“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.

“Filled was the air with a dreamy and magical light”: Mí Bhealtaine and the Dream-Child

"A cat may look at a king..."

A pet hobby of mine has always been studying the often-uncanny reoccurring patterns that surround different facets of history, mythology, folklore and language. Call it the result of synchronicity, “name games”, the emanation of a mysterious Fortean psycho-social “Twilight Language” phenomenon or simply the human brain attempting to make sense out of randomness, such patterns seem omnipresent and have always caught my interest. One of the key premises of this school of thought is that certain names, dates, places and events, via coincidence and written historical narrative, become “vortexes” for an unusually high concentration of sociological artefacts and are transformed into, in a sense, pseudo-sentient forces that inspire mimicry and happenings.

Take May 4 for example: This date has born witness to a number of intriguing historical events and movements over the years, particularly those involving politics and power structures. A cursory look at Wikipedia reveals that on this date in 1493, Pope Alexander VI split the Western Hemisphere over the Line of Demarcation, a key moment in the development of colonialism; in 1776 Rhode Island rejected the authority of King George III, the first American colony to do so; Napoleon began his exile on Elba on this date in 1814 and key battles in the War of the Roses, the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War, the American Civil War and World War II also all took place on May 4. In addition, Margaret Thatcher first took office as Prime Minister of England on a May 4, a date which, perhaps ironically, had in years past also seen two infamous civil uprisings: The Haymarket Square Riot in 1886, in which a bomb was leveled at police trying to break up a labour protest in Chicago, and the Kent State Massacre in 1970, in which peaceful Vietnam War protesters were gunned down by riot police at Ohio Kent State University.

Perhaps the most important happenings on this date, at least the two most relevant to the purposes of this article, were two events a world apart geographically and decades apart temporally. On May 4, 1919, students gathered en masse in Tienanmen Square, Beijing to protest the Chinese government's response to the Treaty of Versailles. By this point China was governed by a fragmented group of warlords, the Qing Dynasty having been overthrown during the Xinhai revolution in 1911. The fractured government was easily taken advantage of by influential Western powers, who attempted to divide China into spheres of influence. The tipping point came when the province of Shandong, annexed by Germany during World War I,was transferred to Imperial Japan as a result of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, resulting in large-scale student revolt. This protest, dubbed the May 4^th Movement, could be seen as the political climax of a larger cultural movement known as the New Culture Movement, typically seen as lasting from 1911-1921. The New Culture Movement was initially born out of young scholars' reaction against traditional Chinese values and society, seen as having failed after the fall of the Qing Dynasty, and was guided by a desire to explore and embrace concepts such as democracy, globalisation, cosmopolitanism, individual liberty and sexual equality.

Meanwhile, thousands of miles away and decades earlier, a young girl named Alice Pleasance Liddel was born on May 4, 1852, a date which a mathematician friend of hers who went by Lewis Carroll would later use as the birthday for another Alice, and the setting for one of the enduring classics of literature.

Speaking more broadly, the first week of May has traditionally held a very unique power over people, dating back to some of the earliest historical records we have. The Celtic peoples of Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man referred to May 1 (another date with a history of political turbulence) as Beltane-Technically Lá Bealtaine, literally “The Day of Beltane”, as opposed to Mí Bhealtaine, or “The Month of Beltane”. As it marks the halfway point between the Vernal Equinox and Summer Solstice, this was considered the start of summer and one of the most important times of the year: A time for purification, transition and reverence. Beltane is in many ways a mirror image of Samhain on October 31, the day now known as Halloween: Both are liminal dates between seasons set aside for festivals and introspection and times at which the boundaries between the physical and spiritual realms are particularly loose and permeable.

The Celtic people believed that, in addition to the domain of the living, there existed a separate plane where the spirits dwelt: Sometimes described as lying across the sea on uncharted islands to the west, underground within the barrows that dotted the landscape or simply in a related, but separate dimension alongside the physical world (or perhaps some combination of all of the above), the Otherworld was the domain of the aos sí. Comparable perhaps to modern conceptions of fairies and elves and indeed the basis for many of these beliefs, the aos sí were mysterious, unpredictable nature spirits, deities and deified ancestors. Sometimes they were the descendants of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the original inhabitants of Ireland forced underground by invaders who mastered spiritual and arcane arts to become beings of mysticism. Beltane and Samhain were two of the dates it was said the aos sí could walk freely among the mortals, and the mortals could walk freely among them owing to their liminal position on the calendar. Liminality on the calendar, it would seem, translates to liminality in our lives.

It is perhaps worth noting that modern astronomical research actually places the precise date for the solar midpoint between the Vernal Equinox and the Summer Solstice closer to May 5 or May 7 (the former of course being celebrated today as Cinco de Mayo, the commemorative date of the unprecedented Mexican victory over occupying French forces in the state of Peubla, Mexico in 1862), but this can of course change year to year.

The start of summer then, the time of Mí Bhealtaine, would appear to be in general a time of year marked by transition, change, upheaval and liminality. It is also a deeply spiritual, mystical time according to the ancient Celts, the melding of the human realm with the Otherworld offering a profound, if temporary, restructuring of philosophy and cosmology. It's perhaps fitting then that summer is the time of year most beloved by Lewis Carroll, whose fond memories of summers gone by inspired his greatest work, the diptych Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Wistful, nostalgic yearning for the enchantment and spirit of the season is the dominant theme of the prefatory and closing poems of both Alice books, plays a significant role in the closing words of the first book and, in his Easter Greeting dedication to the 1876 edition of his oeuvre, Carroll encourages his readers to remember the dreamlike atmosphere of a summer morning and to hold on to the knowledge that, no matter how dark life may get, we will all “one day see a brighter dawn then this”.

It's clear that summer was a special time for Lewis Carroll. He seems to have associated it with childlike innocence and strength, two virtues he treasured and valued almost above all else, certainly helped by his summer boat trips with Alice Liddel and her sisters during which he would tell them stories, one of which became the first draft of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and provided the inspiration for the poems book-ending both works. For Carroll then, summer represented a time when we could let go of our vice-grip on the dull, pragmatic realities of this world and allow our imaginations to view the universe with rapturous, if sometimes fleeting, sense of wonderment. Perhaps curiously, both parts of the story are set during Mí Bhealtaine: The first book is set on May 4, while the second is set on November 4, marking a key moment in the development of that book's theme of mirrored reversals: Alice leaves her house in early winter through the Looking-Glass and comes out the other side to find a sunny summer day. Also, November is, of course the start of summer in the southern hemisphere.

Despite this however, the most engaging connection between Carroll and the season may actually come from the pseudo-sentient life force his own text has acquired, and, in particular, that of its heroine. Perhaps contrary to popular belief, it's quite clear the Alice in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There is not meant to be anything so dull as an insert avatar of Alice Liddel. Although he initially told an early version of the story to Alice Liddel and her sisters, the books' protagonist does indeed share her name and undoubtedly owes much else of herself to her, Carroll went out of his way to remove or bury personal signifiers, identifiers and in-jokes in the versions that made it to print. John Tenniel's illustrations of Alice look nothing like Alice Liddel (Apocryphally she's supposedly based on Mary Babcock, another friend of Carroll's, but this has yet to be fully confirmed). Indeed, an oft-overlooked fact about Through the Looking-Glass is that many of its core themes and motifs, most notably those of mirrors, opposites and inverses, was inspired not by Alice Liddel at all, but by discussions Carroll had with another Alice: His distant cousin Alice Raikes.

No, the Alice in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass is something far more subtle and fascinating. She is, as often described by Carroll himself, the “dream-child”: She represents the idealized pinnacle of Carroll's worldview and embodies the purest form of the ideals he saw in his friends and wished to cultivate in all of us. As Carroll himself said, in the dramatis personae for Alice on the Stage:

"What wert thou, dream-Alice in thy foster-father's eyes? How shall he picture thee? Loving first, loving and gentle: loving as a dog (forgive the prosaic simile, but I know no earthly love so pure and perfect) and gentle as a fawn: then courteous—courteous to all, high or low, grand or grotesque, King or Caterpillar, even as though she were herself a King's daughter, and her clothing wrought of gold: then trustful, ready to accept the wildest impossibilities with all that utter trust that only dreamers know; and lastly, curious—wildly curious, and with the eager enjoyment of Life that comes only in the happy hours of childhood, when all is new and fair, and when Sin and Sorrow are but names — empty words signifying nothing!"

Alice is the dream-child. The dream-child, through an open mind, strength of character, curiosity, love and retention of the wide-eyed inspiration of a child, becomes privy to the myriad worlds and possibilities that exist alongside and around ours, but that are conceivable only to the mind of a dreamer. As she states in a famous (and often misinterpreted) quote from Through the Looking-Glass, Alice “ca'n't believe impossible things”. Logically, however, this means what she sees around her are possibilities. She might not always accept them at face value (Carroll once said that trying too hard to believe things that couldn't be true wore one's mind out), but she won't write them off as “impossible” either because impossible things can never be true and are therefore not worthy of consideration. As Alice is considerate to and of everyone and everything, she naturally has no room in her intellectual toolbox for impossibilities: The ultimate declaration and fusion of both childlike trust and mature open-mindedness.

The dream-child is, by necessity, liminal. Because Alice can conceive of and accept the possibility of anything, if not believe the utter certainty of anything, she is the only character in any of the Wonderland works to be able to freely travel between worlds. The most obvious example of this is in the beginning and end of the books themselves where Alice enters and leaves Wonderland. The famous “all just a dream” reading of the climax of Adventures in Wonderland is in fact loaded and has the potential to be dangerously misleading: Alice wakes up at the end of her adventure, yes, but what's overlooked about the scene is that it seems to be meant as a telling bit of role reversal-After retelling her escapades in Wonderland, Alice happily scampers off thinking of them all the way and her older sister falls asleep and begins dreaming herself. However, her sister dreams of Alice's dream and, critically, remains conscious all throughout. She “half-imagines” herself in Wonderland and can appreciate the beauty and magic of this Otherworld, but only on a theoretical level because she remains grounded in pragmatism and knows as soon as she opens her eyes it will all be revealed for the make-believe is truly is. The implication, meanwhile is that Alice is off having more adventures even awake, while her sister can only conceive of the lands she visits with her eyes closed. This is the difference between Alice and her sister: As the dream-child, Alice can effortlessly transgress the boundaries between worlds at will, an ability her sister has lost, having used maturity as an excuse to allow herself to be subsumed by the mundane.

"Remember, remember..."

Alice's liminality, and her ultimate destiny as the dream-child, are major plot points in Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Once she crosses the boundary into the mirror world, the story soon becomes (put most basically) about a chess game played out with all the characters representing specific chess pieces and Alice's desire to become a Queen. This is most commonly read as Carroll's way of dealing with his estrangement from Alice Liddel and the inevitability of her growing up and losing her innocence, especially when taken in the context of the rather dark and funereal poems he placed at the beginning and end of the book. However, if we take that Alice in Carroll's story is the dream-child and not simply a rote stand-in for Alice Liddel (not to mention the recorded fact part of the book's impetus came from a different Alice entirely), we can approach this part of the narrative from a fresh perspective: I posit that the reason Alice is trying to become Queen is not because she wants to grow up and leave her wandering days behind, but because she knows the rules of chess. Alice explicitly starts the game as a White Pawn (she's told inasmuch by the Red Queen) and knows, just as the clever mathematician and chess expert Carroll knew, that there is a rule where a Pawn can become any piece the player chooses if it reaches the last square of the board. Naturally, the obvious (dare I say logical) choice would be the Queen: The piece with most freedom and range of movement, and thus the most powerful. This, I argue, is what Alice desires: Not the stuff and fussiness of mundane adulthood (it's telling once she returns to her house at the end she resumes, and with abandon, the curious self-addressing nonsense logic that's been creeping into her vocabulary over the course of both books), but the freedom to control her own destiny, to transgress against and explore both worlds (thus also mastering them both) and to keep her mind open to possibilities.

It may also be worth noting that Through the Looking-Glass takes place on November 4, the day before Guy Fawkes Night in England. This date, commemorating a failed anaracho-terrorist plot to destroy the House of Lords (while it was in session), seems of particular interest to Alice, who asks her cat if she knows “what to-morrow is”. It would seem unusual to me that someone who is drawn to that kind of history and who has, in the course of two short stories, overthrown two major monarchies (for one of which she essentially spearheaded a revolutionary coup d'etat), is gravely concerned and interested in the plight of a working-class wasp, has frequent discussions with herself about ego death, carries on stimulating two-way conversations with herself and her cats, worries about breaking rules she just invented and enjoys pretending to be a hyaena and that her nanny is a fresh kill would be particularly concerned about emulating royalty and fitting in with social convention of the time. It would seem, if anything, that dream-Alice is an almost willfully marginal, anarchic character. She's surely not going to grow up to fit in with Victorian elite, and she doesn't seem to completely fit in with the denizens of Wonderland either as she is in frequent conflict with them (although this becomes more tempered and academic as of Through the Looking-Glass). She is truly liminal then; someone who can transgress and explore both worlds and, by remaining marginal, master them both as well.

This would most likely please her foster-father because, whether it be owing to his dualistic life as simultaneous childrens' book writer, friend to young girls, esteemed mathematician and college dean or the somewhat awkward way he apparently carried himself Lewis Carroll was most certainly a marginal figure himself who didn't quite fit in with the world of Victorian elite he surrounded himself with. This becomes most clear knowing a great deal of both Alice books is actually little more than thinly veiled political satire skewering Victorian cultural norms and the elite and that John Tenniel, whom he hired to illustrate them, was famous as a political cartoonist at the time. More evidence can be found in the fact Carroll found the courage to troll Queen Victoria herself: After reading a fan letter of hers in which she praised Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and requested a signed copy of his next book, Carroll proudly sent her majesty a special print of a mathematical proof. This becomes arguably textually overt during the infamous Mad Tea Party chapter where, in one scene, The Mad Hatter criticizes Alice for wearing her hair too long. This is a critique that would never be leveled against a young girl like Alice Liddel, but it is most certainly one that would be leveled against a man of status like Lewis Carroll, who was known to keep his hair longer and shaggier than was customary. Knowing all this, it becomes becomes even more difficult for me to read dream-Alice as a straight representation of Alice Liddel and much easier in fact for me to read her as the liminal, anarcho-feminist dream-child who bears as much influence from early postmodern ideals and Carroll himself as she does from Carroll's most famous friend.

Liminality, transition, change and upheaval. These are all themes and motifs the Celts believed surrounded the time of Mí Bhealtain and seem to have been the trend of history. They are also ideals Lewis Carroll's dream-Alice seems to embody enthusiastically and triumphantly. For him and her, as them, summer was a magical time indeed. The most important festival for the Celts also took place during the summer: During Midsummer, the summer solstice, it was almost a guarantee the boundaries between our world and the Otherworld would finally dissolve and the aos sí were free to roam uninhibited, their celebrations being plainly visible from atop the hills and barrows. In Forteana, it is said an unusual uptick in sightings of mysterious or unexplained phenomena coalesce around this date. For Lewis Carroll, everything that makes life worth living is on display this time of year.

It is perhaps very appropriate that the liminal, anarchic Alice is intrinsically linked to Beltane; the summer's spirited and emotionally charged beginning. Her birthday is May 4, the same as Alice Liddel's to be sure, but also a day of extreme significance to both history and the texts at hand. May 4 is also the date on which Adventures in Wonderland takes place, as we can discern from Alice's dialog with the Mad Hatter. That same Adventures in Wonderland that begins by Alice entering a doorway in a hillside and falling out of this world into another one. That same Adventures in Wonderland that ends with Alice maintaining the ability to walk between realms. That same Adventures in Wonderland that was originally titled, among other things, Alice's Adventures Under Ground, Alice Among the Elves and Alice's Doings in Elf-Land. A remarkable coincidence, to be sure, or perhaps not, depending on one's perspective. Deeper and deeper still goes the rabbit hole of Twilight Language.

The dream-child's influence on subsequent fiction has been substantial, but perhaps nowhere does it seem to have had the most dramatic effect then on the medium of video games. The easiest example to cite would be American McGee's 2011 offering Alice: Madness Returns. McGee, a veteran designer on such groundbreaking works as the Doom and Quake series for id Software, set about to reboot Carroll's oeuvre drawing in elements of Gothic psychological horror. The result was the cult favourite American McGee's Alice in 2000, which reconceptualizes Alice as a young mental patient institutionalized after her family burned alive in a house fire when she was a child. The game centres around Alice's attempts to rebuild Wonderland, here cast as her mental “happy place”, and thus cure her illness. Madness Returns is a further reboot, adding in the twist that [spoilers to follow] Alice is not mentally ill at all, but is being treated that way and manipulated into believing it by opportunistic forces in Victorian society who have it in their best interests to keep her marginal.

While not necessarily my favourite interpretation of the character, Madness Returns does echo a few themes and concepts I feel are intrinsic to her: McGee casts Alice as explicitly liminal here, a number of times having his supporting cast point out she's easy to silence because she is an orphan, a loner, an outspoken rebel, a woman and someone who has been labeled insane. A major plot point in the game involves Alice coming to terms with this fact and learning how to take decisive action to use this liminality to her advantage and turn it around against her oppressors. In the end, she overthrows an authoritarian, controlling power and takes charge of her destiny, much as she did in Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.

Perhaps more relevantly to our purposes though, are the following: Firstly, Alice: Madness Returns launched on June 14, 16 and 17, 2011, depending on the region. While none of these dates are Beltane or Midsummer, the season and month of June are perhaps worth noting (June having previously been mentioned in Walt Disney's 1951 film adaptation)-Lewis Carroll would certainly approve, at least. Secondly is Madness Returns' curious focus on eastern spirituality: An entire chapter of the game takes place in a surrealistic world based on Buddhist parables and dynastic Chinese history. Buddhism in fact becomes a major theme in the plot, as the Caterpillar takes on the role of a Tibetan monk who sets Alice on a path to a kind of Nirvana: Literally, freedom from her mental suffering brought on by her subservience to Victoriana. Recalling Alice's interesting fixation on identity and ego-death in the original books (she in turn forgets and renounces her name and famously says “I'm not myself, you see?”) it seems obvious McGee is taking this thread to its logical conclusion.

While the actual level contains elements from Indian and Japanese culture as well (most likely as a comment on and indictment of the crass Orientalism of the time in which the story is set, or perhaps that McGee still observes in our society today; it's literally titled “Mysterious East”) the underlying spiritualist metaphors remain fairly clear to me. This becomes especially noteworthy when taken in the context of Alice's previous flirtation with Chinese culture and philosophy: Recall both Alice Liddel and the dream-child have May 4 as their birthday, the date that is famously associated with the New Culture Movement. The very movement that sought to re-examine or tear down the existing dynastic order and replace it with an emphasis on cosmopolitanism, material social progress and gender equality. Most deliciously of all, one of the leading lights of the New Culture Movement was Liang Shuming, who was a Buddhist scholar (and also noted critic of Marxism and Westernism, believing them limiting and misguided and doomed to failure, respectively) and another, Cai Yuanpei, was an anarchist. I can't think of synchronicity more beautifully elegant than this: American McGee using the language of Buddhism to tell a story casting dream-Alice as an anarchist revolutionary that invokes the New Culture Movement and is seeped in a linguistic, intellectual and historical tradition of upheaval, change and transgression.

As intriguing as all this metatextual synchronicity might be, I feel the single most important thing Alice: Madness Returns contributes to the discussion is actually by virtue of its in-jokes. Peppered throughout are subtle references and shout-outs to other groundbreaking games: There are three levels in which Alice enters a two-dimensional world on a canvas by leaping into it and must jump from platform to platform, at once invoking the original platforming adventure game Super Mario Bros. in its gameplay and its sequel Yoshi's Island in its visual style, evocative of hand-painted tapestries. Additionally, the act of Alice leaping into a painting is clearly reminiscent of Super Mario 64, in which it is a core game mechanic. Alice has a dodge move which involves her turning into a flock of butterflies and traversing great distances very quickly, much as protagonist Amaterasu does in Ōkami. Certain bonus stages involving manoevering a spheroid through a twisting, multi-tiered maze evoke both the arcade classic Marble Madness and certain parts of Sonic the Hedgehog, as well as SEGA's own ball-rolling puzzler Super Monkey Ball. Finally, in the bottom depths of Queensland, the ruins of the Queen of Hearts' domain in Madness Returns, Alice can find a skeletal effigy of a small figure wearing large goggles and apparently poised as if he were focusing his mind on something. Fans of the game Psychonauts, by former LucasArts visionary Tim Schafer and his team Double Fine, will immediately recognize this as Razputin, that game's protagonist. What makes this especially clever is that Psychonauts itself features a scene where Raz follows a rabbit down a hole into a universe his mind creates.

What makes these endearing asides interesting, aside from them being affectionate nods to games and designers American McGee likes and was inspired by? I think a very compelling case could be made that acknowledging these specific works, and with such clear focus and intent, is actually part of a larger phenomenon that reinforces the legacy of the dream-child in modern fiction, particularly video games. In pulling together this reference pool of beloved and hugely influential games, what McGee has essentially done is to firmly place dream-Alice, via his own personal interpretation of her, into a tradition of writing and game design expressly drawn from the raw creative energy of liminality, imagination and dreams. There is a sense that not only are we bettered by our visions, but that our visions and worldviews are what gives us strength and allow us to interact with all planes in a healthy and engaging manner. And furthermore, that despite the physical, emotional and psychological battering she takes in McGee's games, dream-Alice is still a role model to strive for because only by channeling her can we unlock the true potential of ourselves, our minds, and the worlds around us. Layers and layers of Twilight Language take us back to the New Culture Movement, to Lewis Carroll and that sacred Celtic summer, to eternally revolutionary ideals such as feminism, equality, liminality, cosmopolitanism, open-mindedness and the desire and power to bring down corrupt institutions and power structures through logic, sense, love and dreams.

It makes a great deal of sense, and is very fitting, that American McGee should reference Shigeru Miyamoto's games to the extent he does and cite him as a major influence. For in regards to video games, he is perhaps the earliest, and certainly the most appropriate, luminary to trace this particular intellectual lineage back to. I've mentioned it before in passing and it's a matter of public knowledge, but now it's time to seriously analyse it: Miyamoto was strongly inspired by Lewis Carroll, and in particular, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Knowing this, it's easy to spot its influences everywhere in his games-The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, for example, deals overtly with Link travelling between two worlds; one the domain of childhood and one of adulthood. The climactic scene, after all, involves Link being sent back in time to experience childhood as it is something Zelda feels has been robbed from him by his obligations as Hero of Time. This is very reminiscent of at least a common reading of Through the Looking-Glass, but more overtly of Carroll's admiration for the strength and wisdom he found in youth. Many Zelda games also begin with Link “falling out” of one world and into another-This is not as overt as in Alice as for him it usually involves leaving his isolated, insular village and discovering the expanse of Hyrule (evidence of Miyamoto's adoration of exploration and discovery), but the metaphor can still be read I argue.

Despite some clear Carrollian influences in Zelda, it's still Super Mario Bros. that for me most vividly reflects Miyamoto's debt to the dream-child. The homages are everywhere: From the obvious (mushrooms making one shrink or grow depending on which one is eaten) to the slightly more subtle (Mario and Luigi travel underground and overthrow a tyrannical despot). What's more, the basic plot is almost a complete reiteration, as Mario and Luigi enter a strange new world and traverse its length as part of their quest. In fact, Super Mario Bros. can be argued to have a double invocation of the dream-child: Mario and Luigi to be sure, but more importantly the *players themselves*, who Miyamoto is trying to reach and share his experience with. It's only logical-it makes perfect sense for someone whose most treasured memories involve exploring the forests and tunnels in and around his house and imagining them as epic adventures would be drawn to dream-Alice and her planewalking powers. It's clear that Miyamoto believes, just as Carroll did, that a childlike zeal and enthusiasm for the world, tempered with travel, wisdom and above all else a healthy respect for the power of dreams and visions, is the key to unlocking the secrets and mysteries of life and attaining enlightenment. A kind of Nirvana, if you will.

The influence Shigeru Miyamoto and Super Mario Bros. had on the development of video games as an artistic medium has been incalculable, and the motifs and concepts introduced with it have become so ingrained in the nature of what games mean to us that we oftentimes take them for granted. But if we pick up the ball American McGee seems to have started rolling and take this in the context of a larger metafictional ontological force, it becomes clear that it most certainly does not end with Miyamoto as Genesis because he, just like McGee, has positioned himself on a wondrous, branching path that stretches out from them both in all directions. The dream-child walks this path because everyone else on it invokes her in some form or another, but it doesn't even truly end with Alice either. Lewis Carroll gives us the language and the intellectual framework to have this discussion, but only because his dreams and experiences gave him the inspiration to codify them. A warm, mystical haze surrounds this path reminding us that there is magic all around if we know where to look: Over the hills, across the sea and within the barrows, perhaps, but dreamy summer mornings, Golden Afternoons and Twilight Language may forever allow us to visit them, so long as there is life left in the virtues and ideals they embody.

For me, it's times like this that cause me to reflect upon my own happy summer memories, where each day was filled with the warmth and freedom that seemed to assure anything was possible. Many a day did I spend doing my best to channel the spirit of dream-Alice, effortlessly immersed in the worlds to be discovered and the ones I could create on my own. Perhaps my very early exposure to Carroll's words has coloured the way my worldview has developed. The estimable Phil Sandifer uses “rabbit hole” as a metaphor for the transfixing hold certain works can have over us and how they can draw us in, seemingly forever. If that's the case, I've no shame in being a “rabbit hole” hipster and claiming the original as my own. As a child during those treasured summers, whenever I admired an especially sunny day or observed the magic in the wind rustling in the trees, I thought of Alice. Whenever I travelled far and away by myself to be alone with my thoughts and imaginations, which, as an only child living in the rural countryside I frequently did, I was Alice. Whenever I looked up and everything I saw was more than what I saw, it was through Alice's eyes I saw and to I still promise myself to make the time to think of her and keep her in my heart and soul. After all, one ca'n't remain a child forever, but the moment one loses a sense of wonder and hope, there's really not much use going on living at all. That the lesson I choose to take away from the dream-child of summer: Fairies are real, magic is everywhere, love is for everything, change will happen and believe possibilities. And, should darkness and pain find you, a brighter day then this will dawn on you someday.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise

Alice moving under skies

Never seen by waking eyes

"How do you get to Wonderland?/Over the hills and here at hand..."

“That’s the end of the story-There’s no more to it than that!”: Mass Effect 3 and Narrative Ownership

I don't usually like covering current events on this blog. Those who want my Gonzo take on the gaming news of the day are encouraged to follow me on Twitter, where I do this obsessively. For Forest of Illusions I usually prefer looking at more abstract concepts or profiling specific games (or characters) that struck a chord with me. In the time it would take me to come up with a thoughtful erudition about some hot-button issue, translate it from ethereal thoughts into a textual form, edit and publish it it'd already be out of date and my thoughts would most likely already have been echoed by someone faster than me and with a bigger podium (hence my somewhat harried attempts to do just that in Summer 2011). However, if you followed the industry this past month as of this writing in any capacity, it's been damn near impossible for you to avoid hearing about Mass Effect 3 and, more specifically, the furor over its ending. I'll give you a minute to peruse that article in case, for some bizarre reason, you were unaware of what this hullabaloo was all about.

Back? OK good.

The discourse in the mainstream gaming media has been cacophonous and holds severe repercussions for how we as video game aficionados interpret a game's meaning. Since I've already written a great deal about this very subject and thinking critically about games is the primary reason I started this site, I guess I'd better toss in my two cents worth.

First of all I have to make the disclaimer that I am not a Mass Effect fan. I appreciate what the series was trying to do (...to a point), but I took one look at the wonky vehicle sections and convoluted combat in the first game and immediately went back to Super Mario Galaxy. I gave Mass Effect 2 a shot due to the reverence it received upon release in 2010 and while I appreciated the refinements to things like combat and travel, I wasn't a fan of the dialogue and morality system, reading through reams and reams of lore to figure out what the heck was going on reminded me of the worst parts of The Lord of the Rings and put me to sleep and the whole suicide mission thing made me a nervous wreck. In my opinion, the series feels like a choose-your-own-adventure book except with more nonsensical quicktime events, a puzzling fixation on softcore titillation and is on the whole indicative of a trend in games I find, to be blunt, patently stupid. However, my thoughts on cinematic and otherwise conventional approaches to narrative in video games are discussion fodder for another day: Basically I decided that Mass Effect was too complicated and too much work for my tastes and just something I wasn't ever going to completely get.

One thing I will praise the trilogy for though is its really progressive approach to feminism and gender roles (regardless of whether or not BioWare intended it to turn out that way), but even there it'll have to be something I applaud on a theoretical level rather than love because of what I experienced. So, needless to say I have zero emotional investment in whatever the ending of Mass Effect 3 turned out to be. However, I do have a very big investment in the way the game is being talked about and that EuroGamer article I linked to is actually is a terrific metaphor for why: The game's ending has touched such a nerve that it's raised issues about meaning and intent and it's actually really justified to ask if Mass Effect 3 as a finished product truly belongs to BioWare and is reflective of the themes they were trying to convey. In other words, the controversy over Mass Effect 3 is the biggest test of the post-structuralist approach to reading and interpretation I outlined back in my Super Mario Bros. series I've yet seen on the mainstream video game stage. In order to fully explain why though, we should take the time to look carefully at what the Mass Effect fans and their detractors are actually saying.

Let's take the self-professed “Retake Mass Effect” people first. These are people who have a significant emotional investment in the game's story and universe and who, for one reason or another, feel the trilogy-closing curtain call at the end of Mass Effect 3 either did not live up to their expectations for an epic finale, did not do enough to tie up loose ends or simply did not make logical coherent narrative sense. Maybe these concerns are valid, maybe not: As a non-fan I can't critique the work or their reading of it and thus am not in a position to make any judgment calls in this regard. That said, the actual demands the Retake Mass Effect camp are making to BioWare are...bold, to put it kindly. They are in turn requesting additional material via ether downloadable content or expanded universe lore to “better explain” the events of the ending, calling for the ending to be retconned outright and launching initiatives to rewrite the whole game themselves to better suit their interpretation of how they feel it “should” have ended. In addition to submitting their list of grievances, they have taken it upon themselves to, in a seriously surreal turn of events, mail hundreds of cupcakes to BioWare's offices because reasons.

As easy as it is to point and laugh at the Retake Mass Effect campaigners for acting “spoiled”, “demanding” or “entitled” (as indeed the vast majority of the counterarguments leveled at them in the mainstream press seem to) it's equally easy to see how they could have come to the conclusion that this was a reasonable course of action and perfectly within their rights. Mass Effect as a series has always claimed to stress individual choice, proudly touting that every little action the player makes will make a difference and have consequences and that each playthrough can be radically different depending on the choices made. In other words, BioWare seems to have been selling the series as a kind of traditional RPG in the original tabletop sense of the term: The player has complete autonomy to exude a level of authorial control over the events of the game and craft it to suit his or her own needs, values, opinions and whims. At least, this is how the discourse from BioWare and the games' trademark playstyle has been interpreted by this group of fans. In sum then, the Retake Mass Effect fans feel, rightly or wrongly, that BioWare's focus on choice and branching narratives in their games means that the whole narrative belongs to them, the playersXreaders, and that they are entitled to deciding how it ends. To invoke the tri-sphere model for reading I proposed back in my Super Mario Bros. essay, they want all the power in determining textual meaning to fall to the Personal Experience sphere.

On the other side we have the opponents of Retake Mass Effect: The many and varied game journalists and pundits who have added their voices to the din of the past month to criticize these fans and rebuke their claims of ownership. I hesitate to reduce a wide and disparate group of people and opinions down to a few bullet points, but as many of them seem to carry the same flavour I at least feel somewhat justified in summarising what I see as the major arguments they're employing. The anti-Retake bunch, put most generally, seem to feel the claims made by the Retake crowd are completely and totally invalid because, bluntly, the fans aren't BioWare. Because the fans didn't write the game's story (though the fans would actually probably disagree at this fundamental level) they don't get a say in deciding how the trilogy ends and should accept whatever BioWare threw out at them because BioWare are the authors and are trying to make an aesthetic and thematic point with their work. Sometimes this is dressed up in the language of art, and that art shouldn't always be about pleasing people (which is a true statement, but not in the way these people are using it in my opinion) but the sentiment remains the same: BioWare are the authors, the fans are not, and only the authors get to decide what a work says and what it's about. This group also militantly opposes any attempt to elaborate on or alter the ending of Mass Effect 3 in any way because they feel it would compromise artistic integrity in favour of pandering to the series' whiny, childish and demanding fanbase.

Just as it's easy to see where the Retake Mass Effect fans are coming from, I argue it's easy to see how their detractors have come to their conclusions. Emboldened by a love of video games as a creative medium and armed with the language of art, they've spent a big part of their careers trying to in some sense “validate” games as a medium, perhaps against those on the outside who would criticize its legitimacy as an art form. Probably more accurately and relevantly though, they've also spent a great deal of their careers trying to corral ravenous, immature fans and defend themselves from the vile hate speech that is leveled at them with disturbing regularity and frequency. It's not difficult to imagine game journalists would have a knee-jerk reaction to a situation like this and immediately write off the actions of a group like Retake Mass Effect as the usual theatrics and not feel they're worthy of any attention. And, to be honest, the Retake crowd doesn't make a good case for itself when it pulls dumb stunts like filing a formal FTC complaint against BioWare and EA and unleashing their own army of cyberbullies. And cupcakes.

Now that we've defended the integrity of the anti-Retake people though, let's step back and look at what their core arguments are actually implying. By claiming that the fans have no say in deciding how Mass Effect 3's story plays out, they're essentially saying two things: Firstly, they are, in the eyes of the fans, completely flying in the face of what they perceive the series' entire set of core values to be. To them, Mass Effect has always been about their choice, from the first character creation screen to the last fork in the road in the climax of the third game (yeah, I did enough cursory research to have a basic idea about what happens). To hear from their opponents that their choice doesn't matter is completely incongruous and will only serve to make them angrier and more passionately dedicated to their cause. Secondly, and more importantly and relevantly to us, what the anti-Retake side is really saying with this impassioned appeal to sanctity of fiction and authorial vision is that, in post-structuralist terms, they want to give all the power in deciding what a text means to the author. This is, frankly, no better and no more satisfying a concluding argument than what the Retake side is offering from a Lacanian perspective.

Most curiously, neither side seems to be paying much attention to the actual text itself. What actually happens at the end of Mass Effect 3, or in the various possible endings? Not just a rote summary of events (like, say, the one I totally didn't read on Giant Bomb and Wikipedia), but what literally transpires in the ending cutscene that has provoked such powerful emotions on both sides? More importantly than even that though, how does this connect with the themes BioWare claim to be exploring with the Mass Effect Trilogy? Has anyone from BioWare come out to explain what the core themes and motifs of the series are and how they relate to the finale? Has anyone bothered to ask? Or have you all been too busy screaming at one another about who has the better claim of ownership over the narrative? Almost the first rule of doing a serious upper-level critical reading of a text is taking these kinds of questions into consideration.

For the sake of argument, let's say BioWare did indeed have specific things they wanted to address with Mass Effect 3. Even then though, it's entirely possible the finished product doesn't adequately reflect this intent: Whenever you write something, there is by necessity a translation taking place from the hazy ideas you had in your head to physical, textual reality and maybe some of them didn't properly make the transition all that effectively (I had actually planned on doing a whole article going into more detail along these lines before this nonsense came up). Likewise, it's equally plausible for an author to neglect a certain aspect of the finished product causing the readers to interpret it in a way completely contrary to the one that was intended.

Look at the famous example of Bruce Springsteen's “Born in the U.S.A.”, a deeply cynical song about a returning Vietnam veteran horribly mistreated and abandoned by his community upon returning home from the war jarringly and purposefully incongruously set to a towering, anthemic melody. It was infamously misinterpreted by the kinds of people who don't pay attention to lyrics in songs and only focus on catchy hooks and pretty noises to be a flag-waving patriotic anthem. The problem was so widespread it was amusingly picked by Ronald Reagan as the theme song for his re-election campaign before being told in no uncertain terms by Springsteen he missed the point entirely. In Mass Effect terms, think again about that Eurogamer article and Commander Shepard herself: BioWare wrote the character to be male by default and didn't pay any attention to how the story would play out if fans chose to play a woman. This resulted in Shepard becoming heralded as a near-perfect example of post-feminist progressive thinking even though later events proved that had BioWare taken into account the fact people might actually care about her when they initially designed the game she most certainly would not have been.

Were Springsteen's lazier fans right to claim “Born in the U.S.A.” as a patriotic anthem even though the lyrics and Springsteen's intent argue it's not? Not really, because the lyrical content of the work and Springsteen's own quick response made it clear they were blatantly and obviously reading the song incorrectly and being intellectually irresponsible. Are BioWare's fans right to claim Commander Shepard is a feminist icon despite BioWare not intending her to be such? Absolutely, because she displays all the trappings of such in the finished product and that's solely a result of BioWare not taking the time and effort to make their far-less-progressive politics clear in the text that got passed on to the readers. The thing about the triple-pronged Lacanian approach is that it relies on balance: In order to read a text thoroughly, as I've argued in the past, the three spheres must be weighed against one another and sometimes two of the three cancel out the third.

Which brings us back to the subject at hand. The thing about the Commander Shepard example is that a lot of the fodder for the argument in favour of reading her as a feminist icon comes from the games themselves, the actual texts. Even though this wasn't BioWare's intent, what they actually wrote that made it into the finished product lends itself very nicely to being interpreted as such. In other words, the text seemingly pretty clearly contradicts the word of the author. This is nontrivial: A finished text is going to live on far past its author and as long as people are alive and able to experience it, a text will always lend itself to new interpretations. That's why there are about a billion different readings of something like, say Lewis Carroll's diptych tour-de-force Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through The Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There: It's longevity and endless versatility as a work lends itself to countless questions and points of discussion and Carroll wanted to make sure his books would stimulate people's imaginations for generations to come. If BioWare and its fans want Mass Effect to last and stand as one of the great works of the video game medium (as many are already claiming it is) this is absolutely something all sides are going to have to take into consideration.

If we're going to civilise this discourse, the obvious first step is to sit everyone down and take a good, long hard look at what Mass Effect 3 actually is: Does the finished product adequately reflect the themes its authors attempted to imbue it with? If not, what does it say to readers instead? Unfortunately for the journalists, the simple fact Mass Effect 3 exists as a text, not to mention the fact BioWare have already shown their work can take on a life of its own apart from their intentionality means fans really do have a say in interpreting its meaning. However, the Retake crowd shouldn't celebrate victory either because they need to come to terms with the notion that theirs' is not the only reading possible. Perhaps their complaints do indeed have merit and deserve to be heard (again, I'm not in a position to say), but if they're going to make any kind of legitimate case for themselves they need draw on actual textual evidence to back up their arguments, not histrionic language of entitlement.

There. That's done and out of my system. Can we go back to talking about more enjoyable things now please?