Smartbomb

Among the comments to my post about scrolling shooters, John writes:

Maybe with the alternate path system your talking about, you could change the path and rhythm of the game [...] Thats got the old rub of making loads of content that people wont see though.

This reminded me of something I read recently that made me very angry. Kotaku’s Amanda Glasser recently had a go on the upcoming Wii port of Dead Rising, and noted the following:

“[We] wanted people to experience all the content,” says Capcom’s Chris Kramer – the man running the hands-on at Nintendo’s Fall Media Summit. Chris meant this in regards to the untimed missions. By taking the pressure off, you actually have time to go through and do all of the missions instead of having to choose which ones to fail and go back for a replay later.

It’s enough to make one vomit with rage. I love Dead Rising, but I can’t imagine it being nearly as much fun without the constant time pressures building up in the background. I consider it an essential part of the game. We once had a conversation in class about how to define its gameplay… personally, I think it’s best described as a ‘time-limited herding challenge’. Obviously there’s boss fights and photography and stuff as well, but I always feel the main task is to go out into the mall and bring back survivors. Maybe I’m just nice like that? Anyway, the sensation of slowing being crushed between the ever-decreasing time limits and the growing wall of zombies is what gives the game its characteristic challenge - shepherding a group of survivors from A to B would be really easy if you didn’t have a plot event scheduled at C in two minutes time.

During my first game, I remember I once had to abandon a group of six survivors at the wrong side of Paradise Plaza because I just couldn’t wait for their stupid NPC pathfinding to catch up with me. (That’s another thing I can’t understand people complaining about - as far as I’m concerned, the wonky AI just reinforces the fact that Frank is the only capable person in the game - but I digress.) Leaving half a dozen people to become zombie chow really affected me emotionally, because it was my decision. And it’s a decision that Wii players will apparently never face. Nor will they enjoy the euphoria of overcoming these challenges when they make a highly successful run - during my last game, I rescued almost all survivors and killed all but one of the bosses, and it made me feel like a king.

As I think I’ve mentioned before, I’m currently working on a game. I’ve just about finished all the major mechanical functions, but I still need to produce a mountain of art assets. I’m planning on having five stages, but I also want to have different versions of each stage - like day/night, calm/stormy, etc - or hidden, alternative routes. Depending on how much of the art can be re-used between versions, this means I’ll probably need twice as many background tilesets as I would normally. This feels like a lot of work, but I definitely think the outcome would justify it.

Making decisions is what interactivity is all about, but there’s no point making decisions unless they have meaningful effects on the play experience - this is all stuff I touch on in my dissertation. I think creating more content than most people will see is great. Look at OutRun, for example. In a single run you’re only ever going to see five out of the fifteen stages, but having such profound control over your route - and conversely, control over which stages to ignore - is what makes it such a liberating experience.

The arguments against making more content than necessary are obvious and understandable, but if you’re going to create something totally linear where all players will experience everything, then you should really consider getting out of games and buying yourself a video camera. Having said that, I think the real reason Capcom are butchering Dead Rising is because the Wii’s inability to render a crowd of zombies takes away the challenge of herding survivors against a time limit anyway. That, and… perhaps they feel the Wii ‘audience’ want a more ‘casual’ experience? If you ask me, these are both good reasons to not bother releasing Dead Rising on the Wii at all.

And so we come to the truth of the matter - Wii Dead Rising is not Dead Rising at all. It’s a re-imagined spin-off for players - and consoles - that can’t cope with the original. There’s nothing particularly wrong with that, but it sounds pretty boring to me.

THE GLOBAL ECONOMY IS COLLAPSING! IT’S THE END OF CIVILIZATION!

Alert readers will already be aware that I have a degree in economics. The main thing I learned from this is that our banking system is a fragile house of cards built on blind hope and empty promises. This blog isn’t the place to discuss the mess we’re currently in, but it is a place to invent games about it.

“It’s seeds and shotguns time!” is a phrase that’s I’ve read a lot recently, on some of the forums and blogs I read. My friends and I have jokingly discussed plans to emigrate and form a commune for years now, but the recent economic crisis seems to have spurred other people into thinking it’d be a genuinely good idea. Seeds and Shotguns explores this premise, giving players some basic knowledge of how to survive in such a situation, and presenting them with a more rounded, realistic experience than their Mad Max/Little House on the Prairie fantasies can conjure up. It’s not just about knowing when to sow what, or how to cycle your fresh water store, but also where to cache your excess food stock and who to shoot on sight. A bit like Fallout meets Harvest Moon.

With work commitments out of the way, I’ve begin to devote more time to my ‘portfolio’. I have a few things planned, but top of the list in that I want to make a fun little 8-bit style game – something simple enough for me to wrap my head around, but with enough leeway to still be interesting. Given my limited grasp of programming languages, I decided to use Game Maker because it’s cheap and easy, and within a few days, I had managed to piece together a nice little scrolling shoot-em-up engine. But where do I go from here?

I’ve played quite a lot of scrolling shooters over the years, but when I sit down to think about it, I can’t really describe how they work. I’ve been searching online for some design theory on the subject, but all I’ve found so far is a load of narrow genre definitions that focus on the context instead of the gameplay, and technical design theories about enemy bullet patterns. What I’m looking for is something that cuts through all this and gets down to the bare bones. What do I mean? Things like this:

• You control an avatar that can move around the screen and fire shots of some description.

• Your shots usually travel in a straight line, in the same direction as the scrolling screen.

• Enemies sweep across the screen in periodic waves.

• Touching enemies damages you; touching your shots damages them.

I think that’s the basics. Obviously there’s an endless list of exceptions and caveats, but I think most of these can be described as follows:

• You often have two or three different weapons to choose from, with unique qualities and attack patterns.

• In particular, you usually have some kind of smartbomb attack that does massive damage to everything on the screen, while being very restricted in number.

• Your different weapons are often interrelated – using weapon A powers up weapon B, for example.

• Enemies often shoot back! Their shots damage you, but not other enemies.

• Some enemies linger on the screen until they are destroyed, most notably bosses.

An interesting observation at this point is that the scrolling screen seems to be neither here nor there. The optical illusion of flying over a forest or through an asteroid belt, only really has meaning as an explanation of why enemies keep flying away behind you instead of stopping to make sure you’re dead – you’re zipping along in one direction, and they zoom past in the other. At this stage, when I’m just trying to conceptualise the fundamental gameplay, I don’t really care what the background is doing – what’s more important to me is the effect the scrolling screen has on threat positioning, and stuff like that.

What do I mean? Well, in a non-scrolling shoot-em-up like Contra, enemies will run back and forth on screen and keep shooting at you until you kill them or run away; in a scrolling shooter like Ikaruga, enemies will usually move around in a choreographed formation and then fly away. I say “usually” because this is not always the case - stage 3 of R-Type is one of many instances in which a large battleship cruises along at a similar pace to the scrolling screen and forces the player to destroy each section before they can progress – but the basic principles remain the same. Enemies are on screen; some of them are shooting at you; some are moving more than others.

Around here is where I start having problems. It’s not too hard for me to come up with an interesting set of interrelated weapons, because there are lots of different ways weapons can work – different firing mechanism, different movement patterns, different properties for when they eventually hit enemies – but when it comes to things like enemy behaviour and placement, I can’t really appreciate them as anything other than threats to be eliminated.

I mean, given that the player will be flying along and shooting at targets, what other effects can their shooting have? I’d like to achieve something more than just killing a load of enemies, even if I’m sticking to the same style of gameplay – basically, firing an awkwardly-aimed gun at moving targets while dodging about. It’s not even terribly difficult to think of a non-violent context for this behaviour – imagine if the player is flying along in a gyrocopter, throwing breadcrumbs at passing birds – but you’re still just moving and shooting and moving and shooting. Is that all there is?

I’ve been trying to think of ways to make the game world a bit more explorable and interactive, but this doesn’t seem to gel very well with the scrolling screen. Everything is always rolling on by, and players only have a limited time to interact with things before they disappear off the screen. It reminds me of an old game on the Atari Lynx called Gates of Zendocon. At certain points in each stage, an exit gate would float past – players who stuck the level out for longer would be rewarded with exit gates that skipped a few stages. This is a little more like what I’ve been trying to come up with, but it’s still really simplistic.

Well, the process of writing all these thoughts down has given me a few ideas about what to do with my game, but I’d still like to throw it out as a question. What can be done in a scrolling shoot-em-up besides moving and shooting? Is there mileage in deliberately not shooting – picking out particular targets from a group while leaving the rest? What other activities make sense within a scrolling environment?

I submitted my dissertation last week, exhausting my coursework commitments at long last. I won’t be graduating until next summer due to Brunel’s timetabling for such events, but I’ve now started actively looking for work. Entry-level game designers positions are hard to come by, but I won’t bore you with that just yet. Instead, I’ll bore you with a brief overview of my dissertation. Entitled “Gaming in the Round: The Overlooked Potential of Player-Controlled Perspective”, it examines how and why perspective controls are given to the player, and the effects on the play experience.

Pretty much all games these days let players control their view of the game environment – most of the dissertation focuses on first- and third-person games like Quake or Mass Effect, but even Catan lets you zoom and rotate the game board – but I think, with very few exceptions, these perspective controls are implemented in the same way, and for the same reasons, as they have been since the mid-90’s. Back then, a whole load of hardware developments – 3Dfx cards, the PlayStation, Saturn, and N64 – radically accelerated 3D graphics rendering in a short space of time, and suddenly every game was being adapted to take advantage of this.

Early 3D games could be pretty hit-or-miss. I remember playing Jumping Flash! on a rented PlayStation back when I was in middle school, and really enjoyed bouncing around the large, open spaces, but as a game that tries to combine platform sensibilities with FPS action it pretty much fails on both counts. At the same time, I thought Quake 2 was unrelentingly awesome, and spent days making my own maps and skins to trade with my friends on floppy disk. But then, to cut a long story short, Mario 64 came out and blew all other games out of the water.

The camera in Mario 64 works really well for two main reasons. Firstly, it was positioned much higher than in most other 3D platformers at the time, so you were usually looking down on Mario and his surrounding area instead of trying to look over his shoulder; Secondly, you could zoom and rotate the camera around him by tapping the handy C buttons (and switch to a fixed chase-cam using R, but that’s not really important), which meant that if you couldn’t immediately see what you wanted to look at, you could flip the camera round in a fraction of a second. And basically, this second principle has become standard practice in pretty much all modern 3D games, without much of a second thought.

Instead of just compensating for the inherent problems of displaying 3D spatial information on a 2D screen, I think this kind of perspective control can be used to really add to the game experience. In the dissertation, I look at the way audience-controlled perspective has been used in other art forms throughout history – through things like statues, theatre and landscape gardening – and how particular games have used it in interesting ways (although not always successfully, as Night Trap demonstrates). My main conclusion is that, if perspective control is to have any meaning, you have to give players meaningful choices to make in how they use it – they need interesting things to look at, but also interesting things to not look at. Much of my theory is drawn from Janet Murray’s ideas about ‘multi-stage narratives’ in Hamlet on the Holodeck, but with some other bits about non-linear narrative taken from Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext.

To back this up, I came up with a little game design that puts this theory into practice. Ice Station Lemur is a 5-minute ‘cyberdrama’ in which players watch a group of scientists and engineers engage in a tightly-knitted, EastEnders-quality theatre. It has little value as a game design in itself, but I think it demonstrates a few important principles quite well. The main lesson I’ve tried to make through all this is that games have a unique potential for not just explorable environments, but explorable situations. Instead of just herding players through topologically linear narratives, designers should present player with noticeably different routes to follow.

Come to think of it, I’m basically just advocating Metal Slug 3’s multicursal level design.

My dissertation can be downloaded here and the accompanying design doc can be found here.

A shameless Dungeon Keeper knock-off.

Well, almost. The idea behind Metaquest is that the player takes on the role of an MMORPG developer, and must build up a game that attracts players. Money is spent on hardware, software and staff, which all determine how large your game can be and what you can put in it, which in turn determines how many players are attracted, and that forms your main source of income. Players will have to deal with gold farmers, community relations, changing player tastes, rivals, and so on, by controlling their game’s development on a number of levels – internal game structure, physical server management, possibly even office layout.

If you really want to be exciting, you could let players set up their own server and run their game as an actual MMORPG, although you’d have to severely limit the maximum number of connections. This is where Metaquest becomes a bit less like Dungeon Keeper and a bit more like Neverwinter Nights or Metaplace. Would it be worth the effort? Probably not!

I haven’t posted for a while because I’m too wrapped up in writing up my dissertation and finishing my degree. I’d post some of it, but it’s still very much In Progress, and I’m sure I’ll be tweaking every last semicolon until the deadline. I’ve got a things I’d like to post, but I’m at a pretty critical stage and I don’t have time to devote due attention. “Normal” service will resume around the 23rd of this month, with a sudden explosion of back-dated posts to cover up my slacking and the birth of AN EXCITING NEW CATEGORY!

A number of people are quite upset about Titan Studios’ upcoming cake-fest Fat Princess. Of course, speaking out against the games industry led to a rabid counter-attack by angry teenage gamers who feel like their way of life is under fire, and all that’s left of the ‘debate’ is a smoking crater of locked comment threads. I find it very depressing when things like this happen. I think of game design as an art form like any other, but… well, I’m sure feminist criticism of a photo of a fat princess wouldn’t draw the same kind of collective rage. I guess it’s a matter of democracy, or something? Everyone has access to cameras, word processors, pencils and paper, and it’s generally understood that anyone could put them to meaningful use, so people are much more accepting and broad-minded when it comes to both using and criticising these mediums. But games are, generally speaking, still considered the domain of big corporations, and there remains an army of vocal young gamers who believe that commercial companies know what’s best - if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be in charge, right? Still, I digress!

I used to consider myself a feminist, although these days I’m not sure I approve of such a heavily gender-weighted phrase. The point is, I’m aware of how awful most games are regarding women. Even I find it very patronising to play a game like Lost in Blue, where you play as a rugged, adventurous boy who must protect a helpless girl who can’t even walk twenty feet to get a drink from the river if her life depended on it, and I’m amazed when developers say they didn’t put female playable characters in their game because there wasn’t enough time, or it would take up too much memory. I think my favourite moment in absurd feminist arguments was when someone from Splash Damage said that Quake Wars had female characters because the Strogg were “technically female” - an argument that they later retracted (as I recall), but has been trotted out by fans ever since.

Anyway, all of that is really just to set the scene for what I’m about to say: I think Fat Princess is okay.

When I first saw a video during Sony’s E3 press conferences, my first concern was whether players were supposed to force-feed the princesses. You don’t though, so that’s okay. Well, I think you’re supposed to go out and fetch cake and then she’ll happily choose to overeat - so while you’re not forcing the food down her gullet, you’re still a feeder (fetish article - possibly not safe for work), which isn’t entirely cool in my mind - but there’s a big difference between forceful abuse and enabling unhealthy free will, so I can’t say it’s flat-out wrong. And before anyone accuses me of hating normal-size women, I say ‘unhealthy’ because these princesses become quite undeniably obsese.

So, with the fat issue given a faint green light, we come to what people have become so riled up about. It seems that the main objection is that the princess is being objectified - literally, that she exists only as an object within the gameplay, rather than being treated as an equal character. Would it be better if the princess had a personality? I seem to recall, somewhere in all of the chaos, someone said they wished more games had strong female characters, like Portal. I wonder, were they talking about the mute, empty vessel that you play as, or the “technically genderless” AI that acts like a sadistic ex-girlfriend? The woman in Portal - whose name escapes me at present, which only emphasises my point really - is intentionally left as a blank slate, because Valve want the player-character construct to be weighted heavily towards the player, so that they feel more personally involved. She seems, to me, to be just as much of a gameplay object as the fat princesses (princessi??) - very little more than an avatar to represent your place in the world. Feminist gamers seem to generally approve of her, because she runs around and solves puzzles and does things, but of course my view is that it’s the player who is responsible for all that.

For this reason, I can’t deny that Fat Princess is a sexist game, but only in so far as all the playable characters are male. I just can’t say that the idea of having to rescue a princess shocks me much? I mean, for one thing, I think of her more as an anthropomorphism of a flag, than an objectified woman - I think this could be the problem that a lot of gamers have. Everyone’s used to breaking into a fortress and making off with booty, so what difference does it make whether it’s a flag, a briefcase, or a princess? This seems to relate to my personal theory about masculine and feminine attitudes to games, but since I haven’t really written about that yet (and I definitely don’t have time today), this will only make sense to those of you who I’ve discussed this stuff with in person. In this sense, denying her a personality probably works in the designer’s favour - the closer she is to being an actual object, the less she seems like a crude portrait of a woman. If you see what I mean.

But no, I think there’s another side to this, which is just that I’m happy to write off ‘princesses’ as being an archetype unto themselves. It occurs to me that the three blogs I linked to originally are all American. Speaking as a European, I’ve grown up surrounded by stories about kings and knights and princesses and all the rest of it - not just in quaint old fairy-tales, but in newspapers and on TV. For me, there’s a huge political divide separating princesses from regular women, which kinda puts them into a different box on the venn diagram of life; their defining feature is their social status, rather than their gender, and there’s a huge wealth of existing cultural stereotypes about princessess (and princes) that the portly maidens in Fat Princess certainly relate to - such as being too naive to understand their social circumstances, and their faintly greedy assumption that they have every right to consume what their subjects provide them with.

I’m quite loathe to start talking about stuff like politics and class conflict but, if anything, I see Fat Princess less as a bunch of guys rescuing an objectified woman than it is a bunch of workers rescuing an objectified monarch. Well, I suppose this isn’t so much an attempt to justify Fat Princess - after all, I believe it’s being made in the US, so this ‘trans-Atlantic cultural differences’ argument breaks down, really - but I guess it’s another possible reason why I’m not as enraged as some other people. Because of trans-Atlantic cultural differences.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to Fat Princess, and will buy it if I ever get a PS3. It’s obviously not perfect, but I don’t think it’s nearly as sexist as a lot of other games.

I love E3. For as long as my internet connection has permitted, I have made a point of settling down in a comfy chair and watching live streams of the major press conferences every summer. I was even going to concoct an elaborate plan to blag my way into last year’s show, but then there was a big ‘internet backlash’ against much of 2006’s presentations (Giant Enemy Crabs and so on) and a lot of the larger companies threw their toys out the pram. Instead of an electric wonderland of free-to-play, unfinished games, we now just have a series of press conferences and tightly-controlled demo lounges. Of course, the old E3 was a colossal waste of time and money - the fact that random nobodies like me could realistically get in did kinda undermine its value as a trade show - but regardless of the many reasons for change, the new E3 isn’t nearly as exciting.

Traditionally, I end the week with a mental list of half a dozen titles that looked particularly interesting, and a much longer list of complaints about absolutely everything else. This year was no different. I’ll grumble about the three main “media briefings” later, but I’ll start with my nice, positive list of games that I’m interested in:

My Most Anticipated Games of E3 2008, In No Particular Order:
- Animal Crossing (Wii)
- Fat Princess (PS3)
- Fable 2 (360)
- Little Big Planet (PS3)
- Mad World (Wii)
- Beyond Good & Evil 2 (Various, presumably)
- Fallout 3 (Various)

There’s a few omissions that might upset people - I’m terrible at Resident Evil games, so I can’t say I’m that bothered about the latest sequel, for example - but this is a personal list of games I want to buy myself, so shut up. And with that out of the way, I can get on with criticising everyone in turn:

Nintendo

Nintendo lost E3 this year, as far as I’m concerned. The Internet seems to be describing Nintendo’s briefing as a shameful abomination, but I think that’s a little unfair. Gamers (or which the net is obviously rife) seem to have this strange misconception that E3 is for their benefit. The fact is, it’s a showcase event for games companies to put their products in the news - that awful, oft-used phrase “media briefing” sums it up succinctly. Sure, the specialist gaming press are also there, but those guys write about games every day. It doesn’t surprise me at all that Nintendo spent their whole presentation talking about middle-of-the-road junk for ‘non-gamers’; E3 is their biggest chance to make a splash in the mainstream media. If you want to hear about the inevitable new Zelda project, just wait a few months and there’ll be an interview about it. And I wish people would stop being so mean to Cammie Dunaway! It’s hard to stand up in front of an audience and pretend to care about trivial nonsense.

As for the actual content… well, Animal Crossing Wii looks like Animal Crossing DS, but with the kind of extra online stuff that I hoped they would put in. I’m a bit confused about how they’re integrating Miis into it (or not), but then Nintendo seem to have developed a dislike of Miis generally, for some reason. Wii Music looks like a totally pointless waste of time. Miyamoto says that this makes it better than a regular game; I imagine that would be true for some people, but not for me. The drumming demo was as cringingly bad as Sony’s pitiful Warhawk sixaxis demo, two years ago. The MotionPlus adaptor appears to be a hardware patch that gives the Wii remote the kind of functionality it should have had from the start, with end users picking up the bill. THANKS, NINTENDO! Truly, we are blessed.

Microsoft

Yes, yes, Microsoft did a massive about-face and have radically redesigned the 360 to be more like its  competitors… of course, the rumours about this have been going around for months, and it’s hardly a surprise. It is, however, a bit of a disappointment. My only real complaint about the 360 dashboard is that it doesn’t cope very well with having different gamertags signed in on different controllers; I think the new UI is ugly and inefficient, and I think avatars will just add an uneccesary layer to user idents. Partying up in the dashboard sounds good, but I wouldn’t be surprised if only a few games used it. The movie streaming stuff would be great if it was free, but I doubt it will be, assuming it even rolls out over here.

As for the games… well, I’ll be all over Fable 2, obviously.  I thought that ambient co-op orb thing sounded ridiculous, until I noticed the orbs appear to move around to reflect the player’s current position in their own game; I now think it is brilliant. Gears of War 2 looks almost as dull as its predecessor, although I’m sure I’ll play through with a friend sometime. I can’t say I care much about the Final Fantasy XIII announcement - it’s hardly surprising from a business perspective, and I’ve come to think of the whole Final Fantasy multimedia franchise as a relentless engine of shallow, self-indulgent fanservice. Geometry Wars 2 looks the business (although I’m still struggling to wrap my brain around the original game), but the imminent release of Castle Crashers makes every other Live Arcade game look fairly redundant at the minute. Yes, including Braid.

Sony

For my money, I think Sony’s presentation was the best this year. Admittedly, the highlight was the announcement that they would be bringing the PlayStation Network close to XBox Live’s level of functionality, but that’s basically all the PS3 ever needed. Now that sales are slowly starting to pick up, we might start seeing some decent third-party games? Their Little Big Planet powered stats and graphs made my inner economist go all gooey, and nicely showed off what could be achieved with the game.

The PlayStation Network games overshadowed all the full-price titles they had on show. Little Big Planet, Fat Princess, Ragdoll Kung-Fu, sequels for LocoRoco and Patapon, and the random stuff like Flower and PixelJunk Eden, all looked far more interesting than the new Killzone and Resistance and the absurdly-named MAG… speaking personally, I think TF2 renders all other FPS games obsolete. The Gran Turismo TV channel looks like a brilliant idea, although I can’t see myself watching it. I can kinda imagine Hideo Kojima setting up a Metal Gear TV channel, screening military history documentaries, 80’s action films and The Gadget Show.

Conclusion

Much like last year, I didn’t think there was very much to get excited about. Nintendo continued to ignore dedicated gamers, but third-party games like No More Heroes should be enough to put people off selling their Wiis. Microsoft did an incredible amount of back-pedalling, which kinda upset me because I was counting on them to stay the course and be ‘the hardcore gamer’s choice’. I guess they’re just desperate for a slice of Nintendo’s new market? And as for Sony… well, two years after release, I think I’m just about ready to buy a PS3 and complete my console collection. It’ll have to be a second-hand 60GB model of course, with their backwards compatibility and all.

On the 27th of March, Dr Tanya Byron delivered a report to the government entitled “Safer Children in a Digital World”, which dealt with issues of child safety on the internet, and regarding videogames. The ‘games’ side of her report concluded that the current system of games classification in the UK is far too confusing. Games are generally exempt from classification, thanks to the Video Recordings Act (1884), but retailers and hardware manufacturers insist that all games must be rated before they will be approved for sale or release, as a matter of policy. All games released in Europe are rated by PEGI, but games with particularly violent or sexually explicit scenes (or, amusingly, any game that features a lot of non-interactive video scenes) are also rated by the good ol’ BBFC, who (unlike PEGI) have the power to bestow legally-enforced age certificates, or refuse a game’s release (as with Manhunt 2).

Unfortunately, Dr Byron’s conclusions describe a - potentially - even more confusing alternative, where all games will be rated by both the BBFC and PEGI, with BBFC ratings on the front of the case and PEGI on the back (which is pretty much what happens already, for any game that qualifies for a BBFC rating). The general response from the games industry seems to agree with her findings, but disagree with her reccomendations - industry bodies like ELSPA have come out to say that game classification should be handled by the pan-European organisation PEGI.

Oh, she also reassured us that videogame violence probably isn’t as widespread and corrupting as certain parties may claim, but since this is pretty obvious to people who play games, it hasn’t received as much attention in the gaming press.

Anyway, as part of the ’socio-cultural aspects’ module of my game studies degree, I wrote an essay about the Byron report, the state of UK games classification, and so on. Again, I agree with most of her findings, but I don’t think her conclusions make much sense. Speaking as a British consumer, and having done some research into the BBFC and PEGI’s methods, I’d really feel a lot happier if we just rated everything through the BBFC. I can understand that games would have to go through PEGI anyway, to qualify for release in other European countries, but I just think the BBFC have a much more sensible approach to classification - by taking into account the contexts in which game events take place, for example.

Ideally, I think the general classification exemption for games should be lifted, and the BBFC should establish a department dedicated to classifying games; either that, or create a British Board of Game Classification, with equivalent powers. Either way, following the BBFC’s own guidelines, games require a slightly different approach to classification compared to films - basically, because of film viewers interpellating with the victims of violence, whereas game players are more often directly identified as its perpetrator. Either way, once all games are being rated, we can have BBFC rating icons on the front of the box, and written content descriptions on the back, which seems like the clearest way to get the relevent information across to uninformed consumers.

That said, I have no idea how much something like this would cost. It just seems like the most logical answer to a complicated problem. I think it’s insane that a game like No More Heroes can have no legal age rating in the UK, when a game like Mass Effect does. I mean, Mass Effect has a lot of gunfights, and offers the opportunity to glimpse a pair of nipples, but No More Heroes is constructed entirely out of senseless slaughter, rampant perversion, and foul language.

You can download my complete essay here.

I usually have quite a lot to say about gender in games, so it was one of the first things my friends suggested I wrote about on my blog. I thought it over for a few weeks, but kept coming back to the same conclusion: I can’t write about gender in games, because I am a man. Of course, this is totally ridiculous - the idea was to write about gender in games, not specifically women; and even if it was, I should be capable of writing about the subject without feeling fraudulent. So what was the problem?

As part of my studies, I recently read a small stack of articles on the subject of games and gender; tellingly, most of them were written by women, about the gender of characters in games. I’ve never entirely understood why this is such a big deal. Obviously, being a man, most games characters share my gender, so I’ve never had the kind of revelatory experience that many female writers have described upon playing as Lara Croft for the first time. I always used to write this off as being due to some kind of misogynistic genetic programming, but my recent work made me think it through more deeply. If suddenly playing a character of the same gender is supposed to have had such a great effect on players, wouldn’t it follow that playing a character of a different gender would have a similarly noticeable effect? Speaking personally, I’ve never really cared what gender Lara was - all I cared about was how quickly she could kill wolves, or how far she could jump. Perhaps I’m just used to playing as female characters? It’s a tempting explanation, but it seems quite arrogant, and if female characters were so prevailant then Lara Croft wouldn’t have had such an effect on people. Why do people get so worked up about something so trivial? Alternatively, why don’t I care about such a crucially important issue?

During my research, the following line jumped out at me from a paper by the delightful Helen Kennedy:

It has been argued that the internal spaces of game worlds stand in for the mysterious and unknowable interior of the female body[.]

I have no idea where this has been argued, but I’m prepared to take her word for it.

The idea stuck in my head. Taking it somewhat out of context, I began to reconsider Tomb Raider’s gloomy caves as representing “the unknowable interior of the female body”. This, surely, would make Lara herself - the instrument with which I explore these areas - a kind of digital phallus, thrust into an unsuspecting game world so that I may probe its nooks and crannies. This was an interesting new perspective on character gender, and it made more and more sense the longer I thought about it. Generally speaking, I’d say I view Lara as a tool for interfacing with virtual environments; a device with which I exercise my will. I think this is the root of my problems with most existing literature on gender in games - with the exception of Dr Kennedy’s article (which didn’t reach any particular conclusions), everything I have read on the subject focused on looking at the characters and watching them do their thing. I don’t watch Lara kill wolves and steal treasure - I use her to kill wolves and steal the treasure myself!

I think I can surmise my thoughts neatly by saying that Lara Croft is not merely a character, but a player-character. To point at her breasts and call her feminine - or point at her pistols and call her masculine - is to overlook the contribution of the player who dictates her actions. Characters in games will reflect the personality of their handlers, or at least the personality their handlers chose to adopt within the game. The hijacked marionette I see running round in cut-scenes may well be a feisty young lady, but once I take control she becomes a cautious accountant, crawling from room to room while obsessively preserving her ammo and medkits for an emergency that will never have a chance to occur. For any given instance of Lara, her personality is constructed by an on-going negotiation between the player and the game designers; players can generally do what they want, but if they try to overstep the mark, Lara sternly exclaims “No!”. This is the ghost of the designer, using her as a mouthpiece to tell the player to re-think their actions.

So what does all this mean, exactly?

I don’t really believe that you can define a player-character by their appearance, or biography, or any other pre-authored information, because none of that stuff takes into account the fact that there’s an unspecified sentient player making them run and jump and sing. Perhaps you could say this ties in perfectly with saying that Lara Croft is a masculine character because of her guns and insatiable appetite for defiling virgin tombs, but I’d still think you’re an idiot - that kind of logic implies that entering any strange location and exerting your influence to achieve some personally preferred state is a uniquely masculine activity, and I don’t find that argument very convincing. Depending on how far you abstract gameplay out, pretty much anything at all would then become a masculine activity. Shooting wolves; sending your friend a birthday present; breastfeeding a baby; wiping your nose.

I would say that, for any player-character, there is a spectrum of potential playing styles, and if you can define one axis as relating to ‘gender’, or ‘masculinity/femininty’, then it must be always be present. If it is possible to have a masculine or feminine approach to a game as broad as Civilization, then I think you must be able to have a masculine or feminine approach to Tomb Raider. If you really must assign a gender to a player-character, then I think the only real point of reference you can take is that of the player - if there’s a real difference between how men and women think, which seems to be the underlying assumption of terms like ‘gender studies’ or ‘masculinity and femininity’, then the cognitive functions of a player-character must always be rooted in the player’s own gender.

Female characters in games are important for reasons of representation, but that’s a broad topic that goes far beyond mere gender concerns. I think the real issue of ‘gender and games’ lies not in the gender of characters, or even in the actions that they can perform, but in players’ attitudes to ‘play’ itself… but this is a just pet theory that I’ll expand on in a future post sometime.

References:

Kennedy, Helen (2002) - Lara Croft: Feminist Icon or Cyberbimbo?, Published on gamestudies.org

Tomb Raider (1996) - Core Design, various formats
Civilization (1991) - Microprose, various formats