No Need to Explain

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

Alan Wake is the creator and the protagonist of the world he inhabits. Whether he is living through one of his own stories, dreaming, or insane, his personality informs every element of the narrative. After playing Remedy’s Max Payne games, I expected Wake to be more two-dimensional than he is. He is impatient and quick to anger with his wife but his devotion to her is clear. More interesting is the fact that his writing is riddled with clichés which are then reflected in the world he inhabits. In another context, I might call the Taken (shadowy figures controlled by darkness) poorly written, but Remedy has pulled a little trick to remove themselves from this criticism: They are Wake’s creation, so their cheesy design can only be blamed on him.

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.

Real Sacrifice

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

Fair warning: this post on sacrifice contains fairly major spoilers for Final Fantasy IV.

Final Fantasy IV contains a moment of self-sacrifice that completely shocked me. It was dramatic, emotional, and inspiring, but mostly it impressed because it was such a departure from the typical story of self-sacrifice. Since before the story of Jesus of Nazareth’s death for the sins of the world, personal sacrifice for the sake of others has been a source of fascination and praise for humanity. In modern entertainment, these moments typically take one of two forms:

1. The character is unproven, cowardly, or has caused some harm to befall the other characters previously in the story. By sacrificing themselves to delay the oncoming horde/blow up the reactor/offer their lives to a supernatural force, they redeem themselves in the eyes of the other characters in the story forever.
2. The character is a close friend or ally who lives primarily to see the mission succeed or to protect another character. By giving their lives in service of the mission/friend/lover, they forever show their dedication to that cause/friendship/love.

The latter of these two conditions has greater potential for emotional impact, since the character performing the sacrifice has a presumably deeper connection to the other characters. What both conditions have in common, however, is that after the death of the characters, it is possible to look at their lives and their choices and see how far they’ve come, how they’ve changed as people and what brought them to such a decision. By sacrificing themselves these characters purchase relevance to the story and a morally clean slate with their lives.

Self sacrifice is such an overused theme in entertainment that it has become easy, as a viewer, to accept it when a character throws their life away for the sake of others. We may be sad to see a favorite character go, but we can reconcile ourselves to the idea. In less well-written stories, we may barely be affected at all by such a dramatic moment. I doubt it would surprise many gamers if, in Gears of War 3, Dom has a dramatic moment of self-sacrifice in which he dies to save Marcus Fenix or the world. It’s almost what big, gruff secondary characters are designed to do.

There is a moment in Final Fantasy IV, however, which affected me in a way that I was not prepared for at all. Allow me to set the scene:

When I first met Palom and Porom, I had been washed ashore after a shipwreck. I quickly realized that the nearest town was the same one that I had previously robbed and sacked, and the members of the town did nothing but torment me for my past actions. Attempting to reform my ways, I sought the guidance of a town elder who sent me up a nearby mountain to redeem myself and become a paladin. He sent two young children, twins, both aspiring wizards of considerable talent, to go with me and keep an eye on me.

Palom was a sweet girl, very polite and helpful. She specialized in magic that protects and heals. Porom was impetuous and rude, and loved to brag about his magical skill. Typical for his age, which I estimated at about ten. Together, they helped me through the trials ahead, and even decided to join me on my quest, leaving their hometown behind them.

We were fleeing a castle, and the room we were in was completely sealed. The walls were closing in. And these two impossible children, these young children with their whole lives ahead of them, consciously chose to turn themselves to stone, forever, to hold the walls at bay and allow us to escape. We tried to bring them back, but we couldn’t.

As we fled, we vowed that their sacrifice was not in vain, but I knew that it was my fault. If I’d never stolen from that town in the first place, if I’d never returned, they would still be living their lives in that peaceful little village. Maybe it wouldn’t have been peaceful for long. Maybe if they hadn’t been there to stop those walls, we all would have died and hope for the world would have died with us. Still, it was hard to come to terms with the loss of children so young. Did they really understand the sacrifice they were making? Children understand more than we give them credit for, but could they really grasp how much they were giving up?

Not knowing what was to come, I marched onward to confront the evil responsible, inspired by the bravery and selflessness of two ten-year-old children. Their sacrifice meant something. It was unexpected, and it was dramatic, and it made me think differently about them, about the evil we faced, about my resolve to destroy it, and most of all, about the emotional power that video games have held for years. Final Fantasy IV was first released in 1991. In 2010, playing it for the first time on a little handheld device on a long car ride, it showed me a more dramatic moment of personal sacrifice than most movies and books have ever done. It just goes to show that sometimes all it takes is a little twist on an old cliché to give a story a more profound emotional hook.

Game Pitch: Meaningful Death Game

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

After reading Josh’s recent post on death and failure in video games, I found myself thinking that a game that treats any character’s death with a sense of permanence and resolution could be pretty incredible. My next thought was that this would probably also make the game incredibly difficult and barely any fun at all, as I would have to play from the beginning of the entire game each time my character died. So how could a game deal with death as a serious consequence without ruining the enjoyment of playing the game?

To answer that question, I’d like to pitch a concept for a game at you. If you’re someone who plays games, I’d like you to think about whether you’d enjoy this one. If you’re someone who designs games, I’d like you to make this one. If you’re a company that develops games, I’d like you to hire me to be the creative designer on this one. Let’s a-go!

The Opening Scene:

You’re sitting in the back of a bus traveling through the Rocky Mountains, looking out the window. The girl to your left is listening to her headphones, but smiles sweetly when you look at her. The bus stops in a small town to refuel, and the driver and a few passengers get out to stretch their legs and grab some snacks. After a few moments, sounds of a struggle and a scream are heard from the inside of the gas station. The window of the gas station breaks as the driver goes through it, and a strange, near-human creature leaps through and lands on all fours, with several others following it out of the building. Someone in the bus manages to close the doors and lock them as the creatures pound on the windows and panic breaks out.

The girl next to you throws her headphones down. She looks panicked, but she takes your hand and reminds you that you know how to drive a bus, and you have to get out of here. You work your way to the front of the bus, sit in the driver’s seat, turn the key and hit the gas. The creatures hang onto the side, keening and crying as you pick up speed. Suddenly, you see a woman in the middle of the road ahead of you, and you swerve to avoid her. You slam into a rock and go flying through the front windshield. As you lie on the pavement, the girl from the seat next to you runs up to you, crying, as a few others mill around outside the bus. They're talking, but they sound very far away. The girl holds your hand and caresses your face as everything fades to black.

Now you’re looking down at the body of a young man on the pavement. Your eyes are blurry with tears, and the people around you are trying to figure out what to do next. Not too far away, strange and hideous calls sound out in the night.

The Concept:

A survival-horror game with a large cast of characters, where each chapter of the game has the player taking the role of a different character. Each chapter would end when the character currently being controlled either reaches a specific goal or dies. Later chapters would have more or less of the cast remaining based on the survival rate throughout the game. Multiple endings would be possible: one where everyone dies, another where one or more people manage to escape to safety, a third where the story of the town and the monsters is revealed and the threat is wiped out forever. At points in the story it would present the option to give items or weapons to other characters who might have more of a use for them, and the player would have to balance their desire to have the items now against their desire for the other character to have them later in the game.

The Payoff:

Using a satellite phone given to you by a character now long dead, you manage to use your knowledge of electronics to fix it, hook it up to a larger antenna and get reception, contacting help and the outside world. It's a good thing he gave the phone to you to fix, instead of using up the batteries trying to find a signal on a broken phone.

In a later part of the game, another character has a brief, emotional moment where he recollects the death of a character you played earlier in the game. Or, if the character lived, he tells her how much she means to him before they leave the relative safety of the house the survivors have holed up in.

A writhing horde of monsters teems down a hallway towards the few remaining characters. You hand off the keys and items you’ve found to the people you’ve grown so close to in the last few hours, and tell them to run. You stand your ground, shooting the beasts down as your friends escape. The first one reaches you and knocks you to the ground, but as they surround you, you see that your allies have gotten far enough away to make it. You know that they have everything they need to end this.

Other Applications:

A similar idea of a large cast of characters and meaningful, permanent death could be applied to a number of different game concepts. It could make for a more intense and realistic war game, where the player controls different members of a whole squad of soldiers. Or imagine a Batman game where you play as the rogue’s gallery of villains and try to execute a nefarious plan as Batman works to take you down, one by one. The possibilities are both varied and exciting. So what do you say, gamers? Would you play it? And game companies, am I hired?

On Death and Waiting 30 Seconds

Francis’s gone. No one ever really liked him, but he was one of us, if not the best of us. We didn’t see the tank coming until it was nearly on top of us. Francis was running rear guard; the damned thing threw him into a train before we could put up any kind of defense. Zoey and Louis were nearly a block ahead picking up supplies, by the time I’d gotten their attention Francis was a blood slick on the tracks. I’ve seen those tanks at work before, seen ‘em tear a man apart at the waist. This ain’t my first time to the rodeo, after all. But man, did that thing do a number on him. Then the witch showed up. We didn’t have them back in ’57, and sometimes when I lay awake at night – Hell, who am I kidding? Ain’t like I ever sleep anymore – I wonder what happened to make ‘em what they are. Everything else about these monsters I feel like I got some kinda handle on: they’re just mouths, I figure, mouths and stomachs and guts without much else to keep ‘em human. But those witches – what kinda thing has to happen to a deadhead to make it cry? So Zoey and Louis are running back, and I’m shouting to ‘em that Francis isn’t much more than a stain anymore and there isn’t much of anything we can do about that and for God’s sake give me some cover, and then I hear that noise, that sobbing that never fails to raise the hair on my neck. And it stops, and I know it only ever goes quiet before the damned thing attacks, and I hear Zoey scream as something knocks her off her feet. I didn’t have time to warn them to shut off their flashlights, it must’ve seen them coming a mile away. Here’s where I’m ashamed to say I started running. Call me a coward if you like, but between a tank and a witch there’s no winning. Everyone’s gotta go sometime, and it’s gotta be said that Zoey and Francis made it longer than most. I just hope Louis is smart enough to make the same call. I made it out of the train yard before I turned around. There were a few dozen of the bastards closing in on Louis from the north, plus another twenty he hasn’t seen yet pouring into the tunnel from the east. He’s doing a fair job keeping ‘em off Zoey, but she’s done for and he has to know it. I can’t help but think that – What the fuck? Ok, Francis is back, I guess. Uh, I think he got better from being, you know, turned into paste. Maybe he had a med pack? Or…pills? Can pills do that? Oh, ok, and Zoey isn’t really dead. She was…uh…hiding inside the switch operator’s office. Ok, so that’s good for her. Louis? Is he still – no, he looks pretty fucked. There are about thirty zombies around him, and they’re working on – scratch that, they are finished tearing off his arms. We’ll have to pick him up later, he might need to walk that off. Anyway, as I was saying, Francis is fine. Here’s where Left 4 Dead went from being a terrifying survival-horror game to a pretty standard multiplayer romp through the woods. I was fully immersed in the pants-wetting crisis before me – seriously, a tank is no laughing matter – and then we found our dead friend hiding in a closet. This is not the sort of development that generates emotional resonance. I’m a little frustrated with games that offer easy re-spawning. We were talking a little while ago about the obstacles still standing between today’s video games and tomorrow’s “narrative engine” (to paraphrase Mr. Guillermo del Toro), and with a little reflection I think I’ve hit upon one of the biggest ones: games want you to live. I think this struck me first as I was playing one of the Resident Evil games, maybe 5. I’d played through one scene about a half dozen times, I’d discovered the glut of uniquely flavored deaths I could experience at the hands of an undead tribe, and I got to thinking: what if this is where my character was meant to die? What if this is just the dramatically logical end to his journey into hell? (Ok, the Resident Evil games probably aren’t the best examples of sound storytelling. Still.) I can count the number of great works of literature with happy endings on one hand, and I’m including Calvin and Hobbes in that estimate. So it’s frustrating that the video game, that narrative medium that is meant to afford us entirely new vistas to behold, has yet to really include any titles where failure is a real, dramatically realized option. What about the elf who confronts his arch-nemesis and finds himself grossly out-matched? The Sith Lord who cannot betray his master? The plumber who gets stuck in a pipe? Who will tell their stories? Romeo and Juliet differs from, say, a Harlequin romance novel in both superior writing and the willingness to delve into tragedy. (To clarify, both belong to the former, though I guess that’s a matter of taste.) So when will we see tragic video games? Games where failure is a scripted, developed option? I’d like to see a game where you can’t re-spawn; where there are not save points before boss fights; where, in short, every challenge offers the possibility of success and the very real chance of failure. I think it’d add a lot to a game’s appeal if the player wasn’t certain of success; I’d worry more about my character’s safety, but be equally pleased if he died and his death was honored with more than a “Game Over” screen. Dulce et decorum, and all. I want to see Link fail once in a while. I think it’s the only way his story can really succeed.

Reflections with Jonathan Blow

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

Having finished Braid this week in the Monthly Game Club, we're left with many questions about the meaning of the game. One thing is certain, however: Braid stands as a profound example of the quality and polish possible in the world of independent games, and the level of intelligence possible in all video games, independent or otherwise. Jonathan Blow, the developer and designer of the game, was kind enough to answer a few questions for us on being an independent game developer, the role of interactivity in games, and the inspiration for Braid.
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Your game was independently made, but first released on Xbox Live Arcade. Would you share a few thoughts with us on being an independent game designer working with a huge corporation like Microsoft?

Whenever dealing with a company like this, you usually work with a (relatively) small division. I don't really know what kinds of politics goes on there, because for the most part Microsoft is good at isolating developers from that. Usually I would be dealing with just 1 or 2 people, and spending most of my time making the game. Because they had done a lot of Arcade titles before Braid, they did a pretty good job of ushering games through the approval and certification process with minimal BS. I did have one episode late in development where someone on the Microsoft side who I had never talked to decided to monkey with the game at the last minute in an unexpected way, and that was a very negative experience, but ultimately I decided to go ahead and release the game on XBLA anyway. Largely, though, it was a hands-off experience: my job was to make a good game, and the job of the guys I talked to at Microsoft was to help me get that game onto their service.

How do you think services like Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network, and WiiWare are affecting the independent gaming world?

It's definitely a positive thing that independent game developers have these places to sell games where they can find a large audience and where the piracy rate is relatively low -- it means that it's much more feasible now to make a living as an independent developer than it was 10 years ago.

Braid has been cited as an example in the continued debate about whether video games can be art. What do video games need to do to be taken seriously as an artistic medium?

All that needs to happen is for game developers to do more-serious work. The appreciation will come from that, naturally. Right now, the work isn't there. Most of what we do as an industry is about pandering and infantilism. If enough of us just stop doing that, we will find that there is an audience out there that takes us seriously.

How does interactivity change the ways ideas or stories are explored?

It just leads to the contemplation of a different field of ideas than something like film or music does. I can't say how that is "changed" from another medium because they aren't necessarily related that closely. There are connections, sure, but each one is in its own right a wide and deep body of stuff that can't be easily summarized. That's why we use these media to explore these things! If I can just say what the point is, then we don't need games in the first place.

Braid uses a number of innovative game mechanics; did the story inspire the gameplay, or vice versa?

The whole thing came to mind at roughly the same time. I would say that maybe the gameplay idea came first, by a very thin hair, but it was a very general idea -- that the way time behaves would change from world to world, though I didn't know what those behaviors would be, and in fact had very different ideas about these time behaviors initially than what ended up in the game. But as soon as I had that concept, I knew that I wanted the game to be done in the tradition of Italo Calvino's book Invisible Cities and Alan Lightman's book Einstein's Dreams, and that there would be textual pieces introducing each world.

One thing a number of people have said, when being critical of the game, is that they wish that the story parts happened in cut-scenes or were otherwise integrated into the gameplay. When they say this, I detect some kind of sentiment that, hey, now that we *can* have cut-scenes or pieces of story dribbled to us during the primary gameplay (as in Bioshock), that these are the only valid way to do things, that somehow text is obsolete. But that is a bit silly. The book has not gone away, and the way subjects are explored in literature are different than how they happen in dialogue or in pictures. It's a different medium, it has a different grain, and it's perfectly valid to use that grain if you want to. (And if a designer does not know this fact, then he is going to work with an incomplete toolbox!)

From the very first day, Braid was conceived as a videogame with its story presented in the tradition of a few books that I respect, and maybe a film or two.

Do you have any advice for aspiring independent game developers?

The most important thing is to make games and get them done. The second most important thing is to ensure that those games are the best things that you can make, whatever that means to you. Unfortunately these two goals are in conflict.

Would you like to share with us what you're working on now?

Every time I answer this question, it's something different. I have four different games that I have taken to the prototype stage since finishing Braid. I keep changing my mind about which game is really my next project, so I would just be misleading you if I gave a concrete answer here!

The Humor!

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

A couple weeks ago, I spoke about some less-than-stellar trends in horror games - tendencies that make the genre less scary when it could evolve in more interesting directions. This week, I want to focus on something I think is improving: humor in video games.

Just in the last four years, we’ve seen more and more games try to be funny and succeed. Psychonauts was hilarious. The first Overlord game displayed a quirky sense of humor. And the dry wit and humor of GLaDOS helped make Portal one of the best games in recent memory. And with Brütal Legend, Overlord 2, and rumors of Portal 2 on the horizon, it looks as if games with a sense of humor are enjoying a resurgence in popularity. Hopefully, the trend will expand beyond these developers and franchises.

I grew up on funny games. King’s Quest, The Secret of Monkey Island (getting remade!), and similar early adventure games all had a sense of humor clearly present. I appreciated that in my games. I didn’t stop appreciating it, but it seems that game developers lost interest in funny ideas for a time. There were hints of hilarity. I could tell that Alyx Vance had a sense of humor, but she and I were rarely able to relax for long enough for me to be sure.

Now, writing humor is notoriously difficult, so it’s no surprise that most games either don’t try to be funny, or fall short on their attempts. When games like Gears of War can be wildly popular with almost nothing to show in the writing department, it’s follows that most companies won’t shell out the cash to hire talented writers. I think the Gears of War series even has a few weak attempts at humor, though I can never be totally sure:

“There’s a shitload of Locust down there!”
“More like 10 shitloads.”

Funny? (Is there any series that we’ve ragged on more than Gears? For the record, I played and enjoyed both of those games, which just goes to show how much good gameplay can get us to ignore.)

Humor’s return to popularity in games is likely related to the fact that talented writers are actually being seen, more and more, as an important part of game development. All of the games I mentioned at the beginning of this post are associated with a strong writer or group of writers: Tim Schafer is the creative mind behind and lead writer of Psychonauts and Rhianna Pratchett (daughter of the also funny Terry Pratchett) wrote the script for Overlord. Valve has one of the best writing teams in video games in Marc Laidlaw, Chet Faliszek and Erik Wolpaw. Besides the stellar humor on display in Portal, there are moments of genuine hilarity in their more action-oriented games, like when Bill mumbles in the middle of Left 4 Dead, “You call this a 'zombie apocalypse'? This is nothing compared to the Great Zombie Attack of '57!”

Displays of humor in games serve a greater purpose than mere amusement. They show that games aren’t just all about aggression and violence: an intelligent game, like any work of art, evokes a wide variety of emotions. Humor is just another world that games should feel comfortable exploring, and it will take more good writing to make that happen.

So let this serve as a note of commendation. I’m thrilled to see these companies treat writing as an important part of game design, and I’m very excited to see that games are funny again.

Playing with Art

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

We at Press Pause to Reflect take as an assumption that video games, like any other form of media, can be artistic works. This has been debated on many blogs, and by notables like Clive Barker and Roger Ebert, but I don’t really think that video games’ potential for art remains debatable: they certainly can be. The question is how video games can best show their artistic value.

Often, when the argument for artistic merit in games is made, examples are given of the craftsmanship shown in some particular aspect of a game. The visual style of Okami, for example, evokes traditional Japanese art and calligraphy. Nobuo Uematsu, the composer for the much-lauded Final Fantasy soundtracks, can be cited as a musical talent creating artistic works for games. Or a particularly well-told story with compelling characters, such as those present in Beyond Good and Evil or Silent Hill 2, can make a compelling case for comparing games to works of art in film and literature.

Ultimately, that is where the argument breaks down: the most enduring works of art are only possible within their chosen mediums. When we compare a game’s story to that of a book or a movie, its visuals to a painting, or its music to a song or an overture, we are merely exploring the way in which games imitate other forms of art. Story, graphics and sound are important aspects of any game, but they are not the most important element, nor do they distinguish video games from other artistic mediums.

Instead, the question of what makes a profound artistic accomplishment in a game should revolve around the thing that makes the video game a unique art form: while one observes paintings, listens to music, reads a book and watches a movie, the unique quality of a video game is that you play it. Beyond bringing your own perspective to a game, you can shape the path of the story itself, control the pace and the situations, and choose what to assign importance and what to ignore to a degree that is impossible in other mediums.

For a video game to achieve artistic greatness, it is this interactivity that must be explored. Art in gaming should toy with the expectations of how to play a game, and create circumstances and scenarios that would be impossible without the input of the player. Just as Citizen Kane could not have been made into an equally excellent book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being failed to convey itself as a movie, and the Mona Lisa lacks any potential for greatness as a song, great artistic achievements will not come to the world of video games without wrestling with the idea of user input and interactivity. Gaming has yet to reach the lofty heights of any of the works I mentioned, largely because most game developers are attempting merely to imitate the qualities of other works of art, instead of innovating and exploring the possibilities unique to video games.

Let’s look at a few examples of games that explore those possibilities to artistic effect. From the world of role-playing games comes one of the first major innovations in story-telling to reach the world of video games: the ability to make choices that shape the outcome of the game itself. From the multiple endings in Chrono Trigger to the dramatic shifts in narrative possible in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, video games offer the ultimate fulfillment of the idea first presented in “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. While the dialogue and options are still prepared for the player, games have been written to accommodate more and more choice, so that the player determines the outcome of the plot and the attitudes of the characters in the game. If your character becomes a paragon of virtue, it is because you guided them down that path. If your choices result in the genocide of a people, the sadness and horror of that moment is mixed with your own guilt. When the choice is yours, the emotional impact of a well-told story is that much more profound. This is expanded further by sandbox games like Fallout 3 or Grand Theft Auto 4, which have “main” storylines but so much else to do that one could begin the game, play thirty hours in and have created a compelling story for yourself without really dealing with the supposedly primary story arc.

Another way that a game can achieve artistic greatness is by playing with our expectations of the game itself. Braid, for example, takes one of the oldest archetypes of gaming controls, Mario, with his running, jumping and landing on enemies to kill them, and uses that as the jumping-off point to explore a number of mind-bending situations and variations on basic gameplay. Because the controls are so simple, the game instantly feels familiar, which allows for every change in the basic rules of the game to take the player by surprise. When the character dies for the first time, for example, instead of losing a life, they are prompted to press a button which rewinds time to before the death. In a later level, as the character walks right, time moves forward. As he stands still, it pauses. As he walks left, it moves backwards. The story, too, is a familiar one: we seek a princess, who is always in another castle. Our expectations fall into line naturally, only to be confused and swept aside as the game proceeds. Rez also does fascinating things with an established gameplay idea: you are moving forward and shooting at enemies, like in so many other games, but the levels, the visuals, and the music evolve as you progress, with every shot you fire contributing a drumbeat or a click to the electronic score.

Video games can achieve artistic greatness, but we must first learn to evaluate them by different standards. It is not in its similarities to works in other media but in its differences that an artistic movement ultimately achieves its greatest works. The difference here is an exciting one: with video games, you are encouraged to touch, you are compelled to be involved, and it is perfectly acceptable to play with your art.

Grinding My Gears of War

by C.T. Hutt

I’m not holding back on this one folks. Fair warning, thar be spoilers ahead.

When Castle Wolfenstein 3D first reared its inflexible, muscle bound head onto the scene in 1992, the first person shooter took off. Along with this new platform came a new kind of protagonist, the first-person-shooter über-male. From Doom to Duke Nukem to Halo 3, this discount Hercules hasn’t changed much. He is mostly silent, nigh unkillable, comically large, and capable of displaying an emotional range that falls between enraged and severely enraged. While there have been some excellent exceptions to these stereotypes (I’m looking your way, Gordon Freeman), the implicit limitations of such an oafish character have resulted in some less than stellar story lines. In some cases (I’m looking your way, Quake series), there has been no discernible story at all.

After playing through both the Gears of War games with Daniel, I’ve had some trouble assigning the series to either category. There seems to be a plot in there somewhere, but I have no idea what it is.

Here’s what we know. Humankind has put all, or at least the majority of its eggs in one basket in the form of the scenic planet Serra. With the exception of razor hail falling from the sky every once in a while and some kind of explosive goop coming out of the planet’s crust, everything seems just ducky about this new terra until the neighbors show up and make things awkward for everyone by killing lots of folk and wrecking up the place. It seems that, while building the various soon-to-be-charred ruins of cities on Serra, none of humanity’s engineers noticed that the planet is a honeycomb of tunnels filled with antisocial goblins. The protagonists are COGs, an elite squad of hideously gargantuan ape men who get their jollies blasting away at any of the subterranean bad boys that poke up their heads like so many evil gophers. Something is also going down with an evil government plot, a kind of killer robot/A.I. thing, and the standard medical experiment gone wrong riff we’ve heard in nearly every shooter ever made. We are never given enough information to understand or really care about these subplots but they are in there. Bon appétit!

The main character, or at least the fellow controlled by player 1, is Marcus Fenix. Unable to decide which persona was tougher, a prisoner or a space marine, the writers opted to have Mr. Fenix be both. The series opens with him being busted out of a prison facility made entirely of skulls and dead bodies, just lovely. We never learn why he was incarcerated; I assume it was due to some kind of moving violation; the man is the size of a diesel truck and has a personality to match. Marcus is the type of person you might expect to see in the darkest corner of a biker bar, yet we later learn that he was raised by a well to do scientist on a palatial estate. Man, those must have been some awkward teenage years. Over time we discover that Marcus’s father may have been making time with the troll queen, leader of the underground baddies; this may explain why he felt less inclined to academic pursuits.

Player 2 is at the joystick of Dominic Santiago (“Dom” to his friends) who is basically a slightly smaller version of Marcus Fenix. We know nothing about Dom until the second game. Apparently, on top of being a kill-crazy badass, Dom is a family man. While we never run into his kids, we do eventually catch up with his wife who has been on the worst vacation ever for the last ten years in a modern oubliette. Apparently, Dom is also a doctor, and promptly euthanizes her like a lame horse. The scene I’ve just described is the biggest emotional hook in the entire series. While the effect on the players is more awkward then traumatic, it causes both protagonists to display their most colorful emotional state, i.e. severe rage.

That’s who you are working with, Gorilla-man Marcus and Dom “The Veterinarian” Santiago. Not exactly compelling characters, but they shine next to the parade of quarter-dimensional weirdos in the background of these games. Your military support is a Burt and Ernie duo that appears periodically to provide suppressing fire and comedic relief. There is Cole, who is aggressive and crazy, and Baird who seems to find the entire “fight for survival” thing completely boring. The antagonists, called the locusts, are evil in all the standard ways and look like larger, uglier versions of the heroes. There are a couple indistinct female characters that were probably flying the transport ship and giving you orders but they don’t even really register to the players.

That, as they say, is that. We don’t know why people settled on the planet; we don’t know much of anything about the characters; we don’t know how long this war has been waged or even if we are fighting on the right side of it. In short, we don’t know a damn thing.

In most cases, I would simply go with it. The Gears series looks fantastic and is fun to play. However, there is a limit to the number of alien heads I can explode before I need a reason why. Granted, that is a very high number, but come on, a little back-story here fellahs. I’m not asking for Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia from a game that features an assault rifle with a chainsaw bayonet, but in order to make this series a real winner in my book they need to give me a reason for fighting the good fight.

There is a wealth of moral and philosophical issues the writers could have sunk their teeth into but, sadly, they haven’t. It could be a story about the trials of the common soldier, but it lacks any actual internal conflict found in developed characters. It could be a story about revenge, but how are we to empathize with such a motivation without a solid beginning? Gears would make an excellent metaphor for the futility of fighting for a cause in which you no longer believe, or about humankind’s undying tenacity, yet it only touches the surface of such themes. In a time when society should be asking questions about the nature of war, even fictional war, the Gears series doesn’t even lift an inquisitive eyebrow. The end effect is like eating a bowl of very realistic wax fruit; it looks amazing, but really doesn’t sit well.

I’m very satisfied with the controls and aesthetics of this series, but without commitment to a proper story arc I’m afraid it will be nothing but another shoot ’em up, certain to be forgotten in the annals of video game history.

Start Screen

by C.T. Hutt

Greetings readers,

I’m C.T. Hutt, a Washington professional, aspiring writer, and, like my colleagues, lifelong aficionado of video games. Let me preface my introduction by saying that this manner of commentary is long overdue. While many out there in the literary world shake with trepidation over the implications of Amazon’s new gadget the Kindle 2 I’d like to point out that this doohickey is just one of many steps toward a new and exciting literary world. However, this path was not started in the golden age of the internet, no, it all began a long time ago.

Let me take you all the way back. In the beginning, there was Pong. Two little white pixel bars and a bouncing square that changed the world. Players would maneuver their bar so as to knock the square off the screen on their opponent’s side. Doing so gained a player points, satisfying both the early gamers’ need to gloat at an opponent’s failing and the bizarre evolutionary adaptation that makes people fascinated by rising numbers. For a long time, the reward of points was enough to keep arcade jockeys dropping quarters into slots across the globe. Driven to gaming by a lack of social graces and athletic ability, having more points than the next set of initials was all the first gamers could aspire to. The industry responded to their needs, providing them with new and creative ways to feed their addiction to big shiny numbers. Space Invaders, Asteroids, Frogger, Pac Man (who was not a man but merely a shape) and so many other variations, all were designed on the basic premise that getting points was a good thing. Then along came the plumber who dared to upset the balance. In 1981, just two years before yours truly hit the scene, Shigeru Miyamoto’s famous protagonist said to the world “Itsa me Mario!”

Here was something all together new, a video game character that looked like a person, a tiny blockular person, but a person. Gamers now found themselves in control of another human being (sort of). As the first actual character in the video gaming world, Mario needed some kind of motivation to get off his lazy plumber ass and do something. From his attire, it was clear that Mario was of good lower class working stock, not the kind of deviant who would be satisfied spending time running after points. Then we met the princess, helpless captive of an antisocial simian, Donkey Kong. A title wave of new dimensions hit the gaming scene. Now we had animosity, revenge, fear, triumph, betrayal, love, and the entire pallet of the human experience to motivate our digital avatars, video games had become stories.

As momentous as this epiphany was, writing in video games has been one of the slowest aspects of the experience to evolve. Indeed, even on the sleek animal that is our current standard of game, story remains a freakishly underdeveloped limb; still necessary for survival, but often a glaring flaw in otherwise excellent games.

I will be reviewing the stories of video games, taking particular note of excellent specimens and stinking failures in all categories.