Showing posts with label silent hill. Show all posts
Showing posts with label silent hill. Show all posts
Thursday, June 16, 2016
Crit Links 16/6
Solaris (And How it Influenced Silent Hill 2) | Monsters of the Week
§
Controllers Control Everything | Game Maker's Toolkit
§
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past's dungeon design | Boss Keys
§
E3 2016 Thoughts and Analysis - Writing on Games (Bonus Episode)
§
Game Commercials are Still Stupid - The Final Bosman
§
Still Skeptical of V.R. - Five Challenges for Virtual Reality - Extra Credits
§
Strategic Butt Coverings - Tropes vs Women in Video Games
§
OXENFREE | Part 1: The Story
§
The Kojima-P.T. Conspiracy (Silent Hills|Konami) - Monsters of the Week Special (feat. Fungo)
§
Designing Morally Difficult Characters, Responsibly
Designing a morally questionable character doesn't have to railroad your players into moustache-twirling villainy: done right, it can present a truly meaningful study in compromise and complicity. Dan Nagler, designer and writer for Gigantic Mechanic, details a unified design strategy for creating this type of game protagonist: a character whose very moral ambiguity is leveraged for positive dramatic, emotional and educational effect. This theory is grounded in Gigantic Mechanic's design for the Edward M. Kennedy Institute's Senate Immersion Module, a digital and live-action hybrid game that puts students in the shoes of antebellum, slaveholding American politicians.
§
Some people insist that reliance on psychotherapy or medication is a sign of moral weakness, while others deny that clinical depression exists at all. Playing Quinn’s game and allowing yourself to feel sad therefore becomes a form of social action; to play is also to take a stand, placing yourself on one side of a debate. The sadness intertwines with a kind of proactive anger to challenge the status quo and advocate for the disenfranchised. The role of art in unpacking incontrovertible sadness is more ambiguous.
/.../
Ten years later I’m a little wiser and a lot less snarky, but I still don’t think Rabbit Hole is a good play. Its emotional punches land squarely on the nose, yet its point-of-view is absent. One ends up feeling manipulated by such a work: we are made to feel sad because, well, it’s sad to watch parents grieve for two hours. No one could argue with that. But what’s the point? There is no stand to take, and any anger evoked cannot be put to productive use. What can be gained by such an exercise? Then again, perhaps the idea that something should be gained is simply an indication of our discomfort with facing the undeniably tragic.
/.../
The emotional core of That Dragon, Cancer is real—so real, in fact, and so personal, that I ended up feeling like an outsider looking in. I pitied the Greens for having to endure this awful series of events, but I did not come away feeling connected to their experience, or enlightened by it. This was not because the game tried but failed to connect with me, but because it didn’t. There is an insular quality to the vignettes; they are by and for the family Green (and, perhaps more broadly, others who have lived through similar trials). The “point” of the game is that this is how Ryan and Amy are dealing with their loss. I can praise or criticize it, but really my opinion is irrelevant. This game was not made for me, and reviewing it feels like a borderline intrusion into a family’s private mourning.
/.../
for the Greens, the titular dragon turns out not to be an RPG’s final boss but rather one of the Arthurian variety: an evil to be battled by brave Christian crusaders, pure of heart and clean of soul, who know that even losing the fight means an unfettered ascension to god’s heavenly kingdom. As a secular existentialist Jew, it may go without saying that by ultimately settling on this metaphor, the game started to lose me.
/.../
This is sadness. Our task, I think, when faced with this kind of sadness, is not to force it into an ill-fitting symbol, or turn it into a cause, or define its point. Our task is to sit there for a while and feel its invisible weight, its randomness and cruelty. But I understand why the Greens could not stay in that space for long. Who could? I applaud that they tried, and I am sorry for their loss.
§
On its own, the tedium of The Ice-Bound Concordance would not be enough to carry the text to any sort of end beyond exploring the well-trod intersection between play and work. Instead, the game focuses on narrative layering in a way that attempts to discover the compulsive allure of difficult texts. The echoes of Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), or Borges’ Labyrinths (1962) are fairly apparent, but present also are the interests of electronic literary experiments like Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995) or Michael Joyce’s Afternoon: a story (1994). Like these artists and their respective works, Reed and Garbe use The Ice-Bound Concordance to prompt its player to embrace the pleasures that come with deciphering, or maybe just interacting with, texts that actively resist comprehension.
/.../
While KRIS wanted to write about “human dignity” and “going it alone,” I fought to keep the focus on the aforementioned spiral imagery and ever-growing threat of existential horror that haunted dark places below the facility. KRIS cared more about character flaws as they related to the personal sins of the writer whose mind the AI was meant to emulate, but I found its quest for self-discovery a dull moral tale about the need for humanism in the process of artistic creation. KRIS and I fought constantly, each of us vying for authorial control until we landed on an ending that disappointed the both of us. Ultimately, it was my struggle against KRIS that interested me most in The Ice-Bound Concordance. Even as that damn program insisted that “endings are the crux of this matter” and warned me not to “get distracted by the medium” because “it’s the material that’s important,” I found my time spent trying to use the book to redirect the program’s focus to fit my needs far more satisfying than coming to any sort of end. All of this is by design, of course, though the heavy-handedness of KRIS’s direction over-explains the themes of the game that were already revealed organically. Indeed, if The Ice-Bound Concordance has any noticeable flaws, they appear in the occasional pontifications about the toil of creation that are a bit too obvious, or with a few supposed tricks that are far too telegraphed in their method. But such observations may reveal more about my own hubris than it does an actual flaw in a game about the tension between authorial intent and editorial obsession.
/.../
There’s something troublesome at the heart of The Ice-Bound Concordance that rests in the space between the physical copy of the book and the way a machine can see patterns and forms beyond the player’s perception. The complicated networks of mediation reveal that there are systems at play beyond the human faculties of language. From the actual mechanics of printing and editing to the complex codes that run software required to read the physical Ice-Bound Compendium, these unseen forces aiding in the processes of artistic creation trouble our concept of the single author. After all, we can never read Ice-Bound in its native form because it only truly exists in the raw data of the computer program and the obscure iconography of the compendium, each only readable when filtered through the computer. For us, that text will always be just beyond our scope of understanding—formless, changing, and warped as if it is partially obscured behind a translucent sheet of ice.
§
Was it worth waiting an extra five years to play The Witness? No. What I played in 2011 was satisfying and intriguing enough.
§
Undertale and The Witness have a lot in common, too. Both heavily reference a mid-90s game (Earthbound and Myst, respectively) but avoid cloying reverence, instead managing to say something new. Both games are extremely avant-garde, constantly requiring the player to think about genre convention and challenge it head-on. And like The Witness, Undertale is essentially one long ritual labyrinth. At the outset of the game, an assortment of characters and posted signs walk you through a series of trials where you're meant to tread a path that has already been clearly marked for you.
§
In the end, Oxenfree is absolutely a game about teenage bullshit (forgive me for being a little disingenuous earlier). But it manages to revitalize that narrative by focusing on feeling more than substance; it glances at each character’s inner struggle rather than serving it up for a full meal. The supernatural side of the story carries some of the weight here as well, mirroring Alex’s own story of grief and isolation even as it performs the work of all good ghost stories: reinterpreting your immediate surroundings and enchanting the mundane. If you’re looking for a story that valorizes adolescent struggle by iterating all of its existential complaints, you’d be better off looking elsewhere. But if you miss the naïve wonder, the warmth of lifelong friends, and the thrill of still having rules to break, Oxenfree can take you back.
Sunday, January 17, 2016
Longform Crit Comp 17/1
there is a history of American temperance literature that Carousel slots
into nicely. Temperance literature, very briefly, aimed to convert the
drunkard from his destructive ways and onto a path of righteousness and
bourgeois productivity. In many cases this was through tales of the
(female) children of these intemperate men taking the brunt of their
violence and, through the power of their innocent acceptance in the face
of this onslaught, their weathering of the storm, allowing these men
the chance of redemption. It would seem that a broken and powerless man
is in need of an unflinching and unarguing object for his patriarchal
control in order to be rebuilt as a man of action. The drunk is drunk
because he has been denied, or has forsaken, the mantle of authority
that a man must wear: alcohol is a way to avoid responsibility and for
the family patriarch the first responsibility is ownership of the women
(and the as-yet ungendered boys) of his household./.../
When, in Bioshock: Infinite, then broken drunk Booker DeWitt batters down the doors of a castle that he himself built in another life to rescue his own daughter, trapped there in an asexual stasis it is not the chaos of imagery and symbolism that it at first seems, but instead a direct descendent of the form of rehabilitation pioneered by temperance literature.
/.../
Perhaps unsurprisingly then the piece of Infinite fan media that most makes sense to me is Zone’s Biocock: Intimate, which collapses the erotic tension inherent in the game and as Maddy Myers says ‘comes … a lot closer to offering me the version of Elizabeth that I wanted to see than BioShock did,’ one who ‘speaks, moans and calls the sexual shots.’
/.../
In Zone’s game, the protagonist, this time a disembodied cock rather than a disembodied gun, as if there is a real difference, is still Booker, making explicit the incestuous undertones of the source game while neither remarking on them or judging them.
/.../
Ken Levine, Bioshock’s lead creator, keeps telling people to stop sexualising Elizabeth because he views her as a daughter. But I cannot for the life of me imagine why he thought a young woman would neither develop or be the subject of a sexual gaze, especially when, as I keep saying, the story that is told in Infinite is the story of her sexual awakening and her emergence from the cloying constraints of a father who wants to own her and use her as a replacement for his wife, with all of the sexual labour that that implies.
/.../
It is a fairly common mechanism of patriarchy that violence against women is framed as being bad, by and for the understanding of men, on the premise that ‘you wouldn’t want this to happen to your daughter,’ that a victim is ‘somebody’s daughter.’ Fundamentally what this says is that men can apparently only view women as an object in relation to a man, not as a person in their own right. The non-daughter is an acceptable site for your sexual fantasies because she is not owned and spoken for. Female sexual awakening is therefore posited as a process by which a man separates the bond between father and daughter, destroying the tower and building a new one to encase her and protect her from the sexual fantasies of other men.
/.../
as an industry and a society we will continue to seek our redemption in the arms of those we have wronged, whose job it is, like the little sisters of the original Bioshock, to be used to fuel our monstrous rages and to accept our caresses and desires when we break down and wish for forgiveness. We will continue to expect these women to save us with their love.
[I love how pieces like these can put something in a larger context and enrich my understanding of something which didn't make as much sense before. It's interesting how I even come to appreciate Bioshock Infinite more in some twisted way, even if it's flawed in its execution and in using this idea of temperance without my having seen them putting it in brackets or providing self-reflexivity.]
§
we see Fragile Dreams trying to reconcile modern Japanese life with traditional Japanese thought. However, looking at the game on a character level complicates the aesthetic. These ways of seeing the world are not natural, as Seto (the game’s protagonist) must spend the entire game learning to appreciate the beauty that arises from a fleeting reality.
/.../
For Japanese aesthetes, the most beautiful arts would blend into the greater world around them. Anything that announced its presence was considered simple, boisterous, and to be avoided.
/.../
in terms of mono no aware, the best way to bring out something’s beauty is to remind us of its inevitable change or passing.
/.../
as long as technology does not supplant the feeling of change and being in nature, it’s capable of functioning within Japanese aesthetic theory.
/.../
Over the course of the game, Seto finds various broken items amid the wreckage. When he takes those items to a bonfire, he finds out what they are, and hears a short story regarding the item’s last owner. There’s a consistent message running through these stories: one of unfulfilled desire. The protagonists of these stories regret making choices they can never fix, or they feel scared after having something valuable taken from them. They realize that their lives are short, and Seto sees that their worries outlasted them.
/.../
The game relays most of these narratives through some object the owner confided in. They intended to relieve their pain at least a little bit, but all we see is their emotional pain; we rarely see any kind of resolution. Therefore, the objects fail to serve their intended purpose of consoling their owners. The cell phone’s story displays this quite poignantly: while her intent is for the world to remember her, the tragic irony of her situation is that she leaves us nothing by which we can identify her. We don’t know her name or any details about her life, and it’s unclear if Seto can even access those details. All her story illustrates is how insufficient her possessions are for satisfying her wants, even if she can never know that.
§
If Fragile Dreams uses its environments to celebrate Japanese aesthetics, then it uses Seto, the protagonist, to complicate them.
/.../
he’s so pre-occupied on his loss that he’s unable to draw a connection between the impermanence of life and its being valued in the first place. Any mentions of impermanence at this point in the story reveal Seto’s negative thoughts on the matter. For example, he opens the game with the words “At the end of a summer that was all too short” (tri-Crescendo). On one level, these words indicate his wishes that the summer had lasted longer. Yet on another, they connote loss. This is a consistent theme throughout Seto’s opening narration, implying that he can only perceive change and passing on painful terms. We might also draw connections between the youthful connotations of summer, Seto’s adolescence, and the death of his caretaker.
/.../
if we interpret the old man’s death as an opportunity for Seto to appreciate life’s transience, then we must also interpret the possibility of survivors as an opportunity for Seto to deny that very same transience.
/.../
Seto’s denial is best illustrated through his interactions with Ren, a silver-haired girl who appears to Seto very early in the narrative. She runs from him the second the two meet, and he only gets brief glimpses of her throughout the story. He follows her by the drawings she leaves in her wake, and when the two finally cross paths, it’s only for a short period of time. While the story uses these facts to code her character with impermanence and uncertainty, this isn’t the meaning that Seto reads from her. Upon first meeting her, he remarks, “On my journey through the world, all the people I thought I saw slipped away like they were just a mirage. But that girl… her cheek was warm to the touch” (tri-Crescendo). So for him, Ren represents life and stability. She is the anchor against which he can verify his own experiences as real. Yet the irony is that is in worrying about whether his experiences are real, he fails to appreciate them for what they are.
/.../
the time he spends with other people shows him how it’s possible to appreciate things for their temporary nature. The first person to show him this is PF, a robotic assistant that Seto attaches to his back. The two grow close to each other as they explore the underground mall in search of Ren. However, their journey together is very brief: at the end of the day, PF’s battery drains, effectively ending her life.
/.../
Where the old man struggled to share his most intimate with regrets with Seto after knowing him for fifteen years, PF has no problems telling him about how much she loved talking with him, despite only knowing him for a day.
/.../
The two themes that emerge from Seto’s time with PF — death and its relation to mono no aware — carry throughout his encounters with other people. Chiyo demonstrates this the best by bringing the two into focus for him. When the two characters meet, Seto initially sees her as the ghost of a bratty little girl who demands that he does the impossible. But as he continues to fulfill her requests, he eventually learns the reality of the situation: she is an old woman on her death bed. Chiyo leaves Seto with these final remarks: "The day will come when your journey will end as well. Your greatest adventure will be over and you will make your way home. However, your journey will not be complete. The days will still go on for you. One after another they will pass, until you’ve had enough of the monotony. No new discoveries will await you. You’ll watch the sun rise and set. That’s all your days will have to offer. That’s the moment when you’ll realize the truth. The sunbeams, the wind rolling over the tall grass, the idle chit-chat with friends…These were the gems of your life. Then your heart will be carried off by the gentle, caressing breeze and it will sparkle like a jewel, fade, and grow cold."
/.../
her own life suggests that mono no aware could be a psychological state of being rather than something inherent in life’s experiences. She was able to view the same natural phenomenon (sunrise/sunset) at least twice in her life but have greatly divergent reactions to them at different times. In her youth, she viewed the sun’s movement as a dull monotony. It is only on her deathbed that she can finally appreciate it as a liberating event. That realization didn’t come to her in a moment; she had to cultivate it over an entire lifetime of thought on the matter. In relaying her message to Seto, Chiyo helps him through the process of appreciating life’s transitory nature, and hopes to shorten the time necessary to learn it.
§
Silent Hill 2’s architecture, along with its iconic blend of fog and darkness, is its main antagonist.
/.../
Oddly enough, this unnerving dysfunction stems from the game’s sense of order. It has an obsession with the well-ordered spaces of institutions, taking the player from an apartment block, to a hospital, to a prison, and finally a hotel. The symmetrical ground plans for these locations, found on the game’s various maps, seems to have been pulled wholesale from life, rather than created for use in a videogame. In order to become functional spaces in a game where exploration is key, these maps have then been hacked into, with entrances blocked off and walls smashed through. The divisions, functions and even internal logic of the game’s architecture is subverted, room by room. The game constantly forces the player to turn back on herself at a dead end, to check again and again the map, and try to connect its straight and true lines with the decaying masonry around them.
/.../
The descents of Silent Hill 2 are many. It is no coincidence that the game’s protagonist, James Sunderland, begins his journey at a rest stop high above the town, and must descend into it. This marks a preoccupation with downward gestures that recurs throughout the game, from elevator rides, to climbing into your own grave.
/.../
In the final third of Silent Hill 2 the player arrives at the top of a staircase. Its not the first staircase in the game, or even the last, but it is the beginning of something. Projecting down into darkness, it marks the start of the game’s most exhausting descent.
/.../
This is where Silent Hill 2’s architecture reveals itself as a psychological construct. Up above, in the town, ordered spaces stand in a struggle with the onset of decay, but here, as you tread ever deeper, the subconscious takes over.
§
the beauty of P.T. is not in its basic looping structure, but they way in which it plays and experiments within that structure.
/.../
In semantic terms, the game’s corner is analogous to the classic ghost-story phrase “and then.” It is the architectural equivalent of the shock reveal, articulated through a 90-degree turn. It’s an ancient story-telling trick, holding information back until the last possible second, but P.T.’s twist on it is to do so without speaking a word, performing its repeated reveals through the clever manipulation of space. Sometimes these reveals are red-herrings, showing you the corridor you expect to see, but in the world of P.T. even this is a cause for concern—if the corridor hasn’t changed, then something else has. It’s worth nothing that almost everything that happens, from bloody fridges to generic horror graffiti, happens on the other side of that corner. After every repetition the first task is clear—walk. This is the way the storyteller has you in her grip. “She entered the corridor,” P.T.’s storyteller says, “walking cautiously, unsure of what might be waiting for her. As she reached the familiar corner she paused … and then …”
/.../
The clock, the phone and the radio, all three sources of information, are carefully spread, each given its own alcove. The front door is the only door that never opens, an escape to an outside world hinted at but never allowed. At the end of the corridor lies a short set of steps, meaning that for each loop you must descend a little further down. This descent is carefully offset by the balcony that hides in the darkness above the entryway, imbuing in the player the distinct feeling of being watched. These precise architectural features, twisted through an elegant play of light and shadow, are laid out with precise intelligence.
/.../
Agency is non-existent—instead, choreography reigns supreme. P.T.’s scares may follow well-worn horror iconography, but they don’t require it to function. Instead they rely on the corner and the corridor, the room and doorway, the bright and the dark. This—the idea that horror exists as little more than a series of spatial arrangements, presences and absences—is truly P.T.’s greatest trick.
§
Eventually, every genre, every media, has its Ulysses. I don’t know if Kentucky Route Zero is Ulysses. It’s certainly allusive: a structurally complex, confusing, the brilliant and beautiful episodic point and click game by Cardboard Computer in which a host of characters embark on a seemingly meaningless and mythical journey through the finance and poverty ravaged landscapes of rural Kentucky. Regardless, writing about KRZ is not “easy”. Partly because of its episodic nature, and partly — I think — because of its dense and almost Beckettian allusiveness, its semantic density, KRZ seems to escape ready comprehension and understanding. Its mechanics (the word we often descend on to describe a technical process) are both simple (literally, “point and click”) and alarmingly diffuse (navigating, by symbols, the Zero itself). Meanwhile, its ‘story’ – the fabula itself – is slippery, and the formal framework around which it is arranged is complex. It’s perhaps the hardest ‘text’ – not simply ‘game’, but text, product, artefact (see? Even finding the right category word is tough) – that I’ve ever tried to write about.
/.../
Maybe we’re not properly equipped to write long-form about video games — especially those games which excel in their own obscurity and strangeness — and are not used to it, or are standing in the primordial sludge of it.
/.../
For KRZ, and games like it, it might be best to think with the rhizome in mind. You build your theory as you go.
§
[SOMA]
These days, when we talk about being human, we’re more preoccupied with defining humanity in opposition to machines and advanced AIs. We want to reassure ourselves that we have something more than an uncanny android who looks like us, acts like us, speaks like us, and is better than us at almost everything. It’s as if we know our feeling of superiority is dwindling. Taking the Aristotelian definition to its extremes, perhaps we could say that modern-day machines, as purely rational creations, are even more human than us.
/.../
In trying to preserve the core of what it means to be human, it’s easy to forget that this core immediately changed when coming into contact precisely with what we’re defining humanity against. The very existence of machines has already changed our concept of what it means to be human.
/.../attachment to the body as an imprescindible part of one’s identity, both in a positive and in a negative way, is one manifestation of that excess that is unique to the human. We also have have Catherine, the exception who accompanies the player for the best part of the game but who lives in a chip attached to Simon’s Omnitool. I don’t think the game explicitly says why she doesn’t go mad like everyone else who suffered a similar fate, but I believe the answer may be found in her strong sense of purpose. /.../
Catherine is the most liminal figure in this world in which every barrier is being broken. A human mind in purely mechanical hardware, she is driven by a very specific purpose, and, like a machine, she evaluates the world purely in terms of utility towards that purpose. But what she wants to achieve is precisely the recovery of a space in which to be human. As such, she is driven by a concept of what human life means as opposed to the mere survival of biological functions, a concept that the WAU never understood.
/.../
The machine ends when there is no clear objective left to achieve. The human, as we have seen, begins with the excess: the reality of being left behind when the objective has been achieved and disappears. It’s the reality of being alive when there is nothing left to do, a reality in which the body remains in its irreducible, useless materiality.
§
When, in Bioshock: Infinite, then broken drunk Booker DeWitt batters down the doors of a castle that he himself built in another life to rescue his own daughter, trapped there in an asexual stasis it is not the chaos of imagery and symbolism that it at first seems, but instead a direct descendent of the form of rehabilitation pioneered by temperance literature.
/.../
Perhaps unsurprisingly then the piece of Infinite fan media that most makes sense to me is Zone’s Biocock: Intimate, which collapses the erotic tension inherent in the game and as Maddy Myers says ‘comes … a lot closer to offering me the version of Elizabeth that I wanted to see than BioShock did,’ one who ‘speaks, moans and calls the sexual shots.’
/.../
In Zone’s game, the protagonist, this time a disembodied cock rather than a disembodied gun, as if there is a real difference, is still Booker, making explicit the incestuous undertones of the source game while neither remarking on them or judging them.
/.../
Ken Levine, Bioshock’s lead creator, keeps telling people to stop sexualising Elizabeth because he views her as a daughter. But I cannot for the life of me imagine why he thought a young woman would neither develop or be the subject of a sexual gaze, especially when, as I keep saying, the story that is told in Infinite is the story of her sexual awakening and her emergence from the cloying constraints of a father who wants to own her and use her as a replacement for his wife, with all of the sexual labour that that implies.
/.../
It is a fairly common mechanism of patriarchy that violence against women is framed as being bad, by and for the understanding of men, on the premise that ‘you wouldn’t want this to happen to your daughter,’ that a victim is ‘somebody’s daughter.’ Fundamentally what this says is that men can apparently only view women as an object in relation to a man, not as a person in their own right. The non-daughter is an acceptable site for your sexual fantasies because she is not owned and spoken for. Female sexual awakening is therefore posited as a process by which a man separates the bond between father and daughter, destroying the tower and building a new one to encase her and protect her from the sexual fantasies of other men.
/.../
as an industry and a society we will continue to seek our redemption in the arms of those we have wronged, whose job it is, like the little sisters of the original Bioshock, to be used to fuel our monstrous rages and to accept our caresses and desires when we break down and wish for forgiveness. We will continue to expect these women to save us with their love.
[I love how pieces like these can put something in a larger context and enrich my understanding of something which didn't make as much sense before. It's interesting how I even come to appreciate Bioshock Infinite more in some twisted way, even if it's flawed in its execution and in using this idea of temperance without my having seen them putting it in brackets or providing self-reflexivity.]
§
we see Fragile Dreams trying to reconcile modern Japanese life with traditional Japanese thought. However, looking at the game on a character level complicates the aesthetic. These ways of seeing the world are not natural, as Seto (the game’s protagonist) must spend the entire game learning to appreciate the beauty that arises from a fleeting reality.
/.../
For Japanese aesthetes, the most beautiful arts would blend into the greater world around them. Anything that announced its presence was considered simple, boisterous, and to be avoided.
/.../
in terms of mono no aware, the best way to bring out something’s beauty is to remind us of its inevitable change or passing.
/.../
as long as technology does not supplant the feeling of change and being in nature, it’s capable of functioning within Japanese aesthetic theory.
/.../
Over the course of the game, Seto finds various broken items amid the wreckage. When he takes those items to a bonfire, he finds out what they are, and hears a short story regarding the item’s last owner. There’s a consistent message running through these stories: one of unfulfilled desire. The protagonists of these stories regret making choices they can never fix, or they feel scared after having something valuable taken from them. They realize that their lives are short, and Seto sees that their worries outlasted them.
/.../
The game relays most of these narratives through some object the owner confided in. They intended to relieve their pain at least a little bit, but all we see is their emotional pain; we rarely see any kind of resolution. Therefore, the objects fail to serve their intended purpose of consoling their owners. The cell phone’s story displays this quite poignantly: while her intent is for the world to remember her, the tragic irony of her situation is that she leaves us nothing by which we can identify her. We don’t know her name or any details about her life, and it’s unclear if Seto can even access those details. All her story illustrates is how insufficient her possessions are for satisfying her wants, even if she can never know that.
§
If Fragile Dreams uses its environments to celebrate Japanese aesthetics, then it uses Seto, the protagonist, to complicate them.
/.../
he’s so pre-occupied on his loss that he’s unable to draw a connection between the impermanence of life and its being valued in the first place. Any mentions of impermanence at this point in the story reveal Seto’s negative thoughts on the matter. For example, he opens the game with the words “At the end of a summer that was all too short” (tri-Crescendo). On one level, these words indicate his wishes that the summer had lasted longer. Yet on another, they connote loss. This is a consistent theme throughout Seto’s opening narration, implying that he can only perceive change and passing on painful terms. We might also draw connections between the youthful connotations of summer, Seto’s adolescence, and the death of his caretaker.
/.../
if we interpret the old man’s death as an opportunity for Seto to appreciate life’s transience, then we must also interpret the possibility of survivors as an opportunity for Seto to deny that very same transience.
/.../
Seto’s denial is best illustrated through his interactions with Ren, a silver-haired girl who appears to Seto very early in the narrative. She runs from him the second the two meet, and he only gets brief glimpses of her throughout the story. He follows her by the drawings she leaves in her wake, and when the two finally cross paths, it’s only for a short period of time. While the story uses these facts to code her character with impermanence and uncertainty, this isn’t the meaning that Seto reads from her. Upon first meeting her, he remarks, “On my journey through the world, all the people I thought I saw slipped away like they were just a mirage. But that girl… her cheek was warm to the touch” (tri-Crescendo). So for him, Ren represents life and stability. She is the anchor against which he can verify his own experiences as real. Yet the irony is that is in worrying about whether his experiences are real, he fails to appreciate them for what they are.
/.../
the time he spends with other people shows him how it’s possible to appreciate things for their temporary nature. The first person to show him this is PF, a robotic assistant that Seto attaches to his back. The two grow close to each other as they explore the underground mall in search of Ren. However, their journey together is very brief: at the end of the day, PF’s battery drains, effectively ending her life.
/.../
Where the old man struggled to share his most intimate with regrets with Seto after knowing him for fifteen years, PF has no problems telling him about how much she loved talking with him, despite only knowing him for a day.
/.../
The two themes that emerge from Seto’s time with PF — death and its relation to mono no aware — carry throughout his encounters with other people. Chiyo demonstrates this the best by bringing the two into focus for him. When the two characters meet, Seto initially sees her as the ghost of a bratty little girl who demands that he does the impossible. But as he continues to fulfill her requests, he eventually learns the reality of the situation: she is an old woman on her death bed. Chiyo leaves Seto with these final remarks: "The day will come when your journey will end as well. Your greatest adventure will be over and you will make your way home. However, your journey will not be complete. The days will still go on for you. One after another they will pass, until you’ve had enough of the monotony. No new discoveries will await you. You’ll watch the sun rise and set. That’s all your days will have to offer. That’s the moment when you’ll realize the truth. The sunbeams, the wind rolling over the tall grass, the idle chit-chat with friends…These were the gems of your life. Then your heart will be carried off by the gentle, caressing breeze and it will sparkle like a jewel, fade, and grow cold."
/.../
her own life suggests that mono no aware could be a psychological state of being rather than something inherent in life’s experiences. She was able to view the same natural phenomenon (sunrise/sunset) at least twice in her life but have greatly divergent reactions to them at different times. In her youth, she viewed the sun’s movement as a dull monotony. It is only on her deathbed that she can finally appreciate it as a liberating event. That realization didn’t come to her in a moment; she had to cultivate it over an entire lifetime of thought on the matter. In relaying her message to Seto, Chiyo helps him through the process of appreciating life’s transitory nature, and hopes to shorten the time necessary to learn it.
§
Silent Hill 2’s architecture, along with its iconic blend of fog and darkness, is its main antagonist.
/.../
Oddly enough, this unnerving dysfunction stems from the game’s sense of order. It has an obsession with the well-ordered spaces of institutions, taking the player from an apartment block, to a hospital, to a prison, and finally a hotel. The symmetrical ground plans for these locations, found on the game’s various maps, seems to have been pulled wholesale from life, rather than created for use in a videogame. In order to become functional spaces in a game where exploration is key, these maps have then been hacked into, with entrances blocked off and walls smashed through. The divisions, functions and even internal logic of the game’s architecture is subverted, room by room. The game constantly forces the player to turn back on herself at a dead end, to check again and again the map, and try to connect its straight and true lines with the decaying masonry around them.
/.../
The descents of Silent Hill 2 are many. It is no coincidence that the game’s protagonist, James Sunderland, begins his journey at a rest stop high above the town, and must descend into it. This marks a preoccupation with downward gestures that recurs throughout the game, from elevator rides, to climbing into your own grave.
/.../
In the final third of Silent Hill 2 the player arrives at the top of a staircase. Its not the first staircase in the game, or even the last, but it is the beginning of something. Projecting down into darkness, it marks the start of the game’s most exhausting descent.
/.../
This is where Silent Hill 2’s architecture reveals itself as a psychological construct. Up above, in the town, ordered spaces stand in a struggle with the onset of decay, but here, as you tread ever deeper, the subconscious takes over.
§
the beauty of P.T. is not in its basic looping structure, but they way in which it plays and experiments within that structure.
/.../
In semantic terms, the game’s corner is analogous to the classic ghost-story phrase “and then.” It is the architectural equivalent of the shock reveal, articulated through a 90-degree turn. It’s an ancient story-telling trick, holding information back until the last possible second, but P.T.’s twist on it is to do so without speaking a word, performing its repeated reveals through the clever manipulation of space. Sometimes these reveals are red-herrings, showing you the corridor you expect to see, but in the world of P.T. even this is a cause for concern—if the corridor hasn’t changed, then something else has. It’s worth nothing that almost everything that happens, from bloody fridges to generic horror graffiti, happens on the other side of that corner. After every repetition the first task is clear—walk. This is the way the storyteller has you in her grip. “She entered the corridor,” P.T.’s storyteller says, “walking cautiously, unsure of what might be waiting for her. As she reached the familiar corner she paused … and then …”
/.../
The clock, the phone and the radio, all three sources of information, are carefully spread, each given its own alcove. The front door is the only door that never opens, an escape to an outside world hinted at but never allowed. At the end of the corridor lies a short set of steps, meaning that for each loop you must descend a little further down. This descent is carefully offset by the balcony that hides in the darkness above the entryway, imbuing in the player the distinct feeling of being watched. These precise architectural features, twisted through an elegant play of light and shadow, are laid out with precise intelligence.
/.../
Agency is non-existent—instead, choreography reigns supreme. P.T.’s scares may follow well-worn horror iconography, but they don’t require it to function. Instead they rely on the corner and the corridor, the room and doorway, the bright and the dark. This—the idea that horror exists as little more than a series of spatial arrangements, presences and absences—is truly P.T.’s greatest trick.
§
Eventually, every genre, every media, has its Ulysses. I don’t know if Kentucky Route Zero is Ulysses. It’s certainly allusive: a structurally complex, confusing, the brilliant and beautiful episodic point and click game by Cardboard Computer in which a host of characters embark on a seemingly meaningless and mythical journey through the finance and poverty ravaged landscapes of rural Kentucky. Regardless, writing about KRZ is not “easy”. Partly because of its episodic nature, and partly — I think — because of its dense and almost Beckettian allusiveness, its semantic density, KRZ seems to escape ready comprehension and understanding. Its mechanics (the word we often descend on to describe a technical process) are both simple (literally, “point and click”) and alarmingly diffuse (navigating, by symbols, the Zero itself). Meanwhile, its ‘story’ – the fabula itself – is slippery, and the formal framework around which it is arranged is complex. It’s perhaps the hardest ‘text’ – not simply ‘game’, but text, product, artefact (see? Even finding the right category word is tough) – that I’ve ever tried to write about.
/.../
Maybe we’re not properly equipped to write long-form about video games — especially those games which excel in their own obscurity and strangeness — and are not used to it, or are standing in the primordial sludge of it.
/.../
For KRZ, and games like it, it might be best to think with the rhizome in mind. You build your theory as you go.
§
[SOMA]
These days, when we talk about being human, we’re more preoccupied with defining humanity in opposition to machines and advanced AIs. We want to reassure ourselves that we have something more than an uncanny android who looks like us, acts like us, speaks like us, and is better than us at almost everything. It’s as if we know our feeling of superiority is dwindling. Taking the Aristotelian definition to its extremes, perhaps we could say that modern-day machines, as purely rational creations, are even more human than us.
/.../
In trying to preserve the core of what it means to be human, it’s easy to forget that this core immediately changed when coming into contact precisely with what we’re defining humanity against. The very existence of machines has already changed our concept of what it means to be human.
/.../attachment to the body as an imprescindible part of one’s identity, both in a positive and in a negative way, is one manifestation of that excess that is unique to the human. We also have have Catherine, the exception who accompanies the player for the best part of the game but who lives in a chip attached to Simon’s Omnitool. I don’t think the game explicitly says why she doesn’t go mad like everyone else who suffered a similar fate, but I believe the answer may be found in her strong sense of purpose. /.../
Catherine is the most liminal figure in this world in which every barrier is being broken. A human mind in purely mechanical hardware, she is driven by a very specific purpose, and, like a machine, she evaluates the world purely in terms of utility towards that purpose. But what she wants to achieve is precisely the recovery of a space in which to be human. As such, she is driven by a concept of what human life means as opposed to the mere survival of biological functions, a concept that the WAU never understood.
/.../
The machine ends when there is no clear objective left to achieve. The human, as we have seen, begins with the excess: the reality of being left behind when the objective has been achieved and disappears. It’s the reality of being alive when there is nothing left to do, a reality in which the body remains in its irreducible, useless materiality.
§
Thursday, December 3, 2015
Some sound and video for a late Halloween.
§MONSTERS OF THE WEEK
The Gods of Silent Hill (Part 1): Valtiel - Monsters of the Week - YouTube
The Gods of Silent Hill (Part 2): The Yellow God - Monsters of the Week - YouTube
Pyramid Head. (Silent Hill 2) - Monsters of the Week - RagnarRox - YouTube
The Butcher. (Silent Hill Origins) - Monsters of the Week - RagnarRox - YouTube
SOMA: The Philosophical Zombie - Monsters of the Week - YouTube
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream: A Freudian Nightmare - Monsters of the Week - RagnarRox - YouTube
§OTHER VIDEOS
Until Dawn - Observations on Interactive Drama Design - RagnarRox - YouTube
Errant Signal - SOMA (Spoilers) - YouTube
Places of Horror - The Secrets of Scary Settings - Extra Credits - YouTube
5 Annoying Things HORROR Games Need to STOP Doing - RagnarRox - YouTube
Silent Hill 2 or (The Genius of Hidden Player Choice) - RagnarRox - YouTube
Silent Hill & Konami - Did You Know Gaming? Feat. Matt & Pat of Super Best Friends Play - YouTube
Tokens of Memory: Sanitarium - Monsters of the Week - RagnarRox - YouTube
§PODCASTS
Moving Pixels: The Music Machine
Moving Pixels: The Fall
Moving Pixels: The Swapper
§
Ontological Geek: Horror and Asylums
01:36 – Mashup of Thief music by Eric Brosius
05:20 – Horror and horror music in Games (Amnesia: the Dark Descent, et al.)
27:35 – Asylums in games (Outlast, Thief: Deadly Shadows, Batman: Arkham Asylum, et al.)
1:34:26 – Roundtable discussion (Brothers: a Tale of Two Sons, Dark Souls, To the Moon)
The Gods of Silent Hill (Part 1): Valtiel - Monsters of the Week - YouTube
The Gods of Silent Hill (Part 2): The Yellow God - Monsters of the Week - YouTube
Pyramid Head. (Silent Hill 2) - Monsters of the Week - RagnarRox - YouTube
The Butcher. (Silent Hill Origins) - Monsters of the Week - RagnarRox - YouTube
SOMA: The Philosophical Zombie - Monsters of the Week - YouTube
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream: A Freudian Nightmare - Monsters of the Week - RagnarRox - YouTube
§OTHER VIDEOS
Until Dawn - Observations on Interactive Drama Design - RagnarRox - YouTube
Errant Signal - SOMA (Spoilers) - YouTube
Places of Horror - The Secrets of Scary Settings - Extra Credits - YouTube
5 Annoying Things HORROR Games Need to STOP Doing - RagnarRox - YouTube
Silent Hill 2 or (The Genius of Hidden Player Choice) - RagnarRox - YouTube
Silent Hill & Konami - Did You Know Gaming? Feat. Matt & Pat of Super Best Friends Play - YouTube
Tokens of Memory: Sanitarium - Monsters of the Week - RagnarRox - YouTube
§PODCASTS
Moving Pixels: The Music Machine
Moving Pixels: The Fall
Moving Pixels: The Swapper
§
Ontological Geek: Horror and Asylums
01:36 – Mashup of Thief music by Eric Brosius
05:20 – Horror and horror music in Games (Amnesia: the Dark Descent, et al.)
27:35 – Asylums in games (Outlast, Thief: Deadly Shadows, Batman: Arkham Asylum, et al.)
1:34:26 – Roundtable discussion (Brothers: a Tale of Two Sons, Dark Souls, To the Moon)
Sunday, June 14, 2015
14/6
A Eulogy for P.T.
§
Why is Mario's Theme Music So Catchy?? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
§
The Minecraft Industrial Revolution
§
Would You Believe There Have Been Only 14 Playable Black Women in Gaming?
§
Game Theory: Why Video Game Movies SUCK!
§
How Can Videogames Make You a Kinder Person? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
§
Every single game I can think of where I’d really like to skip an individual boss fight or mini-boss fight has a button available to skip lines of dialogue or entire conversations entirely. Players can willingly skip the parts of games I’m there to see, so why can’t I skip the parts of games that they’re there to see?
§
Why is Mario's Theme Music So Catchy?? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
§
The Minecraft Industrial Revolution
§
Would You Believe There Have Been Only 14 Playable Black Women in Gaming?
§
Game Theory: Why Video Game Movies SUCK!
§
How Can Videogames Make You a Kinder Person? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
§
Every single game I can think of where I’d really like to skip an individual boss fight or mini-boss fight has a button available to skip lines of dialogue or entire conversations entirely. Players can willingly skip the parts of games I’m there to see, so why can’t I skip the parts of games that they’re there to see?
Monday, June 8, 2015
Someone elses article about Shattered Memories
I’m finally ready to talk about Silent Hill Shattered Memories.
As you may know from reading my top picks from last year[1], I found the game to be one of the most emotional and beautiful games I’ve played in a while. I even went so far as to say that the “game…understands the series and videogames as a medium so well that it alienated nearly the entire Silent Hill fan community.” I was not being hyperbolic. I meant every word I said.
So let’s talk about that reaction. Climax’s previous Silent Hill game–Origins–was very Silent Hill By The Numbers and is widely considered one of the least interesting titles in the series for that very reason. Shattered Memories, on the other hand, throws out nearly everything that makes Silent Hill be Silent Hill, and that led to an appropriately chilly reception. Rather than being a case of a developer latching onto a series to boost sales no matter how inappropriate the idea is (The Room, anyone?), I believe that the alterations and changes were not made lightly. Climax had the opportunity to give us Another Silent Hill game that would be everything we expected and would sell well, but it decided to brave internet flames to give us an example of a videogame that does something different. I would like to take some time to briefly (for me, at least) discuss how Shattered Memories uses its Silent Hill-ness in order to futher its themes.
There will be spoilers.
I tend to get fairly idiosyncratic interpretations of games, so take anything I say with a grain of salt, but I actually think the Silent Hill brand is pretty necessary to the game. Thematically, the game is about the process of therapy as a method of uncovering past trauma in order to finally deal with it properly. Cheryl’s character has some preconceived notions about how the past was, how the people in her life acted and how they treated her. As is the case with many of us, she dealt with this trauma at too young of an age to make a rational, empowered decision and it’s caused some major psychological issues. She has this notion of who her father is, who her mother is, why she feels abandoned, etc. Dr. Kaufmann’s goal is to force her to break through her prejudices and see her parents for who they “really” are–flawed and human. To realize that, for example, the divorce wasn’t something done *to* her, but the result of two people who simply made some mistakes.
Without playing the games, without having lived with these characters for 10 years, one can certainly understand and appreciate the story–it’s extremely well-written, I feel, and the emotional resonances of the story do still exist. That’s part of why the game needs the variable dimension–if the questions are answered honestly, it’ll confront you with things that you may feel guilty or ashamed about.
But if you’re a Silent Hill fan, the personal resonances become deeper, because you *have* lived with a picture of Harry for 10 years. The first time you saw him, in SH1, he’s a devoted father willing to go through hell to find his daughter. Dhalia is a manipulative woman in league with the demons and willing to inflict abuse and neglect upon her daughter. Shattered Memories’ Harry is not the Harry we have come to know and love. Mine was a drunk. Yours may have been promiscuous. Either way, there’s supposed to be a feeling of wrong. Did you pay attention to the backlash over the new character design? People criticized the fact that, this time, Harry wears glasses. Ruined forever.
You are, through the entire game, supposed to be telling yourself: That’s not Harry. That’s not Dhalia. That’s not Cybil. They changed these characters. They changed them into something completely different and that is not how these characters are and why did they change my favorite characters and why didn’t they just use new characters if they’re going to shit all over them?
For Cheryl, Dr. Kaufmann is doing the psychoanalytic equivalent of shitting over her family.
As far as my limited understanding of therapy goes[2], there are two related concepts at work here–repression and resistance. Both are pretty easy to understand and you may already know them. Repression is when a traumatic experience or a desire proves so difficult to deal with that you banish all traces of it from conscious thought. This rarely goes well. The trauma will appear elsewhere. I don’t believe it to be so straightforward as Freud’s conception of repression–few people do anymore–but pretty much everyone agrees that if you go through some tough times before you’re ready to deal with them, and you’re expected to deal with them on your own, you’re going to have a bit of an interesting worldview.
But the problem is this: It’s YOUR worldview, dammit, and though you may be miserable and crazy, you’re damned if you want it changed or taken away from you. And that’s where you get into resistance. You may not like the way you think and feel and act, and you may be going through therapy to change those things, but no one said it was going to be easy. No matter how comfortable you feel with your therapist, no matter how open a person you may be, no matter how much you desire to change or receptive you may be, there are going to be times where you’re going to want to fight your therapist or spend the full hour saying nothing and staring at the window.
Very little of the action in Shattered Memories actually happens. What we are seeing is a literalization of resistance. The Raw Shocks are the most obvious manifestation of this. Any time a character is about to reveal a truth about the situation, any time Cheryl is about to have a breakthrough, the world freezes and a bunch of monsters chase. When you get caught, the monsters appear to caress Harry. A lot has been speculated about this, often in Electra-complex terms–there’s definitely some strong overtones of this throughout the game[3]. There’s other theories that the creatures are offering simple comfort. Whatever your interpretation, it’s undeniable that the creatures aren’t trying to kill Harry–they’re just detaining him indefinitely. The creatures are agents of repression. They appear to protect Cheryl from the truth. More importantly, they prevent the player from continuing.
Let’s never forget this: Shattered Memories was pitched at tailoring itself to the player from the beginnig. The very first thing you see is a warning screen which, rather than the normal survival horror intro letting you know that the game you just paid $50 for contains violent images and you should shut it off forever if you don’t want to see blood, alerts you to the psychological profiling. “This game plays you as much as you play it.” It shows its hand: If you don’t want to be manipulated, don’t play it.
In the original Silent Hill, Harry braves hell in order to find his daughter, with no thoughts towards his own safety. Dhalia manipulates him, prevents him from finding Cheryl, is ultimately responsible for all the horror. Dr. Kaufmann abuses his position in order to grow his power, callously using everyone around him without any care for their feelings. Cheryl is a sweet little girl who’s been wronged, who is scared, and who can’t take care of herself–who needs her daddy to take care of her. Those are the preconceptions the player takes in with him or her. Take out the supernatural elements and view the characters as archetypes. Harry is separated from his daughter and, even in death, longs to be with her. Dhalia drove Harry to a ruin which ultimately led to his death and Cheryl’s unstable mental state. Dr. Kaufmann is a sadistic, angry, often frightening man who yells at and berates his patients. Cheryl herself is having a difficult time making her way through the world and anxiously awaits the return of the one person who can make her whole. Those are the preconceptions that Cheryl brings to therapy.
Shattered Memories plays you as much as you play it. It manipulates you. That backlash you feel? The feeling that this Harry isn’t the real Harry, that that’s not who Dhalia is–that’s resistance.
You’ve got your ideas about how Silent Hill works, the game is challenging you, and you’re fighting back. I don’t even think that the “real” Dr. Kaufmann is as angry as he appears in the game. I think he’s just a stubborn therapist who knows that the best thing for his patient is to force her to confront what she does not want to, and she sees him as a raving lunatic.
We’ve all seen player/character identification before: The example I always give is when Mario falls down a pit, the player simply says, “I died.” We’ve all seen games which directly involve or address the player–the final battle of Earthbound, for examples. We’ve even seen games which give the player the same exact experience as the character–the .hack// series is one. Shattered Memories, in my interpretation, does all of those things. It places its psychology scenes in first-person not only to delay the reveal, but because the game desires to analyze you. Because you are the one answering the therapist’s questions, you are, effectively, taking on the role of Cheryl.
Shattered Memories not only uses videogames as a medium for telling its story, it uses the Silent Hill franchise as part of its palette. Most of the complaints had to do with the fact that it’s widely perceived that the game simply uses the franchise/characters in order to boost sales of an unrelated game; it would have had a better reception if it had used all new characters to tell its story. But that’s clearly not the case. The game is quite literally about the inability to see people you believe you know in a different light, from a different angle. Our unwillingness to do so mimics the characters’ inability. We need to have preconceptions of these characters; we quite simply need to have some baggage. Giving this storyline to completely original characters would not have made it nearly as effective; the player would have been more of an observer than an active participant. The fact is, the only way the game could have furthered its themes more intensely would be if the game had been from the perspective of Princess Peach, thinking about Mario’s journey to save her.
Love,
Richard
_______________________________
1.http://cartridgeblowers.wordpress.com/2010/01/02/2009-in-memorium-richard/
[back]
2. I may have a Lit degree, but I have more credentials about talking about psychology than Cooper Lawrence does about videogames, and she even got on TV and everything. A large component of that lit degree was spent on psychoanalytic criticism, so I’ve got some Lacan and Jung and other writers under my belt. Meanwhile, I’m in therapy myself; my therapist is aware of my interests and will often discuss the underlying concepts of what’s going on in our sessions with me. I may not know enough to write a paper for an academic journal, but I’m not working from entirely false information here. And that’s why our side is better than the moral guardians’.
[back]
3. My friend Rai pointed out that Silent Hill 3′s main theme, “You’re Not Here”, always felt a little too sexual for the game’s plot. The song is intended to be sung by Heather/Cheryl–there’s a video which i believe is official depicting her singing it. The most important character to her is her father, who is definitely a source of strength for her, and it’s natural for her to miss him, but the lyrics are clearly addressed to a lost lover. In light of Shattered Memories’ plot, the song takes on a completely different meaning.
As you may know from reading my top picks from last year[1], I found the game to be one of the most emotional and beautiful games I’ve played in a while. I even went so far as to say that the “game…understands the series and videogames as a medium so well that it alienated nearly the entire Silent Hill fan community.” I was not being hyperbolic. I meant every word I said.
So let’s talk about that reaction. Climax’s previous Silent Hill game–Origins–was very Silent Hill By The Numbers and is widely considered one of the least interesting titles in the series for that very reason. Shattered Memories, on the other hand, throws out nearly everything that makes Silent Hill be Silent Hill, and that led to an appropriately chilly reception. Rather than being a case of a developer latching onto a series to boost sales no matter how inappropriate the idea is (The Room, anyone?), I believe that the alterations and changes were not made lightly. Climax had the opportunity to give us Another Silent Hill game that would be everything we expected and would sell well, but it decided to brave internet flames to give us an example of a videogame that does something different. I would like to take some time to briefly (for me, at least) discuss how Shattered Memories uses its Silent Hill-ness in order to futher its themes.
There will be spoilers.
I tend to get fairly idiosyncratic interpretations of games, so take anything I say with a grain of salt, but I actually think the Silent Hill brand is pretty necessary to the game. Thematically, the game is about the process of therapy as a method of uncovering past trauma in order to finally deal with it properly. Cheryl’s character has some preconceived notions about how the past was, how the people in her life acted and how they treated her. As is the case with many of us, she dealt with this trauma at too young of an age to make a rational, empowered decision and it’s caused some major psychological issues. She has this notion of who her father is, who her mother is, why she feels abandoned, etc. Dr. Kaufmann’s goal is to force her to break through her prejudices and see her parents for who they “really” are–flawed and human. To realize that, for example, the divorce wasn’t something done *to* her, but the result of two people who simply made some mistakes.
Without playing the games, without having lived with these characters for 10 years, one can certainly understand and appreciate the story–it’s extremely well-written, I feel, and the emotional resonances of the story do still exist. That’s part of why the game needs the variable dimension–if the questions are answered honestly, it’ll confront you with things that you may feel guilty or ashamed about.
But if you’re a Silent Hill fan, the personal resonances become deeper, because you *have* lived with a picture of Harry for 10 years. The first time you saw him, in SH1, he’s a devoted father willing to go through hell to find his daughter. Dhalia is a manipulative woman in league with the demons and willing to inflict abuse and neglect upon her daughter. Shattered Memories’ Harry is not the Harry we have come to know and love. Mine was a drunk. Yours may have been promiscuous. Either way, there’s supposed to be a feeling of wrong. Did you pay attention to the backlash over the new character design? People criticized the fact that, this time, Harry wears glasses. Ruined forever.
You are, through the entire game, supposed to be telling yourself: That’s not Harry. That’s not Dhalia. That’s not Cybil. They changed these characters. They changed them into something completely different and that is not how these characters are and why did they change my favorite characters and why didn’t they just use new characters if they’re going to shit all over them?
For Cheryl, Dr. Kaufmann is doing the psychoanalytic equivalent of shitting over her family.
As far as my limited understanding of therapy goes[2], there are two related concepts at work here–repression and resistance. Both are pretty easy to understand and you may already know them. Repression is when a traumatic experience or a desire proves so difficult to deal with that you banish all traces of it from conscious thought. This rarely goes well. The trauma will appear elsewhere. I don’t believe it to be so straightforward as Freud’s conception of repression–few people do anymore–but pretty much everyone agrees that if you go through some tough times before you’re ready to deal with them, and you’re expected to deal with them on your own, you’re going to have a bit of an interesting worldview.
But the problem is this: It’s YOUR worldview, dammit, and though you may be miserable and crazy, you’re damned if you want it changed or taken away from you. And that’s where you get into resistance. You may not like the way you think and feel and act, and you may be going through therapy to change those things, but no one said it was going to be easy. No matter how comfortable you feel with your therapist, no matter how open a person you may be, no matter how much you desire to change or receptive you may be, there are going to be times where you’re going to want to fight your therapist or spend the full hour saying nothing and staring at the window.
Very little of the action in Shattered Memories actually happens. What we are seeing is a literalization of resistance. The Raw Shocks are the most obvious manifestation of this. Any time a character is about to reveal a truth about the situation, any time Cheryl is about to have a breakthrough, the world freezes and a bunch of monsters chase. When you get caught, the monsters appear to caress Harry. A lot has been speculated about this, often in Electra-complex terms–there’s definitely some strong overtones of this throughout the game[3]. There’s other theories that the creatures are offering simple comfort. Whatever your interpretation, it’s undeniable that the creatures aren’t trying to kill Harry–they’re just detaining him indefinitely. The creatures are agents of repression. They appear to protect Cheryl from the truth. More importantly, they prevent the player from continuing.
Let’s never forget this: Shattered Memories was pitched at tailoring itself to the player from the beginnig. The very first thing you see is a warning screen which, rather than the normal survival horror intro letting you know that the game you just paid $50 for contains violent images and you should shut it off forever if you don’t want to see blood, alerts you to the psychological profiling. “This game plays you as much as you play it.” It shows its hand: If you don’t want to be manipulated, don’t play it.
In the original Silent Hill, Harry braves hell in order to find his daughter, with no thoughts towards his own safety. Dhalia manipulates him, prevents him from finding Cheryl, is ultimately responsible for all the horror. Dr. Kaufmann abuses his position in order to grow his power, callously using everyone around him without any care for their feelings. Cheryl is a sweet little girl who’s been wronged, who is scared, and who can’t take care of herself–who needs her daddy to take care of her. Those are the preconceptions the player takes in with him or her. Take out the supernatural elements and view the characters as archetypes. Harry is separated from his daughter and, even in death, longs to be with her. Dhalia drove Harry to a ruin which ultimately led to his death and Cheryl’s unstable mental state. Dr. Kaufmann is a sadistic, angry, often frightening man who yells at and berates his patients. Cheryl herself is having a difficult time making her way through the world and anxiously awaits the return of the one person who can make her whole. Those are the preconceptions that Cheryl brings to therapy.
Shattered Memories plays you as much as you play it. It manipulates you. That backlash you feel? The feeling that this Harry isn’t the real Harry, that that’s not who Dhalia is–that’s resistance.
You’ve got your ideas about how Silent Hill works, the game is challenging you, and you’re fighting back. I don’t even think that the “real” Dr. Kaufmann is as angry as he appears in the game. I think he’s just a stubborn therapist who knows that the best thing for his patient is to force her to confront what she does not want to, and she sees him as a raving lunatic.
We’ve all seen player/character identification before: The example I always give is when Mario falls down a pit, the player simply says, “I died.” We’ve all seen games which directly involve or address the player–the final battle of Earthbound, for examples. We’ve even seen games which give the player the same exact experience as the character–the .hack// series is one. Shattered Memories, in my interpretation, does all of those things. It places its psychology scenes in first-person not only to delay the reveal, but because the game desires to analyze you. Because you are the one answering the therapist’s questions, you are, effectively, taking on the role of Cheryl.
Shattered Memories not only uses videogames as a medium for telling its story, it uses the Silent Hill franchise as part of its palette. Most of the complaints had to do with the fact that it’s widely perceived that the game simply uses the franchise/characters in order to boost sales of an unrelated game; it would have had a better reception if it had used all new characters to tell its story. But that’s clearly not the case. The game is quite literally about the inability to see people you believe you know in a different light, from a different angle. Our unwillingness to do so mimics the characters’ inability. We need to have preconceptions of these characters; we quite simply need to have some baggage. Giving this storyline to completely original characters would not have made it nearly as effective; the player would have been more of an observer than an active participant. The fact is, the only way the game could have furthered its themes more intensely would be if the game had been from the perspective of Princess Peach, thinking about Mario’s journey to save her.
Love,
Richard
_______________________________
1.http://cartridgeblowers.wordpress.com/2010/01/02/2009-in-memorium-richard/
[back]
2. I may have a Lit degree, but I have more credentials about talking about psychology than Cooper Lawrence does about videogames, and she even got on TV and everything. A large component of that lit degree was spent on psychoanalytic criticism, so I’ve got some Lacan and Jung and other writers under my belt. Meanwhile, I’m in therapy myself; my therapist is aware of my interests and will often discuss the underlying concepts of what’s going on in our sessions with me. I may not know enough to write a paper for an academic journal, but I’m not working from entirely false information here. And that’s why our side is better than the moral guardians’.
[back]
3. My friend Rai pointed out that Silent Hill 3′s main theme, “You’re Not Here”, always felt a little too sexual for the game’s plot. The song is intended to be sung by Heather/Cheryl–there’s a video which i believe is official depicting her singing it. The most important character to her is her father, who is definitely a source of strength for her, and it’s natural for her to miss him, but the lyrics are clearly addressed to a lost lover. In light of Shattered Memories’ plot, the song takes on a completely different meaning.
Sunday, October 26, 2014
26/10
§KICKSTARTER
The Black Glove
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/theblackglove/the-black-glove
http://dayfornightgames.com/black-glove-gameplay
http://dayfornightgames.com/maze-space-minotaur
§PLAYED
Zest
Be a good samaritan and go to the church in this game. That part has quite a wonderful sermon, where as Emily Short writes, "The loaves and fishes weren’t multiplied because God miraculously violated the law of the conservation of mass, but that the people in the crowd were shamed or persuaded into donating their own food which they had formerly been selfishly reserving for themselves". As the priest in Zest says - "That instead of an audience, they had become a community". Let's top it off with a nice prayer:
Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace;
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is discord, harmony;
Where there is error, truth;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master, Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console;
To be understood as to understand;
To be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
§
Bernband (Tom van den Boogaart)
It fascinates me how lo-fi experiences such as this and Slave of God can immerse and mystify me so strongly. At the surface level, there doesn't seem very much to these experiences, yet just walking around there - no aim in sight, exploring stuff - can feel more compelling and exciting than exploring a town in a high-end RPG, say Wasteland 2. Well, for some time at least - I guess making larger areas with more substance is where it gets really tricky to sustain my attention. Immersion in these walking simulators (paradoxically?) probably has something to do with the lack of objectives, lack of "agency", lack of pressure put on me as a player to perform, lack of uncanny valleys, lack of too high expectations on what the game might be simulating and how finegrained the system is for that simulation. It thus probably has something to do with simulation fever. By painting in broad strokes, it leaves more to the imagination. This reminds me of Chris Bateman's Imaginary Games, and some ideas there: "The movie dictates almost everything about the accompanying game of make believe, and thus the movie is more intrusive in the viewer's game than for example a book, the authorial vision stronger. The props (things mandating specific imaginings in games of make-believe) do not leave much room for the imagination of the player, which explains why the experience of a movie can be quite unconvincing and non-immersive when the props are of poor quality." Yes indeed, and the psychological locks upon you may be as such that you deem the movie to be of bad quality ("at the surface it seems like nothing much, really"), to be cliched or stupid, and you could still be moved emotionally by it, or in this case, immersed.
§
NaissanceE is all about architecture and atmosphere. Shadows cast on white and grey. Well, not only - it is also about breathing, and running, and jumping. But without any context. Sort of. What do I know, I only played it for an hour and watched the last chapter on youtube. The soundscape is very unsettling and wonderful too. It's like an alien Blade Runner running around in the abstract love child of Tarkovsky and Kubrik.
I'm hoping when these darn walking simulators flood the VR-market people will become too seasick to jump around, and instead just opt for, well, walking. Or autojumping. Or something.
§
A City Sleeps
I've been a fan of Harmonix ever since FreQuency and Amplitude, and although their kickstarter video pitch was awesome, the game pitched seems to be the same game which was released almost ten years ago, only with new songs. This interests me as little as yet another Rockband, and the music video game genre in general lays dormant for me right now. But Harmonix seem to be trying some different stuff too, both in Chroma and A City Sleeps. Shmups are another genre which I've been a big fan of, but which I'm really not into these days, so the music game-shmup-breed that is A City Sleeps comes at me from a very specific angle. I didn't expect much, and after the initial hour I was very pleasantly surprised, only to be disappointed when venturing further. I've come to the conclusion that the shooting and scoring in the game isn't very deep. The potential was there to let the music guide your dodging, to let your secondary weapons be placed in different areas of the screen and let your dodging follow a natural rhythm since you'd want to be at specific places when the beat hits or whatnot, but I just couldn't find any good flow at all while playing. When the game was at its easiest it also felt the most relaxing and rewarding, graphics and music in unison with the cool backstory. But soon enough things started to get more difficult, and I quit because nothing made sense to me. It just didn't feel graceful. I thought I'd just play breeze through the game to get the really good writing and story out of the way, but realized that quite fast the game became too hard for me, like 3/5 difficulties in! Seems I'll be waiting for a playthrough to get the rest of the story. A real shame. Seems to me the universe they built up (and mostly allude to) for the game is a very interesting one, but I just can't progress much further due to sucking too much, which says a lot considering I've played these types of games a significant amount of time...
§
Devil's Dare
Sidescrolling beat em ups are awesome. And yet, where are the really good ones? Where are the Turtles in Time, Super Double Dragon and Final Fight of our era? Or Streets of Rage, or Three Dirty Dwarves, etc? I remember Alien Hominid made a splash, yet I didn't find it very appealing. Well, Devil's Dare plays a bit like Streets of Rage and feels very old-school, in the sense that movement is quite limited. Disappointing, but since there is the possiblity of co-op play for up to four players, I will definitely return to this when I have the friends available for it.
§
Laza Knitez!!
I played this back when it was a prototype in a homemade arcade cabinet, and it was as awesome then as it is now. Aw hell yeah. The roster of action-packed party games keeps growing. Towerfall, Nidhogg, Samurai Gunn, Laza Knitez, Starwhal...
§
Dragon Age 2
I started playing it! Suddenly I'm anticipating the third installment, because I realized I have a friend who will play it and it seems quite cozy to sit beside hir and watch hir play, even though I'm skeptic to the game and probably won't be seeing it through to the end. Maybe that will be the case with Dragon Age 2 - it all depends on the characters and the story...
§MISC
Pulling all these tools together, we have a flexible system for authoring Ice-Bound stories that lets them adapt to the particular context the system decides to use them in, without becoming overwhelming for us as authors.
http://ice-bound.com/news/shifting-story-text-combinatorial-narrative-part-three/
§
Like so much horror, Silent Hill 2 is about the failure of things – of nerve, of compassion, of organs, of machinery, and of mind and body as a whole. Everything is in a process of decay, a town that has aged decades overnight and still carries traces of lives continuing just around the next corner or through the next door. It’s unclear if James himself is the ghost, walking through lives in process but failing to see them through the shadows of his own state.
/.../
I still can’t play certain sections without company – I am the world’s most cowardly horror fan – but the lasting sense is of sadness rather than spooks. Tragedy requires flaws and the game’s narrative of decay is built upon human failings of every kind. It’s a more sorrowful experience than a stack of melancholy ‘art games’.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/10/12/silent-hill-2-review-pc/
§
Game Theory: Five Nights at Freddy's SCARIEST Monster is You!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th_LYe97ZVc§
Are Videogames About Their Mechanics? | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsybY6dcXAQ
§
What's Wrong With Duck Dynasty?
http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/imb33e/the-final-bosman-what-s-wrong-with-duck-dynasty-
§
Extra Credits - Plan, Practice, Improvise - Understanding the Three Types of Play in Games https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9xkfPLJWf0
§
Maximum Hertz: The Value of Gaming Beyond 60fps
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DMWmKitqM0
§
Thoughts on Game Mechanics vs. Story | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-nkZANzikQ
§
Shooting Down the FPS: Team Fortress 2 vs. Far Cry 3 | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJGIg1JksQA
The Black Glove
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/theblackglove/the-black-glove
http://dayfornightgames.com/black-glove-gameplay
http://dayfornightgames.com/maze-space-minotaur
§PLAYED
Zest
Be a good samaritan and go to the church in this game. That part has quite a wonderful sermon, where as Emily Short writes, "The loaves and fishes weren’t multiplied because God miraculously violated the law of the conservation of mass, but that the people in the crowd were shamed or persuaded into donating their own food which they had formerly been selfishly reserving for themselves". As the priest in Zest says - "That instead of an audience, they had become a community". Let's top it off with a nice prayer:
Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace;
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is discord, harmony;
Where there is error, truth;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master, Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console;
To be understood as to understand;
To be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
§
Bernband (Tom van den Boogaart)
It fascinates me how lo-fi experiences such as this and Slave of God can immerse and mystify me so strongly. At the surface level, there doesn't seem very much to these experiences, yet just walking around there - no aim in sight, exploring stuff - can feel more compelling and exciting than exploring a town in a high-end RPG, say Wasteland 2. Well, for some time at least - I guess making larger areas with more substance is where it gets really tricky to sustain my attention. Immersion in these walking simulators (paradoxically?) probably has something to do with the lack of objectives, lack of "agency", lack of pressure put on me as a player to perform, lack of uncanny valleys, lack of too high expectations on what the game might be simulating and how finegrained the system is for that simulation. It thus probably has something to do with simulation fever. By painting in broad strokes, it leaves more to the imagination. This reminds me of Chris Bateman's Imaginary Games, and some ideas there: "The movie dictates almost everything about the accompanying game of make believe, and thus the movie is more intrusive in the viewer's game than for example a book, the authorial vision stronger. The props (things mandating specific imaginings in games of make-believe) do not leave much room for the imagination of the player, which explains why the experience of a movie can be quite unconvincing and non-immersive when the props are of poor quality." Yes indeed, and the psychological locks upon you may be as such that you deem the movie to be of bad quality ("at the surface it seems like nothing much, really"), to be cliched or stupid, and you could still be moved emotionally by it, or in this case, immersed.
§
NaissanceE is all about architecture and atmosphere. Shadows cast on white and grey. Well, not only - it is also about breathing, and running, and jumping. But without any context. Sort of. What do I know, I only played it for an hour and watched the last chapter on youtube. The soundscape is very unsettling and wonderful too. It's like an alien Blade Runner running around in the abstract love child of Tarkovsky and Kubrik.
I'm hoping when these darn walking simulators flood the VR-market people will become too seasick to jump around, and instead just opt for, well, walking. Or autojumping. Or something.
§
A City Sleeps
I've been a fan of Harmonix ever since FreQuency and Amplitude, and although their kickstarter video pitch was awesome, the game pitched seems to be the same game which was released almost ten years ago, only with new songs. This interests me as little as yet another Rockband, and the music video game genre in general lays dormant for me right now. But Harmonix seem to be trying some different stuff too, both in Chroma and A City Sleeps. Shmups are another genre which I've been a big fan of, but which I'm really not into these days, so the music game-shmup-breed that is A City Sleeps comes at me from a very specific angle. I didn't expect much, and after the initial hour I was very pleasantly surprised, only to be disappointed when venturing further. I've come to the conclusion that the shooting and scoring in the game isn't very deep. The potential was there to let the music guide your dodging, to let your secondary weapons be placed in different areas of the screen and let your dodging follow a natural rhythm since you'd want to be at specific places when the beat hits or whatnot, but I just couldn't find any good flow at all while playing. When the game was at its easiest it also felt the most relaxing and rewarding, graphics and music in unison with the cool backstory. But soon enough things started to get more difficult, and I quit because nothing made sense to me. It just didn't feel graceful. I thought I'd just play breeze through the game to get the really good writing and story out of the way, but realized that quite fast the game became too hard for me, like 3/5 difficulties in! Seems I'll be waiting for a playthrough to get the rest of the story. A real shame. Seems to me the universe they built up (and mostly allude to) for the game is a very interesting one, but I just can't progress much further due to sucking too much, which says a lot considering I've played these types of games a significant amount of time...
§
Devil's Dare
Sidescrolling beat em ups are awesome. And yet, where are the really good ones? Where are the Turtles in Time, Super Double Dragon and Final Fight of our era? Or Streets of Rage, or Three Dirty Dwarves, etc? I remember Alien Hominid made a splash, yet I didn't find it very appealing. Well, Devil's Dare plays a bit like Streets of Rage and feels very old-school, in the sense that movement is quite limited. Disappointing, but since there is the possiblity of co-op play for up to four players, I will definitely return to this when I have the friends available for it.
§
Laza Knitez!!
I played this back when it was a prototype in a homemade arcade cabinet, and it was as awesome then as it is now. Aw hell yeah. The roster of action-packed party games keeps growing. Towerfall, Nidhogg, Samurai Gunn, Laza Knitez, Starwhal...
§
Dragon Age 2
I started playing it! Suddenly I'm anticipating the third installment, because I realized I have a friend who will play it and it seems quite cozy to sit beside hir and watch hir play, even though I'm skeptic to the game and probably won't be seeing it through to the end. Maybe that will be the case with Dragon Age 2 - it all depends on the characters and the story...
§MISC
Pulling all these tools together, we have a flexible system for authoring Ice-Bound stories that lets them adapt to the particular context the system decides to use them in, without becoming overwhelming for us as authors.
http://ice-bound.com/news/shifting-story-text-combinatorial-narrative-part-three/
§
Like so much horror, Silent Hill 2 is about the failure of things – of nerve, of compassion, of organs, of machinery, and of mind and body as a whole. Everything is in a process of decay, a town that has aged decades overnight and still carries traces of lives continuing just around the next corner or through the next door. It’s unclear if James himself is the ghost, walking through lives in process but failing to see them through the shadows of his own state.
/.../
I still can’t play certain sections without company – I am the world’s most cowardly horror fan – but the lasting sense is of sadness rather than spooks. Tragedy requires flaws and the game’s narrative of decay is built upon human failings of every kind. It’s a more sorrowful experience than a stack of melancholy ‘art games’.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/10/12/silent-hill-2-review-pc/
§
Game Theory: Five Nights at Freddy's SCARIEST Monster is You!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th_LYe97ZVc§
Are Videogames About Their Mechanics? | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsybY6dcXAQ
§
What's Wrong With Duck Dynasty?
http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/imb33e/the-final-bosman-what-s-wrong-with-duck-dynasty-
§
Extra Credits - Plan, Practice, Improvise - Understanding the Three Types of Play in Games https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9xkfPLJWf0
§
Maximum Hertz: The Value of Gaming Beyond 60fps
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DMWmKitqM0
§
Thoughts on Game Mechanics vs. Story | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-nkZANzikQ
§
Shooting Down the FPS: Team Fortress 2 vs. Far Cry 3 | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJGIg1JksQA
Sunday, October 19, 2014
19/10
§§§§§THIS WEEK§§§§§
Cave! Cave! Deus Videt – Episode 0Who would have thought, a game where you explore the paintings and the secrets therein of artist Bosch? Both music and graphics are unique and exciting. The narrative reminds me much of the works of Joestin Gaarder, an old childhood favorite of mine. It's The Matrix and Alice in Wonderland and Sophies World set in a world of intriguing history, art, religion and the potential growth that comes with the alienation of youth.
Dog of Dracula: Barbecue Densetsu/Dog of Dracula 2: Cyber Monogatari
Wonderful neo/cyberpunk noir pastiche which is both hillarously funny and dead-serious as the same time. Despite its very short length, it managed to draw me in and care about the world and its inhabitants which left me wanting more, much more, and also to consider what video games I've played gave me the most laughs (list below.
East van EP/Oracle (ceMelusine)
I love the people behind Silverstring (ceMelusine is part of Silverstring), because of Glitchhikers, and because of Azraels Stop. This game wasn't as interesting, although more evocative than increpares newest "let your mind fall to rest", which too is a form of tarot-reading. Imagery is quite sublime, but it's not something I'm prone to return to, nor give much thought in retrospect, as opposed to the aforementioned games.
Girls Like Robots: NerdfestHey, a girls needs to have fun, right?
Niddhogg (Messhof)
Played it with a friend. Crazy, wicked fun I haven't had since Samurai Gunn! Hopefully will be seeing much more of this. I hate to say this, but I enjoyed it more than Johann Sebastian Joust (and I hate to say it beause I'm all for physicality in video games, alternative controllers and folk games).
Octodad: Dadliest CatchThe second really funny game this week I played! Humor is a rarity when it comes to video games, especially humor which isn't all scripted and script, but comes from the interaction with the world. Seems like a worthy successor to the original game. The coop is killer.
Rehearsals and ReturnsNow when it's finally free to download, I gave it a spin. It is interesting in the way that it feels compelling without having very much there to begin with, but it probably could be realized better somehow. Even just by letting people choose whom to interact with. Since the game is so much about player input, it could have gone further yet and probably be more cathartic for it.
Spelunky
Yeah. So it came out on the PS4 and me and my friend thought we'd give it a try. I can sort of image us sitting there, playing it a month from now, cursing ourselves and the game. But honestly I just don't think it's for me - too frustrating. But I do love cooperative video games and although they seem to be all the rage right now, I still feel there is a shortage on good ones.
Stopped playing: Wasteland 2. Yes, the second part of the game is better. And yet, I started to grow tired well before the second part, and now that I'm like 80% in, I'm giving up for now. I'd give it a 7/10, probably 8 if I'm in a good mood, which I'm not anymore since I feel it doesn't do the things it sets you up to believe it will do. Well, some of that surely is my own fault, but still - I'm tired of wanting to roleplay and act as if the things I feel and do carry weight, only to realize that they indeed do not, and I was a fool for thinking so. The only recourse then is to play a game parallel to the video game in front of you, where the motivations of your characters make sense. But try to mesh this world of fantasy in your head with the one on the screen in front of you and the world of your imagination gives way to the two-dimensional illusions of programming. I get the choice to pick a character which has kids and I can enter the age of this character, say 50+. Do the kids make any appearance of any kind in the game? No. And people still call me "youngster". Sure, I use this person to talk with people, because in my mind this character is the leader of my ranger pack. But it doesn't make any difference. Yeah, I can add more charisma to this character so that they gain levels faster and thus become "more experienced" ("older") than my other party members, but meh. A couple of levels of difference after 50 hours?
I just wish I'd come across an RPG where after playing it I wouldn't feel that I tried to give way too much credit to its ambitions, expected way too much in terms of reactivity to the way I play and feel and act and roleplay. There are other problems with Wasteland, such as the fact that "choices" don't seem to matter, and I don't only mean that in the way that there doesn't seem to be any gravitas to ones interaction with the world (although that too is true, since the characters aren't well-developed enough for me to care all that much, basically the same problem I have with Bethesdas games and the former Fallouts, although Fallout 1 & 2 made up for that with a really mysterious, interesting and alive world and its open-ended system of exploring it), but that many of the choices that you'd think matter (do I choose repair mechanic or computer science) seem to come down to... whatever. It just doesn't matter. It doesn't matter for my character which has perception as a skill, because it doesn't matter who has perception as a skill, and because my character isn't changed by being perceptive in any way, and me being perceptive barely matters for other characters as well - mainly it gives me the opportunity to spot more digging grounds where I can dig for buried scraps which means more money. In the end it doesn't matter also because there is probably another way of solving the problem in front of you, and it doesn't matter which one you choose. Chances are you have both options available in the party anyway, unless you want to roleplay and not game the system by having each party members specializing in certain fields, but then you'd just go back to playing that parallel game in your mind, which at least I need some small input from the outside world (game system) in order to stay interested in. If you don't have the skills in the party, eh, just blow the wall up instead of kicking it down. It will just cost you some money. In the end skills become cash. Everything becomes cash. And loot. Loot everywhere. And the numbers don't add up, either, seeing how I've maxed skills and still see the "impossible" icon on chests and locks and whathaveyou, which according to the explanation of how the skills are implemented in the game just doesn't make sense. Sure, it's interesting that you can play "on the fly" and just roll with the punches as superbunnyhop would have it, and fail at half the things you try to do. But eventually I just stop caring due to everything being random - contents of chests and such - and just feel that opening stuff is a waste of my time.
I am disappointed. Planescape seems to be a game about something else entirely, so I do hope Inexile deliver on those promises (every combat encounter will count, etc) even if they believe that what they did with Wasteland 2 was good for Wasteland 2.
LOL
XD
§PATHOLOGIC!!!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1535515364/pathologic/posts (yes, all of them)
§INTERACTIVE FICTION
Ice-Bound: A Novel of Reconfiguration
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1850151847/ice-bound-a-novel-of-reconfiguration
§
Our design for Ice-Bound rejects both branching-path models of interactive story as well as overly simulationist approaches, targeting a middle-road aesthetic of sculptural construction that marries a focus on quality output with the player's exploration of both an emergent expressive space and an AR-enabled art book.
http://www.fdg2014.org/papers/fdg2014_paper_23.pdf
§
This paper introduces a new set of design-time visualizations for combinatorial interactive narrative authoring. By using these visualizations during thd creation of Ice-Bound (an interactive narrative iPad game) we were able to author content within a large combinatorial possibility space, and achieve both desired player freedom and content responsiveness
http://fdg2014.org/papers/fdg2014_paper_10.pdf
§
First up is combinatorial narrative, as we think this is the heart of what sets Ice-Bound apart from other story-games. It’s fairly complex, but we’re going to try and distill it down into something easily digestible.
http://ice-bound.com/news/combinatorial_narrative/
§
Riffing on the dramatic concept of Chekhov’s gun, which states that everything introduced into a story should serve a narrative purpose, we’ve taken to calling our model “Chekhov’s dollhouse.” Do you put the spotlight on the gun over the mantelpiece, and bring it (and the violence it implies) into your story? Or do you put the focus somewhere else? Unlike branching path models, where making a choice is usually irreversible and high-consequence (even if the consequence is only wondering what you missed), with our model you can freely rearrange the story as much or little as you like before committing to a single configuration, as easily as rearranging the furniture in a dollhouse.
http://ice-bound.com/news/combinatorial-narrative-part-two/
§
Conventional game design often denies players the act of interpretation./.../
I just want to raise the question as to why there isn’t a lot of interpretation going on in games. My hunch is because of the canonized idea of games mostly being composed of rules that need to be fairly communicated to the player, vagueness is discouraged.
http://www.mattiebrice.com/further-thoughts-on-the-tarot-and-interpretation/
§
"You are Kickstarting Ice-Bound; an interactive piece of sculptural fiction and, uhm, what is sculptural fiction?"
"It's a term I've started using to describe a break away from the "branching path" model of interactive narrative. I also sometimes call this the "rat in a maze" model, because a) you can't usually see the big picture, b) often have no way of knowing what, if anything, you're missing when you make a choice, and c) it's usually difficult to go back and try again: you either have to restart from scratch, or laboriously retrace your steps. "Some of my recent projects, including Ice-Bound and 18 Cadence, are experiments towards a different approach: one where you can see the whole story at once, and make small, reversible decisions about its form, rather than big, high-consequence choices. The analogy is to the act of sculpting: iteratively making changes, large and small, until you arrive at something you're satisfied with. This is interesting to me because it pushes the player away from being an "actor" within a story, to something more like a "director" or "editor." I've always wanted my players to feel like they're collaborating with me in telling a story, and sculptural fiction is a move closer towards that ideal.
http://indiegames.com/2014/10/aaron_a_reed_on_ice-bound_and_.html
§
Elegy for a Dead World: A Game About Writing Fiction
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dejobaan/elegy-for-a-dead-world-a-game-about-writing-fictio
§OTHER VIDEOS
The True Legend of Hyrule
http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/qsso4i/the-final-bosman-the-true-legend-of-hyrule
§
Majora's African Roots pt. 1 (Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask) - Culture Shock
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un1iv1Ws5XU
§
Extra Credits - Digging Deeper - Do Games Have Less Value than Other Media?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lPUlN0dnKk
§
All Games Are Created Equal
http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/r270r0/the-final-bosman-all-games-are-created-equal
§
Should League of Legends Be a High School Sport? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ypx5rbkAzpk
§
Why Does Mario's Jump Feel So Awesome? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2oV2DQ2dEA
§
James Recommends - Analysis! - Wasteland 2 - A New Old School Fallout Game?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpSA7MAQxlE
§
Extra Credits - Big Bad II - What Makes a Good Villain?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyDx5nG7koA
§
Interplay Part 1: Meteoric Rise
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srdR55V7D-s
§OTHER ARTICLES
Alien: Isolation is an interesting game. It is the latest entry in a lineage of games that I refer to as horror simulators. It does an excellent job at creating tension and uses a lot of the knowledge built up over the years to great success. But, because it has such a laser focus on a certain type of play a bunch problems arise and other parts of the package suffer. It is a great game in many ways, truly excellent really, but there are some fundamental problems. These lead to, for me at least, a devastating flaw: At its core it fails to be a faithful emulation of the original Alien (1979) movie. Before we can properly discuss the game, we need to talk some video game history and design theory. Over the past, there has been two different schools of horror games. One that has a horror wrapping on top of standardized gameplay (horror wrapping) and one that tries to recreate the happenings of a scary movie/novel (horror simulation). The former is quite well known and started with games like Lurking Horror (1987). Mechanically, the game played like other contemporary adventure games, but took place in a scary setting with events meant to frighten the player. The latter one is a bit harder to nail down precisely, but I would say it started out with a 3D Monster Maze (1982), a game that is neatly captured in its name: the player is trapped in maze and needs to escape a monster (in this case a heavily pixelated T-Rex).
/.../
Just as the horror genre stagnated in the mid 2000s, because horror was merely a wrapping, the same might happen if we fail to move beyond "chased by monster" scenarios. While there is nothing wrong with these sort of games, I think it would be foolish to be satisfied with just that. There is so much more to explore in horror, and the success of recent horror simulators gives me hope that video games can handle it.
http://frictionalgames.blogspot.se/2014/10/thoughts-on-alien-isolation-and-horror.html
§
Just as there are real contradictions to the exercise of sovereign exception, the use of such power within the rules of a video game, even one whose trademark is branching-path storytelling, remains a technical impossibility. Mass Effect seems to solve this problem by making the agency of Shepard rather illusory. As players, we are meant to feel that we share Shepard’s sovereign power, but the intrinsic contradictions of that power, mirrored by our subordination as consumers to the game design, give the Spectres a deeper, if more problematic, meaning.
http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/blasto-sacer/
§
“The project that ended up on the shelves would never have been signed off by anyone up front,” Barlow says of the total overhaul of the classic Silent Hill formula. “It wasn’t like right back at the start we just pitched what became the game and everyone came on board. It very much just kind of meandered.”
/.../
“The driving thing was exploring different ways of using interactivity,” Barlow says. “There’s so much data that games take on board about their player – we know where you are, what you’re looking at, how long you spend looking at things, what you’re doing – but 99 per cent of games don’t use any of that.”
http://www.edge-online.com/features/the-making-of-silent-hill-shattered-memories/
§
Water Temple Analysis: Part 1
the design of the Water Temple is incredibly flawed on both large and small scales. But perhaps this also achieves an effect that matches up with what the Water Temple is trying to achieve in the context of the game’s narrative?
http://hapticfeedbackgames.blogspot.se/2014/10/water-temple-analysis-part-1.html
Cave! Cave! Deus Videt – Episode 0Who would have thought, a game where you explore the paintings and the secrets therein of artist Bosch? Both music and graphics are unique and exciting. The narrative reminds me much of the works of Joestin Gaarder, an old childhood favorite of mine. It's The Matrix and Alice in Wonderland and Sophies World set in a world of intriguing history, art, religion and the potential growth that comes with the alienation of youth.
Dog of Dracula: Barbecue Densetsu/Dog of Dracula 2: Cyber Monogatari
Wonderful neo/cyberpunk noir pastiche which is both hillarously funny and dead-serious as the same time. Despite its very short length, it managed to draw me in and care about the world and its inhabitants which left me wanting more, much more, and also to consider what video games I've played gave me the most laughs (list below.
East van EP/Oracle (ceMelusine)
I love the people behind Silverstring (ceMelusine is part of Silverstring), because of Glitchhikers, and because of Azraels Stop. This game wasn't as interesting, although more evocative than increpares newest "let your mind fall to rest", which too is a form of tarot-reading. Imagery is quite sublime, but it's not something I'm prone to return to, nor give much thought in retrospect, as opposed to the aforementioned games.
Girls Like Robots: NerdfestHey, a girls needs to have fun, right?
Niddhogg (Messhof)
Played it with a friend. Crazy, wicked fun I haven't had since Samurai Gunn! Hopefully will be seeing much more of this. I hate to say this, but I enjoyed it more than Johann Sebastian Joust (and I hate to say it beause I'm all for physicality in video games, alternative controllers and folk games).
Octodad: Dadliest CatchThe second really funny game this week I played! Humor is a rarity when it comes to video games, especially humor which isn't all scripted and script, but comes from the interaction with the world. Seems like a worthy successor to the original game. The coop is killer.
Rehearsals and ReturnsNow when it's finally free to download, I gave it a spin. It is interesting in the way that it feels compelling without having very much there to begin with, but it probably could be realized better somehow. Even just by letting people choose whom to interact with. Since the game is so much about player input, it could have gone further yet and probably be more cathartic for it.
Spelunky
Yeah. So it came out on the PS4 and me and my friend thought we'd give it a try. I can sort of image us sitting there, playing it a month from now, cursing ourselves and the game. But honestly I just don't think it's for me - too frustrating. But I do love cooperative video games and although they seem to be all the rage right now, I still feel there is a shortage on good ones.
Stopped playing: Wasteland 2. Yes, the second part of the game is better. And yet, I started to grow tired well before the second part, and now that I'm like 80% in, I'm giving up for now. I'd give it a 7/10, probably 8 if I'm in a good mood, which I'm not anymore since I feel it doesn't do the things it sets you up to believe it will do. Well, some of that surely is my own fault, but still - I'm tired of wanting to roleplay and act as if the things I feel and do carry weight, only to realize that they indeed do not, and I was a fool for thinking so. The only recourse then is to play a game parallel to the video game in front of you, where the motivations of your characters make sense. But try to mesh this world of fantasy in your head with the one on the screen in front of you and the world of your imagination gives way to the two-dimensional illusions of programming. I get the choice to pick a character which has kids and I can enter the age of this character, say 50+. Do the kids make any appearance of any kind in the game? No. And people still call me "youngster". Sure, I use this person to talk with people, because in my mind this character is the leader of my ranger pack. But it doesn't make any difference. Yeah, I can add more charisma to this character so that they gain levels faster and thus become "more experienced" ("older") than my other party members, but meh. A couple of levels of difference after 50 hours?
I just wish I'd come across an RPG where after playing it I wouldn't feel that I tried to give way too much credit to its ambitions, expected way too much in terms of reactivity to the way I play and feel and act and roleplay. There are other problems with Wasteland, such as the fact that "choices" don't seem to matter, and I don't only mean that in the way that there doesn't seem to be any gravitas to ones interaction with the world (although that too is true, since the characters aren't well-developed enough for me to care all that much, basically the same problem I have with Bethesdas games and the former Fallouts, although Fallout 1 & 2 made up for that with a really mysterious, interesting and alive world and its open-ended system of exploring it), but that many of the choices that you'd think matter (do I choose repair mechanic or computer science) seem to come down to... whatever. It just doesn't matter. It doesn't matter for my character which has perception as a skill, because it doesn't matter who has perception as a skill, and because my character isn't changed by being perceptive in any way, and me being perceptive barely matters for other characters as well - mainly it gives me the opportunity to spot more digging grounds where I can dig for buried scraps which means more money. In the end it doesn't matter also because there is probably another way of solving the problem in front of you, and it doesn't matter which one you choose. Chances are you have both options available in the party anyway, unless you want to roleplay and not game the system by having each party members specializing in certain fields, but then you'd just go back to playing that parallel game in your mind, which at least I need some small input from the outside world (game system) in order to stay interested in. If you don't have the skills in the party, eh, just blow the wall up instead of kicking it down. It will just cost you some money. In the end skills become cash. Everything becomes cash. And loot. Loot everywhere. And the numbers don't add up, either, seeing how I've maxed skills and still see the "impossible" icon on chests and locks and whathaveyou, which according to the explanation of how the skills are implemented in the game just doesn't make sense. Sure, it's interesting that you can play "on the fly" and just roll with the punches as superbunnyhop would have it, and fail at half the things you try to do. But eventually I just stop caring due to everything being random - contents of chests and such - and just feel that opening stuff is a waste of my time.
I am disappointed. Planescape seems to be a game about something else entirely, so I do hope Inexile deliver on those promises (every combat encounter will count, etc) even if they believe that what they did with Wasteland 2 was good for Wasteland 2.
Funny/Humoristic Games
That's funny...Day of the Tentacle
Conker's Bad Fur Day
Deadline, or, Being Douglas Adams
(Gunther Schmidl)
Grim Fandango
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
(Douglas Adams/Steve Meretzky)
Sam & Max Hit the Road
Sam & Max Hit the Road
Slavoj Žižek Makes A Twine Game
(Cameron Kunzelman)
The
Apprentice II: Knights Move (Herculean Effort Productions)
LOL
Dink Smallwood
Katamari Damacy
Katamari Damacy
Little Girl In Underland (Lively
Ivy/Erin Robinson)
Psychonauts
Sam & Max Season 1&2
The
Journey Down: Over The Edge/The
Journey Down: Chapter Two
(Theodor Waern)
Thirty Flights of Loving/Gravity Bone
(Brendon Chung/Blendo Games)
Warioware
Inc: Minigame Mania
Dog of Dracula: Barbecue Densetsu/Dog
of Dracula 2: Cyber Monogatari
Jazzpunk
Portal 1 & 2
Soviet Unterzögersdorf (Monochrom)
The Secret of Monkey Island (and the
rest of them)
The Stanley Parable HD Remix/The
Stanley Parable Demo (Galactic Café/Davey Wreden)
§PATHOLOGIC!!!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1535515364/pathologic/posts (yes, all of them)
§INTERACTIVE FICTION
Ice-Bound: A Novel of Reconfiguration
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1850151847/ice-bound-a-novel-of-reconfiguration
§
Our design for Ice-Bound rejects both branching-path models of interactive story as well as overly simulationist approaches, targeting a middle-road aesthetic of sculptural construction that marries a focus on quality output with the player's exploration of both an emergent expressive space and an AR-enabled art book.
http://www.fdg2014.org/papers/fdg2014_paper_23.pdf
§
This paper introduces a new set of design-time visualizations for combinatorial interactive narrative authoring. By using these visualizations during thd creation of Ice-Bound (an interactive narrative iPad game) we were able to author content within a large combinatorial possibility space, and achieve both desired player freedom and content responsiveness
http://fdg2014.org/papers/fdg2014_paper_10.pdf
§
First up is combinatorial narrative, as we think this is the heart of what sets Ice-Bound apart from other story-games. It’s fairly complex, but we’re going to try and distill it down into something easily digestible.
http://ice-bound.com/news/combinatorial_narrative/
§
Riffing on the dramatic concept of Chekhov’s gun, which states that everything introduced into a story should serve a narrative purpose, we’ve taken to calling our model “Chekhov’s dollhouse.” Do you put the spotlight on the gun over the mantelpiece, and bring it (and the violence it implies) into your story? Or do you put the focus somewhere else? Unlike branching path models, where making a choice is usually irreversible and high-consequence (even if the consequence is only wondering what you missed), with our model you can freely rearrange the story as much or little as you like before committing to a single configuration, as easily as rearranging the furniture in a dollhouse.
http://ice-bound.com/news/combinatorial-narrative-part-two/
§
Conventional game design often denies players the act of interpretation./.../
I just want to raise the question as to why there isn’t a lot of interpretation going on in games. My hunch is because of the canonized idea of games mostly being composed of rules that need to be fairly communicated to the player, vagueness is discouraged.
http://www.mattiebrice.com/further-thoughts-on-the-tarot-and-interpretation/
§
"You are Kickstarting Ice-Bound; an interactive piece of sculptural fiction and, uhm, what is sculptural fiction?"
"It's a term I've started using to describe a break away from the "branching path" model of interactive narrative. I also sometimes call this the "rat in a maze" model, because a) you can't usually see the big picture, b) often have no way of knowing what, if anything, you're missing when you make a choice, and c) it's usually difficult to go back and try again: you either have to restart from scratch, or laboriously retrace your steps. "Some of my recent projects, including Ice-Bound and 18 Cadence, are experiments towards a different approach: one where you can see the whole story at once, and make small, reversible decisions about its form, rather than big, high-consequence choices. The analogy is to the act of sculpting: iteratively making changes, large and small, until you arrive at something you're satisfied with. This is interesting to me because it pushes the player away from being an "actor" within a story, to something more like a "director" or "editor." I've always wanted my players to feel like they're collaborating with me in telling a story, and sculptural fiction is a move closer towards that ideal.
http://indiegames.com/2014/10/aaron_a_reed_on_ice-bound_and_.html
§
Elegy for a Dead World: A Game About Writing Fiction
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dejobaan/elegy-for-a-dead-world-a-game-about-writing-fictio
§OTHER VIDEOS
The True Legend of Hyrule
http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/qsso4i/the-final-bosman-the-true-legend-of-hyrule
§
Majora's African Roots pt. 1 (Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask) - Culture Shock
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un1iv1Ws5XU
§
Extra Credits - Digging Deeper - Do Games Have Less Value than Other Media?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lPUlN0dnKk
§
All Games Are Created Equal
http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/r270r0/the-final-bosman-all-games-are-created-equal
§
Should League of Legends Be a High School Sport? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ypx5rbkAzpk
§
Why Does Mario's Jump Feel So Awesome? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2oV2DQ2dEA
§
James Recommends - Analysis! - Wasteland 2 - A New Old School Fallout Game?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpSA7MAQxlE
§
Extra Credits - Big Bad II - What Makes a Good Villain?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyDx5nG7koA
§
Interplay Part 1: Meteoric Rise
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srdR55V7D-s
§OTHER ARTICLES
Alien: Isolation is an interesting game. It is the latest entry in a lineage of games that I refer to as horror simulators. It does an excellent job at creating tension and uses a lot of the knowledge built up over the years to great success. But, because it has such a laser focus on a certain type of play a bunch problems arise and other parts of the package suffer. It is a great game in many ways, truly excellent really, but there are some fundamental problems. These lead to, for me at least, a devastating flaw: At its core it fails to be a faithful emulation of the original Alien (1979) movie. Before we can properly discuss the game, we need to talk some video game history and design theory. Over the past, there has been two different schools of horror games. One that has a horror wrapping on top of standardized gameplay (horror wrapping) and one that tries to recreate the happenings of a scary movie/novel (horror simulation). The former is quite well known and started with games like Lurking Horror (1987). Mechanically, the game played like other contemporary adventure games, but took place in a scary setting with events meant to frighten the player. The latter one is a bit harder to nail down precisely, but I would say it started out with a 3D Monster Maze (1982), a game that is neatly captured in its name: the player is trapped in maze and needs to escape a monster (in this case a heavily pixelated T-Rex).
/.../
Just as the horror genre stagnated in the mid 2000s, because horror was merely a wrapping, the same might happen if we fail to move beyond "chased by monster" scenarios. While there is nothing wrong with these sort of games, I think it would be foolish to be satisfied with just that. There is so much more to explore in horror, and the success of recent horror simulators gives me hope that video games can handle it.
http://frictionalgames.blogspot.se/2014/10/thoughts-on-alien-isolation-and-horror.html
§
Just as there are real contradictions to the exercise of sovereign exception, the use of such power within the rules of a video game, even one whose trademark is branching-path storytelling, remains a technical impossibility. Mass Effect seems to solve this problem by making the agency of Shepard rather illusory. As players, we are meant to feel that we share Shepard’s sovereign power, but the intrinsic contradictions of that power, mirrored by our subordination as consumers to the game design, give the Spectres a deeper, if more problematic, meaning.
http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/blasto-sacer/
§
“The project that ended up on the shelves would never have been signed off by anyone up front,” Barlow says of the total overhaul of the classic Silent Hill formula. “It wasn’t like right back at the start we just pitched what became the game and everyone came on board. It very much just kind of meandered.”
/.../
“The driving thing was exploring different ways of using interactivity,” Barlow says. “There’s so much data that games take on board about their player – we know where you are, what you’re looking at, how long you spend looking at things, what you’re doing – but 99 per cent of games don’t use any of that.”
http://www.edge-online.com/features/the-making-of-silent-hill-shattered-memories/
§
Water Temple Analysis: Part 1
the design of the Water Temple is incredibly flawed on both large and small scales. But perhaps this also achieves an effect that matches up with what the Water Temple is trying to achieve in the context of the game’s narrative?
http://hapticfeedbackgames.blogspot.se/2014/10/water-temple-analysis-part-1.html
Tuesday, September 2, 2014
2/9
§GAME SERIES
§SILENT HILL§ That's what has been missing from the series. The manipulation. The off-kilter madness. The worlds within worlds on top of worlds, in Silent Hill itself and between the player and the game, all tied together in an elaborate metatextual knot. The sequels, particularly those developed in the west, saw only the gore and the monsters. They saw Pyramid Head as an iconic slasher movie villain rather than a very specific Jungian symbol. They saw the fog, the meat and the rust, heard the sirens, and slavishly copied them while spectacularly missing the point.
Finally, that may be about to change. Hideo Kojima has long said he'd love to make a Silent Hill game, and since this is the guy who made Psycho Mantis taunt you with the contents of your memory card, I'm confident he sees the potential for more than just a gonzo splatter game.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-08-17-why-silent-hill-2-is-still-the-most-disturbing-game-ever-made
§
§BIOSHOCK§
Bioshock 2 is the best Bioshock. It has the best gameplay and story, yes, but it also is the best at being Bioshock.
/.../
Bioshock is about extreme philosophy, parenthood, and the subversion of flesh, mind, and environment. Bioshock 2 is the purest instance of this formula.
/.../
The other Bioshock games present philosophies of abuse and ask you to lend them credibility. Bioshock 2 hands you apparently-nurturing altruism and asks you to see the darkness in it. Not only is that more interesting but it’s also more ethical.
http://ludusnovus.net/2014/08/29/the-sublime-bioshock-2/
§COMMUNITY
We, “video games,” do not “take care of our own.”
On the contrary: We expect freelance professionals to function as our avatars, to say and do what we ourselves wish we could say and do. And when the battle becomes too much—when the fight is too great, the baddies too numerous—we absolve ourselves by shutting off the Xbox.
http://infinitelives.net/2014/08/31/you-have-to-protect-yourself/§
Thoughts on Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn & More | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO8Cck3vm_o
§
Women as Background Decoration: Part 2 - Tropes vs Women in Video Games
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5i_RPr9DwMA
§
The News is Ruined
http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/qc6a91/the-final-bosman-the-news-is-ruined
PC vs Console: Why the Hate? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH1UuxxmiQ4
Design Club - The Blue Shell - Why Mario Kart's Most Hated Item Makes It Better
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFfga8-3SZI
§DESIGN
Extra Credits - First Move Advantage - How to Balance Turn-Based Games
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRHdIScOMWQ§
Castlevania & History Special - Did You Know Gaming? Feat. Markiplier
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WY1TUJal0E
§
Games typically want to communicate the importance of the power to choose, while pieces like Benthic Love have you contemplate the function of choosing anything in the first place.
http://www.mattiebrice.com/benthic-love/
§SILENT HILL§ That's what has been missing from the series. The manipulation. The off-kilter madness. The worlds within worlds on top of worlds, in Silent Hill itself and between the player and the game, all tied together in an elaborate metatextual knot. The sequels, particularly those developed in the west, saw only the gore and the monsters. They saw Pyramid Head as an iconic slasher movie villain rather than a very specific Jungian symbol. They saw the fog, the meat and the rust, heard the sirens, and slavishly copied them while spectacularly missing the point.
Finally, that may be about to change. Hideo Kojima has long said he'd love to make a Silent Hill game, and since this is the guy who made Psycho Mantis taunt you with the contents of your memory card, I'm confident he sees the potential for more than just a gonzo splatter game.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-08-17-why-silent-hill-2-is-still-the-most-disturbing-game-ever-made
§
§BIOSHOCK§
Bioshock 2 is the best Bioshock. It has the best gameplay and story, yes, but it also is the best at being Bioshock.
/.../
Bioshock is about extreme philosophy, parenthood, and the subversion of flesh, mind, and environment. Bioshock 2 is the purest instance of this formula.
/.../
The other Bioshock games present philosophies of abuse and ask you to lend them credibility. Bioshock 2 hands you apparently-nurturing altruism and asks you to see the darkness in it. Not only is that more interesting but it’s also more ethical.
http://ludusnovus.net/2014/08/29/the-sublime-bioshock-2/
§COMMUNITY
We, “video games,” do not “take care of our own.”
On the contrary: We expect freelance professionals to function as our avatars, to say and do what we ourselves wish we could say and do. And when the battle becomes too much—when the fight is too great, the baddies too numerous—we absolve ourselves by shutting off the Xbox.
http://infinitelives.net/2014/08/31/you-have-to-protect-yourself/§
Thoughts on Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn & More | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO8Cck3vm_o
§
Women as Background Decoration: Part 2 - Tropes vs Women in Video Games
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5i_RPr9DwMA
§
The News is Ruined
http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/qc6a91/the-final-bosman-the-news-is-ruined
PC vs Console: Why the Hate? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH1UuxxmiQ4
Design Club - The Blue Shell - Why Mario Kart's Most Hated Item Makes It Better
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFfga8-3SZI
§DESIGN
Extra Credits - First Move Advantage - How to Balance Turn-Based Games
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRHdIScOMWQ§
Castlevania & History Special - Did You Know Gaming? Feat. Markiplier
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WY1TUJal0E
§
Games typically want to communicate the importance of the power to choose, while pieces like Benthic Love have you contemplate the function of choosing anything in the first place.
http://www.mattiebrice.com/benthic-love/
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
