A Few Words About Halo: Reach

Above: Me, earlier this evening, pulling off one of the sweet new Assassination moves on some guy online.

Halo: Reach has been out for almost exactly two months, a modest span of time in which I have managed to devote comfortably over 100 hours to playing it. Yes, really. I'm stating that from the outset not to brag about the fact that some 4 and an half days of my life, which might have been applied toward any manner of personal or professional advancement in a not inconsiderably critical developmental period, have instead been spent in front of the 360, but rather to establish that Halo: Reach is a really good game. I had an inkling of this going in, from my experience with the multiplayer beta (chronicled here), but the extent to which Reach has become a staple of my nights poses an interesting question: why the hell do I still care about Halo?

After all, it's not incredibly different from the four Halo games that preceded it; there's a lot of tweaks, fine-tuning, and loving care put into the game, but that all really adds up to more of a refinement of the hallmarks of the franchise than any sort of reinvention. If anything, Reach deliberately sets out to evoke the first Halo and strips away quite a few of the added features of the sequels. It works brilliantly, even when it really shouldn't.

Here's why: as a franchise, Halo understands that video games as a form live and die by their controls. After you've played a Halo game for a few hours, the controls are about as natural as breathing; and moving to the latest incarnation rarely requires you to learn more than one or two new changes, which are characteristically more intuitive that what they are replacing. (Incidentally, the decision to break with tradition by remapping the melee button from B to right bumper in Reach was a stroke of genius that almost reinvents the game). When you're playing Halo, everything you could possibly want or need to do - shoot, toss a grenade, jump, pistol-whip, etc. - is a single button-press away. The ridiculous number of effective techniques and attack options underneath the essential simplicity of the control scheme means that you start to develop a personal style pretty quickly, which you are rarely punished for doing. Even hardcore skilled multiplayer Halo junkies vary widely in their favored tactics; there's not a whole lot of unfair advantages to be had.

In all the hours I've spent playing Reach and it's predecessors, I've never felt like there was one right way to play the game. The experience of playing Halo has always struck me as similar to a giant sandbox with a bunch of different toys that are all somehow fun in their own way; there's just this sort of tactile friendliness to the game that encourages that sort of engagement. Halo: Reach is the apex of the series because it takes the Halo mechanics and lets them be the endlessly reconfigurable Rubik's Cube they always were: out of the box, you can choose to play the excellent single-player campaign alone or with friends, you can go online and play any one of a slew of competitive game-types, you can team up with other people in the Firefight mode, which throws waves of enemies at you and grafts on an arcade-style scoring mode, or you can come up with something completely unique using the Forge editor that comes with the game.

I think that more than anything else, Halo: Reach succeeds so wildly as a game because it invites you to have the experience that you want to have (as long as that experience involves shooting things, naturally, but if that's not your cup of tea, there's always reading). Since I've been playing it, it's been hard for me to really contemplate switching to another game; I may eventually pick up Call of Duty: Black Ops since it's getting good reviews, and there's those neat-looking Borderlands and Red Dead Redemption expansions, but I think it's going to take some time before Reach gets its hooks out of me.

Extra Lives book review

Extra Lives is the best writing about video games I've read. It's so good that I'm not even mad that it's only 200 pages long and about a quarter of that is slightly expanded versions of articles I've already read (his piece in the Guardian that I wrote a post about in March and his New Yorker article on Gears of War 2.) Partly, this is because the quality of Bissell's writing is head and shoulders above even the more talented games writers currently working, but mainly it's because he understands that subjectivity is the special sauce of video games. Extra Lives's subtitle is Why Video Games Matter, which makes it sound like some sort of polemic entry in the "games as art" debate, but it's actually a gaming autobiography of sorts. That's a risky approach - somebody telling you what playing video games is like for them isn't the most immediately compelling hook for long-form writing - but Bissell captures it beautifully and comes closer than anyone else yet has to capturing what the experience of playing video games is like.

In the first chapter of the book, Bissell relays an anecdote that hooked me completely. He writes about living overseas and finally getting his hands on a copy of Fallout 3 on Election Day 2008. Intending to try it out for an hour or so before tuning to the news coverage, he winds up playing for 7 hours and missing the returns and Obama's victory speech. This made me smile, because although I did watch the evening coverage in full with a group of jubilant friends, I spent the majority of that day (which I had off from the state mental health facility I was interning at) trying to finish Dead Space so I could give it back to a friend I had borrowed it from. I didn't quite do it - Dead Space is a lengthier game than it probably needed to be, and I had to keep it until the end of the week - but the modest perversion of focusing so intently on a video game at the culmination of a historic and consequential presidential election was something that struck me at the time, and I liked reading Bissell's version of the experience.

The smartest decision Bissell made in writing Extra Lives, focusing almost exclusively on contemporary games, is the one that will by his own admission almost certainly date the book quickly (it was just published last month). With one exception, all the games he writes about have been released in the past three years or so and are on the current generation of consoles. Part of my admiration for this decision almost certainly comes from the fact that every game he writes about at length, with the exception of LittleBigPlanet is one that I've played, which is a nice frame of reference to have. There's also something to be said for the idea that examining the latest and greatest is the only way to get a good understanding of a developing medium like video games. More to the point, though, focusing on recent games allows Bissell to sidestep the influence of nostalgia. This is the single biggest Achilles heel of writing and thinking about gaming; as with any medium, there's a strong contingent of enthusiasts who have a marked preference for past eras. This usually manifests in the insistence that a bunch of BS Super Nintendo RPGs (or more pretentiously, PC adventure games) represent the apotheosis of the form. The problem with this is that unlike other mediums, the formal qualities of video gaming are still very much in flux, which means that 1990s games held up as The Godfather-style masterworks actually seem like charming but primitive Georges Méliès short films.

I think that the most valuable aspect of Extra Lives is the manner in which Bissell grapples with the shortcomings of games as a medium and the resulting unease that comes with being both an intelligent adult and a gaming enthusiast. Here's the paragraph in which he captures this most succinctly:

" ...I was then and am now routinely torn about whether video games are a worthy way to spend my time and often ask myself why I like them as much as I do, especially when, very often, I hate them. Sometimes I think I hate them because of how purely they bring me back to childhood, when I could only imagine what I would do if I were single-handedly fighting off an alien army or driving down the street in a very fast car while police try to shoot out my tires or told that I was the ancestral inheritor of some primeval sword and my destiny was to rid the realm of evil. These are very intriguing scenarios if you are twelve years old. They are far less intriguing if you are thirty-five and have a career, friends, a relationship, or children. The problem, however, at least for me, is that they are no less fun. I like fighting aliens and I like driving fast cars. Tell me the secret sword is just over the mountain and I will light off into goblin-haunted territory to claim it. For me, video games often restore an unearned, vaguely loathsome form of innocence - an innocence derived of not knowing anything. For this and all sorts of other complicated historical reasons - starting with the fact that they began as toys marketed directly to children - video games crash any cocktail-party rationale you attempt to formulate as to why, exactly, you love them. More than any other form of entertainment, video games tend to divide rooms into Us and Them. We are, in effect, admitting that we like to spend our time shooting monsters, and They are, not unreasonably, failing to find the value in that."

Bissell doesn't shy away from this topic, to his immense credit. Some of the most intriguing parts of the book are when he explores the mixed-bag role gaming has played in his personal life, such as when he spent 200 hours playing Oblivion in the grip of a depressive episode or the lengthy cocaine and Grand Theft Auto IV odyssey detailed in his Guardian article. I think that even someone relatively sympathetic to gaming could read these parts and justifiably come to the conclusion that it's a fundamentally problematic social pursuit. Despite my clear enthusiasm for it, it's something I question myself some days, and while Bissell comes out clearly in defense of his hobby, his admission that the issue remains open to interpretation is an admirable display of intellectual seriousness. This book is highly recommended. 

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time: The Movie, or An Object Lesson In Why Hollywood Can't Make A Decent Video Game Adaptation

A

Above: The hands on hips pose makes Jake Gyllenhaal look like less like a fearsome 'Persian warrior and more like he's waiting impatiently for bar service at a leather club. Who does a boy have to blow to get a vodka and Red Bull in this place?

Over last weekend, when I was visiting my family and girlfriend in St. Louis, we all went out to see Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. My sister was the main person who was interested in seeing it, but I was kind of curious myself, seeing as this is probably the highest-profile and most expensive video game to movie adaptation to date, having been midwifed by blockbuster merchant du jour Jerry Bruckheimer in a thinly veiled attempt to replicate the success of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Plus, I've played the 2003 Xbox/PS2 game, which I enjoyed and is widely regarded as a minor classic to boot, so I had a pretty good point of comparison against which to judge it.

I'm not going to waste a lot of time reviewing the movie itself - it sucked, but if you saw the ads, you probably guessed that already. I would like to point out that while I admire Jake Gyllenhaal's ability to Bowflex himself into the $10 million dollar abs you see on display above, he's really not right for this type of part. Gyllenhaal works best when he can break out that look of slight naive confusion that he employed to such good effect in Donnie Darko and most-underrated-movie-evar Zodiac. He can't really conjure the mocking insouciance that his character in Prince of Persia is clearly intended to have. Come to think of it, most of the under-40 A-list male crowd in Hollywood these days is lacking in the smart-ass factor - that was always the weakest part of Tobey Maguire's performance as Spider-Man as well.

Anyhow, the point I want to raise is that adapting a video game into a crowd-pleasing blockbuster shouldn't be nearly as hard as the dismal results of the many attempts to do so would seem to indicate. As I see it, this is a classic Hollywood problem: lack of respect for the source material. Check out this trailer for the original Sands of Time game:

 
You can basically summarize what the game's like from it: you play as a prince who performs amazing acrobatic feats and can rewind time with a dagger powered by magical sand. He spends a lot of time swordfighting with monsters possessed by the same magical sand that powers his dagger. This is kind of a stupid plot, but the plot isn't really the point. The cool stuff you can do in the game is the point, and the plot is a means to that end.

The Prince of Persia movie, by contrast (I'd embed the trailer below for comparison, if it weren't for the fact that the trailer is pretty misleading about the actual content of the movie) does away with the idea of possessed monsters, barely has any time rewinding at all, and stages the action scenes mostly in spatially confusing medium-close shots stitched together with quick-cut editing. Most of the movie is divided between watching Jake Gyllenhaal and Gemma Arterton walking through the desert and engaging in limply-written bickering, and listening to various characters spout boring expository dialogue about court intrigue and the rules for protecting the dagger. To add insult to injury, whereas the game was renowned for its lighthearted storybook aesthetic, the tone of the movie veers erratically between goofiness and self-seriousness. 

Prince of Persia would have been a much better movie if it had been built around the same stuff that went into the game instead of all the superfluous crap thrown in as a desperate attempt to have a story to focus on. Summer blockbusters get a lot of crap for being overly reliant on action set pieces, but I think that criticism speaks more to mediocrity of action set pieces these days rather than the basic template. Put it this way: Raiders of the Lost Ark is just a bunch of set pieces with the barest minimum of exposition connecting them, and everybody in the world loves that movie. Prince of Persia was obviously never gonna come close to that, but why not try? Why not hire some parkour experts to try and top the foot chase sequences in Casino Royale or District B-13? Why not keep the sand monsters idea and turn the swordfights into a PG-13 friendly version of the battles in 300? Who decided that this movie needed to be a slow-witted homage to Romancing the Stone? Making a video-game based blockbuster movie doesn't entail re-inventing the wheel, but it ought to entail a careful consideration of how to keep whatever made the game appealing in the first place in the film. 

The greatness of multiplayer Halo

Above: Blood Gulch, site of many fond memories. There's a shotgun in that building on the bottom screen!

The original Halo has a very special place in my heart. Not only was it one of the first games that I owned for the first Xbox, way back when it came out in 2001, the multiplayer was also a staple of my entire college career. After the massive popularity of the online-enabled Halo 2 and Halo 3, it's easy to forget how unlikely it was that the multiplayer in the original became a phenomenon in its own right. Halo, however, came out at a time when splitscreen was the only game in town. You could theoretically get up to 16 players into a game by networking four consoles with four controllers each, but who the hell would have the space and the resources to pull that off? When I first got the game, I had all of two controllers to work with, which meant that my friends and I were limited to one-on-one deathmatch. Mind you, Halo was not designed for one-on-one, most of the maps were actually targeted for 6-12 players. It should have been mindnumbingly boring. Instead, it was glorious.

     
Playing a multiplayer shooter with only two competitors dials the pace way back. With Halo, it turned a chaotic blastfest into a tactical affair, where long periods of mutual stalking build up to an explosive flurry of moves and countermoves. This worked so well in Halo for two reasons: the regenerating shield system, which is now an industry standard but was completely innovative and new at the time, and the fact that the default spawn loadout included a cache of grenades and a remarkably effective scoped pistol. In Halo, you can hold your own even if you wind up in a fight before you can find a better gun, and if an opponent gets the upper hand and starts inflicting damage, you have the option of falling back and recouping. Compared to other shooters of the time, Halo had a unique and fluid rhythm that fluctuated constantly between defense and offense, with no one tactic guaranteeing success at any moment. Not only was it fun to play, it was fun to watch - which was important, because with only two controllers, somebody would always be watching and waiting for their turn.

Later, when I bought some more controllers, we started played 3 and 4 player matches, which brought back some of the chaos and randomness of the game. One thing we did semi-regularly is setting up King of the Hill matches (where you score points from standing in a random spot on the map that moves every 30 seconds) where every player spawned with a rocket launcher by default. This turned the game into a kind of Warner Bros. cartoon, where within 5 seconds of getting into scoring position, you'd be nailed by multiple explosions that left you staring at your corpse as it pinwheels across the map through the third person death camera that's one of Halo multiplayer's subtler pleasures. Even though this was probably the least skill-intensive permutation of Halo competition, it was hilariously fun to play.

I skipped Halo 2 multiplayer, mostly because the game came out when I was in grad school and didn't really have online access or anyone to play splitscreen with. I did play quite a bit of Halo 3 online, which I enjoyed. Since that game concluded the story arc begun in the first game, I figured that it would wind up being the apex of the series and basically assumed that any subsequent games would be less inspired or more minor entries, which seemed to be born out by Halo 3: ODST, which was a lot of fun, but hewed pretty closely to the basic gameplay formula of the parent game. So when the two-week multiplayer beta test for this fall's Halo: Reach opened up to ODST owners, I figured that I'd download it and play a couple matches to check out the graphics and new weapons and that would be that.

You can guess how that turned out. I've been totally hooked on Halo: Reach. It's probably a good thing that the beta ends on Monday, because I'd probably keep playing it into the forseeable future, even though the selection of maps for the base game is limited to two (there's a couple other maps that are devoted to specialized modes, one of which is a kind of variant on the Assault gametype from Unreal Tournament). Reach is a chronological prequel to the existing Halo games, although it's not going to feature the same characters, and it seems pretty clear to me that Bungie's using the opportunity to bring back some of the feel of the original Halo multiplayer: there's no more dual-wielding mechanic, no more grenade types beyond frag and plasma, and the scoped pistol is back in slightly modified form as a default weapon. More importantly, they've tuned the game down substantially away from Halo 3's emphasis on close combat - the default strategy of running straight at an opponent while firing the shitty default assault rifle until you're close enough for a melee blow doesn't work nearly as well now, and the grenades are substantially more effective. There's also a mechanic where rapid-firing precision weapons reduces accuracy. All in all, the feel of the game is a lot closer to the tactical balance of the original Halo, and I love it. 

There's also a lot of new stuff, with the most significant addition being the substitution of persistent abilities (jetpack, sprint, invisibility, or power armor) picked from a class-selection menu that replace the temporary power-ups of previous Halo outings. I was skeptical about this when I first heard they were doing it, but it's amazing how well-implemented it is in giving you more options to alter the flow of combat without breaking the game. I tend to favor the sprint ability, which lets me close into medium range more quickly to better use the pistol, but I've seen other players use each of the other powers in smart ways, and you're free to equip an different one between lives a'la the Call of Duty class system. The new weapons are also very cool and surprisingly substantial in terms of differences from Halo 3 - pretty much everything has been rethought or replaced. Below is a shot of me, captured using the Theater mode that's been brought over from the last game, in the process of taking out somebody with the new grenade launcher:

So I'm seriously impressed by Halo: Reach: it's much more of a new-feeling game than I was expecting given the wide acclaim and huge sales figures of Halo 3. The design choices evoke some serious nostalgia for the first Halo and all the good times I had playing it back in college, while also adding a bunch of new and modern wrinkles to the gameplay. This is definitely a must-buy for me when it comes out later this year, and based on the small taste available through the beta, I can see myself getting more than my money's worth out of the online multiplayer.

Video Games as Art: A Proposition

At the end of the post I did a month ago on video game addiction, I left an opening for future posts on the subjects of whether gaming is healthy and whether games are art. As it happens, this past week has presented an ideal context to address the second question, as famed film critic Roger Ebert posted a substantive rebuttal to a talk claiming the mantle of art for gaming. Ebert's critique builds off of an earlier exchange on the topic between himself and Clive Barker (yes, the one you're thinking of), and his position is stated boldly in the title of his latest post: video games can never be art. I won't link to any of the responses from gaming press and enthusiasts, but suffice it to say they range from polite engagement to petulant dismissal and none (that I've read) agree with Ebert.

I do agree with him, and I think that it would benefit the status of gaming as a cultural phenomenon immensely if more people immersed in gaming did, too. The essence of Ebert's case against gaming as an art form rests on two related observations. The first, which invokes the tradition of auteur theory in film criticism, notes that video games as an experience are not generally the product of a singular creative vision (i.e. there's no 'artist' whose work one can be said to be taking in while playing a game). The second observation, which is connected to the first one, is that games are ill-suited to producing emotional or intellectual insights about the human condition, which he states most explicitly as part of his 2007 reply to Barker:

(T)he real question is, do we as their consumers become more or less complex, thoughtful, insightful, witty, empathetic, intelligent, philosophical (and so on) by experiencing them?

Ebert openly admits that the vast majority of ostensibly artistic works, including those in his favored medium, fail to clear this bar, but contends that for the reasons summarized above, no video game will ever make the cut.

The typical response to Ebert from gaming aficionados usually centers on two points: (a) the subjectivity and malleability of how one defines"art" and (b) the fact that gaming is in its relative infancy and no one can tell what the future of the medium will hold. I'm not going to engage these contentions because I find (a) to be tedious and pedantic and (b) to be impossible to discuss in any informed way, because time, not argument, will settle the score.

In fact, in agreeing with Ebert, I'm going to sidestep the particulars of the debate entirely and instead attack the underlying assumption behind it. As a jumping off-point, I want to expand on a point Ebert makes in the closing paragraphs of his most recent post:

"Why aren't gamers content to play their games and simply enjoy themselves? They have my blessing, not that they care. Do they require validation? In defending their gaming against parents, spouses, children, partners, co-workers or other critics, do they want to be able to look up from the screen and explain, "I'm studying a great form of art?""

To put it simply: pretty much. I'd venture that the average adult hardcore gamer who feels that he (or possibly she, but let's be real about the demographics here) has skin in the "are games art" debate is motivated at least in part by defensiveness over a lifetime of having their enthusiasm dismissed as childish. I think this is more of a human trait rather than something specific to gamers, although male nerds of all stripes seem more susceptible to it - consider the type of person who insists he's reading graphic novels, not comic books. There's a very strong, but mostly unspoken, rule in our culture that things which we do to Improve Ourselves are fundamentally superior to things we do just because we like to. The definition offered by Ebert that I excerpted above pretty much states that art and self-improvement are inseparable from one another, and all semantic debates aside, I think that tracks fairly well with the views of most people.

This idea regarding the preferability of Improving Ourselves, when filtered through the intense moralistic streak that somehow manages to simultaneously be both one of American culture's greatest strengths and one of it's greatest weaknesses, inevitably comes out as the idea that we should constantly be Improving, and should never consider passing on the opportunity to do so. Ask a gamer if any of these statements sound familiar:

"How can you waste the day inside playing video games when it's so beautiful out?"
"Why would you play Guitar Hero when you could be learning how to play real guitar?"
"Why don't you get together with your friends and do something, instead of just playing video games?"

I've played a lot of video games, and barring some sort of thumb incapacitating incident in the near future, I'll probably play a lot more. To answer Ebert's challenge, no video game has given me any sort of experience that has expanded me intellectually, emotionally, or culturally. I am perfectly OK with this, because I never picked up a controller expecting anything like that. I have many other sources of acculturation and learning in my life that more than compensate. What's more: with the time I've spent playing video games, I almost certainly could have learned another language, read more great literature, and cultivated a unique and interesting hobby of some sort. I chose to play video games instead, and I'm not sorry about that. I like playing video games, and that's a good enough reason for me to do it. It ought to be a good enough reason for anybody to do anything in their leisure time.

I understand the impulse to go on the defensive and try and stick games with the tag of "art" thus marking them as something with the potential to fulfill the holy task of Improving Ourselves, but it's the wrong path. Instead, I want to see some pushback against this idea that there's a moral obligation to maximizing our exposure to things designed to Improve Ourselves and that we should feel guilty about choosing to do things simply because we find them pleasurable. I want to be clear that this isn't about making different choices - we pretty much wind up doing the things we find pleasurable regardless of how anyone feels about them - but about consciously stating that our choices in entertainment, whether they be video games, watching pornography, or knitting, don't need to be transformative or Important to be worthy of respect. And I think we should get started on this before somebody decides to fuck around and try to make the Un Chien Andalou of games in an attempt to prove Ebert wrong, because I definitely don't want to play that shit.

Splinter Cell Conviction Micro Kinda-Review

I'm not done playing Splinter Cell Conviction yet, but I'm probably a bit over three quarters through with the single-player campaign. The Splinter Cell series has always occupied sort of a strange space for me: I've bought and played every single one that's been on Xbox/360 (this is the fifth in the series, excluding handheld spinoffs and cellphone de-makes) and enjoyed them all to one degree or another, but it's never been a series that I've felt an abiding passion for to the point where I would consciously identify them as some of my favorites. This is despite the fact that a strong case exists for Splinter Cell Chaos Theory as being one of the most finely crafted games of the previous generation.

Conviction changes up the formula quite a bit: it strips Sam Fisher (the player character) of his government affiliation and gear and puts him in the middle of a revenge tale. The gameplay is a lot different as well; the emphasis is still very much on stealth, but whereas in previous games, killing patrolling enemies was a risk/reward proposition that encouraged you to try to find a way to sneak through undetected, in Conviction you're more or less expected, and often times forced, to shoot most of the bad guys. To the credit of the developers, this doesn't feel like as much of a radical change as it initially sounds - since you're always outgunned and relatively vulnerable, the game isn't structured like a Gears of War/Call of Duty straight-up shooter (with the exception of the fourth level, which is structured exactly like this, and the less about which is said, the better) but rather forces a more tactically aggressive bent while allowing you a fair degree of experimentation.

The centerpiece of this approach is the "mark and execute" system, which allows you to designate between 2-4 hostile targets, depending on your loadout, and hit a button to autotarget and kill them. The catch is that you can only do this after pulling off a hand to hand takedown of another target, so you're forced to use stealth up to get the ability. Since you can mark targets at any time, this creates some really cool scenarios where you can, say, stalk a trio of patrolling enemies from a second-floor vantage point, mark two of them, jump down to take out the third, and immediately nail his companions. The system really allows you to pull off these type of maneuvers in a way that maintains the sense of control while enabling things that wouldn't be possible with previous iterations of the control scheme.

Actually, the controls in Conviction overall deserve high marks. The overhauled system provides some of the most fluid third-person control I've experienced in an action game, with the possible exception of Gears of War, and Conviction is giving you a lot more complexity than does Gears. There are a few snags here and there (I always find myself having trouble getting out of a crouch when I want to run, which requires that you hit RB after leaving cover) but the improvement over previous entries is clear, and obvious care has been taken to make sure that the control scheme fits the new, more aggressive gameplay style.

So I like Conviction quite a bit, which paradoxically makes its flaws and shortcomings more frustrating. The first issue I have with the game is probably more an artifact of my past experience with the franchise, but some of the changes really are at odds with things that were at the core of prior Splinter Cell games, such as the fact that you can't hide bodies anymore and you wind up in situations where you have to shoot your way out with no stealth option. Even the "mark and execute" system, which I think is actually pretty consistent with the Splinter Cell ethos, comes off to me as something that would feel more at home in Max Payne 3 than in a Sam Fisher adventure (note to people making Max Payne 3: steal this idea!)

The second issue I have is with the design choice to make the enemy AI yell at you constantly (nicely skewed in this Penny Arcade strip from last week, which doesn't exaggerate the situation by much). I'm sure there's a solid gameplay rationale for this, because it does improve your ability to track the enemies as they stalk you, but to have supposedly elite combat troops give away their position every five seconds while engaged in a cat-and-mouse battle of tactics really does break the illusion more than is desirable. Finally, despite the promise of a grittier and more emotionally driven narrative, Conviction turns into a boilerplate Tom Clancy improbable-and-poorly-explained conspiracy tales surprisingly quickly, and the dialogue and voice acting, with the exception of the always-great Michael Ironside as Sam Fisher, could use a lot of improvement. Even by the hallowed standards of video games stories, Conviction's plot doesn't make a lot of sense, and the antagonists pretty quickly cross the line into cartoonish supervillainy (word to Waylon Smithers).

I don't know if I'd mark Conviction as a must-buy for people who aren't series stalwarts such as myself, but it's an interesting experiment that does a lot of things rights. I'm really interested to try the co-op mode (the trailer for which I've embedded below), which is a completely different story and set of environments from the single-player and has been highlighted for special praise in a lot of the professional reviews. I could really see how the balance between careful planning and improvisation that the game encourages could be a lot of fun to navigate with another player, and the nature of the gameplay is such that a lot more actual cooperation between players would be necessary as compared to your average shooter. Also, one of the co-op characters is named Archer, which conjures the hilarious FX animated show by the same name. If I get the chance to check this out, maybe my estimation of Conviction will improve.

Video Game Addiction and the Psychology of Gaming

Above: Fake Magic Johnson and Fake Alan Alda enjoy a competitive videogame on a television that is not turned on.

There's a lengthy but compelling piece in the Guardian online about video game addiction that's well worth a read. It chronicles the author Tom Bissell's journey from being a prolific writer to what amounts to a video game-addicted cokehead, and centers around his obsession with Grand Theft Auto IV. The thing that grabbed me about this piece is that there's a million cliches that could have gone into this story, from analogizing video game makers and drug pushers to assuring readers he's given up games to spend more time sitting outside or some such, but Bissell avoids pretty much all of them. Instead, he gives one of the most frank and thoughtful depictions of games and their appeal that I've ever read.

A large part of this is the fact that Bissell devotes several paragraphs to a stream of consciousness description of the experience of playing a GTA game (Vice City, in this instance), and writes it in a way that really captures the sense of freedom and possibility that the games provide. Later, when he's started abusing cocaine heavily, Grand Theft Auto IV becomes his go-to activity while high, and the game and drug form a sort of symbiosis. This leads up to the climactic meditation of the piece:

What have games given me? Experiences. Not surrogate experiences, but actual experiences, many of which are as important to me as any real memories. Once I wanted games to show me things I could not see in any other medium. Then I wanted games to tell me a story in a way no other medium can. Then I wanted games to redeem something absent in myself. Then I wanted a game experience that pointed not toward but at something. Playing GTA IV on coke for weeks and then months at a time, I learned that maybe all a game can do is point at the person who is playing it, and maybe this has to be enough.

My experiences with life and with video games are hardly identical to Bissell's, to put it mildly, but I think he absolutely captures something vital about gaming with his point about games providing real experiences. This is a point that I do not believe non-gamers fully understand: so much of the quality of a game, especially a modern game, is tied into its ability to break down the sense of separation between the physical activity of playing a game (read: pressing buttons) and the actions onscreen. In short: the extent that a game can make you feel personally involved and empowered in what's happening onscreen, you'll probably like it.

In some ways, this is a grotesque oversimplification: there's many, many factors that have to come together to provide that experience. However, in great or even merely enjoyable games, the whole is more than the sum of the parts in a way that's difficult to capture with objective description. Here's the really interesting thing, though: despite all this complexity, games are getting much, much better at providing this quality of experience on a consistent basis. Think about this: a short game is roughly 5-7 hours of playtime in length, and a long game can easily be over 100 hours (I played Grand Theft Auto IV for at least 140 hours, and I imagine that Bissell played for triple that amount or more) or essentially endless if the focus is on competitive multiplayer. That means that a game has to keep your attention for much longer than a feature film does, and likely as much as an entire season of a TV program. What's more, almost all games are built around a fairly simple set of actions that repeat themselves over and over again with usually little more than minor variations over time. Even in expansive, free-form games like the Grand Theft Auto series, you'll get the main essentials of play in the first few hours.

By all rights, keeping someone interested in a video game ought to be an impossible task, but it turns out that it isn't. In fact, over the past several years, I've found that video games as a medium are not only more consistently compelling in my opinion than pretty much any other form of entertainment, but getting better all of the time, and I think Bissell has zeroed on the main reason why with his statement about experiences. A misconception that has plagued popular thinking about video games for some time now is the idea that the appeal of games is something like a more-participatory movie or television show, that the structured narrative is at the core and that the interactivity serves to make the narrative more compelling for the player. In fact, the reverse is true: games get most of their appeal from coming up with cool things for the player to do and letting the player control his or her experience of those things. Nobody plays video games for the story; if they did, nobody would ever play video games, because video game stories, with punishingly few exceptions, are terrible. GamesRadar wrote an article on the plot holes of Modern Warfare 2 that's three goddamn pages long (granted, mostly to maximize the number of pages clicked on, and thus ads viewed - welcome to the world of Internet games writing) and that's a game that's grossed more than one billion dollars since last November. MW2's narrative flaws didn't even stop it from amassing widespread critical acclaim, either. Hell, I'll even throw in my two cents: Modern Warfare 2's story was completely retarded, and I still played through the game twice, spent a solid two months with the multiplayer, and loved about every minute of it.

The contrast between games and other forms of entertainment has really hit home for me that past couple weeks as I've been playing Bioshock 2. A brief recap for the uninitiated: Bioshock is a first-person shooter game that came out in 2007 that became a massive critical and commercial hit. It is far and away one of the most original first-person shooters ever created; partly because of the setting (a failed underwater city resplendent in 1930s Art Deco architecture created as a libertarian utopia by a thinly veiled version of Ayn Rand), and partly because of the rich and well thought-out narrative, which actually came to a definitive resolution at the climax. This last point is important because virtually all major video games follow the modern Hollywood blockbuster model, of openly planning for a multi-sequeled franchise in pretty much all aspects of production, with none more glaringly obvious than the plot. Bioshock, however, felt self-contained from the get-go.

It also (deservedly) made a shitload of money, so when Bioshock 2 was announced, I was scornful. Here was an unnecessary cash-in sequel to a original and complete work, which to top it off wasn't even being made by the creators of the first. It's the sort of thing that drives fans crazy. The thing is, though, that Bioshock 2 didn't turn out to be the Blues Brothers 2000 of the video game world (fun challenge: come up with a snappier analogy and post in in the comments! I couldn't!), it's actually an immense amount of fun to play (less surprisingly, it's also selling by the bucketload).

Now, I don't want to give short shrift to the makers of Bioshock 2, who all things considered, did a fine job with the narrative and tonal aspects of the game, but most of what makes Bioshock 2 work in the way that it does are small improvements to the core gameplay and a few neat additions. In fact, the phrase "small improvements to the core gameplay and a few neat additions" is essentially a comprehensive summary of the philosophy behind video game sequeling. Simple as it is, this approach really works in games in a way that I don't think it can in other media. If somebody came up and told me that the upcoming sequel to a blockbuster movie was being hailed as "pretty much the same thing as the first one, only the hero shoots somebody with a speargun this time," I probably wouldn't make seeing it a priority. However, when I found the speargun in Bioshock 2 (it pins dead enemies to the wall, and you can pull out the spears to reuse them, which makes the corpse fall to the floor!) I was genuinely jazzed. I can't rule out the possibility that this speaks to a certain lack of sophistication on my part, but I think it has more to do with the point that the experience of playing games is qualitatively very different from our experience of other media. Playing Bioshock 2 made me realize that despite what I had thought, the not easily replicated aspects of the first game, its originality and narrative focus, were less important than I had previously thought, while more reproducible elements, the combat and exploration of the game world, were much more.

This has been a bit of a digression, but I think it relates profoundly to Bissell's piece on game addiction and the core role of experience in it. There's a reason that we can talk seriously about gaming being an "addiction," even if it doesn't fit the technical parameters of the term, in a way that's harder to apply to an equally avid consumer of movies, TV, or novels: video games give us feedback. They reward good play, punish bad play, and create a sense of improvement over time. Cracked's David Wong wrote a great piece a few weeks back on how video games use basic principles of behavioral psychology to hook people and keep them playing. Wong's focus is more on massively multiplayer RPGs like World of Warcraft, which I've never played and have no interest in, (although my girlfriend and I have sunk 80+ hours into playing Borderlands, which is essentially an scaled-back postapocalyptic shooter version of the same basic ideas) but I think that the basic framework he elaborates can be made to fit just about any type of video game to one degree or another. Simply put, the appeal of video games is ultimately a behavioral one, rather than an intellectual one.

I'm not sure what the full implications of this are, although I'm sure that the hoary old chestnuts of "are video games healthy?" and "are video games art?" will resurface fairly rapidly. I may have more to say on this topic in general, and those two questions in particular, at some future date. I am fairly sure, however, that it means that the current cultural ascendancy of video games will probably be a prolonged one, and may even just be getting started, given the explosion of platforms like Facebook and the iTunes App Store. Look for some 40 year old college student to publish an essay in Newsweek about the intermingling between her FarmVille and OxyContin habit by December or so.

when will it all end?

Via Kotaku, a story about an Indian man who broke the world record for most hours spent playing Grand Theft Auto IV in a row: 40.3.

The Mumbai, India resident started playing at his home on September 4 at 10:00 a.m. and wrapped up on September 6 at 2:00 a.m., taking only four breaks. His marathon play session was observed by observers and has earned its place in the Guinness Book, surpassing the previous record of playing GTAIV for 28 hours and 1 minute.

So now the Indians are better than us at science, engineering, wireless router tech support, and sitting around on their asses playing GTA? I weep for America's future, Glenn Beck-style.

Proof of my greatness: part one

Andrew Sullivan linked to a blog post tonight by some libertarian blogger named Peter Suderman pondering whether or not video games are supplanting B-movies. This caught my attention primarily because I wrote a blog post a little over two years ago making essentially the same argument on the eve of the release of Halo 3. I doubt that Peter Suderman was copying me, seeing as the post was on my friends-only MySpace page (mind you, I was writing back in the heady days of 2007, before it was scientifically proven that using MySpace marks you permanently as a member of the urban poor) but still, chalk me up as being ahead of the curve. Adding to my greatness, I also predicted in this post that The Dark Knight was going to be good, that Halo 3 was going to be better than any of the bullshit blockbuster movies of summer 2007, and that I'd never wind up seeing the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie. All of which came true! The entire post is re-printed below so you can bask in my reflected glory.

The hype around the release of Halo 3 this week generally says that the game stands a good chance of bringing in more money on the day of its release than any entertainment event, ever. Traditionally, of course, big-money openings are the province of blockbuster action movies, with the current champ being this year's god-awful Spider-Man 3. The comparison poses an interesting question: namely, how long is it going to be before big mindless summer blockbuster action movies are rendered irrelevant by video games? My line of reasoning is this: of all the action films I saw this summer, the only one that strikes me as particularly notable is Live Free or Die Hard, and that's mostly because I expected it to suck and it didn't. I saw Transformers, but I can't remember a goddamn thing that actually happened in it. Obviously, the less said about Spider-Man 3, the better. In fact, pretty much the only one I didn't see was Pirates of the Caribbean Go To China or whatever it was called, which I decided to skip when I found out it was like 3 hours long. Clearly, I haven't played Halo 3 yet, but I think it's a pretty safe bet that it's going to be a lot better than any of those movies. With the level of production value and interactivity that games offer in the Xbox 360/Playstation 3 era, at some point, we have to ask ourselves what the point of watching some CGI robot blow shit up is when you can do it yourself from the comfort of your own home? Obviously, action movies will continue to exist for the foreseeable future, given the fact that box office takes are still rising and I still hear a lot of people talk about how they can't handle the amount of buttons on modern video game controllers. But you have to wonder how long that's going to last given the fact that by this point, the bottom half of the crucial 18-25 demographic came of age in the Playstation 2 era, and more and more of the types of people who might not have played many video games in past generations (read: girls) are getting into the hobby. My guess is that summer event movies will survive the transition, but they're going to have to step their game up a peg by emphasizing the elements that film does better than video games, like story and performance (I'm crossing my fingers for The Dark Knight to represent the critical step in this direction), because they aren't going to be able to compete much longer in terms of sheer visceral experience.

The greatness of Batman: Arkham Asylum

I might not have wound up playing Batman: Arkham Asylum if is wasn't for the confluence of a three-day weekend, my first paycheck in ages, and the Internet collectively flipping its shit for the game. Lucky thing for me, then, because Arkham Asylum is an amazing game, one of the best of the year and probably one of the best of this console generation.

One of the things that separates video games from other forms of entertainment is that gaming places less of a premium on creativity and innovation and more of a premium on execution. It's why game sequels are more often than not improvements on the originals, while sequels in other mediums are generally watered down cash-ins. Games borrow ideas, techniques, and entire gameplay mechanics more or less shamelessly from one another with little penalty incurred from the critical or consumer communities as long as the execution is solid and the game is compelling. Simply put, a large part of Arkham Asylum is one of the best examples of creative borrowing that video games have yet produced.

Breaking Arkham Asylum down into its constituent parts probably illuminates the game better than any straightforward description. The game adopts BioShock's hybrid of free-roaming yet linear gameplay and Art Deco environments (obviously, the Art Deco aesthetic is also woven into the DNA of the Batman mythos, but the execution and the fact that both games use Unreal Engine 3 graphics really accentuates the comparison). It incorporates Crackdown's joyfully kinetic character movement and liberal reward of exploration. It also adopts the techno-gadgets and balance between tense stealth gameplay and multiple viable routes of attack found in the better Splinter Cell games (i.e. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory). To top that off, it blends in a truly satisfying hand-to-hand combat system; which it sort of like the one in Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, only much better.

For those of you who didn't understand a damn bit of that previous paragraph, let me sum it up thusly: Arkham Asylum takes many of the best parts of many of the best action games made in the past five or six years. The truly special thing about it, however, is that rather than playing like some Frankenstein's monster, Arkham Asylum pulls together a cohesive experience that really does make you feel like you're Batman. So when you're fighting six thugs hand-to-hand, rather than deal with clumsy and awkward controls or fall back on the dreaded Quick-Time Events, the game autotargets for you and chains together smooth animations as you time your attacks and counters, pulling off all sorts of really cool looking moves as you go. If this were to be explained to you by a helpful Australian with visual aids, it would look like this:

Batman : Arkham Asylum "Free Flow Combat" Gameplay Trailer
by FrenchGamers

The stealth gameplay is also obscenely well-done, and logical within the context of the gameplay. Essentially, whenever you come across a gang of armed henchmen, you can't allow yourself to be spotted, or they will shoot you and you will die. There's a ton of very cool stealth-attack options, such as gliding down from a height into a kick, rappelling upside down from your grappling hook and snatching up the bad guy, or the stealth-game mainstay of grabbing a patrolling guard and flinging him off a ledge. Arkham Asylum does an excellent job of recreating the warehouse scene for Batman Begins across a variety of scenarios in gameplay and making it fun, and enough new gadgets and twists are introduced that the conceit stays fresh throughout. There are plenty of little touches of user-friendliness, such as the option to grapple out of accidental falls without dying, that make the game feel more fun and less frustrating.

The storyline and presentation of the game are also worth applauding. Arkham Asylum takes its cues from Batman: The Animated Series (which I haven't seen, but I understand is quite good), a gutsy move when one considers the financial allure of aping Christopher Nolan's mega-popular "realistic" Batman movies. It pays off, though, by opening up the gameplay and plot into more fantastical avenues. The story has an appropriately dark and adult tone without becoming tedious or obtrusive, and the voice acting is excellent, especially Mark Hamill as The Joker, who absolutely nails the character. As a plus, there's tons of Batman trivia in the game in the form of discoverable character biographies, which are remarkably comprehensive, especially for Batman novices such as myself. I learned from Arkham Asylum that the Batman universe has a truly ridiculous number of villains (side note: who the fuck is Calendar Man?).

I basically can't imagine anybody not enjoying Batman: Arkham Asylum, even people who aren't particularly fond of Batman or fond of video games. It's likely going to be remembered as one of the signature games of the 360/PS3 era, and it's already a massive hit. If you have the opportunity to play this game, take it.

Some bonus entertainment by way of closing: the Zero Punctuation review of Arkham Asylum, which I think summarizes the game nicely and with trademark wit. Enjoy:

Probably not the future of psychotherapy...

British shrinks want to treat addiction to World of Warcraft. OK, fine. I've never played WoW or any other online RPG, but I understand that people get sucked into it pretty hard and cognitive-behavior therapy can be helpful for changing compulsive behaviors. Where they lose me is the part where they want to do it inside the game itself. Also, they want free accounts to do it with.

Look, I'm certainly not an addiction specialist, but I know that when you're treating someone, you probably don't want to use a method that requires them to be in continued or increased contact with the thing they're addicted to. And you definitely don't want to use a method that requires you to model the addictive behavior itself while performing the treatment. Assuming that Blizzard is willing to front free accounts to a group of people who are comparing their cash cow to crack cocaine (or the cheap bastards pony up for their own accounts), this "therapy" is the equivalent of choosing to treat alcoholics in a bar, while you yourself are knocking back shot after shot of Jim Beam.