In defence of video games - the satirical approach

Absolutely genius piece of satire http://www.thepoke.co.uk/index.php/2010/04/28/video-games-linked-to-something/

Roger Ebert and Games

Just read this piece on the Guardian Blog taking acclaimed film critic Roger Ebert to task regarding his statements on videogames. Roger Ebert is one of an old guard of critics on the way out, dragging their heels in light of a new artform that they don't understand. But what amazes me is that he belongs to a generation that fought so hard to have film recognised as an artform...

He's even turned down the offer of a free PS3 with a copy of Flower from opponents wishing to sway him. There's a word for someone who professes strong opinions about something of which they have no knowledge and last time I checked it was spelled B.I.G.O.T. It's tantamount to me proclaiming that Monet was shit (which i don't believe is the case, incidentally) and then closing my eyes when someone tried to show me one of his paintings. Its somewhere between a primary school tactic and an almost Biblical level of ignorance.

Ebert should be given credit for softening his views in a second blog entry, although that might have been a result of the four and a half thousand comments, the majority opposing his view, he recieved. For my money the first comment sums it up: "Roger - as you are sure to be inundated with comments for this post, I will simply say: You just don't get it."

Two of the problems that Ebert has with games is firstly a percieved lack of human empathy and secondly the malleability of the narrative - fact that you can change their outcome. But if Ebert thinks art is about absorbing a preset message from the artist then he's effectively ignored most art and art theory since the sixties when Barthes declared the author dead! perhaps the problem is that Ebert doesn't understand games but doesn't understand post-structuralism. As for the 'empathy' issue, i can appreciate that it may appear to an outsider that most games (especially the most commercially dominant forms) simply involve killing, but he is very wrong to conclude that the entire medium is incapable of dealing with empathy. Games are experienced via an avatar - the player becomes the protagonist via a level of identification and control not seen in any other medium. Even more so than with a first person narrative in literature he is put in that character's shoes. I would argue that games are in fact the very best artistic medium for exploring themes of empathy and self. Of course this rarely happens, but that is because games are still in the early stages of development and are still viewed primarily as an entertainment by many inside and outside of the industry (as was the case with the industrial art of film before the sixties), although I firmly believe that the notions of 'entertainment' and 'art' are not mutually exclusive whatever your definition of art may be.

A growing number of games are dealing with these issues, however, and are finding ways to tell stories that couldn't be replicated in any other medium - this is art. Good examples are Bioshock, which deserves to be considered one of the great works of modern philosophy in light of the way in which it analyses the nature of free will; Prince of Persia, the ending of which forces the player to make a moral and emotional choice that undoes everything thing he has done up to that point; and recently Red Dead Redemption, which has an ending that rivals the greatest of tragedies in its emotional power.

Sergei Eisenstien believed that each artform possessed something that made it unique from all other mediums. For film this was editing; the ability to create meaning from juxtaposing images, which had hitherto only been static. For videogames this is interactivity, and there's no doubt in each of the three examples given above (and there are many more) this played a hugh part in the storytelling innovations on offer (just the fact that you have experienced so much as John Marston makes the ending of Red Dead Redemption shockingly poignant and the designers cleverly play on this by putting you in a position in which you feel utterly powerless). It is quite simply breathtaking and utterly, utterly unique.

Ebert says:

"I thought about those works of Art that had moved me most deeply. I found most of them had one thing in common: Through them I was able to learn more about the experiences, thoughts and feelings of other people. My empathy was engaged. I could use such lessons to apply to myself and my relationships with others. They could instruct me about life, love, disease and death, principles and morality, humor and tragedy. They might make my life more deep, full and rewarding."

I agree this is certainly one important aspect of art, but this statement certainly doesn't exclude games as Ebert thinks it does. After all how does Ebert think he is experiencing any more or any less about life than by sitting in a dark cinema for 2 hours watching the pattern of light play upon a screen than I am sitting in front of a game? At the end of the day films, books, games all have one thing in common - they are artifice (actually I believe this to be the most reliable definition of art), but it's the meaning that is injected into it by the creator and interpreted by the consumer (not necesarilly the same i hasten to add) that elevates it. In that regard games are just as capable of becoming art as films are, and are equally just as capable of becoming completely vacuous. Each work needs to be considered on its own merits. Sweeping judgements like "games can never become art" are ridiculous from the very beginning.

Video Games in the Papers

Its good to see video games in the papers for the right reasons (ie, not as a knee jerk reaction to all social evils by lazy journalists and showboating politicians). In this case Independent columnist Tom Sutcliffe takes to task the prejudice surrounding the medium, asking why games are criticised for the kind of depictions of sex and violence that wouldn't raise an eyebrow in other art forms. He suggests that its because games still have a foot in the toy box as well as art and the assumption is that as they are for kids they carry certain expectations of moral innocence. Of course we know that this isn't true, but the wider public perception of games still needs to change in much the same way people needed to revise their opinion of animation in the late eighties as something 'just for kids' in order to appreciate the credence of masterpieces like Akira and Perfect Blue. The truth is that since the Playstation emerged the gaming demographic has shifted firmly away from kids towards people in their 20s (a generation who grew up with the medium) and video games are now subject to the same kind of age classification as films.

Tom Sutcliffe also touches on a point that i've been fascinated by for years now. He says: "Video games have been around for years but they are still struggling to pass through that long gestation that any new creative form must go through before it matures from frivolity into art." Film only really attained the status of 'art' in the sixties thanks to a new generation of filmmaker/critics driven by the French New Wave and modernism. Sure there were isolated figures who argued the toss before then (Eisenstien and Vertov, Renoir and Melies) but by and large the medium was seen as purely an entertainment for the first 60 years of its life. Video games are developing much faster and I believe that they have reached roughly a similar stage in their development. Like the directors and critics who fought tooth and nail for cinema to be recognised as an artform, our generation must likewise fight for our medium, the 'eighth art' of video games, to be accepted.

E3 Roundup

Last week LA once again played host to the biggest event in the gaming calendar; striding across the urban skyline like a virtual Godzilla, E3 whipped the media circus into a frenzy with its yearly avalanche of video game news (for the first time the event was even broadcast live to Time Square). New consoles where unveiled, killer titles unearthed and certain things under whelmed. Here’s Rhythm circus’s take on the proceedings with the juiciest pieces of information lovingly harvested just for you.

Given that E3 is the place that the industry prefers to make its biggest announcements, inevitably it’s the press conferences in the city’s massive auditoria by the big three – Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo – that are going to be of most interest, so let’s begin there. Of course by their very nature press conferences are annoyingly self congratulating affairs, but this year Microsoft carried off our award for most toe curling delivery. Whilst Kinect, the new name for project Natal which is to be released in North America on November 4, underwhelmed with its array of inane dancing and sports mini games, Microsoft desperately tried to inject some excitement into proceedings by enlisting the help of Cirque de Soleil to put on a bit of a show. At the actual conference they dragged out an overly cute pig-tailed child to demonstrate Kinectimals, Xbox’s take on Eye Pet, featuring a series of exotic animals. Next came some annoyingly hip street dancers to demonstrate the device’s generic dance title. Oh and let’s not forget the female executive with the voice of an American school girl who demoed Kinect’s video messaging abilities with her twin in Atlanta.

Although also to be released on the PS3 the psychedelic synesthetic shooter Child of Eden, by game designer Tetsuya Mizuguchi of Rez fame, points to more innovative uses of the technology than the games on display at the conference, which ape the kind of games Wii has been churning out for years. Lion Head’s Milo, another one of the more creative Kinect titles in the pipeline, was conspicuously absent, although Molyneux himself appeared under the guise of Creative Director of Microsoft Game Studios Europe, to show additional footage of Fable 3, the concluding part of Lion Head’s brilliant adventure RPG series. Still poised somewhere between a quirky Japanese title and a sprawling western RPG, this time the player is after the crown of Albion itself, and the game promises to add even more weight and responsibility to the moral decisions you make in that they now effect the entire populace. Molyneux also reminded us about the return of “the great British humour... we all know what that means”. We certainly do Peter, and I for one can’t wait to be performing vulgar thrusts at my loyal subjects in the town square wearing nothing but a crown.

But of course where would you be without Microsoft’s big core exclusive franchises? True to form Call of Duty, Halo and Gears of War sequels all headlined the show. But as impressive as Black Ops, Halo Reach and Gears of War 3 look as games, and as groundbreaking as their predecessors are, the fact that they all belong to exactly the same genre continues to cast doubt on the width of Xbox’s appeal. Surely Microsoft have been keeping themselves aloft on these titles for far too long?

In contrast Playstation’s biggest exclusive titles – Little Big Planet, Uncharted, God of War – although fewer, operate in a far broader spectrum of genres. This year one of those titles, the incomparable, indefinable Little Big Planet spawned a sequel, which will up the ante by empowering players to make even more crazy games including Micro machine-esque racers and even complete Command & Conquer style RTS games with a full range of units and AI. The new addition of holographic material allows for the creation of neon soaked psychedelic shooters or custom HUDs, expanding the creative potential of the game considerably.

Sony showed off Move, which actually looks like it might achieve what it set out to achieve, with the intriguing title Sorcery, in which you take on the role of an apprentice spell caster in the fairy kingdom. It’s the perfect showcase for the Move peripheral, which fluidly replicates all your flicks and swishes into fireballs and whirlwinds sent speeding towards the game’s bumbling foes (it’s always surprising how something falling off the edge of a cliff emitting a high pitched comedy scream never gets old). Things really got interesting when Kevin Butler, Sony’s ‘VP of Sharpening Things’ and star of the Sony’s best ad campaign since Chris Cunningham learned to use the warp tool in After Effects, crashed host Jack Tretton’s party to deliver a few humorously scathing remarks at Microsoft (“Did anyone see a bunch of French acrobats yesterday? I hear there was a sale on blue ponchos”) and a spirited speech celebrating gaming backed by soaring Hollywood strings: “gaming is having a ridiculously huge TV in a one room apartment… and staying up until 3am to earn a trophy that doesn’t exist – but does”. Couldn’t have put it better myself. Another unexpected entrance came at the conference’s finale in the form of psychotic clown Sweet Tooth driving his rail-gun mounted ice-cream truck on stage, as David Jaffe announced the new installment of Twisted Metal – putting to bed speculation as to what the rumour of “a sequel to a classic series” referred to. For anyone who is old enough to fondly remember blowing up the Eiffel Tower in Twisted Metal World Tour it was hard to contain the excitement at the prospect of playing 16 player online death matches or four-way split screen in vast environments.

But for all their pomp, Microsoft and Sony failed to even come close to the excitement generated by Nintendo’s press show, which was like seeing an old friend wake from a coma. Their show was a perfectly poised combination of nostalgia and technical innovation. It begun with Zelda creator Shiguro Miyamoto addressing the audience via a video screen against a funky green background to introduce the eagerly anticipated new Zelda title, The Skyward Sword, before becoming so frustrated at the incompetence of the man playtesting the thing that he slices his way through the screen and into LA. Nice. This was the first of many classic titles getting a new lease of life including Donkey Kong Country Returns, which looks so delightfully old-school that it brings a tear to your eye, Kirby’s Epic Yarn with its astonishingly fresh looking needle and thread aesthetic, and then of course the return of the greatest first person shooter ever made: Goldeneye (sorry Bungie, Nintendo just bitch slapped you for a one hit kill). As if that wasn’t enough Deus Ex creator Warren Spector came along to showcase the ingenious looking gameplay for Epic Mickey, which looks set to become a postmodern classic as it literally redraws the platform genre and remixes Disney’s back catalogue with joyful abandon.

This time last year when Nintendo unveiled their laughable vitality sensor, I would never have thought I’d be writing that they stole the show in 2010. This is simply the biggest turn-around since, er… Nintendo’s last turn-around. The announcement of the 3DS as the first ever glasses-free 3D entertainment platform kind of caught Sony and Microsoft with their pants down, especially given how much Sony were emphasizing the native 3D capabilities of Playstation 3 (next generation Bravia TV not included). Of course Nintendo admitted it was impossible to actually see the effect of the 3D without actually holding the thing in your hands, but what is immediately obvious is the increased graphical capabilities of this successor to the frankly shameful DS. The bigger screen boasted graphics on games like resident Evil Revelation that easily surpassed the PSP. On top of that Project Sora, founded by Nintendo last year, has spawned the platform’s first homegrown 3D hit. Kid Icarus: Uprising sees the return of yet another vintage Nintendo flag bearer who joins the rest of Nintendo’s impressive all-star line-up for 2011.

As if all of those announcements weren’t enough to fill up their hearts and their notepads, the journalists who dared to venture into Nintendo’s conference after the embarrassment of last year were treated by the appearance of about a hundred sexy models with 3DS units tethered to their waists (strap-ons as I prefer to call them). As dozens of glowing screens made their way into the eager, sweaty-pawed audience, a dozen Wii consoles rose on obelisks from the stage with the first hands on copies of The Legend of Zelda: The Skyward Sword. Nintendo just delivered the year’s biggest sucker punch.

Published with permission of www.rhythmcircus.co.uk. Read the full article and watch trailers of their top 20 games of the event here.

In defence of Final Fantasy XIII

Final Fantasy XIII, the latest iteration of Square Enix’s long running and celebrated Japanese RPG series, has come under flac in some quarters for its linearity. In one of the more balanced reviews of the game, Edge admitted that once the game hits its stride at about the 25 hour mark it has some of the most interesting gameplay mechanics in the series, although these are drip fed into the game at such sparse intervals it sometimes seems like your playing the mother of all tutorials, and by which point all but the most dedicated of the series’ fans still have it’s undivided attention. Edge calls this a ‘disaster of pacing’ and in many ways this is correct. Fans of the western-style RPG, a genre that has peaked in the last five years or so, have used this as an opportunity to criticise the old fashioned Japanese RPG (JRPG) for its out dated structures. Responses from Japan that western gamers just ‘don’t understand’ the first half of the game haven’t exactly helped break the cultural stalemate.

The argument is that western RPGs are more modern because they are based on freedom of player choice; often including narratives with multiple endings based on moral choices and open sandbox environments – all things that can be seen in abundance in some of the most successful recent iterations of the genre: Fallout 3, Oblivion, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age. Meanwhile JRPGs present the player with a single well-told story that does not accommodate player choice and ends at a single point (when the credits roll). For some this makes JRPGs closer to a static artform like a book or a movie rather than the interactive medium of video games, which should be based on player agency. Of course it is tempting to schematise this into a crude analogy of two differing ideological structures. Whilst western games emerge from a socio-political tradition of democracy and individualism, Japanese games stem from a more rigidly structured society that emphasises conformity over self expression.

However in narrative terms this simply doesn’t wash. The Final Fantasy series has always offered a narrative that pits the heroic individual against the status quo – whether that takes the form of the Shinra Corporation draining the planet’s life force in Final Fantasy VII, the oppressive military establishment in Final Fantasy VIII or the manipulative religious institution in Final Fantasy X – and Final Fantasy XIII is no exception to this tradition. The game is set on Cacoon, a floating shell with an entire world built on its inner surface, constructed and maintained by the god-like Fal’cie, who benignly care for their human charges – although there is undoubtedly a dark purpose behind their actions. Scarring Cacoon’s surface is a gaping hole, a remnant of the War of Transgression with Pulse, when the creature Ragnorak almost succeeded in breaching it. Pulse is the world above which Cacoon floats, which despite having never been glimpsed by a single soul on Cacoon, is feared and reviled by its entire populace.

The game begins with the seaside town of Bodhum on Cacoon being ruthlessly purged by the government after its inhabitants come into contact with a reviled Fal’Cie from Pulse, which had been lying dormant for centuries. The claim that they are being ‘relocated to Pulse’ is actually a cover for a massacre. At the beginning of the game we join our protagonists on the Purge train, and although many of them don’t know one another yet, they all become instrumental in leading a rebellion. After a series of events that leads them all into contact with the same Pulse Fal’Cie that caused the Purge in the first place, they are transformed into l’Cie, human thralls that the Fal’cie choose to carry out a specific mission called a ‘focus’. As l’Cie they are granted powerful magic and consequently become complete outcasts from human society. What’s more if they don’t fulfil their focus within the allotted time they will be turned into monstrous Cie’th, but unfortunately the vision they all share isn’t clear on whether their focus is to destroy or save Cacoon. The characters are divided in their decisions. Whilst the girlish Vanille and Sazh (a blaxploitation-esque character with a baby chocobo living in his afro) decide to ignore their new destiny and run away, Lightning (a former soldier) refuses to submit to her fate and rashly sets off to bring down the Fal’Cie and destroy Cacoon, with the young boy Hope tagging along hoping she can aid him in his misguided quest for revenge. Meanwhile Snow, who inadvertently caused the death of Hope’s mother, remains optimistic and strikes off to save Cacoon spurred on by his fiancée’s last words. The motivation behind their actions is explored in this first half, which concerns itself with slowly bringing the disparate characters together into a unified group. This is a very different approach to the standard structure of picking up allies as you go along and, thanks also to some of the series’ deepest characterisation yet (although still not totally free of common JRPG character types), the result is a combat team built of meaningful relationships that the player can invest in emotionally.


A massive part of the genre, something shared by both Japanese and western RPGs, are the town locations; places where the player can take some time out from the battle to shop, trade, and pick up side quests from NPCs (‘non player characters’ – basically anyone who speaks to you in game who isn’t under your control). However in Final Fantasy XIII all of the shopping is done ‘online’ through save points and there are no towns or NPCs, just an endless narrow road that you are corralled down with very little chance for exploration. If this sounds pretty bleak, then it is in a way, but I also believe this linearity is a daring example of the game’s form reflecting its content – even to the point of overhauling the traditions of the series and the expectations of the audience. Reviled by the people and hunted by the government as hated outsiders and revolutionaries, the five protagonists are hopeless fugitives, inexorably forced towards the destiny that is their focus. This is the reason they don’t go to any towns or meet any people; they can’t. It’s not that it was too ‘difficult’ for the development team to construct realistic towns in such breathtaking graphics, as some have suggested. In short the first 25 hours of the game are successful in placing you in the shoes of the protagonists and making you feel the same sense of frustration that they are feeling in the story, through the gameplay.

This also goes someway towards explaining the game’s auto-combat system, where in fights a single press of the action button stocks a series of context specific actions tailored towards exploiting the enemy’s weaknesses. Of course it’s possible to go into the menus and select your own actions, but it’s highly ill-advised as the fights are normally quite difficult and unlike other games in the series your enemy doesn’t bother to wait for you to make your selection before pummelling you into a bloody pulp. Whilst many have seen this as a concession to the worst elements of casual gaming, where the challenge is diluted down to accommodate a wider audience, usually resulting in less buttons to press, this feature is vital to maintain the dramatic pace of the fights. Eventually the paradigm system becomes fully available, allowing you to train each character in a series of roles – the magic casting ravager, the damage dealing commando, the healing medic – and to switch between them throughout the battle. If the game truly was appealing to casual gamers the fights wouldn’t be as difficult as they are, and also the paradigm system is a highly original addition to the series and adds a level of interaction that was removed by the auto-battle system.

After 25 hours of being funnelled down the undoubtedly beautiful corridors of Cacoon, you finally find the inevitable airship and make your way to Pulse. Almost instantly the game opens up. Pulse is made up of wide vistas and open play areas filled with huge beasts that seem to be playing out the process of natural selection, rather than just being there for you to kill. The game finally allows you to explore and offers side quests in the form of ‘stone missions’, where basically you take on the failed focus of a l’Cie, which normally requires you to hunt down a mark for a grand reward, ala Final Fantasy XII. The most impressive thing here, though, is the way the game’s dramatic new openness reflects the character’s own broadened horizons. As citizens of Cacoon the larger part of your group will have been raised on propaganda that insisted Pulse to be a hell on earth, and likewise for the past 25 hours you as a gamer have only been on Cacoon, so you share the character’s sense of revelation (not to mention relief) as the environment, as well as the gameplay, opens up. Rather than being criticised for its linearity the game should be appreciated for its daring to do something new with formal structure. After all this is what embodies the recent entries to the Final Fantasy series, with Final Fantasy X scrapping the age-old character levelling system in favour of the ingenious sphere grid and Final Fantasy XII’s revolutionary gambit system, which has recently been copied so thoroughly by Dragon Age (perhaps demonstrating that the western RPG isn’t always as original as it claims to be).

Moral intelligence in games vs general ignorance in daytime TV

On Thursday a few friends and I attended an event at the National Science Museum’s Dana Centre entitled ‘What are Games Really Teaching Us?’, which sought to look at the ideologies and moral frameworks embedded into video games. It’s part of a season curated by the queen of geeks, and my ideal woman, Aleks Krotoski. However no amount of Mario Kart Wii could make up for the fact that she wasn’t there in person (although perhaps it’s just as well as I would have probably embarrassed myself).

The panellists who were present were John Kirriemuir, Pat Kane (author of The Play Ethic) and
Sophie Blakemore (a game designer). John mainly concentrated on the most literal reading of the title of the night by discussing gaming as an educational aid. The idea of replacing the curriculum with an RPG style levelling-up system to motivate learning is certainly an idea I’d love to see rolled out in state schools (congratulations, you have levelled up to class 3 and acquired a +5 modifier to trigonometry). Meanwhile Pat, whose book argues that the act of play is just as important to human functioning as work, sleep or nutrition, was coming from a socio-political charged perspective and provided the most interesting food for thought when he suggested that the very nature of videogames echoed the ideals of the anti-globalisation movement because “every game you play lets you realise that another world is possible”. However I couldn’t help but feel there was still a sense of pessimism within the panel that the ‘commercial’ games industry was lacking when it came to a moral intelligence.

I personally feel that this is completely ungrounded. On the contrary commercial video games have never been as morally complex and sophisticated as they are now. You need only glance at a shelf of recent releases: Bioshock 2’s story revolves around philosophical notions of control and ethical inheritance, whilst Mass Effect 2 further perfects Bioware’s trademark game mechanic of moral choices, as does Heavy Rain. In fact games that don’t seem to deal with morality appear to be in the minority. The Fable series has always given the player a choice between good and evil, and has strived to make the evil path as difficult to follow as possible. The third game in the series, currently in development, will give the player the chance to become the ruler of the kingdom, potentially embedding those moral choices within a complex social setting and allowing the game to comment on political systems. Perhaps this emphasis on morality in games is a product of the increase of realism in next generation games; a strong sense of responsibility is emerging within the industry and there is a sense in games design for the need to mitigate the realistic scenes of violence that are predominant in gameplay (after all the majority of games do revolve around killing) with a moral narrative framework.

One game that this new morality doesn’t seem to have affected too much is Grand Theft Auto. I recently got into a discussion with two friends about GTA4. Friend ‘a’ defended the game and its violent, nihilistic aesthetic as a pure fantasy and escapism, whilst friend ‘b’ argued that the game’s environment was presented too much as a simulacrum of reality to excuse or justify its content. I’ve always had a bit of a love/hate relationship with GTA; resenting it for proudly becoming a flashpoint for moral outcry against gaming in general (whilst benefiting from the publicity that ensues), whilst simultaneously admiring it as a great piece of satire (anyone who has tuned into the games talk radio stations will know what I mean) and for offering an unrepentantly fun and anarchic vision of gaming without feeling the need to justify itself. The issue of player agency and interactivity muddies the moral waters somewhat here, but I think one of the great things about the game is its ambiguity – it’s just not clear what the game is saying about gang violence (should games even be obliged to strike a moral stance?). At the end of the day it’s your choice to run over innocent bystanders or plant car bombs outside hotdog stalls – and even if you choose to do that (like me) it’s more likely because you appreciate it as a moment of escapism (or absurdist humour)rather than a lesson for life.

In spite of its growing acceptance as a cultural art form (see coverage in The Guardian G2 magazine and particularly Charlie Brooker’s defence of the medium) and its important position in the British economy, video games are apparently still an easy scapegoat to lazy politicians and self promotional conservative commentators. The biggest recent example of this is a ‘debate’ on the subject of gaming on Alan Titchmarsh’s day time show on ITV. The staggering level of ignorance displayed here is utterly dumbfounding, with Titchmarsh seemingly unable to even read the names of the games correctly off the auto-cue. One wonders whether he would show the same dedication to journalistic integrity if he were going to interview, say, the minister of defence about the situation in Iran. Perhaps he’d find out a little bit about the country that was to be the subject of his show before hand (like where it was, or how to pronounce it). In fact the entire premise of the piece was built around the inaccurate presumption that games were still for kids, even when one of the panellist quite rightly mentions that the average gaming age is 33, and that games are subject to the same age restrictions as films. They’d invited Tim Ingham, editor of CVG, to defend the medium and then proceeded to cut off his every comment and instructed the audience to boo him (perhaps I’m ignorant of daytime TV and Titchmarsh’s show is actually a pantomime?). Basically the whole thing is a despicable witch hunt. You can read Tim’s entirely reasonable response to the whole affair here. And if it gets your gall as much as it does mine, then you can view and sign the petition here.

As gaming as a medium breaks away from being a solitary teenage pursuit to a vital industry and a vibrant artform, it’s becoming all the more important that the ignorance that surrounds the general public’s perception of games is addressed and rectified. The British games industry alone is in fact worth around 1.5 billion pounds and is one of the country’s most flourishing industries, which even the government has realised as they’ve given the games industry tax breaks in the latest Budget. Video Games have also recently received their own BAFTA ceremony, which will hopefully go some way towards clearing up the ignorance surrounding the medium as well as awarding the incredibly creative people that work within it.

It’s funny that no amount of tearing around Liberty City running over old ladies has actually made me want to do it in real life. The only thing that’s made me want to kill someone recently is the Alan Titchmarsh show (or at least trample his tomatoes).

Dusk to Dusk: The death and rebirth of the adventure game

I’ll start with a piece of very sad news. The creators of the Nintendo DS masterpiece Hotel Dusk have recently declared bankruptcy according to a post on Kotaku . But why should anyone care about an obscure, tiny Japanese studio that turned out games that interested a small minority of people? Well I believe that the genre that Cing embodied is far more important than many would think.

Released in 2007, Hotel Dusk was an interactive detective story in an evocative style. Set in a mysterious small town American motel, you played Kyle Hyde, a former police officer, who discovers that every one of the motel’s intriguing inhabitants to be connected in some way to the disappearance of his former partner. The game is based almost entirely on turning up information through dialogue and to play the game the DS is tipped to the side like a book, with Kyle on one screen and the person you’re talking to on the other, elegantly illustrated in a rotascope sketchbook style. Although not a runaway hit, as with games like Ico, Hotel Dusk showed verve and stylistic originality and has acquired a cult following with gamers looking for a somewhat different experience. Unfortunately the company’s uncompromising approach to videogame narrative has obviously taken a financial toll and so on March 1 the company tragically folded with a reported 200 million yen in debt. The biggest question that is hanging on everyone’s lips is will Last Window: Mayonaka no Yakusoku, the sequel to Hotel Dusk recently released in Japan, ever make it over to Europe?

It seems particularly tragic that this company, which started out attempting to tread a new path in game narrative with the PS2 title Glass Rose in 1997, should fail just as the point and click renaissance builds momentum. Games like Zack and Wiki, Sam and Max, and the recently released Ghost Pirates of Voojoo Island show the genre is not simply a nostalgic resurfacing but is making a full fledged come back with fresh ideas and IPs. Soon even Jane Jensen, the creator of the classic Gabriel Knight series released by Seirra, will be releasing her new work Grey Matter (published by Mamba games who, along with Tell Tale Games, are proving to be leading lights in the new point and click movement). Because its simple mechanics and emphasis on story telling over action flies in the face of next generation gaming, the suggestion is that this is a niche genre best tackled by independent studios using new digital distribution networks – networks that have seen quirky titles like Sam and Max and Machinarium become so successful. Studio Cing were more of a traditional games company, putting expensive boxed releases out into games shops to compete with the latest blockbusters, rather than using viral publicity and a strong web presence to gently grow an audience like Tell Tale Games.

That said one recent release couldn’t care less about what I’ve just said. Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain, released exclusively on PS3 on 24 February, is behemoth of a game backed with a publicity campaign and production values that are on par with any next gen release. Apparently nobody told the creator and CEO of Quantic Dream, David Cage, that this genre was next to impossible to pull of in the form of a traditional release, or at least if they did he thankfully turned up the volume of Flight of the Valkyries and continued pursuing his dream. Because, for all its visual flare and impressive cinematics Heavy Rain is essentially a very sophisticated adventure game, in which the point and click elements have been switched with Bioware style diologue trees and an interface built almost entirely around QTEs (Quick Time Events, where buttons shown on the screen have to be input rapidly by the player). Indeed, one of Cage’s biggest triumphs in the game is to make this much criticised ‘lazy’ gameplay mechanic not only functional, but exhilarating.

Perhaps Heavy Rain is an indication of the adventure genre coming of age. If Rockstar’s new game LA Noire is anything to go by game narrative could be heading somewhere very interesting indeed. Very crudely this project looks to be a mixture of Grand Theft Auto, with its open city setting a meticulously recreated 1940s LA, mixed with Heavy Rain’s complex plotting and emphasis on player choice. Each of the games cases turn around investigating crime scenes based on actual police records and have a complex variety of outcomes, based on the evidence you collect, the attitude you take to grilling witnesses or finally whether you’re able to put everything together and catch the killer. Once upon a time, when storylines in videogames were merely a loose pretext for the gameplay (Mario: the princess has been kidnapped by Bowser… again), the point and click adventure (with games like Broken Sword and Monkey Island) had a hand in bringing intelligent scripts and deep plots to gaming, enriching the entire art form. Now, when it seems that story in games is once again undergoing a radical transition, you can detect the resurgence of the humble adventure game in the background. That is why the closure of Studio Cing, one of the leading lights in the field, is such a tragedy.

Religion in video games

The best critique of organised religion in games, to my mind, comes in Final Fantasy X (which I controversially maintain is one of the best in the series) where the religious establishment maintains its social control and the status quo through the process of sacrificing a summoner to the destructive entity known as Sin, who simply absorbs her power and starts the cycle anew, the fear generated in each cycle ensuring the people are loyal to the church. Yet this is still only an allegory. After all the youthful, brash world of videogames doesn’t often concern itself directly with the stuffy traditionalism of religion (games like GTA and Manhunt the medium has enough enemies already), but this month the situation changes considerably with the release of no less than 3 A-list titles which set themselves within specifically Christian apocrypha. They are Bayonetta, Darksiders (both out now) and Dante’s Inferno (released start of Feb), and you might also add to this list Assassins Creed II, which debunks Catholicism through its central antagonist, who works his way up to become pope solely to gain access to the secrets of the Vatican before claiming the Bible to be ‘superstitious nonsense’. Judging from the subversive approach these releases take, it seems there’s going to be a few more spaces reserved for game designers in the fiery furnace. But that’s all good, because after all only the cool people go to hell.

One of the coolest people in the brimstone would undoubtedly be Bayonetta, the eponymous heroine of one of the most gloriously inventive and devilishly fun games released in a long time, and an early contender for game of the year. This sassy vixen, clad in a slinky black cat suit (which disappears each time she powers up a combo) and designer glasses, simply oozes sex appeal. Dispatching her angelic antagonists in a hail of bullets (from guns mounted on her stilettos in a nod to Planet Terror) or a series of electrifyingly fast, flowing combos, Bayonetta punctuates each movement of her lithe body with an erotic wiggle, and sometimes straddles her prey to dish out a literal spanking. In short Bayonetta is the most gloriously sleazy game I’ve ever seen, taking the crudest elements of the medium and elevating them to glorious new depths in cut scenes that quite simply leave you in stitches. Platinum Games seem to have perfectly fused the spirit of 1970s American exploitation flicks with a kooky Japanese hentai anime sensibility and, thanks to the involvement of Devil May Cry creator Hideki Kamiya, presented it all with a breezy confidence and some of the most high octane gameplay so far seen this generation of consoles.

The pitch: In a weirdly distorted vision of our world, Bayonetta is the last witch surviving the persecution of the witch hunts, who is now employed as a kind of angel hunter for Rodin, the shady underworld arms dealer and bartender at The Gates of Hell (spot the fine arts reference). As a witch Bayonetta is able to move between the real world and Purgatorio, where the citizens of heaven (Paradiso) and hell (Inferno) are able to roam, and attempt to influence the human realm (incidentally these terms are all derived from Dante’s The Divine Comedy). Looking to test her abilities, Bayonetta tracks the sale of a precious artefact to the European city of Vigrid, the former base of the now vanished Lumen Sages and Umbra Witches, but finds herself embroiled in an angelic plot to bring back the Creator as well as dealing with unlocking the traumatic memories of her past.


Anyone who has seen the masterful anime Neon Genesis Evangelion will be in familiar territory with regards to the picture this game paints. In Neon Genesis young children had to pilot huge mechs in defence of humanity against the angels, in a weirdly inverted interpretation of the book of Revelation. These ‘angels’ were depicted as vast semi-organic alien ships, constructed in a variety of bizarre shapes and created from a mysterious compound. The devastation they wrought on Neo Tokyo was as shocking as the gruesome end they often came to, violently torn apart by the Evangelion mechs (traumatising their young pilots). Likewise in Bayonetta, despite possessing names like ‘grace’ and ‘harmony’, the angels are ferocious killing machines split into groups according to the mythical hierarchy of the angelic choir. The most memorable of these are colossal, their scale lending the game much of its epic grandeur. For instance one angel, Fortitude, is depicted as a vast upside-down cherubic head grafted disturbingly onto a rotund torso and topped by two huge serpents. They are quite simply some of the most impressive and terrifyingly original character designs ever seen in any art form, demonstrating both the imaginative powers of the medium and its ability to subvert cultural elements in fascinating new ways.

Far less original, but no less sensitive, is Darksiders’ depiction of demons and angels, casting the denezins of hell as clichéd ogres and the armies of heaven as winged marines, who descend to Earth to play out their long awaited final battle. Meanwhile you play as War, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, alone and disgraced after you realise the seven seals binding the ancient treaty between heaven and hell haven’t in fact been broken and it is, rather, your very presence that has precipitated Armageddon. The game sees you stalking the destroyed cities of man attempting to redeem yourself by ending the conflict that you have inadvertently started.

Whilst both Bayonetta and Darksiders project the story of biblical apocalypse onto our world, the forth coming Dante’s Inferno depicts a more personal odyssey. One man’s journey through the nine circles of hell in search of his murdered wife Beatrice, Dante’s Inferno promises to act as a diabolic counterpart to Bayonetta’s astounding depiction of the angelic hordes, by offering its own truly epic depictions of demonic beasts. This is apparent from the very start of the game when you defy the grim reaper himself when he turns up for your sinning soul, and instead steal his scythe and give him a taste of his own medicine. Here the literary meaning of epic, the classical style of poetry embodied by the Divine Comedy, is replaced by a more modern meaning of the word: terrifying and impressive in scale and scope.


The protagonist of the source poem, the author himself Dante Alighieri, is a pilgrim wrestling with his faith; a passive observer of hell as he is lead through it by the pagan poet Virgil. Video games, of course, require a more active focus and so Dante is recast as a soldier from the crusades who, having realised the central hypocrisy of the Catholic church, is wracked with sin (he sews his sins literally into his own flesh in the form of a cross) over his actions and physically battles his way through hell. By recasting the protagonist as an absolute badass the game will almost certainly alienate the literati who sneer at the medium of video games, but there’s fundamentally absolutely no reason why the poem as source material should not be played with in this manner. Rather EA should be congratulated for having the ambition to tackle making a game out of an ancient piece of literature, and may even help turn a fresh young audience to the source material (in the same way that film adaptations often renew interest in the source novel). And just as the best film adaptations are those that take liberties with the source text, so that its meaning is better explored in a visual medium, Dante’s Inferno reimagines the elements in the context of a video game, trading in the literary aspects of the poem for a more immediate and visceral experience – in short replicating the kind of experience that poetry strives towards.

Ultimately there may be more of a line of continuity between literature and video games then we are initially seeing. Bayonetta’s inversion of heaven and hell was first put forth by Milton’s masterpiece Paradise Lost (itself inspired by Dante), which in a controversial allegory of the English civil war depicted God as an authoritarian monarch and Satan as a revolutionary who turns hell into a parliamentary democracy by constructing Pandemonium. This heretical tradition was taken up by William Blake in his critique of society A Marriage of Heaven and Hell and by the romantic poets, where Satan was often used as a metaphor for creative potency. Some might consider the medium of video games a highly unlikely place for this age old literary tradition to turn up, but for me it is just another indication of the artistic maturity of the medium.

The legacy of Yasumi Matsuno

I couldn't believe my eyes. When I logged into Playstation Network after being disconnected from the net for 3 weeks what should I find waiting for me but the digital re-release of my favourite ever game, the often sadly overlooked PS One masterpiece Vagrant Story and the game that gives this blog its name (the protagonist, Ashley Riot, is a Riskbreaker knight). It’s the perfect time to talk about one of the great auteurs of video games - Yasumi Matsuno.

Vagrant Story is quite simply exceptional. Released in 2000 when games were just starting to come into their maturity it boasted an orchestral score (by the equally legendary Hitoshi Sakimoto) worthy of the great classical composers and the kind of intricate and deep plotting that was a revelation. Furthermore it was created within a company, Square Enix, known for its serials (Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest) rather than original IP (intellectual property), and yet in many ways it is utterly unique; mixing RPG stat crunching with real-time combat, platforming and puzzle elements.

Set in the long abandoned and mysterious city of Lea Monde, which was architecturally modelled on the medieval vaults of Bordeaux, the plot sees Valendian Knight Ashley Riot descending into the ruins to rescue the Duke’s kidnapped son from a religious cultist. Whilst most RPGs feature villages filled with shops and non-player characters with which to interact, in Vagrant story you are utterly alone; forced to scavenge rare potions from the corpses of the slain and forge your own weapons in abandoned workshops, scattered throughout the city’s echoing, haunted streets. The result is an incredible atmosphere of desolation, which is accentuated by the game’s exceptionally dark and unique art style. A fitting setting given that Ashley discovers his greatest threat is not his enemy but his own past.

Actually Vagrant Story isn’t as isolated a game as it seems, given that it takes place within the larger world of Ivalice, which was created by Matsuno during his time at Square and is still used by them today (their current crop of releases are under the banner ‘Ivalice Alliance’). In this world he set his two other masterpieces: Final Fantasy Tactics (which was just remade as War of the Lions for the PSP), with its jaw-droppingly complex sweeping storyline, and Final Fantasy XII, the game that signalled a massive departure from the staid traditions of the series. In both titles Matsuno completely overhauled every aspect of the Final Fantasy universe, making it completely his own in way that hadn’t been done since Hironobu Sakaguchi loosened his grip on the series. Even though he was removed from the project in its late stages for his perfectionism (the official line was health reasons) the game’s complex world and narrative is still pure Matsuno, despite the last minute addition of the unbelievable wet-blanket protagonist that is Vann.

An interesting aside: After Matsuno left the project the developers of FFXII added an optional boss named Yazmat (formed from the compounded first syllables of his first and second name) into the game. Whether this can be seen as an affectionate homage or a sly dig at the man’s controlling nature isn’t certain, but one thing that is clear is the respect his colleagues had for him, after all Yazmut has entered the Guinness book of records for being the toughest boss in any game – the average time taken to defeat him is 8 hours continuous fighting, a feat only achieved by a handful of the most hardcore gamers (amongst whom I sadly do not count myself).

‘Tis the season to slay beasties

Christmas is all about over-indulgence, and this coupled with the fact that your likely to have a couple of weeks off work and a house-full of noisy relations to avoid, means there’s no better time to embark on an epic multi-stranded RPG, the playing-time of which lurches into the triple digits like a level 30 reanimated corpse. Last years drug of choice was the amazing post apocalyptic Fallout 3, courtesy of Bethesda (of Oblivion fame). This year Bioware has almost certainly stolen the RPG crown with their dark fantasy epic Dragon Age – though unlike Oblivion the acclaim is by no means universal…

The sad truth is I was reluctant to buy Dragon Age after reading a less than glowing review in Edge magazine that claimed the game to have a shoddy, clichéd and poorly scripted story, and ultimately branded it a five out of ten. Fortunately word-of-mouth won the day and I was persuaded by many people that, on the contrary, this was a finely crafted, meticulously scripted game – and guess what? It is.

Now I’m no fan of clichéd run-of-the-mill fantasy so suffice to say I was approaching the game with a sceptical eye when the first thing I was asked to do was to craft a character based on a choice of three rather familiar races and classes (Dwarf, Elf, Human – yawn). Still I reserved judgement and took my human rogue into battle, where it very quickly became clear that the game only uses tradition as a convenient springboard for a new idea or merely to have a little fun. Take the first quest in the human story: you and your faithful Malbari war hound have to clear a few rats from the castle pantry – a familiar set up that leads your partner to announce ‘this sounds like the start of a bad fantasy adventure’. After some crashes and bangs you emerge from the larder dripping in gore to calmly tell the incredulous elderly cook that ‘the problem has been taken care of’. A nice moment of understatement and a good example of the ribald humour that runs throughout. Later, for instance, you can stay at a brothel and for company are given the choice between ‘some girls’, ‘some men’, or ‘surprise me’. If you choose the latter the game cuts to your character standing in the bedroom the next morning in their underwear with two pigs desperately trying not to make eye-contact.

There are also some nice deviations from tradition in the detailed world that the game constructs via hundreds of codex entries. Here elves are former slaves living in ghettoes in human cities, rather than noble lords of the forest, whilst magic is outlawed except for a small circle of mages that the chantry (Ferelden’s rather corrupt religious entity) keeps on a short leash. But the most impressive thing here is the attention to characterisation, which is at times staggering. At any point your frequently antagonistic party members may break into witty banter, trading verbal blows in the down time from fighting. ‘Stop tripping me up dwarf!’ shouts the samurai-esque Qunari warrior Sten to your foul mouthed dwarven berserker Oghren ‘if you were more substantial perhaps I wouldn’t step on you.’ Unable to come up with a response Oghren resorts to responding ‘Your mother!’ The game bristles with tongue-in-cheek, witty banter (and the mind boggles as to how much must have been recorded for every possible party combination) all finely presented with some decent voice acting, and certainly not the ‘staid and limp performances’ Edge accuses. It is this playful tongue-in-cheek quality, poking fun at the conventions of the genre without ever being arrogant enough to do away with them entirely, that makes Dragon Age such a charming game in spite of its admittedly slightly laggy, dull graphics and initially over-familiar setting.