Current preservation of games criticism is insufficient. Can Critical Distance help?

In this post, I'll be discussing Critical Distance extensively. For those unaware, Critical Distance is a website that promotes, aggregates, and solicits video game criticism. It is crowd funded, and I have at various times supported it monetarily.

A few weeks ago, Zoya Street concluded Critical Distance's weekly "This Week in Videogame Blogging" feature (retrieved 2016-08-19) with a question: "how do you see the current state of games criticism?" I don't know if anyone else responded, because it hasn't shown up again since then in the weekly posts. In any case, in this post, I'd like to highlight what I personally see as the most distinguishing feature of video games criticism. Street asked for one or two sentences, so here's my attempt: "Video game criticism is poorly preserved and rapidly being lost, and this problem is compounded by the absence of any way to efficiently index or search existing criticism. Critical Distance is currently the best-positioned entity to address this problem, but it has not yet made any meaningful progress in that direction." That's the summary, but I'll spend the rest of this post elaborating.

Critical Distance has on numerous occasions highlighted writers that discuss the urgent problem of preserving the history of games, but the focus of such statements has largely been on (the very important) software and hardware preservation. Among many others, Kris Graft has written about the emulation efforts of the Internet Archive (retrieved 2016-08-19), and Gita Jackson reacted (retrieved 2016-08-19) to the loss of P.T. (dev. 7780s Studio, dirs. Hideo Kojima & Guillermo del Toro, 2014). That latter article is particularly instructive because it makes an analogy to silent film. It rightly recognizes that games have something to learn from how so many silent films were lost in the early years of cinema's history. the film industry eventually learned its lesson and stopped destroying every copy of most of its films once the cultural importance of the medium began to be understood in more depth. As film grew up, the dialogue with critics was often quite important. Perhaps the most famous examples of this dialogue are the early Soviet montage essays or, decades later, the founding of the seminal Cahiers du cinéma magazine in 1951. Film history and our understanding of the function of film was shaped by these and many other critics. By default, because film grew up in the pre-digital era, these writings were not destroyed by link-rot or unpaid server fees. Their longevity, both in terms of their physical persistence and their critical importance, is attested to by just how common they remain today. The textbook assigned to me in my first ever introductory film class way back in college was Leo Braudy's and Marshall Cohen's classic anthology of historical film criticism, Film Theory and Criticism, now in its eighth edition.

Video game criticism is not published in state-sponsored tracts or a widely distributed French magazine; it is published on the internet. One need not delve very far into Critical Distance's archive of blog roundups to begin to find dead links or links with dead links within them. If one is lucky, one might find the article somewhere on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine in varying states of completeness. Though I have no way of knowing the statistics for sure, I imagine that less popular articles that did not enjoy the signal-boosting of a Critical Distance plug are even more likely to be inaccessible. The critical history of video games is being lost.

But do we even know which history of video games is being lost? For that matter, can we even reliably and comprehensively find niche criticism that is still accessible? Critical Distance's Patreon page (retrieved 2016-08-19) points out that it is a great "starting place," and it is. I often do a quick search there for for playing or writing about a game, to see what people have said about it. Critical Distance, however, is curated; it is a thin slice of the video game criticism that the world produces. That's great for a research starting place or for a weekly roundup to keep your readers current, but it is insufficient for in-depth research or preservation purposes. We need something more before we have lost so much that we can't even tell what was lost. The Patreon page alludes to archival projects, but they are ill-defined and certainly haven't happened yet. The proposed print anthologies, an even thinner and more easily lost slice of the criticism landscape, certainly aren't the solution.

The solution is two-fold. First, games criticism needs an uncurated (but still moderated), searchable index. Professionally, I am an astrophysicist, so I spend a great deal of my time browsing and searching the astronomy and physics literature. The astronomy academic community has two main tools to browsing the literature: arXiv (pronounced AR-kive - the "X" is a Greek "Chi") and the Astrophysics Data System (ADS). Though there are more differences than similarities, in some ways, arXiv is analogous to Critical Distance. Researchers post freely-accessible preprints of their papers there, and other researchers browse them daily to see what's new. A digest gets sent out via email. ADS, however, fills a very different niche. It is a searchable, tagged index of the published (and some unpublished) literature in astronomy, physics, geophysics, and science education. For older literature, it also serves as a historical index of scanned pages. Using ADS, one can quickly find nearly anything that has ever been published in these fields based on nearly any criteria. ADS was one of the first such data systems and its colossal importance to research is well studied (there's even a summary on Wikipedia, retrieved 2016-08-19). Games criticism needs something analogous to ADS. There needs to be a way to search and filter more than just was is featured on the Critical Distance homepage. The database could be implemented as a web crawl of known likely sources of criticism that also allows manual submission to the database.

Second, games criticism needs that searchable index to double as an archive. It needs to mirror lost webpages (when those webpages don't prohibit archiving via the well-defined methods for doing so). Ideally, the index itself would serve as the mirror, but other possible solutions exist, such as a collaboration with the Internet Archive to automatically make a Wayback Machine clone upon addition to the database, a feat that could be quickly implemented with a simple script that uses the Wayback Machine's API. Even if such an index database was never created, this solution could be easily implemented for every link ever posted on Critical Distance with a single Python/Perl/whatever script that either downloaded a copy of each link or queried the Wayback Machine to make a clone. Links to these backups could be automatically used to replace dead links throughout Critical Distance via another script, assuming that Critical Distance's current backend doesn't prevent doing so. None of these procedures should be undertaken manually, however, as that is an unsustainable approach. A series of server-side scripts should be used to manage these projects.

The solution to preserving games criticism requires both simple and difficult, expensive steps. It is not out of reach at the present time to archive, simply and automatically, all criticism referenced on Critical Distance. Is is substantially more difficult to create a long lasting, searchable index. These efforts will never be an exciting project that galvanizes the community, and half measures will not suffice in the long term. If we care about preserving games criticism, however, there is little choice; these are necessary steps, and they require careful planning with community involvement. I am not involved with the running of Critical Distance, but it seems to be a natural place to host these projects. In lieu of that, I hope that some enterprising website, university, or library one day decides to tackle this little-publicized problem.

Thoughts on Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island - 3D Game Design Principles in 2D with Super FX 2

• Developer: Nintendo EAD
• Directors: Takashi Tezuka, Toshihiko Nakago, Shigefumi Hino, Hideki Konno
• Original Release: 1995-08 (JP), 1995-10 (NA, EU)
• Version Notes: This post refers to the original North American SNES release played on a Windows 7 PC via the bsnes emulator (64-bit version 088; new releases use the name "higan"). Xbox360 controller mapped as closely to the SNES controller as possible was used. No video filters used. "Blur" video shader, Direct3D, DirectSound, and RawInput were used.

By the time Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island was released for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES)  to Western markets in October, 1995, both the Sega Saturn and the Sony Playstation (as well as the minor players, the 3DO and Atari Jaguar) had already ushered in the fifth generation of home consoles. With the new generation came the dominance of 3D polygonal games on home consoles, supplanting the sprite-based 2D games that had previously dominated the market. Development of games that use these polygonal 3D spaces is fundamentally different from 2D sprite-based development in many ways. In this post, I will focus on the increased importance of graphical asset deformation as a mode of animation, in contrast to the more frame-based animation of many 2D games of the SNES era. Yoshi's Island, perhaps influenced by the growing 3D development market, implements many of these deformative techniques in its game design, making it one of the most experimental 2D, Nintendo platformers on the SNES. The function of these aspects of its design are likely major aspects of the game's critical success.

Most platformers, and indeed most games, on the SNES achieved animation by moving 2D sprite images relative to each other. Each of these sprites could have multiple frames of animation itself, with the color and location of each pixel in each frame rigidly defined. This approach was prevalent partially due to the SNES hardware, which was practically incapable of rendering complex 3D worlds or even of rotating, scaling, or deforming 2D sprites in-game.  The few games that attempted to do something differently usually had to do so through careful sprite-based trickery. Super Mario Kart (dev. Nintendo EAD, dirs. Tadashi Sugiyama & Hideki Konno, 1992), for example, used a clever combination of the Mode 7 (retrieved 2015-10-14) graphical mode and changing kart sprite size to give the impression of distance in a 3D world. Even the changing sprite size, however, was not done on-the-fly in the game; instead, the developers created the illusion of sprite scaling by swapping sprites of different sizes in and out of the display. (And even this false-3D world required an additional piece of hardware - the DSP-1 chip - on the game's cartridge.) These hardware constraints naturally informed the sorts of game design that could be accomplished on the SNES, and the restrictions imposed by such mostly-static, sprite-based design can be seen in the myriad 2D platformers released for the system. (There were exceptions of course: Clever software rendering on only the native SNES hardware allowed alternate approaches by a handful of games, such as Wolfenstein 3D [devs. id Software & Imagineer Co. Ltd., 1994], which managed a pseudo-3D first person shooter.)

In time, developers sought to expand the SNES's hardware capabilities by including additional processing power on the game cartridges themselves. Perhaps the most famous of these coprocessor chips were the Super FX and its successor, the Super FX 2. Nearly all of the games that used these Super FX coprocessors attempted to use the aging SNES to compete with the next generation of game consoles by creating games in 3D. However, these early attempts at 3D games on the SNES were simplistic; though they managed to capture some simple thrills of flight or racing, they could not explore the promise of 3D for game design in any real depth. Ultimately, these attempts at bringing 3D to the SNES were a dead end from a game design perspective. The one Super FX title that attempted something different with the additional power afforded by the Super FX 2 was Yoshi's Island. It deploys its coprocessor to expand the possibilities of 2D platforming, and as a result it ventured into more creative and experimental game design. The principles that it explores are ultimately closer relatives of later 3D game design than any of its 3D Super FX cousins.

Yoshi's Island is superficially quite similar to its predecessors in the Mario series. Its most obvious departures - the crayon-like art style and the Yoshi-protecting-Mario mechanic - have been amply discussed elsewhere, so I won't dwell on them here. Instead, let's consider how the game leverages the capabilities of the Super FX 2. Throughout the levels, numerous obstacles - including a few polygonal ones - are maneuvered in interesting ways. However, I want to focus on how the design of boss battles has evolved in this game compared to its predecessors, and how those techniques relate to more modern game design perspectives.

A game that takes place in a 3D world has a vastly larger number of possible positions and movements for its assets and camera than one that takes place in a 2D world. This feature precludes any possibility of planning the graphics pixel-by-pixel, as had been done in many sprite-based 2D games. Instead, 3D graphical assets are defined and then deformed, such as into a walk cycle, before the resultant pixels are calculated and rendered to the screen. This approach accommodates a flexibility of design in which a greater variety of player actions can be accommodated. Despite taking place in 2D, many of the boss battles in Yoshi's Island take similar approaches, something that previous Mario games could not do owing to hardware limitations. Where past Mario bosses typically required the dodging of patterned obstacles while trying to jump on the boss's particular weak spot, Yoshi's Island's bosses create variety that encourages critical thinking and dynamic attack strategy while maintaining excitement through the combination of this diversity and stylized graphics. These boss battles control player movement and positioning dynamically by using very large sprites, they allow a diverse set of positions and angles from which the player can attack via deformations and rotations, and they heighten tension during the battles by creating depth via dynamic sprite scaling. Let's look at several examples.

Sluggy the Unshaven deforming
in response to an egg throw.

First, consider the mid-world boss of World 5, Sluggy the Unshaven.  Sluggy is a large, gelatinous creature (reminiscent, perhaps, of the Big Beanie boss previously seen in level 1-8) that fills the tunnel in which the battle takes place from top to bottom, creating a dangerous wall that the player cannot move beyond. In another lovely graphical trick that shapes this scene's structure, Sluggy is transparent and, as the player quickly discovers, houses a vulnerable heart in the center of the gelatinous mass. Initially, the game suggests no mode of attack, but the player cannot remain inactive for long, because the large, impassable, squirming image of Sluggy (not easily possible on native SNES hardware) is forcing the player to move slowly and tensely leftward toward a bottomless pit. Because the blob has no obvious way in which it can be jumped upon like the bosses of past games, the impending doom forces the player to desperately try alternate strategies. Upon throwing an egg at Sluggy, a solution is finally revealed: Sluggy both moves back slightly and, shockingly at the time of the games release, dynamically deforms in response to the egg. The player now realizes that the deformation can provide a way out of this predicatment, because the repeated use of thrown eggs can deform Sluggy into a shape with exposes his vulnerable heart.  The use of large, deformable sprites has created tension which prompts creative player action, which then in turn introduces a completely new game mechanic. Crucially, this attack strategy is subject to the player's creativity. Sluggy can be deformed in any direction from any location; there is no one fixed point of attack as would have been expected in earlier platformers or even many subsequent ones. It is this flexibility, enabled by the Super FX 2, that makes the battle so exciting and memorable.

Raphael the Raven's battle on a
planetesimal, made possible by liberal
use of sprite rotation.

Later in World 5, the player encounters Raphael the Raven in a battle seemingly pulled directly from Nintendo's future, when they sent Mario into space for Super Mario Galaxy (dev. Nintendo EAD Tokyo, dir. Yoshiaki Koizumi, 2007). Like that later Wii title, this battle is able to explore the movement of platforming from a different perspective by translating the jump mechanic to a scenario in which the gravitational field varies spatially. If the Mario series is a mediation on jumping, then this battle, like a musical piece playing with variations on its melodic theme, is an exploration of a variation on the series's movement theme. After the characters dramatically fly up to a moon-like object in an animated sequence achieved with rotation and scaling, the moon serves as the obstacle in a cat-and-mouse game. By clever rotation of the character sprites, their projectiles, and the background, the player must deploy their jumping and ground-pounding skills on the planetesimal, whose gravity always points toward the center of the screen.  Put another way, the developers have asked the player to execute their jumping in a coordinate transformation.  Despite taking place in 2D, the Mario games up to this point have always limited their movement controls and their strategic deployment to what is effectively a 1D space - left and right in Cartesian-like coordinates. The same is true in this battle, but the concept is made refreshing by moving to polar coordinates with the Super FX 2's rotation capabilities - the player still moves primarily in 1D, but now it is the azimuthal angle that the player manipulates.

Baby Bowser looming in the
background, inching forward.

I'll finish off my examples as the game itself finishes: with the final battle with a giant Baby Bowser. Here, Yoshi's Island engages in fairly direct emotional manipulation of the player using techniques analogous to the previous battle with Sluggy the Unshaven. In that earlier scene, the movement of a large sprite leftward created tension that spurred the player to action. Here, the enormous Baby Bowser sprite, perhaps the most dramatically shaded sprite in the game, is scaled up and down to give the illusion of depth into the background. He gradually moves toward the player (both the player-character and the screen itself), all the while destroying the ground upon which the player stands, creating the most tense battle yet. Again analogous to the battle with Sluggy and using the knowledge that the player gained in that battle, the only way to hold Bowser at bay is to throw eggs, this time into the screen, which are scaled and rotated rapidly to give the appropriate illusion of depth.


These battles, and others like them, set the tone of the game as a whole. Yoshi's Island encourages experimentation in strategy on the part of the player by continually subverting the player's expectations of what will be required of them in a Mario game. The game is only able to make this design work because it adopts the sprite-deformation techniques enabled by the Super FX 2 and perhaps informed by the burgeoning 3D game design industry. In this sense, Yoshi's Island is the first truly modern Mario game in game design sense, as it, for the first time, has full control of its graphical assets and can deploy them against its themes. The small segments inform the whole, exploring the mechanics in greater and more experimental depth that had been achieved before.

Despite the critical acclaim that Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island and its re-releases received, there has been little critical discussion of how it is mechanically distinct from its predecessors owing to its hardware. Indeed, the word "Yoshi" has never even been mentioned on Critical Distance (retrieved 2015-10-16), despite the game's enduring legacy, both in terms of the sequels it spawned and the impact it likely had on future Nintendo game designs. Instead, it has become lost in the sea of Mario games, and what few consumer-guide-oriented reviews exist for the title largely focus only on surface-level discussions of the presence of an infant Mario character and the crayon-styled graphical assets. Such neglect of any deeper criticism is a shame, because while some aspects of its level design had become run-of-the-mill by the time of its release, other aspects, such as those discussed here, were truly remarkable for their subtle innovations.

Notes on Morrowind II - A Response to the "Skywind" Redesign of the Seyda Neen Lighthouse: How inconsistent architectural details paint a complicated history in Vvardenfell

This "Notes on Morrowind" series of posts will be brief remarks on small topics related to The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind Game of the Year Edition (dev. Bethesda Softworks, dirs. Todd Howard & Ken Rolston, 2003 [original game release 2002]) for PC rather than a holistic game analysis. All posts refer to the unmodded, version 1.6.1820 of the game played with maximum graphical and AI quality settings, a 1280x960 resolution, and all other settings at their defaults.

The Elder Scrolls series has prompted the creation of thousands of user-made game modifications ("mods"), and this community-driven development has become so prominent that it has become a major identifier for the franchise and selling point for the PC editions of the games. One of the more notable collections of mods are those by the TES Renewal Project (retrieved 2015-03-17). This team produces mods that recreate older Elder Scrolls games within the game engines of relatively newer Elder Scrolls games. For example, they host (although they didn't originally create) "Morroblivion," a mod that attempts to recreate Morrowind within the game engine of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. "Skywind," which is under active development, attempts to recreate Morrowind within the game engine of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

The off-kilter Seyda Need lighthouse.

As others have noted (retrieved 2015-03-17), such endeavors are less like recreations and more like complete reboots or reinterpretations, owing at least in part to the dramatic changes in game mechanics that they represent. As such, it should be obvious that they neither act to historically preserve of the games nor do they act as replacements for any purposes the original games serve. Nonetheless, as with similar projects for other games (e.g., Black Mesa, retrieved 2015-03-17), it is common to see online recommendations that players new to the Elder Scrolls series wait for "Skywind" to be released to "play" Morrowind, and perhaps even the developers of "Skywind" see the project as serving this purpose to a degree. Aside from the aforementioned problems with this line of thinking with respect to changed game mechanics, I want to highlight another type of problematic whitewashing of past game releases that occurs as a result of these sorts of projects and their desires to adjust the graphics of past games to present standards. To be very clear, when I call these issues "problems," I do not mean that it is a problem that projects like "Skywind" or Black Mesa exist in their present forms; I merely mean that these issues are problems for understanding the historical context of their source material when a large portion of player-base assumes a one-to-one mapping of the two texts. Really, I am just attempting to illustrate that these remakes are distinct texts by different authors that require new criticism relative to their source material. I'll illustrate this phenomenon by focusing on one small change to one particular building in "Skywind."

Interior bracing of lighthouse.

One of  the more memorable buildings in the game world of Morrowind is the Seyda Neen Lighthouse (retrieved 2015-03-17). Though not particularly notable from the perspective of the game's narrative, it is one of the first distinct buildings that the player is likely to encounter upon beginning the game because of its position in the starting town and its involvement in two minor quests. The lighthouse is peculiar for its architecture. It is built with simple, rough stone braced by interior wooden beams, and strangely, it is apparently off-balance and misaligned. The portion that houses the lighting element at the top is substantially off-center compared to the bulk of the structure, and the exterior stone staircase adds a further element of apparent instability because it hangs awkwardly off of only two sides of upper-half of the structure. Taken alone, this strange design might not be considered especially notable, but the lighthouse has the additional peculiarity of not matching any of the other architectural styles in the town or, indeed, the rest of the game. The bulk of Seyda Neen is populated by architecture in the style of the Imperials, who evidently colonized the region relatively recently, along with a handful of poor, makeshift wooden huts for underprivileged locals. The lighthouse, however, stands alone.

Imperial buildings near lighthouse.

The developers of "Skywind" recently detailed their redesign of the lighthouse in a blog post (retrieved 2015-05-18; redesign image backups: 1, 2, 3, 4). Citing the architectural inconsistency, they propose that it seems most likely that the lighthouse is of Imperial origin within the games narrative. This assumption, along with influences from other lighthouse designs, is used by the "Skywind" developers to create a new version of the lighthouse that visually matches the Imperial architecture of Seyda Need, and they thus homogenize the buildings of the region in their reinterpretation of Morrowind. It's worth noting that all graphical assets used in a project like "Skywind" are redesigns, but some assets are redesigned with different goals than others. For many, or perhaps most, the goal is to recreate the assets by guessing what the original designers would have done had they merely had access to more powerful graphics processors and memory. This approach involves inventing new details that are below the polygon or texture resolution thresholds of the source assets. It is a rewriting of the game's narrative only by addition, in that it tries to avoid editing the parts that were put into place in the original text. But other redesigned assets, such as the Seyda Neen lighthouse, have different goals: they are disagreements with the original designers, and they are active, deliberate rewritings of the narrative presented in the game.

Dunmer shacks near lighthouse.

As I've previously noted, Morrowind is deeply concerned with the nature of history. It is interested in the contrast between the small changes in the world observed in daily life as contrasted with the vast changes to the world that occur on larger historical timescales, and it frequently highlights how these changes are deallt with in memory, prophecy, politics, and historical record. The remnants of history are everywhere in Morrowind, evident in the damaged landscape, the racial tensions perceptible in dialogue, the texts in books, and even in the architecture, which is our primary concern in this post. Seyda Neen  is a key port controlled by the Imperials, and the Imperials have a vested interest in asserting their control in Morrowind, a once-foreign land that is now part of the Empire. This attitude is suggested by the uniformity of the bulk of the buildings in the region: their architecture asserts Imperial dominance over the land and the local culture. The player thus sees this dominance immediately upon beginning the game: the Imperials are self-evidently far more powerful that the player and seemingly in control of their surroundings.

Close-up of lighthouse fire.

But upon exploring the town and its surroundings, the player just as quickly discovers that the reality is more subtle than that. Seyda Neen is not a bastion of Imperial dominance. The swamp creeps in on all sides, the first resident of Seyda Neen that we encounter doesn't get along with the Imperial guards (retrieved 2015-09-16), and the most important building in the town, the lighthouse, is the one that cannot be made to submit to Imperial design sensibilities. It raises the question of why the lighthouse's architecture was never wrangled under control by the Empire. Perhaps the lighthouse predates Imperial control of the town, and they could not afford to ever take it offline for fear of interrupting port activities. Seyda Need certainly predates the Imperial presence, as indicated by information seen elsewhere in the game (retrieved 2015-09-16) and in The Elder Scrolls Online (retrieved 2015-09-16), so perhaps the lighthouse does, too. Or perhaps it has become a symbol for local denizens, and the Imperial colonizers lack the cultural clout to unseat its cultural significance - maybe that is why the structure has an alternate name, the Grand Pharos (retrieved 2015-09-16). Or perhaps the bizarre architecture is mere Imperial failure to build a stable structure in the unstable swamp, resulting in structural reinforcements being added haphazardly over the years. The precise history of the building cannot be determined from the information presented in game, but the unusual structure nonetheless raises questions which teach the player about the subtleties of history and power structures within the game. Indeed, the questions surrounding the building can lead players to construct quite detailed speculative histories (retrieved 2015-09-16) and related fictions (retrieved 2015-09-16) about that locale.

Alternate view of lighthouse.

The messiness of the environment is thus one of the great strengths of Morrowind. That occasional incoherence allows the game to both teach the new player about the nature of the world into which they have stepped, and to explore themes of history and memory, time and change, politics and power, in more depth than a more easily digested and less ambiguous game world could. Alterations of the sort undertaken by the "Skywind" redesign of the lighthouse reduce the impact of these themes. In a sense, such a redesign fulfills the in-game goals of the Imperial characters in Seyda Neen, because it gives them complete dominance of the land. The player is no longer prompted to question the implicit histories presented by the game, but instead the player is encouraged to accept the status quo presented by the characters that they encounter.

Alternate view of lighthouse.

The lighthouse at Seyda Need is a remarkable illustration of the caution we must exercise when critically discussing projects like "Skywind." With any one small change, the thematic implications of a text are altered, so no remake or remaster of a game can be used as a one-to-one replacement of its source material in critical discussions. The lighthouse is one among many details in a game as vast as Morrowind; as critics, we should spend more time reading how the small details function with games, and we should be cautious of growing as prescriptive towards them as the "Skywind" developers have.

Notes on Morrowind I - How Time Never Passes But Always Does

This "Notes on Morrowind" series of posts will be brief remarks on small topics related to The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind Game of the Year Edition (dev. Bethesda Softworks, dirs. Todd Howard & Ken Rolston, 2003 [original game release 2002]) for PC rather than a holistic or fully-researched game analysis. All posts refer to the unmodded, version 1.6.1820 of the game played with maximum graphical and AI quality settings, a 1280x960 resolution, and all other settings at their defaults.

Citizens disbelieve even very recent history.

Morrowind is a game deeply concerned with the nature of history and prophecy, as well has how one becomes the other. History, and its various different interpretations, are presented directly in the extensive writings that can be found throughout the game world, and numerous characters are happy to discuss their knowledge of history. In many cases, such as those that lead to the events of the main quest of the game, differing knowledge of history leads to differing interpretations of prophecy, which the player is then left to disentangle by enacting a path for the player character, thus transforming nebulous prophecy into precise events and back into nebulous history. This effect of time on knowledge is occasionally made explicit, such as when the player is unable to convince other characters of the deaths of the gods Almalexia and Sotha Sil after the events of the Tribunal quest. It is perhaps strange, then, that Morrowind, with its temporal obsession, so deemphasizes the passage of time through its mechanics. Though many of these aspects at least partially result from technological and development cycle limitations, they nonetheless suggest some of the priorities of the game.

Much of the presentation of the game world suggests a static nature of time. NPCs are primarily unmoving, always to be found at the same locations, always willing to give the same responses as if you had never met them before. The land rarely evolves, with no seasons, growing plants, or evident geological processes, though a quest as epic as that of the main quest story must have taken months or years to complete. There is no urgency to any quests, which can be completed at the player's leisure, with the exception of a few that have delays built in to force the player to do other things first.When the main quest stories are all complete, the world still exists just as it was (with a couple few changes to dialog, weather, and enemies), for the player to continue exploring.

Moons, stars, and clouds move
relative to each other.

There are rare exceptions to this static world, however. Most obviously, the game has a clock in its user interface which records the date and time of day in the game world, and the world becomes light and dark with blue and red atmospheric hues according to time of night or day. This notion of daily time is enhanced with changing weather (though not seasons), which varies among sunny days, ash storms, and rain, among other climate conditions. Even the moons and sun move across the sky, but they do so in a physically impossible way. The star-field is static with the moons moving across it, suggesting that the planet on which the player-character stands does not rotate on axis or orbit its sun. Instead, it must be that the planet is orbited rapidly and impossibly by the moons and sun, suggesting an unreality to this universe or, perhaps, direct intervention by the gods that seem to roam the land. The moons themselves maintain an unlikely static and photogenic configuration relative to each other that defies orbital mechanics. Astronomy seems to have a impossibly dual nature in Morrowind, in which time is static on some scales and moving on others. (The within-narrative lore of The Elder Scrolls series has a complicated cosmology that is beyond the scope of this post. For further reading, see this page with general information on the planets (retrieved 2015-05-19), the cosmology section of The Imperial Library website (retrieved 2015-05-19), and the astronomy page at UESP (retrieved 2015-05-19).)

Other exceptions include certain locations, such as Holamayan (retrieved 2015-05-20) or the Cavern of the Incarnate (retrieved 2015-05-20),  which can only be accessed at dawn or dusk. This again suggests a connection between time and the god-like beings of Morrowind, in this case the major character Azura, because these locations are holy places dedicated to that being. By associating some of the few aspects of the land that are dynamic in time with god-like beings, it suggests the limited scope of history seen by humans in comparison to beings who operate on larger time scales. The predictability of the opening and closing of these locations further associates them with prophecy, suggesting its validity within the game world when it is originating from reliable characters like Azura (and this in turn suggests her reliability).

The final major time-sensitive aspect of the game is construction. The construction of a handful of buildings and other structures can be triggered if the player undertakes certain quests. These structures include the Great House strongholds (retrieved 2015-05-20), the Shrine of Boethiah (retrieved 2015-05-20), and the Raven Rock colony (retrieved 2015-05-20). Notably, these building projects are one of the few ways that the player can directly impact the physical layout of the land in Morrowind, whether by choosing which quests to complete or by making actual construction decisions in the case of Raven Rock quests. However, construction of the projects does not proceed in real time. Upon initiating a construction project, the land and building change in phases, moving from no progress to discrete levels of construction in quantized leaps forward. This progress always occurs when the player cannot see the building site, giving a slight illusion of time continuity. Taken in context with game's themes of memory's interplay with history, this phenomenon seems to be an embodiment of people's tendency to remember things in terms of discrete, important moments leading to important events that changed history, rather than being able to simultaneously perceive the ensemble of small, continuous events that lead to change. The players view of construction is distorted and artificially discrete, and this warping of perception reflects the distorted perspective of the history of the region that the player encounters in books and conversations throughout the game. (The discreteness of the player's journal entries also serves this purpose.)

Straddling the seemingly conflicting themes of static time and moving time are the minor enemies, such as animals, that populate the game world. The player can clear an area of these enemies, and for a time, that area will be safe. Eventually, however, the enemies will respawn and repopulate the region. The player's efforts to eliminate the enemies are thus nullified on larger timescales than a typical play session, suggesting the difficulty of enacting lasting change on the game world and relative equivalence of different points in history. This contrasts with how the game treats NPCs from intelligent species. There, the game enforces the permanence of actions, removing the character entirely if the character is killed and potentially removing the ability of the player to access certain quests and items. Because this seems to occur only with intelligent characters, it suggests an importance that lasts in time to decisions that the game deems moral decisions.

Taken as a whole, the odd way that Morrowind presents time dually, as static and flowing, couples with its narrative emphasis on history and prophecy in interesting ways. The player is made to observe the difficulty of trying to enact lasting change on the world, which lends weight to the main quest's narrative. The player is made to understand that the faulty ways that time and history are remembered has made the player's understanding of the narrative suspect, and whatever the player achieves within the narrative will be, inevitably, misunderstood and misremembered by the future inhabitants of the game's setting. How all of this relates to prophecy is left unclear, perhaps because the player's perspective is too limited compared to beings such as Azura. Though many of these time-related aspects of the game's mechanics are likely related to limitations of the technologies upon which the game was built, their integration with games themes plays a large role in the success of Morrowind.

A call for more precise game citations in games criticism

In academic writing, citations of books, articles, films, and even webpages are usually fairly precise. Printed media is referred to by specific printing or edition, while webpages are usually specified by both URL and retrieval date (though the archiving of webpages is still an area in need of improvement). Most publications with electronic editions, such as academic journals, are even completely uniquely identified by their digital object identifier (DOI). Games criticism, too, usually follows these conventions at least moderately well. Peer-reviewed journals, such as Game Studies, usually follow something like APA style for their citations, which is fairly comprehensive in identifying books, articles, and the like. The increasingly-important critical discourse that takes place on blogs and gaming websites is naturally more varied, but usually URLs and book editions are provided.

Strangely, however, games themselves are rarely uniquely specified in citations. Take, for example, the citation guidelines for Game Studies (retrieved 2015-03-15). The most comprehensive possible citation for a game as described in the style guide must follow the format,

Developer. (Year). Title. [Platform], Release City and Country: Publisher, played month day, year, .

In practice, many Game Studies papers simplify this style, as in this example from an article by Paul Martin (2011, Game Studies, 11, 3):

Bethesda Game Studios. (2006). The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. 2K Games.

I'll use this example throughout this post, but please note that I don't mean to pick on Martin or his excellent paper; I chose this example merely because it cites a game conducive to this discussion. This citation format is woefully inadequate for any critical or academic writing, but it is usually simplified even further outside of peer-review journals. Most game blogs and websites merely mention a game by name and leave it at that.

The above example of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is instructive as to why this citation format is a problem. Perhaps the most obvious issue is the lack of a version or platform specification. Naturally, the game varies among platforms for which the game was released, but issues such as patches make the problem far worse. The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages identifies (retrieved 2015-03-15) at least six officially release patches for Oblivion. Other potential patches certainly exist, such as versions used internally at Bethesda Game Studios. These patches sometimes make changes that could potentially impact the arguments presented in Martin's article. The behavior of NPCs is modified in some cases, and the level of detail in the rendering of the environment is modified. Surely one could find even more severe examples of software updates having aesthetic consequences, now that many games are released to the public (and written about by critics) while still in early development, thanks to distribution platforms such as Steam's Early Access program.

Beyond just patches, Oblivion, like many games, allowed the player to purchase content that expands the software. Oblivion's most notable such expansion is The Elder Scrolls IV: Shivering Isles, released in 2007. This expansion pack adds a new storyline, an entirely new region of the in-game world, numerous in-game items, many characters, and several tweaks to systems such as the user interface. Although originally released as an expansion, it was also bundled built-in with later editions of Oblivion. As Martin makes no citation to Shivering Isles, we must assume that the experiences he is writing about are based on the un-expanded Oblivion only, although given that he was writing years after the release of Shivering Isles, it seems far more likely that he was actually using one of the more common expanded versions.

Because Martin works at an English university and writes in English, it is perhaps safe to assume that he is referring the the original, English-language, unlocalized editions of Oblivion. If he were corresponding from a different university, however, this might not be obvious. Oblivion has a wide array of localizations, complete with translated text and different voice acting, both of which have aesthetic consequences. This problem can also affect games played in English, as many games, especially Japanese-developed ones, are localized for the Western markets. These games often have even more dramatic departures from their original versions than mere text translation and alternate voice acting. Yakuza 3 (dev. Sega, dir. Daisuke Sato, 2009), for example, saw many of its minigames removed (retrieved 2015-03-17) for Western localizations. Choice of localization can therefore have a substantial impact on the interpretation of a game. Just as criticism of literature would not refer to a translation without being very clear about what is being discussed, games criticism should not be ambiguous about the effects of the localization used by the critic.

We can take this further. Presumably, Martin is discussing only versions of Oblivion released directly through the publisher, 2K Games, but this is not necessarily true of all authors. Many games, including entries to franchises like The Elder Scrolls and The Sims, are heavily dependent on community-made modifications ("mods") to extend or patch the games. The Oblivion section of Nexus Mods (retrieved 2015-03-17) alone hosts over 26,000 mods for that game. These sorts of modifications can have nearly any effect imaginable, ranging from bug fixes to graphical enhancements to complete reworkings of the game. Even something as simple as a change to the graphical engine's rendering distance has a huge aesthetic impact on the player (for an extreme example, consider how a change to the fog distance in a game like Silent Hill (dev. Konami Computer & Entertainment Tokyo, dir. Keiichiro Toyama, 1999) changes the whole feel of the game). It is thus necessary to be very explicit about the mods (or lack thereof) used in preparing a piece of games criticism.

Finally, even the settings used to play the game are important to most pieces of games criticism. Even if a piece of game software is unambiguously identified as the text used for a piece of criticism, it is unlikely that the author of the criticism is referring equally to all possible configuration settings within the game. Except for pieces explicitly discussing particular difficulty settings or the like, this is almost never addressed in games writing. Difficulty setting may change entire characters or accessible levels, audio settings can entirely change the aural information available to the player, and control settings can impact the experience in a wide array of ways. Graphical settings can have a dramatic impact as well. Choice of aspect ratio or field of view settings change composition and framing, while overall graphical fidelity changes the visual information available to the player. These sorts of decisions need to be made explicit when referring to aspects of games.

The above list of variables that need to be represented when citing a game is potentially quite large and complex. Perhaps academic writing needs to move away from exclusively citing games the way that books and articles are cited. An article might address this complexity through the inclusion of a "Games Methods" section that, like a methodology section in a science or social science paper, describes in great detail the methods for obtaining and using the games that are cited. This sort of detail is especially necessary if games criticism is to continue to be useful years after it is written, because the default mode of interaction with a game can change dramatically over time. The Half-Life 2 (dev. Valve Corporation, 2004) of 2004 is not the Half-Life 2 sold on Steam today; today, players are using a version with a dramatically updated game engine that affects the whole experience. Will these subtleties be remembered in fifty years without accurate and comprehensive game citations? The games writing community as a whole, at all levels of formality and professionalism, needs to make a conscious effort to improve the specificity of citations to games.

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A new statement of the scientific consensus on the effectiveness of brain-training games

A while back, I wrote a short review of the scientific results on whether "brain training" games like the Brain Age (devs. Nintendo SDD & Nintendo SPD, various dirs., 2005-2013) series have any cognitive benefits beyond mere entertainment, as their marketing strongly implies. I argued that while it is possible that cognitive decline might be mitigated in certain populations by playing such games, the effect was poorly established and no better (and possibly worse) than other mental exercises, whether they be more traditional activities or any other video game. This question is clearly one that is on the minds of many consumers; search results leading to this post are one of the largest sources of traffic to this blog.

Recently, a group of scientists has issued a statement through the Stanford Center on Longevity that summarizes the current scientific thinking toward such games. The statement, "A Consensus on the Brain Training Industry from the Scientific Community," is available online. It largely agrees with my assessment, arguing that there is no evidence that these games are better than other activities in reducing cognitive decline. It, however, offers new and different citations to the scientific literature that my post did not have access to at the time, and it is written by experts in the field. Please give it a read if you are interested in this topic.

Thoughts on Bulletstorm - Bulletstorm, the Shooter Form, and Wuxia Cinema: An Analysis

• Developer: People Can Fly, Epic Games
• Director: Adrian Chmielarz
• First Person Shooter
• Release: 2011-02-22 (US)
• Platforms: PC (version played), Xbox 360, PS3

Wuxia cinema is a genre of film that is a variant of the martial arts film. It typically focuses on a martial arts hero's adventure, usually in a melodramatic historical setting and often motivated by an honor code of some sort. In some ways, the genre's characters are analogous to gunslingers in the American Western genre. Stylistically, however, wuxia films of the last few decades have diverged from related genres in their elaborate and extremely extensive use of highly choreographed fight sequences, which often use some combination of complicated wire-assisted choreography, CGI effects, or slow-motion camera work. Its earliest examples date to the 1920s in China (e.g., The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple, dir. Zhang Shichuan,1928), and its fighting choreography style developed into its modern form in the 1960s (e.g., Dragon Gate Inn, dir. King Hu, 1967). Today, the genre is internationally popular with examples from Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 2000) and Zhang Yimou (Hero, 2002; House of Flying Daggers, 2004) becoming influential worldwide blockbusters.

The integration of lengthy combat sequences with a feature-length narrative is a problem that both wuxia cinema and certain video game genres, such as shooters, must tackle. Historically, the dissonance between narrative and combat in games has been troublesome, with jovial characters like Nathan Drake of Uncharted (dev. Naughty Dog, dir. Amy Hennig, 2007) discussing moral qualms and cracking light-hearted jokes before massacring hundreds of men. Ken Levine, director of Bioshock Infinite (dev. Irrational Games, 2013), brushed this issue aside by comparing it to the musical genre from film and stage:

The shooter part is [...] tricky because like you say it is kind of an odd thing, where all of a sudden all this combat's going on. I think of it sort of like musicals, you know - like you have this story and then all of a sudden everyone bursts out into song.

But this comparison neglects the non-literal function of the musicals' songs to express character development and motivation by controlling the audience's emotional reaction to the score. The music serves thematic, narratological purpose in a metaphorical, non-literal way and is thus necessary to understanding the text. In most shooters, no such essential meaning is created by each violent action required of the player. While the action sequences may convey a vague sense of tension or achievement in the player that is analogous to that felt by the avatar character, they rarely move beyond such simplistic identification.

Though the use of violence in a variety of films, such as the work of Quentin Tarantino, is instructive when considering its implementation in games, here we will focus on the wuxia example. A number of wuxia films have elegantly used combat as a non-literal, expressive tool that is essential to the films' thematic meaning. Take, for example, Zhang Yimou's Hero. The film recounts a variety of past occurrences from several subjective points of view. The elaborate, unrealistic fight choreography teaches the viewer of the unreliability of the narrative, while highlighting that the essential aspects of these memories may not be the historical veracity. Instead, emphasis is placed on the motivations for the fights, with the beauty serving as a stand-in for their nobility of cause. The fights inspire a sense of wonder and inevitability in the viewers, while also contrasting how such honorable actions have inherently contradictory aspects of beauty and horror. The viewers come to understand that these subjective tensions are the true story of a people's history. This construction of thematic meaning is similar to how music functions in the musicals of Levine's analogy, but it is a good deal more sophisticated than a typical first- or third-person shooter.

It is here that we come to Bulletstorm (dev. People Can Fly & Epic Games, dir. Adrian Chmielarz, 2011), which seemingly has tried to implement the lesson that wuxia teaches about meaningful, non-literal combat. Much as in a film like Hero, Bulletstorm's frequent combat sequences are outlandishly unrealistic and, in a sense, choreographed. While most shooters ask the player use the avatar to kill other characters, they typically do so in such a way that encourages optimization of killing efficiency. The best weapons available should be coupled with the safest tactics to ensure progression through the game via the quick elimination of enemies. Bulletstorm still asks for optimization of a sort, but it asks for the maximization of an arcade-game-like score. The score is increased by finding interesting ways to kill the enemies, such as through particularly gruesome wounds or combinations of various tools, such as environmental hazards and a lasso-like leash that the player controls. On the surface, this stylistic play initially seems more closely related to games like the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series (various devs. & dirs., 1999-2014) than to the most popular forms of shooters, such as the Call of Duty series (various devs. & dirs., 2003-2013), that Bulletstorm nominally calls its kin.

Bulletstorm is not the first shooter to center its premise on score maximization through killing technique, but it does notably diverge from past attempts. The Club (dev. Bizarre Creations, dir. Martyn R. Chudley, 2008), for example, attempted something similar, in which a score was maximized by maintaining a combo meter that only stayed active if a consistently quick pace of killings was maintained. This sort of score-earning structure, however, largely results in the same sort of optimization motivation that a standard, narrative shooter encourages. The player both scores well and progresses through the levels by quickly and safely eliminating all enemies. The aesthetic effect is the same old vague sense of tension and achievement. Bulletstorm achieves something different from previous score based shooters by asking the player to improve killing style rather than killing results. In this way, the combat becomes choreographed, with the player acting as a choreographer with the assistance of the the game's list of possible combos.

This style-optimization goal is further removed from result-optimization through several related design choices. The points scored by the player serve a secondary purpose of being a currency that can be used to purchase new abilities for the various weapons. Most of these weapons and abilities, however, are side-grades rather than upgrades, and points are accumulated quickly enough that all options can be easily afforded in a short amount of time. The abilities therefore serve primarily to increase the player's repertoire of moves available during fight "choreography" rather than to strengthen the player such that progress can be made.

The function of the leash is the second major design choice that encourages thought about the aesthetics of the kill. Notably, it is the one "weapon" that is incapable of directly damaging an enemy. Instead, the leash provides the opportunity to manipulate the positions of enemies such that environmental hazards, melee attacks, or weapon fire can be more elegantly combined in the enemies' destruction, especially when the melee kick attack is combined with the leash for more precise enemy positioning. Further, time slows for all game elements except the player avatar when the leash is in use, allowing complicated combinations of attacks to be executed while the leash and kick rearrange the enemies. The types of kills that these mechanics encourage are not the optimal kills from a purely narrative or game progression stand point; they are typically more complicated, riskier, and slower than a more standard direct confrontation of weapon fire would be. Our choreography of the combat therefore shifts our interpretation of the game and introduces new ways of relating to the game's characters.

The characters and narrative interact with these mechanics in a number of interesting ways. On the surface, the plot of Bulletstorm is fairly typical of other shooters in that an action hero player-avatar, Grayson Hunt, must defeat the bad-guy, General Sarrano, before escaping the war zone. Hunt, in command of a small squad of soldiers on board a small spaceship, initiates the plot by drunkenly attacking the spaceship commanded by Sarrano, Hunt's former commander, to attempt revenge for Sarrano's past actions. This attack results in both ships crashing to the planet below, killing most of Hunt's crew, except for his friend Ishi, who is maimed and converted to an unfeeling cyborg during an interrupted surgical procedure. The two soldiers, along with a woman named Trishka that they meet along the way, hunt down Sarrano hoping to defeat him and to use him to get back off the planet. The planet itself is an apocalyptic, abandoned amusement-park city, with several aggressive and monstrously deformed species of inhabitants that make up the bulk of the combat enemies throughout the game.

As we saw in Hero and other wuxia films, consideration of choreographed combat in a subjective, non-literal sense can reveal aspects of character perspective and motivation that may not be immediately apparent from a surface level interpretation of this rather standard plot. Indeed, Hunt's character development is fairly nuanced. Prior to his falling out with Sarrano, Hunt held a highly skilled, difficult, and important position as the leader of his squad. His self-worth was reaffirmed by society and peers through his work performance. But upon defecting from his position under Sarrano's command, he was made aimless, grasping at meaning through an ill-conceived quest for revenge. By resorting to alcohol, he creates a surrogate for his lost mechanisms for creating self-worth. He drinks because his skills as a soldier are of no further value in his everyday life. Increasingly, he his seen as incompetent by squadmates, which Ishi continually reiterates once they are on the planet. The artistic killing, then, acts as an escape and restatement of self-worth for Hunt. It now functions for Hunt much like the alcohol does; it is an ecstatic release that brings past achievements back to the present, affirming Hunt's value to himself. Hunt seems to recognize this aspect of his skills. In Act 4, Chapter 3, he gleefully shouts, "Badoom! Killing as an art form!" Ishi notably is unable to recognize the aesthetic achievements of Hunt's kills, perhaps partially because of Ishi's new cyborg form, but, luckily for Hunt, time slows during these kills, providing a respite from Ishi's criticism. (We might also read this divide between Ishi's and Hunt's perspective as a small statement on the valuation of non-technical skill in society. Ishi fails to see value in the beauty that Hunt can create with his combat skills.) By positioning the player as choreographer of Hunt's maneuvers, Bulletstorm is able to leverage the escapist nature of many video games as a way to induce empathy with Hunt's need for a way of dealing with his changing position in society.

It is hard not to also read Bulletstorm as a statement about how its genre can function as art (recall Hunt's exclamation: "Killing as an art form!"). It seems to want its audience to consider whether games can achieve the same level of meaning through combat that wuxia cinema has, or whether we must resign ourselves to brushing it aside as Ken Levine's statements seem to suggest. From the outset, Bulletstorm calls explicit attention to the common trappings of its genre and its own position as part of that lineage. In the midst of the earliest tutorial segments which introduce the standard controls of all modern FPSs, the dialogue ramps up to a hyper-masculine, crude, violent, and ridiculous register - an obvious pastiche of the similar language presented with deadpan sincerity in series such as Call of Duty. The game even threatens to continue in that direction, soon dropping the player into a flashback in a far more conventional FPS setting, complete with military-esque dialogue and a colorless office building setting, before it aborts that thread and brings us back to the bizarre planet on which Hunt is stranded.

That planet is a giant caricature of popular shooters. Within the narrative, it was once a resort planet, practically one giant amusement park. We see the abandoned rides, entertainment devices, and concession stands everywhere. All are either non-functioning or functioning in a pointless way, like the newsbots who spew news to no one. It is a visual metaphor, suggesting the state of this genre - a defunct amusement that longer functions in a useful way. (Yet this planet is also full of gorgeous set pieces, perhaps suggestion its aesthetic potential.) The savage enemies that Hunt and Ishi encounter are mutated humans that once lived on or visited the planet, and now fall into three distinct factions. These factions seem to be playing out their own shooter-game amongst themselves, as they can frequently be seen to be fighting amongst themselves. Their fighting is chaotic, inelegant, and perhaps without any purpose, in stark contrast to Hunt's ability to move among them through the use of highly choreographed fighting.

Other shooters, such as Spec Ops: The Line (dev. Yager Development, dir. Cory Davis & Francois Coulon, 2012), have questioned how a shooter can function thematically as art. But while Spec Ops merely points a finger at the questionable aspects and potential failures of the form, Bulletstorm suggests a way forward. By suggesting the use of stylized combat to functionally create meaning, much like the way that combat functions in wuxia cinema or song functions in musicals, Bulletstorm creates a cohesive thematic depth that exceeds that of most of its peers. Perhaps it doesn't go far enough, however. In the late levels of the game, Bulletstorm seems desperate to increase its difficulty in line with the typical difficulty curves of other shooters. It does so by throwing large number of enemies at the player, requiring more optimally and quickly executed kills and thereby removing much of the aesthetic freedom that it built up so carefully throughout the game. Perhaps if the Bulletstorm had committed just a bit more fully to its central conceit, eschewing any attempt at a typical difficulty curve or a sequel-bait ending, it might have drawn a bit more critical attention and had a bigger impact on the state of the genre. Nonetheless, it remains one of the most important formal experiments in the shooter genre to date.

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For reference, a (probably incomplete) critical bibliography of the Bulletstorm discourse follows. If you can point me to other discussions, I would love to include them.

• Richard Clark used Bulletstorm as an example of an indefensible depiction of violence. As one can probably guess from my discussion above, I strongly disagree with this interpretation.
• The same author took a similar view in an opinion piece at Gamasutra.
• Craig Wilson notes the relationship (archived version) between Duke Nukem Forever's (dev. 3D Realms, Triptych Games, Gearbox Software, & Piranha Games; dir. George Broussard, 2011) ostensible style and the mechanics of Bulletstorm.
• G. Christopher Williams discusses whether Bulletstorm sufficiently telegraphs its irony and camp elements to warrant a serious interpretation that relies upon them.
• In comments made prior to the release of Bulletstorm, Gus Mastrapa observes that it could potentially function in a way akin to film's Starship Troopers (dir. Paul Verhoeven, 1997). 
•  Over at The Mediocrity Codex, a piece discusses Bulletstorm's emphasis on score. I don't think this reading goes far enough. It identifies how Bulletstorm kinda pulls the rug out from under the concept of score, and in doing so reveals how standard FPSs work, but the author never notices that in doing so the aesthetic potential of the game is liberated.
• Most mainstream video game review websites wrote about the game, and the ensemble took a generally positive stance toward the game. Though their commentary is typically fairly shallow, they represent an important record of social opinion toward the text.

Difficulty Settings

It would be very peculiar indeed if a critic were to publish an academic essay on an abridged version of Gravity's Rainbow or a version of Eraserhead with explanatory voice-over added. Not only would this hypothetical critic's experience be far different from that of countless other readers or viewers and thus not generally applicable, but he or she would be writing of a totally different work of art with an additional author other than Pynchon or Lynch. Let's eliminate this complication and assume that Pynchon himself abridged the novel and Lynch, in his odd drawl, added the narration to Eraserhead, both artists doing so to aid the less experienced audiences in understanding the work (perhaps because their distributor insisted on such a version). We would still have a problem with these secondary works and their use in the critical discourse on the primary works. Part of this problem is just the aforementioned issue of disparate experiences, but there is a second issue related to the artists' decisions when creating the works. At least one of the two different (hypothetical) versions of each of these works must not be the maximally effective version for conveying the artist's themes. We tend to recognize this immediately with abridged versions of novels, because large swaths of content and style, which the author clearly intended to be a contributing factor to the interpretation of the novel, are missing. We could argue that something similar happens with the voice-over example, but in this case it is an issue of excess: every part of the work is not contributing maximally to the thematic content, and some pieces may now even be subverting or distracting from it.

Gravity's Rainbow and Eraserhead are, of course, quite difficult texts. They are not suitable for all readers and viewers because it takes a certain familiarity with the grammars of their respective mediums to make meaningful sense of them. As such, they are inaccessible to most of the populace. Few people take issue with this fact, though.  We accept that certain artistic achievements require some amount of training to apprehend. We work up to them, and we train our children with simpler works. At times we may use abridgement or adulterated videos as teaching aids, but we do not view these teaching aids as an end in themselves. We accept that an artists work, with each element chosen to be maximally effective in service of its themes, may naturally present a certain amount of difficulty, which may be large or small, to its audience.

Why, then, do we insist on multiple versions - that is, multiple difficulty settings - of each video game?

My comparison of video game difficulty to literature and film is certainly a highly flawed one. I am comparing apples to oranges in that video games alone offer relatively simple routes for the author to implement variable difficulty within the primary work. Further, difficulty is rarely used as a direct mechanic in any medium other than games; in other media, it is usually simply a by-product of a particular stylistic technique. This is a very significant difference because it suggests the possibility of variable difficulty being a device that can carry thematic meaning in and of itself. But my comparison to literature and film still has some suggestive relevance to video games because the majority of games, especially narrative-driven games, are not using variable difficulty as a direct mechanic, but, rather, include menu-based difficulty settings to maximize the appeal of the game to a variety of audiences. This use of difficulty settings implies that game designers are not typically using in-game difficulty with thematic purpose, but instead, they are injecting it for some tangential purpose, such as consumer demands or mere tradition.

In April and May of 1842, Edgar Allan Poe published a pair of reviews in Graham's Magazine of Nathanial Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales. These reviews would go on to become quite well-known and influential pieces of literary criticism owing to their careful delineation of the significance of the short story. Poe celebrates the short "tale" as a genre, particularly because of its ability to sustain a "unity of effect" owing to its total consumption by the reader within a single sitting.  He notes that such a unity of effect requires of the author that "there should be no word written" which does not contribute to the "pre-established design." Most video games, of course, are not consumed in a single sitting and thus do not sustain a single unity of effect quite as Poe imagined for the short tale (though Poe might well have been impressed by our ability to serialize such effects as we do with modern TV and games). Nonetheless, his concept of the unity of effect is an instructive one.

At every point in the creation process of a work of media, the artist is making a representational choice with every piece that goes into the work. Likewise, the audience is making an interpretive choice at every moment in the experience of that piece. Each aspect of a work of art is a tool for creating meaning in some way, and something like Poe's unity of effect is achieved when all of these pieces are used together effectively in service of theme. If a game designer abdicates responsibility for feelings of frustration or achievement and tense focus or casual relaxation, then the designer is abandoning a portion of the thematic control the medium offers. No longer does the designer have any information about the emotional state of the audience at any given moment, and thematic meaning through game mechanics may be lost. There is no unity of effect, for at any point various aspects of the game may be working against each other emotionally. For these reasons, I suggest that it is not enough to simply take user-controlled difficulty settings as a given necessity and merely discuss various attitude toward them (as people have done, for example, here, here, and here). Instead, designers and critics must address this problem more fundamentally. They must ask what difficulty means in a given game, and seek to wield it as a tool for creating meaning. At times, this may mean removing control over such aspects from the audience.

I imagine that many players and designers would view the sacrifice of such user control as something that approaches sacrilege. To anticipate some of the objections, I note that I am not advocating a wholesale abandonment of variable difficulty - I am advocating its careful application with artistic purpose over haphazard adherence to convention, which at times, especially in some narrative-driven games, may mean abandoning difficulty settings. Perhaps it is no accident that many of the most artistically acclaimed games, such as Braid or Ico, lack the community-mandated difficulty options menu. Others might object to a lack of user-controlled difficulty settings from a more practical angle: customers expect them, so their removal might be a financial mistake. I suspect that this objection rests on faulty assumptions, because I doubt that any reliable statistics exist regarding how this would affect sales. Still, if it is an issue, it could be easily mitigated. In Valve's multiplayer shooter, Team Fortress 2, the default settings cause a warning to pop up if a player tries to join a server with more than 24 players. The message warns that the game has been designed for 24 or fewer players, and may not create the same experience with more than that. Because it is relatively simple to implement features like reduced or increased difficulty, designers could accompany alternate settings with a similar warning.

The demand for players to have endless control over their in-game experience in all cases, such as with difficulty settings, is a symptom of how much of the populace views video games. In demanding such features without regard for thematic meaning, we are treating games as consumer products rather than artistic media. Surely some aspects of consumer demand inform all media, but I would prefer that we treat games more like we treat film and literature and less like we treat microwave ovens and lawn mowers. If we are to move in this direction, we must view every game design decision in terms of its artistic meaning and its effect on the player. Re-evaluating how and when we utilize variable difficulty may be an important part of such a refinement.

Narrative Distance and the Cult of 'Immersion'

There is a peculiar, though perhaps not wholly unexpected, trend in the way many people view and describe the experience of video games: players are demanding "immersion." Though this word is often ill-defined, it usually refers to something like the player's ability to fully identify with their avatar to the point of "losing themselves" in the game.

In some discussion forums, this word pops up in nearly every discussion that makes value judgements on games. For example, as of 2013-06-26, about 5% (360 out of 7260) of posts on Reddit's TrueGaming subreddit, which purports to be dedicated relatively serious games discussion, take "immersion" as their subject, and the subject arises in thousands of other posts in the comments sections. Authors of games criticism often take immersion as an a priori desirable facet to any narrative game, as Stu Horvath did in a recent lamentation of his inability to feel the frailty of the characters of The Last of Us. This assumption seems faulty, and I suspect that games criticism is doing itself a disservice with its obsession with 'immersion.'

But before we get to that, it's perhaps best to clarify the concept of immersion a bit. Players are not referring to the "immersion" of typical academic discussions of art, which is characterized by maximal illusion of reality (i.e., attempts at virtual reality; see, e.g., Grau's Virtual Art). Instead, when players talk about immersion, they are really referring to an aspect of narrative distance, to use more standard literary terminology. In narratological studies of literature (and, by extension, other narrative texts like film and games), narrative distance refers to the 'separability' of the narrator's point of view from the story presented. Put another way, it is the extent to which the audience feels directly involved in the narrative - does the narrator place the audience's perspective directly into the story or is the perspective removed from the action? To a large extent, narrative distance is a stylistic choice of the author, but it is also impacted by the audience's approach to the text, as Film Crit Hulk illustrated in a recent article about audience reactions to spoilers. So far, there hasn't been all that much talk about these concepts as they relate to games in formal sense, although Matthew Schanuel almost hit upon upon it over at the Ontological Geek, albeit in a rather limited sense.

The issue with gamers' obsession with immersion is that it is formally limiting. It is a similar to the problematic nature of discussing game in terms of how 'fun' they are, as Campster over at Errant Signal discussed last year. Briefly, Campster takes issue with 'fun' as a critical term for games both because it is ill-defined and implicitly excludes a wide variety of modes of engagement with the player (e.g., can a game convey feelings of suffering, rage, or cautious reason if it strives only for an ill-defined 'fun'?). These same issues arise with the term 'immersion.'

To begin with, the term is presently far too ill-defined to be useful critically. A simplistic reading of 'immersion' suggests that it is increased by minimizing narrative distance. Taken most literally, this suggests that first-person games rendered realistically with no HUD, cutscenes, or menus should be most immersive and, if immersion is a priori desirable, most successful. This definition excludes much of the term's usage, though. Engrossing third-person RPGs and MMOs (and even, sometimes, 2D platformers like Limbo) are often held as pinnacles of immersion, as a quick Google search will readily demonstrate. And while many players disable HUDs to increase immersion (indeed, many PC games have modifications available that remove HUD elements), it is not self-evident that this tactic actually does increase immersion in the sense that many players mean. Roughly aiming a gun in the real world, for example, is relatively intuitive even if one is not looking down the sights, thanks to our natural spatial awareness of our body parts. In a first-person shooter, the crosshair usually acts as a crutch to simulate this awareness. Removing it may counter-intuitively decrease immersion by forcing the player to more consciously consider the aiming mechanic itself. When using the term 'immersion' critically, these alternate interpretations are not usually made explicit, so the term loses any explanatory force.

Perhaps the more worrying aspect of the immersion obsession is how it limits the formal options that we tend to assign to games. Let's return to considering literature and film, for a moment. Most bestsellers attempt relatively low narrative distance. The work of Dan Brown or romance authors typically places the reader close to the action, taking omniscient points of view while emphasizing the physical and sensory aspects of plot advancement. Similar approaches exist in blockbuster films. This approach is obviously quite successful in terms of interesting consumers, and it can create great empathy with characters. If we widen our net a bit, however, other successful options become apparent. In the canon of classic literature and film, many of our most revered texts are those rife with formal experimentation. (We will not mention other media, such as poetry and sculpture, that typically make no attempt whatsoever to create anything like immersion.) A work like Joyce's Ulysses, frequently considered among the greatest novels ever written, is hyper-allusive, carefully structured, and full of word-play. In short, it employs many techniques that require a large narrative distance to fully appreciate, and it thoroughly discourages long-term immersion despite the elaborately realized world that it creates. Even more extreme is something like Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, which alternates between the second and third person points of view, telling the story of the reader's attempt to read various novels. This novel self-consciously plays with point of view and narrative distance to examine how the reader-author relationship informs the act of reading and how that, in turn, affects our lives. Immersion is acutely broken in these works in service of their themes, and the effects achieved by doing so could not have been obtained through other means.

By implicitly asserting that immersion is always a desirable quality, we are discouraging the analogous formal avenues in games.  While there will always be experimentation in the independent game development sphere, the obsession with immersion likely limits the ability of more mainstream development to use new and experimental devices in their game design. Perhaps more troubling, this tendency toward the praise of immersion limits the directions that we take in the critical discourse on games. We should not always be asking how a particular game could be made more immersive. We should not take immersion-breaking devices to be flaws in a particular work. Instead, we should be asking how different devices and narrative distances function within a given game. These are choices that game developers must consider when creating their game. If immersion is broken, we should not discard that as mistake but instead seek to understand how it alters the creation of meaning for the player by the game. If we encounter the game-equivalent of If on a winter's night a traveler, we must ask why the game is calling attention to our gameplay, not ask for a different game.

Games certainly have a unique ability to draw us into their worlds. That ability to create immersion opens up thematic pathways that are closed to other media, and that feature is often rightly praised. But surely games can also do other things. We already see this experimentation popping up in a range of recent titles, from the frenetic jump-cuts of Thirty Flights of Loving to the direct address of dys4ia. Let us not dsicourage the spread of such experimentation, and let us not do a disservice to games that do experiment with narrative distance by doing them a critical disservice.
 
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For additional interesting reading on the concept of immersion, see Jamie Madigan's article over at The Psychology of Video Games or the High Level Storytelling Design article at Frictional Games's blog.