Non-fiction games... Worms ahoy! (wait not the game Worms, I meant this discussion is a can of worms)

Fellow bloggers ought to chime in on this discussion, preferably in posts of your own, or the comment section if you want to be lazy and write something that even less people than already read this site will read. Don't know how readership can number in the negative, but I'm sure that's one thing this blog can accomplish.

Andrew mentioned non-fiction games in his last post because he said reading makes him feel like a genius. My congratulations.

Alright I kinda have to start by saying I don't really care about this topic. I'm more inclined to read about it than write. Then again, I have a blog, and write I must. For ego's sake. Come on though I don't wannnna.

Let's get ourselves into the right mood by listening to a[n] historical song:

Ah, now I'm ready to learn.

Do I even know what non-fiction is? K, Wikipedia clarifies: the assertions made by the author are understood to be factual, according to his knowledge/research. Doesn't that kinda make religious texts non-fiction though? And that's definitely not right. But a book doesn't become non-non-fiction if one of its assertions is disproven at a later date. But let's just skip that weird discrepancy because it doesn't need to apply to this discussion. Non-fiction is a work in which all assertions are understood by the author and audience to be facts, let's leave it at that.

A game contains authorial assertions alongside audience input, the latter not present in other media. Assertions in the form of setting, dialogue, and scripted events can be argued to be factual in a manner identical to books or film. Nothing new there. That alone is enough to establish that a game can contain non-fictional content - content that the player knows is being dictated to them as fact. Assassin's Creed is a widely popular example of this. The game includes dossiers on historical landmarks, personalities, and organizations. Though the plot (and thus the game as a whole) is clearly historical fiction of the Dan Brown variety, the factual matters are well-enough delineated that an audience member can know they are absorbing information about reality.

Semi-fiction, explained

Control is the more difficult matter to assess - without establishing non-fictional player interactivity, the best a game can be is semi-fiction. An argument made elsewhere on this blog that we'll take as an assumption is that any action leading to failure of the game's winning condition is not a part of the narrative*. Meaning that if you're playing as George Washington and accidentally fall off of a cliff, that does not mean the game is asserting that George Washington fell off a cliff and respawned back in town - only that he could have (fallen that is - I don't think historical figures respawned too often). But without establishing a binary pass/fail to every action the player takes, ambiguity is introduced into which is an assertion and which is simply a player freedom. Say, for instance, we were examining a biogame about Miles Davis. Imagine a scene in which the player is presented with the prompt "press X to throw a trumpet at the bigot or press Y to say 'yessuh massah'" If the player knows that making the wrong choice will cause a Game Over, he can assume that the right choice is a factual assertion. If the game continues regardless of selection, it becomes unclear what action Miles Davis actually took, or whether that was a historical situation at all. Even if it is factual, if the player can't tell that it is, it's not nonf, is it? 

So it seems to me that there is potential to create a non-fictional game experience, though not without limitations. It is first understood that all scripted content must be factual to the greatest degree available to the creators - this includes setting, characters, and plot events. A restriction on interactivity is also necessary to inform the player of what exactly is an assertion and what is a freedom. This can take the form of a binary reward/punish mechanic (an artless means of accomplishing this would be the implementation of a score counter: +1 point for factual actions, -1 for deviation) or a delineation between history lessons and playtime (see Age of Empires II - the battles are clearly free-for-all historically set playgrounds, while the cut-scenes and story progression are informative). 

I always loved how the tiny units lined up for you. It was such a delight. Real-time tiny-unit-lining-up-for-you action!

Dunno, just a day's worth of thought on the subject. Maybe I'm not clambering for non-fiction gaming (personally I find there's as much to learn from fictional narratives), but I will admit that I do feel pretty edified after a session of Romance of the Three Kingdoms VII or AoE II. Actually I never really appreciated how much I learned from New Horizons, but it was chocked full of information about the Age of Discovery. Maybe I'd even make a case for that being a nonf game, on that inevitable day when I expound on how it's one of my all-time favorites.. Regardless, as the Americans say, "it is good enough for me".

*if we do not assume this, the entire argument is fruitless, so we can either take it as fact and argue about it later, or not have this conversation at all

My favorite thing about books: reading them... or TBA

I definitely read more than I play video games.  By a significant margin.  This might have something to do with my current living arrangement; I share a TV with 6 other people and so it's not often that I can take over my living room for a significant amount of time.  But it also fits my lifestyle better in a few other ways.  For example, I can pick a book up and put it down with less hassle than starting and stopping a video game session.  I also read a fair amount of non-fiction, which has the added bonus of making me feel like I'm educating myself, whether or not this is actually the case.

Now there's an interesting thought... has there ever been a truly non-fiction video game?  How could that possibly function successfully?  Would a game based entirely on historical fact be considered fiction instantly when allowing for very minimal levels of player control over action?  Or if someone wanted to publish something academic, to what extent could a thesis or study be successful as an interactive  "video game," ceteris paribus?  I'm guessing the "game" portion of that name might have to be discarded.

Oh yeah I wanted to do some an MMM for some books I recently finished.  Lets call it Tiny Book Assessments.  TBA.  Nailed it.

Miles: The Autobiography

Heroin is a hell of a drug

The "miles" in this case is one Miles Davis, the prolific trumpet player and composer.  It's a vernacular-heavy, no nonsense account of one of America's most interesting musical figures' life from childhood in 1930/1940s St. Louis to the end of his career in the late 1980s.  It does a good job of balancing its tracing of the music with the tracing of his personal life, and the sometimes absurd number of road blocks and bumps in between.  Let's just say it makes you dislike white people even if you happen to be one.  I would definitely recommend with hesitation, however, reading the tome if you're not a jazz head.  The books was often at its best when sharing juicy personal insight into his relationship with other jazz greats (Mingus, Monk, Diz, Bird, Max Roach, Tony Williams, Trane, Wayne Shorter, Marcus Miller, et al) and I can't imagine that being particularly absorbing if you don't know a bit about the other's lives or music.  Here is where I would go off on a tangent about people "not getting jazz" and my thoughts on the matter, but instead of wasting everyone's time let me just leave it at this: if you don't enjoy listening to it, then don't and that's fine.  It just pisses me off when people try to create arguments about why its objectively not good music, when quite obviously its a subjective experience.  In any case, it still might be worth a read for the story alone.

A Sherlock Holmes Graphic Novel: The Sign of the Four
Whoops this is a graphic novel not a book.  Oh well, suck it up.  This is a adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's second Sherlock Holmes novel.  I haven't read the original novel, so my opinion suffices only as applied to the graphic novel.  My understanding is that the writing is almost entirely verbatim from the original, but much was cut to make it readable in the comic format.  This being the case, the story flows quite nicely, though I have to admit that I found myself going back a few times to remind myself of character's relationships with one another, a problem which might have been avoided given the more fleshed-out version of events.  The plot is classic Holmes, full of twists and intrigue, and manages to bring a critique of British imperialism to bare as well.  The art was well done, if a bit cartoon-ish for my liking; other might find it endearing, perhaps.

No seriously, it's a hell of a drug

Darkness at Noon
Arthur Koestler was a Hungarian author and journalist writing over a great swath of the 20th Century.  His Darkness at Noon was published in 1940.  It is an account of Rubashov, a fictionalized member of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, and his struggle as an old-guard Bolshevik after Stalin's consolidation of power.  A little background knowledge of the Stalin's purge, Trotsky, and the show trials will help with historical context when reading this gem, but the novel does a good job of putting the battling ideas up front, without too much contextual baggage.  The issue being confronted, at the heart of book, is what you do when your ideas don't align with your conscious.  It examines one man's psychological transformation as he is confronted by a brutal government he helped install.  I can't recommend it highly enough to anyone with a functioning brain.

Next batch of these will most likely include Boomerang, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Last Lecture and Homage to Catalonia.

Darksiders totally ripped off Gargoyle's Quest

After all the whining about Darksiders being a copypants and then me whining about people whining about Darksiders being a copypants, there's one thing we've all forgotten to mention. The main villain is called The Destroyer. That is a terrible and highly stupid name for a character, especially because it's apparently not even a nickname or anything. Wait, nickname isn't the right word. You know what I mean, like an alias or come on I know there's a better word that's escaping me. Kenning? I just looked up some kennings and "destroyer of eagle's hunger" meaning "warrior" is uh... well... maybe that's this Destroyer's full name.

Anyway, it's the type of name that so blatantly and artlessly characterizes a villain that you would expect it to appear in, oh I dunno, an old NES or Game Child game. Wait a tek! Game Child? That reminds me of Game Girl... which reminds me of Game Genie... which reminds me of Game Boy... which reminds me of Game Boy Color... which reminds of Game Boy... which reminds me of 3DS Virtual Console Game Boy... which reminds me of a classic recently on my tongue's tip: Gargoyle's Quest! The first Fire Brandy game; spinoff of Ghosts n' Goblins, precursor to Demon's Crest, agitator of RPG and platformer stereotypes. And whatcha-no, the villain of GarQ (gark) is none other than The Destroyer! Is this a crossover? Some type of veiled future reference to the connection between Darksiders and another GnG spinoff, Maximo? What could this mean. It can't be coincidence. Maybe it's a message from the baby Jesus? Take the letters of "Destoyer", order them phonetically (?), translate to ancient Greek, translate the ancient Greek to modern Greek, and translate that back to English. The resultant phrase may shock you: "Obama did 9/11"?! And that's just what I got from making up the answers! Think of what could happen if you actually did all the translations!

 

Did I cover my thesis already? I'm gonna assume yes and move on. The number of lines above looks pretty small, but that's probably a welcome change from my recent thousand-word standard. If I knew at age 16 that in just seven years time I'd happily write a thousand-word paper every single day, I'd have built a rocketship instead of getting older. Time [takes slow pull from cigarette]; she is a cruel mattress. Cruel buttress? Well she's at least a good name for a song. Pink Floyd's best song is called "Time", and so is Richard Hell and the Voidoids'! Look how your reaction to that sentence went from "yeah boy!" to ":(((" in less that one word. Apparently having a short and crappy premise allows for me to spend extra paragraphs doing this.

GarQ has the typically minimal (and not-that-fantastically-translated) dialogue familiar from its era, but what the hell is this:
Baron: Firebrand, you are too late, they took the candle. It's in the Desert of Destitution to the east of here.
Firebrand: [Choose Yes or No - turns out you can only progress by choosing no? Of course!]

Maybe it's just me, but playing 3DS VC, I miss the old green palette. Feel like it at least coulda been an option, since every free GB emulator on the planet provides it 

Now I will review the name of each item in the game:
Blockbuster - Good start, I like a descriptive name. 3/5
Claw - Hmm, we're getting vaguer. 2/5
Darkfire - Moving in the wrong direction - did a six-year-old name this? 1/5

Armor of the Dragon - Wonder Boy III reference! AWESOME. 5/5
Armor of Guile - Street Fighter II crossover! Now I'm imagining Firebrand in camo pants. 4/5

Candle of the Poltergeist - Kinda meaningless. 2/5
Candle of Darkness - Oh, irony, I get it. 3/5
Eternal Candle - More candle irony? What? 3/5
Falcon Wings - Utilitarian. 3/5
Fingernail of the Spectre - Why would a ghost have fingernails? And why would they be magic??? 5/5
Gremlin Stick - More word salad but I laughed that having a Gremlin Stick allows one to see the future. 4/5
Vial - Not even worth scoring.
Essence of the Soulstream - Whatever. 2/5
Talisman of the Cyclone - This item is a one-up - did you get that from the name? 1/5

I have this problem CONSTANTLY

If Darksiders is a God of War ripoff, then call me Mark Pringles

I'd like to bring you a point today. A very special point that has been near and dear to my heart for almost my entire life. That point is: Darksiders reminds me so much of the PS2 Maximo games that claiming it's derivative of anything else not only proves the subjectivity of such claims, but also that everything is derivative of everything. I talked about this last week - everything under the sun has been done before. Darksiders is no different, God of War is no different, Shadow of the Colossus is no different, etc.

You don't need any incoming knowledge of Maximo or Darksiders to understand this argument; allow me to set you up with the basic facts:
-Maximo: Ghosts to Glory is a 2001 hack'n slash from the Ghosts'n Goblins series, receiving only one sequel, 2003's Army of Zin
-God of War is an ongoing series which has seen seven games since its 2005 debut and has become one of the most popular and profitable in gaming
-Darksiders is an original action/adventure property from 2009 with a big budget and blockbuster aspirations. Developed by Vigil Games.
-Though positively received, Darksiders has earned a reputation as less of an original game and more a greatest hits mishmash of mainstream giants like God of War, Legend of Zelda, and Shadow of the Colossus.

Before I get any further, let me remark that I do not care that few people have played the Maximo games. This post is not a case for those games or their significance in gaming history. Ghosts to Glory is novel and Army of Zin is a good time, but you haven't really missed out on anything if you skipped them back in the PS2 era. My subconscious picked them as my example when it interrupted my Darksiders session to say "hey doesn't this remind you of Maximo?" - plenty of other games could be used to make this same argument.

What bothers me is the suggestion that Darksiders couldn't exist without a handful of extremely recent pop games (ooooh, new term. Bet you can guess what it means!), as if it isn't a natural creation but rather some kind of Frankensteinberger's Monster. It strikes me as utter arrogance on a player/critic's part to assume that they know so much more about games than the developers at Vigil that they can dismiss their work as a bunch of "stolen" mechanics. Yes, a few bits of Darksiders' gameplay are tinglingly familiar: the don't-call-it-a-Portal-Gun Voidwalker, the fucking first tool-item being a boomerang. Vigil isn't trying to trick us into believing it created these ideas, they're providing their own take on recent innovations that haven't yet been further explored. Whether they prove successful in expanding these ideas doesn't affect that it's a worthwhile intention.

These references are mere asides to a game that otherwise fits comfortably in the action/adventure genre. If the core of the game was the Portal-mechanic or Panzer Dragoon flying stage, it might be worth complaining, but it isn't. The central gameplay is exploring environments and combating monsters. Yeah, I can see where God of War plays out much the same, but uh... it hardly invented that. If anything, calling Darksiders derivative of God of War is a testament to how generic the latter game is. In that case just about everything is inspired by God of War, since apparently it's the only game that ever had a character killing monsters in a fantastical landscape. Moreover, the gameplay of Darksiders conforms to expectations. It's pretty much exactly what I'm looking for in a game where I play as one of the Four Horsemen of the apocalypse.

If our protagonist suddenly burst into a musical number, then I'd be suspicious

Any game is just going to remind you of what you're familiar with. It's good to identify influences and become knowledgeable about both long-running trends and contemporary fads, and it's equally important to recognize that every game attempts to bring a new story to life. The means by which that is done can be new or old, but most of all should be appropriate.


asggggggggggggggggggG I', so tired eright now. I ewamted to make this oist post have anyhting to do wtih Maximo so it would make even a tiney bit of sience sense but ive given up ast this point. I wrote what you can fee abeove etis mornign and was gonna aediet edit after lkunch but now a[p[a[parrently oene cupo f coffeee is not eno=ugjh to trick me into staying awake to write, i can barely do work right now or not fall asleeepo at my dcesk. i'll right about darkeiders again later anythiway and mayhbe revisit this;.

Bioblogging Part 2: Questions? Answers! Answers? Questions!

It probably doesn't hurt to start with Part 1
This started in the comment section of the previous piece, but it got long so I'm going to make a full post of it.

Ezio asked:
"You wrote: "Trying to place everything on a level playing field is part of my larger push, especially with this blog, to evaluate games based on their ideas, not their mechanics." Wasn't the original intent of this blog to review controls of individual games? Was the shift to "ideas" more externally driven (i.e. there is not that much good stuff to talk about control schemes) or the internally driven reasons you gave here? Either way, that column needs to be revisited."

The control customization options thing was largely a joke. Remember, it wasn't about reviewing CONTROLS. It was about reviewing control OPTIONS. From the first Back in the CCCR: "But of course, I'm not here to review controls, I'm here for the customization options.". I might revisit the column at some point, but it's frustrating because I do most of my writing when I'm not at home, so I don't have access to the options screens.

The switch in personal focus from mechanics to ideas hit me hardest when Golem and I spent a month playing every game (skipping sports/ports/turn-based rpgs) released in 1990 (about 150 total, I believe). We did that back before the blog was even a tiny fetus conceived in its momma's womb (first time I've ever figuratively described my brain as a womb). I realized that even if every single one of those games was a platformer or shmup, I didn't care because of the wealth of unique ideas. A smaller genre-pool and limited technology couldn't put a damper on the imagination of those forerunner developers.

Your question still applies though, and the answer is that it was a combination of the "external" and "internal" reasons. Internally, a lot of it was my change in perspective after creating a game of my own (and deciding that was what I wanted to do with my life). Externally, yeah, you're right; playing so many games eventually made me realize it isn't really interesting to talk about every last battle system and boss pattern - who gives a fuck? It's one of a million.

I was also affected by my developing taste for cinema. See, in the world of film, I'm an outsider. I don't really know much about the process that goes into creating a movie and I don't see myself ever being involved in creating one (except that high school Moby Dick adaptation). So when I read film criticism, I ignore incessant discussion of what millimeter film it was used and the type of lens and focus and blah blah blah don't care. To me, that stuff is just, DUH, it's there, it had a subconscious impact, why do we need to analyze it. When I read a review about a video game that talks about skill trees or physics engines, I have the same reaction. The critics I prefer are people like Ebert, who just talk about plot and theme and motif - the things that last in my mind after the credits roll.

What has gradually seeped into my consciousness is the notion that great artwork is independent - it doesn't need contextualization. If you have to know the difference between 25 and 50fps filming, or what MOBA means, to appreciate a work, then it becomes something technical. It loses its universality. It can still be interesting from film buff to film buff or gamer to gamer, but the public isn't going to watch fifteen other movies or buy a Dreamcast to understand this one work. I'm not saying that broad aim is inherently good, but that the target audience should be distributed across all of a culture, not a particular subset. That is to say, if your game is intended to resonate with teenage females discovering their sexuality (what game isn't!), it should resonate with any teenage female discovering her sexuality, not just teenage female gamers discov-their-sexu-etc. Execution is just a barrier of entry, and the more complex it becomes, and the more we focus on it, the less people we can communicate with.

When friends or family tell me they don't read the blog because they "don't really know much about video games", that's extremely frustrating to me, because what I'm trying to do here (most of the time) is expand the number of people who want to know about games. Freestanding games and game ideas that can be appreciated in a complete vacuum, that you don't have to be a gamer to understand. The idea that games are only for gamers is exactly what I wish to dispel, because I know this medium has the potential to reach just as wide an audience as film, music, and literature.