Notes on Badland

1. Think: the dark humour of Lemmings meets the aesthetics of Limbo meets the controls of Jetpack Joyride.

2. Badland is a simple creation. Your creator is on the lefthand side of the screen. It's like a hairless doll's head (like the spider thing in Toy Story) with little bat wings that are far too weak to carry it competently. Holding to fly upwards; release to fall downwards. Forward momentum is automatic. Your only goal is to get to the end of the level before the auto-scrolling screen leaves you behind.

3. Holding the screen to fly up feels counterintuitive when the action you are performing is flapping wings. It feels like you should be tapping repetitively. I'm clearly not the only person who feels like this. After struggling with the first few levels, I went to the in-game help where it explicitly tells you that you shouldn't be tapping—like the creators knew that is what the player would naturally do. Which begs the question: why didn't they just do what feels natural?

4. There are puzzles, in a sense, but hardly any. There are 'points', in a sense, but they don't really matter in any meaningful way. Badland is one of those precious few iPhone games which simply exists to be experienced, to just get to the end, to just see it happen. Forget high scores or challenging puzzles.

5. As you move through each world there are pickups. Some make you faster, some slower. Some make your doll-head-bat character grow in size; some make it shrink. Some, significantly, create clones of your character. Some create a lot of clones. The closest the game has to points is the number of clones that make it safely to the end of the level.

6. The thing is, you can't control the clones. Or, rather, you can, but they are all controlled by the same input, but they are not all in the same space. So safely guiding this creature around boulders means those other ten are going to fly directly into a buzzsaw. You can't save everyone.

7. Sometimes the sheer number of clones are their own downfall. A scene: there are five clones flapping flaccid across the screen. You accidentally pick up a series of powerups that make each of them grow as the passageway narrows. Suddenly, you have five oversized dollheads all jammed into a small tunnel, and none of them can move. You tap and they just flap and their eyes open wide and then they are eaten by the side of the screen.

8. In Badland, your character is pathetic. They are so pathetic. They flap and fall and rise because their wings are too small. They bang into pipes and thud into boulders. The splat themselves on buzzsaws and squish themselves in tunnels. They are stupid, like lemmings. It's a dark, sadistic game, where most of the satisfaction of playing is just in trying to move this bloated, pathetic little creature through this bad land that hates him.

Notes on Tomb Raider

1. Just like Uncharted did a good job of riffing off Tomb Raider without just copying Tomb Raider, Tomb Raider does a good job of riffing off Uncharted without just copying Uncharted. It is very much inspired by that character-driven, action/platforming model, but it feels like its own game with its own vibe, not just a reskin.

2. I love how Lara moves. I love watching her even as I enact her. I love feeling like I am acting. I love the way the animations change to shift the tones of my inputs. The way she will run when we are alone but then cower and creep with the same weight put on the thumbstick when enemies are around. She is a tremendously well animated model and it is such a pleasure to just be her.

3. I am a big fan of sticky-cover shooters, but after playing Tomb Raider I am left wondering why I ever had to push a button to stick to cover. The way Lara just naturally hides behind a wall, just organically sticks to it, is so fluid and intuitive.

4. Is it a problem that Tomb Raider is, first and foremost, a cover shooter? Two answers: yes; no. I enjoyed the cover shooting. It felt gritty. The guns felt messy. The enemies felt as amateur and confused and unprofessional as Lara. As far as a cover shooter trying to portray a sense of gritty survival, I think it did that well.

5. But, there was certainly too much cover shooting for the story it was trying to tell and the scene it was trying to set. Excuse me while I go armchair developer for a moment, but I found myself at multiple times wishing the game had taken a Splinter Cell: Conviction approach. That is: pseudo-messy-stealth until you inevitably screw up and then have to use loud guns. A few scenes do embrace that, where Lara sneaks around and uses silent arrows for a few kills before she is spotted. It creates this great, Far Cry 2-esque in control/out of control seesaw. But too often Tomb Raider just has waves of men running right at you from the start. I don't mind that I spent most of Tomb Raider killing dudes, but I wish I had spent that time killing less dudes with more consideration.

6. On the dudes: the game made some interesting attempts to make them clearly not elite soldiers, but just stranded survivors who actually have a disadvantage to Lara (they are not 'Crofts'). Most of them had bows because they are not an army decked out with unlimited firearms. A lot of them were as scared of Lara as they were angry. A few overheard conversations later in the game really humanise them. You heard them talk about how they are grouped into squads on the island based on which ship they were on that crashed. One group jokes and teases another group in some kind of tribal rivalry. For the most part, it didn't feel 'unbelievable' (which is different from unrealistic) that Lara was holding her own against these men, because these men were not elite soldiers. I liked that. The only problem was the game did not commit to this. It made allusions to the amateur status of your enemies, but never really committed to it long-term over the entire game. So, too often, it just became 'shooting bros' again and again. Fun 'just shooting bros', but 'just shooting bros' all the same.

7. Tomb Raider's biggest improvement over Uncharted is that the act-three enemies did not break the game.

8. The limit of weaponry was excellent. When I got the machine gun and the game went all Modern Warfare Slow Motion so I could use it to wipe out a room of dudes, I distinctly remember saying, "URGH." Then I vowed I would play the entire game just the pistol and bow. But then I got the shotgun and that was enjoyably messy and loud. So I only used those three weapons (and the machine gun when I really had to). I like having a character with a quantifiable, knowable amount of gear. I like knowing exactly what is on my character's body. It adds to the survival sense the game is going for. I liked that I wasn't just picking up new guns every thirty seconds. Though, that worked for Uncharted. Uncharted gave me a sense of desperation, of clawing for a new gun frantically. Tomb Raider gives me a sense of possessive aggression, of refusing to let go of any of my gear. Both work in their own way.

9. The game has an unhealthy obsession with gore. I think it wanted to shock me, with the mass graves of random messy meaty bits. But it was equal parts terrible and laughable. It was beyond believable that this many corpses could possibly be on this island. Several small countries would have to have been depopulated to make this many corpses. Unless the game was trying to make me laugh, it utterly failed to do whatever it was trying to do with all those corpses.

10. One of my favourite things is characters wearing permanent scars throughout a game. Martin Walker. Max Payne. John McClane (not a game, but same deal). I'm not sure if I mentioned in my Bioshock Infinite notes how much I liked that Booker's hand stayed bandaged for the entire game after it was stabbed. The permanence of experience inscribed on the body is a nice touch. For the most part, Tomb Raider did this well. It's a risky thing, mutilating a woman's body for the camera. There is a lot of ways that can go wrong, can seem like exploitation, can actually be exploitation. It very much was exploitation in the marketing material leading up to Tomb Raider's release: here is a girl panting and sighing as she is injured. The opening scenes of Tomb Raider are pretty bad, too. She takes a pretty dramatic, unnecessary beating before I have even done anything. I guess they wanted to throw her in the deep end and see if she could swim. It made me uncomfortable at the start of the game, but as the blood and mud from those opening cut scenes faded and were replaced with scars and injuries from Lara's and my joint experiences, it was better. It didn't feel like (to me, at least) that they were just mutilating some woman's body for no reason. It felt like she was earning scars to be proud of in a way usually only allowed of male bodies.

Edit 10b. Lara's overly gory deaths were terrible and exploitative and cringe-worthy for totally the wrong reasons. Watching her get punctured by tree branches or smashed agains the same aquatic rock no matter where abouts on the island she falls into the water was super gross. It didn't add anything. It was just, "Hey, watch this woman get beat up before you get back to the action."

11. With the exception of Lara's girlfriend, Sam, I have no idea who any of the other 'good guy' characters were meant to be. Apparently Roth meant a whole heap to Lara, but I have no idea who he actually was. For the first part of the game where everyone was separated, names were appearing in the subtitles and over the radio and I had no faces to connect them to. I did not care for any of these characters the way Lara seemed to. Also, they were all terrible. White geek dude who looks like Harry Potter (and who gets to sacrifice himself to save Lara in a weirdly symbolic way). Tribal islander who Lara turns to for support whenever she just 'feels' something in a spiritual way (he is Tribal so he will totally get her, you know?). Angry Irish man who is from Glasgow, in case you missed him telling you five times. I cared about Sam. The rest of the characters were just filler for plot points.

12. Apparently these characters are fleshed out by the diary entries they left scattered all over the island before they crashed onto the island (yep). I wouldn't know because I didn't pay attention to any of these. How to do a good in-game diary: record the character speaking it so I can listen to it even as I continue to play the game. How to do a tolerable in-game diary: have a paragraph of text for me to quickly read before I return to play the game. How to do a totally frustrating in-game diary: force me to look at the wall of text while the character reads it. If the character has recorded voice over of this text, why am I being forced to look at it while they read it?

13. So Tomb Raider's story is ridiculous, prevented from falling in on itself only by the strength of Lara's character (I really liked Lara as a character). But it was so much more enjoyable than Bioshock Infinite. Why? I've been thinking about this for some time. I think, ultimately, Tomb Raider never tried to be anything it wasn't. It never tried to not be a game about shooting a bunch of dudes to get off an island. It was honest. Bioshock: Infinite pretended to be about racism and nationalism and parallel universes when it was actually just about shooting dudes. It was dishonesty. Tomb Raider set up my expectations adequately for the game I was going to play; Bioshock: Infinite did not. I spend a lot of time comparing different games and my reactions to them.

14. Lots of little things made Tomb Raider's platforming really nice. Just a few extra button presses demanded of the player to couple you to whatever flimsy structure Lara is hanging onto just that bit more intimately. When Lara makes a wide jump and only manages to grab with one hand, you have to tap X to get the other hand to grab. When you jump at a wall that Lara needs to use her pick to hold onto, you have to tap X as you sail past it to latch on. To scamper up high walls, you need to tap A a second time for Lara to kind of wall-jump and get a bit extra height. It helped make the platforming feel a bit more intimiate than just finding the path for Lara to stick to. It felt more perilous.

15. My god. The split-second insta-fail quick time events. How are these actually still appearing in games?

16. At the very end of the game, just before the credits, the screen goes white and the line "A SURVIVOR IS BORN" splashes across the screen. It is pretty terrible. It would be like if at the end of Romeo & Juliet someone just yelled out: "TWO LOVERS JUST DIED." It served no purpose other than to turn the entire game into a ten-hour trailer for the inevitable sequel. It also just totally belittles all of Lara's later achievements in the previous games. Lara is much more than a survivor. We know that. We've seen what she goes on to do. By labelling her as just a survivor makes her too reactionary, too much on the back foot. That isn't Lara. Lara is headstrong and determined. She doesn't go on to just survive. She goes on to live.

17. The camera work is exceptional. Someone went through this game with a fine comb, tweaking the exact placement of the camera in every scene to be in an optimal, cinematic position. I don't think it ever crossed the line, as far as I recall, and always felt organic even as it was clearly staged. Throughout the game, you often perform the same action, like climbing a wall, but with the camera positioned differently, and it breathes new life into the same old actions.

18. 50 Shades of Brown.

19. It is really, really refreshing to just be a woman in a game. Or, perhaps more accurately, to not be some well-built white dude yet again. It's not for me to say if Lara is or isn't sexist, but I felt like the game walked a fine line where she was very much a woman (not just a man with breasts) without being reduced to an object. It was just really nice to be a woman for once.

20. Tomb Raider is the kind of disposable genre game I would play again just because it feels good to play and it is fun to watch myself play.

March and April Writing

With GDC at the end of March, I never got around to writing a summary of that month's writing, and then as I tried to catch up on all my GDC writing in April, I never got around to writing a summary of that month's writing! So here is a summary of the things I did write in March and April.

My "You Know What I Love?" column is still going strong at Games On Net. I wrote about unreliable narrators, first-person bodies, audio-diaries, simulated physics, and acting.

At GDC, I had the opportunity to sit down and chat with Walt Williams, the lead writer of Spec Ops: The Line. He is a great guy! I was hoping to turn the interview into a 'People' column for Edge, but they had done a studio profile of Yager just a month before so that wasn't going to happen. Instead, Stu at Unwinnable gave me the opportunity to post the entire, sprawling discussion as one long essay. That right there is pretty much why I love Unwinnable so much.

Early in March I wrote for Bit Creature for the first time. I wrote two essays that are kind of meant as companions to each other about Dark Souls. The first is about how the game's level design and layout and ambience communicates a sense of passive-aggressiveness to the player, a sense that you're not suppose to be here. But then, both thanks to and in spite of this design, the game encourages a far closer sense of camaraderie between players than nearly any other game. I'm really happy with both these essays, and I really like how they work together.

Australian NGO Right Now asked me late last year if I would write something for them about videogame violence and human rights. I wrote an essay that tries to strike the middle road of the whole debate between calls for censorship and calls for utterly uncritical engagements with videogame violence.

And just on this blog, I wrote out some notes about Bioshock: Infinite after I finished playing it, and also some further thoughts about how the game is incredibly, accidentally racist. And my partner, Helen Berents, wrote a guess essay about how Ni No Kuni depicts childhood.

I think that is actually all I have written over the past two months! I do have some very exciting, massive features all written up and forthcoming, but more on them when they are actually published! I've also been working on a few different academic articles/chapters, which I'll be sure to share when they're available, but they might not be interesting to too many people. Other exciting projects are starting to gain momentum, too! But that is all on the down low for now. But they are exciting, I promise!

I did also appear on a few podcasts over the last couple of months. Michael Abbott's Brainy Gamer podcast is probably my favourite podcast ever, and the only podcast whose episodes I will lap up as soon as they come out. So I was incredibly humbled to appear on it back in March alongside Leigh Alexander. I can think of few people writing about videogames that respect more than Michael and Leigh, so that was a little bit intimidating, but also a lot of fun. I also recommend listening to the other three parts of that podcast where Michael talks to a wide range of intelligent people.

Also, during GDC, Giant Bomb's Patrick Klepek spoke to me about Killing is Harmless, and why and how I went about writing it.

And speaking of Killing is Harmless, if you are yet to buy it (or even if you have!), you might be interested in the Story Bundle, which is selling a bunch of books about videogames for super cheap, including Killing is Harmless. The bundle has already more than doubled the number of copies of Killing is Harmless that have been sold, so that is incredibly exciting!

As for May's writing. Well, this happened:

Unsettled childhood of Ni No Kuni

[My girlfriend, Helen Berents, is a Peace Studies academic whose research is all about how young people affected by conflict are engaged with. Recently, she finished playing Ni No Kuni and had all sorts of opinions about how it depicts and treats children. I invited her to write out her thoughts in a proper post, and she did! So here it is. If you find the things she says interesting, she also has her own blog for her own academic musings here. There will be spoilers.]

Childhood in Ni No Kuni is a contradiction. On one hand, 13-year-old Oliver is a complex, compelling protagonist with real depth and nuance, a noble child-hero. On the other hand, other representations of children in the game are so fraught with stereotypes and problematic encounters that I’m left wondering if their presence contributes anything to the game at all or if it ultimately harms it.

The notion of childhood in Ni No Kuni is unsettled, and it unsettles me. Conceived, as it is, within a frame of a child’s quest to save his mother in a magical land only he can access with the help of his fairy friend (Oliver’s sidekick Drippy (so-called Lord of the Fairies)), the game immediately poses questions about the stability of the land of Ni No Kuni (quite literally ‘Another World’). With a Studio Ghibli aesthetic (more on Studio Ghibli in a moment), the player is already asked to suspend belief, to have an adventure. The narrative is a classic: boy saves mother, saves world, with help from magical friends and a few fetch quests to get magical items that are requisite for success.

Yet once Oliver is in the land of Ni No Kuni, his childhood is rarely invoked. Characters question his preparedness to fight Shadar the Dark Djinn, and offer him all sorts of assistance from spells to advice to items. However, particularly once he is out of his ‘ordinary’ clothes (pants and a shirt with braces) and into his cape, he becomes a children-hero. Oliver sits uneasily between his own desires as a child to have his mother back, and the desires of an entire world that see him as the saving hero.  

The danger of hero narratives about children is that it presents a decontextualised image of young people affected by conflict. It’s an issue that many academics who study children and conflict have raised[1]. This is less of a problem in a videogame in which you expect there to be a protagonist, and you expect the narrative to be tidy. As the player, you take on a heroic role, and in this case it is a young boy you are journeying with.  In fact, the very fact that Oliver is 13 would be almost entirely unremarkable (even to someone attuned to these things) if it wasn’t for several questionable occurrences involving young people through the game. But first, where I think the game succeeds in negotiating representations of children.


An Active Imagination and Kids with Agency

The potential pitfalls of a child protagonist are eased by Ni No Kuni’s connection to Studio Ghibli. The joys of Studio Ghibli films are their ability to take seriously the adventures, experiences, emotions and beliefs of their (usually) young protagonists. The perils children face in Ghibli films are real and not superficial—the threat of a mother’s death, the loss of parents, growing up—and moreover they don’t infantilise the children, but rather highlight a resilience or strength which can just as easily come from imagination and belief as real world encounters. The tendency of Studio Ghibli to feature female protagonists with feminist convictions has also always endeared me to the films.

Indeed, Oliver isn’t the only young person in the party. Relatively early in the game you meet Esther (in Al Mamoon), whose father is Rashaad, one of the Great Sages (who previously failed to defear Shadar). With her father’s permission—which is worth noting in a discussion of children’s agency—and once cured of a broken-heart by Oliver, she joins Oliver and Drippy on their quest[2].

I recognise that Miyazaki did not have anything to do with the creation of Ni No Kuni, but the art style is pure Ghibli, and music comes from Joe Hisaishi who has scored many of Ghibli’s films over recent decades. These evocations ask the player to accept the conventions we have come to accept from Ghibli films, as we step into another world and embark on a grand adventure. Moreover, they reassure us that the heroic young person we are traveling with is intelligent, caring, imaginative and valuable.


“I’m not a child!”

While Oliver is the ‘heroic figure’, from the moment you meet Pea the game wants you to believe she is some kind of mystical, yet innocent, idealized child. You meet Pea very early in the game, before you’ve even left Motorville for the other world for the first time, and she is a puzzle and a mystery only Oliver can see throughout most of the game. She is a very young looking girl with bright green hair, a propensity to giggle, to disappear mid-conversation and to reappear with new worries. It is once you’ve defeated Shadar and your gang catches on that there is something bigger going on in the world of Ni No Kuni in relation to the White Witch, the Council, and some disaster from times long past, that Pea becomes more important to the story.

Essentially Pea is the pure and goodhearted aspect of the imaginings of Casseopeia, the White Witch (of the title), similar in existence, but diametrically opposed to the Council who seems to be the negative and harmful aspect of Casseopeia’s imagination. These real-but-not-real imaginings are a result of the lonliness Casseopeia has endured for milenia. So Pea is part of Casseopeia, but this isn’t revealed until the end of the game. For most of the game she is just a mysterious young girl with conveniently ridiculous powers. This leads several of the older members of the gang to question her inclusion and usefulness:

“…the three kingdoms are rife with horrors. We cannot send her into their midst. She is only a child” Macassin declares at one point. Pea responds “I’m not a child!”, which is largely ignored by the others, as Swaine notes “…have you seen who you’re traveling with? This lot aren’t exactly grown-ups”.

Tied up neatly in this exchange (and exemplified again later when Pea again restates her objection to being called a child) are many of the tropes associated with children, both broadly, and within the game. Pea is seen to be innocent, young, a potential victim and consequently unable to act. Yet Pea is quick to negate that reading and demonstrate that they cannot succeed without her. While Macassin remains dubious of her ability, and of the others’ abilities to apparently protect her, Oliver claims his place as the child-hero when he names her friend and declares he will defend her. 


Take Heart: Consent, respect and the failure of Ni No Kuni and childhood

With the aesthetic granted by Studio Ghibli’s art, and an easy to follow story, I enjoyed playing through the game, exploring new areas (particularly once you meet the sky pirates and Tengri the dragon, who will fly you almost anywhere on the map), setting out on side quests and meeting new characters.

Part of the premise, and progression, of the game is that Shadar the Dark Djinn has been stealing people’s hearts. As you move through the game one subset of side quests consist of meeting people who are broken-hearted and restoring their heart to them—missing ‘heart’ includes a range of virtues from ‘enthusiasm’ to ‘courage’ or ‘kindness’. This includes, at one point for example restoring enthusiasm to a wife who just wants to go home and sleep rather than working:

You restore heart through two spells. Once you’ve received the quest, you find someone who has an abundance of that kind of virtue, you speak with them, and you cast the spell Take Heart. The precious virtue is popped into a magical locket Oliver wears around his neck and you run it back to the poor, broken-hearted soul where you cast Give Heart, and, wonder-of-wonders, the person is restored and ready to dive headfirst back into whatever task they were unmotivated to do.

Now, and this is really important, the spell Take Heart is described in the Wizard’s Companion (the magical guide book with details on every aspect of the game and world) in the following way:

This spell allows you to take some virtue from a person who has it in abundance, and store it in the Locket. Just be sure to ask for permission before you proceed. Remember: a heart belongs to one person, and one person alone.

Let me just emphasise something before moving on: Just be sure to ask for permission before you proceed.

This is an example of how most of the exchanges go when you ask someone if you can have the excess of the virtue they possess via Take Heart:

Similarly to this pieceby Ana Mardoll, I was surprised and enthused that the game was emphasizing consent. Particularly for a core activity that was so bound up with people’s emotions. As Ana said:

…to see [Ni No Kuni] unexpectedly and unabashedly assert to the gamer community that Consent Matters -- that, indeed, it matters so much that it's literally the difference between a Good magician and a Bad magician -- is amazing to me. And very much appreciated.

As someone interested in and invested in more complex portrayals of young people, and in recognizing their contribution and participation in society, I was pretty excited to discover that the young people in Ni No Kuni often have quests for Oliver and his team to complete, and they also sometimes have the virtues needed for other quests. How fabulous, I thought, that children would get to be an active part of this process which recognizes consent, which is built on moral choices and a benevolent aim of, at the most basic, making people happy!

Sadly, no.

Instead where Oliver needs to obtain a virtue from a child he acts with deceit, condescension and a worrying disregard for the child concerned. In this first example the young girl in Perdida says she’d be glad to help with a favor. Oliver responds “Swell! Would be mind closing your eyes for just a couple of seconds”… I’m sorry. What? If anything Oliver should spend more time explaining what will happen to a child than to an adult. As someone who has had to fill in (piles of) ethics forms for research with children, this exchange violates about every premise. Trust me. If Oliver doesn’t think the girl understands what he wants to do, he should either try and explain another way or find an adult guardian to speak to about progressing the activity. And yes, I understand complex ethics procedures probably don’t have to be written into a JRPG, but why the infantalising and almost creepy exchanges between children and Oliver (who, if you remember is also only 13)? If the game wants to include children but isn’t sure what to do in conversations, just treat them like adults! I could even cope with some awkward ‘tee hee’-ing from the children NPCs, if only they were treated with any kind of respect. 

The exchange Oliver has with a young boy in Castaway Cove is even more bizarre. After a reasonably witty (for the game at least) and adorable exchange about the young boy wanting to be a pirate when he is older—a ‘Future Pirate King of Justice’ no less, Oliver notes he is clearly full of ambition. The young boy asks “Ambition? What do you mean?”. Does Oliver explain? No. Oliver stumbles like a creepy uncle and responds “Oh! Uh…It’s nothing. Don’t worry”. After some more banter in which Oliver makes nothing any clearer for the young boy, Oliver casts Take Heart. Contrasted with Oliver’s heartlessness (oh yes, pun), the young boy still invites Oliver to be part of his crew.

Shame on you Ni No Kuni! You were doing so well with your practicing consent, and your dodgy humour, a complex young protagonist hero, and even some feminist undertones. But then you willfully threw it away at the expense of these young people and missed a fantastic opportunity to extend the nuanced, interesting exploration of childhood via Oliver’s story into other parts of the game. Instead Ni No Kuni seems to freak out, not understanding how to interact with young people. 

As an aside, I can't speak about childhood in Ni No Kuni and not speak about the truly bizarre, neo-colonial, weirdly-sexualised quest, "An Artist's Muse", where an artist in Al Mamoon decides he needs one of the forest dwellers, a young girl "as wild as the hills", with a necklace for his painting. Around the world are hidden 'forest dwellings' within collections of trees whose inhabitants are caricatures of indigenous people; wearing skins, with face paint, and unable to speak in complete sentences. So you head off to collect her, she comes back with you and the artist is grateful. To me, the undertones of that exercise are problematic enough (noble savage anyone?), but then they young girl starts striking a series of sexualised poses 

 She's still there winking and posing if you leave and come back later. I felt protective of her like I hadn't with any of the other children in the game; if this is how Ni No Kuni would treat children as-if they were adults, as I hoped for above, then I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to how I'd prefer children to be represented (more like Oliver and Esther, perhaps?).


So, How Then Should We Think About Children in Videogames?

Games have a complex relationship with children. I understand this. I understand why. It would not only be deeply unsettling to shoot children in an FPS, it probably wouldn’t pass a classification board. And I’m a peace studies academic for goodness sake! I don’t really want to shoot anyone, particularly not children! So often game worlds, which are otherwise richly developed, beautifully looking, and complex places either have no children in them at all, or treat them essentially as part of the wallpaper, where your crosshair/cursor refuses to recognizes them as something to be interacted with.

Lest I be misunderstood, I don’t want children that can be shot at added to my videogames!  But if your game is going to include children as members of the world you are moving through, can we at least treat them with the same ethical and moral consideration as the adults? Why do adults receive the courtesy of an explanation before they have a spell cast upon them, while children are either asked just to close their eyes or not even asked at all?

It has a lot to do with how we think of children and young people. “Don’t act so childishly”, “grow up”, “you were behaving like a child”; common place comments which reinforce a view of children as incomplete, as passive, as unable to participate in a ‘proper’ adult world. In academic work these kinds of assumptions are said to operate in frameworks that are ‘adultist’, which privilege adult competency and re-inscribe incompetence and incompleteness upon children. This growing critique of these views, argues instead that children can make sense of their world, they can and do participate and contribute to family life, to communities, to their everyday lives[3].

Of course, Pea both is and isn’t a child. And in many ways the better parts of Ni No Kuni’s engagement with the themes and issues of childhood are encapsulated in that statement. On one hand the game gives a lot of credit to children and their practical and imaginative capabilities, their resiliency, and their capacity to respond to the world around them. It is just a shame that at particular points the game seems entirely unable to sensitively engage with children and reduces them to the equivalent of a magical chests in which Oliver and his friends find convenient aids scattered throughout the land.

The game gives us an opportunity to reflect on how we speak about children, both in gameworlds and in real life, how we engage with them, how we perceive them. Yet it continues to rely on harmful and dehumanizing narratives about who or what children are.  Ni No Kuni is a fantasy, an escape; both as a videogame, and as Another World for Oliver to conquer his fear and sadness. I loved the sensitivity with which the main story is told, and the wonder and sense of exploration Oliver has. I’m only sad it had to come at the expense of more nuanced understandings of other children in his ‘other world’.

[1] In an excellent academic study of former child soldiers in Sierra Leone, Myriam Denov argues that children in conflict are frequently constructed through “the logics of extremes”: “extreme victims, extreme perpetrators or extreme heroes”, or in another way “dangerous and disorderly, the hapless victim and the heroic figure”. The critique of these neat (and flat) representations here is that the messy, difficult aspects of living amongst conflict (or even day-to-day in relatively peaceful societies) as a young person is erased by a logic that speaks before the reality of life can be explored.

[2] As an aside, it is worth commenting on the gendered implications of Esther, both within the game, and more broadly in a discussion of children and conflict. Esther (like so many other women in JRPGs before her) is the healer of the party, with low defenses and limited attack potential. In academic discussions girls’ invisibility has been increasingly recognized. While girls are actively involved in combat roles in many armed groups (Colombia, CAR, Cote d’Ivoire, Uganda, Nepal…) frequently they are seen only as silent victims, particularly as ‘wives’ of commanders, as victims of sexual slavery, and in support roles (cooks, cleaners). While this gendered portrayal speaks to the experiences of some girls, it comes to characterize all girls in this way, and highlights their victimization rather than their agency.

[3] In the field of peace and conflict studies there are some fabulous works on this topic including the volume edited by Siobahn McEvoy-Levy “Troublemakers orPeacemakers” and Lesley Pruitt’s recently released “Youth Peacebuilding: Music,Gender and Change”. Ethnographic/anthropological work by Alcinda Honwana, Myriam Denov, and Carolyn Nordstrom are also making fascinating contributions to this field.

Notes on Bioshock Infinite

[This is a new format I want to experiment with. As I rarely write reviews these days, I feel like I'm rarely actually writing anything about specific games that I play. To fix this, I want to try to write a Notes post about a game after I finish it. This will be a series of points about that game that may or may not connect to any of the other points. Points may be musings on something thematic or just one-line observations. I'm not sure how this is going to work, but I guess we will see. Also, there will be spoilers.]

1. I appreciate how Infinite situates itself in the Bioshock series. I like how it starts on the surface of the ocean, where Bioshock 2 abandoned me, and takes me to a similar lighthouse. I like the nods and the reassurance that this game will be thematically tied to the previous games in the series, even if it is geographically detached. As you ring the bells and summon the city, the thundering call of the city vibrating the clouds is a wonderful thing.

2. The lights and the sounds and the ascension into Columbia are just one example of the wonderful worldbuilding the game does in the opening scenes. An overheard conversations of buildings docking late was perhaps my favourite of the many snippets that these early stages gave me of how Columbia works. This was a fantastic and fantastical city I had just fallen/risen into, of course I want to understand how that city works. So, for a time, I was happy.

3. Infinite's biggest problem, then, is that it is not about Columbia. Not at all. Columbia is nothing. Columbia is the facade of a city painted onto a leaking helium balloon. For precisely one act of the game, Columbia matters. As Booker makes his way to Monument Island, as Booker and Elizabeth make their way through the Hall of Heroes on the game's most tolerable (well, least intolerable) fetch quest, we are given insights into Columbia's history and ideology. But then we travel to the smoke-covered factories of Finkton. Then back to the streets of Columbia proper—but now it is covered in storm clouds. Except for that opening act, Columbia might as well not even float.
After the Hall of Heroes, the game no longer cares about the Columbia it put so much time and detail and devotion into. Columbia is left behind with the first tear that Booker and Elizabeth walk through. On the other side, there's just some streets and buildings and bad guys.
Bioshock 1 and 2 were about Rapture, before anything else. They were about this impossible city—how it came to be and how it came to die. Bioshock Infinite is not about Columbia. It would be a far more interesting game if it was about Columbia. Even in Rapture's slums, you could never forget the ocean. In Columbia, air is just something you breathe.

4. Right before I lost all interest in the game (that is, when I first entered Finkton), I had the most enjoyable single skirmish of the game. After picking up the electricity vigor in the Hall of Heroes, Elizabeth and I returned to the previous area to summon the gondola to the airship. As we waited for it to arrive, we were attacked by airships full of police. This area, with its multiple levels and skyrails, provided a perfect playground for Infinite's gunplay to shine. I would jump on a skyrail, launch myself at an enemy on a distant airship, launch him into the air, take out the other two, jump back onto the skyrail and continue moving. There was an effortlessness to my movement, and a verticality. In this area, I didn't just feel like I was running-and-gunning. I felt like I was performing in a way befitting Columbia, falling sideways through the air with a satisfying ease.
When the gondola arrived and all the enemies died, it was the last moment that I truly enjoyed my time with Infinite.

5. It was also the time that Infinite forgot it was about anything. In the opening hours it alluded to themes of racism, manifest destiny, religious fundamentalism, and then it forgot about all of them. It stopped being 'about' racism and just started being racist. I already wrote about this while I was playing the game. Nothing that happened after that point altered my opinion.
Once the game (apathetically, lazily, boringly) decided that the Vox Populi were as bad as their oppressors, once the game opened a tear and stepped us from all-out-peace to all-out-war, anything that could have been interesting about the game was lost. The nuance of racial power politics was obliterated. The most interesting part of any rebelling (where the first spark starts smoking) was skipped over. Rapture was a distopic city already dead. Irrational knew how to do dystopias. Columbia started as a city still living before Irrational dashed back to the dystopia setting they already knew. And it was boring. It was well-trodden. It was uninteresting and about nothing at all.

6. The depth of Infinite's meaningful engagement with any of the themes it brings up is essentially, "Racism. Boy, I don't know."And that is why so many critics decided to kick its arse. Someone on Twitter (I forget who) asked why so many critics would tear into games like Infinite that at least aim for the moon, even if they fall short. My response at the time, having not yet played the game, was that those are exactly the games we should be tearing into if we ever want to get to the moon at all. Now, having played the game, my response would be that Infinite doesn't aim for the moon; it cuts props out of cardboard and stages a moonlanding in the basement.

7. Never make the playable character more ignorant than the player. If the player knows something is going to go bad and the character doesn't, that is a problem. Booker is a dimwit, and it is far too easy to remain several steps ahead of him, making the game's many fetch-quests even more frustrating. When Fitzroy promises to give you back your airship if you go and collect some guns from a gunmaker, it already sounds like an absurd mission. Why can't she send someone else? How is one man meant to carry enough weapons for an uprising? Booker doesn't care, so you just go ahead and follow the green arrow.
And, instantly, the gun fights are boring. The interesting context is gone. Now I'm just killing people for no reason other than the fact that I'm playing a shooter. I am more than happy to play a generic shooter, but the actions of my character still need a justified motive. That was gone the moment I fell into Finkton.
So we go to find the gunsmith. But he has been arrested and killed. So we just jump to a universe he was never arrested in. The most ridiculous part of this is that we then have to walk all the way back to his house. It's a fetch quest without fetching. But now the police have stolen his tools. But the gunsmith we can see is clearly glitching in and out of the world, he says he can't hear us over his tools. He is clearly in a world with his tools. So do we change worlds again to one where he still has his tools? No, we go and shoot more people on our way to the police station to recover his tools.
When we find the tools, Booker says "I didn't think this through." Elizabeth opens a portal to yet another world and we walk all the way back to the gunsmith again. It's a multiverse onion of fetchquests where you don't even fetch anything. Most players will think this absurd before even the first world hop, but Booker never stops to think of it, and the player is stuck driving a stupid automaton of a man, killing three worlds of cops because he didn't think this through.

8. Don't even get me started on the ghost fetch-quest.

9. I don't like Doctor Who. I've never quite understood why I don't like Doctor Who, but I think Infinite helped me figure it out. It's something I'm vaguely calling worldbuilding-as-deus-ex-machina. Every episode has its own pseudo-science explanation for why the weird phenomena is happening, and half the fun of each episode is finding out what that pseudo-science is and, thus, finding out what is 'really happening'. What I think bugs me about this is where the worldbuilding is also used as a convenient solution to solve the plot. I realised this when Infinite started using it. 'Tears' go from parallel universes to time machines to wish-fulfilment to all three at once and forward and back again, depending on what the story needs it to be at any one time. But the story never actually explains to the player what exactly tears are, and half the time their use contradict the way they were previously used. They are never understandable, and never interesting.
Worse, as they take you out of the original world the game spent so long building, as you step through that first portal, you lose any world to care about. From then on, you are just somewhere else.

10. At one point, Fitzroy says to Booker, "You just complicate the narrative." I chuckled.

11. Dead or alive, Andrew Ryan leaked into every corner of Rapture even more successfully than the ocean. For huge chunks of Infinite, Comstock is not mentioned nor invoked nor seen. He is described at the start, then he just disappears until he is needed again at the end of the game. And with him go any interest I have in Columbia or the game's cardboard cutout themes.

12. Okay. I have to mention the ghost fetch-quest. So you are chasing this ghost of Lady Comstock around because you need her fingerprint to open a door. Why is there a ghost? Do ghosts even have fingerprints? Who knows! So you get her to the gate and she is so angry about something or other she just rushes through the gate and blows it up. This ridiculous fetch quest didn't even give me the satisfaction of playing it out. Instead, it just blows up the gate. I could've done that with the RPG on my back!

13. I liked how Elizabeth was useful in combat but not in the road. It made sense why people wouldn't shoot her. (It made less sense why the Vox Populi wouldn't shoot her, but I couldn't even tell which enemies were Vox Populi so whatever). I liked that I never really had to worry about health or ammo while she was around. When she wasn't around, I turned the game down to easy difficult because I realised how boring the combat actually was.

14. The next minute of this video was one of my favourite scenes in any large-budget game in a long time. Especially the traintrack-clanging music.

15. The slow buildup of this scene was also a highlight. If Infinite spent more time on carefully crafted narrative moments instead of fetch-quests through tunnels of generic enemies down generic streets that might as well not even be in the sky, I think we would've got on a lot better.

16. One thing the story did well was flag a few things early on that were easy to forget about: Elizabeth's finger. The name Anna. When these were brought up again at the end of the game, I was like, "Oh yeah! Those things!" I think they were well implemented, at least.

15. Which I guess brings me to the ending. It was a very well implemented ending. I had lost all interest in both story and game by the time I pointed Songbird at the remains of Monument Island. I was composing all kinds of snarky tweets in my head. Then, suddenly I was in Rapture. Then I was somewhere else and somewhen else. Then things kept moving so fast until it clicks who Elizabeth really is. And then it keeps moving until then, even as the screen is fading to black and all the Elizabeths are disappearing, I understand who Booker is. It doesn't sit around for you to figure it out. It just tells you then drowns you. Bam. Just like that. I really liked that, even if it was just Levine overcompensating for regretting putting the twist too early in the first game (you couldn't put it much later than that!). Out of all the illogical stuff related to tears that don't make sense, the relationship of Booker and Comstock perhaps got the closest to making sense. And, for about the length of the credits, it was satisfying. But then I started to think about it again and none of it made sense. Not that I didn't understand. I understood, but what the game said happened didn't make sense. Especially not if there was a million other worlds out there.

16. In 2007, the very presence of themes made Bioshock a relatively 'smart' game to an audience of players who had never had to deal with these things before. Stuff like objectivism and the idea of being financially rewarded if you are mean to people and not being rewarded if you are nice really felt like a big leap in maturity for games to make. Bioshock convinced a lot of people that games could be smart not because it was the smartest game ever made, but because it was the smartest game a lot of us had ever played. Bioshock Infinite's biggest problem is that it is not 2007 anymore.

Some Preliminary Thoughts on Bioshock Infinite's Racism

This is going to get a little bit tumblr, sorry. I'm still playing the game but I have opinions that I want to get out so here I go. Probably some minor spoilers for the first bit of the game will be present.

The first act of Bioshock Infinite is a splendid setup. I love the ascension from the surface of the ocean (where Bioshock 2 last left me drifting) into the skies of Columbia. I love those opening minutes walking through Columbia on a festive day. The environmental storytelling is a bit heavy-handed (please just stand there as these floats drive past with our history plastered on the side) but it paints such a magnificent and layered city. A beautiful city with an obviously dark heart. This is a racist society, and, for a while, I was excited to have a videogame that wasn't afraid to depict a modern, American society as a racist society. These weren't futuristic humans or aliens from another planet or Arabs or Nazis. These are Americans—Westerners like us—who are racist, who base their entire ideology on a racist other and manifest destiny. Here was a game, it seemed, that was going to confront the racism entrenched in our own societies.

We see the racist underpinnings of Columbia everywhere. We see posters of George Washington radiating a heavenly light that casts away Monkey-faced Africans and bright-yellow Asians and Irish drunkards. We see the fearful black man serving cool refreshments to the kids in the penny arcade, self-effacing in the way that only an utterly broken man could be. In the Hall of Heroes we walk through the propagandist displays of the Boxer Rebellion and the Wounded Knee Massacre. The message is clear: this racist society is afraid of the savage Other. The savage Other needs to be controlled, contained, managed. Or else they decapitate our womenfolk! The racist society of Columbia justify their own cruelty to other races by telling themselves that if they did not treat the Other like this, their entire way of life—not to mention their actual lives—would be at risk.

For a while, this is great! We can see that the society is, clearly, built on some terrible and horrific fallacies that are used to justify slavery and cruelty. We know, and the game seems to know too, that these people are wrong, that the Asians and the Africans and the Irish aren't one bloodthirsty mob that want to kill everyone. The game isn't racist; it is depicting a racist society.

But then some stuff happens. You end up in another world or the same world changed or something (I imagine the game will explain the tears better later but at this point it actually doesn't matter. Videogames take us to different worlds all the time; it doesn't stop them being racist.) and now the Vox Populi—the underground movement of the oppressed minorities—are fighting back. They are burning down the factories that they were previously slaves for. Great! You go, oppressed people!

But then you get back to the streets of Columbia. There is a barge that is taking fleeing citizens away before the Vox Populi forces attack. Not everyone can fit on it and tragic music plays as it flies away. Suddenly, the game wants me to feel sorry for these racists as though suddenly they are the poor, innocent victims.

And soon we see why. The Vox Populi are killing everyone. They are scalping people are nailing their scalps to a wall. Fitzroy, the black woman in charge of the Vox Populi, slits a man's throat and rubs the blood all over her face.

Bioshock Infinite showed me a society not that unlike my own where the everyman was terrified of a horde of savage Others being given equal power and then killing everyone in an inhuman bloodlust.

Bioshock Infinite then showed me a horde of savage Others given equal power, killing everyone in an inhuman bloodlust.

Bioshock Infinite went from knowingly winking at me, telling me that it knew this society was racist, to telling me that this society was right. This society was justified to treat non-whites how it treated them, because look at how they behave when they are set loose. They are animals, smearing blood on themselves and pinning our scalps to a wall.

This isn't simply a violent uprising. There is nothing wrong with depicting a violent uprising!

But neither is this simply 'power corrupts'. When the Vox Populi revolt, Bioshock Infinite says, intentionally or not, that Columbia—that America—is right to fear and oppress the non-white person because these people are naught but savage beasts. Bioshock Infinite says that Columbia's racism, built upon a fear of the Other, is justified.

And that is pretty racist.



Pre-emptive disclaimers in case this post is spread further than I anticipate!

Yes, I'm white.

People have probably said this way better than me but I haven't read anything on the game yet. Well, I've read Dan Golding's great critique that pretty aptly talks about a veneer of racism, but that's about it.

If you want to tell me how the later parts of the game justify depicting a collective of non-white people as a savage horde far more violent than their oppressors, go ahead, but I probably disagree.

If you want to tell me why you think the game is, in fact, not racist, bear in mind that the best counter to someone saying "X is racist/sexist/whatever-ist" isn't "Allow me to tell you why you are wrong," but "Allow me to try to understand why you see it that way." But whatever.

February Writing

A quick summary of the writing I did in February. As previously mentioned, I'll be writing less this year than I was last year. This is partly because I want to commit more time this year to my academic writing (both getting my PhD properly underway and hopefully getting some journal articles out the door) and also because I simply wasn't happy with the quality of my stuff when I was writing weekly pieces at multiple outlets. But even though I am writing less, I'm happier with the quality of the stuff I'm writing now, so that is good, and I have some ideas for some features I want to write in the coming months that I'm really excited about.

Anyway. Things I wrote. At Unwinnable I only have one piece this month. I wanted to look at this interesting thing that happens when I play games like Antichamber and Where Is My Heart?. Namely, I get really, really exhausted just from thinking. So I wrote about that.

At Games On Net I have two "You Know What I Love?" columns this month. The first one is about the Borderlands 2 enemy type, the Goliath, which I think is a really interesting enemy. The second one is about grinding as I've enjoyed it in several games I've been playing recently.

Also at Games On Net this month, I had the opportunity to head to Sydney for a Bioshock: Infinite press event. So I wrote a preview of that, which I'm fairly happy of (as far as previews go), and I also interviewed the game's Director of Design, Bill Gardner.

In February I decided to go back and give Dark Souls a second chance after failing miserably at it when it first came out. Subsequently, I've played the game for about fifty hours in a rather short period of time. I had lots of thoughts about how the game in general and the level design specifically communicate the world to the player as hostile and stand-off-ish. I put together these thoughts for my first even piece at Bit Creature, which is exciting.

Last month I had a "Places" piece in Edge about Skyrim's The Reach. It was republished online this month.

Earlier in the month I gave a very casual lecture about the term 'nongame' and why it is terrible and discriminatory. I wrote about it briefly here, and provided a link to the (not very good quality) recording of the (not very good quality) talk.

And that is all for this month. The only other news is that Killing is Harmless is now available on Kindle. You can purchase it from Gumroad to get the Kindle version along with the pdf and epub formats, or you can now also buy it for Kindle alone directly through Amazon.

Journalism, Storification, and Harassment

This is just a quick post to bring up a recent trend in games journalism that is bothering me. So this is one of those 'writing about writing about games' kind of posts. If that's not your kind of thing, well, this is your warning.

I also want to stress that this post is not meant as an attack on either Kotaku or on Patricia Hernandez. Over the last few years, Kotaku has grown and matured to incorporate a whole heap of exciting writers and content, and I am sincerely glad that the site exists and that (for the most part) it does what it does. Some of my favourite games writers of anywhere write at Kotaku, including Patricia herself, who is a phenomenal writer and an editor of a phenomenal site.

This post is more an attack on a practice that I've seen on a range of outlets, and I imagine it is only going to become more popular and widespread in the future. It just so happens that the two particular cases that highlight the issue with this trend that worries me are written by Patricia on Kotaku. But I really want to stress that I mean this as an attack on neither of them but rather just exposing issues that have arisen in a form they have in part forwarded.

My issue, simply, is the practice of creating a story that consists of nothing (or very little) other than embedded tweets—worse, tweets on sensitive topics that are embedded in a story without the tweet writer's consent.

The games industry/culture is increasingly being sucked into Twitter, and important conversations are increasingly taking place there that deserve reporting on. My concern is that instead of reportage, we are getting storifying[1], the online equivalent of vox pops without any actual commentary to frame these opinions.

But my concern isn't the sacredness of journalistic integrity. Rather, it's the safety of those people whose tweets are being used to create the story. To continue the vox pop analogy, storifying tweets onto a website is like a vox pop segment of the news posting each interviewee's address at the bottom of the screen. From the story, responding to the people who wrote the tweet is just one click away, with a reply button embedded on the page right alongside the tweet.

Why is this a problem? Because, simply, a lot of really terrible people like videogames. I think it is great that Kotaku reports on issues of discrimination as often as they do. I think it is great that they have the courage to have a diverse writing crew and the courage to let that diverse writing crew actually write about sexism and racism and homophobia issues. However, mainstream outlets also need to acknowledge the fact that a lot of terrible people read their sites, and a whole heap more terrible people are lurking on forums waiting to pounce on anything on those sites once they hear about them. So by posting somebody's tweets on a mainstream games website, you're not just exposing somebody to a huge audience of terrible people who would love nothing better than to go harass that person, you are giving that audience of terrible people easy access to that person.

I have seen two particularly worrying instances of this recently. Most problematic was the whole tirade about 'Is Tiny Tina racist?'[2] Brief context: a guy on Twitter, Mike Sacco, had a really insightful conversation with Gearbox's Anthony Burch about the Borderlands 2 character Tiny Tina, a 'whacky' white girl whose wackiness is defined by the way she uses a lot of slang primarily associated with black cultures. It was a really great conversation! I had never before considered Tiny Tina like that, and it was insightful to see how other people might have an issue with her. Better still, Burch, despite being stand-off-ish to start with, was keen to listen to criticism, even going so far to say he would like to change Tiny Tina if people had issues with her.

It was this last, perhaps not well considered statement by Burch that got the Twitter conversation onto Kotaku. Here was a dev saying he might change a character because some people found her racist. (Obviously, this was just poor wording because of Twitter's character constraints. There is an update at the bottom of the story where Burch clarifies that he means he would take these concerns into consideration for future content. The fact this needed clarifiying further shows the problems with just storifying tweets as a story). Certainly, if Kotaku didn't post this story, someone else would've. So the story went up as a series of tweets. Unsurprisingly, a whole mass of, uh, what's the race equivalent of MRAs? WRAs? Let's just go with dickheads. Anyway, unsurprisingly, a whole mass of dickheads descended onto Twitter to 'educate' Mike and Burch about racism, many even creating new Twitter accounts just to do so! By 'educate', I obviously mean 'harass'.

This really bothered me. Here, a dev and a dude had a really great chat about something problematic. It wasn't even an argument! There was no controversy until it went up on Kotaku and the hordes of dickheads descended onto Twitter. My initial fear was Burch was going to get in trouble for talking about the game publicly. Instead, it was Mike who ended up losing his job. Mike has understandably been cagey about going into details, but essentially it seems that some really passionate dickheads went so far as to email the company he was working at (some WoW card game place) and told them they would no longer be buying their product as long as Mike still worked there. Company, in turn, told Mike to stop talking about it. Mike, understandably annoyed that his employer would try to silence his free speech because of some dickheads on the internet, refused and, hence, resigned.

He tweeted this. And Kotaku made another storified story. The dickheads all over the internet found out via this post, and harassed him even more on Twitter, so happy they were that they had protected the status quo of videogames and cost this 'whiner' his job. A while later, Mike got a 'cease and desist' letter from his company since he kept talking to the media—which he hadn't!

Obviously, it is not Kotaku's fault that Mike lost his job. The conversation was public when it was happening before they came along. But being 'public' doesn't necessarily mean 'everyone' is going to see it. 125,000 people have read the Kotaku article, and it has been reposted all over the internet on other outlets and forums.

I think Kotaku (and all videogame outlets) have a responsibility to acknowledge that by amplifying messages like this, they are putting the original tweeters at great risk of harassment simply because of who, regrettably, reads their site.

Another example from yesterday (which fortunately hasn't cost anyone their job), was when Leena van Deventer tweeted a very succinct tweet in disgust at the lack of any women on stage during Sony's Playstation 4 event. Leena' tweet topped a storified story about the lack of women at the event—a story that consisted of nothing other than other equally frustrated tweets.

I saw this story as soon as it went up, and I knew what was going to happen. I searched Leena's twitter handle on Twitter and, sure enough, the mansplaining dickheads were starting to roll in to give her shit for 'making this a sex issue'. I only imagine that many of the other people linked in the story had the same thing happen.

Again, it is great that Kotaku is willing to follow up a massive, generation-defining event with an article about the fact not a single woman was present at it. That is excellent. The problem is, this style of reporting is, I think, borderline unethical. Just as with Mike, putting this tweets on a mainstream games outlet, with only a single click required to reply to the tweeter, achieves nothing other than telling the angry mob of terrible dickheads where to take their anger. Here is this person on Twitter claiming something is sexist. Sick 'em!

Obviously this was not Patricia's intentions in either case. And it is worth noting that Patricia gets just as harassed for posting these stories as the tweeters themselves. It takes a huge amount of bravery to expose yourself to that bile and hate and to talk about these issues on a mainstream site like Kotaku, and I greatly respect Patricia for doing it as often as she does. The issue is that neither Leena or Mike put themselves out there—they were put out there. Their tweets were lifted and placed on Kotaku and that was that.

So I think this practice of just storifying tweets and calling it an article is unethical. I think it is irresponsible. For all their good intentions, mainstream outlets that are trying (commendably) to be progressive, need to accept that a huge contingent of terrible people read their sites (which, it is worth stressing, is not to say that everyone who reads their site is a terrible person), and they need to first and foremost protect their sources.

So two solutions I can think of. First, simply, ask the person whose tweet you want to storify if they mind being included in the post. I think that is the bare minimum that needs to be done. Just because someone's tweet is public doesn't mean they want it amplified to the kind of people your story is going to amplify it to. Second solution: don't embed tweets. Write your own opinion about this issue and, if necessary, post screenshots of the twitter conversation (with the tweeters' consent) that prompted it. At least this way that reply button won't be right there, begging to be abused.

So that is my concern. I don't want Kotaku to stop talking about race and gender issues in games, and I commend them for talking about them as much as they do. Patricia, among other writers, is fighting the good fight against the toxic parts of our culture, and that is something I greatly admire and appreciate. I just have my concerns about this particular way of going about it.

I stress again, this post isn't trying to point fingers at Patricia or Kotaku, they just supply me with the most succinct examples of a wider trend that I have concerns about. Simply: can we please just stop storifying people onto articles without their permission? That is all. Thanks.


UPDATE: I want to stress one last time, that I do not think Patricia is in any way a lazy or unethical games journalist. The ability to embed tweets into a post is a relatively recent thing that people have been able to do, and it is a mode of reporting on conversations that happen on Twitter that was worth exploring and experimenting with. But now it has been experimented with, we can see these issues arising, and that is worth acknowledging. So, one last time, I don't mean to imply that either Patricia or Kotaku are unethical in themselves, but that the ethics surrounding this new tool need to be considered, and I apologise to both if that was unclear.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Several people on twitter have raised the question of retweets. Don't retweets serve a similar function in exposing something someone said to a wider audience. Indeed they do! And I think they also deserve a more nuanced consideration. Specifically, I think people should consider their clout (urgh) when they go for that RT button. I've certainly before RT'ed friends with only about a dozen or so followers to my 2000+ followers, and then immediately regretted the barrage of angry naysayers I sent their way. So that is certainly something worth considering!

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: I have changed the second last paragraph as the way it was previously worded may have implied that Patricia and Kotaku only post about gender and race issues for hits, which is not something I believe and certainly not something I want to imply. What I meant to demonstrate was simply the ignorant/privileged position from which I am writing this post, as someone who has never faced the pressures of an actual games journalism job. Anyone who writes about gender or race in relation to videogames is putting themselves way out there and that is something I only have the deepest respect for.


Notes:

1) I don't know if it is actually the program Storify itself that Kotaku uses on these specific stories to embed these tweets, but just like 'google' has become a verb for 'using a search engine', I am using 'storify' as a verb here for 'make tweets into a story'. Update: Storify the actual company replied to me on Twitter since this post went up and noted that, indeed, it is not Storify being used in the specific stories I speak about in this post. They also pointed out their Privacy page that does indeed suggest asking people if they mind their tweets being archived.

2) As a(n angry) side note here, I really fucking hate it when outlets post stories like this as "Is X Racist/Homophobic/Sexist?" (note: Kotaku didn't do this, but I saw many other outlets re-post it on their Facebook pages with this question) as though what their readership of primarily white/straight/male readers think in any way matters. When someone finds something discriminatory in any way, we don't sit down and have a fucking vote with the question "Is this discriminatory?". We stop, shut up, and listen to that person to understand why this thing offends them, and we fucking learn something about the world. So outlets: stop asking your readers this inane question for the illusion of participation and, instead, just tell them that someone did find it discriminatory. And, people, if you ever find yourself trying to convince someone who had a problem with something that they are wrong to have that problem: shut the fuck up and try listening for once.

On So-Called Ungames And Why You Don't Need To Define 'Videogame' To Talk About Them

So Harry Lee and Chad Toprak organising these lecture-like things the last couple of weeks. If you don't know Harry, he is an incredibly intelligent and engaging game designer who creates the most delightful games. He also studies medicine. He also co-directs the Freeplay Independent Games Festival. He's an all-round pretty great guy who you should be keeping an eye on if you dig videogames. Chad, meanwhile, makes all kinds of whacky things at RMIT's Exertion Game Lab. He is also an all-round pretty great guy but I don't think Kotaku have posted a profile about him before.

Harry asked me last week if I'd like to give a small talk as part of these lecture-like things that he is doing. I had probably been saying ridiculous things on Twitter that day and suggested I could do something about the whole un-games/non-games monicker. Specifically, why I hate the idea of some videogames being labelled non-games or un-games on both a linguistic and a political level.

So I gave a small rant about that to my impressionable audience. And since this same discussion has been rearing its ugly head on Twitter time and time again since Proteus's release (often entirely my own fault) about a week ago, I thought I'd record it and put it online.

Before you go "URGH" (too late, right?), I am not engaging in the "what is game?" debate so much as actively decrying its very existence as something that is damaging to our medium (which, yes, okay, is a kind of engagement with the debate). As something that both jars with how language actually works and which, usually unintentionally, excludes a whole range of experiences and identities that happen with videogames.

But yes. I am not going to defend those points here. I am just going to point to the recording and say it is there if you want it. I will note that I am not a particularly great public speaker, so there are a lot of 'ums' and 'likes' and embarrassing ableist adjectives sparked by nervousness that I apologise for (feel free to comment on this post about how 'stupid' isn't ableist so I can delete said comment). Also, things go off on a tangent at one point as I made the thoughtless mistake of thinking I could use QTEs as an unproblematic example of something. Sorry about that!

But yes. As I told the audience, this was more of a rant and a musing of half-formed ideas than a well thought-out lecture, and I welcome your challenges to things I say that perhaps could use some clarification.

Anyway. Here is the talk if you want it. I call it "On So-Called 'Ungames' (in scare-quotes) And Why You Don't Need To Define 'Videogames' (And Why You Can't Define It Anyway So Stop Trying Already)". It is 25 minutes long. Enjoy!

(tl;dl: 'videogames' is a tree that is constantly growing in all directions, not a static box that all videogames have to fit inside)



References!

Dear Esther: store.steampowered.com/app/203810/
Proteus: store.steampowered.com/app/219680/
Thirty Flights of Loving: store.steampowered.com/app/214700/
Dys4ia: www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/591565
Lim: mkopas.net/files/Lim/
Howling Dogs: aliendovecote.com/uploads/twine/howling dogs.html
Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: www.indiebound.org/book/9781609803728

Further Reading!

Merritt Kopas (Lim) on how "non-game" is gendered: mkopas.net/2012/07/on-the-non-game/
A recent, fascinating article on how 'traditional' games depict movement as easy and unproblematic while queer games present it as difficult and full of hurdles, reflecting the identities of the makers of these games: borderhouseblog.com/?p=10113
An article I wrote on Edge last year where I spoke to the developers of Proteus, Dear Esther, and Journey about redefining videogames: http://www.edge-online.com/features/redefining-videogame/