What is a mechanic? (my pragmatic view)

This is a little piece about the meaning of the word 'mechanic' which I fired off on Twitter the other day. It's about why talking about mechanics does not need to be rigid or robotic and about the uses and limits of the concept of a 'mechanic'. It's not perfect and probably incomplete but I've been asked to post it on the blog for easier citation and I hope it does a job.

It was prompted by a question from @criticalbrit (now @utterlyhorrid) and a response from @xenobotanist. The original can be found here.

How does it taste? The sexual politics of how Metal Gear Solid 3 treats Raiden

I like Raiden, okay? I’m a Raiden fan. I have all the merchandise - the action figures, the Skull Suit, the mask for casual and formal wear. So you can imagine my delight when Metal Gear Solid 3 allowed me to dress up as his spitting image – one Ivan Raidenovich Raikov. At first it seems like a bog-standard Metal Gear in-joke, but when it's considered alongside Raikov's relationship with bisexual electo-bastard Colonel Volgin, it suddenly crackles with a sexual charge. So is this a subversive twist on mainstream sexuality? Or just complicated homophobia?

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?

The circles of hell: valence as character and Hitman's obscene moral calculus

I wrote this post AGES ago and promptly forgot about it. I've just unearthed it in the guts of the blog system, and so decided to let it light, regardless of timing. Hope you enjoy it.

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If you think your family reunions are bad – and believe me, mine are Shakespearian – spare a thought for Agent 47. Every few years he has to push his way to the buffet table through crowds of identical bald men distinguishable only by their barcodes, all disguised as each other and holding syringes behind their backs. Still, 47 is used to feeling anonymous because he was designed to be that way. He is deliberately without personality, a blank human being...as long as you pretend that ‘white’ and ‘male’ are blank attributes.

But what of his enemies?

This week [actually, months ago - ed] I wrote an article over at Gameranx about how the Hitman series handles character and morality. It's a reading of Contracts and Blood Money as "socially conservative treatises on sin and moral frailty" - which, by the by, an explains the origin of Absolution's infamous leather nuns. Here's a bit about BM's rehab clinic mission:

The situation is explicitly psychological: this is a place where people are imprisoned to protect themselves from their own destructive behaviour. The militarised boundaries and guarded checkpoints which make up the game’s bread and butter exist here as much to keep the inmates sober as to keep intruders out. But the system can’t protect your targets if they insist on subverting it. The mobsters seal their own fates with regular visits to secret booze caches, which, through careful observation, you can find and poison. It’s a clever setup because we already think about addiction in this way—both a crime and a sickness, a moral trespass and a fatal weakness. We are exploiting these men, but they also allow it to happen.

Read on for a supplementary post.

Interview: Jason Rohrer wants you to come home and find your family dead

...and in the game? (Honestly, he said it! It's at the bottom!)

Jason Rohrer was the final developer I interviewed for my New Statesman article. His forthcoming game, The Castle Doctrine, has become embroiled in the political storm over gun rights and self-defence. What fascinated me about it was that it simulated a little world with the specific intention of bringing about numerous armed robberies. After the Trayvon Martin, the Colorado theatre shooting, CeCe McDonald and Sandy Hook, it doesn't get much more political than that.

Jason Rohrer has a long indie pedigree. Five minute mortality simulator Passage did little for me but was played by many; Sleep Is Death allowed players to create stories for each other, while Chain World turns Minecraft into religious mythology. He's 35 years old and has been playing videogames almost his entire life. He became a programmer and studied Computer Science; these days he's able to make a full-time living from his games, and lives with his wife and three kids in Davis, California.

Pulling off the psychic kiss: A conversation with Richard Hofmeier

For my New Statesman article on political games, and following on from my interview with Merritt Kopas, I spoke to Richard Hofmeier about Cart Life, a "retail simulation for Windows." I had heard a lot about Cart Life and it had been gazing accusingly at me from the top of my 'must play' file for months, so I plunged in as quick as I could.

As it turned out, Hofmeier (@RichardHofmeier on Twitter) was a regular reader, and as interested in hearing my thoughts about the game as I was in hearing his. As such, this interview takes a slightly different form: it's more of a conversation. I abandon the normal journalistic practice of not blabbering on about your own half-formed ideas, and proceed to blabber on about my half-formed ideas. This is the full text of our conversation.

"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).

Fuck the Holodeck

This post was written for Blogs of the Round Table. Read the other entries, when they appear, at Critical Distance.

There is a spectre haunting videogames: the spectre of the holodeck.

Developers, fans and the media are united in doing its work. Janet Murray first summoned the word to game studies, but it has long since escaped her control. In its purest form it is the teleological fantasy that games will one day achieve the status of perfect simulation: computerised experiences of such fidelity that they consume all five senses and immerse the player in a fake reality. But we pay tribute to it whenever we measure our games against it, or imagine that it is the end-goal of the medium; whenever we repeat simple platitudes that immersion is better than distance or the intuitive better than the obtuse.

"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.

The Political Uses of Fear

Edited screenshot from Lim, by Merritt Kopas

This post is in response to Blogs of the Round Table. Trigger warning for street harassment, passing anxiety, rape culture. 

Here in videogameland we relish fear like children relish Halloween. Actually, we relish Halloween like children relish Halloween. But our uses of fear are essentially escapist, even hedonistic: we lust after the adrenaline rush of shocks and frights and cathartic thrills like the psychologist in Psycho who has a little too much fun delivering the denouement. Games are very good at fear, too, though when we mention this it's usually just before we note how bad they are at ~*love*~. But that primal, animal emotion, that evolutionary hangover that cross-wires nuclear bombs with teeth and claws, is good for more than rollercoasters. It has political uses. By harnessing fear we can trap even the most privileged players in the frightening subjectivity of another. The scariest things are not the ghosts and goblins of seasonal kitsch, but the hidden, suppressed suffering our society produces as if it were a machine specifically constructed for that purpose.

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.

Sneaking on the D-Pad: Why Metal Gear Solid benefits from being like Pac-Man

1998. That’s fourteen years ago now - more if you’re a citizen of the future. I remember fondly the time I spent as a youngster; enjoying 90s action films when I was too young to realise they were genuinely crap, watching children’s cartoons when I was too young to realise they were genuinely brilliant and wondering why my penis felt all tingly and nice when I hugged a pillow between my legs and thought of Kate Winslet. They were simpler times, really – videogames being no exception.

Why stealth games still matter, elsewhere

You might have spotted a new gaming site creeping through the shadows in your cabbage patch; that site is Sneaky Bastards, and it’s devoted entirely to stealth in games. As lovers of the genre we Brindles are keen to support them. Today they’ve published my article arguing for the continuing value of dedicated stealth games, bless their night-black hearts.

There came a time last year when the beeping ECG beside the bed of the stealth genre seemed to flatline. Solid Snake and Sam Fisher had burst forth from the shadows, guns blazing, whilst stealth was only one part of Ezio Auditore’s parkour power fantasy. Relatives gathered round, holding their breaths; physicians uttered grim prognoses. Now, with fans uncertain about the new Hitman, and bemused by the inventive but nonsensical ‘Thi4f’, it is worth looking at just why we need dedicated stealth games – not games with stealth options, or games with stealth elements, but games built from the bottom for sneaking and snooping.

You can find the article here. Make sure you stay and peruse the rest of the site, COUGH COUGH. Particularly of note will be Justin Keverne’s series on Thief 2’s level design, if his long-running blog entries at Groping the Elephant are anything to go by.

Incidentally, did you know that the top google search keywords for this blog are ‘groping’, ‘brother groping’, ‘groping brothers’ and ‘groping and touching’? I don’t know who you are, groping enthusiast, but your secret is safe with us.

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.

Review: Infantry Combat

Brindles do reviews? Why, yes. If you choose to read the review below, go to section 2. If you choose not to – maybe you’re too good for such things, or maybe your child is wailing next door – stop off at section 1.

SECTION 1: Ravenous mice burst from a lesion in your thigh and consume the rest of your body before destroying it in a series of star-bright antimatter detonations visible (after ninety minutes) from Saturn.

SECTION 2: You settle down peacefully to a review of Infantry Combat: The Rifle Platoon. Since the game is actually an interactive novel in dead tree form, picked up in New York City for a dollar, you have the rare experience of reading a videogame review written in the same medium as the game itself – just as as Wolfenstein 1d might be considered a prescient review of Modern Warfare 3.  

The Assassination of Rockstar by the Coward John Brindle (or, three design failures in Red Dead Redemption)

Revenge. It’s an ugly word, but I’m an ugly man. I tried to start a new life of peace and fulfilment – I started playing Red Dead Redemption. But now the work of just one blogger has turned that all to ashes. They say this path never ends anywhere good. Maybe. Maybe not. But I’m damn sure I’m going to end the son of a bitch who spoiled that game for me.

As you can see, I get a bit carried away with the idea of the Wild West. Yet RDR itself leaves me somewhat cold, and the dirty no good rotten spoiler in question – Lee Kelly over at Ambient Challenge – has perceptively summed up the reasons why. The game’s visuals and sound are immaculate; it shimmers (to steal a phrase) with droplets of purest atmosphere, and, for a game, I guess the writing’s okay too. But Redemption is so entangled in the design conventions of the GTA series that its mechanics never live up to its aesthetics. I want to expand Spoiler Kelly’s critique to illuminate three major structural ways in which Redemption fails the challenge of its Wild West setting.

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.