Ah, the end of the semester. The bittersweet promise of the end and the work that comes with it. I rather do hope everyone has enjoyed these course even a fraction as much as I’ve enjoyed teaching it! I like using the final blog as a chance to reflect on all the weeks which came beforehand. So, what I’d like to ask you to do is precisely that: reflect! I won’t necessarily drop a bunch of numbered questions, but I’d love to know how your experience and/or relationship with games has evolved this semester. Are you hyper-aware now and can’t play a game without being annoyed by considerations of procedurality? Do you have a better sense of the capabilities and nuances of videogames thanks to our course presentations and readings? Are you bored to death of thinking about games critically and looking forward to a near future which includes nothing but mindlessly mashing buttons without a care in the world? Have your opinions of games changed in light of the good they can do (as represented by Bogost) and their relative darkness (as seen in Blog 6)? Did you think all of this was a complete waste of time?
As I always stress, I don’t want some sort of fake “now I see the light!!!” statement about how you were a lowly gamer, unaware of the awesome power of games, and by coming to this class you were born again. If that’s the case, awesome! Let me know what it was like! If not? Tell me the truth! I get tons of reflections that tell me “I still don’t care,” and I’d rather hear that than a big fake sweet talking session. Why bore yourself writing that? Tell me what you did or didn’t get out of this semester, and feel free to pitch ways of making it happen next semester (two sections of this course will be thrown to the wolves, so you’ll be doing them a favor!)
I’ve loved every minute of this course and it’s going to be sad to see it end. Let’s make the end count for something, though! Let me know your thoughts on games, theory, and everything else we’ve discussed and considered this semester!
After spilling the blood of dozens of walkers (and maybe even a few characters) you should be at the very end of The Walking Dead game and comics. Now, especially since you’re in a class where you can hear and discuss the decisions of others and ask yourself “what did it all mean?,” you may find yourself asking a very simple (but important question): did my decisions matter? At all? One of the ways games differ from more traditional and linear forms of media is their ability to have different experiences and outcomes to them. It is unlikely that any of the 2 of you had an identical experience with The Walking Dead…. but, so what? For the cynics or curious among you, our blog this week will address whether or not your decisions in The Walking Dead mattered. For some context, read the following post from Kotaku:
Also, don’t read this before finishing the game. That’s just crazy. You’ll ruin it for yourself. So, finish first and then you can do this blog. Or, ruin the game’s ending for yourself. Your call.
Do you believe your choices really mattered throughout the game? Why or why not?
Returning to Blog 1, did you get a sense of immersion from playing as Lee? Were you invested in him as a character after making all of those difficult decisions through him? Did you (like me) find yourself forgetting all about his murderous past from the game’s beginning?
Did you enjoy the game? Why or why not?
How do you think the story as it was told was different from the story being told in the comics? How did a game-based story and a comics-based story feel different to you? Did they at all? Why or why not?
Which did you prefer? The game or the comics or the show? Why?
Like the comics and TV show, this game is released in an episodic format. What do you think of this idea/move?
Will you be checking out Season 2 of the game this fall? (I’ll be on it in a heartbeat! Praying for a Wii U release as well, but, we’ll see….)
Today, I want everyone to start thinking like a game designer. To do this, we will begin by working with Schell’s Elemental Tetrad and start fleshing out the ideas for your game for project 3 and how you want to go about creating it. In order to do this, you should be discussing the following 5 items:
Theme (experience-based or truth-based)
Story
Technology
Mechanics
Aesthetics
Some of these elements may be restricted by the software you’re using to create your game, but I want you to start thinking about all of these elements and how the game you’re making addresses them in some way, and why players would want to play through your game. No game designer wants to make a game that players are instantly bored with and stop playing almost immediately. What are you going to do so that this doesn’t happen?
Start out for now by getting the foundations of these ideas written out, and build out from there as the project continues, since your first workshop on this project is due on Friday to your peer review groups, and the more work you have done, the better
One of the criticisms leveled at one of my all-time most beloved gaming companies, Nintendo, is their lack of creativity. I think my old pal Yahtzee does a nice job of summing this perspective up for us in his recent review of Paper Mario: Sticker Star —
Plenty of franchises have this claim thrown at them as well, more or less suggesting that a machine just slapped some old art assets together and made the game all on its own. Well, what if that wasn’t entirely impossible? Say hello to ANGELINA:
ANGELINA is a machine and artificial intelligence which does that: make videogames. For this week’s blog, I want you to check out some of ANGELINA’s games. The view below shows a walkthrough of one of them, The Conservation of Emily, which includes some useful annotations:
But don’t stop there. Here is a link to all of the games made by ANGELINA so far. I want you to play at least one of them (they’re browser-based, so you don’t need to download anything):
Now then, feel free to give me your general thoughts on ANGELINA in 200-300 words, or respond to the prompts/ideas below:
Can you see a future where games (some or all) self-create and self-replicate? Keep in mind that this is a recent development, and of course, won’t be churning out Assassin’s Creed 5 any time soon.
How advanced do you think a machine like this could some day be?
Do you think developers using programs like this to automate some/all parts of their games is a good or bad thing? Why or why not?
Would you have ever guessed a game like The Conservation of Emily was made by a machine? Why or why not?
What are your thoughts after trying one/some of the games made by ANGELINA? Good? Horrible? Impressive for a machine?
Would you ever pay money for a game made by a machine?
Any other thoughts on the matter? General fear about the rise of the machines?
David Cage, head of Quantic Dream studios which made games such as Indigo Prophecy and Heavy Rain, has made some waves in the industry with his recent chat at the PS4 reveal a few weeks ago. Similarly, the gents from the Killzone reveal made an appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, and made some similar waves. Check out the videos below and their responses.
First up, we have the Killzone guys on Jimmy Fallon Live
Similarly, David Cage made some bold claims about emotions and polygons, seen here in this video:
… and the critical response as per outlets like Jim Sterling’s Jimquisition was as follows:
So, with the PS4 on the horizon, the big talk seems to be about how many gigs of memory it has (8GB, for those counting at home) and what this means for gameplay, which is, seemingly, an increased ability to portray emotion. What do you think about all of this? Additional questions to ponder are as follows:
How do you see the relationship between a game’s visuals and the emotions it conveys relating?
Do you think more graphically advanced games mean more emotional potential? Less? Why?
Considering the games dominating the market (Madden, CoD, GTA and other perennial favorites), do you see emotion being crucial to these experiences? Is there a relationship between visuals and emotion in AAA blockbuster games?
Who do you tend to fall in line with? The polygon-pushers? Or the critics? Why?
What are your thoughts on the potential for next generation hardware (Wii U, PS4, and the NextBox) to move gamers emotionally?
What makes a game emotional and what emotional experiences have you had with games? Were they related to the visuals in any way?
Any other thoughts on the polygons vs. emotions discussion as of late?
Okay everyone. It would seem we got some surprisingly passionate responses last week! I’m glad to see so many of you feel passionate about the issue of censorship in games, and see it from such a diverse array of perspectives. One response seemed to loom over the conversation, however: the App Store is Apple’s, and they can do whatever they want with it <id=”internal-source-marker_0.9753663812298328″>(which I agree with in full). So in a lot of ways, it’s necessary to default to Apple’s authority when considering the games in question regardless, and nobody can or should force them to accept any game or text they so desire. This, however, I think, took some of the teeth out of the discussion. Saying it’s Apple’s call is a little too…. easy. So, I’m going to tell you a bit about some games which push the boundaries of good taste by touching and commenting on several tragedies throughout American history and ask you to respond.
Similarly, let’s remove any commercial games from the mix. What happens when we remove major corporate interests from this? Money, even. Several controversial games have come out over the years, all of which hoping or claiming to be making a statement about the world around us. These creators (in almost all cases) are not looking to make money, or distribute their works through major publishers or app stores. Personal projects which have come under the gun (literally and proverbially) for their explosive content. Here are just a few, which Bogost discusses in his book Persuasive Games:
“In the game, players don a plastic David Koresh mask with implanted microphone and are ‘resurrected’ into a 3D representation of the Branch Davidians’ Waco, Texas compound. Once inside, players must use voice commands to enact incantations that give Koresh power to do divine battle against the ATF, convert agents to his cause, and lead followers around his compound” (Bogost 126).
The next, 9/11 Survivor, leaves little to the imagination given its title (also, it seems all places to download or play it have vanished on the internet…. for whatever that mean or may be worth).
In it “the player is challenged to escape the burning World Trade Center towers on September 11th, 2001. […] The player is spawned in a pseudo-random location in the building. Controversially, some locations have escape routes via stairway, some are blocked by fire. […] In certain cases, players are faced with the choice of being engulfed by flames in the building or throwing themselves from windows” (126).
The gameplay? You guessed it—the game “puts the player in the shoes of Lee Harvey Oswald on the sixth floor of the Texas Schoolbook Depository” (128). The creators claim the game was made with the intention of proving that the findings of the Warren Commission were true and offered $100,000 dollars to anyone who recreated the shots as Oswald fired them by using a sophisticated physics and ballistics model (128).
Then, there’s the one which probably made the biggest splash of them all, Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, which asks players to play out the experiences of the boys who committed the horrible acts of that day.
“This is a medium in which people use to drown out a few hours of their life after they get home from work or something. This is not the place you turn to for a challenging, moral program.”
This has been a major point throughout this unit, and one Bogost’s book for our course touches on consistently: the power of games as a medium to grapple with serious issues in the real world (and sometimes the not-so-serious). After reading through information about some of these games (the games and videos all being linked and shown above), what are your thoughts on the matter? No simple numbered out questions this time. Removing publishers and game companies from the mix entirely and focusing on projects which specifically did not seek the aid of companies like Apple or Nintendo to distribute the game, what do you think of the ability of games to tackle some of the most difficult subjects we have ever faced as a nation? Is it right for developers to do this? Should they? If you play any of the games above on your own computer (which, I highly recommend before commenting too in-depth on any of them so you can be properly informed… let’s not take the same approach as the media and simply become enraged that they exist without taking the time to at least attempt to understand them…. you’re in a class on games and rhetoric, after all, so you should be smart in how you handle this), do you believe they are effective at getting their points across, or any point across?
Odds are, a whole lot of you got the comment back from me on your first project that your introduction and conclusion felt a bit…. off. Many of you have probably never taken a composition class before, and even fewer of you have probably written something which sought to synthesize personal experience with game analysis, like Project 1, or rhetorically analyzed a game, like Project 2. And that’s good! That’s what we’re here for! Conversely, we’re also here to focus on our skills as writers. As such, we’re going to be doing some work in class today with Introductions and Conclusions. I’ve decided to add in a whole lot of other flavor as well, however, and I want to have us turn our focus from just Introductions and Conclusions to a series of different topics related to writing mechanics.
What I’ll need you to do is go to this link here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gdJcstRV-ZgHxptoGx-yh0S8gmOaYzBb4ubdCaYxemw/edit?usp=sharing
You’ll see links to 20+ items related to writing practices and almost all of which are relevant to this project or elements of your writing which I have commented on. You will all be required to pick a section you’re most interested in learning more about, and will need to come up with no fewer than 5 pieces of advice for someone else on the topic you’re working on based on the reading. When you finish reading through your assigned section, I want you to use your blog to write out a list with no fewer than 5 items on it which we should keep in mind.
If you finish early, I want to see you browsing through other topics on these pages you may feel like you could use help with.
Looks like Blog 5 was supposed to be due last Friday. Whoops! Let’s try to make up for that, shall we? This week, for a blog due on Friday, March 1st, I want you to think about what it means for games to be shifting into other spaces, and what games trying to do something different in those spaces can mean. In particular, a game entitled Phone Story and another entitled Endgame: Syria were blocked from iTunes.
For this week’s blog, I want you to begin by reading this article:
So, now that you’ve checked all this out, consider the following questions (and I can tell when you respond to them without reading the article… seriously, just do it!).
The Supreme Court has already argued for games a form a media which is protected by the first amendment. What do you think of companies like Apple having this kind of power, however?
iTunes is Apple’s platform, however, their stance is that games can’t/shouldn’t take a stand on issues. Can and should they? Should games/apps be considered different from music, books, or movies? Why or why not.
Despite the power of developers to make games which provide intriguing commentary, major outlets like iTunes can ban them. Do you see these kinds of barriers as significant to games being able to make compelling arguments about real world issues? Why or why not.
What are your thoughts on game censorship? In light of events like Newtown, should we be looking to shy away from controversial content in games? Or should the First Amendment provide developers a sanctuary to do as they wish?
What other thoughts do you have about the article not listed above? Any concerns about game/app censorship? Concerns about game regulation falling to other authorities? Let me know in your blogs!
One of the major sticking points for me in the forthcoming unit of this class is to make sure that everyone is aware of the fact that “analysis” does not have to mean “tearing to shreds and hating.” If anything, it really shouldn’t mean that. Maybe it’ll happen for you as you write, maybe not, but you should be able to balance a structured analysis of something with maintaining a love of gaming and/or the game you’re playing.
My goal in these blog entries as well is to consider a variety of big questions surrounding the world of videogames, and in this case, we’re going to be trying to do a bit of both. So, as a result, we’ll be turn a questioning eye to games we like.
Check out the video below from Destructoid reviews editor Jim Sterling from his series called The Jimquisition.
Now, I would like to think that you found yourself largely in line with the video, but, if you didn’t allow me to get the ball rolling with some of my own thoughts as related to the video and my experiences as a gamer:
I started and finished playing Batman: Arkham City last year when it went on sale super cheap from OnLive. My fiancée loves Batman, and after I mentioned splurging on buying the game, she said she’d be interested in watching me play it. I was rather thrilled by this development, as the only games I typically play with the main TV on are the Zelda games which she also likes watching and helping me play. I had heard some things about the character outfits in the game, specifically the female character outfits, but suspected it was largely a matter of overreaction. To say I felt like I was wrong would be a drastic understatement. I was genuinely bothered by the character outfits in Arkham City. I would have been just fine had Catwoman and Harley Quinn been fully clothed, and it was frankly a bit embarrassing to play the game in front of her. I felt embarrassed on the game’s behalf…. like it thought I needed that to enjoy the game or something. It was a rather sizeable sore spot on a game which I would otherwise be compelled to call something of a “mature” Zelda game at times (what a nice boomerang and hookshot you’ve got in your ice level there, Batman).
Was this really necessary, devs?
Arkham City is still a rather good game. And the character outfits in no way ruined it for me, but it’s something that genuinely bothered me about it. I couldn’t enjoy it completely as a result, since every time the female characters came onto the screen I literally cringed. It felt like the game was implying that I was desperate to see Catwoman’s cleavage, and I most certainly wasn’t. I showed up for a solid action/adventure game which made several critics’ GOTY lists, and that may be what I got, but I also got a whole lot more than I was looking for. It’s not any less a good game, but the female characters’ outfits? I literally can’t defend that.
So, all that said… what about you? What have you seen in a game that downright bothered you? Remember, you can criticize without needing to hate the thing you’re criticizing.
Earlier in the week, we will have read Bogost’s chapter on whether or not games are art. Let’s explore this further. Check out this video:
And also, give this one a watch:
So, as always, here are some questions, to mull over and consider responding to:
Bogost downplays the importance of games as art. In this video, an argument for Super Mario Bros. as art emerges. Which camp are you in? Are games art? Does it matter?
Do you think SMB counts as surrealist art? What about some other games out there?
Are there any games you see as being “art”? Why?
Is Microsoft supporting the arts with Kinect?
How are games and game creation tools supporting art?
ENC 1145 Spring 2013 