Dead or Alive Extremism

So who are the feminists who actually wanted Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 banned? Can I have a show of boobs hands?

Ever since Play-Asia attributed Koei Tecmo's decision not to release the game outside of Asia to "SJW nonsense", the usual suspects have been yelling about a "war on free speech". But the agents provocateurs who instigated said war are some sort of reified 'They', a free-floating self-sufficient pronoun-without-antecedent. This is conspiracy-theorist language, guys.

See also: GameFAQs' best game ever poll.

Press the Gamergaters on this, and you get links to online articles in which the writers roll their eyes at the unabashed male-gaze sexism on display. Eye-rolling, as we all know, is a singular indicator of bellicose intent. It's practically firing a missile. Except for how it's, y'know, not.

When not linking to articles, they clarify that they're talking about "the SJWs", a set of which I am an element. Guys, your argument is literally based on telling me what I think and want, a subject on which I have - not to boast - some considerable authority. You might even say I'm the preeminent expert. I'm kinda going to know if you're wrong. Which you are.

I'm going to be clear here: I don't want your titty game banned, and I don't know anybody who does. What I do want is for your titty game to be criticised, and we all know Gamergate hates thin-skinned people who can't take criticism, so you should be right on board with me on this.

There has been a sea-change in negative criticism of video games in maybe the past five years, to which Gamergate seems to have remained oblivious. When Fox News criticised Mass Effect for including sex and allowing kids to "virtual orgasmic rape" their friends, that was ridiculous. Of course it was. They were trying to manufacture outrage over a story-driven entertainment product containing an admittedly somewhat clumsy (but remarkably tame) romance subplot, fabricating elements from whole cloth in order to do so. But Fox News didn't know what Mass Effect was. Even their invited "expert" had little clue. It is one hundred percent understandable that gamers should feel a little defensive about this. I feel defensive about this.

But as much as Gamergate loves to protest otherwise, Anita Sarkeesian et al do know video games. They make their living playing them and writing about them. They are, however, choosing to look at games through a lens of which the average 'gater has little experience, namely feminism. These aren't people who don't know what they're talking about. I promise you, no-one who doesn't know what they're talking about has even heard of Dead or Alive Xtreme.

By all means, get up in arms when an alarmist news outlet makes an uninformed criticism about games, but when someone's criticism is more informed than you are, maybe take a fucking seat. Of course, Gamergate doesn't make a distinction between informed criticism and uninformed criticism, or maybe can't. To them, criticism is hate, and in their flattened landscape, journalist Tauriq Moosa criticising gendered slurs or a lack of people of colour in games he otherwise loves is on exactly the same level as Jack Thompson calling for a blanket ban (or would be, if they didn't bewilderingly consider Thompson "not so bad"). It's a black and white, Us and Them mentality drip-fed through the dual channels of reactionary politics and "the game They [there's that word again!] don't want you to play" marketing.

The First Amendment is a funny old thing. Although it promotes the separation of Church and State, it's against the separation of head and body for criticising the wrong person. Way to be consistent, America! Anyway, my point is that encouraging criticism is literally the reason freedom of speech exists, so it's bizarre to see these self-styled free-speech warriors objecting to criticism so vehemently. To them, criticism is censorship, and freedom of speech is therefore freedom to speak without being criticised. They pervert the idea of free speech to mean its opposite, and then call us Orwellian.

As is their wont, Gamergate has once again conflated feminism with puritanical Mary-Whitehouse-esque moral guardianship, quite literally responding to accusations of sexism with the confused Spïnal Tap refrain, "What's wrong with being sexy?" Little wonder nobody wants to debate them when they're so exhaustingly pathological at missing the point.

Unity, Steam, and the Gaming Revolution

Five days ago, I downloaded Unity. In between working through tutorials and watching didactic videos, I've managed to construct something that generates a random terrain (based on the Diamond-square algorithm) with different textures based on the steepness of the terrain at any given point, drops a third-person player character on top of it, and allows the player to run across the terrain, using the mouse to turn, all while the game has a rudimentary day-night cycle.

That's five days, most of which, to be honest, were spent learning about Unity rather than working with it. Conclusion: Unity is easy.

Jim Sterling made a video about Unity actually being good as well as just easy (which is what prompted me to try it, to be honest), and how it has an unfairly bad reputation. Which is only fair, since the reason it has an unfairly bad reputation is largely because of his videos where he slags off certain terrible so-called games which happen to be made with Unity.

I want to expand a little bit on that idea here. The problem with Unity is exactly the same as the problem with any other democratising force in any creative medium: When 'can' gets too easy, 'should' is ignored.

That's not to say that democratisation is in itself a bad thing. I fully and without reservation believe that it's a good thing for the tools of game development (or, again, any other creative medium) to be placed in the hands of people who might have talent, but limited resources. But there is a price to be paid for it.

I know this is a common theme in my posts, but we've already seen this happen with music. I'm going to come out and say it: anyone who says music was better in the old days is objectively wrong. Even twenty years ago, what you listened to was mostly what record labels told you to like. There were a few little indie rabbit holes you could explore, if you were willing to expend the time and effort, but mostly it was either mainstream or "big indie". Now, it's super-easy to find music you actually want to listen to, because there's far more chance someone out there has the ability and inclination to make it, and because our methods of music distribution have adapted to that. (Caveat: Music was better in the old days if you don't want to have to actually decide what you like.)

Where gaming is at, particularly with Unity, is where music was ten years ago. At that point, it was a lot easier to record and release music than it was twenty years ago, so there was a vibrant explosion of creativity, but distribution hadn't adapted to that. So you had to wade through dozens of awful MySpace bands - who bypassed the 'should' check because the 'can' check was too easy - before you finally found something listenable.

And in all this, Steam has taken a retrograde step. It has democratised access to its store, which in principle sounds laudable, except Steam is a distributor. It's not Steam's job to democratise game development; it's Steam's job to adapt to the democratisation of game development. Steam has become to games what MySpace was to music ten years ago. You can find something that appeals specifically to you, rather than to a target demographic carefully cultivated by marketing, which is great, but only if you're willing to wade through effluent to get there.

What makes this all the more bizarre is that, at one point, Steam was trying to learn the lessons the trials of music distribution had to teach. Recommendations were based on forming last.fm-style associations between games, and the more recently implemented tag system could have brought a lot more power to show users games they are likely to be interested in.

Except... they didn't really do anything with it. And recommendations have been reduced to highlighting games that a lot of people have bought (honestly, tell me something I don't know), that a lot of people have reviewed positively (implying that Steam reviews have any intrinsic value), or that are just plain new (which really isn't an indicator of anything useful). Oh, and pushing DLC for games I already own. Don't recommend me that. It's quite simple: If I like the game, I will buy the DLC. Your recommendation of it is just a waste of space.

Even the curator system is a good idea in theory, but doesn't work well in practice. For one thing, and perhaps I'm using curation wrong, but whatever, I tend to follow curators whose critical style I enjoy; not necessarily curators who have the same tastes as me. And that works both ways, too. Certain curators I dislike for reasons other than their taste in games are enough to put me off a game if they endorse it. I know that's not rational, but it happens.

Now, here's the thing: I don't even necessarily have a problem with Steam selling asset-flipped garbage. If Valve wants to open the floodgates, abandon quality control, and sell all the things, then that's fine. But when such garbage is given greater standing on the supposedly personalised storefront than a game for which Steam already has all the data necessary to be able to guess I might actually want, then that's when Steam isn't doing its job properly.

Like I say, I'm all for democratisation of game development. Even the "death of modding" I hear people talk about in fearful tones is, to my mind, less because of AAA publishers locking their games down, and more because people who would previously have turned to modding now have access to the tools they need to produce their own games. Which I can't really see as a bad thing.

I did say that there is a price to be paid for it, and that price is that it empowers everyone. Yes, including cynical exploiters and talentless hacks, but not limited to them. And that, I think, is a price worth paying.

But democratisation, if it requires anything, requires our distribution channels to seriously up their game. Digital distribution isn't the same as bricks and mortar retail, but one thing from the old ways still applies: the greater the range you have, the more effort you're going to have to make to help customers find what they're looking for.

The Indie Scene is Gaming's Oasis

On 22nd November 1968, The Beatles released their self-titled ninth album, commonly known as The White Album. Music historians can argue to and fro over whether it was The Beatles' most important album, but it was an album that, as its self-referential title implies, sums up what The Beatles were. The album opened with Back in the USSR, betraying The Beatles' rock 'n' roll roots, and pressed lyrical pop melodies like Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da against naked experimentalism like Revolution 9.

On 29th August 1994, Oasis released their debut album Definitely Maybe. It was, you know, an okay rock album. Definitely commercially successful. But these Beatles-wannabes were definitely (maybe) missing something.

The problem with Oasis was that, while the Beatles were great because of their willingness to try new things and diverge from expected forms, Oasis' particular brand of alchemy was indeed about distilling The Beatles down to a formula and reduplicating that. In their eagerness to copy The Beatles, Oasis erased the very thing that made The Beatles exciting. Oasis were, to put it bluntly, very deliberately about not trying new things, because they were so in awe of the past.

On a certain level, I can understand the indie gaming scene's fascination with nostalgia. To celebrate older forms of gaming that have been abandoned by major publishers before their time is not entirely unworthy, especially when what major publishers have chosen to focus on instead is, by-and-large, uninspiring.

But I simultaneously can't help but feel there's a certain level of... let's call it Oasisism in the indie sector. We love those old games, so let's reduplicate those. Ok, but if you're nostalgic for a time when game developers were more willing to try new things, what does deliberately not trying new things really accomplish?

Let's talk about why major publishers' games are so uninspiring. They're not bad games. They're not even games I dislike. But they're made to such a calculated formula that for everything I like about them, I know exactly why I like it. And there's a certain predictability in that, which lacks the power to surprise and, yes, inspire. The magic is gone.

What I love about older games is what I call "The X Paradox", after Egosoft's X series of games. I love the X series. It's one of my most-played franchises, and not without reason. I mean, I know there is a reason, but I'm not entirely sure what that reason is. Ask me to talk about the games and all I'll give you is a laundry-list of complaints. And yet, it still ranks among my all-time favourites. In fact, the lack of ease with which I can identify its appeal is, itself, part of its appeal. The X Paradox, then, can be expressed as "I love it because I don't know why I love it."

X3: Terran Conflict is one of the few more recent games to do this to me, but it's a common theme in older games. It is not, however, something that games that trade on nostalgia have managed to recapture. The reduplication process of nostalgia games is, much like Oasis, trying to distill an appeal formula from the work of people who were just trying stuff.

This process is so entrenched in the indie scene that I can understand people trying to push the label of "alt games" to distinguish themselves from indies. Unlike the nostalgia-trade, alt games are about trying new things. In my more idealistic moments, I detest the term "alt games" because everything is an alternative to something, but at other times I kind of accept that that view is more one of how gaming should be than how it is. As trite a summary as it may be, it's important to try new things because that's what makes games exciting.

I didn't hate Oasis. I just found them kind of boring. Mimicry of pioneering is not in itself pioneering. Mimicry of a game that showed us something we'd never seen before is, by definition, not showing us anything new.

And it's not like the game industry has run out of ideas. There is a massive surplus of cool ideas in game development - more than could ever be made into games. It's just that, thanks to not even market forces, but the perception of market forces, those ideas don't get followed through.

And that's a shame.

Monstrous Regiment

It seems that Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 will allow the player to choose between a male and female player character for the campaign, to much celebration from those durned SJWs. But I'm a little more cynical about this.

Consider what Call of Duty's single-player campaign is and has always been about. Its message is clear: a good soldier is a tool, not a person. You are expected to subsume your identity beneath your uniform. You are the property of the United States Government, and you will follow orders. The titular duty of the game trumps who you are.

With that in mind, what does it even mean to have a choice of gender? On the one hand, you're being told that you can choose your identity; on the other, that your identity doesn't even fucking matter. The choice is immediately undermined by the theme of the game.

I don't believe that this is a bad move on the part of Treyarch/Activision; simply a confusing one. It harks back to what I wrote before about the difference between normalisation and humanisation of women. Sure, it's good to have the normalising influence of one of the top-selling video game franchises saying "female characters are playable now - get over it", but it is a franchise that depends on the dehumanisation of its protagonists.

The surface statement - "Women can do whatever men can do" - is certainly a positive one. But it's a statement that feels like it glosses over a lot of gender issues. The subtext to the statement is that being a woman doesn't mean anything. Women are interchangeable with men when they're both nothing more than cogs to be slotted into the military machine. Call of Duty is treating women as people in the same way it treats men as people, which is to say not at all.

I don't want to sound too negative about this. Treyarch have realised that there is no reason the player character shouldn't be female, and have accordingly made that an option. More developers should do that. I celebrate it. But when you look at the reason there's no reason, at why a female character can be included, it gets uncomfortable. Call of Duty is including a female player character not because gender matters, but because it doesn't. And my celebration of that is considerably more muted.

Of course, this is all speculation. I'm assuming Black Ops 3 won't deviate from previous entries in the franchise in other ways. Maybe it will humanise its protagonists more. Maybe it will tell a more personal story. But I doubt it.

Representing as Self and Other

Toby Gard, the creator of Lara Croft, suggested a distinction between two different types of playable character in video games: the avatar and the actor. The avatar, in his model, is a character that the player 'inhabits', projecting either their own personality or an invented personality onto the character. Silent protagonists, such as Gordon Freeman or Link, fall into this category. The actor, meanwhile, is a character with personality pre-created by the game's writer, a character of whom the player takes control. Examples include Gard's own Lara Croft, or Solid Snake. Gard also suggested that avatars should be tied to a first-person view, while actors should be tied to a third-person view, though I think the relationship between camera view and type of playable character can be overstated: Link is an avatar with a third-person view, while J.C. Denton is an actor with a first-person view, and both of them work just fine.

I'm also not convinced that the distinction is as binary as Gard first suggested. Is Mass Effect's Commander Shepard an avatar or an actor? The answer is that she's a bit of both. (Or he is, if you're playing it wrong.) The character is customisable, and the choices presented in the game are, as I've argued before, not 'true' choices that the player is expected to decide on, but questions about how the player interprets the character. Shepard has neither the flexibility of an avatar, nor the rigidity of an actor, but lies somewhere in between.

But what I want to delve into today is the parallel between Gard's concept of avatar and actor, and the psychological concept of 'self' and 'other'. Some playable characters are proxies for the player's 'self', acting as the vessel for the player to be transported into the game world. Other playable characters are, well, 'other'. The player relates to the character, but doesn't necessarily identify with them.

Take Mario and Sonic. After 30 years, we still don't really know who Mario is. He is a (white male) human with whatever personality the player invests him with. He is the 'self'. Sonic, on the other hand, has a personality (unfortunately). But even before he had a personality, in his heyday, he was still a blue hedgehog. Assuming that nobody playing the game is actually a blue hedgehog, he is the 'other'.

This all has a knock-on effect for diverse representation in games. We are comfortable with playing white dudes as the 'self', and we are comfortable with playing all manner of outlandish creatures as the 'other'. The joke has often been made that the industry is content to let you play as a dragon, but balks at letting you play as a woman. When we introduce a character who is a woman, a person of colour, gay, trans, gamedom gets confused. Is this supposed to be a 'self' or an 'other'? It shouldn't be that way: after all, we're content to cast white guys as the 'other' as well as the 'self' - we're content to play as white guys who have their own personalities rather than being a surrogate for ourselves. That's a function of white male defaultism.

Anita Sarkeesian made a video about why the Scythian from Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP is a positive female character. And Sarkeesian's right: the Scythian is a positive female character. But she's a positive female character in a very specific way. It may be an oversimplification, but I would say the two goals of feminism are to normalise women (which is to say, get away from thinking of male as the 'default' and female as the 'exception'), and to humanise women (which is to say, getting people to treat women as actual human beings). These goals are very closely aligned (to the point where I have had trouble explaining the distinction), but I think they are served in games quite differently. Normalising women is better served by allowing a female character to be the 'self' - as the Scythian is. Humanising women is better served by portraying a woman as an 'other' - after all, how do you demonstrate the humanity of someone who has no personality beyond what the player brings with them?

Neither of these things is 'better' or 'worse' (although casting a woman as 'other' does need to take care not to undermine the normalising effect of casting a woman as 'self' in other games). Both are necessary. But I can't help but wonder if it's possible to achieve both at once. On one hand, Mass Effect seems to manage it. On the other hand, ludonarrative dissonance is often caused by a playable character switching unpredictably between 'self' and 'other', as in Grand Theft Auto, where the cutscenes and missions present the character as an 'other', but the between-mission gameplay presents the character as a 'self'.

I've focused a bit on women here, but the same can be said for other non-'default' groups. We need positive examples we can identify with ('self') to normalise them, and positive examples we can relate to ('other') to humanise them.

There is a caveat that, as a white guy, I might be talking nonsense. But I do think that discussions of more diverse representation in games do necessarily need to talk about what particular kind of representation we're talking about, and what that means.

Bias and Objectivity

There's been a lot of talk about the objective review of games, as Gamergate (yes, we're still talking about them. God, I wish we weren't.) have decided to paint having opinions as an example of journalistic bias. Now, before we go any further, let's talk about bias. Bias is where you claim to hold a certain position and have something to gain from making people think you hold that position. When oil companies claim that climate change isn't a thing, that's bias, because they have something to gain from making sure that people continue to consume what they're selling.

Simply having an opinion and expressing it is not bias. Yes, even if it is an opinion you personally do not share. It is ok to like or dislike a thing, and even valuable to tell other people that you like or dislike it, in order to either recommend it or warn people away. And yes, as a reader of reviews, you might dislike something someone else likes, or like something that someone else dislikes, and that review might not be 'correct' for you. But the alternative is to buy the game anyway and then decide whether or not you like it, which hardly puts you in a better consumer position than having read someone else's opinions. What this self-styled consumer revolt is actually doing is advocating a situation where the consumer takes on more, not less, risk of going out of pocket on something shitty. But hopefully we're past the point now where I need to explain to anyone that Gamergate's pro-consumer stance is nothing more than a smokescreen for misogyny. I think most sensible people get that.

But bias isn't really the subject today. I don't even really want to talk about the impossibility of objective reviews, as other people have done that beautifully. I just want to pick up on one point where something can seem to be objective, but actually isn't.

TotalBiscuit, before he decided to put his considerable YouTube celebrity behind a misogynistic hate group and spout transphobic gibberish, made a video where he said that someone's opinion on a game is mostly subjective (and how that's reconciled with his supporting Gamergate is anyone's guess). But he did say that we can be objective about certain things, like optimisation. If a game is poorly optimised, he says, it's poorly optimised and that's that. Anyone who knows half a fraction of a thing about software development knows that this simply isn't true.

When you optimise a piece of software, three things happen. Firstly, the program runs faster. That's the point. Secondly, it becomes harder to make changes in the code. Thirdly, it becomes harder to extend the code. The more you optimise, the more costly and difficult it becomes to patch bugs. The more you optimise, the less extensibility you give to your program.

Would Skyrim have been a better game if it ran faster? Undoubtedly, but that's not the question. The question is, would Skyrim have been a better game if it ran faster at the cost of the bugfixes it received post-launch and the power of its modding interface? Whether that cost would have been worth it is a judgement call that depends on which factor you think is the more important. And the relative importance of those factors can only ever be subjective. You can disagree with the decision Bethesda made on this relative importance, but you cannot say it was objectively wrong.

Gaming is both one of the most hardware-intensive and one of the most performance-critical applications of computers. All games do need to be optimised to some extent. But precisely what extent that is depends on a whole load of other factors, many of which are subjective. The idea that more optimisation is always better is sophomoric and naive, and has no place in real-world software development.

The larger point here is that things in games are rarely simply "done well". They're very often done well at the expense of some other factor. Even with the inconceivably large budgets the top-end AAA games have, spending money on one thing means not spending money on another. Part of the art of game development is striking the right balance, but critics and consumers alike have differing views on what "the right balance" is, because they have different subjective priorities.

Being a Boy's Like Sucking on a Lemon

Yesterday, Lionhead Studios tweeted a silly image in honour (if that's the right word) of National Cleavage Day. The image was of a barmaid with an ample bosom holding up two jugs (get it?) of ale. Many quite rightly felt that this image, in the social context of the current climate of video games, was tone-deaf and stupid.

Of course, Gamergate disagreed, because of course they did. Lionhead removed the tweet, which of course caused Gamergate to explode about how SJWs were censoring artistic freedom. Which is missing the point, because we SJWs didn't even want them to remove it - that was all Lionhead. We wanted to have an open discussion about it (you know, open discussion? That thing Gamergate used to pretend they wanted?), and perhaps would have liked Lionhead to apologise for it. That's very different to censorship, but that's an aside to what I wanted to talk about today.

I had a discussion with someone who was complaining that Lionhead was pandering only to straight dudes. That I took on board, but as a straight dude, it's also not flattering to be reduced to a boob-liker. To be fair, I do like boobs, but out of everything that makes up who I am, for that specifically to be chosen as the thing that would appeal to me felt manipulative and insulting. I wasn't, in making this point, trying to say "but what about the menz?" - I was trying to demonstrate that the tweet was doubly stupid because it excluded a large number of people and wasn't particularly flattering to the people it was including.

On reflection, I was right to feel manipulated. It was, "Here's some boobs. You like that, don't you? That's what you want." It was a condescending pat on the head for conforming to expected masculine norms. Where does that expectation come from? It comes from patriarchy.

I remember hearing about some feminist developers who complained that there are already a lot of games for men because there are a lot of games about shooting and racing and sports. I don't want to cast aspersions on how 'truly' feminist they are, but the idea that that is What Men Want is a deeply patriarchal attitude that they've internalised. At the time, I resented the fact that they thought that games with more substance, nuance and/or complexity were an exclusively female domain.

I still don't like the idea, but now I see it for what it is. It's an example of how the patriarchy harms men. The patriarchy sees male as default, and female as an exception. That idea contains a lot of advantages for men, and it's a large part of where male privilege comes from. But in gaming terms (which is, after all, what this blog is about), as soon as something breaks away from the default (and might thereby be more interesting), it's suddenly Not For Men, because male is default.

In fact, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is a game with not one, but two male-coded words right there in the title, and, one could argue, a game that is brimming with masculine themes, and yet it "feels" like a game for girls because the masculine themes it covers do not conform to patriarchal expectations of masculine norms, nor do the tone or mechanics remotely resemble the games men are "supposed" to like. (Incidentally, it also happens to be one of my favourite games - go check it out.) Brothers is an exceptional game in two senses of the word: it is both excellent, and an all-too-rare departure from the patriarchal default.

The restrictive expectation to conform to masculine norms, whether that be of behaviour or, as in this case, taste, is certainly an area where patriarchy is harmful to men. And when it's compounded by an industry that seeks to maximise profits by targeting a 'default' audience, at the same time reinforcing masculine norms to keep that 'default' market stable, it's also harmful to gaming.

Playgrounds of the Mind

I admit to being something of a veteran of OKCupid. One thing I've noticed about online dating, one of the biggest pitfalls, is that the profile you see is necessarily not an accurate representation of the person behind it. I'm not talking here about people deliberately misrepresenting themselves: Even people who strive to be as true as they can in their profile will end up with little more than a sketch. There is a temptation for the online dater to see a profile, which always leaves something to the imagination, and fill in the blanks with their own ideals. That can lead to unwarranted feelings and overattachment, which can very easily lead to hurt, and certainly lead to a lot of the creepy behaviours we all have a car-crash fascination with when they're shared by the recipients on Twitter.

But what is a danger of online dating can be a benefit to video games. I often feel like this same phenomenon is precisely what makes Final Fantasy VII so dear to so many people's hearts. We have characters with double-digit polygons, who have no voices and communicate entirely in (poorly translated) text. These highly abstract characters are, by virtue of their technical limitations, necessarily playgrounds of the mind, where the player's imagination has a lot of freedom to fill in the blanks as they'd like, enriching their attachment to and involvement with the characters. In Mass Effect, my Shepherd is probably different to your Shepherd because of the way I customised her appearance and the choices I made in the course of the game, but Final Fantasy VII - whether intentionally or not - leveraged the most powerful customisation engine that exists: the human imagination.

Incidentally, this is a large part of the reason I didn't like Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. Here we had a film that made Final Fantasy VII's characters suddenly startlingly realistic. The film told me what these characters looked like, how they sounded, and what their mannerisms were. It not only didn't allow me to use my imagination to fill in the blanks; it trampled roughshod over all the investment I'd put into engaging with the characters in the game. This is also why I never want to see a remake of Final Fantasy VII. I can't help but feel a remake would take a game beloved precisely for its abstraction and fill in the blanks for you, denying you the power of your imagination. Even Cloud's appearance in Kingdom Hearts - itself hardly a paragon of detail - felt like it diminished the opportunity for engagement.

In recent years, another game used abstraction to allow the player to fill in the blanks with their imagination, and its characters were beloved, if not by so many, at least as much as were Final Fantasy VII's. I speak, of course, of Thomas Was Alone, where, forget double-digit polygons, each character was one polygon. And although the game was fully voiced, it was narrated by King of Lovely himself Danny Wallace, rather than acted by an ensemble cast, which again took a step back from the level of direct representation. Mike Bithell has done (I assume) intentionally what Squaresoft did (I assume) accidentally, and created characters who invite the player to engage with them by using their imaginations to fill in the blanks, thereby creating involvement and personal meaningfulness.

This may also go some way to explaining the appeal of anime-influenced visual styles. Granted, that particular art style is not to everyone's taste, but to those who like it, it appeals not just because it has more kawaiis per desu than any other style, but also because anime is abstraction-in-a-box. It is a style that - at first through necessity, and then through design - has been honed to encourage viewers to get personally involved by filling in the blanks with their imagination.

All of this is not to say that abstraction is all you need. There is an art to abstraction. In Christine Love's Analogue: A Hate Story, for example, it is important that Hyun-ae and Mute are abstract enough such that you can engage with them using your imagination, but not so abstract that they can be whoever you want them to be. This was writ large in the sequel, Hate Plus. Mute died, which evoked similar feelings in fans as Aeris' death in Final Fantasy VII, but whereas in Final Fantasy VII, Aeris was taken from you by the big bad, Mute's death was a suicide. An act of her own agency transgressed the mental image of the character players had themselves built up. This was used to great effect, but it could just as easily (and was, by some quarters) be seen as a betrayal. "What has Sephiroth done to my Aeris?" became "What has Christine done to my Mute?" The dynamic of attachment and loss is incredibly powerful - too powerful for some players to deal with - but would have been a damp squib without the abstraction that allowed that attachment to form in the first place.

There is a storytelling principle called "show, don't tell", but I feel it's mis-worded, particularly for such a visual medium as video games. It's very easy for a video game developer to say, "Well, we are showing, and with tens of thousands of polygons in HD no less!" Yes, that's true, but the spirit of "show, don't tell" might better be explained as "imply, don't make explicit". Janet Murray, in her seminal book on interactive storytelling, Hamlet on the Holodeck, partially rejects Samuel Coleridge's notion of "willing suspension of disbelief", preferring instead the term "active creation of belief", and this is, I think, where I'm coming from. Creation of belief that does not engage the imagination is inherently less active.

If you're telling a story, and especially if you're making a video game, the onus is on you to give your audience something to do. And that goes beyond pressing buttons to control the action - your game's interaction with the player doesn't begin and end at their fingertips. It is, and must be, interacting with the player's imagination.

The Poetics of People

One of Marie-Laure Ryan's "conditions of narrativity" is that a story must be about individuated existents. To put it more simply (but less accurately): A story must have characters. It must be about people doing something, otherwise it's not a story.

Narratologically, characters are broadly divided into three components. They were previously thought to be three types of character, but hybrids are not only possible, but common enough that it makes more sense to think of them as three components of character.

• Aesthetic (or Synthetic): This is the character insofar as how it contributes to the plot, or the other narrative effects for which it is employed. This can be thought of as character in service of story.
• Mimetic: This is the character as a representation of a human (or otherwise) being. It is not a real person, but one that may "pass for real". A character who is believable or realistic will have some thought put into this component.
• Illustrative: This is the component of a character that deals with the ideas or themes the character symbolises or represents. Not how the character serves the story as such, but how the character serves the meaning or message of the story.

A well-rounded story will strike a good balance between these components, but what that balance should be may depend on genre. When Aristotle wrote his Poetics, plot had primacy (or at least Aristotle thought so), and characters therefore necessarily emphasised the aesthetic component. Character-driven stories gained in popularity over the intervening centuries, though, and the peak of emphasis on the mimetic component can be found in the novels of the Victorian and Regency eras. The use of the illustrative component is both as old as the hills (Aesop, the Bible) and relatively recent (Orwell).

And what of Hollywood (and, by extension, the Hollywood-aping medium of video games, which is what we're really talking about here). By and large, it's gone back to Aristotelian Poetics. One could argue that that's a cynical move that allows low-risk manufacturing of stories according to a proven formula, and that might not be wrong, but what I'm more interested in is what effect emphasising the aesthetic component has.

If we unpack what the aesthetic component means, it means characters being used to serve a story. And that's not wrong, but it does have some problematic side-effects. First of all, it leads to characters being valued for their dramatic usefulness. Secondly, it creates situations where any character who has the desired technical effect will do. Right away, then, Aristotelian Poetics is a formula that creates a need for, respectively, instrumentality and fungibility, which are two of the key components Martha Nussbaum identified of objectification (it's arguable that denial of subjectivity is also present: at the very least subjective experience of characters is conveniently ignored when it doesn't suit the plot). Particularly against a cultural white-male-default backdrop where women and people of colour have "known technical dramatic effects" in stories, this is a problem.

This also gives a clue as to what calls for "more realistic" female characters means. The "But escapism!" argument isn't one I'm unsympathetic to. Realism is boring. However, what we are talking about isn't necessarily realism per se, but about paying more attention to the mimetic component of female characters. 'Realism' is a strawman (albeit one perpetuated by the people calling for it not having the technical language to explain what they mean): what we're really talking about is merely less one-dimensional characters. And if you're against that, then I don't know what to tell you.

For Everyone is Not For Everyone

Andy Warhol once famously said, "In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes."

The Scottish musician, writer and former blogger Momus less famously (appropriately enough) said, "In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen people."

One of the almost-legitimate criticisms raised by GamerGate is a dissatisfaction that the apparatus of games journalism is out of touch with popular opinion. But is that really true, or is "popular opinion" something that, for all we take it for granted, isn't a real thing? This bears examination.

Mitu Khandaker-Kokoris is, sadly, GamerGate's latest target. In addition to the heartfelt sympathy I extend to anyone who is targeted for harassment, it just so happens that her game, Redshirt, is a great example to pry this question open. This is a satirical game about working on a space station and using social media to improve your relationships with your co-workers. In her response to the GamerGate conspiracy theories, Mitu notes that reaction to the game was very divided. She humbly attributes this to it being her first game, and an ambitious one. I disagree. I think it's great, and I think the reason for the division in the response to it is not because it's imperfect (which, if we're honest, would more likely have led to a consistently lukewarm response), but because it's simply Not For Everyone. It is good at what it does, but not everyone is going to care about what it does.

This is one of the articles of faith of a GamerGater. Since they are gamers, games must be for them. They refuse to believe that this assumption is nonsense, and anyone challenging this assumption is immediately painted as an 'invader'. GamerGate questions how people can like "walking simulators", but rejects the only legitimate answer: "Because they are not you." "Well, that must mean they are not real gamers, because I am a gamer, right?" Because GamerGate believes in the cultural homogeneity of the gamer identity, they feel justified in projecting their own values and perspectives as "popular opinion".

A lot of people opposed to GamerGate have said that gaming is mainstream now and that we won. They're wrong: gaming has in fact become post-mainstream. The explosion of gaming is getting closer to the "elective affinities" Momus wrote about in music. Gaming is still about identity, as is any cultural affinity, but where GamerGate is wrong is that our identities are shaped by and reflected in what kinds of games we like, not whether or not we like games.

Arthur Chu wrote convincingly about parallels between GamerGate and the violent reaction of 'white' rock to 'black' disco in the 70s. While it's politically on point, where gaming as a medium is now is parallel to a rather more recent phenomenon in music. The 70s were just the start of the idea of 'choice' being present in the music industry, a more extreme - and racialised - rehash of mods vs. rockers. Over time this binary choice has given way to an array of genres, which have then had to be split up into sub-genres (I don't like Metallica but I like Dimmu Borgir: How can metal be a genre I identify with?). The democratisation of music production using computers and music distribution using the internet has broken that up even further. Things like the Music Genome Project are, essentially, an attempt to use computing power to keep track of a musical taxonomy that has become too complex to be modelised within the human brain.

And gaming is in the same place. It's easier than ever to make and distribute a game, now. Notwithstanding the "just because you can doesn't mean you should" effect that gave us thousands of godawful Myspace bands, that democratisation is necessarily going to lead to a broadening and diversification of games. It's inevitable. Of course it starts with indies, because that's the nature of democratisation.

When Michael Jackson died, Momus wrote - in keeping with what he had written nearly two decades previously - that he was not only the King of Pop, but the Last King of Pop. Not only was the man dead; so was the paradigm of artificial universality ("it don't matter if you're black or white!") on which he built his career. Call of Duty is gaming's Michael Jackson. Modern Warfare may have been the title that brought gaming fully into the mainstream, but there is no place for "the mainstream" in the internet age, and Modern Warfare 3 was the last flagging vestige of the main stream giving way to a network of rivulets. It's ok to like Call of Duty, though the fact that I have to grit my teeth to say that, or a casual inspection of any gaming-oriented internet forum, will reveal that it, too, is Not For Everyone. Not any more.

So when we say that "gamers are over", what's really over is this "synthetic unity" of gaming. When we say that "videogames are for everybody", what we mean is exactly the opposite of "every game is for everyone" (which is why nobody is trying to force anything down your throat). When we say that "I need diverse games", we mean that we want to be able to exercise elective affinities rather than merely taking whatever a bunch of rich guys in suits have decided we ought to like.

It's also worth noting that GamerGate's "Not Your Shield" campaign is, even ignoring everything else wrong with it, entirely about retrenching the synthetic unity of homogenised defaultism, of asserting 'normal' on something that cannot adequately be captured by a single label. For all that it is used by Gamergate to make high-minded claims about diversity, its core statement is that diversity doesn't have any material meaning, that "it don't matter if you're black or white". This "colour-blindness" that is so often touted as virtuous is about being swallowed up by the prevailing, 'default' culture, not about celebrating multiculturalism.

This is something the industry has to adapt to. The overcapitalisation of AAA titles cannot weather the fragmentation of the mass market into the archipelago of elective affinity. Games that expect five million sales (and even more so those that need that number just to break even) are insane in a climate where it's increasingly easy for a customer to simply choose a different game, to elect a different affinity.

Journalists and critics, on the other hand, have already adapted to this (with much celebration, I might add). Momus predicted this, too: He said that what Melody Maker considered "the best new band in Britain" would be quite different from what Soul Underground considered "the best new band in Britain". The same doubtless goes for Metal Hammer, Mixmag, Jazzwise... Journalists - particularly cultural criticism journalists - should not have to apologise for writing from a certain perspective and for a certain audience. In the GamerGate lexicon, 'clickbait' is a codeword for "things other people want to read," but when Leigh Alexander addressed game developers to say that stereotype 'gamers' don't need to be their audience, she could just as easily have been addressing game journalists.

There are, of course, many worse aspects to GamerGate than the assumption that games should be for them, but their entire veneer of legitimacy (or what remains of it) rests on this faulty premise. Take that veneer away, and we can start dealing with the real problems, because any real gamer knows you don't shoot at the boss' core while the shield is up.

The Dialectics of Videogames

This is something I've been meaning to post for a while. I've talked briefly about dialectics in video games before, but that was in a sort of different context.

Socrates (Image credit: Eric Gaba)

So, I understand that for most people, the word 'dialectics' is probably big and scary. Let me break this down with a short and oversimplified history of dialectics. Dialectics was allegedly invented by Zeno of Elea (he of the infamous Archer's Paradox), but was really made famous by Plato and Socrates. They gave us what we call (for rather obvious reasons) Socratic Dialogue. In Socratic Dialogue, one party adopts a position, which we call the thesis, while the other adopts the opposite position, which we call the antithesis. There are formal rules for how the dialogue proceeds, but suffice to say it is the goal of the antithesis to find a flaw in the thesis, and the goal of the thesis to defend itself. Socratic Dialogue is, therefore, a means of evaluating the strength of a thesis. If a thesis is strong, the antithesis will fail to find fault with it. If the thesis is weak, the antithesis will defeat it, and you should go and think up another thesis.

We're going to skip over 2000 years of history now and go straight to the 19th century, and the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Georgie gave us another form of dialectics, which we (again, for obvious reasons) call Hegelian Dialectics. Like Socratic Dialogue, Hegelian Dialectics begins with a thesis and an antithesis, but it's perhaps fair to say that Hegel saw dialectics as more generative than evaluative. Rather than using the tension to test the strength of the thesis, Hegel rather saw the tension between thesis and antithesis as culminating in a process we normally call sublation (although we're talking about Hegelian Dialectics, we actually use a lot of terms where Hegel himself actually used different terms, but they basically mean the same thing). Sublation does not represent the triumph of thesis over antithesis or vice versa, but the creation of a new, third position, called the synthesis.

G.W.F. Hegel

We could also talk about Karl Marx and dialectical materialism, but the difference between dialectical materialism and Hegelian Dialectics isn't really relevant to our purposes.

So what does this have to do with videogames, and why am I writing it on a videogame blog that is especially concerned with stories?

Well, I propose that games qua games are Socratic, and stories are (often) Hegelian, and because of that, they require different methods of resolution.

If we consider a game, where the point is to win, in dialectical terms, it seems obvious to say that the player represents the role of the thesis, and that the opponent or other challenges represents the antithesis. A player wins a game by not allowing the challenges to find flaw with their playing: by not allowing the antithesis to find flaw with the thesis. (This is slightly different from Socratic Dialogue, because the antithesis is often waits for the player to come to it, but whatever. The player can only win the game by facing the antithesis' challenges.) The strength of the thesis is directly correlated to the player's playing ability.

In a story, the story tension is indeed set up by the tension between thesis and antithesis, but is resolved not by the virtues of either side, but by some change to a new position: the synthesis. If one side was inevitably going to win anyway, there is no tension. Now, yes, the protagonist often beats the antagonist in a story, but usually because of some change in the protagonist such that the protagonist is no longer playing by the thesis they presented to begin with. In this case, the protagonist doesn't so much represent the thesis as resolves the story by switching from the thesis to the synthesis. This is pretty much what we mean when we talk about a character arc: the character changes over the course of the story. Here I would say that I think the Socratic-style dialectic of the protagonist merely overcoming the antagonist's challenges without any real change is a perfectly valid story - it is, at the very least, something I would be content to call a story - but I'm not convinced it's often, if ever, a good one.

I don't want to put words in Ernest Adams' mouth, but I get the feeling that, when he talked about the disanalogies between gameplay tension and dramatic tension, this is what he was driving at, particularly when he talks about dramatic novelty and the need for change.

Likewise, with reference to when Jesper Juul talked about the distinction between immediate desires and aesthetic desires, I would propose that our immediate desires are by and large Socratic (in the sense that we want the thesis to win) while our aesthetic desires are more Hegelian (in the sense that we want an interesting resolution).

Inevitably, we're going to have to talk about Mass Effect 3's (pre-extended-cut) ending here. I don't want to get too hung up on what I think about the ending, or why people liked or hated it. The story of the trilogy is, essentially, about cycles, and specifically Hegelian cycles, so it's rather appropriate the the three ending options were the thesis (destroy the Reapers like you set out to do), the antithesis (siding with the Reapers in the hope of controlling them) and the synthesis (which was, helpfully, even called the synthesis ending). To my mind, the thesis and antithesis endings are your typical 'good' and 'bad' game endings. Like in Streets of Rage (or was it Streets of Rage 2?), where, upon meeting Mr. X, you can choose to either beat him up to get the 'good' ending, or join him to get the 'bad' ending. This is complicated a little bit by the fact that the 'good' ending in Mass Effect 3 was portrayed as a Renegade choice, while the 'bad' ending was portrayed as a Paragon choice, but let's discuss that later. Then you have the synthesis ending, where the story is resolved by some change, as stories, as we've established, usually are.

In summary, a win in a game often means the triumph of the thesis, while a resolution in a story often means replacement of the thesis with the synthesis. One of the great challenges for narrative-heavy games is reconciling the two. A good place to start might be Raph Koster's idea that Narrative is not a Game Mechanic.

Is "free" not cheap enough?

This is primarily anecdotal, so it's perhaps not enough to draw any conclusions from, but it does seem in line with some rumblings from other corners of the internet.

The big news is that Christine Love's Analogue: A Hate Story has made its way to Steam. It's a visual novel about stumbling across a Korean colony ship in the far future, and, through interacting with the two AIs who are the only 'living' remnants of the crew, trying to piece together what happened. And it's good. Very good, in fact, but this isn't a review piece. I don't really do them.

It's not an instruction. It's not that kind of visual novel.

Before I even played Analogue, what really struck me was how enthusiastically I accepted the offer that I pay for it. The thing is, I haven't played Digital: A Love Story or Don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story, though I was certainly intrigued to read about them. But Christine Love's previous titles were free. Why is it that I never touched the ones I could get for free, but was very happy to get the one I had to pay for?

Perhaps GOG.com's Guillaume Rambourg has the answer. When he spoke to Rock, Paper, Shotgun last month, he made it quite clear that he felt a certain price point was necessary to "preserve the value of games". He kept talking about the value of games, but I think he meant the perception of value, which is a bit different. Nonetheless, as sceptical as I was, I now wonder if there isn't some truth to that. It's a criticism I've heard of pay-what-you-want style bundles, too: that they effectively devalue the games they contain.

Of course, the free-to-play model has been phenomenally successful for bigger publishers, with people paying piecemeal for in-game items and new gameplay. But it's easy to see that they expect (or, at least, hope for) my money at some point. A game that is just free with no strings attached seems to awaken some sort of alarm bell in us. Put into words, it would be something like:-

Why would it be worth my time if it's not worth my money?

This is, perhaps, a vindication of the frequent lament we make to non-gamers that games aren't just for kids. Kids have more time than money, so they worry about how much something costs. We're grown-ups, though (honest we are!): we have more money than time, and while we're glad to spend that money, we want to be sure that what we're spending it on is worth our time.

Part of it is that, as authorware becomes more accessible and more sophisticated, anyone can do it, and not everyone realises that not everyone should. There's no getting around it. If people can make bad games, they will, and over time we've built up this sort of association between 'free' and the baser qualities of amateurism. There's another side to that, too. Back when I was making music, I was all too familiar with the idea that one has to have confidence in one's work before one can justify selling it. I never had that confidence in my music (but if you ever heard it, you'd know why), and so it was always free. But if the creator of a work doesn't think it's worth selling, why should the audience think it's worth anything?

Of course, I don't know if Digital: A Love Story and Don't take it personally, babe were free due to a lack of confidence, but because I don't know, there's nothing really telling me that surmising that would be wrong. (And, oh! How wonderful it would be for a smarter person than I to look at how this phenomenon plays with Barthes' Death of the Author.) But clearly, somewhere along the line, it was decided that Analogue: A Hate Story was worth selling. And that decision made me think (much as I don't want to paint myself as easily manipulated) that it might be worth buying.

An interesting outcome is that I liked Analogue: A Hate Story so much that I definitely will check out Digital: A Love Story and Don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story. The game I had to pay for is effectively selling me on games I don't have to pay for. That is so the inverse of everything that is intuitive, it's quite wonderful.

Conclusions, then? Well, as I said at the beginning, this is anecdotal, so my conclusions aren't really anything new. Primarily, it might be crass for an artist to think about filthy lucre, but we live in a world where setting a price point is the best way to communicate to your audience that you think you've done something worthwhile, and if you don't demonstrably think it's worthwhile, neither will they. Secondarily, if you must release free games, try to make them somehow related to a game you're selling. Oh, and tertiarily (is that a word?), if your independent game is bad, don't release it. You're making all the other indies look bad. The hell is wrong with you? Or maybe you should release it so everyone can tell you how bad it is. It sounds like you need that. Who are you, anyway, and why have you made me digress from an otherwise positive post just to tell you how much you suck?

Ahem. It's not exactly a three-step plan to guaranteed success, but what were you expecting?

This is just my opinion.

Leigh Alexander wrote a thing about subjectivity and objectivity in media in general and games in particular on her blog. As someone whose day to day activity involves doing science to stories, I am somewhat horrified by the blanket statement that "objectivity is a ridiculous notion," although I don't deny that it's a difficult question. We need objective measurements because the only way we can get technological or theoretical progress in the medium is if we can (somewhat) objectively justify that the development of that progress is worthwhile.

However, that, I suspect, is the exception that proves the rule (although I think "the exception that proves the rule" is a ridiculous notion, so what does that say?). Technology and theory aside, I do agree with the sentiment.

There is a saying: "There is no accounting for taste." I think that saying has lost its true meaning through overuse as an oblique way of ironically suggesting that someone else's tastes are 'wrong'. But I think we need the unironic meaning of the phrase back. There is no accounting for taste. We need to understand that there is no need to defend liking something, nor is it necessary (or even desirable, since it marks you out as a bit of a fuckwit) to rationalise your dislike of something in an attempt to make it seem more authoritative.

It took me a while to realise I have no need to defend liking Dragon Age II.

I encountered such a person, today, on an internet comment thread. It was the typical kind of thing: presenting a lens of preference and trying to pass it off as an objective truth. A value judgement masquerading as a theoretical concept. When I challenged them on it, by building an argument to the contrary, what followed was a cyclical litany of ever angrier bare assertions, circular logic, red herrings and fifty-foot strawmen. The kind of thing a veteran arguer can spot a mile off, and not something that really lends any credibility to the argument. In the end, I got bored and stopped arguing, because I went in expecting an interesting theoretical discussion, but found myself talking in circles with someone who just wanted to legitimise his own subjective opinion in just about the most pathetic way possible.

That's not to say we shouldn't talk about why we like or dislike something, of course. That discussion is valuable, and the ancillary ideas that come out of such a discussion can be very interesting. But that's only possible if neither party is intent on 'winning'. Other than in certain specific cases, dialogue is not a competition.

Tempting as it is to attribute this concept of "right and wrong" opinions to some innate competitiveness of gamers, though, I think its roots lie in a far uglier side of gamers, a word that people are sick of hearing applied to gamers by now.

Entitlement.

When someone attempts to claim that their personal preference is an objective truth about gaming, what they're really saying is, "Developers should only make games that I like." Aside from the obvious statement that gaming as a medium can and should support a diverse range of experiences enjoyable by a variety of people (seriously, what the hell is wrong with you?), and the slightly-less-obvious statement that restricting the cultural breadth of games can only impoverish the medium, there's also the simpler question of how it looks. Throwing a tantrum because a developer makes a game that someone else likes doesn't really do our image as gamers any favours. Likewise if their resentment of someone else enjoying a game means that they have to loudly complain about how bad the game is (with some of the creakiest rationalisations I've seen this side of Creationism) and call people who like it dumb, well, people are going to think gamers are dumb, but rather than thinking they're dumb for liking that game, people are going to think we're dumb for having huge sticks up our arses about what other people like.

Sure, it happens in other media sometimes, but in no other medium is it as endemic as it is in gaming. This kind of behaviour is part of the reason there is even still a certain shame about being a gamer, and it's really got to stop.

Now, in order to stave off accusations of hypocrisy, I'll have to pretend I don't think there's anything it's not ok to like. No, sorry, I just can't do it.

Twilight: Not ok to like.

PC Skyrim is not a "lazy console port".

So Skyrim came out. The blurb on Steam calls it "[t]he next chapter in the highly anticipated Elder Scrolls saga". I don't know about you, but I don't find myself lying awake at night wishing that Oblivion and Morrowind would hurry up and come out. "The highly anticipated next chapter in the Elder Scrolls saga," marketers.

Marketing grammar aside, comment threads and forums have been alive with praise and condemnation in what seems to be about equal measure. However, one note that caught my eye was variations on the theme of "lazy console port". It's ironic that the phrase "lazy console port" is a result of lazy thinking. This is the kind of knee-jerk condemnation that the PC gaming crowd loves to go in for, but it's not helpful. So why is it a lazy console port, and why is it not? A lot of these are things I've said on forums and comment threads myself, so if you've been following me around like some creepy stalker, 1) you've probably already read most of this, and 2) don't make me call the police.

The interface - navigation

Now, I'm not going to defend the interface. It's terrible. However, while I have not played the game on an Xbox 360, I have played it on the PC with an Xbox 360 controller, and let me tell you, that's just as bad as trying to navigate it with mouse and keyboard. If they've designed this for a console, they've done a poor job of it.

In fact, the UI seems like it would be a lot more at home on an iPad. And this is the problem with the interface: they've designed it for aesthetics before function. It looks lovely, but it's a pain to use. In their aesthetic design of the interface, they've quite clearly taken notes from tablet interfaces (which are very cool) and not thought properly about how that would impact the function of the interface on a different device. It's bad interface design, but it has nothing to do with consoles.

The interface - dual wielding

The only interface issue that I think might be a console problem is the dual wielding thing. On a console, see, the item in your left hand is bound to the left trigger, while the item in your right hand is bound to the right trigger. On a PC, this is reversed; the item in your right hand is bound to the left mouse button, and the item in your left hand is bound to the right mouse button. That sounds confusing, but it's gaming convention to map primary attacks to LMB and secondary attacks to RMB. Skyrim just assumes that your character is right-handed, so the dominant hand is mapped to the primary mouse button. In console conventions, the right trigger is often thought of as the 'primary' one.

That's all ok apart from how it's represented in the interface; when you equip items into your hands, they're marked with a little 'L' or 'R'. Does that refer to which hand is holding the item, or which button you should press? It actually refers to which hand is holding the item, but that's not clear. I hesitate to call this a console design issue, though. I think it's more just that console players are lucky their conventions don't raise any ambiguity here, rather than that the interface was designed with that in mind. Denoting into which hand your weapon is going is an established RPG convention, and it seems likely that the design of Skyrim is just following that rather than contemplating too deeply how that applies to the control system.

Mouse sensitivity and acceleration

Ok, let's start with mouse acceleration. It is the very devil, and I'll give you that it's a problem with console ports. However, given that it takes more effort to implement than not, I don't think it's a problem with lazy console ports. I don't understand why games persist in using it. Everyone hates it, and it's easier just to not implement it. (Update: Apparently I'm an idiot. Mouse acceleration doesn't, in fact, take more effort to implement than to not implement. If you use Windows' mouse input, you get mouse acceleration. To get around that you have to do your own hardware calls to the mouse, which is more work. But the corollary to this is that mouse acceleration isn't "to make it feel more like a controller" but "to make it feel more like the cursor in Windows", which still indicates that it's not a symptom of consolitis.)

Then there's the mouse sensitivity. For some reason, the mouse sensitivity is set incredibly low by default. That must be because it's designed for gamepads, right? Well, no. Although Skyrim appears to only give you one option for sensitivity, it actually has two; one for mouse and one for gamepad. It only shows you the option for the device you're currently using, but mouse sensitivity and pad sensitivity are stored by the game independently. If you switch devices, the sensitivity option will change to whatever you set for that device. This sensibility to the potential of using multiple devices is a purely PC thing; it can't be said that it's an artefact of a console port. So why the mouse sensitivity is set so low by default is beyond me, but it's not a console thing.


My one gripe is that the mouselook sensitivity also affects the mouse sensitivity in the lockpicking minigame, so having a reasonable sensitivity for looking around makes lockpicking very fiddly. But that has nothing to do with consoles. I will say that Skyrim's lockpicking with a mouse is seventeen times infinitely better than Oblivion's lockpicking with a mouse, but it's basically just the same as Fallout 3's lockpicking.

The 2GB memory cap

This is something that's come up less commonly, but I have seen it. Skyrim, you see, will only ever make use of 2GB of memory, even if you have more. "This must be because it's a lazy console port," comes the cry, conveniently ignoring that the Xbox 360 and PS3 both have 512MB of memory (including video memory) and nothing like 2GB.

No, it's not because it's a lazy console port; it's because it supports Windows XP. Windows XP 32-bit can technically address 4GB of RAM (including video RAM), but it limits individual programs to using 2GB (this can be raised to 3GB by a switch in the bowels of the system, which involves editing boot.ini in a text editor and so is not for the casual user, but this can cause instabilities and so isn't enabled by default).

There are still people out there who refuse to upgrade to Windows 7, insisting that Windows XP is "good enough". One of the advantages of PC gaming is that it can be; PC games can run on a wide range of hardware and software setups. But sometimes, ensuring compatibility on a broad range of systems entails compromises. It's ironic, though perhaps not unexpected, that a decision that was made to service one of the advantages of PC gaming is blamed on consoles. Although Bethesda could conceivably have made the 2GB limit XP-only, the point is that it's not a lazy console port; it's lazy XP compatibility.

Update: To clarify, without the large-address-aware flag set, 32-bit processes are limited to 2GB on all versions of Windows, not just XP. The reason it's an XP thing is that XP doesn't even support LAA by default without editing boot.ini. (Technically speaking, even 64-bit processes are limited to 2GB without LAA, but they have LAA on by default; you would have to manually turn it off when you were compiling, and, although you can, I don't know why you'd do that.) Incidentally, the Xbox 360 is 64-bit and the PS3 is 128-bit, so I'm not sure how making it a 32-bit Windows process could possibly be a concession to codevelopment for those machines. (And, according to the latest Steam hardware survey as of March 2013, about 25% of Steam's install-base is still running on 32-bit machines.)

Default FOV

Ok, you can have that one.

So there. Skyrim's not without issues, but very few of them have anything to do with its console development, and those that do are relatively easily fixed. I haven't addressed the complaint of "it's dumbed down" because (1) I've talked about how idiotic I think that phrase is before, and the people who blame it on console development are doubly idiots; (2) I surprisingly haven't heard that complaint much, excepting from the people you just knew were going to call it dumbed-down anyway; (3) that's a subject for a future post, and (4) I was too busy checking my surroundings for creepy stalkers. Go away.

What's Up With Australia's Game Prices?

I don't want to tread on anyone's righteous indignation, but I think it's time we got something straight. I've heard very many complaints from Australians about the kind of situation depicted below.

 

Spot the difference: Rage on Steam's Australian store (above) and on the US store (below).

What the? Aussies have to pay $30 more? How is that fair?

Well, it is fair. Let me put on my economist hat and tell you why.

The first thing you need to understand is that the purchasing power of a currency is not the same as its market exchange rate. Ok? When you go to a site like xe.com, all you are learning is how much of one currency you can buy for another currency, not the comparative value of those currencies. The value of a currency is determined by what you can buy for it. We call this "purchasing power". A currency's purchasing power can often be quite different to its market rate. If a country's economy is strong, like Australia's is right now, then purchasing power will be a lot lower than the exchange rate; if a country's economy is weak, then its currency's purchasing power might be higher than its exchange rate. Exchange rates can fluctuate wildly, but purchasing power tends to remain pretty consistent (inflation notwithstanding, but assuming two countries have roughly the same rate of inflation, their currencies' comparative purchasing power isn't going to change much). If only there were, I don't know, some cool way of comparing purchasing power directly without those pesky fluctuations of currency markets getting in the way.

Well, as it turns out, there is, and it's called PPP-adjustment. PPP (or purchasing power parity) works on the basis that things are going to cost pretty much the same wherever you go. As a simplistic example (cribbed shamelessly from an IMF page on the matter), if a Big Mac costs £2 in London, and $4 in New York, then the PPP-adjusted exchange rate would be £1 = $2. In other words, one pound is worth two dollars, no matter what the current exchange rate might be, because you can, on average, buy the same things in Britain for £1 as you can in America for $2. Like I say, this is a simplified example: the people responsible for the International Comparison Program survey, from which PPP-adjustment is derived, look at a lot more than just Big Macs - they look at a whole host of goods and services across the globe, comparing their prices (and it turns out £1 is actually worth $1.61).

To avoid confusion, we introduce a hypothetical currency called the "international dollar". The international dollar is like a US dollar, but it's entirely virtual. It's calculated from the findings of PPP-adjustment. Because it can't be traded, it's not subject to the fickle whims of the currency markets, and as such it is useful as a stable benchmark of the purchasing power of a given currency. That is to say, the hypothetical exchange rate from a given currency to an international dollar is the amount of that currency an inhabitant of that country would have to spend on average in order to get goods that, in the US, would be worth $1. The most recent international dollar rates are from 2005, but that's ok, because, as I said, comparative purchasing power doesn't change very much.

The most recent international dollar rates are available from the World Health Organization here (the rates themselves are in an Excel spreadsheet). So we'll look at that and find out that one international dollar is worth 1.39 Australian dollars. There's a big difference between that and the market rate, which is currently 1 USD to 0.96 AUD, but I said that might happen, since Australia's economy is relatively strong right now (Australia being one of the countries that was least badly hit by the global recession).

Let's do some calculations. Australians have to pay $89.99 USD for Rage. At current market rates, that's $86.06 AUD. Adjusting for purchasing power, that's $61.91 international dollars. Remember how I said that an international dollar is how much of a given currency someone would have to spend to get $1 worth of goods in the US? So in real, purchasing power terms, Australians are paying the equivalent of a whopping $1.92 more than Americans. So unfair!

This, like I say, is based on the assumption that goods and services are going to cost pretty much the same wherever you go. So, either literally everything in Australia is 50% too expensive, or games specifically are priced just right (compared with the rest of the world, at least). Given that the average salary in Australia is about twice that (at market rates) of the average salary in America, and remembering that salaries are decided based on purchasing power, and not market rates, I'd go with the latter.

I don't think that the Australians who are complaining actually realise this. It's not particularly a well-known thing. Australians want to pay the same price as everyone else, and that's understandable, because that seems fair. But that relies on market rates being indicative of purchasing power, which they're not. If Australians actually paid $60 USD for Rage, by the time you converted to AUD and adjusted for purchasing power, they would be paying the equivalent of about 40 international dollars.

My point here is that, despite what they think, Australians aren't complaining about how expensive their games are; they're actually (however unwittingly) complaining about how they can't have these games effectively cheaper than everyone else. Which, you know, wouldn't be fair.

Virtual Tourism: I Lost Myself in Tokyo and San Francisco

I spent the other evening playing through Go! Go! Nippon!: My First Trip to Japan, Overdrive's first visual novel targeted at overseas audiences. The somewhat by-numbers romantic plot aside, Go! Go! Nippon! contains elements of travelogue. Players can choose three of six possible areas of Tokyo to visit, followed by a visit to Kyoto and then, depending on how the romance plot plays out (which depends on which areas you chose to visit), either Kamakura or Yokohama. It veers towards virtual tourism.

Meiji Shrine, Shibuya

Sadly, while the locations are beautifully drawn (and often link to photographs of those locations on Google Maps), and the textual information about the locations imparted by the two girls is interesting (at least, I learned some stuff I never knew), iconic, familiar landmarks (and even familiar views of those landmarks) are favoured. In a way, it's unsurprising that a title like this, targeted at overseas audiences, would show people the things most people want to see, but in the static frames of the visual novel format, the landmarks become decontextualised: more a highlight slide-show of a visit to Japan than a virtualisation of an actual visit, and it left me feeling strangely unsatisfied. One might suspect that that's the point: After playing, I've gone from "I'd like to visit Tokyo some day" to "I'd like a little more to visit Tokyo some day".

But I'm really interested in virtual tourism proper. It's not a substitute for real travel, but it's inexpensive and convenient. More than that, though, it's risk-free, and you're not limited to travelling to places in the real world. Let's say you want to experience life in the Old West, or in Pompeii before Vesuvius blew its top, or Renaissance Europe, or Edo-period Japan. Those places don't exist any more, so the only way to experience them is virtually. Further, you could visit worlds that can't exist -- a common setting for games, but games are... different. Even further, you don't have to be yourself when you visit these locations. You don't even necessarily have to be human.

Video games have given us an indirect taste of what virtual tourism might be like. Ernest Adams said that he was very excited about exploring Far Cry's Pacific island environment until he realised that he couldn't do it without someone shooting at him every 30 seconds. The Grand Theft Auto series allows us to visit 'gamified' (though it's not really anything to do with Gamification) versions of New York, Miami, L.A., San Francisco and Las Vegas. True Crime: Streets of L.A. and L.A. Noire both allow us to visit somewhat more authentic recreations of L.A. than does GTA: San Andreas (and, as a bonus, L.A. Noire lets us visit a recreation of an L.A. that no longer exists, albeit with the disclaimer that it's not entirely authentic), but they somehow feel less believable.

Let me tell you about an early gaming experience of mine. Visiting my dad at a young age, he let me on his PC and loaded up for me a game called Vette! This game involved racing Chevrolet Corvettes around a cubist San Francisco (the game was released in 1989, and the 3D technology of the time didn't permit much in the way of detail). As a child, I was always interested in subverting the object of the game and finding other play-spaces within the game's systems, so it wasn't long before I realised I could ignore the actual race and just go for a leisurely drive around a recreation of San Francisco. While my brother was probably more interested in the proto-Grand-Theft-Auto elements (you were, shockingly, able to run over nuns!), this was probably my first taste of virtual tourism; complete freedom to drive around the city and just see what was there (interrupted only if I happened to crash into a certain statue, at which point the developers posted a textual memorial to the Tian An Men Massacre and froze the game).

Ok, your virtual tourism could also be interrupted if you got stopped by the police for your reckless driving. Those poor nuns!

The thing is, video games give us a seductive glimpse of what virtual tourism might be like, but they're not actually that good at virtual tourism. Game environments are often the spatial equivalent of a movie montage: enough to convey the sense and salient details, but necessarily contracted and warped. Partly this is because of technical considerations, and partly it's for the sake of the gameplay. A street that takes five minutes to walk down in real life might take thirty seconds in a game, because spending five minutes walking down a street is boring from a gameplay perspective. Virtual tourism, unlike games, has a covenant of simulative fidelity: it needs to be accurate. Technologically, there's a trade-off between accuracy, detail, and scale. This is why World of Warcraft's Azeroth is, mile for mile, about the size of a small city; not so much a 'world' at all. Morrowind and Oblivion have earned a reputation as games the strength of which lies in being "a place to be" rather than "a game to play", but their environments are still designed in a very game-like way. Virtual tourism using existing game technology would probably be necessarily limited to very small areas, or else be rather unpretty, violating the expectations we -- thanks to games -- now have of virtual environments.

Other, non-game applications have moved towards virtual tourism as well. Second Life contains impressive recreations of real-life locations. But Second Life's problem is community-generated content. Much of it is ugly due to people not realising that just because you can contribute, doesn't mean you should -- and, though I'm no prude, the permissive nature of the user-generated content creates a pervasive air of seedy sexuality: you can almost smell the jism, which is naturally rather off-putting. Google StreetView is another application that suggests virtual tourism. In The Book of Japans, Momus (whose song Folk Me Amadeus I reference in the title of this post, because I'm a bit of a fan) gives instructions for recreating the journey taken by two of the novel's characters in Google StreetView. The problem with Google StreetView, I would suggest, is that tourism is not purely exploratory; you can see things, but it suffers from a lack of agency, and, like Go! Go! Nippon!, from the static frames in which you explore (albeit with an awful lot more of them, although using only the visual medium). Further, both Second Life and Google StreetView have navigation problems that interfere with the sense of presence that a good game can provide: surely a prerequisite for satisfying virtual tourism!

It would be nice to think we could just load up a program and visit some exotic locale, but the more I think about it, the more difficulties I see with that concept. Video games may make an attempt at distilling and approximating what we want from virtual tourism, but that relies on "what we want" from virtual tourism being an objective truth, rather than the subjective thing it is. For now, we have to close off some of the possibilities.