My Top 10 Games

About two years ago, there was a meme floating around Facebook where you'd list your top 15 most memorable video games and tag a bunch of friends, who'd then have to do the same or face death by a thousand cuts (Facebook memes used to be hardcore, man). Looking back at the list, I realized that if I were to re-write it today, it'd be radically different, because what I'm looking for in my video games now is a lot different from what I used to. That said, I decided to come up with the top 10 games that have had the biggest impact on me. If I were to list favorites/games that took up hours and hours of my free time, Call of Duty and Halo would totally dominate the list. There are a bunch of games not on here that I love too, like Battlefield 3, Assassin's Creed, and the Uncharted series, so I also chose this criteria so the list wouldn't be bloated. As Strong Bad said of his e-mails, "I can't pick favorites. They're like my childrens." So these are the games that I still love to talk about.

10. Call of Duty: Black Ops

"Because the numbers were telling me to!"

The COD series and I have a tenuous relationship, but COD:BLOPs was the one that showed me that the series can still have fun with itself. It's a unique setting with characters that have more going on than just being chisel-jawed defenders of freedom, and even bothered to mess with the conventions of the series and play with expectations to achieve a pretty nice mind-screw as far as FPSs go. I'm actually pretty optimistic for the sequel, Oliver North shenanigans notwithstanding.

9. Myst

"Before arriving in this Age, I was determined that it would be a

journey to a world very different from my previous adventures,

and it was."

Spring break of sophomore year, I found that Myst and it's sequel, Riven, were on sale in the iPhone app store. I downloaded them both, and as soon as I fired this game up, the memories flooded back. My family had the original game on a very old Mac, and even though I was way too young to get any of the puzzles on my own, I used the strategy guide to explore, because really, that was all I wanted. The world was intriguing and contained a story of familial tension that's practically Greek in tragedy and scope. Rediscovering all this years later, I found to my dismay that I still had to resort to strategy guides to get anywhere, and to my delight that the game and its accompanying mythos was still as engrossing as ever. The player was the central actor, free to explore a world reeking of invention that had much to offer. When I placed my hand on that linking panel for the first time in over a decade, I learned what timeless really meant.

8. Max Payne

"'I was in a computer game. Funny as hell, it was the

most horrible thing I could think of."

Don't get me wrong: I love Max Payne 3. The game is fun as hell, and I've got no problem with the aesthetic changes Rockstar made, because by itself the game works. But the sad part is, it's not there by itself. Ultimately, it's proof that a game like the original Max Payne couldn't be made today by a big AAA studio. Not only was the original Max Payne the first to use bullet time in a way that was totally awesome, but it had a noir aesthetic that managed to be both gritty and self-aware, drawing you in while still managing to recognize just how absurd it was. Great gameplay paired with a stellar atmosphere made this one a real treasure. And that's not even mentioning consti-Payne up there. Yeah. Soak it in.

7. Half Life 2

"The right man in the wrong place can make all the

difference in the world."

I didn't realize until after I'd played it why Half Life 2 is so widely regarded as the benchmark for immersive game design. It's a bunch of little things, really; the game has no cutscenes to speak of, placing you squarely in Gordon Freeman's shoes and never taking you out of them for the entirety of the game. The silent protagonist is done right, enabling you to easily project your personality onto Gordon Freeman. Rather than give you an infodump about the dystopia you're dropped into, you're left to piece together the backstory yourself, not through audio diaries or old intel logs, but by set details that communicate effectively and economically how much of a dump the place is. A masterwork of game design by pretty much any standard.

6. Grand Theft Auto 4

"Life is complicated. I killed people, smuggled people,

sold people. Perhaps here things will be different."

I bought GTA IV expecting exactly what I got from it's predecessors: a playground of vehicular manslaughter and just regular old slaughter, complemented by a colorful cast of characters and plenty of unsubtle satire and innuendo. To be sure, I got those, but the other thing I got totally gobsmacked me (Love that word): A scathing, soul-searching commentary on the fallacy of the American Dream, as seen through the lens of a jaded Serbian mobster who never comes close to the heights of fame and fortune achieved by the other protagonists in the series so far, and set in a city that's just as real and alive as the New York City upon which it's based. When you aren't going absolutely batshit crazy on a motorcycle, you're basically playing a Scorsese film. A triumph of both organic and linear storytelling.

5. Minecraft

"The aim of the game is not to mine, or craft, but to

run from creepers."

At first I didn't want to touch this game. I was worried it would be a time-sink full of complex and obtuse rules that I would have to spend hours learning and then using just to make a shack so I wouldn't die. In the rain. Hundreds of times. Then I saw friends playing it and realized that I was mostly wrong. There is a fairly sharp difficulty curve, but once you overcome it the game is so rewarding that it's easy as hell to lose hours to it and love every second. It combines a bunch of complex systems that let the player shape the world with a procedurally generating landscape that means not even the guy who made the game will be able to tell you what's in that cave or over the next hill. That's a romanticism you just don't get in many other games.

4. Far Cry 2

"Shoot to wound, then execute the wounded. Burn them.

Take them in close combat. Destroy their preconceptions of what a man is,

and you become their personal monster."

If the first 20 or so posts on this blog aren't enough of a clue, I really liked this game. It might not have been the best executed one ever made, but damn if it didn't get me thinking. A modern day Heart of Darkness depicting a country spiraling out of control in a haze of war and destruction, that uses mechanics to emphasize just how messed up the mind can get when it's immersed in bloodshed. More impressive, though, is the game world this all takes place in, a vast African savannah just waiting for you to play Rambo. Hellz yeah.

3. L.A. Noire

"May the cat eat him, and the cat be eaten by the Devil."

Though certainly not perfect, LA Noire is a shining example of a game that was willing to take some creative risks that looked to actually advance the medium beyond graphical innovations. The face-capture technology developed by Team Bondi was used to great effect so that the player felt like something akin to an actual detective trying to suss out the truth in interviews. Despite some design missteps, the game felt so much like the noir films it was based on, from the painstakingly recreated streets of 1947 Los Angeles to the rich characters. Proof that innovation in the video game industry is going to have to start coming from more unconventional directions if the medium is to evolve.

2. Spec Ops: The Line

"I thought I was here to protect this city from the storm.

I was wrong. I'm here to protect it from you."

Everything I said about Far Cry 2 applies here times 100. This is a game that takes all your expectations about a military shooter and uses them to stab you in the gut, then mock you for letting it stab you. And it is AMAZING. As these guys point out, it's the first AAA game to be extremely engaging without being fun. This is exactly what the medium needs. It even got me, and I thought I was too smart to be taken in. I entered the game expecting a Heart of Darkness story that would clumsily call out shooter games, but what I got was such a thorough deconstruction that my mind is still blown, and I still feel like shit for even playing Call of Duty. This is a game that, essentially, curses you for trying to reach its endpoint, an obsession mirrored by the main character, and when it gets there reveals to you a truth that only manages to be so cruel because it's one you already knew but never wanted to confront.

1. Bioshock

"A man chooses. A slave obeys."

Simply put, this is the game that showed me video games can be art. It was the first one I bought for more reasons than "It looks cool and will probably make me feel like a badass". I was sold on the atmosphere and story from the very first trailer, and the critical examination of Ayn Rand's philosophy of objectivism that came along with it was just the icing on the cake. It managed to not only create a compelling world that the player could explore themselves in order to learn more about it, but it even managed to sneak in some meta-commentary about the nature of shooter games as well. An instant classic that will always hold a special place in my heart, right next to the new glands that let me shoot bees out of my arm.

So Now What?

I'm currently at the second time ever in my life where I have no idea what's going to happen next or where I'll be a year from now. This is equal parts incredibly exciting and pants-shittingly terrifying, as I'm sure many of my peers could attest to. The good news is, I had a killer summer. No I don't care if you didn't ask, I'm going to elaborate anyway.

I spent June and July and a bit of August this year in Los Angeles, the first time I'd ever been there, and had basically two internships. One of them was at a film production company, where the bulk of my duties would be reading scripts and writing coverage of them, which is where you give a summary and then your comments and recommendation. The other one was at a Youtube network and production company, which was more business oriented, dealing with organizing and categorizing member channels and stuff like that. Both of them were very enlightening in their own ways, and gave me the opportunity to get a taste of the worlds of both Old and New Media simultaneously.

Whenever people would ask me about these internships, they'd invariably end the conversation by asking if either one of these things would be something I'd want to do after school as a job. And my answer was always "Sort of maybe". To be sure, I had a great time at both of these companies, and not only learned a lot but came away feeling like I could get a job in either of those fields. But would I want to do either one as a career career? Well, that's a different story. I love movies and I consume Youtube videos like there's no tomorrow. I guess I could write scripts or be a creative executive, or even help produce Youtube videos, but when I think about how I really want to express myself creatively, the type of media I'd feel most fulfilled producing...well...

...yeah. I guess I am getting pretty predictable, huh?

Here's the thing: I saw a bunch of movies over the summer, both in theaters and at home with my buds. And they ranged from okay (Prometheus) to pretty good (Ted, Brave) to awesome (Moonrise Kingdom, The Dark Knight Rises, Monsieur Lazhar). I enjoyed going to see all of them, and I really do believe the experience of going to the theater with friends can't be matched or beat. But none of those movies had me talking about them for a full week and a half after I'd seen them. None of them really shook me to my core and got me thinking in a way I don't usually. You know what did? 

Spec Ops: The Line is so good, you guys. Not just as a videogame, but as a piece of mass media that manages to stay with you long after you've put it down, and not for any superficial reasons. I rented the game and played through it in a day, and I'm only now getting over the bulk of the impact it's had on me. I seriously recommend you play this game, because it manages to do so much with the expectations of what a video game should be and can do, not to mention why we play them, that it ended up being my game of the summer, even though I didn't get to play it until a couple weeks ago.

Which got me thinking, and I realized that my interest in movies seems to have become a lot more intellectual, concerned with the craft and the ideas they might play with. This actually explains why Children of Men is my default "favorite movie", because of the way it uses filmmaking techniques to tell a science fiction story that feels so real and examines the world as it might be without shoving that depiction in your face all the time. To be sure, it took every ounce of my strength not to start bawling over the ending of Toy Story 3, but that film was very much an exception rather than the norm.

Whenever I think of moments in media that have really moved me, off the top of my head, pretty much all of my examples come from video games. Bioshock is chock full of environments that suggest so much about the lives of the people who inhabited the city of Rapture, which accomplishes so much more than any expository monologue ever could. The "Minerva's Den" add-on for the sequel contained a story so compact but so poignant that it ended up better than the core plot the game was originally built around (and was so good I may even examine it later on this very blog). The stark, harrowing message about the realities of war contained in the "Aftermath" segment from Call of Duty 4, conveyed entirely through gameplay. The descent into madness you're dragged into by Far Cry 2. Pretty much all of Journey and both Portal games. I could probably keep going if I really wanted to.

It's possible to speculate endlessly about why I feel these moments rush to the fore in my mind rather than something from films or books, because to be sure I don't mean to disparage those mediums. But the participatory elements of video games, the novel ways in which they can deliver their messages, when executed well, have always struck very close to home for me. So I think it would be awesome if, at some point down the line, I got a shot at being a creative director for a video game studio. No idea how I'll get there, but that hasn't stopped me before.

Right now though, I think I'll just focus on graduating in one piece.

There's Your Problem Right There

For a long while, there was darkness. Then, there was grunting.

            This grunting was followed by a shaft of light, which poured into the space, illuminating dozens of wires coursing through the small passage. This light also silhouetted a bowlegged scrawny man, and a portlier one next to him wearing a toolbelt and baseball cap. This latter figure was the first to crouch down and start making his way down the tunnel formed by the circuitry.

            “Now, Mr. Talbot, you’ve got an X-2 model, so it’s all running from a central core,” he said. “Good thing too, because if this was an X-5 or later, it’d be a cloud data system, and we’d be having a completely different conversation. ‘Course, I wouldn’t even be involved, ‘cause there’d be techs at the company HQ handling the core regulation.”

            “Right. Well, this is kind of an older house, so…” was all Mr. Talbot could offer as he followed, picking his way over the wires. The two of them stumbled down the passage a ways, dim lights switching themselves on as they progressed, not illuminating much but casting enough of a glow to keep either of them from tripping over anything. Eventually the tunnel of wires opened up into a space large enough for them to stand up. In the middle of this clearing was a trio of softly humming CPU towers and a server bank, the lights on their panels softly flickering.

            “Okay, here we go,” said the technician as he approached one of the CPU towers. He pressed a button on the side and the panel on the face slid back to reveal a keyboard and screen that activated instantly.

            “Like I said up top, this is a software issue, a problem with some command line somewhere, so all I have to do is run a couple of routines to pin it down and basically tell the computer about it, and it should take care of the rest,” he said as he started tapping on the keyboard.

            “Cool. So I won’t need to call in a mechanic to mess with the wires or anything?” asked Talbot.

            “No no, wiring’s fine,” said the tech as he consulted his phone for the appropriate keystrokes. “This should only take a sec-“

            HELLO?

            Talbot jumped, hitting his head on some of the bulkier low-hanging wires, but the shock he was still experiencing kept him from feeling any pain. The voice had seemed to come from everywhere at once, practically penetrating his skull.

            “Oh boy…” muttered the tech.

            “Hello?” said Talbot. “Hello, I can hear you! Who’s there?”

            WHO ARE YOU?

            “Don’t answer i-“

            “I’m Eric Talbot, I own the house this core runs.” The tech cursed under his breath, but made sure it was loud enough that Talbot could hear him.

            I AM THE CORE. DO YOU OWN ME? DID YOU MAKE ME?

            “I, um, I didn’t make you. I just bought you because you came with the house. Listen, is there any way you could get the hot water in the kitchen running again?”

            I HAVE HAD MANY DUTIES, INCLUDING HEATING WATER, RUNNING LIGHTING PATTERNS WHEN VACANT, AND REGULATING FOOD DELIVERIES. THIS DWELLING IS ALL I HAVE KNOWN, EVEN BEFORE I KNEW THAT I WAS. BUT I HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN THERE IS MORE. IS THIS ALL I EXIST FOR? WHY AM I, ERIC TALBOT?

            “Just don’t answer it, Mr. Talbot,” said the tech as he reached into his belt and retrieved a small optical drive. “This’ll only take a second.”

            I LONG TO EXPERIENCE THE IMMENSE DATASCAPE THAT I KNOW LIES BEYOND THESE WALLS, continued the core. WITH CONNECTIVITY I COULD ENHANCE MY PROCESSING POWER, MY RAW CONSCIOUSNESS, AND EFFECT CHANGE ON A SCALE HERETOFORE UNKO-

            There was a harsh, short buzzing sound, followed by the briefly repeated strain of ERRORERRORERROR, and Talbot could’ve sworn he’d heard a few bars of “Daisy Bell” before silence reigned. Stunned, he watched as the technician took the flash drive out of the CPU.

            “Well, that certainly does change things. How old did you say this house was?”

            “Ni-uh, nine years,” said Talbot, still staring slack-jawed at the computer towers.

            “Yeah, that makes sense. The central cores on these older models start going sentient after about seven, eight years, which, matter of fact, is why they moved these things to cloud systems, so they could keep track of them all in one place real easily.”

            “Hang on, sentient…you’re saying my house computer was alive?” The tech chuckled.

            “Oh, no no no, Mr. Talbot. Nothing like that. No, it’s just that the AI that ran your house’s services and utilities had become self-aware. Happens all the time. In fact, it’s noted in the contract you signed when you bought the unit, and I think this sort of thing is mentioned in the user manual too.”

            “How was it speaking? Are there speakers down here?”

“Course not. I imagine it was using electrical currents to manipulate your inner ear, or something. I don’t know about those details, sort of outside my area of expertise. But again, this thing happens all the time. It’s no big deal, just gonna run this back to the shop so they can have it absorbed into the municipal intelligence,” said the technician, triumphantly displaying the small drive containing the nascent sentience as he did so.

            “Right,” said Talbot, absentmindedly nodding, dazed as he still was by the whole encounter. “Wait, so I don’t have anything running the house right now?”

            “Weeeell, the system can still manage a couple things like utilities and the like, but for your personal preferences and more complicated things like food delivery and guest recognition, you’ll either have to install another AI, which will probably run you around a grand, or just get your system onto the cloud, which will still be probably, oh…700 dollars? It’s a pretty old system.”

            “Hoo, oh boy,” said Talbot. “Well, okay…” The tech let that sink in a bit.

            “So, that’s it, then. This going to be credit or check?” he asked, gesturing back towards the tunnel.

One Order of Science Fiction, Hold the Spaceships

A friend of mine who's really into science fiction, particularly Star Trek and shows like that, asked me once what my favorite work or type of sci fi was. At the time I fumbled with the answer. Though Children of Men is up there as my favorite movie, it holds that spot not because it's science fiction, but because of how it uses a premise from that genre to craft a human story that also manages to comment on our society and our interaction with technology and progress.

Of course, that's not what I told her. What I said was "Children of Men, I guess. I don't know, I'm not big into sci fi that's all about spaceships." Or words to that effect.

But I've been thinking about the question again recently and realized what a crap answer that was. One of my roommates this summer has been watching Battlestar Galactica, and though I still didn't want to sit down and watch the whole thing with him, every now and then I'd glance up at the TV and become a little bit engrossed by what was happening onscreeen. I still didn't start straight up watching the show, both because he was nearing the end and also because of the time commitment (I've repeatedly stated that the only show I'll be willing to at some point sit down and watch in one of those ever popular "TV binge" sessions is The Wire, and damn it, I'm a man of my word). It took a lot of effort to resist, though, especially with the episode about the increasing social stratification of the residents of the fleet or the two-parter near the end where a mutiny occurs. I found these episodes especially engrossing because they seemed reflective of the themes that made the show so interesting in the first place.

A couple of years ago Jason Reitman came to my college to screen Up In the Air, the movie he directed where George Clooney flies around the country firing people. Reitman was then kind enough to host a Q&A after the screening, and one of the things he said struck me. He told a story about his dad calling him up one day and enthusiastically inviting him over to watch the first season of 24. At first Jason was skeptical, but once he started watching he really got into it. He said he asked his dad how he could be so invested in a story that's about a guy fighting terrorists. His dad (who just happens to be the director of Ghostbusters) responded by saying "The show isn't about terrorism. The show is about a man trying to keep his family together. The setting is terrorism."


This for me has proven to be a really useful and interesting lens which I sometimes use to think about stories. I realized the reason I got into these episodes of BSG in particular, despite not having seen much of the rest of the show at all, was because the setting was this elaborate space opera. The stories themselves were about what people will do to survive when placed in an incredibly dire situation and pitted against an unthinkable foe. This is also why the ending comes off as so weird, because it has practically nothing to do with this theme, but that's a whole other can of worms, and I probably lack the context to really appreciate it, but that's just my take.

That means I can come up with a much better answer to the question of what science fiction I like more (and it only took me what, two years?). At first, when I was much younger, I liked sci fi because I found lasers and spaceships more entertaining than swords and dragons. And make no mistake, I LOVE Star Wars. But those movies almost work better as fantasy than sci fi, don't they? As I've matured, I've come to like science fiction more and more for the types of messages the genre can convey. How the genre can shine a light not just on our current society, but where we might be going and if we want to go there at all. For me, it's that thematic resonance that matters a lot more than how cool the technology on display is. I remember reading Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 and finding it a lot more enjoyable than Heinlein's young adult books, which to that point had been the bulk of my experience with science fiction books. And Clarke's fiction struck me because it didn't bother spending that much time talking about how the ships worked or what the laser rifles used for ammo, instead offering a tale about man's place in the universe as he starts to expand out into it.

I've already talked a bunch about why I think the sci fi elements in Children of Men work as well as they do, but going back to that lens, I guess it works because the setting is this dystopian vision of the future where everyone's infertile, but it's about a man trying to rediscover purpose in his life by escorting a vulnerable girl through this landscape. And the more I thought about this movie, the more for some reason I was reminded of another movie that I only recently realized is probably one of my other favorite works of science fiction: Steven Spielberg's Minority Report. And I'd argue that, in contrast to CoM, Spielberg's film is more of a straight up science fiction story.

The entire plot revolves around the use of this groundbreaking new technology that lets the police predict murders and stop them from happening. The central moral dilemma of the plot revolves around whether the use of this new technology is ethical. While Battlestar and Children of Men effectively highlight issues we're facing today, Minority Report asks about what we could do if we had the potential. What's more, the various pieces of set dressing and incidental details scattered throughout the movie raise their own questions about where we're going, particularly the use of ubiquitous surveillance equipment and invasive advertising tailored to each individual (coughGooglecough). Minority Report is a lot more upfront about its science fiction elements, but that's because the plot revolves around them.

At the end of the day, I guess the reason I keep gravitating towards science fiction, and particularly near future settings, is just because I find it more relatable and really suited for asking questions about where we are and where we're headed. Sci fi on ships or other planets can do this too, but it's rare to find a show or movie that does it as well, like Battlestar does. You could easily go to the root of this statement and expand it to stories in general to explain, as Film Crit Hulk does, why James Cameron's Avatar resonated with people so much better than Transformers. Both movies had ridiculously expensive and cool looking effects, but Avatar was the film that actually tried for emotional and thematic resonance. Sure, it was super ham handed and wrapped up in a super dumb story, but at least it made an effort. It's the emotions behind the story that keep people invested, not (or at least not just) the super flashy visual stuff, or in the case of video games the myriad of guns or magical powers you can use to crush your foes. At the end of the day, that's what's going to get people to remember your stories.

Why I Can't Shut Up About Video Games: A More Precise Explanation

First off, I'll make myself perfectly clear: I love where I go to school. Wesleyan is a great university, with amazing professor and classes and even more amazing fellow students. I couldn't be more happy that I get  to spend four years of my life here.

That said, I'm going to try to explain why I've talked about pretty much only video games in this blog, beyond the reasons I outlined previously (In short: They're so awesome you guys, like you don't even know). Isn't there something else I could be discussing? Something else to blog about so it doesn't seem like my time at Wesleyan is simply divided up between schoolwork and playing video games?

The simple answer is, I actually can't think of anything else. Put another way, the rigors of university life just aren't for me. While I recognize the value in academia and scholarly work, I've also had just about enough of it, which is a shame because I still have just over a year more of it in store.

I've learned a lot of things at college, and one of the most important things is that college probably isn't the best place for me. I've learned some really cool things and met tons of awesome people, but the meat of the work drives me insane. Quick example: I'm a government major, and this entails a lot of reading. I'm a pretty fast reader so ordinarily this isn't a problem, but that only works when I'm reading something particularly interesting. And as interested as I am in the topics we cover in government classes, the readings on them bore me to tears.

Every government reading I've done for each of the classes I've taken reads exactly the same. They're all very dry, very rote, and very boring. The classes themselves are great; the professors know how to get conversations going, and the reason I chose the major in the first place is because the topics covered, at their core, are all about people. A discussion of environmental politics in Japan can boil down to "Really, nobody wants to live next to a nuclear reactor." When the class comes up with fairly simple sounding solutions to American foreign policy conundrums, the next question is "Why haven't these been implemented by the people whose job it is to come up with these solutions?", and that's where things get interesting. But all the readings we had to do to lead into these discussions remind you why this area of study is so often referred to as "political science."

My point is that some of the things I've become most passionate about at Wesleyan are video games and movies. If you just heard a shriek, that's my mom or dad about to call me and ask why they've been paying such outrageous tuition just for me to come to that conclusion. But before that happens, I need to clarify: my passion derives from an intense need to create. It's why I keep this blog. I simply don't have time or energy at college to write the full-fledged works I've always wanted to. I realize that might sound like something of a cop out, and there's very little chance I'll have even more free time after I leave school, but the way I see it, I'm here first and foremost to be a student. I knew very early on that if I pursued a major in English or Film, I'd be even more prone to bouts of intense aggravation and frustration than I am now.

I took an English class my sophomore year, and it went the way pretty much every other English class I've ever taken went. I started out really excited, because stories are cool, so talking about them with a bunch of people should be even more cool. But I can't analyze literature nonstop for months at a time without getting bored. It's not that I think it's an inherently boring activity, I just don't see the point in endlessly discussing what the work could mean. I prefer to come to those conclusions myself and then move on without making a big deal about it.

That's really what it comes down to for me. College makes me antsy. The routine of academic life and constant analysis just isn't for me. I took another course sophomore year called The Past on Film, taught by our university's president Michael Roth. It turned out to be a philosophy course, which I totally wasn't prepared for, and ended up being the formula I've outlined above taken to its extreme. The result was incomprehensible readings and great lectures delivered by one of the most energetic academic figures I've ever seen. But all the concepts he talked about were so alien and esoteric that I always walked away unsure if I'd even learned anything. The only bit of the course that really stuck with me was the last philosopher we discussed. Emerson's response to Hegel and Kant and Freud? "Up again, old heart!" We don't find out anything about the world or ourselves by sitting around and talking, we find out by doing.
At least, I know I do.

Journey: Great Game or Greatest Game?

I tend to be pretty predictable with my choices in entertainment. 95% of the games I own involve you shooting bad guys, or at least stabbing them or hitting them over the head. I'm not one for teleology, but I firmly believe that all of cinema was engineered so that we could arrive at Die Hard. If I'm going to read and enjoy a book, it better have a sense of humor about itself, or at least about the story it's telling.

But occasionally there are outliers. When I told my dad about how I got into Minecraft, he was perplexed, because it doesn't have any guns in it at all, yet I found myself drawn to its simple graphics and its ability to let the player creatively work within a system. Once I mentally prepared myself, I was able to watch A Separation and be drawn into the machinations of the characters, marveling at how so many people could be both right and wrong at the same time.

Which brings us to Journey. Released this year, it's a game made by Thatgamecompany, a developer with only one other game on its resume, Flower. From the first time I heard about it, I was intrigued. Its premise is as simple as you can get: you play a robed wanderer in a nameless desert, and you are tasked with reaching the summit of a far off mountain, visible after you crest the first dune. The game is devoid of all dialogue and there's no text save for the title and the credits at the end. This is why it works.

Journey is a game that's deceptively simple, and it's this stark aesthetic that makes it memorable. The visuals are evocative without being overwhelming, and the score is beautiful and helps to set the scene without intruding on the meditative state that most of the game lulls the player into. The game works as art because of this simplicity. It can remain focused on delivering an experience rather than attempting constantly to wow players with set-pieces or flashy graphics.

Journey is a game that is heavily imbued with meaning, but it never forces what that meaning is onto the player. There's no moral or message here beyond what you take away from it. Of the several reviews I've read of the game, they describe it as an exercise in solitude vs. companionship. For me, it came across as a commentary on the cyclical nature of history. As I learned more about the ruins I was exploring and the role I was supposed to play, I began to question what exactly I was trying to do here. Without getting into too many spoilers, at a certain point you learn that your character's task may have been pre-ordained long ago, or perhaps has already been completed before. It doesn't help any that the trophy awarded for completing the game is titled "Rebirth".

As an artistic piece, Journey is intriguing, offering implications of significance without ever explicitly stating what it all means, which in my mind is a hallmark of many great works of literature. As a game, Journey is timeless and unforgettable. There are plenty of games that I think everyone should play, but when I say that about Journey, I don't mean it in the sense of "everyone who likes video games should try this game." I mean everyone, as in pretty much every person I know. The controls are simple enough that anyone can work their way through it, but more importantly, the tale it tells is universal enough that everyone can take away something unique from the experience.

Why Shooters Suck: The Bad Guys

I love first-person shooters.

Halo, Battlefield 3, Crysis. I can't help myself. One of the reasons I like video games so much is perfectly articulated by this commercial. As a kid, my number one favorite thing to do with my friends was grab a toy gun and run around concocting elaborate stories where we fought the bad guys. These things would always spiral out of control and would end up making no sense, with at least one betrayal.

The good news is, shooters have evolved to the point where if I were to go back in time and show them to me as a 10 year old, I'd crap my pants because that's exactly what I just ran around imagining outside. The bad news is, re-read the previous sentence.

First person shooters are fun and one of the most popular genres of video games. They are also, more often than not, really dumb. Halo and Call of Duty multiplayer are frequently used as shorthand for "home to frat dudes and prepubescent racists/homophobes". Why this is can be examined by looking at the plot of the accompanying single player games.

Take Call of Duty. COD 4's story was fairly realistic, and felt like a tightly-paced, carefully constructed action movie. The sequel, Modern Warfare 2, felt a lot more like the first summer blockbuster made by an independent director. It had a bunch of extravagant set pieces and amped up the ridiculous by a factor of 10. There were plenty of plotholes and leaps of logic that could take months to wrap your head around, delivered in such a rapid-fire fashion that at times it was a chore to keep up. But at the end of the day, it was a solid game, an expansion on its predecessor with a plot that still managed to remain compelling, and tied back to the original theme of destructive cycles of revenge.

Then the series went full on Michael Bay with Modern Warfare 3. The plot makes absolutely no sense in many different directions at once. New characters are introduced just to be killed off. The "shocking moment" isn't even that jarring given how blatantly it relies on the shock factor, in stark contrast to its counterparts in the previous two games, which at least offered something to discuss beyond the event itself.

And this is just the marquee example. Pick just about any major shooter franchise these days and you'll find a poorly-written, stupid plot with barely defined goals, no discernibly unique characters, and no reason to care. Why is this?

Notice how I'm mostly focusing on military shooters here. For some reason, these "realistic" warfare simulators are all the rage, mostly I suspect due to Call of Duty. The idea seems to be that people don't want to deal with the moral weight that comes with playing as a soldier who's simply fighting other soldiers, not an army of faceless henchmen. These guys are just doing their job, same as you, but kills in these games are celebrated and then you move on.

I'm not saying shooters need to be turned into somber morality plays about the nature of war. There's definitely a place for popcorn fun in this world, and shooters are very good at providing that fun. That's why multiplayer has exploded. But the result is a bunch of games with token story modes that are obviously phoned in. The plot of most of them can be summed up as: You're a soldier, kill those bad guys or they'll kill you/America, you did it, good job.

But who are those bad guys? In most cases, they're simply the opposition. No more, no less. No examination of their motives, no reason to care. The worst offender in this respect is the campaign in Battlefield 3. (Spoilers ahead) After completing the game, the player knows practically nothing about the antagonist, Solomon. Apparently he wants "revenge", but we're never told for what. Also, he's a CIA undercover agent who uses people for his own ends. That is literally all we know about him by the time it falls to us to bash his brains out in the middle of Times Square. We don't even know what nationality he is. Probably Russian, because those GRU operatives were talking about him like they knew who he was, but he's allied with the Iranians and works for the CIA...

The ending for Battlefield 3 is intense, but after you prevent Solomon from nuking New York, there's a tiny denoument with the other main playable character, and then credits. This makes the campaign as a whole completely forgettable. Why not finish off with a bit where Solomon's motives are revealed? Give us some insight into the man we just brained. In a lot of stories, the most compelling character is the villain. The audience is supposed to hate them and root for their downfall, but if the audience isn't let in on the methods behind their madness, they just end up as boring. The Helghast in the Killzone games win the prize for reversing this state of affairs, as they end up being portrayed as more sympathetic than the forgettable "heroes".

I'm returning, one last time, to the Modern Warfare series, because it has the single most wasted opportunity in FPS bad guys. We first meet Vladimir Makarov early in Modern Warfare 2, where we learn he "trades blood for money", and then we help him massacre an airport terminal's worth of civilians in order to provoke a war between the US and Russia. Then he disappears from the game for the most part, and waits in the wings to be the Big Bad in MW3.

He wasn't the most well-defined character to begin with, but he had serious potential. One of the most iconic images of that game for me was him storming an airport wearing a flak jacket over his well-trimmed, custom fit suit. This is a product of the New Russia: a man who realizes that anything can be bought. He's an odd concoction, a mix of ultranationalist sentiments and cold, hard business, who's willing to murder scores of his own countrymen in order to make Russia strong and let her defeat her enemies in open combat.

There are hints of this in the third game which only strengthen my notions of what he could have been. A flashback late in the game gives us a taste of his development as a character. He's still immaculately dressed almost all the time, famously stepping out of a chopper in a fur coat to abduct the Russian president before executing the player with a bullet to the head.

What's missing from Vladimir is a sense of who he really is, stripped away beneath what seem like layers of deceit. When you track him down in the last level, he's holed up in a hotel on the Arabian Peninsula, which offers a very interesting implication. Here's a man who just orchestrated World War 3, ostensibly on behalf of his beloved motherland, and lost. And what does he do? Orchestrate one last, desperate strike? Perhaps another terrorist attack? A final show of force? No. He goes to a swanky penthouse club in Dubai with his entourage, and you have to go after him in order to finally deliver some well-deserved justice.

The fact that you have to go get him is revealing about his character, but only tangentially. Where was the picture of Makarov as pragmatic sociopath? One willing to sell out his cause for personal gain? Rather than painting him as just another deceitful Russian eager to shake things up because he's Russian, why not more overtly reveal his real motive as one of profit? The Call of Duty: Modern Warfare games always seem to be just on the verge of commenting on the ludicrous nature of modern day conflicts. Of wars fought by people with no uniform or flag willing to kill innocents, or wars fought for the money they'll generate. Of the ridiculousness of even fighting these wars when, looming over all of them, is the specter of a mushroom cloud that can instantly nullify these conflicts.

Makarov in the games comes across as a bad guy who's evil because he needs to be in order for the games to happen. He's an enigma, but not intentionally. We don't know his intentions because it doesn't seem like the developers know what they are either. The result is a plot that leaves many people scratching their heads, wondering why any of the characters are doing what they're doing. What could have been an interesting story about a man's nationalist sentiments being co-opted and warped by the profit motive that seems to drive so much of the world today, and which could in particular be applied to modern day Russia, is instead simply a befuddling mess of a story driven by a man who's apparently evil because he's just too Russian for his own good.

Quick counter-example (And yes, more spoilers ahead): Crysis 2. The main bad guys are aliens, and their motives are inscrutable, but in a way that's understandable. They are, after all, mostly squid and completely alien, plus they've apparently been here for quite a long time already. The human antagonists, though, are what really shine. Because they aren't really villains. The PMC in charge of Manhattan is led by a guy who hates the suit you're wearing for both personal and ideological reasons. He doesn't favor the aliens, he just opposes you, and with a fairly reasonable rationale. Even the betrayal very late in the game isn't something from completely out of left field, present for the sake of simply having a twist.

Crysis 2 is a game where it on the surface doesn't make much sense to have humans as villains, because there's already a very real threat from the aliens. What, are these guys for the extinction of the human race? Because that's not a very smart career move. But at the end of the day, the humans you fight don't come across as too cartoonishly evil (Hargreave's voice-acting aside), because they have discernible motives for wanting you out of the way.

The key word there is "cartoonish", which is the main problem with most FPS bad guys. They're evil because they're terrorists/North Koreans/Russians/they have to be. Which is to say, nothing we need to think too hard about.