Disclaimer: I know this reads like some college freshman shit.  It's purple enough to be Prince homage.  Suffice to say that if you have not both played Final Fantasy XII and read at least the prelude to Fear and Trembling you do not get the joke and please don't judge me.


Once upon a time there was a man who as a child had heard the beautiful story about the gods' chosen hero, who was reborn in the power of his destiny to write his chapter of an eternal history.  When the child became older he regarded the same story with a newfound wariness, for life had informed and keenly honed the pious simplicity of the child.  In time such tales, told as they are again and again, were noteworthy more for their human omissions than their divine testaments.  In time he would deliver his answer.

Two great nations go to war.  The battleground, a small kingdom in between, is obliterated in a single explosion that asserts Arcadia's dominance over the entire globe.  This death and destruction set the tone for an era of bloodshed and fear.

The new Ivalice holds no place for the name Dalmasca; her new Dynast-King's time is nigh.  Happy the world whose hero arrives at all, to prevent these terrors.
Her gaze fixed on duty, her thirst for power and vengeance left unchecked, the deposed queen sees only the path to glory.  Filled with holy purpose, stones of power in hand and treaty signed in enemies' blood, the gods' will is fulfilled and a dynasty of sacred order and Roman peace is secured.  What hours of darkest night will these new shards bring?

Sword in hand, Dalmasca's enemies are laid to rest.  Sword in hand, she makes an enemy of all.  Happy the world whose hero gives not her heart to a stone.
When is a quest worth abandoning?  At what point do virtue and justice yield to some hope for dignity, for the peace that history denied a ruined homeland?  What price will the children of Dalmasca pay to see the machinations of empires repaid?

Revolution, resistance, insurgence--these words all splinter, shattered and bloody, at the breast of the uncompromising folly of conviction.  Happy the world whose hero must face the exhaustion her cause has brought the devoted.

The knight's path is arduous but firm, watching over his charge with no concern for his self.  Even a brother's hate and a kingdom's disgrace can be no burden to him as he shields his queen from any harm or interference.  Vulnerable and weak, a desperate regent is not, alone, enough to stand against the tide of history, and a pawn for others' designs she shall ever be.

In the end, the knight's duty is to both sides of a conflict, that it may not be won but rather dissolved.  Happy the world whose hero receives such protection and whose counterpart receives it double.
Memoirs are filled with the posturing of nations.  History's needs are those of borders and titles, of opposing nation-states and conflicting ideals.  This dialectic holds no meaning for the meager, for those desperate lives clinging to its lowtowns, its alleys of muted sighs.

History's orphans seldom offer counsel to its masters, and thus do their numbers swell.  Happy the world whose hero knows the lot of its weakest.
The ground beneath thrones has had its fill of tyrants' blood; their seats are too easily filled by their like for true peace to last.  The trick is to find that rare, solicitous leader who is both poised and willing to replace power with care.

Once again the survivors of war are claimed by the last remaining aggressors.  Once again force begets force, and all the virtues of youth meet their end at the peace table.  Happy the world whose hero has such enemies as these.

Thus and in many like ways we see how the thread of history must be informed by the pain of individuals.

Final Fantasy XII is a story of overcoming empire, overcoming gods, but most of all overcoming pain and loss.  Each of its characters, even those we see as frivolous and offensive, is essential to its precarious outcome.  For it is one thing to cheer on righteous violence and another to burn one's ambitious resolve at the altar of compassion.  Duty to country, to friends, to allies, to history, each is insufficient on its own.  The true leader feels pulled by all of these, but finds a way to be consumed by none and thereby satisfy all.

On the surface it is a story we have seen too much of: the hero's journey, the chosen one leading a righteous rebellion against an evil and powerful empire.  These tales mostly play out the same, but this time the tired resolution is overcome.  This time, the whole picture is considered and a world of individuals cries out against it.  FFXII simultaneously honors and undermines a legacy of storytelling and thematic expression that is said to encompass human history.  It is an unprecedented and brave step forward for fantasy of all kinds, a therapeutic salve for the trauma of the hero's journey.

Ten years ago today this game blasted all expectations, misgivings, and cynicism out of the water.  Ten years ago today Yasumi Matsuno not only revolutionized the Final Fantasy series, but upended a legacy of lazy storytelling and miserable ideology whose origins are ancient beyond belief.

Go play Final Fantasy XII, and if you have the means to play the International Zodiac Job System version then definitely do that.  It is my favorite game, by my favorite writer of games, and its quality will surprise the doubtful and the faithful alike.

Two games came out on the NES with the same design goals, but with different inspirations.  Both games were open-world action games that emphasized the hero's gradual mastery over an environment, but while The Legend of Zelda attempted to capture the spirit of adventure of a young child playing in the woods Metroid was inspired by the solitude and anxiety of the film Alien.  Understandably, this led to two very different protagonists.  Zelda's Link as the chosen hero, guided by destiny to rescue his princess, is a trope that even as a child I couldn't stomach.  His rise to victory is pre-ordained, a series of formalities the game, like its world, is obligated to bestow.  Metroid's Samus shows up similarly under-equipped, and similarly unlocks the secrets of her environment to gain the power to achieve her goal, but the game inherited Alien's emphasis on its heroine's personal struggle.  Even after awkward world-building was forced into the series Samus retained her potency, her desperate strength.

Metroid 2's only indication that Samus is a woman

It is mercifully mundane nowadays to note that Samus, like Ripley who inspired her, is a woman.  At the time it was something we talked about at recess.  "But the manual calls Samus 'he'!" Those of us who knew the code for her second quest (of course we couldn't beat the game ourselves), where the armor came off and her hair came down, knew the translators had just made the same assumption we had.  Seeing this made me think, probably for the first time, about where these assumptions came from.  But in the end Samus acted as a glorified peep show, rewarding the player with a flash of skin for completing the game quickly.  The positive impact of this representation was overwhelmed by objectification.

A few years ago I read a story about a man whose daughter loved playing Zelda games but wasn't interested in playing as another boy saving a girl.  He hacked the game script for Wind Waker so that it was a story about a young girl saving her brother, and it ended up working perfectly.  This is a really sweet story, one that highlights many of the imperfections to which "typical gamers" have the luxury of blindness.  There was a time I'd have sworn that gamers would cling to this anecdote as being indicative of video games' universal applicability, that the girl's desire to play Zelda at all meant vindication that games were more than mere focus-grouped novelty and had genuine cultural value, for everyone.  I now know better.

The backlash, in a smirking equivocation that has become all too familiar, came in the form of a version of Metroid hacked so that Samus is a man.  Neither hack was a high-profile event, but the audacity of this absurd rebuttal presages GamerGate's core tenet: that even one heroine is too many.  That young girls should stay out of the treehouse.

How powerups are acquired in Other M

This juvenile tantrum presaged something else: Nintendo itself rescinded Samus's heroic status, releasing a new Metroid game whose only purpose was to retroactively excise all agency, power, and courage from its once ground-breaking protagonist.  This game, Metroid: Other M, is the most aggressively sexist game I have ever played, made all the moreso by its determination to undo the barely-progressive "mistakes" of its forebears.  Its purpose was to reassure us that Samus, while she may have done cool stuff once, is ultimately nothing but a pretty vessel for male will, delirious with her desire to procreate.  Her newfound weakness illuminated a path of unconscionable derogation.

At the center of the most important moment in gamer culture right now is a series of videos made by Anita Sarkeesian on the representation of women in games.  A lot of nerds have responded with threatening vitriol, and while no video she could possibly have ever posted to YouTube justifies death and rape threats, I was somehow still surprised by how calm and careful her videos are. All she does is follow a trope from its origins in other media through the history of video games and then point out that, while these are mostly very good games that she can enjoy despite their problematic elements, those elements are still troubling enough to warrant attention and discussion.  It's the product of someone who clearly has a great love of the art form and wants to see it rise above its shortcomings.

For any element of the gaming community to react badly to this is confusing on many levels.  First are the obvious ones: I don't like to think about how people in our society could ever be this morally bankrupt, and that anyone could watch this video series and not only find fault with it but feel the need to make a "rebuttal" that attempts to invalidate rather than engage her points takes an uncomfortable degree of dishonesty and intellectual laziness.  What keeps me wondering, though, is how wrong I was about gamers' priorities: I have always known gamers to be so obsessed with the art form that they see as "theirs" that they want it to be all things to all people.  It isn't just that they like games, it's that games are the best.  It's that a higher class of people like games, smarter people who see the value in something the rest of the world doesn't understand.  There's a smug pretense about it all, and I always found this overcompensating myopia to be constitutive for gamer culture at large.

The controversy over Anita Sarkeesian, as well as GamerGate, highlight the shameful truth: that these gamers are more interested in abusing women than they are in video games.  Rather than wanting to see games eliminate those qualities that lead to justified derision, rather than shepherding a fledgling art form into true cultural relevance, they lash out at anyone who suggests they overcome their deep and protected bigotry.

Of anyone who still thinks this is an example of "boys will be boys", or of a vocal minority, I ask simply to consider the example of Samus Aran.  An already-problematic character, she nevertheless blazed a trail of representation that, if supported, could effect real change in how young boys are taught to think about women.  I have already written about the power this art form can have over the way that we care; to not only shout down any attempt to listen to women about how our art affects them but to find whatever meager sprig can grow in the wasteland of mainstream representation and pull it up by the roots represents a degree of hatred and willful oppression that nobody can afford to ignore.

So I last wrote about the problems that go with using zombies as the object of violence in a video game.  I was hyperbolic and self-righteous, but there's nothing in there I would want to take back, short of pointing you to some of the more recent research into the Kitty Genovese case that shows I maybe should not have used it as an example.  All the same, I'd like to talk now about one of very few games that actually does something interesting with zombies and undeath: Dark Souls.

The undead of Dark Souls are essentially ordinary people, but afflicted with a curse that gradually eats away at their memories of home and self.  The game is set in and around an asylum where the undead are sent in hopes of preventing the curse's spread.  Their ultimate fate is a violent madness, such that other undead serve as the game's foes as well as merchants and allies.  By far the most important thing about undeath in Dark Souls, however, is that it represents a real-world affliction that the game gives genuinely sweet and sincere perspective on: dementia.

There are two storylines in the first Dark Souls that I'd like to highlight.  Anyone who plans on playing the game should probably stop reading, since I'm going to spoil the ways one's interactions with these characters unfold.  While these aren't story spoilers in the usual sense, they're a part of why Dark Souls is a brilliant and challenging game and I recommend letting the game reveal itself to you naturally.

The first character on the list is Big Hat Logan, a ravenous scholar who has ditched his apprentice and keeps getting himself captured:

Initial meeting:
  Mm, you seem quite lucid! A rare thing in these times.
  I am Logan. I'm a bit cooped up, as you can see.
  I have a bright idea. Suppose you set me free?
  I'm old and empty-handed, but i could repay you with my knowledge, and sorcery.
  This place is melting my mind. The inactivity is repressive!

In the Duke's Archives, after rescuing him:
  A great pool of knowledge, the fruits of superior wisdom and an unquenchable desire for truth.
  Some would say Seath had an unsound fixation …But his work is a beautiful, invaluable resource.
  All progress demands sacrifice.
  And I certainly bear no antipathy for that wonderful scaleless beast.

After defeating the area boss in the Duke's Archives:
  Oh, there you are, it has been a while.
  Or were you just here?
  This fascinating place defeats my sense of time…

Then later:
  Mm…mm…

Later still:
  …Who are you…
  …Stay clear…stay clear of my work…
  …Curses upon you!
  …How dare you disturb me!

After this you find his clothes in a heap, and if you search carefully you'll find him in another area of the archives running around naked.  He attacks you on sight, wild and paranoid.  The player has witnessed Logan's decline from celebrated intellectual to babbling fool, and there is no "good path" to take with Logan to prevent this fate.  It's a sad perspective on the fragility of intellect, where we witness perhaps the heaviest fall from greatness in the game.

But for me the most poignant story in Dark Souls will always be that of Siegmeyer of Catarina and his daughter, Sieglinde.  It's always been a heartbreaker, but when I sat down to write about it I realized it was even sadder and far more real than I had thought.  Siegmeyer is an undead adventurer.  He's friendly and good-natured, but not really up to the task of scurrying around Lordran getting into scrapes.  Time and again the player helps him out of a bind, and eventually comes across his daughter.  She's not undead, but she's come to Lordran to track him down and make sure he spends his remaining time comfortably instead of being a burden on others and getting into trouble.

Sieglinde is just as sweet and kind-hearted as her father, but when the player eventually comes across their reunion it's the aftermath of his inevitable decline: he has gone hollow, and it was up to her to put him down:

My father…all Hollow now…has been subdued. He will cause no more trouble.
It's finally over…I will return to Catarina.
You assisted us both greatly. I can hardly return the favour.
Oh, father…dear father…
Sob…

Rather than leave him to his fate in the Undead Asylum, Sieglinde sought to look after her father herself.  When the time came for him, it was left to her to pull the plug.  This is the scene that rewards the player for helping Siegmeyer through all of his difficult troubles, and it's representative of the tone of Dark Souls in general.

Dark Souls 2 made a tiny change that drives these themes even further.  Instead of being called "Humanity", the item that returns the player to full human status is called a "Human Effigy".  Upon creating a new character, the player is not prompted to decide the character's appearance or background until Strowen the firekeeper bestows one of these, saying it is a doll made in the image of a famous adventurer.  She then says it is the player's image, and this is when appearance and background are decided.  The doll is in fact completely vague in appearance, but the act of trying to make it out as one's self allows one to recall one's own self by trying to project it on the effigy.  Instead of a magic soul item, it's a definite focus for "getting it together" and recovering one's sense of self.

A few years ago my father was diagnosed with vascular dementia.  It's been a long and gradual decline, full of worry and crisis and hard decisions.  The worst thing about it is that whatever hard decisions you make, and however correctly you make them, the result is the same.  The best you can sometimes hope for is to make him comfortable for a very slightly slower decline.  Most players won't even realize it, but Dark Souls forces these kinds of decisions.  At the end of the game it's up to you whether to prolong a misguided and exploitative source of warmth and life for a little bit longer or plunge the world into an age of darkness.  Fans still can't agree much on which is the "good ending", because there isn't one.

Ultimately, Dark Souls is far kinder to the player than it is to its characters and world.  Advertisements for Dark Souls 2 proclaim that it's not about death, but life and learning.  This is an optimistic spin, but not untrue.  As with all stories that dwell on themes of the inevitability of death, Dark Souls teaches us to hold on to what we love and make the most of our time.  It also brazenly confronts the fact that not all of us live out our days as ourselves, and sometimes we lose those things we cherish before our time really comes.

The undead aren't always cannon fodder, hellspawn, or an apocalyptic plague; sometimes they're our parents.

Villains in video games are a troubling thing.  I don’t even mean villain characters like Sephiroth and Kefka, or anime conventions about saving the world from a malevolent ham.  Now that we’ve actually developed the medium to a point that moral questions become relevant, the question for all video game violence is: “Just whom, exactly, are we supposed to have fun killing?” Video games are generally violent and almost always supposed to be fun, and while most negative reactions to this violence are ill-considered and reactionary, I don’t think it’s responsible to neglect the issue entirely.  The fact is that we have found solutions to the problem of video game violence that are in many ways more socially dangerous than the problem itself.

Nazis, for example, are the ideal antagonists: they’re never the underdogs, they’re maximally white, they fought to build a fascist empire that committed one of the most appalling genocides in human history, and they lost the war.  It is a convenient moral loophole that a fighting force existed who were so ideologically repugnant that any act committed against them could be considered, at worst, justice.  Over and over again the victory pornograph played for us, until Nazis became cartoonish impossibilities.  Instead of a terrible lesson about unchecked nationalism, instead of an illustration of the tendency toward racial scapegoats in the face of poverty, we have Snidely Whiplash and his Silly Accent Brigade.

After too much of this we risk feeling sorry for them.  So once the buzz of moral superiority wears off and the crass repetition is impossible to ignore, whom do we kill?  Monsters and aliens were always fair game, of course, but those can still be conceived as having rights and morals.  Self-defense takes some writing to make plausible, too, and you always risk the audience identifying with the people he or she is slaughtering.  This is where horror films supplied the next step, and it is my position that despite its grounding in kitsch and classic horror the zombie is as morally problematic as any human antagonist, and probably more so.

It’s not just that Zombies are a lazy device, or that there is only a small number of stories you can tell that include them.  The problem is that zombies are such a forced black-and-white morality, the nuclear option of unsympathetic antagonists, that people who are specifically into them as a genre are probably sociopathic.  Nothing about them is particularly interesting, so the only exceptional characteristic they have is that you can laugh and smile as you shoot them or blow them up.  Or set fire to them.  Anybody who is, as a rule, a fan of anything with zombies in it is probably just a fan of setting people on fire.  The very thing that made Zombies terrifying in early horror (their lack of moral agency) has made them a flashpoint for contemporary disaffected blood lust.

It’s like that scene at the beginning of Bad Boys II (yeah, we’re doing this) where the heroes are performing a drug bust, but there’s no reason for the audience to care that these people are doing drugs.  They’re having a party in the woods, and happen to be popping some pills.  Is this gunfight going to be a thrill ride?  What if someone in the audience has ever done a drug and it wasn’t a big deal?  Well, what if we also make them members of the Ku Klux Klan?  Problem solved, fire away!

It’s a mostly unspoken rule these days that it’s okay to hate anybody who is a member of any form of the Nazi party, or the KKK, or is a pedophile.  That’s probably fine, since those are some spectacularly terrible things.  It should not be okay, ever, to delight in their being the victims of indiscriminate violence.  And here is where the problem has turned itself around.  We needed a scapegoat, an easy target that wouldn’t make us uneasy.  But now that very desire has revealed itself as reprehensible.  In this way Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty are no different: one has virtual innocent victims and one has virtual victims that are sanctioned by the community, but both revel in the violent act itself.

The common theme is one of dehumanization, and it’s a serious problem.  The fantasy of video games, the escape from reality they provide, is that nobody in them is a real human being.  Once a person becomes accustomed to looking at people this way, the danger is developing a solipsistic lack of concern for one’s fellows.  I would like to make, or at least see made, a game that explicitly reinforces this tendency.  Thus made concrete, we will have the opportunity to confront it.

In this game the player will commit no violence, witness no shocking images, and be exposed to absolutely no sexual content of any kind (in fact, this lack of agency and exposure is the goal itself).  The game is set in a nondescript New York apartment, which should be fully interactive.  There is a television with compelling dramas playing, a newspaper, Monopoly, and other everyday distractions.  The player can make coffee, order pizza, call a friend, etc.  The only remarkable thing about the setting is that outside, in an alley, Kitty Genovese is being murdered.  If the player tries to interfere, call the police, or even look outside then he or she loses the game.

Kitty Genovese

This is not a murder simulator (per se - it is, arguably, a second-person murder simulator), and it won’t train anybody to become violent, yet it is perhaps the most base and monstrous game imaginable.  What it will train is a lack of concern for other human beings.  It is the worst kind of role play, explicitly encouraging the player to not help anyone, ever.  To this end, care must be taken in ensuring that the player is never ignoring the game itself, but instead focused exclusively on the task of ignoring the atrocities that occur within the game (for example, if the player is idle the game will automatically start toward the window or the phone, forcing the player's hand).

Jack Thompson once proposed that no video game developer would dare make a game about killing video game developers, since they would be training their own murderers.  Thompson assumed that video games so perfectly aped human experience that a player would find himself confused about what was real and what was the game.  Whatever apprehensions one has about games and technology, it's flatly evident that no such confusion exists.  I want to emphasize that the game I propose here is very different, because even though the murder in the game is a mere simulation of a real-life event, the player's active ignorance of it is real.  Part of the threat, too, is that once a person sees, face-to-face, the victim of a savage beating who is in danger of being murdered, involvement is inevitable.

The real murder of Kitty Genovese, as told and retold in college classrooms of every discipline in the humanities, was made possible because everyone who could have helped her was able to ignore the sounds and suggestions of her fate that reached them.  While these indicators are more urgent and real than anything we encounter in a video game, they nevertheless can be desensitized even where an encounter with the murder itself can not.

Ultimately, whether the target of your simulated violence is a simulated Nazi or a simulated game developer or a simulated woman in an alley, we have to have our debate about violence in games in a way that ties into the things about them that aren't fantasy, aren't simulated.  We have to wonder why we want to pretend the things that we pretend.  Video games aren't going to train us to do anything other than the things we're already inclined to do, but they can have a more powerful effect on our ideas about race and sex than any film or book ever has.  They can also have an effect on our ideas about humanity itself, and threats to the way that we care are considerable indeed.  I don't think we're going to prevent any real-life violence by preventing simulated violence, but we can maybe hope to exert some control over our apathy, and that's a start.

As you may have heard, GameCenter CX, the Japanese Video Gaming show about Section Chief Shinya Arino and his gaming escapades, was finally picked up for U.S. broadcast by the gaming blog Kotaku. The format for this release being that they would post episodes on the Kotaku website on a weekly basis.

For fans of the Japanese show, and even for those that may have only vaguely heard of it, this was a big deal. Only a handful of episodes had been fan translated prior to this announcement, and now that it would be officially available, spreading awareness of the show to gamers that wouldn't otherwise have access to the show would be much easier. And the more support the show gets, the more GCCX gets made. It was a time of great excitement!

And then the first episode was released...

...and it was terrible.

Now when I say terrible, I don't mean it in an elitist-snob "I only watch foreign movies+shows in their purest form, in the original language with subtitles" kind of way. If you've seen other Japanese shows ported to American TV like say Iron Chef or Ninja Warrior, those are perfectly watchable with dubbed-over dialog and announcers and such. In fact, you could say that it makes it even more accessible for viewers that have very little experience with watching something made in Japan. When I say the Kotaku dub is bad, I'm talking flat-out unwatchable to the point that I wouldn't want to expose new Gamecenter CX viewers to the Kotaku dub, as it might turn them away from watching the show completely.

But how terrible is it, really? Let me count the ways:

1. The English narrator is subpar, and his pronunciation is terrible.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm sure he's getting paid peanuts for this obviously low-budget localization job, but considering this is probably his big break into the entertainment industry, you'd think he'd do a better job. Did he even watch the original version before he did his voiceovers? I guess the main thing about his voice that bothers me is that his announcer voice isn't very compelling. If he were more natural about his delivery, which highs and lows in his level of excitement, then it would make it easier to connect with the audience. As it is, it just feels so fake and insincere.

Also, why is his pronunciation of all the Japanese names so terrible? His pronunciation is so off it makes me think that he's doing it on purpose, like he's mocking us.

2. No music.

Just watch even a little bit of the original show, and you'll see why this is so terrible, it adds so much to the show. As it stands the Kotaku dub is a guy in a quiet room playing videogames while his friends are talking.

3. A lot of the title cards and on-screen graphics are cut out.

Gamecenter CX has a lot of funny graphics that are lovingly crafted and very funny, many of them involving photoshopping Arino's face on the body of the main character of the game he's playing. Even if the main character is female. These are all cut. Boo.

Here are some of the title cards you are missing out on.

4. None of the on screen Japanese text is translated. AT ALL.

This is the deal breaker. This is ultimately is what makes the show pretty much unwatchable for most American viewers. They don't bother to translate any of the on-screen text, which makes it kind of hard to follow certain games (Clock Tower probably being the most egregious example) because Arino doesn't necessarily read all the text aloud. You also miss out on a lot of the explanation text that shows up, as well as the witty comments from the King and Queen mascot characters. The explanation text is a big deal too, because even if you are familiar with whatever game is being played, they point out some pretty obscure game information sometimes.

5. The Kotaku dub lies to you. BIG, FAT, DIRTY LIES.

At the end of the Mighty Bomb Jack episode, the announcer says something along the lines of "And that was the end of the Might Bomb Jack challenge," even though RIGHT THERE ON THE SCREEN it says that Arino will challenge the game again, live in front of a studio audience. Well okay, the on-screen text is in Japanese, but the Mighty Bomb Jack Live Challenge is one of the best episodes of the show, and the fact that the Kotaku dub deceives the viewer of this fact is a pretty big slap in the face to those unable to read Japanese.

So yeah, as a huge Gamecenter CX it pains me to say this, but the Kotaku dub is terrible and you shouldn't watch it.

However, it's not all bad news.

In a somewhat miraculous set of circumstances, there is now a team of fan-subbers that are actively translating the show, in a not terrible way. In fact, the translations are really well done, with all the Japanese cultural and video game references intact. Here is a link to point you in the right direction. Kacho, On!!!

(Images blatantly stolen from the SA GCCX thread)

P.S. - You may have noticed that I didn't point out how the Kotaku dub doesn't have a lot of the side segments that are in the show. While this does indeed suck and they should have them, it is most likely a licensing issue that is out of their control so it would not entirely be fair to put that in as a negative point for the Kotaku dub. The fansubs have it though if you know where to look, wink wink.

As an avid reader of German philosophy, I so often find myself at the mercy of translators to properly understand the material. Even if I, like Heidegger, refuse to concern myself with fidelity to the philosopher's intent, a poor translation can obfuscate or even completely cover over useful nuances and enlightening tricks of meaning. This problem is as much present for novels and music as it is for philosophical works, and I've found it applies to video games as well. Masterpieces like 7th Saga, Final Fantasy V, Secret of Mana (Seiken Densetsu II), Chrono Trigger, and even parts of Final Fantasy VII suffered from having poor to nonexistent translations that hid their greatness from view.

Fortunately, Japanese publishers started to catch on that not everyone in the US is a drooling moron around the time the original PlayStation came out. Instead of dumbing down hard games and not even releasing games that were too complicated, Japan discovered that gamers in the US were thirsty for true works of art. For me, the turning point was a game called Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and after the opening scene I knew things would never be the same again.

What follows is an annotation, a sort of recreation of my own thoughts as I relive these precious moments today. You are encouraged to click this YouTube link first, so that you can appreciate these lines as I first did all those years ago.

We see here a desperate and crucial line being drawn, a dualistic boundary with foundations in Plato that has, much like Dracula himself, endured (some might say thrived upon) the millennia of strife human beings call history. The irony foreshadowed here is that not only does Dracula belong, but this world is contingent on another dualism that he represents. He cannot be banished from this world, because without him there can be no world. Koji Igarashi is arguing here that one cannot banish value, cannot operate outside of it, and cannot simply eschew the uncomfortable and macabre. This becomes important later, but for now one can simply appreciate the claim that worldliness comes after value.

This famous exchange at first seems to contradict Dracula's opposition to the value of Goodness, but he is not trying to equivocate. He is in fact highlighting his nature as the opposite, that he behaves the same but in the other direction. There is a note of sadness to be discovered here by the perceptive: there is no hate in this exchange, as though Dracula mourns the fact that his foe, whom he respects more than he can ever let on, could just as easily have been his most trusted ally and friend. The futility and contingency of it all throws the attentive player into an authentic experience, fully appreciative of the arbitrariness of the very distinction the series represents. This irony is one of the most compelling moments in video game history, and is possibly the main reason for the fondness so many gamers have for this title.

Who knows what secrets lie hidden, deep within a man's heart? Does Dracula? Is it his lack of a soul which clouds the deepest truths of humanity from his vision? Or is it perhaps the very thing which allows him the keenest vision of all, a pure and objective view of humanity which is the source of his contempt? In this beautiful passage we see the heart of Castlevania's meaning, the foundation and culmination of all of its themes. Dracula--dangerous, powerful, timeless--displays a kind of insecurity. Unable to relate to anyone but his greatest foe, he is quick to dismiss the subject. Could he abandon his position, see if the world could survive without his chaotic influences? Best not to think about it. The last time he let himself see humans as anything more the results were too painful to bear. Best to end the discussion and do his duty. Best to go on forgetting, go on hating. It's the best for everybody.

What childhood could a man like this possibly provide? Is it even so different from the plight of any father quaking in the face of the insurmountable responsibility of parenthood? The roles of faith, love, fatherhood, and family legacy all collide here. In this brief encounter with Richter we seem to learn so little of Dracula, and yet one can see his entire person (dare one even suggest a soul?) laid bare in these few lines. It is only fitting that Richter sit the game out, having done his duty: the stage is set for Alucard (Is he his father's opposite? He goes in the other direction, but is made of the same stuff...) to discover his father, and himself. By the end of the game we see not only the purest of good, not only the most dastardly of evil, but the gentle, terrified man who sits precisely between them. And we see the horizon by which to judge him: the balance of all things.

Building on my previous post about game designers as the new existentialists, I found these words by Rorty rather stirring:

Many will tell you of the harm Derrida (inadvertently I think) caused to literary analysis, and that phenomenon is the specific target of that passage. Rorty was concerned with the assumptions Derrida's criticisms of philosophical thinking made about both fields, but this came on the heels of his own significant bias toward prose:

Heidegger famously elevated "the poetical" in his later years, and Rorty seems hellbent on elevating the morality play instead. Heidegger's distaste for Western metaphysics and its insistence on objective fact appears, to Rorty, to be a distaste for the considerable social and political strides that have been made in the West. This essay was published in 1991, and I would love for Rorty to have been able to draw on the considerable cross-pollenation of Eastern and Western game development instead of century-old paintings inspired by still older Japanese prints. That said, it makes little difference to his point: instead of trying to express some transcendent quality through poetry, one should instead concern oneself with tackling moral and social problems by connecting them with people, with characters.

Still, it's not as though there haven't been games that tried to address these issues within a narrative. Whatever you think of the results, there can be no denying that Hideo Kojima's impenetrable oeuvre makes various comments on (post-)modern lifestyles and political attitudes. I encourage anyone who plays his games to forgive the failure at achieving the impossible task of tying all his games together into a single narrative, and to those of us who started playing Metal Gear games at the outset his turn to the dissonant and absurd is jarring and sometimes revolting. In spite of all this, one can discern a few central threads that he's been struggling to follow to their conclusion, possibly without even realizing it.

You can disagree, and claim that Kojima has always been playing the philosopher/poetess game. People seem to think that he's always been courting some kind of recognition from the world of acknowledged intellectuals, or that he really still wants to be a film director. I say that he's failed spectacularly at both, to his benefit. I'm not one for Dickens, but what Rorty claims Dickens can accomplish is something that video games can accomplish tenfold. I don't think anybody can play a Kojima game without being bothered by him. Some people criticize the game, thinking they're bothered by it, but it's always Kojima. It's always Kojima making you look at what you're doing, what you're not doing, what you're ever doing. And he always considers himself to be in the business of providing pleasure.

Sometimes Kojima just seems to be a guy stuck in Metal Gear, but if you go back to his other work you'll find that Metal Gear is simply stuck in the broader narrative of Kojima himself. There's never been a better time to find this out, either: Policenauts, his legendary follow-up to Snatcher, has finally been translated by dedicated fans. I urge everyone to find out firsthand what Hideo Kojima has really been up to all these years.

Every once in a while somebody who makes games will tell a story or explain a decision in a way that is really jarring and thought-provoking. The obvious example is Miyamoto's story about the origins of The Legend of Zelda. Even more primal than Miyamoto's childhood adventuring, though, is the anecdote itself: romantic and inspirational, reminding us that there are reasons games are fun and that it might be possible to understand what they are on some level. The problem is that only rarely does this kind of personality shine through in a game on its own, and the language barrier between us and Japanese developers keeps any explanation on the side either completely opaque or vastly leveled-down.

I'm going on about this because I just read this spectacular piece on game design, and it gives a great look into the workflow of game designers. One man's brief epistle, while restrained in scope, approaches the game in its complete character in a way marketing copy and third-party features and reviews are hard-pressed to. This has been on the rise of late because smaller, independent development teams not only thirst for direct contact with players, leading to more direct essays like this, but their small size brushes away all the dirt that covers over the personality of the people making the game. This has been talked about at length over the last few years as independent games have begun to thrive, but as video games have become more personal they have also necessarily, thrillingly, become more dialectic.

It's tempting, when writing a review of a game, to enframe it in terms of "difficulty", "music", "graphics", and "gameplay" (usually meaning the interface). None of these things necessarily has much to do with playing a game. They are attempts to objectively measure its quality, not to convey the things one feels while playing it. The result is that most such reviews set out to tell you nothing at all that you need to know, and only accidentally and ambiently convey some notion of what the reviewer's experience of the game really was. Saying that GOD HAND is "too hard" is a troubling proposition. On the one hand, GOD HAND is incredibly hard. On the other hand, its difficulty is so masterfully paced that with the proper introduction it pulls you forward like a conveyor belt. Reviewers of Devil May Cry 3 were infamously humbled by the first levels of the game's original US release, to the point of dismissing the game entirely. Both of these examples show games whose reviewers are so consumed by the need to objectify the game that they have a hard time simply experiencing it.

Any game can be challenging, and this challenge can help or hinder it. Just as an older game's graphics can be technically inferior but factically far more expressive than a more recent one, a game that is easier to beat might be far more difficult to play well. Most of us have a list of things we hate to see used to add challenge, and yet we have sometimes enjoyed games despite these things. I am inclined to agree with Hiroshi Shibata that one way for a game's challenge to "work" is for it to force the player to confront and overcome fear. More than just a series of command inputs, a game takes place in terms of its presentation. A game can be challenging without making the player lose, as the fear of losing is only one kind of fear the player of a video game confronts (as anyone who's played La Mulana will attest). Shibata's essay brought to mind Heidegger's characterization of "what is encountered in fearing":

There's a lot of Heidegger jargon in there, but I'm sure you can see how this list reads almost like a map of an action game's boss fight. Typically one thinks of the phases of a boss fight in terms of its attacks, patterns, and tells, but the designer must put it together in more primordial terms. What this reveals is a more existential way of looking at video games in general. Facing off against a boss for the first time is always more terrifying than when you come back to it, not simply because of its dramatic presentation but because it places the player in an environment that is unfamiliar, "uncanny". The player's own imagination of what harm this opponent can inflict is even more terrifying than the actual "damage output".

Existentialism in novels and films has led to a great deal of snobbery and competition over who's the biggest artist. It's comforting to see that in video games we have the possibility to employ the ideas in a way that's less referential and more applied. Video games are existential always already in that they must involve the player in an experience. A game that seeks to limit the player's experiences to a script is missing this critical point. I've talked before about how good games empower players, but that's probably the wrong way to put it. A good video game puts the player in a world in a way fundamentally different from mere storytelling. A good video game opens up a world of decision making and possibility, gives the player a chance at pursuing a project.

Sandbox games, nonlinear games, storytelling games, puzzle games, fighting games, every single genre of video game does or doesn't do this at various points, and I think it's important to change the language we're accustomed to using when talking about these successes and failures. We live in a time when game designers can perform, can put players in a world like never before. It's time to stop waiting for video games to be the same things as books and movies. We're well beyond that now, well beyond the script and the recording and the measured span of time. Video games found their way years ago, with almost nobody noticing and even fewer taking the lead.

So I know a lot of people are criticizing Nintendo for some of the directions they took with the latest Smash Bruthas game. When a beloved game franchise goes in new places in ways that change its fundaments, the results can be disappointing. One needn't look beyond the recent Burnout Paradise to see this writ large, but it's been happening increasingly often of late as the old giants of the industry start to feel the need for the ol' Harrison Ford earring.

One thing that makes this version of Smash Brothers so jarring is the steeper learning curve. Traditionally an approachable party game, Smash Brothers: Rawls challenges players more on every level. Most people will probably be able to get through the game right away, but to really get it takes an understanding of the principles of justice set forth by Aristotle, Rousseau, Mill, and even a little Nozick in the later levels. Nintendo helpfully included unlockable excerpts from these thinkers to aid new players, but the effectiveness of 60 seconds of Anarchy, the State, and Utopia is hard to measure. Additionally, the perplexing and somewhat offensive decision to make the Sandel excerpts Japan-only makes the package somewhat less appealing to American players.

While I found the new character select screen innovative and fun (players now select a character without knowing which one they will control once the game starts), I was less impressed with the new "Veil of Ignorance" power up. HAL Laboratories was obviously trying to encourage verbal interaction and shouting matches between players, but having it just turn three quarters of the screen black seems like a lazy implementation of an idea with great potential. Having it occult the damage/lives indicator would have made more sense, especially considering the overall brokenness of the new "fairness meter".

All that said, SSB:R is a splendid fighting game, well balanced and thoroughly considered. Every time I lost a match or died in the single-player mode I knew it was just, and the controls are responsive and intuitive.

This game is recommended for anyone who likes the point to be made early on and then repeated for 300 pages.

A lot of games back in the day started making a big show of having "role-playing elements" worked in. In some cases this just meant there was an inventory that may or may not affect gameplay, but sometimes it translated into actual choices the player got to make. The phenomenon began long before anyone talked about it, probably most originally and elegantly with the first Mega Man. The levels could be tackled in any order you pleased, and the weapons you got along the way would make each level a very different experience from that had by someone playing in a different order.


There are more obvious examples, like Metroid and The Legend of Zelda, that have already been talked about enough. In Mega Man, the opportunities given to the player to progress in any way he or she chose were an integral part of the gameplay, and in Metroid and Zelda they give the player an opportunity to experience the same areas from different perspectives as the game progressed. Aspects of these games could present themselves to players in ways that were determined by choices they themselves made. It was primitive, yes, but well-used, and another example of ingenious developers making the most of small games. Because this was an intentional decision made by the game designers, much effort was put into preventing the player from acquiring everything at the outset of the game and playing through the entire thing homogeneously.

In console RPGs this phenomenon became rather more mechanical. Leveling up was mostly just a means of satisfying a player's Progress Quest appetite, and while some gameplay complexity would arise from it, it was really just a way to keep certain powerful items and monsters out of reach until the designers felt they weren't imbalancing. Character progression became a way to put video games on rails, and players found that usually by the time they got that powerful spell or item, they only got it because it wasn't very useful anymore. Over time, the means of extending a game's duration have become the means of limiting the possibilities available to the player. Somewhere along the line this process became moralized.

It's a common bit of stubborn ignorance that people want everything about the world to conform to their own assumptions. Explanations of the world around us have a way of "fulfilling themselves". When Isaac Newton says that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, the observation becomes a moral proverb: actions have consequences. Soon we find people punishing others to teach them this lesson about the world. We call them natural consequences, but they are really imposed by people more often than by nature. The moral law set forth is that someone has to pay when something goes wrong; all forces must balance out or there can be no rest. "You can't get something for nothing."

There has never been as great an example of this warped and misguided ethical view as the Grand Theft Auto series. I'm not sure anyone has complained before that Grand Theft Auto reinforced traditional moral values to a fault, but I assure you it's the case. The games have toys and joys too numerous to mention, and the devoted player who overcomes their challenges will have a lot of fun with the bonuses he or she unlocks. But the challenges themselves are not fun by any definition of the word; they are punishments, ordeals set forth so that the player's fun might not accidentally grow out of control. The developers, when including a very fast bicycle or a well-armed helicopter, seem to have collectively decided that these things are too good to give to the player for free. The player must pay for the privilege, above and beyond the cost of the game.

The result is that every mission has about a hundred ways to lose and only one way to win. Punishment is doled out liberally, and the bonus missions that unlock great things are the purest distillations of raw agony. Powerful, useful tools and games in GTA are withheld not to develop the game experience or to prevent a trivial completion of the game, but out of spite. And those who complete the challenges will tell themselves that it is worth it. That the satisfaction of accomplishing these meaningless feats of repetition and arbitrary precision make the rewards that much more satisfying. These people will grow up to deprive their children of joys and tell them it "builds character". After all, misery necessitates equal reward. It's a law of nature.

It's not worth it. Each entry in the Grand Theft Auto series is more dehumanizing than the last. As much fun as I've had flying around with a jetpack and a dozen kinds of weapons blowing up half of a fake Las Vegas, if I could return not just GTA: San Andreas but the entire experience I would. It's more fun to watch an expert play than it is to play. It's more fun to download a 100% save file off the Internet than it is to get 100% yourself. The game allows the player to engage in violent sex acts, murder national guardsmen, and commit a terrorist act on a hydroelectric dam, all in the name of profit and power, but none of those aspects of this game is as hurtful or socially base as the "challenges" offered the player.