Why Old Spice Wins at Marketing

If you are reading this blog, then you have seen this ad. That is just a statistical fact, and ordinarily I don't trust math, because it's performed by people who are interested in math, and therefore clearly have something deeply, intensely wrong with their brains. Those people should go see a brain doctor at once.

Anyway, that ad. It was just the first of many. It showed up 3 years ago and blew everyone away to such an extent that they're still going strong. All of these ads feature ridiculous effects and sharp writing that serve to get one message across clear as day: Use Old Spice and you will be the manliest of men. And we, the makers of Old Spice, know this.

It's that second part that is key to the success of Old Spice's marketing. Most other ads that take this tack, both before and after the revelation that was "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like", have tried to use the first part to varying effect. As an example, I would offer up every ad for pickup trucks ever made. It's a truism of advertising that you aren't just selling a product, you're selling an idea. When people make a decision to buy something they consider the act a sort of personal statement, and brands naturally recognize this. This is why successful marketing manages to tap into feelings that can transcend the obvious trappings of the product being sold. I don't watch sports, let alone soccer, but Nike has made tons of commercials centered around the game that I consider among my favorites of all time. This isn't just because of their impressive production values or the novel concepts they have as their premises. It's because they realize that soccer can be about so much more than just kicking a ball around a field. The ads are really about things like success being earned and not just granted, or how at the end of the day, our future is ours to determine.

Most ads, of course, aren't quite so high minded. Selling pick up trucks requires an emphasis on the fact that this truck is going to make you strong and powerful because it is big. That's about it. When they have done something similar to those Nike ads, they're still about how tough the people who buy (and make) these trucks are. Take a good long look at that commercial. It's selling an idealized vision of a lifestyle that has become marginalized in real life by agribusiness and gigantic factory farms, but the vision of a hardscrabble, salt of the earth farmer is so ingrained in the popular subconscious that the commercial can effectively use it as a shorthand for manliness, which they then link to the truck. The message is clear: buy a Ram pickup, and you will be as rough and tough as these grainy pictures we're flashing across the screen.

Old Spice, on the other hand, realizes there are more and more people becoming more aware of the tricks of the trade of marketing. The solution to this conundrum isn't self-deprecation: people aren't going to buy something if you tell them it's crap, because you're making it, so you would know better than anyone. The solution, rather, is to go in the exact opposite direction as hard as you can. Underlying all of the Old Spice commercials is the tacit acknowledgement that yes, the idea that a body spray can grant you the physique of a god is ridiculous. But that idea is also so hilarious that it becomes ripe for parody in a cavalcade of outrageous and hilarious commercials.

Old Spice ads don't just grab people's attention through their overload of images and crazy concepts. They speak to a self-awareness that is permeating a lot of the media that absolutely saturates our culture. Their philosophy is to take the implicit claims of other "manly" marketing campaigns and make them explicit, which manages to both defuse and win the argument at the same time. Ram can't claim with a straight face that buying one of their trucks will imbue you with the spirit of centuries of wizened cattle ranchers, but they can very heavily imply it. Old Spice explicitly says that using their body spray will enable you to win all the first place medals and live forever through your line of premium table crackers. My roommate once noted that a lot of commercials are just weird from an objective standpoint, because they're set in a world where the product being advertised is the most important thing in the life of the characters involved. Having bad teeth in a commercial for toothpaste is basically asking to be thrown in jail for making children everywhere burst into tears every time you open your ugly mouth. Old Spice takes this to its logical conclusion by making the men who use it in commercials into mythical heroes who can turn tickets into diamonds because they smell so good.

You just can't beat that. Being ridiculous on that same level for your product won't really work, because Old Spice already did that (and did it pretty much perfectly), and most other traditional ads pale in comparison. The Old Spice ads are brilliant because they manage to be almost perfect satires of a lot of other commercials, and even if you don't catch on to this, they still work because they're so well made and written. Old Spice has managed to both deconstruct and reconstruct the idea of marketing products as "manly", a feat that could obviously be accomplished only by a man who smells like freshly cut wood being used to build a boat for conquering the deadliest ocean.

Okay, I lied. Dos Equis does it well, too. You know what, forget everything I just wrote up there. The key to selling products is a deep voice. Get a dude with a deep, powerful voice, and everyone will buy whatever you're selling. There, done. Marketing: Solved. You're welcome, New York.

This Is What War Looks Like

Zero Dark Thirty was criticized for tacitly glorifying torture. There's an argument that the film's presentation of the act being performed by the protagonist and other supporting characters on her side in the service of the search for Osama Bin Laden ultimately paints a more forgiving picture of the use of "enhanced interrogation" techniques. They might not be 100 percent reliable, but they get results, and at the end of the day they led to a successful raid against a mass murderer, a fact every audience is very aware of as they take their seats.

This is true.

The reply to this argument could be phrased as: while torture was used and some intelligence was gained from it, the film takes great pains to show these practices in unflinching detail. The viewer isn't meant to come around to a position of supporting the use of these methods, but they are necessary for understanding the full history of the war on terror and the search for bin Laden. They are there not in the service of propaganda, but rather of cinema verite, further reinforced by the documentary style in which the film is shot.

This is also true.

******

The Nazis and Japanese soldiers of World War II era action and adventure films, both contemporary works and more modern ones, are basically an amorphous blob of clones. They talk funny and all dress the same, and history has vindicated the wickedness of their cause, so go ahead and shoot about eleventy billion of them to prove how awesome you, the hero, are in the face of overwhelming odds. It's no surprise that some of the first video games to feature the player shooting humans and not aliens or demons saw Nazis as the targets. The National Socialist party was one of the most evil movements of the 20th century, and the conflict in question really did see scores of men charging at each other across fields and down bombed-out city streets. These images and the soldiers like Audie Murphy that spawned them were canonized as modern day warrior-saints, and subsequently elevated to the position of epic heroes like Hercules or Odysseus.

World War II has provided so many irresistible images that it has become the template of choice for politicians to use when arguing for war. Appeasement at Munich was the example provided to urge action in Vietnam and Iraq. After all, the Greatest Generation proved themselves in war, why can't we? I mean, if we couldn't, then how could we be Great, right?

*****

Nukes and TV (then later the internet) have ensured that we don't get to have our own World War II. The threat of mutually assured destruction from total war is too great to allow for that kind of conflict, first of all. But just as importantly, the world has shrunk. It's hard -not impossible, but still very hard- to label entire swathes of the world as vicious and savage when you can find out about what they're really like relatively easily. It's even harder to do this when you're supposed to be the good guys because you beat the bad guys who did just that in order to justify genocide on a previously unheard of scale.

9/11 was an evil act that killed thousands of innocents, but it wasn't perpetrated by a singular nation state, or even one definitive group of people. The perpetrators might be more accurately likened to a cult, both in their devotion to a warped creed and the manner in which they operate. But who's going to pay billions of dollars to mobilize the American war machine to go to war with a cult? And just as important, are you really going to sell what happened to the American people as the actions of a relatively small and messed up portion of the Earth's population? Will that be enough to rile them up in the face of this overwhelming attack? No, you're going to need a force of pure evil, formless but deadly. The problem, of course, is that they happen to look just like regular people. That, in fact, is a key component of their strategy.

We can wage war on armies quite well, better than anyone else in fact. But how the hell do you fight a war against people?

*****

The first scene of Zero Dark Thirty occurs over a black screen as audio from phone calls and radio dispatches culled from the events of September 11, 2001 play. The image of the towers on fire has been overused to the point of banality. Just over a decade out, it's hard for most people to feel much more than odd pangs of reminiscence when they see it. This audio, however, is not only fresh but effective. It's a singularly terrible human experience diluted to its essence, and accomplishes in just a minute or so what no bloated montage could hope to. Immediately after this, we cut to a scene of the main characters torturing a man. Not even a terrorist, but a middle man who handled finances for other terrorists. There is no soundtrack and the loud echoing of the interrogator's harsh commands all lend the scene a brutal immediacy. We can't help but sympathize for the captive, despite the fact that he helped murder 3000 innocent people, as the interrogator is quick to point out.

We don't know how to feel, and that's really the point. The truth is that the war on terror is such a complex mess of morally gray areas that there is no narrative that neatly fits it. In some cases, America kind of is the evil empire taking on the underdog rebels, which is supposed to make us the bad guys. In many others, we are the battered but still standing bastion of freedom staring down a violent fanaticism. We can be both and neither at the same time because the truth is there aren't ever just good guys and bad guys. At the end of the day, we're all just guys. And girls, fine, but you get the point.

*****

Commander Vimes, head of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch from Terry Pratchett's Discworld, is a great cop not just because he's diligent about enforcing the law, but because he's willing to ask himself if the law is worth enforcing. When his hometown is all set to be embroiled in a war with a far away, vaguely Middle-Eastern country, he at last manages to do the only sensible action available and moves to arrest both of the armies for attempting to commit the greatest crime of all; starting a war.

My Top 10 Everything Else

In this post I discussed the ten video games that have had the greatest impact on me, partially to get people inside my head but also as a way of showcasing what I saw as some of the most triumphant examples of the medium. This post right here is a lot more focused on that first part. What follows are the top 10 pieces of media that have stuck with me the longest and are also probably the most influential when it comes to my creative output. Again, this isn't supposed to be a list of favorites, and certainly not of bests. Just what's stuck with me the most at the end of the day.

10. My Neighbor Totoro

"Next stop, little sister!"

This is one of the first films I can ever remember watching that I can still point to as a legitimately great movie more than a decade after I first saw it. It was one of those VHS tapes that was just on repeat for a couple of weeks, which seems to be the preferred method of movie-watching for most people below the age of five. Re-watching it again a couple years ago was like seeing an old friend again and finding out that they were exactly as cool as you remember them from last time you met. A serene, charming peek into the life of two young girls struggling with life in a new home away from their ailing mother that serves not just as a fantasy for children but a reminder of what it's like to be a kid in the first place. There's a very good reason Hayao Miyazaki is considered the American Walt Disney, and it's not just because his films are animated.

9. The Dark Tower

"The man in black fled across the desert,

and the gunslinger followed."

I read all 7 books of the Dark Tower cycle over the course of my freshman and sophomore years in high school. Part of this was driven by curiosity over such an ambitious work, one that Stephen King himself considers more like a novel spanning a thousand pages rather than numerous separate stories. The other part was fascination with the idea that an author who cranked out as many stories as King did could try and construct a universe that would encompass all of them in some fashion or another. As I worked through the books, however, what kept me coming back was the way he tried to blend such disparate genres as the western, horror, romance, political drama, and more, producing an unforgettable world that took my preconceived notions of what "fantasy" was and shot them full of holes. The Dark Tower showed me that there's no reason to let yourself become pigeon-holed into one type of story or one genre in particular. If you believe in the vision, no matter how crazy, pursue it to the ends of the world.

8. Fullmetal Alchemist

"Humankind cannot gain anything without first giving something in return. To obtain, something of equal value must be lost. That is alchemy's First Law of Equivalent Exchange. In those days, we really believed that to be the world's one, and only, truth."

This was the only anime series I actually followed semi-religiously. Part of this was thanks to the fact that it aired on Adult Swim, which made it relatively easy to find time to watch. The other reason was because it appealed to me in a way other shows didn't. I didn't watch a whole lot of anime, but this was a show that caught my gaze and held it. Maybe it was the setting, set on an alternate history Earth in a country modeled off of World War I era Germany where alchemy is widely practiced and regulated by the state. Maybe it was the memorable characters or the political drama that occurred alongside the standard battle sequences. If anything, the show was a prime example of how to break the mold: it took some of the staples of anime and used them in exciting, novel ways to create a unique and entertaining experience.

7. Aqua Teen Hunger Force

"Some would say the Earth is our moon.

But that would belittle the name of the moon, which is the real moon."

My sense of humor is probably one of the weirdest things about me. I frequently find hilarious things that most other people would find just too weird to consider. Aqua Teen Hunger Force was there to remind me that I was not the only one. It's pretty much Dada: The Cartoon. Characters frequently die at the ends of episodes and then just show up again next time like it's no big deal. Some episodes have no plot whatsoever. Most things characters throw to the ground explode for no reason at all. One of the recurring characters is The Cybernetic Ghost of Christmas Past from the Future. Explaining anymore kind of defeats the purpose of the show. Long story short, this show is drugs and amazing, and was super influential in shaping my comic sensibilities, for better or worse.

6. Star Wars (Episodes IV, V and VI)

"The Force will be with you. Always."

Star Wars as a whole has a very troubled legacy. The franchise has become synonymous with merchandising, and the body of work surrounding the movies ranges from comic books to video games to novels to action figures, all of which also range from great to good to godawful. And of course the prequels, but the less said about those the better. Amidst all of this it's easy to lose sight of why all this ancillary stuff was made in the first place. The original trilogy was amazing. The evocative nature of the mythical story it presented took place in a world familiar enough in its fantastic trappings but still genuinely new. Like with Totoro, I fell in love with it at a very young age, and upon seeing it again years later found that love wasn't misplaced at all. If I really have to explain why this is, you haven't seen the movies, which should be remedied immediately. As for the new ones they're making, I don't have any particularly strong feelings, so let's just go with "cautiously optimistic".

5. DMZ

"The only way was forward. Into the belly of the beast.

But my path was not with these men. It never was."

Matty Roth is a photojournalist in his early twenties whose cushy summer internship becomes something very different when he finds himself stranded in Manhattan, the no-man's-land that has become the one physical battleline between what's left of the American government and the Free States of America, who've taken over pretty much the rest of the country. The alternate history this comic presents of a second American civil war should be regarded as a manual for how to write about war in the 21st century. While it might seem like a stretch to say what's happening in Iraq could happen here, the comic brings it home by showing that in any conflict, the "enemy" is never just a group of evil terrorists who want little more than to wreak havoc. 99% of the time, it's scared people made stupid by fear and oppression, who just want to be able to eat, sleep, and protect their community without getting bombed into oblivion. In every war, there are three sides: the two who started fighting, and the people who never wanted to in the first place.

4. Transmetropolitan

"Journalism is just a gun. It's only got one

bullet in it, but if you aim right, that's all

you need. Aim it right, and you can blow

a kneecap off the world."

When I stumbled across the first issue of this comic, it was a revelation. Part of that was because it was the first comic like this I'd ever read, one that wasn't part of a years-long superhero franchise but rather a long form story that was focused first and foremost on just that: telling a compelling story. Most of it, though, was because it's such a damn great comic. The revelation in question was a vision of a future with fantastic technology and wonders beyond our wildest dreams where the people haven't changed a bit, because people will always be people. We live in a world where you can walk around with a device that can access all of the information known to man and most of us opt instead to use it for taking pictures of cats and arguing about trivial crap with other people. Warren Ellis understands this principle quite clearly, and the result is a world that feels intensely believable despite it also being one where powdered Welsh children can be bought at the supermarket. On top of all that, it has pretty much the best main character ever, who proves that it's fine to be a bastard so long as you've got a point to it.

3. Children of Men

"Last one to die, please turn out the light."

I've already talked a lot about this film, so I'll keep this relatively brief. Basically, everything I talk about in that post, about the way the movie accomplishes such a nuanced portrayal of our relation to technology and the world we live in without ever uttering a single word directly about that subject, is to me exactly the sort of thing I'd like to do in science fiction. Sci fi can be great for examining the human condition through fantastical settings and scenarios, but as soon as it starts getting preachy at all the effect is lost *coughAVATARcough*. Connecting those scenarios to a human story populated by people who act believably, however, can allow that sort of film or story to have a message without feeling the need to beat the audience about the head with it. For amazing cinematography and a harrowing, unique story, Children of Men makes my list.

2. Brazil

"Where would we be if we didn't follow the correct procedure?"

My roommate is a huge fan of Terry Gilliam, and as it turns out, so was I. I just didn't know it yet. I first saw this movie, then devoured most of the other movies in the director's ouvre, and while I liked them all for various reasons, none of them matched up to Brazil. A better 1984 story than the actual 1984, it used black comedy to paint a picture of a world where dystopia exists not because of some evil cabal consciously enforcing it. Human virtue can't be mercilessly stamped out, but it can certainly be commoditized, and an evil regime can be founded entirely on a bunch of people sincerely trying their best to do what they think is right. Add to that the way the effects manage to amplify the surreal atmosphere throughout and the result is a dream-like story about a dreamer who doesn't want to wake up.

1. Discworld by Terry Pratchett

"Stories are important. People think that stories are shaped

by people. In fact, it's the other way round."

What I said about sci-fi above for Children of Men and fantasy for the Dark Tower applies here times a million. I picked up the first book in this series on a whim, figuring it would basically just be comedy stories with fantasy archetypes thrown in and skewered, good for a laugh. I was in for quite a surprise. While the books are very comedic, they're actually more like straight up fantasy, and the parodic elements are usually there to subvert tropes, not just make fun of them. The result is a wide range of stories, about everything from watchmen to witches, all of them dealing with actual issues that prompt the reader to think and consider the world in ways they probably didn't before. When I think about what I want to do with my writing, that's always part of it. I want to write things that can make people thoughtful, and Sir Pratchett was there very early on to show me how to do that without sacrificing entertainment or genre. By carefully examining one of the most rote and cliched settings out there, he's managed to craft a wholly original world that has managed to be bigger than merely the sum of its parts.

The Best Game Ever

About three years ago, I came up with my very own icebreaker question: assume you had access to all the resources you would possibly need (money, talent, etc.) to make a video game, so whatever you make, it'll be pretty much the best possible product. What kind of video game would you make?
This question has now become mostly irrelevant to me for two reasons. First, I just got as a gift "Hypertheticals" by Chuck Klosterman, which is 50 ridiculous icebreaker questions in one convenient box.

The second, more important reason, is that someone beat the question. This someone is Austin Bening, so all credit for this idea should go to him. I'm just writing it up here for posterity, so future generations with the capability and balls can follow through on the idea. As it stands now, it's a total pipe dream, but it's a very, very fun one. What follows is the pitch:

Raise your hand if you've ever played Guitar Hero. Any Guitar Hero.

Now keep your hand raised if you still play Guitar Hero. (For purposes of this demonstration, you'll have to pretend there are a bunch of people with you who raised their hands for the first question, then lowered them for the second. Meet me halfway, that's all I ask.)

There are a ton of games this applies to. Games that we remember fondly which, for whatever reason, we just don't play anymore. Maybe we don't have the time, or we don't want to tarnish any nostalgia we might have for them. But they're still great games, and we still want that experience of playing them, even if we don't have the dozens of hours required to sink into them to get to the really good bits. And even then, there's no way to recapture that spark that happens the first time you ever play the game. The sensation you get of winning that first battle or race, or nailing that particularly tricky solo that makes you fail the song every damn time. That's more or less where this idea is coming from.

In short, the best game is the game that essentially is all the really cool games you know and love mashed up into one long, super varied game. If you were to try and make a game that combined the rock-offs of Guitar Hero with the thrill of coming from behind to win the world cup in Fifa, you'd fail, because those would require two completely different teams with completely different design philosophies. But you don't need to, because those games already exist.

Basically, the game would look like this. You'd download the main game, which would take the form of an overarching narrative tying all this together. This could be a super meta, "game world" type thing, but I think it would work much better if you just made it basically Scott Pilgrim. That is, have it take place in a world where all this ridiculous, over the top stuff happens just as a matter of course. The player character could be a Buckaroo Banzai type figure, who is a genius master swordsman and gunfighter who is also in one of the most popular rock and roll bands ever, and in his free time competes in pro sports and street races, winning all of them.

The bits from other games would take the form of downloadable content for those games, pretty much just extra levels that you would play when you got to that part of the story. If you didn't have the game (or in the case of Guitar Hero, plastic controller), that's where a social element could come in. It would be up to you to track the games down, and if you'd never played them before, it would give you an excuse to discover them for the first time.

The reasons why it's a pipe dream are obvious: licensing alone would sink this thing right out of the gate, as well as finding ways to develop for games whose studios have gone belly up or since moved on way beyond their older productions. But it's such an enticing idea that it's still really fun to think about. In short, you don't have to make the best game ever, because it's already been made. It's just spread out over all these different games. Looking at it another way, it would one big old celebration of the medium by looking at the best of what this console generation had to offer, and presenting it all in one fun, hyperkinetic package.

Video Games and Satire: NOPE

This will be a quick sort of follow-up to the last post, but I feel like it's still worth it to bring this up. So apparently, Far Cry 3 was supposed to be a satire, but it didn't work. At this point, I'm reminded of something my instructor said to me years ago when I used to practice Tae Kwon Do: if you're practicing a technique with the class and you notice everyone else is doing it differently than the way you're doing it, there are two possibilities. Either you're the only person in the whole group actually doing the move the correct way, or you're doing it wrong. Which is more likely?

Having played it, I can safely say that John Walker's assessment in that first interview is correct: the game doesn't work because we're conditioned to expect first-person shooters to feature over-the-top, clunky narratives. It's kind of a given for a genre predicated on the player mowing down lots and lots of dudes over the course of the experience. But from the way the writer is talking about it, it doesn't seem like this is the sort of cop-out Tommy Wiseau pulled with The Room, namely a retroactive attempt to cover his ass. It really does seem like the original intent with the game was to produce a satire of first-person shooters, or perhaps even violent, "gritty" video games as a whole.

The thing about satire is that it has to walk a fine line, and that requires subtlety. And with Far Cry 3, along with arguably Max Payne 3 as well, nuance is going to be very hard to pick up on. To be sure, this is partly because players aren't expecting to find any in big budget titles like these, but something has to be said for presentation too. It's not that players aren't receptive to nuance and satire, it's just that these elements are bound to get lost in a work where the player's primary interaction is shooting a bunch of similar looking "bad guys", which they'll do dozens of times over the course of the first half hour of play. For satire to be effective, it should only fool a fraction of the people exposed to it, not the majority. When that does happen, as with Far Cry 3, you're left with a game that just feels clunky, trying to comment on something without ever making it clear what it's trying to say.

I feel like I'm sort of retreading the ground I covered in the post I linked to above concerning the merits of Max Payne 3 versus Spec Ops: The Line and which one better confronted the inherently ludicrous nature of video game power fantasies. But that's kind of just because Far Cry 3 sort of serves as a more high-profile counterpoint in the argument. Spec Ops resonated because it made itself clear about its intentions. And we can argue all day about the artistic value of that as opposed to a more nuanced approach, but the fact is that it resonated in a big way, while Far Cry 3's narrative has gotten a mixed response. Games are at a weird spot now, where the desire to tell a deep story with a real impact is crashing up against a bunch of mechanics that can undermine the whole endeavor from the start. While Spec Ops drew attention to how crazy the mechanics were, Far Cry 3 didn't, or at least didn't do it well enough, leaving a bunch of people scratching their heads, which apparently isn't the response that Jeffrey Yohalem was aiming for.

As for me, I must admit: the game was a hell of a lot of fun. It was basically an RPG that played as a shooter, and it did a very good job of giving the player freedom to play how they wanted and explore a vast, open world. It also had some really awesome sequences where the player character got to trip balls and go on vision quests, which, when pulled off well, automatically qualifies the game for at least 3.5 stars out of five (This is on the Sam Scale, a.k.a. the only one that matters). Story-wise, yeah, it was a mess, but at least it was an entertaining one.

Giving the People What They Want

So I haven't beaten Far Cry 3 yet, but I've made a good amount of progress with it. Enough to already get the central tension that the game is structured around. The setup goes like this: you, Jason Brody, and a few other of your rich white friends are on vacation, but when you go skydiving over the Rook Islands, you all end up captured by Vaas and his merry band of human traffickers. You and your brother manage to escape, but your brother is killed in the process. Now it's up to you to become a super badass in order to bring down Vaas and save your friends, which is mostly accomplished through copious amounts of tribal tattoos and drugs.

"I haven't done sambuca since I was twenty!"

The key element here is that you aren't supposed to project too much onto the player character. Jason Brody has a voice, a bit of a backstory, and a clear motivation which he frequently brings up, as would most people in a similar situation. So as you transform into a killing machine, your friends notice it. They comment on it, and they aren't awed by your presence and skills. They're deeply disturbed by it. An awesome car chase after you rescue your girlfriend, Liza, where you blow up pirates with a grenade launcher is seen by Jason as just that, an exciting experience. But all his cries of "Awesome!" and "Did you see that?"are met by Liza (the driver) recoiling at how he could find any of this fun. For her, this is a nightmare. For Jason you, this is a thrilling set piece with a brand new toy that gets you a bunch of experience points for new skills.

Again, I haven't beaten the game, so I can't say if there's a satisfying payoff for this conflict. I might have to revise what I say here if it manages to somehow mess it up beyond belief. But in any event, the fact that this is the defining conflict at all made me realize something. Though it might not be all the rage, deconstruction is very in vogue when it comes to popular entertainment. Two of the most popular game franchises, Assassin's Creed and the bro-iest of bro shooters, Call of Duty, use their latest installments to question what drives the people the player is fighting for. ACIII featured the most sympathetic bad guys of the series, and by the end of the game, the main character Connor is thoroughly dissatisfied with the way things have gone, but finds there's pretty much nothing he can do about it. Whereas the first Call of Duty: Black Ops felt mostly like a scenic tour of the Vietnam War, Black Ops 2's missions in the late eighties feel much more like a highlight reel of questionable American foreign policy decisions. Rather than pegging the villains as an amorphous blob of evil Russians, we're given a legit antagonist, who has pretty clear motivations and is sympathetic to boot.

The "bad guy" and his burned, crippled sister

To be sure, there are plenty of works that comment upon themselves, usually for the sake of comedy, and it isn't like deconstruction is anything new when it comes to fiction. But when you start talking about pop culture, that's where things get interesting. Because as I see it, the last year has seen a startling amount of self-aware works, pieces of fiction that attack themselves or even the viewer. Obviously, Spec Ops: The Line comes to mind, but it's definitely not the only thing, or even the most visible thing, to partake in this trend.

I haven't seen Cabin In the Woods, and before you start, yes, I know I should, but that isn't the point. I have read up on the plot and what it does, though, and that's enough to make it clear that the movie is almost explicitly about confronting the demands of the audience. A group of teenagers are herded to a remote spot in the woods to get offed one by one in order to satiate the demands of the Old Gods who will tear everything down if they don't get what they want. (Hint: That's supposed to be us, watching the film). The movie, which got a wide release and was fairly popular, was all about critically examining why we like horror movies and what we get out of all the slaughter. As good ole Film Crit Hulk puts it, "JOSS WHEDON AND DREW GODDARD JUST DROPPED THE FUCKING MIC ON THE HORROR FILM".

Django Unchained was a very interesting movie, and though I don't think it was Tarantino's best, it definitely isn't a bad film by any stretch, or even a mediocre one. And it doesn't resemble any of the other period pieces of the civil war, which try to present a more nuanced version of events. In this movie, you could count on one hand the number of white people in the cast who end up doing anything remotely noble. Every member of the aristocratic, slave-holding class is presented as an avatar of excess that uses genteel language and customs hand in hand with absolute brutality. And by the end of the movie, the black hero gets to kill them all in a rain of blood, tearing down the whole structure without regard for offending anyone's sensibilities. From what I've heard of it, Zero Dark Thirty, rather than simply glorifying the members of Seal Team Six and their actions, delves into how we got to that raid, and the numerous grey areas we had to go to morally to get the information. Rather than bland, easy heroism, it strives to depict a vision of reality.

As far as I can tell, the reasons for why this trend was so much more widespread last year than in years prior are twofold. First, we live in an age of unparalleled media saturation. Thanks to Netflix, direct download services like Steam and iTunes, and our good friend online piracy, it's now easier than ever to simply immerse yourself in stories, and doing this is enough to get one intensely familiar with the tropes and techniques writers employ time and time again. These works are successful because now so many people are familiar with them that the audience can be that much more responsive when someone decides to comment on them in depth. Going back to Tarantino, you could argue the roots for this were laid down with Inglourious Basterds, a film that took America's go-to bad guys, the Nazis, and used them to examine how violence in cinema can make us demonize entire swathes of the population and how war can bring out the worst in everyone, even the supposed "good guys".

Second, there's the fact that people now just aren't as responsive to the standard good-vs.-evil conflict as they used to be. In her review of The Fellowship of the Ring, the Nostalgia Chick points out that the movie, coming out on the heels of 9/11, presented audiences with a brand of escapism that was in very high demand. The good guys all look pretty, while the bad guys are genetically engineered to be evil. Fast forward ten years. Rather than the monumental struggle between the enlightened forces of good and the "Islamofascists" that Rumsfeld and Cheney were prepping for, we got to experience a slog, where the enemies didn't wear uniforms and the fact that we did just made us vulnerable. There was no caricature we could slap onto a poster and label the enemy. And it turns out we were willing to torture our captives too, not to mention engage in the same sort of bombing campaigns we were initially afraid of being subjected to. It's not hard to see how doubt could creep into the picture, and once those attitudes become imprinted upon the culture, it's not surprising they would seep into our entertainment as well. The world is a very different place from the way we would like it to look, so naturally, we're starting to get movies and video games that reflect that, that dare to ask why we'd even want it to look that way in the first place.


So naturally we're led to the next logical question. Why? What has led all these creators to produce works that are so much more self-aware and critical? I don't think you can just peg it down to cynicism, because that's not quite what we're experiencing. Rather than simply wanting to get to the core of these experiences just so they can conclude they're full of shit, all these films and games seem to be more concerned with getting to the roots of these genres and stories so that we can engage with them more meaningfully. They're a way of criticizing the culture from within, of indirectly asking what sort of people could find all this bloodshed entertaining on such a massive scale. They're a reaction to a reaction. The easy escapism offered by works after the attacks of September 11th was by no means unwarranted or even necessarily a bad thing. But it has become so widespread, and so easy to simply embrace it all the time without seeking more nuanced alternatives, that it's only natural that it would produce a backlash.

It's entirely possible that these movies and games are just another step in a cycle. Escapism will probably come back into vogue at some point, because there's always going to be room for giant robots punching things. But these works have come in such a dense concentration, and have been so unflinching in defiling the proverbial sacred cows of their genres and mediums, that there's reason to hope there will be a more lasting effect produced from all this. Maybe I'm still just playing my role as the eternal optimist, but I find it hard to believe that the democratization of information and creative tools could somehow lead to a dumber public, one less willing to appreciate nuance in their entertainment and culture.

"You're Here Because You Wanted to Be Something You're Not"

Over the past couple of weeks, I've seen my evangelical efforts pay off, and my roommate has completed Spec Ops: The Line. Naturally, this resulted in a lengthy conversation among me and my housemates about the game and what it's trying to say, because that's the kind of guys we are. The main division was between me and another housemate. He hadn't played the game but had watched it being played, and we managed to describe the game's revelatory ending so that he basically got the gist of it, and was by no means uninformed going into the discussion.

His argument basically boiled down to the fact that the game was disingenuous. It was made to be profitable and still operates like pretty much every other military shooter out there, built around the same core positive psychology gameplay loops that reward kills. In the case of Spec Ops, though, the game's attempts to make you feel ashamed for reveling in these loops struck him as hypocritical and contrived to the point where it undermined the larger message of the game. For comparison, he held up Max Payne 3 as a good example of a game that uses extreme violence to call attention to the absurdity of the heroic power fantasies that practically all big budget video games are built around.

So first I'll explain where I'm coming from. I've already covered my feelings on Spec Ops (In brief: HOLY CRAP IT'S SO GOOD AND CHANGED MY LIFE AND EVERYONE NEEDS TO PLAY IT NOW NOW NOW NOW VIDJA GAEMS ARE SAVED), but Max Payne 3 is where things get a bit more complicated. I won't go in depth about all my problems with the game but suffice to say, I liked it a lot even though it didn't feel like a Max Payne game. There was practically no connection to the other games, and it felt instead like I was playing as Max's douchebag, nihilistic brother Mack. But that I could forgive, because the gameplay was very well done, with a bunch of rich environments and an intriguing story. But that's where the problems started for me.

Throughout Max Payne 3, the main character is presented as a drunk idiot who's blundered into a situation way over his head. His solution to these volatile and complex political intrigues is always "shoot them in the face". Max is very much presented as the bumbling American tourist, trying to parse through familial conflicts, violent city politics, and a seedy underworld, all situated in a location so exotic he doesn't even attempt to learn the language. There are a bunch of scenes of really gruesome violence, which, as my housemate puts it, force the player to step back and reassess how ridiculous all these things are. Case in point: every time you clear out a room, you're treated to a slow motion close up of the last enemy keeling over, with headshots yielding even more gruesome rewards and the player being able to slow down the view to really appreciate all that viscera spewing everywhere.

"So I guess I'd become what they wanted me to be.

A killer. Some rent-a-clown with a gun who puts holes

in other bad guys."

The problem is that the game never really rises above all this. What starts out as a shocking display of exaggerated violence becomes quickly sublimated into a simple positive psychology mechanism. "Oh good, I got the last guy, so now I can progress." The story suffers from the same problem. When I played through the game, I was never once struck by the absurdity of the idea that a drunk, painkiller-addled ex-cop from Jersey can singlehandedly kill hundreds of criminals and corrupt cops, and as a result solve all the problems. I came away from it unsatisfied, because after both of my playthroughs, I was left with the feeling that Max's actions (namely, running around and shooting people until things get fixed) were being endorsed by the game. At the end of the story (Minor, vague spoilers) the bad guys are all dead and Max gets to retire to sunny Bahia.

But when I was presented with this take on the game I was forced to reevaluate my view on it. Because after all, this is Rockstar we're talking about. They're one of the few development studios that has shown a consistent dedication to using the medium of video games to try and tell a story in addition to simply offering up cool gameplay. Beyond the stylistic choices, it's totally possible to look at Max Payne as a very subtle and wry satire about the absurdity of the idea that a hostile, complex situation can be fixed by one pissed off guy with a gun killing all the "bad guys". This also helps to make the super abrupt and seemingly dissonant ending go down a bit easier.

But if this was the creator's intent, then the bad news is they failed. The game got a fairly warm critical reception, but was by no means a smash hit. What's more, the majority of critics saw the game's plot as either an attempt to ape the style of such films as Man on Fire or as another instance of a game that's trying to be mature by presenting itself as gritty and hard-boiled. If there was a satirical or subversive element to the game, it passed right over the heads of most of the people who played it. By contrast, all people can talk about with Spec Ops: The Line is how brutally and effectively it deconstructs the modern military shooter.

The game accomplishes this feat by making what it's doing very blatant. As the game progresses, the player is assailed with evidence that what they're doing is wrong, to the point where the loading screens start verbally attacking you. Another housemate said that while there are obvious parallels between the game and Apocalypse Now, one of the more striking areas in which the two differ is that in the film, the ending leaves a lot more up for interpretation. In Spec Ops, it is explicitly spelled out for the player what is going on and why they should feel bad. As my roommate would argue, this is where the disingenuousness creeps in, because the game still uses those core loops of kill and reward, then admonishes you for participating in them.

I'd argue this is why the game's message works so well. Though the conceits of Spec Ops' message (and even the twist at the end) aren't anything new, they are things that haven't been tried in video games before. The key strength of Spec Ops, for me, is that it realizes it doesn't exist in a vacuum. The Call of Duty series has made millions of dollars and is in turn played by millions. The games in the franchise come out annually and consistently break sales records. The series has spawned a host of imitators, all of which purport to provide an "authentic" experience that winds up resembling your standard Hollywood blockbuster more than anything remotely similar to actual conflicts occurring today across the world.

Why these games in particular are so successful is due to a number of reasons, and most of them probably are related to gameplay and multiplayer in particular. But as Film Crit Hulk points out, the single player campaigns shouldn't just be ignored. Spec Ops: The Line is bold enough to ask why we like these stories so much and why they're so popular despite the fact that they present a vision of both politics and warfare that is grossly distorted, sometimes horrifically so if you think out all the implications (look at how torture is presented in the Modern Warfare series).

Though this game was, like Max Payne 3, not particularly successful commercially, it was widely praised by critics. Even those who had qualms with the story and its execution praised it for what it set out to do, and the fact that it was willing to address these issues in a way other games clearly didn't want to. The innovations Spec Ops: The Line introduced in terms of what video game stories could be about resonated in a big way, though it's premature to say whether it will have a lasting effect.

So why did Spec Ops succeed at conveying a message that was widely acknowledged whereas Max Payne 3 was simply regarded as more of the same? As Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw put it, a medium or art form can only be as good as the culture that surrounds it. At the risk of making really big generalizations, video games right now are very firmly divided into mainstream games concerned with providing entertainment and "art" games. There is very, very little overlap between these two areas. So when we see a game like Max Payne 3, which presents itself as an especially pretty and well-made shooter with a robust multiplayer heavily touted by the developers and a fairly absurd and contrived story, we take it at face value because we're accustomed to all that being the norm when it comes to big AAA games. When a game like Spec Ops comes along, a game that is very self-aware and that urges the player to examine what they're experiencing critically, we react in a big way, because even though that's a very old literary technique, it's one that hasn't ever been used so effectively in video games.

The net result of all this word-vomit? As I see it, it speaks to the fact that video games are such a new medium that there's very little context for really in-depth, cerebral criticism of them. We're still grappling with the fact that this medium, which many still regard as either "kid's stuff"or a simple distraction, has the potential to affect us emotionally and intellectually in ways other art forms can't. Though it might be easy to understand this concept on a basic level, the implications of what this could mean for video games as it becomes more prevalent throughout the development landscape are only just beginning to make themselves felt in really noticeable ways. Even though members of the video game community have been touting this sentiment a bunch in defense of the medium, the community at large clearly isn't yet accustomed to a mindset where, in the words of Film Crit Hulk once more, we stop asking what games can do "for" us, and more what they can do "to" us. In that respect, I stand by my assessment of Spec Ops: The Line. It might not be the most sophisticated work, but it serves a necessary purpose for the big budget video game industry in it's current state, holding up a mirror to the player and creator and asking them if this is really what they want.