Chungking Espresso

Build-A-Newsgame Kits?

Posted in Columns, Newsgames, Schoolwork by Simon Ferrari on December 10, 2008
(early ideas on breaking newsgames for http://jag.lcc.gatech.edu/blog/)

We still haven’t decided here at JAG whether or not the idea of a breaking newsgame is possible. There are already many examples of public policy and news games of varying levels of quality, but the idea of being able to churn one out in a week or less in order to accompany a breaking story seems mind-boggling. One creator of the recent Truth Invaders 2008 presidential campaign game notes the difficulty of pumping out their relatively simplistic project on a two-and-a-half week timeline (look at the third comment down). Another issue we’ve been looking into is the rapidly expanding notion of the citizen journalist, and the question has been raised whether or not an analogue to the “professional” citizen journalist blog might be developed in the newsgame format. I’d like to suggest a way that citizen journalistic games and an expedited production schedule for breaking newsgames might be possible: the use of generic game creation software and game-specific level editors. It was jokingly asked in one of our project meetings whether a level made in LittleBigPlanet could be considered an “indie” newsgame. Yet within a few days of LBG’s release a few players had already created levels that required one to fly an airplane into the Twin Towers, as comically recounted by The Penny Arcade. Below I shall discuss the multiple programs available, their relative strengths and weaknesses, examples we already have of games made in this way, and the idea of journalistic originality in the context of these pre-packaged game creation tools.

Most level editors are only available if one owns the game they are derived from. When one builds a mod in Source or Unreal, the mod can be distributed for free to anyone who owns the game as well. This situation arose when game companies saw that they would make more money off of selling game discs to people interested in modding culture than they would from tracking down and suing their amateur content creators. In the case of Counter-Strike, based off of Half Life’s Source engine, Valve bought the intellectual property from the modders who created it. KumaGames, a company that makes both schlock fare (dinosaur hunter games) and vaguely politically relevant games that seek to immerse players in a news event (such as John Kerry Silver Star Mission), appears to use the Source engine for their games. The value of Kuma’s political games as educational tools is shaky, as Doug Wilson has written elsewhere, but the notion of dropping a player into a violent situation pulled from the news seems like a largely untapped reservoir for newsgaming if integrated with an emphasis on journalistic practice. The anti-violence game mod Velvet Strike comically alters Counter Strike so that players shoot spray paint instead of bullets. With a valid and apt context grafted on top of a “protest game” such as Velvet Strike, the idea of a citizen journalist game developer appears realizable.

Another popular base for modders are games made on the Unreal Engine. Albanian survivors of widespread “blood feuds” co-created Medieval Unreality with Lindart by modding and skinning Unreal Tournament. Lindart sat down with individuals involved in the blood feuds and helped them visualize their interior/psychological spaces inside the game. The model for citizen journalists to derive from this would be that of a modder interviewing people and then deriving an in-game version of their stories or perspectives. 9/11 Survivor, a game that places players in the shoes of someone trapped in an upper story of one of the WTC towers as the building collapses into flames around them, is also a UT 2003 mod. Doug Wilson is making a game about terrorism and paranoia (don’t want to spoil anything) using Unreal as well. Mods based on shooters have the strengths of being able to either immerse a player in a first- or third-person perspective within a dynamic 3d environment. Being able to skin spaces allow modders to alter pre-built structures to look and feel the way they want them to. A major weakness of basing newsgames off of shooters, as evidenced best by the KumaGames we’ve played, is that such games almost always carry shooting into the mod as the primary mode of interaction with the game space (there are notable exceptions).

If shooters and their game mechanic-related limitations aren’t one’s cup of tea, then RPGs are an obvious alternative. Their main strength would have to be the increased emphasis on dialogue between the player and NPCs. There are already many communities built around designing outfits and facial skins for characters in PC RPGs, allowing simple and deep NPC customization. Professor Nora Paul of the University of Minnesota has already created a newspaper reporting simulator, Disaster at Harperville, in the Neverwinter Nights level editor. The value of using older RPGs as the base for one’s work are that the decreased emphasis on graphics suits the mode of micro-development we’re looking at. The only obstacle is the fact that an isometric view implemented in older RPGs has obvious weaknesses in the area of optical immersion as compared to 3d shooting games. One could imagine building a newsgame in Oblivion’s level editor, but the amount of work that would go into lighting everything and making the textures look proper would far outweigh the benefits of the enhanced graphics at this point in time. The two most accessible amateur build-a-game kits are RPGMaker and RPG Sim Maker. The ultra-controversial Super Columbine Massacre RPG and its Virginia Tech shooting clone were both made using RPGMaker. This is obviously the most accessible method of building a game, because all it requires is time and the ability to drag objects around with a mouse. Another strength is that games made with these programs can be exported by the developer and then downloaded by people who don’t have the RPGMaker software (unlike most mods). They can also be sold, if finances are important to the citizen journalist/developer.

So we haven’t really made any progress into citing specific examples of how to make breaking newsgames; however, I think these examples show that a notion of the citizen journalist game developer is both viable and desirable. Discussion of journalistic independence and originality forthcoming.

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Potential Future Distribution of Newsgames

Posted in Columns, Newsgames, Schoolwork by Simon Ferrari on December 9, 2008

(co-written with Bobby Schweizer)

In response to Ian Bogost’s discussion of Platform Studies at the GVU Brown Bag, we raised the question of delivery formats for news games. (Bogost’s study deals especially in technical peculiarities of particular consoles, but we’ve adapted the idea for broader use here) We believe this is not just an important question, but a critical question for conceiving of newsgames. Not only do platforms imply different technologies affecting output, but they can also have an effect on audience. Though we can use some abstract and general concepts to begin designing our newsgame, the platform will dramatically influence its direction.

In order to do this, we unfortunately have to make some generalities. I say unfortunately because we don’t like generalities. Bobby believes that terms like ‘casual’ and ‘hardcore’ are better suited for the marketing departments than the scholars, though Simon disagrees. Either way, this is an intellectual endeavor with marketing results, so some amount of demographic lumping will occur. We hope to show that these groupings are already a result of the platform technology–that the hardware and platform interfaces are more suited to specific kinds of design. The obvious answer for a newsgame’s platform is web browser because it is ubiquitous and structurally connects with news websites. However, to think only about browser games is to limit ourselves to certain kinds of games. By focusing on these other platforms we can develop a broader range of games with greater possibilities.

To explore this question, we’re breaking gaming platforms into the following categories:
Web Browser, PC, Xbox 360/Playstation 3, Wii, DS, PSP. Through this discussion we imply/conclude that the Web Browser, Wii, and DS might be where we’d want to narrow the field of investigation for the future dissemination of newsgames.

Web Browser
This is without a doubt the most accessible means of newsgame delivery. It has a low barrier of entry in terms of required hardware and uses input devices that most anyone with a computer can understand. Anybody with webspace has a platform for a web-based game. The development times for these games are often much shorter and the shortened publishing pipeline speeds to process of deployment. It’s other greatest strength is also a weakness–the limited requirements for computing and graphics processing power of a Flash-based game make it accessible but limit possibilities for 3D modeled games.

The web browser ties naturally into news websites and provides for a direct connection between the story (or stories) and the accompanying game. I believe that if this were the case, though, news organizations would end up falling back on their written work to avoid coming up with ways to explain the story in the game itself. It is quite possible that I have this opinion because I am a game player looking for more complex newsgames, while an editor sees it as beneficial.

PC
‘PC’ refers to non-browser games. These games might be downloaded as applications to be run or installed that may be provided in physical format, download from the web, or through a client like Valve’s Steam. They have the potential for higher-end graphics and to use game engines like Unreal or Source. The Kuma games model is based on the Steam model: 3D game rendered with Source distributed through a download client. This works well when the designers want to place the player in a realistic environment and need more intense physics modelings. As we’ve discussed in class, this format is good for recreating scenes from the real world, but I think it’s limited to very specific range of games.

The client-based approach approach has the benefits of automatic delivery through a single pipeline like the consoles, but is not forced to use go through the corporate channels of Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo. Steam users have grown accustomed to different kinds of games being available on the service whether it be a full 3D first-person game, a short puzzle game, or a 2D platformer.

The PC also allows users to look at material on the web at the same time. This could be the opposite of the browser-game interaction: instead of reading a story and then playing a game (which is how I imagine editors would conceive of the use-flow), the written material could inform the gameplay afterward. Also on the web exists the possibility of newsgame portals. Imagine a Newgrounds or AddictingGames specifically for journalistic games. The newsgame, as been shown in many of the examples we’ve looked at in the Journalism & Games project, does not have to come from traditional sources. It could develop a community of fans interested in the whole genre of newsgame and give developers a place to showcase their work.

Xbox 360/PS3
These two high-end consoles (not as high-end as a good PC) have two possibilities for delivery: the disc and the download. I’m going to say up front that I think these are the least valuable platforms for newsgame delivery. Their graphical capacities are so high, and the expectations for games on the consoles so demanding, that only highly-polished works are accepted by the community. Re-releases of retro games are popular, but only if they’ve been enhanced for HD or given blur effects that help hide their harsh pixelization. On the other hand, the PSN and Xbox Live network have shown themselves to be more open than the Wii in presenting art games (such as Braid, Everyday Shooter, and Space Giraffe) to the public. It’s hard to argue that this in any way trumps the distribution of these games over computers, however. On the other hand, if a newsgame managed to break into the communities developed by these two consoles then the company that made it could cultivate a dedicated group of fans. Now, most larger game companies can’t really afford the risk of making a AAA title addressing the ill impact of the American military on life in Iraq, say. But a smaller company such as The Behemoth, if it were so inclined, could definitely get away with it – maybe the video game analog of the “news graphic novels” we read about for our alternative journalism study considering The Behemoth’s use of cell shading and hand-drawing graphics.

We imagined the kind of schlocky idea of the Sunday Times sending out a game disc once a month the same way that the glossier video game magazines do. What are the content on these discs? Usually less-labor-intensive content such as prefab demos, article supplements that didn’t make it onto the print space, and simple games that could easily have been made in Flash that one plays in order to get gamerpics or some other small reward that can be displayed on one’s online community/forum avatar. In mid-November Microsoft will be unveiling its “Mii killer” new Xbox Live avatar community, featuring graphically-enhanced avatars and activities such as online gameshow-style games. It still stands to see how impressive these features are and whether they’ll catch on with the Xbox Live-ers, but the kind of avatar-based debate game with character progression and development based on quality participation judged by a moderator or survey of other players seems like it could find a home here.

Games produced for the Xbox Live Arcade might also be played by a certain sect of the population just for the purposes of accessing achievement points. This could be used as a way to draw in players who might not otherwise desire to access newsgame content. I think it stands to be explored in a later week to see how developing an achievement structure so online avatars can display a person’s access or engagement with news content or news games might engender more interest around the news with our generation of Internet- and avatar-crazed individuals.

PSP
With the launch of PSP Firmware version 5.0, the PSP has gained the ability to download games and content wirelessly from the PlayStation Network Store. This makes the PSP the first handheld to behave the most like its console counterparts and puts it in a unique position for newsgame delivery. Expectations for a PSP newsgame would fall somewhere between browser and 360/PS3. Its controls closer resemble those of the PlayStation 2 than its handheld competition the DS. The limitations of the technology–storage space, screen size, processing power–mean that developers can focus on more simple designs, but still benefit from having a standard controller scheme.

However, this standard controller scheme may be a burden. It forces unnatural mappings of any sort of mouse/pointer games we might find in browser or PC games which, like the 360/PS3 limit the kinds of games that can effectively be developed.

The PSP also has about half the userbase as the DS in the United States. While there is some overlap, this userbase is different than the DS. When considering these numbers in conjunction with what the hardware and software have to offer, the prospects of newsgames on the portable are not the most inspiring.

Wii
Graphically the Wii stands on much lower footing than its current-gen counterparts; however, this would seem to be a strength considering the lack of time and resources that many companies have when it comes to creating newsgames. The Wii already has news channel that tries to replicate the experience of reading a story on physical media: grab the page with the Wii Remote hand to move it around. While not nearly as engaging as holding a physical newspaper in one’s hands and filling one’s field of vision with the news-scape, this does seem to hit much closer to home for dedicated news readers than simply clicking on hyperlinks to navigate news stories. There’s also the fact that one can read news stories by navigating around a simplified Google Earth-type globe by grabbing the map and spinning it. This is a progressive information visualization that just isn’t seen on news sites today. Unlike the other consoles, the Wii already has multiple channels that aren’t game related.

The Wii Remote also seems well-suited to a game where players would be able to flip through television stations and perhaps magically enter the news story, TV show, or advertisement (to do some nice family-friendly adventuring and manipulation) a la Alice’s looking glass. This is outside the scope of our project, but it does suggest some interesting intermedia possibilites for the Wii’s special controller.

Read the discussion of the DS below to see what we think about Nintendo’s more open mission of providing educational games and games keyed toward children, the elderly, and businesspeople. Also of note is the discussion about Japan’s acceptance of alternative methods of education through media such as the manga.

DS
The Nintendo DS appears at first to have the greatest technological limitations of any of the other delivery methods we mention here, but really this is only true in terms of graphics–as we’ve discussed this may not be an issue. Instead, we turn to the DS’s main strength: the stylus and touch-screen. The stylus maps to how one uses a pen to explore a document. Regarding traditional games in print media, such as those Ray explores in his discussion of games in newspapers, the stylus seems to be the unqualified best candidate for such content. But we’re far from fully demonstrating the possibilities for persuasiveness and political power of games in the print media at the moment. Still, there’s definitely something to be said for the tactile quality of holding the stylus pen. There’s a reason businessmen in Japan and 40-somethings in America are playing games like Brain Age on the DS – you feels like you’re doing semi-productive brain work when you hold the stylus.

The best DS games force players to effectively use both screens to min-max their play activity. Let’s look at The World Ends With You as a premiere example of this. While playing this game, it’s difficult to tell whether your brain is creating novel, efficient synaptic connections or just decaying into ADHD. This is because the player has to control one avatar with the stylus in the bottom screen, while using the four-direction control pad to direct a secondary hero’s simpler actions in the top screen. This is taxing even for a hardcore gamer such as myself, so the character in the top will go into auto-pilot if left idle – but it won’t be as efficient or quick with its attacks. In any case, the second screen almost always adds a helpful UI that can visualize information more conveniently for most games (as opposed to opening up a map or help screen separately on the main screen). The microphone also picks up basic actions such as shouting and blowing, which seems tailor-made for something like a British Parliament simulation. Coupled with the DS’s less intensive graphics, all of these features seem like they’d be major strengths for delivering newsgames with smaller design budgets.

But what about delivery? Well, for the current model of DS lites one has to have the taboo Revolution 4 chip to download games off the Internet, and its wireless features are wonky. This is why future newsgames will really only be conceivably accessible on Nintendo’s recently announced DSi. This new hardware will feature robust wireless capability and download service. Since Nintendo bills itself as the future of casual and alternative gaming (engaging children at a young age and now the elderly and business-minded), I don’t think it would be much of a stretch to convince them that delivering newsgames to the DS could be anything but a benefit to their company profile. Especially considering the fact that alternative methods of delivering educational content through manga is a popular trend in Japan. The DSi also comes with two cameras (one for each direction, don’t ask why) – field journalist simulation, perhaps? The new DS will play MP3, but no sound recorder has been announced. If it did, that would also be a strength for a journalism game. Coupled with a creative community of contributors used to uploading content (like as Spore or Little Big Planet), you’d have a robust online news community or forum that we’ve been mentioning as something that might be crucial to developing a following around news games in the future.

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Forums Roman and Virtual

Posted in Columns, Newsgames, Schoolwork by Simon Ferrari on December 9, 2008

When it comes to discourse over the Internet and the popular develop of the semantic web through tagging and sharing newsworthy items, we here at JAG have mostly read material that finds these areas of Internet development lacking. Our original discussions of the subject have largely fallen back on a somewhat weak stance of agreement that Reddit is better than Digg – because of filtering and its more intuitive upvoting and downvoting scheme – yet not better enough to mark a major victory for Internet intelligence and citizen journalism. As far as the quality of reader forums surrounding newspapers go, there’s still far too much flaming and nitpicking going on to really generate useful input for a newspaper most of the time. I’ve been bouncing around an idea for awhile that might be a “gamey” or ludic solution to this problem (although requiring far more resources than we’re able to acquire for our research). So I figured I’d jot down everything I’d come up with so far and ask for feedback from you, the reading community, on how you’d personally improve the system I’ve devised.

The basic idea is to create an online, multiplayer Roman-style forum within which to encourage meaningful debate, story sharing, and contribution to a news story – be it political or apolitical in nature. I’m not sure of the ideal server population for such a game. I’ve enjoyed a fairly deep political climate in MUDs such as Achaea that had slightly fewer than 100 heavily active users and 300 casual users at any given time. The game would, of course, have to be graphics-based for my idea to work. The key here is to tie people’s online voices in forums to an avatar that they actually care about. Something like this could be done in Second Life, but I’ve found that particular virtual world difficult to navigate as a novice user unsure of where to go. I feel that giving a player’s opinion on a news story a face and a body (virtually) in such a game would lead them to debate issues constructively (or at least intelligently) while avoiding flaming. Each realm would be monitored by volunteer moderators who would also reward players for continued contribution to posting news stories and rating them based on journalistic values. Their other duty would be to keep score during official debates over contentious issues. The experience points and levels rewarded to players would allow them to “pimp out” their avatars, have more weight in upvoting or downvoting news stories, and speak more during crowded debates.

What are some problems with this idea? Well, cost for one. Unless there was large user base and the game attracted well-paying advertisers there’d definitely be maintenance and development cost issues here. Also, it’s more time-consuming for the average user to participate in a virtual world like this instead of just checking in on Reddit, Digg, or their RSS feed. But maybe it would attract the bored, mature WoW player who has a few hours to kill before her guild dives into Black Temple for the evening? Can anyone help me modify this idea to make it cheaper or more casual? (I’m starting to realize that something like this would actually be fairly easy to implement in Second Life as a prototype). Thanks for reading!

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Moralizing versus Choice

Posted in Gaming, Newsgames, Schoolwork by Simon Ferrari on November 28, 2008
I’d like to take issue with Bobby’s post about “issues in games” following Rowsell’s Escapist piece. I don’t agree that “game poetry,” such as the experience of playing Shadow of the Colossus, does a good enough job of making its players more informed or better humans. It’s become a quick cliché in the indie game movement, feeding likewise into independent newsgames, to have games that teach a moral through “unwinnability.” Take, for instance, September 12th or a game made here at Georgia Tech about heroin addiction, where the only way to “win” the games is to not play it at all. I don’t think Shadow of the Colossus operates in the same way as these games, but many people seem to want to read it as one. From Bobby’s examination of Shadow, it would seem that the only way to be a good person would be to not kill the colossi in the first place. The moral isn’t that interesting: don’t sell your soul in an attempt to play at being God. Do we really need more versions of Faust or Frankenstein in our lives in order to be better people?

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The problem with these games is that there aren’t any moral choices to be made within the games themselves (the decision to stop playing is meta-game). Shadow of the Colossus doesn’t work on an ethical level for me, because simply watching a character’s forced fall from grace through plot progression is about as persuasive today as an Aesop fable. September 12th and Shadow are old games now, and it’s a cop-out at this particular moment in gaming history to create a game without a choice other than: play and be damned, or drop the controller. If only making such a statement got the mainstream game industry out of its slough of despond! (I’ll also be linking this back to choice in newsgames at the end.)

Ethical decision-making and choice are still largely lacking in most video games, even in Western roleplaying games where character development is supposed to be a key element. I saw this written on the whiteboard in our game lab the other day:

a) saintly response
b) noncommittal shrug
c) be a rat bastard

How can we even conceive of a game where someone deals with telling a partner about having AIDS, or an FPS set in Iraq (or Vietnam, if you want to make metaphors instead of open statements) where a soldier must choose to either shoot an innocent woman or disobey a direct order from a superior, when in a fantasy or scifi roleplaying game your choices are as black and white as giving what little money you have to a homeless man or stealing his clothes before shooting him? This is the real first hurdle that we need to leap before we can have “serious issues” gaming in the mainstream  (as opposed to infinitely rehashed poetic reflections on the soul).

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I’d like to invite input on where you see realistic moral choice in video games, but I’ll give some examples of where I see some glimmer of hope for the future. Despite the utter lack of meaningful choice I found while playing Fable II, I was in fact floored by the decision I got to make after the game’s somewhat disappointing finale (I’m not going to spoil). In Fallout 3, the choices one has are fairly constrained by the good/neutral/evil tree parodied above; however, there are some points in the game where collecting information provides more nuanced choices. While completing “You’ve Gotta Shoot’em in the Head,” one can gain the choice (through dialogue with other NPCs) to change one’s mission from killing three men to persuading them to part with special items they hold. Some work has also been done toward integrating consequences for one’s actions into the game. If one plays as a particularly good or evil character, then roving bands of hitmen or lawmen will pursue you. This is a small step forward from the usual consequence in RPGs of “if you kill or steal in a town then the guards will attack you until you pay a fine.” In general I’d say that Bethesda has integrated more dialogue options, choices, and character development nuances based on alignment in Fallout 3 than in their Elder Scrolls series.

My other favorite mainstream game company, on the other hand, has taken a step backward. BioWare’s Mass Effect has markedly less choice and consequence than their earlier Knights of the Old Republic titles. In the first KotOR, good and evil alignment opened up advanced Jedi or Sith force power; furthermore, the player’s ethics had a major impact on the planets they visited and their party of NPCs. Sure the choices were still largely black and white, but one could sometimes garner particularly benevolent or manipulative results through a proper handling of dialogue trees (one could force two families to slaughter each other or provide a happy ending to a Romeo and Juliet plotline). KotOR II expanded on this, by making good/neutral/evil choices more fuzzy depending on the party members currently following the player. Early in the game, one can choose to give money to a beggar. In the first Knights this would result in instant “good” points; however, if a mysterious Jedi guide character were following you, then she would show you how the beggar would go on to gamble with the money and eventually kill someone else over a debt – netting you “evil” points for not fully examining the moral quality of a man begging for money in the streets. In Mass Effect, one’s choices have little effect on the game world and none on the abilities of the protagonist. If I recall correctly, one can kill Liara and Wrex out of spite. But if one decides to off an entire race of possibly benevolent insectoids the only consequence is an angry teleconference with the Intergalactic Council (a similar action leads to quite an intense judicial proceeding in the first KotOR). There are also far fewer points in the game where dialogue trees make a tangible difference in player action.

So here we’ve got examples of two mainstreamers making steps in either direction, but there’s still probably a long way to go before we’ll see a mainstream game with a more realistic setting providing a more nuanced set of choices. Maybe HAL/Ape will give Bethesda the rights to Mother 4 in the near future and we’ll have a revolution on our hands (har har).

Let’s talk about possible integrations of choice into newsgames. I’ve already stated that while September 12th was effective at its time, it’s “unwinnable” twist has become dated. In our early examinations of games where one plays a journalist, I found Dead Rising disappointing because of its use of photojournalism as an unsubstatiated gimmick: while one does pursue “the truth” to eventually uncover a governmental wrongdoing, we never see the story published. Also, the action of taking pictures for experience points doesn’t have much to do with real photojournalistic practice (or educating the player about it). The only choice one has in the game is either to make it to checkpoints at the proper time or have “the truth” fade from history. If one could choose alternate methods of dealing with the game’s “psycopaths” or terrorists, then it would have been a much richer experience. Being able to forward pictures and stories to Frank’s editor over a cellular device would have added an extra layer: do you ultimately choose to expose the goverment secret or to turn over your evidence and not cause a public stir?

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Molleindustria’s Oiligarchy makes an interesting step forward from its previous McDonald’s game. In the McDonald’s game the only lesson one learns is how corrupt you have to be to keep a huge fast food industry profitable – the experience is frustrating and soul crushing. My distaste for the hyperbole the game frequently uses aside, it accomplishes some modicum of persuasive work. On the surface, Oiligarchy would seem to be using the exact same argument with an evisceration of a different industry; however, on viewing the game’s extensive production notes we found that Molleindustria did provide one “winning” condition where the player can cut back oil production to allow green initiatives to safely carry the world out of crisis when peak oil consumption looms. Developments such as this are crucial, in my opinion, to the future of newsgames. It’s not surprise that moralizing is so rampant in the genre, because anyone willing to spend the time and money to create one of these largely (fiscally) unprofitable games must feel very strongly about the issue or problem at hand. Being transparent about one’s bias does do some work toward making newsgames better, but I think the choice to either affect a different outcome or to see an issue from two sides in a newsgame adds to its value immensely.

Happy Thanksgiving, readers. Now go play PETA’s Turkey Cooking Mama: it gives you the ***choice*** to make scrumptious tofurkey at the end of the slaughter!

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Model Propaganda

Posted in Columns, Newsgames, Schoolwork by Simon Ferrari on November 28, 2008
(My article for JAG that got prematurely linked on Kotaku and eaten alive: follow up on the way.)
So we read Chomsky’s Propaganda Model earlier in the semester for insight into limiting forces on journalistic verification and transparency in mainstream news media. Before you discount this post as mental masturbation or the ramblings of another upper-middle class anaracho-syndicalist (which I’m not), I’d like to state clearly that I’m not going to suggest that there’s any sort of collusion between the video game industry and the government to prevent the production of video games dealing with touchy foreign policy issues (or any government issue for that matter); however, I’d like to dispel the common association of video games with harmless “escapism.”

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Coming from a background in film, the archetypal examples of escapism that pop into my mind are the Depression-era big budget musicals and screwball comedies. If you’ve never seen a Busby Berkeley musical, then you owe it to yourself to see some of these prototypical examples of “eye candy” that have informed the visual flair of most action movies, Broadway musicals, and even video games that we see today.

Warner Brothers was the only Hollywood studio to maintain independence during the Depression, and they did so by appealing to everyone’s desire to visually escape from the drudgery of daily life at the time. This is essentially the same method used by the Catholic Church during the Dark Ages, when cathedrals were the only place one could go to see a visual simulation of what Heaven might look like to a populace riddled with poverty. Screwball comedy poked fun at the foibles of the rich to show poor people that money didn’t necessarily make one happy.

The point I’m getting at here is that escapism works, quite literally, as an escape from real world ills. Video games don’t necessarily do this. If we sought an escape from violence and terrorism, then we wouldn’t have so many video games on the market focusing on just these two issues. Rather, many video games seek to provide catharsis for the mental ills that plague us all. We don’t see games about Iraq, but there are plenty of games that attempt to deal with the same “forces of evil” that fearmongering pundits fill our heads with through metaphor or displacement.

Even Mario wages battle against the totalitarian, (literally) draconian Bowser. Americans don’t like seeing freedom, safety, and capitalism toyed with (and the Japanese are happy to produce games that reflect our values exactly). WWII games used to be the most common FPSs besides scifi-themed shooters, but recently we’ve seen a market influx of “modern” shooters – Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare being the highest-quality example. If game company marketing departments advise against addressing current political situations directly in war shooters because of fiscal considerations (“we don’t want to alienate half of all potential buyers”), then we have a self-enforced limiting influence similar to the mainstream news propaganda model on our hands. I’m not saying that the cause is the same (government control), but the effects certainly are (avoiding sensitive subjects through a given medium).

I do think there is something troubling about the kind of shift from WWII shooters we’ve seen towards games positing Russian and Mexican terrorists as the enemy. One would do well to remember how quickly the American propaganda machine shifted from vilifying Germany to declaring a cold war on “Uncle Joe” after Berlin’s surrender. When you listen to any right-wing radio personality talk about his “solution” to our present sticky international relations situation, he reminds us that propaganda was essential toward the goal of hardening American hearts toward its enemies during and after WWII. CoD4 is particularly troubling because it posits Russian terrorists as having a controlling influence on Middle Eastern militants (this is actually a complete reversal of the truth of our having financed Bin Laden and others in their struggle against the USSR).

Currently we’re on the brink of seeing yet another cold war against Russia (our politicians use the war on terror to obscure this fact), and the “looming threat” of cheap foreign labor (particularly Mexican, on our own soil) troubles a majority of working class Americans. Both CoD4 and Battlefield: Bad Company deal with Russian enemies, while Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter I & II deal with terrorists on the US/Mexico border. All four of these games are both well-made and wildly popular; however, we must ask the question as to what it’s doing to our subconscious thoughts about foreign policy when we play games where we have to battle Russians and Mexicans instead of extremist Muslim terrorists. Are we not priming the minds of teenaged players toward future conflicts with these countries under the guise of avoiding touchy “real” military engagements?

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Narrative Space Ends With You

Posted in Columns, Game Analysis, Schoolwork by Simon Ferrari on November 18, 2008

Maps are spatial depictions of data. Video games, insofar as they create space, similarly depict data spatially. Henry Jenkins, writing about what he calls “narrative architecture,” attempts to present an alternative to the procedural and narrativist extremes of video game theory. Narratologists (he cites Janet Murray as a prime mover here) fail to realize that video games do not have to tell stories, and if they do it is not likely that they will tell them in the same way that a book or movie does. Ludologists (like Jesper Juul) fail to understand that the intentions of an author do not necessarily limit the narrative explorations and interpretations of the reader (or player, or user). Despite the mis-steps of these two schools of thought, it seems clear from a comprehensive history of play that it requires, creates, and expands space. Jenkins addresses the concerns of both warring schools of video game theory through his discussion of Kristen Thompson’s (my film studies grandmother, as it were) derivation of “embedded narratives” in film. The idea here is that a work such as a film or a video game is a body of information through which a viewer/player moves while attempting to make sense of it by forming and testing hypotheses. One salient comparison Jenkins makes from literature is the fact that “spatial stories” such as War & Peace and The Lord of the Rings have more in common with video games than with most other written work because of their shared emphases on environmental descriptions and open, unfolding space.

This post argues that The World Ends With You, both as a game and as an interactive map, constructs space based around the ideas of trendiness and flux. Why do I say that TWEWY can be alternatively read as an interactive map? First let me explain how the game’s narrative and mechanics work. Our protagonist here is a selfish, insular boy named Neku. Neku has died, and he has to play a game called The Reaper’s Game in order to earn a second chance at life. This fact is of course revealed not in a straightforward manner, but through a plot construction based on flashbacks and revelations of withheld information that construct feelings of intrigue, suspicion, and wonder. The Reaper’s Game takes place in an spiritual version of Tokyo’s Shibuya district called “the UG.” The ghostly players of this game can see the living inhabitants of Shibuya, and they can read their thoughts as well. TWEWY tackles the baffling problem of depicting the capricious nature of “trends” in Shibuya.

To the uninitiated, Shibuya is the epicenter for all of the bizarre fashion that one sees coming out of Japan (google Yamambas, Fruits, or Gothic Lolitas). What do dead people playing a game where they essentially struggle to survive against demonic forces called “Noise” for the duration of a week have to do with fashion trends? Well, in TWEWY the clothes your avatars wear and the “pins” they use to summon forth magical powers are “branded.” As you enter into battles against Noise wearing clothes and using pins of a given brand, that brand will gain points on a popularity chart for the area you are currently battling in. So trends in the living Shibuya are set and manipulated by an invisible contest between the dead! The game manipulates player expectations by showing the world of the living and that of the dead simultaneously on the same plane, because sometimes certain events or NPCs seem to exist both among the living and the dead – playing on the idea of multi-dimensional beings sharing the same spaces as mere mortals such as us.

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Usually games are criticized for relying on “backtracking” as a means for moving through the game space. In this game, backtracking is essential in every conceivable way. The entire game takes place inside this one little section of Tokyo. You do unlock small amounts of new territory as you progress through the game, but you never leave the district itself. When you bring up the pause/inventory management menu, the top screen on the DS fills with a map of all of Shibuya. A tiny icon of Neku’s head shows you the section of Shibuya that you’re currently in. To the left of the map is a ranking board of the trends in the area. Wearing popular brands grant the player bonuses, while the least popular brands will hurt the player in some way

Celia Pearce writes about the idea of narrative environments in relation to theme parks and video games (with an emphasis on MMORPGs). According to her account, the early conceptions of Disneyland were not of hybrid media synergy; rather, Disney’s idea was to recreate for Southern California a folk American history that had been completely buried by movie studios and luxurious villas. This is what Henry Jenkins would call an “evocative space.” Narrative spaces within games foster agency, while multiplayer games also engender identity and community. For anyone living outside Japan (and probably the same is true for its inhabitants), Shibuya certainly strikes one as carnivalesque to the extreme. From the garish clothes, to the street games and shows, to the towering shopping and technology centers, Shibuya maps closest to the goals of Disney’s Epcot Center – that is to say, it constructs an environment that predicts our hyper-consumption capitalist future. Working completely against the notion of community, anyone entering Shibuya must struggle to create an identity for themselves against waves of pettiness and flamboyance. These are the forces that TWEWY‘s player and protagonist must battle against.

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Ludica’s “A Game of One’s Own” explains that the idea of personal or feminine space are important when constructing narratives that will appeal or cater to women. They contrast their feminized spatial ideals of enchanted, secret, or domestic spaces with the “contested” and “dangerous” spaces of male play. I actually wrote about the importance of feminine space in an unpublished essay on women in the films of Wong Kar Wai.. In Chungking Express, the female protagonist Faye uses the song “California Dreaming” to demarcate her (aural) space from the world of men around her. Breaking into her desired mate’s apartment, she plays this song on his stereo and goes about changing everything to her taste (much like Amelie‘s scene of revenge on the cruel shopkeeper). This basically turns the stereotypical domestic role (or fantasy) of women and posits it as something active or potent. Women in this film are in a constant state of flux, while men are continually associated with stagnation. In order to become happy and “get the girl,” male protagonists must learn how to embrace change.

The dual notions of feminized space and the masculine struggle to accept flux intertwine in TWEWY. The game’s Shibuya certainly maps to the notion of a male “contested space,” with the gameplay’s emphasis falling on the contest against Noise and Reaper foes. I struggle with the idea of labeling the strong element of shopping and character customization as “feminine,” but it certainly provides a relaxing alternative to the constant stylus-whipping and frustration of battle; furthermore, I think that female players generally enjoy the act of clothing their avatars (I posit this because I’ve seen multiple non-gamer females become instant addicts when presented with the character outfitting in a game like Oblivion). The game also includes a mechanic wherein shopkeepers reward loyalty from frequent shoppers by revealing secrets about each outfit and allowing access to newer and better clothes. This reflects a real-world mode of capitalist exchange wherein women tend to develop personal relationships with proprietors while men treat them as a means to an end. The personal strife that the game’s secondary protagonist, Shiki, feels about her self-imposed loss of identity and her search to reclaim it will also resonate with female players.

Theworldendswithyou2008041604022921 Neku, the game’s protagonist, begins the game at a distinct disadvantage because of his inability to embrace change and open himself up to others. Because of the nature of the Reaper’s game, Neku must rely closely on a rotating cast of strangers who serve as his partners in the contest. TWEWY‘s game space is fractured in an interesting way, reinforcing the humbling effect of complete reliance on others. On the bottom screen the player controls Neku with the stylus, while on the top screen Neku’s partner battles in an alternate plane of the same location and battle – controlled with the four-direction control pad. This splits the players attention in an interesting way, destroying the typical concentrated, unified viewpoint that players usually take have on a game. Sometimes the action of the game becomes so hectic that one must just let the partner on the top of the screen go into AI autopilot, a particularly frightening form of trust for gamers used to faulty NPC intelligence. So The World Ends With You teaches masculinized, “competitive” or “violent,” players to learn a new way of playing (adapting to flux) while reiterating this point through the narrative space of the game that teaches Neku how to be less self-serving and isolationist.

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Greatest Month of Gaming, Ever

Posted in Gaming by Simon Ferrari on October 23, 2008

So I just finished Viva Pinata TIP, and I’m almost finished with Batman. Netflix will be sending me Farcry 2 and Dead Space when those are returned. I’m getting Fable 2 in two days, Fallout 3 in 5 days, and then Gears 2 and Mirror’s edge at the beginning of November. There’s also MK vs DC, which although it’ll probably be a rental is sure to be a gas. I’m also assuming I’ll rent Saint’s Row 2 once I’m finished with all the really important titles here. If I had a PS3 I could also be playing Little Big Planet. So, October 14th to November 11th, 2008 – the greatest month of gaming ever, at least for an XBox fanboy?

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Trouble in Paradise and the Vision Camera

Posted in Gaming by Simon Ferrari on October 18, 2008

So Trouble in Paradise is, on the whole, a solid offering for the animal collection/customization set. The new hunting features and expanded flora and food options are delightful. The biggest flaw are the races and beauty contest which just seem tacked-on and too simplistic/random (I guess this is so people who bought Party Animals don’t feel like they wasted their money). Also, the new weeds are a terror early on in the game when your shovel isn’t that great yet. Most of them can be safely grown behind a fence so you can get your plant growth experience, but if you play this game don’t plant hemlock if you have more than a couple pinata in your farm. The flying ones will get in there quickly and spread that partciular weed all over the place. Another big issue is the fact that a lot of the early content of the game is pretty much wholesale re-hashing of the first Viva Pinata. This would be almost intolerable if it weren’t for the Vision Camera’s ability to scan in cards of any pinata, which is kind of cheating. But I think you’re cheating yourself if you spend the time to re-collect all of the pinata you acquired in the last game. So I would urge you to card in all the pinata you got in the first game, and then experience all the new animals and hunting and evolution without using these cards. This is by far the most satisfying Vision Camera experience I’ve had so far. It’s kind of uncanny how the game can read the cards off of a computer screen (it does take some tweaking and hair-pulling, though). What would I like to see done with the camera in the future? If this game can read these cards based basically on lines and a barcode, I don’t see why it couldn’t take in basic changes in facial expression. I think it’s probaly capable of reading changes in mouth alignment and browline, since it’s clearly reading line data here. So somebody please put this in an RPG so I can make my character look neutral, happy, sad, angry etc. to influence conversation trees. That would be totally bad-ass.

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Web 3.0

Posted in Miscellany by Simon Ferrari on October 17, 2008

So as my pageviews from personal friends have dropped off as my posts have gotten longer and more related to school, I get most of my blog visits from people picking up tags or RSS feeds. It’s exciting that the semantic web is becoming so much more robust as more and more programs and sites pick up tagging capability.

However, anyone visiting the blog should know that the posts here are mostly my schoolwork. For the most part I write about games that I love with a passion; the assignment isn’t to praise them, ever. So if I mention a game here and I criticize an aspect of it, it’s because I think that the game could have been slightly better in some particular way (take the case of Elder Scrolls and the Redguard race – my favorite games, worst stereotype I’ve ever encountered).

If you’re going to comment, please keep the fact that these are learning exercises in mind. Please link literature that might contribute to my understanding of the issue or personal development, and don’t just argue with me because you like a game a lot and have been personally offended by some constructive criticism.

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Taxi Missions, Dead Space, and OXM

Posted in Gaming by Simon Ferrari on October 17, 2008

So one reviewer of Dead Space, writing for the OXM, gave a grossly outside-of-standard-deviation review of Dead Space that is keeping it from the 90+ (on Metacritic) sphere that almost everybody else agrees that it deserves to live in. The criticism? That the game is nothing but taxi missions. This coming from a magazine that, like almost every other source except Destructoid, gave Grand Theft Auto IV a 95. Not to take the message too literally, but the entire first third of that game is literally taxi missions. The rest of the game is figuratively taxi missions. And the script is horrible, the characters are annoying, the graphics are poor, and the city isn’t half as engaging as Rockstar claimed it would be.

Fire this woman.

EDIT: I finally got around to reading the comments under the review and have come up with some new thoughts on the issue. Most people are attacking this review because 1) the score is so low 2) the review is painfully short and 3) the review has been written by an inexperienced intern. Paul OXM stood by Meghan’s review and has cited the space constraints of the print medium as to why the review is so woefully contracted. He also stated that the entire staff played the game and agreed with their intern, and they refuse to apologize in any way because it’s their right to publish a minority opinion on a game. I posted this in reply:

Sat, 10/18/2008 – 11:53
Posted by chungkingex

I’m glad Paul brought up the right to and importance of the minority opinion, especially if it’s true that the entire staff shared Meghan’s view of the game. In this way journalistic integrity has remained intact. Yet there are plenty of basic principles of journalism that imply a duty to the reader, especially the paying reader. This doesn’t mean one has to write a review that every reader will like. But it means that somebody, probably an editor, should be able to tell when the reading community is going to raise some flags on a review.

Some things could have been done to prevent such a backlash. If the entire staff has a negative opinion of a highly-anticipated game receiving positive reviews from most sources, then one of the more recognized writers should be given the task of delivering the bad news to readers. Next, hiding behind the need to constrain the length of a review because of page space in the print edition is either misleading or just plain not well-thought-out.

One of the gifts from the Internet to journalists is an abundance of space. If a reviewer has the time to play an entire video game, then they have time to expand a print capsule review to something more fully conceived for the website. It’s not like reviewers needs to do extensive info visualization or fact-checking to extend their web content (like news media outlets have to); pretty much a fully fleshed-out page of the notes Meghan took while playing the game would have sufficed.

Alberto Cairo (and even the super-lame Journalism 2.0 by Mark Briggs) is fairly good source material for teaching newer journalists how to expand print content for a web audience. Thanks for reading. I love your magazine, and this review and its backlash are a mess you guys really don’t deserve.

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