Chungking Espresso

Left 4 Dead and Mutual Reliance

Posted in Film, Game Analysis, Papers, Schoolwork by Simon Ferrari on March 3, 2009

Assignment: analyze a videogame as if it were a cinematic artifact.
—
ABSTRACT
Sergei Eisenstein, a Russian constructivist filmmaker and theorist interested in the idea of intellectual montage, conceived of editing as the major method available to a filmmaker for conveying ideas to a viewer. Left 4 Dead, a 1st person cooperative survival shooter, must rely on something other than editing in order to convey its rhetoric of mutual reliance to players, because it presents a seamless cinematic experience with little editing akin to the long takes celebrated by Andre Bazin. The game communicates its message through redundant visual and sound cues.

INTRODUCTION
This article deals with the construction of the videogame Left 4 Dead (referred to as L4D) as a cinematic experience. This analysis draws from the fields of visual rhetoric and sound design in both cinematic and ludic arts.

L4D is an important recent example of 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 of the construction of this cinematic artifact will show how a redundancy of visual and sound cues, in the form of image overlay and sound effects, works to encourage players to depend on each other for survival.

Visual Rhetoric and Cinema
All media use rhetoric in order to convey an argument or expression. For a film or a videogame, this rhetoric does not have to come, as one might believe, from explicit dialogue between characters. “Visual rhetoric” – the way that images express or argue – is a term that can be generally applied to any film or film theory. As explained by Ian Bogost, videogames have procedural rhetoric to work with as well as visual; this is the ability to express an idea through the very programming of the game; however, for now we will consider L4D as a cinematic work.

Bazin’s Objective Reality
Film theorist Andre Bazin is best remembered today for his “auteur theory” – the idea that great directors employ unique styles and techniques that can be examined across their career. His other major contribution to film theory is a visual-rhetorical argument that deep focus and long takes will somehow construct “objective reality.” The shots Bazin loves can best be described as “exploratory,” such as the multi-layered, wandering sequence during the party scene in The Rules of the Game. This is convenient for us considering we often use the word “exploratory” to describe our engagement with the kind of realtime 3D spaces constructed by a game such as Left 4 Dead.

Bazin’s theory explains the aesthetic pleasure we experience when playing Unfortunately the notion of “objective reality” does more to idealize and celebrate cinematic artistry than to explain how a sequence of images can convey an idea; thus, we move to another school of film theory in our search for understanding.

Montage: from Kuleshov to Eisenstein
One tool for conveying an argument in the cinema comes from the style known as Soviet Montage. Theories of montage began with studies by Lev Kuleshov exploring how editing can communicate cues for understanding space, time, and action linkages between shots – the “Kuleshov effect.” Pudovkin’s early films employed this version of montage: he conceived individual shots as “bricks” to be constructed into a cohesive structure.

Eisenstein moved the theory of montage forward by recognizing that editing could also make arguments. Taking a cue for Marx’s version of Hegelian dialectics, he saw montage not as construction (piecing together “bricks”) but as conflict (among “cells”). Simply by placing two compositionally or conceptually disparate images together in a sequence, Eisenstein was able to convey complex ideas about the struggle of the proletariat against the Tsar.

Because Left 4 Dead is an almost seamless first-person experience (it does cut to a 3rd-person view when your character is restrained by a Smoker enemy or hanging onto the edge of the level geometry), it cannot rely on editing to convey its argument about mutual reliance. Soviet Montage films were created before the advent of sound in the cinema, but in order to explain how L4D functions as cinema we must also take its sound design into consideration (Stockburger, 176).

Redundancy, Not Always a Bad Thing
The art of redundancy is one aspect of montage theory that I believe helps explain how L4D work. In many of Eisenstein’s works, he capture individual actions multiple times from different angles and then edits them together. This helps place emphasis on the action, highlighting its intentionality and consequences. L4D employs a redundancy of visual and sound cues in order to make its argument for mutual reliance between players. This is to say, information about the world is conveyed to player/viewers in an overlapping, cooperative way.

An Artificial Image: HUD and Overlay
The HUD is something I ignored in my discussion of L4D as a photographic image, but it bears mention now. A HUD is an artificial construct placed “between” the visual representation of a game’s action and the player. In L4D the HUD communicates information about the status of one’s teammates: their health and their inventory. This information is redundant, because it can also be gleaned simply by looking at them: they stagger when they’re injured, and one can see their equipment strapped to their belts.

Working together, the HUD and the visible state of the player avatars help one quickly gauge the state of the team before a firefight. A visibly staggering avatar, or a character displaying a health bar “in the red” on the HUD, sets the pace for the team. Leaving her lagging behind or unprotected will result in her imminent death and a weakening of the team; therefore, the image itself encourages the other players to protect her.

Finally, the HUD also informs players if they are currently being attacked from behind or the side. This primarily informs one to turn and beat off the attacker oneself, but in some situations it acts as an important cue to announce multi-angle attacks over the headset so that a teammate can direct their fire to assist the overwhelmed character.

“Backlit” haloes, a form of artificial image overlay, communicate various types of information to a viewer/player depending on their hue. Blue haloes (0:39 in the video) stand in for teammates whenever one’s view of them is blocked by level geometry. This both enhances tactical knowledge and encourages players to keep track of each other, because characters too far away can be easily incapacitated before a teammate can run to help. Blue halos also surround items such as ammunition, bombs, and medpacks concealed by darkness. Carefully distributed by the game’s AI Director, such items are essential to surviving upcoming encounters; therefore, the game clearly wants players to be able to find them without undue searching in shadowy recesses.

Other haloes appear around teammates when they become adversely affected. An orange halo (0:46) means that the player has recently been blinded by Boomer bile, constrained by a Smoker’s tongue, or pinned down by a Hunter. If constrained or pinned, a character must be rescued quickly by a teammate or suffer incapacitation. If an avatar has been blinded by bile, hordes of Infected will be attracted to them. This cues one to pay attention to this player and defend them from multiple angle of attack. Players blinded by bile lose the ability to see overlay haloes on top of the general decrease in visual clarity, so the orange halo also serves in this case to alert others that they must communicate with the blinded character to avoid friendly fire.

A red halo surrounds a character who has been incapacitated or a Hunter currently pinning someone (0:46). An incapacitated character will slowly bleed to death on the floor unless another player runs over to help them stand up. Thus, we see that the green, yellow, and red of the stoplight have been modified here to become the blue (all safe), orange (caution), and red (stop everything and help) haloes. Despite the wealth of information provided by image overlay, it only becomes truly redundant when sound effects have been added to the cinematic experience.

Diegetic and Non-Diegetic Sound
Sound design stands as one of the most important components of AAA videogames, the elusive capstone to a work that can either make or break its market and critical success. In survival horror games, designers use sound expressively to convey feelings of danger or uncertainty: even a sudden lack of non-diegetic music in these games communicates to a player (usually, it’s an upcoming surprise scare). In this respect, Left 4 Dead conforms to the norms of the genre; however, added levels of detail in this game hammer in the message of mutual reliance through redundancy of cues and match Stockburger’s definition of the spatialising “indexical function” of sound objects (208).

Crescendo
Most of the sounds in the game, including the unique growls of different types of Infected and character dialogue, are diegetic; only the crescendo is non-diegetic. “Crescendo” means exactly what one would think – a term coined by Valve to describe a climax in their game’s procedural soundtrack. L4D features three kinds of crescendo: horde (5:17 in the video), tank (3:05), and witch. All three of these send cues to the players that they must stick together (if they’ve been separated) and prepare a strategy for the encounter to come. In the case of the witch crescendo, there is also a diegetic element – the noise of her sobbing. This sound practically commands players to turn off their flashlights for fear of alerting the avoidable yet devastating killer (she incapacitates humans in one swipe).

A crescendo seems to lie somewhere in between Murch’s “flat” and “dimensional” audio-visions (xxii) it begins seconds before one can make visual confirmation of an attack (the sound of the door slamming coming before the image of it).

Humans Chatter, Infected Growl
Diegetic dialogue and sound effects lay at the heart of the game’s sound redundancy. The dialogue between characters in L4D has been lauded by critics and designers, and a fan of the game has even programmed Twitter feeds between bot accounts to emulate their simple banter.

When a player grabs ammo her character announces, “ammo over here!” When an Special Infected, such as a Hunter, spawns it emits its unique growl; this sound cue is then reinforced by dialogue stating, “Look sharp, I hear a Hunter!” A wounded character will not only begin to visibly stagger, but he will also call out to his teammates: “Ugh, I’m in a lot of pain… wait up for me!” These redundant sound effects constantly draw player/viewer attention to changes in the game state, while simultaneously making the avatars more “human.” This is how L4D embodies Chion’s synchresis (Murch, xix).

CONCLUSION
Because it is a seamless first-person experience without cinematic editing to express its argument (as in Soviet Montage films), Left 4 Dead relies on something other than editing in order to convey its rhetoric of mutual reliance to player/viewers. A redundancy of visual and sound cues, in the form of image overlay and sound effects, works to encourage players to depend on each other for survival.

As with even the most well-designed implementations, the redundancy of information in Left 4 Dead quickly becomes old to players who have experienced the game multiple times. For the rhetoric of mutual dependence, we can paraphrase Wittgenstein’s assertion about his own philosophy: once one understands the argument being made, they must abandon it as a ladder already ascended.

Once players have grasped the idea that they must stick together to survive, they are able to compete against the game’s AI at higher difficulties (higher degrees of realism in damage to the player) and concentrate on developing emergent narratives through their gameplay. The necessity of sometimes abandoning one’s teammates at the finale of a scenario has already been written about as a particularly difficult and heart-wrenching decision-making process – only after understanding the game’s argument would one even be able to see the game in this light.

REFERENCES
[1]Murch, W. Foreword, in: Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, by Michel Chion. Columbia University Press, 1994, vii-xxiv.
[2]Stockburger, A. PhD Research into the Modalities of Space in Video and Computer Games. 2006, 175-206.
[3]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVIdHPG0wYI&feature=related

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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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My Achievement Philosophy

Posted in Gaming by Simon Ferrari on November 25, 2008

I’m an achievement whore. Kind of. For my Master’s thesis I plan on doing a comprehensive study of existing achievement structures in games, generalizing the types of achievements that pop up across games of similar genres or audience targets. This would also do some work toward establishing the difference between a good set of achievements for a game versus a poor one. I’ll write more on this later; this post is about how I go about getting achievements on 360 games.

I have a very specific ethos when it comes to achievement gathering. I don’t play any game that I don’t want to play (I nabbed the 1000 in Avatar because I was bored and there was nothing good to rent at the time). I don’t play sports games or children’s games. I don’t boost online achievements (with the exception of Steppin’ Razor on Halo 3). I’m not a game completionist, unless I own a game and like it one hell of a lot. Because I have a lot of schoolwork and a social life, I don’t like wasting time getting achievements or playing the same game for too long.

My basic strategy is to expose myself to as many of a game’s options and experiences before moving on to another; therefore, I have a kind of min-max strategy for achievement scoring. I will play a single-player campaign once, on the hardest difficulty that I can manage. I will also play any multiplayer content that a game has, as long as the networks aren’t so bugged out that I get fed up and ignore the online content altogether. When I play a game’s campaign, I will look at the achievements beforehand and nab any of them that I can figure out as I go through. I will stop at points in the game to grind for a “kill x numbers of dudes with x weapon in one blast” kind of achievement. I won’t follow step-by-step walkthroughs unless completely baffled by a puzzle (like one time dilation puzzle in Braid). This means that I tend to avoid achievements such as “find every x in this huge game map we’ve created to hide x in.” For multiplayer achievements, I will look at the list before playing to know what I’m aiming for. I will play online content for a game until I’m bored with it. This means that I’ve never gotten any “10,000 online kills” or “reach General rank” achievements. I will go out of my way to kill people in particular ways if it will garner an achievement.

This pretty much sums up my method. It leads to a minimum of time wasting and frustration, and since I move through games pretty quickly I’ve still managed to rack up a respectable gamerscore (with an average of 600 points or so per game). I think the restriction of not playing anything I don’t want to just for achievements is key here. I’m not really impressed when I see people with a ton of children’s games under their belts. This is not to say that I don’t respect players with 200,000-odd gamerscore… as long as they don’t use save states. I’m not really one to judge the amount of free time people are willing to commit to playing video games. I just personally choose to pursue my achievement obsession with a critical distance and a mind for not wasting too much of my own time.

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