I’ve been trying to write more criticism that can be used directly to improve people’s game designs. Extra Credits is a nice show, but they work in far too general frameworks to really be useful as a way to think about games in the specific, in the way that authors trained in criticism might consider certain branches of criticism when writing. Ditto a lot of criticism, which to this point has been mostly works which try to define how video games work. There’s precious little decent criticism on specific games that is geared towards actually figuring out the implications of design decisions as they are made in a production environment – probably because few academics know much about development (academics in the general – the most I’ve seen at conferences is ‘my son plays Xbox’) and few developers really care that much about critical theory. Here, I’m trying to apply Bogost’s theories of how games work to Prince of Persia, and trying to tease out the implications of design decisions beyond the fun factor.

This definitely doesn’t go as far as it could, and by no means is my argument perfect. I don’t pretend to out-academic anyone, much less people like Bogost and James Portnow. I’m going to try to expand this for my MA project, so comments and criticism are expressly welcomed.

Karl Parakenings

Times Out of Joint

June 18, 2011

Play Out of Time: Atemporality in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

Heroism is a basic assumption of action-adventure games. Games where the player is asked to defeat hordes of enemies typically imply that she is doing it for some greater purpose; whether it’s the defense of an entire country or the rescue of an estranged wife, the genre exemplifies the idea of an overriding purpose. Take the ill-fated adaptation of Dante’s Inferno, for example, where one plays a Dante refigured as a knight of the Crusades, condemned to damnation. In the introductory sequence he fights the Grim Reaper and steals his scythe so Dante can kill his way through the circles of Hell to defeat Satan in single combat and rescue his virginal wife. It’s not what one would call an accurate adaptation, but it is conventional – the “save the girl and kill the villain” plot is endemic in video games of this stripe. However, game designer and screenwriter Jordan Mechner, the mind behind Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, has never been one to engage uncritically with genre; every game in his publication history has innovated or challenged convention in some way. In an essay about the development of Sands of Time subtitled “Creating a Video Game Story”, he writes repeatedly about his desire to challenge convention, citing influences as diverse as film noir and Ridley Scott’s Alien. Given that impetus, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is arguably not a conventional game. Although at first it engages wholeheartedly with conventional action-adventure gameplay expectations, the central mechanic by which the game operates is time manipulation. I intend to argue that Prince of Persia’s game mechanics imply an initial premise which is then subverted over the course of the game through the development of time manipulation, thereby interrogating the basic assumptions of gameplay and proposing a rescued model of video game heroism.

Of course, analyzing video games requires a critical method suitable for the medium. I will use Ian Bogost’s theory of procedural rhetoric, as set forth in his book Persuasive Games. Building on his earlier book Unit Operations, which is a theory of game mechanics as “processes of the most general kind… characterized by their increased compression of representation” (Bogost 8), Bogost summarizes procedural rhetoric as “the practice of using processes persuasively, just as verbal rhetoric is the practice of using oratory persuasively and visual rhetoric is the practice of using images persuasively” (Bogost 28). He emphasizes that, despite the modern connotation of rhetoric as empty of meaning or pointless, he uses it in the Aristotelian sense of argument with a persuasive aim. While procedural rhetoric is figured by Bogost as useful in any situation in which procedure might serve a persuasive function, such as advertising or politics, he also spends a significant amount of time developing the theory for video game criticism. The rhetorical figures of the syllogism and enthymeme are central to Bogost’s formulation of procedural rhetoric; the syllogism is a deductive conclusion following from an initial proposition, such as “Politicians are untrustworthy; John is a politician, therefore we cannot trust John,” while the enthymeme omits the premise, instead implying it, as in “John is a politician and therefore untrustworthy” (18). Bogost relates these figures to procedural rhetoric by saying that “a procedural model like a videogame could be seen as a system of nested enthymemes, individual procedural claims that the player literally completes through interaction” (Bogost 43). In an extended analysis of Grand Theft Auto 3, he examines the hunger system of rules: over time, the player character gets hungry and must eat, however, the only food available is fast food which is fattening but cheap. Implicit in this restriction is a statement about the relationship of class to health (113). This demonstrates that, in Bogost’s words, “the games we create can support, interrogate, or oppose [the] cultural contexts [in which they are experienced]” (54). The player grows to understand the implied premise of the procedural enthymeme by learning to play the game and discovering the constraints imposed upon her by the game mechanics.

Which brings us to Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. The player takes the role of the titular Prince, the son of a Persian king who accompanies him on the warpath. The prince narrates the game as a framing device, often introducing gameplay situations or locations for the player. Without going into too much detail, the game begins with the sacking of a rival city and the capture of a princess. The Prince steals a magical dagger and is tricked by a traitorous advisor into using it to cause a disaster, turning everyone into monsters except for the princess and advisor. The magical dagger initially allows the player to reverse time for up to 10 seconds for a limited number of uses. The weapon grows more powerful over the course of the game as the player kills enemies, giving the player more control over time manipulation and the ability to use the dagger’s powers more often. Unlike the framing narrative, which intrudes whenever the player dies, saves, or quits the game, the dagger’s power explicitly affects the game world and is a central gameplay mechanic.

At the opening of the game, the gameplay systems are quite similar to other games of the action-adventure genre, involving parkour-like acrobatic challenges and swordplay. This opening tutorial section asks the player to guide the Prince as he steals the dagger, much in the same manner as Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark – except with more backflips. Shortly thereafter, the time-reversal mechanic is introduced in an extremely limited capacity, leaving the generic gameplay largely untouched. In the player’s introduction to the new mechanic, it is figured primarily in terms of avoiding mistakes; if the player accidentally runs the Prince into a giant rotary saw or falls into a pit, the time reversal allows her to correct her mistake before she reaches a ‘game over’ screen. However, this is the extent of the usefulness of the time manipulation mechanic, given that the environments are limited to physical obstacles which must be overcome using the same skills used before the dagger was introduced. At the conclusion of the introductory segment of the game, the dagger is basically unnecessary.

At this point, what enthymeme is the game presenting in its procedures? The window of time reversal is fixed at a tiny duration, enough to reverse a death or a mistake when jumping around, but not beyond that. As Bogost notes, we recognize gameplay generically through repetition of the constitutive procedural representations of gameplay (14); broadly, the gameplay systems at this point in the game seems to differ only slightly from other games in the action-adventure mold, being centered around agile dodging and precisely timed strikes. Given the broad generic expectations of the action-adventure game, it seems that the protagonist is firmly fixed in the role of vengeful hero, who must track down the advisor in order to kill him. The dagger’s power is too limited at this point to be that useful; at this point, the player is still learning the limits of the procedural enthymeme, proceeding under the implied premise that Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time functions similarly to most other action-adventure games. In other words, by enacting conventional tropes of combat and exploration in gameplay, the player completes the enthymeme with the conventional proposition of the heroic overriding purpose.

Conversely, at the end of the game, the prince uses the – now extremely powerful — dagger to reverse time all the way to an unspecified date previous to his father’s attack. He finds the princess and tells her about his experiences, completing the internal narrative and returning to the frame narrative. It transpires that the corrupt advisor has been eavesdropping the entire time and attempts to kill the Prince. The player keeps the developed powers of the dagger for the final battle, able to pause, reverse, slow, and accelerate time in order to gain an advantage over the advisor. Although the advisor was once untouchable, with the aid of the dagger the battle becomes relatively trivial.

How does this complicate things? The developed time mechanics subvert the generic constraints of the action-adventure genre. In a game like God of War, for example, the game is designed with the assumption that gameplay time proceeds at a steady rate. While the player might be surrounded by enemies, her tools for dealing with the situation are restricted to various martial attacks. She can move about to dodge attacks, but she is restricted to physical movement. The avatar increases in power over the course of the game, but only in ways which reinforce the central dynamic of the game. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time’s allowing the player to control time fundamentally changes the gameplay dynamic. The difference between the combat in the tutorial section of the game – during the sacking of the city – and afterward, with the time manipulation power, is significant. Rather than the steady beat of swordplay, the prince is able to move in a dimension unavailable to his attackers, temporally repositioning himself or freezing his enemies, allowing the player to strike at her leisure.

As the prince grows in power through use of the dagger and the temporal actions available to the player multiply, the complexity of the procedural rhetoric increases as well. Bogost suggests that sophisticated gameplay benefits procedural rhetoric, because “sophisticated interactivity means tighter symbolic coupling between user actions and procedural representations” (42). Here, the increasing sophistication of the time manipulation powers mirrors both the protagonist’s character development and the overall narrative structure of the game. As the player’s understanding of the game increases as a result of playing the game, so too does the protagonist’s self-understanding. Consequently, the goal of the game is retroactively redefined: while initially the player, like the Prince, was playing to solve an initial problem, at the end of the game the objective is deferred to a mission of prevention. The ability of the player to halt or manipulate time in the combat and parkour sections prefigures the narrative’s strategy of halting and reversing diegetic time. This allows the protagonist to prevent the initial problem instead of seeking revenge. The increased potency of the player’s time manipulation abilities allows the player to complete the enthymeme of the game’s fundamental assumptions, this time with a full understanding of the game’s ruleset, interrogating and opposing the initial premise.

The significance of this rhetorical move might seem trivial. Given videogames’ position of being respected to a fault in terms of cultural commentary, it is tempting to conclude that the ultimate premise that the player is left with is “don’t accidentally kill everyone you love,” making the syllogism of the game “you shouldn’t kill everyone you love; you have killed everyone you love; reverse time to make it better.” While a laudable goal, some might accuse it of being obvious, and worse, improbable. However, to make such an inference is to deny the deliberation with which the gameplay systems were designed; quoting Bogost, “The underlying models of a video game found a particular procedural rhetoric about its chosen subjects. Put differently, rhetorical positions are always particular positions; one does not argue or express in the abstract” (Bogost 243). The underlying model of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time goes beyond simple exhortations against homicide; allowing the player to turn back time to use her prescience to her advantage not only speaks against the generic conventions of the action-adventure game, but lays bare the syllogism underlying that mode. Where the initial gameplay impulse of the Prince of Persia is towards death, glory, and revenge, his gradual conversion into a figure of justice, redemption and sacrifice throws the motivations behind most other game protagonists into sharp relief. Standing next to contemporary franchises like Duke Nukem or Bulletstorm, founded on testosterone-laden competition and indiscriminate gunplay, the time-travelling Prince is representative of a hero little seen in modern video games. If Bogost’s final assertions are correct, and “the way we make our games […] is the way we want our world to become” (340), then Prince of Persia attempts to rescue our conception of heroism from itself. By questioning the unhealthy assumptions upon which much of the action-adventure genre is based – that vengeance is just, that princesses need saving — the world that the game design of Prince of Persia points to is one where the overriding motivation is no longer “kill the villain and rescue the princess.” When the Prince recognizes his role in the apocalypse which starts the game proper, we are made implicit – it’s the player, after all, who guides the Prince to steal the dagger. The player’s investment in the enthymeme is reciprocal: when the prince travels back to the beginning of the story, it’s not just his actions that he is reversing, but those of the player as well. By completing the enthymeme of the game in its final moments, the player is shown a new rhetorical conception of video game heroism: one which offers the possibility of renewal, not just for the in-game world, but for this one as well.

Works Cited

Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2007.

Harrigan, Pat and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. Second Person. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2007.

Wolf, Mark J.P. The Medium of the Video Game. Houston, TX: U of Texas Press, 2002.

Watch this space.

The basic problem, as I see it, is that we have many game developers who are interested in telling a good story but rarely have experience in what that means. I have a degree in writing (for whatever’s that worth) and I’ve been doing it in various capacities for the last ten years as well as teaching for the last two. The problems that we see with game writing? Absolutely freshman year creative writing class problems. There’s a reason why people shudder when we say stuff like ‘where’s the Citizen Kane/Watchmen/emotionally wrought game that will make me cry of our medium?”

You see the same preoccupation with emotional affect in untrained writers, or writers who haven’t had much experience. The first novel I ever attempted to write had the word ‘dark’ seventeen times in the first paragraph. I was fourteen. Ironically, it read a lot like a game pitch, with its preoccupation with cyborg warriors and glowing red eyes and people what accidentally killed their families. I really wanted it to have the same feel as the detective novels I was reading, so I emphasized how dark everything was in an attempt to create atmosphere. In my third-year creative writing class, there was a man who had designed this elaborate backstory for his comic series, a broad and evocative world of the afterlife that took influences from a diverse spread of cultures. The problem was, the actual stories were terrible. He had expected the narrative to be carried by the world design, and it simply wasn’t.

In art, when people begin to learn to draw, they do what’s called symbolic drawing: instead of drawing a face by observing what’s in front of them, a beginner artist will draw the symbol for a face, which is an oval with almond-shaped eyes and a nose and mouth. They’ll get frustrated, because they want to draw well but they put down what eyes and a face are supposed to look like, and the two don’t match up. Learning to draw is mostly ignoring what you think the world around you should look like, and drawing it the way it actually is. We have a similar problem in game writing, where we really want our stories to feel Important, but try to get it across through angst-ridden warriors and blood splatter everywhere and more exposed breasts than in an art school. These elements keep cropping up because when people think about the elements that are common within enjoyable stories, boobs, blood, and badasses keep coming up.

Thing is, those are the surface qualities of good stories. The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly is probably one of the biggest influences on the creation of badasses in the western hemisphere. People remember the showdown at the end over Arch Stanton’s grave, but what gives that scene emotional resonance is every interaction the characters have had up to that point and the various alliances and betrayals that have happened over the course of the movie. Yes, Clint Eastwood is a quick and accurate hand with the revolver and he doesn’t talk much, but he wins because he thought ahead, not because he was grizzled and spoke in one-liners. We care about him because he has sympathy for the soldiers who die needlessly and he’s the cleverest pragmatist in a pragmatic world, not because he saves Tuco from hanging in a cool way. That focus on character is what separates the Blondies from the Snake Plisskens – one is a well-drawn character with defined motivations and personality, and the other is a pulp stereotype. Games have largely been the latter. The boobs and blood and badassery are largely the result of good characters, not the cause, and mistaking one for another leads to things like Kane and Lynch and Alpha Protocol.

We even already have the game that’ll make us cry. It’s called Planetfall, and it’s a text adventure that was published by Infocom in the 1980s. You are marooned on an alien planet and have to find ways to survive. It’s completely barren, except for a robot named Floyd, who plays the role of your charming sidekick and comic relief. Throughout the game he does you several favours, usually while cracking wise – if you save the game in his presence, he says “Oh boy! Are we going to do something dangerous now?”. He’s a devoted friend. And at the end of the game, he sacrifices himself to save your life. A lot of people have been quoted as saying that was the first moment that made them cry. Afterwards, you’re wandering throughout the complex, and there’s nobody else there. It’s completely desolate. There’s nobody to comment when you save the game – almost no reason to save the game to begin with. And when Floyd is repaired at the end of the game, it’s a moment so joyous that it’s hard to believe. All that is because of the connection that the player has with that character. It’s what Ken Levine and co. wish Bioshock’s Little Sisters were.

I was at David Cage’s presentation on why Heavy Rain is the future of game writing at GDC. Despite the biases that Abbott talks about, I thought it was quite inspiring. I like David Cage, because he’s managed to do the work of the experimental fringe while being sponsored by Sony and made a pretty decent return for them in the process. I also really enjoyed Heavy Rain, but mostly because of what it promised in terms of emotionally mature narratives, not because of the story itself. There were a few emotionally striking moments (and they usually are informed by Cage’s experience as a father) but overall the story of Heavy Rain is a mess. The same thing is the case with Dragon Age or LA Noire, ad nauseam – games which do innovative things in terms of the gameplay of game narrative, but the story is lackluster. Cage’s talk was inspiring because – putting aside the endless self-lauding for Heavy Rain – he strongly advocated for an increased role of writers in the game development process.

But ultimately, I think we need game designers and developers who know how to write, both classically and for the unique medium of games. Learning how to write is a process of making mistakes until they get less obvious. We keep paying $60 for the mistakes, especially when noted writers from other media come in and completely fail to take advantage of the medium, leading to things like having to wait behind your party members in Homefront so you can watch their dialogue. Let’s find some people who have already made all the mistakes and hire them instead.

Happily, not an hour ago GDC posted a smorgasboard of free content on the GDC Vault. In video form there’s comparatively few lectures to the premium content; however, many of the talks’ slides have been posted under the free section as well. Some highlights:

ALAN WAKE: Light and Dark

Game Design in the Coffee. Lovable Game Design by SWERY

Biofeedback in Gameplay: How Valve Measures Physiology to Enhance Gaming Experience

Beyond Horror: Art Directing DEAD SPACE 2

There are scores more interesting talks available – it looks like they’ve made available content from past years as well. Have fun reading!

Click for big.

The following is with the caveat that I’m a student, and though I call myself an indie game designer I haven’t shipped anything, so I’m not speaking from authority. When I say ‘you’, I mean ‘I’.

The insights I took from GDC:

There are many game designers, and I’m not really sure what they do.

I lost track of the amount of people I met who gave me cards with ‘Game Designer’ on them. Darius Kazemi has a good post about business cards, networking, and being memorable; a title like Game Designer doesn’t really say much about what you actually do or what your skills are. I had thought about collecting information with an eye to eventually having an actual team working on Solitary, but instead I found myself determined to develop it with as few people as possible just so I had something to show at conferences. When I initially moved to Vancouver, James Mouat was one of the first people I talked to who worked in the games industry. I asked him what a game designer actually does and the resulting conversation lasted two weeks. That’s two weeks I don’t have to pitch myself at a conference: I`m lucky to get two minutes.

Takeaway: Game credits aren’t standardized, so if you’re calling yourself a game designer, be prepared with an excellent elevator pitch about your job skills. Be working on something, even if you’re job hunting or just networking. For me, it made me determined to put myself above the crowd through the quality of my work.

It’s not who you know, but who interests you and is interested in you.

There’s a mercenary bent to networking in most people’s minds, it seems. During the weekly professional development seminar that I’m required to take at SFU as part of my MA, there was a session on networking at academic conferences. “I’ve read extensively about this in the games industry,” I thought. “This is something I actually know about!” I proceeded to raise my hand and hold forth about interesting business card design, the necessity of an online presence, being memorable and doing your research about the context that the conference is in. I promptly got shot down by the seminar leader, who proceeded to say he’d be happier if Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter all disappeared overnight.

To him, these services cheapen human interaction and make it easy to collect friends only to boost the counter on your profile. To an extent, he’s right – and that’s a terrible way to network. The people I remember most from the conference are interesting people, doing interesting things, and I had interesting conversations with them. The people who were particularly mercenary and usually jobhunting? They looked hungry, and didn’t have much to say other than to ask whether I was hiring for my volunteer hobby indie project. Needless to say, I wasn’t.

Takeaway: When you approach someone with the intent to get a job or just to pad your business card pile, they can tell, and they’ll remember you as the douche who made some cheap crack when he found out you weren’t a recruiter or connected with major players in the industry. Practice social skills and the art of conversation – it’ll probably pay off.

Swag is bullshit.

Outside the convention centre, there was a throng of hucksters pushing free t-shirts on passers-by. Gamify was particularly bad about this: by the end of the conference, the lab coat-wearing employees on the street wore restrained smiles. “They’re making me do this,” their expressions said. “I need the money.” I waved away their t-shirts probably more than ten times over the course of the week. THQ was running a Homefront promotion on the Wednesday the expo started, and that went fairly terribly for them despite handing out free tacos. At various networking events after the expo floor closed, I’d overhear people comparing notes on how many t-shirts they got that day. I can understand that attitude at PAX, where everyone’s a fan, but don’t developers have enough t-shirts? If anything, companies should be handing out button-ups.

Takeaway: It’s not a fan convention. Outside of the admittedly awesome Zombrex pen I got from the Capcom Vancouver booth, GDC isn’t about swag. It’s about meeting people and learning from your fellow developers.

There are so many people that want jobs in the game industry.

So many.

I’m gonna link this youtube video here:

There are about ten thousand people at GDC who want jobs worse than that robot, and they all have more experience and better connections than you. They’ve been trying to get into the game industry since they were seven years old; their mothers ground up 5.5” floppies and fed them BASIC code instead of milk.  They want it bad.

Takeaway: You have to want it more and make better assets and games than them. Don’t be crap+1, as William Goldman says: be better than your heroes.

That’s where I am right now. See you next time!

“We had no idea what we were doing, none whatsoever, and I think that’s an important lesson, because sometimes you just need to do things, and sometimes thinking too much and knowing too much can hurt more than it can help.”

-Ron Gilbert, in his postmortem of Maniac Mansion

I just got back from GDC. I realized on the plane to San Francisco that time had slipped from mid-December to the beginning of March without me realizing it. Graduate school has a way of doing that to you.

GDC was fantastic, though, and it made me really energized to work on Solitary and other projects, including this blog.

Upcoming posts:

*Why Bulletstorm is actually a good game

*Responses to David Cage and SWERY’s talks about their respective games

*Networking lessons I learned at GDC

*Player-driven narrative techniques

*Preview of my conference paper about time manipulation and narrative

*Cupcake recipes (probably!)

*Solitary concept art

In the meantime, stay tuned.

it feels like something’s gonna change

(double note: I named this site before I ever found that blog. I know, I know.)

It’s Christmas, so why not revitalize one of the standout Christmas movies of the last twenty years?

Die Hard was the film that arguably launched Bruce Willis’ career as an actor. Superbly directed by John McTiernan and with a fresh-faced Alan Rickman as the antagonist, Die Hard remains one of the standout action films of the eighties. It’s still extremely watchable today.

In 2002, Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza was released for the PC to mixed reviews. Although the graphics were mediocre at best the game earned praise for the at-the-time unique leaning mechanic and take on inventory management.

Nakatomi Plaza

It does some interesting things: for example, McClane can use his badge to convince hostages that he’s not a terrorist, and the three different health indicators – physical, stamina, and morale – function to pace the gameplay in an interesting way. But overall, Nakatomi Plaza was a bland, samey FPS whose departures from the script of the movie were usually not good. One notable puzzle had waves after waves of enemies spawn – remember, there were only 12 terrorists in the movie – whose only purpose was to put pressure on you to solve the damn thing.

Upon rewatching the movie, it made me wonder what a good Die Hard game would be like. Clearly, the early 2000s run-and-gun approach doesn’t work that well. What makes the movie work?

John McClane is, from the start, a character first. We meet him on the airplane, sick to death of flying, wearing a gun, struggling to carry a gigantic teddy bear out past an attractive attendant. From that first scene, we get hints of his troubled marriage, the central role his job plays in his life, and his acerbic nature. Unlike the dudes from Bad Boys, this is a man who lives his life by his principles and moral code, and that approach hasn’t worked out so great for him.

Hans Gruber is an intelligent, witty, and ruthless criminal. As he’s quick to remind McClane’s wife, he’s not a common thief, he’s an exceptional one. He’s at the center of the plot, manipulating the local PD, members of Nakatomi Corporation, and the FBI to get to the corporation’s vault and disappear with the money inside. Where McClane is physical, Gruber is intellectual – as when the two meet and Gruber takes on the persona of Bill Clay in order to even the tables when McClane catches him pistol-less. The ending conflict between the two works because it’s a reversal. McClane’s got only two bullets left, and Gruber has his wife hostage and a helper in the room with him. When it comes down to it, McClane beats Gruber at his own game, and that’s what makes it so satisfying for the viewer.

McClane is vulnerable. He’s alone, with no shoes, in a strange building with no allies and men who outgun him actively searching for him. He’s well-trained and good at his job, but it’s his determination and quick thinking that enables him to win out over the better educated and supplied Gruber.

“Now I have a machinegun. Ho, ho, ho.”

He’s mobile, and he has time to plan and study the environment he’s in for ambush opportunities. Nearly every fight McClane wins in the movie is through surprise, subterfuge, or fighting dirty. He’s as likely to tell you to fuck yourself as he is to shoot you.

The game opens as McClane is dropped off at the Nakatomi Building and says goodbye to his chauffeur. As soon as we guide McClane through the door (from a third-person perspective,) we’re faced with the first challenge of the game: finding Holly’s extension number. Instead of the 80s touchscreen which Bruce Willis uses in the movie, McClane looks around the lobby and pieces together clues in a tutorial sequence – the receptionist doesn’t recognize the name McClane, but after a trip to the directory board across the lobby McClane spots the name H. Gennaro. In practice it’s as simple as walking over to the board and pressing A, but this kind of environmental investigation sets the scene for more elaborate setpieces later.

The rest of the opening walks the player through the other essential gameplay mechanics. While waiting for Holly in her office, throwing darts introduces the ranged combat interface, and McClane can’t help but play with the stuff on her desk. He notices that her letter opener is broken, so he digs out the super glue and attaches the handle to the blade, absentmindedly pocketing the glue. This introduces the improvised weaponry mechanic – as this is an office building and McClane will only have whatever ammo he can fit into his pants pockets, the player will need to be able to combine objects to create booby traps and melee weapons. (Note that while Dead Rising makes this kind of cartoonish, in Die Hard it would be more on the viscerally lethal side – stabbing terrorists with a pencil prison-style rather than beating them with a picnic umbrella.)

Holly walks back in, and as McClane puts the opener down sheepishly we are introduced to the limited conversation menu. McClane’s tongue is far from silver, so rather than a Dragon Age-style interface, we get something more like Alpha Protocol, where McClane can choose to be confrontational, sarcastic or friendly. The conversational options the player chooses affects that character’s impression of McClane, which changes how they interact with other parties like Hans Gruber (in the case of Holly or that asshole that I can’t remember his name) or the police and FBI (in the case of Sgt. Powell.) There are no massive shifts in story as a result of conversations, but a well-timed insult can give you an advantage later on, whether it’s support from police snipers or a better armed party of terrorists hunting for you – which would be bad at first, but once defeated you’d be able to scavenge their guns.

After a fight, Holly’s called away to the party, and Hans makes his entrance with a blaze of gunfire. You have to get to the stairwell without being seen, which you do through the simple medium of running like hell. McClane’s shoelessness is actually an advantage as far as stealth is concerned. Because guns are deadly and ammo is short, stealth is needed to get around the terrorists – but you’re not wearing shoes, so you can run pretty much silently. Stealth is based around speed, not crawling from area to area while switching camo patterns. It keeps gameplay dynamic and minimizes frustrating ‘you were seen, game over!’ situations.

The rest of the game uses these basic mechanics; levels are basically puzzles where McClane must use stealth, improvised weaponry, and sarcastic chatter to tilt events in his favour. Working his way through the tower, he kills some of the terrorists but uses non-lethal means on others. There are a few opponents who refuse to be stopped by any means short of killing, but the game tracks how many others McClane kills and displays an appropriate follow-up news article at the game’s ending.

Released after an extensive delay due to the game’s complexity, DIE HARD scores a 79/100 on Metacritic; while many critics applaud the game’s fresh approach to office guerilla warfare, the level designs are often confusing and gamers used to more straightforward FPS gameplay are frustrated by the de-emphasized gunplay and social mechanics.

Once only the province of social misfits and distressingly stereotypical high school students with glasses and button-up shirts, video games have emerged as a cultural monolith, consistently earning more than Hollywood as an industry year after year (Tanenbaum 2, Bogost viii). While initially the arcade game Asteroids and the Atari 2600 were novelties, artifacts of a curious development in electronics, today electronic entertainment is common in mass media.

With this growth comes a need for critical examination; just as with the growing medium of print throughout the 18^th and 19^th centuries, games as a medium require careful analysis to determine what messages are being transmitted and how those messages are communicated. For example, while novels present a fictional situation which involves ethically challenging material and the reader interprets the novel’s content and forms a conclusion about the morality of the text, some games take an altogether different approach. Rather than simply presenting an ethical stance, Fallout: New Vegas simulates a political situation for the player who manipulates it in a manner of their choosing. After the player enacts his or her solution, the game awards his or her character “karma” points which can either be positive or negative.  By measuring a player’s actions on a good/evil axis, Fallout: New Vegas gives rise to a Foucaultian biopower paradigm in which the player’s actions are controlled as effectively through the politicized structure of gameplay decisions as Foucault’s conception of political regulation of a state’s population. As the player proceeds through the game, each instance of their gameplay decisions – to kill or not to kill this person, to help or harm – converts the heretofore neutral player into an agent of juridical power. Moreover, the player is transformed into Agamben’s Fuhrer; “[a body where] bare life passes immediately into law” (187). To the player of Fallout: New Vegas, the very act of engaging with the population of this fictional wasteland merges political life and private life; there is no existence for the characters the player meets other than bare life.

Bare life is a central tenet of Agamben’s elaboration on Michel Foucault’s conception of biopower. Biopower, for Foucault, centers around threats to the population of the human species. In a biopower system, “killing or the imperative to kill is acceptable only if it results not in a victory over political adversaries, but in the elimination of the biological threat to and the improvement of the species or race” (Foucault 256). Although at first this statement seems to imply that wars, being a conflict between political adversaries, are not within the biopower system, Foucault goes on to suggest that war is “not simply a matter of destroying a political adversary, but of destroying the enemy race [and] regenerating our own race. As more and more of our number die, the race to which we belong will become all the purer” (257).  This agent of racial purification has what Foucault calls the sovereign right, which comes from the idea that sovereign political figures both constitute the law and are above it: whatever the king of a country decrees is law, but he may also violate that law as he sees fit. As political systems evolved from the monarchy, the state assumed the sovereign right. However, Foucault contends that the ultimate destination of the modern State is the play between “the sovereign right to kill and the mechanisms of biopower” (260). Agamben explores Foucault’s theories and expands upon his definitions by returning to classical conceptions of life. He turns to Roman law for the concept of the homo sacer, a person who may be killed but not sacrificed because the state has judged him for a crime (71). To explain this, Agamben turns to the ancient Greeks, who had two terms for life: zoe, which referred to biological life, the quality of being alive, and bios, which is life qualified by social action, a life lived within a society of peers (1). Agamben examines the overlap between the two states and terms it “bare life”: the property of homo sacer which allows him to be killed but not sacrificed. The production of bare life is “the originary act of sovereignty” (83), the single action which, once taken, bestows upon the actor the sovereign right: as Agamben quotes Carl Schmitt, the “sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception” (Agamben 11). Finally, Agamben recontextualizes the term biopolitics in terms of “the growing inclusion of man’s natural life in the mechanisms and calculations of power” (119), a consideration which, as this essay will demonstrate, is almost inescapable in the post-apocalyptic setting of Fallout: New Vegas.

In order to understand how Fallout: New Vegas functions as an ethical text differently from literature, first we must understand how ethical criticism of the novel functions. Mary Devereaux examines the question “What are we doing when we assign moral values to a work of art?” – specifically, the novel (3). She outlines a number of specific features that elicit moral judgements about novels which are unique to the genre of the novel: the purposiveness of the text, the posited author, and the novel as an agent of the moral imagination. To see a text as purposive is to read it as organized in such a way as to allow the reader to ask questions about the characters, events, setting and structure of the novel (Devereaux 6). Devereaux refers to Kant’s conception of “purposiveness without purpose:” seeing order and arrangement in nature but being unable to locate the causes of this form in a will (6). Similarly, for Devereaux written narratives are read in terms of intentionality, and it is this intentionality which enables novels to be intelligible from an ethical perspective (6). As a result, she argues, the act of reading a novel results in the conception of a “posited author,” an agent distinct from the historical author or narrator of a text, whose function is simply “to allow us to read the text in a certain way [...] under the concept of literary purposiveness” (Devereaux 6). Since the posited author follows from a conception of the novel as purposive narrative, Devereaux continues to the conclusion that to judge a novel morally is to judge the posited author of the novel (7). Finally, she recalls Lionel Trilling’s observation that the novel is “an especially useful agent of the moral imagination,” or in other words a tool for moral education (Devereaux 7-8). This recollection is important because, as Devereaux notes in the final section of her article, “the moral judgements we make of the novel’s “posited author” parallel our moral judgements about real human agents [, which] has implications for how we are to do ethical criticism,” referring to the necessity of engaging with literature on both aesthetic and ethical fronts (8-9). On the whole, however, Devereaux’s method of dealing with moral judgements about literature is to “engage the whole text [...] a task that requires careful reading, imagination, and hard interpretive work” (9). Ethical criticism of novels, then, requires the reader to assess the content of a novel and form his or her own judgements about the text. As we will see, this differs markedly from Fallout: New Vegas’ approach to morality in several important ways.

Central to this essay’s understanding of the ethical structures which underlie the playing of games like Fallout: New Vegas is Miguel Sicart’s landmark book The Ethics of Computer Games. Like Mary Devereaux’s approach to the moral character of the novel, Sicart devotes much of his book to a structural examination of the formal characteristics which make some video games a unique ethical enterprise. However, as the play of interactions between the player of a game and the potential, actual, and ethical aspects of the game is quite complex, dealing with the ethical implications of computer games is correspondingly complex. Because of this complexity, Sicart cautions that not all video games may be seen as moral objects:

the games that can be considered moral objects are those in which ethical discourses and values can be found embedded in the practices suggested by the rules and that take place in this space of possibility. If the space of possibility of a computer game can be analyzed using the tools of ethics, and if that analysis is corroborated by actual gameplay, then we can say that a specific computer game is a moral object. (Sicart 51)

However, he hastens to add, “A game […] is not only its rules, its material aspect, but also its experience – the act of playing that game. A game is both its rules and the practical expression of those rules” (Sicart 54). Drawing on Aristotle’s conception of potentiality, Sicart makes the case that while a set of rules for a game (or, in a more technologically advanced sense, a CD-ROM or DVD containing the computer code and assets for the game) functions as a set of conditions that the player must accept in order to play the game, it is the presence of a player which makes it become a game (54). More than simply a catalyst for the game, however, when playing a game the player is subjectivized by the Foucaultian power structure created by the rules of the game, wherein the player is “at least partially affected in her moral being by the game” and, furthermore, creates an onus on the player-subject to be ethically conscious of the nature of the power structure in which she is immersed (Sicart 68-69). He goes on to posit that the player-subject also constitutes a “player skin”, a construct of the person interacting with the game which supersedes her everyday experience without ignoring it completely; the subjectivization of the player-subject, in other words, does not divorce the ethical subject outside the event or game from her larger cultural context and embodied set of subjects (77-85). Central to Sicart’s conception of games as moral objects is his explication of the virtuous player, inspired by Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. A virtuous player is a player who “engages in a game and enjoys its ludic experience, but it is also she who, in the face of a moral challenge, uses the practical wisdom acquired by […] playing the games that form her repertoire, in order to make the most ethically informed choice” (92). The virtuous player uses the experience gained from playing games as well as her own extradiegetic personal experience to make moral decisions within the context of a game’s rules and embodied ethical assumptions (93). While being a “good” player means making ethically appropriate choices, in the context of games it also means respecting the system of rules which constitute a game. To paraphrase Sicart’s example, a “good” player would use a motorcycle to navigate an obstacle course designed  for motorcycles, while a player who circumvents the challenge by using a helicopter would not be considered “good” (100-101). However, this also means that “games as objects can condition what the ethical practices and values of the players will be through their affordances and constraints,” and although the game object “is not exclusively responsible for what players believe is ethical or unethical” (102), the conditioning of the player-subject’s ethical practices and values constrain the actions of the player in both a literal and ethical sense. While it might seem that the definition of a virtuous player precludes the idea of virtuously playing an unethical game, the above stipulation of “good” as keeping in mind the designed nature of the game pre-empts that notion by ensuring that while a virtuous player may experience unethical content within games, she does so while aware that by doing so she is playing the game by a predetermined set of rules, and that while a given game action may be violent or unethical, she realizes that this action is the most rational and efficient approach within the game. To use the infamous example of paying a prostitute in the Grand Theft Auto games to have sex with the player avatar, increasing the avatar’s health, and then killing the prostitute to get the money back, the virtuous player would “be aware that she is actually increasing her chances of passing a challenge by means of exchanging game tokens in the most efficient way” (Sicart 197). The virtuous player, in other words, performs unethical game content while simultaneously staying morally aware and reflective upon the unethical content’s implication, both upon the specific instance of gameplay which the player is engaged in as well as upon the game’s ethical nature as a whole. While the conception of the virtuous player-subject appears similar to the posited author of Devereaux’s critique, it is the element of interactivity which differentiates the media and changes the nature of the ethical discourse between the moral object and player. For the novel, the reader is a passive judge, viewing the work in its entirety and then proceeding to a moral conclusion on those terms; for the game as moral object, the virtuous player instantiates the game as moral or immoral through his or her actions in the space of possibility created by the game’s rules.

Fallout: New Vegas is the fifth instalment in the critically and commercially successful Fallout series, which are set after a catastrophic nuclear war which devastated most of North America and sent the world into nuclear winter. Many members of the American public – other countries are not mentioned, save for an annexed Canada – sought protection in privatized fallout shelters called Vaults. Unbeknownst to the inhabitants, each vault was the site of a predetermined social experiment: while one vault’s armory might be overstocked with weapons, another might not have any, a third requiring yearly sacrifices in a Soylent Green-esque robotic euthanasia chamber. Those who survived these experiments emerged, once the titular fallout had subsided, to start a new society in the post-apocalyptic wasteland. New Vegas is set in the year 2281, 204 years after the war, and is primarily concerned with the newly developed political factions vying for control over the former city of Las Vegas and the state of Nevada. The three main factions at work are the New California Republic, founded by Vault survivors who were concerned with preserving pre-war America’s democratic ideals and customs, Caesar’s Legion, a misogynist collective of slave-trading warriors whose society is modeled after the Roman Empire, and Mr. House, a Howard Hughes-esque pre-War billionaire who had made his fortune as a robotics engineer and used his company’s resources to achieve a level of life support so advanced as to essentially gain immortality. House controls the remains of Las Vegas with an army of robots which function as peacekeepers, allowing both NCR and Caesar’s Legion troops to entertain themselves within the renovated casinos on the Vegas Strip. An undercurrent of socio-political critique runs beneath the fabric of the game’s setting; the NCR are plagued by bureaucratic inefficiency and corruption, House’s insistence on a Milton Friedman-like credo of unrestrained capitalism carries Randian undercurrents of corporatist, profit-based rule, and the Legion are the image of a fascist, militaristic culture whose jingoistic politics recall the nationalistic fervour of Hitler’s public addresses. In short, there are no ‘good guys’ in Fallout: New Vegas: only those whom the player supports in their agenda.

New Vegas’ gameplay systems are fairly standard for a game of its genre; Fallout 3, published two years previously, is almost identical to its successor save for the addition of the faction system. As the player completes objectives that benefit or harm a specific faction, she gains favour or infamy with that faction, measured as a positive or negative number. Additionally, when certain actions are performed the player’s avatar gains positive or negative “karma” points which modify how characters react when spoken to. While the karma system was present in Fallout 3, it has been modified in New Vegas to be less relevant than the faction standing system. However, the system’s mere existence is problematic in terms of Sicart’s conception of ethical games: as he points out in an applied examination of Knights of the Old Republic, a Star Wars game with a similarly unipolar morality system, “ethical decision making becomes another algorithm for the state machine to take into account, disempowering the player as an ethical agent with the capacity for self-evaluating her actions” (211). In other words, by assigning a good or evil label to a player’s given action, the karma system of Fallout: New Vegas undermines the virtuous player’s ability to judge her own actions within the game world. Taken in the abstract, this seems harmless, if somewhat unnecessary, but in practice this system takes a somewhat sinister turn. By assigning positive or negative karma values to certain actions or outcomes, the developers of Fallout: New Vegas encode their own ethical systems into a supposedly lawless diegetic space. As the player traverses the post-apocalyptic Mojave desert, she is occasionally attacked by hostile animals. Killing these results in no karmic response, but murdering members of specific gangs or “feral ghouls” – humans mutated by radioactive fallout to the degree that their biology changes, their lifespan extending and their skin changing into a chapped and mostly missing form – results in good karma. This is where Agamben and Foucault enter the fray. As ghouls are human, if mutated, the game’s rewarding the player for culling them can only be read in the most biopolitical of terms. No faction requires you to exterminate these posthuman lifeforms; indeed, most ghouls are not feral, possessing a decidedly human outlook and affect. Killing these non-feral ghouls does not result in a karmic loss, implying that the only ghouls who need to be culled are those who have lost their mental faculties. Additionally, killing the members of the drug-addicted Fiends or escaped prisoners will also result in karmic gain. Although both the Fiends and the ex-cons are enemies of the NCR, the Fiends are cast in terms of moral weakness; more than one character states that they feel sorry for Fiends members’ weakness in being addicted to drugs, but that they must be exterminated regardless. The implication, to quote the title of a collection of Foucault’s lectures, is that society must be defended; those members who are physically, mentally, or socially unfit within the Nevada wasteland are killed by the player instead of offered admission to any of the communities within Fallout: New Vegas.

Outside of the karmic system, Fallout: New Vegas’ game mechanics are as explicit a simulation of Agamben’s bare life as one could expect. Within the simulated Nevada of the game world, nearly every active agent has the digital equivalent of bare life: the player character may kill almost any character she meets without repercussions beyond a loss of reputation or karma, as qualified above. If she does so without being witnessed by a member of a faction, even reputation loss does not occur. Mechanically, nearly all of the entities who are depicted as having life – including plants – have the digital equivalent of zoe, as the game’s “kill counter” is increased whenever the player exercises their sovereign right. However, those few characters who are deemed essential by the game’s narrative are not able to be killed; rather, upon sustaining the amount of damage which would usually kill them, they are rendered “unconscious” and fall to the ground before getting up minutes later. These characters are explicitly political, possessors of bios; the reason that they are essential to the narrative is that the narrative is exclusively concerned with the political struggle for control of New Vegas. The player character is the sole possessor of sovereign power: her methods for influencing the political balance of New Vegas are nearly universally homicidal. Mr. House, the eccentric billionaire, needs your assistance to murder the Brotherhood of Steel, a technocratic organization whose mandate is the preservation of pre-War technology. The ambassador of the NCR would like you to discover the revolutionary plans of the proprietors of one of the casinos on the Strip, and afterwards, to murder them. Caesar himself sees culling weak occupants of the wasteland as his society’s mission, and expects you to fall in line. Although in comparison to Fallout 3, the pacifist solutions available to the player in Fallout: New Vegas are outlandishly numerous, it is still impossible to complete the game without murdering someone. When working with the NCR or Caesar’s Legion, Mr. House himself must be murdered to progress the storyline, a withered spectre of biological mediation who explodes into egregious amounts of gore once killed, a sharp contrast to the debonair exterior he projects through the computer monitors he has heretofore communicated through; even if the player disconnects House from his army of robots and leaves him within his machinery, the bacteria introduced to House’s sterile environment as a result will kill him within a year. If the player did not possess the sovereign power of exception or refused to exercise it, the world of Fallout: New Vegas would remain in stasis, and it would be as if she were never there.

If Foucault’s contention that the ultimate turn of the state is to biopolitics bears fruit, then Fallout: New Vegas will prove him prescient, having foreseen the arrival of these post-apocalyptic systems of thought nearly a half-century in advance. Rather like Mr. House himself, Foucault’s observations about the systematization of population control and measurement points the way towards a future in which the same assumptions which underlay the Nazi regime find a new home in modern politics, albeit under a different name. Although Fallout: New Vegas may well be an unethically designed game due to its measurement of moral action, that does not lessen its potential power as a rhetorical exploration of where the politics of today might lead; unlike more obviously political games like Bioshock, the interactive critique of Objectivist thought, Fallout: New Vegas is not always so obvious with its treatment of ethical quandaries. As ethical, moral beings, the players of games like Fallout: New Vegas, Bioshock, and others which present problematic ethical situations and ask for their players’ complicity must heed Sicart’s call for the virtuous player, a player who examines her own actions and the situations which necessitated those actions even as she performs them. One of the great strengths of both Devereaux and Sicart’s ethical conceptions of their chosen medium is their potential power as rhetorical tools and morally instructive works; both novels and games provide the potential to practice morality in a setting free of the consequences which infest our day-to-day life. Although we may be faced with the spectre of Mr. House, an eldritch Rip van Winkle encased within a bed of technology, our decision whether or not to open his box is one that we must not undertake lightly or without reflection. It is when the issues of euthanasia or machine-assisted longevity rear their heads that the players of today will recall House’s face, and the decision which accompanied that first sight of the man behind the monitor. When faced with the voting machine, these virtuous players will press the button with certainty, guided by the hesitation of the same press on the gamepad and the longing for a nonviolent solution which now presents itself.

Works Cited

Fallout: New Vegas. Version 1.1.1. Obsidian Entertainment. November, 2010. Video game.

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford Press: Stanford, California,         1998.

Devereaux, Mary. “Moral Judgements and Works of Art.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62.1        (2004): 3-11.

Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Random House: Toronto, 1990.

Foucault, Michel. Society Must be Defended. Lectures at the College de France 1975-1976. New York:       Picador, 1997.

Sicart, Miguel. The Ethics of Computer Games. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2009.

Tanenbaum, Joshua. Believability, Adaptivity, and Performativity: Three Lenses for the Analysis of Interactive Storytelling. MA Thesis. Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, 2008. Print.