Subverting Trust

     Macromedia Flash Player is the most indie game development platform of them all. Flash games are made with the smallest teams, almost always on a zero-dollar budget for little to no compensation. Flash game developers are almost all hobbyists; their games get made simply because they want to make them and share them. This gives them total freedom to experiment.

     Not to say that the realm of Flash games is some kind of beautiful artistic paradise; far from it. Finding the really good experiments is extremely difficult, but playing them always makes me want to get a copy of "Actionscript for Dummies" and dust off my ancient, woefully underutilized copy of Flash MX.

     Such a game is Loved, by one Alexander Ocias. I recommend playing it before reading further, if only for a minute or two. Another benefit of Flash games is how easily you can do so.

     While the game is certainly an thought-provoking little creation that warrants replaying at least once, what earns it a spot in this post is that it talks back to you. The first moment of Loved is a choice that's routine to anyone who's ever played any kind of RPG. It then proceeds to shatter that routine by spitting on your decision. The benevolent tutorials and objectives - something that players trust as a sort of natural law in games - are replaced with a hostile, manipulative voice. It's like discovering that food poisoning is caused by chemistry being mad at you: the neutrality is gone. Naturally, this drastically alters the tenor of the game.

     This trick - playing with the player's implicit trust - also brings the game BioShock to mind, most notably in the pivotal confrontation with Andrew Ryan at the end of the game's second act. The twist is, of course, that the protagonist, Jack, has been controlled all along by a subliminal code phrase.

A slave obeys.

     But the larger implication of the reveal is that, just as Jack was controlled by the code phrase, so too was the player controlled by the game's structure: both are blunt, unquestioning instruments. Story-wise, Jack has no real reason to play along with Atlas when he arrives in Rapture beyond basic compassion; certainly no reason to fight his way across half the city to personally dispose of Ryan. But the player justifies these actions to himself - he'll convince himself that injecting himself with plasmids, hunting down Big Daddies, and assassinating Ryan is the right thing to do, because he trusts in the moral framework of the game. What the confrontation with Ryan does is pull that rug out from under the player: you didn't slaughter your way across Rapture because you wanted to, or decided to, or believed it was the right thing to do: you did it because the game said so, and that was all you needed. And then the game takes away control of your character - for the first time since the game began - to follow this realization to its logical conclusion: you kill someone you have no real business killing.

     Generally, gamers have come to trust these meta-voices of authority in games - things like HUD, tutorials, and mission objectives. What if a game just outright lied to us about these things? How long would it take for players to catch on? Obviously this isn't long-term, big-idea stuff (when you come right down to it, it's a fool-me-once sort of trick) but I'd be curious to see it handled well.

     It's more an expression of the larger concept of subversion, which I think is integral to most, though not all, good art. Subversion breaks through our expectations and makes us see things from a new perspective. It makes us question how we think about things. Watchmen asks us to reconsider what heroism means; Blade Runner asks us reconsider what being human means. BioShock, likewise, asks us to reconsider how we approach and think about the games we play. These are the sort of thought-provoking narrative twists that resonate with us after the film, game, or graphic novel is over.

Not Dead Space 2 (and a little bit on protagonists)

    A few weeks ago over the holidays, I downloaded the demo for Dead Space 2 and gave it a try. I hadn't played the first Dead Space, but wasn't really compelled by it - Resident Evil 4 IN SPACE pretty much summed it up. But the second game seemed fairly enjoyable, with punchy combat and an awesome little bit of zero-gravity gameplay. And with the psychological elements of Isaac Clarke's story, the game might even be scary, which is unbelievably rare in survival-horror games nowadays; while the vast and imaginative arsenal Isaac totes around with him quickly downgrades the enemies from shambling nightmares to cannon fodder, the gradual onset of madness can't be conveniently dismembered with space-age mining equipment.

    However, I don't know if I can buy Dead Space 2 in good conscience, on account of their ad campaign.

    Now, I admit this campaign is hilarious and very, very clever. I admit the reaction videos are all very amusing. I know that I'm being 'that guy' by decrying it. And it's made worse by knowing I'd probably love Dead Space 2 if this hadn't mentally polluted it for me. But on principle, these ads are like poison to gaming's progress toward broader acceptance. It's demeaning to suggest that gamers want senseless violence and nothing else, especially if its only to rebel against our mothers. For me, Dead Space 2 isn't about psychological horror or science fiction anymore: it's about gore and childishness. And if I give the people who made it sixty dollars, I'll be telling them that I'm into that, and to please continue making it. So unless I get it on good authority that Dead Space 2 is gaming's answer to H.P. Lovecraft, I won't be playing it.

    Anyway, in lieu of having a new game to talk about, I'd like to talk a little about game protagonists for the remainder of this post. Specifically their haircuts. Because as games go by I can't help but notice there's one haircut that seems to heavily outnumber all others: buzz-cuts. Or, at least, short hair that stays close to the scalp. To name a few, there's Isaac Clarke, Niko Bellic, Starkiller, Alec Mason, Alex Mason, Commander Shepard...among many others. Now, there's a reason for this, and it goes beyond looking tough and being simple to animate.

     When someone asks me what physical trait I find most attractive in the opposite sex, my answer is always hair, because it's the trait that reveals the most about their personality. Hair is the only part of our physical appearance we have direct control over. How we wear our hair says something about us and how we want to be seen. This is why in the military, new recruits have their hair buzzed off - to transition them from a group of individuals into components of a larger military machine.

    This holds true for game protagonists. If a character has hair, that says something about their personality; if they have no hair, that aspect of them is unreadable, and can be projected by the player. A bald head is a blank slate; it's the haircut of the everyman. If a game has a scripted story and the player is intended to relate to the game's protagonist, it's a good move for the developers to give that protagonist a buzz-cut. You know this sort: they don't have much understanding of the world they find themselves in during the story of the game, and focus their violence against enemies who profoundly deserve it or hit first. They're just as lost, confused, and (reasonably) moralistic as the player: Marcus Fenix kills slavering, aggressive monsters with that chainsaw, not women and children. Their actions are palatable and therefore relatable.

     However, the alternative - giving the character a definitive hairstyle - is more effective if the protagonist has a well-defined personality. Which is the real topic I'm discussing here: the line between strong personalities and blank, relatable characters.

     If done right, a well-defined protagonist can definitely enhance the story - especially if that story revolves around doing things that the player wouldn't themselves do. In Mafia 2, Vito Scaletta gets some freedom as a character by not being totally relatable. He's a family man and WWII veteran with no scruples about using violence to get ahead. His humanity is contrasted by some very believable, very garish flaws; under the slick veneer, he's an irritable thug with no regrets about hurting other people (though he does briefly express misgivings about doing drugs, which seems like it was written in as a hackneyed PSA.) In a way, Mafia 2 is a crime drama as told from the perspective of Henchman #2. However, it works because Vito isn't trying to be like the player. The game is a portrait of a fictional man; he can have flaws that the player doesn't share and still be an effective character. Vito decides where the story goes, and the player gets to follow.

Joe and Vito: unrepentant assholes, and all the better for it.

     When this approach doesn't work, we have characters like John Marston in Red Dead Redemption. John Marston at first looks like a strong character, but ultimately he has no personality, and simply drifts along with the story of the game trying to be a mouthpiece for the player. This expresses itself most egregiously when he's instructed by a Mexican despot to raid a local village for sex slaves. Marston snarls about how doing so would be morally wrong and that he won't stand for it - which is of course the player's response as well - but as soon as he stops talking he goes and does it. Red Dead Redemption is a story that needs a protagonist who accepts the morally gray - and morally black - elements for what they are, but the convictionless John Marston endlessly contradicts himself in an effort to anticipate what the player feels and emulate it. If John Marston was an unapologetic scumbag from the very start of the game, I would have no problem with him riding off to raid and pillage for Colonel Allende. But as it stands, he's got one foot on either side of the line.

Fallout: New Vegas

     Games that use the Gamebryo engine - which is to say, Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series and the recent Fallout revivals - are difficult to classify. There aren't really any other games like them, so despite the fact that they're riddled with technical flaws and development shortfalls, their uniqueness routinely outshines all their weaknesses. They're a complex cross-breed of other genres; something along the lines of 'First-Person RPG Sandbox.' They all feature vast landscapes, entire nations of NPCs, and opt-out storylines that seem secondary in emphasis to exploring the gameworld.

     Fallout: New Vegas is the most recent addition to the subgenre (until Skyrim drops at the end of the year) and is essentially a gigantic mod for Fallout 3, courtesy of Obsidian Entertainment. In the high school chemistry class that is the video game industry, Obsidian Entertainment is the smart kid who doesn't apply himself. New Vegas is teeming with tweaks and clever additions to the Fallout 3 formula, to the point where it's initially overwhelming - things like a revamped skill system, hunger and thirst mechanics, and the massive lists of craftable items - but the whole product feels haphazard and unstable. Their ability to brainstorm has outweighed their ability to realize their ideas. There are horror stories of game-breaking bugs all over the internet, though the worst I encountered was occasionally seeing a giant radscorpion exit warpspace a few feet off the ground, or someone delivering a line of dialogue without moving their lips. Obsidian did manage to find superior voice actors to Bethesda's usual crowd; I was even able to turn off the subtitles without feeling an overpowering urge to skip through all the spoken dialogue. The stiff, faucet-like delivery of the lines still clashes with the ravaged and often brutal setting, however, especially when the writers start cracking jokes.

     Maybe that's part of why playing these games feels less like inhabiting your character and more like being an actor in a play. The first time you go through a scripted scene, you might be looking the wrong way and miss a choreographed event, or ask an NPC questions in an order that doesn't make conversational sense. NPCs bug out and miss their cues; even the way that they plant their feet and deliver their rehearsed lines sounds like their holding a script. When combat goes awry and your character collapses in a lifeless heap, it's easy to imagine an offscreen director shouting, "Cut, cut, cut! Again from the top!" After a dramatic confrontation with one of the story's antagonists in a deserted apartment, I went to the trouble to pick up his ragdoll and slump it over the table he'd been sitting at, pretending that our actual showdown had consisted of a single dramatic gunshot rather than the two of us running in circles emptying clip after clip into each other's faces. The scripted elements of the story, while by no means weak, often disappoint.

A lot of people praised how New Vegas is less brown and gray than
Fallout 3, but isn't nuclear apocalypse one of those situations where
brown and gray are sort of thematically appropriate?

     Where these game do excel - and what sets them apart from other RPGs - is their capacity for self-imposed role-playing. Most RPGs are considerably more structured, especially in regards to story: the protagonist's every action is usually directed towards the objectives dictated by the plot. In New Vegas, the vast majority of the game is spent off this beaten path. You start off about as far away from the main questline as you possibly could, and the first ten hours or so are spent working your way across the vast map. It's easy to forget the main questline entirely once you march out into the wasteland. This opens up a whole new avenue for role-playing that few games explore: what does your character do when no one's giving him instructions?

     Not many other games have this sort of unstructured situation. In these stretches of gametime - on the road or between quests - what the protagonist does becomes pure character development. How you interact with NPCs? How do you deal with potentially dangerous situations? What landmarks do you head for, what items do you seek out? If your character wants an item and knows an NPC has it, will he take it by force, or steal it? During quests and dialogue, you're usually given a handful of options how to proceed, but that invariably pales in comparison to the infinite options of a sprawling landscape. This is the elusive phenomenon we call 'emergent gameplay.'

     So, in a way, to get the most out of New Vegas, you have to selectively ignore certain elements of the experience - the hammy dialogue, the occasionally stifling quests, the rules-before-realism combat. Is that really a positive thing? Not exactly; it's more of an excusable weakness than a strength. Any story can be good if you just reimagine the parts you don't like. Right now I'm applying this same mindset to Fable III, and while it's considerably more difficult to ignore all the dissonant elements in that game, this time around I'm actually enjoying the game instead of just groaning at the hamfisted story and irritating dialogue. Both games offer a lot of freedom to the player, but on top of that add a layer of restrictive scripting that limits the game's use as a pure storytelling tool.

According to Peter Molyneux, I'm a fugitive prince striving to overthrow
a corrupt monarch. According to me, I'm a rugged, middle-aged blacksmith
who lives in a small mountain village with his wife and daughter.

    So, in the interest of providing constructive criticism to the games I play, here's my suggestion: we need more emergent gameworlds and fewer instructions about how to play in them. Imagine if the next Elder Scrolls had no main quest. It would have questlines, yes, but they wouldn't be thrust upon you from the very start. You are simply born into the world. You aren't told that you're the chosen one with a destiny to fulfill, or instructed to go somewhere and talk to so-and-so. What you do initially is completely up to you. You could take up a sword and set out to seek your fortune, maybe become a great hero and save the realm from a looming threat in the process. Or maybe you set out in the other direction at the start of your journey, and end up embroiled in a completely different conflict. If you so choose, you could spend your whole life in the town you were born, working a day job and raising a family, watching the world change over the years as larger events proceed without out. Gamebryo games always give a sense of a larger world, but that world always seems to revolve around the player and has no life of its own, with everything hinging on a central questline. The Civilization games are completely emergent games, and that's part of the reason they're so good. The diplomacy, wars, and global crises aren't preordained by scripting, making each game its own unique saga. We need more of that in our adventure games.

ILOMILO (a recommendation)

    Ilomilo is an ingenious little puzzle game set in a world of cloth, needlework, and folded paper, in which two adorable ambulatory pillows - Ilo and Milo - meet in the park each day for a picnic. Your job is to make sure they find one another. The problem is that the 'park' is a constellation of floating cubes, peppered with a variety of strange stuffed animals and gravity-bending carpets. Welcome to the most non-threatening, smile-inducing game ever designed.

    This is a game that came out of nowhere and won me over almost instantly. The developer, SouthEnd Interactive, doesn't really have any other big titles to its name, and the game has so far been flying under the radar with a super-secret launch based around finding download codes online. What I consistently marvel at is the game's underlying simplicity - the spatial trickery isn't so much mindbending as it is mindtickling, with a wonderful difficulty curve that gradually introduces more and more advanced mechanics before interlacing them into some extremely clever puzzles, without ever becoming repetitive or frustrating. This is the sort of lateral thinking in game design that makes a game satisfying to play. On top of that, the game has a distinct style that's all its own, with visuals and audio just as strong as its puzzles. The art and story are essentially uncut, weapons-grade cuteness, but the quirky soundtrack deserves special mention. Composed by one Daniel Olsén, the music employs everything from sitars to kazoos to bring a soothing charm to the whole experience.

     But what I really must stress about Ilomilo is the co-op. It's nothing fancy - just the ability to play the singleplayer campaign with a separate controller for each character, really - but it's enough to work. There's something nostalgic about sitting next to someone and trying to think through a video game together - maybe it's memories of playing Ocarina of Time with my brother - pointing at the screen and insisting that the other person "try the thing over there again." It's a very potent social experience, and it makes Ilomilo a must-have if you're looking for something to play with a sibling or significant other. The levels are bite-sized and plentiful; the game has quite a few hours of gameplay for its pricetag. If you appreciate a good mindtickling and/or things that are adorable, definitely try Ilomilo. It officially hits XBLA on January 5th, but can be downloaded early here, as well as already being available for Windows Phone (that phone with the irritating ads that scold and berate you for using the product they're selling.)

Games as Art

    There's an entire argument about whether or not games can be art, but that's an easily answered question. Have you ever felt emotionally invested, in any capacity, in a game? Well, there's your answer. Art is pretty much only limited to things that are 1) are intended to be art by the people who creates them and 2) convey some kind of emotional or intellectual statement. Film can do it, books can do it, a doodle of a frowny face. There's no reason games can't do it. If you still need convincing that there is merit in that, I refer you to this video for a more complete breakdown of the subject.

    So it's true games can be art. But they aren't quite there yet.

    As for why not, two big reasons come to mind: fun and directors.

    Presently, games are not predominantly focused on telling enriching stories or enabling meaningful player expression - they're concerned with challenges, the gameplay mechanics. Pointing a virtual gun at a target and pulling the trigger or executing a jump from one platform to the next is no more artistic than making a play in a game of basketball. It's a test of the participants' ability to follow an arbitrary set of rules. Perhaps there's some statement to be found in the broader context of these activities - why we spend our time with them and why they're important to us, for example - but in themselves, these portions of games are predominantly just skill-based exercises, not artistic statements.

    Now think about the ratio between the skill-based and artistically significant portions in most games. Even in BioShock and Mass Effect, two of the most intellectually engaging mainstream titles I've ever played, you spend the vast majority of your time simply shooting your way through legions of faceless enemies. We're used to this - we don't even think about how our lone protagonist somehow dispatches hundreds of other people on a daily basis, almost casually, without any sort of physical, mental, or emotional struggle. In our minds we neatly divide the story and the gratuitous action into separate compartments. The challenges may drag on long beyond retaining any emotional weight or value, but we eat it up like popcorn. It's most profound in games where the world of the story and the world of the gameplay follow noticeably different rules. Classic example: if Aeris dies in one of the hundreds of turn-based battles in Final Fantasy 7, it's a momentary tactical setback corrected with a spell or item, but when she dies in a cutscene, she's gone for good. There are exceptions, of course - games like Heavy Rain make an effort to keep a strong emotional presence from start to finish, and in Braid it can be argued that the gameplay itself is a metaphor for its story's themes of obsession and persistence - but generally speaking, games have developed this strange dual nature where gameplay and story are almost two separate entities.

    This is mostly a practical concern: if a war game was trying to be truly authentic, there would be no medkits, no regenerative health, and no respawning. That wouldn't be entertaining, and we expect our games to entertain us. This expectation holds the medium back . Games are expected, above all else, to be 'fun'. Art is not always fun. Meaningful, engaging, and thought-provoking are all accurate words, but 'fun' rings a little hollow when applied to most existing great works of art. Now, would you argue that film was an art form if the only movies ever made were vapid comedies and action movies? Probably not - it would be hard to imagine Munich or There Will Be Blood being created under those circumstances. Games are still considered to be 'games' in the childlike sense, and that means that they must be fun.

I'm also pretty sure you have attacks in this game that crash
planets together and stuff. If that happened in a cutscene, it
would probably have more widespread ramifications.

    Because of this, games aren't trusted to deal with serious issues. No one bats an eye at a movie about war or sexuality, but Six Days in Fallujah was canceled and Mass Effect's eight seconds of right buttock were treated like immoral affronts to good taste. It's assumed that, no matter what a game is about, the game will treat the subject lightly and ensure the player enjoys it. Therefore if it was announced that a game was going to be made about the Holocaust, the public assumption would be that the game would make the Holocaust seem like fun.

    So that's one part of it. Games won't be able to break out as an art form until people stop thinking of them as nothing but cheap thrills. Obviously this doesn't mean get rid of the cheap thrills - everyone likes those - but it at least needs to be demonstrated that not every game is necessarily like that.

    Games-as-art proponents have been known to claim that, in order for gaming to be accepted as a legitimate art form, it needs to first have a Citizen Kane. However, in order to have a Citizen Kane, games must first have an Orson Welles. Which brings me to my second thesis about what games need to do in order to be accepted as art: games needs to have strong directors.

    Right now, games are mostly designed by committee, something that heavily dilutes any artistic message or vision that might go into them. The more people involved in creating a game, the more it loses focus - the work is no longer a single, concentrated statement, but a large cluster of smaller statements, all drowning each other out. Instead of following an overarching theme or style, the game becomes a composite of hundreds of smaller contribution by different people. Artistically, it makes a game feel more like an anthology than a novel - it has some nice pieces that you particularly like, and might contain some samples of truly excellent work, but taken as a whole, it won't become a classic. Contrast that with indie productions - Limbo, Braid - with much smaller teams: these games have a much more cohesive, deliberate feel. Go even further into super-indie territory and you'll find one-man developers like Jason Rohrer of Sleep is Death and Passage, where the game is parsed down to almost pure artistic statement. Games benefit from having a strong authorial voice, an individual director who takes ownership for the piece as a whole. I think there's proof of that in the upcoming game Journey - a game that makes me fairly envious of PS3 owners - as expressed in this interview with the game's director, Jenova Chen.

Journey. If you're into artsy indie titles and haven't heard of it, give it a look.

     Of course, games are extremely expensive to create nowadays. Every day they're getting more and more comparable to film budget-wise. Therefore, staking a game's success so heavily on a single person is something that demands a lot of trust in their artistic ability. And to acquire the trust of publishers, directors need to first acquire the respect of the consumer public. In film, the idea of the director as a film's "author" and celebrity in their own right is already widely accepted. Names like Steven Spielberg or James Cameron in a film's trailer typically create a stir in and of themselves. With games, you're more likely to know the name of the developer than the name of any individual member of the dev team. Who made Half Life 2? Valve. Who made Fallout 3? Bethesda.Who made Mass Effect? Bioware. While a developer may have a good reputation, the idea of the group as the creator is still design-by-committee. Can you name the person who came up with the idea for any of those games?

     Where we do see the rise of individual artists in gaming today is indie developers. For instance, take Jonathan Blow, creator of Braid, or Markus Perrson, (sole) creator of Minecraft. Tim Schafer is another (somewhat older) name with brand-recognition. The point is, these creators have developed a reputation for having good ideas and the vision to execute them. If their name is attached to a product, the community anticipates something exceptional. And if the community anticipates something exceptional, publishers are more likely to see backing the creator as a safe investment, and thus give the creator the necessary funds. And - here's the important bit - when the creator creates, it actually will be something unique and artistic. Because these creators are artists who care about their work.

    So those are, as I see it, the main goals for games on the road to becoming art. Will it ever happen? Hard to say. With the rise of casual gaming and motion controls, games and fun are more tightly intertwined than ever. Indie developers develop cult followings but don't make a tremendous deal of money, and therefore linger at the lower rungs of the game industry's ladder. Games may very well be taking the route of comics, getting pigeonholed into one genre - superheroes for comics, action titles for games - and leaving all other experimentation to the odd fluke or independent effort. But a lot can happen in a few years, so it's hard to tell. I for one am probably going to keep rambling about it.

Call of Duty: Black Ops

      The Call of Duty series, and games about real-world wars in general, are put in a somewhat uncomfortable position. On the one hand, they're meant to be fun. On the other, they're about real things that happened to real people, which throws a bit of a pall over all the brutality and violence their obliged to depict, and the simplified terms they depict it in. There was a particularly jarring bit at the end of Call of Duty: World at War, where you watch your Russian Sergeant go to town on a Nazi stormtrooper with a machete on the roof of the Reichstag, in what's meant to be a climactic moment of catharsis and badassery. Immediately after that, the game transitions to footage of the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima, and the message "60 MILLION LIVES WERE LOST AS A RESULT OF WORLD WAR II" flashes up on the screen. It's as if the game is saying, "Hey, isn't this war awesome? Well, it isn't, and you're a terrible person for thinking so."

      Lately, however, the Call of Duty games have been making their way out that pratfall. Modern Warfare 2 was a pronounced move away from realism, with its James Bond-style stunts and fantastical plotline about World War III, but it was still steeped in the same hollow, confused messages about war. Black Ops marks the point where the series puts those messages almost completely behind it.

      Just before the game's finale, the protagonist, Alex Mason, finally figures out the location of the secret Russian base poised to destroy America.
     "Where?" asks Hudson, the CIA spook who's spent the entire game trying to coax the information out of him.
     "Cuba," says Mason.
     In response, Hudson whips out a pair of sunglasses, and a thundering guitar riff plays in the background. At that moment, I realized that the game wasn't trying to be historically accurate anymore: it was trying to be awesome.

The exact moment when the franchise stops pretending.

      This is a good thing: with Treyarch having realized that they can't make both an entertainment piece and a war-is-hell aesop in one game, Black Ops throws its lot in with the former. It isn't so much an 'FPS war game' as it is an FPS that incidentally visits Vietnam during the course of its story. It's not trying to provide an accurate portrayal of war or promote any ideology. At heart, Black Ops is just a summer action movie - pulpy, meaningless thrills. And because the element of dishonoring dead soldiers and real-world issues has been taken off the table, I can sit back and enjoy the story. And story-wise, Black Ops is a pretty sound conspiracy thriller. It's full of evil Russians and Nazis, a hokey super-weapon, and a plot to destroy America. It's campy, but it's handled so well that that's just fine. Strong voice work, face-mapping, and motion capture makes the characters believable, if simple, and the plot has just enough mystery to it to stay engaging.

       If the story has one fault, though, it's pacing. Like Modern Warfare 2 before it, Black Ops is very cynical about the player's attention span, and therefore rushes from setpiece to setpiece at a breakneck clip. Five minutes of stealth, five minutes of explosions and gunfire, five minutes of flying a helicopter. While this ensures that the player never has a chance to get bored, it also prevents any of the good bits from really shining. There was one section where Mason and his squadmate, Woods, infiltrate a Vietcong riverside compound, swimming from hut to hut, stealthily planting explosives and taking down guards with muffled knifework. One touch I particularly like was how Woods issued his instructions during our infiltration in the form of hand signals and gestures - he'd motion for me to duck down, or point out a Vietcong for me to take out while he took out another. Minutes later, however, I was back in a firefight, and going toe-to-toe with twice as many enemies as I had just been sneaking past.

      The stealth section stood out for me, however, because it gave me a glimpse at what a more subdued, realistic wargame could be like. It felt organic and believable - each kill had weight, and the importance of avoiding detection felt paramount. I wasn't an unstoppable killing machine that could shrug off bullets and kill ten thousand mooks on my way to the bathroom - I was one man with a knife and a bundle of C4.

A glimpse into another kind of war game.

       While Black Ops seems to cure Call of Duty's long-standing schizophrenia, giving up on 'war simulator' and embracing 'action movie', it's interesting to think what a game that goes the opposite direction could be like. Being dropped into a platoon of well-characterized NPCs for a full tour of duty in Vietnam could be a powerful experience, without the comforts of a Hollywood plotline or clear nemesis. The majority of the missions would simply be the day-to-day experience of being a soldier in enemy territory: patrol, reconnaissance, infiltration, with the rare raid or major battle. The constant action would be replaced with constant tension - any of your squadmates could die from a sniper's bullet, or an ambush, or a landmine at any time. Confirmed kills would be few and far in between, and the definition of an enemy combatant would be hazy at best.

      Handled correctly, such a game would absolutely be able to hold its own beside great war films about Vietnam, like Apocalypse Now or Full Metal Jacket. Will we see a game like that any time soon? The fate of Six Days in Fallujah, the canceled video game adaptation of an actual battle in modern Iraq, tells us probably not. Right now the public doesn't trust video games to treat their subject matter with the appropriate respect - a respect that is present in film and literature - and generally speaking, it's hard to blame them. Even the most 'realistic' depictions of real conflicts in gaming today are still massive empowerment fantasies. I've said before that a truly realistic wargame isn't going to be fun - meaningful and thought-provoking, yes, but not 'fun' as it applies to games like Call of Duty. It's the same with all other forms of art: some of my favorite films are ones I don't want to watch a second time, because they took me somewhere that was dark and miserable - but while I was there I found something enlightening and meaningful.

But games as art is a topic for another day.

Halo: Reach

      In the games industry, Bungie - especially in regards to the Halo franchise - is one of the few developers to achieve critical immunity. All of the Halo games garnered tremendous praise on release, most receiving near-perfect scores from reviewers everywhere. In spite of this, there is a lot that isn't nearly perfect with the series. There's no disputing that Halo's gameplay is some of the most polished and mechanically sound on the market today (personally, the multiplayer is probably the most fun I’ve had in a competitive online game) but we demand more than that here at Story Gamer, so we're going to instead focus on the singleplayer campaign.

         First, it should be pointed out that the Halo universe is a very well-developed place, between the games, novels, comics, and other tie-ins. When the first game became a leading title on the original Xbox, I was pleasantly surprised - instead of another WWII shooter or James Bond spin-off, the game everyone was playing was a bold new science-fiction IP. I've lost a few hours to Halopedia reading about the formation of the Covenant and history of humanity; the setting evokes such high-concept themes as religion, imperialism, racism, the value of sentience, and militarism. It's no Mass Effect, but the universe is still engaging and ripe for storytelling when cast in the proper light.

     On top of that, it's not as if Bungie was negligent towards devising the storyline for Reach; they actually expressed, repeatedly, that they were very proud of their plot and their characters, so the excuse that it wasn't the focus of development doesn't hold. They were practically bragging about it. It only makes it all the more shame that these fall flat in so many ways. And if game stories are going to get better, then they need to be criticized - at least the ones that are trying to be good.

The complete layout for the story of Halo: Reach that Bungie rolled out at PAX'10.
They didn't throw it together as an afterthought.

      The storytelling in the Halo series has always been, at best, mediocre. In Bungie's defense, they don't exactly have their work cut out for them; the only way to justify the amount of rampant slaughter the player can casually dish out is to make their protagonists brainwashed, cybernetic supersoldiers trained from age seven - not even real-life military personnel can even begin to relate to that sort of lifestyle. This does not a sympathetic character make. In Reach, Bungie gives you the ability to modify your Spartan's appearance and select your gender (giving them male or female dialogue), but this amounts to next to nothing, as you almost never see or hear Noble Six.

     You meet up with five other Spartans, Noble Team. Bungie stressed very much that Reach was a character driven tale, and that these personalities would drive the story. Unfortunately, these Spartans have no personality - and how could they? They're all career supersoldiers, all selflessly committed to their mission. It's almost impossible to imagine a Spartan on shore-leave, or even out of their power armor. They are soldiers, all the time, from the moment they sign up to the moment they die.

     In addition to all being snarky and capable, Bungie gives each of them one - and exactly one - character trait: Jorge is kind-hearted, Jun is wisecracking, Emile is a sociopath, Carter is the determined leader (read: extra-bland) and Kat is good with computers (the sort of character trait that is not actually a character trait at all.) Aside from this one defining feature, the Spartans have no quirks or flaws whatsoever. They never get nervous, scared, sad, or display any other humanizing emotion in the face of adversity. They have two speeds: 'calm' and 'slightly frustrated about how the rest of the world isn't as capable as they are.' What little personality they do have is poorly manifested; I could only classify Jun as 'wisecracking' and Emile as 'a sociopath' because that was how they were described in the promotional material. Jun never says anything particularly funny and Emile never does anything particularly twisted. I once had a Fiction Writing professor who said, "There is no such thing as 'Character'. In a story, people just do things." This means that you can give a character a twelve-page backstory, but if all the audience sees him do is stare at the wall and eat potato chips, that's all he is. And that's all that Noble Team does with their screen time in Reach - sit around and make wry remarks about nothing in particular. We don't learn what's important to them, where they're from, or what drove them to give their lives over to permanent supersoliderhood. The one glimmer for hope in terms of characterization in Reach is Jorge, who, in a short bit of mostly-Hungarian dialogue with a civilian girl, reveals the closest thing to a flaw a Spartan has had in a Halo game: part of him regrets being a gigantic superhuman war machine.

None of this information is actually expressed in the game, in dialogue, text, or otherwise. Bungie has forgotten more about its games' backstories than other game developers have ever written.

     The first mission of Reach's campaign is actually an interesting break from the typical Halo bravado and melodrama. Having just met up with Noble Team, you're sent to investigate an isolated village with which contact has been lost; rebels are suspected. And so you move cautiously from building to building, taking orders from your commanding officer, moving as a military squad. You encounter a ragtag group of farmers hiding in a storage shed - they only speak the local language, and a member of your squad has to translate. About a minute later, the Covenant show up, and everything goes to hell.

     Let's stop there for a moment. Everything that happened before the word 'Covenant' could have been set in modern day Afghanistan. There's a believable mood and atmosphere that allows for real suspension of disbelief, however fleeting: for once, we see Spartans behaving like real soldiers would. While this sequence has no action whatsoever, it's probably the closest to Bungie's vision that the Reach campaign comes, and while it lasts, it's a success.

     But then the Covenant show up, in full force, and it's back to the dazzling pink-blue-and-orange color palette. The characters become wooden, and not knowing any other way to get to our hearts, Bungie starts killing them off, in descending order from most- to least-likable, until we have only the most wry, stoic, bland teammates left in the game's final chapters. Their deaths come off as an insultingly obvious grab for the heartstrings. It's like a baby swatting at a harp to try and make music; the mid-sentence surprise insta-kill, the kamikaze, the go-down-fighting, the I-have-to-activate-the-bomb-manually. None of them feel fear or show hesitation about this - they are, after all, supersoldiers, and far be it from the player to know what that must be like. What Bungie fails to realize is that while killing off a character we care about is effective, we first need to have a reason to care about them; at some point in writing Halo 3, Bungie mistook "players' amusement with Sergent Johnson's sassy one-liners" for "players having some emotional attachment to Sergent Johnson," and so he was placed in several perilous situations before being given a melodramatic death scene, all in blind pursuit of tension and drama where none was possible.

   The storyline of Reach is, in the absence of compelling characters, reduced to an unremarkable chain of military objectives: scout out the enemy, blow up this or that base, destroy this or that starship, protect this or that macguffin. While this is certainly more realistic than the Halo Trilogy's superheroics about a man with a made-up rank who travels the galaxy diffusing ancient superweapons and battling zombies, it's hardly engaging. And for the final mission, we get our shout-out to that trilogy, in the form of Cortana. This reveal is somewhat clumsily handled - the player knows that Cortana is important, and will later play a major role in saving the universe, but the characters on Reach don't know this. In order to match the (presumed) thrilled reaction of the fans, Cortana is still treated with a strange reverence by Noble Team, as if they've all read the script for Halo 3 and know just how important she will turn out to be. She's spoken of not like a package to be delivered, but like a Master Sword that must be used to defeat Ganondorf. A big deal is made of the AI 'choosing' Noble Six, but why and how this decision was made is dismissed for the sake of preserving the melodrama.

     And while missions 2-10 are nothing memorable, it's after the credits have rolled that Halo: Reach reveals a diamond in the rough. You’ve helped Master Chief and Cortana escape the doomed planet, kicking off the Halo trilogy proper. But now, in epilogue, the scene returns to Noble Six, standing on a hilltop, looking out over the ravaged landscape. Your mission is complete, all of your commanding officers are dead or fleeing, and now you’re standing here, completely alone. You realize that no one is coming to pick you up or pull you out; that there is nothing but enemies for a hundred miles in every direction.

    And then the game hands control back to you, fresh with this revelation, and the objective banner pops up one last time: “Objective: Survive.”

    This is probably the most poignant moment in any Halo game for me. It drives home the implication that you’ve got nowhere left to go, nothing left to do; you’ve outlived your purpose. Most importantly, it conveys to you that, although you ‘died’ a lot to get here throughout the course of the game, this time, you actually will die; it will be Noble Six’s death. It’s a confrontation with mortality. If you’re going to make a noble sacrifice, you’re going to have to follow through on the ‘sacrifice’ part. The objective banner reads 'Survive,' but think about it: it might as well say 'Die.'

Five minutes can almost make up for ten hours.

As you fight off the waves of Covenant forces that come to finish you off, your helmet cracks, distorting your vision. Your weapons run dry one after another until you’re scrounging for ammunition. You’ve seen your team members and supporting cast give their lives throughout the campaign, but the epilogue finally makes you understand what that’s like. In it's final moments, of course, the game chokes: instead of making you follow Noble Six to his ultimate conclusion, control is wrested away again and you watch from the third person as three Elites pin the kicking and thrashing Spartan down and finish him off - instead of getting the full weight of that death experience, we instead watch a little video of this character we only sometimes inhabit as they go down swinging. It mutes the impact slightly, but it's still there, and, for me, served as an eleventh-hour rescue of Halo: Reach's campaign.