Fixed Bug: Capitalists Were Refusing to Pay Their Workers

The way that Paradox has implemented copy protection reflects the way that they build their games. If you don't have access to the patch forum (which you have to posess a legitimate CD key to access), or if you don't buy the latest expansion, your game rapidly becomes tiring, and then boring, and then agonizing, as all of your friends are off somewhere playing with the new subsystem and you're left with a product which is clearly incomplete.

Compare this to a game like Company of Heroes, where the opposite situation is in effect: people frequently talk about how they only wish they could go back to a time before the expansions, when the Brits and PE were not in the game and all multiplayer ladder games could only be between what are considered the most balanced, interesting sides: Americans and Wehrmacht.

In both cases the question is complexity: Paradox games can't possibly have enough of it, and Company of Heroes would probably benefit from the simplification of a situation that was made more complex. In the case of CoH the additional sides would have been more welcome if they'd been better designed... but the point stands, the game was 'good enough' back in the day. Nobody has ever said that about a Paradox game. Even if a new system isn't designed exactly correctly, it's still a welcome addition (I'm leaving the worst Paradox game, Hearts of Iron, out of the equation entirely cos it's lame).

Which situation is better? I think Relic has made the better game, overall. Most of the time when Paradox fixes or upgrades something, like the colonial system in the new Victoria II expansion A Heart of Darkness (finally, a Conrad reference in video games that's actually appropriate!) it just gives you something else to worry about. Now you need to build a navy and micromanage your colonies more intensely to do what you were able to do in a simpler way in the last expansion, to basically no effect. The aspect of 'colonial competition' is still there, the Scramble for Africa in-game is still crazy and highly competetive, it's just more busywork. And gradually, like the enhanced factory system in Victoria II which vastly improved on its predecessor by featuring actual supply and demand, it will become part of the background noise that seasoned mapgamers take for granted.

So there's nothing wrong with increased complexity, but when that's all that's being added to your game- more endless popups for trivial election issue debates that modify one tenth of your pops in one state on one issue, more time clicking 'upgrade railroad' (the most recent patch fixes this!), more newspapers with five cut-and-paste event descriptions from countries you don't care about, etc. the fatigue sets in quicker and quicker. People frequently play the "new" Paradox game, expansion, patch, whatever, continuously for days and then quit entirely. It's been literally years since I've played Europa Universalis. The Anno games are like this too. Totally engrossing once the new material arrives, grating once it's been assimilated. The relationship to addiction ("Ich bin ein Anno-holic!") is clear- and as I mentioned in the first paragraph, it's what Paradox has built its business on.

Meanwhile CoH has remained relatively unchanged for years and still draws a consistently high rate of interest. Part of that is the fact that multiplayer is the main draw of the game, and the community and its strategic camps (called the "metagame") have kept things fresh for the better part of a decade now, with new 'styles' of play becoming dominant and fading away, and the sheer variety of human thought and action, as compressed into build orders, teching strats and micro, standing in for computer opponents and busywork augmented by unweidly interfaces and lists of percentage modifiers that would actually be easier to understand if they were in a literal spreadsheet.

I like these games a lot and to be fair Paradox does what nobody else even thinks about doing, I'm just saying that maybe the Relic approach, as embodied in the early Company of Heroes game, of selecting complexity instead of amplifying it across the board, and maybe going back to basics and designing a new game from principles other than those that guided the first Europa Universalis (when there were 8 playable countries or something and everything outside of Europe was a complete black hole) way back in the day, might be a better approach than emulating Dwarf Fortress and trying to smother boredom by ever-greater applications of shit to worry about.

Locked Down In The Complex

I came across this a few days ago and it kind of pushes all my buttons. I had to talk about it.

The book is about something that I've talked about before, the connection between video games and the military-industrial complex. The book's argument is that modern video games are not just products of this environment but actively reproduce it. Every game is engaged in a war on 'contingency' and has a techno-fascist obsession with control, prediction, logistics, technique, etc. that has to be excised from games before we can really use them as a tool for human liberation.

Bogost doesn't seem to sympathize with the book's left-wing stance which is lame but he does see the importance of a book that exposes the fact that a game like SpaceWar!, the progenitor of all games, was designed on a campus practically bought and paid for by the Defense Department, and by people who had dedicated their lives to making the US military a more effecient killing machine. So far so good.

What the book and the review miss is that all basic research (and electronics and computers and cybernetics were extremely 'basic' during the period the book covers) in the west, and particularly in the United States, was directly funded and overseen by military bureaucrats. Part of this has to do with wartime demands- the need to protect Britain from a novel threat, that of aerial blitz, kicked the development of radar into overdrive, and the need to make effecient use of artillery drove the development of the ENIAC. The excuse of there being a war on loosened the purse strings and put technicians, as long as they produced something relevant to the war effort, in control. The pace of technological discovery was so rapid and the benefits so great that the postwar academic situation in the hard sciences and engineering has never changed. Defense dictates all progress by controlling the purse strings and perpetuating the weird neo-feudal structure of university engineering and science departments, and those departments churn out innovations that make bombs burst better, sattelites communicate quicker, and so forth.

So this is pretty obvious. You could easily say "yeah, well that's his entire point. games are derived directly from military technology and retain its techno-fascism and obsession with control." But the things that Crogan (thats the dudes name) chooses to pick out that have influenced games actually don't have anything to do with militarism specifically, and his extremely limited survey of actual real games (always a red flag) reveal that he's not even aware that games can have militaristic themes, even make use of militaristic technology such as prediction and logistics, and still do things "orthogonal to miltarism," to borrow Bogost's pointlessly complex phrase.

Before I get to games (sorry!) we should take a short detour through cybernetics. As I said above, you couldn't do research in computers after the Second World War without getting money from the government. Does that mean that all research was intimately tied to militarism, and that no alternative tradition was nurtured or could have been nurtured in the belly of the beast? As an academic who, presumably, doesn't get along with the administrators of his college, Crogan is personally familiar on the level of his very own paycheck with the phenomenon of the radical trying to do something with resources appropriated from a non-radical source. Is it so hard to believe that technicians, scientists and engineers, driven by pure devotion to their subject or active hatred of militarism (see the letter the developers of the atom bomb wrote pleading that it never be used) managed to carve out a niche for themselves in an area dominated by something they disagreed with, perhaps by falsifying their research proposals (as everyone does), doing work independently or something else like that? Or, to take it one step further, can something as generic as 'prediction' or 'simulation' posisbly be reduced to militarism and only militarism in any meaningful sense?

One of the three pillars that Crogan's argument rests on is cybernetics. He, conveniently, chooses an Air Force anti-aircraft coordination system as a forerunner of the modern 'predictive,' anti-contingent fetish in computer games. The system was developed to make anti-aircraft guns more effective by estimating the future position of an enemy aircraft based on its last observed position and probable routes of attack. It involved complicated feedback routines, nationwide coordination of data gathering and so forth. Clearly, if this is the only cybernetic example we talk about, then his argument is airtight. Video games descended from Cold War megalomania.

I'd never even heard of this particular cybernetic system before reading about it in this review. A system I have heard of, though, completely contradicts everything Crogan alleges about the biased nature of cybernetics. It is, of course, Salvador Allende's internet, Cybersyn, the half-implemented attempt at using Bayesian filtering, levels of algedonic feedback (I looked that word up, I dont know what it means), and the oh-so-dreaded specter of prediction, modification and control to... implement socialism. When the Air Force uses cybernetics it creates a system that shoots doen enemy aircraft. When Stafford Beer used cybernetics he designed a way of devolving effective control of factories to workers and rapidly adjusting real production to human need. Certainly the CIA and the junta that overthrew Allende present a critique of Crogan in this respect.

The truth is that even if Cybersyn had never been invented, the idea of it is cleary implied in cybernetics. Any technology, however it is developed, can be turned to any use people can make up for it. The fact that innovation in computers was driven by the military industrial complex of a capitalist country means that things like Cybersyn don't get a fair shake or much funding, but without ENIAC, without the mad dash to higher clock speeds and miniaturization and improvements in long-range networked communication, Cybersyn would have been completely impossible.

Let's get back to games. Crogan (still his name, lmao) writes about something he calls "gameplay mode" which is the category above categories such as difficulty, the treatment of time, perspective etc. "Gameplay mode" is the idea that games have to be about controlling reality by blending it with simulation. Here's Bogost's summary of Grogan's thing:

Not surprisingly, Crogan’s not terribly thrilled with the gameplay mode that is his subject. He interprets the logistical model of reality as a deliberate if unacknowledged attempt to reduce or remove contingency. Just as military defense is meant to eliminate contingent outcomes in favor of ones knowable in advance, so “computer games play with the playing out of the war on contingency” (p.36). That is to say, left to their own devices, video games retain unassailable traces of the logic of military logistics in their form and function, even if particular games may not take up explicitly militaristic themes.

Elsewhere Bogost says that some readers will "rightly take issue" with Crogan's limited survey of actually existing video games, and here is probably where anyone who has played wargames or any other type of game with any frequency will take some serious issue. We can say that one trend from the beginning of computer wargames to the present has been the continuous addition of complicating detail and the continuous creep of the literal fog of war. The fog of war was actually among the earliest innovations that computer wargame designers implemented, and it was the first major advance that computer games offered that went decisively beyond what was possible with a boardgame. With a board you can always tell what your opponent is doing, generally. Even if his counters don't face you and you can't tell exactly what he has, you can make a guess. Try that in a game like Combat Mission where the only real given is the terrain (and even that might change, with the weather or with events like fires and building collapses) and even when you hear a tank engine, or see a vehicle, you're still never completely sure what the source exactly is. And try playing Eastern Front 1941 on one day and War In The East on the next, and tell me that computer games have shown a fetish for smothering complications and inconvenient possibilities. It is literally impossible to play War In The East without basically throwing your hands up at some point and trusting the AI, or trusting the weather, or trusting something you have zero control over. The trend since the beginning has been to thrust contingency more and more to the forefront to the point that one of the major lessons wargames can now be said to teach is that there is basically no unassailable defense or truly knowable enemy asset. As wargames become more complicated they become messier, more prone to testing the player's ability to see the unforseeable, better tools for educating strategists. And as cybernetics and computer science become more and more advanced their capacity to be used, either to make war or to make the things that people need to live, increses greatly.

Ex Lax

ALthough nobody I've met believes it, in high school I wasn't in the band. I played lacrosse instead (there were basically those two options). One weekend I went to a camp hosted by someone who played in one of the professional leagues back east, and during the opening monologue he gave us before we broke apart into passing, shooting and dodging drills he told us through a thick stoner accent and even thicker shades that "the Iroquah, man, used this game to simulate WAR. I want you to, like, think about that when you're out there today. WAR." Thankfully he didn't have us perform some ritual but it was almost to that point.

There's an old fable about a hypothetical wargame being conducted in the last days of the Battle of the Bulge among German staff officers in France. During the game, the Americans attack the village the game is being played in, and their movements and the positions of the German forces wind up appearing remarkably similar to the movements and positions of the different forces in the wargame being conducted. So, instead of stopping the game, the officer in charge orders it continued, with the 'moves' of the players being translated into orders to the real units outside. This is one example of how simulation passes semalessly into reality under the right conditions, and lacrosse, which as it was practiced by natives is even less of an abstraction from real war, has an even better seamless transition that isn't a fable at all: during Pontiac's rebellion a group of Ojibwas played a game of lacrosse in front of a fort they wished to take, and while the British soldiers were outside watching the game as they had before someone 'accidentally' knocked the ball inside the fort. Since there were no out-of-bounds areas in lacrosse at the time, everyone naturally ran inside the fort, where they pulled out their weapons and killed half the garrison.

I'm making the connection between wargames and sports because someone who read my article on skill in games disagreed with it entirely and said that people choose games as if they were sports, and so games should be judged in the same way sports should. Does the game provide me with a good challenge, does it engage me? If yes, then I'll play it, if no then I don't. He said that my entire analogy comparing understanding of games to understanding of literature is completely baseless, even though he did agree with my conclusion that the only meaningful criterion of understanding of games is skill in them. Most people agreed with my argument and didn't agree with the conclusion, which is more or less what I expeceted. I didn't expect the opposite.

On the surface of it this opinion of games seems to get rid of the possibility of a 'message' or a 'meaning,' reducing games to their sets of rules and closing off the rest of the world- nothing in the game (a ball and a stick, or an asteroid and a spaceship) having any meaning beyond the playing field of the game and its irrelevant outcome. Most people criticized my conclusion along these lines. But what happens when you take the same ball you were playing with and turn it into a gambit to bypass your opponent's defenses, and you take the stick you were using to hit the ball and instead hit someone over the head with it? What do your game rules, which got you into a position to change the world outside of the game, mean then? Can you combine my conclusion, that games are better understood by those that can play them well, with the argument that games are sports and the only legitimate criteria is the complexity of the rules they posess, with games having an artistic purpose, like literature, that cannot be reduced to the sum of the different rules? Let's ask the stoner from my lacrosse camp.

Obviously most games can not lead directly to something as drastic as storming a fort or directing the course of a battle. Tetris can not fold into something real that easily (unless you work a job where you stack boxes of different sizes from the floor to the ceiling) and some games, bad games, pretend to correspond directly to real life via forced 'meaning' while actually preventing the kind of seamless transition that lacrosse offers, which, I think, is the only way in which games as artistic expression can ever refer back to reality in a coherent way.

I still think a game, like a sport that is actually more than a sport (lacrosse was, under normal circumstances, used to prepare young men for war and was conceived of partially as collective worship), can make an argument or provoke a response or affirm something that is connected to the rules while doing something that cannot be traced back piece by piece to the rules. It's just that lacrosse, and not a bad novel, should be the model for games that are supposed to mean something.

The Kickstarter Mode of Production

Which is a more degrading way of making a living?
	Labor for a wage.
	Running a kickstarter campaign.

I want to see what people think. I also want to provide some of my own thoughts.

Kickstarter presents developers with what appears to be a fair challenge: come up with a cool idea, demonstrate to others that your idea is cool and that you can complete it, and capital shall be allocated to you. We can imagine almost immediately some problems with this model- Kickstarter isn't a really 'free' market, certain products are banned or can be banned, Kickstarter does take a non-trivial amount of money from each successful campaign, it's limited to the United States presently, and, the biggest one: there's no effective legal recourse for people who donate to a campaign and then don't get what they paid for. Kickstarter very carefully avoids calling itself an investment company or framing campaigns as anything other than hobbyist donation solicitations with a possible future payoff equal to or less than the value of ones donation. Which means that nobody will ever be building steel mills or floating muni bonds over the service. Which is probably a good thing.

The most crippling disadvantage of the Kickstarter mode is that it actually gives people (who have money) the terrible things that they really seem to want. It's difficult to properly describe the phenomenon... a reprint of a book based on a webcomic about sticks got over one million dollars, Penny Arcade got fully one half of a million dollars to remove some, not all, ads from its front page, half the most-funded page in the games category has the word 'zombie' somewhere, and people forked over ten million dollars of money that was apparently 'earned' in some sense at some time to a dorky watch. I wish I could describe this stuff better than I could, but the wretchedness of the entire thing kind of chokes off any description of it. It really is the unfettered operation of the nerd mind over the freest yet conceived marketplace of ideas, and the results are stick webcomics, rape card games, and insulting statues.

The demands of the Kickstarter marketplace just replace the demands of the boardroom or the investor or venture capitalist, they don't eliminate them. Kickstarter requires a different kind of self-selling, and different form of prostitution and exerts a different kind of discipline. Even though no one is technically required to deliver the goods, in order to get the money to develop the goods in the first place, every developer using Kickstarter has to carefully manage their product and make it appear to be within acceptable bounds. You must be courteous and respectful when you deal with the people who fund you, of course, but you must also respect their ideas about design and theme and everything else. That means only projects that tickle the right fantasies or present themselves in the appropriate way get funded. If your game has a buzzword in it, like zombie, or if it has a graphical style including visible pixels or blocks, there is a minimum funding floor you will not be able to go beneath no matter how amateur you look or how weak your ideas are. Here's an actual screen grab from recently triple-over-funded zombie project "The Dead Linger" (tagline: "The Dead Linger is an FPS that embodies the gaming community's hunger for a true, open-world, zombie apocalypse survival sandbox.")



If you have an unconventional design or you don't care about zombies or cartoon pornography, you're going to have a rough time.

Kickstarter isn't that far from the ideal funding form. If it were project-agnostic (somehow) and just gave everyone capable of producing something interesting a modest stipend and money for development expenses it would be a more effecient replacement for state funding of the arts and not a grotesque fanservice festival. But nobody currently contributing to Kickstarter would put their money in that kind of pot. It's the control fantasy, more than any specific zombie-apocalypse or high-school-rape fantasy, that makes Kickstarter work the way it does, the idea that the individual can have his effect on the world by making sure the latest epic zombie boardgame gets the three hundred thousand dollars it needs to be printed and shipped.

Update 9 Sept 2012: never mind about that muni bond shit I mentioned earlier...

The Mystifying Hex

I was putting together a game reviewer résumé (laugh out loud) a while ago and in the process I went back and looked at a bunch of my old reviews, including this one. Because I have nothing better to do I also decided to look Elven Legacy up on Metacritic to see which side of the bell curve I was on. Here is the link to that.

A fuctional community is made up of diverse individuals and any abstract 'community opinion' is a summary of diverse opinions. The addition or subtraction of any one member changes the abstract. So conforming to a community opinion means that either the individual is dysfunctional because he doesn't understand what a community is about or it means that the community is dysfunctional because it doesn't allow diversity. Doug Henwood's book on Wall Street partially characterizes Wall Street as this kind of dysfunctional community, where everyone is desperately in search of everyone else's opinion so that they can base their investment decisions on it and profit. If market research, advanced stochastic simulations and MSNBC all point to 'the Street' saying that the Facebook IPO will go crazy, then everyone on 'the Street' will bet against Facebook. But the point is that the community opinion is made up of people guessing what the community opinion is and maneuvering to profit from it. Nobody actually takes stands of their own or reveals their hand.

Metacritic is the same way. They really do 'deal with criticism' in that they reduce it to the same kind of pointless guessing game you see on Wall Street. A score in the seventies, for instance, almost certainly indicates a niche game. A couple people (me, Pelit and Absolute Games, in this case) review it positively, most people don't understand what is going on and don't care and so give it an average score since going either way out of the doldrums would put them at risk, and someone people come right out and admit they don't get it, but, since it's a niche game, think that it's safe to bash without consequence. The average opinion is created (Metacritic averages publications' scores based on an arbitrary and opaque system) by people trying very hard not to stray from the average opinion. By anxious bullshitters' consensus the precise quantification of 'average' has come to rest at somewhere around the mid seventies, and Metacritic obliges by putting these reviews in the middle of the list and giving them a nice neutral color- either green, as if the game were good after all, or yellow, as if it were just kind of alright. For some games this is appropriate, for a game like Elven Legacy it's not appropriate at all.

What I really want to get to is the reviews at the bottom of the list, specifically the very bottom. Here's the money quote:

The whole notion of a scored review seems a little arbitrary in the face of the niche and dedicated fanbase this game will attract, and its attempts at populist window-dressing are virtually pointless because for the rest of us, the whole entity is at its most lenient completely mystifying, and at its most uncompromising utterly impenetrable.

The whole notion of a scored review is actually way more than a little arbitrary when the person doing the reviewing admits in the next sentence that he found the game 'utterly impenetrable.' The bottom side of any mid-seventies game is always a fun place to be because it's the actual object that casts the long shadow of the I-don't-care mid-seventies reviews: people on the bottom just say what everyone else above them was thinking but didn't even have the cojones to put in print. There's no functional difference between a mid-seventies review that says 'it will please fans of the genre' (as in, 'not me') and a mid-forties review that says 'fuck the genre.' The guy on the bottom just has fewer advertising dollars at stake.

Reviewing a game that has not been designated as niche below the mid-seventies Happy Zone is a totally different thing, however. I did that a few times, because I'm a rough-n-ready maverik who plays fast and loose with the rules and isn't afraid to shake things up, and also because I wasn't being paid. My most infamous moment was with Sins of a Solar Empire. I played for about twenty hours, which I'm almost positive was a longer period of time than half of the rest of the reviews invested, and decided that it wasn't worth it to continue and went back to Company of Heroes.

The most common accusation that people made in the emails they sent me and in the forums thread about my review on the official Sins forum was that I was only reviewing it poorly for the advertising revenue that it would generate for my site. Even when I was getting paid to review (I wasn't at the time and wouldn't be for another couple years) I was making a flat rate of thirty whole dollars per article. Not enough to tempt me to sell out. I would do that for maybe 400 dollars.

But people should have known, from looking at the site I was reviewing for, that I was either not getting paid or that it was so little that trolling for views wasn't really going to make a difference. But because of the Metacritic infection the only way people could justify my behavior was by comparing me to everyone else- to the people who reviewed the game in the Happy Zone for a designated non-niche game, which is in the mid eighties to the high nineties. And if you compare me to people who are reviewing for ad revenue after guessing what the consensus will be, then of course I have to be doing the same thing as they are, just taking a different tack: reviewing outside of the consensus for ad revenue. Some people did criticize me for not playing the game that much, and some people did question my knowledge of RTS 4X games (which is nil, because RTS 4X is a marketing term and not an actual genre). Of course the same scrutiny was not applied to, say, the Cheat Code Central review for the same game, which gave it an absurd 96 out of 100 and didn't say anything concrete about it. The crucial difference in each case is where the Street thinks the Street is going to put the game- in the niche pile or in the non-niche pile. A lot of the calculation has to do with who is making the game (as in, a large developer or an indie studio with a lot of profile) and which switches it flicks (puzzle platformer, visible pixels, story, no difficulty). In no case does the quality of the game enter into the decision. And it goes without saying that after the initial decision has been made, deviation is even more ill-advised.

Ritual, Magic and Gaminess

So a design I'm working on (thinking about while I toss boxes) was giving me some trouble. It's about the American Southwest during the Spanish colonial period and the relationships between the New Mexican settlers, Spanish colonial administrators and the heads of different bands of Indians. It's going to be super small-scale and turn based, and it will involve war but mainly things like slavery, trade, agriculture, seasonal migration and so on. Most of my ideas for historical games come from specific monographs, and this one in particular came from Ned Blackhawk's Violence Over the Land which is a good book as long as you have a stomach for digesting typical academic history. Which I do.

Part of the challenge of a historical setting for a computer game is getting people to behave in hisorical ways. The behavior is measured in a weird way. Wargamers want two things out of a historical game: fidelity to history measured in terms of the result, and fidelity to history measured in terms of the process. Normally they emphasize the first (see this) and ignore the second. Developers like those behind the Magna Mundi atrocity for Europa Universalis III try to game the process by plugging all orifices with arbitrary values, to the point where anti-semitism is quantified as a plus five percent modifier to revolt risk once the Jewish population of a province passes a certain threshold.

At least that's better than the event-driven approach of other mods for other Paradox games, like the Vicky Improvement Project for Victoria, which 'simulated' the rush for Africa not by diminishing the expansionary capacity of Europe but by outright forbidding colonization before a divinely ordained date, as if everyone was really just holding back and toeing the starting line for fifty years before 1880 out of a sense of sportsmanship.

Of course both of these mods and the games they were designed for are on a much higher level than a specific event or a specific intra-province dynamic. Its really not that bad, in the great scheme of things, if anti-Semitism is modeled in an anti-Semitic way in a few provinces if the whole thing kind of holds together on a macro level and produces believable results. Wether or not the Vicky Improvement Project or Magna Mundi (which is now spiraling completely out of control in the form of a stand-alone game) actually do produce believable outcomes or if they do it in a believable way is another question.

But it is important to think about these small things, especially if your game is going to be tiny and built around nuances that grander strategic games would abstract out of existence. Making people think and act like people did in the past doesn't demand that you place restraints on them in a system that should logically not have that restraint (for example: Vicky is built around conquest and colonization, why restrict it?). It demands that you make the conception that people had of their time and their role in the world real by designing your game around it. Wargames can learn from RPGs in this instance. One example that comes to mind is Darklands.

The designers of Darklands said that the starting point for the game was asking the question "what if the world was actually what the average German peasant thought it was?" From this premise adding monsters and magic was entirely logical. And players in the game accept the premise unthinkingly and adapt to rituals (praying to saints, for instance) that would be arbitrary and ridiculous if the game were modeled on real life but required the player to pray anyway because that's what people did back then. Making a game requires giving the average citizen of your imagined world some credit. You have to treat the things he thinks as real as if they were real. It makes for a better game and maybe designing and playing it gives you some insight into the absurd rituals in your own time and place.

Anyway, this led me back to my design. Modeling things like seasonal migration and slavery is easy enough- put resources in different areas of the map, vary their peak availability times and let players figure out when the best time to hunt small game is and when to visit the piñon groves. But modeling something like the relationship between the settlers and the Indians is tougher. Why, for instance, did the Spanish bother baptizing Indians, and why did Indians not immediately kill any settler they came across? From the perspective of the 21st century the existential danger that European colonialism posed to native peoples is blindingly ovbious. But it wasn't back then (Utes initially invited the Mormons to settle near them, for instance), otherwise violence against settlers whould have been the first resort of native peoples and not the absolute dead last (after long periods of hospitality, accomodation, friendly trade, credulous treaty-negotiation, and tolerating increasingly hostile impositions). To natives at the time settlers appeared as a far more neutral force. They occupied some land and deprived natives of access to some resources, but they had trade goods like metal pots, horses and rifles that natives found immensely useful, and in some cases the paternalism of an imperial power was preferable to slave-raiding by your neighbors: when the Escalante expedition passed through Utah, for instance, they promised to establish missions and settle among the Indians they encountered (which is a promise they never kept) and many bands of Indians, who by that time had endured decades of raids from more powerful tribes to the east, were very happy to hear it. That's why the design emphasizes trade and co-habitation and overall adopts the viewpoint of a group of people who did not (and could not) see with perfect vision several hundred years into the future.

Stories From My Past #2

After several months of fascinating discussion about emerging interest in the academic study of videogames, I am overjoyed that the University of Chicago Library has acquired its first videogame collection, and that these games will soon be available for borrowing from the Mansueto Library. Why, some might ask, should a university library add videogames to its holdings? Moreover, why is the popular digital game form important? And, finally, what might the University of Chicago community gain from this new collection?

In seventh grade I had the opportunity to give a presentation on the history of video games to my world history class (it was a pretty sweet class). I cut up some foamcore, printed out some screenshots and went to town. The only games I talked about were early arcade and PC games, I didn't mention fighting games, (J)RPGs, platformers, or anything except shooters and strategy games. I was so excited and so convinced that my presentation was sick that I asked a couple of pals to look at my board and my notes beforehand and give me their feedback. They were not impressed. The games that they cared about (Smash Bros, JRPGS) weren't anywhere in my notes, and I talked about only 2 or 3 games before 1990, and probably half of the games they played at the time were on emulators for ancient systems (as a result of admitting my deficiency to them, I got a CD full of emulators and ROMs, which was way cool and educational). Incidentally, I still don't give a shit about JRPGS or fighting games and I'm probably even less sympathetic to platformers now than I was then. At least now, though, I have the self-awareness to acknowledge from the start that what I'm doing or saying is applicable only within certain limits and with major qualifications. Like anything else.

The aggravating part of the game gallery at U Chicago is that it is evidence of exactly the same kind of arrogance that I displayed when I spent five minutes talking about how awesome Ghost Recon is and zero minutes on the ColecoVision or Street Fighter. My presentation was BS for that reason. U Chicago's list is BS for similar reasons. There aren't any PC exclusives on the list, there are games on the list which are pretty sorry examples even by the standards of their own genre (BioShock), and despite the cursory inclusion of a Really Old Game, most of them were made well after 2000. And, of course, no wargames, no strategy games, no shooters proper, no sims, no traditional RPGs, and a couple of games that are objectively, indisputably terrible (Heavy Rain and the game that's so fucked that the only way it's playable is by mutual agreement among players that certain features and characters be ignored). My one friend said "this presentation just looks like 'games Kyle likes'" and this presentation looks like "games dumb undergrads at U Chicago like."

What's even more aggravating is that these people are setting themselves up as the people who know what they're talking about. I was a child in a school, these people are undergraduate and even graduate students (name a more worthless, suspect field for postgraduate study than video games... economics doesn't count) and they should be aware of the effects of pretending to universality, and the stifling effect that an academic establishment can have when it's really established itself (when critical game studies sits around the house, it really sits around the house).

For me these things are especially troubling because the discipline I study, economics, is divided along lines that I can see emerging in video game studies today. Economics is, for whatever reason, one field that people outside of the field have actual respect for. It is the relevant science of government and daily life. Whenever I say that I study economics people immediately have questions about the job we're both working at, or the news the other day about unemployment, or "the banks," or even the entire state of the US ("so, how long until we're out of this hole?"). As a result of the respect economics has outside of the academy (the president doesn't have a Council of Anthropological Advisors, though he definitely should) it's one of the most hysterically conservative and backwards academies out of all of them. There are a dozen or so schools in the entire English-speaking world where you can study economics other than marginalist neo-classical, and most of those are just Keynesian. If you want to study Marx as an economist at a rigorous post-graduate level you have less than five options, some of which are in the process of backsliding or can't offer you any money. That's serious. The situation in philosophy, with analytical in the hegemonic position and continental out in the cold, is similar but I don't know if it's worse or better than economics. It's hard to imagine that it could be worse. Boo hoo, right?

The way that neo-classical economists talk about non-neoclassical economics (not at all, and superficially when they do) is almost exactly the way that the U Chicago people are talking about games other than ones they're aware of. It's tempting to draw the comparison between U Chicago's economics department, which is among the most prestigious neoclassical departments, and its game studies program, which seems to be aiming for a similar dismissive hegemony, but that's not very fair to the econ department. Grad students in the econ department don't talk about how bold and controversial their ideas are because they know they're on top and they know they're so far above the competition they don't even have to address them. But the game studies program simultaneously blots out entire eras, interpretations, and histories of games and assumes the subaltern stance of a 'discipline under siege.' It's a pure stance. Actually, the rich history of all the games no one at U Chicago has ever played or cared about is the only thing threatened or subaltern.

Alienated Fun

Back In The Day I worked on mods in my spare time with some internet pals. We never actually released anything, the best thing you could say about the experience is that it provided exposure to the process of making a game and a few specific skills (C++ and Unrealscript for me, modeling and texturing and level design for the rest of the crew).

Another positive aspect of the experience was that it introduced us to design. Maybe everyone else wanted to actually get something done, but for me talking about designing a game was more fun than actually figuring out how to make one (on top of Source, with a strong OO background, losing my mind when I found the zoom-in code for the crossbow in a place other than where I expected it to be). We kicked around a ton of ideas while we were supposed to be working, one of the most promising was one that was codenamed "Super SpaceShip Repair Team." In the game you would travel through a series of derelict ships trying to get them running again, presumably for a salvage company or for yourself. The main draw for me was the levels, how they would have to be somewhat coherent so that the 'puzzle' of getting the ship to move could be solved. You couldn't do the regular serpentine set-piece sequence design if you were supposed to be on a real spaceship that you could float around and enter into and exit from at any point. It would have to be somewhat real, like a warehouse level from Deus Ex: they actually look like people punch in and move pallets around in them. That was the appeal for me. My partner was attracted to the ability to transfer his real-life job, as a welder, into a game. He wanted to model consumables and power sources and beads and everything. The game would have been cool if it had ever been made.



I was thinking about Super Spaceship Repair Team recently, and because I'm lazy and think backwards I was imagining the proper soundtrack and what the player models would look like. My partner's designs from our other projects were pretty gritty and cool (see above), and I was thinking that if we had actually gone through with the game it would have had a blue-collar-in-the-23rd-century vibe, with blue space-overalls and helmets with stickers on them like "Spaceshipbreakers Local 112."

But I realized that that would not really be accurate, at least in the sense that a working-class vibe wouldn't really communicate what the game was about. The player in the game would be off on his own (theoretically working for a company but on the levels by himself) gathering and prudently employing resources, not conforming to assembly-line discipline but making the kinds of decisions that someone running a small business would make. And I realized that, as appealing as space overalls are, more proper would be space collared shirts and slacks.

So fun in a game where the process resembles coercion to a privatized labor process (loss of control, separation of what should be unified) is a contradiction just like alienated labor is. That doesn't mean that all player-characters in all games must be capitalists, but that the rules of fun we've set down for ourselves don't allow us to simulate or talk about what most people do their entire lives.

I did this I did that

"I fled the Reaper Invasion of Earth."

I dont want to start diagramming sentences but whats going on here is written in the active voice, right? I did something. The fact of a sentence implies a complicated process of construction from a range of possible alternatives. "I" was specifically chosen, the verb "to flee" was conjugated in a specific way, the object of the sentence was put in its position for a reason, by the person speaking. Chris Crawford designed his entire Storyworld system around the construction of sentences, based on the revelatory experience of putting Siboot: Trust and Betrayal (a game that uses an inverse parser) together in the late eighties. His idea was that simple sentences offered the easiest way to the largest possible horizon of useful, coherent possibility. You can play Balance of Power: 21st Century and decide how well it worked (its a mixed bag) but the fact that he looked to language for a powerful, versatile tool tells us a bit about what a sentence like the above actually means (or should mean) on the context of a game.

Obviously the game in question here is Mass Effect 3, and the sentence is totally false. The 'I' is nonexistent, there is no 'fleeing' and there isnt really an 'invasion' or an 'Earth' either. What happened is that "I watched a cutscene." Let's diagram this shit anyway and figure out why each word is misplaced.

When you flee something you run away from it in a hurry. In the situation the sentence "I fled the monster trying to eat me" describes there is an actual scene we can picture in our head, with several components. First, me, booking it across a field, secondly, the monster, trying to eat me, and all of the relationships and consequences implied (in this case, not very many, just that the monster wants to do something bad to me and I dont want that to happen). Does anything resembling that happen in Mass Effect 3? Where's the scene, where is it represented in something that players actually have anything to do with?

Paul Veyne tells us that when we read a novel, 'we believe while we read and only afterwards do we call it fiction.' I agree. A 3d model resembling Earth being bombed by Reapers or whatever is clearly not the actual real planet Earth, but we pretend like it is while we watch it being bombed, so the actions of the characters later (who, for example, avenge the invasion of Earth) make sense and we get something out of the story. But that's a story we're talking about, or a movie. What does Veyne's belief-for-the-duration look like in a video game, and why is it totally off-base to say "I did x" in a game that actively prohibits or restricts your agency?

For the sentence "I fled the Reaper Invasion of Earth" to make sense in discussing a videogame there would have to be the possibility of something else happening, and the requirement that the verbs actually be done in some symbolic sense by the player via his interaction with the game. Saying, after a game of Asteroids, "I destroyed the asteroid" is coherent because it relates to the rule system and the symbolic language of the game. You didn't literally destroy an actual asteroid, but you did maneuver your spaceship symbol in such a way that it was directed towards the asteroid-symbol, which you then erased from memory with a well-placed shot symbol which obeyed the physical laws of the Asteroids universe in traveling in a straight line towards its destination. Saying "I fled the Reaper Invasion of Earth" is actually incorrect because there was no possibility of anything else happening, and in a game the possibility of something else happening is the core of everything. In language, too. "I fled the monster" implies that it could have turned out another way, because of the complex relationship between me and the monster and my ability to flee and his ability to catch up. Nothing resembling the dynamic implied by that language exists in the situation that "I fled the Reaper Invasion of Earth" describes. It was a cutscene. You pressed a button and watched something.

Now, of course, there's nothing wrong with setting something up. But you have to have something following after the cutscene that letigimizes it. If you take away the player's ability to interact with your game in a meaningful way for any length of time, there should be a really good reason to do so. But with Mass Effect 3 it keeps happening, right up until the end, when you get the equivalent of a trivial pop quiz on your squadmates abilities ("Shepard, should the person that's good at hacking do the hacking, or should we use someone who isn't as good at hacking?") and it determines the outcome what should logically be the most intense, challenging sequence in the game.

This point is true for all kinds of examples and not just Controversial Game of Several Months Ago, Mass Effect 3. It was even more jarring in text-adventure games.

The entire premise of the text adventure is a lie in a similar way that the first sentence of this article is. The sheer audacity of putting a blinking cursor for the input of text (ANY text) in front of a player as his primary means of interaction is still astounding years later. The cursor says "you can tell me anything" but of course it meant "anything I have been programmed to understand." The process of figuring out exactly what the parser had been told to parse and how it had been told to parse it occupied the first thirty minutes or so of any adventure game, whereas in a game like Doom you jumped right in and knew what input could be processed and how it would be returned to you. W means move forward, click means shoot, and so forth. Technically, a more limited vocabulary, but because it was established intuitively very quickly, the higher levels of interaction (dodging projectiles, for instance) could be reached and enjoyed much more easily. The game talked to you in a symbolic language that was delightfully artificial and alien, and you had an easier time than in a game that pretended to take your native language as input but actually only took a weirdly interpreted subset under certain obscure conditions. The jarring effect in Mass Effect comes from the terrible gap between what the game is telling you in a detached story and what you're expected to do as a player, which is diminished almost to the point of comedy. The range of what Mass Effect 3 will accept or allow is like the most limited parser ever, where the only sentences you can type are "save the universe epically" and "bone down on an abstract hole of my choosing." And, of course, in a parser that accepts two static sentences, neither sentence or any of the words within them, much less "I fled the reaper invasion of Earth" can possibly mean what they appear to say.

Is there ever a reason to roleplay?

In this video, Blufor searches for and destroys ammo caches in a city occupied by a combination of armed and unarmed civilians. Blufor is bound by an ROE that makes the mission harder for them should they break it (e.g., if they unlawfully kill an unarmed player, the mission spawns armed AI for them to deal with).

If the civilians wanted to, they could take weapons and explosives from the ammo caches and perform hit and run attacks (and most do), but Blufor also has the ability to check if a suspected combatant has fired a weapon with their limited number of gunshot residue kits. Blufor also has a helicopter circling overhead with magnified and thermal optics, which could make fleeing difficult. I am, of course, choosing to play as a non-combatant in this video (well for most of it [spoilers]).

It's almost worth it to watch the entire 22 minutes of the video.

A long time ago I was in a roleplaying guild that hopped between a bunch of MMOs. We were in Mourning for a while, we were in WoW, we were in Shadowbane before it closed down for good, we discussed going on to a UO private server but ended up disbanding. We were never that hardcore, mostly we used RP as an excuse to write lore, and picked classes in whichever game we played that allowed us to rob, steal, kill indiscriminately. Not very exciting, and certainly a far cry from the RP that Shack Tactical (the people in that video) engage in, with a strict hierarchy, radio protocol, binding Rules of Engagement, and weapon/vehicle certifications (only some people can operate helicopters, for instance).

There was one game we did RP pretty hardcore in though. It was a browser-based mainly text-driven mmo with maybe 100 people playing (pretty exciting huh?) whose name I've forgotten. The conceit of the game was that everyone was the leader of a militia company in the middle ages, and people would band their companies together, hire themselves out, fit themselves into intricate webs of vassalage and so on. All of the actual gameplay was fairly simple (move company, recruit new men, pay men, besiege, fight) but because you were playing against humans and not going on awful PvE grinds all day most of what you actually did in the game was write short messages to people, in-character, asking for their help, forming an alliance, and so forth. There was no real mechanical enforcement of things like vassalage, it all fit together, like a good pen and paper game, on the mutual agreement of everyone playing to not fuck it up. It was cool.

So, whats the deal with roleplaying? Is it completely fine or is it categorically pathetic? I'm playing Tribes: Ascend right now and one thing I've seen people do is pick a spot on the map (the tall towers on Raindance, maybe) and play 'king of the hill' with each other and ignore the rest of the game going on around them. They also seem to like yelling at each other in some kind of half-baby half-orc patois. It's kind of annoying but it does prevent people with rocket launchers from using the towers as a vantage point. So overall it's a wash. And certainly other people in the game are RP-ing in the sense that they're ignoring the ostensible purpose of the game and playing according to their own rules. Technicians in T:A frequently roleplay as if they were TF2 engineers, a lot of other people (in capture-the-flag mode) pretend as if there were no flags and the only purpose of the game was to rack up kills. A frequent boast from the people at the top of the losing team at the end of a round is "54 kills, suck on it," as if to say "you won, but we played with style" like there isn't any intrinsic style to beasting to begin with, and that 'counting coup' with flags requires less finesse than blowing everyone away with guns designed especially for that purpose. If you can't already tell from the fact that I hold my nose high in the air and sip champagne, I play pathfinder.

I guess the difference between roleplaying and not-playing is that one is done consciously and the other isn't. But the effect, and the definition, are frequently similar: playing by your own rules to enrich an experience created, by definition, with other rules. Techs playing like they're supposed to would obviously have less fun, and if my friends and I had played that unnamed browser-based militia MMO as if it were just a system to be mastered and glitched into oblivion we would have ruined everyone else's fun as well as our own.

Playing king-of-the-hill or as if you were playing a different team-based shooter obviously pits two sets of rules against each other, but what if the two rules (the RP rules, and the actual game rules) are complementary? If they are, you get the browser MMO I was talking about, or the video at the top of the post. You get a game plus roleplaying, not a game minus roleplaying. More gameplays, more cools, additional utils of fun, beasting piled on top of beasting.