MIT Gambit's "Elude" and half-baked procedural rhetoric

First, play "Elude" so you know what I'm complaining about.

The core of Ian Bogost's "procedural rhetoric" is the idea of meaningful player agency; and for a choice to be meaningful, there must be a viable alternative.

In MIT Gambit's "Elude," the only thing new it brings to the platformer / doodle jump genre, a "resonate" verb, does not have any cost associated with it. There are no consequences to it. Thus, you can just spam "resonate" all the time and everywhere. It might as well not even be there.

(Yet in real-life, you can totally resonate with the "wrong" thing: a political party promoting racism, the co-worker who turned out to be crazy, the great apartment that turned out to be full of roaches and leaky ceilings, etc.)

But let's assume, for the moment, that the procedural rhetoric in Elude is sound and not just some re-skinning of a platformer...

The Illegible Free Roaming City, the Linear, the Nonlinear and the Ugly.

This slightly old article over at Serial Consign is a good survey of cities in video games -- not just as settings or narrative devices, but rather functions of gameplay mechanics, as in the SimCity series. However, the article argues Will Wright has embedded a pro-growth, pro-economics ideology in the game.

Player agency in these "god games" is an illusion. We aren't actually creating a city; we're just optimizing some preset numbers and formulas about how Will Wright thinks a city should privilege high property values or high density housing or nuclear power.

If you're going to argue that these so-called holy grails of emergence and player agency, "god games," paragons of nonlinear systems are actually linear and limited in a sense -- well, then you gotta be scared about the types of cities we actually acknowledge as linear.

Over Games?... or Over Tale of Tales?

Timeline, for your convenience:

1) Tale of Tales gives a presentation at the "Art History of Games" conference in February... people kind of care but also not, because Sleep is Death is dominating the news cycle instead.

2) Everyone plays Sleep is Death for a little while... and now no one is. It was cool while it lasted. Next!

3) ToT publish a full web version of their talk, "Over Games," formatted all nicely with pictures and inflammatory poststructuralist language. People link to it a while ago. Someone links to it again, more recently.

4) Cactus is angry.

5) No one looks at ToT's more recent talk from June, "Let's Make Art With Games!" that's much more productive, inclusive and kind of back pedals on some of the crazier things they said in the earlier presentation.

Edit: 6) ToT and Cactus kiss and make-up. ToT says they were being inflammatory on purpose or something, for a museum audience! It's our fault for assuming that they meant what they said!... even though this is, like, the tenth time they've said stuff like this.

(bento_smile, who makes some delightful notgames-ish games, sums it up well: "It just struck me, that the impression notgames gives is one of reducing the scope of games, rather than broadening it.")

I agree, it sounds like a really counter-intuitive design philosophy.

My take?

Handle with Care: the novelization

So here's what happened: First I wrote a short story. Then I turned it into an HL2 mod.

And now a kind fellow has written a short story based on my mod. (Read his other posts too; because us unread, low-traffic blogs have to stick together!)

The next step? Naturally, a mod based on a short story of a mod based on a short story.

Fib

http://www.sophiehoulden.com/games/fib/

Start rumors. Say people said things that they didn't. Use their corpses as platforms. This is what a "Mean Girls" game should've been.

Fib is a pretty cool ass pants twist on the "manipulate NPCs" sub-genre of platformers, the theme for Ludum Dare 18. Ideas like this are especially great because they're (a) simple, (b) intuitive, (c) funny, (d) only work in platformers. I don't think this type of thing would work too well in an FPS setting without a lot of changes.

(Unity web player required)

No updates this week. I'm kind of dying from apartment hunting in New York City. Nothing big. Just a little bit of dying.

(obligatory and desperate plug: if you or someone you know in Queens / Brooklyn / Manhattan needs a roommate, e-mail me details or whatever at campaignjunkie {aaaaatttt!} gee-mail, thanks. I can pay my bills and I'm house-trained.)

The First Person Ruin and the Death of the Level Designer

You should read Triple Canopy if you aren't already, or at least this one article that has special relevance to video games: "The Anatomy of Ruins," analyzing our relationship to ruins and what that means.

In video games, that usually means romanticizing them in some way, making them oddly beautiful or otherwise visually arresting. It makes sense, after all, seeing as the vast majority of FPS games are about destruction and the spectacle of the remains. And, well, guns and explosions and things that go boom.

Some games (World War II-themed games, Fallout 3) are content to use ruins to demonstrate some mundane truism like, "look at all the destruction that war has wrought -- look at all these empty houses! Man, war sucks and displaces innocent civilians, even if you do believe in a theory of just war!" Indeed, war can be pretty bad.

The Halo series and the Elder Scrolls: Oblivion treats the ruin as a mysterious "other," the result of an alien civilization that had strange uses for these ruins, uses that we struggle to comprehend.

Other games celebrate the ruin as a reflection of player agency: the Red Faction series and the Battlefield: Bad Company series come to mind. In it, the player actively creates the ruins. Red Faction celebrates it as revolution, Bad Company treats it like good ol' fun.

Half-Life 2 manages the feat of accomplishing both... sort of: you begin in the derelict remnants of an Eastern European city. The structures are intact, but the social fabric of civilization is in ruins and disrepair. Then, when you return later and the city is in ruins -- specifically a setpiece where fellow rebels tear down a Combine screen in the plaza amid cheers and applause -- it is both liberation from the old world / the oppressive new world order.

Introduction to Starcraft and Heidegger (Part 2)

(This is a two-part essay on Starcraft II and its relation to Heidegger's writing using Sirlin's excellent write-ups, for relative novices who don't play Starcraft multiplayer.)

Last time...

• I was about to lose a game of Starcraft II -- the guy had micromanaged his forces, with one army slowly but surely killing mine and another army about to attack my now defenseless base.
• I talked about Heidegger and his ideas about technology: We can't manufacture raw resources; they are created by the earth, as with coal being formed from fossils over many years, etc. However, modern technology makes us think we control these resources, through a mental construct called enframing -- the process of re-orienting ourselves to these raw resources to give the illusion of control. When we mine / store / "control" coal, it's actually just a different state of mind.

So, first, since Heidegger's all about these raw resources -- what are the raw resources of Starcraft? Minerals, gas and time? Maybe even "map territory" I guess?

Wrong. You're thinking too narrowly. Yes, those are the raw resources within the construct of the game, discrete variables tracked by the computer -- but what about the raw resources of your opponent?