Call of Duty: Ghosts ABRIDGED

Call of Duty: Ghosts was a game that initially aroused none of my interest. After five straight games in as many years, I was burned out on the franchise. But the more I heard about this latest iteration the more ridiculous it seemed. It couldn't really be that over the top and xenophobic, right? I mean most of the other COD games are less jingoistic than they appear on the surface, at least overtly. My curiosity ultimately got the better of me, and I decided to watch a play through of the game, both because the series really has gotten to the point where the player's presence is ancillary to the whole experience and because I couldn't find a copy to rent anywhere near me. What I saw confirmed that yes, actually, it's not just as bad as you might have heard, it's worse.
The result is what you see before you, with much apologies to The Editing Room.

CALL OF DUTY: GHOSTS ABRIDGED

Update: XCOM is Kicking my Ass

The reason I don't watch much TV at all is because for me, video games are my TV. Instead of knocking out a few episodes whenever I have some downtime, I like to spend an hour or two playing a video game. It feels more active and there are plenty of games structured in episode-esque chunks. When I get a new game though I tend to play through the whole thing over the course of a weekend or two. Partially this is because most single player narratives are still structured like a movie or book and are more continuous, but it's also due to simply enjoying the novelty of a new experience.

About a week ago I bought XCOM: Enemy Unknown off the Xbox Live Marketplace since it was on sale. Yesterday instead of continuing my (sixth) campaign to save Earth from the alien scourge, I opted to replay another game. A simpler game. A less soul-crushing game.

Auteurs, Metal Gear Solid, and Dumb-Smart Games

So what about that Grand Theft Auto V, huh? With all the cars and the guns and whatnot. Sure looks fun. Probably the last big game of this generation, and from one of the most interesting and story-driven development studios ever.

But who cares about all that noise? I just finished the Metal Gear Solid HD collection on my Xbox so we're going to talk about that instead.

From hiimdaisy's "Let's Destroy the Shagohod!"

See, there are few things I feel as confused about as I do about Metal Gear Solid. I love to play it and talk about it despite the fact that I think pretty much every game in the series is deeply flawed.

The Future Has Happened/Is Happening/Will Happen

This summer a few things happened to me that, though unconnected on their surface, have combined to produce a prolonged bout of introspection. Also, I don't have a job yet, so I just have too much time to think about this stuff.

The things that happened are:

1) I graduated college,

2) I engaged in a very heated discussion alongside a classmate of mine against my mom and a couple of her friends, and

3) I re-played Deus Ex: Human Revolution.


The first one is pretty self-explanatory, as there has been no shortage of puff pieces in numerous publications about how simply being a part of my generation means that I'm an entitled and ineffective burden on society, which is not exactly the way to boost the confidence of a new generation eager to enter the real world and start contributing to it.

The second thing was a bit more complicated, and lasted pretty much for the entire dinner. But I'll try and break it down here. Essentially, my mom and her friends (who were about her age) were arguing with me and a classmate of mine from high school who's just a couple years younger than me. The debate revolved around the older people's conception that our generation has, on the whole, less meaningful relationships and ways of communicating, due in large part to technology. We tried to counter with arguments like "technological change has always happened and has always shook up culture, like the printing press" and similar stuff but by the end of it we seemed no closer to convincing them. What's more I had a similar conversation around the same time between my grandparents and my best friend and I. I got the sense from both of these conversations that the older people felt the changes being wrought by our generation's use of social media and other such technologies was unprecedented for the changes being wrought upon our social landscape, and what's more such changes were unquestionably terrible overall in their effect on our development and lives.

And the third thing up there perfectly encapsulates where I was coming from in those debates (it helps that I was in the middle of my playthrough when that conversation happened). Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a game not just set in the future, but about the future, much like the way Far Cry 2 handles war. But where Far Cry 2 had a very definite message about war, Deus Ex's element of personal choice allows it to do more than just deliver one message, or even multiple messages. Deus Ex basically puts you into a very well-crafted world with its own political problems and actors and lets you decide how to respond.

In 2027, human cybernetic augmentation has become widespread, basically just this side of mass commercialization. The consequences of this development are widespread and manifold. On the one side are advocates of the technology who see it as the next step in human evolution. Embracing technological change on this scale is not just necessary for our development as a species, but is in essence our destiny, the culmination of hundreds of years of scientific progress. On the other hand, there are many who fear the dangers human augmentation can bring with it. Granting unnatural strength and abilities to everyone unchecked may do little more than usher in a Hobbesian nightmare of constant war, all against all, where the richest citizens who can afford the technology and drugs necessary to sustain its use can triumph over the lower classes, presuming they don't just chuck cars at them in an effort to be done with the whole thing more quickly. And then there are those in the shadows who see a future in the technology, albeit one carefully structured and controlled according to what they perceive as humanity's best interests.

Deus Ex exposes you to these viewpoints by placing you into a world where they already exist and letting you explore. As you read e-mails, books, and digital newspapers and overhear conversations by people on the street (not to mention occasionally getting involved in their problems), you manage to get a sense of where proponents of every argument are coming from. On the one hand, your boss David Sarif, head of a leading producer of augmentations, is adamant about the good this technology can do in the world and the opportunity it offers humanity as a species to transcend its mere physicality. On the other hand, he engages in shady practices all the time, occasionally asking you to join in as he displays a stark mentality of the ends justifying the means. Bill Taggart, the head of the anti-augmentation lobby, has supporters who are so extreme that they frequently resort to terrorism in opposition to the spread of this new technology. But then you get on his PC and read an e-mail from a woman about how his book and message managed to help her turn her life around and get back on track after a bout of suicidal depression.

At its core, the story and world of Human Revolution is about the societal tensions that arise when progress occurs, which is to say all the time. Change is never neat and never wholly bad or good. It is messy and different, and those are about the only constant things one can say about the process. And frankly, I feel that message rings a lot more true than "things now suck because they were just better back in my day". But what elevates the game is that it does give you the option to reject this progress. Choice is an integral part of the game, from how you talk to people to how lethally you want to approach situations. The view the game has of the central issue isn't made explicitly clear, and the player is left to draw their own conclusions. If Deus Ex does have one singular message, it's "Be Adaptable", which is made very clear by the last level of the game, which represents a stark change in gameplay from the entire rest of the game. If you've been dead-set on one particular playstyle for the whole game, you will be thrown for a loop for the last hour or so.

It's not like what I'm experiencing now is anything new. Generational debates have happened pretty much ever since there was more than one generation around. As Grampa Simpson said "I used to be 'with it'. But then they changed what 'it' was. Now what I'm 'with' isn't 'it' and what's 'it' seems weird and scary to me...it'll happen to you." But this divide has never been more apparent than right about now, as technological developments occur in such rapid succession that generational divides are not only deeper than they've ever been, but can occur even more frequently. And games like Deus Ex offer an interesting and constructive lens with which to approach these sorts of discussions. On the one hand, we can yell at each other until we're blue in the face about the precise value of Twitter to society at large. Or we could realize that change isn't necessarily good or bad. It simply is, and always has been. It shouldn't be demonized or glorified outright, but recognized as a constant which must be approached with a measured and calm mind.

A measured and calm mind that can invent arm-blades you can use to pull off sweet takedowns.

The Man of Steel, Not Of Tomorrow

(THERE ARE TOTALLY SPOILERS FOR MAN OF STEEL IN HERE)

If you look over the last few posts in this blog reaching all the way back to September, you'll notice a couple of themes which sort of overlap. They're basically:

A) People are hungry for (and are producing) new and interesting takes on old stories, probably due to the absolutely bonkers amount of media available in modern life.
B) Many big budget movies and games of a genre that frequently paint the protagonist (and the player) as a shining beacon of heroism have started to question that role. See: DMZ, Zero Dark Thirty, Spec Ops: The Line.

It's pretty obvious how these themes can overlap, and together they add up to a lot of media that are primarily concerned with deconstructing whatever it is they're depicting. This means critically examining aspects or tropes of a work that people usually take for granted and trying to apply them to something more closely resembling reality. The result usually is not-strictly speaking-fun, though when done well it can be quite engaging. In some cases it can even perform a necessary function, as when Spec Ops managed to make a lot of video game players and creators realize that maybe making games where the central mechanic is shooting people in the head as realistically as possible isn't the best way to depict heroism.

As far as comics go, the gold standard for deconstruction was Watchmen. It presented an alternate universe where superheroes exist as a fact of life, eventually being outlawed as vigilantes, and these heroes were in turn depicted as people who turned to that life due to ridiculously messed-up personalities. The comic also featured Dr. Manhattan (the blue guy in the picture up there), the only character in this altered history with actual superpowers. He's depicted as a god in the story, and his mere existence is enough to tip the scales of the Cold War in the 80s much farther than they ever went in real life. A character in the book remarks, "The superman exists, and he's American." Later he admits that this statement was altered from its original content, with "superman" standing in for his original phrasing, "God".

So, Man of Steel.

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.