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.

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.

Right as I start to get really excited about Clover Studios and their new incarnation, Platinum Games, this announcement turns up. Four games! Here's my take:

Bayonetta: Hey, we're innovating on the Devil May Cry formula! Finally! I love all three Devil May Cry games, a lot, but hopefully this will finally make my dream of Viewtiful Joe-style time control combined with Devil May Cry action a reality. Interestingly enough, this is exactly the team that could do it and do it right.

Infinite Line: I never played Steel Battalion and we really have no info on this other than that it's a DS RPG, but there are no pieces of this puzzle so far that do not sex me up.

MadWorld: I love Nintendo consoles because I don't think videos games need to be violent to be fun, significant, or even awesome. That said, I like violent video games and think Nintendo needs more of them. Maybe one of these days I'll gush about No More Heroes, but for now it's enough to say that it tickled me in very private, very splendid ways. It was like an easygoing GOD HAND on the Wii, with absolutely sociopathic amounts of blood and arbitrary violence. MadWorld looks like it's going even further, as instead of making all the blood grey or whatever in Japan they are simply not going to release it there at all. This game will be indulgent, offensive, bloody, and on a Nintendo console. Make it happen.

Shinji Mikami: Yeah, he's working on a game. There are rumors that Suda 51 (the guy who made Killer 7 and No More Heroes) is involved. That's all we know, but I'm going to go ahead and pretend they're making GOD FOOT together.

So it turns out that the lead guys from Clover Studios are still out there, and with the Wii port of Okami anyone who hasn't felt the love yet should get started. The game rains down style on you for like forty hours, and shows Nintendo that if they're not going to take Zelda anywhere then other people are certainly up for the job. Once you're done getting a furry handjob from Okami, though, I've got something you need to try:

Where Okami makes love to you, GOD HAND rapes you into tiny pieces without even noticing you're there. Remember when games weren't just hard? Remember when you needed not just the skills but the right constitution to finish a beat-'em-up? Besting GOD HAND is a triumph of will, a demonstration of one's ability to go beyond playing the game and take up the reins of one's own destiny. To complete GOD HAND is to face one's ownmost, inevitable, yet indefinite potentiality-of-being. As born, the player undertakes the journey. Dying, the player discovers the resoluteness to complete it.

GOD HAND gets a lot of gruff for being "too hard". I'm here to tell you that that is an ignorant thing to say. Despite its difficulty, GOD HAND is one of the most fair games I've ever played, and while it is extremely difficult, it has a scaling difficulty system that lets you and the game reach a natural equilibrium while still rewarding skillful play. There are two different kinds of super-powerful attacks that you can use strategically, and every time you die in the game you not only learn a ton from your mistakes, but also get to keep any moves and cash you picked up. This is an example of one of GOD HAND's most brilliant accomplishments: the complete abandonment of archaic and irritating game behavior.

Every single power-up item an enemy drops or you find in a crate will stay on the level indefinitely. This means you don't have to waste a healing item when you don't need it, you don't have to break your combo to go pick stuff up, and you can plan your use of powerful moves based on what items appear. Not only that, but if you do pick up an item that you don't need, you get money for it instead.

There's a lot of other surprising little touches that show the game's fairness. When you use a weapon on enemies, it'll break after a certain number of hits, but you can use it to break open all the boxes you like. Punching exploding barrels doesn't blow them up, and there are unlimited continues with frequent checkpoints. GOD HAND is not difficult because the game environment is arranged to be stingy, irritating, or punishing. GOD HAND is difficult because you don't know how to play it yet.

To get good at the game, you'll have very little tutorial to rely on. Practicing with every move, studying enemy behavior, mastering the subtly versatile dodging system, and managing your tension meter are all genuine skills you develop as you make your way through GOD HAND. You can actually learn a lot by watching other people, as I did with this thread.

Besides the fact that the gameplay is super rewarding, though, why should you play GOD HAND? Because it's hilarious. Anyone who's played a Resident Evil game knows Shinji Mikami's knack for B-movie kitsch, but the celebrated campiness in this game has been turned all the way up. Dialogue between the protagonists is awkward and nonsensical, charmingly childish, and never tries to be genuinely moving. All the characters have literally the most awesome names possible, and the animations and subtle gags are better than I can possibly describe. Every single note is hit perfectly.

In the end, the experience of playing GOD HAND is put best in the words of a scantily-clad woman you rescue from a pair of dominatrices:

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.