"But, even in the west, the Rainmaker vanishes. No one needs him anymore.": Linkblogging at the end of Skyrim?

This isn't going to be a really massive update: I do have big plans for this site I'm busily working on behind the scenes to set in motion and I have a major blog project unrelated to this one I'm currently scrambling to get into a reasonably presentable form. But, there was one piece of recent game industry news I absolutely had to say something about.

As I'm writing this, Bethesda has just announced the cessation of development on and support for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. While minor patches will continue to be released for awhile, Dragonborn, the expansion pack that returns players to Solstheim, the remote northern island first seen in the Bloodmoon expansion for The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, will be the last piece of official Bethsoft DLC for Skyrim. It's a more than fitting end for the game, but the announcement has left me with somewhat conflicting emotions.

The news has been difficult for me to deal with for a number of reasons. For one thing I have a habit of intentionally not beating many games: When I was young I somehow got it into my head that if I beat a game, then that was sort of the end and I couldn't enjoy it any more. This is of course silly: I've played through Super Mario Bros. alone a frighteningly incalculable number of times over the years without it ever becoming trite or hackneyed and I've gotten 100% on Metroid Prime and Alice: Madness Returns at least four times apiece. I continue to play SSX Tricky over a decade after its release in spite of the fact there is literally nothing more for me to unlock or accomplish that physically exists on the disc. Even Skyrim I must have played through at minimum a dozen times already if for no other reason than how often I've had to start from scratch thanks to corrupted saves brought about by mods conflicting with each other and even the official DLC packs and updates. But the fact remains I remain, at least subconsciously, uncomfortable with the finality the end of a video game signifies.

And The Elder Scrolls is different from other video game series. More than any other game I can think of, each TES outing relies on the dynamic interaction between players, developers and the physical game itself. Tamriel is a game world that on every conceivable level works under the assumption that it will be shaped by each of these forces working cooperatively-The world of Skyrim exists only because they collectively want it to. It could be convincingly argued this is true of any video game, possibly any work of fiction for that matter, but The Elder Scrolls is overtly, textually *about* this at a basic, fundamental level. And among Elder Scrolls games Skyrim means something very special, at least to me. It's too early for me to say exactly what, but it's something.

As a result, even though the end of Bethsoft support for Skyrim certainly doesn't mean Skyrim will necessarily cease to exist, there is still a palpable sense of loss to be felt here, at least for me. Yes, Skyrim is now fully in the hands of the ever-vibrant Elder Scrolls mod community, who continue to amaze me with the absolutely unbelievable things they can do with the game and who will most assuredly continue to support it for many years to come (there are even still modders supporting 2006's Oblivion and 2002's Morrowind to this day), but I still can't help but feel one of the engines of creation has run down and a major sense of creative drive is no longer with us. It feels like part of Skyrim, and a very significant part, has died.

This is neither the time or place for me to go into great detail about exactly what Skyrim has meant to me over the past two years: There's far too much for me to say and I'm still not entirely sure about how I'm going to go about saying it (nor am I, for that matter, terribly confidant I can put it it into words at all), but I do fully intend to make Skyrim and The Elder Scrolls series as a whole the subject of a major, large-scale project of mine at some point in the future. What I do want to do with this space is take a little time to gather some initial thoughts about the game's legacy and how the world it's helped create will live on, even without Bethesda. Unfortunately, I don't have a ton of my own at this time. What I do have is access to some very touching things I've read from other people. I suppose that makes this entry little more than a glorified linkblog, but that's all I've got right now and I would highly recommend checking out each of these articles regardless. They're not explicitly about the end of Bethsoft support for Skyrim, but they all feel oddly fitting in the wake of it. Sometimes things work out that way, as if the gentle touch of the ideaspace is subtly reacting to our collective zeitgeist.

Sky above.

Voice within.

Wind guide you.

-Arngeir of the Greybeards

Skyrim is unique among contemporary so-called AAA video games, and likewise Bethesda is unique in terms of studios that put out AAA games. Destructoid's Jim Sterling noticed this too, and sat down with them for a very frank and candid interview about the state of the modern video game industry, its overall sustainability, and how games like Skyrim show the way forward. I'd actually go even further and say that Skyrim, and the larger Elder Scrolls work as a whole, might actually be wholly unique in all of pop fiction. It's certainly consistently proven itself to be the one exception to pretty much every rule I can come up with for franchise Soda Pop Art.

Eurogamer has an extensive, and very beautiful, interview with Jeremy Soule, the composer behind the soundtracks for, among many others, Secret of Evermore, Guild Wars 2, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. In it Soule talks about near-death experiences, the spiritual dimension behind his music and his inspirations. He also muses on music's ability to allow us in some ways to channel those who came before us and speaks not of “composing” but “transcribing” and makes the act of writing and listening to music sound like an almost transcendental, magickal experience. Those who've read the entry where I name-check Avital Ronell as one of my favourite philosophers will know this is a statement that speaks to me. I think Soule might just have it figured out, and I feel similarly about video games. Soule also spends some time talking about the Kickstarter project to fund his first symphony, The Northerner, which will be an extension and continuation of the themes and stylings of his soundtrack to Skyrim. While The Northerner won't be The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim II, I do find it telling that a guy with the kind of mind and list of credits Soule has felt moved and touched enough by Skyrim to revisit it in a work of this magnitude.

The Northerner is due out this September at the earliest, and you can hear a musical sketch of what it might sound like here.

Finally, Skyrim itself might be given new life via the Oculus Rift, quite possibly the single most exciting thing to come out of the current video game industry climate. Indie developer and YouTube user Cymatic Bruce has gotten Skyrim running on the Rift and recorded a video to show us his first impressions. I've already spoken at great length about how much I'm looking forward to the Rift, and I won't lie and say Skyrim wasn't one of the games I've been most hoping to see in VR. Up until now though I had assumed that was only a pipedream. Even if no new content were to be made for Skyrim, experiencing it again on the Oculus Rift would be like playing an entirely new game.

As fancy and as technically fascinating as the Oculus Rift is though, the key thing it contributes to Skyrim is the same thing the mod community and The Northerner do: It reminds us of and continues to reinforce all the thoughts, ideas, emotions and experiences the game stands for and has allowed us to share between ourselves these past two years. Bethesda's involvement with it may be over, but things like this might just ensure that Skyrim lives on not just in the hearts and minds of its people, but because of them.

The eruption of Red Mountain was caused when the meteor Baar Dau crashed into Vivec City following the disappearance of Vivec, despite the efforts of Morrowind's best mages.

-From Lore-Based Loading Screens, a featured mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

“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.

“Seemed Like The Way Of The Future”: VR Mk. II and Video Game Narrative

Note: So clearly what I'm talking about here is the Oculus Rift. Equally clearly, I have absolutely no idea that's what it is in this piece and seem under the impression it's of John Carmack's design and not Palmer Lucky's and unaware it's an independent company, which it is. To be fair to me, I was far from the only journalist to make this mistake and the coverage of the Rift at E3 2012 was spotty at best, leading people to make posts like this. I'll leave this up as my larger points on VR are ones I still stand by, despite getting the details of the machine itself pitifully wrong. I hope to have a full review of the Oculus Rift once the consumer version ships, as well as a follow-up on the promise and potential of VR sometime later in the year (2013).

Header video is, of course from The Angry Video Game Nerd, one of my favourite shows ever. If you're in the small minority who still aren't familiar with James Rolfe and Mike Matei and would like to see more from them, please check out their site here.



Well, at this rate my rule about “not covering current events unless particularly relevant” is starting to sound downright farcical...

So E3 2012 was this past week as of this writing. I wasn't physically there thanks to prohibitive travel costs and lack of an official press certification, but I was able to follow the breaking news in real time via a massive amount of streaming content, on-floor video, LiveTweets, instant recaps and my own personal array of spy satellites controlled from the Moon Base where I secretly plot to take over the world. Oh wait, you weren't supposed to know about that last part. Anyway, despite this year's expo being an overwhelmingly tepid and lukewarm affair that showed the industry in a creatively bankrupt holding pattern, there were a few interesting reveals of note. First was Ubisoft's ambitious-sounding new IP Watch Dogs, which I'm sure you'll find is the darling of the games media right now and the talk of the Internet and which hints it might tackle some intriguing, sophisticated and timely themes about the world socio-technoscientific zeitgeist. It certainly deserves a closer examination, and I'll be happy to rise to the challenge when it's actually a thing.

The second, and more important, reveal in my book is one that has baffilingly received very little attention, even on the show floor itself. I find this inconceivable because for me it was the absolute highlight of the entire weeklong expo. Tucked away in a little alcove and separate from the main conference hustle and bustle, John Carmack, whom I've expressed quite a fondness for on this blog before, was demonstrating a side project he's been working on that showed off some truly astonishing technology and potential. With a funky looking pair of goggles literally held together with a duct tape headstrap, Carmack hopes to do no less than bring back that electronic pipedream of the early 1990s, Virtual Reality, and damn well do it properly this time. What's even more unbelievable, if my informants from Los Angeles can be trusted, is that he's actually managed to do it. Describing how he's pulled it off requires some rather muddling digital computer lingo that I don't entirely understand, so let's let the man himself explain in his own words here and here.

What I find so exceptionally laudable about what Carmack says is that, from the way he tells it, this new kind of Virtual Reality system finally does what everyone who was taken in by VR in the 1990s wanted it to do: Fully immerse the player in a realistic-feeling digital world. Even better than that is Carmack's drive to make the materials to build the headset freely available to actual players as a kit that can be purchased for a price that's frankly scarily affordable. This is a conscious, targeted return to the hacker and HAM Radio roots of computer hobbyism that makes up a not-insignificant part of the video game community: A breathtakingly forward-thinking approach to an intellectual tradition that dates back to the Altair 8800 and the BBC Micro. The contrast between Carmack's spirited little demo and the vapid sludge I saw on display at the EA, Sony and Nintendo press conferences was completely night and day. John Carmack is truly the real deal and seems to have the healthy future of both the industry and the medium square in mind. Frankly, where he goes I'll follow.

As excited as I am for the hacker-positive aspects of Carmack's new project and as much as its ramifications and what it reveals about the culture of video game fans deserves careful attention and analysis, what I find most promising about it is what it illustrates about the way video games handle narrative. I had my suspicions before, but this new project has made me certain: John Carmack is not just a whiz kid techie with a bottom-up attitude, he's the first developer since Shigeru Miyamoto to effortlessly grasp what makes video games unique amongst creative media and I'm overjoyed he now works for Bethesda. To explain a little bit more about what I mean and why I'm making this claim, I need to bring up some things Sony showed off at E3 this year.

Sony's press conference was essentially one great big party thrown for the so-called “hardcore gaming crowd” and the loyal PlayStation faithful. It seemed to go over rather well (and it damn well had to given what Sony's fortunes are right now), especially coming off of the sleazy EA show, the fever dream of a Ubisoft presser and the supposedly-disappointing Microsoft showing. I was personally entirely unmoved, but my reasons why are part of a larger attitude I see present in gamer culture and are better saved for another day. One thing both me and my colleagues were in complete agreement of however was that Wonderbook for the PlayStation 3 is an absolutely nonsensical and pointless waste of time. In case you are unfamiliar with the madness that is Wonderbook, allow me to illuminate you: Wonderbook is basically Sony's stab at an Augmented Reality programme where players stand in front of the PlayStation Eye, hold a book-like tablet and wave the PlayStation Move controller over it to make things appear on screen. This was demonstrated by a Harry Potter licensed game where aspiring wizards use the Move controller like a magic wand to turn pages and interact with words to do things like cast spells and trigger minigames. Sony claims this will revolutionize the act of reading and allow books to “transport you to other worlds”.

Let's leave aside for the moment the fact that books are already designed to trigger the imagination in their own way and in no way require motion control nor Augmented Reality to do this and the troubling notion that all of the Wonderbook titles seem to be written for kindergartners. What I instead want to focus on is the Sony's notion, very problematic by me, that video games and books somehow need one another. The existence of Wonderbook tells me that Sony thinks books would be improved by slathering on some token rote interactivity and, conversely, that video games are improved by being connected more intimately to books. By implying the mediums are in some way codependent, and logically in some way related, this cheapens them both because in my view books and games couldn't be more different in the way they interact with readers. Books, while dependent to some extent on readers using their imagination to flesh out the look-and-feel of the world, are generally passive media that rely on a linear form of narrative built around character development that is slowly and methodically revealed to the reader. The story has already been told, in other words, and the reader just has to guess how it will turn out. Whereas video games, as I've argued, are designed so players can generatively build the story in tandem with the developers (when they even have a story, which is not even a prerequisite). Given this logic, what is the purpose of Wonderbook? If the book's story is open to player agency, it's not much of a book and if the story is already mostly written the player's role is largely irrelevant. It's a bad game and a bad book all rolled into one: Like one of the potions in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim that gives you an error message and disappears when you mix incompatible ingredients, much less than the sum of its parts.

There's a bothersome habit amongst game developers and journalists that, because of the medium's troubled history with moral guardians and its general struggle for legitimacy, to attempt to justify its existence by comparing games to books and movies. If they could somehow show games can tell as good a story and provide as good an experience as the best novels and films, they reckon, this will finally prove video games are a valid and respectable form of art and entertainment. This logic is, simply put, wrong. Video games are most certainly a valid and respectable form of art and entertainment, but not for these reasons at all. When developers operate from this mentality we get calculated misfires like Wonderbook and, more to the point, Quantic Dream.

For those unfamiliar with Quantic Dream, they are a positively vainglorious development studio headed by the unflappable and controversial David Cage who has spent the majority of his career trying to beat Hollywood at its own game. Responsible for such massively-hyped hits as Indigo Prophecy and Heavy Rain, Cage's group has embodied better than any other studio the trend to make “cinematic” games. By hiring A-list actors and jockeying to remain on the cutting-edge of realistic motion capture technology, Quantic Dream consistently aims to provide the most realistic games with the most nuanced and sophisticated narrative. Cage often boasts the stories in his games are as good or better than those of the most dramatic movies and are singularly responsible for proving games are art, an argument that might hold water if any of his games were written well. If my bitterness and apathy hasn't already betrayed my positionality, Cage's is not a viewpoint I am especially fond of and I've found both of his previous efforts to be deeply unpleasant experiences. Both Indigo Prophecy and especially Heavy Rain are built around making decisions at crucial moments to activate different paths on a ludicrously branching narrative. It's definitely interactivity and the player is a crucial component to the game's story to be sure, but not in any meaningful way in my view. Mostly these games play out like really fancy, dolled-up choose-you-own-adventure novels to me and any investment to be gained from them comes from the themes discussed by the characters during the constantly playing narrative which is so carefully-constructed I feel distant from it. It's all the reasons I gave for not liking Mass Effect but taken to the logical limit.

The reason I bring up David Cage and Quantic Dream is because they were another developer to unveil a new project at Sony's E3 conference. Dubbed Beyond: Two Souls (or 3EYOND, I'm actually not sure which), it will apparently chronicle the story of Jodie Holmes, played by Academy Award-nominated actor Ellen Page and deal with Cage's own ruminations on death, mortality and the afterlife. The trailer revealed at E3 had the commendable gonads to be several minutes long, rendered entirely using the in-game engine and show off no interactive gameplay whatsoever to the packed auditorium of veteran games journalists. Never have I seen a finer demonstration of David Cage's opinion of players, interactivity and the basic fundamentals of the video game medium.

Both Wonderbook and Beyond: Two Souls are symptomatic of a big problem the games industry has in my opinion. This constant, insecure pursuit of comparisons to books and movies misses the core value and purpose of video games as a medium which is, as I've argued the ability to effortlessly share experiences and build a shared world through which an infinite number of singular stories can be told. This is something neither books nor movies can do in my view because they are passive media. Without that crucial element of player agency, there's no tangible connection to the fictional world (this is of course not to say one cannot get invested in a book or movie; there's a difference between relating to something and experiencing it). Books and movies are very good at telling stories other people have written and provocative themes can be explored through them both textually and metatextually, but they are at heart still based around linear narratives readers can look at and critique from afar. Video games are something completely different and to conflate the three of them is spectacularly wrongheaded in my opinion. It's like in the Uncharted series, which is designed from the ground up to be like an action movie. Players assume the role of an Indiana Jones analogue and move from setpiece to setpiece and magnificent cinematic cutscene to magnificent cinematic cutscene. Even the mechanics themselves belie the action movie influence: Players do not “die”, they “throw the take” and have to “redo the scene”. Everything about these games gives the impression developer Naughty Dog have a very specific story to tell and if the player deviates from the literal script it makes things inconvenient and annoying for them. Player agency has been compromised in favour of linear narrative, and I don't think there's anything more self-destructive than that for a game. I dread a world where every game is like Heavy Rain or Uncharted.

This brings us back to John Carmack's big idea. Carmack, and his partners at id and Bethesda, understand the importance of agency in a way Sony, Naughty Dog and Quantic Dream don't seem to be able to. It's telling Carmack and id made their name via seminal first-person shooters like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake, which were all groundbreaking early steps towards immersing the player in a game world in a way that had never been attempted before, at least not with any real success. The big revelation these games ushered in is right in the name of the genre they helped codify: “First-Person Shooter”. For the first time, there were games that put the player literally in the shoes of their character, making the proverbial link between them and the game even more direct and intuitive. It's difficult to overstate the effect this shift had on the way players interacted with games: No matter how seamless and intimate Super Mario Bros. was, there's truly something to be said for the ability to actually see through the eyes of a character. It simply adds a layer to the experience that hadn't been there before. What id's games did for the first time was change the role of the player from puppeteer to active agent within the game world itself (Miyamoto eventually found a way to change the paradigm here too, but that's another story). Now, with his new experiments with head-mounted VR displays, John Carmack may very well be taking this core concept to the next stage.

If video games are, as I've argued, fundamentally about sharing or creating a generative experience and the point of player agency is to blur the boundaries between the players, developers and game world than a viable first-person perspective is a logical way to facilitate this process. Likewise, competent and effective motion control and well-implemented stereoscopic 3D are further technological ways the medium of games can invoke to make provocative statements (the latter is also important for visualizing 3D space and kinesthesia, as I have of course argued before). Setting the accuracy of the statements aside for the moment, the intimate, pure sense of “I found this” or “I saw this” or “I made this happen” which dates back to at least Super Mario Bros. is integral to the way video games convey themes and I feel Virtual Reality could be the singularity at which technology will finally be able to demonstrate this in its purest form. In my opinion the more streamlined we make interfacing with our games, the easier it will become to connect and resonate with them because it will be easier for us to feel like the experiences onscreen are actually happening to us. This is exactly what Shigeru Miyamoto wanted to evoke through Super Mario Bros. and is the core difference between active and passive media and why trying to shoehorn a linear narrative onto a video game is such a poor choice in my opinion. The way I see it, games like Uncharted, Heavy Rain and Mass Effect series would all be far more evocative and powerful titles if, rather than pausing the game every few seconds to play a lovingly rendered CGI cutscene with professional actors angsting about choices the player has or has not made, players are confronted with those choices and the themes of the work at a visceral, personal level because they have been made to feel an intimate part of the world or narrative.

In the not-too-distant future I'll take a closer look at a game that shows how this alternative can work brilliantly, but for now I want to concentrate on the potential Virtual Reality has to be a perfect fit for this oft-overlooked model of critique and, frankly, revel in the knowledge I live in a world where it can not only exist, but exist in an open, generative, bottom-up form that's true to a pioneering ideal of the medium in a way unlike anything else I've seen in recent memory. There may very well come a time when this too is subsumed by the soulless corporate lowest-common-denominator chasers or misguided hipster artists that have the run of the industry today, but for right now let me bask in the afterglow of an unexpected victory for not only the video game spirit that caused people like me to fall in love with the medium a long time ago, but also the playful underclass that helped light the spark of that ideal in the first place. If this is where one of the medium's leading lights is pushing the medium to go, then I for one am behind him totally and completely and hope he gets all the support and resources he needs. I'd adore for this to be our future and can't wait to see how inspired developers utilize the potential of this new technology to make the most evocative artistic video game works to date. Just this once, I hope a so-called “innovation” lives up to its hype instead of becoming a last-minute cash grab in the dying throws of a generation desperately tossed out by publishers who know they can no longer compete, destined to be abandoned as quickly as they were introduced.

Please, oh please let me be right about this one.

“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.

***********************************************************************************


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.

The Nintendo WiiU: What's It All About?

Ever since it was formally unveiled at E3 this past June, there has been much debate and discussion regarding Nintendo’s upcoming successor to the Wii: The confusing and confusingly-named WiiU. With its bizarre tablet controller and near-PlayStation 3 level specs, gamers and industry followers alike have been scratching their collective heads trying to figure out exactly what Nintendo’s strategy is, if there is one, and what this new console is actually for. Nintendo are rarely ones to leap into a major launch without a game plan and are certainly ones to buck convention, so in many ways this is a logical move by them, and yet, for many this isn’t quite enough to justify the WiiU’s existence

I’ll freely admit, even as a Nintendo fan from the very beginning and someone who staunchly defended the Nintendo 64, Nintendo GameCube and Wii, even I was baffled by the reveal. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what the purpose was meant to be, why Nintendo was releasing another underpowered machine after how the Wii turned out in the minds of many and what on Earth the point of that ridiculous tablet was. In the months since, however, I may just have done an about face on the WiiU and now think it may just be one of the most brilliant moves Nintendo have yet done. I think I at long last “get” the WiiU and what its purpose is, and it’s all due to three seemingly unrelated bits of industry news. Let me explain:

One person who isn’t at all uncertain about the WiiU’s future prospects may also be one of the most surprising: John Carmack, the legendary co-founder of id Software and one of the many talented folks behind groundbreaking games like Wolfenstein 3D,  Doom, Quake and the upcoming Rage, has enthusiastically and completely thrown his support behind Nintendo’s new project. In an interview with IndustryGamers from earlier this month, Carmack made the claim that the WiiU is a “slam dunk” for id Software titles and Tech 5 games. He seemed particularly impressed by the controversial new tablet controller, stating:

"I think there may be more good uses of that [Wii U tablet] than [there are for] the current generation with Kinect and Move... there’s clearly a subset of games for which things like that are appropriate for,"…"We’ve been going on with how can we use those types of motion things with Rage and it’s hard to take a game that’s fundamentally designed around a controller and get value out of doing some of those other things, while adding extra touch interfaces there, that seems like something that almost every game could make some use of without it being just like, 'Oh, we have to do something like this.' Because if you remember, when the DS came out, there was a lot of talk about how, ‘Isn’t this going to be just a gimmick?’ But really it did turn out to be quite a good interface to build on."

Carmack’s comments came the same week as some other buzz he generated regarding mobile gaming and cloud computing. Carmack believes that not only is it “unquestionable” that mobile technology, like Apple’s iOS-capable devices and its legions of competitors, will continue to increase at an exponential rate, but will soon eclipse what is currently possible on home consoles. At the same time, however, interest in Triple-A titles on consoles like the XBOX 360 and PlayStation 3 has not decreased, but rather increased, stressing that the two markets are growing in parallel. Most interestingly, he sees the future of these developing technologies as arriving at a very unique place indeed:

“Could the bottom drop out on the triple A market because everyone’s playing Angry Birds? It doesn’t seem to be happening. The numbers don’t show that. We’re selling more big titles than ever before, despite having all of these other platforms out there. So it looks like it’s parallel growth rather than one stealing from the other. But platform wise, you could certainly imagine a future where, instead of having your console, you have your mobile device and it talks to your TV and when you want the experience on your big screen with the surround sound coming out of there, it’s still on the same device."

That last comment is particularly important to my overall theory, and I’ll return to it a little later on.

The third piece of what might seem like totally isolated news pieces that got me thinking is the minor upset caused when it was announced earlier this month that Nintendo would be releasing Pokémon-themed app for Japanese iOS and Android devices. This bombshell announcement caused quite a bit of a stir, with some claiming that this is the first sign Nintendo might be eyeing to get out of the console business, much as SEGA did a decade prior. Nintendo quickly issued a follow-up, assuring fans and investors this was not the case. Rather, the app came about because The Pokémon Company is technically a separate entity from Nintendo which only holds partial control over the franchise and can’t actually prevent TPC from releasing a game if there’s enough internal support for it. Despite Nintendo’s assurances, though, I can’t help thinking there might be an even greater plan at work, and it was John Carmack that got me thinking.

If Carmack is right, then what we think of as a video game console at a fundamental level is soon going to change and change dramatically. In the not-too-distant future, there will come a day when consoles will basically be interface ports from mobile devices to the television. What does this have to do with the WiiU and The Pokémon Company’s interesting, though perhaps questionable, choice of platform? Well, for one, look at that controller. What’s the one, universal reaction everyone in attendance at Nintendo’s E3 Press Conference had to it? What is the WiiU controller, essentially? That’s right: An iPad with control sticks and buttons. As soon as I remembered that, suddenly John Carmack’s cryptic comments and the bizarre move by The Pokémon Company made total sense: What the WiiU is, and the reason it exists is quite simply to provide the first steps into that mobile-centric future Carmack imagined. That’s also why TPC is making overtures to support Android and iOS: neither they nor their parent company are at all thinking about dropping out of the hardware business: Rather, they’re keeping a close eye on the booming mobile market because they are envisioning a day when those machines will be the dominant gaming platforms and will link directly with Nintendo’s home consoles. The WiiU and its tablet controller then are by no means mere me-too gimmickry on the part of Nintendo; instead, they are an essential gateway into a new era in the industry that increasingly seems not only possible, but probable and unavoidable.

In the time since I originally started drafting this piece, quite a number of other sources have added their voices to Carmack’s in their support of the WiiU: Reps from EA, Activision-Blizzard, Ubisoft and Insomniac have all come out to heap massive praise on Nintendo’s new console. While the bottom line stresses the more developer-friendly appeal of the system, there does seem to be an underlying interest amongst all these developers that this controller is something special. We’ll all have to wait and see how it turns out and I’m certain there are many gamers still unconvinced, but, at the moment and at least to me, there’s a strong possibility that the WiiU could in fact become, in the words of Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot, a “…huge improvement over what can be done in the console business today”.

Sources: IndustryGamers, Gamasutra, GamesRadar