Indie game dev Christine Love is a Trekker. I know this because half our conversations on Twitter seem to revolve around Lt. Worf, but also because part of Digital: A Love Story consists of a snarky retrospective in which a BBS poster named “Tiberius” (strangely not one of the Shakespearean AIs the game revolves around– or is he?) waxes nostalgic for Captain Kirk’s, um… unique brand of diplomacy.
So it shouldn’t surprise anyone, then, that Love’s latest work, Analogue: A Hate Story (sequel to Digital), bears no small similarity to the TOS episode “For The World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky”, about a generation ship which has reverted back to a superstitious and hierarchical society. In this episode, Kirk, Spock and McCoy stumble upon the Yonada, whose captive population are controlled by “obedience devices” to prevent them from learning of or discussing the true nature of the ship. Why is never really explained, although the AI in question (“the Oracle”, another name which reappears in Digital) seems to have driven the ship off course as well, so we can probably project a little about its reasons.
There are many things Katawa Shoujo could be accused of, but cynicism is not one of them. It is in fact the most uncynical, unironic, utterly earnest thing I’ve played in years, and it should be lauded for that, I think. Everything in Katawa Shoujo is borne out of love: love for the genre, love for the style, and most importantly love for the characters. Gosh, how it loves its characters, even if you don’t.
A while ago, I promised Christine Love Rule 34 fanart of her games. Well, it’s not very saucy, but I did add a lens flare to give it some extra class.
So there you go, John Rook (don’t take it personally babe) and [winter]moot (Digital: A Love Story), in a love only the virtual could bring together. Add another notch to “things I never thought I would draw.”
OK after today’s This Week in Game Blogging I really have to know. How many of you guys over there at CD are bronies?
-anon
Hmmm, two of us, I think? I’m not sure if Eric actually considers himself a brony, though he has watched the entire series (thanks to my incessant prodding) and seems to enjoy quoting it whenever he gets the chance. The others, they haven’t really come forward with their Thoughts On Ponies one way or another. If they hate them they’re being very patient with the 1/3 of the crew that loves them.
Now– before you start clicking away, this isn’t your usual recounting of some bemusingly vivid decoupage of pop culture and personal psychology that usually accompanies someone’s desire to tell you their dream.
It’s more about a certain tendency I’ve noticed within media studies. Something that started itching in the back of my brain when I was writing my thesis in 2008, and which emerged from my head fully formed a couple weeks ago during my MA exams.
In the dream I was browsing through a website that was participating in yesterday’s SOPA/PIPA blackout web protests. The website had left up most of its text articles but taken down most of its multimedia, such as embedded video, replacing them with a brief encyclopedic description of their function, development history, and appearance. Each format was given a Latin name with genus and species.
It was the perfect illustration of an argument I had made repeatedly in my MA exams, which is that we have a tendency to imagine all the various media -especially new media, but any time texts speak about media “in transition”- as on its way to becoming some particular thing, as if we know its destiny. On the contrary, history is full of examples of divergent yet coexisting media “species,” each adapted to the specific habitat in which it developed.
Some of my favorite lyrics in, really, any song ever seem to apply here:
“Our ambition will televise the revolution. And it’ll sell more fucking commercial spots than the Super Bowl, the Olympics, the World Series, and the tragedy du jour combined.”
In short:
The co-opting of a raw, real protest movement by students of an expensive private university is, at the very best, lacking in self-awareness, and at worst, pretty disgusting. Maybe these films will shine an amazing light on current social issues. This being USC? I’m not getting my hopes up.
I don’t want to hear defenses or speculations. Unless the entirety of this screening series is about dropping out and applying one’s talents to helping the real problems of the real disenfranchised, it’s a shallow grab at something edgy from a student body continuously and relentlessly sheltered from everything the movement is about. You aren’t occupying shit, far less cinema. Sagan, do masters students really come this pretentious?
Edit: And despite totally revising this rant, if I find out who came up with this title, I’m still eating your liver.
This is what my manor in Solitude looked like previous to clean-up this morning. My blithely adoring wife, who stood by while I filled our estate floor to ceiling with cheese, didn’t lift a finger to help with the removal. This silent condemnation was the last nail in the coffin. I had to stop hoarding, at least where she was trying to cook.
Before I got rid of it all, I had to do an inventory. Just to see.
I woke up sometime this afternoon to a loud banging upstairs, suggesting my upstairs neighbors were either moving out or moving something large and heavy in. Prior to this I had hibernated for nearly 36 hours straight after the five days’ worth of insomnia, all-nighters and excessive caffeine intake which comprised my MA exam week.
USC’s School of Cinematic Arts Critical Studies program puts its second-year MAs through three of six available exam subjects. These are 10+ page essay responses on delivered prompts due within a 24 hour period. Even if you’re an efficient writer, it’s pretty punishing. I managed to be done by midnight for my first two exams but the final one kept me awake until about six in the morning, a mere four hours before the deadline. So I elected to take an extended vacation, not to visit the fam, but to visit my bed. David Carlton, luckily, filled in for me for TWIVGB over at Critical Distance– thank you for that, David.
I guess since I have exactly two seconds before I pass out again in preparation for the first day of my last semester tomorrow, I’d catch everyone up on what I was doing these past few weeks.
Subsequently the other editors and I aided Eric in determining our final list for 2011′s This Year in Video Game Blogging. Apart from doing my share of the whittling and participating in a very long Skype conference, I also saw to it that Eric’s tenses were consistent.
Everything that made it onto TYIVGB is very good. Not all the pieces on there were my decision, but this is a collective process among six very distinct editors no two of which have the same background in approaching this kind of work. We all strove to feature the best of the year’s offerings from many different authors. Here’s to 2012 being an even more diverse and dynamic year for the ludodecahedron.
Gameranx
I agreed to Ian a while ago that I’d do a few articles for him for Gameranx. I’ve written two so far, the first of which you can already go and read on the site. It’s about how Mass Effect is actually a hypercapitalist dystopia, and as consequence, why I think it’s a more interesting sci-fi universe than the giants it seeks to rival. The second one, when it appears, I’ll also remember to link here. Um, if I remember.
Oh, if you’re wondering, my new year’s resolution was to pass my MA exams. So, here’s to hibernating for the next 365 days.
Why am I doing this? It’s Eric Swain’s fault, as usual.
11. Audiosurf
Okay, it’s actually been out for three years now, so sue me. When I finally got a PC this year that could handle games, this was the first thing I bought through Steam. And it remains the most-played entry in my library.
Why? Well, Brendan Keogh put it best: “You don’t just see your music in Audiosurf; you feel through a sensation less like listening and more like dancing.”[1]Audiosurf takes music and transforms it into a complex visual index of signifiers to match the aural nuances of its source material. It’s like semiotics synaesthesia.
10. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Skyrim‘s plot is pretty rank at best. The voice acting and incessantly recycled audio clips turn it into one long, unfunny Seth Rogan comedy. It’s buggy, it’s uninspired, and you need mods just to create a halfway decent avatar. But damn is it pretty. And damn, is it fun to hoard. I’ve lost the storyline completely under one of my floor-to-ceiling cheese piles and I can’t be bothered to dig it out again.
09. LittleBigPlanet 2‘s soundtrack
I’ve given the game a lot of flack for being difficult to play on anything smaller than a gigantic HDTV[2] and for falling short on its pedagogical promises.[3] But its story mode and especially the soundtrack will always be among my most treasured, particularly its ending theme from Passion Pit.
08. Sequence
This is another game which earned a harsh score from me, perhaps undeservedly so. It’s a unique experiment in genre hybridization– a music game RPG replete with Atlus-esque cutscenes and finger-on-the-pulse memetastic humor. I loved it more than my review[4] ever managed to let on and I do so look forward to the developers’ next project.
07. Zeit2
Another quiet little entry which seemed to escape everyone’s notice during end-of-year retrospectives, including yours truly when it came time for the Critical Distance Confab.[5] A traditional side-scrolling schmup with anything but traditional time manipulation and splitting mechanics, it looks the part of a luminous retro-futuristic arcade title and I’ll bet it’s the sort of thing Ender Wiggin would play.
06. Bastion
The game that’s on everybody’s list this year, and with good reason. Bastion is a luminous, candy-coated-bittersweet-center cutesy, magical and dreadful take on the American West. Even if you went in fully expecting its awesome narrator, it’s less likely you knew to expect the multiple gutpunches that rustic voice manages to deliver over the course of the story. As I wrote in my review:[6]
“Bastion‘s truest beauty is in how dark it becomes, and how subtly it draws the player into that darkness. If the West had been won by nuclear war, this is how it might have played out in one’s nightmares. And yet it is so charming, so colorful, so cute with its chibi character designs that we might sooner expect something on the level of Spirited Away, not Grave of the Fireflies. But grim it is, though the game is always careful to provide you with just a glimmer of hope.”
Viciously smart in the execution and a real testament to what a small team and a distinct point of view can accomplish.
05. don’t take it personally, babe, it just ain’t your story
I read two works this year that seemed to perfectly capture the approaching social media singularity. One was Charles Stross’s Rule 34.[7] The other was Christine Love’s indie visual novel don’t take it personally, babe, it just ain’t your story, involving the lives of the youth in a generation that’s grown up without conventional ideas of privacy.
There have been plenty of great readings of DTIPB, but as a mod for a kids’ game frequently (and involuntarily) privy to the growing pains of adolescents, Love’s work struck closer to home than I expected. Once again, my own remarks from earlier in the year capture the sentiment best.[8]
The mod in me envies John Rook’s squandered opportunity to meaningfully interact with Arianna and Taylor about their priorities. The feminist in me sees such an action as treating the symptoms rather than the disease in which young women (and young men) sign up for their own exploitation. Ultimately, however, my anxieties seem to align with Goodwin’s[9] description of “guilt-by-click-association”: by involving ourselves in the digital lives of others, we become in some way accountable.
04. Minecraft 1.0
Few games have the distinction of showing up on GOTY lists for three straight years. I don’t know if any blurb I could write about it here would adequately do it justice. It’s not only probably the biggest indie game success story of all time, it’s something of a new gaming lingua franca. Everyone has played Minecraft.
03. Child of Eden
I described this game recently as an atheist creation fable. It’s a loving tribute to the sheer magical awe that is biology and the ascendency of life. Sure, the space whale is silly. So was the Buddhist meditation in The Fountain. At some point you either allow these missteps in visuality to kill the experience for you or you just embrace it for the childlike wonder it’s trying to impart. Honestly, I don’t find space whale any more ridiculous than a lot of the iconography the religious hold in such solemnity. But anyway, from my various rants on it:
“For all its frenetic energy and at times vicious difficulty, it is a game about positive emotion and spiritual transcendence. Your two weapons act as purifiers, while the stages you explore are a set of technorganic ballets.”[10]
“There is a quality to its contained narrative and the role of the player as enactor thereof which is deeply moving, as in being witness to the birth and exaltation of mankind. This is a game in which human history from microorganism to vast neural networks spanning time and space takes shape.”[11]
“If games are systems, and God (as natural order) is a system, then God is the game we are playing right now and have been since the dawn of time. It’s the spin of electrons that as much give rise to life as computer games. And games are one of many ways in which we, the universe knows itself.”[12]
02. Portal 2
As I mentioned on the Critical Distance Confab, I consider the Portal games to rank among the best of a generation. Rarely do you get a game like Portal 2 which really is the complete package. Great challenges, great writing, great performances, great design. But above all, Portal and Portal 2 are teachers. If you wanted to look to one instance of what digital pedagogy looks like in 3D simulation, Portal and its successor would be it.
And if you’ve been following along, you know which one I haven’t mentioned yet, so let’s get to that, shall we?
01. Dragon Age II
I am generally in favor of any game which inspires as much ongoing discussion as DA2 has engendered. I also enjoy any game which makes entitled straight guys uncomfortable.[13] And I will happily promote the work of writers with a social justice agenda, because damned if they aren’t horribly rare in this industry.
But none of those reasons are why Dragon Age II is my Game of the Year.
This game has lodged itself into my heart the way it has because for the first time, I saw a glimmer of hope that games could be something more. That this hobby which so enticed and frightened me, which did its very best to alienate me at every given opportunity, yet entranced me again and again because it offered another world to plunge into that wasn’t mine, could be all the provocative and ambitious things we adore about other media, could prove it can do one thing excellently which denies our shallow demands for design conformity.
In short, Dragon Age II is my Game of the Year for the exact opposite reason Portal 2 is my runner-up. DA2 is my Game of the Year because it dared to suck.
No, that’s too simplistic. In terms of combat system, item management, map design and epic set pieces, all the things we’ve been programmed to believe are requirements of a good game of its genre, Dragon Age II doesn’t deliver. I can see that as plainly as any of its detractors. But what it does well, it does better than any other game I’ve ever played.
I’ve compared Dragon Age II‘s limited locations and confined scope to The Wire, and maybe that analogy doesn’t work for a lot of people. Try this one, then: Dragon Age II is to RPGs what Dead Man is to Westerns. Looked at under a conventional lens, without being aware that the creators are intending to subvert the genre, the thing is unforgivably broken. Looked at under its own terms, with the story it wanted to tell and the characters it wanted to share with the player, it is dead on with everything that it needs to be.
I would surely have not have complained if more time had been spent in development to release a more finessed game which delivered on mainstream expectations as well as providing the story it wanted to tell. But come right down to it, between a Dragon Age II with a perfected battle system and no heart, and a broken Dragon Age II with the most provocative narrative I’ve ever played out in a game, I know which one I’ll take every time.
My name is Kris Ligman. I'm a graduate student with a hate-on for conventional academia. I curate This Week in Videogame Blogging for Critical Distance and also work for a few other places. See the "About" page for more.
