Digital Love

Fez and Life

The future is scary. I’ve learned a lot over the 18 years of my life and most of that is completely useless.  Next year I will be going into uncharted territory with college.  The tension that arose from college decisions and plans led me to return to what I always found comfort in.  I’ve always found solace in video games, but that doesn’t mean every one is able to resonate with me.  Fez gave me visions of the future though, a hindered (as life commonly is) view of what is to come.  Fez encouraged me to look at life from new angles, a personal statement that not many games allow.  The simple characters, world and art style allow for a cohesive flowing of an individual into the space of the game and conveys a sense of belonging that enables inward thought.  Fez affected me in the best possible way. 

Fez has a strange feeling of foreboding and nostalgic terror associated with it.  The beginning of the game, as happy and bright as it seems, is equally strange as it is welcoming.  The protagonist, Gomez, is told that he is to go on an adventure just like others before him.  Gomez and the player unquestioningly agree and are granted a fez that grants the power to access a third dimension.  In the process of acquiring this power Gomez also destroys the source of this fez, the Hexahedron (it is a floating gold cube).  The game then reboots, the equivalent of breaking the fourth wall within the medium of a game, and puts you back into the world of Fez, except this time with the power to rotate the world that Gomez lives in. 

As simple as Fez’s life and world seem visually, the ordeal that the character just experienced is similar to the experience that any other person experiences in the realization of their calling in life.  The moment that we realize the potential of what is possible with our lives, everything comes crashing down and the world seems to be on the brink of disaster.  Gomez is no different than anybody else.  He is told that he has a new power and has to save the world, just as many other people are told that they have a gift and it is their duty to uphold that gift.  However, Gomez’s journey is not an easy one and after traveling and collecting what seems to be everything necessary to succeed, there is even more to discover and learn. The original goal becomes only a half-way point towards restoring Gomez’s world to order.  His journey looked like it was at an end but instead stretched farther into the distance, a feeling that I could connect with.

 

Going to college is a new beginning for me.  It will be the first time that I will be formally studying a topic that I actually care about.  Going into a game development program may end up being a terrible decision, but it is a decision that I am making and it is one that I see myself potentially doing something with.  I don’t expect to be the next great designer or programmer or producer.  I hope I can make an impact of some kind on the world but there is still so long until I reach that point.  Fez came out on PC a little more than two weeks ago, around the time that I was thinking a lot about where my life choices were taking me.  Gomez’s emergence into a questionable future hit me hard. 

There was something scary that I couldn’t put a finger on.  The deserted and raining city world made me question the existence of any helping hand in the game.  Who was I really saving from this supposed cataclysm if nobody was there?  The graveyard made me want to turn off my computer.  I was terrified of what might rise up out of the ground, even though that area was more filled with life than any other area up to that point.  Even if that life was deceased, it was still more present than other areas.  Gomez’s journey eerily reflected my own, though mine is filled with less raining graveyards and empty cities.  The world of Fez was similar to my own; seemingly empty but guided by an unseen force.  The emptiness gave me hope for something more, a hope that others had come before me and were guiding me, even if I could not see it.  I know others have walked the path I have, stumbling into the future of their lives.  Fez helped me to see that and reassured me that even in a world that seems so empty there may still be something waiting for me at the end.  Just like for Gomez, there are others that have passed through this struggle too and they left behind their knowledge, even if it is in the form of strange symbols that seem to have no meaning.  I don’t know where my future is headed exactly, it wouldn’t be normal if everything was laid out clearly in front of me.  Just as Gomez had a hat placed upon his head, I have set a task upon myself and I know that I will reach that one day. Gomez and I’s journey is not one that is physical or religious as much as it is mental.  All I hope is that when the fez is placed on my head the world doesn’t come crashing down.   

Ico as Life

Some days I want life to be like Ico:

I find a girl I love.  I save her from her caged life, but there is still so far to go until we reach freedom.  As I pull her behind me, I can feel the tug of her arm telling me she is still there.  Only when an outside force interferes do I question whether she wants to come with me or not.  But in the end, when I have faced my trials, I will still be there for her.  And she is still there for me, holding my hand.  At some point we become separated, time has a tendency to slip, but instead of weakness I find strength in that separation.  In the end, I find her and I know my true intentions.  As our world falls apart there is only an open sea.  The future is unknown, except that we will be together and that would be all I need.

Mammon-Machine: Review Criticism: "A Dead Space 3 review reignites the games-as-art debate."

Strategy in Telltale’s The Walking Dead

I’ve recently been reading through Ralph Koster’s A Theory of Fun for Game Design (which is definitely worth buying/reading) and one of the concepts he talks about made me think about Telltale’s The Walking Dead.  The Walking Dead was one of the most critically acclaimed games of 2012 and managed to pack a lot of thoughts about morals, games, storytelling, and many other topics.  The most intriguing part about The Walking Dead was the way it went beyond trying to teach the player to learn a new skill and instead encouraged the player to think beyond a skill within the game and into what they personally would do.

This is where I get back to A Theory of Fun which is now slightly dated, written before many influential and groundbreaking games such as Bioshock, Braid, and before important talks such as Jesse Schell’s ‘Design Outside the Box.’  In 2005, when the book was written, the potential was seen by Koster, but he did not see it acted upon within the industry.  The density of thought provoking and intellectually designed games has increased greatly in the 7 years between the book being published and where we are today, but many of the points he brings up stand true. 

Koster’s basic argument is that games serve to teach the player something (usually within games it is learning a memory or how to aim and shoot at something) and the “skin” of the game is what makes up the aesthetics.  This “skin” entices us to play and it is a mixture of this “skin” and learning that engages the player and makes a game “fun.”  He goes on to state that good game design relies upon several factors (if you want to learn more read his book) one factor being that there should not be any single choice within a game that provides the player an indisputable easy way to succeed.  In my opinion, this is where The Walking Dead succeeds the most.

I’m going to go ahead and say THERE WILL BE SPOILERS AHEAD PROBABLY FOR THIS GAME SO DON’T READ IT IF YOU CARE ABOUT SHIT LIKE THAT.  On that note, the Walking Dead succeeds through its minimizing of any optimal strategies.  The mechanics of the game are almost non-existent and I would argue that it is one of the most accessible games due to this, alongside Dear Esther.  Rather than, as Koster argues, teaching the player some sort of gameplay strategy, it teaches the player to make decisions based upon what they think is best.  There is no optimal way to progress through the game in the sense of “winning”  because of the way the ultimate goal of the game is left to be extremely ambiguous.  The only static goal in the game is to protect Clementine, a little girl you find in the first episode and becomes the moral pillar of the main character, Lee.  However, if you progress through the story only choosing what is best for Clementine, Lee sacrifices many relationships with the people they seek refuge with.  So what is the correct strategy in this kind of situation?  Should the player sacrifice his relationship with his colleagues, a relationship that is necessary for both the player and Clementine’s survival; or should the player make choices that allow for a little girl to think (s)he is a good person.  

Regardless of what choice the player makes, they ultimately succeed in progressing the story, but the memory of the what the player did stays in the minds of other characters in the game.  More importantly, the way the characters reacted to the player’s discussion remain in the player’s memory too.  The game even continues to remind the player of when another character will remember what is chosen to be said.  There is a moment in the fifth and final episode of the game where the player has the choice to cut of the player’s/Lee’s arm in order to potentially stop the spreading of the zombie virus to the rest of your body. There is no right answer to this, because no matter what Lee dies and no matter what the animation and use of the lower right arm of the player is disabled.  I personally chose to keep my arm, a decision that very few people made, because of what Clementine would think about me not having an arm anymore.  The Walking Dead provides a relatively linear experience in terms of story and mechanics, but creates an incredibly large number of ways for the game to be viewed and experienced based upon the thoughts and beliefs of the player.  At a basic level, The Walking Dead isn’t a game about winning or losing, it is a game about learning what we would do when placed in the situation that Lee is placed in.

In the last couple pages of Ralph Koster’s A Theory of Fun, he states that in order to reach the full potential of the medium of video games, we are going to have to push boundaries just like every other medium.  Telltale’s The Walking Dead pushes boundaries of video games, showing its capabilities as a medium that can provide a way to teach players how to do more than to just shoot a moving target.  The Walking Dead dares to teach its player to consider the mental and physical effects of choice, while keeping any bias towards those decisions within the player.  The death of Lee at the end of the fifth episode marks the conclusion of the first season of the game.  This deeply moving scene between Clementine and Lee reveals the ultimate purpose of the game: though the outcome of the game is determined, the way that the player interacts with the system is incredibly meaningful beyond the game.  The strategy of The Walking Dead is not to win, but to instead emerge a better person due to the circumstances the player has been put through.

Honorable Choices

I remember when Dishonored was first announced.  Promised to be steampunk in feel but not in look and to stray away from the norms in terms of combat and stealth.  It was being developed by a star-studded group of designers and was being published by Bethesda in the peak of excitement for Skyrim.  There wasn’t any gameplay footage, no hands-on accounts, only pictures of angry looking rat-like people and rats.  Lots of rats.  But the people developing the game had a purpose.  They wanted choice and an environment worth exploring and I believe nearly a year later they have a achieved that goal.

 

Choices in games have been a major focal point for the past two or three years in the game industry.  It is what people claim makes games unique and gives people a reason to come back to their favorite games over and over.  Games like Mass Effect and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR) brought forward the idea of branching story lines that are influenced by choices the player make.  Infamous made choices available for how your superhero/villain would grow in his journey towards justice.  Different choices have been parts of games for a long time and it isn’t a matter of if they can actually give the player a choice in what occurs but more about how it can extend the “playability” of a game. 

 

There was outrage in the game community in regards to Mass Effect 3’s ending.  The previous games presented several different endings that allowed for the potential loss or survival of characters that the player had chosen to spends tens, if not hundreds, of hours in developing a relationship with.  Though the ultimate conclusion was mainly the same regardless of who was lost, each individual player of the game felt differently towards their squad members.  When Mass Effect 3 was released, the end of the trilogy according to Bioware, players were expecting to have every choice from every other game have an influence on the ending of the game.  People were expecting  an incredible diversity in the possibilities of the endings but instead what they found was 3 basic endings.  This was a choice made by the developers in order to fully conclude the story of the Mass Effect universe but it wasn’t enough to satisfy the people who had put hundreds of hours into the series, expecting any one of thousands of endings based upon how they had played all the other games. 

 

This conflict brought up several points, the first being that games have a potentially infinite number of choices but a finite number of results.  Though games can provide a very large number of choices and decisions that a player can sink hundreds of hours into, it won’t change the overall outcome of the game ending.  Even in games like Skyrim, a game that has “an infinite number of quests,” there is only one ending to the main quest.  Whether or not the future holds a game of infinite possibility, that is still a long way from reality. 

 

Games like Spec Ops: The Line and Bioshock have recently commented on this aspect of games in a more metaphorical way.  The Line, which in many ways is a continuation of Bioshock’s claims on choice and the morality of choice, provides the player with many choices throughout the game, but ultimately leads the same guilt and result in regards to the main player.  Dishonored continues the trend of many modern games and their focus on everything could be based on the choices made by the player.  The game starts out with an event that is uncontrollable, the death of your beloved Empress.  As the game progresses and your avatar, Corvo, must decide how he wishes to dispose of everybody involved in the murder of the Empress.  There are three extremes to how this can be carried out:  kill everybody, kill everybody stealthily, or don’t kill anybody.  All three are hard to accomplish and all lead to slightly different endings of the entire game but the same ultimate conclusion with the empress’ daughter on the throne. 

 

The choices towards those three extremes lead to different uses of different items.  Choices do not ruin this game but enrich its overall gameplay appeal.  Dishonored is unique in its involvement in these choices because rather than put them forward on a basis that you have spent many hours growing in a relationship with the person, they are instead based upon your personal involvement in what you think should happen.  It is less of a so called “moral” system and more of a legitimate choice in regards to the game itself.  In fact calling this a morality system is silly since there is very little morally good in killing, stealing, using black magic, or choking someone into unconsciousness.    This is a different kind of choice than other games in the way that it isn’t promoted as a moral system but instead as different way to play the game.  Games like Mass Effect and Infamous promote their “moral” systems as a way to judge how good or evil the avatar is within the world but they instead just give different incentives to choose one of the choices. 

 

Choices, in many cases, set apart games from other mediums.  The problem arrives when choices are misconceived as a way to increase the longevity of a game or provide a gimmicky way for people to gain different abilities.  Dishonored provides an incredible example of how choices in the gameplay allow for the player to be more influenced in their decisions in the game.  Regardless of how silly and trivial the story may be, the game was not designed to tell an incredibly convincing and moving story, but to create choices for the player and involve them in the setting by making those choices in movement and combat affect exploration and involvement in the environment.