For a long while now I've been using Giant Bomb's lists feature to keep track of my collection of games and provide a brief, ~100 word review of each game as I played it. Since I also used to maintain a blog on a private website, I would carbon-copy a lot of the articles I wrote there onto the GB profile blog for the sake of completeness and discoverability.

Well, the private blog site has shut down, prompting me to set up a tumblr for my general musings (which you can find at SpewagePipe.tumblr.com) and since then I've started to make a general habit of just posting my reviews there. Since I don't need to make regular visits to Giant Bomb for anything except the primary site content, I've let my profile here stagnate, and I finally decided to pull the trigger on this one and shut down the lists and blog. Whatever's already here will probably stay, since I'm too lazy to purge the whole of it, but if you're looking for more, please: come visit me on tumblr!

Thank you to Giant Bomb, also, for providing me this space to shout into the void for as long as they have. It's been wonderfully helpful to me over the years.

If you’re uninitiated, Metal Gear Scanlon is the Giant Bomb premium video series in which Dan guides Drew through the MGS games. Drew is unutterably abominable at them, so the videos are oft painful to watch, but they have provided me with a special opportunity to develop unwarranted opinions about games I have never played.

Somehow, I’ve managed to figure out why the series has achieved critical acclaim whilst simultaneously nurturing a deep-seated, personal loathing of it. It seems, for instance, that all of the MGS games have solid core stealth gameplay. Watching Drew blunder through it gives me an itch to seize the controller from him and demonstrate How It Is Done, so certainly they get a pass on that front. Everywhere else, though, they seem to completely go off the rails.

All of the MGS games to date have featured naught but horrific gunplay, evolving from hip-shooting weirdness to a bizarre configuration requiring pressing a three button sequence to fire a weapon. I get that there’s an argument here for incentivizing careful stealth by making open warfare difficult, but I keep thinking about how one could easily achieve the exact same ends by making the guns spray inaccurately, or by nerfing the damage, or by limiting player health – without making the basic operation of weaponry a complete chore.

For “core” mechanics, the stealth and gunplay seem to make up a relatively small fraction of total play time, which is also largely budgeted into boss fights and scripted sequences. It’s at this point just an accepted reality, for whatever reason, that MGS games are at least 50% cutscenes and non-interactive dialogue. Call me a formalist, but I appreciate when games use mechanics to convey their stories, instead of just periodically not being games.

The Boss Battles confuse the hell out of me, too, because for some reason they are lauded for permitting a variety of tactics and strategies, but that’s something I categorize under “basic expectations” rather than “impressive achievements”. Frankly, with a few exceptions (e.g. Vulcan Raven, The End), I’m bothered by just how gimmicky many of the boss fights are, and how little they seem to care that the rest of the gameplay is about stealth, not combat. I guess it’s all for variety and pacing’s sake?

Finally, while I’ve managed to reach a point where the absurdity of MGS’s narrative has become endearing in a can’t-look-away-from-the-car-crash sort of way, I still resent the regular fourth wall breaks. They never seem to cohere into valuable point or a funny joke, so they only serve to shatter any suspension of disbelief I’ve generously adopted. I’ve seen many games fail at immersion, but MGS is the first to actively fight against it.

Extra Credits posted a follow-up video to that earlier collaboration where I thought some of their observations were getting things backwards. Here, EC covers a lot of the same ideas (and explores some other ones), and I feel tremendously vindicated.

Alright, so, I said most of what I wanted to about this back then, so I’ll try not to just repeat myself. Instead, I’d like to point out that designers can aspire above and beyond just having the mechanics and story be tonally congruent – as I was describing in my comments on the original video, you can aspire for your mechanics to communicate the story and it’s themes much more directly.

I’m not intimately familiar with the examples from this video, so I’ll grab one of my own: Limbo. A simple 2D puzzle-platformer, glued to a somewhat abstract narrative about a little boy’s coming of age or loss of innocence in a dark, uncaring world. The puzzles in Limbo fit the narrative. Interactions with the puzzle elements are often laborious, accidental death is around every corner, and, as the game stretches on, they become demanding, even punishing in nature.

If you swapped for Mario’s high jumping, block-smashing, enemy stomping mechanics, it wouldn’t jive. But at the same time, while the mechanics evoke the feelings that the little boy seems to be having through the narrative, and thus reinforce the themes of the story, what about a game where the mechanic serves up the core thematic metaphor for the story?

I recently played Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, a game that is narratively about the struggle of the titular brothers to work together on a quest to save their father’s life. The brothers are united in their cause, and accordingly, most of the obstacles they face are fairly trivial to solve; but they have to work as a coordinated team to execute those solutions, a challenge that is mechanically symbolized by the fact that the player has to separately control the brothers with two analog sticks – a task not unlike trying to pat your head while rubbing your belly.

Compared to Limbo, Brothers goes above and beyond just a tonal relationship, it creates a mechanical metaphor that is integral to the story, requiring the player to experience the brothers’ struggle in order to succeed. That is how to unite a story with gameplay.

Extra Credits did a collaboration with Idea Channel to make this video about the weird phenomenon in games where people completely forget “what the game is about” (i.e. the narrative, subtext, et cetera), because they only engage with the mechanics (since those are fun, elaborate and demanding).

It’s a really great and important thing to realize, but he goes awry by suggesting that mechanics are “over-privileged”. Mechanics, in contrast with the definition he chose, are not just what allow us tointeract with the game state; they also create the game state and fundamentally underlie it.

It’s true that in many games, the mechanics are in competition with the story or message over the player’s attention – but correcting that issue is not about tipping the balance of the competition in favour of the story. Mechanics are not just a boundary that we have to overcome to be part of the narrative; they are not the elaborate versions of pressing play, or turning pages, because they are also responsible for what is written on the pages.

If you resolve the dissonance between narrative and gameplay by prioritizing narrative over gameplay, what you get is a book, or a film, not a game. What you must do, instead, is to have the mechanics be the message.

When you are playing a game the “things you must do” that the video is mentions need to deliver the meaning on their own! The subtext and the message have to be contained within those actions and those rules. The act of succeeding at the game must require the player to address the theme of the game.

The easiest way to do that is by writing an “interactive narrative”, i.e., one where you incorporate options, and let the player choose how events are resolved: text adventures, visual novels, choose-your-own-adventure books, and games like TellTale’s “The Walking Dead” are all examples of this approach.

If you want a more elaborate gameplay system, then you need to make sure that your mechanics actually relate to the message, and contextualize them properly so that the players can interpret that message. Many great games with great stories nevertheless fail to do this: StarCraft, mentioned in the vid, has gameplay that talks about resource management, prioritization, and even Art-of-War-derived philosophical questions, but the story from the cutscenes is about politics and betrayal, which are not part of the gameplay, so they get ignored. Plenty of great games like Half-Life and BioShock fall into the same trap.

The best example of a game that still has an elaborate gameplay system, but conveys messages with those systems is probably Lucas Pope’s “Papers, Please”, but you can see some of it at work in Yager Development’s “Spec Ops: The Line”, or the new “Middle Earth: Shadows of Mordor” from Monolith (specifically in the Nemesis system – the overarching plot is executed no differently from any other “cinematic” game).

As much as I adore Slender: The Eight Pages and Slender: The Arrival, and consider their core mechanic a masterwork of horror, the fact that there’s relatively little to them other than that mechanic (or variations thereon) leaves something to be desired. The missing component of those games, featured in most other Slender mythos stories, is investigation: the protagonist’s attempts to understand who or what the Slenderman is, via research into his past victims (usually including a close friend or relative who served as the point of contact between the protagonist and the Slenderman).

What I’m picturing is a zone-based open-world game, probably with travel between zones handled by a diegetic GPS phone app interface. Each zone would be an environment littered with clues in the form of old documents, journals, URLs, video tapes or other recordings – look no further than Gone Homefor the perfect implementation of this concept. These would, apart from building the story, also cue the player as to where to look next, and what to look for, perhaps even gating the player to some extent: unlocking a new zone when you find the coordinates of a secluded forest hideout, or finding the combination to a safe that is locked in a different zone. Care should be taken, however, to ensure that there are always multiple leads for the player to follow, lest the mystery devolve into a linear breadcrumb trail.

Each zone would also carry some risk of being inhabited by the Slenderman, or a person he has driven mad, who harass the player while they conduct their searches. The probability would vary – some zones would be completely safe, others might feature mounting risk the longer the player lingers in them, or could shift from low to high risk when the player collects a critical item. It might be possible to escape a location and return another time when it is safer. In addition, the world in general would become increasingly unsafe as the game proceeds, until even the player’s safest “home base” areas are regularly under attack.

The last, crucial feature is the failure state. When the player is caught, rather than a plain Game Over, they ought to be knocked out, and wake up in a different place. They might wake up missing a piece of evidence they had collected, or with a new, strange item in their possession. They might wake up in an entirely new zone! Elsewhere in the world, clues might have been shifted around. Perhaps the player also has the opportunity to review a recording from a camcorder they were carrying, allowing them to find out what happened – and perhaps even forcing them to re-play the section they failed in order to find out. The goal, in any case, is for failure to mix things up and create new challenges, rather than simply end the game entirely or force the player to reload from an earlier save.

As an artform, games have more in common with music than they do with cinema.

If you’re making a tabletop RPG, you’re often creating a set of guidelines that will let a group of people tell a story together. The rules of these games help decide what’s canon and not, and often provide a little creative input, but the real power of tabletop RPGs is the ability of the players and game masters to tell interesting stories on the fly. If you’re making a more traditional tabletop game, or a video game, and you can’t package humans with it, telling stories gets a little more challenging.

Outside of tabletop RPGs, there are three, maybe four broad types of “story” you encounter. The “fourth” type is questionable because it’s the non-story – games that are completely abstract, or feature no story elements beyond the barest context of the game within. Think of the perpetual Red versus Blu conflict in Team Fortress, for example, or the nuclear-threat premise of Missile Command.

Games with more elaborate stories often bolt a pre-written, linear narrative onto the gameplay. This practice strikes me as ill-advised, since, in the simplest philosophical sense, linearity and interactivity are mutually exclusive. Linear storytelling, like that featured in books, comics, and movies, is made powerful and effective by the ability of the creators to exercise complete control over the audience experience. Games, by contrast, require the creator to hand control over to the player, allowing them to determine what ultimately happens. The incompatibility lies in the fact that the creator cannot simultaneously control the entire experience while also allowing the player to express themselves, hence the innumerable game stories that feel like they are quite separated from the gameplay itself. These games have to shift between modes of linear narration and player interaction, but the two are ultimately immiscible.

If you want to integrate story into gameplay, you need to make a game out of the story – player inputs have to affect the story. The most familiar form of this is probably the branching story, in which the player is presented with a set of discrete options, and unique pre-written narratives accompany every possibility. Think of choose-your-own-adventure books, visual novels, some RPGs, or the modern adventure game design codified by Telltale’s various oeuvre.

The final story variety, and the one I would like to see more of in the future, is the emergent story. These are hard to pull off, because they amount to playing an interesting game and hoping that something narrative-like will spontaneously happen. In theory, any and every game is capable of emergent stories, but they’re usually very personal, and they don’t come across as well with a retelling. One can, however, deliberately design a game so that it will reliably produce emergent stories, and that’s an art that I think needs much more exploration. For a few guiding examples, look to Papers, Please, Middle Earth: Shadows of Mordor, and (so I’m told) the Fire Emblem series.

I enjoyed doing me earlier Let's Play of Amnesia, and since I had another "horror" game on my to-play list, I figured I might as well do the same for Dead Space. I fucked up and lost the first episode, then later fucked up again and lost the final episode, but the bulk of the game is still contained herein.

Part 1 is not the beginning, but I never intend to fix this, because Dead Space is pretty bad, and I don't want to play it for any longer than I have to.

In Part 2, I continue my horrifying battle against shitty mouse acceleration and tonal inconsistency.

In Part 3, while otherwise grumbling as usual, I finally get a surprising moment of effective horror!

For Part 4, I finally fix the aiming issue, and suddenly Dead Space is fun again!

In Part 5, once again, I refuse to shut the fuck up while failing to solve simple puzzles.

In Part 6, the story finally steps up, I continue my grand tradition of claiming to know more about design than I do, and I fuck up some more simple "puzzles" and die.

And finally, in the penultimate/ultimate episode, I finish on a cliffhanger, only to corrupt the footage of the ending – AGAIN.

Dead Space doesn't merit a second play through, so this is all the ending you get. If you really wanted my comments on the ending, though, there are spoilers below:

So, there was a big twist when the one support character reveals that she was informed in advance about the marker and the necromorphs, and that she's been sent here to retrieve it. I was actually pretty pleased, since this explained her previously irrational hostility to Hammond (not completely, but it helps, at least). There were also some final stages that were pretty interesting – more elaborate terrain and a variety of bad guys, combined with a running kinesis activity. So, between the step up in storytelling between this episode and that one, plus those solid mechanical challenges, I was ready to give Dead Space a passing grade.

And then it all went to shit. They made a huge goddamn show of revealing that Nicole was DEAD ALL ALONG, even though that had been abundantly, ridiculously obvious from the start of the game. I was legitimately offended that they would try to pass that off as a twist, and it pretty well undermined any and all brownie points they had managed to earn up to that point. This was followed with a boss fight with a giant tentacle monster, which was the final straw in the general horror failure – the entire reason a giant space monster is horrifying is because it's unstoppable: if a single engineer armed with a plasma cutter can kill it, then there's absolutely nothing to fear.

So fuck Dead Space.

This article is a response to this one written by Carolyn Petit.

A lot of people, including, of particular note, a lot of women, have said that Bayonetta is a feminist sort of character – an empowered, powerful woman in control of her sexuality. I find this deeply confusing, because, by all appearances, she’s a generic sex object, made noteworthy perhaps only because she’s such an extreme example thereof that she might be a satire (but she ain’t).

When Bayonetta the first arrived on the scene, I was treated to this analysis by Bob Chipman (a dude). Chipman seems weirdly unaware of the objectification that permeates his own analysis, but his point is salient nevertheless: Bayonetta is sexually aggressive or intimidating, but is not sexually submissive, nor sexually unavailable. This seems like a superb, pro-sex alternative to the traditional sex kitten, ice queen, or vamp archetypes.

Except: while she may not exactly be a factory-fresh clone of every other sex object in gaming, she’s still a sex object.

More recently, another male Escapist writer, Yahtzee, made a ramble-y, naive article in which he eventually (the first 7 paragraphs can and should be skipped) points out that

[…]Bayonetta never employs sexuality in the context of a relationship or seducing a special friend - it’s only ever used as part of combat[…]

which is the most crucial piece of evidence throughout this whole affair. It’s something Yahtzee also discusses in an earlier article in more general terms, and while in that one he also claims that vulnerability and intimacy are prerequisites for sex (not really), he at least manages to identify Bayonetta as a sex object, and even connects sexual objectification to general sex-negativity (“prudishness” in his words).

Bayonetta doesn’t have sex. She doesn’t have intimate relationships, either. She might be powerful and confident (or arrogant?), even, but I find it hard to regard her as a “sex-positive” character when, as Petit points out, she’s still so obviously there only to titillate a presumed straight-male player, and not to be her own person, nor even to do both at once.

It seems almost, to me, like the positive perception of Bayonetta by female audiences is just a happy coincidence, rather than a feminist success. And here Petit puts the last nail in the coffin:

Sadly, Bayonetta seems to lack any real sexual desire or sexual agency of her own. From the opening shot in which the camera caresses her body to the pole dance set to “Moon River” while the credits roll at the end, Bayonetta 2 joins the mountain of other games that only serve to reinforce for the uncritical straight male player the idea that women’s bodies and women’s sexuality exist not for women, but are the property of men.

At the end of the day, if the heterosexual males playing Bayonetta still regard her as a sex object, then that is all that she can be as far as the broader culture is concerned.

There’s a difference between criticism and censorship. This is something that I did not always understand, even as it seems obvious to me now, so I fathom that it can be a confusing distinction. To be clear: censorship is an attempt to prevent artwork from existing (or from reaching its audience, which is functionally the same thing); and criticism is the assertion that artwork has flaws or problems.

An article I read that was attempting to highlight that distinction for the general public brought up an old Penny Arcade newspost in which Tycho argues in defense of the artwork of the game Dragon’s Crown. In it, he pulls a straight-up strawman argument: “It’s very weird to pull up a story about a game with frankly visionary art and hear why it shouldn’t exist,” he says.

At the time that Dragon’s Crown came out, I can recall rolling my eyes at the sexualization featured in the artwork. I was on Team Criticism, that day, but neither I, nor anyone else I can recall, suggested that Dragon’s Crown shouldn’t exist. For that matter, I don’t think people suggested its art shouldn’t exist, either. Some people may have suggested that its art would be better if it were not so overtly sexual in a manner specifically intended to appeal to the male gaze. Maybe, if you backed a particularly zealous critic into a corner, you could induce them to suggest that Dragon’s Crown’s artwork should be better in this way, or else not exist. But no one asserted, as Tycho implies they did, that creators may not create.

There is an intense irony here. Tycho didn’t see it, then, and apparently neither did the writer of the aforementioned article that dredged up the newspost. The irony is in the comic strip, to which Tycho’s post is attached.

The male-gaze oriented, sexualized nature of the Sorceress’ artwork appeals to men, but is understandably alienating to women – that’s what makes this comic strip funny. Tycho and Gabe could not possibly have crafted this joke without fathoming the issue at hand, so they get that the Sorceress is problematic.

This comic, which in so few words elucidates the problem, could not be funny without being critical of Dragon’s Crown. Tycho and Gabe made a strip criticizing this game, and then Tycho made a newspost conflating criticism with censorship.

That’s arguably hypocritical. It’s also incredibly ironic, and, in many ways, tragic: these miscommunications, these misunderstandings, turn people who agree with one another into opponents for no reason.

Today’s Penny Arcade isn’t anything exceptional; Tycho’s newspost starts with a brief acknowledgement of it, and ends with an announcement RE: the PA Scholarship, but it’s the meat of the post that I want to talk about, so hit the link, have a read, and then join me back here.

Referring to this idea as the Final Game is very interesting – in my youth I called them “perfect” games, but “final” might be a more accurate term. A game you could play forever, one that would never need replacement. I have one, of course – it’s called Left 4 Dead 2, but I constantly hunt for a replacement or enhancement upon it’s relatively simple formula.

The trick of a Final Game is that it needs to have, as a key feature, unlimited content. Narrative-driven games generally have this issue where they end, which precludes their achieving infinity, except on the same level that films and books do – you can re-play a game like you re-read a book, but I doubt it could ever be, as Tycho characterizes it, “a game-as-life-practice”.

The actual property a game needs to have infinite longevity is to be different every time it is played, and that’s all. Multiplayer games, because they generally feature as sporting events, almost all have theoretically unlimited life spans. Games with extensive UGC approach infinite life span, but unless the community lasts forever, the content won’t. So, on the single-player or cooperative spectrum, it falls to procedural generation.

That’s Left 4 Dead’s secret, of course – versus mode is a potent element, yes, but the cooperative campaigns can be replayed endlessly because the zombies are different every time; because the director changes things every time. More can always be done: the maps themselves could change, as they do in many roguelikes, and you can expand upon player customization as an avenue for increased gameplay variability. Left 4 Dead has “customization” in it’s most limited forms: shotgun, assault rifle or sniper rifle? But there could be more – drop a MechLab in there and see what comes out, I say.

The last note I have on this subject is mostly a question. Instances, or sandboxes?

MineCraft offers you limitless creative potential, but once you’ve built a floating palace made entirely of golden, magma-spouting dongs, is there ever reason to return? Do you simply start over, for want of better things to do? Forge out into unexplored territory, and repeat the month-long construction in another place?

By contrast, Left 4 Dead undoes all progress you make with every new campaign. Instances – ever resetting, put you in the shoes of Sisyphus rolling the boulder. But if the climb of the boulder, and not the attainment of the goal, is the source of the entertainment, then is that not better?

Is there a merger of the two? Destiny attempted to offer a multiplayer arena, open commons and instances all at once, but the design is, by most accounts, unfocused – jarring, lacking cohesion. I think, also, of FireFall’s “thumpers”; a player-driven instance that is spawned onto an open world.