Attempting to Appreciate Gears of War

Where to begin with Gears of War? Yes, its a big-budget, AAA console action type game, which are meant to be just the kind of thing I’m mostly focused on, but I have only just played through it.  Having played it now, I feel only slightly more inspired to write about it than I did before playing it.  Tom Bissell explores videogames in a deeply personal way in his book Extra Lives, and comes to the conclusion that Resident Evil made it possible for videogames to be stupid.  If Resident Evil paved the Roman road, this makes Gears of War a German autobahn. Yet in the same book, Bissell makes a long claim for Gears of War as something slightly more than what it appears to be on a superficial, surface level.  Can this game serve as a case for critics to put their ludological money where their mouth is?  What do we find if we look past the aesthetics of the game, to the purportedly more important mechanics? Read more »

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Something about StarCraft

Hell, its about time.

To jump on a hyped-up bandwagon: StarCraft.  That long-awaited sequel to a game I did actually play, rather religiously, back when it was current.  I can’t say that I was among those eagerly awaiting its return, but it is a bit like an old friend you haven’t seen in a long time, and he’s aged rather well. That said, SC2 is a wonderful example for any of those theorists still in the games-aren’t-stories camp, because SC2, despite its substantial overhaul of narrative delivery technique, still doesn’t do it very well.  The “game” bit of StarCraft really, really does not want to tell a story, while the story bits aren’t game-like at all.

I will keep the recap very very brief as I’m sure most of us are familiar with the narratology vs. ludology ‘debate’ that took place–and if you aren’t, look up First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game, and you’ll get the gist.  Essentially the argument is that because narratives are constructed by an author to be accessed by a reader in a particular order and at a particular pace, they deliver story in a very precise, author-controlled way.  Games on the other hand are rule-bound systems which are by their nature very unpredictable and largely place control in the hands of the player.  While neither of these statements are unequivocally true, StarCraft would be a great example of how stories-in-videogames simply doesn’t work.  (I have maintained for a while now that videogames are not just games, so we can’t judge them purely on their game-like qualities.  Keep that in mind.) Read more »

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Grand Theft Auto: First Steps

As part of my PhD research I am undertaking case studies of various AAA videogame titles.  These end up taking the form of long critical reviews with essay-like analysis in the latter half of the piece.  Many of these will be appearing in the Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds as reviews, with supplementary information that just doesn’t fit in a stand-alone article on my Videogames Reference Wiki.  So far they all contain a longish discussion of the narrative and game mechanics, with some critical judgment of each in turn.  I will analyse the narrative in terms of story-telling, and make some recommendations, or refer to those of others.  Similarly with the mechanics, I have done some work to understand their ‘gameness’ and their relationship to the narrative framework.  The Assassin’s Creed article below is an example of the results of one such study.  (Or two since AC1 and AC2 consisted of two separate sections in my thesis and in the journal.)

One game I have yet to tackle is Grand Theft Auto IV.  Though it is quite old now (wow, 2 years is old?) I will be revisiting Liberty City and writing out my adventures there for the first time in the coming weeks.  I left this one late intentionally because I felt I needed some practice at this craft of criticism before tackling such a monumental example as GTA4.  And yes, I do begin this task with the bias that GTA4 is a monument.  There is simply so much in it.  I wanted to have some kind of framework that would help me hang onto the wildly differing array of topics that is sure to come up when I play through this thing again, and I think the time is just about right.

So what I have here are a list of topics, themes, points and questions that I hope to address in some way as I play through this game.  They are not in any particular order, but the groupings are how I am at this point understanding certain clusters and relationships.  Please feel free to comment with additions or omissions.  Please feel free to reference your own work as I am happy to synthesize and cite any other analysis that will make this work deeper and better rounded.  So here we go: Read more »

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Contemplating Rules

A tool useful when contemplating rules.

The following is sort of a post-article writing meditation on what I think I’m saying in a forthcoming piece on Fable 2.  Keep an eye on the SCAN Media Journal for a long review/critique of Fable 2 that opens up the idea of different rule sets in an example game.

In the field of game studies, we find ourselves talking about ‘rules’ a lot.  The rules of a game are the most obvious, and often the most valued.  Think of Marrku Eskelinen and early Jesper Juul–they both describe game rules in very clear terms as being a recognisable structure that we can point at, discuss, critique etc.  We learn the rules of the game in order to play, if we break them we are cheaters, etc.  They can be negotiated on the fly in certain types of (children’s) games, that sort of thing.

When looking to narratology, we can discern a different set of rules, the rules of ‘narrative.’  I would argue that these are rules of a different order, more meta-rules for building a good narrative, not content-rules of a particular narrative.  Like the meta-rule of what a game is (should be fair, have quantifiable outcome), the structuralist rules of what a narrative is (beginning, middle, end, having a narrator) are upheld by the narrative, not described within it.  So, the rules of an individual game are not identical to rules of games in general.  Similarly, the rules of narrative (structure) are not the same as rules that apply within a particular narrative.  And quite obviously, the rules that define general narrative and general game are not the same thing either–this is essentially the basis of the narratology vs ludology debate.

However, videogames are not ‘games’ nor are they ‘narratives’ they are, above all, videogames.  A new form of media/expression/art/software that hasn’t been properly defined or criticised yet.  I believe we are getting close, however, as the frame of the general debate has shifted in the last couple years.  A lot of it has to come down to language, and the precision with which we apply certain words.  So a word like ‘game’ needs to not be confused with ‘videogame’ in certain contexts.  Because if we are talking about the rules of a particular game, we may or may not be talking about its particular instantiation within a videogame.  We seem to have a fairly decent grip on the fact that the ‘narrative’ doesn’t account for the entire videogame, but perhaps because of the funny word play involved, it seems that earlier theory tried to substitute the game (rules) for the whole videogame. Read more »

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