Tuesday, December 4, 2007

PURGATORY BLUES: I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream As A Game Of Moral Decision-Making

I have recently joined an interesting bunch of people from the Gambit MIT Game Lab and The Berkman Center For Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, who meet at informal sessions and try to find ways in which games can portray complex issues, such as empathy or moral and ethical decisions. Most of the games that are often brought up as succesful in pulling this off are mentioned below. But to show that ideas like this have been out there for a long time, I set out to do a little presentation on one of my favorite adventure games. The following article/whatever is based on the presentation, the follow-up discussion and it addresses some questions raised at previous meetings. Once the yet unnamed group starts its own blog (soon!), I will edit it and move it there and link to it from here.

Thinking about games that portray the complexity of human emotion and ethical and moral choices, we often find out that these issues come as little surprises hidden beneath the surface. No matter if they are included to enhance the narrative, immersion, the player's experience or because the creators just felt like doing it, the games usually do not wear it on their sleeve. This was the case with Ultima IV and is the case with Bioshock. And even though Planescape: Torment offered a wonderfully crafted personal narrative of exploration of one's soul, it was still marketed as a D&D fantasy adventure. This might also be the best way to introduce these topics, as the players do not feel like the matters of “great importance” are forced upon them. But there has been a commercial game that had moral and ethical choices as its very driving concept. It was the 1995 PC CD-ROM graphic adventure I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, based on Harlan Ellison's story of the same (brilliant) name, produced as a joint venture between the production companies Cyberdreams and Dreamer's Guild. Since its release, the medium of videogame has come a long way, and this is a good moment to reassess Ellison's ambitions.














Prior to the release, Harlan Ellison, who took active part in creating the game, even voice acting the main villain, explicitly stated that he wanted to create a game in which the player had to make ethical and moral choices. Judging from the fact that both of these companies were not heard from since shortly after the release of the game, one might suggest that it was a failed experiment. It was, in some respects, but in revealed a whole range of expressive possibilities of the videogame medium, although it wasn't really able to utilize them.
The story is built around five characters tormented post-apocalypse by a military supercomputer named AM, who hates all humanity. These five people are the last bastion of humanity. Or are they? All of them have to revisit their fears and guilt-stricken memories. Originally conceived by AM as another form of torture, these journeys can be used against him in an attempt to defeat him by restoring the characters' humanity and thus finding weaknesses in AM's program.
Using a traditional SCUMM-styled point-and-click interface, the player navigates the characters in environments supposedly generated by AM. Most of the content is delivered via voice-acted dialogues. After going through the story of each of the five characters, the player might use the temporary loss of stability in AM's systems to overpower him. But Harlan Ellison is fast to warn that the game cannot be won. To cite the sadly unreferenced Wikipedia article on the game, “to preserve the story's nightmarish mood, Ellison wanted to create a game that players could not possibly win. Instead, there would be a variety of ethical ways in which way they could lose. There are ways to lose heroically, gloriously and at the peak of one's humanity -- if players do well. Otherwise, there are ways to lose ignominiously, in a selfish, cowardly, frightened manner. Dying alone, and in terror. Or being tortured eternally.”
At our "morality in games" sessions, we have often discussed the difficulty of making moral choices in games matter and the assertion was made that the relationship between the “moral” choice in the fictional world of the game is often tied to the desire to win the game, which usually leads to making the obviously “right” choices without really thinking about them. No winning option is an interesting design concept, altough its implementation in this game didn't make it justice.
The game features a soldier led to regret the harsh treatment of his subordinates, a strong woman who nevertheless cannot overcome the terrible experience of being raped, a man who sent his wife to a mental hospital instead of taking care of her, a fake and selfish hypocrite, and a former Nazi doctor, a disciple of Mengele, the angel of death.
The micro-narratives bring up two metaphors used to convey morality issues – that of purgatory (reliving one's sins in isolation from the rest of the world) and moral rediscovery. The rediscovery concept was used to great effect in Planescape: Torment. In both games, player characters are bound to face their forgotten past after a state of amnesia, often making a horrible discovery. This is potentially a very powerful ludic device of conveying the feelings of guilt or misery.
Although most of the game is subtler, I will try to demonstrate the game's pros and cons on the story of Nimdok, the Nazi doctor. He revisits the site of his crimes against humanity, having lost most of his memories and only slowly realizing what he did in the past. These screenshots show him puzzled after his arrival at the concentration camp:


























He is bound to confront his former self and the player chooses whether he will stay on the track of a cruel and brutal scientist or whether he will take a different path and save the “Lost tribe”, which is obviously a metaphor of Jews. The choices the player makes in Nimdok's case are rather obvious. He or she can have him perform a useless and ruthless operation on a young kid, or not (the interesting thing is that if he choses not to, doctor Mengele will do it instead, which emphasizes the hopelesness even more). Once he activates the Golem, he can either have him destroy the Lost Tribe or turn him over to the Tribe. All in all, every micro-narrative can be finished in several ways and all paths to lead to some kind of overall conclusion. The way the characters have dealt with their respective stories has an effect on the final stage, in which they confront AM.
The game's greatest achievement is that it meant (or could have meant) a major breakthrough in terms of what content may be tackled in a commercial videogame. A game explicitly addressing ethical issues is extremely rare, and this one even offered to play as both a criminal and a victim, in case of Ellen, the only female character. No matter whether the game mechanics actually capture – or induce – the mental processes of empathy, morality and guilt, it at least makes you see the points in one's life where these choices can be made and make you think about them. The game's surreal visuals, abstraction-heavy dialogues, deeply disturbing topics (cannibalism, rape, total war and more) and all-around weirdness nevertheless turned out to become a rare exception rather than a new standard.
There were at least two clever design choices: The fact that stories were set in a fantastic enviroment enabled metaphorical puzzles and events, such as one of the characters literally taking his heart and feeding it to a jackal. The inability to reach a “real” winning situation might have brought in some moral ambiguity which is a prerequisite of moral reasoning.
And this is where the shortcomings begin: The players are pretty much bound to Harlan Ellison's take on morality, as the game interface signals whether you have made a “good” or a “bad” choice (in a later attempt at a morality game, Bullfrog's Fable, the main character's avatar changed accordingly). This “spiritual barometer” more or less leads to the reduction of a moral choice to a gameplay choice. And although you cannot win, there is still a most desirable outcome that might not be winning in terms of the narrative, but still is in terms of the rule system and “getting the most out of the game”. Another difficulty stems from the fact that the players don't have any opportunity to emphatize with the characters before they find out about their past. This bogs down the immersion factor. While playing Nimdok's story, I often found myself stuck between two choices: either role-playing him and staying true to his former self, or betraying his character and making him “good”. The narrative of the game doesn't do a good job portraying his change from a brutal monster to a potentially repenting man.
Other drawbacks include technical issues (laggy, unresponsive interface), aesthetic choices (out-of-place cartoony animation) and gameplay elements (puzzles bordering between unconventional and silly). The graphics are, of course, outdated, and the third-person perspective is probably not the best choice for a soul-searching narrative. The whole idea of building a highly original and meditative game on an engine used to play story- and inventory-based adventures is questionable, although adventure games seem to be (or rather have been, as they are extinct as a commercially viable genre) most open to left-field content. But even though flawed, it is still an enjoyable game that screams “These ideas shouldn't go unnoticed” on every corner. Too bad it did not have a proper mouth.

In terms of Different Gaming, this game is interesting in two respects. In German and French versions, the Nimdok part of the narrative was very crudely taken out not to upset the censors, without eliminating all the references to him. As contributors to the ScummVM project (which runs this and some other adventure games' binaries on various platforms, making it amazingly portable) have noticed, these two versions cannot be finished up to the “desired” ending. This naturally sucks, but can be interpreted as an unintended meta-commentary: Without bringing all the characters together, even if it is the most sinful one that is missing, humanity cannot be redeemed.
In addition to that, in the Czech Republic, the game was lifted from obscurity by a budget reissue translated into Czech by Andrej Anastasov, a prominent games journalist, gaming legend and a proponent of “adult” (read: complex) themes in computer entertainment. In the U.S., the game can be purchased directly from Harlan Ellison for $32. That's an unusual price for 12-year-old software, but then again, this game is kind of unique.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Intermezzo: ON GAMES AND CUPCAKES

My lack of posting during the last two weeks was due to being busy finishing an article on media change for my Prague university. Thinking about what it is that transforms a technology into a medium, I discarded the idea of having a clear-cut categorial definition of any medium and media in general, because each medium gets to the point of being treated as medium following a different trajectory. Is there any abstraction abstract enough to cover all kinds of media we know, including videogames, theme parks and culinary media*?

Then I remembered that, at a party I'd gone to a couple of weeks ago, I had jokingly proposed studying cupcake as a medium. Surely, we could do that, if we projected the particular cupcake against the general cupcake-ness and found a meaning in the way it differs from other cupcakes - if we consumed it for or took from it more than just nutrition. It might be an "I-love-you" cupcake or an "I-love-strawberries" cupcake. It is a thought deeply rooted in the good old structuralism, but hey, I come from the university of Jakobson (pre-MIT) and Trubetzkoy, a place where de Saussure is the primer.
Is it then not the social acknowledgment of meaningfulness of difference, that establishes the medium? It works like that with language, which is a medium, too.
And that is what annoys many gamers about the "content-blind" criticism of videogames - the inability of treating games as individual works rather than the lump of medium as a whole. This en-masse criticism of "suspicious" media crippled the development of comics in the 1950's and is indicative of all power-based media criticism. It might be ridiculous to look for meanings in cupcakes, but in order to criticize them, I must get to the point where the nuances of taste and cupcake design are more than random patterns hitting the interface**.

I know this is far from gaming discourse. Next time I will be focusing on the dead (or hibernating?) genre of point and click adventures and the communities that keep it alive. Or at the reasons why interactive fiction failed to remain a major force. Or the origins of the discourse on game "addictiveness".

*Sadly, this term probably does not exist.
**Here, I am without any doubt influenced by Matt Weise's thesis on meaningfulness in videogames.

Monday, November 5, 2007

MATTHEW SMITH: THE MANIC GAME DESIGNER

Last time, I discussed how we see a game designer in the context of the studio system. I set out to examine whether the perception of game designers was different at a time when they made their games alone, locked away in isolation, staring at prehistoric radiation-heavy monitors or TV screens and programming the legendary classics in machine code, thus intimately familiar with the machine's circuitry.
Next day, by convenient coincidence, I got a message from a friend with a link to an English-language blog run by a Czech game-designer-turned-film-critic, further linking to a YouTube video featuring the inscrutable and long-lost mythical hero of the British game industry, Matthew Smith.



Before launching into tabloid sensationalism and biographical detail, let us look at the very beginning of the film clip. The modern-day British journalist acknowledges the supremacy of the U.S. and Japan in the videogame industry of that day. It is important to bear in mind that the modest, largely home-brew and profoundly nerdy early eighties British games industry was a slightly isolated world with its own weird platform (ZX Spectrum) and a community feel expressed by the gaming magazines such as Your Sinclair or the aptly-named Crash. Thanks to the wide availability of the computer and the fact it was NOT a console, anybody could join the programming ranks and gain fame and respect. The magazines featured game designer inteviews almost every month, and at a very personal level (they described Dave Perry, later of Earthworm Jim fame, as "endowed with all the native charm that one would expect of a man with pure Celtic blood flowing through his veins").

And what about Matthew Smith? He was a prodigy, a 17-year-old kid neatly fitting all the programmer-guy stereotypes: geeky, strange, and with a bad haircut. The old footage shows him as the author of the acclaimed Manic Miner, a wonderfully balanced and surreal game that defined what the ZX Spectrum platform would be capable of. After making a hugely succesful sequel, Jet Set Willy, the young programmer vanished into thin air (watch the clip for details).
But even before his disappearance, he was considered alien. He was too good to be true. The May 1984 issue of Crash magazine brings up uncanny hints at the guy's non-existence: "There were rumours that Matthew Smith was a figment of the Liverpool computing mass psyche [...] There were rumours that Matthew Smith didn’t really exist." The review of Jet Set Willy ends with another eerie statement: "Jet Set Willy is a high point in the development of the Spectrum game. I hope there will be others, maybe ones of a different kind, but I’m sure nothing will top this game for addictivity, fluent graphics, responsiveness and sheer imagination. The nightmare quality of the events suggests its author should be receiving therapy. Instead, he’s probably getting rich. Good luck to him..."
The sheer imagination led Matthew to, of all places, a Dutch hippie commune and druggy oblivion. Manic Miner fans set up a website reporting his sightings. Isn't that familiar? Remember Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd, an artist damaged by LSD, trapped in youth, naivete and craziness? His fans did the same thing. As "brhodes0" puts it in the YouTube comments section: "If you look at the stuff he came out with age 17, the psychedelic images... then combine it with the drugs. Well it's good he's kind of recovered, a top bloke." Barrett never recovered, though.
Smith became a legend for one more reason. By fleeing the programming world and doing crazy things, he completely shook off the programmer stereotype and became elusively fascinating. The fact that he was instrumental in establishing the British gaming industry made the contrast between his exploits and his post-fame life even more striking. And, well, he does not seem to remember much of his post-fame life.
Looking back at his old games, Smith says: "Ten years after I was a history, twenty years after, I am a legend." That is especially true in the British ZX Spectrum fan community, which is one of the most active retro-gaming groups, remaking old classics and taking them onto the web - you can even play Jet Set Willy online. And when there is community, there is myth.

Thursday, November 1, 2007

FAERIE NINJA FAN BOY

It is so cool to start your blog entry with a reference to what you have just heard Henry Jenkins say in his class at MIT. (As if he did not touch on the topic of his academic celebrity status and the fact that his name is being attached to everything CMS, for better or worse; now I'm attaching it to my puny blog.) We mainly discussed authorship, the way it shapes our interpretation of the text, and, briefly, the way authorship is assigned to texts. And Henry Jenkins pointed out that in the field of videogames, we constructed a figure of the game designer but the matter is still not sorted out. By that time, I had been already thinking about it. About who's the author, who we adore, what is considered a personal achievement in videogames...

A faerie ninja made me think about it.

On Monday, I checked the schedule of Alice Robison's excellent all-MIT class on videogame theory and found out that Linda Currie (née Sirotek) was coming to give a talk.
Wow!, thought I - for the following reasons: a) she co-designed and produced one of my all-time favorite games, Wizardry 8, the sequel to the Crusaders game mentioned in the last blog entry; b) for me, she became the symbol of the whole Wizardry series, through which she had worked her way, first (1981!) as an involuntary help-line operator, subsequently as a producer and designer. She simply was THERE and, as a fan, I wish I had seen what she saw - "the making of" the legend. And even if Wizardry is now largely and sadly forgotten, it had a unique twist, a distinct, quirky and unpredictable personality, that elevated it high above your average sword'n'sorcery hack'n'slash. One of the funniest things was the fact that fans intentionally played the game with weakest possible characters "to get more fun out of it", often opting for Faerie Ninjas, an absurd and legendary race-class combination; c) she carried the tradition as long as she could, making the beautiful swan song which is Wizardry 8, a testament of (I would say) her own fandom of the series; d) she's half-Czech!
After an entertaining discussion with her and her colleague Scott MacMillan, I asked her a few fan questions and was on my way home. But making my way through a half-lit MIT corridor, I realized that I cannot just leave. I am a fan. Fans do certain kinds of things. Music fans get their records signed (I do!). Star fans get their... whatever signed. But what should I do? I found myself in utter lack of games-specific cultural knowledge I could utilize. I didn't bring a copy of the game. I knew this was a special and great moment of my fan life and that I had to do something about it. But still I felt strange asking Alice to take a picture of me and Linda. I just din't know whether this is the way it is done.
In the tradition of aca-fandom (though I'm probably more fan than aca), I started to explore, why it felt new; what constitutes my fandom and its relationship to authorship, art and the medium. First of all, I had a hard time thinking about with whom else I would like to have a picture taken. John Carmack? That's an engineer, great, but I guess not exciting in the fan way. Chris Avellone of the Planescape: Torment fame? As much as I loved his game (very much!), I didn't really know anything about this guy until I've read a recent interview. To be honest, I'm quite surprised I could still remember his name. Sorry, but that's how the gaming discourse goes. Ron Gilbert? Maybe. Maybe I would be disappointed should I find out he's not as funny as Monkey Island is.
Although I am a fan of games, I cannot usually see myself as a fan of their authors. Are there Peter Molyneux fans in the way there are David Lynch fans? Are there Richard Garriot fans, or just Ultima fans? I can imagine people respect the game designers. In Smartbomb, Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby describe the cautiously respectful way young designers act towards Will Wright and Shigeru Myamoto. They are celebrities, but in their own circle, more like say famous architects than pop musicians or Hollywood directors, although their work is a part of the popular culture. They don't tour, they just make their scarce appearances at gaming expos and conferences. Chaplin and Ruby do give examples of gaming industry people like Cliff Bleszinski, who try to play the role of gaming-world rock stars. Yet an ordinary player won't connect the games he plays with CliffyB's name and face. But maybe I am wrong and you can correct me.
Game is also a collective work, making it harder to think of it as an authored work, but so is film. Even film pushes the credits to a place where people can choose whether to skip them or not, and credits in games are usually made to be skipped and are not a part of the game as such. Maybe the reason for the disconnedtion stems from our perception of games as software, as industrial, technical products, blueprinted, designed, refined, tested, burnt onto CDs, packaged and published, just like spreadsheets. We are probably still at the beginning of the process of establishing our relationship to games as an expressive medium (or to reference Henry Jenkins again, a "lively art"). Unlike films, each game is a technology of its own, not only a manifestation of technology, and game designers stay virtually anonymous, being "technicians" whose power is to know, not to be known. The author is dead and we don't feel any urge to resurrect him, maybe because imagining him tinkering with world design might break our illusion of the virtual world's existence*.
This saves us some trouble with the interpretation, however, because, as we also heard in the class, our knowledge of the author always shapes the way we read her or his work. Most of my gaming experience is untinted by any thought of game designers. But hey, I am going to try out Wizardry 8 once more now, to see whether my interpretation has changed knowing that Linda Currie was a teenage hard-core RPG girl picking up phones and telling people what the gold key is for.

*It's also rather hard to create a whole world in one person (unless you are a god), which makes the intricate webs of texts like Lost the TV show a more team-based and also anonymous work (a collective god-ship?). It might be interesting to look at the way game authorship was treated at the time one or two people usually made the whole game. Hey, I could do that.

Monday, October 22, 2007

MISSION STATEMENT FAILED!

I started this blog to share my thoughts on games, knowing that I come from a different gaming culture than most folks I know who do research on videogames. Hey, I only played Mario Kart once in my life (after coming to the US) while having played weird eighties English games with blue furry monsters squashing eyeballs for dinner.

This will be an outlet for me to write things related or unrelated to the topic of my Ph.D. thesis-in-the-making (actually in-the-planning-of-making), which is roughly gaming discourse, gamer subculture and videogame as an emerging medium. I would usually discuss these things over a beer, but I'd always instantly forget everything I had said.

I must admit that in certain respects, I am an obnoxious retro gamer. Not only do I adore clean and elegant game design. I used to romanticize computer technology as something that is intricate and clumsy and unreliable and requires a certain amount of arcane power to operate. Maybe it was the special knowledge, the wisdom, the ability of making sense of things others would take for a random bunch of pixels, the specific discursive strategies, that separated gamers from the crowd. The gaming discourse at the time and in the place I joined the digital playground seemed to be concerned more with being able to run a game then actually playing it. And, because most of the games were pirate copies which had to be copied and catalogued, the life of a gamer was a damn lot focused storing it and passing it around. (How much fun of the early gaming was/is given simply by the fact that it is on a computer, which is still new to us? Were we or are we amazed by the technology or by our capability of mastering that technology?).

I also experienced gaming as subculture, as something that was so cool to be part of, because it was just emerging and we didn't know what it would be capable of (We still don't know, but I feel gaming as such has become mainstream, though particular niches might have subcultural features). And the views of videogame as an emerging medium is one of the things I definitely want to find out more about.

I love to talk about old games and I bring up forgotten stuff; and I love to play (or watch) state-of-the-art games and marvel at new hardware. I am a gamer, but a picky one.

Right now I have got three topics lined out: first, I always wanted to write an article on British early eighties Thatcher-era videogames dominated by working class heroes; miners and trashmen. This might lead into a discussion of culture-specific content and identity in videogames, which has been mostly relegated into Japan, hasn't it?

I would like to write a piece that would look at the conflict of the design and the use of a technology and the discursive process of redesigning that takes place in the specialist discourse, focusing on the ZX Spectrum platform (a computer amazingly unsuitable for videogames that became a predominantly gaming machine) as viewed by the platform-specific magazines. Might it help to find the moment when a technology becomes a medium?

The third topic, what are our fan relations to games? And game designers?

I have more things in mind, some of them as deep as the Stygian abyss. Stay tuned. Oh, and the musket-firing-Umpani-soldier picture comes from the game I spent the most time with. The vast, incomprehensible, insane(ly difficult), over-the-top psychedelic Crusaders Of The Dark Savant, one of the weirdest Western RPGs. Play it if you miss getting lost.