Relax, don't do it: pulling the trigger in Spec Ops: The Line

There is a line that people like us (i.e. games bloggers) have to cross. It is the line which divides people who like Spec Ops: The Line from people who don’t.

On one side, its lauding as a landmark subversion and the subject of Brendan Keogh’s groundbreaking close reading, Killing is Harmless. On the other, the mocking, the eye-rolling; its indictment by J. Shea as the cake-eating adventures of Captain Obvious, by Michael Clarkson as a “gutless and cowardly critique”, and by Darius Kazemi as “a middling shooter fumbling at meaning.”

And me?

"It's a powerful thing to have people tell me how important this game is to them": Interview with Merritt Kopas

It's been too long since I wrote here, and I wanted my first post of 2013 to go off with a polemical bang. But now that we've given the holodeck a bruising, I'd like to post up some of the full interviews from my second piece for the New Statesman: political games.

For that article I wanted to really go beyond platitutes about games wot have politics in them and ask what it means to try and simulate a political situation - to impart an intellectual or emotional message about a system by building and pointedly contextualising a model of that system. One game that did this to interesting effect was Lim, by Merrit Kopas (@m_kopas on Twitter).

When text games go to war: full interviews

pic: mark muehlhaeusler

Last week, I got an article up in the New Statesman about text games which challenge mainstream representations of war. This week, I've been posting my full interviews with all the people I talked to - and here's a nice single post which links to them all.

The discussion mostly concerns the capabilities of text versus 3D graphics, representations of war, and indie production values, but also includes some specific stuff about the individual games. Enjoy(?)!(!?!)

"I don't think the AAA FPS can't be introspective. They don't think it's worth their time": Interview with Robert Yang

pic: radiator

This is one of a series of interviews I conducted for my article about what text can say about war that AAA games can't. You can read the other interviews by clicking here.

I contacted Robert Yang because I'm a big fan of his blog and in particular his writing about simulation gaps and manshooters (i.e. the difference between a simulation and its subject, and what is implied by where that gap falls). While researching this topic, I found an intriguing blog post about Unmanned which pretty much encapsulated my thesis, and also his blog is almost the same colour as mine, which I applaud.

"Our range of actions, their borders and how we move beyond them, is defined by other people": Interview with Aaron Reed

This is one of a series of interviews I conducted for my article about what text can say about war that AAA games can't. You can read the other interviews by clicking here.

I contacted Alan A. Reed for this article because of his game Maybe Make Some Change. Reed is a PhD student in computer science who's researching the intersection between literature and computational media, which was very relevant to my argument. Maybe, with its text interface overlaying murky FPS footage and its ranks of unreliable narrators, perhaps best exemplified my headline.

"There is a symbiotic relationship between technologies of simulation and the military": Interview with Paolo Pedercini

pic: molleindustria

This is one of a series of interviews I conducted for my article about what text can say about war that AAA games can't. You can read the other interviews by clicking here.

I contacted Paolo Pedercini about all this because he made Unmanned, which is featured in the article. Unmanned concerns an individual cog in the military machine but uses text to simulate his experience of war in quite a different way to most games. Also, he comprises the staff of La Molleindustria, which makes radical games in at least two senses of the word 'radical'.

After seizing control of a local radio tower, I asked him the following questions.

"We need empathy simulators, not another game about being a white savior": Interview with Porpentine

pic: porp

Yesterday, I got an article up in the New Statesman about text games which challenge mainstream representations of war. I talked to a bunch of IF authors and game developers to write it, but only a small amount of what they said made the wordcount.

So this week I'll be posting my full interviews with all the cool people who gave me quotes. To make things simple, I am going to post them up in alphabetical order of surname - a system which our first guest, Porpentine, has already glitched by having none.

When text games go to war, elsewhere

Somehow, against all odds, I have tricked left-leaning UK magazine The New Statesman to publish an article by me, John Brindle. In it, I examine several text-based war games which challenge the representation of war in mainstream games, and which manage to speak about that subject in ways that AAA can't. You can find it here.

Take 2007’s Rendition, whose title would not exist without the war on terror. Both the first two Modern Warfare games include "interrogation" sequences, once with a beating and once with electrodes. But where they coyly conceal the violence involved, Rendition makes you participate in awful detail. Try to leave the room and you’re told you haven’t done enough to Abdul. “Break Abdul’s toe,” you type, and the game replies: “Which do you mean? his left little toe, his left second toe, his left middle toe, his left fourth toe, his left big toe, his right little toe…” At this point, many players simply quit.

Below are some notes on what I think of the article and what others think of it.

Teaching the Camera to Lie: Amnesia and the First-Person Other

Holmes breathes heavily, his face pressed against the wall. He has been running, running for hours, and now he has resorted to screwing up his eyes and trying not to look at the thing that is chasing him. But the temptation is too great. He slowly peers, behind him – and cries out, for though he never made a sound, Watson is there. Watching.

This chilling effect, while hopefully unintentional, tells us much about what First Person games can do. Watson’s creepy teleportation is possible precisely because so much of the environment is obscured behind the edge of the screen.

In ‘First Person Problems’ we argued that although early developers were attracted to first person because of the limitations it enforced, the rise of the shooter has over-prioritised the accuracy and power it allows. I advocated stepping back and re-examining the possibilities its evolution has left behind. Amnesia: The Dark Descent is a game whose developers did just that – illuminating in the constellation of first person’s pros and cons a rarely recognised capacity for subjectivity, and achieving a literary trope not often found in videogames: the unreliable narrator.

First Person Problems (or, the alternate history of modern genres)

“Measure for Measure tries hard but pales beside classic comedies like As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing. 6/10”

– Official Playhouse & Bear-Pit Magazine, 1605

If you want to analyse videogames you have to struggle with the problem that half our critical discourse comes from bullet points on the back of a box. Even as academics and bloggers strive to establish a new conceptual vocabulary, their lexicon still carries the trace of promotional material, their terms of art taken from features lists. This does not make our critique somehow degenerate or ‘impure’ – but it does risk obscuring and occluding ideas the market left behind. Nowhere is this more clear than in the evolution of the first person game.

When Shakespeare’s plays were first published in 1623, seven years after his death, his literary executors – former colleagues John Hemmings and Henry Condell – faced a dilemma about what to call them. Sometime rival Ben Johnson had been viciously mocked in 1616 for releasing his collected plays as ‘Works’, a label too elevated and serious for an art form still considered two steps away from prostitution. But, by the same token, 'Plays' would position their book at the whorehouse end of the market. H & C, convinced that their late comrade deserved better, trod a middle path and published what’s now known as the First Folio under the title of ‘William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and Tragedies’. 

It wasn't a big deal. Many of the plays had once been advertised as different genres entirely, or as more than one throughout their lifespan. A few didn't fit into any in particular. Yet until the twentieth century most critics took the Folio's classifications at face value - and some, assuming strange or hybrid plays like Measure for Measure were supposed to be straight comedies, assessed them sternly by that yardstick.

CS:GO interview, elsewhere

A secret identity of mine has colluded in an interview at fan site halflife2.net, talking to Valve's (and OldManMurray's) Chet Faliszek about the upcoming Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. This blandly-named but interesting project will simply update CS for modern systems, and the limited scope of its changes is testament to how confident Valve are in the basic rules of the game. Perhaps they have good reason to be: it's still popular, and Chet contends the world yet has a place for it. There's also some stuff about the schisms in the competetive community and how player-bases respond to changes and updates.

Read it (if it please you) in three parts:
Part 1: "We won't change the rules of CS"
Part 2: "It's hard to accept change"
Part 3: How long will CS last?

Where the Line Leads

I need you / I don’t need you / and all of that jiving around

It is in the nature of Brindles to return to the scene of a crime long after everybody else has been allowed the mercy of forgetting. Since a similar impulse is clearly afflicting this blog  (Left 4 Dead? The Marriage? In 2011?), let us go stubbornly and grudgingly back to examine a year-old minor furore. Shortly after the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops, a fellow called Bungle put out a video of him playing through the first two levels without firing a shot.

For detractors, Bungle’s video offers the grim spectacle of the linear manshoot genre’s design principles enacted as full-on farce. On Hardened difficulty he is able to stand around like a lemon admiring the idle animations on his gun while AI companions blitz through the enemy before him. He does this from cover, in the open, and in slow motion. He runs through a field of harmless explosions and, as a culmination, sits in the back of a plane twiddling his thumbs over the firing studs of a machinegun as enemies queue up outside to spray blanks at him. As it turns out, he’s been rendered invincible for the sequence. It seems like the player has finally become irrelevant to the proceedings.

A Family Game

If I were called to remember Left 4 Dead by one defining image, I would think, oddly enough, of red doors. The front door to the Brindle household was painted red, but in L4D each red door leads to a safe place. Every red door, in fact – every identical red door – has the same reliable function. Amidst a ruined and shadowy world, these doors are bright reminders that the game’s authentically grim tone and its touches of mechanical realism are employed only and fully to the extent that they bring players together as a unit.

By the time Left 4 Dead was released, our own family was scattered across the world. Most of us had no more desire to get back in touch with each other than the British MoD does with their old pal Gaddafi – but this was also the period in which I began to re-establish contact with my brother Jimmy. Most of our catching-up took place in the haunted woods and ruined estates of L4D’s campaigns. Sometimes we invited other Brindles, and we were able to put away our quarrels for a while in subordination to the goals of the game.