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.