The biggest little game ever

I was tempted to postpone Braid again to discuss the academy's crime against batman, and yet again to discuss Y: The Last Man. From there I would make a running gag of it, habitually ignoring the easily ignored little game which I have been imploring everyone not to ignore. It was a hard idea to turn down, since it was A) thoroughly ironic and B) had the potential to generate an awesome sort of reverse hype that might have compelled curious readers to look up the game themselves. But delays have grown familiar enough on Sarcasmancy in light of recent commitments such as loosing the fight against my WoW addiction and contributing to my anthropology's class blog. All those interested in cyberculture should check it out. Lots of smart young people saying smart young stuff. Now on to the entree.

I don't really remember when I first heard about Braid. For an independent game, it drew lots of pre-release buzz, and while it never really grew into a full blown phenomenon, it consistently made headlines in the gaming industry. In critical and journalistic circles, it garnered some of the most interesting, refreshing commentary I've ever read about a video game. It was positive sure, but hyperbole is the grammar of gaming journalism. What really caught my eye was that reviewers were talking about Braid's implications as a work of art. Jason Roher's comment from Arthouse Games preview in particular really stuck with me: "Braid has the potential to change the way you think about reality. It will certainly change the way you think about video games."

Now I'm not gonna argue that every game should strive to alter our perception of reality. Entertainment is gaming's reason de etra and sometimes simply blowing shit up, stompin' some goombas or dealing with an endless deluge of blocks is more entertaining than a mind bending masterpiece. Still, the staggering potential of video games; the ability to live out the “What if” science fiction questions, is what allows the video game to transcend their status as a simple platform for escapism and instead broadens our perception of reality. This dialectic between the 'reality escaping' and 'reality enhancing' is especially interested when compared to fiction, and recent distinctions being made between casual gamers and hardcore gamers.

As is customary for the English Major, I'm going to fall back on Shakespeare to explain my point. Contrary to popular belief, writer types do not celebrate The Bard for his timeless plots, which were all stolen from earlier storytellers, but rather the way he told them. That's right, the language that confounds frustrates and frightens most casual readers is the writer's aphrodisiac. It's harder to decipher, and requires a greater familiarity with the mechanics of language, much like Portal requires more experience with moving through a simulated avatar through a simulated environment than a game like Tetris does. If you don't believe me, watch somebody who doesn't play video games regularly try to walk around and work the camera in a 3D game. Bring popcorn. Part of the reason hardcore gamers feel Portal is superior to Tetris is because they appreciate the complexity of the game’s mechanics. Most casual gamers prefer Tetris because they can understand it, just like casual readers prefer the easy to read Twilight to Shakespeare. That's right, Twilight is to literature as Tetris is to videogames.

According to this structural comparison, Braid is a lot like Hemmingway minus the chauvinism and alcohol: It uses a familiar easy-to-read vocabulary to create an experience that will challenge readers’ intellect and patience. If they see it through to the end, they will be rewarded with that kind of yawning comprehension which is as unsettling as it is satisfying. In this case, the familiar vocabulary is platforming and time travel. The two-dimensional platformer is probably the most accessible representation of a virtual world which is why Mario was so important: it gave gaming something to stand on (Hahaha! Platform! Something to stand on! Do you get it? …oh go to hell, it’s funny!). Overhead games are also fairly straightforward, but non-gamers are frequently confused about where they are supposed to go. The single axis of interaction makes progressing intuitive and it also gives the game an inherent narrative quality. Time traveling in videogames got really popular with Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, but it’s really as old as the concept of extra lives. Resurrecting to try the same level again is conceptually identical to the plot of Groundhog Day. Every time you die and comeback, your Bill Murray Proxy does a little better based on the mistakes you made earlier. Hopefully, anyway. Sometimes you just throw yourself in a bath tub with a toaster.

Braid returns to the temporal basis for these trial and error systems, and pushes them further by tweaking with the stuff we take for granted. For example, what if certain objects were immune to time travel, so that you could jump to your death to obtain them, and rewind back to life with them still in your possession? Or what if time rewound different obstacles and enemies at different rates? The puzzles derived from such concepts are daunting to say the least, but they are even more incredible after they’ve been solved. The mind can’t help but boggle at their craftsmanship. Braid has set a new bar for both puzzle games and level design. Even Portal’s magnificent trials are humbled by this 2D titan’s offerings. Yeah, really. Because unlike the portal gun, which is modified only once throughout the game, Braid introduces new quirks to every group of levels. There’s one world where the flow of time switches according to whether your character walks backwards or forwards.

Not everybody would agree. In addition to the praise it garnered, Braid made news last year when mainstream gamers cried foul over its $15 price tag feeling it was an inexcusable departure from the typical $8 they had come to accustom to paying for XBLA titles. Holkins and Krahulik tackled the subject back when it was topical, with the cynical wit I try so hard to emulate. People complained that the game was too short, but for a game where rewinding is a near constant practice, it has a surprising amount of replay value and variety. You can complete it fairly quickly, but its quality is certainly just compensation. The lighthearted watercolor graphics won’t win any technical awards, but their simple aesthetic pairs perfectly the game’s surprisingly solemn story. As for the audio, the music is appealing when heard frontwards or backwards (a fairly crucial but easily to overlook touch), and the amusing sound effects are themselves homages to a time when arcade games where defined by their beeps and boops.

Really, I suspect that this negative, undervalued reaction stems from people who ripped the puzzle solutions from the net at the first sign of trouble. For a leisure activity that usually consists of a hand-eye coordination coma, genuine intellectual challenge can be a bit jarring. Some simply won’t stomach it. They don’t want to play games to broaden their horizons or better themselves, but to have some fun and relax. I can sympathize to a certain extent. Much of the entertainment I find most relaxing requires very little intellectual legwork, and where promise of self improvement is concerned, most of Nintendo’s recent offerings, (which resemble digital training regimes than actual games), hold little appeal for me. For others, I suspect it was an image thing. Many hardcore gamers are deeply offended by the recent trend of simplifying game play in the interest of appealing to a broader audience is not just unappetizing but offensive. The irony of course, is that the hardcore gamer sold as a rebellious liberal persona, has become an entrenched conservative, afraid to accept change. Prose, music, film, comic-books and television have all seen similar arguments and tiresome as the bickering is, I can’t help but be excited by it, as it seems to acknowledge the narrative potential games have achieved. At least in my humble, but ardent opinion.

It's a debate which has been brewing for a long time. Roger Ebert famously drew the ire of every serious gamer on the planet when he declared that games were an inherently lower art form than literature and film years ago. He noted that those who created videogames had to surrender some degree of creative control to their audience; a structural quality he argued was antithetical to the craftsmanship of narrative in film and literature. Of course, Ebert does not play games and those that do had little difficulty pointing out the falsehoods and idiocy of his declaration. Considering all the creative effort that went into crafting Braid’s puzzles and weaving its narrative into a perfect circle, there is no question that gaming can produce experiences as thoroughly crafted and moving as any other narrative format, if not more so. Admittedly, the inherent vision structure of the video game’s structure does pose some questions. For example, can the way we play a game make it higher or lower art? Those are questions for another day, though I believe it will arrive very soon.

Those of you sick of videogames will be relieved to know that other subjects, like those mentioned at the top of the post, are coming up next. No promises as to when though, I’ve learned my lesson.

Hope and Change

I'm delaying my discussion of Braid. Given my recent run of broken promises, nobody should be surprised. On this day, there are simply bigger things to talk about.

Barack Obama is beyond big. and I've been waiting to write on him for a while now. In fact, I considered beginning this blog on election night, November 4th 2008, with a discussion of his victory. Ultimately, I decided against it, partially because I was so caught up in the thrills of the evening, but also because I was intimidated by it's sheer momentousness. Aside from questions of where to start or what could be contributed, I was afraid that the inevitable vacuum of the event's historical mass would place my blog, and my voice into a narrowly political category. I never wanted to be apolitical either though. It's a futile endeavor which produces feckless writing. Now that Sarcasmancy has had a chance to spread it's wings a little bit, I think it's finally safe to indulge in political tendencies.

Like most self-described liberals, I was appalled and enraged by the Bush administration, and like you'd expect from a writer, it was his administration's rhetoric which I found most offensive: Culturally xenophobic speeches suggesting, in the tradition of the frontier cowboy (a figure that should have gone extinct over a century ago), that real men don't solve problems with diplomacy and any attempts at compromise or gestures of contrition are signs of weakness. Punctuated with folksy mispronunciations and hollow Christian invocations, these shortsighted declarations were carefully calculated to sustain and even cultivate the very terror they claimed to combat. Bush's scheming handlers found an opportunity in fear. To them, a scared nation willing to sacrifice everything to save itself from phantoms was a delightful prospect. Something which could be mined and muled without complaint. Perhaps, Credence Clearwater Revival described the situation best:

"And when you ask them, how much should we give?
Ooh, they only answer more! more! more!"

I honestly cannot conceive a more appealing and appropriate counter point to this than the idealism and eloquence Barack Obama has displayed throughout his presidential campaign. I thought very highly of John McCain before he consented to run with Sarah Pallin; an avatar of everything I despised about the former party. Regardless of how confident McCain was in his health, anyone willing to risk the nation with a second in command so painfully inexperienced is not fit to lead it himself.

I sigh and digress. It was not my intention to continue bitching about the past eight years when they are now finally past us. The sad truth is, it is far too easy to fall prey to old habits, and the incentives for being a bigger man are small indeed. After a victory, the desire to celebrate is natural. The desire to be gracious, when you fear your opponent will misconstrue your celebration as gloating, regardless of how you conduct yourself...well, not so much. I honestly can't blame the republicans for their cynicism though. If I were a disappointed conservative who listened to liberals complain about how my ideals were ruining the country throughout the entire election, the sudden calls for unification would ring falsely indeed.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't try. Instead of continuing to rant, I will do my best to describe the promise I saw in Barack Obama's inauguration today in such a way that others may share in my optimism. For me, The single most gratifying line I heard in Obama's entire speech was the line "As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." We cannot afford to damn ourselves in order to fight the demons. At the end of the day, there are just more demons to go around. I find Obama's promise to close the guantanamo bay detention facility (look at the end of the entry) with an executive order during his first week of office to be extremely uplifting. Even if you believe that desperate times justify dark measures, you'd be hard pressed to admit they were good things to do, and the fact that such despicable practices are behind us is something to be glad about. We are not loosing anything here. The breakable prisoners have been broken by this point, so there is no potential information being forfeited, nor is there any risk of potential villains escaping justice, no matter how hastily the closure is executed. These people will be kept on tight leashes; they just won't be whipped with them anymore.

That being said, I hope Obama takes all the time he needs with the transition. A lot of evidence can be conveniently lost in a transitional period. The temptation to rush will be difficult to resist too. After all the speeches and promises made about change, not just by the official campaign, but by supporters and everyday citizens, my biggest worry for the new administration is it's own impossible hype. When the liberal messiah fails to solve global warming, gaza and the energy crisis within his first week, the press is going to crucify him. Liberals are going to start presenting pithy anecdotes which are only tenuously related to the shift in political climate and try to present them as proof that change has come. Here is a personal example of 'a false change story' from my personal life:

"After spending another weekend wrestling with illness, and caring for my girlfriend, who has now also come down with a wretched contagion of her own, I showed up for school today exhausted and completely unprepared for my history quiz. But when I arrived at the classroom door, I was greeted by a note stating that class was canceled and the quiz had been postponed until Thursday. There wasn't any explanation, but I'm sure it had something to do with the inauguration. Boom! My life is already better for Obama. Change has come!"

Such stories are heartwarming, humorous and harmless as long as you appreciate the irony of the situation: the real change Obama has been promising is not the sort of thing which will arrive in an instant and affect a single day of your life. It will be gradual and require a lot of hardwork, but it's effects will be tremendous. If people present such meager epiphanies as proof of a promise fulfilled, we will have cheapened that promise. The truth to the story's joke, for all jokes are a blend of truths and ironies, is that change must begin with one's personal perspective.

How d'ya like me now Lich?

This post ended up being more of a comparison piece than I intended, contrasting the game design philosophies of WoW and EverQuest but I do get to WoTLK eventually. So dive in, the text is deep.

My first experiences in online gaming were with Sony’s EverQuest just after it had launched Ruins of Kunark, the game’s first expansion pack. I was exhilarated by the rich potential the game represented, but repeatedly heartbroken as I attempted wring it from the actual product. Despite the title’s implied promise, it was incredibly difficult to find quests. I knew they existed through snippets from the general chat, and high level characters who ran around wearing their rewards, but they always seemed to lay somewhere just beyond the edge of my periphery. Whenever I found a quest giver, the chain was either broken, restricted to a specific class/race/deity, or simply not worth the effort. The mechanics of the game were also viciously punitive. I spent the vast majority of my early playtime corpse running; an activity every ounce as unpleasant as it sounds. There was also a period where, if you could not retrieve your body within a certain time limit, the game would delete your body and everything you were carrying on it, leading to many tearful nights where I struggled to retrieve my mangled corpse from some wretched pit. Since you had no armor or items, subsequent deaths were almost inevitable, and each one produced another decoy which would frustrate your search for the original. Amusing in hindsight. In practice? Not so much. As with most things massive, multiplayer and online, the social component was the core appeal. I enjoyed wandering around the tunnel in Eastern Commons where high level characters would gather to barter, and I found a limited sense of belonging in conversation with other introverted kids. Naturally, that all went to hell when Sony launched Shadows of Luclin, the game’s infamous third expansion. The organic barter economy was abandoned in favor of a bazaar system which was broken at launch and a graphics ‘upgrade’ that replaced the game’s endearingly blocky avatars with some of the most hideous character models the world will ever witness. The increased hardware requirements caused a lot of players to leave, exacerbating the exodus to other MMO’s, which the update was designed to forestall. Perhaps this is the best way to convey the impossible lameness that was Shadows of Luclin.

Yet nearly a decade later, EverQuest is still soldiering on, having launched its fifteenth expansion pack last November (no link, the almighty wikipedia doesn't even acknowledge its existence). One thing which has certainly helped the game’s longevity is that Sony learned its lesson with Shadows of Luclin and has not substantially changed the games hardware requirements since. But one has to wonder who is still playing EQ, to say nothing of why. It is tempting to conclude that after years of abuse and torment, the dark forces at SOE have broken something inside their customers, convincing them that being beaten is a privilege, and that the willingness to withstand such treatment is a desirable trait called “Hardcoredness.” I exaggerate, especially considering how much crueler Ultima Online was, and the game did make some genuine improvements over the years. I tenuously continued to play until EQ’s fifth expansion, Legacy of Ykesha, when Sony convinced me to quit in earnest by making Frogloks into a godly playable race. Not only did this break the balance of the game, it dealt a fatal blow to the games narrative, which was already laughable, even to my fifteen year old sensibilities. For those of you who play WoW, an approximate equivalent would be if Blizzard suddenly decided to make Murlocs into a playable hero-race in the next expansion. Actually, knowing their sense of humor, it’s a prospect which seems frighteningly plausible.

When I started playing World of Warcraft in 2004, I felt like a third world refugee, delighted and mystified by conveniences others took for granted: Quests clearly displayed by bright gold exclamation points hanging over character heads and on an ever present GPS-like minimap, chairs your character could actually sit in, and most importantly of all, dying was not a tremendous ordeal. It was even kind of cool, with the grayed out color pallet and your ghost character’s ability to run on water. The starting zones are very welcoming, abundant with easy tutorial-like quests that yield the necessary equipment for players to progress. Rather than making the game rewarding by building a system so unforgiving that any degree of success feels like an achievement, Blizzard presents players with a steady stream of new items and spells, while making the process as convenient as possible, even to the point of being nonsensical at times (the same size of armor and weapons fit every race of character), yet for some reason, people find this idealized un-sense more appealing than the alternative. It's almost like they play video games to escape reality's inconveniences.

Yet these are mere trimmings. The greatest appeal of WoW’s gameplay is that each class presents players with a unique, but versatile combat system while remaining relatively balanced in power. Even though EQ’s character creation system presents players with more classes to choose from, controlling them felt identical. Worst of all, some classes, like healers, are not viable for solo-play later on, and some race and class combinations will end up being fundamentally weaker than others. In WoW, a character’s race is mostly cosmetic, and any available class/race combination is viable. Also, while each class has distinct gameplay mechanics and a specific role to fulfill in parties, they can be adapted to fit whatever play style you prefer (solo questing, PVP, or dungeon raiding). I don’t mean to say WoW is perfectly balanced. Blizzard constantly has to tweak the classes to keep them on even footing. My main character is a paladin, and for a long time Blizzard didn’t really know how to make the class work. Now my patience has been rewarded with godliness.

Yet while the classes are relatively even in power to one another, level based elitism lingers, though I suspect that’s a problem MMORPGs will never be free from. Since the game system is based on numerical levels of power, power based stratification and discrimination are inevitable. Even if you’re just in it for the story, you won’t be able to debate your way into a cool dungeon if you can’t fight its mobs yet. That part of the universe is closed to you until you can pay your dues in the currency of experience, and graduate to a new grade in ass kicking. But Blizzard is does its best to allow average customers to get the most out of a subscription, which I believe is a noble endeavor.

Whenever such changes are made however, the elite players will start in with the “When I was your level I had to fight both ways through a dungeon, debuffed and I learned to like it!” speeches. It’s reasonable to want your hard work to amount to something, but it always strikes me as strange when people gauge the value of their leisure activities in terms of quantifiable work.Then again, where the game’s first expansion, The Burning Crusade, was concerned, they had a right to grouse. Epic gear people spent months questing for in the original game was rendered obsolete by basic equipment in the expansion. The fairly even correlation between effort and rewards people had come to expect from the game was broken. Most people didn’t complain too bitterly, since they were getting superior gear, and I was surprised by how little bitching actually occurred.

Another detrimental change that occurred during the big BC shift, was that Blizzard suddenly realized just how marketable their universe was. This resulting ‘growth’ subjected their lore to the same sort of weary dissolution which plagues other long running bodies of fiction: stories rife with nonesensical alliances and ret-conned deaths. While EQ had to weave its fantasy world from whole cloth, the original trilogy of Warcraft strategy games provided Blizzard with recognizable characters, locations, and a compelling story to build on; yet that considerable advantage had become a liability as fans were left to argue what canonical Warcraft should resemble. One could make a strong argument that this is the inevitable fate of a fiction opened up to its loving public: “the tragedy of the creative commons” so to speak.

I like to think that there is genuine narrative potential for MMOs however, and Wrath of the Lich King has done a lot to keep my optimism alive. The earliest teaser had a strong narrative vibe, which only grew stronger in CGI movie, but I was skeptical until I heard about the pre-launch event. Capital cities, thought of as universal safe havens, were over-run with throngs of undead that would infect players and force them to turn against other players, even on non-pvp servers. It was a ballsy move met with a harsh outcry and more than a couple cancellations, but it also showed that Blizzard is serious about telling a story in their world. I must confess I don’t know how bad the zombiefest was, since I was taking a break from the game. Such rest periods are vital, lest you be drawn too deeply into the virtual world and lost to the real one. The quest chain which introduces the much talked about Death Knight “hero class,” is also decidedly story driven. Arthas also frequently pops up in Northrend, establishing him as a more imminent threat than Illidan was in TBC.

In addition to the buffed storytelling, the increase in item power feels much more natural than it was in the crusade and Blizzard has continued to promote accessibility by giving all dungeons and raids a five-player mode, so you can tackle Icecrown Citadel (when it opens) without finding twenty other people who are free, well equipped and competent. The level design is much more detailed and varied than it was in burning crusade as well, and there are some truly beautiful environments to explore. Even the music is stellar. If you’ve tried WoW, and it didn't tickle you, Lich King won’t change your mind. But if you’ve never played, now would be a great time to take a stab at it.

Back from the Dead

It’s been longer than I intended. Some things happened over winter break which really fucked up my outlook on life, and left me feeling broken. I went back to school sick and spent the first week sleeping through most of my classes. I’m still sick actually, but things are looking up, and I’m ready to move on now.

During my dark hours and convalescence, I sought refuge in many forms of fiction, and I will discuss all of them eventually, beginning with three outstanding games which made 2008 a better year: Left 4 Dead, World of Warcraft: WoTLK, and Braid. I’ll be discussing each game with relation to several other titles, not because they aren’t big enough to discuss by themselves (they totally are), but because I’d like to really get at what these games ‘say’ as products of art and where they stand with relation to what else has been done before them. So buckle the hell up.

The boys at Valve proved they knew how to make a first person shooter way back with the first Half-life, and while I was never terribly taken with Counter-strike (mostly because of the crowd that plays it), Team Fortress 2 certainly convinced me they could do Co-op as well. In fact, Team Fortress 2 was the best co-operative FPS I had ever played. Tons of shooters have played around with the RPG class concept but never had such a mechanic been presented in a manner which was so conducive to actual team work. Each class’s unique play style is designed to fit together with the others, interlocking and connecting until the team becomes an avatar of composite badassery. By contrast Call of Duty 4’s perk and equipment system was based more on the trope of character customization, and consequently felt like minor adjustments to a standard issue chasis than adopting a specific role. Then there’s also the fact that each class in TF2 was an actual character; which is to say a distinct entity with personality. Stock personas to be sure, but in a genre where character runs deep as shrink wrap, a little effort and a slick presentation makes all the difference.

Of course, this is all a preamble to Left 4 Dead; the new king of cooperative first person shooting. I do not mean to suggest it has replaced or dethroned TF2 however, but rather that it is a new monarch presiding over a completely new territory. Instead of challenging you to learn the specific advantages, limits and synergies of various playable character types, L4D puts you and three other people on equal footing and has you run a gauntlet of nightmarish yet intriguing combat situations, against the beloved backdrop of a zombie apocalypse. From a narrative standpoint, TF2 is a character driven afair, while L4D is all about the situation. The game implements a new mechanic called an AI Director which decides when and where to plant the games special enemies while the players are distracted by the constant but milder threat of standard zombies. Each of the game’s four campaigns are filled with spots where things can and will go horribly wrong.

Just in like the films which inspired the game, Cooperation is a necessity for survival, and gameplay goes down according to the old adage of strength in numbers. When you have only four people fending off a flood of zombies (all fast and frenzied from the school of 28 Days Later), loosing somebody, even if they suck, is a big deal. At the very mildest, it means you’ve run out of bait. While the survivor characters all handle identically, class based game play pops up in the game’s versus mode where you get to take the special infected for a spin. The head to head is actually remarkably similar to the game’s campaign mode; the only difference is that other people are controlling the special zombies instead of the AI Director.

On each level, both teams get to play both sides (Survivors and Infected), and whoever completes the level more competently wins. The dynamic is similar to football in that you have one group rushing to a goal, and another group trying to stop them. While it might seem a little bit lazy for both co-op and versus to use the same maps, it is far more creative and preferable to some half-assed deathmatch mode. With the exception of the tank, a rare spawning special zombie with the powers of the incredible hulk, all of the Infected characters are weaker than the gun totting survivors. Furthermore, it’s thoroughly refreshing to have multiplayer that’s dynamic. It is a multiplayer shooting game where camping is not an option. The survivors are rushing through the campaign environment as quickly as possibly and the Infected characters have to co-ordinate where to set up choke points and ambushes. Once again, the player is confronted with an emphasis on situation as opposed to character.

In order to successfully coordinate in versus mode, and to fully enjoy all the “Whoa shit!” moments in campaign, you’re going to want to play with a mic. I am notorious for avoiding voice chat, to escape both the social and technical headaches such practices tend to inflict, but after playing just a couple rounds with a headset, I had to admit that the game was better when my friends could hear me scream. On a related note, some people have asked if you can play Left 4 Dead alone. The technical answer is ‘Yes,’ but the game was not designed for such an outing. I’ve played through one of the four campaigns with just bots and the experience was wholly underwhelming.

Again, Valve did a fantastic job of merging practical mechanics with an aesthetic presentation. The AI director fits perfectly with the game’s frame story which presents each campaign as a ‘Movie’ starring the four survivors. A grainy filter dulls and distorts colors as appropriate if the video were being projected from an aging film real. The music builds and climaxes in correspondence with the zombie hordes. But for all of its brain splattering splendor, the game could be better. Like TF2, Left 4 Dead’s presentation outshines its innovation. The Hunter’s pinball like pouncing ability and the Smoker’s noose like tongue hint at the novel experiences you may have had in other Valve titles like Portal and Half-life 2, but it never quite reaches the same echelon as the gravity gun.

Stay sharp, Wrath is coming up on Wednesday. [EDIT: <=== A Lie]