Who lives here?

Every once in a while Cuchlann mentions that he wants to write more about video games. And he has — over here. (Did you know he set up a new solo blog? Rather than talking about nerd stuff how he’d talk about classic literature, he talks about classic literature how he’d talk about nerd stuff. If even there’s a difference. Which is kind of the point.) But resurrected dinosaur Super Fanicom needs more video game content, I say!

So, Proteus. Is it a game? The IGF seems to think so.

Developer Ed Key isn’t so sure you’ll agree. He mentions his early trepidation in an interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun:

I wasn’t sure how it’d be recieved without any traditional goals or rewards but many people loved it enough to make me remove any remaining hints of goals. I’m happy and a little suprised that it seems to be so refreshing to so many people. There are a bunch of philosophical things I was trying to do, but I’ll spare you the exposition.

Alec Meer (interviewer), “IGF Factor 2012: Proteus”

True, you have no predefined goals in Proteus (granting that only a basic demo is currently available, but Key doesn’t seem eager to change this). It’s like pre-Beta Minecraft in that way. Minus even a character progression system to motivate you, you wander around a random landscape doing whatever you feel like doing.

In other words, you see/hear things. You have almost no real means of interacting with your environment. You can control Proteus with only the mouse, if you want to. Sometimes the environment reacts to you, but there are no puzzles to solve, no resources to gather, certainly no monsters to kill. There are only weird teleporter obelisk things and creatures/objects whose proximity makes the (really, really fantastic) music change.

Proteus is by no means the first entertainment product that sets you down in a strange place and lets you wonder at it for a while. This is a key component of adventure games, and pretty much has been since Zork. It’s a relatively common tactic in fantasy and SF of all kinds. Mundane literature puts it to use with some regularity; Proteus might remind you of the third chapter of Ulysses, which shares its name. And we anime/manga types with our Aria and Mushishi and Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou should be quite used to it by now — we’ve even imported a vocabulary for describing this kind of experience: iyashikei, mono no aware.

But to what degree is it a game? How much interaction does a thing need before it’s a game? How much in the way of goals? I don’t know. I never know how to answer that question. I could quote a definition from game theory or something, but I doubt it’d be applicable, as indie games seem to be shredding every solid definition at our disposal (for which I love them, of course). Is a visual novel a game? Is Dwarf Fortress a game when you generate a world just to read its history? I do have a cop-out answer — it depends on how you use it — but, frankly, I don’t care; I enjoy these things, and that’s all I need to know.

I can tell you what the maybe-game does, or what it might do to you.

Let’s assume for the sake of convenience that you’re exactly like me. You’re dropped into Proteus’s colorful, musical, pixelly world, and immediately you set out to find something to do. Because that’s what you do in video games. If there is no goal, you at least need to determine what you’re capable of here, so you can then proceed to do it.

This doesn’t take long. You can’t punch trees until they drop wood. Sometimes you’ll run into packs of little sound-creatures, but you can’t do anything about them. You can make the day/night cycle speed up, you can change the season, but this requires no more effort than walking into the appropriate area.

Here you’ll think about quitting. You won’t. You’ll keep walking around, necessarily covering the same ground. It isn’t a massive world.

You’ll start to notice things. Why’s the ground a different color here? Why’s that tree different from all surrounding?

Well, why not?

What does this or that difference signify?

It must have some significance. Things in video games have significance. Your surroundings aren’t accidental; they constitute a playing field. Even when the field results from random numbers fed into an algorithm, someone had to write that algorithm.

The more you tromp about, the less your preconceptions nag.

Here’s a nice-looking area. It’s nice because, who cares? It’s nice. And, look, a house! Who decided to build a house there?

Maybe you’ll want to share this place with someone. Like showing off a strange Minecraft seed on a multiplayer server, or simply sharing the seed among friends. Only you can’t; Proteus lacks the means by which to do those things. It’s just you and trees and mountains and water and a house. You’re hiking through the woods alone and you stop to rest in a calm and peaceful clearing. You contemplate a nearby obelisk. How do you communicate this feeling? And why, after all, do you feel such a need to? It wouldn’t even be a significant sort of feeling (how many virtual landscapes have you experienced, after all?) if not for its transience — you know that when you quit the game, as inevitably you’ll have to do, you’ll never stroll through this particular landscape again. Proteus doesn’t save its worlds. It’s, well, protean.

It’s not that this sense of benign melancholy is unique to Proteus. But it’s one of the few games I can think of that elevates the act of being there to the status of primary objective.

As someone who, in my World of Warcraft days, would hold up dungeon runs so I could read the books of lore scattered throughout, I can appreciate that.

I rarely harbor feelings of hate when I play video games. But when I do, I do it with audacity and intensity. So when the concept of incorporating Cash Points in modern gaming came into existence, I was furious. Why, you ask? Because the existence of Cash Points is the most horrific thing to happen in the video game industry.

To know why it’s bad, one must know how it works. Basically, you purchase the points using real world cash, which you can use to unlock rare and powerful items in the game, hence the term. Feeling underpowered with the cheap Longbow you mugged from some random monster? Become a god of archery with this Cash Point-only Super Bow. Fifty inventory slots not enough for you? Purchase fifty more slots using Cash Points. Want to stand out from your guildmates? Get the limited edition Gold Ring.

Now that you know how it works, back to why it’s bad. And it’s bad on a number of reasons:

Cash Points Break the Game

Items that are available in Cash Points throw a lot of game semantics out of the window. Now that you have the Super Bow, grinding would always be a breeze. You can have all the items you can get your hands on because you have a hundred inventory slots. And nobody will mistake you for another player now that you wear the Gold Ring. In exchange for convenience and uniqueness, players would simply buy these items. This in turn defeats the purpose of working to get the common but trusty items.

Use of Cash Points is Intensely Exclusive

Rarely will you see a game that will let you sell Cash Point items for ingame currency. Why is that? Simple: If anyone can purchase said Cash Point item using ingame currency, then it defeats the purpose of the item being exclusive to Cash Points. Therefore, to make sure that they can earn a lot of money from players purchasing Cash Points, they make sure that the item stays exclusive. They “lock” or “bind” the items to those who purchased them, you can’t trade them to other players, you can’t sell them, you can’t drop them so other players can pick them up, etc.

Cash Point Items have Time Limits

To keep you purchasing Cash Points, they time the items you purchase. The Super Bow will only last in your inventory slot for a week. After that, you’ll have to purchase it again for another week to be able to use it again. The extra fifty inventory slots you purchased using Cash Points will only last for a month, after which the items in those extra slots will be unusable until you purchase the extra inventory slots for another month. And while some players think of it as one of the ways game designers implement ingame balance (putting you back in the same level as common players), the majority thinks of it as one of the ways game developers make you waste a lot of money (making you purchase more Cash Points to stay on top of the game). I can’t agree on the latter any better.

Constant Obsolescence on Cash Point Items

A lot of online games are constantly updated. The same goes for the plethora of items that you can acquire in the game. Of course, that only means one thing for Cash Point items: What can break the game now won’t break the game later. This is specially painful for those who spend their ten dollar weekly allowance on Cash Points. You should’ve saved the ten dollars you used to purchase the Gold Ring last month. Now you can’t purchase the Platinum Ring that came out this month because it’s worth twenty dollars. Oh, woe.

Cash Point Gambling

This is a recurring trend to a lot of Japanese MMOGs, and is probably the most evil of the marketing strategies they employ. They put the Cash Point items in a lottery box, and you use Cash Points to roll the box. The more rare the prize item is, the lesser the chance you get it. Alas, the frustration can only escalate to uncontrollable heights as players with the capacity to buy Cash Points rage at the fact that they are wasting a lot of money on something they can only get by chance, while those who can’t buy Cash Points gripe and whine at the fact that people who get the items would literally break the game into inconceivable pieces. And oh, did I mention that the game developers can rig the lottery box?

Now we’re on to why I hate it. As an oldschool gamer (I’m from the cartridge/chiptune/8-bit era, and thank heavens most of the guys here are the same as me), I’ve always believed that a gamer’s toil in the game must be well rewarded. I’ve always believed that in order to be overpowered and badass, you need to slave yourself grinding all night like a sleepless insomniac just to get the high levels and cool items the game has to offer. I’ve always believed that a friend or two can make even the most powerful enemy fall. Modern gaming changed all that. Today, rewards are bought by Cash Points, so the need to toil is virtually nonexistent. High levels and cool items can easily be achievable through Cash Points, so you don’t need to go through sleepless nights and grinding marathons. You can’t share Cash Point items to your friends, because Cash Point items can’t be traded or sold. And considering the gullible concept of needs-versus-wants (in this case, real life necessities versus the Cash Point items), it’s a constant battle for your money. Take note that we’re haven’t even talked about promotions and ingame freebies that tempt you into purchasing a great deal of Cash Points. Yet.

Now, I don’t mean to sound like a pretentious idiot, or someone who whines a lot on something that can be merely dismissed as an unimportant feature of any game. If I were to find a purpose as to why I wrote this post, it w0uld be to raise a questionable point in the current era of gaming: Why would game developers make virtual money, and why would they incorporate it to the point that it drastically changes the role and behavior of a player? There are number of reasons that answer to this, like easy access to game consumers and the implementation of content that is relevant to gamers’ interests, but one thing is for sure: They want your money, and they want more. It doesn’t matter if you bought the game since without Cash Points, it’s considered incomplete, obsolete even.

What of the non-Cash Point players, then? What of those who still stick to the tried and tested methods in enjoying the game? They get the common, underpowered items. They aren’t as powerful as those who buy Cash Point items. And yet they can still play and enjoy the game nonetheless. At the most, they possess the most powerful sentiment: They will never have any regrets on playing the game, for they have never spent a single nickel on it. And if the game dies due to bad game developers and management? They’ll wear a smile that goes from ear to ear, tap a Cash Point player and say “Problem, mate?”

This is the part you’re familiar with. Azuma posits that otaku, and postmodern media consumers, have stopped consuming in the traditional manner and have adopted, instead, a kind of database consumption. An aside: if you like Azuma, you’re contractually obligated to be OK with random philosophy/theory references; this chapter is full of them, from Freud and Lacan down to Zizek and Hegel. It was pretty crazy. In fact, Azuma’s theory is indebted to Hegel and readings of Hegel by Kojève. Hegel claimed that once history died (history being the phenemological struggle for self-hood against a similar-in-kind Other), only two routes would be available for the actualized person: animalism and humanism. Hence the database animal. Hegelian animals live in harmonious co-existence with their environments, as contrasted to humans, who fight their environments and shape them.

The database is a collection and collation of material from media, spread out in a kind of nebulous web from which creators and consumers alike draw. Indeed, Azuma claims the database is the fundamental way in which fan artists, such as doujin creators or amv remixers, are able to do their work. Without a sense of connectivity between elements that aren’t actually connected in any way (for instance, at no time does Linkin Park actually do soundtrack work for Naruto), such remixes, fan creations, and even “official” peripheral creations would be impossible. His example of the latter is the Eva spin-offs, created by GAINAX but just as removed from the show as anything else. In fact, remember all that good Baudrillard stuff from last time? Azuma brings him up specifically, and claims the media itself (the show, NGE) and the fan art are equally simulacra – that is, hyperreal, removed from “original” and “real” as opposed to “fake.” He has good reason to say this… but he doesn’t use his good reason – the contemporary manufacture and consumption process. He claims they’re hyperreal because they draw from the database. But he also brings up something that, in Japan, is called “anime realism.” It works on the prevalence of anime ideas. They’re so widespread, the habit of thought goes, that referencing them is like referencing reality. The viewers accept it as something that appears.

This, especially, doesn’t seem like something specific to anime or Japan. It’s the whole of the backing of genre theory, it seems to me – the understanding in the audience that some things simply appear. Suvin’s theory of SF talked about nova, or estranging things. Space ships might be an example. And that makes sense, but the concept of “anime realism” points out that fans of space ship shows or books simply expect the space ships to be there. They’ve read/seen so much of them that it’s simply a facet of the genre that’s true.

The database is supposed to be Azuma’s illustration of how we no longer use grand narratives. And in the nineteenth century way, he’s right – there is nothing comparable to, say, the Victorian grand narrative of one’s duties, privileges, and obligations. But between this chapter and my experience, both personally and with other fans, is that the database allows people to build a different kind of “narrative.” It allows them to build an identity. Think of all the people you know who, as fans, identify themselves with certain database elements. Some people go with whole shows, like giant robot fans, or romance fans. Others identify as loli-con, or glasses fans, or even zettai-ryouiki fans. Instead of grand narratives, society-wide, users of the database build personal (or small in-group) identities based on certain specific cullings of the database. This has a lot to offer the studies of genre, specific genres, and, of course, anime.

Anime is a genre, of course.

Yes yes, don’t boo me just yet. Let me drop the tiniest amount of Derrida on you. He pointed out that the term “genre” had been stretched too far from its original base. Now, in light of that, I’m not trying to reclaim the term. We use it the way we use it. However, the original meaning of the word was a particular kind of media. For instance, in the original sense one couldn’t read more than one genre of novel – novel was the genre. The distinctions of what happens inside them are actually, in the traditional sense, “modes.” So in the classical sense anime is a genre, and there are many modes within it.

So what? There are a lot of arguments about what makes up certain genres. That’s genre in its modern sense; mode, in the traditional vernacular. The distinction allows us to see that there are database markers that have to do with the way something’s made – animation styles, designs, etc., as well as database markers that have to do with content – character behavior (GAR is one example), plot points, so on.

That’s the argument Azuma makes that works but is most alien to me personally – that plot and setting are database elements as much as characters. But it makes sense. Into the database go traditional plots, like the “meatball” structure of a shounen, or the young woman gets pulled into another world thing. The database is basically the undercurrent where our knowledge of tropes lives.

I’m used to thinking of plot as something that emerges from the bringing together of characters and setting, even though I know many plots are shared across stories and even across media.

I do think Azuma goes a little too far in some of his claims. His historical account of the shift from grand narrative to database doesn’t take into account the different reading habits of different sorts of fans over time. That is, no postmodernist would deny that the grand narrative was strong in Regency-era England, yet Catherine Moreland and her friend, in Austen’s Northanger Abbey, read Gothic novels more like database animals than any fusty “grand narrative seeking” reader. I suspect what’s really going on is that fan behavior adheres to the database, no matter when it’s happening. If one is a fan of something, one follows it through all its permutations, even when it looks different or does something out of the ordinary. Scholars trying to define SF in traditional terms have flailed around for years because there’s no single shared element. But there is a database pool of things that are associated with SF, including certain plots. That’s how Peake’s Gormenghast novels can be fantasy even when nothing unrealistic happens (at least, not in the first novel). Because the characters and setting are drawn from the sub-database of fantasy as much as from anything else, and the plot is, well, odd.

Can there be many databases? I think Azuma does imply there is only one, though he is specifically examining otaku culture, so he may not have felt the need to discuss any others. However, in a book claiming otaku culture is a microcosm for all postmodern culture I would have expected at least some work connecting the two in that particular way.

As I said, I suspect this is more fan behavior than any new postmodern thing, though I certainly believe the postmodern condition shaped the rise of mass fandoms. The otaku look like microcosms for everyone simply because, in our postmodern world, most everyone is a “fan” of something. Not just a follower, but a fanatic. C.f. Genshiken.

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.

When I think of sidequests I actually still think of The Legend of Zelda; specifically, I think of Ocarina of Time.  That Biggoron sword is still one of my favorite sidequest items.  Even though it wasn’t really practical and didn’t do me a whole lot of good, I loved that thing.  It was huge, man, huge!  I had to roll across half of Hyrule, because I could never get up on my horse quickly enough to get those ingredients to the old lady in Kakariko.  That would be one of the first games I ever played with sidequests, I believe.  I didn’t actually get to play many games until the Playstation/N64 era, and even then I got a lot of them late.  I played FF8 before 7, and finished 7 just as 9 was coming out.

Sidequests serve a lot of different purposes.  I’ve been asking this afternoon on Twitter and Facebook about sidequests, and the (admittedly small, you guys should have gotten on the ball) consensus is that sometimes they’re padding and sometimes they’re great opportunities to develop a character.  Granted – it always comes down to how good the game is, in its writing and its gameplay.

But Oblivion continues to stick out.  Its sidequests aren’t bad (or I don’t think so), but they don’t really develop a character, as the character in an Elder Scrolls game is basically you – there aren’t any dialogue trees where you can choose how you respond.  I guess there are a few, but they don’t ever appear to have a huge effect on things.  There’s a fame/infamy score adding up in the background, but I have to dig into several menus to see what’s going on, it doesn’t throw the results in your face.

So what are the sidequests doing in Oblivion?  What do they do in general, given that they don’t always develop character?  I didn’t learn anything about Cloud by raising chocobos, and all I know about Tidus, given his chocobo racing, is that I’m terrible at catching balloons.

For the most part sidequests don’t actually teach us anything about the character(s). If they did, we’d have to do them, because we need to know as much about the character as we can. Sometimes they can tell us stuff about the setting, though sometimes it’s not what the developers want – for instance, what do we learn when we leave Sin’s insides to go race chocobos? At the very least we learn people will continue running frivolous games underneath the apocalypse. Also, we learn that said people will withhold valuable quest items (Tidus’s crest, remember, is what you get if you get that chocobo in in less than 0.0 seconds), in the face of destruction, until you jump through their hoop.  Oops.

Of course, games are only now getting so they can contextualize. Oblivion changes what’s going on depending on what’s happening in the world, but only to some extent. For instance, the Mage’s Guild missions focus on a story that could actually be the A story of a game; you have to save the guild and the world from a dark necromancer returned from the grave to wreak vengeance. And no one notices outside the guild. I suppose the gag is that it all happens behind the scenes, but still, it’s a little odd. I just saved the world, and outside the guild hall I’m still just a “citizen.” Indeed, I went back to a Mage’s Guild to do a Fighter’s Guild mission, and the person I was technically boss of ordered me around like a moron, because my quest switched her dialogue to “talking to Fighter’s Guild dope.”

Despite all that, the potential seems to be there for context-sensitive worlds.

And anyway, that still doesn’t illustrate why some of us bother with sidequests. Certainly if we love a game we’ll try to milk every drop of actual play from it, but sometimes we do sidequests in games that are, at best, OK.

I suspect it’s this: we choose to do sidequests. They are entirely optional. In a medium defined by our input on the system, sidequests represent the ultimate expression of our input (outside a sandbox game; more on that in just a bit). A sidequest is, by definition, something that happens outside the parameters of the game itself. It may even take you to places where no storyline stuff ever happens (the Deep Sea research facility in FF8, for instance). We do the story because we’re following it, but we do the sidequest because we’re following nothing but our own will.

There is always the truth that someone has been there before you, when you play a game. On a practical level, you probably just weren’t the first person to beat it. But deeper still, you always know a programmer did this stuff, and a tester somewhere did what you’re doing. Even the sidequests aren’t actually new. But that’s not the point. You are entirely free to ignore the sidequest. You don’t actually need Cloud in FF: Tactics, not at all. But any accomplishment that happens within the sidequest is your accomplishment. The game is built for you to beat it, as is the sidequest, but if you choose to do the sidequest, your victory is contingent on your choice. You wouldn’t have succeeded if you didn’t start. That, I think, might be what makes sidequests somehow different than the story they’re appended to – they’re up to you. You exert your influence on the world.

Sandbox games could have made the sidequest obsolete. I don’t believe that, but a lot of what I’m saying we get out of sidequests appears to be delivered, and more fluently, by sandbox games. But most sandbox games, by their nature, can’t have you succeed. Again, that’s changing as programming develops and systems get beefier, but in GTA I can’t actually change anything in the city. San Andreas allowed the player to take territory, but if you steal that plane and slam it into a building and escape to save? Nothing will have changed. You did nothing. You had fun (God knows I don’t want to knock random acts in GTA; I especially like to see how extravagantly I can wreck a car). But you didn’t alter anything, you didn’t achieve a victory, as a sidequest will allow you to.

Also, a sidequest usually appears in a more linear game. Can you have sidequests in a game that doesn’t insist on its own narrative? Everything’s to the side, isn’t it? But if you’re playing a game that’s essentially linear (and the strong narrative of any rpg makes it linear to some degree), then the sidequest is a valve, a way for you to escape that linearity while still playing the game. It’s no longer true that the only way to beat the system is not to play: you could just breed a gold chocobo.

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? Time travel isn’t unique to Earthbound, of course.  Chrono Trigger is all about the stuff.  But EB’s time travel isn’t typical, just as most of the game, I suppose, isn’t typical.  We’ll get to the end part, where Ness and friends plain old go back in time, but mostly what I’m interested in is the Your Sanctuaries. I know.  I said time travel, right?  What about the Sanctuaries ?  I think we can read the Sanctuaries as a form of time travel.  Specifically, not the Sanctuaries themselves, but the “memories” evoked by the Sanctuaries when you record their songs. There’s not much of a progression in the memories — my subjective impression, while playing, was that they moved farther backwards, away from the present.  However, looking at a list now, I’ m not sure that’s really true.  Anyway, the memories are such things like “Ness smells a whiff of Steak” (provided you chose “Steak” as Ness’s favorite food — he’s an all-American boy, so you surely did, right?) and “Ness remembers his mother holding him.”  At first they seem like memories — memories of so long ago Ness can’t recall them normally, but contact with the energy of the Sanctuary opens them again.  That’s interesting on its own. But the game doesn’t leave it at that.  Some of Ness’s “memories” should be impossible for him to remember.  The final three are suspect — though it could be argued that “Ness’s mother when she was young” is a memory of Ness seeing his mother, across a room say, when he was just born.  I personally think it’s not, that he’s seeing his mother before he was actually born, but there’s no real evidence either way. However, the final two “memories” are, I think, impossible to explain in the same way.  In Lumine Hall Ness sees his father holding him, and in the Fire Spring (damn you, Diamond Dog), Ness sees himself as a baby.  The fact that he sees these things is the important part:  Ness isn’t remembering his father holding him, he’s SEEING it.  Ness gets these sensations from outside, as though he is peering through time and seeing moments associated with his life in some way.  He’s peering back through time, as though each Sanctuary opens a little window onto some day in his life (or, as with his mother when she was young, possibly before he was born?).

That’s what’s odd about this — because the Sanctuaries theoretically don’t have anything to do with time travel.  They’re about obtaining power to defeat Giygas — the way Ness unlocks that power, in fact, is to fall into Magicant, a world of his own mind, where he must defeat his dark side in order to use the power for good (on its own an interesting take on the idea that power would corrupt — the hero must defeat the corruption in himself, while it wields the power, before he can use it for good).  So what’s up with the time travel?

In fact, what’s up with the power?  Because Dr. Andonuts designs the machine that sends everyone back in time (Dr. Andonuts AND the Saturns), and it’s Paula, the modern-day eleven-year-old priestess who prays for the whole of the world to help stop Giygas, who facilitates Giygas’s downfall.

So what’s up with the Sanctuaries?  Why do they puncture the fabric of time for such seemingly-insignificant glimpses into the past?  Now, we all know those “seemingly-insignificant’ things are what drive the hero on, from Frodo’s memories of the Shire to Kyon’s obsession with Haruhi’s ponytail, but you see my point I hope.  Are the Sanctuaries trying to prove something to Ness?  If so, why the meaningless glimpses?  If they’re not, why mess with time at all?  It seems like Giygas is doing quite enough of that as is.

Pontifus already unloaded a big bottle rocket on the problem of Giygas himself, and without playing the other games I don’t want to try and add much more to what he’s said, but I want to build on one thing he mentioned.

Ness’s head (or at least the head he left behind when he agreed to have his consciousness housed in a robot body[. . .]) occupies the position of iris and pupil. The mirror effect serves to link Ness with Giygas[. . .]

The reminder that Giygas’s “eye” isn’t reflecting Ness as he is at the time, but Ness as he usually is, helps us immensely here.  Ness, when facing Giygas in the past, is in a robot body.  So his image in the Devil’s Machine can’t be a reflection — a literal reflection, anyway.  It is as though Giygas is seeing Ness either in his “true form” or through a window forward into the present.  Given that Ness and Giygas are related in some way (the mysteries of Mother 1, I suppose, but also in a figurative sense in that they once occupied similar positions vis. PSI powers and pressures), it’s as though Giygas has been watching Ness through a time window and that stress has resulted in the Sanctuaries and their time-muddling properties that, in turn, allow Ness to glance backwards to his own past, even that time before he was born when his mother was young and the moment his father held him.

Giygas wanted to protect people, you know.  He was like Ness, and might still be — given that it’s possible Giygas is more mad than evil, and his power is being exploited by the Starmen and Pokey for their own ends.  I shudder to make the comparison, but it needs to be made, if only because it’s so terrible its structure is obvious:  but Giygas is like Anakin Skywalker.

I know, it makes me throw up a little too.  But forget Hayden Christensen for a minute, just remember the story.  Anakin wants to protect his mother, so he agrees to become a Jedi to get the power necessary, he loses his mind a little bit when his mother is killed, and loses it a whole lot when he thinks his new Convenient Female in Need of Protection (Padme) is dead.  That’s Giygas.  And like Luke, Ness has enough good support to avoid a similar fate.  We never do really figure out what Ness is thinking, except that one time in Lumine Hall, but the moments in time he sees indicates his strong ties to his family.  The Mother games are well-named, because their main locus of concern is the family and how it influences the ripples outward from that center.  It might be significant that in a parody game, a Japanese company chose America as its target, given that those two countries are some of the biggest (most vocal) proponents of the nuclear family.  Because Giygas wants his family, he loses his mind, and fixates on Ness when Ness arrives.  However, Ness is also an object of fear — as Ness has arrived to kill Giygas.  So Giygas might be trying to simply defend himself, or maybe even communicate (don’t even get me started on the nature of communication between truly alien groups, I’ll go all His Master’s Voice on your butt).

Ness has, while he’s struggling through Magicant (and everything else), already saved the world, because he did it in the past.  But like FF8′s non-sensical storyline, time might be compressing due to Giygas’s influence.  I have to wonder if he was just trying to find a friend, and another family.  Ness would suit perfectly, wouldn’t he?  His most important times, that he sees through the veil of time, are all about his family.  But hugging someone too hard will kill them just as dead as strangling would.

And one final thought, mostly unconnected to the rest:  Pokey gets back in time just fine with his body intact.  Was it necessary to send Ness and co. back in machines so their human pity might be suppressed?

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.

Part One

0:00-0:37 — Somehow it took me over thirty seconds to walk the length of this fleshy corridor. It’s all that walking in circles, I suppose.

Given the corridor’s aforementioned and very evident fleshiness, this is as good a time as any to mention the contentious fan interpretation that imagines the approach to Giygas as a birth canal…

0:38-0:45 — …And the pulsating thing at the end as a…well, look at it.

There’s an anonymous graphic that goes along with this theory, which, once seen, can never be unseen.

I don’t prefer to think of Giygas as a fetus. But, given the way Giygas is handled in Mother, it isn’t too much of a stretch to see it as childlike, and it’s true that Pokey (or Porky, though I’ll stick with the old translation) has a way of using people to get what he wants. It’s also true that, with Giygas out of the way, Pokey is free to do what he does in Mother 3. Whoever wins the fight, Pokey stands to gain in that he’ll be rid of major opposition — which does not, of course, mean that he explicitly tricks Ness and co. into aborting a fetus.

It’s not that I’m unwilling to grant that the game’s heroes commit an act of questionable heroism; in fact, I think we can reach that conclusion even without the Giygas-as-fetus angle, if we really want to. And anyway, it’s really no stretch to take some of the things that happen throughout this fight as figuratively evocative of birth and sexuality. I’m just not convinced that Earthbound’s final battle is literally an abortion. But I’ll leave the fetus theory at that; it’s been debated across the internet quite enough already.

0:55 — The Devil’s Machine looks more like an eye than a cervix, as far as I’m concerned, or at least it evokes in me the idea of an eye first and foremost. Ness’s head (or at least the head he left behind when he agreed to have his consciousness housed in a robot body — how’s that for the hero changing himself to meet the challenges he faces?) occupies the position of iris and pupil. The mirror effect serves to link Ness with Giygas, actively raising the question of which of Ness’s qualities or inner demons Giygas could represent. Also consider that the iris and pupil are responsible for the admission of light; perhaps Ness alone could get through to the crazed Giygas, if he tried — in fact, Giygas’s weakness in Mother was its deep-rooted compassion — though the game offers no option for this. I suppose we could say that the gameplay thus defines Ness as practical and efficient; after all, slaying a foe ensures that it cannot return, and, though I don’t think Ness realizes it, Giygas has fallen and returned before. Even the empathetic Paula does not protest. But, setting aside the question of whether I’m overanalyzing (I don’t really believe one can over-analyze), perhaps we should ask whether we ought to allow gameplay to define characters in this way. We might establish gameplay and characterization as separate concerns, but I’m not sure we can divorce anything from gameplay entirely.

1:13 — Nobody ever properly explains what the “Apple of Enlightenment” is in the first place¹. We’re told that Ness and his merry band do what they do in fulfillment of destiny, but the nature of destiny is always left vague. It’s more like they’re being jerked around by people who claim the authority of destiny than being led on by destiny itself. Destiny isn’t much help at all.

1:23 — I suppose we should receive “the embodiment of Evil itself” with skepticism; given that good and evil are never all that well-defined in Earthbound, and that Pokey is a pathological liar, perhaps it’s been a misconception throughout the game that Giygas is wholly evil.

1:35 — Let’s go ahead and get this out of the way: when asked to define Ness’s favorite thing at the beginning of the game, I chose “Fuckin” (not because I want him to suffer from nymphomania, but because “Fuckin α” sounds like “fuckin’ A” and “Fuckin Ω” is just amusing). At least I didn’t change his favorite food to some phallic euphemism.

2:06 — Giygas’s use of Ness’s special attack makes me wonder again which part of Ness it resembles closest. It’d be easy enough to say that Giygas is Ness’s evil/dark side, if not for the fact that Ness has already overcome his inner evil at that point. Besides, I’m hesitant to choose “evil” as the be-all, end-all of Giygas; it seems too easy, even if we’re talking about a mid-90s SNES game.

4:04-4:08 — See, this is what I’m talking about: if Giygas is, for all intents and purposes, mentally disabled, can it be said to be “evil?” It’s mentioned that Giygas isn’t even aware of what it’s doing. How we define Giygas, then, probably depends on whether we base our definition of evil on the act (and/or the intentions behind it) or the effect, and whether we’re willing to grant that a person or sentient thing can be defined in terms of good and evil. Surely Giygas’s war against the Earth at least makes sense to the Starmen and other sentients fighting for its cause.

4:12-4:17 — In a 2003 interview, Earthbound writer Shigesato Itoi discussed the creation of Giygas. At one point, he brought up the topic of typical villains:

Itoi: Well, you know, having a villain there who simply goes, “Wahahaha!” and the like would clearly be bad. But, actually, when I think about it, having villains go, “Wahahaha!” is a really intriguing pattern. But there’s no point in wondering all by yourself for days on end what it means for a bad guy to go, “Wahahaha!” at the climax of a game, you know? I get the feeling that there aren’t many people in the game industry who would do that sort of thing, though.

[Interviewer:] I don’t think it’s limited to just the game industry, though.

Itoi: In short, “What does it mean for a bad guy to laugh?” Hmm…

With that in mind, it’s interesting that Pokey gets a brief Evil Laugh at this point — not that I think there’s much to gain as a reader from scrutinizing a creator’s creative decisions as such, but it’s fun to think about.

5:06 — “You cannot grasp the true form of Giygas’ attack!” — Itoi talks about that, too.

Itoi: Basically, Giygas is something you can’t make sense of, you know? But there’s also a part to him that’s like a living being that deserves love. That part is the breast of Hisako Tsukuba from “The Military Policeman and the Dismembered Beauty”.

…

Itoi: … When I was a kid, I accidentally saw the wrong movie at a theater. It was a Shin-Toho movie titled “The Military Policeman and the Dismembered Beauty”.

After I saw it, I went back home and was silent and just really out of it. I had received such a big shock that I worried my parents. After all, a lady had been raped. By a river. In the movie. When the guy grabbed her breast really hard, it got distorted into this ball shape. It all hit me really hard. It was a direct attack to my brain.

[Interviewer:] When you were a little boy?

Itoi: When I was a little boy.

In other words, there was this sense of terror having atrocity and eroticism side-by-side, and that’s what Giygas’ lines at the end are. During the end, he says, “It hurts,” right? That’s… her breast. It’s like, how do I put it, a “living-being” sensation.

Word of God aside, Giygas comes to embody at least two qualities in a significant way. The first is incomprehensibility; everything from its attacks to its mad babbling to its physical form is difficult for the protagonists to fully understand. The second quality becomes clear as the fight progresses.

6:29 — This stuff is truly nightmare-inducing. It’s theorized that Giygas was planned to return in Mother 3, but the developers felt it’d be too frightening for a younger audience, and I can see why some fans would reach that conclusion. Seriously, Kefka and Lavos don’t have shit on Giygas, and coming from me, that pretty much means Giygas is the greatest end boss ever.

Speaking of Lavos, Giygas is a similarly intelligent but incommunicative alien. In the works of Orson Scott Card (the Ender novels specifically), it’s argued by some characters that the killers of such a being cannot be held morally responsible; humans must protect themselves, after all, and when reason isn’t enough, there’s really nothing else that can be done. Perhaps Giygas exists beyond human logic, and so concepts like morality don’t apply to it — but it can, after all, communicate to Ness in recognizable language, so maybe not.

6:46 — Adding to the tension of this battle is Giygas’s immunity to the arsenal you’ve built up throughout the game; literally, all you can do is pray.

But you don’t pray to a deity, interestingly; people you’ve met and interacted with receive your prayers and send you their best wishes, which damages Giygas somehow. Essentially, the protagonists’ connections with people allow them to succeed. It’s like the Persona games, or the good end of Clannad, or the writing of John Donne made fictional.

6:58-7:36 — I wonder why some of the Mr. Saturns show up around the edges of the screen, but refuse to gather in the middle. They’re probably just wandering NPCs the code doesn’t delete or shoo off, I guess, but maybe, maybe…

I believe Itoi says the Mr. Saturns have something to do with innocence, but they always reminded me more of creepy old men, for some reason.

7:50 — OH GOD IT’S A FETUS

Part Two

0:08-0:12 — Alright, let’s go ahead and get to that other quality Giygas embodies. There’s really no way around the fact that its dialogue is at least vaguely sexual. It may not be so apparent in this particular playthrough of mine, but the dialogue is thrown at you randomly, so you’ll occasionally get “it hurts,” “I feel good,” and random grunting and groaning in succession. And even if that’s what Ness thinks he’s hearing, it’s still worth a look, as I’m trying to figure out what Giygas is to Ness anyway.

So let’s review: Giygas is potentially not purely evil; it represents (and practically is) chaos, it uses Ness’s abilities against him, and it has an air of sexuality about it. Considering that Ness is roughly a young teenager, Earthbound’s scourge of the galaxy begins to look a lot like puberty².

0:46-1:14 — Here’s a relevant Itoi quote about Tony, Jeff’s boarding school friend (the linked article also includes the bit about Mr. Saturns and innocence).

…There’s a gay person in MOTHER 2. A really passionate friend who lives in an England-like place. I designed him to be a gay child. In a normal, real-life society, there are gay children, and I have many gay friends as well. So I thought it would be nice to add one in the game, too.

Yeah, intentional fallacy etc., but, to be fair, the character is pretty gay. You didn’t see a lot of gay characters in Nintendo games during the 90s, at least in the United States.

2:10 — Heh, Poo…why they couldn’t have translated プー as “Puu” is beyond me. I guess they sought to amuse.

4:19 — If you weren’t guaranteed to have nightmares before, you are now.

6:04 — That’s right: the final prayer, the prayer that defeats Giygas, comes from you, the player. If you thought the question of whether Giygas’s defeat has any moral repercussions wasn’t your burden…well, you’re still right, insofar as Giygas is fictional, but involving the player in the process like this brings the player a little closer to all the game’s implications. Imagine if Fallout 3 assigned your name to the protagonist’s father. Or if Portal gave your name to GLaDOS. Either would throw a few rocks at the boundary between play narrative and game plot narrative. And, of course, in Earthbound’s case, you really are responsible for Giygas’s defeat, being the player who consciously brings it about.

In retrospect, it may have had more of an impact if I’d entered my real name instead of Juan Pontifus.

6:31 — Wait, if Pokey can travel through time, why doesn’t he just…damn you, time travel!

Anyway, Giygas having been vanquished, I leave you with this:

Endnotes

¹It makes me think of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, though I’m not sure that there are thematic parallels between Earthbound and the Eden story, unless we go with loss of innocence.

²Also Azathoth. I’d love to be able to discuss Giygas as gothic, or Lovecraftian, but I don’t know enough about those things to do it properly.

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.

Gaynor elaborates:

Video games are able to render a place and put the player into it. The meaning of the experience arises from what’s contained within the bounds of the gameworld, and the range of possible interactions the player may perform there– the nouns and the verbs. Just like in real life, where we are and what we can do dictates our present, and our possible futures. Video games provide an alternative to both the where and the what of existence, resulting in simulated alternate life experiences.

It’s a powerful thing, to be able to visit another place, to drive the drama onscreen yourself– not to receive a personal account of someone else’s experiences, or observe events as a detached spectator. A modern video game level is a navigable construction of three-dimensional geometry, populated with art and interactivity to convincingly lend it an identity as a believable, inhabitable, living place. At their best, video games transmit to the player the experience of actually being there.

…After which he goes into his “agents of chaos” spiel, which is still as relevant as ever, but this time we’re concerned with the functions of specific story elements, rather than how the actions of the player, in a general sense, construct the narrative or narratives which constitute the game experience. In order to discuss setting in games as I intend to, however, we need to take for granted that the aforementioned principle, the constructive function of player agency, is more or less true — and I think we can do that, at this point, but that doesn’t mean we’ll agree on what that entails.

One approach was put forth recently by Cuchlann. Of player agency, and the act of playing in general, he says:

If authorial consciousness is theoretically available in a game, does the gamer become dispossessed and filled in with the authorial consciousness? Yes, I would say so. The gamer takes up the skills offered by the game, learns them well enough to do without reminders, and then moves through the world of the game. It is less like being absorbed into a book and more like being caught up in a dance or a kata. The gamer is doing precisely what the author intends — and yes, that’s what happens, even with the idea of the gamer as an “agent of chaos.” The game world is constructed for the gamer to move through in the same way Poulet posits the world of the book is made to move into the reader. We’re simply dealing with activity rather than passivity.

This is predicated upon the assumption that entering into the world of the the author of a text, in the act of reading (or viewing, or playing, or what have you), results in the dispossession of the reader’s consciousness as it is inundated with the authorial consciousness into which it is immersed (if I’m understanding it correctly). In a comment on the quoted post, Cuchlann describes “authorial consciousness” as used here as “basically the ‘stuff’ readers, players, and critics get out of the text normally,” and that’s probably the best definition I can think of; it’s likely akin to what I’ve called “the surface level” of a text, the structural concerns of the author as opposed to the deep, limitless webs of potential meaning that people like me busy themselves with mapping.

The distinction made here between books and games seems to involve the location at which the reader’s movement into the authorial consciousness takes place. When reading a book, one brings the consciousness to oneself; the consciousness travels to the reader, at which point the reader inhabits it¹. The opposite may be true of video games; that is, they may require players to relocate themselves into the consciousnesses as they exist in the games themselves. To put it another way, when reading a novel, a reader, given both textual cues and informational absences, must personally conceptualize and construct story elements, whereas the same kinds of story elements — characters, setting, and such — exist in pre-constructed states in games, solidified into uncompromisable forms by the constraints imposed upon them by the computer language of which they are woven. The player is tasked primarily with determining the order and manner in which these elements are encountered, being free of the task of giving them form in the first place.

In the following paragraph of his post, Cuchlann delves into the implications of this.

My speculative idea here is that the activity of the game is what induces this state [of dispossession] in the gamer, not the story (if a story is present)… Little of the story is ever delivered, in [either Half-Life or Shadow of the Colossus], to a passive reader — how many cut-scenes are there in either game? True, they’re not absent, but more often than not the gamer is gaming, and not watching. Games dispossess the gamer through motion — the gamer’s own motion. Gamers are not immersed — logically, if we really did map ourselves onto the protagonists, then alarmists might actually have ground to stand on when they claim games make us more violent. But that’s not what we’re doing. We’re coming in contact with the authorial consciousness, “enacting a wondrous merging with the presence of someone wholly other and unique” (1319). A video game is the least immersive form of entertainment, because it requires complete, willed action on the part of the gamer…

“Readers act on themselves,” Cuchlann later adds; “gamers, on the other hand, act upon something external to themselves.” We must ask ourselves whether gamers being forced to leave themselves behind, in a sense, thwarts immersion in video games. Cuchlann seems to suggest that it does, and I think I see where he’s coming from — at least, I disagree with Gaynor’s characterization of the player’s interaction with the main character as “direct inhabitation of an autonomous agent” — but I’m not ready to conclude that games lack immersion just yet. In my estimation, our question here is not “Is it immersive?” so much as “In what area is it immersive?” What we’re dealing with here is, at the very least, an entirely different kind of immersion than that offered by books and film.

And now that I’ve opened that can of worms, let’s talk about Fallout 3, as my experience with that Oblivion-esque romp through post-apocalyptia made me start to wonder about the role and function of setting in video games to begin with.

To be blunt, the Capital Wasteland creeps me right the fuck out, and not just because of its inherent loneliness (which the few NPC companions in the game do little to alleviate). We live in a world in which the United States, staunch enemy of communism, owes a startling amount of money to China; a world in which practically anyone can get their hands on nuclear material, and no number of UN injunctions or invasions of the Middle East can change that. Fallout 3′s ruinous Washington, DC area, the end result of war with China, serves as an example of what might happen if everything that could possibly go wrong in our world suddenly did. It is, after all, a setting in which every other explosion results in a mushroom cloud.

In a recent post, Gaynor comments on Fallout 3 in particular.

I’ve gained unique perspective by engaging with the fictional people and places of recent games… Freely exploring the Capital Wasteland in Fallout 3 and choosing to complete unanchored quests like Agatha’s Song illustrated just how much our world, and humanity’s value systems, might change when faced with global catastrophe. The most memorable stories I recall…lay outside the narrative spine…

That more or less sums up my enthusiasm for the game, though I’d take it a step further. Agatha’s Song was an interesting side quest, I suppose, but my most memorable experiences with the game often did not occur in conjunction with quest objectives; my nerve-wracking six-hour odyssey through the ghoul-infested DC metro comes to mind, or my first encounter with a deathclaw, or my off-the-beaten-path adventures in Vault 106 and the Dunwich Building. Fallout 3 has great potential to provide experiences “outside the narrative spine,” which makes setting a more significant aspect of what I like to call its “authorial shell” than it would be if the game wasn’t a game. Perhaps another name for the authorial shell I’m referring to here is, as Cuchlann called it, “authorial consciousness,” but giving form to abstract concepts always helps my understanding, and the shell might be bigger than the consciousness anyway, encompassing or using it.

It seems, then, that to understand setting in games, we’ll need to understand that shell. But, video games being as new as they are, there’s little consensus on how something like an authorial shell or consciousness functions in the context of games, perhaps because of the vastly different approaches of those discussing the medium. In the previously-quoted post, Gaynor argues for an “immersion model of meaning:”

…does abdication of authorship have the potential to convey profundity or deep meaning?

…

I would argue that abdication of authorship, when paired with certain existing game forms, points toward such an alternative: a mode that trades painstakingly-paced plot points or densely symbolic mechanics for a matrix of unstructured potential personal revelations; one that trades grand, orchestrated received meaning for the encompassing sensation of visiting someplace outside the player’s prior experience, with the potential to return deeply changed. The immersion model of meaning, as it might be called, takes the act of travel as its primary touchstone, instead of relying on traditional media such as film, the novel, or even sculpture, music or painting to inform the author’s role.

“Abdication of authorship” …to whom? Every text has an author, I think, whether it’s a lone writer, a video game design team, a set of social and cultural conditions, some combination thereof, or something else entirely. The player of a game, despite being an agent of momentum, still seems to be more a reader than anything; players determine the order in which the events of a game occur, but they do not determine the array of possible events to which they are bound. Even assuming that we could place such concerns entirely in the hands of a computer, could truly randomly determine which of an infinite number of events the player could experience in a particular playthrough, the computer would then become the author, and the player would remain the reader. The bottom line is that there is always a limit to what the player can do, and this limit is determined by an author. I cannot, for example, leave Fallout 3′s Capital Wasteland because none of the land beyond is virtually mapped, and I cannot brandish a broadsword because there is no such weapon in the game. I would rather it be this way; I maintain that a structured narrative experience can “mean” practically anything, but lack of structure seems to preclude meaning. If you can come up with a truly random way of scattering words on a page, and if you can subsequently achieve a sublime experience with your jumble of words, let me know.

That’s not to mention my disagreement with Gaynor’s characterization² of the “traditional media” of novels and film as employing a strict “message model of meaning,” in which “the genius author cooks up deeply meaningful thought in his head and hands down his superior understanding to the waiting masses.” Call me a tool of the poststructuralist critical establishment, but I’m one of those who feels that the author doesn’t have much to do with the reading experience, beyond contributing to that structured shell in the first place. Further, I don’t think there’s much meaning inherent in any text, that meaning will always be based primarily on the experiences of the reader; even if the “genius author” (and I think it’s erroneous to assume that the effective “author” of a text can be characterized as an individual human being anyway) did intend to convey some message, whatever message or messages would really be taken away from the text would depend on what the readers saw in it. To quote the ever-useful TV Tropes, I’m one of those who “[considers] the uncertainty and ambiguity of canon to be a good thing and [decries] the Word Of God as shackling the imagination and interpretations of the fans.” To take it even further, I don’t believe writers can have any more authority over the meanings of their texts than their readers; once the text is written, the writer is just another reader³.

Essentially, I’m saying that Gaynor is worrying too much, that “traditional” narrative media already give readers and viewers enough agency that the gap between such media and video games isn’t that big to begin with. But if Gaynor’s approach to the subject isn’t that useful to me, to whom shall I turn? How about Roger Ebert, who Gaynor seems to identify as a foe? It’s hard to blame Gaynor, actually.

…I did indeed consider video games inherently inferior to film and literature. There is a structural reason for that: Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.

Et tu, Ebert!? “Serious” film and literature requires authorial control of what, exactly? If he’s talking about meaning, I’ll reiterate that I don’t think authors have control over that anyway. If he means our authorial shell, though, we’re in the process of establishing that games have that, too. It may not look quite the same as it does in the film Ebert’s used to, but it’s there all the same. And anyway, who is Roger Ebert to determine what narrative art is “serious?” By my reckoning, the only artistic experience Ebert can truly, deeply understand is Ebert’s. The same goes for all of us, no matter how many degrees we have or volumes we’ve written.

Ebert’s not done, though.

I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful.

Thanks for that, Big E. I feel so validated.

But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art. To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.

Ebert’s basic stance seems to be that, because video games don’t do what plays, novels, symphonies, et al. do, they aren’t art, or they’re at least not worthy of comparison with the greatest works of human history. The medium is young, I’ll grant him that — game designers haven’t had much time to produce yet — but his approach doesn’t make much sense to me. Novels don’t do what musical compositions do; given that novels are the newer of the two, shouldn’t it follow that, by Ebert’s standards, novels aren’t art because they don’t adhere to a form and purpose established earlier? On that note, people didn’t know what to make of Oroonoko at first, but eventually English novels reached their current prominence; if the novel as a basic form wasn’t capable of artistic power to begin with, the shape of literature today would probably be quite different. Video games constituting a very young medium may mean they haven’t realized their full potential yet, but we can’t write the medium off for that reason alone.

Ah well; disregarding that Ebert’s argument makes little sense, and that the last sentence of the above quote is a rather galling and pretentious generalization (I hope you can see here that I’m trying to use video games precisely to make myself “more cultured, civilized and empathetic,” though I doubt my definitions of those three words are the same as Ebert’s), he’s not really a staunch enemy of fan-kind. He liked Princess Mononoke, if I remember correctly (not that it would really bother me if he didn’t). But now that we’ve used Ebert up like a Grand Theft Auto whore, let’s kick him out of the car and punch him to death so we can get our hard-earned blood money back.

We can say, now, what the authorial shell of a game isn’t. It isn’t nonexistent, nor is it likely to be much more subject to the will of the player than the authorial shell of a novel is to the will of the reader, given the limits imposed on player action. But that’s inconclusive. A definition of isn’ts and maybes isn’t a very good definition. In particular, we still don’t know what setting has to do with anything.

It seems, then, that three questions beg for answers. How does a player enter the authorial shell of a game? How does the player then function within it? And what the hell is the authorial shell in the first place?

The answer to the first seems initially to be that the player enters the shell through the act of experiencing the story of the game, which requires play, as play constitutes the forward movement of the story. But then, those actions available to the player, in being predetermined by the game, are also a part of the shell, in a sense. The player cannot act beyond the shell — at that point, the player is playing a different game altogether. We might say that play doesn’t get the player into the shell; the player makes the decision to enter the shell, and play keeps the player inside, just as forward reading keeps readers inside the shell of a novel, and forward viewing keeps viewers inside the shell of a film. The difference here is that play need not necessarily be “forward,” in the traditional sense. Cuchlann says:

A gamer can still be actively engaging in that trade-off of consciousness — that is, still playing — even if they aren’t advancing the story at all. Think of modern sandbox games, such as Grand Theft Auto 3, where the gamer is still playing if they steal an ice cream truck and ride around a farm but refusing to do any storyline quests. The gamer could even stop and watch the sun set over Vvardenfell — that’s still playing. Doing these things, or their analogues, in the act of reading a book or watching a movie, effectively stops the act of reading or watching. Going back and checking out a cool scene in Star Wars isn’t absorbing the author’s consciousness — that consciousness is delivered to the watcher through forward motion through the story. Pausing in reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell to reflect on the beauty of Clarke’s prose isn’t absorbing the consciousness either, it’s aesthetic appreciation of craft. So even in the most linear of games, the fact of how gamers dispossess themselves to take in, rather than receive, the authorial consciousness turns the story into something that results from the gamer’s actions.

I would argue that each act of play constitutes forward movement on the part of the game’s story as it exists within the play experience, even if it does not advance the game’s central plot. It can even go against the advancement of the central plot; isn’t this what happens when a player loses and must return to a previously-completed section of the game? Whereas the plot of a novel or film is, even in its most abstract and absurd moments, structured, its events predetermined and forever unchanging, and conducive to intense scrutiny in its relatively rigid form, the plot of a game is highly dependent on the methodology of the player. We might say that, where the plot of a novel or film is interpretable in its implications, the plot of a game is interpretable in the order of its events — but perhaps less so in implications, for how much weight has a sequence of events that could have gone differently? I don’t have a good answer — it has more emotional weight, probably, to the individual player, but it’s hard to compare one playthrough to the body of human fiction; for that, we’d probably need an array of all possible plots. A game has no “one true plot.”

I suppose that means that, unless we’re comparing playthroughs, we can get farther by discussing characters and setting (though, on the other hand, is discoursing critically ever anything more than comparing notes?). As I said, I agree with Cuchlann in that we do not “map ourselves onto the protagonists,” even when we directly control the protagonist’s actions — remember, the range of possible actions available to the characters under our control are for us to discover, but not decide. Assuming that the authorial shell, composed of characters as much as plot and setting, must exist within the player before the player can fill it with meaning, it may be more apt to say that the protagonist maps itself onto us — or from us. But it’s easier to make that claim in the case of a novel, which prompts us to compose the shell internally with its language cues. Many seventh-generation games seem to hand us a shell at least partially pre-constructed of elements with determinate visual and aural form and personality. In sandbox games such as Fallout 3, the game allows us some determination of these factors where the protagonist is concerned, but the game also limits our options out of necessity. Do we take the partially-whole shell the game gives us and draw it into ourselves? Do we leave ourselves, in a sense, and enter into the shell within the game? Or is there some sort of midway point at which the transaction takes place?

The second option, that of leaving the self and moving elsewhere, seems difficult to substantiate, even if we rephrase it as the player acting upon something external. To what degree can the shell even be external? The shell, once constructed, is the array of signifiers that point to the signifieds that fill the void within, and, as de Saussure notes, the semiotic sign is a “psychological entity,” connecting “not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image⁴.” It’s all, by necessity, in our heads. We can’t work with the shell if we don’t conceptualize it.

We might be inclined to say, then, that we draw the shell into ourselves and go from there. But wait! A new challenger appears, and his name is Wolfgang Iser.

…[T]he literary work has two poles, which we might call the artistic and the aesthetic: the artistic pole is the author’s text, and the aesthetic is the realization accomplished by the reader. In view of this polarity, it is clear that the work itself cannot be identical with the text or with its actualization but must be situated somewhere between the two. It must inevitably be virtual in character, as it cannot be reduced to the reality of the text or to the subjectivity of the reader…⁵

Iser postulates a middle ground between text and reader that constitutes the work of literature — this middle ground is, I think, analogous to our as-yet-poorly-defined authorial shell. Now, this may sound odd; if we take de Saussure for granted, which I’ve done, how could anything exist between reader and text, when the text exists beyond the reader’s mind, and semiotic processes are “psychological entities?” The answer is simple: the text, or at least that version of the text that participates in the reading experience, that combines its powers with the reader to give birth to middle ground, doesn’t exist beyond the reader’s mind. What the reader is working with isn’t a physical text, but the mental impression of a physical text; the mind is a kind of white screen upon which a projection of the physical text is cast when the luminous reading process passes through it. That may seem obvious, but consider this: perhaps the act of play, being a reading process, a means by which the player experiences the story of a game, not only keeps the player engaged within the shell, but acts as a means of constructing the shell in the first place — a means that sometimes places enough determinative power in the hands of the player that the player is tasked with determining what they’ll get out of the story’s end result up front, as is the case in Fallout 3.

Iser (who apparently had kind of a thing for pinstripe suits) continues:

If the virtual position of the work is between text and reader, its actualization is clearly the result of an interaction between the two, and so exclusive concentration on either the author’s techniques or the reader’s psychology will tell us little about the reading process itself. …[S]eparate analysis would only be conclusive if the relationship were that of transmitter and receiver… In literary works, however, the message is transmitted in two ways, in that the reader “receives” it by composing it.⁶

From this, we can glean that Iser’s middle ground amounts to an outright interaction between reader and text. Insofar as both the reader’s consciousness and the mental text-image coexist in the reader’s mind, we can likely characterize this interaction as “discourse with oneself,” which seems in line with both Poulet’s phenomenology and the Foucauldian ideas discussed (among other things) here. Given that “the reader ‘receives’” the “message” of a text “by composing it,” we can also substantiate the text as text-image approach.

It is only now, after much tl;dr — that is, after much scholarly toil that the authorial shell begins to take shape. Consider the reader’s mind and the physical text in relation to one another.

The reader brings accumulated knowledge and experience to the table, but can’t simply toss it at the text; the text, through reading, must be brought inside. Now I’ll apply the process to which Poulet, de Saussure, and Iser have led me: the physical text, through the process of reading, casts a text-image upon the reader’s mind, and the reader’s knowledge and experience combine with the text-image to complete the authorial shell, which can then be filled.

This is a very simple representation, and not drawn to scale, if there even exists a scale to which it might be drawn. That is, don’t take the relative sizes of the reader’s knowledge and experience and the text-image to mean anything; the nature of the shell’s composition most likely differs from one reading experience to another. A graphic that depicted an authorial shell composed of bits of text-image scattered throughout the reader’s knowledge and experience would probably be more accurate, and it’s possible that the text-image and knowledge/experience simply become one in the construction of the shell, so bear those variations in mind.

Also note that this model is by no means specific to video games. I suggested earlier that games might deliver their authorial shells in “pre-constructed” or at least partially-constructed states, and I think that we can now more or less rule that out. Games might provide specific visual and aural data that novels present only in abstract, but even these amount to cues, raw data that must be “read” into a text-image as surely as language. The authorial shell model is, I think, general enough to apply to most narrative media.

How does setting in games fit into all this? How is it “the place where I am” in addition to “the place where they are?” To answer these and other questions, we need to scrutinize the composition of the text-image⁷.

As a general rule, what setting we see in literature and film is attached to the characters and their actions. That is, while both media have their share of epic pans over the countryside (I’m looking at you, Tolkien), readers and viewers will only tolerate so much of nothing eventful happening. This is not the case in games; as I said, a player need not be advancing any of the game’s scripted plots to advance the all-encompassing plot of the play experience. Though the same set of events would bore most readers and moviegoers, many Koreans players can and will gladly endure a two-hour game of Starcraft that consists mostly of building things and repairing or replacing them when they’re damaged. How many viewers would leave the theater or ceremonially burn the DVD (in a fire, not a DVD-RW) when faced with a film that made them watch the first twenty minutes of a Starcraft game? Not that I haven’t watched gameplay videos of very good players, but I certainly didn’t do so for the story, and I found myself skipping around.

The difference, of course, is play, which keeps the player engaged through what in other media would be very uneventful stretches, stretches during which countless minutiae of setting can be conveyed. Given engaging play, games stand to convey a higher volume of setting information than novels and film, which means setting is more strongly represented in the text-image, which means it plays a more significant role in composing the authorial shell — while “the place where I am” may not be the best way to describe setting in games, it’s a feeling I’m more likely to have while playing a game than when reading most novels, and, to me, that feeling is one of the markers of a good game.

Perhaps more importantly, I consider that sense of identification with setting a requirement in sandbox games such as Fallout 3, which often very purposefully don’t contain plots of epic proportions. As Fallout 3 made me feel as if my explorations of its setting meant something, even without quest objectives, far more than did, say, Oblivion or most of the Grand Theft Auto games, I can confidently recommend it over most games I played last year.

But the point here is that I don’t think it’s “direct inhabitation of an autonomous agent,” as Gaynor suggests, that sets games apart as a medium, nor do I think games are necessarily less immersive than novels or film. They’re simply different in that they’re played; we get more of some things and less of others to work with in our authorial shells, and setting seems rather well-represented therein.

Endnotes

¹The consciousness inhabits the reader, in a sense, insofar as we can call the reader’s conceptualization of the text inhabiting on the part of the consciousness, and then the reader inhabits the consciousness, which causes the consciousness to inhabit the reader — it seems paradoxical when termed thus. But think of it this way: concepts such as inhabitation and inside/outside aren’t really adequate, and just serve as convenient descriptors in explanation. “The extraordinary fact in the case of a book,” says Poulet, “is the falling away of the barriers between you and it. You are inside it; it is inside you; there is no longer either outside or inside” (Poulet, Georges. “Phenomenology of Reading.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2001: 1321).

²To be precise, Gaynor is running with some ideas first presented by Jonathan Blow.

³That is to say, the writer is just another reader in theory; effectively, the writer does have some authority, given the tendency of some fans to accept the testimony of a writer as irrefutable fact. We might say that the literary value of all readings is equal (in that there aren’t “levels” of literary value at all), while social/political values of readings vary widely. See also “Over 9000 meaningless words.”

⁴De Saussure, Ferdinand. “From Course in General Linguistics.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2001: 963.

⁵Iser, Wolfgang. “Interaction between Text and Reader.” The [you guessed it] Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2001: 1674.

⁶Ibid.

⁷I’m inclined at this point to think that the text-image specifically is analogous to Poulet’s authorial consciousness, while the authorial shell as a whole is analogous to Iser’s middle ground, but I could be wrong; maybe it’s all the same thing.

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?

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.

Obviously, given the context of this blog, we decided on the latter.  Specifically, my professor told me the former option sounded good — for a dissertation — and that I might want to consider going with the other one.  So I did.  Some of the results of this process showed up on Super Fanicom already.  I may post a kind of summary, at least of some of the paper’s parts, at some point in the future.  I actually want to field the paper to journals and conferences, though, so I can’t put the entire thing up — and it’s about fifteen pages anyway, who among you would be willing to read it all?

This is probably the most important moment in the list for me — that is, for my development.  I had myth criticism on my side already, but I was beginning to think, over the course of this year, that it wasn’t quite enough, but I didn’t have much else to go on in terms of literary theory “schools.”  Going on my professor’s suggestions, I discovered phenomenology (see earlier link).  Now, I don’t know if I’m going to be a terrible, hybrid mythic-phenomenologist for the rest of my days, but it kicked me in the pants, if you will.

If you’re curious about my topic, at least, it ran like this:  I explained video games through phenomenology, then looked at how Resident Evil and Silent Hill are Gothic, the synthesized the two sections by claiming that the concerns of the contemporary Gothic are played out better in video games than in most prose fiction, because of the phenomenological edge the gaming environment provides (Hint: it’s all Freudian).  I’m also particularly proud of the title:  “Press ‘A’ to Go Through the Dark and Scary Door.”

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.

I already had an SNES emulator on there, and that for several years now, but for some reason it just slipped my mnd that I could be getting old DC games and other emulators on there.  I picked up a second controller at a thrift store in Memphis and first tried a Genesis emulator.  My roommate, my girlfriend, and I all trawled our way through Mortal Kombat 1 & 2, as well as a few others, but overall that didn’t work out.  Then I had the sense to get an NES emulator, and oh my.  We stayed up way too late, several times, trying to get the Ghosts N Goblins guy’s goddamned girlfriend back.  After a few false starts with crappy emulators, I found one that would run Castlevania 3, and we spend a solid four hours, maybe five, trucking through there, only to have our save state crap out on us while I battled through the epic three-coffin fight, featuring mummies, a hammer-wielding giant, and the mother-fucking devil himself.

I don’t like to give in to the hue and cry about how games are easier nowadays.  They might actually be, but my memories of gaming during the actual heyday of the NES involve being incredibly frustrated.  People look at me funny when I say this, and maybe I’m mis-remembering — but I used to rent the original Legend of Zelda every so often, and I couldn’t find the sword.  It probably didn’t help that I didn’t have a copy of the manual.

Anyway, what I’m trying to talk about here is the sheer joy of, with a group of friends, throwing yourself against a wall of agony in an attempt to best it, to use your own shattered body parts to make a little hill to climb.  One thing about modern games that does irritate me is the assumption that I don’t want to be in the same room as my friends when I play games with them.  Look, all the X-Box live stuff is great, sure, whatever, but some games are apparently coming out now with co-op modes that don’t support a second controller.  That is, you are required to play co-op with your friend through X-Box live, rather than sit in the same room with him or her.  This seems to defeat the purpose.  The only reason that hill of body parts is possible is that your friend is sitting on the couch with you, screaming when you do and passing the controller off like burn-outs with a well-rotated joint (I just had to stop and think to remember a term for marijuana rolled into cigarrete paper — you kids and your drug culture).

This requirement to use the internet is, simply, bullshit.  Look, game industry:  the only reason we started gaming online with computers is that we were far away from each other.  My friends in undergrad. and I, we took every opportunity to drag our immense computers to my dorm’s basement, spent hours setting up the damnable router that never fucking worked, all to play really cool computer games in the same room as one another.  Have you stopped to think that some of us, at least, bought your fucking console because console games are about having your friends in the same room?  That’s the fucking point.  Every time I see people saying the Wii doesn’t have any games on it yet that aren’t just gimmicks, first I wonder if they missed the Mario and Zelda games, and second I assume if I could look into their houses I would see an X-Box flickering with the steady glow of anonymous people online screaming obscenities.  Why do that when I can scream obscenities at people who are right there with me?

This, uh, turned into something else entirely, didn’t it?  Oh well.  So, moment 7:  playing retro games with my friends, in the same room.

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.

Poulet was one of the leading figures in the field.  I’m actually working solely off the introduction to his work I just read, but I wanted to get this down.  Poulet describes the act of reading as entering into the author’s consciousness (he keeps to a Barthian idea of the author — he doesn’t mean the person who wrote the text, but the figure which acts as the collation between the texts) and actively studied the oevre of writers, rather than single texts.  He believed readers were receptacles for this authorial consciousness, and embodied “an interior universe of mental entities” (1319).  Basically, the reader absorbs the objects of the written consciousness, replacing the book with the world within, and the consciousness of the reader is dispossessed and is filled in, for a little while, with this author-consciousness.

First we must assume Poulet’s “book” can be any text.  That’s easy enough to do today, in a world where everything is considered a text.  Done.  So let’s apply this idea to video games.  The first problem we seem to run into is one of passivity — Poulet described the reader as passive when he or she is the receptacle, but gamers are not passive.  That is, if the gamer is passive for too long, we (usually, MGS notwithstanding) consider the game as poorly-made.  A game with no story does not function without activity on the part of the “reader.”  The gamer must act, or nothing happens — and this is true every moment.  Think of Pac-Man or Space Invaders.  Pac-Man especially — there are no real pauses, and none in the gameplay.  There are no cut-scenes, no text blocks delivering dialogue or exposition.  There is simply action.  So, for now, let’s rub out “passive” and write in “active,” then see if the rest of this stuff holds together.

Now, the game disc — or cartridge, if we’re being old-school — is replaced by the game itself.  We don’t think much about the medium of the game while we’re playing, so that feels on track with Poulet’s idea that the book is replaced.  Our knee-jerk reaction may be to say it can’t be the author’s consciousness, because there’s almost never a single author for a game.  But we’re not dealing with biographical authors here, but Barthian authors.  Sonic Team is the “author” for Sonic games, for example — it doesn’t matter if certain developers were fired or hired between games, the team is a cohesive force binding the games together.  If someone else were to release a Sonic game it wouldn’t be all that appropriate to consider it lumped together with the others, would it?  We would view it as a reaction, like Wide Sargasso Sea is to Jane Eyre.  The same characters appear in the same setting, but they’re never considered as two parts of the same authorial consciousness.

If authorial consciousness is theoretically available in a game, does the gamer become dispossessed and filled in with the authorial consciousness?  Yes, I would say so.  The gamer takes up the skills offered by the game, learns them well enough to do without reminders, and then moves through the world of the game.  It is less like being absorbed into a book and more like being caught up in a dance or a kata.  The gamer  is doing precisely what the author intends — and yes, that’s what happens, even with the idea of the gamer as an “agent of chaos.”  The game world is constructed for the gamer to move through in the same way Poulet posits the world of the book is made to move into the reader.  We’re simply dealing with activity rather than passivity.

I’ve managed to map a theory about books onto games.  They are still different forms of media.  My speculative idea here is that the activity of the game is what induces this state in the gamer, not the story (if a story is present).  Now, I love good stories, and I love them in video games.  On my own I prefer to play games with strong stories, like Half-Life or Shadow of the Colossus.  I use those two examples not only because they are two of my favorite games, but also because they exemplify where I’m trying (in part) to go here.  Little of the story is ever delivered, in either game, to a passive reader — how many cut-scenes are there in either game?  True, they’re not absent, but more often than not the gamer is gaming, and not watching.  Games dispossess the gamer through motion — the gamer’s own motion.  Gamers are not immersed — logically, if we really did map ourselves onto the protagonists, then alarmists might actually have ground to stand on when they claim games make us more violent.  But that’s not what we’re doing.  We’re coming in contact with the authorial consciousness, “enacting a wondrous merging with the presence of someone wholly other and unique” (1319).  A video game is the least immersive form of entertainment, because it requires complete, willed action on the part of the gamer (I hold, along with most book-nerds, that reading is an active process, much more so than watching movies or TV, but I’m not talking about the same kind of activity here.  In books it’s active reading, a usage of the reader’s consciousness to, in Poulet’s terms, absorb the secondary consciousness.  The reader seeks the state of that passivity that lets the author come visit.  Readers act on themselves; gamers, on the other hand, act upon something external to themselves. So, really, revising my earlier statement — gamers dispossess themselves).

All sorts of related conundrums come up at this point.  What is the role of the protagonist in this relationship?  Does this affect the story, as I was talking about earlier?  The protagonist thing — I’m still doing reading on that.  I have an article to read all about the construction of protagonists in games, actually.  The story, if one is present in a game, is affected by the gamer.  Even if the game is perfectly linear, it isn’t.  The gamer controls the pace at which the story comes to them.  A gamer can still be actively engaging in that trade-off of consciousness — that is, still playing — even if they aren’t advancing the story at all.  Think of modern sandbox games, such as Grand Theft Auto 3, where the gamer is still playing if they steal an ice cream truck and ride around a farm but refusing to do any storyline quests.  The gamer could even stop and watch the sun set over Vvardenfell — that’s still playing.  Doing these things, or their analogues, in the act of reading a book or watching a movie, effectively stops the act of reading or watching.  Going back and checking out a cool scene in Star Wars isn’t absorbing the author’s consciousness — that consciousness is delivered to the watcher through forward motion through the story.  Pausing in reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell to reflect on the beauty of Clarke’s prose isn’t absorbing the consciousness either, it’s aesthetic appreciation of craft.  So even in the most linear of games, the fact of how gamers dispossess themselves to take in, rather than receive, the authorial consciousness turns the story into something that results from the gamer’s actions.

“Your princess is in another castle” isn’t memorable because of the struggle Mario went through to finish this castle; it’s memorable because of the authorial consciousness successfully negating the last moments of gamer-action, spurring the gamer forward to new heights of action.

citations from The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.  Vincent  B. Leitch, ed.  New York:  W. W. Norton & Co.  2001.

[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.]