“Dear lost companions of my tuneful art”: Gamer Culture and A Life on Video (Part II-At Home and Abroad)

WYSIWYG

One of the ways Nintendo was able to rebuild the viability of home video games after Atari imploded and took the whole industry with it in 1983 was to reconceptualize video games as children's toys. It may seem strange to look back from our vantage point and observe how bizarre and radical a shift this was, but it was a very deliberate and tangible change in direction with repercussions. Nintendo had been expressly warned that launching a new game console in the wake of Atari guaranteed them failure as Atari's collapse had tainted the entire industry. Therefore, Nintendo consciously marketed the NES in the US as a hot new toy for kids in an attempt to avoid comparisons with the failed Atari 2600 and other personal computers that were starting to dominate the consumer electronics market. Afterward, and once it was a reasonable assumption that the majority of youngsters had access to an NES, it became very easy to take this fact and build a huge merchandising empire out of it. There was Nintendo breakfast cereal, Nintendo bedsheets, Nintendo clothes, Nintendo action figures, Nintendo stuffed animals, Nintendo sports equipment (*yes*) and even Nintendo Saturday Morning Cartoon shows (they were all crap, in case you're wondering, but this really isn't the place to talk about Saturday Morning Cartoon shows in any detail). But that's far from all that was going on with NOA and the NES: the clever idea they had was this. Once all the parents bought their kids Nintendo consoles and games for the Holidays, they'd be able to subtly start showing off the machine's true potential and capabilities. It worked, and worked amazingly well.

The conflation of games with toys that really started with the NES may be where some of the stigma gamers claim to experience originated from, as it could be said they never “outgrew” their “toys”, but it's telling no similar strategy was used in Japan, where the thing was simply dubbed the Family Computer and even had a floppy disk drive and a planned rudimentary Internet-like system. It's also crucial to note that Shigeru Miyamoto's early arcade games, Donkey Kong and Mario Bros. were expressly not designed to be solely kids' fare, meant to to be played as they were in bars. But of course we know better: NOA's little scheme to sneak the NES into households under the radar was absolute genius, and it was a common occurrence in many homes for parents to put their kids to bed after an evening of watching them play Mario and then, after the kids were asleep, to creep back downstairs and spend the rest of the night playing Nintendo themselves. Many grandparents were enthralled by the new games too and would discuss them just as earnestly and fervently with each other as their grandchildren did.

This was of course Nintendo's goal from the start: To make games anyone could enjoy, appreciate and share. This is an intellectual tradition of theirs that dates back to Donkey Kong, the Game and Watch series and their skeet shooting ranges. I surely need not remind my readers their first console was called the Family Computer. This is why I'm so continually baffled by people who bemoan the Wii and it's abandoning of the “hardcore” to court the “casual, social crowd”. As if Nintendo had ever catered exclusively to the “hardcore gamers” (a term of self-definition I personally find incredibly intellectually and historiographically lacking). Nintendo's games have always been for anyone who possessed a child's unconditional love of life, no matter what the biological or calendar age. No-one is entitled to a monopoly on them.

In any case, given the Nintendo saturation that was prevalent in the late '80s and early '90s, and even after Nintendo of America made a concerted effort to make video games synonymous with kids' stuff, which the medium absolutely had never been before 1985 or so, I can say from my experience at least that neither myself nor anyone I knew was ever persecuted or bullied for liking video games. It was just something kids did: You talked about Nintendo on the playground, went home, ran around outside for a bit, played some video games and watched TV. If it was the summer, you'd split your time between traipsing around forests building forts and playing kick-the-can and eating lunch with the Nintendo. To be perfectly honest and fair I was homeschooled for a lot of my childhood so the interaction with friends and the use of the playground as a social centre was a bit limited for me personally a lot of the time, though I did witness it and have comparable experiences with the friends I did make and members of my own family. In a previous post I've already recounted my memory of playing Super Mario Bros. at my cousins' house: Playing video games together with them was a regular occurrence, either at our place or theirs and was usually done after coming in from having adventures outdoors for the day and before dinner (and after at times as well) and those evenings spent playing local multiplayer on the NES or passing a Game Boy back-and-forth with my cousins are some of my most treasured.

As I got older and travelled elsewhere, home video game consoles continued to be a source of social bonding for me. For a time in my teenage years I attended a school where Olympic-bound athletes would take their lessons during their training period. The campus during that time was a weird confluence of extremely determined professional athletes, serious academic-minded scholars, artists and conservationists. It was an utterly unique and valuable experience and I even got to train with the local snowboard team for a bit while I was there. Video games were a big part of my social life there too, as me and the rest of the trainees would often hang out in the lounge after school taking turns on the communal NES and various SEGA consoles (there really were quite a lot of those, weren't there? And all out at the same time too). One of the at once coolest and strangest things I remember happening was hanging around the lounge alone after hours one evening playing Super Mario Bros. and having my science teacher, a charming young lady fresh out of college who split her time between teaching at the school and working as a tour guide and ecologist on the summit of the tallest mountain in the state, walk in and, seeing what I was playing, excitedly sit down next to me and jump into the game with me. She even taught me some of her signature tricks to navigate the underground levels-it was awesome.

Every new place I go games have traditionally been a kind of glue that held my various social connections together. From joining my whole dorm in an impromptu Halo: Combat Evolved tournament on the lounge XBOX, throwing LAN parties with my suite-mates over a local network we Gerry-rigged together for us and us alone to late-night Super Smash Bros. jam sessions with the guys from the common house, video games have continued to frequently go along with some of the best memories I've shared with my friends and family. And, just as always, everybody played: Girls, boys, athletes, alpine tundra ecologists, creative writing students, artists, frat guys, humanities scholars and astronomers. There was never anything strange or unusual about that: Video games were a universally shared cultural experience, just like any other kind of media, hobby or activity. I'd never thought of them otherwise.

Because of this, I've been presented with quite a few large and confounding philosophical problems these last few years. Things like “When did video games ever fall out of the 'mainstream'?”, “Where did the self professed gamers come from, why are they apparently so horribly persecuted?” “Why does playing video games constitute a subcultural lifestyle any more than watching movies, reading books or listening to music does?” and perhaps most annoyingly “Where are all these big mean jocks who are supposed to bully me for playing video games? I mean, I went to a jock school forchrissakes: If anything qualifies for that label it's a school for Olympic athletes in training. The only jocks I knew were the ones playing Nintendo with me in the lounge. Does that make me a big mean jock too? Do gamers just watch too many John Hughes movies?”.

In spite of the attitude my above glibness might imply, I'm not intending any of this to belittle anyone's personal experiences with video games as a medium or in anyway claim their positionality is imagined or fallacious or that mine is more valid. What I am saying is that my positionality is radically different from theirs, to the point of complete incongruity, and I don't understand why. There certainly does seem to have been a shift in the way video games were generally perceived and a clear-cut turn to a presumption that the medium has always been underground and fighting for legitimacy, I'm just not sure when and why that happened or where it came from. I certainly remember some half-baked moral panics in the mid-1990s to early 2000s over games like Mortal Kombat, Grand Theft Auto III and some of id Software's early games and that some especially obnoxious politicians were complaining games were corrupting the youth, but I honestly remember that never being something anybody really took too seriously (the Columbine school shooting aside, of course, but even that seemed to resolve itself rather quickly) and the sort of thing that happened to all young media, like rock music and witchcraft. There is of course the omnipresent existential nightmare of how video games handle narrative and how they compare to other forms of media in terms of artistic expression and value (goodness knows I've written enough on that already and I'm far from through yet), but that's a problem of self-reflection the industry brought on itself, not had imposed on it from the outside.

I'm also not saying bullying and bigotry isn't a problem for far too many people: In fact, the older I get the more convinced I am it's the defining aspect of Western society. I was picked on as a kid too, though not nearly to the same extent as others and nowhere near as much as I would have had I not been an extremely private person, and only so far as the fact my elementary school was full of egomaniacal bastards who were horrible to everybody. In other words, of all the things I was made fun of for growing up, playing video games was not one of them. And while I never experienced any video game-driven harassment as a kid, or at any other age for that matter, this does segue nicely into my final point which is, if video games had never been a harsh, exclusive, unwelcoming environment in the past, they bloody well are NOW and most of the vitriol is coming from within the so-called “gamer” community and is being perpetuated by the industry itself.

While I of course am going to avoid generalizations and stereotypes and know full well not all self-professed gamers are angry, bigoted people there's no way to put a fine point on this: The games industry as it stands today is a damn scary place as far as I'm concerned and honestly makes me ashamed to be involved with it at times. The treatment of women is particularly unforgivable: Just this past year we've had competitors at a Capcom-sponsored Street Fighter tournament sexually harass a female player to the point she was forced to drop out, a sizable army of cyberbullies send incalculable amounts of appalling hate speech and threats of violence to a female producer attempting a startup campaign for a Web TV show about Male Gaze in video games and not one but TWO high profile games journalists getting fired for verbally abusing female personalities over the Internet in clearly sexualized ways. I'd go into these cases more and scores others to boot, but I'll instead link to this article which summarises them all nicely.

It's not just from the gamers: Our industry thrives on sexualized violence, and why not if that's what its consumers want? I briefly mentioned the male domination subtext in the blockbuster hit Batman: Arkham City in the past and the questionable gender politics inherent in franchises like Call of Duty and Gears of War should hopefully require no elucidation. This year we even got a lovely trailer for the new Hitman game, Absolution, which took great pains to show protagonist Agent 42 brutally slaughtering a group of supermodel female assassins dressed in fetish nun gear. However, for my money there's no better example than the games proudly showed off to legions of jubilant games journalists at E3 2012. The Far Cry 3 demo began with a minigame where the player gets to grope a submissive female NPC's blocky breasts and proceeds into a horrific bloodbath of explicit and brutal violence. Assassin’s Creed 3, the latest entry in a franchise already about creative ways to murder people, clearly revels in the new elegant ways to dispatch the many representations of living things contained within. New entries in the Splinter Cell and Tomb Raider series were no different, the latter even being an exciting reboot where pioneering video game leading lady Lara Croft gets a new violent and depraved backstory and gets threatened with rape at numerous points in the game to make her feel more “vulnerable” and “realistic” so players would want to “protect” her. Hell, even Watch Dogs, arguably the most interesting reveal at the show, has one or two fairly disturbing moments.

I'm not one to defend censorship or claim violence has no place in fiction, but there's a difference in the way the violence was treated here. If you must use overly violent content in your work, it ought to have a purpose, usually to show off how serious and disturbing the setting has become. None of these games do any of that, and it seems more and more like gamers don't care. This violence is sexualized and celebrated in a way that alarms me (especially given this industry's obvious problems with women in general), and both the producers and critics seem on the whole fine with this. This editorial from GamesRadar adequately relates the sickening feeling and impending sense of dread I got sitting through this year's E3 and the problem is so pervasive and evident that both Warren Spector and Shigeru Miyamoto have publicly come out to condemn it. What this year has ultimately shown me is how out-of-touch the games industry has drifted from reality and I from it. Simply put, this medium is unrecognizable to me and both the latest crop of games and the sentiment I'm getting from the “gamer culture” these past few years is most assuredly not why I fell in love with video games. Should the industry continue down this path, I'll eventually, and sooner rather than later, run out of positive things to say about it or really anything to say about it at all.

It seems to me, to quickly and unfairly psychoanalyse a ludicrously large swatch of people, that these most vocal aspects of “gamer culture” seem terrified their Old Boys Club might actually be split open to allow other people entry, even (gasp) women. This is positively ludicrous. As I've spent the last obscenely long tract arguing, video games are, and always have been, for everybody. They are, at least from my experience, a unique and intimate way to connect people separated by distance, worldview or even (and especially) in the same room. If “gamers” continue to complain about being unfairly marginalized and this is the best they can come up with to argue their case, well then frankly they ought to be ignored. Any creative outlet or culture this insular and hateful has no right to any kind of voice at a public forum or really even to exist. I still may not know who these gamers are and where they came from, but to be perfectly honest if this is how they represent themselves I don't want to know, nor do I want anything to do with them and I'll be damned if I let them selfishly hoard our shared cultural traditions and experiences. What I'd rather learn is what happened tho the kind of communal spirit and attitude towards video games I remember from my childhood and I know for a fact existed thanks to historical record. More to the point, I'd like to know if there's any way to ever get it back or if it too is forever doomed to be an artefact of history alongside my NES, the Pong cabinet at my local pizza parlour or the video arcades that used to be on every kid's street corners.

“Wow! You really are Mr. Hero!”: World-Building and Role-Playing in The Elder Scrolls

 Note: Being a writer I'm eternally critical of my older work. However, this piece I feel especially hostile towards as there's quite possibly no single work of fiction I feel I've misread quite as catastrophically badly and unjustly as The Elder Scrolls series, in particular the two games I highlight in this post, Morrowind and Skyrim. Suffice to say my opinions on both games have changed dramatically since I originally wrote this and if ever there was a time I wish I could completely retract something I wrote this would be it. If you haven't already read this post, I'd first humbly ask you *not* to, but if you must I suggest you skip the entire section where I discuss them. There still may be one or two vaguely valid points I bring up in regards to gender roles and the story of Mjoll the Lioness, but mostly I talk absolute bollocks and get everything about the series' core philosophical tenets laughably, provably and factually wrong. As of this writing I'm in the middle of planning a major update that I hope will give The Elder Scrolls a much, *much* fairer and more appropriate evaluation. The bits about Tolkien and RPGs I stand by though.

 I'm leaving this post up as a historical record of my own stupidity, but please keep in mind I no longer feel comfortable defending it at great length.

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I'm going to make a confession. After I do so, you are free to revoke my Nerd Card (I haven't taken great care of it; haven't used it in years and the photo's out-of-date), though I do ask you at least bear with me for the remainder of this essay. That settled? Alright then.

I do not like J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

Now, when I say this I mean I am not especially enthralled by its merits as a novel-Tolkien *did* accomplish something truly incredible and I have a huge amount of respect for that. The Lord of the Rings does something very, very well, it's just that its strength is not in its ability to tell a story. What Tolkien did is craft an entire world from scratch, populating it with its own unique cultures, languages (complete with alphabets and primary sources) and thousands of years of intricate historical record. Granted, many of the rote building blocks of Middle-Earth were cobbled together from various Norse and other Northern European mythologies, but Tolkien's savvy move was to arrange them in such a way as to make the whole thing streamlined, cohesive and elegant to follow. As no-one had blended these literary traditions in this way before and enough of Tolkien's own imagination shown through, The Lord of the Rings still felt uniquely singular and remains so today. What The Lord of the Rings reads like, more than anything else, is a three volume set of historical records about a meticulously detailed fantasy world, and it's difficult to argue that isn't a remarkable achievement.

However, the other side of this is that it's a rare person who actually relishes the thought of settling down in front of a fireplace and eagerly digging into a history textbook. I will freely admit to not being that sort of person. History textbooks are notoriously dry, prosaic and full of questionable appeals to authority and objectivity-In other words, pretty much how The Lord of the Rings reads to a non-fan, or at least to me. More relevantly though, history textbooks do not tell stories: They're focused on crafting a linear, deterministic model of history and not the story arc of one or a handful of protagonists. The Lord of the Rings chronicles the stories of many different characters (Frodo's quest to return the Ring, thus fulfilling his destiny and embodying the spirit of hope and perseverance, Aragorn's quest to assume the Throne of Gondor and rally the Alliance of Men, Arwen grappling with the repercussions of her immortality) but no one character can be claimed to be the central focus of the whole saga. This has both positive and negative ramifications: On the negative end it's potentially laborious for a reader to get invested in a text more geared toward relating the historical record of a fictional world instead of chronicling the evolution of one particular character. On the positive, by contrast, it makes the world of Middle-Earth feel for more nuanced and alive than many other fictional settings owing to the staggering amount of lush detail that went into creating and documenting it.

If The Lord of the Rings falls down as a novel though, there's one genre it fits very comfortable as a trailblazing member of and its impact makes it arguably exceedingly ahead of its time: The tabletop Role-Playing Game, or RPG. In his overview of the FASA Doctor Who RPG from the mid-1980s, the meritorious Phil Sandifer compares that game to one based on The Lord of the Rings, making the claim that the latter property is “in many ways a world in search of a story. (Or, actually, a language in search of a world in search of a story. Which is even better, really.)”. This is, to me, a perfect reading of the series and a great summation of why it makes a great RPG and something like Doctor Who doesn't: Like Sandifer argues, as the framework of Doctor Who relies to an extent upon The Doctor being the central figure and, in one way or another, upsetting the establishment into which he's cast, it's difficult to map out a cohesive, three-dimensional world for the franchise to be set in. In other words, and the way I tend to read it, Doctor Who is about inserting The Doctor into other people's stories so he can give them a little kickstart. Since he is simultaneously the one irreducible part of the series and an ability to transgress narrative boundaries is tacitly written into his character, it's essentially impossible to build a universe around this.

The Lord of the Rings is different, however: Where Doctor Who is a framework for reshaping existing stories, Middle-Earth is first and foremost a world; a setting. It's a place where stories happen, not an agent for creating stories or a story in and of itself. This is what makes it such great fodder for RPGs, because an RPG depends fundamentally on taking a pre-built setting and finding new ways to tell engaging stories with original characters that take place there and are lore-friendly. Because the source material has a big enough scope and the focus was never on characters (no matter how iconic they may be) it makes it very easy to roll up an Elven battlemage in a Lord of the Rings game where it might be tough to convince a Doctor Who fan to play a game where they aren't allowed to play The Doctor or one of his cool companions.

All of this is a roundabout way of getting at my main point, which is to analyse and re-examine the legacy and influence of the RPG as a framework in contemporary fantasy video games. I mean at first glance the footprint is pretty clear: A great many video game fans are also fans of pen-and-paper RPGs and a great deal more game designers got their start crafting intricate and unique fantasy realms through traditional RPG rulebooks. We even have a genre of games called “RPGs”, which immediately imply that these titles are drawing on a very long and very specific intellectual heritage. It should almost go without saying-Video game fantasy owes a tremendous debt to pen-and-paper RPGs: Our medium's very oldest fantasy epics, games like the Ultima series, were overtly based on their creators specific flavour of Dungeons and Dragons. Richard Garriot's Brittania is literally his old D&D map and Ultima was his exercise in realising that world in a new medium. Games like Neverwinter Nights are explicitly designed around translating the rules and game mechanics of D&D to video games. Dungeons and Dragons has been with us from the very beginning and its presence is still heavily felt today, as even recent AAA blockbusters like BioWare's Dragon Age games can trace an easily noticeable lineage back to D&D. Pen-and-paper RPGs are in the very blood of video games.

I personally feel there are other models of narrative structure video games can (and actually should) take advantage of more often that aren't descended from RPGs (anything by Shigeru Miyamoto and his school, for the most obvious example), but that's a treatise for another day. Right now I want to look at the RPG model itself and the very beneficial effect it can, and has, had on game design via my favourite series to invoke it: Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls. Like in Ultima, the world of The Elder Scrolls, Tamriel, is based on the original designers' custom D&D map. Where it differs from its predecessor, however, is that while Ultima followed the story of one hero who, through a series of epic quests and tribulations becomes the Avatar of the Eight Virtues of Brittania tasked with bringing spiritual enlightenment to the people, The Elder Scrolls is expressly the story of Tamriel itself, with each of its as of this writing five main games (Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim) chronicling the events of a specific era in Tamriel's history with an emphasis, more often than not, on a a specific region. The choice to write the games this way is nontrivial: While each installment can (and does) feature a different, specific hero, the focus remains squarely on the world itself and the state it finds itself in at the time any given title begins. This focus on the state of Tamriel itself, coupled with Bethesda's famous penchant for obsessively meticulous attention to detail (each game has hundreds of fully written books on millennia of Tamrielic history that even account for authorial biases and misinformation; every character, player or otherwise, has a specific backstory and several branching character arcs for starters) means the world of The Elder Scrolls comes alive in a way very few other video game settings are able to.

It's at this stage I'm careful to avoid too much dialogue about “immersion”, “escapism” and “suspension of disbelief”, however, because these can be very loaded terms. A strong argument, and one I'm not entirely inclined to contest, can be made that the goal of fictional storytelling should not be these things, but instead on an emphasis that fiction is not reality but merely resembles reality and showing how that can be used to explore specific themes and get readers invested. I'll freely admit this is an effective model for explaining how stories work. That said, here's the real rub: I don't feel either RPGs or video games should be, at least primarily, about telling stories. I've previously argued that the purpose of video games is to serve as an outlet for a designer to share an experience with players, and explicitly so owing to the irreducible factor of player agency. In this sense, and in terms of comparisons with other expressive media, I liken video games most closely not to books, movies and television, but to music and theater (an analogy that warrants further study at a later date). RPGs, by contrast, I am currently arguing are designed to build a detailed, cohesive world in which stories can take place. This is what makes the two genres a natural fit for one another: From RPGs, a game gets the ability to craft an expansive, intricately detailed canvas on which to tell a story and the power to write any kind of story. From other video games, it gets the ability to intimately link authors and readers through shared experience. When put together, a good high fantasy video game can give players the power to explore and craft their own story in tandem with developers, hence making each playthrough of a game such as those in The Elder Scrolls series potentially unique. And this is what Bethesda does really well from my perspective: Effortlessly fusing the two styles to create games that both clearly reflect themes the designers wish to explore whilst at the same time providing players a level of freedom to run around and help shape a shared world that's almost unprecedented.

If we take as read the goal of The Elder Scrolls is not to tell a story, but instead serve as the generative vehicle, framework and setting through which stories can evolve, what consequences might this have for the way the narrative of any given entry plays out? There are, I argue, some peculiarities of this arrangement that ought to be addressed. The most important of these is that in order for The Elder Scrolls to successfully be a video game based around RPG-style world-building, the one kind of story it absolutely cannot entertain is, unfortunately, the kind that the main quest of nearly every single Elder Scrolls title has been thus far: Epic poetry about a chosen hero destined to deliver the world from evil. The protagonist of Arena traverses the world to retrieve the broken pieces of the Staff of Kings and reunite a war-torn Tamriel, the Emperor himself chooses the PC in Daggerfall to soothe the restless spirit of a ghost terrorizing the region's capital and navigate the rapidly deteriorating political situation, and Oblivion's main character becomes the beloved Champion of Cyrodiil by closing the gates to a chaotic Otherworld and preventing all of Tamriel from falling under the rule of the very embodiment of destruction and conquest. This becomes especially egregious in Skyrim (cribbing from testosterone-laden Norse mythology as it does): Not only do players assume the role of the prophesied reincarnation of the “Dovahkiin”, one who is born with the soul of a Dragon who is destined to prevent the Tamrielic equivalent of Ragnarok, but who also conveniently becomes the destined heroic saviour of any in-game faction they choose to join. The game is arguably a modern classic, but the amount of beardy macho bravado its plot exudes actually makes me physically gag a bit sometimes.

This is even more incredulous if you happen to come off of Morrowind, which actually very cleverly deconstructed the Chosen One archetype effectively. Throughout the game, the player character is referred to as the “Nerevarine”, an alleged reincarnation of a literal God who will lead the Dunmer people to salvation. However, as the game progresses, players get conflicting information that casts doubt as to whether or not they truly are the Nerevarine, before it's ultimately revealed that the title is essentially meaningless and is used primarily so external forces can use the player as a political pawn. In an absolutely delicious bit of irony, the character who would be traditionally held up as the most powerful and given the highest accolades and adulation winds up potentially the most marginal and easily exploited. Morrowind leaves readers with the underlying theme, especially evident in its final moments, that destiny, fate and the future are ultimately only what each individual person chooses to make of it. No-one, it would seem, is predestined to be a legendary hero or given a divine right at birth that would set them above everyone else. In other words, the Chosen One archetype is so ancient The Elder Scrolls itself already picked it apart to a satisfying extent almost a decade before Skyrim even came along and it most certainly wasn't the first.

I'm not going to continue going on about how dull and hackneyed this storytelling framework is, dearly loved by hack fantasy writers since the days of Beowulf it might be, because it actually has different ramifications for this kind of video game that are a bit more interesting to talk about. Put simply, an intellectual framework that sets world-building as its primary concern and a story where one character, even if it is the player character, is the centre of the universe is completely incongruous. It runs completely contrary to the very thing that keeps The Lord of the Rings, and by extension RPGs, afloat: Namely, that the worlds of these stories are places where heroes live and heroic deeds are done, not where one character is the most important entity in existence. An argument could be made Lord of the Rings falls into this trap more often than strictly necessary given how all of Middle-Earth seems at times hinging on whether or not Frodo makes it to Mount Doom, but there's enough else going on and the world is developed enough it diverts our attention from the painfully pedestrian nature of the basic plot. In the case of Skyrim, however, if the Dovahkiin is the most important being in the lives of everyone in the game world at this particular time, this dehumanizes the other characters and ultimately reduces the world the game is trying to build to little more than a series of levels and checkpoints the player passes through.

I've seen quite a few fans come out to defend the decision to write The Elder Scrolls stories this way: A common argument seems to be that it is “empowering” to be given such “special” treatment and that it's a good way to get players to feel like their actions have consequences. This is often used as a way of defending such “massively single player games” and contrasting them with “massively multiplayer online games”, (MMOs) from which they derive their epithet. Now it is true that some MMOs have serious issues in terms of handling individual players, but this is the thing: A game series like The Elder Scrolls should not be about making the player feel special. Turning the player into a legendary unstoppable exalted demigod is absolutely the last approach to take to this kind of scenario for it does nothing but cheapen the world and the stories it's supposed to be fundamentally about building because in RPGs nobody is special. What makes RPGs unique is that the stories of countless heroes that walk the game world and interact with it in entropic ways help shape and mould the world and allow it to come to life. When the world itself becomes subservient to one hero, it ceases to feel singular and cohesive. As Skyrim is explicitly the story of the Dovahkiin's heroic deeds and destiny and there are no other characters cast at a remotely comparable level, the effectiveness of the game's setting as an entity unto itself suffers mightily.

The other side of this issue, which we can find if we approach it from a strict video game perspective in addition to an RPG one, is equally as troubling. This justification language of “empowerment”, “player autonomy” and “massively single player” is unfortunately intrinsically linked to some truly disquieting patriarchal power structures. The plain, simple and sad truth is that video games, as a business and not an art form, are still targeted fairly heavily towards adolescent males and the vast majority of our designers are either also straight males or tend to write from that perspective for commercial reasons. As a result, an uncomfortably large proportion of games are meticulously designed to play into and feed adolescent male power fantasies. An obvious example would be the borderline hilarious levels of manly bravado in military shooters like the Call of Duty series or the depressingly well documented male domination subtext and rampant Male Gaze in Batman: Arkham City, but sticking to the case study of this article lets take a look at Skyrim. One of the most popular features in the game is its “Follower” mechanic, wherein a friendly NPC will happily set aside all her (and the vast majority of these characters are female) goals, aspirations and responsibilities to travel all over Skyrim with the Dovahkiin and “carry” the player's “burdens”. Followers can even be married, at which point they can be ordered (yes, ordered) to literally stay at home, cook dinners, watch the house and open up a shop to manage the couple's finances. This should without doubt already be making my readers uncomfortable, but let's take an even more specific example to illustrate how this can go wrong.

My follower for the first playthrough I undertook of Skyrim was a character named Mjoll, a retired explorer who dedicated her life to fighting crime and corruption in the city of Riften after she was nearly killed in combat. However, she gladly set all that aside (and by extension all the people in Riften counting on her to help them) to go travelling with me after I found the trusted sword she lost in an ancient underground city and returned it to her. Now, my Dovhakiin is a woman, because Bethesda most appreciatively allows players to customize every aspect of their characters, from race to appearance to most welcome of all gender. The subtext of the characters' relationship thus becomes one of rapport and camaraderie: One can assume that two female friends who share a love of travel and adventure might bond over shared and similar experiences and thus get on quite well and relate with one another. Imagine however, for a moment, that I'd chosen to play a male Dovahkiin. That, by contrast, would dredge up centuries of patriarchal power structures and lend the entire relationship a very different, and altogether more awkward and distasteful, implication: The story then ceases to be one about sisterly bonding and becomes one about a heroic, powerful, dominant male coming in, sweeping Mjoll off her feet and carrying her away from the wicked streets of Riften. In one reading, Mjoll and the Dovahkiin are relative equals. In the other, that becomes far more difficult to claim.

For another, perhaps more vivid, example, look at Aela, a wild and keen huntress who manages the Companions, Skyrim's warriors' guild. Should the Dovahkiin choose to join them, Aela will happily step down and let the player character take command of the group at the end of the quest line because the game casts the Dovahkiin as the destined saviour of the Companions who will restore the group's honour and greatness. Additionally, Aela can also become a follower and a candidate for marriage after the player completes this particular story. Similar to before, this is merely a puzzling state of affairs for a female Dovahkiin and seriously problematic for a male one: The former simply raises the question of why a relative newcomer would be entrusted with such power and responsibility, her status as Dragonborn notwithstanding, while in the latter case it seems awfully like Aela is submitting to male authority and retreating towards a more “proper” supporting role in the epic tale of the virile male lead.

This is the fundamental problem with doing a Chosen One story in an RPG video game. Because of the medium's historical connection to adolescent male power fantasy, not only is it counter-intuitive to tell this kind of a story with this framework, it's downright self-destructive, potentially running the risk of scuttling the entire game in a mire of tangled patriarchal power structures and traditional associations. No amount of “escapism” or “empowerment” protestations and defenses will extirpate this particular narrative archetype from its web of problematic implications. It's perfectly possible to tell a different kind of story than this with this setup, I'd simply point to the nigh-infinite amount of variety to be had in traditional pen-and-paper RPGs. In fact the genre is essentially designed for it. Perhaps one solution is to bring other players back into the equation (As I mentioned in my Mass Effect piece I hate talking about current events, but I couldn't help noticing this got announced as I was writing this essay) but MMOs come with their own suite of problems I'm not prepared to discuss right now and I would rather hate to see single-player RPG-influenced games completely disappear. But as the clever subversion of Morrowind shows, there's a certainly mileage to be had in crafting an exquisite single-player RPG experience that doesn't play into generations of male dominance and oppression. I certainly don't have all the answers (perhaps they're to be found written in The Elder Scrolls themselves), but I do know that if our medium is ever going to continue to evolve, mature and sustain, it absolutely must shed the childish and antiquated power structures it mires itself in with frustrating frequency. This then, must become its quest.

Elise Riggs: It’s Good To Be Back (Part II)

Butterfly High

Elise is very intimately connected to my personal history with SSX and the video game medium in general over the past decade. Introduced to the series with SSX Tricky over at my cousin's house (the same one who introduced me to Super Mario Bros. and games in general) I was initially drawn to Kaori because her massive trick stat and hyperactive, cartoon-like personality seemed to me to fit the game's overstated, caricatured tone and atmosphere the best of the characters I saw. However, after a few rounds with Elise I had immediately found my character, not just the one whose play style I liked the best, but the one who I genuinely liked as a person and the game clicked for me.

The first thing that really struck me about Elise was her Devil-May-Care attitude and that she seemed to me to be someone who, despite her constant egomaniacal boasts, knew at heart she wasn't anywhere near as cool as she let on and was really just putting on a bit of an act, but who ultimately didn't care one way or the other because she was doing what she loved. I'll chalk that up to Lucy Liu primarily: Her subdued, withdrawn and nonchalant, crucially not boisterous or confrontational, delivery of lines like “I'll get over it”, “I'll get it next time”, “Easy come, easy go”, “Throwin' it all away” and “Think you're hot stuff, huh?” when Elise falls or gets passed, not to mention the consciously exaggerated and over-the-top bluster of Elise's self-congratulation in general, are all good examples of how a skilled actor can add layers of meaning to a script.

That said, there's enough in the writing of the first two games to support this reading as well I argue: Whether that's due to EA Sports' actual intent or some comical misunderstanding on their part of what passed for hip and trendy amongst the young'uns in 2001 (hence the somewhat amusing inclusion of the slang term “mofo” in a E-rated game; Elise tosses it out to bookend her chatter every once in awhile) is actually beside the point. The implication and meaning I read in either case is that while Elise will trash-talk to keep up appearances, when it gets right down to it she doesn't so much talk as she just does: Letting her actions speak for themselves, concentrating on being the best she can be at something she loves, always keeping in mind she's ultimately answerable to herself and nobody else, and furthermore that she's her own harshest critic. Put another way, Elise's interpretation of “cool” is almost a Glam or Drag version of cool rather than a straight pursuit of fame and popularity: She wears the trappings, and while she always knows she can't take full advantage of them it doesn't bother her in the slightest because her priorities lie elsewhere. Paradoxically, seeing how Elise didn't seem to care about being cool (despite halfheartedly pretending she did) and only concerned herself with following her passions made her seem really cool in a backhanded way to me. The fact Elise was so multi-talented, yet ultimately a bit of a goof with a loose attitude towards style made her really endearing to me and brought to my mind memories of Marsupilami, another character I'd loved as a kid (to the point Elise, rather uncannily for me, even used some of the same slang and vocal inflections, which I thought was awesome).

On top of all that, knowing that my cousin's favourite character was Eddie and mine was Elise added an extra layer of intimacy to my connection with the game in a way that can only happen when two close friends play a multiplayer game together in the same room. It's a great example of how two people can bond over a shared gaming experience, accentuated by what little background information about the characters we got. Despite its pretenses, SSX Tricky was really a retro game, being most comparable in my opinion to classic time-attack and sports pastiche games in the arcade tradition than the big-budget AAA titles that were starting to become the norm in Generation 6. And, just like the characters of those games, SSX icons like Elise and Eddie have very little in the way of biographical information and certainly no elaborate, fleshed out backstory. All we get is just enough for us to get a feel for who they are and what's important about them because that's all we need: Elise is a fun-loving, super confident adventurer with a Glam approach to style, Eddie is a wacky goofball with a huge Afro and a love of pop culture and they're best friends. That's all we needed to know and that's all we required to be able gravitate towards them. And it worked, not just for me and my cousin, but for others who I could share the experience with: Later on, when I got my own copy of the game, I'd introduce my younger sister to it the same way I'd been introduced once she reached gaming age and I could bond with someone else through the simple joy of SSX Tricky's arcade revivalism and pure fun.

Only 11 years later and the video game industry is a vastly different place than it was my cousin invited me to pick up SSX Tricky for the first time and I've seen every twist, turn and bizarre lateral turn it's taken. Through all that Elise and SSX have been almost a kind of constant for me: Despite the series experimenting and making many changes over its life, it's remained remarkably consistent, both in terms of core gameplay and more broadly thematically and tonally, which can be rare on a long-running game series (just take a look at the Sonic the Hedgehog series for an example of how that can go badly wrong). Despite maintaining a solid intellectual footing, SSX never feels stale because just enough is polished from entry to entry to keep the series feeling fresh (just take a look at The Legend of Zelda series for an example of how that can go badly wrong!). And, just like the series she hails from (and in spite of the brief speed bump that was SSX 3) Elise has never compromised her ideals, but remains on top of an ever-changing cultural zeitgeist, her rotating stable of jobs and hobbies becoming a metaphor for her ability to adapt, and that of the series as a whole. Elise and SSX have kept me playing through a generation of tight, hectic competition (Generation 6), helped ease me into one of the most radical, groundbreaking console launches and generational shifts of all time (SSX Blur, the Nintendo Wii and Generation 7) and now, after a worryingly lengthy period of prolonged absence, are once again barnstorming the industry to prove Generation 7 still has some life left in it and Elise Riggs, just like SSX, is impossible to keep down.

I must confess I was very worried when the 2012 XBOX 360/PlayStaton 3 reboot was announced: A dark, intense teaser trailer at the 2010 Spike Video Game Awards that seemed inspired by the gritty, testosterone-heavy likes of Gears of War and Call of Duty rather than the kitschy '70s and early '80s retro trash of SSX Tricky and in which Elise, who up until then seemed to be the series' mascot, only appeared as a subtle Easter egg via a decal on a distinctly Black Hawk-esque helicopter left me frankly appalled at the new game's prospects. My panic subsided a bit as developer diaries started to come out that seemed to reassure fans the series' sense of fun wasn't going anywhere, and neither was Elise (a revelation that caused me to breathe possibly the biggest sigh of relief in my entire wannabe journalistic career) and I started to feverishly anticipate the reboot.

My panic quickly returned, however when I actually got hold of the game and found it seemingly built around a checklist of my worst 7^th Generation demons: Mandatory persistent Internet connections, online passes, competitive online multiplayer, leaderboards and social media not just a primary focus but deeply integrated into the fundamental core of the game, a complete LACK of the splitscreen multiplayer that allowed me and my cousin to bond over the series in the first place, short, linear maps in place of expansive, nonlinear ones made for exploration, arbitrary difficulty spikes and cruel, unfair level design intended to artificially lengthen the game in place of adding more content and a crass points/credits system that monetized every aspect of the experience, from board upgrades to level progression. It seemed, horrifyingly, that this new SSX had been meticulously crafted to focus on the absolute worst industry trends of the past five years. Most baffling of all, in an attempt to make the series feel “hip” and “current” to a new generation of players (something SSX never felt the need to do before, even for SSX Blur on the Wii, a console explicitly marketed towards new players) a soundtrack almost exclusively populated by dubstep, the current trendy indie music genre (and also one I happen to despise, speaking bluntly). It seemed for all the world that this was finally the game in which a great deal of SSX's timeless soul had been excised to make room for Generation 7 window dressing and dubstep.

Then I got to play Elise for the first time (after an unbelievably annoying, insulting and nerve-wracking tutorial where I actually had to *unlock* her), and all my trepidation and horror evaporated in an instant. She's no longer voiced by Lucy Liu (and in fact hasn't been since SSX Tricky), but absolutely all of her dialogue has been carried over from SSX Tricky, new dialogue written for the reboot sounds like it's a perfect extension of that game's script and the new actor delivers Elise's lines with the exact same kind of freewheeling, tongue-in-cheek confidence and fun that Lucy Liu did and is, for my money, the first to accurately capture Elise's character since Lucy Liu. The first time I heard her I knew that this was the Elise I loved, the Elise I remembered, and that she was back, and with her came the soul of the series I'd been missing in this game and honestly, hadn’t really felt in full since SSX Tricky.

Just as in the past, Elise had adapted to fit in a new gaming reality: She's now a seasoned adventurer and a living legend. At 33, she's the oldest rider in the game; a fact which makes her even more valuable as a feminist icon. I can count on one hand the number of female video game characters older than about 21 or so (being as we are in a medium where 21 is often bemusedly considered old, wise and experienced because our target demographic is still, frustratingly, adolescents), let alone the ones who are playable, major series leads and who are portrayed as individualistic, strong and yeah, sexy, as Elise is here: She's not fretting about her age or worrying about settling down, she's just looking for the next big adventure as always. Even Elise's good buddy Eddie is finally back too; this reboot marks his first major, official appearance since 2001. Every game since SSX Tricky had him either conspicuously absent or only available via cheat codes, and even then he was only a re-skin and had no unique dialogue. Bummer. But, now that Eddie's made a proper return at last you can bet the two best friends are busy tearing up the slopes and dominating the circuit together just like in the Good Ol' Days.

To have Elise back, and back in that fashion, was indescribably reassuring for me. Having her be in her 30s was one of the best ideas EA Sports has ever had, in my opinion, especially when paired with her characterization being so wonderfully loyal and accurate. Since so much of the game feels radically different than what the series had been in the past (though at its best it's still the SSX I remember), having Elise be recognisably the same person she'd been 11 years ago and not some strange hybrid reboot character as is so often the case when series are revived, meant it was effortless for me to relate to and latch onto her, making it much easier for me to accept and deal with how much else had changed. I could now walk through the game with Elise who, just like me is an old veteran returning to the scene after a very long absence even with her relevance (and most definitely her hipness) potentially now in question. We can tackle whatever the game throws at us together, her as much a stranger in this curious new land of online passes, Deadly Descents and dubstep as me. If she can make her way through and prove she's still got it, then damn it, so can I. Just as Elise often says in the game, “it's good to be back”.

SSX has changed, just like video games as a medium, and indeed so much else, has changed in the past decade. But Elise is someone who, if nothing else, knows how to adapt and remain current without losing her spirit, zest or identity. After all, nothing about Elise Riggs is accidental and any born self-promoter needs to be able to tackle whatever life throws at her head-on. If she can remain multi-talented, versatile and stylish without ever compromising who she is, Elise will continue to be, at least for me, a powerful role model to live up to. No matter where gaming, or indeed the rest of the world, goes in the next few years, hopefully I can be like Elise, look any new challenge square in the eye and tackle it head-on with the kind of inner strength and calm that only comes from a love of life and a confidence in one's own place in it.

Elise, you are a star and yes, you're absolutely right: I would indeed love to be you. You're my favourite video game character of all time. Stay Gold, honey.

Elise Riggs: It’s Good To Be Back (Part I)

It's Tricky, It's Tricky...

She's got the nickname “Bombshell”, maybe because of her blonde hair and devastating good looks. What she should have it for, however, is the fact she exudes the energy of a bunker buster every time she walks into a room and channels that into every aspect of her life. She unabashedly, unashamedly lives her life to the fullest and does more in a week with hers than most of us do in an entire lifetime. She's Elise Riggs from EA Sports' beloved SSX series, and while she'll never be spoken of in the same sentence as Samus Aran, Chun-Li, Ms. Pac-Man or Commander Shepard, to me she'll always be one of the greatest video game heroines of all time, and maybe the greatest of them all.

Elise is a self-made woman; indeed, her bio in SSX 3 flatly states “nothing about Elise is accidental”. She's one of the best professional snowboarders in the games' world (not to mention one of the best professional surfers as well), and when she's not carving a barrel she spends her time as a model, clothing designer, actress, producer, director, businesswoman, rock climber, base jumper and professional Mexican seashell necklace vendor. She has the shrewd business leadership and sense of adventure of Scrooge McDuck and the athletic prowess of Kelly Slater and Tony Hawk and no matter how you slice it that should be a frighteningly awesome combination in anyone's book.

Some may criticize Elise by calling her narcissistic, conceited or arrogant, and her repeated exclamations of “Am I unbelievable or WHAT?”, “I am SO fine” and “Wouldn't you LOVE to be me?” during events would seem to support this accusation. However, despite her countless ventures and hobbies and her legendarily fierce competitive streak, Elise comes across as actually rather affable and self-effacing, her self-congratulation delivered completely tongue-in-cheek (thanks in no small part to her tremendous voice actor in SSX Tricky, Lucy Liu) and matched just as often by humble resignation and self-deprecating joking whenever she bails a trick or slams headlong into a rock outcropping (usually due to me fumbling with the controls). Elise is also on relatively friendly terms with the others in the SSX circuit, always looking out for her pals Kaori, JP, Alex and Skye. She's also longtime, inseparable best friends and riding partners with the infamously wild, goofy and slightly awkward retro '70s-afficionado and super nerd Eddie Wachowski: “You and me, we're gonna rule this race, baby!” and “You and me, right to the end!” they say to one another before events in SSX Tricky. Extremely confident and fully conscious of her abilities sure, but cliquey and snobbish Elise surely isn't.

Another thing that strikes me about Elise is that she's clearly a sexual person: Various character bios describe her as enjoying “carving up men's hearts” and her first appearance in SSX Tricky has her address the player with the vaguely sexual “This is gonna be very, very...interesting”. However, that said, she's also a person fully in control of her sexuality-She's sexy for no-one except herself: The men chase her because of how hot she is due to her natural athleticism and confidence, not how she's trying to be, how she's drawn or how she's posed (and many of them are probably at least subconsciously aware they'll never be as talented and capable as she is). One thing that really sets Elise apart from many other gaming leading ladies is that, despite her obviously being very sexy, EA Sports has always treated this aspect of her character, and her character in general, with extreme respect-Elise's sexuality has never been exploited or used as a crass way to market the series and neither she nor her female colleagues are shot through the male gaze in cutscenes. When her sexiness was turned up starting with SSX Tricky, she was given a flattering, yet still very stylish and practical alpine jacket and jeans ensemble. It exposed a tiny bit of her midriff, but this was still something one could reasonably expect a snowboarder to wear, especially during Spring riding. Besides, it was nothing compared to what her male counterparts got: Moby, for one, went completely shirtless to show off his super-ripped physique and full-body Union Jack tattoo.

The only minor blemish on EA Sports' record is when cheesecake artist extraordinaire Adam Warren was brought in to do the concept art and character models for SSX 3: Elise was given ludicrous proportions, put in some really suggestive and provocative poses and also seemed to have been de-aged. On top of that, one of the possible outfits she could wear was a slinky black bikini, which is not an entirely practical fashion choice for someone who lives the life of an extreme snowboarder. However, Warren at least had the comparative decency to do this to everyone in the cast, not just Elise and EA Sports thankfully backpedaled hard from this for the next sequel, SSX On Tour, where she was given a cute and stylish white sweater and cargo pants and all attempts to make her a sex object ceased with no further discussion. This trend has continued for all the subsequent games culminating in Elise showing up in 2012's series reboot in a full-body suit of protective alpine armour and gear, befitting her new role as an adventurer in Earth's harshest environments, which still manages to show off her really impressive (yet not unrealistic) build and musculature.

Despite the minor hiccup with SSX 3, Elise has on the whole been treated much better than game heroines like Samus Aran or Lara Croft, both of whom started off in some form as immediate feminist icons but who have, over time, strayed somewhat from their legacy and ideals due to excessive and often blisteringly incompetent rewrites (sometimes with absolutely catastrophic results). EA Sports has never felt the need to give Elise a hilariously tortured backstory, for example, nor have they felt a burning obligation to give her an overbearing, upstaging male mentor or convoluted sexual tension with a love interest. Elise does what she does for the love of it, because it's interesting and important to her and because she's always looking to broaden her horizons. Since Elise and her sexuality have always been respected and never treated as an object of childish gawking and exploitation, she remains a formidable feminist role model 12 years after her creation. That resonates really strongly with me and makes it really easy for me to cheer for her each time a new SSX game is released

One of my favourite TV shows growing up was the PBS series Wishbone, about a talking Jack Russel terrier bibliophile who retold classic works of literature after being inspired by similar events in his daily life (...it was better than it sounds). Slightly looney premise aside, what I liked best about it was the character Sam Kepler (played by Christie Abbott) who was the best friend of Joe, Wishbone's owner and David, his next-door neighbour. Sam was a cheerful, outgoing and friendly tomboy who always had the backs of her two best friends. She was also a total ace: Hands-down the most athletically talented and versatile of the kids on the show (despite Joe's being a basketball enthusiast serving as the main crux for many an episode), she dominated at skateboarding, soccer, and even roller hockey. Sam's dad even owned a pizza parlor and she'd invite all her friends over to hang out there after school. It seemed like there wasn't anything Sam wasn't interested in and wouldn't lend her skills and talents to-When she wasn't showing off her sports skills or throwing pizza parties for her two best friends, she was leading them on all kinds of wild adventures, many of which proved to be fodder for the titular dog's overactive imagination. Why he wound up the star and not her remains a mystery to me, though she works incredibly well in a non-lead capacity. As a kid I really looked up to Sam and hoped someday I could be as effortlessly cool and have as many hobbies and interests as her.

I bring up Sam because she's a great metaphor for explaining why I dig Elise so much on a more personal level. Put bluntly, as someone who was a fan of Wishbone and has followed SSX since its inception, it's not inconceivable to me that someone kind of like Sam would grow up to become someone kind of like Elise. Both are unbelievably strong characters with a fierce sense of independence who are driven to succeed at anything they put their minds to, and they put their minds to a lot. Despite that, they both have time for those closest to them. There are some differences: Elise is an insane caricature, sure and Sam, while definitely a product of the 1990s, is at least somewhat more realistic, but their core personalities still seem similar enough to me that I feel this analogy works. And, just like Sam, Elise is someone I can deeply admire-I can only attempt to emulate some of her energy and sterling steel resolve. Elise also has the benefit of being a video game character: Someone we can, however briefly (and at times awkwardly) step into the shoes of.

In my analysis of Super Mario Bros. I made the argument that one of the reasons the game succeeds is because Shigeru Miyamoto designed Mario and Luigi to be very easy to relate to: Noble, humble working-class chaps tossed into a strange world and made to explore. By making the main characters people we can identify with, the boundary between the player and the game is blurred and it becomes easier to lose oneself in the immersion of the experience, which was the absolute most important part of Super Mario Bros. Elise works for me in much the same way, but with one crucial variable: Elise isn't just someone I can understand and relate to, but someone whose ideals I actively admire and who I consciously want to be like. In the same way some people look up to “badass” characters like Solid Snake or Nathan Drake, I look up to Elise: I want to be as strong, self-assured, self-reliant, independent, sexy, confident and successful in so many different and exciting things as she is. Being a sort of personal hero and role-model, Elise becomes more than just a cipher and is elevated in my eyes to the level of genuine escapism in a way that, contrary to a lot of mainstream and literature on the medium, I rarely feel with games: I can escape into her world, her life and live vicariously through her when I can't follow her example in real life. Combine this with the series' increasingly effortless and intuitive control scheme and tumbling mechanics engine and SSX, when it's at its best, becomes one of the most powerfully evocative video game experiences I can ever have.