2015 Retrospective

So, 2015. While I feel kind of weird about looking at years as comprehensive “units” of our lives with their own trends, themes, and personal developments separate from other years, I also think these indulgent retrospectives are useful. They help us organize our thoughts on where we’ve been and where we’re going. They help us track our successes and failures and decide how we might improve for the future. It’s easy to be cynical about this kind of “New Year’s Resolution” rhetoric, laughing at the cliched influx of gym memberships at the start of January that don’t get used past March. But this kind of reactionary, patronizing cynicism is the exact thing I want to further cut out of my life, and other end-of year retrospectives I’ve read have echoed some similar sentiments. You could also argue that we should always be reflective of ourselves and set out to improve. But I find that self-reflection takes a massive amount of energy, and it’s hard to change or improve when you’re questioning every life decision or situation ad infinitum without actually acting (which is what the majority of this year has been for me). And the holidays momentarily remove us (at least partially) from the hustle and bustle of work and school, giving us some breathing room for this kind of reflection. Writing this is an indulgence for sure, but I think it’s a healthy one that I want to use as a tangible thing to hold me accountable for better behavior and attitudes for next year.

2015, for me, was kind of like this. 

Yay.

2014 saw me climb out of the abyss after graduating from high school. It was the year I started to read and write more about games and developed great new friendships during my first semester at college. 2015 saw me struggle to stay afloat during an okay second semester, a long, lonely summer, and a kinda bad fall semester. Whereas I started doing so many things I thought I could never do in 2014, which hugely boosted my confidence and mental health, I feel like I stagnated in 2015.

But I should acknowledge that my stagnation in 2015 is largely a perceived one. I did some writing that I’m proud of. I was on a panel of young videogame critics alongside wonderful folks as part of ADAF. I feel like I’ve learned a lot in some of my classes. I came out as queer/bisexual. And though I failed to grow much externally, various challenges and failures this year made me grow internally.

I’ve tried to write some more about my feelings on 2015, but I haven’t liked any of the attempts I’ve put together. So instead, I’m going to write about the works of art that have impacted me the most this year to talk more about those feelings in a different context.

Before I do that, I just want to acknowledge the awful tendency I’ve had this year to try to play/read/watch everything I possibly could. According to a Google Doc I updated throughout the year, I played 104 videogames in 2015. That’s more than I ever have in a single year before, much more than the 60 I played last year. Granted, a lot (maybe even the majority) of those games were short, less than half an hour long #altgames. But my distanced imbibing of all those works has really hindered my abilities to focus and reflect on the games to get the most out of them. I approached games this way with a desire to be literate about as many games as possible. This approach failed wildly though; I probably couldn’t tell you much about a good chunk of the games I did play this year. What this behavior did was turn engaging with art into a mindless, endless cycle of consumption. I treated art the exact way that “cult-of-the-new ” technocapitalism wants us to. Consume, discard, do not look back. Steamroll through game after game, TV episode after TV episode, book after book. Being on Twitter often exacerbates this type of problem--with everyone sharing articles, games, controversies, shitposts, and a bunch of other things all at once. It’s very distracting! So there are some things I want to try to do to build healthier relationships with the art I engage with. For example, next year I’m forbidding myself from moving on to the next videogame on my queue before writing something--anything--about the last one. Not all of this writing will necessarily be published, and I might make exceptions for games I’m planning a longer piece for or allow myself to play 3 short games before writing my impressions. I hope this method helps me develop more intimate connections with what I play, allowing me to bring more to the works and get more out of them. I’m hoping I don’t play more than 50 games next year. I’m also going to try to establish more specialized interests within games. I want to focus on a few key AAA series (Okami, Metal Gear, Bayonetta, Metroid Prime), genres (hack ‘n’ slash, interactive fiction) and topics (relationships, anxiety, bodies, violence). This doesn’t mean I’m just going to stick to certain kinds of games, and what I’ve listed here might not even be what I decide to focus on. But it would be more productive to develop deep knowledge about a few subjects than vague understandings of everything.

Okay, so let’s get on with it. Here’s some cool stuff I looked at in 2015:

Grimes - Art Angels

I don’t really follow music, but it seems that every six months or so I find an artist or album that blows me away so much that I stop listening to everything else for a while. Grimes’ Visions was one of those last year, actually. But for the past two months, Art Angels has been all I listen to--when I wake up, in the car, in between classes, before I go to bed. I’m listening to it now! Listening to Art Angels is sort of like a “centering” activity; it simultaneously relaxes me and pumps me up. I just love Grimes’ vibrant bubblegum sublimity. I love the confident, high-energy “Flesh without Blood,” about realizing the need to cut a fairweather, false friend out of your life and “Kill V Maim,” about a genderfluid space vampire Al Pacino. I love the more mellow yet optimistic “REALiTi” and “Butterfly.” Parts of Art Angels are about dealing with friendships that may be enticing but either damaging, fake, or falling apart (“Flesh without Blood,” “Easily,” “Pin,” “REALiTi”), and a lot of it is about asserting a self (through music) amidst a lot undermining noise (“California,” “Belly of the Beat,” “Butterfly”).

I find myself relating a lot to the content of Art Angels, remembering the better times of the end of 2014 as certain relationships seem to fall apart around me in 2015. In particular I really like the way the album ends: “If you’re looking for a dream girl / I’ll never be your dream girl.” In “Butterfly,” Grimes presumably sings this lyric to a fanbase who often wants very specific things from her and her music. She rejects those impositions in order to develop herself and her sound on her own terms, a butterfly of her own creation. It’s a song about not being able to please everybody and accepting that. I often feel like I’m being pulled in different directions--between my “normal” friends in real life (read: “straight” and “““apolitical”””) and the volatile spaces of the games community. I often think I don’t fit in with either crowd, nor can I adequately perform for either. And I think I’ve figured out that that’s okay! And moving forward, I want to surround myself with people who’ll support me for being myself and for developing in ways I want to see myself grow.

Why you looking for a harmony?

There is harmony in everything

It’s a butterfly who waits for the world

To fly away.

Anyway, I love the shit out of Art Angels and definitely want to bring its cathartic energy with me into 2016.

Gay Apathy

J Bearhat’s zine Gay Apathy is earnest and hilarious and also sobbing softly in the corner next to an empty bottle of tequila. It’s also probably one of the best things a babyqueer like me can read. It expresses the anxiety of belonging to an identity fragmented beyond any stable recognition, one that’s become repurposed, repackaged, and redistributed alongside Gay Rights victories and cruising apps in the hellscape that is late capitalism. It features dream dates with boys behind your supermarket counters, a list of the freshest and totally-not-demoralizing gay aesthetics, Unresolved Gender Issues, Absolut Vodka, and Ellen Page!!!! It is very much a zine about a disconnect from the myths of The Gay Experience™ and a disconnect from other gays, and it’s beautiful.

Seriously, go check it out. J Bearhat’s other zines are also great. I especially enjoyed Date a Boy Who Travels and Corporate Interiors. Their work on itch.io is pay-what-you-want!   

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

I understand why a lot of people don’t really like Buffy; it has a lot of representation problems (especially re: race). And some of its ideas about sex are questionable at best. But it turns out that if you put likable teens in your show and have them face Teen Things as well as campy vampires, I will like it. I spent my entire summer working my way through the seven seasons of Buffy, and I came to really love the charming characters and sometimes cheesy, sometimes brilliant writing.

This summer I felt pretty isolated from people as I simply cycled between being at work and being at home most of the time. After a month, I desperately wanted to go back to school to be with my friends. As Jackson Tyler says on the Metal Illness and Games panel for ADAF, watching TV/film (especially shows with ensemble casts) can be isolating because you’re explicitly distanced from the relationships that develop between the characters. It’s easy to look at connections and friendships on TV and go, “I want that!” That was very much my experience watching Buffy both because of the context of my summer and because, ya know, high school was Bad. I have really weird, uncomfortable feelings about my relationship to the show--how I projected myself onto the characters (especially Willow) as a sort of fictional replacement for my mostly empty real teenage experiences. This kind of relationship to a media object seems unhealthy to me, but a lot of people seem to inevitably develop these kinds of relationships to characters. In 2016, I’d like to try to understand more about why that is and how to negotiate the weird feelings I have about these kinds of engagements.

Anyway, it’s easy to become passionate about a show like Buffy--the characters are so likable that you want to see them written well. I think the show is more interesting for fumbling with themes and representations sometimes and succeeding at other times; its unevenness encourages the audience to discuss it more, which is probably why academia dotes on it. Willow is also probably one of my favorite characters of all time, rivalling Bayonetta for the title of favorite witch. :)

(Season 2 is my favorite, Season 5 is the “best,” Season 7 is the worst, and Season 6 is way better than people give it credit for okay bye)

Life is Strange (spoilers follow)

Life is Strange has all of the problems Buffy has, particularly for being a story about teenage girls created by mostly straight white dudes. It’s been rightly taken to task for its depictions of disability, race, and queerness (spoilers). But like Buffy, Life is Strange has great characters and an earnestness that I appreciate; it’s definitely a game that deserves nuanced conversations. Nobody else in the AAA space even tries to make young adult games about high school, so I’m happy Dontnod made a memorable attempt that got people talking. And I loved Life is Strange’s rewind mechanic that changes the dynamic of player choices.      

I played the first four episodes of Life is Strange right before I went back to college for the fall. I expected a semester in which everything would fall into place for me. But most of my relationships and plans didn’t meet those expectations, largely because I acted as if conflicts and desires would sort themselves out on their own. The happenings (and often, non-happenings) of this semester started to deteriorate my mental health, and I played the conclusion to Life is Strange over Thanksgiving break--when I was at my worst this year. And I still don’t know if I’ve processed the ending right. The game’s ending is cheap, emotionally manipulative, and judgmental, but it is also the logical development of the game’s plot. You can see the final choice coming probably by the end of Episode 1. So why was I so upset about it if it was everything I expected? I guess because it was the most explicit time the game looked me in the eye to say that the way I wanted the world was wrong--that if I wanted to have my way, natural forces would destroy the world for everyone else. Life is Strange tells me I’m selfish for wanting to be happy, and I’m scared that it’s right. And I want to be able to accept that since I’m usually on board with games that decentralize and deny the player’s wants (MGS2, Stanley Parable, Spec Ops). But Life is Strange seems more like a personal accusation than those other games. I guess that’s because MGS2 and Spec Ops say it’s bad to want to be a videogame war hero, an idea I can get behind, whereas Life is Strange says it’s bad to want to be gay in love. Obviously that’s reductive--obviously that’s not what Life is Strange is trying to say. The game wants to say that you can’t have a perfect life, and trying to control the world and other people to have a perfect life is wrong. But to stake that conflict entirely on a queer relationship? Maybe it’d be less of a problem if more games had diverse queer representations to begin with, but really--

We Know the Devil

--it just makes me feel like the Devil. Life is Strange makes me feel like the Devil, and shames me for it.

We Know the Devil makes me feel like the Devil, and loves me for it.

Out of everything I played, watched, and read in 2015, I’ll remember We Know the Devil the most. It’s far and away my favorite game of the year and could easily be considered one of my favorite games ever. I really appreciate that this game exists as I ride out these last few months of being a teenager.

We Know the Devil is a visual novel different from the more traditional Western magical girl stories of Buffy and Life is Strange because not only does the world hate its teens, but the teens hate themselves. They’re not even really trying to save the world either--they’re just trying to survive it.

I went to Catholic school all my life, so being queer was essentially not an option, what with people around me saying that being gay is at best something to be controlled and repressed and at worst just inhuman. And I was very good at repressing queerness in high school (so was everyone else it seems--I don’t know if anyone else in my class was out at the time), even though that must have compounded my self-hate back then. The characters of We Know the Devil also live in a world where being queer means being the devil, and the trio struggles to hold their friendships together amidst their self-loathing and shared isolation. I see a little bit of myself in all the characters’ responses to their pain. Jupiter tries to hide her desires by trying to be perfect, Venus hides her fears by being a pushover, and Neptune hides her pain by being cold, bitter, and mean. There’s a character who I identify with the most, but I’m, uh--*snaps hair tie against wrist*--not telling. Just go play the game.

The three protagonists of the game are all lovable, and the dynamics between them are hilarious and heart-wrenching. Aevee Bee’s writing is consistently amazing, maneuvering flawlessly between passive-aggressive jokes and tender heart-to-hearts. Mia Schwartz’s character designs are beautiful and fit each character’s personality wonderfully, and Alec Lambert’s soundtrack flits between warm and harrowing synths.

You play the game by pairing up two of the characters in different scenes, and the one most often left out is taken by the devil at the end of the game. The game depicts how friendships often unintentionally come at the expense of other friendships, and the final scene is a metaphor for being left to deal with your pain and unfulfilled desires on your own. This system makes playing the game so guilt-ridden because none of the characters deserve to be pushed out. The game’s three endings simulate some of my experiences of loneliness this semester. I’ve several times been upset (along with drunk) about feeling unable to share feelings or Real Shit with certain people. Because the few times I have, I feel like I’ve been either hand-waved or met with little reciprocating honesty. It’s the worst feeling in the world to have people you trust shut you out like that, and I’ve sort of “lost it” a few times. Someone has videos of me babbling about subjectivity and yelling about “what’s wrong with me!” and being a “negative ball of negative awfulness” ~to no one in particular~ at 2 AM. That’s what being the Devil is. The Devil’s the only one who’ll hold you in those situations.

But the times that friends have taken care of me this year have meant the world to me. The game’s “true” ending shares the beautiful possibility of a community of friends in which no one gets left out. It’s presented as an ideal that takes work and effort but certainly isn’t impossible. That ending inspires me to put in that work both for myself and others in 2016--to love myself and find others who can know the devil with me. It’s not going to be easy, but I’m definitely going to try to be better to myself and the people around me.

I just heard it’s on Steam Greenlight. Please go vote for it!

Honorable Mentions

Bayonetta 1 & 2

Jessica Jones/Daredevil

Little Party

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance

HUGPUNX /Comforting Sounds /Alpaca Run

Minkomora

Splatoon

FKA twigs- M3LL155X

Sonic Dreams Collection

Robert Yang's Games

The Beginner’s Guide

In between semesters, free from a good deal of responsibilities, I have all this energy re: making 2016 better. And I don’t want this energy to die out by the time I make it back to campus. So I really want to hold myself to higher standards, to improve my craft, my relationships, and my self.

Thanks to everyone who’s been awesome and supportive this year! Here’s to building something great in 2016.

Life is Strange: More Thoughts on Time, Consequence, and Anxiety

[Spoilers for Life is Strange Episodes 1-4]

[TW: references to domestic abuse]

I can’t fucking wait for school to start again. I’m writing this just a few days before I go back to college, and I’m really excited to live with my friends again and take interesting classes. Every day the past few weeks, I’ve been saying to my parents, “I want to go to school,” or, “Can’t I just be at school now?” which is beautifully and horribly ironic considering that just a few years ago, I would say to my parents every day, “I don’t want to go to school,” or, “Can I please just not go today?” (Of course I went every day in high school and got perfect attendance despite the daily grievances.)

In these last few weeks of summer before my sophomore year, I’ve been keeping myself busy playing through Dontnod’s episodic Life is Strange. While I’ve been anticipating a variety of social situations among friends, strangers, and university faculty in the upcoming weeks, I’ve been experiencing both the mundane and spectacular situations that high school senior Max Caulfield finds herself in at her school Blackwell Academy and the surrounding small town of Arcadia Bay. The game revolves around Max’s newfound power to rewind time to redo events, make new choices, and fix mistakes. 

Gamespot.com

Max’s superpower is an excellent premise for a young adult videogame, not only because of games’ history with rewinding time as a mechanic (e.g. Braid and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time), but also because most people fantasize about going back in time after saying something they regret or missing out on a opportunity, especially teens with naive wishes for perfect, easy lives in which everybody likes them. I can think of so many situations when I would like to use this power. Like in class when the teacher asks a question I think I know the answer to but am too afraid of answering in case I’m wrong, only to feel salty after another student confirms my guess. Or when I definitely know the answer to something, perhaps with more detail than the teacher, but I don’t want to seem like an obnoxious know-it-all, so instead of answering, the class sits in awkward silence for a minute before the teacher disappointedly continues the lecture. Or the times when I’ve thought of a great joke after the window in which it’d be appropriate to use it. And as a queer person, I’d feel a lot safer flirting with a boy at a party if I could rely on a rewind power if he gets wigged out or becomes threatening. But with my social anxiety, I’d be rewinding most often after I’ve omitted doing something rather than after speaking or acting.

Last December I wrote a post about how Creatures Such As We and Queers in Love at the End of the World use time restraints to create anxiety in the player, inciting her fear of missing out, fear of not being perfect. But with the power of time at her fingertips, Max can eliminate the anxiety of missing out. Life is Strange caters to the player like Mass Effect in that you’re free to walk around the environments, look at objects, and talk to people at your own pace even when the narrative says you should be urgently focused on a task. The Earth is burning, but it’s, like, totally fine that Shepard chills on the Citadel for a few days. An anxious Warren waits for Max in the parking lot, but it’s, like, totally fine that Max talks to everyone on the quad first and even lets Daniel draw a detailed sketch of her. The dissonance takes you out of the experience, but it’s less of a problem than in Mass Effect because it reinforces that since Max has all the time in the world, she’s free to see everything and assess accordingly.

Max’s new power naturally gives her a new sense of confidence, which the game implies during Max’s first confrontation with Juliet in Episode 1. Juliet is confused by Max’s newfound upfrontness, wondering why she would suddenly care enough to approach her about her problems. Totally weirded out by Max pushing into her personal affairs, she says to her, “You never talk, just zone out with your camera.” It’s clear that Max was a socially awkward and shy girl before she got her powers. Before she realizes her powers, she walks the halls of Blackwell with headphones in her ears after Mr. Jefferson’s class, choosing to see but not engage with anybody in the hall. This scene seems a lot closer to my experience of high school than Max walking up to everybody to check in on their lives and intervene during situations after she gets her powers. Max’s rewind ability is a clever means to let you play as an awkward, shy teen without having to deal with the baggage of existence as an awkward shy teen who is unable to talk to anyone ever. 

wethenerdy.com

Max’s newfound confidence comes from not having to worry about the finality of her choices right away. Every choice you make that has a consequence later comes with a chime and a flapping butterfly icon on the top left of the screen, signalling you to rewind if you want to consider a different option before moving on. I always rewind in the case of diverging paths, even when I know my first decision is the one I wanted to make, just to see what happens. I want to see the different outcomes of different possibilities to 1) see which actions and dialogue choices work most in my and my friends’ favors and 2) test these against what I feel ethically comfortable doing (more on that later). Because Max can only rewind about a few minutes at a time, you can only see the immediate results of your actions; you can only guess the long term effects. Most decisions have potential negative results, which Max will voice as she asks herself if she should rewind. Though Max has time on her side, my anxiety about the choices is often worse in some cases because even though I now have the power to potentially be “perfect,” I still don’t know the future. Since I have the opportunity to change my choices, the pressure is on to get it right. I see that letting Chloe keep the gun she stole from her stepdad prevents her from feeling betrayed by me, but I don’t know if it’ll get her into trouble or danger later on. Thinking about the possibilities with my expanded control over situations actually heightens anxiety because now I feel even more culpable for the consequences of my actions.  

I’m thorough in my playthrough both because I want to see all that the game offers and because I want to make sure I’m being as perfect as possible. Most of the time I rewind after optional conversations with no effect on the plot just to ensure that I both see everything and I choose the dialogue path that presents more authentically what I would say or what my intentions are to the other characters, regardless of whether or not their reactions are essentially the same either way. When snooping around a person’s room, I rewind so that it was as if I never looked at certain things, even though the game wasn’t going to punish me for snooping in the first place (though it sometimes does). After a classmate didn’t let me fly her drone, I searched her bag and found the model number, rewound time and impressed her with the information I pretended to have already known. But after she let me fly the drone that time, I felt guilty and rewound as if I had never approached her. I became so obsessed with some of my choices that it was hard to progress through the game. Most of the episodes took me 5 or 6 hours rather than 3 as most reviewers say.

I find it hard to feel like I’m ever doing the right thing while playing Life is Strange.

Mari of Geek Remix made an excellent video analyzing the morality of Max’s use of her superpower:

 

As Mari details, because of her rewind ability, Max never has to take responsibility for any of the short term consequences of her actions. Instead of apologizing for upsetting someone, she can just rewind and comfort them instead. She can use information gleaned from conversations gone south to her advantage after she rewinds. In real life, if people were rude to or made fun of me for not knowing about drones, skateboarding, or obscure photography facts, I would not want to engage with them. But Max doesn’t have to accept the fact that some people don’t like her and can instead manipulate people using time to say the right things and make friends with everybody. Sure, it makes all parties involved feel better about each other, but those Max uses her powers on don’t really know who the real Max is.

Max is able to make several choices all in one scenario, but she can rewind so that she can only be judged for one of the choices she makes. In one scenario, Chloe’s stepdad David gets ready to barge into her room while Max is present. She can choose to face David with Chloe or hide in the closet at Chloe’s request. When David finds weed in Chloe’s room, you can either take the blame, deny your involvement, or stay hidden if that applies. When you refuse to intervene from the closet or take the blame, David ends up slapping Chloe across the face, but not if you make a different choice. I saw all of the different scenarios play out and made my final choice to hide in the closet, then intervene and take the blame for the pot. But I had still witnessed David slap Chloe, which colored my impression of him for the rest of the game. I choose to judge David as an abuser even though he technically didn’t slap Chloe in the universe I chose to move on in. But no one has to judge Max for any of the awful things she does in alternate universes. I want to be clear here - I’m not saying we should give David a free pass, because he did hit Chloe in an alternate universe that does exist. But Max acts horrendously in plenty of alternate universes, but she faces no judgment for those actions. I made fun of Victoria after splashing her with wet paint, let Frank and his dog get killed almost a dozen times, tried to shoot Frank myself, and watched passively when a friend got bullied, but it’s all fine because I rewound time to erase those questionable decisions. It’s unfair that Max can see and judge everyone’s shitty actions that don’t necessarily come to pass, while she can essentially get away with anything and does in some cases. If growing up is about making mistakes, then Max can never grow up as long as she holds on to her superpower.

I did a bad thing last semester. Without going into too much detail, as housing selection for the fall drew near, my friends and I bailed out on another friend, who was under the impression that we were definitely planning to room with him, a week before the housing applications were due. To make matters worse, he found out from someone else we had told. I felt like such a horrible person and cried about it because I thought our decision meant he’d be alone for a whole semester and because I know I would have felt betrayed and devastated if I was in his place. Of course I wanted to rewind the whole week and a) convince my friends to room with him, b) call him earlier to tell him of our plans, or c) make sure the person who spilled the beans keeps their mouth shut. But I don’t have Max’s powers, so instead I apologized. And, yeah, he was mad at me. But he eventually found a new roommate and the whole deal blew over with everyone being okay. But Max never has to process or own up to her mistakes; she only has to rewind and make it seem like things never went out of equilibrium, like when Dana catches her snooping in her room, as highlighted by Mari’s video. Sure, she still feels anxiety over making big decisions with unclear, lasting impacts, but she never has to engage with regret after immediate consequences. 

Tough decisions abound. | Gamespot.com

In her video Mari reasons through rewinding time while playing as Max:

“...I want to have a perfect game, a perfect playthrough, a perfect life. I want people to like me, I don’t want my friends to die, I want to get good grades, and I want all of that to come to me easily. I want that so bad that I don’t think about the possible consequences in the future. I’m willing to break the universe, let my body get ruined, and betray all sense of morality in order to be perfect, no matter how many warning signs I get. And isn’t that the entire psyche of a teenager?”

One of the best things about Life is Strange is its characterization of Max is relation to her rewind powers. Clearly, Max has a good heart despite the poor morality of her actions. Max is legitimately trying to be a good person and make things better for both herself and others around her, but in her quest for perfection, she fails to see the benefits of owning up to her mistakes and learning from them. The game even implies that she has a sense of awareness about her actions. When you look in a certain mirror, Max will wonder whether she’s a superhero or a total hypocrite. She feels like a real teenager with all the right intentions just trying to get everyone to like her. She just has to learn that it sucks to be a person and live in a world where you have to deal with your flaws, and if being perfect means having to constantly manipulate the world and deceive other people, maybe it’s just best to be yourself.

So it all comes down to the final episode. Will Max finally have to confront the dubious ethics of her abilities and choose to relinquish them? Will Episode 5 finally explicitly depict queerness, or will the game go down in history as a particularly egregious example of queer baiting? And what exactly happened to Rachel Amber and Kate Marsh, who is responsible, and why? And finally, why did Max receive her powers in the first place?

I’m almost as excited and anxious about the possible answers to these questions as I am about starting my sophomore year and my last eight months of living as a teenager.

Invisible Harnesses

Last week a friend and I decided to spend an afternoon on an elaborate obstacle course suspended by ropes and cables from trees. We shimmied across platforms circling tree trunks, balanced on suspended logs, climbed a cargo net, and slid across several zip lines. The physical actions required to complete the course reminded me of the platforming and set pieces of the Uncharted games and the Tomb Raider reboot. After finishing the Tomb Raider reboot last month, I thought that those sections failed to provide tension despite entire architectures crumbling and rock structures caving in all around Lara. Escaping from a burning monastery just felt like going through the motions to me. But walking along the tightrope on the course with ropes to hold on to and harnesses hooked to a safety cable felt pretty scary. Obviously, a physical simulation of traversing a dangerous environment is going to be more frightening than a virtual simulation in which you sit on the couch with a controller in your hand. But I think my experience on the course reveals how these games try to compensate for the mundane safety of your own body by putting your virtual body in spectacular danger. Sadly, this contextual approach of raising the stakes to create tension doesn’t always work because harnesses more foolproof than those of the obstacle course are baked into these games’ design.

It seems that the physical game and the virtual one must aim for opposing aesthetics to make each experience fun and engaging. Because the obstacle course involves risk, however minimal, of injury and death (according to the waiver we signed), the course needs to feel safe in order for people to comfortably zip across 250 feet of cable several stories from the ground. Bright red landing pads indicate the platforms you zip to and soften the impact if you’re unable to break properly, carabiners on your harness clip onto red safety cables throughout the course, instructions and tips litter each platform, and guides follow you on the course to make sure everything goes smoothly. The course in its reproduction of actually hazardous environmental conditions has to compensate by reassuring you of your safety. The course unfortunately only accommodates able-bodied people of certain body types and also failed to reassure my friend who is a bit more scared of heights than I am and who chose to get down after the first zip line. Videogames like Uncharted and Tomb Raider need to instead make players on their comfy couches feel like they’re in danger and that they need to take urgent action. The games rely on visual spectacle and dramatic scenarios to try making holding up on the analog stick and pressing X more intense and interesting, like this:

Source: venturebeat.com

I think Uncharted 2 was my first photorealistic AAA action game, and I was very impressed by this scene and all the other climby bits back in 2009--the bombast of the visuals, the way the ledges and platforms crumble and disappear the moment you jump to the next, and Drake’s great animations and weighty kinaesthetics. But after playing both Among Thieves and Drake’s Fortune a few times, the illusion started to break as I became more aware of the harnesses. By the time I played Uncharted 3, these set pieces still looked remarkable, but they didn’t really offer any surprises or true moments of tension. I realized that every climbable ledge stands out in the environments because of its shading, there will always be a climbable ledge when Drake is in danger, and Drake can safely stand still in a burning ruin forever or hold on to a ledge without getting tired. Drake will always survive these perilous platforming sections because 1) such a death would be “anti-climatic” by these games’ standards and 2) game narratives built around controlling a singular protagonist can’t really afford their deaths. Drake will leap across impossibly wide chasms, as the game wills it. If Drake jumps on a platform that breaks, Elena will save him just in time, as the game wills it. If you, the player, mess up and deviate from the game’s script, and Drake plummets down a bottomless pit, the invisible harness will catch him, respawning him just a few seconds before the failed leap. You come to realize that not only is your own body always safe when playing Uncharted, but Drake’s body is ultimately safe too.

The physical strength and dexterity required of the difficult parts of the obstacle course are in and of themselves the course’s source of fun and engagement. But in the games all you have to do is move the stick in certain directions and press X at the right time or perform a simple quick-time event. To make platforming sections feel more like rewarding labor, the games emphasize the hazards, make the jumps wider and the stakes higher. While the obstacle course designers want to make their users feel safe, the game designers want to make their players feel in peril, and both sometimes fail. My friend was too scared of heights and too short to easily reach the wire to slow down when on the zip line. The platforming set pieces of Uncharted and Tomb Raider, with their toothless threats to your character’s safety, are often no more exciting than your local playground and jungle gym.

I think these action games are starting to realize that these set pieces aren’t very affecting. The Last of Us replaces most platforming with the frankly quite worse ladder puzzles, and Tomb Raider tries to go beyond Uncharted by forcing the player to watch needlessly gritty, horrible cutscenes of Lara’s death, often by impalement, perhaps to make players feel more pressure to perform well so as to not have to see such obnoxious, gross images. There is one sequence in Tomb Raider, however, that is fairly successful: when Lara climbs the radio tower. The scene requires the simplest interaction of all the set pieces--holding up to climb the ladder. But in context, this scene is essential to Lara’s character progression. Everything relies on this moment. Successfully climbing the rusty, extremely tall, and partially broken tower in the chilling wind not only means that Lara and her friends might be able to signal for help and safely get off the island but also that Lara can start to believe that she is capable of overcoming incredible odds in order to survive the toughest scenarios. The way the wind whistles ominously and the camera pulls away from Lara and back towards her suggests that this is a pivotal moment and that tragedy could strike at any point during Lara’s climb. Her palpable trepidation as she ascends the tower and her immense relief as someone responds to her distress signal at the top make for an tense, emotionally powerful moment.

via user TRStrider74

This scene in Tomb Raider is successful mostly because the action of climbing becomes significant to the character and the narrative context, which these set pieces rarely are. Platforming seems to be used primarily as a device for pacing. We scale a fortress wall to give us break from shooting dudes in the face. And that works for the most part; those sections lack the stress of combat, even though they should probably include the stress of physical exertion on our character. But Lara will never tire out climbing up a rope that she used as a zip line like I almost did on the course when I took the wrong zip and had to turn back. She’ll use a single climbing axe to scale rock walls (I’m not sure how that’s even possible), but there are no contingencies in which she slips or the axe falls out. These gameplay sections that would be incredibly difficult and petrifying to perform in real life are usually taken as a breather.

I don’t really have a solution to the problems of the platforming bits in Uncharted and Tomb Raider and other action games. Besides, they do work well to control the games’ pacing, and it can be fun to perform the acrobatics amidst the spectacle of things exploding, collapsing, burning down, etc. Despite their benefits to the games’ structures and how they always look incredible, they often don’t evoke much of anything and appear little more than excessive showcases of technology. I realize it’s not really news to anybody that an aspect of Uncharted has become rote and that the main purpose of whole parts of games is simply to mix things up for the player or show off a game’s engine. I just want to suggest that climbing, shimmying, balancing, and zipping could be actions that excite and engage players and provide a challenge that’s meaningful to the characters that players control. How, exactly? I don’t think I can fumble through armchair game design advice on this topic, but perhaps the radio tower scene from Tomb Raider is a start. Ultimately, though, I can only leave you hanging (sorry) with these observations.