6/18/13: GOG promotes their summer sale by giving away Torchlight for free.

• Torchlight (2009): Runic Games (Seattle, WA) [2 hrs]

An “action RPG” — where “action” means “just click click click incessantly,” and “RPG” means “but with an intricate system of crap and crap upgrades and crap upgrade currency etc.” Maximum ado about nothing. I like games where you’re rewarded for paying ever closer attention to what’s going on; this is the opposite. Cleanly executed, at least. One hour was just the right amount for me. Then I did another hour.

6/28/13: “Humble Bundle with Android 6”: 10 games for $5, but two of them (Frozen Synapse and NightSky) I already owned from prior bundles, and one of them (Pulse) is for Android only, so better call it 7 games for $5. I didn’t play any of them until now.

• Aquaria (2007): Bit Blot (= Alec Holowka & Derek Yu) (Winnipeg, MB / San Francisco, CA) [21.5 hrs]
• Fractal (2010): Cipher Prime (Philadelphia, PA) [1.5 hrs]

Aquaria is in the noble genre of the nonlinear action-adventure, or “Metroid-like.” (The internet, alas, has taken to referring to this genre as “Metroidvania,” but that’s inane and inaccurate and I reject it.)

I said once that the graphic adventure was the king of game genres, but that was rash; it might just as well be this. Or maybe it’s that this is the queen of game genres. There’s definitely some yin and yang going on between them.

Plain old adventure games are goofy and forthright and frequently embarrassing. Action-adventure games play hard-to-get, which gives them a tinge of charismatic cool. That is, adventure games are dogs and action-adventures are cats. They each have a story that they won’t reveal until you do something, but in an adventure game, when it comes time to withhold, it basically just bites its lip and eagerly waits for you to say the magic word that gives it permission to bark again. Whereas an action-adventure will fill the screen with a giant monster and have it stomp you over and over again until you learn to obey. Then, and only then, it will feed you your snack.

Okay, so I guess I’m actually saying that where adventure games are like dogs, action-adventures make you the dog. Definitely something to do with dogs.

Note that video game genres need better names. It’s a more pressing need than in film, because to be a film audience all you have to do is sit and look, no matter the genre; a game player’s job, on the other hand, is completely different from genre to genre. Yes, maybe there aren’t really “genres” in video games, just mix-and-match elements… well, if so, that’s fine: they still need better names. “Action” vs. “Action-Adventure” vs. “Adventure” is like distinguishing the meals of the day solely by how spicy they are. (“In the morning I usually have a Bland, and then in the afternoon a Medium, and then in the evening another Medium — but understand that the afternoon meal is characterized by sometimes being bland, and the evening one is sometimes spicy, so generally we refer to the evening meal as a “Spicy-Medium” and the one in the afternoon as a “Medium-Bland.” The morning one we can safely just call “Bland” — though, footnote, there are some European examples that are, in fact, spicy…”)

So Aquaria is an “Action-Adventure,” but really it should just be called “lunch.” (i.e. “Metroid.” Except that’s still lame, because it’s naming the genre after an exemplar rather than as itself — like calling lunch “a sandwich-like.”)

I spent many hours playing Aquaria; all these digressive paragraphs correspond to that time expenditure. Now the review: dreamy fishtank world full of varied sea creatures — odd, atmospheric, memorable. Game itself — engaging enough to hold me down for very long play sessions, but ultimately too distended to be satisfying; it didn’t feel respectful enough of my time and effort. If the whole map were shrunk by about 30 percent — just the distances, not the content — and the game was saved every time you entered a new area, and there were about twice as many stops on the quick-transit system, and the boss battles were a little less obtuse, this would be a splendid, transporting 10 hour game. Instead it’s a trying 20 hour game.

I got all the way to the FINAL FORM of the FINAL BOSS — and as soon as I could see that the end was within reach, the spell was broken and I was suddenly filled with the awareness of how little I actually cared about this mermaid game. So after more than 20 hours of play and with only one obstacle remaining, I declared myself done (and watched the last 5 minutes on Youtube). Better late than never.

Fractal, meanwhile, is just what it appears, a puzz-procedural in the Bejeweled vein, but with hexagons. These sorts of games directly target the subconscious, so only the subconscious can review them. My subconscious shrugged at this and said “nah.” So that’s that.

• Organ Trail: Director’s Cut (2010/12): The Men Who Wear Many Hats (= Ryan Wiemeyer & Michael Block) (Chicago, IL) [.5 hrs]
• Stealth Bastard Deluxe (2011/12): Curve Studios (London, UK) [8 hrs]

Organ Trail is, as you can see, an opportunistic hipster mashup of the Apple II Oregon Trail with the standard zombie apocalypse shtick. Ha ha, get it? Good idea, right? Yeah, I get it. It’s cute, for what basically amounts to a conceptual pun. But I never thought Oregon Trail was a very interesting game and I just don’t go for the zombie thing, so this isn’t for me, as a half hour’s play confirmed.

Stealth Bastard is a pretty typical “puzzle-platformer” (= kind of like Sunday brunch). Middle-of-the-road stuff: the levels are mostly superficial button-rigged contraptions rather than deep or elegant puzzles, and the screen is always a little more cluttered than I wanted it to be. But I like puzzle-platformers so, sure, I’ll take it. A noteworthy touch is that prescient-seeming snarky commentary appears onscreen when you fall for a trap or, alternately, make a breakthrough. This is a nice use of the counter-intuitive fact that the whole process of solving a puzzle is actually a pre-planned experience, even though the player always has the sensation of blazing his/her own trail. Video games tend to blur the line between free will and determinism; I like it when they find ways to revel in the blur.

• Broken Sword: Director’s Cut (1996/2009): Revolution Software (York, UK) [6 hrs]
• McPixel (2011–12): Sos (= Mikolaj Kamiński) (Nowy Tomyśl, Poland) [2 hrs]

Calling a revised release a “director’s cut” even though the director had total control over the original release is stupid. In this case it should properly be called “Broken Sword: schizophrenic tart-up for the console and touchscreen market.” The original game, which I thoroughly enjoyed in the year of its release and replayed fondly about 10 years ago, continues to stand. It has its shortcomings, of course, but it’s coherent on its own terms. The new version constantly intrudes on that coherence with a lot of clumsy insertions, replacements, and deletions, with mismatched new art and audio, and an overall depressing sense of Lucasian disjunction between the 1996 and 2009 incarnations of the aging designers. In short: this was tacky and kind of a drag, but I played it all anyway.

McPixel is deliberately asinine to the max, a joke game meant to feel like a 7-year-old made it. It’s an endless, spastic, dadaist restaging of the SNL MacGruber sketch — so a parody of a parody: just the kind of indefensible and compulsive thing a 7-year-old takes for humor. When I was 7 would I have thought this was funny? or would its calculated childishness have raised a red flag? I probably would have thought it was funny, but also a little weirdly menacing, the way other people’s ideas of “naughtiness” always are. Since it’s deliberately a stupid waste of time, it kind of defies critical response. The only worthwhile question, I guess, is whether it helped put me in touch with my sense of the exhilaration of the stupid. Not consistently, but sure, a little. Faintly.

• Waking Mars (2012): Tiger Style (Austin, TX) [7 hrs]

My favorite thing about this game was its genre defiance. It looks like one kind of thing, talks like another kind of thing, and has the gameplay systems of a third kind of thing. That means it’s none of those things. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s better or more interesting than those things, but it does mean that the question “what is this?” becomes stimulating in itself. I don’t think Waking Mars quite added up, but it took its originality seriously, which I admire, and I enjoyed the process of letting this unknown quantity sink in and make its case. One of the great attractions of video games is that each game has to sell its own paradigm from the ground up. I never stop feeling grateful for the sheer scope of aesthetic tourism this form allows, even if a lot of stops on the tour are only so-so. Or worse. This was so-so.

5/30/13: “Humble Weekly Sale: Telltale Games.” $5 for eight games, two of which I played soon thereafter:

• The Walking Dead (5 episodes, 2012) [feels like a real TV show. In the world of computer games that’s a revolutionary achievement. It was widely hailed as a major milestone for the form — rightly — so I wasn’t going to miss it, even if that meant putting up with a lot of zombies and “desperate measures” apocalypsploitation. I enjoyed it even though it wasn’t for me]

• Puzzle Agent (2010) [a tasty, atmospheric cartoon, unfortunately made to house a series of flimsy unprofessional puzzles. But the art direction is clearly a labor of love, and it’s very short, so it managed to leave a good impression despite itself]

That left the following six games:

• Back to the Future: The Game (5 episodes, 2010—11): Telltale Games (San Rafael, CA) [12 hrs]
• Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse (5 episodes, 2010): Telltale Games (San Rafael, CA) [15.5 hrs]

Back to the Future is certainly superficially impressive as a piece of licensing work — the Marty McFly impersonation deserves some kind of award — but underneath it’s still flat and dumb and gawky in all the ways adventure games usually are, which puts it into an embarrassing uncanny valley of quality. Neither offensive nor lovable.

Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse has all the same limitations, but the material better suits the style. It’s Mad Magazine loopy mayhem, which is inherently more forgiving. The puzzle design is occasionally clever, and the experience benefits from the variety and unpredictability inherent to zaniness. Still dorky, though.

Adventure games have always had an unfortunate tendency to be creatively undercommitted, by which I mean that the player can sort of smell the world of the programmers the whole time. Telltale games prior to The Walking Dead seem to have tried to counter that by deliberately doubling down on “story” and “characters,” without addressing the real problem, which seems to me more one of confidence than craft. The result is that the games feel simultaneously undercommitted and overcommitted (as in “why are you acting like I care about these stupid paper-doll characters?”) — which is the way of dorkiness.

• Poker Night at the Inventory (2010): Telltale Games (San Rafael, CA) [4 hrs]
• Hector: Badge of Carnage (3 episodes, 2010–11): Straandlooper (Donaghadee, Northern Ireland) [9 hrs]

Poker Night at the Inventory isn’t really a full-fledged game, just an experiment at creating the illusion that you’re in a social space with four other characters. The illusion basically succeeds for about 20 minutes, and then dies as soon as dialogue begins to repeat. It was striking to observe myself feeling the intimidation and shame that I would feel at a real poker table. (“Dammit, even Strongbad is more worldly and competent than I am!”) I stuck with it for a couple more hours because I was interested in getting some poker experience, but eventually I came to see that playing against these spastic AIs hardly even counted as poker.

Hector: Badge of Carnage was distributed by Telltale but isn’t actually a Telltale game, and it has a very different personality from anything else here. It’s in the tradition of Leisure Suit Larry, willfully “seedy” and “naughty,” which means at heart actually innocent, but still not my kind of company. I will grant that the artwork is well done, a nice stylistic solution to the longstanding problem of doing 2D adventure games in high resolution. Might this be the only game I’ve ever played from Northern Ireland? Not sure.

• Puzzle Agent 2 (2011): Telltale Games (San Rafael, CA) [2.5 hrs]
• Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures (4 episodes, 2009): Telltale Games (San Rafael, CA) [12 hrs]

Puzzle Agent 2 is a weak retread of the already watery Puzzle Agent (see above), reusing art and, inexcusably, the exact same story. I got the sense that it was put together as quickly and cheaply as possible, maybe by interns and meek new hires who didn’t dare introduce any new ideas or improve on any of the things that ought to have been improved. Graham Annable’s visual style is still compelling, but the game couldn’t be more superfluous.

Wallace & Gromit has all the same problems as Back to the Future and Sam & Max (and the Telltale Monkey Island game that I played a few months back), but the gentle domesticity of Wallace & Gromit’s world put me in a mindset more accepting of inanity. Playing this game is nicely congruent with doing some knitting, or waiting for a Rube Goldberg contraption to butter your toast, so even at its dullest — and it is frequently quite dull — it at least feels cohesive. As usual, brand-matching is Telltale’s real forte, and here it’s second to none; I had no doubt that I was puttering around in the company of the actual Wallace & Gromit. (Wallace’s voice is another top-class impersonation. If only Kermit the Frog had been so lucky.)

Meanwhile in the present day:

4/21/16: Stephen’s Sausage Roll, purchased new for $29.99 — by far my largest single expenditure on a video game in at least 7 years, probably much longer.

• Stephen’s Sausage Roll (2016): Increpare Games (= Stephen Lavelle) (London, England) [31.5 hrs]
• Jelly no Puzzle (2013): Qrostar (= “Tatsunami”) (Japan) [8.5 hrs]

This is the second commercial game by the designer of English Country Tune (which I mentioned in the previous game log) and, like that game, is an exquisite collection of Sokoban-variant puzzles. They are truly hard but never cruel; they generously communicate everything about their own solutions except for the new insight that each puzzle requires the player to reach. There is something stirring about the abstract, musical quality of this kind of communication; it’s an art of taste and feeling, as much as any other art. The best such puzzles are designed by people who have an ear for that musicality, and Stephen Lavelle is a gifted composer in this medium. He also has a good sense of the aesthetic value of entering that abstract thought-space, and the game knowingly cultivates an atmosphere that sensitively complements the puzzle-solver’s inner atmosphere.

Playing this (and The Witness a couple months back) has reminded me that it’s possible to feel really and truly engaged by every minute of a game. After one hasn’t been for a while, it’s easy to find one’s standards dropping involuntarily.

In the Steam discussion forum for the game, in response to the many people who showed up to say “$30 you gotta be kidding me,” the developer posted a list of what considered to be “amazing free puzzle games,” the first of which was Jelly no Puzzle. So after I was done with Stephen’s Sausage Roll, I decided to play that (free, for Windows or Android; sorry, Mac, though you can still play a version of the first six puzzles here).

Jelly no Puzzle (that’s Japanese for “Jelly Puzzle”) is similar to Stephen’s Sausage Roll in that it is concerned with abstract communication, but different in that its communication is almost always a deliberate misdirection (which is only occasionally the case in SSR). You “read” each puzzle until you understand what it requires, then figure out how to put that into action… and only then do you realize that the implied solution has in fact been subtly blocked. Then the real puzzle begins. The true solution is always something that goes somehow against the flow implied by the layout. The challenge here is to recognize all the ways the puzzle is influencing your thinking in order to be free of them, and engineer a stubborn solution that disregards the insinuations but actually gets the job done. This too is a mode of communication, sort of like a magician tricking an audience.

I will admit to looking at hints for the last two puzzles, after being stuck for nearly an hour each. The rest I proudly did by myself.

I’ve decided that I stand by the conclusion reached at the end of the previous entry, that writing in depth about videogames is like dancing in depth about architecture — which is to say: an interesting enough project for every now and then, but not worth cultivating as a habit.

However, I do like marking my progress — like getting my summer reading sheet stamped at the library! — and letting my fans and biographers see what I’ve been playing. So the most superficial and least interesting part of this habit is, for the time being, going to persist. Like, subscribe, and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr.

I’m putting all the video trailers on the page, so to keep things compact, I’m making them small. You can zoom ’em up or not, as you like.

5/24/13: Humble Weekly Sale: Alan Wake, $1.00. (I already owned and had played Alan Wake, but was interested in the behind-the-scenes stuff in the bundle, which included the sheet music from the orchestra recording sessions.)

• Alan Wake (2010): Remedy Entertainment (Espoo, Finland) [~ 20 hrs]
• Alan Wake’s American Nightmare (2012): Remedy Entertainment (Espoo, Finland) [5 hrs]

I’m listing the original game here because I found myself replaying it in its entirety (including the DLC, which I had skipped on my first go-round back in 2012), in preparation for playing the follow-up game.

I enjoyed and admired Alan Wake a lot more this second time around because I played it on a harder difficulty setting. This surprised me, since I have a tendency to choose “easy” mode on games where I’m more interested in the story than the challenge of the gameplay. It turns out that once the gameplay gets hard enough, the center of gravity shifts, and this can lift up the whole experience. Alan Wake aspires, unabashedly, to deliver the dramatic content and atmosphere of a TV miniseries, so my original instinct had been to treat it like a TV miniseries that happened to have a game in it. But viewed that way (i.e. played on “easy” mode), the drama is a no better than clumsy, dorky, fannish imitation of its models, and the gameplay is a tedious and repetitive routine that clogs up the narrative flow. Whereas when the gameplay is turned up to the highest difficulty level, it becomes a weighty thing-unto-itself, no longer inherently repetitive (because if something requires one’s full attention it never seems repetitive) — and the drama, by receding to the status of window dressing, becomes the most lavish and delightful window dressing imaginable (a Macy’s display with a moving train and animatronic teddy bears). By treating the game less like a storyteller it became a much better storyteller.

So that’s a lesson I’m going to carry with me. No more “easy” mode, at least not until I’ve played a game for a while on “normal.”

Alan Wake’s American Nightmare is just the stump of a canceled sequel, not really a full-fledged thing, but hastily dressed up like one, and artificially prolonged, to make it salable. There are good ideas implicit here, and the combat gameplay is still pretty good, but clearly nothing is at its final stage of development and I couldn’t help feeling that my time was being wasted.

(The developers are Finnish, but the character Alan Wake is an American and his whole life has taken place in America so the title is pretty funny.)

5/28/13: Humble Indie Bundle 8, $7.00. Eleven games, many of them interesting. A great deal. Prior to this past month I had already completed:

• Little Inferno (2012) [fascinating for being a satire on time-wasting games that attempts to transcend satire into earnestness — but none of that changes the fact that, at heart, it’s kind of a time-wasting game]

• Thomas Was Alone (2012) [a memorable gimmick if nothing else: a thoroughly unremarkable “get the rectangle to the goal” game given a strange meta-poignancy by absurdly incongruous anthropomorphic narration and emotional music]

• Dear Esther (2012) [experiential tone poem, walking around a richly atmospheric Hebridean island rendered in meticulous detail. Tremendous sense of place was enough for me; I was perfectly happy to disregard the soggy boggy narration and needless scraps of story]

• Hotline Miami (2012) [ultra-brutal killing spree game in loving imitation of the movie Drive. Fetishistic “80s-sleaze-nightmare” atmosphere, very well done but I can hardly approve. Nonetheless I surprised myself by getting drawn into the well-balanced split-second gameplay.]

• Proteus (2013) [another experiential tone-poem of wandering around an island, but this time a transportingly unreal pixelated one, rendered with dreamy simplicity. There’s really hardly anything to it and yet this feels to me like an important piece of latter-day videogame art. It somehow gets directly at one of the basic moods.]

• English Country Tune (2011) [this is as good and as hard a pure puzzle game as any ever made. I consider myself something of an aficionado of pure puzzle games, and this beautiful, merciless piece of work is at the very top of the heap, clearly made just for aficionados like me. I also really like the title, which is offered without comment; I take it to be a reference to Michael Finnissy and/or the general tradition of serious composers doing sophisticated takes on traditional melodies, just as this game is a sophisticated take on the indelible folk melody that is Sokoban]

The bundle also included Awesomenauts (2012), but I’m skipping that one because it’s online multiplayer only, and I don’t play that.

So, remaining to be played this past month were:

• Capsized (2011): Alientrap Games (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada) [abandoned after 2 hrs]
• Tiny & Big in Grandpa’s Leftovers (2012): Black Pants Studio (Kassel, Germany) [4 hrs]

Capsized is one of the countless games “with physics” where the imprecision of the physics means there’s no distinguishing between struggling with the game’s challenges and struggling with the game itself. To me that’s a vital distinction. After two hours of insufficiently specific frustration, I quit.

Tiny & Big has a lot of art-school verve in its aesthetic, and is built around a clever and promising mechanic: slice the environment, then push and pull the resulting pieces around. But then it doesn’t really develop, as a game or as a story. Its scope and duration felt like an indulgence rather than an idea. But it was still short, so why complain.

• Intrusion 2 (2012): vapgames (= Alexey Abramenko) (Ufa, Bashkortostan, Russia) [7 hrs]
• Oil Rush (2012): Unigine (Tomsk, Russia) [abandoned after ~ .5 hrs]

Intrusion 2 is another “with physics” game, but this time it works completely. The chaos of contending with the physics is always part of the fun; the character is easy to control and thoroughly responsive — he’s just up against a world of mayhem, of increasing zaniness. Where the crazy cartoon inventiveness of Metal Slug always felt slick and commercial, this has a certain gleeful childlike abandon such as only a one-man indie project can have. And I’m no great enthusiast of boss battles but even I can tell that these battles (especially the final one, which took up a third of my play time) are something really special, carefully crafted with deep and obvious affection for all things boss-battle-y. Definitely my favorite game ever from Bashkortostan.

Oil Rush is a real-time strategy game, not really my cup of tea to begin with, and one where absolutely nothing about it is appealing. The wretched writing and voice acting was the first straw; the fact that simply pointing the camera where I wanted was infuriatingly counter-intuitive was the second. I allotted it half an hour to give me any glimmer of a reason to soldier onward, which it resolutely did not.

developed by Double Fine (San Francisco, CA)
designed and written by Lee Petty

Third of the three new games I bought in the “Humble Double Fine Bundle” on May 7, 2013.

Almost all 3D games have elaborate menus for adjusting the graphics, but I generally ignore them. At restaurants when asked how I want meat done, I tend to say “however the chef recommends,” and that’s how I feel about graphics options. I come to an artwork to see what someone else has to say, so it seems wrong that I should make any of the aesthetic decisions. The only times I’ve tinkered with graphics options have been when my low-end computer can’t handle the defaults, so I have to dial it all down. If need be, I can make do without high resolution, or fancy reflections, or fog, or being able to see far into the distance. That’s the price I pay for not constantly buying new and expensive computers, and it’s a very fair price. I still get to play the games, right?

Maybe that’s not a rhetorical question. I’m expressing a pretty contradictory attitude here. On one hand, I don’t dare touch my pinky finger to the options because I only want to receive official, canonical aesthetic experiences, straight from the chef. On the other hand I take proletarian pride in being so unpicky as to accept whatever degraded version of the game my crummy old hardware can manage. This despite the fact that graphical degradation has an enormous impact on the “feel” of a game, which, as I’ve said many times before, is the game.

I think the hypocrisy arises from my completely polarized attitudes towards “art” and “life,” attitudes that I would probably do better to reconcile. My instinct has always told me that “art,” being constructed and artificial, can be held to ideals, whereas “life,” in all its slippery irrationality, cannot. The fact that sometimes I have to turn down the graphics quality because I have an old computer seems like a necessity of life, to be accepted with grace; whereas the question of whether I might tamper with the default settings merely to suit my personal taste seems like an issue of art, to be determined by high principle.

Not the healthiest way to go through life or art, I think. Having come to believe that everything in the world is subjective, nothing is objective, I probably could stand to change settings whenever it strikes my fancy; or rather, I could probably could stand to allow myself some fancy in the matter. In this as in anything else.

How this relates to Stacking.

I played Stacking through to the end, and felt a kind of subtle visual uneasiness throughout. The game is populated by matryoshka dolls and takes place in diorama-like sets, with detailing that suggests bits of cardboard, playing cards, crayons, etc. etc. In keeping with this dollhouse aesthetic, the graphics are subjected to a gentle shallow-focus blur effect, to give a miniature impression. While playing, I thought this effect was aesthetically cohesive, admirable in principle, but also a bit alienating or disorienting at some level. Somehow I never felt quite as comfortable in the space as I wanted, and I felt certain it was because of the shallow focus.

Then when I was done with the main story, I went online to browse through discussions about the game, and came across the comment that the PC version, which had been converted from a console original, hadn’t had its default field of view (“FOV“) properly updated. What this means, briefly, is that too narrow a wedge of the world is visible on the screen: the effect is somewhat like looking out through a porthole rather than standing in a field with full peripheral vision.

(The reason this needs to differ between consoles and PCs is because console games are generally played on a TV while sitting across the room on a couch, and thus take up significantly less of the player’s visual field than a computer screen does when one is seated only a couple feet away. Looking out at the game world “through” a TV across the room, it seems spatially correct to be able to see only what’s directly in front of you, whereas looking out “through” a computer screen close at hand, one intuitively expects to be able to take in a lot more of the surrounding world.)

So it turned out that my spatially alienated feeling, which I had attributed to the the “miniature effect,” was actually a settings problem. Sure enough, when I went into the graphics options and widened the field of view, suddenly everything about the space felt friendlier, easier to wrap my head around. But now it’s too late! I already had my experience with this game and developed a feeling about it.

The fact that that feeling turns out to have been based on “settings” rather than “the thing itself” is something I’m uncomfortable with. If I complain about that queasy feeling that was such an important part of my game experience, who is my audience? What kind of communication is that, if it’s about a completely unshared phenomenon? Just me checking in with myself.

But that’s what we all do. That’s certainly what I’m doing here, as always. Am I right folks? (You know you are!) Yeah! Thanks!

Stacking is nice.

(In middle school or thereabouts, I was inculcated with the opinion that the word “nice” ought never to be used because it’s too weak to convey anything. This was, I believe, part of general encouragement toward striving for mots justes when writing, rather than settling for reflexive patterns and cliches. “Nice” was given as a universal counterexample, le mot injuste no matter the occasion. But like so much of my education, this received wisdom is something I’d now love to be rid of. My writerly tastes need to be my own, developed through my long personal sojourn in the kingdom of words. I’ll decide what I think of “nice,” thank you very much. And I’ve decided it has an opportunity to make a real contribution, here and now.)

Stacking is nice. It feels like playing with toys, which is surely the intention. The dolls make the proper clacking sound as they toddle around. The low level of investment demanded and the very mild-mannered puzzles — each of which has many possible solutions — keeps alive a sense that one is just goofing around, lying on the floor. The basic gameplay conceit, that the smallest doll can temporarily possess the shells of the larger dolls so as to benefit from their particular traits, comes immediately and intuitively, and the storytelling is silly enough that one doesn’t need to ask any of the questions about how this world works (i.e. why am I the only one who has this ability). It’s just so.

Playing with toys always had the Buzz Lightyear existential threat hanging over it: what if these little guys notice that they’re on a living room rug and over there is a mind-bogglingly enormous wall? Why in fact wouldn’t they notice immediately? To play with toys one had to be comfortable with the uncertainty. This game, despite taking up 6 hours of your attention, remains cheerfully vague about what any of this could possibly be or mean. It’s very simple: you’re that little doll and these are the other dolls you can jump inside. You’re trying to save your family. Done.

Part of what I mean when I say the game is like playing with toys is, specifically, that it offers that hovering existential uncertainty, which for me brings back warm memories of spending many floating childhood hours on the wobbly shore where imagination laps against reality.

When you’re, say, “on a boat” in this game — a real full-fledged 3D game space, with a sky and waves and stairs and rooms and different decks that you spend a while bopping around in — there is, for me, a heady, humming feeling of impossibility. Where does this boat full of dolls possibly come from or go? Where the hell am I really? My gut knows something is very wrong here. But it’s also fine and friendly. That’s a basic and desirable kind of disorientation, the disorientation of dreams.

Gripes include:

1. Hyperemphasis on meta-play: collecting, completing, doing everything all five different ways, exhausting each area, and building up a meaningless trophy case. Though I suppose it’s less meta- than it might be, since the main storyline doesn’t carry as much weight and priority as in most adventures. These are simply some other suggested forms of play, with this toy. But still.

2. Less than professional writing. There’s a flippancy to it all that at times feels like actual flippancy rather than artful lightheartedness. For example, there is, rather conspicuously, an awful lot of stinky farting in this game. Far from seeming like pandering to children, it seems like the designers sincerely amusing themselves, at a primitive level that to them feels “mischievous,” which doesn’t match the inherent sophistication of the toybox world as a whole. Similarly, the “old-timey” dialogue is written with too amateurish and superficial a grasp of the idiom.

3. The interstitial scenes all run about four times longer than the player wants.

4. Etc. Perhaps this is all best summed up by noting that this is a game designed and written by an art director. It plays and reads and feels that way. Visual artists have their characteristic strong suits and blind spots, and the product here is more or less in keeping with my stereotype.

It’s nice though. The shining painted wood and the clacking noise are really at the heart of what’s being offered, and they are spot on. The rest hangs off of that.

(Yes, and I also played the DLC. It too was nice. Better than the last level of the real game, in fact.)

Charm can’t be achieved by force; it must simply happen to be so. This game obviously intends to be charming and that does tend to weaken its charm. But perhaps that’s for the best, since actually being a child and playing with one’s toys isn’t at all like being “charmed” by them. How effete and adult the whole concept is. “Playing” means honestly taking part in whatever is there in front of you. There’s no judgment involved, no “appreciation.”

Video games have that going for them: you’re forced to get your hands dirty and actually play with them.

Engaging with the world is far preferable to evaluating it, and in a way they’re mutually exclusive — one has to do deliberate mental work to generate “opinions” about things that one has actually done. It takes a certain bending of the mind. I think I’m attracted to talking about video games because I’m still attracted to trickiness, the particular hardness of the work involved in generating words from such a fundamentally wordless place.

But I know better than that now, and god knows I’m tired from constantly over-bending my mind. So maybe I’ll stop and just play my games in honest wordlessness. It’s been a year of these entries and I don’t feel I’ve particularly carved anything out for myself, by repeatedly taking on this tricky work. I just accrue more pointless collectibles for my pointless trophy case. Whereas actually playing the games has been rewarding in odd inner ways that my entries here can’t remotely capture. So maybe enough.

Maybe. I’ll think about it.

developed by Double Fine (San Francisco, CA)
project led by Tasha Harris
designed by David Gardner, Tasha Harris, Gabe Miller, and Elliott Roberts
written by Elliott Roberts and Tim Schafer

Second of the three new games I bought in the “Humble Double Fine Bundle” on May 7, 2013.

The idea here is that cozy Halloween trick-or-treat nostalgia is the perfect subject for a video game: it’s a ritual process with role-playing, and prizes, and delicious menace and mystery. And huge sentimental significance. This is a good insight! It’s true. In fact it’s so true that even with gameplay as bland and rudimentary as it has, Costume Quest still manages somehow to seem fun. The fact that it’s so manifestly a great idea for a game carries the player along.

Well, for a little while, anyway. Then its arms get tired and it sets the player back down. To play a bland and rudimentary game. Luckily, by the six-hour mark, the point when it finally dawned on me that I ought to stop playing Brütal Legend, I was at the end of Costume Quest. Saved by the bell.

Basically: another exceedingly well-meaning production from the exceedingly well-meaning people at Double Fine.

The game is in three sections, each of which took me about an hour and a half to get through. I found the first section quite charming, despite recognizing that as game design it was shallow and monotonous. The important thing was that it felt right; it invited the same attention I would cheerfully bring to a middling network Halloween special, and rewarded it with the same kind of vague carpeted comforts. I was willing to disregard what I was actually doing (namely: almost exclusively busywork and padding) and just roll with it for its sweet naturedness and exemplary Holiday Branding Compliance. I got at least an hour of that kind of satisfaction, for real, which is to say at least two half-hour TV Specials’ worth. Not bad!

The problem, for me, was that the subsequent second and third sections were — quite unabashedly — just recapitulations of the first section. Liked trick-or-treating in the suburbs? How about trick-or-treating some more at the mall? And now how about trick-or-treating some more in a rustic village? Yeah… okay, I guess.

It’s the economy approach to game design. I can respect taking an economy approach to production — I certainly respect Double Fine for scaling down their ambitions and putting out something modest and cute. I just wish they had allocated more of their little budget towards refining the design until they honestly believed it merited six hours of play. I would gladly have given up a few animations and map areas for that.

Despite its relative brevity, this game still felt like a slog. But let’s acknowledge that sometimes slogs are games. For example, I recently witnessed Beth playing all the way through “Slog Sandwich: The Game” (my gift to her!). I can absolutely respect a slog every now and then. On the other hand, Beth’s game was about building an actual skill — the things she was doing as a player on her last day would have seemed outlandishly difficult on her first day. That’s a process that inevitably takes time and practice and patience, and offers real rewards for it. (Yes, real rewards: I strongly believe that genuinely learning something new is an inherently healthful experience — especially when the thing learned has the purity of being utterly useless and burdened by no social significance. It’s like roughage; it keeps your mind regular, present to the world.)

Whereas Costume Quest is an RPG, a genre I have always considered philosophically dubious, because (as I’ve complained before) it’s all about phony skill-acquisition: you are told that you’ve “leveled up,” but of course so have your enemies, so what you’re doing remains exactly the same, just measured in larger numbers. The player needs no skill or understanding at the end that isn’t already available at the beginning. The only difference is, essentially, how much Halloween candy you’ve gathered in between. Since in the context of the game, that’s a completely make-believe task, there’s no good reason why it ought to be a repetitive six-hour slog.

(Well, except for the obvious reason: that game purchasers are really purchasing invented obligations, to delay the necessity of returning to their own unpleasant feelings, so the more invented obligations per purchase the better. Any slog is a good slog.)

Anyway, whether -advertently or in-, this game is sloggish. You’ll notice that they punch the word “Collect!” in the preview. Yup! There sure is a lot of collecting to be done.

After finishing the game, naturally, I immediately played the DLC (“DownLoadable Content”) despite its being none other than: one more area in which to do all the same stuff again. I guess I didn’t want to return to my own unpleasant feelings yet. I’m not embarrassed to say it.

DLC is an awkward fit for the notion that games are an “art form,” because long after the window of time in which selling DLC for a given game is good business, the DLC continues to live on as a weird satellite to the game itself, occupying some formal gray area. Is it part of the work or is it not? Usually it gets lumped in to a “Complete Edition” (or, as has hilariously become industry standard, a “Game Of The Year Edition” or “GOTY,” basically the video game equivalent of “World Famous Pizza”) such that the form of the game that heads off into posterity is one with a barnacle or two clinging to it. The main menu always has to ask: do you want to play “The Game Itself” or “Inconsequential Cash-In, Previously Sold Under The Title ‘The Unmissable Final Chapter Of The Game Itself'”?

In this case I played it. I knew I would get through it one sitting and I did.

developed by Double Fine (San Francisco, CA)
written and directed by Tim Schafer

[I don’t know why it’s not showing the thumbnail. The video works fine.]

May 7, 2013: I “beat the average” on the “Humble Double Fine Bundle,” which gets me three games from a studio to which — based on their satisfying Psychonauts and, especially, their behind-the-scenes documentaries I’ve been watching since December 2012 — I feel a sentimental loyalty. I had already been interested in playing all three games, which is why I’m comfortable immediately putting down a full $10.

It is thus with genuine dismay that I come to you today and report that I am abandoning Brütal Legend, after 6 hours of increasingly unsatisfying play. I seem to be only about halfway through the story.

I really wanted to see it out. I feel great good will toward this game for its enthusiasm, eccentricity, and ambition. In attitude and aesthetic, it’s a true original; how rare that is in this medium. But it dawned on me just now that my relationship with the game had gone entirely from one where it gave me entertainment to one where I gave it charity. And having recognized this, I knew it was right to stop, because the game, being insensate, cannot benefit from my charity. My good will is actually for the people behind the game. They already got my $10. So I can stop playing.

Part of what’s so wonderful about video games is that playing them is an almost entirely intuitive process — by which I mean “governed by the intuition,” not (necessarily) “conducive to being intuited.” When a video game is working, it’s passing a satisfying form of communication back and forth subconsciously with the player, which it would require some self-investigative effort consciously to name. When a game isn’t working, it’s failing to meet the player at the same subconscious level. This is a level on which things can be felt to be “clicking” or “not clicking” constantly throughout our waking life, most of which information we strategically disregard. Why? On behalf of social incentives, governed by acquired systems we call “culture.” These, in turn, are constantly affecting and influencing our intuitions.

In trying to get one’s parents (and other pre-cultural peoples) to try video games, one is forced to confront all the myriad ways that video games are not actually intrinsically intuitive (“What do you mean, ‘the little guy is you‘?”). But they can become genuinely intuitive after an enculturation process. This is true of the form as a whole, but it’s true of every new game, too. Every new game has some degree of its own unique culture; every new game has its own responsibility to stake out a way of operating in intuition-space. And the player has to be willing to wander out blindly into that darkness, to be met there.

The upshot is, it can take a surprisingly long time to consciously recognize that something isn’t working. I played Brütal Legend with a continuous sensation of actively “figuring it out,” which is to say of being not yet met where I was. I am accustomed to a certain amount of that sensation; I recognize it as the price of enculturation, which is a price I’ve come to trust is worth paying. But that trust is itself subconscious, and it can easily be abused. After six hours it was with a sense of waking to a submerged truth that I realized I had never stopped paying the entry fee; I was still paying it. I wasn’t being scammed; just unmet.

The game makes sense from the outside in — it has its big vision pretty well in order, just not its operative, in-practice reality. I’m sympathetic to the idea that this is a way to make worthwhile things. I guess I’m even willing to believe that this game is a worthwhile thing in some abstract artistic sense. (The idea of taking heavy metal album cover fantasy art literally, as physical space, is a wonderful and stimulating one.) But because of the interactive component, visionary video games are harder to actually put across than visionary books or movies. You can’t just passively humor them and let them insinuate themselves into your subconscious; humoring them means swimming with them, conversing with them, tangling with them.

Maybe I’ll watch the rest of the game being played on Youtube, which conveniently converts interactivity into passivity — letting you, for example, watch long interviews with people you couldn’t personally stand to talk to.

Adding on to that last thought: it’s perfectly possible to be visionary about interactivity itself, about how you’re going to engage with other people. That’s the best kind of artistic vision. But that’s not the kind of vision that drives this game.

Well, better put: this game does have a big vision about audience engagement, but unlike the aesthetic vision it’s a fervently primitive one. This game’s social vision felt like the fantasies of “delighting everybody” that I had as a young child: “everyone will come see the thing I made and it will put them in a great, great mood!” Then I’d eventually have to face the fact that it didn’t have any effect on them.

At the time, I thought I just had to learn more psychological strategy, learn to anticipate people more accurately; this is what “growing up” came to mean, for me. Now I think the lesson ought to have been the opposite: spend less mental energy fantasizing about effects and you’ll end up bringing more sensitivity, and thus value, to the thing itself. The reason a kid’s drawing doesn’t “put everyone in a great, great mood!” isn’t actually because of what the kid doesn’t know about people and moods; it’s because of all the inborn humanity the kid hasn’t yet allowed to manifest itself in his craft, which instead is, in fact, manifesting in this social fantasy.

This is the great counter-intuitive artistic idea I’ve arrived at in my adulthood. If you want to communicate effectively, you cannot afford to allocate any of your spiritual resources to the task of anticipating your effectiveness. Not even when it feels “constructive.” That feeling is always backward.

It’s a very tough intuition to flip.

This is to say that while Brütal Legend might seem to have failed the player because it didn’t take the player’s experience enough into account, I think it’s actually because it was too preoccupied with the audience, too set on “delighting everybody!” Too intent on having some effect instead of being some thing. It’s almost overwhelming how much this game sincerely wants to delight and amuse. That’s not the same as being delightful and amusing. Insofar as it eats up real estate that could have been put to better use, it’s the opposite.

As a player, I know exactly what the intended effect of this game is. But I don’t know what the game is. I don’t think anyone does.

Good will all around! Good will right back atcha! Thanks, Jack Black! Thanks, famous rock-and-rollers! (RIP Lemmy Kilmister!) Thanks, artists! Thanks, Tim Schafer and Double Fine! Thanks everyone for so very clearly wanting to put me in a great, great mood — that’s sweet of you!

Onward I go to your next game! With trepidation.

developed by Thekla (San Francisco, CA)
designed by Jonathan Blow

Occasionally I do still play computer games when they’re new. Not often, but occasionally.

This entry is here to mark that I played this one, which was very good. As with Portal 2, telling you much about it would be to its detriment. It’s a game designed to be inhabited and gradually discovered, and there’s no value in pre-empting any of that. The ideal way to experience it, I think, would be to encounter it with absolutely no foreknowledge — not even having seen, say, the trailer above. That’s how I first encountered Myst in 1993, on one of the demonstration computers at Learningsmith: completely fresh. The impact of that encounter is still vivid. The Witness is founded in that shared cultural memory, I suppose. But it’s not a nostalgia piece at all.

Games are places, and games that deliberately act like places tend to be the most rewarding. This game acts very conscientiously like a place, attending with great care to the things that matter about places: light, sound, texture.

What goes on in the place is always secondary, and despite being stuff I spent nearly 30 hours doing, it’s secondary here too. But again, it’s conscientious, and that’s what really counts. Knowing that everything around you is the product of care and taste is a tremendously luxurious experience, such that “luxurious” is hardly the word. Games like this transform ordinary architectural experience into something supernaturally enveloping, something that coats the whole sensorium, like a heavy fall of snow.

There are reservations to be had, I suppose, around the edges of this game, where its “ideas” and “premise” live, but I feel no need to withhold any degree of approval. This is a generous and thoughtful game and those are overwhelmingly sympathetic qualities. I’m willing to ride along with its eccentricities.

For the time being I’m a little sad that 1) I zoomed through the whole thing while I was sick, and now I’ve more or less exhausted the game but I’m still sick; and 2) I currently associate the beautiful environment of this game with being sick, which is a shame.

But I’m sure there will be time to revise that association. I have every expectation of watching other people play this, and/or returning and playing through it again some day.

Is it for everyone? Is it for you? I would say it’s for everyone to start. Only some will finish. That’s fine. I never finished games when I was a kid, when they meant most to me.

While we’re on the subject, I should acknowledge that I’ve played a couple of other games, in the past couple months, that weren’t actually off my backlog.

• On December 8, I played Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist. Which is more like a skit in the guise of a game than a real game. But an amusing and well-delivered skit. I was charmed. This was free and lasted 15 minutes, so hardly an offense against my backlog.

• The next day, inspired by the fact that I had so enjoyed a short free game on a whim, I looked around to see what other games were free on Steam, and ended up playing through You Have to Win the Game, a nostalgia-styled platform game in a similar vein to VVVVVV. Another hit! Well thought out, just the right length, not an offense against my time or intelligence. 2 hours and 0$ well spent.

• Then a couple weeks later, on December 21, I returned to the same source. Let’s see what else is free on Steam! The Plan seems to be free and basically well-liked; let’s play this! Oops. The Plan was stupid faux-art with no content or point of view. 10 minutes ill spent.

• And finally, on January 11, somehow suckered by online hype and my own weird late-night mood, I put down a small amount of actual money to buy and play the ostensible game of the moment, Pony Island, which purports to be a weird indie sardonic fourth-wall-breaking mindbender. This was also a bust. Maybe not a total bust, but close. This is just the 2016 “Made with Unity” version of the same old dinky Commodore 64 “fourth-wall-breaking” gags of 30 years ago. It felt chintzy and amateurish, and I felt like I’d been had. Lesson: reviewer enthusiasm and “buzz,” in the internet era, are not good reasons to buy anything. You’d think I’d have learned that by now.

Now I have that good thorough feeling again.

developed by Valve (Bellevue, WA)
project led by Joshua Weier
written by Erik Wolpaw, Jay Pinkerton, and Chet Faliszek

This was a total blast. A splendid performance through and through, a real pleasure, utterly charming.

So what is there to say?

Mediocrity inspires me to want to express myself — maybe as a kind of protest: “Dammit, my feelings do matter!” Mediocrity is obliviousness and obliviousness can be hurtful. But attention and care — the feeling that I’m in good hands — leaves me free to remain in my natural wordless state. Or at least my natural non-analytic state.

I think that’s at least somewhat true for everyone, because it’s fundamental to the nature of the mind. It’s why the word “criticism” denotes both negative response and conceptually sophisticated response. That’s what concepts are for: coping with problems. Whereas when someone is genuinely delighted, no matter how “smart,” they’re likely to lapse into The Chris Farley Show: “Remember when that thing happened? That was awesome!” Because what more is there to want from pleasure itself than simply to revisit it? Perhaps there is one thing to want: to render it more social, by asking “Remember when?” or reenacting it.

Of course you, dear reader, haven’t played Portal 2, so we can’t reminisce together. I can’t just quote it to you and say “awesome.” And I’m certainly not going to spoil it by saying “well, get a load of this!” and describing stuff. Because the surprise is an important part of the offering; it works like a wrapped present, and far be it from me to unwrap it for you just as a way of demonstrating my enthusiasm. You can just trust me: I am enthusiastic. I scarfed the whole game down in two days, because I wanted to.

One of the greatest charms of the original Portal was in the fact that it had no obligation to be charming at all. The collection of abstract puzzles — and despite the impression you might get from something like the trailer above, these games fundamentally are collections of abstract puzzles — would constitute a perfectly satisfying game presented “straight,” without any theatrics at all. So a great part of what makes the showmanship so engaging is that it’s all pure surplus. And I wouldn’t want to rob it off that status by advertising it as the main attraction. It’s not. The main attraction is puzzles. I love puzzles.

(To be fair, after finishing the first game, you bring different expectations to the second one, so you very well might experience it as a storytelling machine that just happens to be propelled along by solving puzzles. It’s to the game’s great credit that it works equally well that way. In fact you might say it explicitly invites you to switch your attitude back and forth, which you can do without experiencing any disorientation because both components have received equal polish.)

I’ve said elsewhere that I relish the sense of imaginary space into which puzzles place me. Proust talks about memories relieving us of the anxieties of time because they place us outside it; similarly, engagement with abstract entities in geometrical worlds relieves me of various anxieties of physical existence, because it occupies the part of my mind that needs to orient itself in space, but still keeps me comfortably outside reality itself. Puzzles situate me into my own imagination space, the unbounded, pregnant, hypothetical space in which my mind stretches out, cat-like, when it is most truly relaxed.

For me a lot of the joy of the Portal games — particularly 2 — is that they have a real intuition for the elastic, spooky, unreal quality of such imagined space, and they embroider their story whimsically on to that. Instead of trying to nail the puzzle world down on the plinth of some reductive fiction, they let it be what it is: the zone of all fantasy, about which anything said will be pleasantly absurdist. The storytelling is constrained at the center, by particular characters and relationships, but around the periphery it stretches off to infinity. It offers me the same exuberant rewards as Brazil, a movie that takes place in a series of charismatic spaces that, it tacitly acknowledges, can only coexist in an impossible world, which is to say inside someone’s head.

In a way, this goes all the way back to the ridiculously vast underground complex in Half-Life, which inaugurated Valve’s 15-year tongue-in-cheek relationship with cold war imagery — more specifically with particle accelerators, dams, mines, tunnels, bridges, power plants, and other engineering projects of mind-boggling scale. An interesting zone of comic nightmare emerges as this kind of real-world awe gets inflated and inflated until it overlaps with the fantastical awe of the infinite plane, where grid puzzles take place.

In the commentary included with the game, a developer says that when they first put a certain big door into the game, it came out about five times bigger even than planned, but they thought it was funny that way and left it in, joking about making it a selling point that Portal 2 contained the biggest door ever to appear in a video game. I don’t know if that’s in fact true; I remember some awfully big doors in, say, the original Tomb Raider (1996). But back then, environmental gigantism felt like it came of the designers being indiscriminate and/or lazy, and was generally something to be nauseated by, or awed by in a dangerous way, a private way. Here, the nightmare of the infinite is delivered with a knowing grin, a wink that takes it all in. I thought the enormous door was funny, because awe is funny. Because things, all things, real or imagined, are absurd. What could be more delightful than that?

Okay, so I’m spoiling this one thing: there’s a really big door somewhere in the game.

The only thing I can comfortably compare this kind of entertainment to, in its effect, is Pixar, which similarly manages to make you feel well cared-for while you’re invited to meditate on supernatural textural or spatial intensities. (Usually subtler ones than these, but then again think of the fantastical spaces of Inside Out — or for that matter the door warehouse in Monsters Inc., which in many ways is exactly like Portal.) But unlike Pixar, Valve feels no obligation to be edifying. Whatever is there is there because it pleased the developers, and then tested well, and no other reason. So there’s something very pure about the ride. No hugging, no learning, no nothing: just stuff they think you’ll like.

I was particularly delighted at all the moments that from a strict “gameplay” point of view were neither fish nor fowl — not really a puzzle, not really story, not really anything — because they always worked anyway. It always flowed. My imagination always felt at home.

This experience came as a real breath of fresh air after the artistic frustrations of BioShock, which sounded so much more promising on paper than it felt in practice. It is so immediately obvious to me that testing was a far larger part of the process of developing this game than that one. I always easily knew where I was, what I was doing, what it meant, how it felt. I recognize that that’s very hard to achieve. It takes discipline and confidence to tailor things to the way people actually are, and not the way they think they are. This game met me where I actually was.

There’s some really great voice work in this game, by real people, but talking about it, or them, would, I think, be spoilage. So would almost anything. So I’m going to stop.

I’m delighted just by the very fact that there can be an abstract puzzle game so utterly packed with inventive storytelling surprises that it’s a spoiler-bomb. I wish all puzzle games were like this, loaded up like a Christmas tree. Okay, maybe not all. But I at least wish this was a rich and well-populated genre — the puzzle game as second-person Pixar movie — instead of just these two games plus a couple of less successful imitators.

So far. There’s time yet. Let’s keep it coming, computer games!

I’ve known since the day I bought this that I had something particularly tasty in store for me, waiting in my backlog. I was right. I feel a little sad that I no longer have it to look forward to. But, you know, there’s a lot of other stuff out there. Onward.

developed by 2K Boston (Quincy, MA) and 2K Australia (Canberra) [= Irrational Games]
written and directed by Ken Levine
project led by Alyssa Finley
design led by Paul Hellquist

This trailer is a specially animated standalone and includes no footage from the actual game. It’s not terribly misleading as such things go, but you may still want to watch a bit of the game (the fairly effective first 10 minutes, for example) to get a better sense of what it looks like in action.

As I said in a previous entry, I had to put off playing this one until I had access to a computer that could handle the graphics. All’s well now.

A tremendous amount has been said about this game (as already mentioned in these pages on December 13, 2007, which coincidentally is exactly 100 years ago today!). Its ambition, its influence, its depth and sophistication, blah bibby blah blah. I tried to engage with all that, I really did, but that draft was going nowhere so I’m simplifying. Suffice it to say that I think this game is overrated. It has intriguing and impressive aspects, without question, but they all exist principally to give context to the over-elaborate mechanics of a somewhat tedious first-person shooter, not the other way around.

The other way around I’d be very sympathetic to. I’m happy to play almost any sort of game if it’s the vehicle that drives me through a compelling and well-told story. A real story. But the story of BioShock, despite all its bold ideas and memorable moments, is ultimately an opportunistic fake-out. It’s cobbled together from incongruous bits and doesn’t make sense the way it claims to. It’s just the deluxe gold-plated golf cart that escorts the player through a blam-blam zombie slaughter game layered with endless intricacies of resources upon resources, upgrades upon upgrades that are of absolutely no interest to me.

I know, I’m getting to be a real tired clock — as they say — with this complaint, but it’s what I have to say: SYSTEMS ARE NOT EXPERIENCES. EXPERIENCES ARE NOT SYSTEMS. If you’re selling me on an experience, don’t give me systems. The last thing I want, when I’m setting out to explore a spooky undersea art deco fallen paradise city, is to be managing three different kinds of currency and two different resource bars and four different sets of slots for four different kinds of upgrades and five different kinds of upgrade-management stations ETC FOREVER. The amount of blindly inherited D&D “character stat” balderdash in games is, to me, soul-stifling.

I know, there are lots of players who call this “role playing,” who call it “choice.” They get to choose a style of fighting; they get to choose a modus operandi. Want to stock up on X and trade it for Y and then use a lot of Z, instead of stocking up on Z and trading it for X and using a lot of Y? You can! Hooray, choice!

I say “choice” is a false god. Despite what the marketing copy for decades of games might tell you, nobody has ever minded that movies don’t offer “choice.” People like movies because they offer no choice. What games uniquely offer that deepens engagement is not choice but agency. This is such a crucial distinction. I want to be the one actively having the experience. I don’t want to be determining the experience! Stop throwing choices at me just for the sake of choices! It’s frickin’ exhausting.

(Have I already said exactly this in some previous entry? I know I’ve said essentially this, quite recently, but I have the sneaking feeling that I’ve said exactly this, which I still aspire to avoid, believe it or not. But 100 years of opinionating is a lot of text to remember.)

I want to be clear: there’s some neat stuff in BioShock. It has atmosphere, it has ideas, it has style to spare. It has panache. It’s just that I felt like I had to grind through the game itself to enjoy what was enjoyable, like I was sucking hard to get the meat out of the shell. Certainly I had to grind a long time just to finally find out what these twists were that I’d heard so much about. 8 years and I managed not to have had it spoiled for me! I won’t spoil it for you neither. Manchurian Candidate. Oops.

The strongest thing it’s got going is the initial premise: It’s 1960. A megalomaniacal “heroic” industrialist in the Atlas Shrugged mold (the character is called “Andrew Ryan” — get it?) has over the past 14 years been building and presiding over a spectacular art deco city at the bottom of the ocean, where he and other great minds could live according to Objectivist principles, free from interference by parasitic governments and the emasculating cult of “altruism.” But by the time the player arrives on the scene, the paradise has all somehow gone spectacularly wrong — imagine that!

That’s the good part of the premise, and it is indeed good. Even though I already knew the gist, I was thrilled as the opening of the game unfurled itself. “I guess I see why this is considered a masterpiece,” I thought. That was basically the high point of the experience for me. But hey, at least it was pretty high!

The rich environmental design beautifully embodied both the appeal and the menace of the Ayn Rand worldview. Or better put: the game beautifully found a way to hang explicit significance on the subconscious appeal and menace that have always characterized 3D game spaces. BioShock finally gave real, story-grounded meaning to the nostalgic sensuality and architectural triumphalism that have inhered in high-budget games for the last two decades. Such environments have always made me feel simultaneously cozy and uneasy; now, for a change, I knew that they knew I felt that way.

Not that things are inherently better when they have a reason. But it can still be exciting to be given a reason where you’ve never had one before. “For once, I know the name of the vague oppressive force that always seems to lurk behind these lush environments — it’s ‘Ayn Rand’!”

I would have been very happy to wander around in that elegant, creepy, undersea Rockefeller Center nowheresville, listening to the creaks of the ocean bearing down on it, piecing together bits of information to try to make sense of what had gone wrong. Unfortunately what I mostly found myself doing instead was shooting crazy zombies in the head for 12 hours, while constantly gathering resources that granted me more and more choice in how I went about shooting crazy zombies in the head.

Plus I listened to audio diaries of random characters chattering about the “story.” These were scattered around on identical collectible tape players, all optional, all disembodied, just a string of texts. No more interesting or more committed than any number of lazy games where the “story” is just shoehorned in as some document that you find on a desk and read, or don’t.

Yes, there were some genuine scenes and events, and one of them was indeed pretty good. But Half-Life 2, whose influence showed all over this game, managed to deliver a sense of continuous event and forward motion. Whereas for the most part, if you tore the expository text dumps out of BioShock, most of what’s happening to you the player is almost indistinguishable from what happens in Batman: Arkham Asylum, a game that basically consists of following paths that lead to supervillains and then battling them. So too this game, Objectivist critique be damned.

Plus, it didn’t, in fact, offer any real critique of Objectivism. It was about an Objectivist paradise that (spoiler) had been torn apart by a crime boss and a catastrophe of genetic engineering. The Ayn Rand menace angle, despite starting out promising, ended up as just the usual “Ayn Rand was a meanie” laziness.

My take on Ayn Rand — because this is obviously the place for it — is that her philosophy is wrong, but so is the standard rejection of it. “Altruism” vs. “self-interest” is a completely false binary, so anyone who fights on behalf of one over the other is just making noise. And there’s a lotta noise out there.

She confused fear with “subservience.” Her opponents confuse fear with “greed.” Both sides rail against the thing that bears the name they’ve given to fear, and think they’re fighting with each other. Fear itself is the great blind spot. Like a black hole that can’t be seen because it devours light itself: we avert our eyes from fear because it’s fearful, and so we’re unaware of it. The brain dreams up something arbitrary to fill the gap, we fall for it, and then we argue about that instead.

This accounts for the absurd political environment in which we live. And most other ideological disputes. FWIW.

I am disappointed to be disappointed in BioShock. I’m not enjoying writing about it. I stop.

developed by Telltale Games (San Rafael, CA)
design direction by Dave Grossman
season design by Mark Darin and Mike Stemmle
story by Mark Darin, Mike Stemmle, and Dave Grossman
written by Mike Stemmle (1, 4), Mark Darin (2, 5), Sean Vanaman (3)
directed by Mike Stemmle (1, 4), Mark Darin (2, 5), Joe Pinney (3), Jake Rodkin (3, 5)

I find the trailer for this game embarrassing, so I’ve embedded the German-language version instead. Everything becomes less cringe-inducing when it’s in a foreign language. Just ask opera.

Video games seem perpetually to be in a state of awkward adolescence. Despite having had forty years to find their bearings and learn to move with grace and authority, they still tend to come off like gawky pretenders. One of the main reasons for this failure to fully blossom is that technological change never stops, and you can’t build anything very impressive on ground that’s always shifting. There’s never been a chance for really sturdy artistic practices to develop, because every few years, the old materials are replaced with new ones with different demands.

If over several years you gradually learn to paint idiomatically in watercolor… but then someone invents oil paints, and there’s industry-wide pressure to “upgrade,” you will suddenly become a clumsy painter again, instinctively lapsing into watercolor techniques while working in a medium that has no use for them. Finding your way artistically with new materials requires forgetting everything you know and responding to those materials completely fresh. That’s not something that the video game industry feels it can afford to do. Instead of reinventing the wheel every year, game designers try their best to keep using the old wheels, even though they no longer fit tightly on the new axles. That’s why there are a lot of wobbly games out there.

Maybe it sounds like I’m talking about technological “wheels,” but I’m actually talking about artistic thinking and aesthetics. A whole set of aesthetic practices evolved inside the technological constraints of the original Atari arcade era — limited pixel resolution, limited palettes, limited sound synthesis, limited processing power, limited storage space. Now that we no longer have any of those limitations, none of the practices of that era is actually artistically idiomatic anymore, but they live on anyway. People still want that culture, updated to this technological environment — but that’s impossible, because the environment determines the culture. There is no truly organic way of “updating” art as things change. All we can do is make new art.

The original two Monkey Island games (1990, 1991) were satisfying because they were particularly elegant creations within their technological moment. Their subject matter was perfectly matched to the level of depth inherent to the tech. The adventure games of that era operated in bas-relief, like hieroglyphics; the things that “Guybrush Threepwood” would undertake felt like just the sort of adventures suited to a person with a one-pixel eye and only a few postures. That self-suitedness — that sense of unity — is what made those games land so firmly and stick in the memory.

The third game (1997) had the resources to afford a new cel-animation aesthetic, without visible pixels, and with full recorded audio. The experience accordingly had a completely different texture, but it still found a way of coexisting with the old bas-relief attitude toward content. Now there was a tinge of amused irony to the fact that this human-voiced, screen-filling Guybrush in a lavishly illustrated world was still entangled in simplistically goofy “pick up key” “use key” shenanigans. The underlying meaning of the game had changed, as it had to, but the designers had managed to stay attuned to their materials, so the new meaning felt equally legitimate.

The fourth game (2000) felt obligated to have 3D graphics, a technological advance but an aesthetic regression. Now the characters were primitive balloon animals bobbling through unconvincing spaces. Suddenly “camera placement” became a consideration, as did the task of trundling the character around (rather than pointing where to go and letting him do it himself), which changed the whole spiritual order of the player’s investment in the game-world. Yet the audio stayed the same — emanating from puppets that seemed like they maybe didn’t deserve such fully-realized voices. So did the underlying game design, which no longer felt apt in the least. The whole “Mad Magazine does Pirates of the Caribbean” thing had been a perfect match for the hieroglyphic lock-and-key world of 10 years earlier; now it felt like stale shtick being spun out by rote, with no feeling for the actual present texture of the medium.

That brings us to the present (2009) game. I bought it (after waiting four years for it to go on sale: 4/20/13, $5.24) because my 1990 experience was so gratifying that even after 25 years I still feel loyal to this series. But it made me embarrassed for my loyalty. What, after all, am I being loyal to? “Guybrush Threepwood?” That — and everything else about the scenario — was always intentionally flimsy nonsense; I’m not here because I care about him. (As though Guybrush Threepwood is a “him,” rather than a “that.”) And yet at this point it’s the only stuff that connects the dots.

This game, as you see in the video above, is made out of middling-for-2009 3D puppet graphics, a lot of junky TV cartoon tropes, and an overabundance of plot. Despite retaining “pick up key” and “use key” actions, it is in practice a completely different beast from a 90s adventure game. Telltale, the studio that made it, has been gradually honing their craft over the past decade, and with their 2012 Walking Dead game finally hit on something that felt idiomatic in its own new way: a scripted TV show, where the player’s rudimentary interactions just serve as empathy checkpoints, to enforce and intensify dramatic engagement — kind of the narrative equivalent of Guitar Hero.

Their prior games, including Tales of Monkey Island, tend to feel like awkward half-measures. This game can’t be “watched” like The Walking Dead because its world was never meant to shoulder that kind of empathetic burden. Just the opposite, in fact: Monkey Island was clearly concocted to be slippery, whimsical, under-realized, self-aware. The protagonist is named after his Deluxe Paint brush file! He’s just another pixel “guy,” same as in every other video game from the 80s, given a few amusing things to say. Now in 2009 I’m supposed to watch a whole TV show about him being embroiled in a tragic love triangle, and feel things about it? That’s simply impossible.

It is similarly impossible to play this as a lock-and-key adventure game without being aware of an ungodly bloat surrounding the puzzles. Some of the puzzle design is actually pretty good, in theory. But there’s no sense that this flouncy, gabby cartoon show has any intrinsic reason to contain such puzzles, which are based on such a rigid, bare-bones world model. (“There is a lantern here. There is bread here.”) Enjoying them as the main attraction would mean being brought to them more efficiently, but that’s not what’s going on here.

What’s going on here is a lot of old ideas (and old intellectual property) mashed together on a new computer, with insufficient sensitivity. Within a few years they’d get a better handle on their materials and stop going through some of the motions. This feels like a laborious and embarrassing going through of motions.

That all said, I enjoyed it.

Yeah, that’s how art can be, and I like being honest about it.

It’s how all experience can be. If I’m in the right frame of mind I can deeply enjoy looking at the floor of my room. I can deeply enjoy looking at a fly buzzing around the kitchen, even though I have nothing but distaste for the fact that a fly is buzzing around the kitchen.

I didn’t like this game, it embarrassed and disappointed me… and I had a pretty good time playing through it. It was made out of lots of sounds and colors and stuff, all of it basically cheerful and good-natured. If I let my eyes glaze over, the difference between that and something I really like becomes so marginal as to be irrelevant. And sometimes my eyes do glaze over.