“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?

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

Butterfly High

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

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 I'll chalk that up to Lucy Liu primarily: Her subdued, withdrawn and nonchalant, crucially not boisterous or confrontational, delivery of lines like “I'll get over it”, “I'll get it next time”, “Easy come, easy go”,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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But What Does It All Mean?”: Lacanian Reading and Video Games (Part II)

OK, let's back up and take a look at what I just did. In brief, I wrote a basic little analytical essay about Super Mario Bros., drawing conclusions about it based upon what I could glean about Shigeru Miyamoto's inspirations and worldviews and the actual text of the game. I started off talking about how Dave Sheff recounts elements of Miyamoto's biography, and then I took that information and dovetailed it into an essay in which I essentially argue that Super Mario Bros. is a piece of radical deconstructivist commentary on the video game medium and player's expectations circa 1985 and, furthermore, serves as an outlet for Shigeru Miyamoto to share experiences and emotions with an audience. What I've done is constructed an argument consciously and explicitly out of the first two layers of a Lacanian reading: The actual text and authorial intent. There is, however, a bit more work to be done because there is, of course, a third level to this analysis.

The third level is perhaps the most difficult to come to terms with as it is fluid and defies easy explanatory devices: It is the way in which the text resonated with its audience. Put another way, it's what the text means to the individual reader. This is the part that probably isn't taught in most English classes (though talented ones can implicitly foster it) as it cannot be quantitatively measured or tested: It directly calls upon the reader's positionality, that is the unique set of preconceptions, associations and experiences that any given reader, and only that given reader, brings to the discussion table. What does the text mean to you? What did you, personally, take away from it? This to me is the most revelatory part of the theory Felman, via Lacan, outlines and when joined to the other sides creates a powerful dynamic reaction that yields practically limitless explanatory power. Because then, and only then, can we finally tease out what any given text actually means: By looking at it in the context of these three dynamically interacting spheres. Meaning isn't one thing that a text inherently has: It's not something that the author “hid” under layers of irritating, obfuscating metaphors and symbols and is cruelly making you “dig up” and “unearth”. No, meaning is an intangible and ever-changing thing that is generated by the act of reading itself through the dynamic interaction of these three core principles.

I've already touched upon this third sphere to an extent already: Much of the leverage I have to claim Super Mario Bros. is a work of radical deconstructive game design in the previous essay is because that's what it plays like to me. This isn't something Miyamoto has expressly confirmed, but it's present and noticeable to me when I put it in the cultural context of the time. It's also something other critics have picked up on, so I'm not the only one to notice it. To continue my argument, I should logically now explain to you what the game says to me as a playerXreader. I could now rattle off a few comfortable paragraphs about how I interpret Miyamoto's vision within the context of the game, but there's an additional wrinkle here: This is Super Mario Bros. In many ways, this is the game that single-handedly made me fall in love with the medium and showed off its full potential for creative and artistic expression. It is impossible for me to disentangle it from my own childhood memories of staring with rapture at a hazy 1980s television set and having my life changed forever. So, for me to do this properly, I have to do a bit of reminiscing and autobiography.

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This story begins, as many of my formative ones do, with my cousins. They lived about six hours away so we didn't see them very often, but whenever we did it was an occasion. This was my first time visiting them at their newer house (I hesitate to say "new" because they had lived there for quite some time and we'd just never visited). Not long after arriving and settling in, my oldest cousin (who had first exposed me to video games in the first place via the Game Boy he always had on him when he travelled and brought whenever he visited us, but that's another story) urged me to come upstairs to his game room so he could show me something cool. It was his Nintendo Entertainment System, the original one with the wonky side-loading cartridge system that broke down when you looked at it funny. The first game he wanted to show me was Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt, a special pack combining the game we've been spending a great deal of time talking about with the surprisingly excellent and accurate (for the time) skeet shooting simulator Duck Hunt.

That single event is permanently etched into my mind it was so important to me. To this day I can remember the exact look and layout of that house to the tiniest detail: The sprawling suburb in which it was situated, the diminutive front yard, the big open first floor, the deck leading out to the pool and the backyard, the spiral staircase, the long corridor upstairs and the bright games room (made even brighter by the vibrant summer sunshine pouring in through the large window to the right) with the fuzzy 1980s television sitting on top of the entertainment centre with the NES beneath it and the stack of games in the long file beneath the bed.

Super Mario Bros. was by no means the first video game I'd ever played, but it had an effect on me unlike almost any I'd played up to that point. Super Mario Bros. was literally unlike anything I'd ever played before and for very subtle and specific reasons. I'd played sidescrollers and platformers before and I certainly knew who Mario was (I'd played a few of his earliest games beforehand) so the actual gameplay was nothing particularly revelatory. What Super Mario Bros. did that I'd never seen a video game do before was exude an atmosphere, a sense of place and of emotion from every single detail. The first thing that struck me was how vibrant, warm and inviting the game's colour palette was, full of striking blues, greens, reds, pinks and oranges. There was literally no other game that looked like it: Every other game I was familiar with was in black and white, grey-scale or that classic arcade dark psychedelic vector neon that's a vibe unto itself. Super Mario Bros., helped in no small part by the lush summer sun pouring in through the open window and reflecting off the trees and grass outside, felt young, fresh and full of life.

Whole articles could, and have, been written about Super Mario Bros.'s theme song alone. It's a positively enchanting and infectious Calypso/Latin fusion piece that was surprisingly musically complex for its time. Like the colour palette, it was like nothing else at the time, coming into a world of 8-bit techno beats, brief little jingles and games that were silent save for scratchy laser blasts, explosions and bleeps. The Super Mario Bros. theme, like all good songs, sets a mood and uses music to paint a picture in the mind. Combined with the games already bright visual style, the song melds with the other aspects of the game to build a mood with magnificent nuance and elegance. The Mushroom Kingdom is not overtly tropical in climate, but Super Mario Bros. is simply made of dazzling, summery emotions and a sense of wonder and youthful joy. Despite its nigh-infinite number of remixes, covers, adaptations and samples, not to mention copious usage in other games, the best possible way to listen to the song outside Super Mario Bros. proper is to find a steel pan trio playing it: It simply feels right.

But perhaps the most remarkable thing about the world of Super Mario Bros. that struck me is that it *changed*: After the initial level sets you up for a pseudo-tropical romp, Level 2 dumps you in what amounts to a sewer. Level 3 returns you to the surface, but makes you clamber over soaring cliffs. The fourth level of every world (and the fact that Super Mario Bros. has eight “worlds” made up of four “Levels” each made it seem indescribably large and sprawling for the time) is a dank castle with fire sticks, lava pits and giant fire-breathing monsters. Some levels even take place at night, which was something I'd also never seen done before. As the game progress into its later levels, the overworld itself changes seeming to get paler and harsher the further you get (trees turn from green to white, for example) as if Mario and Luigi are steadfastly moving north. This culminated in one level set in what seemed to be a frozen tundra at night where everything has a sleek, white sheen. It even snowed onscreen! The fact that this gorgeous snow effect was, as my cousin later informed me, a result of his hand-me-down television going on the fritz instead of some genius design decision by Miyamoto did little to take away from the magic of playing through that level the first time. Temperamental television or no, the fact remains that all of this came together to make Super Mario Bros. the first game I played that felt like it took place in a cohesive, living, breathing world, which made exploring its various secrets all the more substantial and enjoyable.

Super Mario Bros. for me than is an absolute triumph of game design and playing it was one of the most important moments of my life. Because of it, I really started to see what video games had to offer as a medium. With Super Mario Bros., Miyamoto gives us his first, and arguably still best, master stroke: Using brilliantly nuanced game design to put the joy of exploring, of living in wonder and just plain living front and centre and allowing someone like me to experience it in the bright, naturally lit games room at my cousin's house the same way he himself experienced it so many years ago as a child in the city streets or the forests behind his Kyoto home.

Because that's what he's done, of course. He's created a work that is a reflection of his personal feelings and viewpoints that has successfully recreated for countless people around the world the very sensations and experiences that helped make him into the person he became. In other words, Miyamoto, through Super Mario Bros., has actually literalized the Lacanian concept of reading as a fundamental tenant of his game design philosophy: The authorial intent is obvious, but the fact that the text of the game allows players to actually discover and feel such things on their own through the agency the medium provides indicates Miyamoto is aware of positionality and how to exploit it to share experiences with his audience. This is the true potential of video games as a medium of artistic expression in my view: It's one thing to tell a story with heroic characters you relate to about themes you care about, but to actually be able to share an experience, share an emotion, and have the reader be able to not just witness it but experience it themselves, that's something else altogether, and something almost unique to video games in my opinion.

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What I've done here is use my experiences with Super Mario Bros. to make another argument-In this case that video games are inherently, literally Lacanian (at least ones with skilled designers. There are exceptions, but I'm not ready to discuss those yet) The reason I spent so much time talking about my personal relationship with the game is not just for me to indulge in misty-eyed nostalgia: My history with the game, and crucially my history of experiences dating from before the point at which I picked it up for the first time, is essential to understanding the positionality I inhabited as I played it, how my positionality shifted after I played it and crucially, how that affected the way I read it.

Positionality is key to utilising the third sphere of Lacanian reading as Felman describes it, because it's only through getting ahold of one's associations, relations and preconceptions that we are able to understand how any given reader will respond to a text. In my case, Super Mario Bros. dramatically shifted my conception of what video games were capable of, and is probably why I'm sitting here writing this now. So, if you're looking for someone to blame for my incoherent academic gobbledygook blame Shigeru Miyamoto. Well, and Jacques Lacan. And Shoshana Felman. And my philosophy teacher who introduced me to both. And my Anthropology professor who set me on the path to joining this field. And...

Which brings us to the real delicious irony of this whole thing: Reading is not just one act, but the chaotic interaction of many and varied acts, individuals and texts. I just spent a series of essays writing about Shigeru Miyamoto (whom I understand primarily through what Dave Sheff wrote about him in a book I read) through tools I learned from Shoshana Felman who learned them from Jacques Lacan, who was resolute in his claim that he was doing nothing more than reading Sigmund Freud, which I read because my professor read them and thought I should as well. Not to mention the fact large portions of this series have been dedicated to me reading and analysing myself, and you reading me as I do that. Somewhere in this grand, beautiful symphonic cacophony and language and discourse is meaning. But meaning is, as I've claimed, not one thing, but a mutable, ethereal series of concepts dynamically generated by the interaction of three forces and countless subjects whenever anyone reads anything.

This then is finally how we can judge whether any given reading is “valid”: The addition of the third sphere would, at cursory glance, seem to render all analyses into exercises in futile relativism, but rather what it does instead is give us a more nuanced way to practise it. All we need to do to determine whether a reading is valid or not is to weigh how it utilises the three spheres against itself. For example, I can claim Super Mario Bros. is a work of radical deconstructive game design that literalizes the concept of Lacanian meaning to recreate for players the experiences of exploration and discovery treasured by Shigeru Miyamoto. I can do this because I've (hopefully) provided enough evidence from both what is on record about Miyamoto's intent, my personal experiences with reading it and the actual text itself to back up my claim. I couldn't, however, claim Super Mario Bros. is about a magical flying hamster who soars through Candy Land turning clouds into doughnuts to fight Communism because there is absolutely nothing in the game or what Miyamoto said about it that could remotely be used to support such an assertion, no matter what my personal experiences might be. One is a valid interpretation, the other isn't. One constitutes a legitimate reading of the text, the other is me reading the text wrong.

On the other hand, this is also why no-one can claim I am "reading too much" into a simple video game from 1985 or "picking up on things that aren't there", because the very act of ever reading anything is inherently bound by these forces and interactions. These are the conclusions to which I have arrived at via my history of reading things, and not just video games, as texts from a particular positionality. This then is the core of analysis for me, and the tool set by which I'm going to approach anything else I do on this blog.

“But What Does It All Mean?”: Lacanian Reading and Video Games (Part I)

It's-a-me...

At the risk of dredging up the tired “Are Games Art?” debate, I think it's safe to say that anyone taking the time to read this weblog has probably felt some kind of emotional connection with a game at some point during their lives. Whether they cause us to see things a different way, force us to ask provocative questions, immerse us in an engaging fantasy world or give us vivid characters and stories to relate to, video games, like all forms of creative expression, have the power to resonate with us on a personal level and leave a lasting impression. Taking the time to unpack this truism, however, is an altogether different project and one that is uniquely rewarding. If it is safe to claim that games *can* affect us and that *why* they affect us differs from person to person, what about asking a third question? That is, *how* do they affect us as human players? Well, perhaps I ought to call us “readers”, because for this piece I'm going to try and subtly move us away from the language of pure game journalism and into the language of philosophy, media studies and, to be blunt, artistry.

The reason I make that fine redefinition of terms is that I believe video games can be read and understood as what we call “texts” in the world of theoretical humanities and social sciences. The word “text” carries an implied connection to books (which is typically what we talk about in philosophy), but really it can be applied to any creative work that has textual, subtextual and meta-textual elements to it, like a movie, a piece of music or, yes, a video game. I think the world of philosophy, media studies, qualitative social science and radical psychoanalysis offers a wide array of tools that we can use to look at games and read them better, and part of the reason I started this site was so I could highlight them and hopefully contribute something to a new level of discourse for our medium. That said, one of the simplest, most profound and most important tools we now have available to us is the concept of textual meaning, and, more to the point, where it comes from and how we read it.

There have been many theories and many debates about how we communicate, discuss and read one another, but the one I think is most appropriate to us is the one embodied by the work of one Jacques Lacan. Lacan was a controversial mid-20th Century French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who nevertheless wound up making a sizeable number of important contributions to a bunch of different fields apart from clinical psychiatry, like philosophy, sociology, feminist theory, literary and film studies. Although, truth be known, we're actually going to be drawing more from Yale University professor Shoshana Felman’s contemporary reading of Lacan put forth in her truly excellent book Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight. In it, Felman argues that Lacan’s work can be read as a kind of metaphor or subject, through which we can re-evaluate what it means to be a reader and what it means to be contemporary. In other words, Felman thinks that psychoanalysis, particularly the kind done by Lacan, has made possible a unique new way of reading that allows us to get a closer look at the actual act of reading itself and the significance that has for discourse.

I'm going to extrapolate Felman’s analysis further, using her conception of reading and the reader gleaned from Lacan as a starting point. For you see in this piece I am going to make the claim that not only can video games be read in exactly the same manner as any other kind of text, but that talented game designers can actually literalize this way of reading works as a key part of the final product. This is actually an underlying principle of the way I approach games and gaming, and I'll be returning to this thesis many times in subsequent articles for this site because I think it can be applied to any number of different titles and situations. For the meantime, however, I am going to concentrate on one game I feel is a perfect microcosm of my theory but of which, in a deliciously paradoxical manner, this might not be apparent at first: Shigeru Miyamoto’s groundbreaking 1985 classic, Super Mario Bros.

And yes, for those of you keeping score at home, I am reading Felman’s reading of Lacan (who more often than not was reading Freud in his work), and then appropriating those concepts so that I can read Super Mario Bros. I'm also going to be basing the conclusions of my case study somewhat on what Dave Sheff wrote about what Miyamoto said to him in the 1998 book Game Over: Press Start to Continue, but I'll touch more on that later. And, by the way, you're reading me as I'm doing all this, so that's another layer in of itself. Isn't deconstructive philosophy fun? Of course it is, so lets get started. But first, let's learn a little more about Lacanian thought and how we can even know what anything ever means.

Felman has quite a lot of different applications for Lacan’s work in contemporary philosophy and literature studies, but the one most relevant to us is the idea of how meaning is generated. Essentially, what a text “means”, what it's “about” and how it acquires any level of significance other than words on paper (or in our case binary bits in an NES cartridge). If you think back to your High School English days (and I knew as soon as I wrote those words some of you weren't going to want to, but bear with me-it wont be long) you'll probably remember your teachers once told you how great works of literature have a “deeper meaning” inherent in the text and how to look for symbolism and metaphors within it that explicitly related to those overarching themes and concepts. Some walk away from those classes thinking authors spend months and months toiling away at works to load it up with as many obscure symbols and hidden concepts designed to create for the reader a nasty web of ideas forcing them to analyse each and every last little thing. While I'm not denying some authors might do this (I can think of a few right now) this is, at heart an overly-simplified, reductive and narrow-minded way of approaching texts. In fact, I feel perhaps the most important thing to take away from this discussion is that textual meaning does not derive solely from the author (the author is certainly important, and that's a point I'm going to return to, but there's more to it than that). Here's what I think Felman, and by extension Lacan, is saying:

When we read a text, there are actually three very specific things happening in tandem that work together in order to generate meaning. Therefore, if we're ever going to figure out what our works mean, we have to pick apart each one of them and keep them in mind, because this is not only where we're going to figure out what the meaning is according to this specific reading (and yes, it will change depending on the reader), but it's also going to help us decide what constitutes a valid reading (more on that a little later). Let's look at these three concepts then: Firstly and probably most importantly, is what does the text actually, literally say? In a book, this is the first and easiest step: Pick it up and read those words. What are the actual words printed on the page (or represented by pixels on your iPad)? It boils down to a very simple binary (though I usually dislike them immensely): Did you or did you not actually read this book?

In my Super Mario Bros. example this is a little trickier because the game has next to no dialogue, but we can discern a lot from things like the onscreen prompts and the sumptuous instruction manual Nintendo kindly provided, which, for the purposes of this exercise I'm going to count as part of the game, mostly because without it Super Mario Bros. essentially has no story seeing as how the technology wasn't capable of fully conveying one yet. This isn't even taking into account the somewhat obvious fact that if you picked up the game when it first came out without reading the manual you probably would have absolutely no idea what you were looking at. In more recent games there are other ways of reading this level like in-game cutscenes, acted dialogue or pantomime sequences.

Returning to my case study, however, what we can discern about Super Mario Bros. on a superficial level is that it's a video game where you move a sprite left to right, jumping over obstacles and looking for passageways. The manual elaborates on this further, telling us that we “are” one Mario (a very important and loaded phrase that demands deeper later examination), a humble plumber who vows to help repel a band of wizard turtles who have invaded the Mushroom Kingdom and kidnapped Princess Toadstool, who is the only one versed in magic enough to defeat the invaders. The “Bros.” comes from the fact that Mario’s brother Luigi joins him on the adventure and can be controlled by a second player. Right away we can ascertain a basic yet fairly functional idea of what this game is, however we're far from done.

The second key needed in creating a claim to meaning is the obvious: Authorial intent. That is, what did the authors of the work intend when they sat down to write it? Now, this is a very complex issue and I actually fear the words I have laid out are not fully capable of conveying the thorniness of it. In brief, the whole notion of intentionality is a contentious one and one certainly worthy of full examination at a later date (I can already think of at least two philosophers who would like a word or two with me after saying this). For the moment though, let's simplify things and say that yes, the author had a specific intention to create a work and a specific idea of what the work is supposed to mean. How then can readers know what the author explicitly intended the work to be about?

Well, the easy answer is to read it, but this isn't actually as easy as it might appear at first glance due to another concept I'll address soon. No, the only way to truly get a firm idea of what the literal authorial intent of a piece is would be to ask the author straight up. This is admittedly difficult when the author has been dead for several centuries, so in those cases we are often reliant on other places where the authors wrote about their works for the record or, barring that, having endless discussions with other reader-philosophers in comfortable seminar rooms about what we feel Kant was really thinking when he wrote Kritik der reinen Vernunft.

With video games we have a slight advantage on this level because the medium is so young so many of its foundational artists and creators are still alive to talk about what inspired them to make their works, often at great length, and much has been written quiet extensively about it. Super Mario Bros. was, as stated above, the brainchild of Shigeru Miyamoto: Nintendo’s very own “staff cartoonist” and creator of many of its biggest hit titles. Much of Miyamoto’s biography and his thoughts on his own oeuvre is well-documented public knowledge, and the reason it is so is due to the work of journalist Dave Sheff compiled in his comprehensive history of Nintendo’s early years as a game publisher, Game Over: Press Start To Continue. Taking a look at how Sheff profiles Miyamoto, we can gain some insight on what his games mean:

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Sheff details how Miyamoto's childhood growing up in Kyoto shaped how he came to view the world. Miyamoto loved cartoons, and would travel with his family great distances to see animated movies and spend countless hours drawing, making puppets, putting on shows and reading different kinds of fantasy books. A particular favourite of his were stories like Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. His love of fantasy belies Miyamoto's greatest love however: Exploring.

To Miyamoto, his neighbourhood, the maze-like corridors inside his house and the forest behind it may as well have been mythical fantasy lands full of adventure. Getting past his neighbour's angry guard dog was like a valiant fight to the death and a trip to the basement could be a grand adventure to find secret treasure hidden in the old chests stored there. Perhaps the most special moments for Miyamoto, however, were when he would take long walks into the forest to see what he could find. He would rejoice at finding a lake he didn't know about, or a cave leading to a network of underground tunnels.

For Miyamoto, the world is far, far more than it appears to the naked eye: Even when he moved to the city, he would always look around and find ways to let his imagination flourish. He would look at a manhole cover on a wall and wonder what it was doing there or, more to the point, what would happen if you opened it and crawled inside-Where would you end up? Miyamoto's childhood adventuring instilled in him a sense of breathless wonder at the world and a desire to explore it and broaden his horizons, and that profoundly shaped how he looked at it and how he would approach his works later in life.

After getting a job with Nintendo and asked to help out in the creation of some new games, Miyamoto felt it was a perfect opportunity to share his emotions and experiences with children all over the world. He really wanted players of his games to feel the same sense of wonder, magic and discovery he felt as a child, and that was a guiding tenant that went into all of his early games. His first masterpiece then undoubtedly has to be Super Mario Bros., which was consciously, explicitly designed around these very principles. Mario and Luigi are plumbers, a profession chosen because Miyamoto wanted a humble, working-class profession that a lot of people could relate to, thus hopefully broadening his potential audience. Fitting with the plumbing theme, many of the obstacles Mario and Luigi must jump over are large green pipes. However, these pipes hold secrets: Should players choose to stop and play around for a while instead of racing through the level at full tilt, they might choose to find out what happens if they try and go through a pipe. Occasionally, they would find themselves in a hidden area with a stash of gold coins as a reward for their curiosity.

Warp pipes are not the only way in which Super Mario Bros. encourages exploration and lateral thinking, however: From the very outset of the game Mario and Luigi will be confronted with mysterious hovering bricks. These can be used as platforms to navigate the level, but they can also be broken from underneath if players jump into them. Sometimes, these bricks would conceal a mushroom, flower or star which, when grabbed would grant a power-up (a conceit taken, of course, from Alice) a coin, or even a magic beanstalk which, if climbed, leads players to a secret world high above the clouds full of treasures. Other times, the bricks are invisible and only activated if Mario or Luigi make a lucky guess and jump into thin air. In other words, what would appear at first glance to be empty space is in fact something altogether more wondrous and strange to the careful eye.

One of the cleverest things players can do in Super Mario Bros., however, is a trick in the underground areas. In some levels players manoeuvre through an underground cavern, just like the ones Miyamoto was so fond of as a child. These levels are surrounded on all sides by bricks, the same kind that can be broken from beneath. By clearing a few blocks, players might be shocked to find Mario and Luigi can actually end up above the level walking on the ceiling. Follow this new-found path all the way to the end, and Mario and Luigi might stumble upon a secret room with three warp pipes, allowing them to bypass whole swaths of the game entirely. It's an incredibly charming trick, and it's only accessible if players think outside the box and actively want to satisfy their curiosity.

This touches on another major aspect of Super Mario Bros.: It's difficult to tell in hindsight, especially as its gameplay has become the core of almost every platformer made after it, but Super Mario Bros. was, in its day, an incredibly revolutionary and unorthodox game built essentially around challenging and deconstructing player's expectations about what video games should be about. Released into an era where arcades and arcade-style games were still the default, or at least an extremely prominent and important genre (albeit in the waning days of that era), Mario seemed to do everything differently. In an age where it really still wasn't uncommon to see games with one screen at a time about shooting things, Miyamoto gave us a side-scrolling platformer about a plumber trying to save a fantasy kingdom from a marauding band of magic turtles. Every single aspect of the game, from the side-scrolling core to the entire concept of warp pipes, warp zones and secret power-ups, is designed to fly in the face of what gamers would expect from a game at the time. In a way this only makes sense: If Super Mario Bros. is inspired by imagination, creativity, unconventional thinking and curiosity, it's only logical that it should be designed around forcing players to shed their preconceptions and think creatively. I can't think of a better showcase for Shigeru Miyamoto's worldview than that.

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Why 3D Matters

As technophiles tend to love jumping on the bandwagon of digital progress as soon as possible, it is therefore difficult, and somewhat surprising, to think of a recent tech trend that’s met with as much consumer hostility and revulsion as the late-2000s and early-2010s reemergence of 3D. Seemingly coming out of nowhere, though most likely bolstered by the runaway success of James Cameron’s Avatar in 2009, 3D seems to be cropping up everywhere these days: Most notably in other movies where it’s been sternly rejected, but also in television and video games as well. Perhaps it’s because of the economic depression or because it’s seen as an antiquated technology that didn’t catch on in the past (Remember 3D drive-ins, anyone?) or perhaps because the development in television came so soon after high definition just barely managed to become commonly accepted, but for whatever reason the new 3D is the only recent technological development I can think of to be out-and-out protested and boycotted by the entertainment industry’s bread-and-butter consumer base.

While I can’t speak for movies and television as much as I don’t follow them anywhere near as closely, the addition of stereoscopic 3D to the video game industry has me genuinely excited and I’m actually surprised more people haven’t seen the potential the technology could add to the kinds of experiences only games can provide. While Sony made the tentative inroads by adding 3DTV support to the PlayStation 3, it was really Nintendo’s release and announcement of the 3DS this year that piqued my interest. While other home 3D systems require a complex and cumbersome series of setups as well as the ever-present troublesome 3D glasses, the 3DS’ promise of portable glasses-free 3D is the first legitimately exciting step forward towards gaining the technology a wider install base. However, Nintendo’s constant mishandling of the 3DS since launch has done little to settle down riled consumers and the recent, frankly unprecedented announcement of a drastic $80 price cut means the 3DS and its alleged usefulness are again in the news. As such, I felt now was the opportune moment for me to explain why I think gaming needs 3D and how the 3DS can be that first step into proving why, provided Nintendo plays its cards right.

The primary difference between a 3D movie or a 3D TV show and a 3D video game should be obvious: In a video game, there is an element of player agency. In fact, it should also be fairly obvious that the focus on player agency is the whole point of the video game medium. It’s here where the addition of the 3D technology is going to be felt most strongly: Whereas I would hasten a guess that 3D in a passive medium like movies and TV would be essentially a superfluous and unnecessary luxury and where a lot of the bile probably stems from (I wouldn’t know as I have seen next to nothing from the new wave of 3D in cinemas), in a video game, by contrast, it could actually make a literal world of difference.

In the medium’s pioneering stage games were pretty self-explanatory: Take one look at the single screen of Space Invaders or Pac-Man and it’s immediately clear what the game is about, what the world is like and what the player is being asked to do. Once games started getting a little more complex with the Atari home consoles we got escalation of these simple concepts, like four explorable screens in things like the Raiders of the Lost Ark movie game. The biggest leap forward came in the form of sidecrollers made fashionable by Shigeru Miyamoto’s Super Mario Bros. on the groundbreaking Nintendo Entertainment System. Players were expected to play through a huge amount of scrolling, iterating levels to reach a story-centric conclusion that was a design revolution at the time. Sidescrollers became the default template for many games over the next two console generations, but by the mid-1990s technology had generatively evolved (in the proper usage of the term “evolved”) in such a way to allow full polygonal graphics in current consoles. Games like Tomb Raider, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Super Mario 64 showed how increasingly lifelike representations of actual virtual worlds could be created with existing game technology. As a result of taking this path, game designers became focused on making bigger and more realistic digital representations, a trend which has continued at least up to this day.

The advent of this type of game brought with it a number of unforeseen problems, however. While present in all such polygonal games, the biggest drawback was most evident in platformers like Super Mario 64: Since Mario was now in a fully 3-Dimensional world where previously he had been limited to a 2D plane; players now had to redefine their concepts of motion in a video game. Moving about in digital space became more akin to moving about in real space, thus adding that extra level of relation. However, video games still lacked two things that actual people in real life have when moving around: Firstly, and most obviously, polygonal graphics based games lack Kinesthesia, the sort of intuitive feeling your body gets when it’s in motion telling it that it’s in motion. Secondly, as such games are essentially 2D approximations of 3D space, players lack the stereoscopic eyesight they would have in real life, meaning playing one of these games is analogous to walking everywhere with one eye closed. These are two very important concepts for maneuvering in 3D space and I think they are far too often taken for granted. While we might not be able to do much about Kinesthesia at this point, we can do something about viewing a 3D game world the way it’s supposed to be viewed and here’s why we must:

The problem with trying to visualize a 3D world from a 2D perspective should actually be pretty obvious: Just like walking around with one eye closed, not seeing a 3D environment in 3D means it looks flattened out and, as a result, near-impossible to judge distances accurately. Here’s an experiment to try at home: Close one eye and keep it closed for awhile-At first it will seem like not much has changed, but that’s only because we’re accustomed to seeing things in 3D so it takes awhile to adjust. Once your eye becomes used to doing double duty, try walking around your house without bumping into things. You should find it’s much more difficult this way because you have zero depth perception. That’s why humans evolved stereoscopic vision in the first place, so we can move about in our environments, find each other and hunt properly without constantly smashing into things. Playing a modern polygonal graphics-based game without 3D technology gives you the exact same problem. This is something movies and TV don't have to think about because the audience isn't expected to actually move the main character around in a pseudo-3D space in those media.

When gamers first got their hands on games like Super Mario 64, they quickly realised that controlling Mario had become far more difficult, not helped by wonky cameras that didn’t always provide the best angle and both of these points were common complaints leveled against Super Mario 64 and its brethren when they first came out. However, as time went by and these games became more common, gamers eventually developed a new visual system for moving about in the game to compensate for this to the point we no longer noticed it. Developers also tinkered with camera systems to make them slightly less cumbersome, with mixed degrees of success. In short, gamers got used to the drawbacks of the new system and game makers fiddled around to help ease the transition. The inherent problem has never gone away, however.

Which brings me to the crux of my argument as to why stereoscopic 3D actually makes a great deal of sense in video games and why, believe it or not, we need it: I daresay many of the 3D dissenters are hardcore gamers in their 20s and 30s who have been playing polygonal graphics games since they first came out. If you grew up on Tomb Raider or Super Mario 64, played any of their innumerable sequels and remakes and followed the industry as this type of game became the de facto standard for all new games in the past three generations, you’re used to all these issues I raised to the point you no longer notice them. However, this does not mean they are no longer there, nor does it mean that whole new groups of gamers just now getting into the medium on the swell of the casual boom of the past six years should be expected to not realise them.

I have a younger sister who I’ve been trying to introduce to the medium. She’s played quite a few games, mostly casual-oriented things and classic 2D platformers. Awhile back I got her a copy of the Nintendo DS remake of Super Mario 64 with a glowing recommendation. She found the game incredibly difficult to visualize and became so frustrated she never got beyond the first level. She’s not the only one: I’ve tried to show some of my favourite games to other people, both young and old, who didn’t grow up with mid-90s gaming and the reaction is the same: To them, the worlds all look “flat” like a “colouring book” and they can’t figure out how to move around in the faux-3D space. This isn’t the way classics should be introduced to the next generation.

Even so-called “core” gamers occasionally run into this problem, though they perhaps do not realise it: In 2008, EA and DiCE released a unique and interesting experiment of a title called Mirror’s Edge. In it, gamers play as a parkour expert named Faith who lives in a dystopian future where entire cites and communication media is heavily monitored. Faith uses her parkour skills to hand-deliver messages to members of an underground resistance seeking to restore freedom to the city. Mirror’s Edge was a visually stunning game with a specialized control system that aimed to be a full-on first-person parkour simulator with one of the most innovative concepts in years. Nevertheless, it was a commercial flop, leaving the future of this exciting new IP in serious jeopardy.

Why did Mirror’s Edge fail? Many reasons have been cited, from poor marketing, thin storylines, awkward controls and confusing platforming where it’s uncertain where you can and can’t jump to. The thing is, from where I stand, almost none of these criticisms are actually particularly valid: Firstly, speaking as a parkour practitioner myself (though admittedly nowhere near as skilled a one as Faith), there is absolutely nothing wrong with the control system used in Mirror’s Edge as far as I'm concerned: DiCE did a great job mapping the various subtle moves to an intuitive system of button combinations. It is, in essence, a parkour sim. True, the level design is not always particularly clear in regards to what you can and can’t leap to, but then again the game relies to some extent on being aware of your own abilities and limitations, much as in real life (the second half of this argument, that the game renders only certain things that are graspable when bits of the background look equally reachable, is a design flaw I’ll concede, however).

Though poor marketing may have played a role in the game’s unpleasant fate, I think the biggest problem gamers had with Mirror’s Edge boils down to something very simple: It’s impossible to judge distances when making precision jumps. As I hope is now clear to my readers, however, this is a problem that is not endemic to Mirror’s Edge because it is the exact same critique leveled at Super Mario 64 nearly a decade prior. This is not a problem that is brand new and just started with Mirror’s Edge, it is a problem we’ve had since the day video games started using polygon graphics to create 2D representations of 3D space. All Mirror’s Edge did is change the perspective from third- to first-person, making the already preexisting problem all the more self-evident.

And herein lays the problem: So long as games with polygon graphics continue to use 2D approximations of 3D worlds instead of true depth-of-field now offered by stereoscopic 3D technology, this problem will continue to persist. Older gamers are used to it, but new gamers aren’t and are more likely now to abandon such games then grit their teeth and bear with it until they get used to it then they would have if they were in our place 15 years ago. The reason for this, quite simply, is the exploding casual game market on smartphones and tablets. Why continue forcing yourself to sit through a confusing polygon-based faux-3D AAA blockbuster when you could just as easily pick up something like Angry Birds which is incredibly simple, intuitive, easy to figure out and addictive? This is a market we didn’t have in the early-to-mid-90s, and new gamers won’t have the patience, or the obligation, to take the time to figure this sort of thing out to stay in the medium.

I recently picked up the 3DS remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, a game I am intimately familiar with, and was simply blown away by how much easier the true 3D made moving around and how much vaster it made the world of Hyrule seem. The difference between this version and all previous versions I played is so dramatic there's no contest. This is why we need true 3D then, and why I desperately hope the 3DS succeeds. It offers, unlike any other console currently on the market, the potential to finally fully realise the visions designers had almost two decades ago and actually make them playable and accessible to newer fans, not to mention making something like Mirror’s Edge actually click completely. Take notice, Nintendo: You’d be a fool not to contact EA and start talking about a 3DS Mirror’s Edge remake.

Precision platforming is not the only justification of 3D, however: In my opinion, it serves as one pillar of a whole new strategy that could change the way we view and interact with games forever. One other application is this fascinating new 3DTV Sony announced at E3 this year. What it does is broadcast separate 3D feeds tuned to certain goggles, essentially meaning each player will see a different 3D picture: Anyone who grew up, as I did, on split-screen multiplayer should immediately be seeing the practical applications of this technology. There is another, even more important way 3D can help enhance games however, and that’s something I’ll touch on a little later on. I’ll be returning to Zelda and Ocarina of Time in particular in the near future to elaborate. At the moment though, I need to take a little detour to talk about how I think we should read games…

Sources: Destructoid, GamesRadar, Nintendo World Report

Have I convinced you to give 3D gaming a shot? If so, why not check out The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D for yourself? I think it's the best example of how stereoscopic 3D can enhance a game right now and if you buy it from that link, I'll get a little money which would be much appreciated. You could also get Mirror's Edge too, if you want to see how important depth perception and kinesthesia are. It's a good game to boot!