Double Take: Why is that Sexy?

by Daniel Bullard-Bates and C.T. Hutt

C.T.: In the beginning, the video game consumer market was mostly composed of boys, young men (ages 6-13) who wore denim jackets and sported mullets (oh, the eighties). It was an innocent time, a time of Paperboy and Punch-Out, a time when adult themes and weighty social considerations didn’t really factor in for developers any more than it did for us. Time marched on, as it does, and we (the key market) grew up (kind of). As our intellectual curiosity began to percolate so too did a volatile potion of hormones. Suddenly, we wanted more from our games. We wanted relevance, we wanted character, and we wanted the mysteries of our lives reflected on the screen in a dazzling display of high technology with controls at our fingertips. Above all, we wanted sex. The blossoming medium and an ever expanding base of developers were happy to respond to our demands. Just like the genie of Arabic lore our wishes were granted, but not without consequences.

Sex and other adult themes are now a part of video gaming. As an inherently complicated subject for many homo sapiens, it is no surprise that the portrayal of sex and sexuality in games gets into some pretty dicey territory. With this Double Take we are going to be discussing instances where the medium took the inclusion of sexuality in some confusing and occasionally misguided directions.

Beyond Good and Evil

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

A great number of keyboards have been put to use decrying the simplistic moral choices that have insinuated themselves into many video games. Some developers have attempted to remedy this by presenting more complex moral conundrums, such as those present in sections of Dragon Age and Heavy Rain. However, in the process of complicating moral issues for the player, some games have changed the choices so that they are no longer about good and evil at all. BioShock 2 and Heavy Rain present players with major choices, but they ask a different question entirely: do you want to act in-character and confine yourself to the intended narrative, or exert your power of choice and do something out-of-character?

Spoilers follow for both BioShock 2 and Heavy Rain.

The 2009 Select [Button]: Single-Player/Multi-Player

by C.T. Hutt

Most Engrossing Single-Player: Dragon Age: Origins

Despite a plethora of high quality single-player experiences that have come out this year, Dragon Age: Origins reigns supreme. Single-player RPGs are designed to create the optimum mano-a-computer gaming experience, often without an online play aspect or offline cooperative modes, so it’s really no surprise that a title which has been crowned by many sources as the best RPG of the year also makes for the most engrossing single-player experience.

Stunning graphics, complex, strategic game play, and the engaging storyline offered by Dragon Age: Origins combine to keep any gamer with a taste for tactical combat and fantasy glued to their office chair for days. An outstanding single-player experience is not without its dangers of course. Side effects of Dragon Age: Origins may include: vitamin D deficiency, reduced social interaction, loss of sleep, carpel tunnel, poor diet, and delusions of being a Grey Warden. Other than those minor problems, we recommend Dragon Age: Origins to any gamer out there who wants to fly solo.

Honorable Mention: Batman: Arkham Asylum afforded gamers with an experience they have been anticipating for a very long time: a great game based on a comic book character. In some places Batman: Arkham Asylum went a little overboard (i.e.: chemical mega-joker), but it was still a fantastic title.

Most Engrossing Multi-Player: Left 4 Dead 2

Zombies. They stink, they try to kill you, and they drag down property value in a major way. As a responsible citizen and home owner it is your duty and your pleasure to shoot them in the head. But many hands make for light work, so while you are busy clearing the zombie infested streets of New Orleans from the undead, make sure to bring a buddy along. Left 4 Dead 2 brings home the awesomeness of a great horror/ survival FPS and an excellent co-operative game play experience. Nothing says “we are having some fun now” more than pounding your buddy on the back yelling “Shoot the the jockey! Shoot the jockey!” before you get pulled into a puddle of acidic spitter mucus. Toss in some excellent environments and a dash of poignant social commentary and you’ve got a title we will be playing for months to come.

Honorable Mention: Borderlands. Wait, what? Didn’t you just say you hated that game? Not entirely. The setting, storyline, repetitive missions, character balance, and soundtrack of Borderlands all leave a lot to be desired, but the co-operative play is really quite good. Borderlands is proof positive that almost anything can be fun if you bring some friends along for the ride.

The Cutting Room Floor

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

With the advent of the DVD, it has become common practice to include deleted scenes with a movie. It is usually easy to determine why they were cut, whether it was due to the dialogue falling flat, problems with pacing, or simply because it was unnecessary to the plot or character development of the movie. Though it can be painful to amputate a scene that took a lot of hard work, the best directors know when to leave something on the cutting room floor.

It seems to be much more difficult for game designers to let go. Very few video games have no unnecessary sections, missions, or side quests. As Mitch Krpata points out in this post on Uncharted 2, part of what makes that game so fantastic is that there is so little fluff. But Uncharted 2 is the exception, not the rule, when it comes to game design.

Role-playing games provide some of the most blatant examples of unnecessary and unwarranted material. Often this superfluous content comes in the form of time-absorbing side quests. I understand the mentality that might bring a designer to include a few dull side quests: they’re entirely optional, so only the completionist will actively pursue all of them. I was once a completionist when it came to role-playing games, but pointless, hollow side quests have driven me to be considerably less thorough. Just because someone wants to experience everything a game has to offer does not mean that process should be completely mind-numbing.

There is one side quest in Dragon Age: Origins that asked me to collect twenty of a specific kind of mushroom. Here I am, trying to save the country and perhaps the world from an encroaching army of pure evil, and someone wants me to take some time off to practice amateur mycology. Even if this sounded like a fun pastime for my character, giving these mushrooms away for gold is completely counterintuitive to my character’s goals. These same mushrooms can be used to make useful potions to help in my battles against that evil army I mentioned. In other words, the task is boring and the goal is stupid. You get experience points for it, but how do I justify that to my party members? “I’m sorry you’re dying horribly because I traded in all those supplies, but I really wanted that next level up.” Most of the quests in Dragon Age can be completed on the way to more significant tasks or offer more substantial incentives for their completion, but a few should have been cut. Optional or not, boring gameplay is boring gameplay. I’m reminded of the uncharted worlds in Mass Effect.

Borderlands is a refreshingly straightforward game, in that it makes no effort to delude the player into thinking that there is some higher purpose to their actions. The goals are to find more loot and reach the next level, but this dull premise is redeemed by addictive gameplay and a fun co-operative element. This makes it easier to justify embarking on inane optional missions, since there’s no looming threat to make one hurry. Even so, some of the missions presented in the game are ridiculous even for a lowly mercenary. Shooting fecal matter off of a giant turbine does not make me feel cool. Collecting used smut magazines out of dumpsters is not an enjoyable way to spend my time. I don’t begrudge a game the opportunity to have a laugh, but joke missions should be brief so the joke doesn’t overstay its welcome. By the time I’ve trekked halfway across the map to find my third porn dumpster, I am no longer laughing. I am wondering why this made it into the game.

These are minor sins, since they can be safely ignored without detracting from the game experience. What’s even worse is when a game has required sections that are dull or counterintuitive to the game’s goals. In Assassin’s Creed 2, at several points the player is asked to tail someone, keeping an eye on them from a distance while they lead the player to a specific place. Get too close, and they will notice you, lag too far behind and you will lose track of them. This would be simply boring if they didn’t throw in multiple obstacles to your success. Guards along your path might recognize you, requiring you to blend with crowds or hire groups to distract them. This means that you spend large sections of gameplay just walking along watching someone else walk along, and if you don’t do just the right thing, you are noticed, which causes you to fail and start over. Suddenly they’re not just boring, they’re boring and irritating.

Sometimes, important plot information is being relayed by the people you are following. I appreciate the fact that these sections could be seen as a break from the running and jumping and killing, and it’s even a clever way to relay plot information without taking control from the player. But if those are the goals, why not remove some of the complications? Be more lax about the distances; remove the unnecessary barriers to completion. These are not difficult missions, so let them just be breaks from the action. I find it hard to believe that no play tester for Assassin’s Creed 2 turned to a designer and said, “This part is not fun.”

There are lessons to be learned from the cinema. If something isn’t working or doesn’t help a movie, a good director will cut it or edit it until it works. Most video games, even excellent ones, have sections that should have been left on the cutting room floor. Maybe they just need harsher editors.

Real Moral Choice

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

Moral choices, when present in video games, seem to mostly boil down to either saintly behavior or satanic cruelty. Will I save the little sisters from their cruel bonds, or will I tear them into pieces for my own purposes (BioShock)? Should I give the woman her baby for free or threaten its life so she’ll fork over a few gold coins (Neverwinter Nights)? Do I want to end up with a halo or some really gnarly horns (Fable 2)?

I’ve only played about two hours of Dragon Age: Origins, just enough to get through one of the origin stories the game offers, but in that limited amount of time I was presented with the first real moral challenge I have ever faced in a video game. I was a young female elven rogue whose wedding day was ruined by a cruel human noble interposing himself on our modest ceremony. Elves in the world of Dragon Age were, in recent history, an enslaved people. Since we’re still treated as second-class citizens, no one raised much of an outcry when a group of armed men broke up my wedding day and took me and several other women hostage.

With the help of a childhood friend, I broke out, killing the human guards who got in my way. I managed to rescue most of my friends before anything terrible happened to them, but one of the women and my husband-to-be were killed. When I finally reached the so-called noble, he and a group of his men were standing over the sobbing form of one of my closest friends. I gripped my sword in mute fury as the man turned to face me. And that’s when I reached a moment, purely in dialogue, that was more difficult than any series of jumps or room full of well-armed enemies in other games.

The man presented me with a choice: I could fight him, and maybe I would win, but if I killed him his father would probably storm the slum where I lived, killing most of the people I grew up with and burning their homes to the ground. Or I could just walk away, a little richer, and pretend that these atrocities never took place.

I’m not sure I’ve ever taken a longer time to make a dialogue decision. There was no right answer, no clear moral solution. I wanted to do the right thing, but I had no idea what that was.

I told him I would walk away if he let the women go. He refused, saying that he would still be keeping them for the night, all of them but me. That’s when I stabbed him in the gut. It felt good, but I had no idea whether I had done the right thing. I might have doomed us all. Only time would tell.

And that moment, with all of the actual, real-life internal conflict that it elicited from me, was one of the most impressive video game moments of my life. I haven’t played much more of Dragon Age since then, but if that’s all I get out of it I will consider this game an important milestone in video games: a game that finally establishes that morality is not a simple thing, with one good answer and one evil one. Finally, I was asked to make a decision and I had no idea what to do. This shows that games are finally maturing, and that difficulty is no longer just a question of game mechanics. This was challenging to my conscience instead of my reflexes, just like any real, difficult moral choice.

Falling off the Dragon

by C.T. Hutt

Oh my god! Is it Friday?

Crap, I think it really is. That would explain why I am at work at least. I don’t understand, what the hell happened? The last thing I remember it was Saturday morning, I was at a Best Buy purchasing a copy of Dragon Age: Origins, but then it’s all a blank. What happened to my week? Why haven’t I shaved? Man, my joints ache like I’ve spent days sitting in an office chair. I’m exhausted, when was the last time I got a full night’s rest? The last time I remember feeling like this was in the middle of my World of Warcraft addiction back in college. This can only mean one thing. I must have had a relapse.

Wait, now I remember. I’ve spent the last week enthralled in Bioware’s latest time vacuum. Oh god, I thought I was past this. Can I really be blamed though? The game play for this title is magnificent, it’s challenging and varied. Success requires tactical considerations and careful planning. The characters are compelling and the voice acting is flawless. And there is a plot, an honest to god plot that I actually find engrossing. Presented with a game that involves a story arc and character development, can I really be blamed for a little slip? Who’s got a problem? You’ve got a problem. Don’t judge me!

Who doesn’t enjoy a good fantasy RPG? You remember Baldur’s Gate right? Dragon Age manages to combine writing in the tradition of Baldur’s Gate with the same playability that has made WoW an international hit. Ask the other bloggers, I am not the only one who thinks so, the net is littered with praise for this title. The familiar landscapes in the game fall a little short for me, but nothing is perfect. See, you see that? I found some fault in the game; I’ve totally got this under control.

Now if you will excuse me, it is Friday afternoon and I need to go home, to uh, walk my cat, I mean brush my plants, no wait I need to water the cats. Yeah, that’s it…

'Twas the Night Before Starcraft

by C.T. Hutt

A light snow falls on the good simple folk doing their business downtown. Amid the bustle of the marketplace is a seasonal spirit of good cheer, bright wreaths hang from shop doors and colorful garlands frame every window. Gentlemen tip their hats to each other and good ladies curtsy as they pass. It’s a magical time filled with hope for the future and warm memories of Christmases past. And what’s this? All the excited children are gathered around the window of Old Man Bestbuy’s Software Shoppe. See them press their adorable little faces against the glass and watch with doe-like eyes as the newest toy goes on display. Is it the latest model train? Or perhaps a lovable stuffed bear? No, this year it’s Dragon Age: Origins developed by Bioware.

“Callooh! Callay!” The children shout.

See them dance in the street and flare their little nostrils against the window pane. How very adorable the entire scene is, except this is not a Dickens novel and those are not children, that’s me and Daniel and we are in our mid twenties.

We may not be as cute as we were when we were kids, but unlike our mannerisms, our stance toward vegetables, and our general outlook on life and the world around us, our enthusiasm for video games has refused to grow up even a little bit. Also, who the hell asked you what’s cute? Take a hike, buddy.

There is more to enjoy about video games then just playing them. While that is, of course, their primary function as entertainment, I would put forward that the anticipation is an important part of the fun. In the often humdrum monotony of our adult lives, having a few things that we are genuinely excited about is invaluable. It gives us something to monitor and study that is fun rather than vital to the operations of our lives, like the market or the news. Even after a particular title has been played to its completion and retired, it gives us something to talk about (or write about at great length) for years to come.

This child-like enthusiasm is not without its pitfalls. Along with this juvenile “need” to have a particular title comes a childish tantrum when our desires are not met. For example, ever since Blizzard’s announcement of Starcraft 2 back in the late eighteen hundreds, I have been beside myself with anticipation for its release. True to form, Blizzard has dangled this sumptuous carrot in front of its avid fan base for years now and every time we think it is in biting range, they announce another delay. So far they have been completely un-responsive to my letters claiming that if they don’t finish developing it I will hold my breath until I pass out. Daniel is equally unsympathetic to my woe; every time I pout about this subject he enjoys a hearty laugh at my expense. This is hyperbole of course, but I do feel an irrational frustration that I am forced to wait for this release. It’s the same frustration I felt in 1999 waiting for the original Starcraft, and 1995 waiting for Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness. That was fourteen years ago, I was twelve, and it still feels exactly the same. It may be frustration, but in all honesty it is a fun sort of frustration.

We fixate on these games; we follow their development with great interest, play them, and then analyze everything about them. And why? Partially because of the reasons we have so often espoused here at Press Pause to Reflect, that video games are a socially important artistic medium worthy of attention and respect. Also, we simply enjoy the act of playing video games. But aside from these reasons, there is the fact that it just feels good to have something in the often dour and serious world of adulthood that makes us feel like kids dancing in the street, excited for the next big thing.

Fool Me Twice

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

I've been suckered into buying copious amounts of downloadable content for long enough. I purchased Fallout 3 when it first came out (the ridiculously expensive edition that comes with a broken clock), and dutifully bought each additional adventure as it was released. I'd already completed the main storyline, so I waited until all the packs were out to actually play through them. I don't have any problem with the content itself: I think the various additional adventures were well done, and particularly enjoyed the variety they presented in play style, atmosphere and setting. That being said, I felt a bit of a fool when they announced the "Game of the Year" edition of Fallout 3, with all the additional content at the same price point as the original game. I got a lot of enjoyment out of my time with the game, but waiting clearly would have served me better.

I didn't buy LittleBigPlanet when it first came out because I didn't have a Playstation 3. Now I do, and I was lucky enough to get onboard with the "Game of the Year" edition of that game, which comes with a pile of downloadable content already on the game disc. This feels like a small personal success. It's clear that this is becoming the new model for video games with extensive downloadable content plans. Release the game, release the add-ons over a few months, then re-release the game with all the add-ons.

So here comes Dragon Age: Origins, a game that seems specifically designed to empty my wallet. A spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate 2, you say? A dark, epic fantasy inspired by Lord of the Rings and A Song of Ice and Fire? Be still my heart. The only reason I don't own the super fancy mega edition is because I barely resisted purchasing a brand new computer this month to play the thing. I know I want to play it, my soul cries out for me to play it, but I also know that it will be best on the PC. That's how I experienced the Baldur's Gate games, and that's how I want to experience Dragon Age. Even so, it's hard to resist its siren song.

But there's something soothing my hungry soul. The game has only just released, and there's already paid downloadable content out for it, with a plan for a lot more. To me, this says that one day in the not too distant future, there will be some sort of complete edition, perhaps another "Game of the Year" if it wins any such awards, and by then a computer to run it will be considerably less expensive. I may miss out on the experience for now, but I'll comfort myself with the fact that I wasn't suckered into a long, drawn-out scheme to part me from my money. And when I finally play the game, all those additional quests and dungeons will already be there, rife with possibilities, treasure, and intricate plotlines. There might even be a few dragons left.

When Marketing Ploys Go Bad

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

As a role-playing game fanatic, it is safe to say that Dragon Age is one of my most anticipated games releasing this fall. I've enjoyed every BioWare game that I've played thus far, and been very impressed with their other original properties, Jade Empire and Mass Effect. So naturally, when I saw that they have a free flash-based game, presumably to whet the public's appetite with a taste of the setting and story, I decided I would give it a spin.

The game, Dragon Age: Journeys, is a fairly basic point-and-click affair with a simple turn-based combat system. It's nothing fancy, but one doesn't expect much from a free flash-based game on the internet. But having played the game to its completion, I find myself much more nervous for Dragon Age: Origins than I was before. Previously, I was going to pre-order the game. Now I think I'll wait to read a few reviews.

Why such a sudden change of heart, based solely on flash game? Simply put, the writing and plot are terrible. I understand low production values on a flash game. Things like a simple interface, basic combat, and uninspired gameplay are pretty much par for the course in the realm of free games you can play in your browser, especially games that are meant as promotional tools. But what I really expect from a BioWare game is good writing and an interesting plot, and there's no reason that the flash game could not fulfill the basic function of making the world of Dragon Age seem interesting. Let me give you an example of the dialogue in this game:

Dwarf: "We found only you at the gates of Orzammar, wounded, dazed, and rambling."

PC: "We ran into an emissary. He seemed different. He was... glowing?"

Dwarf: "Glowing you say? I've never heard of such a darkspawn."

GLOWING. That's actual dialogue! This isn't just one tiny example out of the whole game, either. You spend the majority of this game talking to people about how you saw a guy who glowed blue. They don't even try to make it sound more interesting than that. You'll walk up to characters and say things like, "We have to see the king! He needs to hear about this glowing blue darkspawn!"

I'm sure this game wasn't written by the lead writing team of Dragon Age: Origins. In fact, the game may not have even been touched by BioWare, but rather handled entirely by some other branch of Electronic Arts. But what's the point of a flash-based Dragon Age if not to show how interesting the setting and plot will be? We certainly don't come to browser games like these for the incredible 3D graphics and console-like gameplay.

At the end of the game, there was a questionnaire which asked how much I would be willing to pay for the continuation of the game, either online or on the DS or iPhone. I'm not sure I'd play it even if it were as free as the current game. I honestly don't want to know what happens with the sinister blue glowing guy. It's discoloring all my thoughts about a game I'm very excited about.