Whose Tester?

The question that my patchy background in critical theory teaches me to ask about reality television is pretty basic: whose reality is it supposed to be? Whatever MTV is trying to do (provide a quality thirty-minutes-hate or stealthily promote GTL at the behest of Maytag and 24 Hour Fitness) with Jersey Shore, it clearly has nothing to do with providing unvarnished 'reality' in any remotely acceptable sense of the term. There's a clear agenda. So what is Sony's objective with The Tester?

Let's run down the list of preliminary horrors of the show, which you can pick up from one of the episode remix youtubes floating around. First there's the blatant advertising for bad games or bad products ("your last challenge involves being driven in a 2011 Ford Focus to finish the new Killzone, only for Playstation Three. no jumping at any time"), second there's the wicked sick pad/playland/womb with crazy colors, corrugated metal, bright lights and a prepetually open bar, third there's the contrived competition, fourth there's the actual prize itself, and finally there's the shameless fanservice.

The bigger horrors, the ones you can't pick up from the remix youtubes, involve the world Sony is implicitly working towards establishing. Everyone is referred to firstly by their gamertag and secondly by their actual Christian name. The attributes of a person- their kindness, the fact that they take responsibility for themselves, their coolness under pressure, are mentioned in the same breath as their attributes as a gamer- people are always talking about how many trophies they have, and how impressed they are by their co-contestants for having "twice as many as I do!" For those of us who choose gamertags arbitrarily or with an eye towards something other than complete congruence this is really frightening. Would anyone with an intentionally offensive gamertag and a documented history of anonymous teamkilling and shameless teabagging be eligible for this show? What would that look like, if someone with a horrendous gamertag personality and a relatively normal real personality appeared on the show? It would break the spell Sony is trying to cast: your gamertag literally is you, you are completed by and immersed in Sony's virtual world and your existence is somehow truncated or impossible without it. The Tester is that one episode of Black Mirror, except serious. In fact, the whole show is a bit like someone else'e nightmare done straight and with a positive spin. It's like someone on Sony's Tester production team read Baudrillard hyperventilating about capital actualizing itself and transcending into astrality or whatever and said 'sounds cool. let's do it.'

Of course implying that 'you are incomplete without our products' is the first principle of marketing and in no way new. Sony is breaking new ground with The Tester by getting that message across in a much more pervasive and complete way than has been done previously. During the first episode of each season everyone is issued a special card which they are solmenly told is the one thing allowing them to stay in the competition- and in Sony's dreamwomb. During the final reckoning at the end of each show, when one or two cast members are sent home, there is a hook at the back of the room with the cards of previous failures hanging on it, like some kind of weird gallows! And whenever something positive is introduced- the reward for completing a competition, or the initial introduction to the show- the robotlike host is always careful to reinforce that 'all of this could end, at any time, if you fail, if we take your badge.' The cast does a lot of vocalizing- cheering when something cool happens, shreiking and fainting when a commodity prize is dangled in front of them, booing and crying when they are sent home- and it's not hard to see them as Sony treats them, as children held in bondage and gradually losing their minds.

The show's handling of diversity is even more interesting. The composition of the cast- unlike Jersey Shore- is carefully heterogenous. There are always one or two outrageous (or stoic, honorable) black men, women are half or close to half of every cohort, and in the second season there was a gay man, who went on to actually win the entire season and presumably secure a worthless bottomfeeder job at one of the worst studios in the business. Stonewall wasn't for nothing! The cast looks like a company brochure with pictures of fake 'employees' smiling. Always women, minorities, inventive combos of women and minorities (Indian, yes, but... dot and feather!?), sometimes a woman with super short hair, never any of the people who either run or benefit from the running of the company, straight old white men.

Of course The Tester's diversity, even on the surface level, has clear limits. White people are not really allowed to be racist (one girl is sent home for, in part, complaining that her compadre shouted at her in Spanish during a particularly hairy sequence in one challenge) but the cast is still overwhelmingly white, and nonwhite characters are (typically) eliminated early or appear to have been selected on the merits of the one-liners they can color the scenes with. Everyone is middle class and above, and there are audible gasps when one contestant admits to not owning a Playstation 3. One contestant gains instant cred by claiming to own all systems ever produced, and it's only when he reveals that he doesn't know anything about games that his facade evaporates.

But the significant diversity- diversity of experience and of ideas- is something The Tester doesn't have. The idea that you could be playing other games or having other experiences with them is not discussed, mentioned, implied, or allowed. For a show that's supposed to be about getting a a job making games, the contestants have very little to actually say about the process. Precisely one challenge (that I've noticed) in the entire three season series has to do with coming up with an idea for a game. And even then, the competition consists of marketing the idea to a focus group, not examining the idea itself. During one 'unscripted' sequence in the pad, someone says "I want a game where you're a guy and you lose everything and like, you get it all back over the course of the game and at the end of the game you're like, wow, I did all this, and that story is yours." Everyone is in awe of how smart of a comment this is. And it's the longest discussion of something approximating game design I've seen so far (I have not watched every episode...).

The kicker is that the message, and Sony's ideal world, is neocolonial. Everyone is acceptable, black, white, straight, gay, nerd, whatever, as long as you stay on message. The actual experiences of real women, who are universally mistreated in video games, and of minorities, who exist only selectively and at the pleasure of an overwhelmingly white development establishment, are nowhere. There is some lip service to getting 'more women in games' but it doesn't seem that the intention is to change the way games are made. It's just to apply a patina of respectability- producing the same trash, but with different faces attached to the credits screen at the end. The gay character I mentioned earlier makes a key slip during the last episode of the second season, when the remaining three contestants have brunch with the judges and a higher-up at Sony, who happens to be black and also happens to be seated across from the gay dude (how's that blocking). They get to talking, and the gay character says it was so great to hear encouragement from "a fellow minority." That's music to Sony's ears. What possible significant information could you gather about someone from hearing that they were a "minority?" What could you say about two people who were both "minorities?" Almost anything, and nothing significant or personally identifying. This is what Sony wants, an undifferentiated and amnesiac bunch of vague "minorities" to put a contemporary stamp on an old white-supremacist/mysoginist/transphobic etc. product.

This is already too long of a post. Let's finish it: The sufis said that the world is the introspection of God. The small, shitty world of The Tester is the introspection of Sony.

Dream of the Serious Chamber

Watch this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MoS4oZHAcU

Before I got a job, I played games a lot, on some days eight or ten hours a day. I still try to spend a significant amount of time (a 'serious' amount) on any one game I'm playing, and to play it in chunks of time eight or so hours long, if I can string together that much time consecutively (normally I can only do this on a weekend). If I don't succumb to malnutrition or warp my spine what I'm rewarded with is a dream or two related to the game that night.

What's the utility of a dream? Everyone has had the experience of writing a piece of code, or working on a math problem, or playing a game, or reading something, and having difficulties with it- and then, hours or days after giving up in frustration, have the solution to their difficulty (or, at least, a novel approach) appear spontaneously. Dreams are just a more radical and immediate form of thinking-by-separation, when you're churning through the problem you just confronted, but at a more leisurely or casual pace and with less anxiety (the book with the imposing derivations, or the bracket-bound code, isn't right in front of you). It's perfect for reflection, even if that reflection (in a dream) is warped.

More practically, what I noticed in my dreams about games is that the things which I did most often and the pattern into which my actual playing of the game fell would be revealed in a much more obvious way. Playing Max Payne, I didn't really notice that most of my time I was sliding to the side in slo-mo. It was happening at a level below whatever my engagement with the game was- I was thinking: 'here is an enemy, I'm getting rid of him so I can reach the next room' and sliding sideways was an automatic response to that imperative. Having a dream where all I did was slide everywhere sideways with my arms pointing out made it much more obvious (and funnier) than the action would have been otherwise. I remember a dream of Anno 1404 in which I felt like I was constantly moving closer and closer to the corner of a house (from a birds-eye isometric viewpoint) without ever passing through it, and where it felt like the corner of the house was growing more and more magnified until I was staring at a single knot in a single board of wood. This reminded me to stay back from the monitor a bit, and also reminded me that all radii city-builders (city-builders where service buildings etc. provide services in a fixed radius, as opposed to the walker system which I think is more organic) turn you into a surveyor.

Another example of a game dream is actually the youtube I posted at the top. I remember playing Serious Sam for a punishing amount of time and getting dreams in which I was eternally running backwards, firing into a flat wall of weird faces. It seems someone else either had the same dream or the same insight. And with this sort of thing the journey really is irrelevant- getting there is way more important. Please don't play games for ten hours a day. Sweet dreams.

Mourning Zomboid

A little of this knee-jerk, know-it-all vigilantism even found its way into our comments threads, for which I am thoroughly ashamed and worried – not purely in terms of Project Zomboid, but because it suggests the distinction between independent and corporate development seems to have been lost in the wake of growing quantities of indie success stories. - here

One of my most embarassing memories is the two years I spent anticipating a terrible MMO called Mourning. I was on the lore team (official fanfiction writer) and in that position I was given access to the beta of the game early, so early that I got to see that there was basically nothing to the game at all. Here's how bad it was: I lobbied for months for them to add archery to the game, and eventually gave up because no one was responding to posts on the forum, which was eventually shut off because the devs sold the game and the domain and someone forgot to pay the hosting bill. Later a friend of mine interviewed a former developer (how he tracked him down idk) and I put the interview on the fansite I'd made for the game- it got posted on Slashdot and I almost got sued. Thankfully my domain registry info was out of date so the papers were served to whichever asshole had bought my parents tract home on the outskirts of Boise. My actual address was in another state.

The Zomboid fiasco brought all of this to the fore again. The Mourning devs were amateurs and ran out of resources about three years too soon, and there were some real idiots in command. They dropped instantly into obscurity- nobody ever licensed the engine they developed from scratch, nobody's heard of the game they spent probably three years working on, and all of the IP they developed got sold for peanuts and sat on indefinitely, and the ten or so people who did pay $20 for a preorder threatened lawsuits unless they got all their money back. A complete disaster, and an embarassment to my friends and I who got too tied up in something that wasn't actually a game and was never going to be. All is well. Working as intended.

But the Zomboid developer's story is different for some reason. Losing your code is almost impossible to do these days. It's such an unbelievable fuckup on their part that it's difficult to even imagine how they managed to do it. Everything I work on (more on that later!) literally cannot be stolen or destroyed, and nobody cares about what I'm working on, and I certainly haven't gotten any money from it!

But the Zomboid developers have gotten the exact opposite response that the Mourning people did, while deserving that response less. At least in Mourning's case there was an actual game moving to completion, instead of a pre-alpha with zero recognizeable gameplay and unbearable cutscenes (how is that, by the way? they promise an open-world beast of a game and the very first thing they bother to add is some bullshit about your dying wife?).

It seems that indies have managed to restore profitablilty to games not by vanquishing piracy (which, thank god, is not slowing down) but by marketing. If you've been convinced, as many people have, that indies are a priori worthwhile and corporate development is so terrible that even the competence that corporate developers occassionally display becomes something undesirable, then the act of opening your wallet to people who are basically thieves (like the Zomboid people) is automatic. The Mourning syndrome my friends and I displayed- waiting on a game for years, promoting it, helping to make it better, ignoring its critics, fetishizing it, for nothing- is now the default mode for people who care about indie games. It has to be- it's not like there's ever anything in them to actually draw your attention objectively.

It's getting so depraved that not even an outlet like RPS can avoid brushing on the truth at least tangentially. I hope this is a wake-up call for at least a few people in the same way that Mourning was for me.

not just a commercial thing

"But the problem was that turn-based strategy games were no longer the hottest thing on planet Earth. But this is not just a commercial thing—strategy games are just not contemporary."

Not just a commercial thing is definitely the right way to characterize this, especially when defenders of turn-based strategy games are interested mainly in sales figures ('strategy games are contemporary- look at how much Civ V sold!'). It's one case where the unreconstructed corporate shill is at least putting his argument into the proper form.

"I use the example of music artists. Look at someone old school like Ray Charles. If he would make music today it would still be Ray Charles, but he would probably do it more in the style of Kanye West"

This is even better, even if the example itself is crude and not really correct (all Black Artists are the same I guess). It is possible for entire genres to fall by the wayside and its necessary to constantly re-evaluate them and update them for a new era (for new technology, expectations, knowledge etc.).

People who fall back either on sales-figure-mongering or uncritical praise of past games are going to fall into traps, sooner or later. Whoever this 2k guy is, he has the drop on all of these people. To really refute him we have to reject his future and be even more ruthless about the past then he's being. Not just retreat into boardroom arguments or nostalgia.

"We use tapes, pre-recorded, and we play tapes also in our performance. When we recorded on TV we were not allowed to play a tape as part of the performance because the musicians' union felt that they would be put out of work. But I think just the opposite: With better machines, you'll be able to do better work, and you will be able to spend your time and energies on a higher level." - Ralf Hütter

Here we go. This is the high ground that is falsely claimed by people who take old franchises and ruin them- their argument is that they are washing away the encrusted gunk of management masochism around these old mechanics and giving players true Choice, real Freedom unburdened by worrying about which caliber of bullets you need to purchase, etc. They almost always miss the mark, and if they did take a game that really was cluttered up with a lot of shit and apply Streamlined Design Techniques to it, what they wind up producing is a set of mechanics where the player not only doesn't have to worry about minor details, but doesn't have to worry about anything else either. It's true that exacting and punishing resource systems for bullet management are petty and primitive. But if you're not able as a designer to produce challenge on a higher level then you're better off leaving the bullet minutae in. It's still a more rewarding experience to get everyone the right guns in Jagged Alliance, despite all the caliber and attachment headaches, then it is to complete a contrived shooting sequence where you don't have to worry about your bullets but the enemies don't present a challenge either.

So 2k Guy is right and also wrong (bold statements for this first post!). We have to be 'unafraid of ruins' for the right reasons- because we're confident in our ability to build something better, not just because we can't understand the buildings that used to be there.