"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.

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.

Good Question: The Games of Pippin Barr

Art: Pippin Barr (with permission)

What do you call an unwinnable game that players can compete to lose the most often? Or a game about our experience of art that simultaneously denies us the chance to experience it and simulates it perfectly? Or a physics platformer in which having complete control of all physics variables – and seemingly utmost power over the game – still leaves you with quite conventional puzzles to solve? You might call them a bit of a joke. You might call them experiments in paradox. You might call them horse shit (which is your prerogative, I suppose). But you might just call them the games of Pippin Barr.

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.

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.