Artful Without Art: A Critique of Bioshock Infinite

"Centuries of their labor would not reveal to them any more of Creation than they already knew. Yet through their endeavor, men would glimpse the unimaginable artistry of Yahweh's work, in seeing how ingeniously the world had been constructed. By this construction, Yahweh's work was indicated, and Yahweh's work was concealed."  Tower of Babylon, Ted Chiang.

A curious thing about ruthless closure in a story is that we start to speak in the same language that created it, even when we're angered by it. My immediate reaction to the experience of Bioshock Infinite is most definitely anger and my first impulse is to use the game’s tropes against itself. I lose myself in the exercise.

The chair that I "willingly" strap myself/Booker into as transportation into the game predictably closes like a trap. It never releases me, really.

Elevators, zeppelins, or rails transport me to spectacles as carefully staged for surrender and awe as a cathedral under stained glass. Or a theme park. Like many players in the initial hour of the game, I absolutely surrender.  

Baptized and ushered into a beautifully rendered city in the sky, I wander through the first areas in a daze, absorbing every detail, every vista, every conversation. It’s like listening to the opening of a sermon and running into Disneyland at the same time. How quickly this exhausts itself shouldn’t surprise me, but it does.

The presentation of the environments becomes as preachy as the in-game propaganda, giving me a constant pairing of dramatic scenery with religious or racist conversations, placards, portraits, slogans, lest I forget that this is a society of xenophobic sheep.  It’s so oppressive and ubiquitous that I can't open myself to what I’m directed to feel as I’m funneled along to the next attraction: nostalgia, awe, outrage, revulsion.  All of these seem over-represented and under-developed, like placeholders, pointers for the next series of events that will justify the gun I'm constantly holding in front of my face.

The lines between the game’s different forms of didacticism start to blur uncomfortably. An elevator sermonizes me with absurdly bespoke, interstitial captions in the railings between floors, presenting me with what amounts to a silent movie montage as its view pans through significant scenes of toil on each floor. Who is the bombastic ideologue here? The preacher in the game or the one behind the game who choreographs a slideshow in an elevator with such self-assurance in my suspension of disbelief?

After I encounter the museum set-pieces in the Hall of Heroes I begin to realize that these exhibits and my passage through them are just microcosms for the entire game: wander through sequences of propaganda submitted to my superior judgement and Booker’s tired amnesiac duplicity, admire the dramatic lighting, the exaggerated architecture, the operatic music, smirk at the figures and mobs popping into view, listen to a disembodied villain barking over the PA system, accept the eventual wave of targets that I can mow down like ducks Vox Populi in a shooting gallery.

My only forms of agency outside of this template seem to be resource gathering to keep my meters topped off and my abilities updated, and an occasional decision that curiously doesn’t branch to anything. I'm sometimes offered pauses, moments where a choice presents itself between standing around and doing nothing or submitting to an event by pressing a button. It’s supposed to feel like stumbling into the intractable "would you kindly?" moment but becomes less affecting for the repetition.

I need to pause again.  I can feel my criticism getting carried along the game’s implosive momentum, its irresistible urge to make everything a reference to some other aspect of itself.  I get a sense of satisfaction out of doing this but I think the writers of Infinite fell under the same lure.

When one’s language and figures start to resonate among themselves, it’s tempting to follow their inward momentum as implicitly significant, something that will almost magically mean something to perceptive readers through the combined weight of their thematic material and self-reflection.  Without moderation and a critical, nuanced effort to tie the work back to the world the result becomes inscrutable, closed to any real dialog or reading beyond a dutiful interpretation of its own internally significant figures.

Bioshock Infinite obstinately stares into this mirror and never really returns to anything outwardly significant.  

I can feel the maw closing at a certain turn in the game’s story. A proletarian uprising gives me one last possible reference to something outside of Booker DeWitt’s tortured psyche. “It’ll be like Les Miserables!” exclaims Elizabeth, at which point I should hear the cynicism approaching but I try to ignore it. I briefly feel some sense of historical resonance and subversive short-circuiting that isn’t just a caricature from a theme park. A kid is singing “Fortunate Son” in blues a capella. Irish war songs jump out of the indistinct roar of the angry mob. It feels exaggerated but energizing and purposeful, like a living Eric Drooker poster.

But this significance self-destructs under the overarching obsession with the zero-sum game, the perfect, closed system: the violent revolution becomes framed as just another form of futile idealism and hunger for power, the other side of the same coin. Daisy Fitzroy, the leader of the rebellion, goes power-mad and begins to bark at me over PA systems, telling me that I “complicate the narrative.” This sounds strained in its anachronism, as if her language is suddenly putting on a new costume and isn’t comfortable with the wardrobe. She figuratively twirls her mustache while holding a child hostage, ready to kill in the name of idealism at any moment. This particular museum exhibit doesn’t end with my actions, though. Through a pane of glass, I watch as my verbs become Elizabeth’s verbs and she executes Daisy with a pair of scissors.  We move on to another interdimensional tear and the game continues to distill itself into self-referential oblivion. 

“There's always a lighthouse. There's always a man. There's always a city.”

I wish I could say that Bioshock Infinite is a missed opportunity, but this would imply a lack of intent on the part of the game’s creators. They foreclosed on most opportunities to use their thematic premise with any kind of bravery, honesty, or outward relevance because they explicitly chose to reduce it to yet another first person shooter meditation on self-redemption.  Though it may be wrapped in the entertaining science fiction conceits of quantum loops and steeped in self-conscious iconography of McKinley-era americana, this is in fact the path of least complexity, least offense, least risk.  One can make it all about a few regretful personal choices that can’t be taken back and wrap everything up neatly with a decision that erases everything.  In doing so, any gestures toward historical awareness, racial politics, or self-consciousness about the repercussions of violence become placeholders that point to nothing and ask nothing of the player. The end result is very digestible and briefly poignant, but ultimately obtuse and evasive, artful without art.

As I complete the game, I’m not sure what to do with the experience it’s given me.  It’s like walking away from an evening at a theme park that somehow tried to tell me the story of its own significance at every kiosk and turnstile then faded to nothingness as I left the lot.  It’s haunting, but not in a way that stays with me, not in a way that asks me to return.  I fear that if I turn around for another glimpse, I’ll just be watching the slow heat death of the first person shooter.

Interim strategies: On gaming, uncertainty, and experience

There are some today who would argue that there is no such thing as "experience" -- lived experience, as it is sometimes called -- save as it is reducible to language and desire[...] abolishing at least what happens as an irreducible ontological order[...].

Say rather (as another interim strategy): The mutual inadequations of language and desire constitute what happens; the mutual inadequations of desire and what happens constitute language; the mutual inadequations of what happens and language constitute desire. [...] We only know any one of the three because of the gap between the other two.

-Samuel R. Delany, "Toto, We're Back!"

So, what's happening here?

The year is 503, p.a. (post apocalypse). I'm controlling three NORAD troops under the stated mission of infiltrating a structure belonging to a faction known as the Salemites: an occultist group who have been experimenting with corpse reanimation for centuries in the aftermath of the last great nuclear war. Our main goal is to retrieve the US Constitution from the Salemite vault and exit the zone.

There's more of a backstory to all of this but I'll skip the exposition because that's not where the game happens.

We're equipped fairly well for the job; all three units are set with individual loadouts of small arms or a heavy machine gun, and assorted explosives and med kits. As with any game where I'm given pre-equipped characters, I'm trying to deduce and enact their intended roles: who is the scout, the medic, the damage dealer, the demolition engineer, and so on.

I've also been staring at the level map and trying to plot a strategy. If the opponent's two Salemite units re-animate three cadavers (spawing zombie units that also enter the opponents forces), we'll lose the mission. These zombies aren't the shambling variety and are quite damaging at close range. I can see exactly where the opposing team has spawned and I begin to formulate a plan. If we can destroy the morgue with one of our explosives, and dispatch two units to the vault...

My command points are limited, as is the available set of commands in the current context due to both the situation and the randomization of the set. Melee'ing the walls or searching the littered outdoor landscape would produce nothing, so moving and shooting seem to be the only relevant options. Fortunately I have a couple of command items under these categories, with large command point allowances, so I'll be able to make an effective blitz into the building. Designated "big gun" Nick Bolter takes point and successfully destroys the nearest door that leads into the facility, but the first re-animated zombie is already running down the hallway toward our team.

An hour later, the situation is grim. My "scout" unit, Vasquez, used as both a sniper and line of sight monitor, was torn to pieces by two zombies. Line of sight plays a big role in the our ability to interrupt the opponent's turn, so we've lost more than just her set of actions; we've lost potential future turns and the ability to react. Our med kits are gone, and both remaining characters are temporarily holed up in the "Patient Room".

James Woo is rifling through the cabinets, hoping the search command will produce something of use. The beds in this room will provide 1 measly HP per turn, at the cost of a precious command point, but Nick uses one to get out of his wounded state which has decreased his movement, weight allocation, max command points, and combat effectiveness. He's been a mess for a few turns now.

Considering that two zombies have been revived, I decide to drop the main objective and go for the alternate win condition: kill all opposing team members. I'm probably going to lose this, but James managed to find a smoke bomb which might come in handy where we're headed: the opponent should be going "all in" and deploying everyone to the morgue for one last zombie resurrection. Maybe the element of surprise, or rather "uninterruptibility" (they can see us on the map just as well as we can see them) will work in our favor.

The opponent changes his mind and decides on a more dramatic approach by sending everyone directly toward us. This isn't going to end well. In an act of perhaps nihilistic humor, Nick decides to take another nap for one more hit point before it all hits the fan.

My son and I are absolutely absorbed with this game, as are quite a few other players since December of last year. Its dated visuals, garish color palette, and postapocalyptic premise form a thematic package that feels like something I would have gleefully purchased from a game retailer circa 1995; a turn-off for some, perhaps, but a treasure for others.

Dependent on one's generation, a contemporary gamer might experience the theme as tongue-in-cheek nostalgia while younger players might see the game as somewhat ugly and derivative. I see it as rather "formally nostalgic", an effort to create something with an aesthetic and thematic design that is consistent in its vintage but stands on its own strengths and explores the possibilities of that theme without too much implied hipster irony. I've seen this formalist approach to retro game design with more frequency lately in games like Cave Story and Superbrothers: Sword and Sorcery EP, which is a trend that Michael Abbott has begun to analyze.

In addition to the thematic throwback, what has engaged most players as they progress through the extensive tutorial system is the versatility of the narrative that grows around what initially presents itself as a tactical skirmish game.

This is enabled through a complexity of mechanics that offer an uncommonly varied and contextual set of choices to the player during each turn. This could have easily been overwhelming to players if the designer hadn't made a couple of important decisions. First, most of the rules and mechanics are isomorphic, meaning their structure and logistics are, once learned, transferable to other rule-sets in the game as they are introduced. The mechanics are also designed to be conveyed through a modular iconographic language which is introduced to the user after most of the core systems are learned.

This achieves a combined effect: rules need to only be conveyed once; most of their mechanics build into subsequent rules which function in consistent ways between themselves and can be communicated by placing a few icons on the appropriate components in the game. As you step through the tutorial you feel as if you're gaining fluency in a language that makes your game both tactically deeper and more narratively complex. It feels empowering and nearly --but not quite-- overwhelming at the same time.

The end result is nothing short of brilliant: a deep retro-postapocalyptic strategy game that teaches the players its own language while giving them narrative scenarios to explore and mutate with this language. It's a structured, tactical, narrative sandbox that grows with each game, and players often repeat the tutorials for the fun of exploring different outcomes and interactions. Once these tutorials are complete, players are moved to a final set of rules that structure how they will auto-generate their scenarios... and the game pretty much explodes from there.

At this point, I should come clean and clarify that none of this is happening in a video game.


I've been trying to describe the appeal of a designer boardgame, Earth Reborn, by Christophe Boelinger, particularly in response to the boardgaming buzz coming out of the last GDC.

I chose this game in response to the initial descriptions I'd heard from the conference which seemed to assume that a turn to boardgames was a "return to basics." At least that was a common interpretation of one of the talks on "Go, Poker, and the Sublime" where Frank Lantz discussed, in an almost phenomenological fashion, the richness of abstract games as manifestations of thought being "made visible to itself" and the lessons that designers could learn from these honed and proliferative systems of gameplay.

This is certainly a rewarding vein to explore: developing more evolved or informed concepts of mechanics by looking at the poetics of non-digital games will be productive for many designers who might not have associated them with the problems they encounter in video game design.

But Earth Reborn is not a good subject for Frank Lantz's approach in several aspects which make it all the more compelling for me as a board game.

It is about as far from abstract or "Euro" games as one could go: almost every mechanic and rule has a thematic analog. It's the product of a board game auteur who often takes his own idiosyncratic approaches to design and builds the games "he wants to play," which along with his French nationality reminds me a bit of Eric Chahi in his relationships with his games. Incidentally, many of Earth Reborn's design choices are also influenced by video games, particularly the iconographic language system and concepts like "command points" (think of any turn-based SRPG in the past 10 years).

But finally, and perhaps more critically for me, this game does not lend itself to an immediacy or transparency of "thought being made visible to itself". The pleasure of the game doesn't really reside there.

If anything, one could argue that the allure of this game lies in the inverse process: "thought" here is first being shaped by the grammar of the game's rules which, once internalized, enable the player to express their decisions. But these choices aren't entirely controlled by player intent since dice-rolling mechanics add an element of randomness. This is, in effect, the pleasure of "submitting" to the game in the interests of developing one's agency within it while also seeing what emergent situations will be presented as unintended consequences of that agency.

I think this argues for a learning approach that diverges a bit from Frank Lantz's by including the "Ameritrash" side of the boardgaming spectrum in our field of influence, since I feel that some of these are beginning to broach the same experiential territory as video games.

Rather than treating boardgames as a quasi-classical set of almost platonic game forms (i.e. "back to basics"), why not look at them as equally vibrant, complex, and sometimes messy experiments that have evolved in tandem with (and sometimes under the influence of) video games and often strive, under their own unique devices, to convey mediated, collaborative experiences?

In this model, both digital and non-digital games can be brought into a larger discussion that I hinted at with Samuel R. Delany's interim strategy for describing our complex interface with experience, with "what happens" in games themselves.

"The mutual inadequations of language and desire constitute what happens."

I feel I should reduce the scope of Delany's use of the word desire here, which he quite intentionally brings into this model as a dialog with the Lacanian concept. I think his personal example in relation to his formative experiences with science fiction fits our purposes a bit more closely:

[T]he necessary feeling that greater excitement lay only a book away had already been clearly--and socially--established. It's a feeling--call it desire--that must be fixed to any genre if that genre is to be pursued; probably it must be fixed to any semantic category for that category to persist as a social reality. Like all desire it is formed on absence, the missed, the just-out-of-reach, the greater wonder and adventure waiting for us just over there that is what language, leaping ahead of experience, constantly creates via that gap.

Bringing this back to gaming, desire is both what keeps us hooked to the game we're playing and keeps us looking toward the next game to fulfill something others haven't yet. It's something that maintains our engagement with a game if there is a compelling and potentially bridgeable gap between what the game's language is telling us --or instructing us in the ability to speak-- and our moment-by-moment experience within that game.

Think of GladOS apologizing to you, telling you that the room you've just entered is a mistake and is unsolvable. This presents ruptures between what the game is telling you, your own previously tutorialized agency in the game, and the actions you are currently undertaking to make it to the next room. You know you are being lied to and you won't put the controller down until you effect the experience of proving this... and exploring just how far the lie really goes. Desire.

I want to get back to the gap between that desire and the ludic language that lags behind it or jumps ahead of it and constitutes the space where the game experience happens.

In gaming I see the dynamics of an interface with experience that I feel are quite unique. The intent of the design, the functioning of the game itself, and the agency of the player are constantly engaged in a negotiation, building a model of what is supposed to be "happening" in the game throughout its duration.

In the best games, or the ones I find most personally satisfying, this experience isn't occurring in the declared rules or representational language of the game, nor the player's own agency (as language). It forms in the slippage between this register of language and the expectation, the desire that impels the player to manifest and construct their concept of what the game is or could become as a consequence of their next step.

Board games in the vein of Earth Reborn can achieve uniquely satisfying, evocative, and engaging experiences because this fluctuating process isn't abated in the interests of making mechanics or language transparent. The player's constant state of constructing and being constructed inform a large part of the pleasure of gaming in this genre and it's a state I would like to see developed and explored more fully in video games as well.

We're beginning to see more of these explorations of experiential modeling in retro-oriented games, perhaps because of their often minimalist conceits in visual design. When playing these games I feel less like I'm being "plugged into" a narrative and/or ludic structure and given some choices and skillsets to propel it (e.g. Heavy Rain), but more like I'm shaping my personal experience of the game and its significance, its act of meaning and textuality. I'd be curious to see if this is possible in more representational games, or whether a certain defamiliarization of the game's presentation is almost necessary to engage this type of play.

In any case, the current state of indie games gives me hope that while AAA development studios are hard at work on the next FPS on rails, there are other souls out there who see other possibilities, similar gaps between our current experiences in video games and what desire, jumping ahead of this experience, makes us believe might be out there to explore and enrich our understanding of what games are.

This is the gap where language and interim strategies form, some expressed as games and some expressed in words.

Thrown to the wolves

When Left 4 Dead 2 launched, I wanted to play the game with a friend of mine whose purview of gaming mostly involved World of Warcraft, some Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance, and a hefty amount of God of War. Twitchy, cooperative shooting was obviously not a significant part of his repertoire, so we had some catching up to do. Since L4D2 used the Source engine, I decided to ease him into the mechanics by getting him started with Half-Life 2, which was rewarding and fun in and of itself, but not just in terms of playing the game.

It was fascinating to watch someone actually go through the process of internalizing a game for the first time, especially in a genre and/or engine where the controls and mechanics have become so conventionalized as to feel like second nature to me. I forgot how "raw" and immediate a new game experience can be, and how paradoxically immersive it can feel when everything is unfamiliar, clumsy, and potentially dangerous; like Gordon Freeman's slow disoriented stumble through the subway station and through queues leading to increasingly menacing locations, and the inevitable chase.

I think we've all undergone the process, to a more or less embarrassing extent. You move your physical body and head around, overcompensating for the lack of effect on the screen, physically jump at surprise events or sounds, feel that "gut cringe" when making a risky leap, point the camera/crosshairs at everything within your sight that may be a threat or point of interest. Most of these immediate, affecting reactions seem to fade as you internalize the rules of the game world and your interface to it becomes more transparent.

Experienced gamers take that moment of "awakening" into a new game for granted as a transitional one. It can last for mere seconds until the basic controls are understood, or it can linger for the first few hours until mechanics are clarified. Players are made to feel that one's mastery of the game is commensurate with building an experiential filter to process the "real" elements of the game and push the rest into the background.

Designers have often considered this moment, or string of learning moments, to only fall within the scope of a tightly scripted tutorial phase, where the user is still cocooned from failure and allowed to internalize what was intended before moving on to the "real" stakes and engaging the player in the presumably higher registers of gaming: navigating narrative, decision-making, skill progression, character-building, tactics, etc.

But one could argue that those other registers of interaction can lose some of their immersive qualities when the player's attention and involvement have effectively become indoctrinated, or rather tutorialized, in "the way things are" in the game, or in what is foreground versus background information. There's something to be said for letting some of that background bleed back into the gameplay and keep the player engaged and exposed, to keep that sense of being thrown to the wolves.

Without this sense of exposure and risk, one finds conundrums such as in Modern Warfare 2, where details in the environment almost feel wasted when contrasted with the scope of the gameplay itself and the objects in the player's actual gaming foreground. Granted they do, as a gestalt, contribute to a sense of place, but that sense is mostly detached or running in parallel to the game being played.



Even moments where one can stop and appreciate the little details of an environment tend to occur in proscripted, safe pauses in the action, or brief lapses of attention to the "real" game. But why frame this form of appreciation in what amounts to smelling the roses, rather than making it a key component of the foreground that one *needs* to understand, to process as a game object that needs to reckoned with if one wants to continue playing?

Why not force the player to pay this sort of attention for the duration of their engagement with the game, without clearly staging safe spaces in which to appreciate it? Or if one needs a safe place to digest a piece of narrative or "drink in" a location why not force the player to create and assess that safe place for themselves?

BioShock does this quite well, where the locale alternates between being the point of focus, the set piece, and being a trove of information one returns to plunder after neutralizing various threats.



Demon's Souls goes so far as to adopt an "unreliable narrator" approach to the game world, where the player is constantly double-guessing the cues in her environment, always gauging the safety of a given location, the maneuverability and weight of her equipment, the good faith of the player who left a message scrawled in some godforsaken corner of the world promising "treasure ahead." Even the safety of the Nexus itself comes into question at later points in the game. It all adds up to a tremendously oppressive sense of place and makes the player "earn" the safety to appreciate it from anything other than a pragmatic, survivalist sense.

I don't necessarily think that such an experiment in death by exposure would always guarantee a better game, and in some cases wouldn't even be applicable. Who would want a competitive FPS where the environment was a constant menace or liability? Most people who play those games look for that quality in their human opponents. They don't need the playing field to be an active threat.

But we're beginning to see more games extending that sense of environmental unreliability and opacity into their foreground to great effect. It doesn't always require a complete rewrite of the premise or mechanics either. Basic changes like the torrential downpours and flooding in the Heavy Rain stage of L4D2 introduce this concept to fantastic effect, making you feel simultaneously helpless yet determined to carve out a safe path with the tools and skills your team has already acquired.

It's not necessarily game-changing, but it's palpably player-changing, and I really hope we see more of these moments in future games.

All Apologies: the current state of videogame criticism

This won't surprise anyone who knows me. I spend most of my work breaks and micro-breaks listening to videogame podcasts and reading videogame blogs.

This sporadic immersion in game journalism steeps my brain in videogaming conversations throughout the day as I work. It's almost blissful, really. I'm continually amazed at how the flame-ridden, nerdy, proto-adolescent conversations in the Usenet enclaves of yesteryear have gradually transformed into a culture of mostly intelligent conversations surrounding game design, theory, and possibility.

While quite a few venues of videogame discourse seem to have grown up with their interlocuters, gaming as a medium and practice appears to be entering the awkward, slowly evolutionary, "teenage" phase of its development, seemingly trailing the critical expectations surrounding it by a few years.

This prototypical stage has lead to an admittedly frustrating disconnect between public mass media, which continue to approach gaming as a primarily juvenile pop-cultural phenomenon (with all of the hysteria accorded to this cultural sector if potency or influence becomes a perceived issue), and a deeply invested critical community of game designers who see where videogaming can evolve as a new art form.

I'm sure many critics in the blogosphere would like to see the evolution of games accelerated toward their obvious potential, as recent discussions concerning the need for a "Citizen Kane" of gaming have indicated. But I have a confession: I actually hope that games remain in their current stage for a bit longer as the critical community eventually breaks free of the apologetic rut in which it seems to be trapped and instead begins to foment, mature, and refine the discourse surrounding games and their relationship with aesthetic cultural practice.

I think the current state of gaming is, in fact, the perfect backdrop for a deepening understanding of what the subject of gaming criticism should be, and what games themselves are capable of becoming.

In the past couple of years, for economic and technological reasons beyond the scope of this post, the attention of game criticism has been effectively split between two spheres: "AAA" games created by large development studios and marketed by publishers with deep budgets, and indie games usually developed by teams that can be enumerated on a single hand.

The former sphere is driven by mass-market sales and largely comprised of franchises or "intellectual properties" which are executed as flawlessly as possible and iterated for as long as the market or brand loyalty for that IP stands. Recent examples include Uncharted 2, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Rachet & Clank Future. Growth here can be characterized as iterative and evolutionary, and primarily honed to the tastes and expectations of their targeted demographics.

The indie sphere is characterized largely by innovative design and a rapid development model, a necessity given the restricted budgets & resources. It also seems to have a stronger imperative to create uniquely engaging and/or experimental game experiences aimed at a smaller, more auteur-oriented audience. Iterations or sequels are sparse here and are usually moot. Examples include: Machinarium, Flower, Braid.

I'm admittedly painting these two spheres in large brushstrokes, but I think that anyone who has read or participated in game criticism lately has noticed this rough distinction and the split attention it has effected. This has created some very productive and encouraging moments of critical dissonance where expectations developed in one arena have been brought to bear upon the other.

For instance, such dissonance has been fruitful in galvanizing critics into holding games accountable for "growing up" in the face of market forces that seem to be actively discouraging this growth in the AAA arena.

I think of this as the "ludic pull" in criticism, a drive to break gaming out of the imitative constraints and genre assumptions it has placed upon itself and to explore what makes videogaming experientially distinct and important as a medium unto itself.

In the opposite direction, the paradigm of the super-produced "blockbuster" title has continued to contextualize gaming in the tropes of cinematic narrative in its critical, marketing, and visual vocabularies, for better or worse.

While this has allowed games to mature in some aspects, such as visual devices and narrative structure, arguments have been brought against this implicit "cinematic imperative" in game design, which purportedly risks hampering growth and exploration, relegating videogames to a perpetual "para-cinematic" medium.

I think this fear of marginalizing videogames is largely misplaced and disempowering to a certain extent. This is the "apologetic pull" in game criticism, and it has outlasted its own usefulness. I agree with much of Michael Abbott's argument concerning the places where cinematic appropriations are actually worthwhile in videogaming if they're taken confidently as tools in a larger palette. The problem is that most game critics and designers aren't entirely confident in that palette yet, mostly because it hasn't been fully defined.

In opposition to this apologetic pull, I'd ask critics to consider the following: Could films, in fact, come to be perceived as "paraludic" in the coming century?

When it comes down to it, I think the tables are slowly turning in this direction. Though it's difficult for visual arts and film critics to see it now, I believe that cinema in its current form will eventually be percieved as a subset of whatever it is that games are becoming.

In my perception, videogames aren't just a new narrative medium or visual art, or interactive entertainment. Agency, interactivity, and systemic thinking are indeed significant aspects in gaming, but they meld with subjective experience and imagination to such an unprecedented extent, that I'd venture to say that videogames are becoming a completely new cultural aesthetic practice. What we're facing is the birth of a new technology of the subject, or technology of subjectivity, which I don't think has really occurred since film.

That's a pretty big change to be evolving toward. As with most paradigm shifts of this order, criticism really won't have the vocabulary to wrestle with it until the shift has already occurred. Modernist critics couldn't entirely fathom or articulate the rupture that art had undergone in the late 1950's until well into the 1970's, when a philosophical discourse on contemporary art had finally solidified around necessary ruptures in its own assumptions, namely with the advent of post-structural and post-historical criticism.

I think gaming criticism is finally entering the preliminary stages of developing such a framework.

However, the recent pursuit and question of a "Citizen Kane" of gaming indicates that escape velocity from quasi-modernist genre concepts hasn't been achieved yet. When we can move past that question and put it to rest as, at best, misplaced, then the real questions can begin to be asked.

Shrink wrapped

As I write this, I'm running on roughly four hours of sleep. Not because I was partying last night, and certainly not because I was gaming.

I was awakened at 4AM by my three-year-old daughter who was having difficulty breathing and could only describe it as "my mouth hurts" followed by gagging and wheezing. She's OK. It was a croupe, common in kids her age and exacerbated by the wildfire smoke that's been filling Santa Cruz for the past week. A few minutes in the cool night air cleared it up. Several days before, my five-year-old son had the same problem around 5 am.

These early awakenings aren't an uncommon occurrence though they're of course usually less scary. Just a kid wanting his/her cereal, or wanting to go potty, or complaining that his/her sheets are sandy. You name it. And in case you're wondering, no, you can't "order" a kid to go back to sleep, and try as they may, they cannot snuggle themselves back to sleep in your bed. At least mine can't, and that's alright. Warm fuzzy morning for the kids; kinda groggy morning for the adults. We can handle it; we have the coffee.

Where was I going with this? Sleep deprivation, yes. Often a sign that your time has become a precious commodity, and that you've been spending more of it than you can afford. This in itself is sometimes a sign of regret, of staying awake in some vain hope of regaining the time you took for granted as a 20-something. Trust me, it doesn't work.

I'm 36, a married father of two, and owner of entirely too many shrink wrapped videogames. They've remained unopened because, whether I admit it to myself or not, I barely have the time to actually play them. I've come to discover that, as I grow older, my game purchases (and book purchases for that matter) signify something more than my intent to play them.

When I'm buying a game, I seem to be buying the idea that I'll somehow have the time to play it. Games are the idealization of free time for me, a symbol that somehow, between the hours of 8 and 11 PM, I will escape the tyranny of the clock (and the onset of sleep). Or sometimes I'll think of it as an investment in future free time, when X game will no longer be available but I'll eventually have the bandwidth to enjoy it.

I've made my peace with this realization and have tempered my purchases somewhat, but I wish I could have seen it coming much earlier because I have left quite a few old games unopened in my earlier gaming years assuming I'd have the time to complete them after playing whatever hot game of the month had shoved it out of the spotlight. And these have accumulated, not into some sort of prized trophy collection as it would to some, but as an embarrassing sign that I made a fundamental mistake as a gamer: I took my damn hobby for granted.

So these pristine pieces of plastic sit there on the shelf, leering at me, and I've often walked up to a copy of say, Persona: Revelations, and thought about cracking it open and basking in the luxury of a JRPG time-sink. Then I look at the clock, put it back, and fire up some XBLA.

Recently, I've decided, both for the sake of my credibility as a gamer, and for the sake of my wallet, that I need to stop doing this.

So I've started a new habit of opening some of these shrink wrapped time capsules with my kids (maybe not the Shin Megami Tensei stuff, but you get the idea), and to them, at this age, the event is almost like opening a Christmas present.

As for me, sitting there with my kids, reading lines of slowly scrolling dialog aloud and listening to my son giving me advice on what spell to cast, I start to feel some of that coveted time coming back to me in an unexpectedly different form, a better form, and one that I certainly won't take for granted, ever.

This was a triumph: a freakin old review of Portal

To alleviate the somber tone of my latest gaming obsession, Fallout 3, I had recently decided to try out Portal. This decision was based largely on the ending song that I'd stumbled across when I googled some of the more bizarre lyrics someone had quoted from the tune. The cheerful morbidity of the AI seemed to hold the humor I was missing in Bethesda's post-nuclear opus.

Admittedly, I'm also a sucker for spatial puzzles.

Upon completing the game, my only regret is that I hadn't played this sooner and that I didn't pick up the rest of the Orange Box package. Any universe that can spawn a spinoff as clever and affecting as this one most certainly deserves a playthrough regardless of my aversion for most FPS games.

The synergy of Portal's presentation, narrative context, and central mechanic is rare enough in itself, but I've never experienced a game that complements such a level of design with a commensurately intelligent and layered level of humor. Much of this is effected through an AI named GLaDOS (Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System) who functions as the player's coach, tester, and warden, delivering a sadism that is as strikingly humorous as it is disturbing in its unassuming, antiseptic quality, spoken in warmly musical vocoder tones.

"Please note that we have added a consequence for failure. Any contact with the chamber floor will result in an "unsatisfactory" mark on your official testing record, followed by death. Good luck!"

GLaDOS is absolutely inhumane, yet equally sincere.

This mirrors the functional detachment the player is made to feel in relation to their own character. The "protagonist" is a rather blank slate whose sole purpose is to wield the portal device and follow your input as you navigate her through each testing room. Our only actual glimpses of her occur in moments when the portals happen to create a recursive field of view that includes her body.

With one ambiguous exception (that I won't describe in detail, lest I spoil it; for those in the know, this does more to personalize GLaDOS than the object in question), one could go so far as to state that there is little to no emotional attachment to any figure or object in the game.

This oddly functions to enhance the player's immersion, directing it as a lightly narrative but mostly cerebral & playful exercise in physics and the pursuit of the next Aha-Erlebnis moment.

And these moments, to my honest surprise, were not nearly as serendipitous as I'd felt them to be. Upon completing the game, I returned to most of the exam rooms and listened to the commentary nodes out of idle curiosity, and I was stunned by the carefully orchestrated and play-tested nature of many of my "discoveries".

Architecturing the lure of these "aha" moments to be the primary driver of the game, and doing so successfully (I never once felt stuck), really shows expert restraint, in my opinion, by keeping the focus on the gameplay and shunning the "cinematic" tropes that many games would fall into in an effort to further immerse the player and drag them along the correct course.

Portal exemplifes the qualitative difference in game design between polishing and belabouring the narrative context. The studio could have easily piled on more visual clutter, more writing, more voicoever work, and possibly a coda at the end, but they obviously understood that this would have diminished the game.

Scattershot "epics" such as those devised by Hideo Kojima almost seem needlessly baroque in contrast to the lean devices here.

Granted the comparison is rather unfair due to the drastically different genres and intended effects, but Portal's style does make a strong argument for finding smarter, more efficient, and dare I say, mature ways to engage the player that don't necessarily use reams of dialogue, contrived plot twists, or hamfisted characterizations. Incidentally, I also believe that it's time for videogames to finally divorce themselves from the cinematic imperative and begin to stand on the strength of their own unique, and uniquely powerful, devices. But that rant's been done before.

In another clever, though somewhat foreseeable twist to the game, the player's progress is accompanied by an increasing sense of distrust in their own trajectory. As the requirements ramp up, so does the player's ability to perceive the possibilities of deviation afforded by the portal gun, and the increasing probability that these will be put to the test.

I'll leave the rest for the reader to experience. The final path one takes, and the obviously inevitable confrontation are too entertaining to spoil here. I can only describe it as something between HAL's demise in 2001: A Space Odyssey and the verbal abuse one might sustain if one managed to really... really piss off Laurie Anderson.

I can only hope that Valve, or at least their Source engine, will bring similarly clever games in the future. In the meantime, I have some catching up to do with the Half-Life universe.

On the Sublime

The texts that have brought me the most enjoyment and fascination have always been those that confront me with an inscrutable strangeness while themselves modeling encounters with the ineffably strange. For me, these push the boundaries of the act of reading and somehow make me feel changed from having read them.

Viewing Mushishi definitely fell into this category of experience for me.

This anime consists of a series of 26 stories that are mostly self-contained and set in what seems to be the late Edo period (though some of the clothing seems anachronistic in places). The main character is a peripatetic wanderer named Ginko whose profession as "Mushishi" impels him to catalog and contain the Mushi, a life form that both precedes and exceeds our known spectrum of living beings. In the first episode, Ginko describes them with a curiously recursive anthropomorphic analogy: if humans are represented by the middle finger of the hand, which is the furthest point from the heart, and microbes are at the base of the wrist, then the Mushi would be somewhere near the chest.

Sounds fairly formulaic enough, until our first encounter with the Mushi actually takes place. Their first visual appearance occurs in a scene where a child, practicing his calligraphy, watches with exasperation as his Kanji once again float off of the page and prance around the room in a growing parade of loping life forms. This same trope of "living writing" recurs in one of the final episodes, as does another materialization of the Mushi: as a parasitic inhabitant of the human eye. I think these are very purposful "bookend" parallels but haven't been able to fully analyze their significance yet. In any case, this isn't your typical series of ghost stories.

Each episode consists of increasingly bizarre manifestations of the Mushi and the situations they create for their hosts, or the society that surrounds the host. Sometimes these situations are seemingly symbiotic, only to reveal deeper problems that have gone unaddressed in the host or his surroundings. At other times an initially hostile infection or possession by Mushi comes to be understood as the correct course for all involved. This isn't as clinical or strictly parasitic as my description might sound, however. The series inhabits an entrancing gray area between zoology, epidemiology, and mysticism, something I haven't experienced since Princess Mononoke, and a few other works.

[SPOILER]

For instance one of the later episodes portrays a seaside village where those who are known to be on the verge of death are sent to an offshore site to be "offered" to the ocean which, on a full moon, will produce small egg-like spheres. A mother is then chosen to ingest one of these eggs and give birth to their "revived" relation. Ginko of course eventually discovers that a form of Mushi is producing these eggs which contain a homunculus-like replica of the living being that was absorbed. The protagonist is called to the village by a woman who struggles with a bit of an identity problem. She has given birth to, and is raising, her own mother, which occasions questions of teleology, the limits of parental love, immortality through progeny, the profound yet familiar "otherness" of one's own child, and so on... I could write an article for each of these episodes, to be honest, so I'll end the synopsis here.

[END SPOILER]

The Mushi and the underground "lifestreams" that they cluster around are as alluring as they are absolutely uncaring, often forcing the character into a tricky negotiation between transformative fascination and self-preservation... one that sometimes pushes the boundaries of what it means to be human.

This simultaneous dwarfing and integration of the individual into the scale of an unfathomably uncaring yet absolutely living universe reminds me somewhat of the concept of the Sublime in the philosophy and aesthetics of the Romantic period, namely that of Arthur Shopenhauer in The World As Will and Representation. But this concept in western philosophy gained much of it's ideological heft by centralizing the self and it's pursuit of this experience, that of it's own staggering insignificance in relation to the larger external world.

In the narrative of Mushishi, the self is usually woven into a larger social fabric, whose intersections with the Mushi are quite a bit more complex than a generalized feeling of wonder and individual insignificance. The Mushi operate as protonatural "drivers", functioning both as a trope that mirrors human problems and as a catalyst toward achieving a certain balance or homeostasis in the character's interaction with extra-human forces.

Where the western sublimist would place the distinct self against a limitless background, the brand of sublimity in Mushishi posits a complex social self in the gravitational pull of an unknown, but constantly interactive, transformative, and sometimes destructive, attractor which is equally boundless.

This sublimity is truly stunning to experience.

With each episode, I've felt compelled to write something until the conclusion of the series essentially obligated me to put something here. Though I feel that I might have diluted the experience of the show by academically blathering about it at such length, I do encourage any thinking reader/viewer with an analytical bent, a penchant for the sublime, and an open mind, to seek out this series in whatever format they can. They won't be disappointed.