Saturday, August 28, 2010

The Dragon Age Blues

As you may have noticed, there has been an smörgåsbord of triple-A video games over the past year, and I have commented on relatively few of them. Assassins Creed 2 and Dragon Age came and went without comment.   Heavy Rain and Allan Wake, the sort of narrative-driven titles I relish, arrived sans discussion. Even the exquisite Red Dead Redemption, which people have hailed as a triumph of Literature, Literature with a capital "L" Literature, remains unexamined. And now there is also StarCraft II to consider. Rest assured, I still plan to discuss these titles in detail, but I have been too busy trying to play through them that I haven't had much time to write.

Applying to graduate school, finishing college, getting married, moving across the country, and starting graduate school have kept me busy, but the games themselves constitute considerable time-investments. I have a backlog of roughly ten titles. Each of them off anywhere from 40 to 80 hours of gameplay, excluding any applicable multiplayer components. This tells you several I am (A) very spoiled and (B) very unfocused, but the very fact that I refer to the games I am currently playing as a backlog, says something about the modern videogame: They are digestible artifacts; things to be consumed and completed rather than relaxing methods of passing the time.

In short, it is the difference between playing table-tennis (Pong) and reading War and Peace (The Witcher). This transformation has blurred the lines between leisure object, and laborious objective. This is especially true if you play a game while following a guide to try and wring out all of its secrets and sidequests, or if you find the title to be exceedingly challenging. This environment of purposeful, highly structured play and frequent frustration can transform play into chore. Such is my relationship with Bioware's Dragon Age for the PC.

Behold the best written game of 2009. Pity that accessing the narrative can be such a chore.

The game is brilliant written. It wins my vote for best-written title of 2009 hands-down. Ferelden is a world of splendid squalor, caked with dirt and dried blood, besieged by demons and despots, and filled with a number of truly fascinating thought-experiments. For example, "What if the catholic church believed that god had turned his back on creation?" (Answer: Catholic Nihilists. There may be nothing scarier.) Then there's also the whole "using drugs to control magic users" thing which is a concept I hold dear to my thoroughly medicated heart. Best of all, the game manages to be both dark and tragic without succumbing to the sort of absurdist nihilism that is evident in many other games with mature narratives. Rockstar, I'm talking about you. The characters are also a lot of fun, and their histories are much richer than the cast of Mass Effect.

Accessing this excellent narrative though, can be a real slog at times. Truth be told, I'm not great at video games. I have this uncanny ability to find every possible pitfall, dead end, and failed strategy before making progress. This is a unique gift (read: personal problem) and I realize that. At the same time, I've played a lot of videogames of every kind, and I can usually cut through a game's "Easy Mode" without much trouble. Not so in Dragon Age. The first boss took an embarrassing number of attempts, and I have had to get into the habit of saving before every fight to avoid serious backtracking. My wife, who has played fewer videogames has had even more difficulty with the title. The fighting system isn't broken, or unpolished, (though it feels bit a dated), just punitively challenging. It bears mentioning that I'm playing the PC version, which I have heard is the hardest permutation of the game, so those looking for lighter fair may want to check out the console releases.

In any event, frequent death and backtracking in a game with a narrative of 80+ hours (with a variety of unique 6 hour opening sequences to choose from) makes play a daunting proposition. It requires the same sort of commitment as going to the gym everyday, or reading a seriously challenging text. And like reading a challenging text, a strange sort of Stockholm Syndrome comes into play. After spending so much time with a game, you tell yourself you're in love with it. Oh yes, there may be genuine affection in play, even genuine love, but like a battered wife, you excuse the game's punitive challenge and mind-numbing repetition as a part of the 'epic experience.' This is not a condition that is inherent, or exclusive to videogames mind you. Hell, I would argue that many 'Literary Classics' are guilty of similar long-winded self importance, and many of the people who claim to enjoy them are merely justifying their time investment.

This topic came up in a conversation I had with fellow graduate student and all-around good guy Chris DeLeon. Chris runs HobbyGameDev.com where he regularly writes articles designed to help aspiring game designers. He's also Vegan. It wouldn't surprise me if I learned he found homes for orphaned diabetic kittens in his spare time. Anyway, he recently published a post about short videogame design, where he writes "Videogames used to be light on content due to limitations of technology...The latest and increasingly dominant limitation now seems to be consumer time and attention." I am inclined to agree. Now that I am ostensibly an adult, finding time (and mullah) to invest in my habit has become a lot harder. This has led me to the dubious practice of buying games used, but even worse, it has also caused me to buy games that I will never finish. The industry's $60 price point is particularly egregious because, it's a lot of cash and I'll feel cheated if I don't get my money's worth, but at the same time, finding time for 60 to 80 hours of gameplay isn't exactly easy. Given those constraints, it's easy to see why iPhone and downloadable titles are seeing so much success. Chris' article lists a number of indie titles that make good on the promise of brief play in various ways.

On a related note, Donut Games' Cat Physics is another excellent free title for iDevices.

One base that isn't covered however, is narrative. Brief, aggressively affordable games are great, but I have yet to encounter an iPhone game with an engrossing story. Some titles may qualify as digital poetry, but narrative seems to be reserved for bigger budget console releases. I know that there are some episodic, downloadable games like the Sam and Max franchise, but for the videogame industry at large, mature, meaningful storytelling is shackled to big budgets and long-hours. I never believed that you need impressive graphics or a high page count to tell a good tale, and I like to think that someday soon, the short story game will have its day.

At the same time, I don't think long-form games will ever go out of fashion altogether. But given the tremendous success of casual controllers, I think we might start seeing play systems that allow people to access the later chapters of a game's narrative more easily. I don't mean to advocate the Mario Party approach to game design where everybody wins all the time; games must be challenging if they are going to be meaningful. But I know there is a market for game narratives outside of hardcore, gamers. I actually have a professor who is actually looking for somebody to play Red Dead Redemption so she can watch.

Over the next few days, I'm going to attempt to address a few of the titles I mentioned at the beginning of the article, but depending how grad school develops, I may get swamped. In any event, I will also be writing a review of Monday Night Combat for Technique, Georgia Tech's school paper, and I believe it will be available online. If so, I'll be sure to Tweet the link. Thanks for reading!

Friday, August 13, 2010

Scott Pilgrim Vs. His Movie

In our hype-saturated world, it's a rare thing for a movie to exceed the promise of its marketing material. Even rarer is the adaptation that manages to eclipse it's source material. This is especially true of videogame films where the compelling ruled worlds of source material are rendered through tedious exposition (rather than exploration and experimentation). Comic-books movies have faired much better. Hell, they've been doing pretty damn well for a while now, but most fans will agree that something is lost in the jump to the silver screen. Snyder's take on Watchman was faithful but uninspired, save for it's ultraviolence. Iron Man 2 was a good time but all the subplots and cameos left it feeling cluttered. Kick-Ass struck a strong balance between surreal, sometimes controversial violence, and nerdy self-deprecating humor, but its satire felt a bit sharper on the ink. 

I expected Scott Pilgrim would suffer similarly. I knew that Edgar Wright nailed the visual style from the moment I watched (and obsessively re-watched) the trailer, but I was worried about the leading man (you are forever George-Michael to me Michael Cera) and the challenge of compressing 6 graphic novels with about 20 characters into 2 hours. Wright not only captures the soul of the comic, he distills it and refines it. He gives it a 1-up, a fire-flower and a starman all at once. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is not only a brilliant comic adaptation, but a brilliant example of how to bring video games to the movies. Bryan Lee O'Malley's opus is a romance first and foremost, but it is also positively saturated with videogame references, and his take on Toronto is twisted by gamic logic. People throw fireballs, produce weapons out of thin air and take shortcuts through alternate dimensions. Ninjas, Psychic Vegans and robots abound. People erupt into showers of coins when they are defeated. Wright gets the game and he plays it well.

This poster is awesome! Why don't they use this one instead of that other dweeby one?


Spoiler alert; specific examples follow: The film opens with an 16-Bit take on the Universal screen, complete with a digitized soundtrack. Immediately thereafter, you are greeted by a familiar melody from the Legend of Zelda. Beloved, nostalgia inducing sound effects from my Super Nintendo youth punctuate conversations and character interactions. Text occasionally adorns the screen, dividing the film into chapters and visual effects illustrate sound effects and music. This super-imposition of visual sound effects and iconic imagery on normal cinematography not only enhances the light-hearted absurd humor of the movie, it leads to a sort of augmented-reality presentation that is prefect for our time: we are surrounded by reoccurring  icons and sounds in every day life. This is especially true of videogamers and cyber-jockeys and cell-phone junkies. This is the sort of stuff that makes a videogame movie.

There are a few moments where the thing starts to feel like the Wachowski Brother's Speed Racer; the screen splits apart to show closeups of several characters simultaneously, or the background fades to abstraction behind characters before they pull off 'special moves.' But unlike Speed Racer, these anime aesthetics are grounded in fresh characters and meaningful relationships.

Speaking of characters and meaningful relationships, the casting and acting are great. The entire cast glows with the sort of enthusiasm that says "I'm happy to be a part of this." Kieran Culkin steals the show as Wallace Wells (though in the comics, I always imagined he was Asian), though Aubrey Plaza's Julie Powers gives him a serious run for his money. Anna Kendrick is great as Stacy Pilgrim and I wish she had more screen time (though it honestly wouldn't fit with the story). The Sex Bob-Ombs all look and sound exactly like I would have imagined them. I still think Wright could have done better than Michael Cera for the lead (When he scowls or puts on his 'game face' it looks like he's pouting and he's still a bit too mopey and awkward), but the truth is, he also could have done much worse. There are a few moments where he's spot on. Mary Elizabeth Winstead makes Ramona Flowers seem much warmer and more appealing than she was in the comic without sacrificing the character's mystique. Ellen Wong also does an admirable job with Knives Chou, and I plan to keep an eye on her in the future.

The aforementioned dweeby poster.

The plot moves absurdly fast. Not quite 'Gilmore Girls dialogue' fast, but a lot of stuff happens and it happens fast. Again, the pace is pixel perfect for generation net. I can't help but wonder how older audiences would react to the film. Parents may or may not get it. Grandma might have a seizure. The pace is essential for fitting everything in however. I also applaud the edits made to the plot. In the books, (particularly in the second half of the season and the last book in particular), there are times where it feels like Scott is just drifting and O'Malley is killing time. To be honest, the last volume of the book, (released a few weeks ago) felt like a rather sloppy ending. The movie has a much cleaner finish, and the battle of the bands subplot adds some more structure to the narrative. All in all, both the books and the movie are worthy of your time, but for the first time in a long time, I have to say that the movie is better.

Part of me wants more. These characters, and the world they inhabit are just too damn fun. But the story is finished, O'Malley is finished with it, and I worry about what might happen if we try to push this forward. In any event, you should definitely give Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World a watch at your earliest convenience. It's an absolute blast.