately disturbed. The book explains that Flemeth has made herself immortal by raising a new daughter every century and possessing her body when she comes of age. Flemeth sent Morrigan with you on your quest in the hopes that her daughter would become more powerful. The more attuned to magic Flemeth’s current daughter is, the easier it is for her to subdue and invade her body. Morrigan asks you to kill Flemeth and free her from this fate. This I did, simply because I was curious to see what would happen. Afterward, when I returned to Morrigan with news of her mother’s demise, things changed. Morrigan calls me her friend.
At this point, I realized that I may have made a mistake. Leliana indulges your need for sustained love and attention, but she has no meaningful character arc. Morrigan, on the other hand, was a real person. Maybe, if I’d stayed true to her, she would have eventually declared her love for me? There was no option to begin another sexual relationship with Morrigan, but I was happy to have her as a friend. Then, on a lark, I came across a golden mirror that Flemeth had taken from Morrigan when she was a child. When I presented the gift to her, I was given the chance to say that she was beautiful–she deserved this trinket and her vanity. I meant this as a friend. You can tell your female friends that they’re beautiful without implying sexual desire. That’s not how Leliana and Morrigan took the comment.
Perhaps it was a glitch caused by maxing out Morrigan’s alignment with the gift of the mirror. The next time I spoke with Leliana, she again accused me of spending the night in Morrigan’s tent. This was identical to the conversation I had with her near the beginning of our relationship. This time, I broke things off with Leliana. I was angered that she’d be so jealous of a harmless flirtation between myself and a friend. Then Morrigan revealed that she was in love with me, though she was obviously afraid to admit it. She wouldn’t have sex with me anymore, though, because “it would make things harder for us later.” She begged me to say that I didn’t care about her; I refused. You lose alignment points every time you broach the subject with her again, but she no longer has scruples about snogging in public or referring to you as “her love.”
Leliana proved remarkably amicable to my choice; a few times, on returning to camp, she would pull me aside to explain that she understood what I saw in Morrigan. I suppose this was the design team’s way of screaming, “Remember she’s bisexual!” But it worked. She required no convincing or gifts to establish the fact that she cherished our time together and continued friendship. She remained my trust lockpicker, and now she had the full spectrum of powerful Ranger and Bard skills at her disposal. Leliana is like a sister to me.
———Endgame spoilers follow.———
Near the end of the game, you learn that a darkspawn Archdemon can only be killed by a Grey Warden who sacrifices him- or herself while delivering the final blow. The demon’s “taint” melds with that of the Grey Warden and combusts (or something). One choice is to have Alistair or Loghain make this sacrifice. Morrigan presents you with a different option; finally I understood what she meant when she insisted that forsaking our relationships would make things easier in the end. Flemeth had warned me from the beginning, and again at the moment of her death, that Morrigan was a woman cut from the same cloth as the crafty witch of the wild. Once Morrigan learned from the grimoire how to possess another, she made a decision and hid it from me. Now, just before the final battle, she asked me to give her a child. When I killed the Archdemon, its soul would find the tainted fetus in her womb. She could sustain its life, and raise it in a faraway land. She told me I wouldn’t be able to follow her.
It’s obvious that Morrigan intends to someday possess the child, who would store the powerful soul of an Old God within it, in much the same way that Flemeth planned on betraying her own daughter. This is the “evil” ending of the game, but I nevertheless granted Morrigan her wish.
This love scene is different from the others. Instead of a few short caresses followed by a gauntlet-run of multiple sexual positions, Morrigan presents herself in a way befitting the occasion. This is the only time you see a near-naked mate standing in full profile for more than a split-second–the other scenes are shot mostly in medium close-up. Morrigan sways toward the bed and begins kissing you. She positions herself beneath you, you make a single thrust into her, and the scene is over. Morrigan is the only party member (besides Shale) not present during the playable celebration scene at the end of the game. You talk to a number of your compatriots, with the chance to follow to accompany them on new journeys. There’s an option to flirt with Leliana about the hero “always getting the girl,” but that would cheapen the entire experience.
When Anora, the queen of the land, asks me what I plan on doing now, I tell her that I’m going to go find Morrigan.
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This was my first attempt at New Games Journalism, something I personally despise—but I recognize its strength, even if I can’t passably wield it. I intended to write this as a pure, mechanical analysis of how the alignment system influences what relationships and dialogue options become possible, but that would require many more hours of testing and reloading to divine the secrets of the code’s black box. It also wouldn’t be as personally meaningful. I am convinced that this is the most realistic relationship depicted in any videogame I’ve ever played (my apologies for the hyperbole, Mitch); moreover, it wouldn’t play out exactly as it did if I hadn’t made the decisions I did at the precise moments that I made them.
The tacit feelings between Gordon and Alyx in Half-Life 2 are tangible, but bereft of agency. Your connection to the companion cube in Portal is a farce. In Mass Effect, making love to a party member is only possible during an intensely emotional time preceding what you know may be your death; the chance to build a relationship with an emotionally-damaged racist like Ashley was a major step forward for roleplaying videogames, but Dragon Age makes that particular space opera look like an early Edison film. This is a relationship rife with deceit, the tangible phenomenon of mistaken love, second-guessing, and second chances—to my knowledge, the first of its kind in this medium.
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