Do Androids Dream the Body Electric?—Spanglypants

So there’s a theme of science fiction and fantasy that’s going to come up again and again and I want to talk about it because everyone in the PPHSjam does it better than any video game basically.

So I like games that Create a World but I like it when they do that because I want the world to tell me a story, and I want a story about people or creatures I can empathize with. So some of my favorite science fiction and fantasy worlds are ones that don’t really care about their thousands of years or history or political struggle but just want to have fun and tell me about some people. (I love all those things too, but only if they’re going to tell me about something bigger than that).

This game is about androids, but it’s really about thinking long term about a relationship, and it uses androids and stuff to get into it, to make it playful and fun so it can sneak up on you at the end. Androids are a trick, like choices are a trick, like sometimes they seem like they’re there but they’re really not.

All of the stars out of all of the stars.

(That’s not “in review”)

Bioshock Infinite yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhh spoils obvs

1. Old-timely pop song covers are probably hands down one of the raddest things I’ve seen in a game with a budget like this. Video games have a cool relationship with diagetic (in universe) and it’s a great way of worldbuilding. Super subtle at letting you know what’s up with alternate dimensions etc and they were also great covers too! And only a game with a budget like this could license the music.

2. Rail riding works beautifully in theory but in practice I’m flinging all over the place and not necessarily getting where I want to go, missing enemies on my first pass and then running in circles like an idiot trying to make a skyline strike. I knew what I wanted to do but executing it was frustrating, and the game doesn’t really make it easy. 

3. Random gear upgrades? A completely bizarre decision, especially given how many rail specific powers they were that are only useful during certain setpieces—that would have been fine if there was a “rail power only” slot, that forced me to have one, which there most likely should have been, because I can see how some of those powers would have made rails a lot more fun. Oh I can switch them out whenever I want? But I already just about killed them all the normal way. And I already learned that skyline strikes were a gimmick, so investing a whole power in them doesn’t sound like a good idea. Maybe if one of my first upgrades had been one and I’d have had it equipped for a while? But this is why random powers are so, so weird, in part because they’re so fun. The first thing I got increased my melee range three times BUT ALSO pulled me towards the guys, so it let me zoom around the battlefield and was the most fun I’d had since Bulletstorm. Or an item that stunned everyone around them when I overkilled them, causing all sorts of chain reactions…a few of the vigor upgrades are pretty cool and the gun upgrades are quite standard, but the gear totally changed the way the game was played and was the thing I most wanted to play around with and customize on purpose. Out of everything in the game, it was the oddest thing to leave to chance and seems to have made games randomly unfun or overpowered.

4. Seriously, how much attention am I supposed to pay to your marketing? Whatever, there was a giant statue of Songbird in Boston two years ago and Songbird, the giant robot monster thing whose special power is only showing up in cutscenes in which he is invincible, shows up a mere handfull of times, has a really sweet relationship with Elizabeth that I basically wish was the entire game, then kills some airships for you in the last battle. If I hadn’t seen that giant statue at PAX I would have had no idea he was coming, and would have been confused every time he showed up (and every time he didn’t show up. What the hell is he doing in between appearances?) like who is this clown, what is he doing in this world, why is he built up as an iconic villain that I literally have no interaction with at all? The game clearly grew into a shape that no longer was interested or able in accommodating this character design and though he’s awesome narratively he doesn’t fit (perhaps literally) in the game. But I liked him better than any of the other characters. He’s the only adversary that’s sympathetic

5. Too Many Ideas, Too Many Characters.

6. “It’s a multiverse onion of fetchquests where you don’t even fetch anything.”—Brendan Keogh is right as usual so I just want to explain why. Look, Bioshock Infinite is a video game that actually feels like a movie, in large part due to the awesome scenes in which you don’t shoot anything. I think Bioshock Infinite deserves just a little credit for being a game with a guy with a gun on the cover that gives you sections of up to an hour where you don’t even see your own gun. The pacing here is incredible, in that I can’t believe a video game has pacing. BUT BECAUSE OF THAT I can’t believe that I have a big climactic fight with a major figure from my past that drops huge plot bombs because I needed a dingus that’s used to activate—for no reason(only people with electricity crystals growing in their hands can go to paris?)—a completely arbitrary door. And the characters keep reminding me I’m not here to have a showdown with my old comrade  I’m here for a video game powerup.

Look, this isn’t Zelda. You can make it feel like I have to go to a place for a real narrative reason, and Bioshock usually does a great job of concealing the fact I’m going from powerup to powerup, but this moment is totally jarring. Both this section and the one Brendan mentions are both excuses to backtrack, of course, but it’s like for one encounter! 

maybe more later

I’m most of the way through my playthrough of Tim Roger’s review of Bioshock Infinite and I’m reminded suddenly of the Perfect Video Game I Wish Existed (As Envisioned Exclusively By The AAA Development Cycle), just by his sort of offhand comment about the upgrade system.

If a year’s crop of AAA games were arranged in the fron yard of my apartment in such a way that I could trip over them, I probably wouldn’t be able to trip over more than two without tripping over one with some sort of mutually exclusive upgrade system. Let me talk about Dishonored’s upgrade system, because that game was pretty good and I actually played it.

So in Dishonored you can choose between things like “I can see through walls” or “I can summon rats to eat people” or “I can teleport further” and with whatever abilities you end up with, you can then solve whatever puzzles that games throws at you with those abilities. The idea is that I get to choose; maybe I prefer to teleport past guys, or maybe I want to cause confusion with all these rats, or whatever. Each one will work; I get to choose which tool for puzzle solving I like best then learn to use it effectively.

The game does this because it thinks player choice is the niftiest thing ever and wants you to have a lot of it. You solve puzzles how YOU want!

Except the thing is that all of these powers are really fun, and worse, the most fun thing about the game is that you could spend hours replaying the same mission over and over and solving the puzzle in as many different ways as you could possibly think of.

Did I say worse? I meant, this is the whole reason those games are cool. Except for the part in which those powers are mutually exclusive. It’s like, why? I never know what they’re going to do or how to use them until I get them, so it’s pretty much just a wild guess, and then once I have them, the other powers might as well not exist.

This is probably really cool to the developer—look at all the unique ways people played this level!—but I don’t care about what happened in other people’s games, really. I mean, if you had given us all the same tools, we would all be having the exact same amount of fun. Our fun would look a lot more like each other’s, but would that even matter? Most video games give all players the same experience and it doesn’t seem to really make them any less successful.

I guess what I’m saying is that what’s so fun about Dishonored and games like it is not playing it Once, but playing it Over and Over, yet the game doesn’t really assist me in doing this, trying new things and discovering the unique fun of each of their brilliantly designed game abilities. So much time and effort were put into that stuff for the seeming purpose of it being in someone else’s game and not your game, so that reviewers could say whoa, my game was totally different than that guy’s game.

Sorry, so I was talking about Brogue right:

The fun thing about roguelikes is that you can get through them in a couple hours and you start from level one and build your character each time. So it’s essentially like Dishonored, except instead in the time you get through Dishonored using one set of powers and never seeing the others, most likely ever, you’ve gone through over a dozen different builds in Brogue.

Okay, so Brogue doesn’t let you “choose” as much because what you get is random, but at least it lets you pretty quickly see all the ways you can build your character and they’re all pretty fun and great, and rather than seal off all the other interesting possibilities in some theoretical other person’s game for you to most likely never see and just hear about when you read the reviews, Brogue lets you do it.

What my Theoretical Perfect Video Game I Wish Existed (As Envisioned Exclusively By The AAA Development Cycle) would be then is basically a Dishonored I start random powers with and can play through in two hours. Replace “Dishonored” with Bioshock Infinite or any other FPS with an upgrade path.

It’s almost universally dumb, the escort mission, an exercise of eye-rolling frustration, a repeated series of failures unavoidable by the player, an obnoxious sequence we can’t wait to be over. But I’m really fascinated, genuinely impressed, in the sheer contempt for the weak that the escort missions engenders.

It’s the total opposite of designer intention, but it’s the natural result. The endlessly repeated sound bites from the escort were probably as awkwardly acted and inane as any other piece of dialogue in this action adventure, but through repetition they become insidiously grating: don’t they know when to shut the fuck up? The repeated failures of the escort, their seeming unwillingness to live, eventually becomes a sort of hilarious game in which the player rolls their eyes and reloads after the escort blunders into another horde of monsters. Are you trying to die? How can anyone be so pathetic? I want to protect this person, yet I can’t help but hate them for being weak; why can’t you pick up a gun and start shooting like me?

Fighting monsters is not that hard. Why won’t you try harder. Okay, it’s hard, but look at me. I’ve been fighting for so long. It’s not a big deal. Why are you acting like it’s such a big deal. Okay it is a big deal. It hurts. I hurt. How dare you cry about it. Don’t you know how much I want to cry about it? Here I am, saving you from monsters, and all i want to do is curl up and wish for someone to save me from them. Why do you get to be weak while I’m strong?

Etc. The point is, that this completely unintentional reaction of players to a common video game trope is an excellent excuse to start doing it on purpose. Games are great at engendering feelings such as frustration, why not do it on purpose?

Well I was a little tipsy and said I’d review every game in the #pphsjam , but I’m sticking to it because the games were consistently hilarious, heartbreaking, weird, sexy, and tender. Everything most games aren’t!

Now I’m no big city blogger, but I do have this old Mammon-Machine here, and I guess I’ll put it’s horrific capitalist death impulse to good use. If AAA is something like Mammon-Machine’s heart core, then #pphsjam is a frayed wire, a small but deadly malfunction dangerous enough to bring this whole fucker down.

#pphsjam in review 1

A time to wa

I’m struggling to say anything that could possibly better than this screenshot, but this game is adorable? I like how it’s dumb on purpose to the point of affection and cuteness instead of satire, since what is there to satire about Waluigi anyway? This is the perfect game about a character design that’s acquired a following for being so bad that you just want to hold it and coo. Three endings, all predictable, except the extended makeout scene is a great demonstration of Ren’py’s high level technical power. 

I gave a talk at lost levels whose transcript is on this blog and I’ve gotten a surprising amount of critical reaction to it (that is like three people have tweeted to me about it instead of the usual zero).

It’s not a very well written speech, so I want to revisit it and maybe explain in detail why I think cuteness is so important.

I don’t like saying “AAA” or “indie” but no one has come up with better terms yet so I guess I’ll just stick with them. What AAA games devote an extreme portion of their budgets to is looking “realistic.” This is pretty much the exact same reason billions gets spent on big budget hollywood movies.

Of course, AAA games can’t render reality precisely or completely. They have to make a conscious decision on what they want to bring to life and what they don’t care about. So certain actions, like picking up ammo, like the individual movements of the human fingers, like the physical presence of a human body in the gameworld (most game protagonists are a bodiless 360 camera with a hitbox) are omitted to streamline the experience. Obviously this is the correct decision: picking up ammo manually doesn’t necessarily add anything of value to an experience that is meant to evoke a blockbuster film, in which it would be common for guns to shoot wildly incorrect numbers of bullets or suddenly appear in a hero’s hands between cuts.

However, when you choose parts of the human experience to render in the video game world, you are also choosing what to exclude, and you are making claims about what is important to the human experience, whether you want to make these claims or not and whether you intend to make those claims or not. Certainly, no simulations of complex economic systems or virtuoso painting are needed for a AAA FPS. Since your development cycles are limited, why not also cut other unessential elements from your game, like women?

This is not neutral. Intentional or not, whether you want to or not, you have created a world without women and must then examine what claims you are making by creating a world with graphical and physical realism, advertise as the closest games will get to reality. You can’t claim that you are not saying anything by doing this. “Realistic” graphics are not neutral. Games are made by humans; of course they aren’t neutral. They are what a billion dollar corporations believes the majority of people will find even more appealing than reality. The claims AAA games make, from gameplay to graphics, are designed to appeal to a very limited worldview and human experience.

So far so I’ve-already-heard-this before. The response I think a lot of us have to this narrow vision of “reality” is to push for inclusion. If queers and women and minorities get to join in the AAA space, we can become accepted and real as well.

This goal is probably worth fighting for, but I want to suggest an optional alternate goal to either include alongside that or make your primary goal if you feel like it and it’s: ignore AAA altogether.

I am speaking for myself, but I do not actually feel represented or included any time I see even a character that superficially represents me paraded by a new AAA game’s marketing department as a step forward, revolutionary, whatever. I mean it’s nice to see. But honestly, every character in every AAA game is so flat, so emotionally hollow, so flawlessly idealized that there is very little I can take away from them. We talk about wanting games to have characters that we can identify with; I can’t identify with a paper doll, even one that looks exactly like me or exactly how I want to be.

Oh, that doesn’t mean I don’t find that valuable too. Sometimes those paper dolls are beautiful and I think they’re wonderful and I love saving fanart of them. I would like to see more cuties dash punching robots at 60fps, please, that would be excellent.

However, I think that the goals of a AAA game are just completely removed from anything resembling a personal, human story that, while I think pushing AAA games to increasingly suck less is a good goal, there were over 80 games made last weekend in the #PPHSjam that contained more human stories rendered more delicately and tenderly than anything that game out in the last forty years on a console. There is a game that eroticizes clipart in there. These games are cute and they are human and about humans.

AAA is trying to appeal to as many people as possible. They might try to be accepting, but only in the most idealized way, and almost always only in stereotypes. This is common in every single industry that exists; you will not find someone who looks weird or cute or sissy or fat or whatever, basically, because they don’t just want to appeal to the most people, they are heavily invested in forcing conformity to a commodified human experience. Corporations would like you to buy a thing but they would not like you to feel a thing other than the need to buy a thing.

I said I was going to talk about cuties but I’m going to just Quote Patricia Hernandez instead:

“What is your interpretation of cutie theory philosophy?

At first it was this kind of amusing thing like, oh hey, there’s a new meme in my friends circle. And then it was like, hey, if everyone is calling everyone else a cutie I can do the same and maybe they won’t catch on that I have a major crush on them WE’RE JUST ALL CUTIES, HAHA. And THEN, somehow, it became kind of like an identification thing? Like, oh, yeah IDK how to define my gender/identity but sure I will be cool with cutie this can Be A Thing.

Which is huge since I hate(d) being called cute before. I guess it was seen as a kind of weakness?

So, the cutie philosophy has been a p great for me I gotta say. It’s weird to say that for something that seems so silly.”

So the idea is you don’t have to identify your gender or identity or body type: you can just be cute. Cute is a vague word and it’s used to describe a variety of attractive traits, and that’s important because usually to complement someone you tell them how much they look like whatever gender you’re assigning them. What if they don’t want to look like that? Everyone wants to be loved, but they want to be loved for who they are or what they want to be. Not that you can’t make yourself look attractive in a way others will appreciate but that you yourself loathe, because you’re really desperate for others to love you for any reason at all. That happens all the time, it’s just fucked up.

So cutie is way to say “you’re attractive to me and others in a way that our language doesn’t have precise wording for because it deliberately excludes and shames and punishes people for looking like you do, but I value you and think you’re neat!”

(Everyone will ignore this next part): this is of course my personal philosophy of what cute means and isn’t everyone’s definition and doesn’t need to be everyone’s definition and certainly there are other great and valid ways of using the word cute. And not everything that people call “cute” is subversive in this way. This is just mine.

But this is the reason why I believe a cute aesthetic is uniquely primed to disassemble ingrained notions of attractiveness. What AAA “realist” games are interested in is inclusion in a space that I don’t think I want a part in. If you’re hot, basically, you can hang out in the cool kid’s club. I never ever want to be hot. I never want to look like the protagonist of a AAA game. Being included in the AAA space means I get to have my identity as long as I look and act like some bald space dude and I just don’t want to! I want to fucking look cute, is that reallllly so much to ask?  Yes, because it fundamentally challenges all sorts of values about our culture. It goes way deeper than anything a AAA game would be willing to include for the sake of appearing diverse (except maybe Saint’s Row).

But the priorities of AAA are just too invested in a fundamentally exclusive system. They might let us hang out there but they wouldn’t let us be ourselves. So why invest so much in breaking through to a system that drip feeds us to keep us buying $60 games when we could find over 80 times the humanity in a weekend game jam?

I gave a talk at lostlevels, dressed in a maid outfit provided to me by Christine Love. Lostlevels had some of the best talks I heard at GDC at it was held in a beautiful park full of cuties.

Since my qualifications to talk about video games are exactly “I have a twitter account” lostlevels was a great opportunity to have people listen to my pause-heavy California surfer fag drawl.

Anyways it was great and here is the transcript of the talk that I wrote on my cellphone in the hour before I gave it. I improvised some stuff and said um a lot so you won’t get the full experience here, but I hope it captures the gist of it.

I think games should be cuter.

Do you think games should be cute I think games should be cute!

We should have games by cuties for cuties. 

But we don’t.

AAA games are obsessed with looking real. Their reality is brown, and bald, and it has a lot of guns. When people are shot they shoot out lots of blood. Or sometimes you shoot blood at someone until they drop guns. Then you pick up those guns and shoot until they drop more blood and guns.

What I want is are games in which it is possible to do something else. 

I know you’ve heard something like this before and probably already feel the same way as me or you wouldn’t be here.So here’s something new: be cute. I want games that are cure because I want to be cute. And I’m pretty fucking Kawaii. 

Cute graphics are the only aesthetic that can truly free you from the tyranny of reality.

The reality you see in games is a powerful machine engineered by  mammon that is intended to be so real in so few specific ways that it is not real at all. The truth can be a powerful lie. When the only voices and people and things that are rendered with “reality” are guns and metal and soldiers and dust then reality will be strangled. The intention of realistic graphics is not to represent reality but to overtake reality. They are a vision of reality that only continues to stay true as long as we support and accept and believe that it is reality.

So I don’t even want to hear about reality. I don’t want reality. Reality will only ever be exclusionary. There is too money tied up in realistic graphics and its vision is inherently limiting.

So why not be cute? Cute graphics don’t take much money, and don’t take the same amount of sheer dedication. But more than that, cute is subversive. It alters and distorts and makes fun of reality. It’s dedicated not to visual fidelity but to emotional fidelity. Because every human vision will be personal, limited view, the only way to find a place for everyone is to give as many voices as possible a way to speak. The easiest way for us to find a way to speak is to speak by altering and mocking the voices that are already there. In order to destroy what is called “reality” it needs to be destroyed or altered or abstracted. And cute graphics can do this very well. They allow us a low budget way to subvert the expectations of audiences. They allow us a vehicle to destroy genre and cliche and tear down what the games industry tells us is “reality”. We can show them what reality can look like if it was done by cuties for cuties, by people who don’t fit into the hypermasculine balding wasteland on the showroom floor over there.

I want lots of bubbles and crystals. I want soft colors that let me feel warm. I want games about comforting and I want games about satire. I want games that don’t themselves so fucking seriously. I want a game that has a heartbeat, not a meticulously designed reality that deliberately excludes us. A cute aesthetic give us a power far grater than any of those millions of dollars can bring. 

Together, we cuties can destroy reality and remake it in our adorable image.

Prob MK, Gears, and GoW take themselves seriously because that’s what their target audience really wants. In adolescence sex and violence are breathtaking mystical dangerous things. When I was 12, I wanted as much of it as I could possibly endure as gratuitously as possible, please. It’s a stunning notion that human beings fuck and die and I was interested in seeing that happen a lot.

It’s maybe impossible to get over that humans fuck and die but you can get a little more used to it, a little more interested in its subtleties, the older you get. That’s where we twentysomethings are at. It’s a bit easier to scoff at it, and certainly it’s embarrassing that David Jaffe takes his fiction so seriously, but they are providing a very crude version of something that is especially fascinating to the young and so it’s not a surprise it’s popular.

Which is not to say not terrible. Because the aforementioned games are all terrible in the stories they (unconsciously, consciously) tell. Still, really dramatic sex and death is fascinating to adolescents and that will not change no matter how hard we roll our eyes. Only designers that understand that desire and address it, and acknowledge it as worth addressing, (instead of acting too cool for it) will create things adolescents will be interested in. They (David Jaffe, Stephanie Meyer) might understand and address the desire for the worst reasons, but they are still doing it.

I feel maybe: those who would be best at saying things to adolescents that aren’t terrible or gross think they are too smart and sophisticated to talk down to adolescents, because we’re twentysomethings still eager to  be cooler than our teen selves. I think we should get over it.

In the 90s and 00s a great deal of magazines (remember those?) were sold on the number of polygons on their cover photo. Now that we have quite thoroughly passed the point at which we can count the polygons in a 3D model it is seriously difficult to care about which 3D accelerator you should buy, and quite difficult to care about graphics in general when a cell phone can run the Unreal engine.

If the previous generation will be remembered for any aesthetic advancement, it’ll most likely be the shift to HD and having to buy a new TV to read now-microscopic RPG dialogue choices.