10/11/14 Today's Inquiry

I thought I'd do a little bit of a long form piece today; hope you don't mind.

It's no secret that I enjoy video games. Certainly anyone on my friends list on Steam sees my name pop up frequently. The hours I put in to games probably place me squarely into the "hardcore" designation although my tastes have changed over the years and I don't think most hardcore gamers would call me that. Having played games most of my adolescent and adult life, I can say with some certainty that video games are getting really, really, really, good. Like, literature quality good. Not Shakespeare or Austen good but Hemingway and Harper Lee good. Or at the very least Suzanne Collins good.



The reason I bring all this up is my recent enjoyment of video game criticism. As games have continually improved and gained complexity, the response of the public and journalists has had to find ways to account for those changes. A recent example would be a game like Bioshock Infinite. It very clearly weaves in social and political themes in a way which matters to the story, characters, and - this is the crucial part - players. The game is about a year and a half old and reviewers found themselves in a tough position. Yes, they needed to write about the visual quality and gameplay mechanics and control scheme and level design and all that jazz but they were also compelled to review the story. Reviewing the story meant interacting with the ideas within including rampant racism, classism, and sexism in the game's culture. Ryan McCaffrey at IGN wrote in his review that

Infinite deserves plenty of credit in its moment-to-moment storytelling too. Serious themes abound in Columbia’s alternate-reality 1912. Racism, sexism, nationalism, and religion are all put directly in front of you, whether you like it or not. It makes a point simply by confronting you with these uncomfortable issues and forcing you to at least think about them. And though Infinite never gets preachy, it certainly offers political commentary, chiming in with obvious nods to the “99% vs. 1%” debate -- even if, unlike in the original BioShock, Infinite slyly submits that both sides of the coin have their demons, and neither can claim the moral high ground in Columbia. To that end, Infinite skips out on any significant moral choices or multiple endings from the previous BioShocks. I didn’t miss them, though, as its story arc is both definitive and impactful while riding its own singular track.

His comment was par for the course in reviews at the time. What stood out to me then was how infrequently games required this level of discussion. Bioshock Infinite was special because, even in it's failings, it addressed real world problems. Games rarely did that. Often the moral complexity of a game came from making choices whose ethics were constructed within the game's fictional universe and had little application outside the game (I'm looking at you KOTOR and Mass Effect). A great game, film, book, whatever, requires more than passive enjoyment and spectacle and Bioshock Infinite demanded a complex and problematic interaction with the player.

Then something interesting happened. It seemed like every few weeks a game would come out that pushed those boundaries. You had Remember Me and The Last of Us. You had the various Telltale studios adventure games. You had a whole spate of independent games which were all, well, weighty. Within a very short period of time studios, players, and journalists went from a simplistic kind of interaction to a very complicated one. The fallout is still being felt now in the industry and many people are reacting very poorly. Go google Gamergate and catch up on the poor state of "gamer" culture if you're at all interested.

So let's fast forward to this past month and two major releases, Destiny and Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. The response to these two games indicates, I think, a big shift in video games. Basically, I think that video games are now best understood as art. Not just one game or another but video games in general are at a point where they demand criticism of the content and experience rather than just the mechanics and gameplay. Both games are what the industry calls AAA. They're produced with multi-million dollar budgets, have huge advertising campaigns, earn millions of dollars, and are released widely to a global audience. Typically a AAA game is not fertile ground for discussions of politics, power, gender, race, or anything of importance (cough, Call of Duty, cough). Yet, the critical response to both Destiny and Shadow of Mordor shows that the audience and industry are now in the art business.



Destiny came out first of the two to much fanfare. It's made by Bungie, the studio behind the massively successful Halo franchise, and promised to build on that success. If you're interested in an in depth look at the game, check out this review. The short version is that you're one of humanity's last remaining people and you have to fight against impossible odds to, well, save the universe. It's different, though, because you're always online and the game includes many MMORPG elements. You gain levels and equipment to progress your character. There are factions within the game that you can complete missions for to improve your reputation and gain access to more gear. You're always online with millions of other people playing the game. So far, it all seems kind of standard but something interesting happened as people began to play Destiny. They started to ask themselves "why am I playing this game?" That question is the crucial distinction which pushes the game into the category of art.

Within literary criticism there is a school of thought which focuses on the interaction between the reader and the text. It's been call many things: reader response, literary exploration, transactional theory. To summarize it as succinctly as possible, the importance of a work of art comes from the value and meaning created when the reader interacts with a story. People playing Destiny suddenly seems to be asking exactly that kind of question. Was there any meaning to the experience? Did they find any value in their interaction with the game?

Here are a few examples of that criticism. Ben Kuchera, a reviewer at Polygon, was very critical of the "loot cave" exploit that was recent patched out of the game.

Loot caves don't seem that fun to me.

The basics are simple. You find an area where you can farm enemies, you stand there for a while, and you kill everything you see. Every now and again you move in to pick up your loot.

These so-called loot caves are big business for Destiny; I've already heard from a few players who have rushed to their consoles to take advantage of the latest one before it's patched out of the game. I only have to pull up our real-time traffic tools to see that readers are more interested in loot caves than damned near anything else going on in gaming right now.

Kuchera is taking a step back and asking whether or not there's value and meaning in the experience of a game that encourages mindless repetition. I don't think this kind of criticism would have even crossed the minds of reviewers and players three or four years ago. People would have been more than happy to rank up and get gear the easy way. Now, many players and journalists are beginning to have a problem with mindless gameplay. He goes on to write,

Players aren't having fun, but they feel like they're getting ahead, and that sense of satisfaction and progression is beating out how the game is designed to be played. All the complex systems and currencies and ranks are thrown out the window when these caves are active in favor of players lining up to shoot into a cave.

A few days later, Bungie changed the way loot worked in the game so players had less of an incentive to grind caves. The caves aren't all that has people scratching their heads about the meaning of a game like Destiny. There was a recent event in the game called the Iron Banner which promised more loot and better equipment bonuses to players who had earned the highest level gear. Unfortunately it didn't exactly turn out that way:

A feedback thread about Iron Banner is likewise filled with complaints. "The level advantages are nonexistent and there is no gear benefit to my character besides aesthetics at 30," one player writes. "It's pretty much a let down, mostly because it feels like the regular crucible, which itself is terribly unbalanced by shotguns, fusion rifles, and auto rifles."

Here we see the flip side. Instead of a journalist asking for meaning, we find players wondering why they're playing. The event is supposedly a way to reward players who have committed time and effort to the game yet it seemed to matter very little whether a player was brand new or highly leveled. Again, that's a search for value and meaning on the part of the player. The game ostensibly had a mechanic to reward players for hard work thereby giving the players some kind of value for all their play time. When the game failed to deliver, players were upset and justifiably mad. The relationship established between the gamer and the game matters now and that's the dividing line between art and mere entertainment.



Switching to Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, we find a completely different kind of criticism at work. In literary criticism, critics who approach a text and look at the larger structure of power, race, gender, and class are often lumped together under the "Structuralist" category. Basically, they are examining the ways in which all of these larger themes play out in relation to the character and story. A feminist would examine how gender factors into characters' lives while a Marxist would seek to understand the role of class and wealth. I'm particularly fond of colonialism as a lens through which to view world literature since so much of the planet was dominated by a small island in the North Sea.

Shadow of Mordor has players taking control of their hero, Talion, who has to wage unceasing war against the Orcs (Uruks) and other evil minions of the Dark Lord Sauron. The reviews of the game were largely positive and one much touted feature was the "Nemesis system" which evolved various enemies based on the player's previous encounters with that enemy. If you hacked off an Orc's arm he would come back later with an ax prosthesis embedded in it and seek out revenge against you. But, the Nemesis system also allows for some problematic choices:

But as I watched my character revenge the death of his wife and son by furiously lunging a blade in and out and into a lifeless Uruk corpse, scaring away the few Uruks that survived his wrath, it hit me: I'm pretending to be a murderer and a torturer, a man who dabbles in terrorism and slavery to somehow right a personal wrongdoing. I'm the Jack Bauer of Mordor.

And like watching Jack Bauer wreak havoc on the threats against America at all cost, I perversely enjoyed almost every moment of it — until a graphic beheading broke whatever mental barrier I have that says, "What the hell is happening here?"

That's Chris Plante writing at The Verge. Plante is going right into structuralist territory by pointing out that the game is designed to allow you to be, well, a terrorist. You enslave and torture countless Orcs and seek to rule your enemy through fear. And even in the seemingly black and white universe of LOTR this kind of depravity is problematic to many players, including Mr. Plante. He is, frankly, shocked by the concepts behind this game and how it encourages you to act. That's not a distinction which many people worried about when playing, say, Skyrim just a few years before even though that game is very violent and allows for all sorts of depravity.

Similarly, Zach Gage noted a big problem with the game's stealth tutorial. There's no difference between sneaking up on your wife to kiss her and sneaking up on an Orc to slit his throat. Gage writes,

Aside from the obvious "women as learning objects that are later murdered" issue, there’s another issue at play here, and it’s one of craft.  Designers shouldn’t make kissing and murdering feel the same. At the very least they shouldn’t do so when you’re trying to make that kiss part of  an emotionally connecting moment that binds you to an NPC.

Gage is also participating in structuralist criticism here. He's identifying the ways in which real world patriarchy and male privilege have allowed the game's designers to ham-fistedly equivocate kissing your wife and killing your enemy. It's a real world power structure which infects the games mechanics and the story. This is not criticism of entertainment or mere pulp; this is criticism of art.

Video games no longer exist in the vacuum of entertainment and spectacle. Even big titles which are probably only meant to entertain and provide spectacle are being subjected to artistic criticism which focuses on far more than the game itself. Players are also demanding games that take their status in our culture seriously. The actions of our virtual avatars are being held to ethical standards which wouldn't have been imaginable a few years ago. The industry is responding because players are demanding games which provide meaningful and valuable experiences. In short: video games are getting really, really, really good.