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.