Re: some mario maker early preview coverage

So I don’t normally do this because a) console wars are literally the dumbest possible conflict and b) gamers in generally tend to be aggressively wrong in a way matched only by hardened rightists so the folks who need to hear this probably won't, but this particular article irked me in just the right way that I want to respond to it.

To contextualize this discussion here I want to point out that this generation of video game hardware has, across the board, sold worse than the last generation of video game hardware. The Sony Playstation 4 is the only home console currently doing well, and it’s doing about as well as the ps3 (last gen’s sales loser) did at its peak. Likewise the handheld market has decreased overall, with the 3ds doing about half as well as the DS did in its heyday. There are a couple of reasons for this, but most of them just come back to the current economic doldrums all of western society is facing as a result of a bunch of terrible neoliberal decisions.

Even so, the Wii U is firmly in third place even behind the terribly lagging Xbone, but the quote re: the system not selling as well as even the gamecube is ignoring that actually at about this point in the gamecube’s life (two and a half years in) it had sold about as many units and that overall hardware systems can’t be expected to sell as many units as the seventh generation, let alone the sixth.

Concerning the Wii being “seen as slightly faddish” this is some typical gamer rigmarole where anything that sells to “casuals” in an unacceptably high amount (literally every facebook game, mobile gaming, the wii, so on) is in some way an abhorrent aberrance to the true gaming community which only buys “serious” consoles without “gimmicks.” It’s this bullshit language that helps maintain the atmosphere where anyone insufficiently versed in gaming shibboleths (ability to manipulate complex controllers to move a character in 3d space, willing to spend hundreds of dollars on a computer that only plays games instead of a few dollars on a game for a computer you already own) is perpetually an outsider despite the theoretical definition of “gamer” being “one who plays games.” It’s both a failure of empathy and taking the skills built into gaming for granted.

The Wii sold specifically and explicitly on a platform of making games easier for average people to get into, and it’s ironically this same platform that created the Mario being valorized in this same article. That it sold tremendously well is an explicit demonstration of the validity of this approach and the Wii U’s problem isn’t that the wii’s popularity is a flash in the pan, but that the wii u is poorly positioned in the market. Instead of retaining the market that the wii successfully capitalized on, the wii u chose a terrible name and returned to a more complex control scheme that alienated their non-gamer market.

The article attempts to position the problem, as so many comments sections do, as a problem with the tablet screen, suggesting that consumers didn’t respond well to it. This is mostly conjecture, but I’d suggest the issue is less with the screen itself, which is actually broadly popular with actual wii u owners, but with the aforementioned failure to position itself on the market and more importantly a failure to interest developers in creating unique experiences for the screen. Not mentioned at all in this article are both Nintendoland and Game and Wario, arguably the two games that most significantly utilize the various features of the screen and demonstrated a variety of possible control schemes for future games, none of which have been later reused even by Nintendo itself. (That said, it looks like the upcoming star fox heavily leans on the design of the metroid game in Nintendoland)

Which brings me to the next issue here, where the article suggests that Nintendo has dragged its feet about putting out major franchises. This shit is a goddamn gamer Gregorian chant at this point, and a chant that frustratingly ignores two things.  One, Mario is their biggest franchise by a very wide margin and they won’t stop making goddamn Mario shit. Mario Kart 8 has something like a 60% attachment rate and there hasn’t been a year since the console came out that some kind of Mario shit hasn’t. What gamers mean is “why hasn’t [series that doesn’t sell as well as Mario] come out yet” which is number two: Nintendo is having to make HD games now, which have much longer development time and thus much greater development costs. So far this generation Nintendo has explicitly been trying to offset those costs by outsourcing a great deal of its design work to other companies (smash 4 with namco, wonderful 101, the new star fox with platinum, hyrule warriors with koei tecmo) and this is 100% the reason Nintendo is shy of creating new entries in franchises that aren’t guaranteed to sell  Mario or Zelda numbers (it’s also why Splatoon almost had Mario characters until the team convinced Nintendo it could be made on the cheap, and indeed they got it out in about a year with just four maps and three major weapon types, more coming on free dlc. Speaking of DLC this is why Nintendo suddenly seems to be so confident in creating and putting it out, because Nintendo’s DLC, like all DLC, is designed to offset the costs of production, which I’ll reiterate are dramatically higher than the costs for producing a Wii game.

Nintendo is literally dealing with exactly the same issue the rest of the industry is, which is that development costs have vastly outstripped the profitability of selling games at $60 and what we’re seeing across the market is publishers scrambling to deal with this paradigm in all kinds of wildly unpopular ways. This is not a case of blatantly terrible decision making, except most prominently the name of the system (market positioning), but a case where Nintendo is having to adapt to the status quo of other console-makers and is trying to still make a profit. Microsoft loses money on every single xbox sold, Sony presently is only making money through their games division as the rest of their electronics are crashing and burning. Nintendo pretty much only makes games, so they can’t afford to take a bunch of business risks, hence a million fucking Marios.

Tl;dr the wii wasn’t a fad, the controller isn’t the problem, and gamers have no idea how games get made.  And the fucking NX is a handheld.

Six Totally Unexpected Reasons Reviewing Games is Harder Than You Think

I gotta stretch this out into more of a personal blog entry to cohere this into something that isn’t just a real facile aphorism. So, I’m reading Nathan Rabin’s latest year of flops on av club, since I guess the spinoff website thing didn’t work out and Nathan is back at the site that loves/hates him. Anyway it’s a review of So You Wanna Marry Harry, a singularly puerile (and those who know me know I don’t use that term lightly [nah I’m just fucking with ya]) reality show where a handful of ladies are apparently coerced into believing they’re competing for the affections of Prince Harry, who is I guess british royalty of some sort. It’s a reality show, so it has reality show morals, so of course the standpoint of the show is the winner should be someone who “deserves” it, which means someone who is honest and genuine and unassuming and whatever other traits society has deemed love-worthy. This is the biggest thing Nathan wrote about in his review, that the typical moral construction of the reality show narrative comes across as particularly flat and tasteless when built on a construct of deceit above and beyond most reality shows; “Harry” was to be interested in the most “genuine” of possible suitors while pretending to be British royalty.

This makes for an interesting angle to talk about, and invites the reader to find value in a theme not necessarily explicit in the text. In short, it co-operates with a good review.

Naturally this got me thinking about video games. One of the more pervasive concepts in critical readings of games is ludonarrative dissonance, the mismatch of the themes presented by the narrative of a video game and the mechanics present within a video game. A good general example is when games present you with an objective that is implied to be time-limited (e.g. we must find the bomb before it blows up the city!) but in reality the game will simply wait for you to eventually complete that objective before moving on. Another common example is presenting characters within the narrative who are supposedly morally correct and relatively pacifistic (usually as opposed to morally bankrupt and deadly antagonists) who violently murder hundreds or thousands of faceless humans over the course of the game. In practical terms this is no big deal, the gameplay mechanics allowing for time for players to explore or practice without the pressure of a time limit or offering a series of combat challenges that break up the platforming sections and pad out the time spent with the game. In terms of video game thematics, though, this dissonance can create ravines of meaning that make it difficult to extrapolate coherent themes out of a game. Ultimately it fosters a certain kind of cynicism in both the reviewer and the player: the story doesn’t really matter because the mechanics are just going to undermine it anyway.

I could be wrong, but I think this is one of the reasons why the notion that game reviews should be “objective” clings to life in a way that criticism in other media doesn’t have to deal with. It is already widely accepted that game stories are bad, and ludonarrative dissonance is but one part of that puzzle (the other parts being how incredibly stereotypical most of these narratives are under guise of adherence to genre tradition and the relative disinterest most publishers have in foregrounding narrative as an essential part of the product they’re selling rather than simply a tool of market positioning) but the problem with bad game stories ripples outward and affects how we think about and talk about games.

One of my favorite game reviewers is a weird dweeb named Tim Rogers, who writes reviews not as straightforward gamepro-style 300 word affairs but as 14-20k word anecdotes about his life that usually border on shaggy dog stories. When he does write about the games in question, he mostly writes about how the game /feels/ and what the mechanics do to create that feeling. Narrative is rejected wholly as an interesting aspect of games.

Roger Ebert talked about games once and caught a really silly reputation among the gaming crowd, up there with shibboleths about Uwe Boll and Jack Thompson in those days. He suggested that games weren’t Art as he understood it, that the nature of games, the structure, the objective, the win condition, the series of rules themselves precluded games from being Art. It’s not a very unreasonable position, but it struck a nerve with a segment of folks hoping for a cultural legitimacy beyond Hollywood stereotypes of nerdy losers. Ebert only elaborated once before his death, mostly just reinforcing his position and pointing out that a lot of the counterarguments were fundamentally misunderstanding his position.

I don’t wholly agree with him, but I think it’s a worthwhile position that can be explained pretty well through the analogy of playing an instrument. While the music produced through instruments is widely regarded as Art and has been for some time, I think you’d be harder pressed to find someone who would describe chords and scales and hertz values as art, but rather as a necessary study in the process of creating art, much as learning proportions is a necessary study in doing painting. The paintings are the art, and the process is sometimes art. The rules governing both are not themselves art. This holds true for games as well. What resonates with players is the experience of playing the game, the emergent narratives they’re experiencing. The experience can be and is often shared through youtube or meandering anecdotes and these representations can too be art, but the actual process of crunching variables or detecting player input or wrapping a virtual skeleton in a bitmap? Not art.

The reason I bring up this particularly navel-gazey and moot critical argument is because it’s directly related to how narrative is often confused as the artistic part of games. Shadow of the Colossus, for instance, is often described as a sort of “Rosebud of games” owing largely to its relatively somber narrative, rare for its time. The gameplay of Shadow of the Colossus, however, is fairly typical of a 3rd person action title. You have a horse, you ride it to a boss fight, which is more accurately a platforming segment followed by tapping a button, and… that’s about it. Sometimes you perform platform action to get to the boss to platform on it.

This is definitely a reductive description, but think about the elements being reduced here. What happens to a game if you strip away the music, the background textures, the user interface, the narrative? You’re left with a series of systems, appreciable mostly as elegant objects designed to produce an outcome, which in game terms is usually just creating a functional input/output feedback loop from the player. It’s all that other stuff that’s designed to make players believe they’re an assassin in 1500s Damascus. So you can see how the two collide. On the one hand you have a series of systems designed to produce, more or less, a Skinner box response from players, and on the other you have another set of artistic systems designed to make you believe that the skinner box you’re participating in is actually driving forth a narrative about invading an alien planet in the past to save the present from being destroyed.

This duality plus the fact that both sides of the system are constantly improving makes critically discussing games kinda weird and endlessly debatable and it’s unique from other forms of entertainment in that by the very interactive nature of video games it’s difficult to achieve the kind of suspension of disbelief that foregrounds the narrative over the tools used to convey it. It’s much harder to believe that you’re a pirate when you’re conveying all of your piratical things by using tiny buttons and some sticks than it is to believe that you’re simply watching pirates do their day to day business through an omniscient window that works kind of like our dreams do.

Not terribly long ago, games were pretty incapable of presenting a convincing narrative at all and were instead more interested in simply providing compelling things to look at (this paradigm lasted about midway through the original playstation era, plus lots of later games doing it for retro reasons) and to a certain degree the present backlash against critical analysis is a nostalgic yearning for the times of yesteryear (as is most of rightism, really) when gaming magazines would simply check a few boxes and rate games based almost entirely on technical competence + audiovisual appeal. It’s this particular style of critical analysis that lead to the current Metacritic paradigm and it’s this style that quite a lot of smaller outlets are explicitly writing against.

End-of-History Illusion

Sometime last year I had a conversation with a person I admire very much about leftism since she’s one of the more involved people in the IWW, and I mentioned that one of the biggest things that kept me out of left activism is the terse and really toxically personal infighting. Flash forward maybe a few months and I got heavily involved with a left activist group founded out of a group of really toxic infighters.

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Let’s switch gears a bit and talk about ethics for a bit. My major in college (and frankly my ongoing passion) was anthropology, which is the broad study of humans as a whole. The modern discipline is divided into Linguistics, Archaeology, Physical Anthropology (sometimes referred to as Biological Anthropology), and Cultural/Social Anthropology. Each part of the discipline has its own questions and concerns but as a field that explicitly deals with people in all possible forms across the entire planet and throughout history, there’s an overt need for examining the ethical procedures by which study is done. Anth as a discipline has a history of ethically nebulous figures performing spurious research and is likewise fraught with a century of attempts to counteract these individuals through codes and creeds and coercion. The feuds are as epic and legendary as any across other disciplines, and there’s no sign of a real conclusion so long as the AAA refuses to maintain blacklist powers.

Point is, I sat in a lot of ethics courses where students were kinda uncomfortable with making any strong statements either way and the professor was no dang help. Being involved in general leftism is kind of like that, really. That or the other reaction where every ethical violation no matter how convoluted is trying to be respected at once, and then there’s the whole issue where people decide that their ethical commitments stop at their specific identities and then there’s the whole concern where ethical disagreements should be swept under the rug in the name of preserving the community, which ultimately means less that a community is being preserved and more that the cracks are being waxed over and forgotten just long enough for the whole thing to blow up later.

And it’s all entirely an exercise in futility, since The Discourse itself doesn’t really help anyone, just entrenches whatever ideological point of view can outlast the others as an epistemological fact. One of the other takeaways from anthropological theory courses was that consistently across a century and a half of cultural formation/perpetuation theories there’s rare suggestion that individuals might have agency in the creation or formation of culture. Instead myriad theories assume that culture is essentially too large to ever really be in control of a single person or a single group. A metaphor might be: the French nation created Napoleon, rather than napoleon creating France.

So ultimately leftism and leftist movements might themselves be ridiculously inept and it doesn’t matter since the fate of whether or not leftism succeeds or racism or sexism or homophobia ends is out of any individual group’s hands. Economic forces are probably going to drive us toward something that looks very much leftward simply due to technological development the same way capitalism successfully globalized thanks to the Long Peace created by nuclear weapons and communications technology.

But of course that still leaves us with in-fighty leftist movements. There’s definitely a put-up-or-shut-up element to ongoing involvement, a sort of “hey if you’re really committed you’re gonna be here” kind of morality both for the groups themselves and for the sort of turgid call-out exercises popular among a certain crowd, where anything that feels more like you’re doing something is preferable to feeling like you’re not doing something.

The thing is, struggle sessions are easy. Arguments are easy! Holy shit is rationalization easy. Literally if you don’t want anything to be your fault and you have even a small understanding of what makes people tick it’s incredibly simple to build dozens of justifications for anything you do. Despite my couching anthropological ethical violations as largely historical in nature, this is only the case because present ethics are exactly the sort of wobbly, finicky issues that can be propped up with twigs, leading to pointless repartees between two sides that are both plausibly correct. Ethical violations continue anon, depending on who you’re reading.  

What’s hard is creating strong, lasting communities of people who’re mutually invested in each other’s wellbeing. It’s tremendously difficult, even as it’s a patently obvious necessity for any kind of radical organization. There’s several reasons that this is so difficult, and they cross over largely into how consumerist-individualism has thoroughly entrenched a primacy of the self in the modern West combined with an understanding of the internet as a customized content delivery device first, communications platform third, but at their base core leftist groups exist as organizational vectors for a particular political bent. If you’re not a leftist, you’re not in a leftist group. What this means is your entire time and involvement in that group hinges on your political beliefs, which in turn leads to constant reexaminations and redefinitions of what those beliefs are.

An effective counter tactic should at this point become clear: take the politics out of the leftist spaces. Create groups that have reasons to exist beyond leftism itself. Create a set of rules that explicitly bend toward a leftist angle and suppress rightist talk within the group as much as you like, but decenter the politics and you decenter the infighting. Do this and you stand that much better of a chance of creating a space where leftism ceases to be a trial of purity and begins to be understood as simply the way things should be, an unspoken expectation that reaches beyond the rational, argumentative political thought-process and into the centers of the brain that drive cultural creation and interpretation. Do this and create a new culture all our own. 

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