Destiny: An Excercise in Disappointment

The biggest problem Destiny has is that describing exactly what it is becomes a matter of subtraction very quickly.  It’s Mass Effect without the character focus and careful exposition, it’s Halo without variety and that intangible scrappy factor that built a franchise, Call of Duty without carefully constructed combat sequences and balanced multiplayer, World of Warcraft without exciting loot and deep skill trees.

But most succinctly, it’s an ambitious video game without the bravado to capitalize on what it does well.

Desti-nearly put me to sleep

Inasmuch as Destiny tries to tell a story, it’s about a humanity on the brink of extinction an indeterminate incredibly long period of time into the future.  Some alien moon/sphere thing called the traveler showed up on Mars, and that somehow lead the human race to a golden age in which they expanded to fill out our solar system.

Following this advantageous development, the darkness, a vaguely defined “enemy of the traveler” pursued it to our system.  A war ensued, and the human race has been pushed back to the bounds of one city, conveniently referred to as simply the city, with the tower serving as the hub for the guardians (of which the player is a resurrected member) who go out and fight the fallen, the hive, the vex, and the cabal, receiving occasional assistance from the queen, the queen’s brother, and the speaker.

As a writer myself, I know that it’s hard to name things in sci-fi without making them sound silly.  All the same, I’m genuinely forced to wonder how this will be localized in Russia and other places where the language lacks a definite article and this unique refusal to name things becomes evident.  It feels like a Mad Gab where [Guardians], [Queen], and [Queen’s Brother] will fight [Darkness] with [Noun] to save [Traveler] and [City] from [Adjective] [Poorly Imagined Antagonists].

This simply serves to add to the frustrating ambiguity of Destiny as a narrative experience.  I paid careful attention through the game’s 15 or so hour long “story” missions, and I’m genuinely not sure what I accomplished.  The role and function of “The Traveler” and the threat that “The Darkness” poses to it are left so intentionally ambiguous (no doubt in an attempt to draw some kind of passé parallel to Lovecraft) that the player is left flitting about from planet to planet with no real driving motivation behind whatever one is doing from mission to mission.

Frankly, I’m not even sure if the enemies I was fighting are themselves “The Darkness”, or if they’re just correlated to it, or opposed to it… I don’t know, it’s all unclear.

This is the biggest central problem with Destiny as a story – at every opportunity it has to provide even the smallest bit of meaningful exposition or explanation it runs away and shuts the door like an impatient child.  At one point which could be an excellent opportunity for finally getting to the bottom of what the hell is happening in this game, a character called the stranger literally says “I don’t even have time to explain why I don’t have time to explain.”

All of this could be closer to forgivable if there was some other mechanism for exposition within the game, something akin to the Codex in Mass Effect or the hundreds of books lying around in every game of the Elder Scrolls series.  Destiny has a “grimoire”, but it isn’t even accessible in-game, requiring you to create a Bungie account, log into Bungie.net just to access it.  Even then, after you’ve given Bungie your email, they refuse to give you even the most basic information.  What did the traveler do that helped humans achieve so much?  What are guardians?  What is “The Darkness”?  The game hoards all of this information to itself, wrapping ambiguity in misinformation and vague hints until it feels less and less like you’re playing through a game and more and more like you’re playing through the diagramed skeleton of a game that someone plans on making.

All of this could be forgivable provided a solid, deep, gameplay foundation…

Desti-knee deep

Make no mistake, the nuts and bolts of a great shooter are here, but it feels like they’re all tossed across the floor like the legos of yesteryear’s playtime.

The movement in Destiny is solid, and so is the gunplay.  The feedback on most weapons is excellent, and the sensation of power-jumping, gliding, and teleporting across co-op and multiplayer arenas is fantastic.  The vertical element games like Titanfall brought to the FPS genre is here, and it makes the basic moving and shooting mechanics fantastic.

However, these great mechanics are wasted on a single player campaign that’s more drab and repetitive than anything I can remember playing in the last ten years.  Literally every mission takes the format of “Go to place, fight bad guys in that place.”  And where the Halo series introduced variety with creative sets, constant new weapons, vehicles, and set-piece battles, Destiny presents the same slog through room after room where enemies either wait in place ala Dark Souls or literally spawn out of thin air, directly in front of the players.

These enemies, which always spawn en masse, have unimaginative AI, boring presentation, repetitive designs and predictable roles.  Every faction has enemies that all fill more or less the same roles: cannon fodder, harder cannon fodder, so on and so forth.  And while challenge is essential to enemy design in a good video game, most of the enemy types in Destiny are simply annoying to fight.  Some enemies are invisible and deal massive melee damage, some fly around and shoot at you like an ungodly robotic hybrid of gnats and termites.  And then there are the bullet sponges.

Taking what may be literally the worst part of RPGs into itself, almost every combat encounter in Destiny includes at least one enemy with impractically large amounts of health and frustratingly powerful attacks.  These enemies roam around the battlefield, often able to teleport themselves long distance, and no matter what faction they come from they share similar capabilities for massive damage at all ranges.  Fighting them is not challenging, so much as it’s a chore.

These enemies extend themselves into a handful of boss characters which uniformly follow the pattern of “a normal enemy, but bigger.”  These boss characters make up the worst parts of the game, especially since they tend to spawn lesser enemies during their already impractically long fights.  This practice annoys me in every video game in which I see it, but here it’s simply, unambiguously terrible. 

There are simply no words to describe how annoying it is to spend fifteen minutes with two people you’ve never met dodging constant, heavy, area-of-effect fire from five directions while trying to accurately shoot a hulking behemoth that is effectively impervious to all individual effort.

These experiences ruin the single-player “campaign”, but thankfully the competitive multiplayer is better.  It’s close to excellent, but the basic problem with it boils down to the fact that “the crucible” is about as well-balanced as a discussion of West-bank settlements on Fox News.

First and foremost, each player can start a multiplayer match with a sniper rifle, shotgun, or “fusion rifle”, with about a clip and a half.  Each of these weapons are horrifically unbalanced, especially considering that everyone starts with one of them.  The shotguns and sniper rifles fill their traditional roles as one-hit kills at close and long range respectively, and the fusion rifles seem to be designed to fill the same purpose at mid-range.  They require a brief charge period, but between these three weapons that, again I emphasize, everyone starts every match with, it’s often 'easy to become frustrated with the whole endeavor.

Tack onto this the “super” abilities available to each player, which function like killstreak rewards that don’t require a killstreak, and dying in Destiny’s multiplayer rarely feels like one was meaningfully beaten.  I can’t even count the number of times I was one-shot-killed by weapons or powers that simply feel cheap, like half-invincible melee upgrades, enemy-seeking super bombs and attacks that at once kill everything in a large radius and render the user briefly invincible.  Almost every class has these game-breaking abilities, but the fact that everyone has them all the time, and that they’re nearly instantaneous and effectively unpreventable, only further contribute to a sense of futility.

Add to this an incredibly lacking selection of maps, and the fact that players cannot influence the map they play on, and that there’s not allotted time to configure one’s loadout to the map, and the experience becomes all the more frustrating.

In Conclusion

Destiny is not a bad game, it’s far from it.

All the same, it’s even more well-distanced from good.

At every turn, it promises depth and substance where there’s not really any to be found.  The opening minutes are exhilarating, and even through the first full mission it’s engaging, but things fall apart very quickly after that when the routine sets in and the plot grows more esoteric while simultaneously providing less context and information to inform the action.

The gunplay is solid, but the single-player campaign is burdened with annoying enemies, repetitive tasking and a shocking lack of variety.  The multiplayer is engaging, but its failure to balance several core mechanics makes even the best moments simply feel like luck of the draw.

All in all, Destiny is simply disappointing as a game, and more importantly as a picture of an industry that seems ignorant to what makes its successes successful, as it does to what makes its failures fail.

Broadcasting on the Wrong Frequency: Anita Sarkeesian and the Immaculate Conception

I have expressed my deep appreciation for and support of the work of Anita Sarkeesian elsewhere.  She is an excellent woman who deserves a great deal of praise for her brazen, unashamed, and helpful critique of modern gaming culture.  However, as a practicing Catholic and a scholar of religious studies, I cannot help but point out two specific and glaring flaws in her work.  Both of these instances betray a critical misunderstanding of Biblical narratives and an unfortunate tendency to, by implication, blame the tropes with which Sarkeesian associates them on the Biblical narratives in question.  In this post, I will discuss only one instance, the more grievous in my evaluation, and the other will be addressed in another post.

The aforementioned comes from her fifth video in the Tropes Vs. Women series, entitled The Mystical Pregnancy.

In the episode, Sarkeesian catalogs a surprising number of incidents across sci-fi television series in which female characters are forcibly impregnated or have their reproductive faculties somehow harvested or taken advantage of in a non-sexual, but invasive manner.  In all of the numerous incidents, she points out, the "pregnancy" in question lasts no more than one episode, is never again addressed, and furthermore produces some distinctly abnormal or freakish offspring.

The trope, she argues, objectifies the female reproductive capacity for the sake of a plot point, calls up unfortunate similarities to a rape narrative, and ignores the real and long-lasting implications, both positive and negative, of pregnancy and child-rearing.  All of this is well and good, a criticism well-applied to the modern examples she cites in the video.

However, three and a half minutes into the video, here if you're curious, she says the following:
"My apologies in advance to my more religious viewers, because we really can't forget the original mystical pregnancy narrative: the immaculate conception.  As the story goes, an all-powerful being descended from the heavens and impregnated a young woman with the chosen one destined to save earth and the soul of humanity... yep."

The first issue that I think needs addressing here is a pernicious, ineffective, and annoying tendency in cultural criticism which seems to believe that apologizing beforehand for saying or implying something deeply offensive makes the act thereof somehow less offensive.  In reality, this statement and others like it accomplish little or nothing more than the de-valuing of the statement which follows

If I mean to tell my friend Jim that he is an asshole and he should stop being an asshole, the most effective way for me to do that is to simply say it as it is - if I want Jim to change or accept where he has genuinely wronged myself or someone else, the best way for me to accomplish that goal is to be very serious, very honest and still very loving in my assertion.  If I instead say, "I'm sorry Jim, but you're an asshole and you should stop being one", I have weakened my position by expressing regret over an observation of wrongdoing.  If Jim is in the wrong and if I have noticed that he is in the wrong, I should have no sorrow at all for pointing out to him the facts of the matter.

Similarly, if Sarkeesian believes (as she obviously does) that the Immaculate Conception is the primary example of the harmful trope, she should be as unabashed in proclaiming that as she is in pointing out modern examples of the trope.

Furthermore, the unnecessary flippancy which her dramatic pause and smirking "yep" are applied seem, in the context of the video, to at once maintain an air of arrogant superiority and (as is the case with essentially all similar moments at the end of any statements) this moment commits an obvious and blatant fallacy known as the appeal to the people.

She does not present an argument for why her (distinctly over-simplified) recounting of the Immaculate conception, which is a fundamentally consensual, benign and full narrative, fits into her own long list of non-consensual, hostile and reductionist narratives that serve as a kind of "reproductive torture-porn."

Rather than presenting this argument, we are provided with a dramatic pause and a yep, which seems to imply that everyone knows and could see how the Immaculate Conception falls into tight coordination with the other narratives, which implies (another trait of the fallacy) that only an idiot, or someone who did not grasp the situation fully, would not see the thorough parallels.

And while there are indeed parallels, at least in that Mary is impregnated with a unique child by a mystical force, I, for one, fail to see how the other instances cited otherwise parallel the Immaculate conception.  As I stated before, all of the other examples which Sarkeesian cites in the video consist of a non-consensual and accelerated or incredibly brief pregnancy.  Furthermore, with the exception of the example cited from Star Trek: The Next Generation, all of these instances are hostile and produce monstrous offpsring.  Furthermore, all of the characters in all of the examples cited are, as she points out, reduced to their female bodies, seemingly selected and used for the singular reason that they are female.

On all of these points, the narrative of the Immaculate Conception quite simply does not match up with the other cited instances of which, according to Sarkeesian, it is the original example and source of continuous perpetuation.

First and foremost, Mary is not selected to bear the offspring of God arbitrarily or simply because she is female.  Rather, in specific contrast, Mary is selected on the basis of her own specific merits, the angel saying she is "highly favored", which in context and in the tradition of interpretation has been taken to mean that she was exceedingly, personally holy.  Mary's selection is anything but objectifying and arbitrary: she is selected among all women (perhaps, according to some schools of thought, in all possible periods or times) for being especially, personally holy.

Furthermore, in a turn that the Eastern Orthodox deem incredibly important, Mary consents to the whole state of affairs.  She is not passive in the process, and the entire impregnation takes place explicitly with her consent.  And if her statement in Luke 1:38 "I am the Lord's servant, may your word be fulfilled," were not enough, she sings a song of praise only a few verses later which has become one of the most important Christian prayers in all of history, known as the Magnificat.

In other words, where all but one of the other examples cited by Sarkeesian are hostile in their nature, Mary not only consents but she rejoices, taking joy in her status and musing that "all nations will call [her] blessed."  The Immaculate conception is rather specifically a benign, positive narrative.

Furthermore, all of the other examples provided include an accelerated or surprisingly brief pregnancy, which is completely absent from the narrative in the book of Luke.

In summary then, the Immaculate Conception, which Sarkeesian accuses of being the original template for intrusive, hostile, objectifying plots in modern science fiction shares none of those traits.  It is distinctly consensual, distinctly benign, and distinctly personal.

Furthermore, while it does contain a narrative of impregnation of a hero figure by a divine or mystical force, it is hardly the first or most prominent to do so.  The Greeks, among others, were writing and telling stories about women who were impregnated by deities with heroic, demigod children thousands of years before Christians were.

Or am I the only one who remembers the stories of (deep breath):
Hercules
Perseus
Esclepius
Arjuna
Orion
Theseus
Minos
Gilgamesh
Achilles

Need I go on?  While the story of Jesus' Birth is fairly unique in its insistence of a virgin birth, it is hardly the first or "original" narrative of mystical pregnancy.  Much more notable here, as well, is that many of the earlier narratives of divine pregnancy do, in fact, share the qualities of non-consent (often even rape), and hostility.  While the accelerated pregnancy seems to be a feature fairly native to modern sci-fi, probably because of the episodic format it so often assumes, all of the other features are indeed native to early religious storytelling, but to early religious storytelling of Greek and Mesopotamian myths.

I do genuinely hate to be so critical and so diminutive of Anita Sarkeesian in this instance, but her inclusion of the Immaculate Conception in a list of terrifying stories of "reproductive torture-porn" is unwarranted, ignorant, and unjust, all of which are made worse by her flippancy and the casual, arrogant nature with which she assigns the blame for a failing of modern science fiction to an ancient narrative that serves as one of the core narratives of the religious commitment of almost 2 billion people.

I support Anita Sarkeesian, but in this instance her facts are wrong, her presentation is fallacious, her assumptions are ignorant, and her claim is demonstrably false.

Tropes vs. Storytelling: Why Anita Sarkeesian's Model of Criticism Falls Short

If you’re 20-something, or male, or into modern popular media (especially as put forward within the realm of gaming), you should drop whatever plans you have for your next hour or two of leisure time and check out Ms. Sarkeesian’s web series Feminist Frequency, which makes a specific task of analyzing and criticizing the media (especially the games) that we know and love from a critical, unabashed feminist perspective.

Ms. Sarkeesian is insightful, and her criticisms and her perspective are as necessary and healthy to gaming as a culture as they are seemingly unwelcome.  

In case you don’t know, they’re very unwelcome.  So unwelcome, in fact, that hers is considered by many a textbook case of over-the-top, gratuitous online harassment, and if reports are to be believed, she has received a number of death threats.  Let’s be clear here: this woman has received death threats for saying that there are some things about pop culture that she does not very well appreciate.

As a blogger, as an activist, and as a contributor to gaming culture as a whole, Anita Sarkeesian is one of the most valuable people on the planet to the cultural value of gaming and the cultural relevance of gamers who would like to have deeper, more meaningful games and deeper, more meaningful discussions about those games.  Hers is an effort that is not misguided, and is effective in bringing out a great number of the persistent problems with the representation of women in gaming and other popular media.  I applaud her work and her personal fortitude.

Feminism, and especially the inclusive, insistent and thoroughly critical feminism espoused by Sarkeesian and others like her, is a healthy force in modern social discourse.  The values, perspectives, insights and complaints that Sarkeesian raises in her videos are, furthermore and similarly valuable, wholesome, intelligent and revolutionary in the best sense of the term.  I agree with and actively support Sarkeesian and the wider causes of Feminism, and LGBTQ rights, with no qualifiers, no detractions and with full support for those who feel that the arrangement of media and social constructs in the modern age grow increasingly restrictive, diminutive inhibitive as one moves away from the “normal” conception of the straight, cis-gendered, white male.

I say all of this to emphasize that what I am about to say is not a criticism or a diminution of the more enlightened perspective that Anita Sarkeesian brings to gaming.  That is indispensable.

Nonetheless, I believe, as an ardent supporter of that perspective that everywhere and always those of us who espouse that perspective should use only the best argumentative means available to us.  Ours is an uphill struggle, and it is important that in our cooperative exercise of conversational and critical faculties, we criticize one another.  The only way to make what we’re saying more palatable, more relevant and ultimately more successful is to address with a careful lens how we are saying it.

The Root Issue

Sarkeesian’s primary continuing series is Tropes Vs. Women, in which she (generally) first labels a specific trope (Trope :  a common or overused theme or device :  <the usual horror movie tropes>) points out a plethora of examples of the trope in question, usually in gaming.  From the examples provided, she will go on to explain how the particular trope as a systematic plot device contributes to the degradation or objectification of women in the examples.  These facts being established, she will go on to elaborate on instances of the trope to explain how the implementation in specific games is harmful or degrading.  These tasks being accomplished, she has a fortunate habit of suggesting alternate paths, or citing examples of games and other media that specifically turn the trope on its head.

This is all well and good, and as it stands there are a number of strengths to this method.

As a criticism of the trope specifically, and of the general social structures or manufactured beliefs that the tropes support and/or put forward, the method is strong.  Furthermore, as a method of artistic activism, her series could be seen as a 2-3 hour guide on how to avoid common, often accidental misogynies when one is engaged in the process of creating art.

Nonetheless, the form and content of the videos often directly criticizes the media in question for having used the trope.  This, very specifically, is a problem in Sarkeesian’s message.

She is in the right when she criticizes Max Payne and a plethora of other games for using the “Damsel in the Refrigerator” to motivate the plot action.  She is in the right when she cites the degrading picture of feminine capability put forward by the tiled, over-worn use of Princess Peach in essentially every Mario game ever.  The problem, however, is that her criticism does not stop at the specific implementation of the trope elements in the particular piece of media being addressed.

The common implication, which she states explicitly in a number of videos, is that the use of the trope in question as a device in the plot is a blot on the creativity and value of the work in question.  This is a mistake.

Criticizing a game (or a show, or a book) for objectifying female characters or presenting femininity (or any other natural, not-evil human traits, for that matter) is valid.  However, the use of a trope is in some cases necessary to achieve a particular meaning.

[SPOILER WARNING for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Ubsoft’s Far Cry 3]

One of the best examples of this is, of all things, Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein.  There are three primary female characters in the novel, Frankenstein’s mother, a serving-girl named Justine and Frankenstein’s own adopted sister/fiancee/wife, Elizabeth.  None of these three are particularly deep as characters, and their place in the narrative novels makes them less involved, changing human beings and more alabaster statues of femininity.  Furthermore, all three of them die, and the primary, perhaps the only, plot function that their deaths serve ends up to be little more than character development on the part of Frankenstein.

Those familiar with Sarkeesian’s work will note multiple instances of “The Damsel in the Refrigerator”, a female character being sacrificed in order to provide character development for the male.

What’s more, a fourth instance of the trope can be easily found in Frankenstein’s destruction of a second, female monster during the process of its creation.  This instance, although the female being in question is not yet alive when it happens, is a destruction of what otherwise would be a female companion, which once more accomplishes little more than providing character development for the monster, a male character.

So really we have 4 instances of “The Damsel in the Refrigerator”, each one more damning than the last - the first dies of essentially natural causes, the second is executed falsely, the third is killed while not yet living, and the fourth is murdered in her bed, with narrative implications that she may have also been raped, and all of this for the character development of Frankenstein and his monster.

But it’s not that simple.

In her article, Possessing Nature: The Female in Frankenstein, Anne K. Mellor proposes that this continual and growing destruction of all things female in Frankenstein, and the disaster that follows from said destruction, is perhaps the key to the narrative itself.

Frankenstein, she writes, rejects the female aspects of life which are embodied in friendship and mutual care when he isolates himself for the sake of his studies.  Furthermore, his creation of the monster is itself a kind of severely misguided effort to usurp female creative power, and his act of destroying the female monster exhibits a complete lack of maternal responsibility and motherly care for the creature he has created.  Read thus, the novel as a whole can be quite effectively read as a cautionary tale about the self-destructive Romantic ideals of “great men” who act through tremendous willpower and erase all feminine impulses from themselves.  Frankenstein, as a novel, is in this reading an exhortation to, if not wholeheartedly embrace, at least healthily accept femininity as half of the human impulse.

Sarkeesian’s model of criticizing media as much for utilizing a trope as for the implementation thereof runs into some serious problems here.  The potent, important theme of the destructiveness of the “great man” ideology finds expression in the plot of the novel through the increasingly gruesome deaths of female characters.

YES, female characters die.

YES, it is primarily for the advancement of male characters that this happens but

NO, taken in full context, it does not amount to a degradation of women and

NO, the fact that Shelley used a trope does not devalue the deeper message of the text.

Another example of the flaws of this critical method can be found in the wide-ranging critique of Ubisoft’s masterpiece, Far Cry 3.

The game has been widely criticized for its use of tropes, especially of “Whitey Saves the Day”, and furthermore for having an unbalanced and unreasonable depiction of South-Pacific Islanders.  I will not argue here that these tropes and problems are not present, although I think they are more rightly said to be subverted, but these examples bring us to an important point.

The problem with Sarkeesian’s critical method is that it seems, at times willfully ignorant.  A trope, like imagery, symbolism and metaphor, is a narrative tool.  It is a means by which those who create media create expectations in those who experience media.  When Jason Brody falls in with Natives fighting for their liberation against Pirates who are also Slavers, “Whitey Saves the Day” is clearly in use, objectifying both the whitey in question as a superior outside force and the natives in question as unwilling or unable to save themselves.  However, the more important thing is that the setup creates a set of expectations, namely, the player will help along a group of noble savages and be victorious against an unambiguously evil outside force.  The trope is deployed, but it is then subverted by constant narrative callbacks to reason, contrasting Jason’s ever-increasing violence with the domestic and humane sanity of his friends.  We are essentially asked by the game whether the liberation of a people from slavery is worth the degradation of the self into a cyclical pattern of increasing violence.

Ultimately, my point is that in Far Cry 3, as in Frankenstein and many other great works of art, tropes and expectations are utilized as a narrative tool, and frankly that narrative tool is morally ambiguous.

Yes, certain tools, like the “Damsel in the Refrigerator” are a good deal more prone to abuse and degrading, misogynistic misuse, much in the same way that sports cars are a good deal more prone to abuse and violent, irresponsible, criminal misuse.  But still, the potential for frequent misuse does not disqualify the act of using a tool as immoral or intrinsically degrading.

As with guns, this does not mean that tools should have unfettered use.  It does not mean that we should use these tropes whenever we want, and if anything it does mean that when we use these tools, writing stories and making games, we absolutely must be careful and creative, doing our best collectively and individually to avoid creating media that is harmful.

BUT, we must also be willing to use these tools when we must.  If it is necessary to tell the story that we want to tell, the way we want to tell it, we should be careful, we should be sensitive, and we should be intentionally very well aware of what we are doing, but we must also be willing to do what we must to tell the story we have to tell.

Come back tomorrow, and we will discuss further some glaring problems in Sarkeesian's criticisms, this time dealing with the content of her recent comments on (more accurately against) Christian myth.

Epic Fail

The other day I was playing Arkham City, and I found myself in a tense hostage situation.  There were two evil henchmen left in the room, and one of them had a doctor held hostage, literally at gunpoint, in a position which made him more or less unassailable.  Being the experienced, sophisticated gamer that I am, I took the most subtle, complex strategy which my long hours of experience could render to me.

I dropped directly in front of him and tried to fire off a stun gadget as I bull-rushed him.

Needless to say, I failed to fire the gadget quickly enough once I had taken the half second to aim it, and the hostage was subsequently killed.  What came next surprised me, although it shouldn’t have: the hostage having been killed, I failed and had to restart the segment.

Given the Batman setting, the limitations of writing and a myraid of other problems, I understand why failing to save the hostage gained me a failure, for the same reason I understand why Captain Price isn’t dead throughout the Modern Warfare series if you fail the Chernobyl mission; the narrative in your standard game seemingly can’t cope with the idea that you don’t win.

My problem with this is that ultimately, at some point, there is a genuine comparison to be made between games like Arkham City, Skyrim, or really any other game made in the last 10 or so years (with the possible exception of Dark Souls) and the Super PSTW Action RPG.  For those who can’t or don’t want to click the link, the aforementioned RPG is an action rpg in which the controls consist entirely of pressing the space bar, by which combat, defense, movement, and quick time events are accomplished.  There is no cost to failure in this game, and there is essentially no way to really fail (except through the 2 quicktime events.)

This isn’t to say, either, that games should implement a cost to failure in the ways that has traditionally been understood.  I don’t want a life system, and I don’t want fewer and fewer checkpoints.  I don’t want to lose all of my powerups when I die, and I think it’s also ineffective to make failure cost in-game money.

All of these things are frustrating, and often enraging, but they aren’t a cost.  When you play a game like Kingdom Hearts, which has a final boss with something like five individual iterations and forms that you have to fight, it’s frustrating to lose and have to start over, but it still doesn’t cost anything.  If it accomplishes anything, it creates a kind of denial loop through which the player is even more satisfied upon the final defeat of the challenge at hand.  The same logic can be applied to life systems and few/no checkpoints.  As anyone who loves “hardcore” modes will tell you, these modes and the risks they bring don’t so much give cost to failure as they give incentive to skill.

Ultimately, the same can be said about pay-to-die systems, like those implemented in Bioshock (excuse me while I vomit off-screen) Infinite or Grand Theft Auto.  When you make dying impede my ability to progress or do well in the game world by taking away powers or money, all you accomplish is the exasperation of the unskilled player and the further reward of skill.  

I guess what I mean to say is that in all of these contexts, systems and situations, the systems on which developers have relied for years have still failed to communicate a genuine feeling of consequence for failure.

What I want to see is what happens when Batman can’t save the hostage, what happens when Jak and Daxter do not, in the end, take out Baron Praxis, or when Andrew Ryan does manage to kill Jack, or when Captain Price can’t quite pull off the hit on Makarov.

I recognize the problems in what I propose, namely a colossal increase in the writing demands of a video game and some genuinely cool plots that can, could, and definitely would turn shitty if the player was not good enough at the game, but I think there are some valuable insights here.

Although ZombiU isn’t exactly the most narrative game on the market, but it’s system, in which players assume the role of a completely different character upon each instance of death, shows a promise that I think is not seen elsewhere.  In that game, there is real, actual consequence to the death of a character, although this idea is perhaps discredited by the generally over-abundant and thereby meaningless iterations thereof.

All in all, I guess what I’m trying to say is that even in the games I already love, I want a better sense of consequence.  How are we supposed to feel like the weight of the world hinges on our success when all that failure renders is a retry with a full bar of health?

The Day Nintendo Beat Rockstar

In case you were somehow unaware, two of the most gigantic franchises in gaming had new releases in the last month, and they are both predictably selling like hotcakes in a cold famine.

Pokemon X and Y released on October 12th and sold approximately 4 million units in  its first two days, which rounds out to about $200 million in gross retail exchange.  Despite these impressive figures, Nintendo is here absolutely dwarfed by Rockstar, who earlier last month shattered previous records as Grand Theft Auto 5 made 1 billion dollars in total profit in only 3 days.

From a strictly monetary stance, Rockstar has in this sense kicked Nintendo (not to mention every other company) right in the teeth.  It's probably true that X and Y will have better long-term sales than GTA 5, given the fervent support of the subculture to which the games appeal and the strong focus on children, who will likely get the game some time in the next few weeks instead of on the release date, but it is nonetheless unlikely that X and Y will surpass GTA 5's sales figures.

But it doesn't matter.  Nintendo has won.

Obviously, I do not mean that they have won or will win in a monetary sense, it's unlikely that any games other than Battlefield 4 and Call of Duty: Ghosts will even approach GTA 5 in sales.

But in contribution to the gaming world, in the creation of a satisfying product, in innovation and in game design, Pokemon has taken the day, or at least the month.  And here's why.

There are of course, a large number of reasons related to gameplay, series progression, innovation in gameplay while maintaining continuity with the spirit of the series, and similar issues that distinguish X and Y from GTA 5, but these are not the focus of the article.  All I think I really need to say on this matter without launching into a review of GTA, is that Pokemon X and Y is a game that can readily make practical use of depth charts, that is still fun for 5 year old children.

What I do think is important, though, is realizing how much extra money Nintendo could have made on X and Y, if they were evil.  By evil, of course, I mean willing to endorse the cancer that is micro-transactions.  I, like many others, have a tendency to be critical of Nintendo for milking the same franchises over and over again while failing to develop viable new content, but at least they have stuck to their guns against micro-transactions.

Imagine a world in which Nintendo is willing to sell you the original legendary birds from Red and Blue for $5 a piece.  Maybe they start selling all the legendaries from previous generations like this, and some time around six months from now they could sell a $40 legendary pack with all of the legendary Pokemon from all the different generations.  Maybe they start selling rare candy for $1 any time you want it.

Maybe they sell the holy grail of Pokemon, Mew, for $20.  Don't act like it wouldn't work.

My point here is that if EA Games, Ubisoft, Rockstar, or any other company on the market decided to make a game that was the perfect storm for making money on micro-transactions, that game would be Pokemon X and Y.  In this generation, at this juncture of gaming history, the wide breadth of content, the long hours required to acquire that content, and the online multiplayer that makes that content finally have some real community prestige in X and Y make it perhaps the single best micro-transaction environment on the market, but there isn't a single one.

Even the demographics of people buying this game are perfect for micro-transactions  eccentric 20 somethings who still buy Nintendo games and go to conventions are notorious for making small, seemingly minuscule purchases that pile up quickly, and 5-12 year old kids with a 3DS are already probably good at pestering their parents into giving them money.

But for the sake of the game, and for the sake of the community, Nintendo has foregone this disgusting industry standard, and for that I think they deserve a standing ovation.

Meanwhile, GTA 5's multiplayer option is riddled with micro-transactions   Cash and experience are earned at disgustingly disproportionate rates in what is clearly a test of the will against the things you want to play the game.  The way it works there is that you can unlock an assault rifle, or house, or bulletproof tires or whatever else you need at a certain level, but you can only acquire those things with egregious amounts of money, which the game gives you at approximately the same rate a dead cow gives you oil.  Into this model strides the micro-transaction, willing and able (for a fee) to help you acquire the content you've spent long hours unlocking.

Are you fucking kidding me?

Pokemon X and Y comes without micro-transactions on a cheaper system for a cheaper price with a better community and a better gaming experience that is free once it is purchased.

In contrast, GTA 5 and it's much-touted multiplayer come with micro-transactions on consoles that are much more expensive over online services that cost additional money to players who have spent $20 more for a game with a shorter and less satisfying single-player campaign.

There are, of course, those who will point out that GTA 5's single-player campaign does not feature micro-transactions, that this is a boon to the game, that the budget for the multiplayer on a console game is bigger than it is on a handheld game, that I should be thankful that there are no micro-transactions in the single player game, and that if I like Pokemon so much better I should just go play it instead.

I'll give you that last one.

But the argument here isn't an argument.  I just paid sixty dollars FOR A GAME!  If there wasn't room in the budget to implement multiplayer without incurring the dread-wrath of the micro-transaction, then perhaps they should have cut multiplayer in what many will (wrongly) call the most expansive single player game to come out this year (like Skyrim did) and then maybe they could have used the same funds to hire some decent writers and put a damn cross-hair on the  screen.

I am grateful that Nintendo did not implement micro-transactions, and that Rockstar did not implement them in the single player experience (yet), but I shouldn't have to be grateful that a game isn't taking more money out of my pocket when I've already bought it!

It's not, or at least it shouldn't be, a credit to a game that micro-transactions don't interfere with the main game, any more than it's really a credit to a person to say that he or she does not walk around punching people in the face.

If adding multiplayer to a game raises the budget and the cost enough that micro-transactions must be implemented, that's a time when perhaps we should re-evaluate how necessary online multiplayer is to a game like this, not a time where developers double-down and we pay the price, literally.

And again, I should never, never, never, never, never, never, NEVER have to be thankful that a game doesn't feature micro-transactions, and when GTA V takes 3 days to make a tenth of the GDP of some countries, I stop accepting any arguments about the necessity of more money.  If you can't make $1,000,000,000 in 3 days into a viable business model, you don't belong in business.

So, good job Nintendo.