Brainy Gamer

We need a moratorium on new games. A six-month respite for game makers. A hearty thank-you and job-well-done to all game designers and developers worldwide. And by "thank-you" I mean six months of paid leave and a promise of NO NEW GAMES. Who should I talk to in order make this happen?

Because, the thing is, I desperately need time. I'm in a sinkhole of unplayed, half-played, and overlooked games, and that hole is getting deeper by the day. If I don't get that moratorium soon, I may never be able to climb out.

I just did some math (always a feat for a theater major), and my calculations add up to a daunting realization. I need roughly 680 hours to finish the games currently sitting on my shelf. That's four solid hours of gaming a day (highly optimistic with a family and other responsibilities) for six months. No holidays. No days off.

It's not that I feel a nagging obligation to finish these games. I *want* to finish them. I bought each one fully intending to complete it, and I can't let that go. No matter how many new games I place at the top of my dance card, in the back of my mind lurks the hopeful thought that I remain committed to finishing God of War, Civ IV or Day of the Tentacle. I've never played GTA3. It sits in its original shrink-wrap unopened. So does Metal Gear Solid 2, Ratchet and Clank and...big confession time...Final Fantasy VII - a game I know all about but have never actually played myself.

How does this happen? Here's a recent example of exactly how: I play and finish No More Heroes and post an essay praising its developer, Grasshopper, and creator Suda Goichi. A knowledgeable reader writes me to say that if I want to see a prototype of the NMH combat system in action, I should check out a previous Grasshopper game, Samurai Champloo. Of course I do, so I rent the game through Gamefly and begin playing it.

In another post I bemoan the demise of Clover Studios, makers of Okami (which I've played but not finished), and another helpful reader informs me that if I'm a fan of Clover and Grasshopper, then I simply must play the highly underrated God Hand, a Clover game with strong aesthetic connections to Suda. Bad reviews put me off this game when it was released, but now I'm very interested. Another Gamefly rental. Meanwhile, I discover that a couple of Suda games never released in the States are coming on the DS, and of course I've *got* to get my hands on them too. Then there's the new Wii version of Okami...

See what I mean?

All of this is great fun, of course, and I don't mean to suggest any sense of drudgery, but my gaming life has come to resemble an epic RPG with a main storyline (play the new stuff and try to keep up) and many side quests (play the old stuff and fill those gaps). In an odd and ironically twisted way, I'm happy when the bad games come out, grateful for the chance to skip them so I can finally load up Oblivion and check out the Shivering Isles. And I haven't even mentioned all the indie titles I'd like to take for a spin. Oy.

I'm pedaling as fast as I can with no finish line in sight. Maybe this ride has no destination. Maybe the real point is to relax and enjoy the scenery. Or maybe I'm on a stationary bike and nobody's told me. Or maybe I'm the bike and Miyamoto is the wind. Somebody stop me before I hurt myself.

Anybody else on this ride?

"Pictures are for entertainment. If you want to send a message, call Western Union."
--Samuel Goldwyn

I spend a fair amount of time thinking about what video games mean. I'm interested in the ways they communicate ideas and stimulate our thoughts and emotions via narrative and gameplay. The value of this analytical process is self-evident to me, but not everyone sees it that way. In fact, some people consider interpreting video games a self-indulgent waste of time.

I recently wrote an appreciation of Aquaria, an indie game I admire for its soulful "vibe," for lack of a better word. Someone on the developer's discussion forum posted a link to my essay, and several people commented, including one of the game designers:

[designer] Every time I read someone's interpretation of the game, I feel like barfing.  Gotta learn to resist the urge to read articles about the game. Its like I feel like I'm X and someone is like "No, you're really Y".

[forum member] The way people tend to analyze and read-into creative work has always irked me to a certain degree.

[designer] In this case, it seems like a really positive article for the most part, but it labels things and organizes things in the game. For me it feels like the game is this big sprawling living creature that I'll never really understand, and when people write articles on it, it kind of feels more like a corpse that's being dissected.[1]

My friend JC over at the superb Japanmanship blog has written a very funny and uncomfortably accurate satire on overwrought academic interpretations of video games:

Super Mario Bros. vs. Marx
The communistic overtones of the adventures of Mario, a working-class plumber, being exploited by the bourgeoisie, a bone-idle princess, who is under constant attack from the lumpenproletariat, need little explanation. The fact Nintendo visualized the metaphorical specter haunting Europe in the shape of a Boo is merely the icing on the decadent cake.[2]

Some of JC's readers took the ball and ran with it:

[commenter 1] I always hated interpretations. I gag when I see people trying to see a meaning in something and even believe the author has put their interpretation in there deliberately. Should it fit into the theme of the work, OK, but when they begin to use references to classic literature like in this case, they should just go back to their poem interpretations.

[commenter 2] Yes, video games are the pornography for much academic masturbation these days. I take it as a sidelong compliment and forget about it.

Believe it or not, I often share these sentiments. Early in my career I delivered my share of mind-numbingly arcane conference papers, none of which did much to advance knowledge or educate students. They advanced me to tenure, and that's how the game is played. But I'm out of that game now, and this blog is an effort to find another way. 

I realize the whole "what does this novel/painting/game mean?" approach can be tiresome and fraught with silliness at times, but one could say the same for all forms of criticism in all media. The fact that there is too much esoteric or theory-mangled criticism out there does not mean criticism or analysis have no place in our consideration of video games.

I believe "reading into" games--trying to understand them in a way that has meaning to us--is an inevitable and positive pursuit. I work and teach in the theater for my "real job" and I find that people see all kinds of things that I may or may not have intended in my plays. When something stimulates us emotionally or intellectually (as some games do for me) we're bound to respond through whatever lenses we see the world, and that inevitably affects what we think a game means or says, if anything.

When you, the writer, composer, designer, or whatever, put it out there, it's basically out of your hands, and that's a good thing. The worst response, I think, is "well that was nice." Better to provoke something meaningful, even if it has no relationship to what you were thinking as the creator. We make meaning from our experiences. That's what humans do, and we each do it in our own way. This, too, is a good thing.

Scholars like James Paul Gee (whom I greatly respect) have written about the "meaning" of Tetris. That takes things farther than I can make sense of. It all sounds like mental gymnastics to me - interesting to think about, but ultimately too much of a stretch and perhaps a bit self-indulgent. Tetris is a game about sliding blocks, and that's pretty much it.

But is it possible to scrutinize the paradox of Kojima's pacifism expressed in gloriously violent games? I think it is, and to me it's a worthy endeavor because those games have a rhetorical and political dimension. They can also be damn fun to play, but that doesn't negate their other qualities. In fact, it only enhances them.

JC wisely cautions that we must be careful not to limit our analysis of games to a single framework, such as cinematic comparisons:

I'm just a little weary of the constant film-videogame linking that goes on everywhere, in the media, even within the industry itself. It's obvious where it stems from, film possibly being the closest medium to compare this exciting new technology to, but the connection is flawed in so many ways.

That isn't to say it's not fun, but it is spurious. Hopefully once the industry and medium grow up and have been around longer it can be fully self-referential like other media. But comparing Kojima to Fincher is doing both men and both media a disservice and actually limits the potential scope of your examination of videogames.[3]

Fair enough. To do this well, we need to develop a language sufficient for analyzing video games on their own terms, not merely borrow terminology from other media or disciplines. This discourse is emerging in the specialized field of game studies, but I believe other disciplines like my own can make valuable contributions.

I hope when the stigma attached to seriously studying video games diminishes--and believe me, that stigma is very strong in my profession--we will see scholars and enthusiasts from various disciplines bringing their experiences to bear on this rich medium. The trick, in my view, will be avoiding the theory-school quagmires and niche-focus turf wars we academics seem bent on creating. I'm pinning my hopes on blogs like Japanmanship (Edge Magazine's January blog of the month!) to help keep us honest.

Now back to my post-colonial Marxist deconstruction of PaRappa the Rapper.

image courtesy of amartinsdebarros at deviantart

A few days ago I posted an essay on the many striking similarities between Godard's classic film Breathless and Sudo Goichi's No More Heroes. I suggested that Suda's work contains many of the signature elements of French New Wave cinema, and the post received some terrific and insightful comments for which I'm very grateful.

Mitch Krpata, whose blog Insult Swordfighting should be in every serious gamer's subscription list, has responded to my essay and advanced the "designer as auteur" ball farther down the field. He raises some interesting points, including a comparison of the artistic visions behind Burnout Paradise and No More Heroes:

By any measure, Burnout is the more polished and "professional" of the two games. Its open world is seamless. It is a technological marvel, and at its best it provides a gut-level thrill that I'm not sure is matched elsewhere. But the game lacks any kind of a voice or point of view. Paradise City doesn't possess an ounce of the character that Santa Destroy has. Whatever attitude Burnout Paradise contains comes from a place that rings false, especially as expressed through the riffage of DJ Atomica. My instinct is to attribute that difference to the lack of Suda 51-like personality at Criterion Games.

My sense is that it's often very useful to have a singular visionary as the driving artistic force behind a game (or film, play, opera, etc.), but it's not always necessary. The Hideo Kojimas and Orson Welles of the world have certainly left their marks, but many great achievements have been created by well organized teams of people united behind a shared mission.

The Hollywood studio system of the 1930s is a good example, when filmmakers like John Ford, Howard Hawks, and William Wyler produced works of surpassing excellence within a system of many collaborative partners. As unbelievable as it may seem, none of these directors had "final cut." They were, for the most part, studio employees. From all accounts, Super Mario Galaxy emerged from a similar team-based, distributed-work environment - see the "Iwata Asks" series of interviews for a revealing account of how this process worked inside Nintendo's EAD Tokyo office.

Mitch's post "The auteur theory of games" can be found here.

A couple of months ago I was listening to a popular gaming podcast, and the commentators were discussing how they were all dusting off their Wii systems to play Super Mario Galaxy. They all agreed that without the first-party Nintendo titles, the system wouldn't be worth owning. One of them confessed that he had yet to even purchase a Wii.

Last night as I ejected my Endless Ocean disc and inserted my No More Heroes disc, it occurred to me that this little white box with the glowing blue light is my system of choice these days. With Super Mario Galaxy dominating my gaming life through December - plus tons of co-op fun with the underrated Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles, plus Zack and Wiki testing my brain far more thoroughly than any Brain Age title - I've decided this underpowered little box is OK in my book.

And, by the way, all the above titles except SMG were made by third-party developers.

Before I go any further, let me say I have no interest in suggesting the Wii is better, more fun, blessed by God (or Miyamoto), or otherwise superior to any other system.  That's not my point. I'm simply suggesting that now is a very good time to be a Wii owner, and the future looks even brighter thanks in large part to third-party developers.

Suda 51's decision to design No More Heroes for the Wii suggests a willingness on the part of developers to make games for the system that are "different," broadly defined. This is not simply a matter of figuring out clever ways to exploit the Wiimote, though that trend clearly dominated the first wave of Wii titles.

When we first heard about the Wii's innovative controller, many of us probably envisioned it as a virtual sword, gun, or lightsaber. Nintendo reinforced this controller-centric image in its early ads featuring gamers of all ages waving their arms around with big smiles on their faces. No surprise, then, that most of the early games for the Wii were little more than mini-game collections designed to capitalize on our giddy fascination with the Wiimote.

NOT using the Wiimote in this way was the wisest design choice Suda made for No More Heroes. The brilliance of the combat control system in NMH lies in its perfect balance of timed button presses, motion activated kill moves, and random slot machine bonuses. The Wiimote/nunchuck enables this action perfectly, and the controls reinforce the gameplay...instead of vice versa.

Even though I have issues with Endless Ocean, the game further illustrates how third-party developers are beginning to "get" the Wii. The fluidity and grace of deep sea diving are beautifully expressed in this game, largely because the intuitive controls don't draw attention to themselves. Point and move. Elegant and easy. One can imagine all sorts of acrobatics, gadgets, and weapons that could have been mapped to the controller, but the designers wisely avoided them to focus the player's attention on exploring and soaking in the underwater atmosphere.

Other exciting games for the Wii are on the way, and I think it's likely they will continue this trend (fingers crossed). Here are a few that have my attention:

King Story (aka Ousama Monogatari)
A new game created by a team of designers from Harvest Moon, Final Fantasy XII, and Dragon Quest VIII. It appears to be a mixture of RPG, adventure, and Pikmin design elements. More than anything else, I'm taken by the visual style of the game, which looks like a living watercolor painting. The trailer also exhibits a sense of humor that encourages me to think this one won't simply be "cute." I strongly urge you to click on the video and check it out for yourself.

de Blob
A project by students at the Utrecht School of the Arts and Utrecht University. Full of color and funky music, I'm admittedly taking a flier on this one, but the video has me interested.

Pro Evolution Soccer 2008
Multi-platform sports titles haven't fared well on the Wii, but check out the way this game incorporates Wiimote controls. If it works even half as well as it looks here, this could be a football game even a North American can enjoy!

Okami
A terrific game made for the wrong platform (PS2). This re-release makes full use of the Wiimote for the painting and calligraphy mechanics at the heart of this game. I don't think I've ever seen a game more beautiful than Okami. Yes, it's a Zelda derivative, but I'm okay with that.

Note that none of these games are made or published by Nintendo. Of course, no one is suggesting that any of these companies will threaten Nintendo's preeminence as the premier developer for the Wii, but it's encouraging to see these and other such games coming down the pike.

Will they be good? I could be skeptical, but I choose to be hopeful. No More Heroes certainly has me encouraged, at least for the time being.

As an American nation anxiously awaits its annual festival of football frenzy--preceded by four hours of pre-game coverage--I sit here ruminating about video games and French cinema. I expect my deportation papers to arrive any day now.

I've been thinking about No More Heroes and the blissful experience it provides gamers who love and care about games. It's creator Suda Goichi has spoken of his deep admiration for games like Out of This World and films like Paris, Texas and El Topo and has credited them as influences on his work. He sees video games as a powerful medium for self-expression, and as he told IGN in an interview last year, "I assure you that videogames are an art form. In my opinion, the highest form of art is the existence of videogames."[1]

The more I learn about Suda and discover about his work (I've also completed Killer 7 and am currently making my way through Samurai Champloo) the more I'm convinced that his aesthetic vision and artistic sensibility are mirrored in the works of the maverick filmmakers who launched the French New Wave. What's more, Suda's materpiece No More Heroes (too early to call it that?...I'm doing so anyway) bears many striking similarities to the signature film of the New Wave: Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless.

Nearly all of the defining characteristics of New Wave cinema can be found in Suda's work:

• Self-reflexive design - Godard, Truffault and the New Wave filmmakers never wanted you to forget you were watching a film. Aside from the narrative (and secondary to it in many ways) is the constant sense that the film is in love with being film. Repeated references to other films, the occasional appearance of the director or a camera operator onscreen, and an all-encompassing embrace of film culture permeate New Wave cinema. Sometimes this embrace feels like homage, at other times a gentle mocking. When your hero looks directly into the camera, he's not looking into another character's eyes in first-person perspective...he's just looking at the camera.
• Rejection of "tradition of quality" - New Wave films were shot on the street, never in a studio, often with handheld cameras. They look rough, even primitive by the standards of then-current Hollywood cinema. New Wave filmmakers perceived the standardized slick, "professional" look of most films dishonest and bankrupt of meaning.
• Rejection of the "tyranny of narrative" - New Wave films tell their stories very differently than typical Hollywood movies of the day. Jump cuts and jagged editing, mechanical zoom-ins and zoom-outs create a much more subjective camera-style. Continuity editing--"Film Language 101" for communicating story--was replaced by a system that self-consciously drew attention to the fact that the story was being constructed on the screen.
• Director as Auteur - the filmmakers of the New Wave saw the director as the primary author of a film, and they used the medium as a means of artistic self-expression. To know a film is to know its maker, and one may discover aspects of the director's personality, beliefs, and obsessions in a single film and, even more, in a body of work.

All of the above can easily be applied to Suda's games, especially No More Heroes. Other links can be found--such as a somewhat detached infatuation with violence--but I'd like to turn it over to you at this point.

If you've seen Breathless--even if you saw it years ago and have forgotten most of it--how many connections you can uncover between it and No More Heroes? Post a comment here and let me know what you come up with. Trust me, there are plenty of connecting points that don't require strained comparisons.

Click on the image above for a few big hints. :-)

If you haven't already, I strongly recommend seeing Godard's Breathless, not merely because of its connection to No More Heroes (or its influence on dozens of other films), but because it holds up remarkably well after all these years. Godard's use of music alone is worth at least one viewing...but there I go with another No More Heroes connection.

Have fun!

Pictures today, words tomorrow.

I can't afford to buy every game I want to play, so I keep our mail carrier busy shuttling orange envelopes between me and Gamefly. When I do decide to purchase a game, it's usually because I think that game is important--all very subjective, I know--or it's one that I or my family will want to play for years to come. So Bioshock is a BUY and Eternal Sonata is a RENT. Occasionally a RENT becomes a BUY (Crackdown), and a BUY becomes, well, regret.

Which brings me to Endless Ocean. I can hear some of you snickering, but I really thought this would be my kind of game. I've written about my interest in meditative games like The Endless Forest, Harvest Moon, and Animal Crossing, and everything I read in advance about Endless Ocean suggested it would be such a game. No rules. Leisurely play. Intentional repetition and cyclical rituals. As the box says, "Dive. Discover. Dream." I was ready for all three.

Ten minutes into the game I was certain I had made the right choice. The underwater graphics are lovely, the Wii-mote control works intuitively, and the game delivers a peaceful environmental message. Learn about these undersea inhabitants, catalog them, and promote the effort to protect them. The phone-it-in onboard boat graphics didn't trouble me much because you don't really spend much time there. This game wants you to be underwater, and that's where it shines.

The single most important element--by far--of a game like Endless Ocean is exploration. That's how you find the fish. That's how you get the photos you shoot. That's how you entertain the NPC's who contact you for a dive. That's the whole point of online co-op mode, which has no voice communication component. If you're not exploring together, what else is there to do? It's a vast beautiful ocean. Dive. Discover. Dream. EXPLORE.

Then I bumped into the "dive radius," and my meditative dreams were shattered. Endless Ocean imposes a limited area beneath the boat where you are free to roam. When you reach this invisible wall, the game stops you from going farther by restricting your movement or draining the air from your tank. Your exploration is limited to the dive radius, and your only option for proceeding farther is return to the boat (long load screen), enter the cabin (load) bring up the map, select a new area, confirm your choice, travel to that location (cut scene followed by load screen), choose Dive to re-enter the water, (long load screen) ... and Bob's your uncle, you're there! Dive. Discover. Dream.

I'm no diver, but I do understand that dive radius is a realistic limitation in real world ocean diving. Endless Ocean isn't real. It's a video game. I want to explore. Please let me.

I'm genuinely disappointed. I realize this game may not appeal to many hardcore gamers--and the subset of Wii owners who will buy No More Heroes and Endless Ocean is probably minuscule--but as a member of that subset I so wish I could defeat that boss assassin, towel off, insert Endless Ocean and freely explore, unwind...and meditate. Dive. Discover. Dream.

What a missed opportunity.