An Open Letter To Nels Anderson; or, Morality Needs to F*** Right Off

Note from the author: I recently read a post by Nels Anderson on ‘Moral Development’ which has some comments on how different conceptions of morality can apply to games. I was distracted the first time I started reading it, and ended up deviating away to the Wikipedia page to read about ‘Kohlberg’s stages of moral development’. I finally went back to read the rest of the post weeks later and it got me so fired up in the passionate sense that I started writing a comment before realising that it would benefit from being posted here as an open letter instead. So here’s my response to Nel’s post:

…plumbing the depths… ‘who the fuck are these people?’… Neo-Nazi’s of the Fourth Reich… deep in the Kalahari… the Continued Survival of The American Dream…

Dear Nels,

I started writing this because I wanted to say to you that I thought your post about moral development in games was a fascinating read and I wanted to thank you for bringing it to our collective attention.

My fingers were rattling with a heat and fury, and I greatly desired to fire-off a vitriolic screed about very, very many games in some kind of Press Release from ‘The Institute of Freak Power Gaming’ saying how positively Neolithic it is that any game feature an incarnation of the dreaded good<–>evil slider system. But that wasn’t going to be enough. No, my friend, the situation calls for going much, much, deeper.

If a game is a conversation between the player and the developer, who the fuck are these people to tell me that I’m “evil” or “good” based upon… what? Their own standards for good behaviour… or maybe some arbitrary guidelines about proper conduct? In the immortal words of the pissed-off, progressively liberal Oz hip-hop collective know to the police as ‘The Herd’; “Fuck that!”

We know better than them, Nels. We know that in the real world there are no rules like this – the rules are what we write them to be, and doubly so for a made up simulation running on a computer! I don’t mean this in a neo-Nazi, Fourth Reich kind of way, but in a passionate anarchistic, newly enlightened devotee of ‘Kohlberg and his stages’ sense. Count me among the greats in my newly acquired desire to reach Kohlbergian enlightenment.

It takes some seriously sick and twisted fishhead logic to try and apply contemporary morality as reflected in our western legal system to a post-nuclear-winter future; a future that has been blown back to the stone ages, yet remains conveniently modern in it’s application of morality.

Have these people never seen The Gods Must Be Crazy? Even the idea of theft as crime or some kind of associated ‘negative action’ is contemporary! When your community has got shit-all to live on and you’re eating the scum that grows on the walls of your cave, you don’t really have anything worth stealing. Morality? What the fuck is that – they’re too busy trying to stay alive to give a damn about some ‘Karma points’ bullshit.

When that kid got hit on the head by the coke-bottle in the middle of the Kalahari, he had no idea he was about to witness the birth of theft in his tribe. When some crunched-on by middle-management Bethsoft code-monkey programmed in the bits that say a coke bottle can be ‘owned’ by a Non Player Character, some Deity higher up the food chain knew that they were inventing the concept of theft on a global scale. Did they even consider the idea that theft in this society would be different from our own? “Possession is 9/10ths of the Law” is the old saying, and I consider the Wasteland the perfect place to institute that final 1/10^th. Theft is abstract and Bethesda codified it in ones and zeroes.

I haven’t actually played Zeno Clash, but it sounds like the antidote to this kind of straight-faced craziness – at least it wears it’s weirdness openly. I wager it’s one of the few sensible and serious games to say “Morality means whatever you want it to”. One of the others is Far Cry 2. Does Zeno Clash give you ‘negative Karma’ for kneeing people in the face? Does Far Cry 2 slap us on the wrist when we’re defoliating swaths of the jungle for personal gain and a return on investment that includes safe-house upgrades? Hocking know’s we’re no fools – we are no babes in swaddling cloth to be told “bad boy!” and given a slap on the wrist for being caught with our hands in the proverbial cookie jar. And we are well able to tell that we are doing some seriously weird things and unnatural things in the name of Continued Survival and The American Dream.

You an me Nels, we need to show these Neanderthal’s that these “Karmic” games are the truly strange and the people who make them are more twisted than Richard Nixon’s underpants on August 9, 1979. We need to start our version of Fight Club. Rather than fighting in basements and parking lots we’re fighting on the blogs and the podcasts. Hit me Nels – hard as you can! Let us fish-punch the good & the bad out the glass windows on the thirty-third floor of whatever building these atavistic bastards call Their Office. If they want to keep making games for the man-children with neck-beards and mushroom kingdom tattoos then We Are Going To Have Something To Say about it.

Yours Sincerely As Always,

Ben.

P.S. I am coming to Vancouver one day. Get the beers ready – we are going hunting.

Things I don't want to do

N'Gai Croal can have my man-babies. Hi N'Gai!

This post could also be called “Things I’m not particularly good at, and hence largely shy away from”, but that was a bit long I thought. It might also help to keep that in mind while reading.

As a member of the burgeoning blogeratti, us pretentious, occasionally intelligent videogame writers (admittedly a somewhat unknown in comparison to the likes of Michael Abbott, Iroquois Pliskin, Leigh Alexander, N’Gai Croal, etc.) there’s a particular thing that I see others doing and that I struggle to be interested in.

Reading around, I get the sense that there’s a lot of thought being put into things like defining the proper terminology for talking about games; whether that terminology should be specialist or general enough to be inclusive; and what kinds of things need brand new words or explanations. And I really struggle to want be a part of it. And when I stopped to think about it, I wondered if maybe I was onto something.

This is going to run the risk of seeming like I’m calling him out, but Corvus Elrod (whom I greatly respect) has devoted a generous amount of words and blog posts to things like his definition of ‘play’ or the definition of ‘mechanics’. I think the first time I saw it happening I actually did a double take. Does an established word like ‘play’ really need redefinition just solely for the context of videogames? Isn’t just the context of a videogame blog enough for people to generally understand what you mean? If you do think there is a case for it, wouldn’t it perhaps be better to come up with some new and descriptive word rather than repurpose an existing one? Can’t we also by this point assume that many (most?) people who are reading our blogs pretty much know most of the terms and understand what we mean when we say things about a game? Surely they don’t really need us to explain that “videogames involve a player’s input, whereas a movie doesn’t”. If a particular reader doesn’t know that sort of thing already, what are they doing on my blog?! Go out and play some games first! Seriously, shoo! Go play Halo or The Sims – you’ll pick up on that whole player input aspect pretty darn quick, let me tell you. And if my mum can do it, so can you.

James Paul Gee wrote in What videogames have to teach us about learning and literacy that the best videogames, the ones that are successful, actually teach the player about how games work. So why do we in the blogosphere seem to think we have to explain the wheel to our readers? They’ve all played Call of Duty, they’ve know all the tricks. And if they don’t, can we even expect them to understand this interactive medium without experiencing it? Gonzalo Frasca, the granddaddy of academic videogame theory, says that in media that is simulational (videogames), unlike traditional narrative’s with which most people have already had significant exposure to in the form of film, books, etc, you can’t actually come to grips with it from the outside or without experiencing it for yourself.

In another example of the terminology discussion, Iroquois Pliskin (who, again, I greatly admire for his near-overnight rise to prominence and contribution to discussion) in a recent post criticized Clint Hocking’s bastard phrase, ‘ludonarrative dissonance’. He described it as,

“needlessly florid, and…the sort of thing that gives aid and comfort to the people who think that games writin' has gotten too fancy.”

I commented on the post, but I’ll reiterate here – I think ludonarrative dissonance is a fantastic term, and honestly it’s not just because I’m enamoured with the work of Clint Hocking himself (heh). It’s because it’s a term that describes quite exactly a specific occurrence in videogames – one that only occurs in videogames. But hey, just a second ago, wasn’t I advocating against discussing terminology and such? True, but in this instance ludonarrative dissonance is actually a term specific to videogames – unless it involves rules or mechanics that “say” one thing, and a story that says another you can’t get ludonarrative dissonance. There is no potential for ludonarrative dissonance in media like film, so I think it’s quite a valuable term for describing something rather unique to videogames and as such hasn’t really had a name before. And it avoids repurposing old words which, frankly I think is actually doing more to create a specialist vocabulary about games than phrases like the above. In what other context does ‘play’ mean “the self-guided exploration of possibility within a bounded space.”1

Okay, so the counter argument to that all this is, well, look in the dictionary – there’s already a bunch of given meanings for ‘play’ that are all different, some subtly, others wildly. But I don’t think I’m alone in feeling like this is an issue. The recent hoopla over the snappy gamer’s article, which tried to call out fantastic games writers as being “overly intellectual” and ruining it for everyone else, so pooh pooh, made Leigh Alexander comment that, while the author was being a dick, he did kind of have a point.

All of which makes me think that, shock horror, Kieron Gillen and New Games Journalism maybe actually had the right idea. You really, truly can’t dissect a game without reducing it to less than its whole. I just don’t think it works as it fails to capture the essence of what’s really great about games and why we play them. What I believe Gillen was onto with NGJ was identifying and writing about ourselves. Ultimately, people and their reactions, their feelings, their thoughts their stories (which I am also a big fan of, gaming anecdotes [RPS’ Planetside, the 1% and the ‘I was there, man’ syndrome is an amazing example]) are always going to be more interesting to read than a technical breakdown of game mechanics and why the pistol in Halo 1 was overpowered.

So, let’s bring this train wreck to a conclusion – what am I trying to say? Is it misguided to attempt to nail down some important and novel terms and ways of thinking about games? Well, no not really, there’ll always be a place for that. But, if writing about games is going to really truly transcend accusations of ‘over thinking it all’ then I believe the blogosphere has got to stop trying to clinically explain ‘how it is’. Let it go a little more often - go a bit wild. I think the really successful writers are already doing it, and I tip my hat in the direction of Duncan Fyfe and his writing at Hit Self Destruct. Also, Rock, Paper, Shotgun are often exceptionally good at this too.

Lastly, to both the guys who I criticized earlier, please don’t take it personally. Feel free to disagree with me, take my argument apart and show me the gaping flaws in my logic – please tell me if you think I’m aiming way off base. I am eternally thankful that, largely, we’re all an incredibly mature, friendly and thoughtful bunch and that that in itself goes miles towards overcoming any disagreements.

An extract from my recent paper on VR and the 'first person perspective' videogame

I've been thinking about (and doing a bit of select reading of) the concept of 'New Games Journalism', which Kieron Gillen outlined in his 'New Games Journalism Manifesto'. The point that I thought was most important, was this:

New Games Journalism... argues that the worth of a videogame lies not in the game, but in the gamer. What a gamer feels and thinks as this alien construct takes over all their sensory inputs is what’s interesting here, not just the mechanics of how it got there...

This makes us Travel Journalists to Imaginary places. Our job is to describe what it’s like to visit a place that doesn’t exist outside of the gamer’s head...The thing with travel journalism or reportage is that it’s interesting even if you have absolutely no inclination of going there.

The idea of dealing with the game and talking about it subjectively, as embodied, is extremely powerful, to my mind. And with this though, I wanted to share with my handful of readers, an extract from my own research discussion paper which will undoubtedly be somewhat adapted into a section of my thesis. I'll hopefully put the paper up in full in a few weeks, but until then, here's a little bit of my own attempt at injecting the aesthetic of 'New Games Journalism' into a bit of academic writing.

Any resemblance to Jim Rossignol's recent post on Rock, Paper, Shotgun from last week is purely coincidence. I started writing the paper only a few days before Jim wrote his and when he beat me to the punch, I was kinda miffed. But hey, it means I must be on the right track if someone as distinguished and insightful as Jim is talking about it.

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Oblivion, belonging loosely to the category of open world or sandbox type games, allows the player great freedom for exploration. At almost any point the player can leave the main narrative path and explore the world to discover and engage with its inhabitants, or simply venture into the countryside for its own sake. The game world stretches for many miles, across many different environments and is populated to varying degrees with ancient ruins and secluded settlements. The ability to go ‘off the beaten track’ is inscribed within the games rules, and is clearly accommodated for, even expected. For example, one of the many ‘skills’ that a play can employ within the game is Alchemy, which involves the brewing of potions from raw ingredients often gathered from the wild. At its most abstracted level, the game can be seen as rewarding players for exploring and discovering these useful reagents through the ability to brew useful, even potentially life saving potions. Somewhat humorously, the possibility is open to reading the game as encouraging the practice of stopping to smell the flowers.

A different aspect of the game that I wish to relate and demonstrate the power of procedural rhetoric is best told through my own subjective experience and reaction. At a point roughly 20 to 30 hours into the game, I found myself at a location called Cloud Ruler Temple high up in the Jerall Mountains. To the south of the temple is visible the towering spire at the heart of Imperial City, the largest city and one of the central places within which much of the game takes place. Behind the temple and to the north is a series of large, beautifully rendered snow covered mountains. There is no road leading up it and no perceptible reason to climb them. With no inclination towards advancing the plot and instead being possessed by a desire to explore the world, I began to enacting the role of ‘the explorer’ as classified in Richard Bartle’s taxonomy of MUD[1] game players[2]. Bartle describes four types of MUD players and their differing rationales for engaging with the game – in the case of the explorer, Bartle says

Players try to find out as much as they can about the virtual world. Although initially this means mapping its topology (i.e. exploring the MUD's breadth), later it advances to experimentation with its physics (i.e. exploring the MUD's depth).[3]

Knowing that my character possessed an exceptional level of the acrobatics skill, which directly modifies the height of a player’s jump, I attempted to climb the mountain through a combination of running and leaping. Thwarted by near vertical surfaces of snow and ice, I made my way across the face of the mountain (in my mind pretending that by rock climbing I was managing to traverse the similarly near-vertical cliff faces) to approach from the north, a much gentler gradient. At many points along the way I would get stuck, just below the crest of the mountain with the knowledge that it was just out of reach teasing me, making me want to get up there all the more. I would perhaps assert that this feeling in me was somewhat akin to that experienced by many serious mountain climbers who characterise their motivation for climbing mountains as doing so ‘just because it’s there’. Similarly, I wanted to climb to the peak of the Jerall Mountains because they were there; however, I also wanted to see what was on the other side.

When I finally did reach a section of the mountainside that permitted the kind of virtual ice climbing I was undertaking, I was rather excited. I had, after all, spent the last several minutes on the face of a mountain and had gone so far as to have crossed several sections of the map. The inability to reach the top so far had only made me more determined. I eventually reached what I believe to be the highest point in the game and the view was all the better for feeling as though I had actually accomplished something. Over the other side of the mountain ranges – and plainly within view of the massive draw distance[4] – was another set of mountain ranges, not snow covered like the ones I was standing on, but wooded and rolling and filled with possibility. Looking north-north-west, the woods continued on down to what appeared to be a large body of water, possibly a lake or the ocean (the ocean was certainly in that direction and reachable in other places) however there was one small barrier between me and those far away hills of promise, and it was a literal barrier. Upon reaching certain points of the world designated by the level designers as the ‘edge of the map’ and hence playable area, players encounter an impassable, invisible barrier and are told via onscreen lettering ‘You cannot go that way, turn back.’ I propose that, in effect, by not allowing the player to visit all the places one can see Oblivion, due in part to its emphasis on beautifully realistic visuals, heightens any feelings of wanderlust already present in the player, whether intentionally or not. The fact that the game intentionally sets itself up as a consistent world, as previously mentioned, and encourages exploration, only to so cruelly curb said exploration, is rhetorically strange, if not wilfully perverse.

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[1] MUD stands for ‘Multi-User Dungeon’. These were generally text based online games, the precursors to modern ‘massively multiplayer online’ (MMO) games such as ‘World of Warcraft’ or ‘Everquest’. I am stretching his definition to include single player games that include large worlds much like MUD’s – such as Oblivion.

[2] Richard Bartle ‘Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs’ in Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, eds. The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology, (Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), pp.754-786

[3] Ibid.

[4] Draw Distance is the technical term for how far the game engine renders the environment into the distance. The fact that the draw distance is so long is a bi-product of the games previously mentioned appropriation of FPS tropes such as technology pushing graphics.