Media, Culture, Technology

Tag: video games (Page 1 of 2)

Valve Loves Mods

Have you ever played a game and thought to yourself “I really wish that dragon looked like Thomas the Train?” Well if you have, then you are in luck, because mods allow you to do just that. And if you have never even come close to thinking that, then fear not: there is still a mod out there for you. Mods are a great way to make a game more personal and entertaining since mods can essentially change almost any aspect of a video game into something the player wants. However, mods would be nothing without the developers that make the games they are for.

One developer that has been particularly prominent in the modding world is Valve. In fact, Valve was actually born from mods. In 1996, two Microsoft employees—Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington—left Bill Gates’ company to go and try designing video games.  To do this, they acquired the software development kit (or SDK) for the Quake engine and began modding. In 1998, they released their debut product Half Life.  Essentially just a large mod to the Quake engine, Half Life was an instant hit and later was actually used by other people to create one of the most successful mods in history, Counter Strike. The Counter Strike mod was eventually bought back by Valve and is now one of their most successful games, generating huge profits for Valve.

It’s obvious that a prominent part of Valve’s foundation is modding but there is one thing that sets them apart from other companies with the same selling point, such as Bethesda Softworks: Valve actively encourages the modding community. This encouragement has brought tons of benefits to the company, but this is not just a one sided relationship. As the rest of this post will explain, Valve’s encouragment for modding benefits modders by offering  simple ways to create mods through things like creation kits, quick and easy ways to access and share mods through the Steam Workshop, and by providing players with a wide variety of mods. At the same time, modders provide value to Valve by providing the company with “free labor” and increasing the value of its games through modders’ creation of “complements.”

Video of mod that turns dragons into trains in Skyrim, By Gampo

In order to fully understand Valve’s approach to the modding community, one first has to know what a mod is. The issue with defining mods, however, is that there are so many different forms they can take. Mods can be anything from an enhancement to a game’s graphics to the creation of an almost entirely new game via the original game’s code, as in the case of Half Life. This is why the best definition of what a mod  is needs to be rather broad. Walt Scacchi, a senior research scientist at the Institute for Software Research, gives a great and widely accepted description of what a mod is in his article “Computer Game Mods, Modders, Modding, and the Mod Scene” where he states that a mod is basically just “a legal change in pre-existing code that creates something new.” Now that a definition is in place, we can explian how mods benefit Valve’s community and Valve themselves can be explained, starting with community benefits.

Valve’s encouragement for modding has benefitted the community by allowing players to easily create mods through programs like creation kits and SDKs. One way Valve has encouraged modding has been through the release of SDKs for certain games. SDKs are essentially development tools that allow its user to create applications within a game. A second way Valve has encouraged modding is through the release of creation kits for certain games. A creation kit can be downloaded upon purchase of a game that has one associated with it. Upon downloading the creation kit the user can then edit almost anything they want in the game. The biggest benefit of using the creation kit to mod is that the mods a user creates are not stored in the game’s files. They are instead stored separately, so that if a user edits something in a game that makes it run incorrectly or messes up a certain part of the game’s engine, the entire game is not destroyed. These programs Valve has created greatly benefit their community by making it is easier than ever to create mods. Take the example of Skyrim. Once someone has downloaded the Skyrim creation kit from Steam anyone can take game models such as walls, characters, items, or even buildings and build entirely new creations quickly and easily with them.  Since Valve provides people with the necessary software to mod right off the bat, members of the community that want to mod do not have to spend hours figuring out how and download outside software; instead, they can just boot up Valve’s programs and have the ability to create any mod easily right then and there.

Making modding easier is not the only benefit these programs have had for the community, they have also made it possible for almost anyone to mod. Things like creation kits  have made modding rather simple and intuitive; one no longer has to be a wiz with computers to create a mod. Instead the would-be modder can just boot up his or her creation kit and be ready to create. Creation kits also mean that new or rather unskilled modders no longer have to worry about destroying the game they are playing since everything they add or create will be stored separately. Valve’s encouragement for mods has made modding simpler and easier than ever, which is a huge benefit to people who play their games and want to mod. But creating mods is not the only thing Valve has made easier; they have also made sharing and accessing mods easier than ever.

Valve’s encouragement for modding has benefitted the community by providing them with easy ways to share and access mods through the Steam Workshop. In 2008 Valve released the Steam Workshop for their game client Steam with the intentions of creating a way for people to easily share and access mods they create themselves or want to use, and it did just that. The Steam Workshop was an instant success and people immediately began sharing their creations. Players no longer had to scour the internet looking for one specific mod they wanted; instead, they could just log on to the Workshop and search for it using the search tool. In fact, the Market not only made finding particular mods easier, it made discovering new mods easier too. The Workshop provided players with ways of browsing the top and newest mods for their favorite games quickly. Once a player found a mod they wanted, he or she could click the subscribe button for that mod and whenever the modder came out with an updated version of the mod it would update automatically.

Image from Counter Strike: Source, By Tamahikari Tammas

Image from Counter Strike: Source, By Tamahikari Tammas

The Steam Community Workshop not only made accessing mods easier, it made sharing them easier too. The Workshop provided an easy way for modders to share their creations since they could just post them for others to find them. All of their creations were also easy for the creators to access within the Workshop so they could update them at any time. The Workshop also provided modders and non-modders with a simple way to share their favorite mods. People could “like” mods and send the links to them to their friends, making it easier than ever to share their favorites.

The final benefit Valve’s encouragement for mods has provided the company’s community is that it has created an expansive variety of mods offering a personalized experience for almost any player. With the implementation of the Steam Community Workshop, creation kits, and software development kits,  it has become easier than ever to create, access, and share mods. This simplicity has lead to a seemingly endless supply of mods meaning there is a mod for almost anyone in any game. This allows players to make the gaming experience their own and tailor it to the way they like it, which is what mods are really meant to do. But the programs Valve has implemented have created such a vast quantity of mods that personalization has been taken a step further. Now players can basically make entire games into what they want them to look like or what they thought the game should look like.

It is great that Valve has encouraged modding and thus brought so many benefits to their community  but they probably would not have been as encouraging if mods did not benefit them in some way. Valve’s encouragement for mods has benefitted them because modders act as a kind of free labor. As stated before, the definition of mod can be rather broad; therefore, a mod is not necessarily just an addition to a pre-existing game. Modders quite frequently actually create mods that fix bugs in a game or enhance certain other aspects of the game, such as graphics. These fixes or enchantments cost nothing to Valve and greatly improve the gaming experience.  Thus, modders act as a type of legal free labor for Valve. In fact, according to Hector Postigo, an associate professor at Temple University, modders actually save game developers upwards of $2.5 million dollars a year in labor costs. Since Valve has encouraged mods through things like the Workshop and SDKs, the number of modders creating these fixes is constantly growing. This means that Valve’s savings from free labor can only increase.

Modders do not only benefit Valve by being free labor, however; they also act as “complementors” to Valve’s games. As explained earlier, Valve’s encouragement for modding has made it easier for almost anyone to mod, thereby increasing the number of modders out there. This benefits Valve because each of these modders offers their own “complements” to a game. How these contributions work to increase the value of a game is explained by Lars Bo Jeppesen, a professor at Copenhagen Business School, in his essay entitled “Profiting From Innovative User Communities: How Firms organize the Production of User Modifications in the Computer Games Industry.” He describes modders as being “complementors” who add complements (mods) to a game that a developer has created. They are complements because they add features that enhance the game. Modders/complementors can only add complements to a game though because the mods or complements they create are not crucial to playing or experiencing the game. When enough complements have been added to a game, the game will increase in value, and this will in turn most likely lead to an increase in sales. However, this does not mean that when a game acquires a lot of complements Valve will increase the price of the game. This  is a huge benefit for Valve since more game sales means more profit. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

Gabe Newell, Co-Founder of Valve

Gabe Newell, Co-Founder of Valve

A great example of this is the Fallout series, specifically the games before Fallout 4. Though Fallout is not a Valve-developed game, Bethesda Softworks, the game’s developers of Fallout,  use Steam to sell and offer mods for their games. The Fallout series is available on all platforms including PlayStation, Xbox, and Steam (Valve’s game platform), but it consistently sells better on Steam than any platform. Why could this be? This is because Valve is the only one that offered mods or “complements” for these games prior to the release of Fallout 4. Because Valve offered the ability to create and download mods to their Fallout games, people would add “complements” to the game, increasing the game’s value on Steam. Thus the sales for Fallout on Steam were greater than the sales on other platforms. The value of games on Steam have thus greatly increased due to Valve’s encouragement for mods.

Many competitors such as Sony and Microsoft have rivaled Valve in game development but Valve has always dominated the modding scene. They figured out what works and know how to use it to create a simple, enjoyable experience for those who want to mod and profit off of the mods these people create. The key to doing this was releasing products that encourage modding such as SDKs, creation kits, and the community market. These encouragements benefitted modders and game players by offering simple ways to create, access, and share mods while benefitting Valve by giving them a source of free labor and increasing the value of their games. A Half Life 3 mod (or full game) would most likely benefit Valve and their community a great deal too.

Sleeping with Thedas

As a company, Canadian-based game developer BioWare has been famous for its attempts at inclusivity of minority characters in its video games. Through the years, most notably in its two most famous properties, the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series, BioWare’s concern with inclusivity has been centered largely around that of minorities on the sexuality and gender spectrums. These attempts at inclusivity have been earned the studio commendations for their progressivity and forward-thinking, as well as appreciation from fans for targeting a somewhat atypical triple-A gaming audience—that is, people who are not heterosexual, cisgender men. Perhaps the most prominent example of BioWare’s efforts at representation is its most recent major publication, Dragon Age: Inquisition.

Of the three major Dragon Age titles published so far, Inquisition, released in November of 2014, is undoubtedly the most inclusive when it comes to gender and sexuality. While Dragon Age: Origins (2009) and Dragon Age II (2011) featured multiple straight and bisexual characters, Inquisition is the first of the three to feature not only gay and lesbian characters, but also a character who falls outside of the traditional male-female binary on the gender spectrum. For all that is laudable about its effort at greater inclusivity, however, Inquisition is not without its representational problems, and indeed the game’s approach to gender and sexuality has not met with unanimous praise from players. The game’s mixed reception in this regard is telling, for ultimately it stems from a problematic aspect of Inquisition‘s design: despite BioWare’s attempt to construct a universe equally inclusive of all sexualities and genders, their inclusivity comes across as  more of an artificial construct, forced into the game, rather than a naturally occurring, organically integrated component.

Before examining the game’s reception in more detail, it is important to understand how BioWare and the Dragon Age franchise in particular came to develop such a positive reputation for inclusivity, and how the inclusion of romance has both created and escalated the attention drawn to the issue of representation in BioWare’s games. Historically, the company’s games have been popular with fans because they allowed players to initiate romantic relationships with certain characters in the games—a feature that was first included in Baldur’s Gate 2 (2002). However, as David Gaider, Lead Writer for a number of BioWare games, has explained, until the release of Jade Empire (2005), BioWare’s character romance options had remained strictly heterosexual. Even after romances for players and characters of the same gender were included, it wasn’t until the Mass Effect and Dragon Age franchises (which are BioWare’s most famous) that the company began gaining attention and publicity for their bisexual characters. To date, almost no other franchises have included “romance options” in the same manner that BioWare has, with a focus on the characters and emotions instead of romance as an achievement or merely a quasi-cosmetic option, as it is in such RPGs as Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011). Through BioWare’s character romances, the player is allowed to learn more about what makes the romanced character unique within the context of the game’s universe, which allows for a unique mode of immersion.

Mass Effect romance

The Mass Effect player character, Shepard, and one of the bisexual romance options, Liara T’Soni, in Mass Effect 3.

Yet another layer of complexity is added to this feature when queer characters become involved—not only for the gameplay, but also for the developer and their fans. Like any traditional role playing game, the Dragon Age universe contains a significant amount of world building, and through the character romance system that BioWare created, they were able to construct an entire queer-inclusive social hierarchy, which the player learns about through dialogue and information in books scattered throughout the game world. The sheer size and intricacy of Thedas, the fictitious continent in which Dragon Age takes place, lends itself well to world building of every variety, and the inclusion of queer lore in the universe is done so in a credible, believable manner, which appeals to fans on many levels. Journalist David Silver, writing for VentureBeatcites Inquisition’s characters, namely Sera (an elven rogue) and the Iron Bull (a qunari warrior), as being realistic and flawed, having “their own struggles, their own desires, their own motivations and backstory.” In other words, BioWare’s queer characters are presented as characters, rather than as tokens offered for the sake of being politically correct.

Because the integration of queer characters has been done so prominently in the Dragon Age franchise, as the franchise has developed, so has BioWare’s inclusiveness. What began as two bisexual characters, Leliana and Zevran, in Origins was raised to four (that is, every romance option) in Dragon Age 2. And in Inquisition, BioWare presented its most diverse cast of potential characters—and potential romance options—yet. Of them, four are straight (Cullen Rutherford, Solas, Blackwall, and Cassandra Pentaghast), one gay (Dorian Pavus), one lesbian (Sera), and three bisexual (Iron Bull, Josephine Montilyet, and Lace Harding). Among these romance options in Inquisition, six are characters who can accompany the player character, the Inquisitor, as party members when exploring and fighting in various parts of Fereldan and Orlais, the two countries in Thedas where the game is set. Two of the remaining three, Cullen and Josephine, act as advisors to the Inquisitor, while Harding is an Inquisition foot soldier and scout, and can only be interacted with at specific intervals during the game. The presentation of queer characters as both party members and romance options ensures that they play an active role in the game, at least so far as the player chooses to interact with them outside of story segments where they prominently affect the plot.

In addition to including more (and a greater variety of) queer characters than Origins and Dragon Age 2, Inquisition did a number of other things better than its predecessors. The greater variety of queer minority characters has been lauded by numerous critics, including GLAAD, which recognized Inquisition with a special award at its 26th Annual GLAAD Media Awards. Another aspect that Inquisition improved on was Dragon Age 2’s “player-sexual” characters. Though arguably Dragon Age 2 was inclusive because of its high number of presumably bi- or pansexual characters, as all four of its non-downloadable content romance options were available to a player character of either sex, this also created a conundrum for players who wished to see greater development with characters’ own sexualities and stories. As game scholar Stephen Greer, writing on Dragon Age 2explains, “While a ‘sexuality blind’ approach to game design may free creators from the burden of attempting to create an extended range of…characters and narrative variations…it also affirms a separation of the cultural politics of design choices from those of the wider world….[S]uch positioning also articulates a preference for models of inclusivity that preserve and privilege the status quo.” Though opinions differed, as the Dragon Age community is fairly expansive and diverse, many players expressed similar opinions, and were grateful for the change in Inquisition. Making every romance option “player-sexual” arguably deprived the characters of some autonomy, which Inquisition addressed and strove to fix. Inquisition’s romance options were all different and the characters had different sexualities, which gave them more of a sexual identity than their predecessors in Dragon Age 2.

Dragon-Age-Inquisition-Cassandra

One of Dragon Age: Inquisition’s heterosexual romance options, Cassandra Pentaghast, is also a fearsome warrior under oath of the Seeker order.

A third aspect that Dragon Age: Inquisition improved on was including characters, especially romanceable characters, of different genders. In previous games, there had been an equal number of male and female romance options for players to pursue, and for the most part, there had been a balance in sexualities of these characters—two straight and two bisexual in Origins, with all four being bisexual in Dragon Age 2—making it easy for player characters of any sex and sexuality to pursue a romance. In Inquisition, however, in addition to including a greater variety of sexualities, there are more potential romance options for a straight female Inquisitor than there are for a straight male, which confronted a long-standing concern in the video game industry that games are not marketed toward minority players (i.e. anyone who is not young, heterosexual, cisgender and male).

Dragon Age lead writer David Gaider addresses this in a conference talk he gave regarding the turn away from sexism and sexuality in BioWare’s games. According to Gaider, minority players “…play our games….but it’s not because anyone invited them to play. In fact, in a lot of cases, it’s clear that they play despite it being made plainly obvious to them that they’re not the intended audience.”  He continues on to ask his viewers what would happen if developers decided to acknowledge what he calls an “untapped audience,” and to answer this this question points to Inquisition, which had not yet been published at the time of the talk. It is cases like this that have given BioWare its reputation for being inclusive, because they as a developer have taken active steps to combat the latent sexism in the industry by ensuring that their audience is not just straight, cis men.

In addition to their inclusions of romance options for minority players, BioWare also included the second transgender character in the Dragon Age franchise, Cremisius “Krem” Acclassi. The player learns through dialogue that he is biologically female, though he identifies as male. Although Krem is not a playable character or a romance option, he is a fairly significant character, whom players have expressed an active interest in, and his inclusion was a statement of BioWare’s trans-inclusivity, which has helped attract queer players to the game. Through targeting a fanbase of female and queer players as Inquisition did, BioWare was able to reach out to their minority audience through the game, and make the statement that they, as a company, valued their fans, and took every step necessary to make sure that they felt as included (or even more included) than their straight male audience did.

Perhaps the most positive result of the greater diversity of sexualities in Inquisition is the ability for players of all types to express themselves more freely through the character romance system. While romances are not necessary for the game’s central plot or quests, the fact that the optionspecifically the option for queer romance exists is an achievement for BioWare in inclusivity. Creating background and side characters, and even major characters as queer is one thing, but allowing the player to play as a queer character and choose their Inquisitor’s sexuality reframes the video game as a privileged medium for the safe expression of (and experimentation with) sexuality.

Although BioWare’s achievements in this regard deserve praise, there is still much that can be improved on for the future of the Dragon Age franchise. Inquisition is frequently cited as being one of, if not the most inclusive game(s) on the market, but it is not difficult to earn that achievement if most other game developers are not actively competing for it. While BioWare’s inclusivity is certainly a step forward, it is only one of many steps needed to make the gaming industry a place that can be dubbed inclusive.

One of the largest points of contention regarding Inquisition’s queer characters was Dorian’s personal quest which, according to some members of the BioWare community, was akin to the stereotypical “gay” stories featured in most other media. In this quest, the Inquisitor learns of a plot by Dorian’s father, magister Halward Pavus, to allegedly abduct his son and bring him back to Tevinter, his home country. After informing Dorian of this plot, the mage suggests that the Inquisitor accompany him, and the two travel to meet Halward, whose true intentions were simply to talk to his son and express his thoughts and feelings about Dorian’s sexuality and the rift it caused between them. Although this meeting turns out to be harmless, the Inquisitor learns numerous details about Dorian’s past, including that his father attempted to change his sexuality through a magic ritual. As one fan put it on the BioWare forums, “I’m a little disappointed that his personal mission was solely based on him being gay,” and many other commenters in the thread expressed the same opinion.

Although Sera has received much less attention, despite being the only other strictly gay character in the franchise thus far, there are stereotypical elements to her, as well. At one point, if the Inquisitor has a strong friendship with her, she will reveal that she feels as if she never fit in with other elves and was brought up by humans, which only adds to the common “misunderstood, angry lesbian” trope that has become all too popular in media representing the queer community. As Jillian, a blogger for FemHypeargues, “Sera comes off more like the widespread cocktail of self-righteous anger and incoherent babbling that make up your token lesbian character than an actual human being.” Jillian also highlights some of Sera’s arguably transphobic dialogue and questions why, if BioWare is meant to be such an inclusive company, they included so much dialogue related to the policing of genitalia?

sera-2

Sera is Dragon Age: Inquisition’s sole lesbian romance option.

In addition to the story’s two gay characters being stereotyped, BioWare’s inclusion doesn’t quite extend to all sexualities. One of the largest examples of this is in the character of Cole, who is a spirit-like party companion who cannot be romanced by the Inquisitor. Arguably, this lack of romantic interest from Cole could be grounds for representation of asexual and aromantic individuals, whose orientations are too often skimmed over by the media and belittled to the point that many believe that these are not valid sexualities with which to identify. However, any hope of asexual/aromantic representation in Cole’s character was snuffed in the downloadable-content ending to the game, Trespasser. Late in the main story of Inquisition, the Inquisitor has the option to either make Cole more “spirit-like” or more “human,” which will affect how others view him for the remainder of the game. If they choose to make him more human, an interaction between him and Maryden, the game’s tavern bard, will occur in which he kisses her cheek and remarks that her songs make people happy. Up until the release of Trespasser, many fans had been happily projecting Cole as asexual and/or aromantic, a conclusion which made sense given his apparent lack of romantic and sexual interest in any other characters. However, during Trespasser, a more human Cole even exchanges the following dialogue with Dorian:

DORIAN. You have a lady friend?
COLE. Well, I am human now.

Kyra S., another writer for FemHype, observed that this dialogue made her feel as though she was “clearly not human.”  “I want to be happy for Cole,” she explained, “but I kind of feel like Bioware is taking a shot at me. I know I shouldn’t expect representation but the fact that it’s Cole saying it makes it particularly cruel.” Until this dialogue was revealed, BioWare’s attempts at inclusivity had, on the surface, looked incredibly positive. Through Cole, they had apparently targeted a portion of their fans who still receive little to no attention from most media texts, and it had workeduntil Trespasser. The ignorance contained in their creation of yet another needless romantic subplot was, this time, a reflection of the lack of attention that the asexual and aromantic community receives every day. Though probably not their intent, BioWare successfully alienated a portion of its players by essentially stating that they did not care about their sexuality or romantic orientation.

Another area in which people took issue with Inquisition was, surprisingly, in its romantic dialogue options. Players generally have no issue with the options which lead to an actual romantic relationship with one of the characters, but there is a baffling gray area contained in the romantic options with characters an Inquisitor cannot romancefor example, a female Inquisitor can flirt with both Dorian and Cassandra, despite neither of them being romantically or sexually attracted to women. It is only after this occurs multiple times that the character in question will attempt to set the Inquisitor straight and explain that they are not attracted to the player’s character.

The purpose of including these “flirt” options is unclear to many, and in some instances it even feels unfair to the characters being flirted with. For instance, a female Inquisitor can flirt with Dorian (who, to be fair, does enjoy flirting as a rule), but after the quest in which he encounters his father, he admits to the Inquisitor that he is gay and not interested in women. As a result, if the player chooses, the Inquisitor can accuse Dorian of having “led her on,” which seems like a potentially hurtful thing to say to a man who just had either a touching reunion with his father or a violent parting of ways, depending on the choices made during the scene. In a similar vein, the player can also inquire about Krem’s gender by either talking with him or to his boss, Iron Bull; the player can then ask a series of questions, or refer to Krem as a woman, which comes across as an extremely transphobic choice in a game where the developer has actively framed their game in terms of inclusivity. On the one hand, it can be argued that these choices add an element of unfortunate reality to the game; but on the other, having the player character play a queer-phobic person in the game is incredibly problematic. At the very least, it doesn’t promote the “equality” that BioWare is so concerned with achieving.

With all of these factorsboth positive and negativein mind, can Dragon Age: Inquisition really be considered a game equally inclusive of all sexualities, romantic orientations, and genders? The answer, undoubtedly, is no it cannot. With so many different types of people in the world, one could argue that it is even impossible to satisfy everyone with just one game, as the inclusion of so many different identities would surely raise issue with at least one person, even if the majority has given its approval. In spite of the game’s failings, though, it is important to remember that BioWare is still doing more as a company to combat majority privilege and include as many minority groups as they can.

In one incident, which has become something of an infamous internet spectacle, a  gamer, stating that he spoke for all “straight male gamers”whom he dubbed the target audience of video gamescalled out BioWare on their message boards for the company’s inclusion of so many bisexual characters in Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2. In response, lead writer David Gaider essentially told him to find another company who actually felt it necessary to listen to his complaints. Gaider wrote, “The romances in the game are not for ‘the straight male gamer.’ They’re for everyone. We have a lot of fans, many of whom are neither straight nor male, and they deserve no less attention.” He later received a reply from the same individual who attempted to clarify his point, but Gaider’s conclusion made it perfectly clear that BioWare was ready and willing to listen to all of its fans, not merely the straight, cisgender male ones. “The person who says that the only way to please them is to restrict options for others is, if you ask me, the one who deserves it least,” Gaider wrote. “And that’s my opinion, expressed as politely as possible” (for a full transcript of the exchange, check out Krissie Pearce’s piece on No More Lost). His response is telling; many other game developers would not express such a vested interest in ensuring that all of their players are happy, and it is this intent that sets BioWare apart from the rest of the gaming community.

That said, BioWare’s games still have a long way to go before they are truly inclusive. As it stands  now, using Inquisition as an example, the company’s inclusivity feels like more of an intentional construct rather than something organic. In other words, the writing of the story and characters did not naturally result in a diverse cast in terms of gender and sexuality; rather, the diversity wasin part, it seemsartificially imposed. This creates a tension between BioWare’s need to include characters of all sexualities and genders and their commitment to the art of storytelling. In fact, it can even hinder storytelling if the goal of inclusivity is paid more attention to than the development of the story itself. There can be no mistaking that Inquisition has a good story and has intrigued many gamers, and that its inclusivity is groundbreaking for an industry which has paid too little heed to gamers who fall outside of the straight, cis male category. In the future, however, the key to creating more successful, inclusive games will be, paradoxically, finding a balance between telling an organic, epic story and being inclusive.

You’re Gonna Have a Bad Time

Warning: This post contains spoilers.

The simulation of morality is nothing new. Much of moral philosophy for instance, relies on thought experiments such as the Heinz Dilemma, the Trolley Problem, and the Ticking Bomb Scenario in order to better explain, discuss, and grapple with various moral and ethical conflicts. We may even think of moral simulation as being as old as religion itself, which often uses parables and the promise of moral judgment upon death to exemplify and promote righteous behavior. In simulations such as these, we can better understand how we have come to understand what constitutes as right or wrong, as well as judge the morality of our own actions and beliefs. More recently, moral simulation has spread beyond the realms of philosophy and religion, addressing the secular mainstream and even finding itself as a type of commodity in the form of video games.

Morality and systems used to simulate and measure it have become important features of many popular role playing game series, including FalloutMass Effect, and Fable. In a lot of these cases, players are awarded points based upon their actions, with these points determining where they fall on some form of moral spectrum. Depending on where they fall on said spectrum, they will receive different types of powers, appearance modifications, and—perhaps most importantly—different narrative endings. In all of the franchises I have mentioned, as well as most other big budget, studio produced games, multiple playthroughs are allowed so that players can start from scratch and try an entirely different approach to morality. Perhaps on one playthrough the player will behave heroically in order to experience the “good” content of the narrative and gameplay, while on another playthrough, they will behave villainously in order to experience the “evil” content.

Games such as these have become an important object of analysis in videogame scholarship, particularly through the lens of scientific, psychological studies. Daniel Shafer for instance, conducted a study on morality and enjoyment in such games, analyzing the reactions of test subjects to determine whether or not there was a correlation between the concepts. He found that those who acted morally and those who acted immorally enjoyed the game equally, but also that those who acted morally tended to connect and empathize with the characters on the screen, while those who acted immorally distanced themselves from their actions. Marina Krcmar and Drew P. Cingel preformed a similar study, but rather than question subjects after gameplay, they attempted to gauge player reasoning as the choices were made, using what they refer to as a “think-aloud protocol.” This study was aimed less at whether or not moral/immoral choices were made or the effects of those choices, and more on why and how players made moral decisions. In general, the authors noted that those behaving morally in games seemed to draw on personal experiences outside the game, which contradicts the idea that game play takes place in a special cognitive space separated off from the real world (what other game scholars sometimes posit as “the magic circle”).

Perhaps the most consistently discussed aspect of morality discussed by scholars and critics with respect to video games is violence. From games such as the Grand Theft Auto series, which allow for wanton destruction, murder, theft, and vehicular manslaughter, to the recently released Hatred, which is essentially a mass-shooting/genocide simulator, violence in gaming has come under a lot of fire from the media. There have been debates as to whether or not there is a correlation between violent games and violent behavior, as well as how these games are distributed and rated. While a lot of the discussion starts with particularly extreme cases such as the games listed above, debates surrounding violence in gaming have spread to other game franchises, including games that include moral choices.

Fallout-New-Vegas

Violence as it turns out, is an incredibly consistent feature in gaming, which in some ways has a lot to do with what computers are capable of rendering and reacting to. As blogger Chris Franklin explains, the majority of modern games are some form of spatial simulation, which is a system that is vast in its ability to render different images, places, and objects, but limited in the sense of what actions can be taken by the player. In general, spatial simulation presents a scenario in which a player is faced with a threat, which they must eliminate. Whether Mario is hopping onto the head of a Goomba in Super Mario Bros., Sonic is spin-dashing through a wave of robots in Sonic the Hedgehog, or Master Chief is gunning down waves of aliens in Halo, combat becomes synonymous with gameplay.

While this is not to say that playing or creating violent games is immoral, violence nevertheless complicates and perhaps even pollutes games centered on moral decisions. Commander Shepard, the protagonist of BioWare’s Mass Effect series, is still forced to kill others, whether or not you have decided to play as good or evil, and the killing of henchmen has no bearing on the game’s ultimate moral judgment of the character or your playthrough. In some cases killing is judged as morally correct, as in Fallout: New Vegas, which awards a player in-game points called Karma if he or she chooses to murder an immoral character. As Matthew Charles of Geek and Sundry points out, morality is often either too simple or shallow, with most moral judgments being limited to specifics moments in the game’s narrative during which only a few extreme options are available.

This is perhaps why Toby Fox’s Undertale, an independently developed computer role-playing game in which a player can defeat every enemy without resorting to violence, made such a splash upon its release in September of 2015. Playing as a child who has fallen into an underground world filled with monsters, the player must guide the protagonist through the mysterious new land in order to find his or her way home. On the way, the player will be confronted by plethora of different monsters, ranging from adorable to comical to terrifying. Unlike most RPGs, however, each monster can be spared if the player can dodge the creature’s attacks long enough to calm it down, either by talking, flirting, dancing, joking, or performing a number of other options that vary based on which monster is attacking you. Dodging occurs during a bullet-hell game, while talking, flirting, etc. are chosen via a set of dialogue options given when clicking the “ACT” button.

While a single playthrough of the game is relatively short in comparison to other role-playing games, the amount of content within the game is dense, as each choice you make might influence later dialogue or events. The three main ways to play the game are the “pacifist” style, in which you do as the game recommends and kill no one, the “genocide” style, in which you kill every fightable creature in the game, and the “neutral” style, in which you kill some but not all enemies. Depending on which path you take through the game, the world, characters, and even the general tone of the narrative changes drastically.

Undertale sets itself apart from other games in a lot of ways, but for this post I will attempt to restrict my analysis to how it operates as a game of moral choice in relation to other games that take morality into account. Even from a quick glance, one might already spot some major differences between Undertale and some of the previously mentioned games. There are no moral red and blue sliders in the game to depict where you fall on an ethical spectrum; there are few dialogue options, none of which carry any moral weight; and though it is later revealed that your EXP. stands for “execution points” and that your LV. is actually your “level of violence,” a player beginning the game would have no clue that these acronyms, which normally mean “experience points” and “level,” are displaying anything similar to morality points.

Something else we might note is that although other games seem to take a utilitarian approach to morality—displaying good as being the most beneficial for all and crimes such as murder being justified if they lead to favorable outcomes—Undertale favors a more Kantian approach, showing that killing is always wrong no matter what the situation is and that your enemies must not be treated as a means to an end, but as ends themselves. Perhaps the most powerful feature of morality in Undertale that sets it apart from other role playing games and moral simulations, is that moral judgment is not directed at a character in the story, but instead at the person who is actually playing the game.

In most games, players have the ability to separate themselves from the actions they are carrying out on screen, but I would like to argue that key features of Undertale are designed to make this disengagement more difficult. To be clear, this is not a psychological analysis such as the studies I mentioned at the beginning of this post. While I would love to test some of my theories on players, I do not have the time or the resources to attempt any scientific research. Instead, I will be providing a reading using the games mechanics as my text in order to present my case. In what follows, I will discuss the ambiguity of the game’s protagonist, how the player is addressed through dialogue, and ultimately how basic game mechanics are manipulated to both remove the player’s power and provide commentary on gaming in general.

To begin my analysis, I will start as the game does, by presenting the game’s “nameless” protagonist, pictured below:

Frisk

As you can see, between the pixel design of the character and the unisex features, it’s hard to say what the sex or gender of this character is. The game’s dialogue also supports this ambiguity, as the protagonist is only ever referred to using the name chosen by the player, and the pronouns you, your, they, their, and them. Later it is revealed that the name you have chosen for the character is actually the name of the first child to fall into the underground world, and that your character’s true name is Frisk, however even that name is genderless. Furthermore, the sexuality of the character is presented as ambiguous, with the game allowing you to flirt with characters of any sex, sexuality, or gender; at various points of the game, you also have the opportunity to take both men and women on dates. Even Frisk’s race is arguably somewhat ambiguous, as due to the graphics and the somewhat unrealistic use of yellow, the character’s ethnic identity can be debated.

One possible reason for Frisk’s ambiguity might be that it allows the player to project him- or herself onto them. A blogger for FemHype going by the penname Nightmare points out, “even if there is no character customization besides picking a name for the human, the game does a great job of making them feel like your avatar with the help of some simple, but smart tricks in the design.” Though one might argue that if the goal of the game were to allow players to project themselves onto Frisk, then further, specific customization should have been used (as it is in many RPGs), I—like Nightmare—would argue that using ambiguity works better than customization for the sake of projection, as customization might lead to what I call an “anti-avatar.” In games such as Mass Effect or Fable for instance, players might opt to make separate, distinct characters rather than creating avatars to represent themselves. They could play as a character that is stronger, smarter, older, younger, a different sex, a different race, or who has any number of different features. Rather than placing themselves in the story, they  distance themselves through the use of a character of their own creation. An ambiguous but still relatable character such as Frisk makes the process of distancing oneself harder, as the game provides no means by which to  imagine him/her as a distinct, separate entity.

Another possible reading for Frisk’s ambiguity that should also be mentioned is a comes from the actual terms you, your, they, their, and them. Though these words are used colloquially to refer to someone without using male or female pronouns, they refer grammatically to a group of multiple people. This is an important note to make, because in the genocide path, Frisk is shown to have been manipulated by an evil spirit the entire time, a spirit who perhaps quite tellingly has the name you have chosen. An alternative reading might be that they and you are actually referring to the duo that is Frisk and the person playing. In interpretation such as this, the player may be able to distance themselves from Frisk, but they are nonetheless being held accountable for the actions carried out by the character.

In either reading, the use of they allows the characters in Undertale to directly address the player through dialogue. When Toriel, the first friendly monster you encounter in the game, explains to Frisk that “you need not harm monsters” to progress, she is explaining that fact to the player in order to warn them that this game does not require killing. If you ignore her advice, other characters throughout the game will continue to comment on your misdeeds, either chastising you for your choices or suggesting alternatives. By continuing to address the player in this manner, the player is actively being blamed for his or her misdeeds. The characters continue to reaffirm that this is the “wrong” way to play the game, and so, in the same way that players cannot hide behind their characters, they cannot claim innocence through ignorance. They have plenty of chances to realize that what they are doing is wrong.

What is more, dialogue changes and adapts based on what it is that the player has specifically done and how they do it, which personalizes character dialogue, tailoring it to a specific player. Some monsters for instance, have specific relationships with other characters, and will make different comments based on how the player havs treated them. Undyne, a warrior who mentored one of the first bosses you must face, will either specifically chastise you for killing that character or befriend you if you showed kindness towards him. Even certain randomly appearing enemies have personal connections, such as Snow Drake, whose father can be found grieving in a pub if the player chooses to kill said enemy. Certain characters will also get special dialogue if you kill them after they have chosen to spare you. Perhaps most notably, if a player is preforming a pacifist run, they will unlock special side quests such as dates that bring them closer to the characters they have spared, while alternatively a player on the genocide path, will run into characters who hate and fear them, with areas that are normally populated by civilians becoming emptied out as it becomes apparent that they are fleeing you.

Above all the other characters however, no one’s commentary is more biting, more thorough than that of the character Sans. In a game full of nuanced characters, Sans might just be Undertale’s most complex character. At first glance he would appear to be a lazy, eternally smiling skeleton with a love of cheesy jokes and bad puns. As the character continues throughout the game however, it becomes apparent that there is more to this character than meets the eye. He continues to meet with your character, alluding to future events, and later it is revealed that despite his goofy, lethargic attitude, he has actually been protecting Frisk the entire game. More so than any other character (with the exception of Flowey, the game’s antagonist in pacifist and neutral runs), Sans seems to know he is in the game. He frequently breaks the fourth wall by winking at the player during bad jokes, he refers to scene transitions as “’shortcuts’ to other places,” and if a player winds up fighting him as a result of a genocide run, he begins to make use of the game’s functions to fight you, such as attacking your cursor and eventually refusing to take his turn in combat.

sans

Sans is pivotal to understanding the game’s moral judgment of the player at the climax. This is clearest in a scene that occurs right before the player reaches the throne room, the area in which they can exit the underground world and end the game. In this scene, Frisk and the player encounter Sans who stands in a hallway to block their path. It is here that he reveals that EXP. and LV. stand for “Execution Points” and “Level of Violence.” Depending on how high your EXP. And LV. are, he will issue different judgments upon your character, ranging from the pacifist score of 0, in which he offers a sort of congratulatory speech and a warning for the necessary boss fight coming next; to slightly higher scores in which he asks you to consider your actions; to the highest scores around 19-20 in which he chastises you, shooting down any excuses the player might be thinking of, such as “self-defense” or “not knowing it was wrong.” In a genocide run of the game, Sans forgoes this judgment speech, electing to kill you instead, becoming a replacement final boss and what is likely the most challenging fight in the entire game. In a neutral ending of the game, he will call your phone after your escape from the underground and leave you a message. Similar to his judgment before your escape, the speech he gives is a reflection on your actions, this time specifically regarding the state of the boss characters depending on whether you chose to execute or befriend them. Depending on who you have spared, the after effects of your quest could range anywhere from an uneasy peace after the king’s death to a coming war as certain characters have become angry with your actions.

Sans’s speeches help to clue the player in to the game’s metanarrative, which seems to be a commentary on how video games are played and how certain play styles might effect a game’s narrative if taken into account. In the real world, your actions have consequences. People do not just disappear when you kill them, and anyone, even someone you perceive to be violent or cruel, still has loved ones and is situated socially within the world. There are of course other games that show repercussions for misdeeds, but in most cases these occur within the narrative as consequences for a character’s actions rather than the player’s. Undertale however, by directly mentioning features such as stat values, is directly commenting on how the game is being played rather than constructing a narrative where Frisk is either a hero or villain.

Further sharpening the judgment through metanarrative is the fact that, due to the nature of Undertale’s save function, it is impossible to completely erase one’s actions without deleting and reinstalling the game. Though the game allows players to save at their leisure, and to revert to previous saves, markers are placed within the games code after certain events, regardless of whether or not the player saves. In this way, the game never forgets what a player did on a previous playthrough. For instance, upon my first playthrough of the game, I accidentaly killed Toriel. Wanting to undo this action, I reverted as I would in any other game to retry the encounter. However upon doing so, the game changed. Toriel commented that I was looking at her “like you have seen a ghost,” and during the fight I had the option of telling her that I saw her die, although Frisk will avoid telling her even if you choose that option (Undertale). What is more, after successfully sparing Toriel, and moving on to the next area, I encountered Flowey, a sociopathic flower who later becomes the secret final boss of the game on a pacifist or neutral run. Upon meeting Flowey he stated, “Don’t act so cocky. I know what you did. You murdered her,” going on to mention that he knew I used “SAVE” to gain the powers of a “God.” As with referencing stats, this constructs a metanarrative around the player’s play style, leading to a continuity in which all of one’s mistakes and varying choices are equally real within the game’s world.

By incorporating references to the SAVE feature and the player’s alternate choices, Undertale not only forces judgement on the player by showing his or her involvement in the game; it also forces the player to contemplate the power he or she has in other games by taking that power away. This de-powering also occurs in other ways—for instance, in turning off the game during the final boss fight with Flowey. The boss fight begins with Flowey gaining control over the game, literally taking it away from the player and causing the game to “crash.” Upon reloading the game, it will appear to glitch, showing a fractured image, and leading to the title screen, which now presents a save file titled “Flowey” and a character level of “9999.” Clicking the file will lead the player to a blank screen containing only Frisk, who, if directed forward, will find a save point. Attempting to use the save file, the file will erase, with Flowey appearing and letting out a menacing laugh and explaining that your previous save file is indeed gone, but that you can continue to return to this point in time to watch yourself “die over and over again.” A fight begins that breaks from the standard conventions of what the player has come to expect from the game. There are no turns and movement is not restricted to a box. The game appears to “glitch” as it flashes to previous segments of the fight and makes use of static to switch the screen. Even the art style of the game changes.By removing your powers—such as turning off the game, saving, or even applying the skills you have previously learned—it forces you as player to understand the immense power you normally have over a game world.

In most games, you have god-like control over time due to saving, reloading, resetting, and even just your ability to walk away. Undertale may put blocks on that power, but that power ultimately remains. By constructing a metanarrative that includes the player, however, and by putting the player’s actions in the spotlight by forcing projection and by subverting traditional game mechanics, Undertale is able to cast judgment on the player. In doing so, it proves to be a more complex and thought-provoking moral simulation than other games. Here, a moral lesson is not given through judging or evaluating a character’s actions, but by an internal understanding of one’s own role in enacting violence. Furthermore, by causing one to consider the power players have over a game world, it provides a commentary on the role of power in general. Even after a pacifist run, upon reloading the game, the player is greeted by Flowey, who after being spared has become an ally. He congratulates the player on the happy ending, but warns that the characters of Undertale are still in danger, not from an in-game threat, but from the player. He claims if you reset the game, you will undo all the accomplishments and victories you fought so hard for. As it turns out, even power used for good must be given up eventually if those affected by that power are to thrive.

Mobile Gaming: Are You Really Having Fun?

Smartphones are pretty amazing. Seriously, I only just got one a few months ago after having the same dumb phone for 5 years, and it has changed my life. And by “changed my life” I mean “it’s made me waste a whole bunch of time.” Some of this time is wasted on YikYak, some is wasted watching Whose Line clips on the toilet, and some is wasted swiping right on every single human being on Tinder. But all of those pale in comparison to the time I’ve wasted playing games on my phone. As we all know, the gaming and smartphone landscape has been transformed by the emergence of mobile games, but why are these games so popular? No doubt their price, easy access, and simple play mechanics–but I would argue that there is one more element not usually considered. These games trick us into thinking we enjoy them.

Quite an accusation, right? Trust me, I can back it up. I spent this semester helping Prof. Steirer with research on mobile games, and my job involved playing every mobile game that was related to a console game or franchise from the last three years. This came out to about 35 companion apps and around 30 actual games that could be played without owning the console game. I think I could argue that almost all of the games I played involved tricking the player into thinking he or she enjoys the game, but two stand out above the rest: Injustice: Gods Among Us and Marvel: Contest of Champions.

Both games are superhero fighting games with an emphasis on collecting heroes and building up their stats to fight against other heroes. They differ in the fine details (Injustice features teams of three heroes in each battle, Marvel has a map screen where you can decide what battle to do next), but these differences are mostly irrelevant. The core gameplay remains the same for both games. I won’t go into detail as to how the gameplay works, as the games are way more complex than they need to be. Plus they’re free, so you can go play them for yourself if you’re really curious. Simply put, the gameplay of each game involves picking a hero on your team who is stronger than your enemy and tapping the screen until you win. I wish I were joking. And yet each game has over 10 MILLION downloads, and some surprisingly active communities on Reddit and on the games’ respective official forums. So why then are these games so popular? Because each game adds a few simple features that make the game feel rewarding to play without actually being an engaging experience.

Both of these games use design choices that help disguise how boring the gameplay actually is. Essentially, the game is designed to make the player think he or she is having fun when really he or she is just enjoying being rewarded by the game. The games reward players do in a variety of ways. For instance: Booster Packs. Both games have “booster packs” (Marvel calls them Crystal Packs because I guess superheroes all come out of crystals now) where you pay some in-game currency (or real-life currency if you’re that bougie) to get a few random heroes or power-ups. What makes these packs feel rewarding is that getting something really good isn’t guaranteed. Rather than being like a store transaction (boring…), they’re like gambling (exciting!) where gains are determined by chance, thus making any gains feel much more rewarding. The impatience aspects of Injustice and Marvel serve the same purpose. Because your “energy” (ability to just play the game) will run out after a while, you start to look forward to when your energy will be refilled and you can play again. Or in Marvel you can just spend some money to be able to play again. You know what they say, “absence makes the heart grow fonder.” And in this case, the game is purposely being absent to make you miss playing it. It’s deceptive and annoying but it seems to work.

mcoc

Injustice and Marvel also make use of RPG elements like stats, leveling up, power levels, and experience. Again, the fine details differ somewhat. For instance, Marvel makes you spend an in-game resource called ISO-8 and gold to increase your heroes’ stats, whereas heroes in Injustice will level up from experience alone. And once again, these differences don’t really matter because they don’t change the way you play the game. Injustice levels up the character that I use the most, and Marvel lets me choose which characters to upgrade by spending money and ISO-8. But I’m only going to upgrade the characters that I use the most anyway, so Marvel is just putting extra steps in between playing the game and leveling up characters to make it feel like I’m accomplishing more than I am. Heroes in each game can also be promoted (subtly different from leveling up) by spending yet another form of in-game money. Two types of leveling up means twice as much opportunity for the player to feel like they’ve accomplished something! This leads to a complicated interface with over-designed, confusing menus that serve to help me do something that could just be automatic. But the games employ effects that compliment what should be an annoying time-waster to make it feel fun. Leveling up in Marvel feels good because of the flashy visuals and big sound effects–never mind the fact that you don’t ever get to really feel the effects of leveling up a character, because every battle plays out the same way. Tap the screen for a while (maybe swipe left to right a few times too) and if you’ve spent enough currency and have better numbers you win. Which brings me to my next point…

Money. Currency plays a major role in both games.  Injustice has three different kinds of money (challenge credits, power credits, and alliance credits, plus you can spend real money to get more power credits). Marvel has five! FIVE different kinds of money! If Marvel: Contest of Champions was a country, it would have the most insane economy of all time. Battle chips, ISO-8, gold, alliance points, loyalty, not to mention crystals, experience, “units”–GOOD LORD, WHEN DOES IT STOP?! Marvel and Injustice have so many different ways to reward the player, but none of these things have any real impact on how the game is actually played! Collecting things is fun, sure. But what’s the point in having an inventory screen full of stuff and a virtual wallet full of money if there’s no fun way to use it? The thing to note about all of these RPG elements, items, and currencies is that they make the games incredibly complex, but not at all deep. Complexity is simply the number of rules that a player needs to know in order to play the game. Depth is a measure of how many meaningful choices a player can make given a rule-set. Having a ton of stats, upgrades, currencies, and items adds a lot of complexity. But the only choice a player makes during actual gameplay is which hero to use in a fight (and Marvel already tells you which character in your party has the best chance of winning so even that isn’t really a choice). With all of that complexity, the games have almost no depth because the player doesn’t get to make any real choices during gameplay.

Injustice screen

All of these elements serve to reward the player. These games feature tons of different items and currencies so that after a battle the player is rewarded. Finishing a fight and seeing a list of stuff that you earned feels satisfying! But these rewards are artificial and don’t change how we play the game in any meaningful way, so what’s the point? The point is just to compel us to keep playing the game even though the game isn’t really engaging. The rewards exist for their own sake, and don’t really factor into any greater purpose. Getting rewards are just a means to get even more rewards. To me, the most well-designed games are ones in which simply playing the game is its own reward. The reward in a fighting game should be that you won the fight! Not that you got some upgrade stuff and some money. Getting to the end of the story and beating the bad guy should be the reward of games with linear narratives. But maybe we don’t want all that depth in a mobile game, right? Maybe we just want something fun to makes us feel satisfied that doesn’t take much thought. I would counter that with one example: 2048.

Everyone reading this has heard of and likely played 2048. The gameplay is simple: swipe numbers together to create bigger numbers with the ultimate goal of getting a tile worth 2048. There’s no RPG elements, no upgrades, no money, no levels, and no rewards beside the main goal of the game. It is a game with little complexity, but a surprising amount of depth. The game gets harder as it progresses, rather than keeping the same level of challenge throughout and just giving the player higher numbers to throw around. And the good news? There’s actually a lot of games out there like this (1010!, Cut the Rope, even Flappy Bird could be argued to be like this). More and more unfortunately are starting to include elements of trickery like the ones used in Injustice and Marvel: Contest of Champions. Cut the Rope when it first came out didn’t have any fake rewards or impatience aspects. But Cut the Rope 2 came along and gave us solar energy that drains as we play, superpower upgrades to let us do the levels without actually doing them, and a silly pointless map screen to give the player an artificial feeling of progression. Games don’t have to be like this. Playing a game, even a mobile game, can still be an engaging experience in and of itself; designers need’s doesn’t resort to trickery to get us to keep playing.

So next time you play a game on your phone (or anywhere else for that matter), think about how you’re experiencing the game and ask whether you’re really having fun, or if the game is just trying to trick you into thinking you’re having fun. And don’t be satisfied with games that do the latter when there are so many better ways for games to engage players.

A Problem In Video Game Scholarship

I’ve said it a million times and I’ll probably say it a million more: Video games as a medium are constantly being dumped on. Too many people write them off as children’s toys, unworthy of serious attention and potential for analysis. That’s part of the reason why I’m writing my senior thesis on the modern military shooter genre. I want video games to be taken as seriously as any piece of literature or any film could be. In my thesis, I’m looking specifically at Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Spec Ops: The Line and analyzing their uses of violence and how they justify themselves. What’s sad is that it seems like a lot of other critics and scholars aren’t willing to put similar time and effort into seriously analyzing the works about which they’re writing.

Often critics will overly simplify and generalize their discussions about games. Many readings of modern military shooters approach games of this genre merely as extensions of the US military complex, ignoring other narrative or ludic nuances embedded in them. The evidence they provide is also unfairly selective, with examples having clearly been cherry-picked to support an argument, thus preventing the game from being read fairly and accurately. One of the reasons that many critics accept this practice may be because the definition of a ‘war shooter’ is rarely clearly articulated; as a result, many shooters with a similar setting are assumed to have similar tendencies. For example America’s Army and Call of Duty are completely different entities, despite the fact that they both portray modern military conflicts. Even within a single game or series, further distinctions have to be made, like differences in different modes within a single title (e.g. singleplayer, multiplayer, or cooperative modes) or differences between the many devices on which games can be played.

Additionally many researchers may not have the necessary skillsets or knowledge base to analyze games, but attempt to do so anyway with their own training and knowledge from various different fields, such as psychoanalysis and sociology. These lenses and fields of inquiry can certainly be applied to video games research and analysis, but a problem arises when those employing those lenses do not understand video games or engage seriously with the works in question, and rely on the methodologies of other fields entirely. Their results thus end up full of holes resulting from incomplete analysis, erroneous claims, and overgeneralizations.

In his article “Playing War” Ian Graham Ronald Shaw argues that “Video games are political spaces fizzing with military agendas… [they] allow millions of users from around the world to transition into a space of pasteurized terror. They are virtual worlds built with the ideological scaffolding of the military entertainment complex that splay the lines between civilian and soldier across a cultural mosaic of consent, participation, and less frequently resistance…. From drones hovering in Pakistan to drones hovering in Modern Warfare 2, the way that war is known is increasingly playful…. Tucked away under televisions in millions of homes, they are banal technologies that distribute carefully crafted military aesthetics.”

Shaw’s argument is that what he calls “war games” serve to support the American military entertainment complex and make war into something playful, in contrast to what war actually is. His conclusion sounds entirely feasible, but his argument is based on erroneous and overly presumptuous research and evidence. While Shaw never explicitly states his playtime or experience with the games in question, it is very apparent that Shaw is extremely unfamiliar and inexperienced with Modern Warfare 2. He claims that “spatial simplification extends beyond a ‘mystical other’ (in games such as Prince of Persia) into a ‘violent other’ (in games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2) through the representation of Middle Eastern cities suffused with conflict.” Höglund argues that in order to keep “the flames of the ‘war on terror’ burning, the military entertainment complex depicts Middle Eastern cities as in a state perpetual war.” This assertion is false, as there are no “Middle Eastern cities suffused with conflict” depicted in the game’s campaign. There are sections of the game that take place in Afghanistan, but these missions take place in a decrepit airplane boneyard and in a secret American base. Even if Shaw’s point about location is taken to be true, the player never interacts with any Middle Eastern characters (neither friend nor foe) throughout the entirety of the story. The main antagonists are Russian soldiers, South American militia members, and American soldiers. Perhaps Shaw here is basing his analysis on the multiplayer action of the game, but he never makes this claim explicit. Furthermore, his reference to drone strikes establishes that his analysis is concerned with the campaign mode of the game, so it should be assumed that he would continue that analysis throughout his piece. Even in the brief few sections that he deals with Modern Warfare 2, he fails to provide convincing and accurate proof for his arguments.

America's Soldiers

David Leonard uses his article “Unsettling the Military Entertainment Complex: Video Games and a Pedagogy of Peace” to argue a similar point to Shaw’s: he makes the case that video games and other forms of popular media should be engaged with and questioned. In regard to the case of war shooters and military games, he believes that video games should be critically analyzed because of their importance to how the United States handles and portrays its participation in physical war. However, like Shaw, Leonard’s analysis is also flawed. He often makes statements that grossly overgeneralize the war shooter genre, likely resulting from a loose understanding and lack of direct engagement with military shooters. Leonard makes the claim that games promote “military solutions and the unilateral acceptance of the War on Terror as justification for all military endeavors,” and that “War video games are no longer purely about training soldiers already enlisted; rather, they are about recruitment and developing future soldiers, while simultaneously generating support among civilian populations for increasing use American military power. Americans of all ages are thus able to participate collectively in the War on Terror and in Operation Iraqi Freedom, just as if they were members of the military.”

Leonard mainly uses America’s Army and Operation Desert Storm to illustrate his points, while briefly mentioning games like Call of Duty and Kuma\War. However, his use of America’s Army and Operation Desert Storm as representations for the entire military shooter sub-genre misrepresents other military shooters. America’s Army in particular is a multiplayer-only experience that is often used as a recruitment tool by the United States military and is funded directly by the government, making this game a direct extension of the United States government. Other members of the military shooter subgenre, like entries in the Call of Duty or Battlefield series, have single-player, multiplayer, and cooperative modes and are products of private corporations and publishers rather than a government. Furthermore, according to “Reality and Terror, the First-Person Shooter in Current Day Settings,” there were over 160 first-person shooters released between 1993 and 2009, 95 of which could be considered military in nature as the these games pit the player against political enemies, rogue governments, and terrorists.” Using two examples to represent a further 93 would lead one to make fallacious claims. Unfortunately, Leonard is not the only video game critic to make claims like these.

According to Johannes Breuer, Ruth Festl, and Thorsten Quandt in their study “Digital war: An Empirical Analysis of Narrative Elements in Military First-person Shooters,” “most existing content analyses of digital games simply look at the first few minutes of gameplay or specific in-game sequences of twenty to sixty minutes. Such time-based sampling is likely to cause bias and does not represent the game in its entireity.” While this certainly does not apply to all analysis done, it does pose a problem to video game criticism when laziness and shoddy research is an accepted scholarly practice.

So what do we do about it? Keep writing about video games. Not as sexist and gun-toting pieces of garbage unworthy of analysis, but as serious pieces of artistic expression. While it is true that there are a lot of bad video games, it shouldn’t soil the integrity of the entire art form. To me, it seems like a lot of critics treat video games like toys or like some passing fad, not as a potential artform worthy of analysis. I’m certainly not trying to claim that all video games are art and worthy of supreme praise, but just that a video game shouldn’t be dismissed because of its medium.

There’s No Place Like Home

Wow. Gone Home shattered all my assumptions about video games. But before I get into that let me offer two disclaimers. One, this is, in fact, the first video game I have every played from start to finish (unless you count a round of Super Mario Kart) and the first video game I have ever owned. Second, I will be talking about my personal life in connection to this game. If that makes your skin itch, I’m sorry.

In the hyper-masculine realm of popular video games, violence is king. Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Diablo, etc. Games are marketed to men and use female characters as pawns to drive the story and to develop the male protagonist’s character. Women in games are not independent or their own characters, but are rather devices marketed to men. This often means that the female character is killed just to give the male character depth or purpose. In addition there is the completely unacceptable sexual violence in Grand Theft Auto where players are REWARDED for raping women, blatantly encouraging rape culture. As someone who has witnessed this problem and who had a mother who purposely kept video games out of the house for this reason, I didn’t realize that there were games out there that were interested in women and their lives. To my surprise, after five minutes of playing Gone Home (developed and published by The Fulbright Company). I was completely hooked on this emotionally complex and intellectually challenging game. It requires players to contemplate women’s lives (their whole lives–not only their connection to men, or their male or masculine personas, but women as they live and struggle in a patriarchal society).

From the start you are playing a young woman: Katie. And you are most interested in the life of your younger sister, Sam. You return home from a semester abroad to your family’s new house (they moved while you were away), and find the house strangely empty. The ‘game’ aspect involves your solving the mystery of where your family is. You walk through your house and learn about your life and the lives of your family members. Understanding the characters and their lives is crucial. There is no enemy. There is no specific goal or quest. Character development drives the game forward. To my amazement, this development is largely focused on Sam’s non-traditional views of gender and her budding relationship with Lonnie, an older girl in her class. As the game is set in 1995, they exchange mix tapes of early female punk rock and write a zine about knocking out the patriarchy. From Sam’s experiences of oppression and prejudice to the fact that THERE ARE TAMPONS IN THE BATHROOM, the game strives to provide a holistic view of a family and specifically a daughter in transition and turmoil.

Even better than that, this game made me feel. I moved from Massachusetts to Virginia after my freshman year in high school. I was suddenly the only openly queer student in a small private christian school. I had two older sisters. I was intensely angry with my parents. Walking through Gone Home felt like walking back into that time in my life. I read notes from Sam to her parents because they weren’t speaking. I heard Sam talk about being bullied in school. I relived how hard it is to be different in a new place with a family you don’t feel connected to. My family was much less religious than Sam’s but I still felt like outsider. This video game made me reflect on that time and forced me to look at it from a different angle. This self-examination was not what I expected to face in any video game. I hadn’t expected that a video game could make me cry with happiness at its conclusion.

The depth given to these characters in the game is astounding. Here is new a way to explore the experiences of a queer identity, to feel how horrible it is to be invisible. The game not only gives historically accurate references to the lesbian community and culture at the time but also has definite connections to present-day queer experiences. The journal entry “A Very Long Phase” talks about the experience of coming out and the powerful impact of each person’s reaction. Sam’s parents simply deny that she is a lesbian (though her identity is never specified, I use lesbian for simplicity) and believe that it is a phase. Unfortunately, this is not unusual even today. Women, especially those who are queer identified, face the challenge of people believing (1) they just don’t know what they’re doing, (2) they’re doing it for male attention, or (3) eventually they’ll get married and everything will be normal (Please, just don’t let women bond with women! If men aren’t involved, IT CAN’T BE REAL). This intersection of sexism and homophobia adds to the struggle of women to be treated with respect, as someone with agency and knowledge.

So I know that this review was more of a love fest than a proper review, but that’s how I feel about Gone Home. This emotional and complex game goes beyond entertainment. It is not a time waste, or useless. Gone Home, if you’re willing, will entertain you and make think about who you are. If you have the time, I absolutely recommend that you play this game. Before I played it I never thought I’d really enjoy video games, or that they were more than a diversion. But after? I think I’m going to search for other games like this. I want more.

Organic World Building Done Right

When I reflect on what’s missing from a lot of games these days, my first thought is “a cure for my crippling loneliness.” My second thought? A sense of discovery and mystery, of finding and uncovering of my own accord pieces of a game’s lore and world. I like going into a world that feels real, one that feels like it wasn’t created with my satisfaction in mind, but rather could have organically existed without my participation. A game shouldn’t have to spell everything out for me, because its job shouldn’t be to please the player. Not all games have to be fun. Games can be more than just things to do in order to pass the time; they can be challenging, emotionally engaging, thought provoking, and even sad. Not every game needs to make me excited, it just needs to succeed in its own right in whatever it sets out to do. Help from the game or being given a sense of power is nice sometimes, but I usually don’t want a game to hold my hand. Why do some games assume I wouldn’t be able to find my own face without a big glowing waypoint?

Two recent games come to mind that have really left a lasting impact on me because of their worlds and infrastructure: Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor (developed by Monolith Productions) and Dark Souls (developed by From Software). I’m not trying to make the claim that these two are the only recent games to have intrigued me lately or that other games are complete failures, but rather that these are merely two examples of the kind of successful world building that I’m talking about. These two games have their own ecosystems of sorts and allow the player to (for the most part) uncover their respective worlds’ mysteries on his or her own.

Shadow of Mordor takes place in Tolkien’s Middle Earth and follows Talion, a ranger from Gondor who seeks revenge upon Sauron’s henchmen for the death of his wife and son. The actual narrative of the story mode is pretty dry and really doesn’t feel all that original. Too often Shadow of Mordor seems like it’s trying to compete with the rest of the Lord of the Rings mythos by imitating other works within the Lord of the Rings universe, namely the Peter Jackson films. Its “me too” attitude makes it look like a little kid trying to wear his dad’s suit; it’s kind of cute at first, but when it tries to drive to work and do your taxes, the act starts to feel a little forced. Its many attempts at shoe-horning Gollum into the plot come off as contrived and Celebrimbor’s endless movie quotes can get a bit tiring, making the story missions in general feel a bit lacking.

However, the game more than makes up for these shortcomings with its Nemesis system, which produces an ever-changing hierarchy of Uruk warchiefs and commanders. The game tracks the rank and combat strength of each of Sauron’s Uruk captains and allows the player to aid, defeat, or enslave any of these captains in their struggles for power. When the player is defeated by one of these captains, that captain will then increase in strength and taunt the player for his failure if he or she chooses to go back for a second attempt at his life. The game will also track the deaths of your friends, allowing you to take vengeance upon the Uruk captain that killed your poor buddy. Lastly, Uruks shift their power positions even without the input of the player, making this system of power feel real and organic. This system is introduced to the player through the main storyline, but for the most part Talion’s interactions with the Uruk captains and bodyguards are not necessary for the completion of the game–which is odd because this aspect is by far the most interesting part of the game.

This ever-shifting ecosystem of war and succession is smart and refreshing and breathes life into an otherwise dull romp through Middle Earth. The game’s world and lore also come out far more clearly in the numerous collectibles that the player can optionally pick up all over the game map. Each collectible is embedded with some sort of memory or engraving, allowing a glimpse into the mind of the individual who owned said collectible. For example, Torvin the dwarf hunter is relatively uninteresting and one-sided in the main story; however, through a few pieces of collectible intel we learn about his relationship with his brother and the reasons for his passion to hunt the Legendary Graug. These pieces of intelligence and history provide context to the action and give the player a glimpse of the micro-level workings of Mordor, something that enhances the overall experience of the game world.

middle-earth-shadow-of-mordor-nemesis-system-info

Even though Shadow of Mordor succeeds in terms of its Nemesis system and enlightening collectibles, in some places it still feels like it’s trying to hold the player’s hand. Once the player gets to an area’s watchtower, every collectible and objective is revealed on the game’s map, eliminating the player’s need to seek out secrets for himself. Instead of letting the player seduce and woo the game into revealing its secrets, Shadow of Mordor just drops its pants and flaunts its goods at the drop of a hat. While some may ask why I’m not more critical of its transparency, it’s because I’m just happy that Shadow of Mordor came to the party with pants on at all (I’m looking at you, Pokémon games; I can indeed chew my own food, contrary to how you treat me).

Unlike Shadow of Mordor, Dark Souls is engrossing and intelligent the whole way through. Along with its predecessor, Demon’s Souls, and its sequel, Dark Souls II, Dark Souls has entered the gaming canon as one of the most punishing and cutthroat games in recent years. Compared to some other modern games that treat the player like an idiot and the player’s character like a demigod, the world of Dark Souls seems intent on kicking the player’s undead keister back to 1988. Granted, it ‘s hard, but Dark Souls is perhaps characterized  too often solely in terms of its difficulty; there are far more interesting things to say about the game than “it’s harder than grandma’s month old fruitcake.” For one, Dark Souls gives the player a great deal of control over almost every aspect of the game, including the unfolding of the plot. The player controls a chosen undead in his mission to traverse Lordran and defeat the hollowed husk of Lord Gwyn, the world’s previous ‘caretaker,’ if you will. If that sounds vague, that’s because it is vague; the story of Dark Souls isn’t expressly given to the player aside from a few scarce cutscenes. All other bits of story have to be gleaned from NPC’s, from item descriptions, or from observation of the world’s topography and architecture. The item descriptions in particular give poignant clues to the nature of some of the game’s bosses and lore, while NPC’s breathe life into the world and hint at a vastness to the lands of Dark Souls.

Not only does Dark Souls leave its story ambiguous, but it leaves its gameplay elements and explorable world a mystery as well. Once you leave the Undead Asylum and its tutorial scenarios behind, the world of Dark Souls is left up to the player to explore (and probably perish in). Failure and character death are staples of gameplay, but they’re not meant to be deterrents; rather, they’re motivational learning experiences–and death in this game acts as a teaching tool. Dark Souls is meant to be taken meticulously and patiently. Rashness and high stakes are often met with death and loss of time and resources. Combat is like a morbid kind of dance where if you miss a step someone stabs you and steals your wallet (after which you get up, dust yourself off, and go back to get your wallet, but this time you’ve brought Mr. Zweihander and he’s out for blood). In addition to the regular combat, boss fights are an interesting endeavor as well. Bosses are scary and do big-boy damage, but their patterns can often be learned and exploited, and often times the most apparently formidable bosses have the biggest, albeit generally secret or hard to find, weaknesses (in the case of the Stray Demon, you can get him stuck on a pillar, rendering him harmless and easily killable).

The combat system has a lot in common with the missions and objective structure of the game. Which is to say that there really is no overtly easy or straightforward way of moving through the game, but the clever player can find shiny new items and areas and will make it much farther than the impatient player. Though there are mandatory objectives that must be completed in order to finish the game, many can be done in interchangeable order and others can be skipped or ignored. Entire sections of the game can go unnoticed by the player, like the Painted World of Ariamis or Ash Lake, the latter being arguably the most visually striking and beautiful section of the game; it’s reached by exploring a hollowed out tree located in the corner of one of Dark Soul’s main story areas. The Painted World also raises numerous questions about its origins and purpose: Who made it? Why does this place exist? These questions, among others, are never really answered, and I’m okay with that. I want to be able to wonder and make up my own conclusions. I don’t want to be spoon-fed every little bit of information and lore.

I don’t want this piece to be one of those “all modern video games are dumb and for babies” posts, because frankly those kinds of opinions are often uninformed and stuck in the past. Not all games have to be mysterious, complex, or highly intelligent, but I greatly appreciate those that make me forget that I’m playing in a constructed world. Sometimes I just want to get lost somewhere else and experience something new and exciting for myself, as I expect do many other players of video games do. Shadow of Mordor and Dark Souls are both excellent games, and should be celebrated for their success, because for someone who feels a bit jaded these are sometimes a breath of fresh air. In a real world filled with monotony and busy work, games like these let me stretch my imagination a little bit.

League of Legends for the Uninitiated

The sudden popularity of a certain new video game has a lot of people asking a lot of questions: (1) What is this new video game contraption that all the young folks are doing? (2) How does one play this game? (3) Why does my chest hurt after drinking a bunch of lemonade? (4) Will I ever truly be happy?

Let me try and answer some of those fascinating queries:

  1. League of Legends.
  2. Read the rest of the article
  3. You might have acid reflux
  4. Probably not but hey might as well try

Not that all of those questions aren’t worth discussing, but I’ll be focusing on #2 for the remainder of this article.

There are a lot of reasons you might be reading this. Maybe you want to be the next Faker (Korean pro player, some call him the Lionel Messi of League, others just call him… Faker-sempai) and be a professional League of Legends player. Or perhaps you’re just wondering what it is your roommate is doing that has him clicking so loudly that it sounds like a woodpecker lives in your ear! Whatever the reason, read on, and find out just what the hell your roommate is doing awake at four in the damn morning on a Wednesday night. (Seriously, Jeremy. I’m trying to sleep. I have a math test tomorrow, I’m late with this article– I do not need this right now.)

Basics of the game

We’ll start out simple. Two teams of five players each face off in a large square arena, with one team’s base in the top right corner, the other in the bottom left. Three paths (lanes) connect the two bases. The object of the game is to get into the other team’s base and destroy their nexus. Getting to this point and finishing the game will typically take around 30-45 minutes. With me so far? Good, because we’re just getting started. In each lane is a series of turrets. These turrets do a LOT of damage, so the game helpfully provides mindless minions to die for you! Small, weak, computer-controlled minions (or creeps) regularly spawn in each lane, and will slowly walk down the lane towards their enemy. Walk into the turret without a healthy supply of minions to back you up, and you might as well drop your weapon, pick up a shovel, and start digging yourself a grave. The players in each lane try to kill enemy minions so that their team’s minions will push towards the enemy’s tower. As long as your minions are in range of the tower it will prioritize the minions instead of you. This will allow you to hit the tower without fear of being pounded into the dirt. Be warned though, the towers do not take kindly to you attacking the champions of their team and will turn on you as soon as you damage a champion, minions or no.

Through landing killing blows on minions, blows on enemy players, and blows on towers, and through just sheer persistence (you generate a small amount of gold every second just for participating) you will acquire gold that can be spent back at your home base to buy items. Each champ can carry six items, and it takes quite a lot of time and gold to get all six. But with close to 200 items in the game, there are tons of possible item combinations (typically called item builds) that a player can have. Each item’s primary function is to give stat bonuses, and every champ requires different stats to do well. Every character has certain things they are good at and things they aren’t so good at. So pick a champion that fits a play-style you like and build items that fit that play-style! You wouldn’t buy a hockey stick for a football player, right? So don’t buy Archangel’s Staff for Garen. Just don’t. Please don’t. You’ll understand when you’ve played a few games.

Phew. Well there you have the basic objective of the game. Let’s make that a list so it’s a bit easier to understand.

  1. Go to a lane and start killing minions.
  2. Your minions will help you destroy enemy towers.
  3. Use gold gained from killing minions to buy items to make yourself stronger.
  4. Keep taking towers until you reach the enemy base.
  5. Destroy the enemy nexus.

Of course, your opponents will be trying to do the same to you the entire time, so you can’t just walk into lane and mindlessly hack away at minions. You have to deal with a human opponent, controlling a character of similar strength to yours. This is where the “meta game” comes in.

At this point, it would be the acme of foolishness not to mention that the game is free to download and has a tutorial built in. If what I’ve just described sounds like a game to which you might enjoy devoting a bit of time (or your entire life) and spending no money (or over a hundred dollars) then download it and give it a shot (I’m so lonely). There are a lot of small details that I won’t be going over (damage types, resistances, scaling, turret agro, ip and rp, possible item builds, how to last-hit, runes, masteries, summoner spells, how to play while eating a sandwich, wards, dragon and baron, blue and red buff), which are all kind of boring, require lengthy explanation and are best learned by simply playing the game a bit. Those are the mechanics of the game, but what really makes League of Legends (or LOL, for short) so much fun is the massive number of characters that you can play. You thought Super Smash Bros. had a lot of characters? Man Smash Bros. ain’t got NOTHING on League.

GarenStats

Garen: The League’s favorite Beyblade

Champions

There are currently 123 champions to choose from, and a team must have five UNIQUE champs. There are millions of potential team compositions, which by itself should suggest the complexity of the game. Champions are divided into a few categories based on how they play. Assassins are champs that do a lot of close range damage extremely quickly but are very easy to kill. Most mages function similarly to assassins, but their damage is usually long range. Tanks (my favorite role) are beefy damage sponges that like to wade into a fight and soak up damage, but they aren’t too good at dishing out hurt themselves. Marksman (usually called Attack Damage Carries or ADCs) are long range champs that prefer to stay in the back of the fight while pumping out a steady stream of damage per second. Obviously these are just generalizations and there is a lot of diversity within each category. You’ve got bruisers, bursty marksman, melee damage-per-second champs, champs with high mobility, low mobility, split-pushers, champs with no crowd control, champs with lots of crowd control, fat champs, skinny champs, champs who climb on rocks. (If you got that reference give yourself a pat on the back).

Though each champ differs greatly, there are a few aspects that every champ shares:

Stats – Every champ has stats that all do different things. (This, by the way, is the kind of in-depth analysis that makes my article a must-read). The most important stats are health, mana (some champs use other resources or no resource, but that doesn’t matter right now), attack damage, ability power, armor, magic resistance, movement speed, and critical chance. Most of those are pretty self-explanatory if you’ve played an RPG before, but the main thing you need to know is that every item gives stats, and certain stats are good on certain champions.

Basic Attacks – All champions get basic attacks, some ranged and some melee. Basically all the dudes with axes and swords have melee basic attacks, and everyone who uses a gun or magic staff has ranged basic attacks. The higher the attack damage stat, the higher the damage on basic attacks. Easy enough.

Abilities – Every champ has a passive ability (no key binding), three basic abilities (Q,W, and E), and an ultimate (R). The maximum level in the game is level 18 and each level gives you one point to spend on your abilities. Each basic ability can be skilled five times, and your ultimate three times. All your basic abilities are available from the outset but you’ll have to wait until level 6 for the extremely sexy ultimate ability. Most abilities increase their damage the more ability power you have (wow, what a coincidence!) but some will cause more damage more as your attack damage increases. Every ability costs mana, so keep an eye on that pretty blue bar under your health.

So before we end this thing, quick wrap-up on how champions work:

  1. You control one character, and you use basic attacks and abilities to do the big damages
  2. As you disregard real life and acquire currency, spend that currency on items that fit your champion. Ex. Attack damage on Ashe, Health Armor and Magic Resist on Garen, and Ability power on Annie.
  3. Proclaim your victory, dance on the desecrated corpses of your fallen foes.

So what are you waiting for? Get out there and give League a try! I’ll see you on the Summoner’s Rift or at Gaming Club in Tome 115 on Satudays at 8pm where we play lots of League and other games. Be there or be square!

A Problematic Vision of Gamers

I like video games. Some say I like them too much, but only those who’ve seen me write “Mrs. Jeremy Games” on the inside of my school notebooks. Recently, my interest in them has started to become academic in addition to recreational; I’ve started to think and write about video games from a scholarly perspective, as you might do with a classic film or piece of literature. To many, writing academically about video games might sound completely ludicrous, like if someone wanted to exhibit paintings of Nicolas Cage at the Louvre or if someone said that spray cheese actually tasted like real cheese. Why is it that most people fully accept paintings, novels, or films as works of art with the potential for analysis, but video games are merely toys for children, not worthy of any scholarly merit?

While it is true that video games are becoming more popular among scholars, they certainly don’t have the widespread acceptance that other forms have; it would be rare to find a professor of video games or someone majoring in Sonic the Hedgehog for his or her college degree. While it is true that video games are a relatively young art form, I think a bigger problem is how the public perceives games, and even how video game fans perceive games. Games are often seen by more traditional and conservative media outlets as purveyors of violence and sex, objects that seek to corrupt our children and turn them into gun-toting sex fiends. Not only can detractors harm the public perception of video games, but sometimes supporters can as well. Both people working within the industry and self-proclaimed video game fans and supporters often infantilize video games and create another juvenile image of the medium as a whole.

While it is often true that new forms of entertainment and media are met with disdain and scorn from members of the old-guard way of doing things, it seems like video games have gotten an especially bad reputation within traditional media. As far back as the Columbine shooting, video games were blamed for heinous acts of violence; Doom was partially blamed for influencing the two teens that then went on to shoot up their school and harm their fellow classmates. The 1992 game Night Trap was also put on trial by Senator Joe Lieberman for encouraging rape fantasies and violence against women.

Even today video games are still being demonized. For example, take the release of Mass Effect in 2007. Fox News aired a segment that put Mass Effect on trial for its depiction of “graphic sex” and questioned the game’s general merit. Most of the conversation focused on its potential impact on children, and how depictions of sex and violence such as those they thought depicted in Mass Effect could inhibit or damage the development of a child. In fact, all of those on the panel that attacked the game had never actually played it; they had only seen trailers and pictures, and actually scoffed at the idea of actually playing the game. All of these controversies begin with the assumption that video games are inherently for children and that children will find some way to get their hands on them. Even today when many modern games explore very adult themes and involve extremely mature content, why is it that many still assume that video games are children’s toys? I believe that one of the biggest factors keeping this myth alive are members of video game fandom whose intentions come from a place of enjoyment and admiration, but whose actions ultimately betray their intentions.

A number of events and films that appear to be on the side of video game success, for instance, can actually do more harm than good. Events and features that are meant to celebrate games and those who play them, such as the Spike TV Video Game Awards (VGAs) and the documentary Video Games: The Movie (2014), treat their audiences (and their source material) like children. The VGA’s are meant, in theory, to celebrate the best titles of the year; however, their actual purpose and existence is something far less noble and worthwhile. The awards are actually something of an extended commercial, with various trailers shown and revealed for the next year’s upcoming releases. When they’re not trying to sell you something, the VGAs fill the rest of their air time with skits that would make Dumb and Dumber look like a dark satire on the duality of mankind. Nothing impresses twelve-year-olds more and says ‘class and elegance’ like Neil Patrick Harris’ entrance to the 2010 VGA’s where he shoots up an entire troop of dancers. At the 2007 awards, the nominees for ‘Game of the Year’ had their likenesses painted onto scantily clad women who then presented themselves on stage. All jokes aside, the VGAs aren’t bad because of the trailers or the lack of awards, but because the awards assume that their audiences can’t be entertained without a copious amount of blood and boobs.

Spike TV's 2007 "Video Game Awards" - Arrivals

The recently released Video Games: The Movie aims to justify a love for video game and seeks to briefly chronicle their history, but comes off as more of a love letter or a puff piece. Stated more harshly: it doesn’t do anything but lick the metaphorical boot of the video game industry. Director Jeremy Snead, along with an ensemble of movie stars and video game industry figures, guide viewers through a very condensed history of video games. Although informative for the uninitiated, the history that the film outlines feels like an encyclopedia article with little to no insight or analysis put forth. The film itself is a sort of pre-pubescent love poem to the video games industry: video games occupy the place of a middle school girl who’s just bought her first bra while the generic video game fans are like boys trying to get a gander at them yams.

The whole film is filled with larger-than-life claims about video games and their potential, but not a lot is said with actual substance. Various celebrities who have nothing to do with video games, such as Zach Braff and Donald Faison, have their voices heard in this film not because of any expertise that they hold, but just because they like video games. While there are prominent figures from within the industry in this film that do offer their insight–for example Cliff Blesinski and Reggie Fils-Aime–they too offer little more than their childhood experiences with Space Invaders or their first time playing the Legend of Zelda. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with sharing these experiences, when put into a film that places itself as an ambassador for video games as a whole, it makes the industry and the medium look extremely childish and unsubstantial. Moreover, the formal elements of the film are often lazily done and riddled with errors; at one point, one of the graphics has a typo and instead of displaying ‘The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time’ the text reads ‘The Legend of Zelda: Ocatina of Time.’ If a film can’t even be bothered to check its spelling, how can the viewer trust that the film’s message and content isn’t any less erroneous?

If VGAs and Video Games: The Movie are the wrong ways of talking about video games, then what are the right ways? I think that some form of justification of the medium is probably necessary, but not to the point of worship. One example of a representation done well is Indie Game: The Movie. It manages to tell the story of three groups of game developers without turning them into jokes, or worse, Big Bang Theory characters. These developers appear to be real people with a passion for video games, but not to the point of worship. I think the best part of Indie Game is that it doesn’t treat its audience with contempt; it assumes that the viewer can do his or her own thinking without having his or her hand held.

But seriously, liking video games doesn’t make someone a nerdy caricature because there is nothing wrong with video games in the first place. Video games can be taken seriously, but not if the only reasons given for the validity of the medium involve childhood memories and exorbitant flattery. If the general public is ever going to take games seriously, those who enjoy or play them need to take them seriously first. Not everyone needs to be the next great video game scholar, but simplifying games down to boobs and guns doesn’t do justice to the potential that video games offer as an art form or as a mode of storytelling. Hopefully the problems within the medium are caused by some kind of formal puberty, because I know that the medium of video games should and will one day become an art form that will be respected in its own right.

Return to The World of Thedas

Bioware loves dramatic protagonists. The company did the hero of legend in Dragon Age: Origins, the underdog-turned-champion in Dragon Age II Origins–and in Mass Effect, the main character was the savoir of the entire galaxy. How could they hope to create a protagonist to top that? With, it turns out, a hero as potential new messiah, embroiled in a good old battle of the gods. Dragon Age: Inquisition thrives on the dramatic and the epic: in the plot, in the characters, and in the imaginary world of Thedas. The first plot point is an explosion seen on the title screen when “new game” is selected, which sets the story in motion. From then on–throughout more than 100 hours of content–the game is one of wonders both big and small.

Meet the Inquisitor

The Inquisitor is entirely your character. You get to customize everything about her (or him), from her race and background to her appearance, and even her voice. When the game begins, your character is the sole survivor of the aforementioned blast, which happens to have killed hundreds, ruined hopes of peace in a war-torn country, and unleashed its own chaos into the world via a magical scar left in the sky. You were saved by a mysterious figure many believe to be the spirit Andraste, the Jesus-figure in the game’s mythology, giving you a great amount of influence and power whether or not you yourself believe yourself warranting it. It falls to you and your supporters to build up a politically and militarily powerful sect known as the Inquisition, gaining followers and influence as you do so, in order save the world.

Narrative premise out of the way, let’s look at how the game actually holds up; in other words, the Good, the Bad, and the In-Between!

The Good

Thedas Is Really Big and Really Beautiful

There are ten main areas, along with several smaller ones, spanning across the countries of Fereldan and Orlais, and every one of them is impressive in size and aesthetically stunning. Not only is the world big, it also manages to feel varied enough to be interesting while yet cohesive enough to function convincingly as a world. The areas clustered together, such as deserts in Western Orlais, are similar in a way that makes sense with their geographic location but are also unique enough in their design that each is its own interesting experience. In contrast with Dragon Age II, where every single room you entered looked identical to every other one in the game, even the smaller locations are uniquely put together and thus satisfying to explore.

The more-or-less lack of invisible walls and departure from the series’ branching-hallway maps is definitely a contributor to the expansive feeling of the areas. Though invisible walls do exist, they are few and far between. The maps are instead given natural limitations; cliffs that can’t be climbed, sand storms that can’t be crossed, and bodies of water that can’t be forged. When a part of the edge of the map is left open, it will usually lead to a map of the rest of Thedas rather than just act as a blank barrier. The result being that you can go almost everywhere you can see, and in most areas you can see pretty far.

Dragon Age World

The War Table

Another clever trick Bioware uses to show both the size of the world and the reach of the Inquisition is the war table. This feature is a map, the same map you use to select your destination when traveling, with markers for missions that require your attention. You can select one of your three advisors to handle the situation, and after a certain amount of real-time passes you are delivered a report on how the mission went and any rewards gained.

Although the Inquisitor can themselves only travel to a limited number of locations throughout two countries, the war table can go far beyond that, allowing the Inquisition to still have a presence in every part of the world. By selecting which of your advisors to turn to for any given mission, you can also gain influence in whichever way you choose, be it diplomacy, espionage, or military strength. It’s also a tidy way to bring up nods to past games in the series and individual world states without losing newer players by bogging down with story references and cameos designed for returning players.

The interactions with the war table mostly include reading reports of the problems you have to deal with, reading proposed solutions by your advisors, and then reading reports of the effects once the mission is completed. Basically, it’s a lot of reading. If you don’t bother looking through these reports, it’s probably going to seem like a fairly boring feature. But taking the time to read the short passages, makes the experience more than just clicking and waiting. It puts you in the position of the decision maker and authority figure that your character is supposed to be.

Skyhold

Skyhold is the Inquisition’s base of operations, and it is awesome. You can spend hours just investigating this area alone, trying to figure out how to navigate your castle and finding all the nifty hidden nooks. Your companions and advisors each have their corners where they hang out if you want to talk to them and each corner has a personal touch related to its character. Throughout the game you’ll find or be able to buy various items to personalize Skyhold’s décor in ways that suit your Inquisitor. Beyond that, you will also have a couple opportunities to make upgrades to Skyhold that reflect your priorities and decisions in the game, such as supporting the Templars versus supporting the Mages. This is where you’ll be able to bond with your followers, visit the war table, and upgrade or forge new equipment.

Another interesting aspect found at Skyhold is a feature called Judgement. At several plot points various characters that have worked against the Inquisitor or the law of their respective locations can be captured and sent to Skyhold, where you get to decide their fate for yourself. This is one more way that the game puts the power and authority of the Inquisition directly into your hands and allows you to literally experience it, rather than just telling you about it or even merely showing it. The various options that you have for dealing with the captives is also personalized, and certain options won’t be available to Inquisitors of certain backgrounds or mindsets, or will only be available if certain decisions are made.

The Characters

Bioware’s strength has always been more in its games’ casts than their play mechanisms–and more in its writing than anything else. This remains just as true for Dragon Age Inquisition. The snippets of dialogue between your companions that occur as you run around the world are always either wonderfully entertaining or interesting and insightful, and a new feature allowing your character to join in the conversations helps to solidify the group’s bonds. The companions that you gather are a diverse and lively lot that feel like real people, as opposed to the companions of Dragon Age II, who by the game’s end seemed big archetypes (or, less generously, caricatures) of single big ideas by the end. In this game, they all have distinct personalities and motivations, and while some might not get along as well with you as others, they are all convincing, well-written characters who, the more you play, feel more and more like real people about whom you actually care.

This is helped by the changes made to the approval rating that has been continually evolving throughout the series. While past games allowed you to treat the companions strategically, giving them gifts and leaving them behind on certain missions to get the desired results, interactions in Inquisition are much more natural as no approval meter is displayed, and changes in approval are not assigned numeric value. What the characters think of you is thus more strongly based on your actions in the world and toward them individually.

DALS

The Bad

Mounts

The system of mounts introduced in Inquisition is a smart idea that was unfortunately lazily executed. With the exception of the largest dessert area, the mounts don’t maneuver well enough in any of the areas to be more useful than going on foot, and even in the Hissing Wastes they aren’t fast enough to feel much different than simply running. Your companions disappear into black smoke when you mount your steed, just as it itself will do if it’s nearby during combat (as it likely will be, since it’s difficult to avoid being thrown off as soon as you encounter enemies until much later in the game). This both breaks the sense of immersion built up so carefully during the rest of the game and means that you don’t get any of the delightful companion discussions while you’re on your mount. Add to that the fact that there are only really four different mounts in a variety of color swaps and all the exciting potential it the concept might have had disappears.

Our Antagonist

The antagonist of the game peaks very early on in the story, with a legion of crazy followers and an epic first appearance. However, from that first appearance on, the impression of the story’s bad guy continues to fade until the game’s rather lackluster ending. An unknown being seeking to become a God sounds good at the beginning, but the little backstory we are given is not enough to make up for his evil-villain cookie-cutter motives. A good story requires a strong antagonist, one who thinks he himself is doing the right thing even if we, as the audience, can clearly tell that he is not. We see this in both of the first two games, but Inquisition’s biggest bad guy isn’t much but a tired archetype, making his followers even more shallow and unbelievable still.

Almost to add insult to injury, there are clear hints throughout the game of a darker, more interesting conflict brewing just beneath the surface. Though the story is cool on its own, I almost felt like it was little more than a place-holder for the slow development of a series-long conflict which has yet to manifest.

The Loading Screen

By far the pettiest of my Inquisition complaints is how the loading screen is handled. When switching areas, the screen displays three tarot cards and information from the game codex for players to read and learn about the world while they wait. While this is a cool idea, it’s not well executed. The codex entries shown are usually fairly long, and the player only has time to read a few sentences at most before it disappears . . . only to be replaced by another plain black loading screen? Really?

The In-Between

Combat

The battle system in this game is interesting. The lack of any healing spells in favor of a set number of health potions is a daring but successful switch from past games, allowing for more variety in party combinations and forcing more of a focus on defense rather than support. There’s a wide variety of new ways to experiment with specializations and party dynamics and a lot of potential for any play-style. The pause-and-command tactical view can be helpful, and is even entirely necessary for tougher battles and higher difficulty settings, but it definitely brings the flow of the battle to a halt as you issue commands to your teammates, resume time again as they carry out your orders, and then repeat.

The biggest negative in regards to the combat for me was the tactics screen in Inquisition. For a game that fixed so much from its predecessors and advertised the combat system so heavily, the tactics screen here is a surprising and disappointing step down. Whereas in past games it was possible to customize a lengthy list of “if-then” statements dictating every followers’ action during combat, Inquisition limits the behavior set of characters to (1) how often they use heath potions and moves and (2) their default target, resulting in many decisions being left to an AI that is, frankly, not that great. In easy battles it may not matter, but in many scenarios it is very jarring to have to constantly try to micromanage all of your companions for the sake of efficiency.

dragon-age-inquisition-drag
Dragons

Living up to the series’ title, the dragons in Inquisition are (finally) plentiful and suitably epic. They’re just as terrifying as they should be until you’re at a high enough level, and they’re such a distinct part of the environments that it’s almost a shame to kill them. That said, after taking a few of the giant beasts down, the battles do all start to feel the same. There’s very little diversity in the combat with the dragons except for each dragon’s elemental resistances/weaknesses, and though the attempt to make dragons feel different from other enemies by breaking them up into parts has potential it ultimately never seems to matter much.

Crafting

The crafting system of Inquisition is another new feature to the game, and it has it good parts and bad parts. You can craft some really powerful items, easily more powerful than anything that could be found through looting. You get to pick out what materials to put in different statistic slots on the crafting screen with each type of material having different benefits, so you get to designate whether you want your armor to have more melee defense/magic resistance/etc. The bad, on the other hand, is that the only effective way to gather all of these materials is to walk around, which is a tedious and time consuming process. Also, the fact that the chosen materials also affect the appearance of what you are crafting occasionally leads to choices such as whether running around in bright pink and green armor is worth the higher stats. You also get to name everything you craft, however, which almost makes up for the fashion problems.

Roundup

Dragon Age: Inquisition is more than a fixed version of the first two games. It holds onto the best parts of each of its prequels and improves upon the worst, but most importantly it throws in its own unique flair, which ultimately re-shapes the entire experience. There are endless moments, from the epic scenes that give chills to the small conversations that warm the heart, which all work together to make this an amazing game. The hundreds of hours of content are not just busy-work running around gathering (mostly not, anyway), but are filled to the brink with an unbelievable amount of unique and exciting things to do and features to play with. While it certainly has some issues, they’re nothing compared to the immersive, expansive, emotional world that is Thedas.

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