Revisiting the Classics

This month The Escapist has an excellent article, “Excellence Never Goes out of Date” by Rob Zacny, in which he argues that the medium of videogames is suffering because of its inability to access and appreciate its past. I really recommend you read the article, as its interesting and well-informed, and throws out what I think is a very good idea to get gamers to buy back into the classics. Indulge me while I block quote the last paragraph or so:

There are many reasons to doubt that more than a handful of diehard fans would pay to play a 13-year-old game in its original state. To share classic games with people who have never seen or played them before, the games would benefit from a little more graphical polish and, more importantly, supplementary content aimed at the passionate gamer.

Most serious gamers would probably appreciate a “collector’s edition” approaches to re-releases and remakes. Limited edition releases of Blizzard titles include books of design notes and concept art. And with The Orange Box Valve has proved that in-game commentary tracks are not only possible, but also enjoyable and informative. The importance of these extras is not that most people use them, but that they give the few who become creators, critics and enthusiasts the opportunity to explore the medium on a deeper level. We’re the ones who will shape gaming’s future - it’s only fair that we’re granted access to the lessons and achievements of its past.

Good call, Zacny! This is important because, as Steve Gaynor said in his interview with Michael Abbott at The Brainy Gamer (which Zacny has also beat me to the punch in quoting), “It does the medium injustice if you put all this work and time, instead of attempting to express something unique and personal to yourself through interactivity, you’re expressing the experience of playing another video game that you like, or was profitable.”

The gamers I know are adults with work to do, kids to take care of, social engagements to keep. They are also very intelligent gamers, steeped in the canon, always on the lookout for games that are original, intelligent, or forward-thinking. We just don’t have time to play another game that only apes other games. Maybe this is why the gamers I know who treat games as a medium worthy of critical thought tend to gravitate to more original visions, like Okami, Shadow of the Colossus, or No More Heroes, all games that draw more inspiration from art, mythology, literature, and pop culture than from recent videogames. In this way I think these games closely resemble classic games. Think of Miyamoto claiming that The Legend of Zelda was inspired by the expansive feeling of wonder he got from exploring the fields, woods and caves near the city of Kyoto when he was a boy, or the detailed sci-fi world imagined by the creators of Spacewar!. Zacny’s got more good points in his article than I do on this blog post, so go and give him a read.

The Birth of SNL

To honor George Carlin, NBC just rebroadcast the very first episode of Saturday Night Live, which, with the exception of musical guest Billy Preston’s timeless “Nothing from Nothing,” has not aged very well. Carlin, reigned in by the newly loosened but relatively tight (for today at least) television censorship, flails around in painful one-offs that still manage to elicit giggles and claps. Have people’s tastes in humor changed this much over the last thirty years? I listened to Carlin’s infamous “seven words” stand-up a few days ago and it was hilarious, but his several monologues on SNL were cringe-inducing, as were most of the sketches. Andy Kaufman was cringe-inducing in a good way, using a slot on the fledgling SNL to practice some weird and experimental comedy.

But even though the show sucked, it was still exciting to watch, probably because it allows you to witness the birth of an American comedic institution. Sure Chevy Chase, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd bumble their way through too-little-rehearsed sketches, sure the weekend update needs work, sure there’s a mystifying segment with the Muppets and many of the jokes don’t make a lot of sense, but it’s SNL for God’s sakes. It went on to change the face of popular comedy, and that kept me watching.

Also, sorry for the lack of updates. Summer means work and studying for grad school tests, so I’m pretty busy. Want to remember Carlin at his best? Stay away from SNL and watch this instead.

Flame wars and hypocrisy: More on Resident Evil 5

I know I’m pretty late in coming to this conversation, but I was just reading more about N’Gai Croal’s comments on the Resident Evil 5 trailer, and some responses to it, and I feel like I have to put my oar in. MTV Multiplayer has a great interview with Croal on race in games that focuses particularly on the RE5 trailer. I think he concisely sums up my objections with the trailer when he says “This imagery has a history. It has a history and you can’t pretend otherwise.” Obviously—anyone who’s read some critical race theory or any intelligent writing on portrayals of race in popular culture can attest to this. Croal should be commended on calling a videogame developer on its careless and damaging BS.

And then there are some responses to the commentary like Timothy W. Young’s article “The Color of a Game; A Commentary on Resident Evil [sic]” for My Wii News. I feel compelled to respond. I want to preface this by saying that I’m a big Resident Evil fan too, and have been since the inception of the series. I loved RE4 and I think it’s great that Capcom is keeping a similar gameplay vibe in RE5. I’ll even say that I’m looking forward to playing Resident Evil 5, but that doesn’t mean that they’ve used racially-charged imagery responsibly. I want to look at these three quotes from Young’s article in order because I think that they represent three (problematic) arguments I read repeated in the endless comments and talkbacks on these posts.

So let’s start off with this quote from Young’s article:

“Capcom (a Japanese company) isn’t making a game for white Americans to play so that they can expel the fears that they have towards “the black man” by mowing down mindless legions of them. I say mindless, but if they are anything like the Spaniards in RE4, they will be anything but mindless. Just thinking about it makes me conjure up feelings of how I longed for rows of dumb zombies in previous games of the series. Sorry, for the digression. I’ll get back to my point now - you can’t honestly believe that Capcom’s goal was to produce racist propaganda.”

I agree: no, you can’t. Many gamers who respond negatively to the criticism of RE5’s trailer seem to think that the critics are implying that Capcom is a racist company who has deliberately created a racist product for some nefarious agenda. I’m sure Capcom’s intentions were golden but these gamers don’t seem to consider the idea that intentionally or unintentionally, Capcom is propagating racist imagery—here I’ll point you back to the MTV Multiplayer interview with N’Gai Croal, who talks about how the Africans in the trailer are “othered.” Intentions aren’t the issue. Young presents a slightly more reasonable argument when he backs off the “You idiots are saying that Capcom is deliberately racist” line in the next paragraph:

“Ok, then it was Capcom who, instead of being out-right racist, was instead insensitive. How dare Capcom show African villagers in an African village. Hell, take the image of Chris Redfield walking through the village, replace him with *insert famous white celebrity here* and you have a common occurrence on television.”

As Croal points out in his interview, it’s not an issue of putting a white man in an African village. It’s not really even an issue of having a white man killing black people. It’s an issue of how these Africans are presented: wild-eyed, violent, lurking in the shadows. As for his argument that we often see white male celebrities in a similar setting, he’s half right. Yes, we’ve seen Brad Pitt strolling through an African village, but we haven’t seen Brad Pitt haunted by othered black specters, giving and receiving violence to black stereotypes.

Another choice quote from the Young article:

“The moment we, as gamers, start attacking games, is when Jack Thompson and the other pinheads start winning. Just pick up the controller and play the game.”

Yeah everybody, “just pick up the controller and play the game.” Don’t think, don’t question, don’t try to be reasonable or foster intelligent discourse, just “play the game.” This binary thinking—you’re either a gamer who’s with us, or you’re an anti-gamer with Jack Thompson—is damaging: it doesn’t allow for multiple perspectives, it squashes critical thought and insults and chides the voices of those who attempt to present a thoughtful perspective. Here’s a similar quote:

“Of course, now I must ask myself the question as to whether or not I am a racist because I enjoyed the trailer. I also enjoyed Black Hawk Down and Schindler’s List. Maybe I am a racist after all. Or maybe, just maybe, I can take a form of media entertainment for exactly what it is: entertainment.”

This is an obvious variation on the “it’s just a game” argument, and this is harmful. For starters, Young’s assertion that entertainment can’t be racist because it’s just entertainment doesn’t make much sense. “Hey, it’s just a movie,” you could imagine some early-twentieth-century equivalent of Young saying in defense of The Birth of a Nation. Entertainment has power precisely because it’s entertainment—we’re told not to question it, that it’s an escape, that reading too much into it is overanalyzing. Well wake up and smell the racism: if the RE5 trailer is (I assume unintentionally) echoing Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a work of fiction that epitomized an era of imagery that degraded and dehumanized Africans, should we ignore it because it’s mere entertainment?

Which brings me to my second problem with the “it’s just a game” argument. What I find interesting about the “it’s just a game” argument is that it’s used by the same people who want videogames to be considered an art form like cinema or music, but when somebody tries to complicate their understanding of the issues surrounding the medium they immediately try to downplay the negative effects by claiming that “it’s just a game.” They want it both ways. Hell, I’m guilty of this too; here I am writing this borderline-rant about an insensitive videogame trailer and the discourse surrounding it, yet any time my girlfriend questions my love for violent games like GTA or Half-Life 2, I respond with “Hey, lighten up, it’s just a game. I’m just blowing off steam.” The it’s just a game argument is one of the issues that’s derailing intelligent videogame criticism. How can people treat videogames like intelligent art worthy of analysis if videogamers only do some of the time?

So what do you all think? The Resident Evil 5 trailer has really stirred up some interesting stuff in the discourse around videogames and videogame criticism. Agree? Disagree? Check out N’Gai Croal’s interview and Young’s article, then tell me what you think.

I wanna hold your hand: Dino Run

Pixeljam’s Dino Run, in all its pixelated, low-rent glory, offers something I’m finding less and less in big mainstream titles: compelling gameplay. It’s simple: you control a dinosaur running for his (her?) life from a life-obliterating wall of death caused by a meteor impact. You collect eggs to try to save your species, eat smaller dinos, upgrade your stats, but mostly you just run. The wall of death is so terrifying—when you lag behind the music is replaced by a bass rumble, everything goes dark, the earth shakes, and trees and rocks rain down from the oncoming shockwave—that it’s all the motivation a player needs to run.

This also gives an interesting twist to the usual relationships found with NPCs in a sidescrolling game. Instead of being enemies who try to impede the player’s progress, they’re other dinosaurs and creatures running for their lives—you’re all on the same sinking boat. As I played through Dino Run, I actually felt a little sorry for the other animals. The animation helps here: the stegosaurus running as fast as it can on its tiny legs, the triceratops bucking its head in fear, and the snake crawling fast for its hole in the ground all add to the atmosphere of panic. When a flaming chunk of rock fell out of the sky and sent a stegosaurus tumbling down the mountain to its death, I actually felt kind of sad; he was my comrade in a race for safety.

Of course, the game also rewards you for eating smaller creatures, so my empathy was tempered with a survivalist drive to come out on top, and the larger dinosaurs can get in your way and crush the precious eggs under their feet, but the refiguring of sidescrolling NPCs from standard bad guys to be jumped on, evaded or mowed down to other panicked survivors running for the hills gives Dino Run an interesting charisma.

Please visit the Round Table’s Main Hall for links to all entries.

A new Resident Evil 5 trailer, a new controversy

http://www.residentevil.com/5/main.php

Post-colonial theorists go nuts! Capcom has dug themselves into an even deeper hole with the new Resident Evil 5 trailer. Now we have the white-cop-killing-African-villagers imagery along with some good old-fashioned verbal devaluing of a people and their culture. Allow me to quote Chris Redfield, who solemnly builds a bridge back to nineteenth century race relations:

I knew it from the moment I arrived. There’s no reason here, no humanity. Everywhere I look I find vacant stares. All I see is death.

Hey, that sounds familiar. Ever read Heart of Darkness? Well unless Capcom is remaking Heart of Darkness with zombies (which would be awesome!), I can’t help but take this as pretty offensive. That said, the trailer isn’t the game—sure the trailer might be in poor taste, but maybe the actual game will treat the subject with a little more intelligence. We’ll at least have more of a context to understand Chris Redfield’s comments. What do others think?

Final Fantasy Bar Revisited

Remember that post where I mentioned the possibility of a Final Fantasy bar? Seems I’m not the only one who thought about this—those crazy Danes beat me to it! Check out the website for Scrollbar’s “Final Fantasy Night,” an evening of costumes, themed drinks and decorations.

Miniature World

I have a love for trashy tourist destinations. I’ve enjoyed Wall Drug, I’ve enjoyed House on the Rock, I looked on in horror at the hundreds of dingy water parks and dinosaur playgrounds that lined the highways surrounding Mount Rushmore, but I never thought I would find such an awesome display of tourist luring so close to home.

I had a few friends up for the weekend and we wanted to play a round of minigolf. I had no idea where I could find any minigolf in Bellingham, so we hit the internet and found Miniature World, a “family fun center” in Birch Bay, about twenty minutes north of Bellingham. We were pretty excited, but when we found out that not only could we enjoy minigolf and go-karts, but we could partake in the train ride through the “Forest of Imagination,” we had to go.

The minigolf was excellent, and the go-karts made me feel like an overexcited ten year-old, but the train ride was something else. We sat down in rickety hand-built train cars and moved slowly through the park—around the go-kart track, through the middle of the minigolf course, and into the forest. The “Forest of Imagination” basically consisted of plush toys and lawn ornaments arranged in an aesthetic manner. Exposed to years of sun and rain, they had faded and become dingy; the effect was very disturbing. Look kids, there’s Bugs Bunny, bleached by the sun, with his lower half covered in mold! There’s a teddy bear in a door with a nail through its hand! The little boy on the train car in front of us got more and more nervous as the ride went on, and really lost it when the train passed through a tunnel and wheeled past a four foot tall Yoda doll with half of its rubber face hanging off like an exit wound.

What is it about these roadside amusement parks that entertains me so much? I think they’re part of that old American road culture you don’t see so much anymore—they’re dirty, they’re fun, they’re local flavor. Little roadside amusement parks are the intersection of screwing tourists for all their worth and making children happy. Miniature World’s train ride may be the product of a horrible misunderstanding of what makes children happy, but it’s an entertaining one. Like House on the Rock, Miniature World’s “Forest of Imagination” is the product of one man’s imagination. Don Giffen built the train, laid the tracks, set up the scenes in the forest, and does all the repairs himself. Don Giffen is Miniature World, and he is also that fascinating kind of entrepreneur—the kind who buys up a plot of land and says “I’m going to build something entertaining and totally fucked up here.” If you’re near Bellingham and you want to explore an interesting little piece of local culture, or you have a child you want to disturb, swing by Miniature World. Here’s one last picture of the train ride: Richard Nixon riding in a car with some kind of giant white monster.

Indiana Jones Impressions

I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull at midnight last night. After the mixed reviews I was apprehensive—would it retain the feeling of the originals or would it be a blockbuster cash-in? I reflected that even if it were another of George Lucas’ pathetic grabs for money, I owe so much entertainment over the years to Indiana Jones that I’d gladly hand over my cash.

Thankfully it wasn’t that bad; in fact, it was about 2/3 good. What I loved about the first two films was the allegiance to old adventure serials and pulp novels. Watch Raiders or Temple of Doom again—there’s very little character development or even dialogue, just action set-piece after exotic locale after exhilarating gunfight. You can practically point to where the screen would freeze and the voiceover would ask “What will happen to Indy? Tune in next week to find out!” Last Crusade changed the formula, with more of an emphasis on comedic character interaction (the rather enjoyable Ford/Connery clowning), and Kingdom continues this tradition, with lots of funny business between Indy, Marion, and Shia LaBeouf (I can hardly bring myself to type Mutt, his character’s name). Some of it is actually funny and some of it falls flat.

There’s also an over-reliance on CG. Spielberg should have watched Live Free or Die Hard to see how an action franchise starring an aging male lead can still kick ass with a minimum of computer trickery (awful freeway chase scene excluded, of course). There are some truly embarrassing moments—Shia swinging on vines with CG monkeys, poorly-rendered groundhogs that show up pointlessly at least three times, and a climax that quickly becomes a boring blur of CG destruction.

Bad stuff out of the way, there’s a lot to like. Ford’s acting is sometimes uneven (he just didn’t feel like Indy in certain parts of the movie), but he looks pretty good for an old guy, and he does a fair number of his own stunts, including a rad fist-fight with an evil Soviet guy in an ocean of flesh-eating ants! The action scenes are good—better in the first half when they use less CG—and Shia isn’t as annoying as you’d think; in fact, he’s pretty entertaining. Also, Indy escapes a nuclear blast in a physically-impossible but incredibly bad-ass way. There’s enough good stuff going on in Kingdom to warrant a viewing or two, even if it’s not as good as the original trilogy and it loses steam about 2/3 of the way through.

Random observations: There’s a moment shot in soft-focus where Indy stares wistfully at a picture of Sean Connery for an inappropriate amount of time that had the whole theater laughing. Also, Neil Flynn, the guy who plays the janitor on Scrubs, shows up as an up-tight, toe-the-line, McCarthy-supporting FBI agent, but it’s hard to take him seriously. Also, at the end of the movie one character’s eyes burst into flames. Awesome!

Cate Blanchett, right, in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Graphical abstraction and the Wii

Graphical abstraction is a bit of a hobby horse for me. Mark J.P. Wolf wrote that since graphics have become so complex and videogames strive so hard for realism, a return to graphical abstraction is an untapped resource. Lots of rhythm-based videogames use abstraction—notice the scrolling, never ending fretboard in Guitar Hero, or the trippy backgrounds in DDR?—and I’ve noticed quite a few Wii titles using abstract graphics.

I think it’s a hardware restriction thing. When developers can’t push the system hardware to produce near photorealistic visuals, they have to find another way to make their game visually appealing. I’m playing through Okami, which was of course, a PS2 game before its release for the Wii. After watching it for a few minutes, my roommate’s girlfriend remarked, “I guess I don’t like watching this game because it isn’t pretty.” “What the hell are you talking about?” everybody in the room replied. “This game is gorgeous.” She shrugged. “I guess, but it’s just not realistic.” Anybody who’s seen this early tech demo of Okami knows that it was a good thing the limitations of the PS2 hardware required a less realistic look. The hand-drawn look suits it.

No More Heroes uses a similar cel-shading technique to look like an adult cartoon, and I’m interested in what I’ve seen from Madworld, which looks like it uses cel-shading to flagrantly rip off Sin City. I watched the trailer, which basically pointed out “Look! You can kill people with different things!” I need more to a game than just graphic violence. That said, even if the game turns out to totally suck, I’ll probably rent it anyway to check out the unique visual style.

Obstructions can be a good thing. The Oulipo writers in France used them, Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth used them in The Five Obstructions, and now Wii developers use them to create visually fascinating games. Sure photorealism is impressive, but there’s more than one way to make a graphically impressive game.

Videogames in weird places

This weekend I went barhopping with some friends in Seattle. Three of the four of us were pretty serious videogame nerds and, serendipitously, our choice of bars seemed to align with our shared hobby. The first bar we visited was the Moon Temple on 45^th. Apparently this is a legendary dive bar, once voted best bar to go to if you lost your job or your significant other. The atmosphere is appropriately dark, dank and depressing, but we were more interested in the name. “Wasn’t there a Moon Temple in Final Fantasy IV?” I asked. My friend Josh laughed. “I was thinking the exact same thing.” I don’t recall if it was a Moon Temple, or possibly a Moon Palace, but we broached the subject of the viability of a Final Fantasy themed bar, complete with appropriate drink names and decor. How awesome would it have been if we had walked into the Moon Temple, sauntered up to the bartender and asked “Can I get a Zeromus?” Untapped market? I think so.

 

After a surprisingly tasty combo platter at the Moon Temple, we hit a sketchy but endearing sports bar named Goldie’s. We bought a pitcher of porter (twelve dollars! I’m used to having a good night in Bellingham for less than ten bucks) and hunkered down in the corner by the big screen TVs showing televised rodeo and lacrosse, still buzzing about our proposed Final Fantasy bar. We think we might name it The Four Crystals. As we left Goldie’s, slightly tipsy, what did I spy but one of those little tabletop arcade cabinets. Ms. Pac-Man! I’ve been writing about Pac-Man recently and thinking about it. GameWorks in Seattle has a Pac-Man machine in their retro arcade, but how many other Pac-Man or Ms. Pac-Man games do you think are left in the city. Those things must be older than I am. I forced my friends to wait for me while I dug a quarter out of my pocket and played Ms. Pac-Man.

 

I know this is a bit of a rambling blog post, and not really focused or up to the typical standards of intelligent discourse about gaming, but I just wanted to share that sometimes videogames and videogame culture can appear in odd places. Why does a sports bar, full of skeezy guys and drunk women playing pool have a Ms. Pac-Man cabinet? What was it doing there? I remember visiting my orthodontist’s office as a kid and playing his tabletop arcade games—Donkey Kong, RBI Baseball, and Dig Dug. The office smelled like fluoride and rubber gloves—it was a weird place to play a videogame, almost as weird as Goldie’s, but there they were. Arcade games in weird places. Where have you found videogames or gaming culture where you least expected it?