Well, OGT warned me, but I didn’t think it would be that bad. The second chapter of Otaku is pretty epic. O_o It’s where most of the meat of the book lies, actually. So. Chapter two: “Database Animals.”
Archive for the ‘Video Games’ Category
Adventures in Criticism: Otaku 2
By Cuchlann on 16 August 2010 | Anime, Internet, Literature, Video Games | 3 CommentsTo Race Chocobos in the Shadow of Sin
By Cuchlann on 27 June 2010 | Video Games | 2 Comments
A great distraction.
I haven’t been watching much anime recently. I mean to post soon about the reason why, but the basic problem is that I’m doing something cool next semester that requires me to do a lot of advance reading over the summer.
I have, however, been playing a lot of video games, mostly Oblivion and Chrono Trigger, with some Pokemon Blue thrown in. Given that I’m playing an Elder Scrolls game, my mind’s been on side quests a lot. If you don’t know, all the Elder Scroll games are famous for having more sidequests than storyline – it’s not a sandbox game, but a game with a similar mindset, that you can go live in the world as an adventurer of sorts. You can enter the Mage’s Guild and work your way up the ranks or become an assassin (or, as thekittymeister has decided – to my wholehearted approval – to become the world’s greatest thief, in the grand tradition of Lupin III and Garrett). Everything’s a quest, from the rare plant behind the guild house to the missing artist in the little village a day’s ride from the capital. It’s good times. But given the contrast in the games I’m playing, it got me thinking.
As you already know, I watched my GF play Earthbound recently. In addition, I’m playing Final Fantasy XII, Oblivion, Chrono Trigger, Pokemon, and am in the middle of a playthrough (with the GF) of Final Fantasy VIII, inspired by Spoony’s review of the same. So I’ve been messing around with a lot of RPGs recently. Nearly all these games have sidequests.
Memories of the Present
By Cuchlann on 8 April 2010 | Video Games | 4 Commentsor, the Always-Already Savior 
So I’m finally getting around to writing on Earthbound. I mean, for cereals. I wrote about it a little over on my personal blog, but I didn’t really have a driving idea, I just wanted to get some feelings out that I couldn’t phrase any better than that. The simplest way start, I suppose, is simply to ask, Dude, what’s up with the time travel in Earthbound?
Grasping the true form of Giygas’s attack
By Pontifus on 15 April 2009 | Video Games | 22 Comments
What’s this? A post? By Pontifus!? Surely glee seeps from your every pore.
Until you realize it’s a video game post about a cult classic that’s probably more cult than classic. But fuck it. Earthbound is amazing, and all the more so for its unusual final boss. Giygas, like the game, compels one to drag those around oneself into mutual madness — and, to that end, I’ve recorded and annotated the battle. You’ll thank me for it later.
Thank God for the apocalypse: setting and the authorial shell
By Pontifus on 9 January 2009 | Art and Culture, Video Games | 17 Comments
Why thank God for the apocalypse? Because it gives me something to write about that isn’t Aria. Not that I dislike writing about Aria, but it has a way of possessing me via dark, indefinable magics and forcing me to serve its needs. It’s an unforgiving master. And I haven’t even watched the second or third seasons yet.
On second thought, I suppose it’s inappropriate to muse on Aria in a post which is, to some degree, about Fallout 3. The Capital Wasteland is most assuredly no place for gondolas. Hell, it’s no place for human beings, and that’s part of what makes it such a compelling setting, at least for me. If, like me, you find a certain creepiness in isolation, in abandoned radio loops and vast, empty spaces, in “towns” populated by two or three or four people, Fallout 3 will do horrible things to your sanity. Horrible, awesome things. Which, coincidentally, brings us back to our good buddy Steve Gaynor. The three-way parallel he draws is simple:
Literature excels at exploring the internal (psychological, subjective) aspects of a character’s personal experiences and memories.
Film excels at conveying narrative via a precisely authored sequence of meaningful moments in time.
And video games excel at fostering the experience of being in a particular place via direct inhabitation of an autonomous agent.
Oversimplification this may be, but Gaynor raises an interesting question: how are we to account for the idea of setting in video games? As much as it’s “the place where they are,” as in, say, a novel, it can also become “the place where I am,” and few games have made that idea more evident to me than Fallout 3.
Before we get into Fallout 3 and setting specifically, though, I want to lay some groundwork — and by “some,” I mean a lot, and in the disorganized spirit of exploratory writing, so now would be a good time to pour yourself a glass of your favorite hard liquor.
Brief thoughts on external aid
By Pontifus on 28 December 2008 | Video Games | 8 CommentsI woke up today thinking about the use of external aids in completing video games, and I wonder if we can fit that into our ongoing discourse about games, so allow me to throw a few random ideas at you.
My feelings toward player’s guides and the like are mixed. While I feel that they “ruin” the experience of a game’s central plot for me, I have no problem using them to find and obtain nonessential extras. The game I have in mind is Fallout 3; I completed the ten or so hours of my 60-hour file devoted to advancing the main plot without any external guidance, but I’ve made extensive use of The Vault in finding unique weapons and bobbleheads and such. Now, insofar as player agency results in the forward movement of the story, all 60 hours constitute the game’s plot, or at least the game experience’s plot; why do I approach one-sixth of that plot with a different attitude toward external aid than I do the remaining five-sixths? I don’t really know, but I doubt it’s indicative of some core difference between “main plot” and “side plot” in games.
Let me ask this: how might we best characterize external aid, anyway?
Is it a kind of criticism? After all, it details one possible playthrough of a game — ostensibly, one possible reading of a text. And I think that, like criticism, it’s certainly entertainment in itself. When I was younger, I used to read those Prima player’s guides for fun. I bought guides for games I didn’t own. I remember devoting hours to reading through The Mynock’s Guide to Final Fantasy III (back when FF6 was still called Final Fantasy III here…God I’m old) despite my near-encyclopedic knowledge of that game, and for no reason other than that I wanted to see how someone else experienced the game. It’s not that I felt I had something to gain, intellectually, from diverse readings, as I do now; I simply enjoyed it.
Can we say that my use of external aid to complete optional content in Fallout 3, the pausing and minimizing of the game and the perusal of websites throughout, helped define my gameplay? That it’s part of the human narrative of my playing, which the game narrative itself may well simply be a part of as well? I don’t hear such a thing often said of literature and the criticism thereof — that is, I’m not sure how many people would tell you that my reading experience of Ulysses continues to this very moment because I keep reading criticism of it and tying it into other narratives. But that’s not really what we’re talking about here; a more analogous situation would be reading Ulysses for the first time with a copy of Ulysses Annotated on hand. To what extent is Joyce (not Joyce the man, but Joyce the author-consciousness) responsible for that reading experience? To what extent are Don Gifford and Robert Seidman responsible? How much responsibility rests upon the sources they consulted when writing Ulysses Annotated? And can we answer these questions by way of addressing analogous questions in the largely unstudied realm of video games?
Twelve Moments 4 — Personal Revelations (not necessarily mine)
By Cuchlann on 22 December 2008 | Video Games | 6 Comments
Depressingly accurate...
For anyone who missed the previous references, this past semester I took a course in the Gothic novel. It was a lot of fun, and I learned a lot of things about the beginnings of the fantasy genre — as the Gothic genre is typically viewed. I just happened to be taking in all of Pontifus’ attempts at video game theory as our final paper proposals were due, and I sent my professor two viable options: the alteration of mad scientists through time and what that reflects about their culture, and the Gothic in survival horror video games.
Twelve Moments 7 — A Dream of Emulation
By Cuchlann on 19 December 2008 | Video Games | 4 Comments
This one is a bit odd, even for me. But a few months ago I realized that my Dreamcast, packed away in watertight storage, could still be useful to me (even though the two DC games I own I also have on other systems). That is, through delicious internet downloads.
Georges Poulet and a terrible visual pun
By Cuchlann on 20 November 2008 | Art and Culture, Video Games | 9 Comments
I keep forgetting Agrias is a dude.
I know it’s been a while since I posted — and even longer since I posted anything worth a damn. Sorry about that. I finished the draft of my project for History of the English Language, and and about to get going on my paper for Gothic novel. Why should this excite you? My paper is on the use of the Gothic in survival horror games. I found a few articles about Silent Hill, and I’m playing SH2 specifically for the paper. But I’m not going to talk about that specifically right now. Instead, I mean to work out a little of the theory on video games I’ll be using — I’m applying phenomenology to video games.
a few more random ideas on game criticism
By Cuchlann on 21 October 2008 | Art and Culture, Video Games | 3 CommentsI was just decompressing after watching the trailer for the new Prince of Persia, and had a few thoughts about game theory.
[By the way, just so you know -- I still cite Sands of Time as one of the best video games I've ever played, so, you know, I'm probably biased.]
Nothing like practicable ideas, I should say. But perhaps some that will open routes of inquiry.
When I’m absorbing art, and that’s any kind of art, I’m looking for a feeling of beauty. I’m going to wax maudlin at you for a moment. The best kinds of art instill in me feelings like I get almost nowhere else. I’m in the middle of some kind of perfect storm of great stuff here, too — the new Decemberists song does this for me, as does a book I’m reading, Dhalgren (in between the frightening dystopia bits). I just started Silent Hill 2 in a bid to write a paper on the Gothic in video games (yes, you’ll likely hear more about that as the semester wears on).
What I’m getting at, and not very well, is that some video games have given me that same feeling. Prince of Persia did it, and so did Shadow of the Colossus. So I may try to write critiques, proper entries here, for those games, to try and get at what makes them what they are, rather than choose-your-own-adventure stories with prettier pictures. I know, somewhere inside me, that some video game stories couldn’t be told any other way, while others (much as I love it, Legend of Zelda springs to mind) could. They wouldn’t be as good, but they would still work. But writing up Shadow of the Colossus for a novel version would involve so much new writing it would be a different thing, whereas you could write up Wind Waker and the effect of the story on the audience would be unchanged. Not that I have a problem with that, I’m not asking every game to fuck me up like a new Lord of the Rings.
I feel like I have a way to tackle this problem through my genre and myth criticism ways, too. Certainly there are enough romantic elements in the games I’ve mentioned to get me started sometime.
[I should say that whenever I use the word "romantic" I mean it in the original sense, that of a story of medieval style romance. If you don't know what I'm talking about, think King Arthur. Those stories, especially those from the French tradition, were romances.]