Chungking Espresso

Brief Interlude, RTB

Posted in Miscellany, Projects by Simon Ferrari on May 4, 2009

I’ll probably be able to finish the second (slightly longer) piece of my response to the hipster discussion between Jeffries and Pixel Vixen later tonight, but Ian just sent me another proofreading job:

racing-the-beam

The opening chapters of the book, about Stella and Combat, absolutely brutalized me the first time I read them. I’m hoping that it won’t happen again, but it’s a lot harder to do this kind of thing when you’re trying to quit smoking. Pray for me.

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The World in a Bowl of Noodles

Posted in Game Analysis, Papers, Schoolwork by Simon Ferrari on April 30, 2009

***SPOILER ALERT: This is an academic paper; we spoil everything, you crybabies.***

ABSTRACT
The World Ends With You is part of a recently popularized genre of games I’m calling the “mutual reliance game.” These games emphasize group dynamics over the valorization of individual action, and throughout the paper I attempt to draw from a series of theoretical writings that may lay the groundwork for an understanding of the genre and can be used to examine other games that take part in it. Through a tight coupling of narrative, control, and mechanics, TWEWY makes its argument for mutual reliance while distinguishing a community mentality from its negative analogue—totalitarian control.

twewy1us9

INTRODUCTION
The World Ends With You is a game about mutual reliance. Its protagonist, Neku, is a misanthropic adolescent who escapes the world around him by constantly wearing headphones. Neku has died, but he doesn’t remember the details of his murder by gunshot until later in the game. In his time among the living, Neku was a denizen of Shibuya—Tokyo’s vibrant center of fashion and youth culture. In TWEWY, a mysterious group of agents known as the Reapers allow the dead to compete in The Reaper’s Game for a second chance at life.

The Reaper’s Game takes place in an alternate realm, spatially coexistent with the land of the living, known as The Underground; the ghostly Players can see the living and read their thoughts, but communication between the quick and the dead can only take place hrough a version of Ouija called “Reaper Creeper.” Players of The Reaper’s Game receive one task a day for a week. In order to survive in the Underground, which is inundated by evil powers called Noise that flock to the negative thoughts of the living like moths to a flame, each Player must quickly find a partner. Any Player who allows his partner to succumb to the attacks of Noise—or fails to complete a daily assignment—faces permanent “erasure” (videogame conventions run deep in the land of the dead). A single Noise manifests simultaneously on two planes of existence, each of which must be defended by one of the two partners. Thus, Players of the Reaper’s Game are required to place a great deal of trust in their partners—a particularly daunting task for a self-absorbed solipsist such as Neku.

TWEWY represents the two combat planes physically by placing each on one of the Nintendo DS’s dual screens. Players control Neku with the stylus, while controlling his current partner with the thumb of their left hand on the D-pad. The partner character will go into “auto-play” mode if the player neglects to press the D-pad; while in auto, the partner will perform attacks less often and thus open itself to additional harm. By maintaining a steady beat, Neku and his partner can pass a light puck granting a damage multiplier back and forth. Neku collects a set of pins that grant him different attacks. The player invokes each pin with a different type of stylus scratch (circles, flicks, presses, and taps) or microphone input (blowing, shouting). Companion characters gain access to new D-pad combos based on the item in their accessory slot. The game features two difficulty sliders (one for Neku’s health and one for Noise strength) of incredibly fine granularity, encouraging each player to find their own “sweet spot” at which the combat’s team-based mechanics begin to shine.

A Genre Defined?
Individual action, once an unquestioned virtue in single-player games, has become slightly less popular over time. This is not to say that games about an individual struggle to succeed have fallen completely out of favor – Far Cry 2 is a recent popular example about one person’s survival in an environment where even one’s friends can quickly become enemies. But recent years have seen a rise in games focusing on group dynamics.

Prince of Persia echoes Braid’s forgiveness mechanism with the character of Elika, who saves the hero every time he makes a false move and is about to die. Left 4 Dead, an online survival horror game, enforces group reliance by making the game virtually unwinnable alone. Beyond Good & Evil effectively fractures the action adventure hero popularized by The Legend of Zelda by making its protagonist, Jade, reliant on one of two partners to solve environmental puzzles and defeat bosses. These games cross genre lines, making them difficult to recognize as representing a cohesive thrust in game design; thus, throughout this paper we will attempt to show how TWEWY helps define the features and concepts behind a new thematic genre I have tentatively named “the mutual reliance game.”

Portable Gaming Devices
But TWEWY is a different sort of game. Relegated to the handheld Nintendo DS, one plays this game alone, while even a single-player console or PC game can be played in the company of friends. A portable gaming device allows one to escape from daily life even when physically immersed in the world outside one’s living room—before there was the iPod, there was the Game Boy. The history of the Game Boy’s development is somewhat occluded for non-Japanese speakers. One can assume that Japanese market data supported the idea that a console playable on long Tokyo train rides would perform well, but The Ultimate History of Video Games contains a quote from Don Thomas of Atari implying that most people thought the device would fail because of its clunkiness and small, black-and-green screen:

Nobody, including me, thought that the Game Boy would take off like it did. Game Boy is the most perfect example in the industry that you can’t be sure about anything. (397)

If any device demands the amount of close hardware inspection provided by Bogost and Montfort’s Racing the Beam, it is the original Game Boy. The Nintendo DS is quite a different beast, but the effect of its hardware limitations on artistic choice inform much of how TWEWY works. We will address this in our discussion of the game’s controls. Lost in Blue—a survival simulator about two children who find themselves alone on an island and must cooperate to survive—is another mutual reliance game for the DS, but is not nearly as self-conscious about being a portable game. For our purposes, the most important fact about TWEWY’s relegation to a portable is that it continually asks its players to take off their DS headphones and develop a sensus communis (in the Kantian sense, not the rhetorical or Aristotelian).

A Tale of Tight Coupling
Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw criticizes TWEWY for creating what Clint Hocking calls ludonarrative dissonance:

What I’m saying is I like games where the story and gameplay go hand in hand. In most JRPGs, the story and gameplay are kept either side of a wrought-iron fence made of tigers.

Incidentally this is almost the exact wording of Croshaw’s critique of Braid—leading one to infer that the reviewer aligns with Raph Koster in holding that game mechanics cannot carry semantic freight. If one considers the surface-level act of scribbling on the DS screen with a stylus to be the extent of TWEWY’s mechanics and control, then this is a reasonable conclusion; however, it ignores many of the levels on which this game operates. It might initially strike one that Croshaw is a particularly easy straw man to mount a defense against; however, in the wake of the great ludology/narratology debates a suggestion of ludonarrative dissonance stands as one of the most serious claims one can level against a game. The following will attempt to show that TWEWY in fact manages a tight coupling of mechanics, control, and narrative rarely seen in Japanese roleplaying games.

Losing Control
Lev Manovich explains part of what makes game challenging (and AI seem a lot smarter than it actually is) by positing that, mediated by the controller, our avatars in a game world represent only a fragment of our potency:

In short, computer characters can display intelligence and skills only because the programs put severe limits on our possible interactions with them [...] the computers can pretend to be intelligent only by tricking us into using a very small part of who we are when we communicate with them. (33)

Understood in this light, we see that TWEWY forces the player to fracture themselves even more than most games. The game’s AI is fairly innocuous even by hack-and-slash standards, but the sheer number of Noise on each screen—coupled with the difficult controls—makes up for the weakness of each individual unit.

The player can move Neku around his screen in order to avoid danger by dragging the stylus. Because the stylus is the only way Neku can attack, players must choose at any given moment whether to use their pins or evade attacks. Pins periodically run out of energy and must recharge, so there are times when evasion is the player’s primary modus. The character on the top cannot be similarly maneuvered, because the directional pad only controls their attacks. It is hard to protect this character because of the relative uselessness of the left hand; nevertheless, the limited manual control still proves more effective than “auto” mode. These facts all come together to show that TWEWY’s combat system is a process of mutual reliance between a human player severely limited to the actions of his right hand scribbling with the stylus and either a weak AI companion or a significantly smaller portion of their brain enacting simple button presses on the D-pad.

“I exist, me, Hélène; isn’t that enough?”
The Blood of Others, an early novel by Simone de Beauvoir, is a fiction rooted in same ideas as her later philosophical work The Ethics of Ambiguity—namely, the implication (following Husserl) “that all adolescents are Cartesian-like solipsists who imagine themselves to be the only consciousness that exists” (Holveck). The heroine, named Hélène (perhaps after Helen of Troy), is a naïve youth who sees herself as completely free from societal bonds; thus, throughout the beginning of the book she uses other human beings instrumentally to fulfill her desires. Not until Paris is invaded by the Nazis does her sense of communal responsibility for other women begin to develop. The unit operation of joining hands, common in videogames such as Ico and Lost in Blue, is invoked when Hélène claims to know an impoverished stranger in order to get her a ride back into Paris with a group Nazi officers. Significantly, the women also share bread together despite the prospect of starvation.

Neku and his teammate share a common health bar—the blood of others becomes the blood of one’s own. This communal life force links the success or failure of two partners in the Reaper’s Game. Shared health bars are a fairly rare occurrence in games, highlighting the fact that the developers desired to deliver a deliberate message with this choice. Winback 2: Project Poseidon is a shooter in which the player controls two different characters, one after the other, on two different routes through any given level. Critics panned this design decision, perhaps because it had little narrative motivation. Forever Kingdom, a little-known JRPG with strong tones of group reliance, features three characters linked by a shared “Soul Gauge.” In this second case the Gauge has direct bearing on the combat tactics native to the game, as well as having a cause in the narrative (evil wizard, blood curse, etc.) Accordingly, the critical reception of Forever Kingdom game was markedly more positive than in the case of Winback 2.

Despite this distinction, some conventional reviews of TWEWY cite the health bar as one of the major contributors to the game’s high difficulty curve. But is a shared health bar so different from what we see in other mutual reliance games? In Lost in Blue, keeping fed is a communal process between Keith’s hunting and scavenging and Skye’s fire-tending and cooking. In Beyond Good & Evil, one of the commands available to the player is to transfer health-restoring items between Jade and her current companion. Admittedly it is a bit too easy to acquire health items in BG&E, a situation that Left 4 Dead turns on its head: players are only given between 4-6 health packs per level, which means that one often has to make the decision whether to heal a teammate or save a pack for oneself in anticipation of future danger. Shared health—and the accompanying need to care for one’s teammates to preserve that health—can thus be seen as common unit operations across the mutual reliance genre.

Dark tourism
“Dark tourism” is a relatively established brand of adjectival tourism focusing on visiting sites associated with death. TWEWY is an exploration of the spatial life of the dead that exist in the Underground of Shibuya. This is an important component of the game for our discussion, because the temporary life of a tourist is one of almost complete reliance—explaining why Ptolomea, the second-innermost zone of Dante’s 9th circle of the Inferno, is reserved for those sinners who betray their guests. Navigating a foreign city is a simultaneously exciting, exhausting, and anxious experience.

Players of TWEWY are visitors to Shibuya, significantly reliant on a map that occupies the top screen of the DS when viewing the menu. The map is divided into different areas, each of which has a different popularity chart for the game’s many consumer brands. Payers must pay attention to these charts, because wearing either the most and least popular brands will grant Neku’s team bonuses and negative effects, respectively. Because the game returns so often to the same locations, every mission features a different blocking off of the city based on invisible walls that either remain static or can be destroyed by fulfilling certain tasks. The map thus often becomes the only way to get from one point of interest to another, weaving one’s way between the shifting blockades.

The fracturing of the city space echoes the mental synecdoche and asyndeton described by Michel de Certeau as intrinsic to pedestrian life (Certeau 101). When walking through a city, one primarily remembers landmarks that draw attention to themselves or hold some significance for the walker; thus, these individual locations become representative of a larger area—synecdoche, poetically speaking. In between these key locations, walkers mentally ignore scenery and thus manifest the second poetic tool of asyndeton. The sites that TWEWY centers around are often emblematic of Shibuya as a youth culture center, but some of the back alleys in which major plot points occur do not necessarily strike one as well-traveled. Thus, even citizens of Tokyo will find the Underground of Shibuya somewhat disorienting, because TWEWY’s particular spatial synecdoche and asyndeton adhere to an idealized, rather than an actual, walker of Shibuya’s streets.

Some Distinctions
Individuality is not an unalloyed evil in the eyes of TWEWY’s designers. Much care, primarily through the game’s narrative but also in a few key mechanics, goes into establishing a difference between mutual reliance and a complete forfeiture of the self. An important part of the definition of a genre is to explicitly understand what does not constitute membership. The following discussions of shopping, trends, and rhythm attempt to lay the groundwork for these distinctions.

A Consumerist Game?
Shopkeeps, perennially some the least developed characters in Japanese roleplaying games, become a vital component of TWEWY’s argument against solipsism. Just as in the real world, one develops relationships with shopkeepers in TWEWY by becoming regular customers. Doing so unlocks new, more powerful pins and clothing for the player to purchase. This is the source of many mainstream critiques of the game as overly consumerist: in the game, one is literally only truly alive while inside a store—the ghostly players of the Reaper’s Game become corporeal when they step past a sigil marking the entrance to every store. This is, of course, simply a way to justify the idea of direct communication between the living and the dead, but its implications should not be completely overlooked.

Certainly the game’s reliance on buying clothing and flair to augment the abilities of Neku and his teammates is disconcerting, but the nowhere does it explicitly claim that the clothes one wears are a source of individuality. Rather, the relationship Neku develops with various shopkeepers echoes the thoroughly modern nostalgic desire for locality and community that Pierre Mayol unearths in his exploration of Madame Marguerite’s notebook:

I have known some very crude shops, display windows of dubious taste, but the shopkeepers knew their customers, there was an exchange of politeness and kindness [...] The shopkeepers are unfortunately no longer authentic Croix-Roussians. They have constructed more modern shops, but they have not acquired the native mentality. There are no more friendly conversations, no one knows anyone anymore… (126)

Wistful remembrances of times past are not unique to the great Continental thinkers and poets—Hayao Miyazaki has built his entire animation career upon the Japanese public’s desire for a return to a simpler, more natural way of life (Napier 181) in the face of rapid industrial change (sometimes by feeding it, sometimes by problematizing it).

Even though Neku can develop relationships with the cashiers at larger-scale stores, their greetings and farewells receive markedly different treatment. The cashier at Pegaso, a shop “for the richest of the rich,” tells you to return when you can afford his wares if you leave the shop without buying anything—an experience that anyone who has accidentally wandered into a Bloomingdale’s or trendy boutique looking for a pair of slacks can instantly sympathize with. Although the most expensive items in the game are powerful, the game does include a method of combining rare materials with lower-price goods in order to cobble together the most potent outfit. Despite the regularity of shopping in TWEWY, the distinction between the local and the corporate is no more apparent than in the subplot dealing with Neku’s rescue of Ramen Don.

Saving the Noodle Man
If one sat and watched The Food Network for an entire day, one would likely catch at least one episode of a show where the host visits Japan or China. At some point in the episode, the host will visit an aging male who spends his final years preserving the dying art of handmade noodle-pulling.4 The crafting of a fine bowl of ramen is perhaps most thoroughly celebrated in the Japanese film Tampopo—a cinematic, ramen-specific analogue to the curry-restaurant game CoCo Ichibanya analyzed by Ian Bogost. As an exploration of Tokyo culture, TWEWY would be remiss to ignore this significant aspect of Japanese culinary life.

During the second week of the Reaper’s Game, Neku runs head on into the world of the ramen business. Ken Doi, owner of the neighborhood noodle bar Ramen Don, has fallen on hard times. Nobody will visit his shop, because a popular blogger named The Prince of Ennui has endorsed a chain restaurant called Shadow Don. Manipulated by the corporate forces maintaining his popular image, the Prince does not enjoy the empty, loveless noodles crafted at the restaurant he endorses:

I miss the old stuff… Just noodles and broth. Warm, simple ramen.

Using a simplified version of Reaper Creeper, Neku imprints in Doi’s mind the image of an advertisement he can use to recover his business. Later in the day the Prince enters Doi’s shop, demands a bowl of noodles, tastes them, and exclaims:

Let me guess: a whole chicken in the soup? That, and a hint of pork bone, seaweed and sardines… It all blends together so perfectly! Among the flavors, I… I can taste the love you’ve put in this. Your love of ramen… No. Your love for ramen-lovers.

The noodle is a symbol of long life in east Asian iconography; however, no matter the level of craft that has gone into making a noodle as supple and long as possible, a bowl of ramen is very much a product of the harmony between every ingredient—reflected in the Zen-minded placement of different meats and vegetables in a wheel across the surface of the broth. Furthermore, the Prince asserts that the soup becomes more than the sum of its parts when it has been made in the spirit of sharing with others.

This sequence and its underlying metaphor are admittedly melodramatic, but ramen as a model for a community of individuals is certainly more refined than the American conception of a “cultural soup” (perhaps because our semi-liquid culinary analogues are homogenized stews and chowders). Encapsulated in this subplot we find both the game’s preference for the local and its mandate of mutual reliance—the ingredients of ramen maintain their purity even while harmonizing together.

The Red Pin
TWEWY also distinguishes mutual reliance from Hannah Arendt’s characterization of a totalitarian centripetal force on society. Kitaniji, the leader of the Reapers, distributes a red pin that, when activated, forces everyone to march to the beat of the exact same drum (to follow Emerson). One mission early on the game is to aid in the red pin’s marketing to the living; the designers seem to have thought that one of the best ways to hammer a social message into the minds of players is to make them complicit in the antagonist’s master plan.

TWEWY features a peculiar mechanic that allows this mission to make sense: trends among the living are set by the fashions of the dead competing in the Reaper’s Game. By wearing any given brand during combat, Neku will incrementally raise that brand on an area’s popularity chart. The very absurdity of this mechanic stands as a secondary counter-argument to the notion that the game is overly consumerist—TWEWY posits that trends are less a tangible social phenomenon than they are completely arbitrary flukes of popular taste.
In her study of Nazi and Stalinist regimes Arendt argues that,

Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its particular ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within. (325)

This idea relies heavily on Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “aestheticization of politics” that propagandists use to take control of society by popularity instead of force. She asserts that totalitarian governments seek not to control classes, but masses; further, “the chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships” (Arendt 317).

There is no more perfect connection between the late capitalist environment of Shibuya and the aestheticization of politics than the notion that youth culture can be easily manipulated by the manufacturers of trends. Trendiness begins as a way for a select group to declare themselves as unique, quickly cuts across class boundaries, and finally becomes normalized when it hits market saturation. The game clearly does not consider the bond of common hipness to constitute a “normal social relationship,” but rather a weak grasping at straws in the face of the highly encapsulated social life of the Tokyo citizenry.

The creeping trend of wearing the red pin in TWEWY is a process that begins early in the game as a hip accessory that only a select few possess and surreptitiously gains momentum in tandem with Neku’s three runs through the Reaper’s Game. By the end, Kitaniji has complete control over a population that voluntarily accepted the yoke he crafted for it. Neku, who has become so involved in the Game due to his newfound fellow feeling for the predicament of his previous partner Shiki (she faces erasure if Neku fails, because the Reapers take what is most important from each Player at the beginning of each week), is the only person in Shibuya who managed to ignore the trend. Thus the communal sense, which saves Neku from mind control, is differentiated from a hive mentality.

Pop Matters
Rhythm games have now firmly established themselves across player demographic boundaries. Most interesting for our analysis of mutual reliance games is the recent transition from single-player games such as the first three Guitar Heros to team-based experiences such as Rock Band and GH: World Tour. Notably, these “party” games feature the shared health bar (here a general level of positive or negative audience vibe) that has proven itself to be such a risky move in other genres. Similarly to other mutual reliance games, individuals rack up “star power” that they can use to either increase their own score, boost their audience vibe, or save a fellow bandmate from failure. This is further proof that games in this thematic genre recognize individual effort in-game while allowing players to make a semi-ethical meta-game choice that leads the group to either enjoy or become frustrated by their experience together.

It is notable that a critique of rampant consumerism is relatively easy to build against these games: buying instruments and clothes only provides surface-level aesthetic change. Further, World Tour is the first rhythm game to feature dynamic in-game advertising provided by IGA and Massive, while Rock Band 2 features corporately sponsored events and competitions. Comparing the rhetoric of shopping between TWEWY and these games only highlights how carefully the former handles the matter.

TWEWY makes numerous connections to the world of music through its naming conventions. Joshua, the local demi-god of Shibuya, is known as the Composer. His second-in-command, Kitaniji, bears the title of Conductor. The most common enemy in the game—characterized primarily as being not-human—is called “Noise.” Though not immediately apparent, the ghostly Players of the Reaper’s Game are also players (that is, “instrumentalists”) in an orchestra or band. When Kitaniji invokes the power of the red pin to control the living and the dead, he subverts the natural musical order of Shibuya’s society and replaces it with a Fascist march.

Theodor Adorno famously associated the early jazz of the Tin Pan Alley with Fascism:

The effectiveness of the principle of march music in jazz is evident. The basic rhythm of the continuo and the bass drum is completely in sync with march rhythm, and, since the introduction of six-eight time, jazz could be transformed effortlessly into a march[...] the jazz orchestra[...] is identical to that of a military band. (485)

Further, he observes that “the most drastic example of standardization of presumably individualized features is to be found in so-called improvisations” (Adorno 445-6). His claim is that popular music, because it must appeal to the aural  inclinations of what the uneducated masses perceive as musically “natural,” risks becoming entirely normalized. Once this process is set in motion, popular music creates a feedback loop wherein both the performers and their consuming public become progressively more regularized in turn. The discussion of whether Adorno knew what he was talking about or was simply biased by his experience with Nazism and training as a classical pianist still goes on today. For our purposes we simply recognize that TWEWY’s red pin story echoes Adorno’s exact fears: the same instrumentalists who compose a completely unique jazz band can one day find themselves following the beat of the same drum.

There are no soloists in TWEWY; like the members of a two piece band (The White Stripes and Mates of State come to mind), the Players of the Reaper’s Game only have a limited amount of actions to perform and tools to use to craft their music (or combat). They pass a puck of light back and forth that increases a damage multiplier if they keep a steady beat. The Player’s pins thus become his instruments, and the price for following the popular trend of wearing Kitaniji’s red pin is the total control of one’s mind and music.

A Biblical Critique?
What we in the West know as the “Christ figure” is in fact a fairly common archetype in many religions and spiritualities—from Amitabha Bodhisattva, to Prometheus, to Japan’s own Amaterasu (the protagonist of the videogame Okami). In TWEWY, Neku himself becomes a Christ figure. Joshua slays Neku, choosing him as his champion in a Job-like contest against Kitaniji; Neku  transforms himself in the land of the dead and is finally resurrected anew.

One might initially assume that Japanese artists have no stake in exploring  Christian mythology; however, Japanese cultural historian Susan Napier writes that,

For most consumers of anime, their culture is no longer a purely Japanese one. At least in terms of entertainment, they are as equally interested in and influenced by Western cultural influences as they are by specifically Japanese ones. (22)

While Napier only explicitly references Japanese manga and anime, the consumers of JRPGs comprise essentially the same market within and outside Japan. Crosses, angels, and demons are common icons in Japanese games, from the winged forms of Kefka and Sephiroth in Final Fantasy VI & VII to the aping of Nietzsche’s famous assertion that “Gott ist tot” in Xenogears. J.W.T Mason explains this by asserting that Shinto, the national spirituality (for it cannot exactly be called a religion) of Japan, is a recognition of the divine seed in all peoples and cultures.

TWEWY inverts the Biblical story of Abraham’s plea with God to spare the city of Sodom. God agrees to spare Sodom for the sake of ten good men, but the angels sent to survey the city can only find one, Lot. Not until the New Testament are the sins of mankind worth forgiving for the sake of one (Jesus). Echoing the God of the Old Testament, Joshua decides that Shibuya has become so vile and imperfect a place that it must be destroyed and composed anew. He bets Kitaniji that the city cannot be redeemed within three weeks, leading the otherwise benevolent Conductor to perpetrate his Fascist control of the populace in an effort to constrain their vices. Joshua murders Neku (he’s an Old Testament God, after all) in order to have a thrall inside the Underground, disrupting Kitaniji’s efforts.

Yet Joshua decides at the end of the game that the otherwise vile city is worth saving for the sake of one man’s (Neku) capacity for betterment. This directly contradicts the story of Christ, who is born and lives without sin in order that his sacrifice might redeem the souls of the imperfect. Neku’s teammate Beat originally died trying to save his little sister Rhyme from being run over by a car. If Christ’s example were meaningful to Joshua, then Beat’s sacrifice would be enough for him to decide that Shibuya could produce virtue; however, it is the transformation of the thoroughly imperfect (selfish) Neku that changes the demi-god’s mind.

One could hold that this celebration of the actions of an individual undercuts the message of mutual reliance, but this would ignore the fact that the very transformation Joshua values is the development of a sensus communis. Christians rely on Christ’s sacrifice for their salvation; in TWEWY it is the bond of mutual reliance formed between Neku and his teammates—forged in  countless dual-screen battles and the twisting little passages through the shop-filled alleys of the city—that saves Shibuya.

CONCLUSION
The World Ends With You establishes the importance of mutual reliance while explaining how to maintain one’s individuality. The game distinguishes between a sense of community and the negative analogue of a hive mentality. It delivers these messages through a tight coupling of its mechanics, controls, and narrative. More so than any other game with a similar moral, TWEWY displays the expressive strength of the rhetoric of mutual reliance. The fact of its relegation to a portable gaming device only makes its message all the more poignant for the player.

In the end, one comment by Croshaw re-emerges to hold true of the experience, namely that the player has been led through the game on a leash. TWEWY, like a raiding guild in World of Warcraft, is such a finely tuned machine that performativity and agency have been robbed from the player. This strikes one as distinctly counterintuitive to the possible goal of allowing players to decide for themselves whether or not to develop a sensus communis. If the mutual reliance game is to mature as a genre, it may have to abandon some of the explicit conncections that TWEWY maintains. Maybe the coupling of two partners is too restrictive to allow true group dynamics to develop. Perhaps an answer lies in the story-free experience of playing Left 4 Dead, wherein game design exists simply as narrative architecture for the team’s emergent story of survival—as great a proof as any that game mechanics, when finely tuned, can carry semantic freight on their own.

REFERENCES
[1]Adorno, T., “On Popular Music” & “On Jazz.” Essays on Music, University of California Press, Berkeley (2002), 437-469, 485-488.
[2]Arendt, H., The Origins of Totalitarianism. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston (1973), 308-326.
[3]Certeau, M. The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, Los Angeles (1998), 91-110.
[4]Certeau, M., Giard, L., Mayol, P. and Tomasik, T., The practice of everyday life, Volume 2: Living and Cooking. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis (1998), 126.
[5]Holveck, E., “The Blood of Others: A Novel Approach to The Ethics of Ambiguity.” Hypatia vol. 14 no. 4, Univeristy of Indiana Press (1999). Retrieved online at 21:20, 4/20/09.
[6]Kent, S., The Ultimate History of Video Games. Three Rivers Press, New York (2001), 397.
[7]Manovich, L., The Language of New Media. MIT Press, Cambridge (2007), 33-34.
[8]Napier, S., Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke. Palgrave, New York (2001), 22 & 181.

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Schooled! postmortem (final)

Posted in Projects, Schoolwork by Simon Ferrari on April 27, 2009

ABSTRACT
Schooled! was created for Michael Nitche’s “Design, Technology, and Representation” class (LCC 6312). Creating the game was a group effort undertaken by Simon Ferrari, Thomas Lodato, and Audrey Whitman. Schooled! is built into Unreal via UnrealEd. The game is a general reflection on the individual’s struggle to create their own identity in an environment that threatens to control that individuation—it is a game about the American Dream. Lighting is decidedly chiaroscuro, and the sound design creates an aura of pervasive mania. The player controls their movement and action in the space with a Guitar Hero controller. By locating sound objects within the game’s level, an elementary school, the player is able to activate or deactivate them in order to create their own personal aural space.

schooled4

INTRODUCTION
Schooled! is a game about the American Dream, specifically its public education system and impulse toward cultural homogeneity. Education is a struggle between the individual’s need to gain knowledge and the organizational and intellectual hegemony of the board regulating each yearly curriculum. Players move through a 3D recreation of an elementary school with a Guitar Hero controller. The space is almost pitch black, expressively lit by spotlights of different color. The space is inundated by the din of almost 20 audio tracks playing simultaneously. Players set their own goals for themselves by navigating the space at their leisure, deactivating or re-activating sound objects as they see fit to construct their own aural space.

Thomas Lodato took the role of project lead, focusing on scripting, lighting, and object creation/placement. Simon Ferrari worked on level design, texturing, and the guitar controller peripheral. Audrey Whitman drew all the concept sketches and took the role of sound designer, constructing three distinct sound spaces composed of at least six clips each.

Our Concept and Backgrounds
The original concept was to create a completely abstract, black space. A constant, bass drone—representing the drive toward cultural homogeneity—would dominate the soundscape. Players would wear headphones in order to be able to hear slight differentiations of sound levels, cuing them on how to move through the space. Using their voices, players would be able to shoot at hidden objects emanating the drone, thus activating the object and causing it to play a different tune. An activated sound object would create a particle field of light, making part of the level visible and allowing players to orient themselves enough to move onto their next goal. Eventually the sound objects would decay and become de-activated, shrouding the player in darkness and defeat—a cynical ending we later redacted.

Inspirations and Source Texts
Visual inspiration for this concept came from a Battles music video for their song Tonto. The game was also to act as an aural counterpoint to the upcoming game The Unfinished Swan by Ian Dallas, in which the player will navigate a completely white space by shooting black paint at the level geometry. We follow Walter Murch’s assertion that “the most successful sounds seem not only to alter what the audience sees but to go further and trigger a kind of conceptual resonance between image and sound” (Murch xxii). A tight coupling of visual/sound space is what we were after.

Ferrari’s background is in race/gender representation in east Asian cinema. Lodato studied mathematical modeling and North American abstract film. Whitman majored in technical writing, but she also learned quite a bit about the sociology of education as an undergraduate.

Frame Analysis
Whitman drew from Erving Goffman’s Frame Analysis to bring sociological considerations to bear on the project. Goffman explains how one understands what is going on in a situated context through “frames,” “keys,” and our reactions to them. A frame is a schema of interpretation that people rely on in order to contextualize an event or space. Keys are prior points of reference that allow one to identify and select from an array of possible frames. We read spaces using the same tools we use to read events and people; a space feels real based on how successfully it conveys its frames to a viewer/interactor. Our game partially dissociates keys and their frames in order to create a deliberately disorienting environment which must be navigated and experimented with carefully in order to be understood. Reading and writing a space is a process of “key” creation.

Sound as Violent Force
Ferrari drew inspiration from Mary Ann Doane’s critique of sync sound in classical Hollywood cinema, The Voice in the Cinema, in order to question the representation of bodies in game space. Doane explains that speech is an individual property right in the cinema. The cinema traditionally attempts to conceal the fact of its constructed nature by always associating the image of a body with the sound of its voice. Voice is thus how one is both contained by and expressed as an individual inside a film. A body anchors a voice within a cinematic space—disconnecting the two is a way to expose the ideology of organic unity in cinematic representation.

Invisible objects in our game emanate sounds, disconnecting the body from the voice. Players control their movement and action in the space with a guitar, an analogue for the voice. We fragment three distinct soundtracks into individual bytes, calling attention to the constructed nature of the game and allowing players to tear it down and rebuild it as they see fit.

Mathematical Topology
Azriel Rosenfeld’s seminal paper, “Digital Topology,” laid the groundwork for analysis of digital spaces through rigorous theoretical and numerical studies of discrete, countable space. In Thomas’s presentation of Rosenfeld, he linked digital topology to continuous topology in order to explore how space is changed, both conceptually and literally. Lodato saw this as a way of bridging the gap between our real world space and the virtual spaces we have created. The term space, and how we use it, is significantly shifted when we begin considering discrete connectedness. Instead of being a dimensional principle, space becomes a factor on connections of parts. While the methodologies may seem dated with our far more vast colloquial dialog with pixels, the manipulable properties of Maya and Unreal would have never come around without them.

The First Roadblock
Our original high concept adequately incorporated all three of these backgrounds, but there was a critical error in our conception of how to depict the problem of cultural and educational hegemony. Nitsche raised the question: “If your game is about combatting the rigid structure of American society, why are you only giving the player one path to proceed through?” Initial efforts to construct an interconnected system of three rooms that could be navigated in any order the player wished conflicted with our amateur abilities at level design. A new iteration on the idea was required.

Level Design
Whitman came up with an idea for how to make the game space both more concrete and more openly navigable: we would design a school. Henry Jenkins describes game design as “narrative architecture”; the school level needed to convey the fact that this was a game about the American education system and its impulse toward control, while allowing players to create their own story through the play experience. Audrey sketched up an initial layout for Ferrari to execute on, but he didn’t find the space expressive or large enough for their needs. Instead he mentally walked through the schools he had attended as a child in order to pick the most suitable model for their project. He decided on his elementary school, Lake Windward.

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Unlike most schools he attended during his secondary education, which were oriented along a linear central corridor, Lake Windward was built around a square-shaped corridor intercut by a central library. Considerations of wheelchair accessibility in the school’s construction also led to the creation of strangely expressive ramps—particularly adaptable to the level geometry of a first-person shooter—throughout the school. Players begin in the school’s cafeteria, from which they can head in either direction toward the gym or two hallways filled with classrooms. Ferrari also scaled the level so as to emulate the point-of-view of a child. The end result is a fairly huge space that can nevertheless be traversed quickly due to its central layout and the inner path created by the library.

First Iteration
In Whitman’s original sketch, sound objects were moving actors that would traverse the space along a set course. There would be teacher objects and student objects. The player’s goal would be to figure out which teacher and student went together by listening to a tune emanated by each actor. We wanted to abstract the representation of human actors to avoid numerous criticism about the voyeurism inherent in film viewership, so Lodato created abstract puzzle pieces (to represent the actors) in Maya that would fit together when activated one after the other.

Ferrari was unhappy with the somewhat simplistic puzzle-solving activity this setup would create, and Nitsche criticized the team again for being overly controlling in how they were scripting their interactors (to take a term from Janet Murray). Abandoning the student-and-teacher puzzle pieces, the team moved forward with a more democratic goal: to create a playground filled with sound objects that the player could choose to activate or deactivate to their liking.

schooled2

Second Iteration
Channeling Plato, Lodato conceived of a unique way to light the level and distribute both sound objects and inert mise-en-scene throughout the school. Maintaining the visual aesthetics of the original concept, much of the school is cloaked in darkness. Spotlights emanate from classroom doors, guide the player through the halls, and highlight corners to prompt turning. Initial playtesting showed that players needed extra feedback on where sound objects were located, so colored spotlights were added directly above them. A text prompt also tells players that they are within activation range of the sound objects. Echoing Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (from The Republic), many of the objects in the school are invisible to the player; one can locate them by looking for their colored spotlights and the shadows they cast on nearby walls. Invisible objects still carry a collision map, so navigating classrooms filled with unseen desks is something of a task; these represent the invisible obstacles to a student’s education.

Sound Design
The original working sound design of the project followed the model of matching two connected puzzle pieces located disparately in the space. Whitman composed two interlocking tracks, which when placed together would form a chord, to accompany each set of sound objects. When the experience became a more democratic affair following Nitsche’s second criticism, Whitman tasked herself with creating three distinct sound zones for the level. Each sound zone is based on a different genre of film, science fiction, war, and the western—these stand as forward-looking, present-day, and nostalgic aural textures, respectively. The experience of hearing all the spaces concurrently creates the feeling of a carnival—a space of pure play that must be explored and experimented with to be fully understood.

Stockburger describes auditory space as being constantly in flux, linking it to “Lefebvre’s notion of lived space, a kind of space that is ‘directly experienced’” (Stockburger 176). Our game follows Stockburger’s and Doane’s call for an understanding of aural space on equal footing with the representation of visual space. The music of three famous movies was used: Forbidden Planet, Full Metal Jacket, and Shane. These were distorted and mixed with industrial and public noise in order to create the final clips. One song was used from each film; Whitman broke each down into six smaller pieces after augmenting the original track. Whitman couldn’t simply cut the tracks down into underlying pieces, so she made multiple min/max passes through each track to isolate instrumental and vocal strings for manipulation. A baseline track was created for each area, which was then submitted to key changes, effects, reverb, and echo—this conveyed distance between the sound zones, which Unreal 2k4 is somewhat unable to do natively.

Player Control
The original concept for control was to allow the player’s voice to steer their navigation through the level. Ferrari attempted to build a patcher in Max/MSP that would convert pitch to MIDI and then send different MIDI ranges to a Java shell that would funnel keystrokes to Unreal. After about eight hours of fumbling Ferrari realized that he was both out of his programming league and wasting time.

Whitman proposed the solution: maybe we could use a Guitar Hero controller? This idea proved to be both  functionally superior and easier to execute on. Using a program called XPadder, Ferrari created a custom keystroke mapping that would function in the desktop background while the computer ran Unreal. Players navigate the space with the colored fret buttons (mapped to WASD). One can jump (space bar) by strumming up on the strum bar and activate objects (E button) by strumming down. Lodato scripted a guitar sound to play when the player strummed down, and Whitman created a crashing tambourine sound for when the player activated or de-activated a sound object.

schooled3

Lessons Learned
Over the course of our semester in Nitsche’s “Design, Technology, and Representation” class, we’ve learned how to model and animate in 3D with Maya, construct levels and scripts in UnrealEd, and iterate on our ideas about how to depict the American Dream in videogames over the course of three distinct projects (basic modeling, basic level design, and the final group project). We’ve learned that the workflow of creating assets for a game can be trying (modeling in Maya on a Mac, converting the model with axmain on a PC, and then importing it into Unreal on another PC), and that there’s a great need for better documentation on game tools on the web. Overall we’ve grown as critics and designers, and working under someone so passionate about 3D design   (Nitsche) has been a pleasure.

Lodato: Following Kubrick’s candle-power experimentation in the film Barry Lyndon, Lodato explored how to give depth to a space using the lowest possible lighting. He considered the information that a blind person would need to navigate a space: “how many strides does it take to reach the end of a corridor,” “where are doors,” and “how do I know when to turn?” Working on the project, he learned a lot about how to “game” Unreal in order to turn sound objects on and off using scripted triggers. Sound in Unreal cannot be turned on and off, so Lodato managed a workaround by which the sound level of each track could be lowered to zero—he thinks this reflects the fact that one of the only ways to stay sane among others is to develop selective hearing, instead of explicitly ask others to silence themselves.

Lodato thinks that his job as project lead was made easy by the fact that Ferrari and Whitman took their work delegations seriously and always delivered material on time.

Whitman: While Audrey was reasonably comfortable editing sound and preparing it for Unreal, with what she learned in the course of completing this project she feels capable of moving on to more advanced sound design tasks in the future. In the process of placing and laying out the connective sonic tissue between each sound zone, she learned a lot about the relationship between sound design and the scale of a 3D space (the distance, direction, and size of a sound bubble determine in part how big a space ‘feels’ to the player, a perception that can be subtly altered through careful design and script triggering).

She reached a level of comfortability if not proficiently in Unreal scripting by bug-testing with Lodato, and would feel reasonably prepared to do more scripting in that vein. Since so little modeling was required for this level, her modeling skills remained much as they were.

Ferrari: First and foremost, Simon learned to listen to the suggestions of his teammates. On the very first day that he proposed the idea of constructing voice controls in the then-alien Max/MSP, Whitman excitedly asserted that a Guitar Hero would fit our ideas about the voice in a game space while also providing more efficient functionality for the player. Ferrari didn’t heed her advice, and he ended up wasting quite a bit of their valuable time fumbling around in the exceedingly difficult development environment that is Max.

Modeling a school in 3D is actually rather easy; texturing it is another task altogether. Schools are rather boring places visually, so a lot of work went into making each area in the school have its own unique flavor (to compliment the sound design). Ferrari had been highly critical of “game artists” who translated everyday spaces such as art museums into 3D engines, but he thinks that this project works because the form and function of the game achieve a tight coupling. Simon enjoyed the trip back in time to his primary school days, continuing his ludic exploration of personal nostalgia following the videogame mapping of his childhood neighborhood for DiSalvo’s design class last semester.

CONCLUSION
Schooled! is a game about one’s struggle to construct identity in our culturally homogenous home, the United States. Over the course of two concept and gameplay iterations, our team feels that we have conveyed this experience rather uniquely within a 3D space. The lighting design of the finished product maintains the visual aesthetic of the original concept—an abstract, black space that the player must navigate with their ears. Three distinct sound spaces, drawn from three genres of film music, allow an experimental building of a personal sound space. The setting of an elementary school makes for a space that everyone can relate to while exploring the subject of cultural homogeneity in the United States. The team worked effectively together and with Professor Nitsche to fully flesh out their high concepts and show what they’d learned over the course of the semester.

REFERENCES
[1]Battles, Tonto. Music video from album Mirrored, Warped Films, 2008.
[2]Dallas, Ian, The Unfinished Swan (2009, work in progress).
[3]Doane, M.A., The Voice in the Cinema. Yale French Studies (1980) pp. 373-385.
[4]Goffman, Erving, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Northeastern University Press (Boston) 1986, 21-83, 247-300, 345-348, 496-560.
[5]Jenkins, H. Game Design As Narrative Architecture. Henry Jenkins Publications, 2007, 1-15.
[6]Murch, W. Foreword, in: Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, by Michel Chion. Columbia Univeristy Press, 1994, vii-xxiv.
[7]Rosenfeld, Azriel. “Digital Topology” in The American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 86, No. 8 (Oct., 1979) pp. 621-630
[8]Stockburger, A. PhD Research into the Modalities of Space in Video and Computer Games. 2006, 175-206.

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Beyond Good and Evil and Photographic “Truth”

Posted in Game Analysis, Newsgames, Schoolwork by Simon Ferrari on April 22, 2009

Simultaneously posted on Bogost’s News Games research blog. So go comment there, not here!

It’s time for another post in which I show how a mainstream videogame manages to capture the spirit of a particular aspect of journalism better than any existing edu-game on the same subject! This month’s game is Beyond Good & Evil, an artifact that shares with Psychonauts the distinction of being a relatively late entry in the sixth generation of videogames that didn’t sell nearly as much as it should have considering its critical reception and creative flair.

games_wallpaper_beyond_good_and_evil-156

Everything one needs to know about BG&E is masterfully presented within the first thirty minutes of playing the game. A newscast cinematic opens the experience, with Hyllis’s most popular newscaster Fehn Digler (Fehn, a Scandinavian surname, is apparently the forename of all “goat sapientes”) announcing an oncoming wave of alien enemies called the DomZ (perhaps a riff on Ubisoft’s own Petz series). He transfers control of the broadcast over to the voice of General Kex of the Alpha Sections – an intergalactic military that is purportedly protecting the people of Hillys from the DomZ. He begins, “Loyal Hillians, the impending battle will be a difficult one, but thanks to the Alpha Sections…” before being cut off by a fadeout to the protagonist, Jade, meditating on a rock. Both Fehn Digler and General Kex are instantly set in opposition to Jade by this  somewhat disruptive cut. Although the name “Fehn Digler”  connotes the historical form of investigative journalism known as muckracking, he in fact aligns with the propagandistic Alpha Sections. When the introductory DomZ invasion begins, Jade springs into action and is captured in a series of black-and-white photograph snaps—Jade is a rugged photojournalist, an independent force flying in the face of the Alpha Sections’ media hegemony.

Jade is a spunky female of unknown ethnicity. Her ambiguous features hearken back to the famous 1993 Time magazine cover claiming to show the “New Face of America” and precede by a year the most famous multi-ethnic videogame heroine, Alyx Vance of Half-Life 2. Her name carries with it connotations of East Asian and Mesoamerican ornamentation. The name “Jade” also indirectly appeals to the game’s title, Beyond Good and Evil. The famous blaxploitation film Ebony, Ivory, and Jade features two female protagonists (one white, one black), and a male protagonist named Jade. Ebony and Ivory, black and white, traditionally invoke the concepts of Good and Evil. The third element, Jade, rests outside this dichotomy. Jade is mineralogically “tough,” and its earliest use was as a sharp weapon—thus connoting both beauty and the ability to “cut through” to the truth of a situation. Also important to BG&E‘s endgame is the fact that a 19th century French scientist discovered that what was known as jade was in fact two different rocks.

The game’s secondary protagonist is Pey’j, Jade’s gruff pig “uncle.” Pigs are significant in reference to jade in Chinese history. Some of the earliest depictions of a Chinese dragon, carved out of jade, are the zhulong or “pig dragon” ouroboros artifacts crafted in neolithic China.  The Pig is the final entrant of the Chinese zodiac, having lost the Jade Emperor’s race in mythological times. Accordingly, pigs in the Chinese zodiac are depicted as vulnerable, which explains why Jade often finds herself protecting her rotund uncle.  Another characteristic of pigs in the Chinese zodiac that Pey’j isn’t is naïve: from the beginning of the game, Pey’j is highly suspect of the Alpha Sections. His name is clearly a pun on the word “page,” connoting both a medieval servant to a knight (in this case, Jade) and a unit of print media.

Despite featuring a strong female, multi-ethnic protagonist, BG&E mires itself in tedious cultural stereotyping. A Latino colleague watched me play the opening hour of the game, and the flamboyant simpering of the AI character Secundo made my face flair with shame for being a gamer. Some of the game’s voice acting and sound design are so ethnically fetishistic and colonial that it was hard for me to stomach the opening acts.

The “animal sapientes” that inhabit Hillys are fairly derivative of the tropes established by Gullah folk stories of the “Bruh Rabbit” tradition. I have two words for you, words that I hope are never made manifest in code by a videogame ever again: Gullah Rhino. I get the joke—displaced Africans living on an island—but I’m not amused. So much effort clearly went into making Jade race-neutral in speech and facial features that I don’t really understand why the makers decided to go with such hackneyed ethnic tropes for the Secundo and Mammago characters.

Moving on. The IRIS Network is an intergalactic organization of operatives and “correspondents” that seek to disrupt the machinations of the Alpha Sections. Their primary modus operandi is the creation of counter-propaganda in the form of newsprint and radio. Calling themselves a “network” of course denotes network television news. The fact that their agents are called correspondents only deepens this connection. The root network of the Yellow Iris is used in natural water purification , a fact which might or might not be an intended connection on the designer’s part—the Network attempts to “cure” the media occlusion caused by the Alpha Sections’ propaganda.

The irides of our eyes control the amount of light that reaches our retinas by expanding and contracting the pupil. Diseases of the irides directly affect one’s ability to see; similarly, the IRIS Network also controls the information that Jade receives throughout the course of the game. Although a seemingly benevolent force (perhaps the Good to the Alpha Section’s Evil), players and Jade immediately question the motivations of the IRIS Network after they introduce themselves to Jade through a deceit: they send Jade on a fool’s errand into the heart of an ancient mine as a test of her abilities. Mr. Hahn’s ridiculous transformation from the Cadillac-driving Mr. De Castellac to a blue collar taxi driver both confirms player suspicions that the Network is not to be trusted while connecting the organization to working class values. Jade finally meets with IRIS in the Akuda Bar, inside of which a dub song constantly drones a one-word chorus: “propaganda.”

The gameplay of Beyond Good & Evil is almost entirely derivative of two Nintendo products: Ocarina of Time and the Metroid Prime series. That said, the fracturing of the self-contained adventure game protagonist into units of Jade/Pey’j and Jade/Double H is both a vital move on the part of more and more recent game designers and cause for quite a bit of realtime narrative and engaging puzzle platforming. The important connection for us is that derived from Metroid: Jade’s camera functions almost identically to Samus’s scanning visor. Not only can it take pictures, but it can also access data terminals. Photography comprises roughly 1/6 of one’s time in the game, as players are practically required to snap nature photographs of plants, animals, and DomZ for a preservation society in order to maintain a steady stream of revenue. Perhaps predicting the recent crisis in print journalism, Jade’s career as a photojournalist has fallen on hard times. The pictures in her studio are of the orphans she takes care of—not what one would usually expect to see in a professional reporter’s darkroom. Before acquiring the nature photography job from Secundo, Jade doesn’t have enough of a line of credit to afford basic power needs or transportation costs.

The use of nature photography, in which verisimilitude is demanded by the needs for preservation and education, is important in understanding the naïve assumptions about photographic truth upon which Beyond Good and Evil rely. Jade’s mission from the IRIS Network is to infiltrate key Alpha Sections installations in order to photograph their unmasked faces and the plight of their hostages:

Every proof we can find relating to this conspiracy will bring us more and more support from the people. A general uprising would allow us to overthrow the Alpha Sections; if the revolt spreads we may be able to end this war, but we need photographic evidence to find out exactly what’s going on[...]

Alpha is the transparency value in digital image manipulation. As a cohesive, unquestioned whole the Alpha Sections are completely oblique. By disrupting and photographing their operations, Jade will increase media transparency and arrive at “the truth.” At the end of the game Jade’s photographs, published under the pseudonym “Shauni” (a name which apparently shares a Hebrew root with Jeanne, meaning “God’s Grace” and therefore associating Jade with Jeanne d’Arc’s goal of driving the invaders from a homeland), do in fact bring about a revolution against the Alpha Sections.

Which leads one to ask, “Why, in a distant future full of anthropomorphized space animals and flying cars, would anyone believe in the integrity of a photograph?” Tweens know how to use Photoshop. Critics questioned Robert Flaherty’s construction of early documentaries such as Nanook of the North roughly an entire century ago (in the 1920s). The game’s title references Nietzsche’s own Beyond Good and Evil, which demands that not that morality be abandoned outright but that philosophers throw away dated (neo-Platonic, Christian) concepts such as “truth,” “knowledge,” and “free will.” Unfortunately, the game only serves to affirm the completely outmoded concept of documentary reality. The game’s ending is somewhat revelatory,  but it can’t honestly be described as “cutting through to the truth.” Players are hand-fed the narrative conclusion and its moral. What the game never explains is how the Alpha Sections gained power in Hyllis, we are told only that “the government was caught off guard.” It doesn’t explain why seemingly the entire populace suffers and accepts the blatant, omnipresent propaganda of Fehn Digler and General Kex. We don’t learn much about how media control comes about, and we don’t learn a feasible modus operandi for independent journalists.

In order to evolve, journalists might one day have to throw their claim to being able to discern and disseminate “truth.” On the other hand, so-called “citizen journalists,” if they hope to succeed in the fragmented environment of newsmaking on the web, are going to have to learn that objectivity is more difficult to attain than the simple snapping of a picture. If only a game so apparently concerned with disrupting propaganda and news media hegemony could have helped light the way.

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Wave! the life and death of an american protest

Posted in Projects, Schoolwork by Simon Ferrari on April 5, 2009

Thomas Lodato, Thomas Barnwell, and I are working on a microworld prototype for Janet Murray’s class. We decided to flesh out a game concept I had last semester, modeling the experience of a grassroots sign-waving effort. I found out while reading Persuasive Games that Ian had already modeled this in part with his Howard Dean for Iowa game. The message there is that grassroots politics border on the mundane, and that such efforts steadily grow as more people become interested/involved. I wanted to understand a different phenomenon:

Driving down Peachtree Street, I passed an anti-war protest. This was the same event I’d passed hundreds of times in the past six years: a bunch of crunchy hippies, people dressed as Buddhist monks, elderly women dressed in black, et cetera, all demanding an end to war without any consideration of how exactly to pull off a safe and effective exit strategy from Iraq or Afghanistan. I understand the desire – I’m quite a super liberal myself – but I can’t advocate this kind of unstudied, ineffectual rant. I didn’t beep. Everybody else did.

Traveling with the same caravan on cars, we came upon a labor strike a half-mile down the road. A bunch of African American laborers, dressed in the construction clothes, were picketing a work site. These people had legitimate grievances, and legitimate demands for how their grievances should be addressed (this is the nature of labor disputes). Yet, nobody was beeping. These people were the same liberals who supported an end to war in Iraq. Why weren’t they supporting another liberal stance, labor rights? I laid on my horn, a long-sustained honk in a corridor of silence.

What this example showed me was that the assumption that grassroots outreach was always going to gain ground was false. The success of a demonstration relies on the political climate of the area where it takes place, the politics, race, and socio-economics of the passersby, and other organizational constraints such as time, weather, density of protestors, and frequency/spatial distance of recurring demonstrations. Our game models this, based on a series of algorithms and census/Gallup/Pew/voting record data.

EDIT: Here’s a link to v1.03a of Wave! That means it’s an alpha, so the cars are driving backward. So it goes. It ain’t nearly finished, but I think we’ve shown that an info-vizualization game is possible. For some reason Firefox isn’t reading some of the external files, so try it in Safari if the signs don’t show up above the hands.

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Thesis Topic!

Posted in Projects, Schoolwork by Simon Ferrari on March 31, 2009

This week I got to plan out the next year of my life. Here’s the thesis pre-proposal I came up with!

“Remediate, Disrupt: Procedural and Performative Responses to Game Rhetorics”

In both Unit Operations and Persuasive Games, Ian Bogost suggests that players might counter the arguments modeled by videogames by responding to them procedurally, or making a “response game”; on the other hand, Celia Pearce and Michael Nitsche elucidate community and performative engagements with these same procedural rhetorics. This paper will draw from both existing artifacts and my own ongoing case studies to develop a practical theory and typology of disruptive responses to videogame rhetorics.

Chair: Ian Bogost
Committee: Celia Pearce, Michael Nitsche, and Fox Harrell (pending taking a class with him next semester)

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360 Achievers Widget

Posted in Projects, Schoolwork by Simon Ferrari on March 23, 2009

I had to prototype a Dashboard widget for Janet Murray’s “Designing the Medium” class. Since I’m an achievement whore constantly trying to justify to others the value I see in achievements as a new, generalizable reward structure in games and as a meta-game, I hacked together something that would host the kind of discussion around achievements that I’ve been looking for.

The only existant 360-related widgets on Apple right now are Gamercard widgets (pretty simple, usually it just sets up a dummy Live account to redirect requests through and then shows you your Gamercard) and the 1337pwn Friends List widget (does about the same, a dummy account looks up information on Friends you enter into the widget and then shows you if they’re online and what they’re playing). This is what I came up with (oh and it actually works, if I’d just designed the layout in Illustrator it would’ve been a lot prettier, but it was my first venture into J-script):

360widget

Basically I wanted a widget on my Dashboard that would quickly retrieve information that I would usually have to search for for 15 minutes on an achievement site like 360achievements.org. The genre tabs on the top, the game icons on the left, and each individual achievement listed are all coded in slick Javascript (from Scriptaculous) that cascades when clicked – heavy credit goes to Bobby Schweizer, who showed me how to adapt some of his code for the project.When you switch between games, the widget will remember the last achievement you were looking at for any given game.

Everything from “Achievement Comments” down is a wiki. The back end isn’t fully implemented, because I’m not a hardcore coder. On the back there are some RSS feeds and a place to input your Gamertag to pull up your Gamercard. The basic idea is that the widget would read your Tag to see the games you’ve played, which would then grant you access to the wikis for the games you actually know something about.

My basic valuation of achievements is that they both parse games into meaningful units while also highlighting modes of play that might otherwise go ignored by players if they didn’t have an explicit, displayable reason to do so (the achievement). A good example of this notion is the 99 achievements for the Orange Box, which focused me toward playing numerous encounters in the games in ways that I wouldn’t have thought of myself.

Bring on the use-ability complaints, bitches! (here are some: my grid could use some work, the achievement list is a bit awkward and hard to differentiate, and I couldn’t figure out how to make the Javascript show you what achievement you’d selected)

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Readin’ the Paper for the Puzzlers

Posted in Columns, Newsgames, Schoolwork by Simon Ferrari on March 17, 2009

UPDATE: Now published here, with hyperlinks to all the sources!

Everybody knows now that eBay and Craigslist did a number on newspaper revenue. We’re told that newspaper producers were caught completely offguard by these online classifieds. One thing Ian wanted to know is: what would happen to the circulation of a newspaper if its game-playing constituency also migrated to the Internet?

This leads to a tacit first question: what number of newspaper-subscribers buy the paper just for the puzzles? There are some difficulties acquiring statistically significant numbers here. First, most newspapers don’t do regular surveys of their readers to actually find out why they’re buying the paper. Will Shortz at the New York Times shares an interesting figure – he does after all have a lot at stake here as the world’s current Dean of Crossword Puzzles. In a 2004 interview Shortz discussed a survey from earlier in the decade that found 27% of newspaper readers playing the crossword occasionally. That numbers isn’t particularly compelling for our purposes, but there is one other number dropped by Shortz that does carry some weight: 1%. That’s the percentage of Americans who named crossword-solving as “their favorite activity in the world.”

Another study by Richard Browne of The London Times estimated that ten percent of their readership did the crossword regularly. For their readership that comes out to 75,000 daily puzzle-solvers. Over 7,000 of those take part in crossword competitions. Browne conjectures that these percentages (10% and 1%) are approximately the same for every major paper. On the other hand, he cites British culture as uniquely interested in crossword puzzles: “many [British] people will take a paper for its crossword even it they don’t like that paper’s political stance.”

On top of these findings, there’s also reason to believe that many readers of more “serious” papers would be reluctant to admit that they buy them just for the puzzles. Internet anonymity helps: 54% of 3500 surveyed at About.com’s puzzle section buy a newspaper “all the time” just for the puzzles. Archimedes-Lab.org claims a much higher number because only 13 percent of their readers answered “never” to the question, “do you buy a newspaper just to do the puzzles?” People are also significantly more open when talking about their local papers.

In 2001, Kristin Tillotson of the Minneapolis Star Tribune cited an industry estimate that 25% of readers considered the crossword a part of their daily routine. This number didn’t surprise Tillotson, because of the violent reader reaction to the Star Tribune’s decision to syndicate the New York Times crossword instead of the LA Times. One comment stood out for me: “This puzzle makes me feel very, very stupid. I am not stupid. I am a physician. … You have ruined my morning. You have ruined my ritual.”

A 2004 article from the Bluefield Daily Telegraph confirms the importance of the puzzles for local paper subscribers, describing it as “a bedrock element.” These findings are both encouraging and frightening, because it shows that local newspapers – which are more vital to the life of “the average American” than national papers – stand more to lose if the population of puzzlers emigrates completely to the Internet. For more insights – to the Internet we go!

One blogger named Russell Beattie wrote a piece in 2003 that predicted crosswords as “the prototypical mobile killer app.” He makes some nice observations along the way. One of these is that “fresh, local, and topical content is key.” Even though every Barnes & Noble has an entire rack of puzzle books, this hasn’t posed a serious threat to newspapers. Why? Because people want today’s crossword, no matter the quality. It’s a shared human experience, part of the collective unconscious. Playing networked games over the Internet makes this shared experience explicit – but it also often robs it of its magic. The idea of tailoring daily mobile puzzle releases to localized audiences is daunting. Ian’s Jetset iPhone game localizes its content procedurally by identifying which airport that player is near – customizing the particular security standards that each different airport holds. Writing a series of processes to both generate a crossword and integrate terms or themes from local news seems to be a bit beyond the abilities of existing data-mining mobile games.

I’ve mostly addressed crosswords so far, and some of you might be wondering why I haven’t mentioned the Sudoku craze. Now that we’re on the topic of possibly generating local crosswords by brute force processing, we might as well mention the fad-tastic number game. Wayne Gould, who popularized the 1980′s Japanese game in 2004, wrote a computer program to generate the puzzles. Part of Sudoku’s appeal is the opposite of the local, temporal qualities of the crossword: numerical in nature, they transcend language boundaries. So why did they only enjoy a brief flourish of popularity in papers before being quickly replaced by Internet versions and bookstore puzzle compendiums? One of the major reasons is the simplicity of programming a generator such as Gould’s, and the fact that Sudoku is public domain (legally, anybody could copy Gould). This led to a glut of the puzzle, a lack of uniqueness, and a passing importance in newspaper gaming.

What can we take away from all this? We have reason to believe that the people who buy newspapers just for the puzzles (especially the crossword) – whatever the percentage – are not going anywhere anytime soon. If it’s true that the local and topical qualities of crossword puzzles are their greatest strengths, then we have no reason to fear that the latest re-skinning of Grid Defender or Bejeweled will rob papers of their business. I believe that the throwaway comment I made about the collective unconscious is key here as well. There’s something magical about knowing that others are struggling against the same word puzzle as you at 6 in the morning while you’re getting ready for work. There’s significantly less magic in playing casual Internet games, which mostly appeal to the “coin drop” addiction of arcade games (keeping players around to suck up more advert banners).

More on this subject to come in the future, especially if we find more games like Ian’s that can procedurally generate local experiences.

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Left 4 Dead as Team-Based Rhythm Game

Posted in Game Analysis, Papers, Schoolwork by Simon Ferrari on March 12, 2009

Final section of a three-part paper on Left 4 Dead for a Tech, Design, and Representation class. So much time has passed since when I started writing the pieces and now that it took a lot to muster enough interest to write this. I hope I came up with a decent angle on it, contributing to everyone’s discussion of the emergent qualities of the game. Special thanks to Jon Mills for providing a bit of creative impetus (he’s in the works cited, too).

ABSTRACT

Left 4 Dead is an exercise in minimalism. Although the levels are fairly linear and player interaction is limited to only a few actions, the play experience changes each time one plays as a result of the machinations of the AI Director. As a cooperative game, Left 4 Dead shares just as much in common with team-based rhythm games such as Rock Band as it does with other shooters and survival horror games.

INTRODUCTION: This article deals with the gameplay of the videogame Left 4 Dead (referred to as L4D). L4D is an important recent artifact in the first-person shooter and survival horror genres. Relevant games in these genres include Half Life 2 and the Resident Evil series, respectively.

Specifically, my analysis deals with how minimalism in level design, narrative, and player control combines with team-based play and a randomized game state (enemies and equipment) in order to cause a cooperative experience similar to the rhythm game Rock Band to emerge. Both emergent gameplay and narrative will be considered. For the purposes of fully exploring the gameplay, I will primarily be referencing the level of complexity inherent in playing on the Expert difficulty level (which enhances the importance of the game’s design).

Minimalism and Flow
One of L4D’s main strengths is its minimalism. Players can basically only shoot, run, crouch, and melee. Inventories are particularly constrained. Most of the levels are linear in nature. Unlike in a lot of shooters, there’s little need to take cover or leap over obstacles; however, within this spare framework a variety of changes to the game state lead to a multiplicity of playstyles and experiences. This exemplifies Lev Manovich’s idea that one of the essences of new media is their variability – that a set of modular elements working together in different ways cause the artifact to be experienced differently by everyone each time it is used (Manovich, 36).

Constrained Player Action
Players move at a constant speed (they cannot sprint, as in some games), which only slows down if they take enough damage. They can crouch to stabilize their shooting accuracy and allow teammates to shoot over their heads without harming them. Unlike some tactical shooters, where a player controls a team of NPCs whose formation they can determine for particular situations, a team in L4D must choose combat formations to fit the given situation and their strengths. The most effective formation for general defense is two players kneeling in opposite directions with the two other teammates standing behind each of them.

One important inclusion is the power of melee. Clicking the left trigger on the controller causes an avatar to swipe crosswards with their gun, knocking Infected enemies backwards. This is particularly useful when a player is overtaken by too many enemies to shoot by themself; crouching and constantly using the melee allows them to minimize damage to their person while teammates shoot off the Horde from a safe distance. A well-timed melee also has the ability to disorient a leaping Hunter or knock a Boomer back to a safe distance for shooting (they explode when killed). Finally, players can click the left bumper button to instantly turn 180 degrees in the event of an attack to their exposed back.

One carries pistols (unlimited ammo) by default, and must choose a single other weapon (limited ammo) from a choice of only two (shotgun or automatic, with the added choice of an almost useless sniper rifle later in the game). Players receive a single health pack at the beginning of each of the 5 levels within a scenario. They will sometimes find one or two more, but usually all one encounters in the field are pain pills (which provide only a temporary boost to health and movement speed). One can also carry either a single pipe bomb or molotov cocktail. Players hold a flashlight, which they can turn on or off.

Level Design and the AI Director
Left 4 Dead’s levels alternate between cramped pathways and dangerous, open spaces. This leads to the creation of a punctuated rhythm that I explain below. Much of the game is wandering down hallways or forest trails, the periphery constrained by darkened offices or dense foliage. Players are the safest during the most linear moments, because they can usually see the direction from which Infected approach them. Open spaces mean multi-directional attacks and a higher chance of being separated.

The game state is controlled by the AI Director, an unseen agent that calculates player performance and varies the state of the game in order to help or hinder progress (by adding items for the players to use or enemy Infected). This artificial agent would satisfy Manovich’s description of a “high-level” AI; its sophistication and contribution to variability in the game state goes far beyond what Manovich observed in early game AI (Manovich, 33). Valve’s implementation of the Director contributes to building the “flow state” in players, a task that usually falls on the level designer.

Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi, a positive psychologist, introduced the notion of flow: a mental state in which one is fully immersed in an experience due to feelings of honed focus toward achievable goals. The game is never too easy, because breezing through one portion will usually mean a Tank or a Witch is about to spawn right around the corner. During more difficult encounters, the game is often fair about the fighting chance it provides you; mistakes on the part of the team, such as brutally damaging friendly fire, contribute much more to failure than the actual challenge presented by the enemies.

Because the task of creating flow has been taken off of level design, the world in L4D acts as a blank state on which players can author and act out their own unique stories (Jenkins, 11-12). Each level draws from a trope of the survival horror genre; thus, these levels constitute “evocative spaces” (Jenkins, 6). This is the essence of Jenkins’ narrative architecture (originally conceived in an unpublished work by Celia Pearce): game design as creation of a space inside which meaningful action can occer.

Team-Based Rhythm
Left 4 Dead is a game about pacing. Compared to other shooters, it is much more about rhythm and teamplay than anything else. The kind of behavior that FPS games usually reward – individual battle prowess – is often inimical to success in L4D. A player who acts as a “Rambo” – the occassionally positive version of a “Leroy Jenkins” – will often be caught off guard by a Special Infected, pinned to the ground, and incapacitated before her teammates can come to her aid.

Pace and Punctuated Action
The best way to succeed in a level is to maintain a steady pace. Backtracking, searching through rooms for items, and standing around to pick off weaker Infected will result in a more difficult experience. Going too fast will result in a breakdown of the team. Weakened teammates move much slower than everyone else, making them easy prey for Special Infected such as the Hunter and Smoker. The most tense moments of gameplay come from guarding a teammate while she heals herself, hoping that the AI Director doesn’t spawn a Horde or Tank.

Play alternates between modes of attack and defense. Players proceed through the level, taking out isolated patches of regular Infected with ease. The only tense moments durin this attack/progress phase come from encounters with Special Infected such as the Smoker or Hunter that can sometimes constrain or incapacitate teammates if not approached carefully with concerted action. Players then must enter defense mode when confronted with a crescendo moment (Horde, Tank, or Witch).

Hordes either come when attracted by a player covered in a Boomer’s bile, at random intervals determined by the AI Director, or at choke points in the level design. Horde crescendos are the most manageable defensive encounters, because players can usually enter a static formation (mentioned earlier) and easily beat back the waves of regular Infected.

Choke points usually feature larger Hordes of enemies, but they’re also typically reinforced by turret positions, barricades, and supply depots. Pipe bombs and molotov cocktails become particularly important during Horde crescendos; the bombs will draw Infected toward them before exploding (useful when the team has become overwhelmed), while molotovs can be used to create defense walls of flame (a pre-emptive measure for protecting the team’s flank).
Tanks require players to enter a focused scatter mode. Keeping too close together will result in the Tank being able to beat multiple Survivors into submission simultaneously, while straying too far apart will allow Hunters and Smokers to pick off distracted players with ease. The Tank will generally pursue the closest teammate. The targeted player must run backwards while firing on the Tank, while her teammates circle the Tank from a safe distance while covering the pursued player’s back.

Witch crescendos uniquely require a stealth offensive/progressive mode of play. Players will hear the Witch crying, and they are usually relatively easy to spot even among throngs of regular Infected. The best option is to sneak around her. In order to do this, players must turn off their flashlights and navigate through the dangerous darkness (light and noise startle the otherwise docile Witch). This leads to an added level of rhythm – that of alternation between light and dark.

More Like Rock Band Than Halo 3
A more fitting name for the AI Director would be “AI Conductor,” because its job is more like leading an chamber orchestra than  a film crew. Levels can be seen as genres of music. You can learn the level (or genre), because the geometry remains the same. But the items and enemies that spawn are different every time, requiring the players to successfully perform a new “song” together with each playthrough.

Because it is a team effort, this game is actually more like Rock Band than a game like Halo 3. In Halo 3, the only thing one can do to help teammates is give them supporting fire. Death means very little, so selfish behavior abounds in the game. In Rock Band, the key to success as a band is to save up “star power” – energy derived from succeeding a particular string of notes. By releasing star power, you can bring your teammates back to life or help them recover from a string of poor notes. It would make it easier for you to save this for yourself, but it doesn’t help you in the end if your team fails out because of one weak performer.

L4D is the same way. Most contemporary (non-tactical) shooters have moved away from the idea of distributing first aid packs throughout a level; instead, a player of a game such as Halo 3 or Gears of War will be able to take a certain amount of damage before needing to hide and regain health. Health packs are the most precious resource in L4D, because the challenege is more one of attrition than individual encounters. Giving one up to an injured teammate means risking that you will be incapacitated in a future conflict, but it strengthens the team overall and gives everyone a better chance at survival.

Emergence, Defined
Janet Murray derides the vague use of “emergence” as a design term as an excuse for laziness and lack of authorial influence on the part of a designer. Left 4 Dead shows that emergence can be structured by careful consideration of level design, artificial intelligence, and randomness. Players are not given explicit roles by the game (the characters are basic ethnic/gender tropes with little personality). They choose at the beginning of each matchmaking experience whether to be selfish or selfless, whether to be a close-quarters fighter (shotgun) or a crowd controller (automatic gun), and whether to be a leader or a follower.

Because the cost of death is so high, it actually means something in this game – something trivially true in real life but usually less so in videogames. Thus, each life-threatening encounter becomes a dramatic moment in which players must quickly decide how to behave. The finale level in a sequence (the fifth) requires the team to hole up in a defensive position against almost insurmountable numbers of regular and Special Infected. When they’re about to be overcome, escape comes in the form of a transport and players must choose whether to make a break for it alone or slowly work through the Horde as a team. These become the most poignant emergent narrative experiences afforded by the game, because all of a sudden all bets are off; sometimes, long-tempered bonds and personal behaviors break down – resulting in real, human tragedy (discussed at length in Mills, Emergent Narratives in Left 4 Dead).

CONCLUSION
Left 4 Dead pairs a minimal level design and player interaction model with a complex directorial AI in order to allow for an almost infinite variety of play styles and experiences. Unlike in many shooting games, where complex level design controls the flow state of a player, the AI Director in L4D measures player performance in order to help or hinder their progress through the level – maintaining a constant level of energized focus and attainable goals. Players alternate between open and cramped spaces, areas of dark and light, and modes of progress and defense that create a distinct rhythm of punctuated action.

Because of the emphasis on team cooperation (paired with the rhythm previously mentioned), the gameplay of L4D is more akin to team-based music games such as Rock Band than to a traditional shooter such as Halo 3. Like Rock Band – where players are free to perform, show off, and create their own narratives about their band – Left 4 Dead creates a structured space inside which personal forms of play and narrative emerge.

REFERENCES
[1]Jenkins, H. Game Design As Narrative Architecture. Henry Jenkins Publications, 2007, 1-15.
[2]Manovich, L. Principles of New Media. What Is New Media? 27-48.
[3]Mills, Jonathan. Emergent Narratives in Left 4 Dead. Academy of Doctor X, http://academyofdrx.blogspot.com/

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Ethics of Care & Alt Journalism Games

Posted in Columns, Newsgames, Schoolwork by Simon Ferrari on March 11, 2009

Originally written for Bogost’s Journalism & Games.

The ethics of care is a moral system devised by feminist philosophers who wanted an ethics based on a more “relational” mode of thought. Their basic criticism of typical ethical systems is that philosophers premise them on the idea of the light of reason – a fundamentally Western, male construct. Instead, they develop a system for ethical decision-making based on casuistry and storytelling (what Socrates would probably deride as a kind of “sophistry” because of its close relation to expressive rhetoric). First let me explain what is meant by casuistry and storytelling here; then, I’m going to suggest how this field might help develop a different kind of newsgame in the future.

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Casuistry is more legal practice than ethical philosophy. Instead of deriving right or wrong from moral absolutes, it takes into account every detail of a situation before making a final decision. Under an ethical system such as Kant’s categorical imperative (one acts morally if one wills that the maxim of her actions be enacted as universal law), one cannot kill another in self defense – doing so would require that you willed that all rational creatures took violent means to defend themselves. In legal proceedings, one admits to killing in self defense and then details the situation in an effort to convince the jury that the use of lethal force was warranted.

Philosophical systems are just that – regulatory processes that work in a top-down manner. Casuistry embraces the unit operational approach proposed by Bogost: right and wrong here are determined through the conscious selecting and synthesizing of individual laws, precedents, and situational details.

The storytelling espoused by the ethics of care is especially useful for women, because it helps one work through issues particular to femininity that often are not addressed by male philosophers. For instance, it is easy for a Kantian philosopher or Catholic priest to demonstrate how under their moral code abortion cannot be condoned. But the actual decision-making process of choosing to abort a pregnancy or not cannot usually be reduced to moral absolutes. This choice is tied to a woman’s relationship with her fetus – whether she has built a social connection to it on top of the biological one. Storytelling helps women to explain to others (and themselves) how and why they made their decisions.

Most existing newsgames have an editorial line; that is, they make implicit or explicit arguments through their mechanics and narratives. I’d like to suggest that some newsgames developers might ask whether argumentation is an even playing field; likewise, maybe one wants to contribute to the dialogue on a news issue by making a game but doesn’t find the argumentative nature of many of them appealing.

What first piqued this question for me was an informal article by Henry Jenkins about the journalistic experiences of one of his students, Huma Yusuf. In her coverage of a murder in Pakistan, she noted that she felt the un-journalistic need to mention the fact that one of the men she interviewed scratched his crotch suggestively while talking with her. Including details like this in formal reportage is considered anecdotal and unnecessary. Alternative journalism, such as the gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson or the infotainment of the Daily Show, embrace such experiential data and personal viewpoints. I’ve been looking at a lot of newsgames to see if they incorporate a unique protagonist with motivations and personal characteristics through which their encounters with news events might be altered – not so much manipulating the facts but at least allowing players to view them subjectively and thus in a more multi-faceted manner.

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To explain the kind of thing I’m looking for, I’d like to take a look at a recent investigative game, even though it’s neither “serious” nor nonfictional. Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble is a 1920′s flapper girl mystery game. The protagonists are female, and they have a few characteristically post-feminist methods of inquiry with NPCs: fib, taunt, expose, and flirt. The game has minor roleplaying qualities – you choose your main character from about 10 girls, and you form a posse of four as your first task in the game world. Gameplay is composed of fairly simple word games influenced by the stats of the characters. Female and male NPCs are susceptible to different kinds of attacks (flirting obviously works well against most males, but sometimes doesn’t work on a loyal husband). The “point” of the game, besides having catty well-written fun – the game recently won an award for excellence in writing – is to uncover a sinister plot in the small town where the girls go to boarding school.

It is not my intention to assert that a professional female journalist should ever fib, taunt, or flirt their way to  ”the facts,” but I think there are a few ways we can look at the inclusion of such post-feminist inquiry in investigative newsgames. If, as Huma Yusuf suggests, men react differently to female reporters, then newsgames seem like an obvious place for this kind of experiential data to be embraced and explored.

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We have more upcoming posts in the works on Global Conflicts: Palestine and South America, and players do get to choose either a female or male avatar in those games. From our discussions, it didn’t sound like the gender change actually influenced the gameplay (someone correct me if I’m wrong). A valid criticism against my idea here would be: “But how does showing how different figures react to a female avatar, or how women might be able to gather information differently from male reporters, help us present the news objectively?”

My only defense against this would be to say that many newsgames have an educative aspect as well as a rhetorical one (Global Conflicts: South America is designed for a younger age group and marketed as an educational tool). Taking Yusuf’s example again, one could learn a lot about other cultures if a game incorporated replay value in the form of avatars of different gender. Playing through the game twice and seeing how the experience changes based on gender, one would learn the subtleties of unfamiliar cultures. Games about Africa would be a particularly apt place for this, since so many Americans run up against a conceptual wall when trying to understand issues such as female circumcision.

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