Special effects, animated actors, entire sets and spaces that weren’t physically present during filming: these aquamarine-colored surfaces are almost conjuring windows through which other environments can be optically inserted into filmed representations of the present moment.

These sorts of walls and surfaces are not architecture, we might say, but pure spatial effects, a kind of representational sleight of hand through which the boundaries and contents of a location can be infinitely expanded. There is no “building,” then, to put this in Matrix-speak; there are only spatial implications. Green screen architecture, here, would simply be a visual space-holder through which to substitute other environments entirely: a kind of permanent, physically real special effect that, in the end, is just a coat of paint.

- The Fifth Wall, BLDGBLOG

It was a big year for me. Although we started Medium Difficulty in late 2011, March 2012 was when it officially launched and immediately went viral. Since then it’s been pretty steady, which isn’t to say uneventful, and I think we’ve learned a great deal that we would never have learned if we didn’t try to run a proper games criticism blog. But it can pretty much all be deduced from one sentence:

Every second that passes is gone.

This is the first principle. Time marches forward, and we can’t do shit about that. I also finished my MA this year. You don’t care about that, but I did it anyway, and I did it by deciding that I would rather have each passing second result in an MA instead of incrementing my forums postcount or number of Twitter followers. What that MA can be used for is another matter, but the important thing is that now I have the option of using it. What am I going to do with a liberal arts MA? Anything I want.

I’ve also spent the last little while working on my mental health. The absolute killer about the conversation surrounding mental health is how it reinforces your passivity. You’re supposed to go to therapy and change your lifestyle, but what actually gets reinforced & focused on is that your medication is responsible for your well-being. This is false. You are responsible for your well-being. Medication helps you act on your own terms. But even when your health professional says that outright, it’s not what the rest of the world tells you, often without you noticing.

That raises the question: why am I being told differently, that genetics and neurotransmitters determine my behaviour? What is endangered by my decision to take control of my own life?

And you’re rolling your eyes – understandably – and thinking that this is such bullshit. You’ve heard it before. Write a bucket list.

Which is fine, but still avoiding the question. What is threatened by action?

You are. And so am I. There’s nothing more scary than change. Revisiting your childhood home induces vertigo because everything is so much smaller. Looking for a new job is frightening because you know the dynamics of your current shitty one. You hate your boss, but you can predict his behaviour. What if you can’t at the new job? What if you actually like it? What then?

What if?

Stop worrying and start doing. Make Weird Shit. Weird, because you’re doing it, and it’s not going to be what everyone else is doing, and Shit, because of course it’s not going to be good. Why are you expecting it to be?

Learn to embrace discomfort. You’re nervous about working on your game, your blog, your novel, your screenplay: what if you’re not as good as you always thought you’d be? Maybe it’s time to check reddit again… as long as you don’t finish anything, you won’t have to deal with sucking. You suck. We all do, and we’ll never get over it, so the important thing is to make shit anyway.

“99% of everything is shit!” Good. Then you won’t be alone.

I’ve been wanting to blog about games, games culture, the games industry, game writing, etc, etc, for a long time. What if I’m not as smart as I thought I was? What if my English Literature MA is actually useless? Who cares? It’s time to start typing.

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