Published on First Person Scholar!

As promised, here is the link to my piece published at First Person Scholar entitled "Unified Games." It's about how the ancient idea of the classical unities in drama strangely affects open-world game design.

They're great people over there at FPS and I would highly recommend anyone trying to get into games criticism to give them a shot.

The Mechanic is the Message: Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons can easily be read as one long setup for a single mechanical trick that takes videogames into a whole new realm of meaning and communication. It's a beautiful game visually and emotionally throughout, but its point--its prestige, if you will--comes all in a single moment at the end of the game. That moment is a kind of mini-manifesto in itself about what videogames can do, and I'd like to take a second here and unpack it.

Warning: REAL SPOILER ALERT. Despite what I have said before about how spoilers can't actually ruin anything, I would highly, highly suggest in this case playing the game for yourself before reading on if you want to get the full experience. The power of Brothers comes not in plot revelation, but in mechanic revelation, and that's a totally different experience. (Incidentally, for those of you on Playstation Plus, this game is free for you at the time of this writing, so definitely go take a look at the game first.)

Last chance.

Okay, for those of you still reading, the moment I was talking about was of course the final river crossing, when the little brother walks up to the water and both he and you realize in a whole new way the pain of the older brother's loss, and have to figure out how to go on without him. The little brother has never been able to swim on his own thanks to his fear of water after their mother drowned, and he had relied on the older brother to carry him through the water every time before. But now older brother is gone and this river is standing between little brother and their father's life--a life made all the more precious now with the loss of both mother and brother. My experience with this scene I'm sure was exactly what the designers wanted. I went forward, pushed the little brother's interaction button, and realized after a couple seconds that that wasn't going to work. I moved around a little bit, tried it again, then stopped and stared at the water for a second while I thought what to do. As an experiment, I tried pushing the older brother's interaction button even though he was dead. Instantly, I was rewarded with the controller rumbling, ghostly whispers, and the little brother bravely diving into the water. I felt instantly the rush of love for what now felt like my own dead brother, and the game expertly lays an ambiguity between simply calling on this older brother through memory and actually receiving help from the brother's deceased spirit. Whether meant to be read metaphorically or literally, I instantly understood that even though older brother was gone, he still mattered in the world of Brothers, and he still influenced the life of his living brother and father. In that one button press, Brothers made me reflect on love, family, death, and life in an entirely new way. In this one moment, Brothers achieved something truly great.

To let you enjoy the sensation, the game lets you use the trick a couple more times in your final push toward the ailing father and the game's conclusion as the little brother draws on the strength of his deceased sibling to pull the lever he could never pull and reach the ladder he could never reach, finally stumbling with exhaustion into the doctor's home to deliver the life-saving liquid to his father.

This one mechanical turn is exactly the kind of moment that proves the unique power videogames have to communicate. It's the exact kind of moment I've been looking for and advocating for. It doesn't give you profound prose or deep dialogue or Oscar-worthy acting, but it does exactly the same thing that makes those things praise-worthy: it successfully transfers a human experience in such a way that it's felt as if it were real, so powerful and piercing that it can never be forgotten. Game writers often make the claim that such-and-such thing that such-and-such game does cannot be done in any other medium, but that claim is often made when a game simply does more than other mediums--like The Last of Us making more connection with its characters than could be possible in film or Bioshock Infinite creating more atmosphere than could be possible a novel. All games are inherently different than other mediums because of the interactive element, and I'm not saying that The Last of Us, Bioshock Infinite, and other games don't use interactivity to communicate, but what Brothers accomplishes with the dead brother mechanic just feels so totally different from anything else, with no analogue in any other medium. It's not that it's just more or better, it's truly different. Yes, other mediums have done ghosts and help from beyond the grave and all that, but I'm not talking about what the story of the game does, I'm talking about what the game itself does in that moment of frustration and that rush of revelation as the player finally pushes the older brother's button. It's a moment where the player must use what they've learned about the systems of the game to advance the story of the game, where suddenly oil and water mix and the game system tells a more powerful story than any of its cut-scenes ever could. It's a moment where gameplay communicates rather than just functions. It's a feat that takes what The Marriage promised to a whole new level. It's one of the best cases yet to show the world that videogames truly can do something different, beautiful, and great.

I've talked a lot about videogames receiving a sense of cultural legitimacy in our society. Many make their case by showing they can do the same things that other mediums do, improved through interactivity. I think that's a good case. But the case Brothers makes is a different case, one that shows the world that with a new medium comes an entirely new way to communicate meaning, and videogame players and designers alike are only just beginning to tap into this new language of expression. This is the case that will ultimately solidify videogames' place in the cultural canon of "great art." More importantly, this is the case that just may wake the world up from its ill-formed and deep-rooted prejudices against this medium as a legitimate medium of real human expression.  This is the best case for the future of videogames, and the one I hope designers the world over continue to pursue.

The Mechanic is the Message: The Agents

I've played a lot of games while I've been off from school for a couple weeks. Thanks to Christmas gifts and Kickstarter, I've been able to play a lot of new games with new ideas. One thing that's particularly stood out to me about the games I played over the holidays is how game mechanics can communicate meaning. This is especially true in two games I played this past week: Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, and the tabletop game The Agents. I'll cover The Agents in this post, and Brothers in the next.

These Cards are People
Let's start with The Agents. The Agents is a "double-edged cards game," a name they apparently trademarked for themselves. The core mechanic of the game, which is explained in their Kickstarter video below, is placing cards either facing you or facing your opponent to get either points or abilities. Abilities help you control the game, but points help you win, so you have to balance the two to succeed.

                   

The Agents is smart in a lot of ways, but specifically it connects its mechanics to its themes better than any other tabletop game I've ever played. The premise is that all these agents have been disavowed by their home governments and are now working rogue, using their skills to whatever ends they see fit. As such, the individual agents' relationships to the player are different than you'd expect in a traditional card game. In most card games, each player has their own cards that serve them faithfully and always give benefit to the player who lays them down. Thanks to the mechanics of this game, though, cards can literally turn on you at a minute, and suddenly these cards aren't slaves to a game, but people--agents with their own agendas.

This is accomplished in two ways. First of all, the Agents breaks the sense of ownership between player and card. Yes, you have cards in your hand, and yes, you play them how you want, but any card you play gives two separate benefits, one to you and the other to someone else. Additionally, you play agent cards on a faction, but no one owns any one faction. Instead, factions are shared between two players, and both players try to influence the faction in such a way that the most advantage goes to them. With cards being "double-edged" and faction control being decentralized, suddenly the agents themselves are players in the game as well.

I've played this game several times now and taught it to 5 or 6 different people. Invariably, there comes a moment in each person's first game where they're holding a card they want to play, just looking from one faction to the next, considering all the implications of each possible placement and direction of the card, and then they'll just stop and blurt out, "Oh, crap." The Agents makes it very difficult to figure out exactly which play is most advantageous to you, and it's also very good at making other players present you with unexpected opportunities as they put points or commands in your direction that you didn't see coming.

Gameplay considerations aside (for now, though seriously that's great game design in itself), I realized in a rush in one game just how well these mechanics combine to represent the game's themes. "These cards are people," I suddenly thought. Rather than serving me like my slaves, the cards in the Agents are characters--skilled agents who have their own agendas and will serve whom they will serve, how they wish to serve them. This effect is enhanced by the extremely careful balance of the cards. It's nearly impossible to get a "mega turn" in The Agents, because each agent only has one ability, and those abilities most often only affect one other card at a time. In this way, the Agents becomes a true tactical game, where you constantly have to look at what's in front of you and consider all the possibilities. All combined, this makes the Agents feel extremely like a tense game of politics and juggling loyalties with real people and real consequences to each decision.

At this point, all the game's subtle puns start coming out. "Double-edged cards" doesn't just mean the mechanic of points and commands, but the duplicitous nature of the agents themselves. "Turn," one of the commands in the game, literally means turn the card around, but it also represents turning loyalties from one player to the other. These and other commands and verbiage in the game serve both gameplay and theme, at times ingeniously.

Games are a language in themselves, and like any language, there are multiple layers of expression going on at once. Functional games present you with mechanics that are understandable and work together well. Good games make those understandable and functional mechanics more robust and complex, and give clever nods to the framing theme of the game to splash in more fun for the players. Great games, though, are like great language: functionally elegant, but exploiting the functions of the language itself to communicate higher-level associations and observations. Great language can be consumed on a functional level without the audience recognizing its subtle greater accomplishments along the way. With a little training and thought and a keen eye, however, great language unpackages its greater meaning as the proper eyes study each bit of functional elegance. The careful study of such language can reveal meanings applicable far beyond the moment of the language itself. Truly great games are also great language--they function properly, but they also make themselves available to extended critical thought that goes beyond the game itself to discussing bigger and broader things.

It is in this sense that the Agents is a great game to me. Functionally, it's genius already, but careful study of the game lends easily and profitably to broader thought and discussion on human nature, ambition, and loyalty, a fact attested to by many a game table dispute as the game heats up,  agents start spinning like tops and the final points come rushing in.

Update: First Person Scholar, an eBook, and Tabletop Games

I haven't posted anything here for awhile, but don't worry, it's not because I've been idle. I've been busy with finals and final projects for school, of course, but I've also been working with the guys over at First Person Scholar to get something published over there in January. Definitely go check them out and I'll keep you updated as that moves forward.

Also, as it happens, one of my final projects was for a print publishing class and I had to typeset a book, so I took a lot of my stuff from here and made a little book out of it, and it turned out looking really good. I also made an ebook version which you can download and check out here.

Finally, with the break I'm going to take advantage of the time to do a mini series of essays a little bit off topic--board and card games. I love tabletop games and I especially get into them around the holidays because I'm with family a lot and we all have free time. So for the next couple weeks be looking for my readings of a few of my favorite board and card games, including Dominion, 7 Wonders, and the recently Kickstarted The Agents.

Happy holidays!

Thanks to Critical Distance

I'd just like to thank Critical Distance for including me in this week's "This Week in Videogame Blogging" feature.

You can see the post here.

Journey and the Epic

Journey, developed by thatgamecompany as part of a partnership with Sony, is one of my favorite games ever made. Despite being short, simple, minimalist, and offering virtually no challenge, it has had the biggest impact on me of any game I've ever played, and I'm hardly the only person to say things like that. Among the many reasons already given for why Journey is so great, I'd like to add a new one: Journey is actually the simplest, most universal epic poem ever written.

The Romantic Dead

I wrote a little bit last week about my experience with TellTale's The Walking Dead and the rise of what I've come to call "film-games." In that post, I also talked about The Last of Us, another of my favorite games of all time. The two games share a surprising amount of similarities (while feeling like entirely different games), but one that particularly catches my attention is that both are works of Neo-Romanticism.